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.

RT’s Afshin Rattansi Talking to Gaza Health Minister Dr Basem Naim

This was posted on May 14th, a day before the Israeli’s massacred 60 Gaza Palestinians for trying to break through the fence into Israel, and it adds some very relevant pieces of back ground detail.

It’s from RT’s ‘Going Underground’ show, where Rattansi interviews various guests. This year is the 70th anniversary of the birth of Israel, called by Palestinians the Nakba, or ‘Catastrophe’, because it led to the destruction of their country and its communities. 400 Arab villages were razed by the Israelis in 1948, and countless villagers massacred up and down the country by Israeli troopers, even those bringing them rice as a peace overture, or seeking refuge in mosques.

To mark this, the Palestinians had organised a ‘March for Return’, which has been going on since April 30th. This is clearly part of the demand that the Palestinians should be allowed to move out of their refugee camps, and, presumably, return from their exile abroad to their old homes in what is now Israel. Israel definitely does not want to do this, as it has been pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing since the first Zionist settlers arrived in the early 20th century. It refuses to let Palestinian exiles return because this would upset the demographic character of Israel as the Jewish state.

He also attacks Trump’s decision to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, pointing out that it is a contested city, and should be the Palestinian capital. He also describes the squalid conditions in Gaza itself, which is deliberately starved of water and electricity by Israel, and indeed the water supplies have been fouled by Israel consumption and water projects. The beach is also heavily polluted – up to 97 per cent if covered with sewage, again from Israel. There economy is also deliberately stifled by Israel. And naturally, he is firmly opposed to the visit to Israel scheduled for later by Prince William.

Rattansi tries to tackle him on Syria, trying to get him to admit that Hamas forces there have been fighting against ISIS and al-Qaeda. Basem refuses to admit this, and just repeats the line that Palestinians are peaceful people dedicated to cooperation.

This adds a bit more information to explain the powerful reaction by the Palestinians to Trump’s movement of the embassy. This was always going to be intensely controversial to a persecuted and exiled people, who look on the Holy City as their own. But the fact that this occurred in what they remember as the anniversary of their country’s destruction and their persecuting, ethnic cleansing and massacre, which they were commemorating with a march demanding their return to their homes, also explains why so many massed at the fence between Gaza and Israel.

As for Palestinians being a peaceful people, the PLO has carried out terrorist atrocities. Israel has regularly denounced Hamas, the governing faction in Gaza, as a terrorist organisation, but I’ve read others claim that Israeli policy has left them no choice. The Israeli state ignores Palestinian moderates, and does not seem to respond except through the threat of violence. When this occurs, they refuse to concede to Palestinian demands because they don’t talk to terrorists. I’ve also come across conspiracy theories, which consider that Hamas is itself a creation of the Israelis.

As for Hamas fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda in Palestine, I’m actually with them on that one. Hamas are also Islamists, but ISIS and al-Qaeda are terrorists. Daesh are responsible for the destruction of antiquities and priceless ancient artifacts and monuments, including mosques and other Islamic buildings, all over the Middle East and North Africa. They have also murdered moderate Muslims, Sufis, Shi’a, and other forms of Islam that don’t conform to their own twisted ideas. And this is quite apart from their persecution of non-Muslims, like Christians and Yezidis, and their re-imposition of sex-slavery for the Yezidi women they have captured. They are an affront to human civilisation, and it is an abomination that the Americans have been backing them as part of the proxy war against Assad in Syria. Daesh should be fought against and the movement wiped from the Earth.

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.

Counterpunch on George Monbiot and Nuclear Experts Spreading Propaganda about Syrian Nuclear Weapons

Thursday’s Counterpunch carried a long piece by Jonathan Cook reporting on an important piece of investigative journalism by Gareth Porter. In 2007 Israel bombed a plant they claimed was a secret nuclear reactor, constructed by Assad. Recent evidence strongly suggests that the building was no such thing, and that the International Atomic Energy Agency knew it wasn’t at the time. Nevertheless, they went ahead with the lie as part of the strategy by the Americans and Israelis, who were hoping to use the incident to bring down Assad and draw Iran into the conflict, so they could conquer that nation too.

The article also goes on to criticise the Guardian’s George Monbiot. Monbiot has, according to Cook, taken it upon himself to be a ‘Witchfinder General’, attacking figures on the left, like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, who are cautious about accepting claims of atrocities by Assad. Like the recent gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun, which appears to have been faked by al-Qaeda themselves. He also states that Human Rights Watch has also falsified information about the war between Israel and Hizbollah. Insiders lower down the organisation knew that what it said was untrue, but were silenced by their superiors.

