Western MSM pushes delusion that Iran’s missiles didn’t obviously shred Iron Dome

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Ramin Mazaheri
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Like Columbus returning and being told: "No, you actually fell off the flat earth."

Two days after Iran’s historic hypersonic missile barrage pounded Israel it’s shocking to see how Western media can’t or won’t admit that countless videos attest to the operation’s success.

This is a major problem for everyone: It’s a problem for Westerners, because wilful ignorance produces policy mistakes, and it’s a problem for non-Westerners, because they’re dealing with opponents who can’t even be relied on to know that key parameters have obviously changed.  

It’s like Columbus coming back and being told: “No you didn’t - you fell off the edge of the flat earth.” After being momentarily stunned, what would Columbus do? He would surely go about his business, consider that person to be a fool and rely on history to tell the tale properly.

Telling the tale properly the day after is the work known as “journalism”: journalism is the history of yesterday, after all.

It’s not easy, but are Western journalists not doing the work here, or are they wilfully lying?

That’s a real question, because any decent journalist today (and any average citizen who wishes to be well-informed) knows the modern media landscape requires examining three areas where news can now be found: the MSM, the alternative media and social media.

On social media there’s no lack of videos which show Iranian missiles striking land time and time again. Such as this one, of an Israeli air base getting hit some 20 times - striking that is rather like striking a Zyklon-B factory in 1943.

It is crystal clear - Iranian high-speed missiles got through the Iron Dome easily and did damage. As one person wrote on social media: it’s like being attacked by aliens.

Anybody who cared enough to look could easily find these videos. I’m sure many people who didn’t care to look found them on their social media feeds anyway, as they are truly amazing. How the world can change, eh? Who would have thought in 1987 that Iran would rise - technologically, militarily, politically, economically, culturally - to the point where they could strike inside Israel, and that the West would be powerless to stop it?

Of course there’s concern for what Israel will do in retaliation, but the point is made: Iran can now strike anywhere in Israel, and that’s a major reversal of historic parameters. Israeli military censorship means we’ll never see the actual damage, but the videos provide overwhelming proof of this reversal of alleged Israeli impregnability. Even if the missiles had no payload - getting through is enough to change paradigms and smash assumptions, at least to any honest person.

If Iran had targeted residential areas, women and children - like Israel and the West does over and over - then there would be more footage for the naysayers, but Iran only aimed for military sites. (Iran not only wants the moral high ground, they need it because they are espousing high revolutionary ideals.)

Who is getting these facts correct? Forty-eight hours later - not many.

Let’s start with who has: Alt-finance site Zerohedge took a full day to let their greed for profitable trades - which require honest assessments and acceptance of facts - to overpower their usual desire to back Israel. Their October 3 article led with:

“The recent missile barrage striking Israel from Iran showcased a security reality that has startled many people in the west - Israel's ‘Iron Dome’ defense system is not as effective as they believed. Evidence suggests it was clearly overwhelmed, either by the sheer number of missiles (estimates vary but al least 200 were fired), or by new Iranian hypersonic technology.  Either way, this one attack changed the prevailing perspective on Israeli air defense.”

Understating the case a touch, perhaps, but that’s what “objective journalism” requires - leave the hyperbole and overconfidence for op-eds. This is a rare case of a Western media which accepts the new reality - anyone who believed the perpetual propaganda on Iron Dome’s effectiveness should indeed be “startled”.

As devastating a blow - on a cultural and human level, but not on a military operations level - as losing the wonderful Nasrallah was, the Iranian strike has clearly extracted an equal price for his death: Israel’s era of impregnability is over. Definitively.

However, a day earlier Michael Every of Rabobank, whom we can call Zerohedge’s preferred foreign policy expert, evinced the same delusion as the MSM when he repeated as truth what the Israeli military absurdly claimed: “Overnight, around 200 ballistic missiles were again fired into Israel from Iran, most shot down in flight with the help of the US, UK, and Jordan, others hitting open areas near real targets, with only one casualty, a Palestinian.” Every claims Iran “just made a huge strategic error”… but he writes as if he hasn’t seen the footage, or is in wilful denial, or simply won’t admit the truth publicly - so what good is his analysis?

