Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.
— Lord Edwin Montagu
Show me one time where a Jew was persecuted in any country because of his religion…. It’s always their impact on the political, social, or economic customs and traditions of the community in which they settle.
— Benjamin Freedman
The latest anti-Semitism witch-hunt being conducted by the Zio-Inquisition in the UK is all hogwash if the statements of two leading Jews are to be believed.
One is the speech by successful Jewish businessman Benjamin Freedman at the Willard Hotel, Washington, …
Survival International has learned that an elephant-hunting safari operation jointly owned by a French billionaire has been implicated in human rights abuses against local Baka “Pygmies” and their neighbors, including illegal evictions and torture.
Media coverage of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline has been hopelessly myopic. Certainly environmental justice, police brutality and the violation of sacred burial grounds are important topics, but no one has addressed the larger systemic issues at play: Native American treaty rights and how their handling portends dismally for the everyone else. Even the most self-centered and politically apathetic must realize Pastor Martin Niemöller’s warning that it’s only a matter of time before even the most mainstream of society are persecuted.
To truly appreciate the full significance of the face-off at Standing Rock, one has to …
Julian Assange interview with John Pilger (Courtesy Darthmouth Films)
by RT / November 4th, 2016
As Wikileaks releases another batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, RT presents the next part of an exclusive interview given by the whistleblower website’s co-founder Julian Assange to renowned documentary maker John Pilger and Dartmouth Films.
People should have known they were being played for fools when Cameron said “the British people have made a very clear decision….” In reality, under 52% of Britons voted to leave the EU in a non-binding referendum. Think about that, because apparently nobody has in these last 5-and-a-bit months. Less than 52% voted to leave and they only represent 37% of the total electorate because 13 million people did not vote at all. There was only a 72% turn-out and roughly half voted on each side.
So why are people like Cameron and Theresa May so adamant that “Brexit means Brexit”? …
Collars serve to rein dogs in,
Quell their nerve with shades and sin.
Wild wolf’s kin such bangles scorn,
Free-born I stay, son of Fionn.
— From the Fenian Brotherhood, “Ní Bóna Ná Coróin”
With the election nearing, massive amounts of citizens are finally beginning to understand the dangerous and growing divisions, the serious sickness in our society. The mainstream media makes it appear that the battle between those on the right and left will be fought mainly on issues of identity politics and the wider “culture wars”. This is nonsense, of course. The real fault line lies between those brave and imaginative enough to join …
The first “Battle of Kunduz” took place from April to October 2015 for control of the city, where Taliban forces were playing cat and mouse for months and finally overran the city, forcing government forces to flee. The capture marked the first time since 2001 that the Taliban had taken control of a major city in Afghanistan. The Afghan government claimed to have largely recaptured Kunduz by October 1 in a counterattack, but by October 6 the Taliban had recaptured substantial portions of Kunduz.
In the confusion, on October 3, long after the government had supposedly recaptured the city, still looking for …
At first sight, compassion appears to loom large in ‘mainstream’ politics and media. When the American and British governments target countries like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, ‘compassion’ is always at or near the top of the agenda.
Time and again, the cry from the political system is: ‘We Must Do Something!’ ‘We’ must save Afghan women from the ‘Medieval’ Taliban. ‘We’ must save Kuwaiti new-borns flung from their incubators by Iraqi stormtroopers. ‘We’ must save Iraqi civilians from Saddam’s shredding machines. ‘We’ must save civilians in Kosovo from Milosevic’s ‘final solution’.
You say “European cultural institutions”, and what should come immediately to mind are lavish concerts, avant-garde art exhibitions, high quality language courses and benevolent scholarships for talented cash-strapped local students.
It is all so noble, so civilized!
Or, is it really? Think twice!
I wrote my short novel, Aurora, after studying the activities of various Western ‘cultural institutions’, in virtually all the continents of the Planet. I encountered their heads; I interacted with the ‘beneficiaries’ of various funding schemes, and I managed to get ‘behind the scenes’.
In 1959, Phoenix, Arizona was growing like a weed. As its population doubled every few years, I was working my way through the public school system, doing my best to obey most of the rules, or at least not get caught doing otherwise. The teacher’s dreaded paddle was something to be avoided at all cost. Dust and asbestos fibers from school construction filled the air as the little city burgeoned into the epicenter of the baby-booming desert Southwest. As my school’s enrollment grew beyond its limits, boundary lines were redrawn in order to fill the classrooms of a newer school, a mile to the East. So …
With the advent of the social impact bond… if Adam Smith were around today, he’d be talking not just about the invisible hand of markets but the invisible heart of markets.