He also states that now the attempt to unseat Assad has failed, or is failing, the Israelis and Saudis are trying to start a war in Lebanon -again- in order to draw Iran into a war they hope they can use to overthrow them.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/22/syria-experts-and-george-monbiot/

I’ve no doubt that this is true, and while I like much of what Monbiot says, it does show how far the Guardian has fallen as a supposedly ‘left-wing’ paper. Tony Greenstein has written several articles attacking the Groan for its blatant anti-Corbyn bias, and its willingness to spread the anti-Semitism smears on behalf of the Israel lobby. And I’m not surprised. The Groaniad backed the SDP and the Liberals in several elections, and its staff seems to be full of Blairites and Neocons. So no surprise that Monbiot is also uncritically spreading disinformation about non-existent nuclear reactors, and attacking anyone he thinks is too pro-Assad.

Code Pink Urges US Institutions to Boycott Arms Industry

This is another important piece by RT America on attempts by American peace activists to stop the war machine that is currently killing and making homeless millions of innocents in the Middle East, as well as the courageous American and allied squaddies sent to fight in it, and which has also resulted in massive cuts to public programmes in order to fund it.

The left-wing peace group, Code Pink, has launched a conference to encourage universities and financial institutions to boycott and divest from the arms industry. The group’s leader, Medea Benjamin, states that the reason these wars have dragged on so long is because they are incredibly profitable to the arms manufacturers. Every time Trump goes to Saudi Arabia, for example, to announce a multi-million dollar sale of armaments, the share price of companies like Lockheed Martin goes up. So, she says, they are simply following the money and trying to get institutions to stop funding and supporting these ‘merchants of misery’.

Vijay Prashad, the director of International Studies at Trinity College, states that even though millions are being killed in these wars, there is no accountability, no outrage, no pity for the victims and no sense that anybody should be dragged before an international tribunal. Instead, the victims of these wars themselves are blamed, as is happening now in Syria, while the reality is that these wars are destroying country after country.

The Black American activist, Ajamu Baraka, who was the Green Party’s presidential nominee, also makes the point that in order to fund this war machine, the American state is cutting vital welfare services and programmes. These include those for the homeless, support for education, such aid for the poor to go to college, environmental protection policies will be cut, energy assistance for the poor and elderly will also be cut, all in order to find the money to provide the £696 billion granted to the US military. It’s money that has been supplied at the expense of poor people’s basic needs.

The clip ends with Medea Benjamin stating that the conference is designed to get people together to say ‘enough is enough’ and that institutions no longer want to make profits from the military and their wars.

All of this is correct. People in America, as well as those over here, are seeing welfare budgets slashed partly to provide funding for the continued wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. These are not being fought for democracy, or the defence of the West and its allies against evil dictators. They are being fought to provide profits for American arms contractors, who provide millions of dollars in funding for American politicos. Iraq wasn’t invaded because it had weapons of mass destruction. That was a lie. It was invaded because the Saudi-US oil industry wanted the Iraqi oil reserves and its industry. American multinationals also coveted Iraqi state enterprises, and Israel hated the aid Saddam Hussein was giving to the Palestinians.

And the same is true of Syria. The neocons want to destroy it, because its an ally of Iran and Russia and a potential threat to Israel. They and a group of Arab states, including Qatar and Jordan, also want to oust Assad because he’s blocking the construction of a massive gas pipeline, which will stretch from Qatar to Turkey. In fact, these nations even told the Americans they’d pay for the war if America attacked Syria.

And the neocons have already destroyed Libya, they’d like to destroy Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Hence Trump’s step in decertifying the Iranian nuclear deal with Obama.

General Smedley Butler described all this back in the 1930s in his book, War Is A Racket, detailing the way American big business had profited from the First World War. As for the poor suffering because of the need to cut services to fund the military, I think it was president Truman, who described it has taking food from the mouths of the poor, and denying the construction of schools and hospitals.

I’ve already said in my last article about the revelation that the CIA was staging fake academic conferences as part of its campaign against the Iranian nuclear programme, that Lobster had published an article expressing similar concerns about the way some of Britain’s universities were also supporting the British war machine. Millions are being plunged into poverty and death, including American and British squaddies, all for the profits of the merchants of death and big business like Haliburton. It’s time for this obscenity to end, and universities and investment houses to pull out of supporting the war machine.