Every is popular mainly because he’s an interesting writer, leavening his work with astute pop culture references but also a bit of Marx: he’s a rare top high-finance thinker who effectively concedes that the socialist/Chinese model is working and that the capitalist/Western model is doomed to inefficiency and inequality. He doesn’t care, of course - he only cares about trying to make money - but how could anyone bother to follow his trading advice when he can’t be bothered to question the bias of Israeli military sources amid wartime?

Moving from alt-media to the MSM, the latter cannot admit, or cannot allow it to be admitted, that the missiles everyone saw get through and land actually got through and landed.

Axios - whose style is to present the news as mere bullet points for busy Western executives who want to know just a little and definitely not too much, and which clearly has sources high up in the Democratic Party - immediately ran to the most biased source they could find: an Israeli arms manufacturer

  • “The system"performed as expected" and produced "wonderful" results, Israel Aerospace Industries CEO Boaz Levy told Axios. State-owned IAI developed the system in partnership with the U.S.”

That’s from How Israel's air defenses knocked down Iran's missiles. I shudder at the idea of an editor telling me to call up Israel Aerospace Industries for a quote on this report….

The Associated Press, which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of objective journalism in the US media, aimed to immediately erase any doubts with a headline that beggars belief, “Israel’s multilayered air-defense system passes another test in fending off Iranian missile strike”.

Refusing to publicly admit the truth - is this the MSM’s real problem? How can they have not seen the videos, somewhere? What’s certain is that it has profoundly negative consequences for anyone within range, including for the speaker, and that it doesn’t change the truth.

 
Ramin Mazaheri’s Substack

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Longtime contributor The Saker, longtime Paris correspondent for PressTV, author of 3 books on China, Iran and France.

The source for this article is here.


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Zuckerberg Defies the Borg | (A Report in 3 Acts)

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Matt Taibbi • Reclaim the Net

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(Act One)
MATT TAIBBI
Zuckerberg Defies the Borg

As governments everywhere tighten their grip on the Internet, Meta's CEO blows a hole in years of official lies. How authorities brought this on themselves

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress in 2018. The Democrats—the Deep State's "designated party"— led the charge. The politicians were after more robust censorship, even if they took pains not to say it so plainly.

On April 9th, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent a Facebook Files” series, revealing documents showing Meta executives worrying about “continued pressure… including from the White House” to remove content.

Zuckerberg yesterday sent a letter that in a country with a functioning news media would have major ramifications. Not in direct response to Jordan’s April query, it appears to have been sent at Zuckerberg’s own volition, and is filled with passages deeply embarrassing to authorities. The first is about pressure to “censor” — specifically “censor,” not “moderate” or “exercise oversight”:

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a bit of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree… I believe the government was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it…

Another was about Meta’s blocking of Miranda Devine’s 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden after being warned by the FBI:

The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.

Zuckerberg’s letter is a stiff poke in the eye to authorities, who brought this on themselves.

(Act Two)
by Reclaim the Net

AN APOLOGY TOUR?
Mark Zuckerberg Confirms Biden Administration Pressured Facebook on Censorship, Admits to Throttling Hunter Biden Story
In a revealing letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has addressed significant controversies surrounding the platform's content censorship practices, especially concerning actions taken during the 2020 presidential election cycle and the COVID-19 pandemic.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Zuckerberg confirmed that senior officials from the Biden Administration exerted "pressure" on Facebook to censor specific content related to COVID-19, criticizing the administration's approach. Despite the external pressures, Zuckerberg emphasized that the final decisions on content moderation lay with Facebook, admitting regret over some of the decisions made under this pressure.

"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration...repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire," Zuckerberg stated, reflecting on the administration's actions which he now believes were "wrong." He expressed regret that Meta was not more outspoken against this pressure at the time: "Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions."

