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Frank Scott
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Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only thing intellectually lower than Trump is his opposition, he was re-elected by a more solid margin than last time. After one of the dumbest and most slanted hit jobs on American consciousness, with tens of thousands of photos of Harris beaming as in contemplation of dinner dishes filled with food instead of animal waste, and Trump in an equal number looking as though he has not had a comfortable bowel movement in thirty or forty years, the public was expected to react as their keepers, in their incredibly bigoted stupidity, expected. The most dreadful outcome for the owners and operators of market democracy is that actual working people may be closer to some power than ever since the new deal, though one should hardly expect anything nearly that good since there were socialists and communists in the government back in those days and now we’re lucky to have a handful of “progressive” reps left of the American Nazi party. At least slightly.
As further proof of complete failure for privileged class expressions of our great democracy Trump was even outspent in the electoral market which is where Americans shop for the illusion of some constitutional or biblical expression of a supposed gift to the world brought by Europeans who savagely attacked indigenous people here hundreds of years ago and transformed earth into real estate while introducing freedom and other good stuff even before Israelis thought of it hundreds of years later in Palestine. Rejoice, be glad and continue taking drugs, spending trillions to brutalize humanity and destroy nature while the ruling class continues teaching us that swallowing sewage is a form of healthy dining and having our heads filled with mental puss makes us worthy of therapy.
Most recently, the outgoing president who has long left any hint of intelligence for the dung heap, warmly offered Ukraine the use of weapons to attack Russia and now, as often, we have to rely on Putin’s humanity and intelligence not to unleash nuclear weapons on the usa when such weapons are used on Russia.
While the USA sinks more deeply in a global political economic cesspool and the rest of the world rises and moves in the direction of a global and cooperative real democracy, a relative handful of capitalist commissars here and in colonial corporations desperately try to hang on to power and in so doing threaten the entire human race and not just their tiny if incredibly wealthy ruling class and are bringing us closer to ruin. The professional servant class which has served as supporting capital in its fading time now assumes even more desperate behavior and the media air contaminated by consciousness controllers becoming more dimwitted and murderous with each passing second threaten to speed up messages of blatant idiocy that may serve to make Trump look less ignorant if that is possible.
Those who speak of losing something that has never existed since euros got here – democracy – strengthen the foolish idea that voting assures the existence of majority rule no matter the fact that in America and as in most other market electoral arenas those with the most heavily financed products/candidates usually win though this case was a slight blip on the blurred screen of a degenerate form of democracy to make the one by which Nazis took power in Germany look close to ideal. While popular comic book formed conception might be that evil Germans took control of the country by marching in with guns and taking over that is fiction. They were elected to power in a more democratic though hardly ideal form of elections in which achieving a minority vote got you at least some power while here in narcoleptic inspired America less than 50 percent gets you booted out with nothing. But lest we become more deeply submerged in oceans of blather about fascism and not notice that millions of us live under it without it being given that name we might consider that millions of Americans are poor, without health care and hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live. This while we spend trillions on war and mass murder and tens of billions on the health and well being of our pets with many of us sleeping in their warm embrace due to lack of any human intimacy in our lives. Meanwhile Trump and many of his innocent supporters speak of Democratic Party members as Marxists thereby proving that he and they have no idea of Grouch’s thoughts on humor let alone Karl’s on political economics. But whether motivated by biblical tales of chosen people and virgin births or modern and less believable nonsense about celebrities and other influencers who make Trump seem almost thoughtful by comparison, news from the material world is that capitalist economics are destroying nature in all its forms and while the obliteration of air, water and other stuff in existence from long before we came along, the threat of nuclear destruction of all of us all at once grows with each new expression of mindless private profit seeking with more murderous policies and weapons that bring billions of dollars to some while offering to destroy billions of lives among the enormous majority of humanity made to absorb the murderous bill until such time as we create real global democracy and end the system before it destroys all of us.
