Dimbleby Resigns as BBC Propagandist on Question Time

Yesterday, Mike put up a piece commenting on the resignation of former Bullingdon boy David Dimbleby as the host of Question Time. The man Private Eye dubbed ‘Dimblebore’ has been presenting the show for 25 years, and now considers it the right moment to leave. Dimbleby is another BBC presenter, who is very biased towards the Conservatives. Mike’s photograph of him accompanying his piece shows him raising two fingers, with the comment that it’s probably to a Socialist. Mike also cautions against feeling too good about Dimblebore’s resignation, as we don’t know what monster’s going to replace. He wonders whether the secret of human cloning has been found, and whether the next biased presenter of the programme will be Josef Goebbels.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/06/17/if-david-dimbleby-is-leaving-the-bbcs-question-time-what-horror-will-replace-him/

Last week Dimblebore was off in Russia, presenting a documentary about the country under Putin ahead of the footie there. He wasn’t the only, or even the first person to go. The comedian Frankie Boyle got there over a week earlier, presenting a two-part show about the country, it’s people and football on Sunday evening. Dimblebore was rather more serious in tone, presenting Russia as a country in the grip of a repressive autocrat, and mired in corruption which was strangling the economy.

Dimbleby first explained that Putin was most popular with young people, the generation that everywhere else is rebelling against autocrats, dictators and tyrants. He puts this down to Russians’ experience of economic collapse under Yeltsin. Yeltsin ended communism and dismembered the economy of the Soviet Union, privatising whatever he could. The result was chaos, and massive employment. At one point it got so bad that some factories were paying their workers in the goods they produced. Putin has restored order and economic stability to the country, and so has the support of the younger generation.

He spoke to a great of young professionals, an advertising branding team who were supporters of Putin, working to promote him through images and slogans. He stated that most of the media was controlled by the Russian president, with a few exceptions. He then went to speak to someone from RT’s Moscow branch. Dimbleby explained that some of the staff were British, and asked one of the Brits there whether he was presenting propaganda. The man denied it, said that there was no one watching over him, telling him what to do, and that his conscience was clear. Dimblebore then gave a knowing smirk into the camera.

He then talked to a female presenter on one of the few dissident broadcasters Putin had allowed to remain open. She said that she had not received any threats, but she knew that she could be killed for what she did. But she was still determined to carry on.

He then talked about how those, who criticised the government were arrested and jailed, interviewing a human rights lawyer, who defended them. When asked what people could be arrested and jailed for, the lawyer explained that it could be criticism of the government, or a non-traditional understanding of the Second World War. The other year Putin passed a law criminalising the view that Stalin was partly responsible for the Nazi invasion of eastern Europe and Russia through the Nazi-Soviet pact. From what I remember, I think you can also be arrested for promoting gay rights.

He then spoke to a woman, who was protesting her treatment by the state. She had already been jailed for criticising Putin, but was determined to do so again. She had not been able to get a permit to organise a protest, and so held her own, one-woman demonstration outside the court. This is permitted under Russian law. If you can’t get a permit for a demonstration, you can still protest, so long as there is only one person involved. As she stood with her placard, she was joined by an increasing number of counter-protesters determined to disrupt her protest, and possibly send her to jail. They moved closer to her, and she moved away, telling them to keep their distance. They kept coming, and their numbers kept increasing. Then the cops turned up, and started filming things as they’d been told foreigners were involved. And someone else from one of the TV companies materialised to film the protest as well. Eventually it all ended, and the police and counter-protesters disappeared.

Dimbleby then did a piece about the police’s brutal suppression of dissent, complete with footage of the cops beating what looked like a feminist protester from Pussy Riot.

He also touched on gender roles. He talked to a hairdresser, while having his haircut, who told him that Russia still had very traditional gender roles, in which women wanted a strong man to provide for them.

Putin has also succeeded in reversing the declining Russian birthrate. Instead of falling, it is now rising, with medals and benefits given to couples who have large families. He showed one woman and her husband, who were being presented a medal by Putin for having ten children.

He also went off to talk to a youth organisation, that was set up to get children, including boys of junior school age, interested in the army. The group’s name translates as ‘Net’, and is run by army officers. The children there wear combat uniforms and learn to shoot using air rifles, which they are also taught how to strip down. They were shown blazing away at targets, and competing with each other over who could reassemble a gun while blindfolded the quickest, with Dimblebore cheering the winner. And it wasn’t all boys. One of the youngster there looked like a girl. Dimblebore asked them if they wanted to join the army, to which they gave a very enthusiastic ‘Yes’.

He then went off to speak to a prelate from the Russian Orthodox Church about its support for Putin, where he described Putin as an autocrat attacking human rights and threatening peace in Europe. The prelate responded by saying that there were those, who did not agree with his view. And that was that.

He then went off to discuss the massive corruption in Russia, and how this was undermining the economy as more and more investors and companies left the country because of it. Russia has 144 million people, but it’s economy is 2/3s that of Britain, or about the size of Italy’s, and is declining.

Now all of this is factually true. John Kampfner, in his book Freedom For Sale discusses Russia as another state, where the population has made a deal with its leader. They have absolute power, in return for which they give their people prosperity. Except that, according to Dimbleby, living standards and wages are declining. Putin has passed laws against the promotion of homosexuality, there are massive human rights violations, including the jailing of the type of people, who would have been called dissidents under Communism. Journalists, who haven’t toed the Archiplut’s line have been beaten and killed.

Other aspects of the Russian state, as revealed by this programme, would have been immediately recognisable to the generation raised by Communism. Like the corruption. It was rife under Communism. The Bulgarian journalist, Arkady Vaksberg, wrote a book about it, The Soviet Mafia. And Gogol took a shot at official corruption under the Tsars back in the 19th century in his play, The Government Inspector. So no change there.