In a separate disclosure, Zuckerberg detailed interactions with the FBI, which had warned the company of a potential Russian disinformation campaign targeting the Biden family and their association with Burisma ahead of the 2020 elections. This led to the suppression of a New York Post story involving corruption allegations against Joe Biden's family, which was later determined not to be Russian disinformation. Zuckerberg expressed regret over this decision as well, noting significant changes in Meta's policy to avoid such actions in the future.

"It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story," Zuckerberg conceded, alleging a policy shift to prevent future such occurrences: "We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Additionally, Zuckerberg addressed his contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to support electoral infrastructure during the pandemic, aiming to assist local election jurisdictions. He defended these contributions as non-partisan, though acknowledged public skepticism about the impartiality of such support.

"My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another," he affirmed, signaling a withdrawal from similar contributions in future electoral cycles.
LOSING CONTROL?
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Laments Decline in Big Tech Collaboration Since 2016
Participants in the Democratic National Convention (DNC) were comfortable speaking publicly about what Congress is investigating as conduct that eventually (after the 2020 ballot) turned into government-Big Tech collusion.

And they are doing this by reminiscing about "the good old days" after the 2016 election when major social platforms panicked and got cowed into "working" with Democrats.

"Election integrity" is how supporters of the practice frame the concern that was and is being addressed as platforms have their "calls" with officials.

A University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism panel heard that there is more "deceptive" content and "manipulating voter sentiment" than ever - and yet social media companies are "sharply downsizing election integrity departments," as one report about the event put it.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chief information security officer Jude Meche shared that the relationship with these companies is now allegedly not what it used to be.

"Following the 2016 election, we had calls with X and with Meta all the time. They were working with us. That no longer exists, that all faded quickly. We don't have counterparts in these companies anymore," said Meche, whose committee's job is specifically to get Democrat candidates elected to the US Senate.

What happened in 2016, of course, was Donald Trump's victory. Professor of ethics and finance at New York University Michael Posner cautioned the panel that "we're back to 2016."

Posner was referring to social media companies backtracking on their promises to increase "content moderation" made in the wake of that election and accused, or perhaps warned them, that they have been allowed to act "with impunity" since.

But, the Twitter Files, for example, say that those who have been acting with impunity during that time are actually Democrats, and their administration since 2020.

Posner is concerned about the number of people companies like X and Meta these days employ to police and censor speech (election integrity and content moderation are what he calls it) - compared to 2016, when "there was a sense that something had to be done."

If this DNC panel is anything to go by, there is once again "a sense that something has to be done" among Democrats - but roping in social platforms, particularly, it seems, X, to "cooperate" is now a very different proposition compared to what was doable only a few years ago.
CHEERING FROM THE SIDELINES
Establishment Voices Attack Telegram Over Free Speech Protections in Wake of Founder's Arrest
Legacy media and some establishment figures are busy justifying the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, attacking the platform, but also making not-so-veiled threats aimed at other platform owners.

Ukrainian-born former member of the US National Security Council Alexander Vindman, who played a key role in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, took to X (calling it "Twitter") - to warn the social site and its owner Elon Musk that there could be "broader implications" in the context of the Durov arrest.
To Musk specifically, Vindman's extraordinary message, which reads very much like a threat, is that he "should be worried." As ever, the accusation is that X is allowing "misinformation" - that is, not censoring enough. And the implication is that unless that happens, there could be more arrests.

In one post Vindman went through the Democrat keywords (mentioning "MAGA tech bros," "weirdos," referring to Trump as "sexual predator") and expressed admiration for the EU's way of "enforcing content moderation" - ostensibly, as opposed to his adoptive country.

Former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt was also on X to reiterate how EU elites see, and treat the issue of free speech while throwing around dramatically-worded accusations: "Telegram sits at the center of global cybercrime... Free speech is not without responsibilities!"
It follows that other platform owners could face a situation similar to Durov's.
Officials who no longer hold formal office often serve to express some extreme points of view that those in government would rather not say publicly, and other handy mouthpieces are always legacy media outlets.