Most recently the outgoing president who has long left any hint of intelligence for the dung heap warmly offered Ukraine the use of weapons to attack Russia and now, as often, we have to rely on Putin’s humanity and intelligence not to unleash nuclear weapons on the usa when such weapons are used on Russia. But of course good and decent Americans are reduced to claiming Putin is horny for world domination while the U.S. has hundreds of military bases surrounding Russia, China and much of the world but these are all about democracy and peace. Of course, and rapists are only concerned that their victims not be sexually frustrated. Trump’s election may well be another sign of the end of American imperial domination of the planet and whether his blatant ignorance and honesty assure positive or negative result, America and the planet will possibly benefit much more than great masses of us were lead to believe.
Meanwhile the usual suspects will fill the air with mental smog accusing any and all of fascism, genocide and even newer synonyms for whatever has been going on before our eyes while they learned memes and performed mimes and qualified as capital’s professional class of well paid servants whose checks may begin bouncing sooner than 2025 gets old.
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.
On the One-Year Anniversary of October 7, It is Clear We Were Not Told The Truth
Hamas fighters used earth-moving equipment to breach the border fence between Gaza and Israel, allowing more than 1,500 fighters to surge through nearly 30 points along the border. [Source: nytimes.com]
In an impassioned speech before the U.S. Congress in June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “like December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, October 7 is a date that will forever live in infamy.”
In the official version touted by Netanyahu, Hamas fighters on October 7 breached the Israeli security wall and attacked the Tribe of Nova music festival and surrounding kibbutzim, killing 1,139 Israelis, including 815 civilians. Israel responded by launching an all-out war.
People skeptical of the official narrative questioned how Hamas could have breached Israel’s security wall when it was among the most heavily guarded in the world and connected to sensors.
They also wondered how Israeli military forces were not immediately mobilized to rout the Hamas fighters who had come in on hang-gliders and were armed with mostly rudimentary weapons.
Even a mainstream news network like ABC aired a special report about a team of female IDF officers stationed near the border who had reported suspicious activity to their superiors days before the October 7 attack only to have their report ignored. Most of the female IDF officers were slaughtered when their base was overrun on October 7.
IDF field observers (tatzpitanitot) seen in happy times. Their reports of suspicious Hamas activity were ignored prior to October 7. [Source: hadassahmagazine.org]
After October 7, Dr. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, wrote:
“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles. In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.”
Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction
documentary about October 7, narrated and edited by John Hankey.
The film shows footage of two purported Mossad agents opening the gates to the electric fence to Hamas fighters to allow them to enter Israel and carry out the terrorist attacks of October 7.
The notion that the October 7 attacks were a surprise is contradicted by advance reports that the IDF high command had received days and hours before, and by the launching of rockets or fireworks by Hamas seen in Jerusalem in the early morning hours of October 7.
One parallel with 9/11 is that there were abnormal stock market trades and manipulations going on just before October 7, which indicates advance knowledge of the attacks by elements of the Israeli and probably U.S. intelligence establishments.
The Netanyahu government had long supported Hamas financially, viewing it as an asset that could weaken Palestinian support for the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and create unrest in the occupied territory that would enable Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy.[2]
A side purpose of the Tribe of Nova massacre, according to Hankey, was to allow for the slaughter of Israeli leftists/peaceniks who were attending the Tribe of Nova music festival, which was a Woodstock-type festival for peaceniks whom the Israeli hard right and Mossad hate.
Lawyers for survivors of the massacre are currently suing the Israeli government because, they say, the government knew in advance of the attacks and did nothing to protect festival attendees. The festival was even moved up to the Gaza border a few days before, even though it was known this would be dangerous.
Hankey shows footage from Israeli Apache helicopters which fired on the cars of festival goers fleeing the scene and others fleeing by foot, suggesting that many festival goers may have been killed by the IDF.
In Hankey’s assessment, the incinerated cars could not have been burned by Hamas. He believes that Mossad later staged the crime scene to make it look like festival goers had been attacked in their cars by terrorists.