As for the Russian Orthodox Church supporting Putin, it was always the state church under the tsars, to which it gave absolute support. The watchword of the tsarist regime was ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy and the People’. And its support of autocratic leadership didn’t begin under Putin. After the restrictions on religion were lifted in the 1990s, the BBC journalists interviewed some of its clergy on their shows. And the clergy had the same preference for absolute state power and total obedience from the people. Putin made the relationship between the Church and his government closer by granting them a sizable share of Russia’s oil.

The youth groups designed to get children interested in joining the army are also little different from what already went on under the Soviet system. Secondary schoolchildren did ‘military-patriotic training’ to prepare them for national service as part of the school curriculum. It was led by retired army officers, who were often the butt of schoolboy jokes. They were taught to handle weapons, complete with competitions for throwing grenades the furthest.

And let’s face it, it also isn’t much different from what used to go on over here. I’ve known young people, who were in the army and naval cadets. And the public schools used to have the CCF – the Combined Cadet Force – which the Tories would dearly love to bring back. And boys, and some girls, do like playing at ‘War’, so I’ve no doubt that if something like the Russian group was set up in this country, there would be many lads and girls wanting to join it.

Russia has also too been a very masculine society with very traditional ideas about gender and masculinity, despite the fact that most engineers were women, who also worked as construction workers and many other, traditionally masculine areas. One of the complaints of Russian women was that the men didn’t do their fair share of standing in queues waiting to get whatever groceries were in store.

And the medals and rewards to the women, who gave birth to the largest number of children is just another form of the Heroic Mother Awards under the Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia continues many of the same aspects of the country’s society from the age of the tsars and Communism, although Dimblebore said the country was going backward.

I’ve no doubt it is, but the programme annoyed me.

What irritated me was Dimblebore’s knowing smirk to camera when the guy from RT denied that he broadcast propaganda. Now I’m sure that RT does. There’s videos I’ve seen on YouTube from RTUK, which could fairly be described as pro-Russian propaganda.

But what annoyed me was Dimblebore’s hypocrisy about it.

The Beeb and Dimbleby himself has also broadcast it share of propaganda supporting western foreign policy interests, including imperialism. Newsnight has finally got round, after several years, to covering the Fascists running around the Ukraine under the present government. But the Beeb has emphatically not informed the British public how the pro-western regime which was put in power with the Orange Revolution, was created by the US State Department under Obama, and run by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland. Far from being a grassroots movement, the revolution was orchestrated by the National Endowment for Democracy, which has been handling the US state’s foreign coups since they were taken away from the CIA, and one of George Soros’ pro-democracy outfits.

Putin is also presented as the villainous aggressor in the current war in the Ukraine, and some have compared his annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine to the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. But Crimea had been a part of Russia before 1951, when Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, gave it to that state. And Putin is not looking to take over the country either. The population of Russia is 144 million. Ukraine’s is a little over a third of that, at 52 million. If Putin really had wanted to annex it, he would have done so by now. And under international law, as I understand it, nations are allowed to intervene in foreign countries militarily to defend members of their ethnic group that are being persecuted. That was the pretext for the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, and it’s also the reason why Putin’s invaded eastern Ukraine. But it’s legal under international law. And I don’t doubt for a single minute that Russians, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, were being persecuted by the new, pro-Western government.

In his documentary, Dimbleby met a very angry, patriotic Russian, who told him that the British had tried to invade Russia three times in the past three centuries. Once in the 19th century during the Crimean War; then in 1922 during the Russian Civil War. And now we were preparing to do the same. He angrily told us to ‘get out!’. Dimbleby looked shocked, and said to him that he couldn’t really believe we were ready to invade.

This was another continuation of the Soviet paranoia and hostility towards the West dating from the Communist period and before. Russia has always felt itself encircled by its enemies since the tsars. But the man has a point. We did invade Russia in 1922 in an effort to overthrow the Communist regime. Pat Mills has talked about this in his presentation on comics he gave to the SWP a few years ago. He tried to get a story about it in Charlie’s War, the anti-war strip he wrote for Battle. This is another piece of history that we aren’t told about.

And when Gorbachev made the treaty with Clinton pledging the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism, Clinton in turn agreed that these state would not become members of NATO. He broke his promise. They now all are, and NATO’s borders now extend to Russia. At the same time, western generals and NATO leaders have been predicting a war between Russia and NATO. One even wrote a book about it, 2017: War with Russia. Thankfully, 2017 has been and gone and there has, so far, been no war. But with this in view, I can’t say I blame any Russian, who is afraid that the West might invade at any moment, because it does look to me like a possibility.

And there are other matters that the Beeb and the rest of the lamestream news aren’t telling us about. They’re still repeating the lie that the invasion of Iraq was done for humanitarian reasons, whereas the reality was that western corporations and the neocons wanted to get their hands on Iraqi state industries and privatise the economy. And the American and Saudi oil industry wanted to get their mitts on the country’s oil reserves.

The civil war in Syria is also presented in simplistic terms: Assad as evil tyrant, who must be overthrown, and Putin as his bloodthirsty foreign ally. Assad is a tyrant, and one of the causes of the civil war was his oppression of the Sunni majority. But we are constantly being told that the rebels are ‘moderates’, while the fact is that they still have links to Islamists like the al-Nusra Front, the former Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Nor have I seen the Beeb tell anyone how the Syrian rebels have also staged false flag chemical weapons attacks against civilians in order to draw the west into the war.

And objective reporting on Israel is hindered by the pro-Israel lobby. Any news item or documentary, which shows Israel’s horrific crimes against Palestinian civilians is immediately greeted with accusations of anti-Semitism from the Israeli state and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. I’ll be fair to the Beeb. Some of their presenters have tried to give an objective reporting of events, like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. But they’ve been accused of anti-Semitism, as was Dimblebore himself when he tried to defend them. In this instance, the bias isn’t just the fault of the Beeb. But it is there, and newsroom staff have said that they were under pressure from senior management to present a pro-Israel slant.