Thus the Guardian sees Telegram as a platform for "information and disinformation" about the war in Ukraine, but then goes on to brand it as the favorite app of "racists, violent extremists, antisemites" - this is the Guardian giving life to claims made by a pro-censorship group.

Europeans and the war again, and the Washington Post decided to disseminate the accusation originating from a senior EU security official that Telegram is "a primary platform for Russia to disseminate disinformation in Europe and Ukraine."

According to CBS, the same is true of another war: "Encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp have been a huge source of misinformation and disinformation in the Israel-Hamas war. Misinformation experts say it's because they are difficult to moderate."

And the New York Times decided to hand-pick several of the worst examples among the hundreds of millions of Telegram users, to vilify apps in general and argue in favor of censorship.
BLURRED LINES
Government and Private Groups Still Unite to Target Election "Misinformation"
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) - a part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - has been enlisting private entities to help achieve one of its goals.

According to CISA, it would be to combat election misinformation and secure "election infrastructure" - while according to critics, it is to continue with the mission of censoring lawful speech "disfavored" by the current authorities seeking to remain where they are after November - by hook or crook.

CISA doesn't feel the need to hide this activity that has been taking place since 2018 through a program called the Election Infrastructure Subsector Coordinating Council (SCC). It is here that US government entities - federal, state, and local - meet private groups ("partners" as CISA calls them).

We obtained the latest document for you here.

What's coordinated here, according to the agency, and as was reported by The Federalist, is the reduction of "cyber, physical, and operational security risks to election infrastructure." The coordination is done to the point where government and private sector have adopted "a unified approach."

Information sharing ahead of the presidential election is also happening as SCC works with the Government Coordinating Council (GCC).

According to CISA, this collaboration is now "unprecedented" while what is referred to as "private sector owners and operators" sit, as part of SCC, in meetings with the FBI and election officials.

But CISA has other partners - the Election Integrity Project (EIP), formed months before the 2020 election, which has been blasted by the House Judiciary Committee as a tool for the government to bypass the First Amendment and censor speech.

The CISA site has a document, "Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation: Planning and Incident Response Guide for Election Officials," put together by CISA/GCC Joint Mis/Disinformation Working Group.
In it, CISA "defines" what each of its targets is supposed to be, and ends up doing what all "misinformation warriors" do - offer subjective and broad descriptions susceptible to interpretation, instead of clear definitions.

For example, "malinformation" is said to be information "based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate."

The document mentions "delegitimization of election results" as one form of mis, dis, and mal information.

It's unclear if CISA has both 2016 and 2020 elections in mind - or only one - but this is how the activity is described: "Narratives or content that delegitimizes election results or sows distrust in the integrity of the process based on false or misleading claims."

(Act Three)
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
Global Research
Techno-Fascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users

“Internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability… Not surprisingly these efforts bore fruit. Facebook adopted new rules that better conformed to the officials’ wishes, and many users who expressed disapproved views about the pandemic or COVID–19 vaccines were ‘deplatformed’ or otherwise injured.”—Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting in Murthy v. Missouri 

Mark

 

 

Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.

In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.

In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.

Image is from ABC News

Zuckerberg testifies about Meta’s child safety policies in Senate hearing

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal:

“The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now willeventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry. [Which it already does to a truly alarming extent.—Ed]

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s happening already.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Seventy-plus years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org.

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Global Research, August 28, 2024
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Lili News 029
  • In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
  • Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS



KAMALAT

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Paul Edwards

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Kamala receiving the adulation of the duly primed crowd at her coronation in Chicago.

In Kamalat... I know it sounds a bit bizarre; but, in Kamalat... that’s how conditions are.

Never in the history of Democratic Conventions has there been one built on sheer exuberance and celebration alone.  Even the carnivals of post-racial joy for Obama didn’t come near it.

With Biden metaphorically wheeled away—buried conceptually, if not yet boxed—the Young Pretendress was exalted as the Brat Hope of the Now, and had her gifted nomination ratified.