While difficult to corroborate, the CIA and Mossad specialize in false-flag operations/deception operations where they carry out crimes and then plant evidence to blame their enemy, so this could have followed in that pattern.[3]
Left: Photo of incinerated vehicles of Tribe of Nova festival goers (the cars were likely burned by Israeli helicopters firing on them) and later (right), what Hankey suggests, is a staged photo of cars left beside the road. [Source: newsable.asianetnews.com]
At the outset of the film, Hankey features interviews with two IDF whistleblowers incensed by the Israeli government’s conduct.
One, a male who served on the Gaza border, stated that “Israel is probably the most advanced surveillance state in the world and the Gaza border the most heavily surveilled in the world. Do you know how long it would take for an Israeli attack helicopter to be activated and blow up any one of the Hamas tractors or pickup trucks [that breached the fence]? Less than five minutes. It could have been a matter of five minutes before the whole thing was upended. I’m sorry, that’s an inside job.”
Another, a female Israeli army intelligence officer whom Hankey characterizes as the “Israeli Snowden,” stated that the border with Gaza is “guarded 24/7 not only by patrol cars and cameras but also by the electric fence and lasers that are activated by alarm. Nobody can cross the fence. You cannot cross unless you had help from inside. This operation [on October 7] was not made by Hamas. The plan is to flatten Gaza. Let’s tell the truth.”
Truth is not, of course, a hallmark of the U.S. and Israeli governments, which clearly distorted what happened on October 7, 2023—like many other events before and since.
The ultimate aim was not only to flatten Gaza but to trigger a regional war that would allow for the long-held dream of attacking Iran and over-throwing its government, which has been considered an enemy since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Apt Comparison with Pearl Harbor
Netanyahu’s comparisons with Pearl Harbor are quite apt because the U.S. government lied about those attacks, which provided a pretext for another genocidal war in which two atomic bombs were deployed against a dehumanized population.[4]
Pearl Harbor attack—a date that will live in infamy. 2,403 Americans were killed in the attacks, and more than 1,000 wounded. [Source: britannica.org]
Navy communications specialists receiving intercepted Japanese messages. [Source: warfarehistorynetwork.com]
George C. Marshall took a leisurely horse ride on the morning of Pearl Harbor and sent news of the impending Japanese attack to naval commanders in Hawaii via regular courier, ensuring that it was received after the attack took place. [Source: marshallfoundation.org]
Additionally, the Roosevelt administration allowed Americans in Hawaii to be sitting ducks, like the Netanyahu government Israelis, by removing U.S. ships from the West Coast in what was known as the “vacant sea.” Further, it failed to adequately warn commanders in Hawaii (Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter C. Short) of the impending attack, which was known about because U.S. cryptologists had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code.
Early in the morning of December 7, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall received information about the impending attack, which he sent to Kimmel and Short via regular courier rather than by scrambler phone, ensuring that the news arrived too late.
The deception over Pearl Harbor was reminiscent of earlier deception regarding the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania that provided a pretext for U.S. intervention in World War I 23 months later.
Illustration of the sinking of the Lusitania—a false-flag operation. [Source: thoughtco.com]
In that case, a British commission uncovered that the Lusitania—carrying more than 100 American passengers from the U.S. to Europe (over 1,000 died overall)—was rigged with explosives, though the destruction of the ship was blamed on Germany.
Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1912 aboard the royal yacht. [Source: pinterest.com]
Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, withheld rescue boats to maximize the number of deaths. The aim was to generate enough outrage for the U.S. public to want to go to war against Germany.[5]
Evidence indicates that Benjamin Netanyahu has adopted the same strategy of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in sacrificing the lives of his own people in order to arouse enough anger to generate support for war.