RT on House of Lord’s Opposition to £200 million Going to Syrian Opposition

This clip from RT covers the opposition in the House of Lord’s debate over the British government spending £200 million of taxpayer’s money on the Syrian opposition groups. Only £14 million of this money was for ‘political purposes’. One member of the Lords asks the obvious question about what the rest of the money is for. A government spokesman replies that it is to help the Syrian people stand on their own feet, and that £39 million has gone towards roads and such. Another peer states that the British people would be outraged if they knew how much money was being spent in this way, and feels it would be better spent against fuel poverty in the UK.

Baroness Caroline Cox argued that we should not be sending this money to the Syrian opposition groups, as they are not moderate and will use the money to purchase arms that will be used against us. Interviewed by RT afterwards, she states that she has gone to Syria to see what the situation was really like there, where she met President Assad. She states that there was much opposition to her when she came back, as the government really didn’t want to go, arguing it was unsafe. But she felt she had to go after working with women and children, who had fled the war. She states that she certainly does not condone many of the things Assad has done, but she went to see what the Syrian people wanted.

Cox is quite right to object to this money being spent supporting the opposition groups. They are by no means moderate. They include al-Nusra, which used to be the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and ISIS. They aim to set up another hardline Islamist state. Syria at the moment, while not a democracy, is a secular state. If the opposition groups take over, they will begin exterminating Christians, Shi’a and moderate Sunni Muslims, and any other religious or secular group that they considered the enemies of Islam, just as they have done elsewhere in Iraq. The weapons they use will be passed on to other Islamist militants, who will use it against us.

The claim that this is to promote a genuinely democratic regime in Syria is a lie. The Likudniks and neocons have been pressing for regime change in Syria for a long time, not least because Assad is supported by Russia and Iran. They, and an alliance of various Arab countries, also want to topple Assad because he is blocking the construction of an oil pipeline which they would like to run from Qatar to Turkey. Assad has refused on the grounds that it would damage the oil interests of his Iranian and Russian allies.

We should not be funding the Syrian opposition. They represent only more sectarian violence and butchery. If they win, the country will destroyed, just like Iraq and Libya. But it will allow the oil multinationals to loot the country, just as they did in Iraq.

Redacted Tonight on How Trump Is Lying to Us about Iran and North Korea

This is a very short video from RT’s Redacted Tonight, presented by the left-wing comedian Lee Camp. Camp shows how Trump is lying to America and the world, in order to bring us closer to war with both of these countries. Trump has said this week that he could declare war with Iran over its failure to keep to the agreement regarding its nuclear programme. Except that, according to the Intercept, UN weapons inspectors have found that Iran has kept to the agreement.

Americans have also been told that North Korea is unwilling to negotiate over its nuclear weapons. Except that the North Koreans have said they’re unwilling to negotiate getting rid of theirs, unless America ends its hostile stance and military threat to them.

Which as Camp points out, means that they are willing to negotiate.

Others have pointed out that the real reason Trump wants a war with Iran is that, while the country certainly is abiding by the treaty limiting its nuclear capability, it is still supplying arms and other aid to groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria and the Shi’a in Iraq. In other words, America’s geopolitical enemies. But they have not violated the international treaty regulating their development of nuclear power, so that shouldn’t be an issue Trump can use for pushing America into another devastating war in the Middle East.

As for the North Koreans, while I don’t trust them, and Kim Jong Un really is a murderous b*stard, with the same taste for killing his family as the most degenerate Roman emperors, past experience with other nations has taught him he can’t trust America if he gives up his nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein did, and the US invaded anyway.

This looks very much like the American military-industrial complex trying to start yet another series of wars, including one that could very easily set off nuclear Armageddon. In Iran’s case, Trump seems simply to be following the policy set by the Likudniks in Israel and the Neo-Cons in the US. They wanted to overthrow the governments of seven nations, including Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.