Domestically, the Beeb is very biased. I’ve discussed before how Nick Robinson in his report on a speech by Alex Salmond about Scots devolution carefully edited the SNP’s answer, so it falsely appeared that he had been evasive. In fact, Salmond had given a full, straight answer. Salmond’s reply was whittled down further as the day went on, until finally Robinson claimed on the evening news that he hadn’t answered the question.

And numerous left-wing bloggers and commenters, including myself, have complained about the horrendous bias against the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in the Beeb’s reporting. Dimblebore himself has shown he has a very right-wing bias on Question Time, allowing right-wing guests and audience members to speak, while silencing those on the left. Not that he’s alone here. Andrew Marr has done exactly the same on his programme on Sundays.

Dimblebore is, quite simply, another right-wing propagandist, with the Beeb backing current western imperialism. His smirk at the RT journalist’s denials of doing the same is just gross hypocrisy.

Syrian Boy in Chemical Attack Video Says It Was All Staged. We Launched Air Attacks Because of a Lie

Mike put this up on his website this morning, and it’s vitally important. Hassan Diab, the Syrian youngster, who featured in a video claiming he and others were the victims of a chemical attack by Assad, has no appeared in another one saying it was all a lie.

There’s a problem here of telling what is or isn’t propaganda in both these claims. This could be propaganda and ‘fake news’ put out by Assad. Or it could be entirely genuine.

The Syrian opposition has staged fake chemical attacks before, and killed and incapacitated real people in them, in order to draw the west further into their war with Assad. I’ve put up a number of videos about it by the American comedian Jimmy Dore, and the radical American news blog, Counterpunch. And the Syrian opposition itself is also a sordid bunch of murderous fanatics. The al-Nusra Front used to be the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. The Americans are funding them, as well as ISIS in Syria, as part of their campaign to unseat Assad. For the benefit of the Neocons, multinationals, Israel and the gulf Arab oil countries. The latter want him gone, because he’s blocking the construction of a gas pipeline running from Qatar through Turkey into Europe, as it would harm a rival pipeline coming from the east set up by the Russians.

The funding and money given to the so-called ‘moderates’ in the Syrian opposition inevitably end up in the hands of the radical factions. In order to oust Assad, the Americans are paying the very kind of people, who staged 9/11, and have helped turn the Middle East into a charnel house after their invasion of Iraq.

And the evidence for the manufacture of poison gas at the factory that was targeted for the airstrikes is less than convincing. UN inspectors found no evidence that chemical weapons were being manufactured there. And amazingly, the airstrikes took place just before another inspection was due. How coincidental!

This looks to me very like a ‘false flag’ attack, staged by the Syrian rebels to bring us into the war. But at least the kid’s alive. There are reports that the rebels have killed real people used in their staged attacks. They were Assad supporters, captured, taken from their villages, and then put up against a wall and shot.

Scepticism of the video is warranted, but remember: the Syrian opposition themselves are intensely intolerant mass murderers themselves. And this is all being done in the name of right-wing corporate geopolitics, despite all the pious huffings about humanitarianism.

Assad is a monster, but he’s better than the monsters, who want to replace him.

The Corporate, Geopolitical Reasons Dragging Us to War in Syria

Now May and the other western leaders are clamouring for air strikes against Assad in Syria following a chemical weapons attack in Douma, which has been blamed on the Syrian president. The dangers of such strikes are immense. Russia has said it will shoot down any American missiles launched against its military. There’s a very real danger that this could flare up into a full-scale confrontation with Russia.

Which may be what our leaders want. After all, various NATO generals were predicting that by May last year, we’d be at war with Russia. One even wrote a book about it with that as the title.

I’m not even sure Assad was responsible for the poison gas attack. I don’t doubt he’s capable of it – he is a thug, and ruthless dictator. But I’ve written several times about false flag attacks involving chemical weapons, which have been staged by the Syrian rebels in order to bring America into the war on their side. And let’s not forget who the Syrian rebels are: the al-Nusra Front, which is the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and ISIS. They aren’t democrats, or people who have any respect for western notions like ‘human rights’. They’re Islamists, of the type responsible for 9/11 and who have, with western armed forces, turned Iraq into a bloodbath.

And whatever humanitarian reasons are being piously spouted by May, Boris, Trump and the others, the real motives are very definitely coldly economic and geopolitical. The Neocons and Israelis have wanted Assad’s overthrow since the beginning of this century. They put together a list of the countries they wanted to invade, which included Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Iran. The Israelis hate Syria because they see it as a threat to their national security, while the Neocons want to do the same to the country as they did to Iraq – seize its oilfields and loot its state industries for the benefit of American multinationals.

And then there’s the Arabs. There’s a coalition of Arab states, led by Qatar, who want to build a gas pipeline up from the Arabian peninsula, through Syria and into Turkey. But Assad’s an ally of Russia, and this would hurt their oil pipeline coming from the east. And so Assad has blocked it. Hence the Arab states have demanded Assad’s overthrow. They even offered to pay the Americans the expenses of going in.

This is a confrontation purely for corporate profit. It has nothing to do with humanitarianism, especially as the rebels have shown themselves more than capable of butchering civilians themselves.

And it is already becoming a real threat to domestic democracy. Theresa May has declared that she wants to declare war unilaterally, without consulting parliament. Mike and the Tweeters, whose opinions he reblogs, have already discussed this and made the obvious point. Kanjin Tor has made a graphic, reblogged by Mike, stating that if May succeeds, then it will be the end of British democracy. We will then become an authoritarian dictatorship exactly like every other.

And I have no illusion that some in the British military will be highly delighted. Going through the history and politics shelves in the Cheltenham branch of Waterstone’s a year or so ago, I found a book by another British general arguing that we needed to give our prime ministers the authority to launch an immediate military response without being burdened with the need for parliamentary debate and scrutiny. Because, you know, national security, and the need for swift action to protect Britain. And so on.