Roosevelt and Churchill are today regarded as national heroes in their respective countries, though Netanyahu is likely to go down in history as a villain, along with his American sponsors. This is because the Israelis have failed to earn a heroic victory against Gaza and have horrified much of the world with the atrocities that they have committed.
Refs.
The film features an interview with an Israeli hostage, Yasmin Porat, who states that Israeli tanks shelled homes holding hostages in Kibbutz Be’eria where 112 Israelis were killed. When asked whether terrorists had killed people in the kibbutz, Porat said people were killed in crossfire—that is in firing by IDF troops targeting Hamas. The Times of Israel on July 8 reported on an IDF probe, carried out by Major General Mickey Edelstein, a former commander of the Gaza division, which acknowledged that an IDF tank fired on the home of kibbutz resident Pesi Cohen, where Hamas terrorists allegedly held 14 hostages—including Porat. See Michael Bachner, “IDF officer recounts ordering tank fire on Be’eri home during hostage standoff on Oct. 7,” The Times of Israel, December 23, 2023. In an October 11 article in Ha’aretz, Nir Hasson and Eden Solomon interviewed the IDF deputy commander of an armored reserve battalion who described how he and his tank unit “fought inside the kibbutz, from house to house, with the tanks. “We had no choice,” he said. Another Be’eri resident, Tuval, told Nir Hasson about IDF shelling of houses on October 9 in a calculated military operation. Anonymous Contributor, “A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,” Mondoweiss, October 22, 2023. Many stories spread in the media about rapes by Hamas, pregnant women having their bellies sliced open, and burning of children were proven to be false. The latter were reminiscent of stories spread about German occupiers in Belgium during World War I that was used to whip up war fever in Western countries. For discussion of the latter, see Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, rev ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). ↑
The Mossad infiltrated Hamas, which the Israelis provided with bags full of cash through Qatari emissaries. The money was used to purchase weapons. ↑
See Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990). The deception operations draw on techniques adopted by British intelligence agents in colonial settings. ↑
See https://peacehistory-usfp.org/ww2/. During the Tokyo firebombing on March 9-10, 1944, the U.S. Air Force killed more than 90,000 civilians and destroyed much of Tokyo. Of course, the Japanese committed horrific atrocities of their own, whether against U.S. POWs, or the Chinese. But Hamas are not choirboys either and have carried out their own horrors over the years. The U.S. went to war against Japan because Japan was in the process of establishing its own regional empire in Southeast Asia that was designed to undercut U.S. hegemony while displacing European colonial empires. As a spoil of victory, the U.S. acquired a chain of military bases in the Asia-Pacific including in OKinawa that the U.S. still possesses today. See Noam Chomsky, “On the Background of the Pacific War,”Liberation, September-October 1967, ↑
See Raymond Hitchcock, The Lusitania Plot (London: Ostara Publishing, 2014); Colin Simpson, Lusitania (London: Longman, 1972). ↑
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called "Left on Left." He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Kamala Harris: Not running on a program, but simply "good vibes".
Is there some connection, — not quite official but it may as well be— between censorship and presidential politics? I pose the question as a survivor of the Russiagate years, when illiberal liberals started talking about “free-speech absolutists,” and when corporate journalists cheered the censoring of unincorporated journalists so long as it was called “content moderation.”
I cannot answer my own question, honestly. But as this November’s elections draw near, a new and aggressive campaign to suppress dissent — in social media, at airports, on campuses, and elsewhere — is hard upon us. This is a trans–Atlantic, trans-national operation. Let us not fail to take note.
Straight off the top, you probably noticed that the Democratic Party’s openly undemocratic elite refused to allow any speaker of Palestinian background to address the convention in Chicago last week. We can read this, disgraceful in itself, as an indication of how the Democrats intend to deal with the Gaza crisis and other such foreign policy matters if they succeed in extending their power another four years.