As for Israel itself, Tony Greenstein on his blog has posted a piece discussing how no-one wants to discuss the real elephant in the room: Israel’s own nuclear weapons. Israel isn’t supposed to have any, but they do. Nobody has held them to account for breaking the international treaty, and officially the Israel’s don’t have them. But in practice, everyone knows that they do.

http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/israels-nuclear-weapons-consistency.html

I still remember the uproar back in the 1990s when Mordechai Vanunu leaked the information to the international press that Israel had broken the treaty and produced nuclear weapons. He was prosecuted and imprisoned for a very long time. And it seemed shortly thereafter that Robert Maxwell, the obese fraudster, who owned the Mirror, one of the British papers which I think broke the news, fell off his yacht. Of course, I might be wrong about all of this. Maxwell was probably up to his ears in international intrigue, but at the moment it seems that his death was just an accident.

Hmmm….

But back to Greenstein’s article, one of the very interesting things he says there is that a few decades ago one of the Middle Eastern countries did propose a plan for a nuclear-free Middle East. This would have made the world a much safer place.

And the country that put forward this proposal was Iran. Now unfairly accused of building nuclear weapons.

Which bears out in spades what Lee Camp has said about Iran and North Korea. We’re being lied to about them and their supposed nuclear ambitions. And in the case of Iran, they’ve been lying to us for a very long time.

Both of these countries are extremely repressive states, though Iran is more democratic and freer than North Korea. Indeed, according to the book on the country written by the veteran BBC correspondent, John Simpson, Iranians often said things to him about their government, which made him fear for their safety. When he asked them about it, they’d respond with ‘Why not? This isn’t Russia.’ But those countries’ lack of freedom isn’t why the Orange Generalissimo is spoiling for another war with them.

General Smedley Butler was right: war Is a racket. And the western military machine want to be the gangsters that run it.

Jewish Chronicle Race Hucksters Make More Fake Anti-Semitism Accusation over Criticism of Luciana Berger

On Saturday Mike also put up a piece reporting how the Jewish Chronicle had taken the opportunity offered by the criticism of Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, by a member of the local party’s executive to make fresh accusations of anti-Semitism against Momentum and the Labour party.

Berger had resigned from the Shadow Cabinet last year as part of the ‘chicken coup’ of Blairites hoping to weaken to Corbyn’s leadership of the party. Roy Bentham, the local officer, who made the criticisms, said

“Luciana needs to get on board quite quickly now. She will now have to sit round the table with us the next time she wants to vote for bombing in Syria or to pass a no-confidence motion in the leader of the party – she will have to be answerable to us.”

However, as Mike points out in his article, Bentham is not a member of Momentum, which has distanced itself from his comments. Angela Kehoe-Jones, the Secretary of Liverpool Wavertree constituency Labour party, said

The newly elected Executive of Liverpool Wavertree are looking forward to working with our MP Luciana Berger for our constituency.

We must disassociate ourselves from one of our officers who did not speak on behalf of the Executive. The views he has expressed do not in anyway represent the views of the CLP officers.

We have a lively and growing CLP and we have regularly campaigned together in local and national elections and to get Luciana re-elected in the General Election. We are united in our common goal to oust this Tory government and to see a Labour government elected under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Berger herself has stated that she did not resign from the Cabinet because of anti-Semitism. And while Bentham’s critics, like Owen Jones, have said that his comments were ‘off’, there isn’t actually anything anti-Semitic about them. There was no mention in his comments of Berger’s religion or ethnicity.

Mike speculates that the Chronicle may have been provoked by Bentham’s remark about Berger voting to bomb Syria. But that’s actually fair comment. There’s nothing anti-Semitic in criticising an MP, who wishes to bomb a foreign country for very dubious geopolitical reasons. Likud and the American Neo-Cons want Assad deposed, as do a number of Gulf states, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, for similar reasons to the Iraq invasion: overthrew a secular, Arab nationalist state allied to Russia and Iran, stop a source of possible aid to the Palestinians, loot the country of its industries and oil reserves, and in the case of the Gulf Arab states and Jordan, send a gas pipeline through the country to Europe and Turkey, which is currently blocked by Assad because of his alliance with the Russians and Iran.

Britain and America are already supporting rebel forces trying to overthrow Assad, and these are very unpleasant indeed. They’re al-Qaeda and ISIS. So we’re cynically supporting the very people we’re supposed to be fighting against in the Middle East, because they’re against a secular dictator the American military-industrial complex also wants to remove.

And it is by no means only Jewish politicos in the Labour party, who voted for the bombing. So was Hillary ‘Bomber’ Benn, the son of Tony Benn.

So, as Mike himself points out, this is yet another baseless accusation of anti-Semitism, like those made against Mike himself in order to prevent him from being elected to Powys council, and for which Mike is pursuing legal action.