Which, in these circumstances, starts to sound like the kind of things the Nazis said following the Reichstag Fire and Hitler’s declaration of a state of emergency.

Which also raises the awkward question: if she does unilaterally declare war, does that mean that, like the Nazis, she’s going to round up and have protesters interned, as a threat to ‘national security?’

This is all about corporate profit, and in May’s case, trying to turn her into a great warleader like Thatcher and the Falklands. She’s risking a global nuclear holocaust purely for her own electoral advantage and the profits of the multinationals. She’s also a menace to British democracy.

Stop the war, before May and the corporatists kill us all.

Vox Political: May Is a Hypocrite and Playground Bully over Terrorist Accusations and Brexit

I gather that the Tories are today trying to resurrect the tired old canard that Corbyn supports terrorism, because he, like many other MPs, met and supported talks with members of Sinn Fein in the 1980s. In fact, the Labour leader, like very many of his parliamentary fellows at the time, urged talking to the Irish republicans as a way of finding a peaceful resolution to the Troubles. I also have no doubt that he was, like many other Labour MPs such as Clare Short, also acutely aware of how badly Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholics were discriminated against.

But Mr Corbyn was respected by both sides. He has been praised by both the Irish Times and the Belfast Telegraph for his efforts for the people of the Emerald Isle. And the wife of the Reverend Ian Paisley described him as courteous, polite and ‘a gentleman’.

Which is obviously not the way the wife of one of the provinces most fervent Loyalists would describe a genuine terrorist fanatic.

Labour were vilified not because they wanted to talk to the Nationalists, but because they were open about doing so. At the same time Maggie Thatcher was jumping up and down on her soap boxes screaming abuse at the Labour party as supporters of terrorism, she herself was holding talks in secret with the IRA. One high-ranking republican commander has even written about, describing how strange it was to be saluted by a British squaddie when he visited an army base as part of the talks.

Now to compound the Tories’ hypocrisy, there’s a photo of another person of the right meeting Gerry Adams. Yes, it’s that well-known opponent of global terrorism, Donald Trump.

Mike has the incriminating picture of the two together on his article about it, and writes

The image undermines everything Mrs May has been saying about the terror threat. Her hypocrisy is revealed.

Both Mr Corbyn and Mr Trump had talks with Mr Adams, but she vilifies Corbyn and venerates Trump.

It is clear that she has no principles on this issue – none at all – other than kowtowing to power.

She is nothing more than a playground bully – and a failed one at that.

Mike also observes that while she enjoys bullying and intimidating weaker nations, she will do everything she can to please countries that are stronger, like the US, China and doubtless many others.

The countries she believes are weaker won’t be bullied by her, and so she will fail massively at the Brexit negotiations.

He concludes

She is a hypocrite and a liability to the security of the United Kingdom and she has to go.

On Thursday – if you vote Labour – you can make that happen.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/07/revealed-mays-hypocrisy-over-connections-with-terrorists/

Looking at the photo of Adams and Trump, you could be quite justified in wondering who is the real terrorist fanatic there. Parliamentary papers released about the negotiations between the British and Sinn Fein state that Adams always gave ‘reasonable’ and ‘considered’ replies to the questions his British interlocutors put to him.

Furthermore, after the peace deal was negotiated, he and Ian Paisley became staunch supporters of the deal and close friends. So close they became known as ‘the Chuckle Brothers’. Mr Adams also travelled to Spain in an attempt to negotiate a similar peace between the Basque terrorists, ETA, and Spain.

Trump has done the exact opposite. Despite his noise about combatting terrorism, he has just concluded a massive sale of American arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia. A country, whose Wahhabi absolute monarchs and princes have actively sponsored global Islamist terrorism, backing ISIS, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

And those arms will be used by the Saudis to butcher innocents, including children, in Yemen, for no other reason than that their victims of Shi’a, another branch of the Muslim faith, whom the Saudis vehemently despise. It wasn’t that long ago that one of the leading Saudi clerics declared that they were ‘enemies of the faith’ and ‘worthy of death’.

And the Saudis have no qualms about threatening Britain with terrorist atrocities when it suits them. When Blair began investigations into corruption between BAE and the Saudis, Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi National Security Council, flew to Britain to tear him off a strip. During his tirade, Bandar threatened Blair was ‘another 7/7’.

The IRA were killers and murderers, but they emerged from legitimate social and historic grievances in Ulster. Bandar threatened Britain with another atrocity purely from pique at the possibility of having his nation’s greed and venality exposed.

The Americans are also funding Islamist terrorists in Syria, as are the Saudis, against the Assad’s secular, Arab nationalist regime. The Ba’ath party there are no angels, but they’re not the absolute monsters they’ve been painted by American propaganda either. And the Islamist terrorists America and the West have funded, armed and trained – al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front and even ISIS, have committed horrific atrocities themselves.

And if we are talking about western governments with terrorist connections, we can go back once more to Maggie Thatcher. Under her, the British government gave information to Loyalist paramilitaries, using them as death squads against prominent IRA members and republicans.

She also implanted SAS men within regular army units, who were also used as assassins and death squads, just as she and her friend, Ronald Reagan, were staunch supporters of Pinochet and the real Fascist butchers in South and Central America.

May and Trump offer nothing but hypocrisy, violence and more war.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, is a man of peace, who wants to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and who will set up a ministry of peace and disarmament.

He isn’t going to be soft on terrorism. Far from it – he will strengthen our security forces to enable them to combat it. But he will also stop funding and arming the very people behind it.

Don’t be taken in by Tory lies and deceit.

Please, vote for Corbyn tomorrow for a safer, saner, more peaceful world.

Comedian Bill Hicks on Gulf War I and George Bush Senior

I found this great tirade by Bill Hicks against the First Gulf War, George Dubya’s murderous father, and the sheer barbarism of American foreign policy on YouTube. And frankly, it’s unbelievable and unbelievably disturbing that it’s still relevant nearly 30 years later.