Yes, they will continue supporting terrorist Israel and the Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine just as they have to date, but they will avoid talking to you and me about the imperium’s gruesome business as they conduct it. Silence on such matters will be as gold to these people, especially between now and Nov. 5. Kamala Harris, or the cynical operatives busily inventing Kamala Harris, are selling “joy” this political season, not any kind of sober, responsible view of our circumstances. Harris is supposed to ride into the White House on a carpet of good vibes. Gaza, the war in Ukraine, Washington’s provocations at the other end of the Pacific: Nah: All such questions are bad vibes.
One of the things the Russiagate years exposed was the close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the national-security state. People who know their history have long understood that “the intelligence community” — so odious, this term — has been, from its beginnings in the late–1940s, more liberal than conservative in its culture and sensibilities. Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing defeat in 2016 consolidated this relationship. It is now hard to tell where the Democratic Party ends and the national-security state begins.
I have been, since the Russiagate years, perfectly comfortable with the term “Deep State.” And here it comes again, reliant as always upon its appendages in the Big Tech social media platforms and the more repellant quadrants of corporate media as they attempt to extinguish all other-than-approved opinions and perspectives.
Of the many recent incidents of censorship, suppression and intimidation, the one that got me to the keyboard concerns Sharmine Narwani, who founded, three years ago this month, an online journal of news and comment called The Cradle, as in “the cradle of civilization.” Narwani, based in Beirut, now writes columns regularly and edits features for the English-language version of the site. She calls The Cradle a collective effort, “an online magazine covering the geopolitics of West Asia from within the region.” Those last four words are the ones that matter most to me.
Last week — on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, indeed — Meta permanently banned The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram, the holding company’s most trafficked social media properties. Narwani now stands accused of “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.” This ruling came without warning. All Narwani got was this:
Your account, or activity on it, does not follow our community guidelines. No one can see or find your account and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request a review of this decision.
How’s this for the sound of liberal authoritarianism? Big Brother could not have got down the poetry of fascistic finality any better.
Narwani, who earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in international affairs before joining the Great Craft, writes forthrightly and without regard for however much her reporting may shock the comfortably misinformed. Hers is not the stuff of beach reading, which is where its strength lies. Narwani’s investigations at the height of the CIA’s covert operation in Syria were especially distinguished but proved simply too honest for American media — The New York Times, The Guardian, Salon, and so on — to continue taking. When Huffington Post stopped accepting her work, it scrubbed her entire archive.
I published a long, two-partinterview with Narwani in 2019, shortly before she seems to have concluded, very wisely, that there is no getting truthful reporting of her kind into a mainstream media scene wholly given over to the imperium’s propaganda machine. It was Narwani who first taught me that “the Middle East” is better understood as “West Asia.” I saw in The Cradle’s pages, in other words, the true power of perspective when it is decentered — or, better put, properly recentered.
Losing alternative perspectives is precisely what is at stake in this new round of censorship. Narwani wrote last week (the italics are hers):
Meta’s accusations of [The Cradle] “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence” largely stem from posts and videos that relay information or quotes from West Asian resistance movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah — blacklisted by many western governments — who are an essential part of the news stories unfolding in a region on the precipice of a major war.
It is also essential to recognize that these are major West Asian political organizations that have deep institutional and civic roots within Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen and are part of the very fabric of these societies. They are represented in governance, run schools, hospitals, and utilities, and disperse salaries to millions of civilian workers.
I am very pleased Narwani made this important point. We lose all such density of understanding when power—political power, media power, Big Tech power—affixes the label “terrorist” to an organization, a person or a group of people. All are thenceforth rendered two-dimensional, while we are rendered ignorant—precisely the intended state. And in this new wave of censorship, the drift is that journalists, too, can be accused as terrorists or of acting as their accomplices.