— Sir Ronald Cohen (a.k.a. “high priest of money-making”).
On the Rockefeller Foundation website, president Judith Rodin asks, “How can innovative finance shift charity to opportunity?” Her answer: By unlocking “greater amounts of private capital to do public good” through impact investing. Rodin goes on to describe “two distinct new opportunities” that will facilitate this financial innovation: Social and Development Impact Bonds (SIBs/DIBs). SIBs and DIBs are characterized by financing where private …
Wall Street and the Pentagon greeted the onset of 2016 as a ‘banner year’, a glorious turning point in the quest for malleable regimes willing to sell-off the most lucrative economic resources, to sign off on onerous new debt to Wall Street and to grant use of their strategic military bases to the Pentagon.
Brazil and Argentina, the most powerful and richest countries in South America and the Philippines, Washington’s most strategic military platform in Southeast Asia, were the objects of intense US political operations in the run-up to …
Last July, the Palestinian Authority took the unexpected, although belated, step of seeking Arab backing in suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration. That ‘declaration’ was the first ever explicit commitment made by Britain, and the West in general, to establish a Jewish homeland atop an existing Palestinian homeland.
It is too early to tell whether the Arab League would heed the Palestinian call, or if the PA would even follow through, especially considering that the latter has the habit of making too many proclamations backed by little or no action.
However, it seems that the next year will witness a significant …
November 2 marks the centenary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which began the still-ongoing colonisation of Palestine and sowed the seeds of an endless nightmare for the Palestinian people. The UK Government needs to make amends for its crimes against the Holy Land. Campaigners are calling on it to apologise.
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In 1937 the Peel Commission declared that British promises to Arabs and Zionists were irreconcilable and unworkable. Too late, Britain dropped its commitment to the Zionists and began talking about a Palestinian state with a guaranteed Arab majority and protection for minorities.
The Zionists reacted furiously. Their underground military …
Washington Abstains Against Itself on Cuba at the UN
by Ike Nahem / November 2nd, 2016
The UN Announcement
Right before Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez closed the first round of high-level diplomats speaking in favor of the annual United Nations General Assembly Resolution on the “necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba,” the Obama Administration’s top diplomat at the UN, Samantha Power, took the podium to deliver an announcement. “For more than 50 years,” Power stated, “the United States had a policy aimed at isolating the government of Cuba. For roughly half of those years, UN member states have voted overwhelmingly for a General Assembly …
Israel has just emerged from its three-week high holidays, a period that in recent years has been marked by extremist religious Jews making provocative visits to Al Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem.
Many go to pray, in violation of Israel’s international obligations. Most of them belong to groups that seek to replace the mosque with a Jewish temple. They now enjoy increasing parliamentary support, some of it from within prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party.
A rash of such visits last autumn outraged Palestinians and triggered a wave of so-called lone-wolf attacks on Israelis. The attacks have recently abated.
The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.
In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First …
I reside in Orlando, a city laden with socio-economic facades which echo the theme park set pieces for which the city is best known – Shiny on the outside and hollow on the inside. If you tilt your head up in the downtown area, you’ll see glossy clean structures that speak to affluence, but it’s difficult to ignore the contradictions on street level where homeless swallow their pride and beg for money, which is not unlike most American cities. It is not uncommon to observe homeless, near retirement age, bound to wheelchairs, who announce their desperation with pleas for help on crudely rendered signage in hopes a passerby will show …
Perhaps the biggest perceived political dilemma for the world right now is what will happen in the United States, and thereby to the world, depending on which of the two becomes president. Because of this unprecedented hate-filled election campaign, many pundits consider this election to be the most important in USA history.
I have long postponed making a prediction about what could occur with either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as president. I also vacillated about making a prognosis regarding Barack Obama when he first campaigned for the presidency. The main reason for both hesitations has to do with the two …
Today the Guardian offers decisive confirmation that it is only too willing to serve as an establishment mouthpiece. It proudly announces that it is the venue selected by Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain’s FBI, to receive the agency’s first-ever newspaper interview.
If the Guardian were a proper independent newspaper, it would regard this interview as a stain. Instead it bills it as a front-page “exclusive”. Exclusively, the Guardian has been given the chance to regurgitate MI5’s propaganda – propaganda designed to help stoke a new Cold War with Russia.
In fact, this is not an “interview” as the Guardian claims, …
November 2 marks the centenary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which began the still-ongoing colonisation of Palestine and sowed the seeds of an endless nightmare for the Palestinian people, both those who were forced to flee at gunpoint and those who have managed to remain in the shredded remains of their homeland under Israel’s brutal military occupation.