She was apotheosized by hosts of Party stars and celebs who all struggled to match the wild enthusiasm of the giddy faithful, and basked in reflected glory as minions of The Heiress Apparent.

Summoning of The Elders is a hallowed tradition in these hoary extravaganzas, and it went off as theatrically as any in living memory.  To a man, and woman, they praised her in terms no one in the Party had ever lavished on her in all her political life.

What they truly, so yearningly, earnestly lauded, was the idea of her, as the symbol and cynosure of a unified, terrified opposition to their Darth Vader figure.  To them all, he embodies a mortal threat to the vast, monolithic machine to which every one of them is in thrall for life, and to which each of them owes his or her personal high status and ample fortune.  They’re not wrong.

No, it is something more complicated and harder to comprehend.  A Ruling Class, beginning with the Founders, our slave-holding grandees, has controlled America by teaching, with ever greater efficiency, an ignorant population to identify with itself.  Behind the facade of sham democracy, it has controlled national policy, loading with gold members of what Carlin called “The Big Club”.

The corollary to the scam was not only exclusion of the American People from any benefits who, hoodwinked, felt its cruelty only in deep distress, but also those not born, or otherwise assimilated, into the fraternity of power and privilege. The financial elite, like European nobility before it was trashed, functioned as a closed class, defensive of its own, and hostile to uppity outsiders.

Our sick polity, that so long raped The People for the Capitalist elite, finally alienated the great majority of citizens.  They have long sought a brash, brassy vulgarian to lead an attack on the bastion of prissy, condescending, entitled arrogance and fraud. And they found him: a brute, glad to martial their angers, and a huge part of our hoodled and buggered citizenry is backing this monkey-wrenching, fake outsider against our Nomenklatura.

This, and nothing else, is what has driven their mass embrace of Kamala.  Don’t misunderstand.  She is certainly not worse than any of those Samurai for the Status Quo.  She may possibly be slightly better.  Who could know?  And how would you?

She is, in her national career, a placeholder, a cypher, a nullity.  What does she stand for, if anything?  All we know is she stood for Joe Biden, and it’s all we may ever know.  That’s why the spectacle of the DNC Cosmic Salvation Fest is so preposterous:  it was the ascension and sanctification of an unknown quantity.

Elevated by a Deus Ex Machina of Democrat billionaires, she is packaged and sold as an amalgam of hollow symbols and infantile memes.  Instead of articulate positions on Ukraine and Gaza, she offers laughter, cheers, giggles and fandom.  She replaced independent Press with vacuous, jejeune “influencers” who minced as if on a lark to a rave.  She uses her sex and color to draw adulation from idiots, as if they guaranteed policy.

All this chirpy, fruity, fluffy performance art is cover for the utter vacuity of her candidacy.  She gives us roses and lollipops and Obama’s rotted hope, and vows her America will be just peachy.

That was the charm of the musical that seems the model for her own fairy tale, her fatuous version of this moribund Republic.

The truth is the epiphany of Kamala is far less the emergence of a savioress than it is a rerun of Hubert Humphrey’s shy crawl out from under LBJ’s shadow, and will likely have a similar outcome.

We are an empire in terminal decline, not that it concerns our money elites.  They, too, with their hedge funds and bombproof, underground Nirvanas, are heavy into magical thinking.  We have no genius leadership because Pirate Capitalism destroyed its possibility, and it likely doesn’t matter whether the Democrats’ Voldemort, or their Taylor Swiftian Pollyanna, takes the flag.

Despite its decreed exceptionalism, Camelot died.  Questions?

“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one, brief, shining moment that was known as Kamalat.”


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The Abuse of Personal Identity

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Billy Bob's Blowback Roundtable
THE WORLD THROUGH AN INDEPENDENT LEFT LENS

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Provocative roundtable discussions of world events from unusual political and cultural perspectives by thinkers and activists interested in building a new society.

The Abuse of Personal Identity

Billy Bob

Streamed live on Aug 20, 2024
8/20/2024 Episode 105 of Blowback: Exposing Imperial Decline with special guests Slava and Max Parry.
In-depth discussion of how personal identity, race and culture are exploited by classism, colonialism and imperialism to maintain their hold on power, with a focus on the Ukraine/Russian conflict. 