Just as I was thinking through Meta’s permanent ban of The Cradle, I came (a little late) to the case of Andrew Napolitano, who, in a previous life, was a Superior Court judge sitting on the New Jersey bench. Judge N.’s daily webcast, Judging Freedom, has become must viewing in my household (and many others, by the numbers). Napolitano has a gift for clipped, succinct questions that call forth the insightful replies of an extraordinary list of returning guests. Ray McGovern, Chas Freeman, Jeffrey Sachs, Alistair Crooke, John Mearsheimer, Larry Johnson — these are top-drawer names, all of them unwelcome in corporate media.
The censors arrived in June, when YouTube, a Google property, took a segment of Napolitano’s program off the air and assigned it a “first strike.” Get three of these and YouTube, long distinguished as one of the most aggressive censors of dissenting opinion, will remove your webcast permanently, with Meta-style courtesy.
When I asked Napolitano about this the other day he replied in a note:
We were told by YT — with no notice — that the strike was due to an on-air conversation I had with a guest back in June of this year. The 20–second conversation addressed the well-known and well-documented Nazi origins of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion and the propensity of many of its members to bear swastika tattoos. The same subject has been addressed in the NY Times and on CNN and elsewhere.
YT called it hate speech. We ran it through standard and respected AI platforms, and all concluded that this was not hate speech. Of course, Google agreed with its offspring.
There are a couple of things to note about this—three, now I think of it.
One, it is by now tiresome in the extreme to have people in the propaganda apparatus pretending there are no neo–Nazis active in Ukraine when the Kiev regime is shot through with them and when Azov and other such groups, driven by a visceral hatred of Russia and its people, lead the most effective battalions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As I and numerous others have pointed out, and as Napolitano suggests, the country’s neo–Nazi elements have appeared and disappeared in mainstream Western media according to passing geopolitical exigencies. Judge N. got paddled for making reference to common knowledge.
Two, when we consider the caliber of Napolitano’s regular guests we have to conclude that the operators of the censorship machine are shifting gears. What has been until now a somewhat spotty, swatting-flies operation shapes up to be a pervasive threat to free speech and the right to dissenting opinion from which not even our most distinguished minds are immune.
Finally, I will take this opportunity to assert that the notion of “hate speech” and all efforts to outlaw it are wholly objectionable in any society purporting to be democratic and come to, at the horizon, nothing short of thought control. Contempt may be a nobler sentiment, but hatred is an altogether human emotion and we all have a right to it. The Germans, who are way ahead of Americans in this line, are a good indicator of where the suppression of “hate speech” leads: It leads to a polity that no longer knows itself because its people, fearful of prison or fines, no longer live their lives, so to say, publicly. All becomes furtive.
When Scott Ritter was pulled off a plane in June, just as he began a journey to St. Petersburg, Russia, to attend an annual conference, it was obvious there was a degree of performance or demonstration in the conduct of the New York police and the State Department, which authorized the operation. Ritter, once a U.N. weapons inspector and now a commentator on military and foreign affairs, had his passport confiscated and cannot, for the moment, travel. State could have got this done without all the theater at Kennedy.
Who knew at the time where this would lead? Who knew it was the front edge of an effort to intimidate journalists of various kinds with the direct threat of prison on charges of terrorism or working as an agent of a foreign power or who knows what?
Earlier this month, while Ritter was marooned in his suburb of Albany, the FBI raided his home and removed all his electronic communication devices, along with many crates of documents. As The Times subsequently reported, this is part of an investigation into whether Ritter acts as a foreign agent when he writes for RT International, Russia’s equivalent of the BBC, or participates in some of RT’s broadcasts.
The operative statute is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the question at issue is whether Ritter transgressed when he failed to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. “More searches are expected soon,” The Times reported, citing officials. “Criminal charges are also possible.”
Now just a damn minute. More searches? Criminal charges? When the BBC’s U.S. correspondents are similarly investigated — unthinkable, of course — I will take this invocation of FARA seriously. But our censors, as the record shows again and again, have no special concern about acting in a serious manner. Power has no such obligation.