*****
A movement called the Balfour Declaration Centenary Campaign is urging action and wants an apology.
“We call on the international community and all peace and justice loving people to join the campaign to call on the Government and Parliament of the …
The anarchist political observer Noam Chomsky has over the years espoused a strategy of voting for the Democrat in swing states. Recently Chomsky, with John Halle, propounded “An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting).”
Chomsky questions the ethical/moral principle rejecting LEV since lesser evil voting is designed to minimize evil. As futile as lesser evilism is, it is also futile to discuss there being a lesser evilism between the two utterly dominant rightist political parties in the United States. LEV, in fact, is an …
It is literally impossible for the world community to get a clear understanding of, and truth about, the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This statement is based upon the Feature article in Columbia Journalism Review (“CJR”) dated October 25, 2016 entitled: “Sinking a Bold Foray Into Watchdog Journalism in Japan” by Martin Fackler.
The scandalous subject matter of the article is frightening to its core. Essentially, it paints a picture of upending and abolishing a 3-year attempt by one of Japan’s oldest and most liberal/intellectual newspapers, The Asahi Shimbun (circ. 6.6 mln) in its effort of “watchdog journalism” of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. …
In its 10 years of existence, WikiLeaks has been at the center of controversy. Ever since its global debut with the 2010 Apache helicopter gun-sight video depicting the killing of civilians in Baghdad, the whistleblowing site has consistently exposed the naked power of empire for the world to see. As a result, the organization has been subject to relentless retaliation. With banking blockades, a secret grand jury and constant character assassination of its founder Julian Assange, who remains arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian embassy, the U.S. government’s efforts to divert public attention from evidence of its own crimes have quickly …
Mysticism does not necessarily lead to despotism, but many despots frequent mystics: to obtain a psychic safety net for high wire acts of political violence, to prescribe emotional narcotics to put the conscience to sleep, and in the final act, as karmic adjusters to insure against retribution from the bloodshed and suffering they unleash.
The Italians under Mussolini grew their own fascist mysticism, the Nazis were mired in occult symbolism, rituals, and mythology, and the Showa Era Japanese Empire, and Shinzo Abe’s current gang of unreconstructed, revisionist, ultra-nationalist militarists are also mystical and religious fundamentalists to a one.
On his return from attempting to stop the terrible slaughter of Rwandans there was no official to welcome home Canada’s General Romeo Dallaire. In his recent memoir, Waiting For First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD, ((“Inside Roméo Dallaire’s brutally revealing new memoir,” Brian Bethune, October 21, 2016, Maclean’s.)) Dallaire reveals that his return also began a pattern of suicide attempts, blamed on PTSD, perhaps survivor’s guilt, but which these years later might be traced more accurately to his reluctance to understand that the people who sent him to Rwanda did not care for humanity. ((My “The ‘Third …
I would never vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and therefore have no dog in this fight. That said, I am an interested spectator, and clearly see that Ms. Clinton is playing a very dangerous game by using the Russians as an election issue and blaming them for everything. When asked about her leaked e-mails in the last debate, she skillfully avoided the damaging content of the e-mails, and turned the table on the Russians, claiming they are the danger. She argued we should all be alarmed at the attempt by Russia to manipulate our election, a charge …
Next week the Fraser Institute’s newly established Peter Munk Centre for Free Enterprise will offer a day long “Introduction to Economic Reasoning” seminar for Grade 10-12 students in Scarborough. Launched in June with $5 million from the founder of Barrick Gold, the Centre for Free Enterprise cements Munk’s position as leading contributor to right-wing ideas. But, the ideologue’s biggest contribution has been to a venerable public institution.
The Munk School of Global Affairs reveals much about the state of foreign-policy debate in this country. Among 35 million Canadians, the University of Toronto would be hard pressed to find a less credible …
The boat, along with other means of travel, is often undertaken as a matter of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt, such movement altogether.
Since the last decade, extreme measures have been implemented that effectively qualify Australian sovereignty while singling out a particular breed of asylum seeker. The former aspect of that policy was specifically undertaken to excise the entire mainland from being qualified as territorially valid to arrive in.
The entire policy effectively assumed a military character, …
Better watch out, Vlad. When Western propaganda throws an “-ism” at you, the gloves have come off. Think Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, communism, socialism, extremism and “Islamic” terrorism, for starters. After all, behind the Great Western Firewall, they are all the same thing, right?
A recent cover and main article in the Economist, pictured left, reminds me of just how hyperbolic and ideological is the West’s propaganda against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While maybe good polemical fodder as a cartoon on the editorial page, the fact that this demonic caricature merits …