   • Do Ukrainians Really Hate The USSR & ... 

Yuri and Olga are two former USSR citizens, now citizens of Russia. Having spent much of their lives in Soviet Ukraine, they shared with us their perspectives on the current conflict, life in the USSR, and how they view Russia. What they have to say is likely not what you might think!




https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022...

Plus: Solidarity Forever
8/23/2024 Episode 106 of Blowback: Exposing Imperial Decline with special guest Dust James.

The system continues to look for ways to weaken and eliminate the pro-Palestinian movement. 

The panel discusses—among many other things of pressing interest—the DNC convention and how many liberals covered their ears as some pro=Palestine protesters read the names of Zionist victims murdered in Gaza. Also, the DNC/Harris campaign refusal to give any details of their program, "waiting to be elected to spell out what the Democrat plan for the nation is." (Which both cynical and absurd. • Billy Bob and Ian Kummer zero in on the choice of Kamala as a tool to divide the pro-Palestinian movement and Black America, since many black Americans are beginning to resent protesters at Kamala's events. Billy Bob notes that notorious Dem/MICIMATT operative Malcolm Nance has already been agitating along those lines. 
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. He hosts the Blowback roundatable.  You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE.

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Politico Does Journalism: “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”

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By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA

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The Israeli savagery in Gaza has reached such levels of sociopathy that Western media—loyal tools of the imperialist oligarchy—are having trouble hiding the truth, as they usually do, and cracks are appearing in their coverage. This is one example. The reasons why they are doing this are complicated and belong in a separate article, which we hope to do in the near future. In any case, we are glad that Politico decided to run this material. It is desperately needed. And, of course, speaking for our audience, our gratitude and admiration for Drs Perlmutter and Sidhwa is beyond measure. —The Editor

PUBLISHED UNDER US COPYRIGHT FAIR USE STATUTES

None of this would have happened if the corporate media had been doing journalism instead of disinformation from the start.

 
PRIMARY SOURCE

We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.

American surgeons who witnessed the [Palestinian] civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.


Illustration by Erin Aulov/POLITICO (source images via Mark Pearlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa)

By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA
07/19/2024 05:00 AM EDT

GAZA — In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.

external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.

In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”

The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.

None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.

“the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”

We have always gone where we were most needed. In March, it was obvious that the place was the Gaza Strip.

The two of us had never met before this trip. But we both felt called to serve, so we packed our bags, leaving our lives behind in California and North Carolina.

We landed in Cairo around midnight and met up with the rest of our group of 12: an emergency nurse, a physical therapist, an anesthesiologist, another trauma surgeon, a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, two cardiac surgeons and two pulmonary and critical care intensivists. All of us had volunteered to work with the World Health Organization through the Palestinian American Medical Association.

We find it instructive that the Gaza atrocities have reached such a level that, as expressed elsewhere, leading members of the Western mainstream media, including POLITICO, are now slowly publishing stories reflecting much of the truth about Gaza. CNN, usually a reliable megaphone for Zionist, imperial/warmongering propaganda, has done this already regarding Gaza (but not the Ukraine), and CBS, also a longstanding and highly reliable platform for hegemonist status quo lies, recently ran a segment that was certainly an example of what good journalism should be.  (Please see: Children of Gaza (CBS Sunday Morning—Jul 21-2024)).  We don't know if this trend will continue. Or how deeply this new, however sporadic, serious journalism phenomenon will go. The largely invisible powers that be have a huge investment in the current unipolar status quo, so narrative control is indispensable for the sustenance of their regime. They will surely find ways to keep manipulating this narrative to insure the perpetuation of their legitimacy.

who grew up in a Parsi household in Flint, Michigan and worked with a Palestinian-Jewish cooperative in Haifa after graduation from college. Neither one of us is religious. Neither one of us has any political interest in the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — other than wanting it to end.