He begins by attacking George H.W. Bush, and says that it isn’t because of his economic or foreign policy that he hates Bush. No, it’s because Bush is a child of Satan come to destroy the world. And it goes on every bit as vicious and politically informed as it is relevant.

He talks about the double standards of accusing Hussein of having weapons of mass destruction, when America and Britain sold them to him. He talks about the racism behind America – and Britain – attacking a Middle Eastern country. It’s two predominantly White country attacking a nation of ‘sandn*ggers’.

That’s the word Hicks used to describe their derogatory attitude of contempt towards Arabs, and I don’t doubt that was the attitude of the warmongers behind the invasion. Remember the Frankie Boyle joke about the Ministry of War’s ‘Department of N*gger Bombing’? Boyle based that joke on a real statement from Lloyd George. When the great Prime Minister was asked what would Britain do when the country was overtaken as a world power by America, he replied ‘We’ll teach them to bomb N*ggers’.

Looks like the Americans learned the lesson only too well.

He also talks about how the right always focus on the government raising taxes as a way of getting into power. It comes from conversations with Republican friends, who told him that if Bill Clinton got the presidency, he’d raise taxes. At the same time the Republicans are screaming about keeping taxes low, their responsible for horrific butchery of innocent people in South and Central America.

‘Hell,’ says Hicks, ‘I’ll pay that extra nickel just to have a little brown kid not clubbed to death like a baby seal.’

It’s dark, impassioned, angry stuff. Here it is.

And we’re still in Iraq, and still backing terrorist factions – al-Qaeda, ISIS and the al-Nusra Front in Syria – who have also committed horrendous atrocities, all for the same geopolitical reasons Saddam Hussein was overthrown. It’s the toxic mixture of American-Saudi oil politics, Israel’s campaign against the Arab countries supplying arms to the Palestinians, and America’s long established strategy of overthrowing secular Arab and Middle Eastern regimes, ’cause they’re a threat to western imperial power. Secular and Socialist Arab governments, like Hussein’s, Assad’s in Syria, Gaddafy in Libya and Nasser in Egypt are too close to Communism. It’s one of the reasons Britain and America have spent nearly a century backing the butchers, despots and head-choppers in Saudi Arabia.

Most of the Fascist regimes in Latin America have fallen, but the Americans have played the same game down there in this century. Hillary Clinton, fully living down to her nickname of ‘Killary’, backed the right-wing coup in Honduras that overthrew a left-wing president because he was doing too much for the poor and indigenous peoples there. The dams his predecessor wanted to build had been impoverishing and displacing the indigenous Honduran peoples. Furthermore, he wanted to give the peons free electricity and better access to medicine and other reforms. American corporate interests were threatened. So once again, the Americans found a comprador dictator to overthrow his predecessor and set up an oppressive military dictatorship. Trade Unionists, left-wing activists and campaigners for indigenous rights have been rounded up, beaten and killed.

And Killary cosied up to Henry Kissinger, one of the world’s biggest unindicted war criminals. It was Kissinger, who, under Nixon, was responsible for spreading terror and genocidal dictatorships from South America to Asia.

Killary didn’t understand the moral repugnance an increasing number of Americans, particularly the young, feel about their politicians backing murderous Fascists. The Democratic leadership had to arrange a dirty tricks campaign to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders, who said America should no longer go around overthrowing other governments. And she still can’t understand how she was beaten by Donald Trump. Okay, this was mostly due the Electoral College system, which gave its backing to Trump despite the fact that half a million or more people voted for Hillary. But amidst all his stupid and contradictory verbiage, Trump also promised not to involve America in any more wars.

He’s since broken that promise big time, but clearly some people believed him. He offered a break from the pro-war policies of George Dubya and Obama.

And this country is still supporting the Americans in their imperialist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world.

The war on terror isn’t working. It’s creating more radicalised Muslims through the carnage in the Middle East. And we’re working against stopping terror by selling arms to the Saudis, who are backing the Islamist terrorists.

Jeremy Corbyn has said we need new thinking to stop terrorism. And Labour has pledged to stop arms sales to the Saudis.

As Corbyn has said of Labour’s policies, ‘tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism’.

For a saner, and more peaceful world, vote for Corbyn tomorrow. We can’t afford another five years of Tory misrule.

Peter Hitchens Spearing BBC Anti-Russian Propaganda over Syria

Peter Hitchens is somewhat of a political maverick. He started his political career as a Trotskyite, before gradually abandoning Marxism and embracing Conservativism. He’s not a supporter of gay marriage, although he admits that opposing it is a lost battle. He supports the reintroduction of the death penalty, the return of grammar schools and more stringent punishments as a deterrent to crime. He’s also very strongly anti-cannabis.

Against that, he has opposed the selling off of council houses and does not believe that private firms should run prisons, as the maintenance of justice and its machinery of punishment and correction should be the exclusive preserve of the state. He got up the nose of his editors at the Mail of Sunday for persistently referring to David Cameron as ‘Mr Slippery’, or similar derogatory names.

And he absolutely despises Blair, whom he terms ‘the Blair creature’, for his invasion of the Middle East. Hitchens has made it very clear in his column that he loathes Blair for sending so many courageous men and women to their deaths in an illegal conflict.

And he is also very definitely not going along with the current Beeb propaganda against the Russians over the war in Syria.

This short video of his appearance last year on the Andrew Marr Show by Scot TV, Hitchens refuses to go along with the general condemnation of the Russians for bombing Aleppo. He makes the point that the al-Nusra Front, whom we are now being told to support by our government and media, are Islamist terrorists, and a form of al-Qaeda. He states that the footage we see of noble white helmeted rebels rescuing the injured victims of Assad and Putin is propaganda footage. We are not allowed into those areas, so we don’t see what’s really going on. Also, we are not shown the horrors that our shelling and attacks, or those of the rebels we are currently backing, have perpetrated on Assad’s supporters.

