ALAN MACLEOD—Maher rose from being an “edgy,” opinionated comedian to becoming one of the most influential and recognizable faces in our media. His political talk show, Real Time With Bill Maher, has been on HBO since 2003, spanning 17 seasons with over 500 episodes to date. Real Time continues to be one of the most popular shows on cable TV, drawing in more than 4 million viewers per episode, according to a new New York Times interview (9/30/19),
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TRT WORLD—In 2012, Israel would announce its war against Gaza on Twitter. During ‘Operation Pillar of Defense’, as Israeli-funneled talking points saturated the US and European media landscape, hasbara made heavy use of the more distilled communication channels of social media. It further exploited browser functions, search engine algorithms, and other automated mechanisms that controlled what content were presented to viewers.
In the process, Israel designed a narrative of itself as the innocent victim of Palestinian terrorism, one that was accorded with the sovereign right of defense against existential assault. This, despite the fact of having initiated the escalation, possessing advanced aerial power against an adversary without one, and unloading more than one thousand times as many tons of munitions on Gazans.
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Debunking Israel’s ‘Human Shield’ Defense in Gaza Massacre
8 minutes readAbby Martin provides a short but powerful rebuttal to Israeli claims that Hamas—a “terrorist organization”—is hiding behind civilians to attack Israel. Meanwhile, we have yet to hear one peep of protest from the usual Hollywood shitlibs: Where’s Rob Reiner, or Ben Affleck or George Clooney (worth about $500 MM) now? When not denouncing Palestinians, complete and deafening silence.
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The Biden administration’s lofty rhetoric is meant to distinguish the new administration from the previous Trump White House and its “America First” mantra. President Biden and his aides are trying to project a seeming return to multilateralism as opposed to Trump’s in-your-face nationalism. And so we hear a lot about the U.S. vowing to uphold the rules-based order. The difference is merely rhetorical. The consistent reality is that the United States and its Western allies are seeking to pursue a unilateral approach to international relations. The Biden administration is just a little more adept compared with Team Trump at public relations and media spin to cover this reality of American hegemonic ambitions. Lest we forget, hegemonic ambitions are anathema to a democratic world order based on equality among nations and universal respect for international law.
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Turning The Clock Back To 2001 – CIA, Others Prepare A New Resistance Against The Taliban
17 minutes readMoA—After 9/11 the CIA and U.S. special forces met with Massoud’s allies, gave them lots of money to hire more fighters and supported their march on Kabul with massive airstrikes. Two month later the Taliban gave up, went home or retreated to Pakistan. The U.S. installed the various warlords and criminals who had fought under Massoud as the new government.
That was a mistake. It had been the utter criminal behavior of those warlords that had led to public support for the rise of the Taliban in the first place. To install the warlords who looted the country as government guaranteed that the Taliban would come back.