I must now fear for people such as Chris Hedges, who had a program on RT America before the U.S. government effectively shut the network down — and at which point YouTube deleted the six-year archive of Hedges’s RT America program, “On Contact.” I have my own views of the wisdom or otherwise of working for RT International, if not RT America, which in practice served as a haven for dissident Americans of various stripes, but will set these thoughts aside for now. The idea that Hedges, top-to-bottom a professional the whole of his career, could get marked down as a foreign agent is simply preposterous.
Did I say “preposterous”? Ah, I come to the case of Richard Medhurst.
Medhurst, born in Syria and a British subject, has an enviable knowledge of West Asian affairs and is a vigorously outspoken critic of Zionist Israel’s terrorizing campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Traveling through London last week—he resides in Vienna—Medhurst was not detained at Heathrow: He was arrested and held in solitary for nearly 24 hours under Article 12 of Britain’s Terrorism Act. He has not been charged with any crime—and I reckon he won’t be, so farcical is this exercise—but he will remain under investigation for three months.
The arrest of the reporter Richard Medhurst, who has been one of the most ardent critics of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli apartheid state … is part of the steady march towards the criminalization of journalism….
It is designed to have a chilling effect on reporting that elucidates Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, as well as the active collaboration in this extermination of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and U.K. governments….
If we do not vigorously oppose Medhurst’s arrest, if we do not denounce the use of terrorism laws to attempt to silence journalists… Medhurst’s arrest will become the “norm.”
There is more where all this comes from. John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who was convicted of exposing the CIA’s torture program, was recently escorted to his connecting flight in Toronto and detained in Washington as he flew home from Athens via Canada. “There’s no good news in these stories,” Kiriakou writes in a review of his and other cases in a Consortium News piece published Tuesday under the headline, “The Slide into Authoritarianism.” “This is the future, unless we stand up to fight it.”
My mind drifts back to the Democratic National Convention as I consider these events. I think of all those dreamy, worshipful faces, eyes uplifted, to which the cameras turned in the course of the speeches delivered by various party elites, and, of course, Kamala Harris when she formally accepted her nomination last Thursday evening. How innocently eager they seemed to have something, someone, they can believe in. How lost they were to the world as it is all around them. And how cynical the illiberal liberals who run the party as they manipulate the emotions of these people while condemning them to ignorance of the imperium the party is committed to sustaining.
That is how it was, more or less, at the DNC in Chicago. There was plenty of talk of AIPAC, the antidemocratic American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a foreign agent if ever there was one — but only in the streets outside the convention hall. Harris finally raised the Gaza crisis, during her acceptance speech, but boyo, did she blow through that topic with haste. This was “strategic vagueness”—that adorable phrase The New York Times has coined to make a virtue of Harris’s weather-vane vacuousness—at its very finest.
It was the usual thing when Harris devoted a few sentences to Gaza: Her White House will shed more crocodile tears for the suffering of Palestinians, but the unwavering, unconditional support the “Biden–Harris administration” extends to apartheid Israel will remain unwavering and unconditional. When you hear Harris say, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” as she stated last Thursday, it is the recipient of AIPAC funds speaking in the code the Israel lobby understands: Worry not. You will get what you have paid for.
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.
Aug 29, 2024
Keaton and Russell dissect the demagogic contortions being used by the so-called "progressive" wing of the Democrats, as crystallised by AOC's answer regarding the question of Palestine. Given the stakes and the corrupt nature of US politics, presenting ever more rotten politicians as "choices", the American electorate is continually faced with the dilemma of the duopoly, whose cynicism has reached new heights in the current period of imperial decay. It is noted that AOC, like the rest of the Democrats —from leaders to rank and file—are so conditioned by now to speak only or mostly of identitarian issues, that their election discourse now rarely or never refers to economic or foreign policy issues, and much less to class questions, making cultural matters such as abortion and transgender problems the putative central issues of the nation (and the world). This in the midst of a blatant systematic genocide and as the world continues to slide toward a nuclear clash.
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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.
Frank Scott
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