Hitchens is absolutely correct, but his stating this horrifies Marr’s two other guests.

In recent months there have been well-documented reports of the supposed heroic rebels massacring those trying to flee rebel-held areas. In the last incident, a suicide bomber scattered crisps and food in front of train, so that the children of those fleeing would first leap out of the train to scrabble for them. He killed 68 people. 12 of these were kids.

There has also been the suggestion that the victims of the poison gas attack, which was falsely blamed once again on Assad, were in fact pro-government villagers kidnapped by the rebels, and then killed by them, their bodies then used as macabre props for a very nasty piece of propaganda.

And the rebels have also faked poison gas attacks several times in order to draw America into the war, setting of chemical weapons themselves as ‘false flag’ attacks.

Hitchens is very much a member of the Tories, but I respect his integrity and independence on this issue. Just as I like him for his manifest disrespect to David Cameron, although his reasons may not be the same as mine.

He is absolutely right about Syria, and it is refreshing to see him speak in contradiction of the lies and propaganda we are being fed by the government and news media.

Counterpunch Article Attacking Story that Assad to Blame for Last Week’s Poison Gas Attack

On Saturday I put up a couple of pieces from the Jimmy Dore show, in which the American comedian presented a very strong case that the horrific nerve gas attack, that prompted Trump to bomb Syria and threaten the country with invasion, was not the responsibility of Assad. He pointed out that Assad is actually winning the civil war against the insurgents, and so has nothing to gain and everything to lose from launching such an attack. He also pledged to destroy his chemical weapon stocks, which leaves the al-Nusra Front, who are basically al-Qaeda in Syria, and the other terrorist groups the sole possessors of such weapons. He also pointed out that the al-Nusra soldiers handling the bodies don’t wear the protective gloves needed when handling victims of Sarin gas. The area attacked doesn’t look like the area that was alleged to have been attacked, but instead resembles very much one of the rebel bases. The doctor tweeting about the alleged attack, Dr Shajul Islam, was investigated in Britain for what Dore calls ‘semi-terrorism offences’. And the victims of the attack themselves look like people, who were kidnapped a week or so ago from villages supporting Assad by the rebels. Dore also cited a previous chemical weapon attack, that was also blamed on Assad in 2013, which was also found to be a false flag attack. It was staged instead by Turkish intelligence in order to draw Obama into the war on the rebels’ side.

Last Friday, Tareq Haddad in Counterpunch also wrote a piece casting doubt on the assertion that Assad and the Syrian government were responsible for the attack. He reminded his readers of the false claims about weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. He also mentioned the widely reported lie that Iraqi soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in a hospital after the invasion of Kuwait. This was another lie used to justify the Gulf War in the early 1990s.

In his article, Haddad presented the following points, which argue against Assad’s responsibility.

One: In spite of the assertions of US officials, there is still no independently verified evidence to suggest President Bashar al-Assad’s troops were behind the suspected chemical weapon attack.

Two: Most evidence thus far has come from the British-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights – a network of opposition activists – and the White Helmets, founded by a former British Army officer. Both groups openly align with anti-Assad forces and are not impartial.

Three: One of the doctors who documented the alleged use of chemical weapons and appeared on television networks claiming sarin was used is Shajul Islam, 31, from east London. In 2013, he was arrested for the kidnapping of two Western journalists and was considered a “committed jihadist” by MI6 before being struck off the General Medical Council in 2016.

Four: Assad, who trained as an eye doctor in London, is said to be so daft that he authorised the attack days before a major peace conference in Geneva and after he has already vastly gained the upper hand against anti-government militants.

Five: Faced with US invasion in 2013 and when former President Barack Obama made his “red line” declaration, Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and destroyed its 1,300-ton stockpile of chemical weapons and so-called precursor chemicals that can be used to make weapons.

Six: Though Assad is still believed to have some access to chemical weapons, he is not the only actor in Syria to do so. Following the 2013 chemical weapon attack in eastern Ghouta, which was immediately blamed on Assad, it emerged that groups such as the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front were more likely to be the perpetrators.

Haddad also discusses the false flag gas attack of 2013, and urged that before the US jumps in to start World War III, we should take steps to find out who really was responsible for the attacks.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/07/before-we-go-to-war-with-syria-inconvenient-truths-must-be-confronted/

Syria Chemical Weapons Attacks Were ‘False Flag’ Operations Intended to Draw America into Civil War

Last week there came a report that Assad’s government had attacked its own people, using poison gas. About 60 people had died. After the Syrian president and his government had been condemned for this atrocity, Trump declared that he was not tolerating it and launched a missile attack in reprisal at a Syrian air force base. And the world came one step closer yet again to World War III. Or at least another bloody western invasion of a middle eastern country.

We are being told that such attacks are to defend the Syrian people from a murderous regime. Our governments are also supplying funding, training and arms to a plethora of rebel groups fighting Assad. These are Islamist groups, such as the al-Nusra Front, who are basically the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, we are being assured that these rebels are moderates, who want to create a democratic Syria.

This is all lies. The so-called moderates are no such thing, and the weapons and funding that’s given to them sooner or later gets passed on to their more extreme allies. This includes ISIS, who is also being funded by part of the American military complex. The bland reassurances that this proxy war is being fought to establish democracy is also bogus. The Neocons have been itching to remove Assad since the early days of the century, because he’s an ally of Russia and Iran. And the real reason for the determined campaign to have him removed is because of his opposition to an oil pipeline that would pass from Saudi Arabia, through Qatar, Jordan and Syria, into Turkey and thence into Europe. Assad objects to this as it would damage another pipeline his Russian allies wish to build from Central Asia.

This is not about democracy. This is about the right of massive oil companies and American corporations to butcher and loot another country and its people in the name of big profits, just like they butchered and looted Iraq.