The Rafah Crossing functions like a rural American airport: one baggage scanner, odd procedures and minimal facilities. Scanning the medical and humanitarian supplies from the dozens of aid teams one bag at a time was inefficiency defined. But it was the only reliable way to bring anything into Gaza.

noted on the Senate floor, the process for clearing aid with the Israeli authorities is opaque and inconsistent. “Items that are allowed in one day can be rejected the next….” For this reason, everyone simply brought whatever they could as personal luggage — even surgical equipment — paying exorbitant airline baggage fees instead of bulk shipping rates. Now that Rafah is closed, even this route for resupplying Gaza’s hospitals has been cut off. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shown no signs of backing off, is scheduled to address the U.S. Congress on Monday. He will also meet with Vice President Kamala Harris.)

famous “road of death.”

ineffective process called “deconfliction.” The fact that “deconfliction” is so unreliable explains why “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker,” according to the International Rescue Committee. It works something like this: COGAT — the office of Israel’s Defense Ministry that coordinates between the Israeli armed forces and humanitarian organizations — agrees it will not attack traffic on a specific route for a specified period.

This coordination is done through — what else? — a smartphone app. When the road turns green on the app you have 15 minutes to get on and off the specified route, and you can only request deconfliction of a particular route every three hours. After a 40-minute wait, we got the go-ahead and our drivers floored it, dodging foot and donkey traffic all along the road.

all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, we could hear Israeli drones humming overhead. We headed to our living quarters — half of our team slept in one room in the adjacent Palestine College of Nursing, while the other half slept in one of the hospital’s outlying patient-care areas — and spent our first night sleeping under continuous, room-shaking bombardment.

For our entire time there, we lived in constant fear that Israel would invade the hospital. Thankfully we never saw a single combatant, Israeli or Palestinian.

had been destroyed, while the remaining partially functioning hospitals operated at 359 percent of their actual bed capacity. The World Health Organization describes them as “partially operational.”

city of 419,000 people in southern Gaza. Now it functions as the only trauma center for well over 1.5 million people, an impossible task even under the best of circumstances. It is likely the safest and best-resourced city block in the entire Gaza Strip — and yet its horrors defy description.

We first noticed the overcrowding: 1,500 people were admitted to a 220-bed hospital. Rooms meant to hold four patients typically had 10 to 12, and patients were housed in every possible space: the radiology department, the common areas, everywhere. Next, we noticed the 15,000 people sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hospital — lining and even blocking the hallways, throughout the wards, in the bathrooms and closets, on the stairs, even in the sterile processing and food preparation facilities and the operating rooms themselves. The hospital itself was a displaced persons camp.

It’s what we imagine the first weeks of a zombie apocalypse would look — and smell — like.

left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces. 

(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)

acute hepatitis A infection in such overcrowded conditions.

Graffiti in the pediatric wing of Gaza European Hospital. Pearlmutter and Sidhwa quickly learned that their Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in the Strip. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa

500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.

After his home was destroyed and his family threatened, European Hospital’s director fled to Egypt, leaving an already overburdened hospital without its longtime leader. This sense of helplessness and disorientation was made worse still by the constant spread of hearsay about kidnappings, troop movements, food shipments, water availability and everything else of importance to survival and safety in a land under siege.

Cut off from the outside world and unable to access reliable information about the forces controlling whether they live or die, eat or starve, stay or run, rumors spread and amplified.

Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die, and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.

Images of Tamer from his Facebook feed that show him after he was shot and operated on (left), after he was released from Israeli custody (center) and after he was treated at Gaza European Hospital (right).

one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. When Israel raided Indonesian Hospital last November, he was assisting the orthopedics team in the operating room. He refused to leave his anesthetized patient. He said Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg, breaking his femur. His own orthopedic team cared for him, placing an external fixator to stabilize his shattered leg.

Next, Tamer told us, the Israelis came to his hospital room and took him, where exactly he doesn’t know. He told us he was strapped to a table for 45 days, given a juice box every day — sometimes every other day — and denied medical care for his broken femur. During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, he developed osteomyelitis — infection of the bone itself — in his broken femur. Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.

detainee abuse and torture at Sde Teiman. In it, the IDF denied mistreating detainees.)