These accusations are all the more disgusting, as they detract from the real anti-Semitic abuse Berger suffered from a genuine Nazi, who was jailed for his offences.

Mike quotes one of the commenters on Twitter, EL4JC, who states that the people throwing around these smears undermine the genuine fight against anti-Semitism, and concludes

That is exactly right. Baseless accusations, such as those made against me or Mr Bentham, undermine the fight against anti-Semitism. One wonders why people do it.

Is it to spread division, confusion, disinformation?

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/08/fake-accusations-against-momentum-over-luciana-berger-are-undermining-the-fight-against-anti-semitism/

In fact, two weeks ago Tony Greenstein put up on his blog an article reporting how the Zionist lobby in the Labour party were going to launch another spate of anti-Semitism accusations after their disappointment with the results of the election. Contrary to their desires, this showed that Corbyn is massively popular with the electorate, a stance that threatens the Blairites’ neoliberal economic agenda and the Zionists’ demands that criticism of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians should be studiously avoided. Joan Ryan, the Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, even wrote to her supporters stating that Theresa May would be better than Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Greenstein commented

The success of Jeremy Corbyn in turning the Tory tide is making these racists sick to the gills which is why they are trying to relaunch the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the hope of dividing the Party, sowing dissent and providing succour to the Tories. False anti-Semitism and false victimhood are their chosen strategy for defending a state which demolishes Palestinian homes, even of Israel’s own Arab citizens in order to make way for Jewish homes and towns.

In Israel ‘Judification’ is official policy. Google ‘The Koenig Plan’ or the ‘Prawer Plan’. In Nazi Germany they had deJewification campaigns. Israel is a state which officially does its best to stop Jews and Arabs having sexual relationships. A Jewish state means a Jewish Supremacist State. It isn’t a constitutional adornment. Purity of race and a Jewish settler state goes hand in hand. This is what Ryan, Kyle and Newmark are defending.

It is essential that if there is a further round of false ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations that Jeremy Corbyn stands firm and calls it out. There is no future in trying to appease the supporters of Israel. You cannot appease racists or the supporters of racism. If Corbyn had, at the very start, said that yes he condemns anti-Semitism and he also condemns false accusations of anti-Semitism directed against supporters of the Palestinians (and even against Jewish anti-Zionists) then he could have defused these attacks early on.

Corbyn above all knows that the ritual response of Zionism’s supporters to opposition to Israel and what it does to the Palestinians has always been false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. They even invented a ‘new anti-Semitism’ since the traditional anti-Semitism (hatred or hostility to Jews) didn’t accord with hatred of racist Israel.

Nothing Corbyn says or does will ever satisfy Israel’s supporters. They are part of the NATO supporting friends of US imperialism. Corbyn will never be acceptable to them which is why the Left in the Labour Party needs to be resolute in opposing any further appeasement of these people. If they think the Labour Party is anti-Semitic then they should clear off and join the Tory Party, the traditional home of genuine anti-Semitism.

http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/labour-friends-of-israel-zionists-are.html

In the case of the accusations made by the Jewish Chronicle and other commenters against Bentham and Momentum, this is just nasty, cynical yellow journalism. There’s nothing anti-Semitic in Bentham’s comments, and he wasn’t a member of Momentum. But they made the accusations anyway, and cynically expect the public to believe it. Who knows, perhaps they even believe it themselves? They hope that simply by repeating the smear – the big lie – they’ll get more people to believe it, just as Goebbels, the master of this type of propaganda, recommended.

There’s a very nasty element of race hucksterism here. This is what such accusations are often called in America, whenever a radical Black politician or activist, such as Al Sharpton, gets up and makes an inflammatory comments about White racism. The Republicans, backed by Fox News, immediately fall over themselves to denounce them as a ‘race huckster’ or ‘race baiter’, and try to turn it around so that the politico making the accusations of racism is the one, who is really racist.

And this is what is going on here. The Jewish Chronicle and its allies are simply playing the race card to smear their political opponents, who are genuinely anti-racists, and who include Jews and people of Jewish heritage. It’s about time the Chronicle was still held to the same standards as everyone else. Owen Jones states in one of his Tweets that they should retract their accusations. They should. And Tony Greenstein is also correct in that if they really think that Labour is anti-Semitic, then they should leave and join the Tories, who are, after all, their natural allies if Joan Ryan is to be believed.

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.