And looked at closely, the chemical weapon attack supposedly launched by Assad in the week starts to look like nothing of the sort. Instead, there is a good evidence that it was deliberately set up by al-Nusra to draw America and the West into the war on their side. The alleged victims of the attack may instead have been people al-Nusra murdered after they kidnapped them from two pro-government towns

The Syrian rebels have previous form on this, as does the American government. In this video below, the American comedian Jimmy Dore reads and comments on the sceptical reports about a similar gas attack four years ago in 2013. The first piece he analyses is by the respected American journalist Seymour Hersh. Hersh describes how members of the intelligence services he talked to were frustrated by Obama’s decision that Assad was responsible for the attack, and that he had overstepped the line. They made it clear to Hersh that there was absolutely no evidence that the attack had been launched by Assad. They also informed him that he had altered the timing of the intelligence reports, so that it appeared that the analysis was occurring at the same time as the attacks. This reminded Hersh of the Gulf of Tonkin affair. This was the notorious ‘false flag’ incident which provided the pretext for the Americans to begin bombing North Vietnam right at the beginning of the Vietnam War.

Obama then retreated from his threat to bomb Syria, after Assad offered to relinquish his chemical weapons. Hersh notes that if this was done, then the only people in Syria to possess them would be the rebels – al-Qaeda and its allies. Obama’s sudden volte-face also suggested to Dore that Obama had received convincing information that Assad was not responsible.

He then cites another report, which was reprinted from Counterpunch. Two delegates from the Republican People’s Party, CHP, in the Turkish parliament, Erdem and Seker, had come forward and stated that the gas attack had been staged by the Turkish intelligence services in order to provoke America into entering the war on the rebels’ side.

In this second video, Dore moves on to commenting on this past week’s poison gas attack. He notes how the EU’s High Representative, Federica Mogherini, had declared that it had been launched by Assad even though this claim could not be independently verified. Furthermore, the photograph of the al-Nusra affiliated White Helmets handling the bodies of the victims is highly suspicious. The dead were supposed to have been killed by Sarin nerve gas. The first effects of the gas is to make the victims lose control of their bowels and bladders and begin vomiting. It is so toxic that protective clothing needs to be worn even when handling the victims. Yet the White Helmets were shown using their bare hands, without protective gloves, and with only gas masks for protection. Attacks using this gas kill thousands of people.

Dore also quotes a number of Tweets from people, who smell a rat about the doctor claiming that his hospital was being inundated by the victims of the assault. The doctor was Tweeting and texting this information, and even offering to provide a video about it later. They point out how suspicious it is that he has time to blog about this supposed crisis. Dore also notes that the doctor himself is hardly a trustworthy source. The doctor, Shajul Islam, was ‘disbarred’ in London for ‘semi-terrorism’ actions, according to Dore.

Dore also reports that last week, 250 people from Majdul and Khattab were kidnapped by al-Qaeda terrorists. Local people have said that many of the dead were the terrorists’ kidnapped victims.

The photograph of the location of the attack also looks suspicious. The buildings are carved directly into the rock. This doesn’t look like the area, where the attacks were alleged to have occurred so much as one particular al-Qaeda base. Further evidence that this has all been set up is provided by the opposition television service, Orient TV. This announced that Russian and Syrian planes had launched a gas attack hours before the attack actually happened. Dore also makes the point that, for the attack, the timing of the attack is nonsensical. Assad and the Russians are actually winning. It would therefore be foolish for them to jeopardise their gains through a completely unnecessary gas attack, whose result would only be to strengthen international opposition against them. This is especially true now, on the eve of a conference on Syria in Brussels, and a week before peace negotiations are due to begin. The report on which Dore is commenting states that this looks like another false-flag operation, similar to the 2013 Khan al-Assal attack.

Other cogent observations came from social media. One woman, Partisangirl, asked why the White Helmets would receive Sarin suits only a month before the attack, when Syria did not have any Sarin? Charles Shoebridge, who had been a Scotland Yard detective, counter-terrorism intelligence officer and international politics graduate and lawyer, pointedly observed that the attack had made Trump’s change in attitude towards Assad apparent to the attack’s beneficiaries. By which he meant the various rebel terrorist groups. Dore plays Trump’s response, mocking the hypocrisy behind the president’s outrage that little babies have been killed, when America and its allies have done the same in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places in the Middle East. Dore also asks if the corporatist Democrats and their shills, like Rachel Maddow, are also happy. They’ve got the war they wanted, a war which will also lead to military confrontation with Russia, because Russian troops are also on Syrian bases. Responding to Mr Shoebridge, Peter Ford, the former British ambassador to Syria, reminds his viewers on Sky that Trump had repudiated Obama’s policy of wanting to unseat Assad. His administration was much more eager to tackle ISIS. Ford states that if the Syrian terrorist groups wanted to prevent Trump’s policy becoming more sensible, ‘they could not have done better than to create a piece of fake news like this.’

Dore makes the point that this information is not going to appear on the mainstream news. And the propaganda effect of the attack is working. He reads out Tweets from people, who are now convinced that America needs to enter the war, as well as from those, who are pointing out how stupid and insane this policy is.

Dore ends the vide with an appeal to his viewers to help fund them through Patreon, as YouTube and its advertisers will demonetise this and other videos. He states that he knew this video would be demonetised even before he began filming it, but he’s doing it anyway because it’s an issue he wants to continue covering. He states that his show is being hit, just like all the other news shows.

Jimmy Dore on Media Censorship of the War in Syria

In this video from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his team comment on media censorship and lies about the war in Syria. They start off by playing a clip of Wesley Clarke talking about how a general he was interviewing told him, and handed him a paper, showing that America was going to invade seven countries including Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Iran. The general did not know why these countries were targeted for invasion, and there was no new evidence against them which would justify invasion.