When we met Tamer at the hospital for treatment, all that was left of him was the disfigured outline of a human being, his body crippled by violence, his eye surgically removed and his mind haunted by torture. A man who once healed others was reduced to constantly begging for pain medications, reliant on others for everything — and wondering if his wife and children were even alive.

Nearly all our patients arrived during mass casualty events. Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, had been under siege and bombardment since December. By the time we arrived on March 25 the town was inhabited by a combination of displaced persons from the north and locals who had not fled south to Rafah despite Israel’s threats against them. (Israeli forces frequently drop flyers or send texts demanding that Palestinians in Gaza leave their homes or shelters.) Extended families often concentrate themselves in as few buildings as possible. They told us they hoped that gathering in numbers would keep them safe — or at the very least, that dying together was preferable to dying separately.

We noticed that bombing seemed to peak at iftar when families were gathered together to break the fast during Ramadan with whatever food they had available.

Left: Israa, a 26-year-old woman during her operation. The mother of four said her home was bombed without warning. Right: The list of ICU patients in the main ICU. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa

 

We took Israa to the operating room. In the United States or Israel this would have been a 5-minute transition, but in the most functional hospital in Gaza it took more than one hour to get her there — working in such a severely compromised space, there was simply no way to get a trauma patient into surgery quickly. During her surgery, we realigned her broken femur, tibia and ankle in external fixators, explored an injured artery, cut chunks of dead tissue out of the massive wound in her thigh and her burned hands (a procedure known as debridement) and stopped her bleeding. It took three experienced surgeons almost four hours to do all of this. For the next 24 hours we were at her bedside almost continuously, knowing the traumatized and exhausted local staff couldn’t be expected to care for her properly.

After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four, told us how she was injured: Her home was bombed without warning. She saw all her children die in front of her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was buried under the rubble of their home. We didn’t have the heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night.

One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza.

Two days later, while we waited in the preoperative area, one of the nurses pointed to a slight and clearly sick little girl. “Can you operate on her?” she asked.

“Who is she? We’ve never met her before.”

“Debridement,” the nurse said, shrugging and walking away.

That’s how we met Juri, the 9-year-old girl with the horrific injuries.

After washing away the maggots, we positioned her on her right side and got to work. We cut away four pounds of dead flesh, washing her wounds as aggressively as we could. Then we bandaged her up and booked her for another debridement the next day.

He’ll come soon, we assured her.

“You’re lying,” she told us, calmly. “He must be dead.”

As it turns out, Juri’s father wasn’t dead. We found him waiting for her in the pediatric ward of the hospital. He was a loving and gentle man who spent all day every day scouring a land in famine for anything his precious daughter would agree to eat. He told us how Juri was maimed: The family evacuated from Khan Younis to Rafah, as Israel demanded. He and his wife left their seven children with their grandparents while they desperately searched for food and water. They came back to the house bombed and destroyed, their children all severely injured or killed. Juri’s surviving siblings were at another hospital with their mother.

no longer exists in Gaza.

And for Juri, “full recovery” means a lifetime of severe and permanent disability.

famine and. disrupted cellular services be damned!

CONTINUE READING WITH THE ORIGINAL SOURCE

Due to the inviolable sacred rights of property preceding moral duty in the collective West, and because we don't have a red sausage to buy legal counsel, nor can we trust that the recent ICJ verdict indicting Israel as the criminal party in the current conflict, and encouraging people to denounce and oppose its actions against Palestinians, will afford us any protection, we must stop this lengthy quote here. Please read the rest of the article on POLITICO.  We hope, however, that you got the message intended by these heroic doctors. Now it's up to you to act. 

<...>

Gaza European Hospital and the surrounding territory to be evacuated. European Hospital is now empty, and has been looted by desperate people trying to survive.

SOURCE: POLITICO

About the Author(s)


Lili News 029
  • In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
  • Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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