Dore also makes the point that Obama, despite all his rhetoric about ‘hope’ and ‘change’, has expanded the number of wars being fought by America from two to eight. If this had occurred under Trump, the public would be horrified, by as it has been done under supposedly liberal Barack Obama, it’s been apparently acceptable.

Dore also describes how Google, which owns YouTube, are attempting to stifle independent comment and reporting on the war on Syria by demonetising videos that are critical of American support for the rebels. This has been done not just to Dore, but also to another poster.

He then shows another video of a rare instance where a reporter in the mainstream media has criticised the official reporting of the civil war. The presenter, Ken or Ben Swan shows scenes of a crowd in east Aleppo celebrating that part of the city’s liberation by Assad and the Russians from the rebel groups supported by America. He makes the point that if Assad is as bitterly hated by his own people, as the media claims, then why should they be celebrating his victory?

Swan goes further and demolishes the notion of ‘moderate’ rebels, who America and the West are supposedly helping to defeat Assad. In fact, these moderate rebels don’t exist. The Free Syrian Army was disbanded last year. They gave their weapons, which had been supplied by America, to the Al-Nusra Front, which is the name for the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. And the biggest force now fighting Assad is ISIS. But the mainstream media simply refers to them as ‘rebels’. It does not tell the American public that their government is supporting ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Swann also shows footage of the buses that were sent into eastern Aleppo by Assad to evacuate the civilians there. These were attacked and set on fire by the rebels. It was done deliberately to prevent the civilians from leaving, as the rebels hide behind them.

Dore makes the point that you will not hear any mention of the above on any of the mainstream channels, such as CNN, MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and so on, and jokes about Swan himself being assassinated.

Here’s the video, which contains strong language.

Although Dore is commenting from an American perspective, the same is very much true of British journalism on Syria, with some exceptions. The I did report the attacks on the buses sent into evacuate the civilians in eastern Aleppo. However, we have had various Tory MPs jumping up and down demanding that we send planes in to bomb Assad and support the non-existent ‘moderate’ terrorists, who are going to liberate Syria for Islamism. With the exception of the I, and possibly the Independent, I don’t recall anyone making the point that ISIS is now the largest opposition group, and that if we send troops into the country, we will joining forces with them.

The media are deliberately feeding the American and British peoples lies to promote a war that has absolutely nothing to do with spreading democracy.

Deep State Lies about Terrorist Threat Produced Syria and Russia

Yesterday’s I newspaper carried a story, UK faces ‘a generation of terrorists created by Russia’, says new MI6 boss, reporting that the director-general of the spy agency had held a press conference at which he told journalists that Putin and Assad were increasing Islamist radicalisation in Syria. The piece by Kim Sengupta ran

The brutal military campaign by Russia and the Assad regime in Syria is creating a new generation of terrorists who will be a threat to the international community, including Britain, the head of MI6 warned.

In his first public speech as director-general, Alex Younger criticised the conduct of the forces of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, saying their actions are leading to further radicalisation by Islamist extremist groups.

“As I speak, the highly organised external attack planning structures within Isis … are plotting ways to project violence against the UK and our allies without having to leave Syria,” said Mr Younger.

“I believe that Russian conduct in Syria, allied with that of Assad’s discredited regime, will, if they do not change course, provide a tragic example of the perils of forfeiting legitimacy. In defining as a terrorist anyone who opposes a brutal government they alienate precisely the group that has to be on side if the extremists are to be defeated. I cannot say with any certainty what the next year will bring. But I know this: we cannot be safe from the threats that emanate from the land unless the civil war is brought to an end.”

Mr Younger’s remarks, to a group of journalists in MI6’s headquarters in London, are at odds with the views of Donald Trump and his advisers, who have expressed admiration for Mr Putin’s actions in Syria and see Russia as a future ally against Isis and other Muslim terrorist groups.

Mr Younger also strongly criticised states that have been using cyber- and other forms of hybrid warfare to undermine Western democracies. Although he did not name Russia as one of the culprits, there was little doubt that he was pointing the finger at the Kremlin when he spoke about the “increasingly dangerous phenomenon of hybrid warfare.”

Now it may be true that the severity of Russia’s and Assad’s attacks on the rebels in Syria may radicalise them further, but this is basically just a piece of misdirection by the British secret state. Assad’s is the legitimate, recognised regime under international law and the UN. And before all this kicked off, Assad was beginning to liberalise. He was keen to share information on Islamist terrorists with the west as they were a common enemy.

Moreover, it is we, who are funding and supporting Islamist terrorism in Syria. This is what the rebels are, and we are funding and supporting them. And it’s a very moot point how ‘moderate’ those supported by America and its allies are. They include groups that have grown out of al-Qaeda, such as the al-Nusra Front. And the moderates have contacts with the more radical groups.

Ultimately, this isn’t about ending the civil war, or bringing democracy to the citizens of an authoritarian regime. Which isn’t remotely going to happen if the rebels supported by the US military and the rest of us get into power. This is simply about getting rid of an ally of Russia, thus isolating it from the Middle East. It is also about building a massive gas pipeline from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan to Turkey and beyond. Ousting the current Ba’athist regime in Syria has been a goal of the Americans for decades, long before the ‘War on Terror’. This has just given the Americans the opportunity they wanted to initiate armed revolt and military action.

As for claiming that Russian cyberwarfare was responsible for undermining Western democracy, this is the purest rubbish from Hillary Clinton. She used this at the election to explain the leaked material showing her corrupt relationship with big business and Wall Street. When asked what evidence she had for this claim, she had none. Nevertheless, she’s been demanding military action in response for it ever since. Now Alex Young is repeating this moonshine.

I’m afraid that misdirection and lies like this are being used to prepare the British public for a western invasion of Syria. The American hawks have been demanding a ground offensive. And so it seems the British deep state wants more war, more carnage, more of our dead and maimed young women and men, for global American military supremacy and big oil’s profits.