Vox Political: Were the Skripals Poisoned by Weedkiller?

Mike over at Vox Political has put up a very interesting post, wondering if the Skripals weren’t poisoned with a Novichoks nerve agent, but something far more prosaic: weedkiller. He notes that if a nerve toxin had been used, far more people would have been affected, and points out that the effects of the two types of poison are similar. It’s therefore possible that, far from being the victims of an assassination attempt by the Russian government, they were instead accidentally poisoned by a gardener.

One of his commenters, Wanda Lozinska, argues on the other hand that it is too much of a coincidence that the only victims of this poisoning were the Skripals. Sergei Skripal was a double agent, who’d betrayed a number of Russian spies to British intelligence and was therefore an enemy of the Russian state. However, she did state that weedkiller was also an ingredient of the Novichoks poison.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/03/23/what-if-the-skripals-were-poisoned-not-by-a-novichok-nerve-agent-but-by-a-weedkiller/

Reading this, I wonder if the Skripals were deliberately poisoned, but with weedkiller by somebody they had crossed, rather than Vladimir Putin. Sergei Skripal had many enemies, including the spies, whose identities he’d betrayed. It’s possible that one of them could have made the poison and then secretly administered it to them. As for Putin’s involvement in this affair, it’s been pointed out that Skripal served time in jail in Russia for his treachery. If Putin had wanted him killed, he surely would have done it there, rather than wait until the man was free and living in Britain.

Of course, it’s possible that the Skripals were killed on Putin’s orders, and you can probably think up a number of reasons why this should be so. Perhaps it wasn’t because of something he did, but because of what Putin feared he was going to do. But this is just speculation. We don’t know if Putin was responsible, and as more evidence appears, the less certain the Tories’ assertion that he was becomes. If the toxin was weedkiller, rather than nerve poison, then its far more likely that the Skripals were poisoned by a private individual, rather than a Russian agent with their arsenal of chemical weapons.

In any case, Jeremy Corbyn is right to demand more evidence before jumping to conclusions and ramping up tension with Russia.

As for the newspapers currently repeating these allegations uncritically, there’s an article attacking them and there cynical use of British jingoism in today’s Counterpunch. This notes a study of the newspapers in five European countries, which found that the Daily Mail and the Scum were the worst for their demonization of immigrants and asylum seekers. In any other nation, that would most probably be a badge of shame. But over here, I can imagine the hacks and corporate managers at these papers actually being proud of it.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/23/hitler-and-the-poisoning-of-the-british-public/

Counterpunch: Manchester Terror Attack Blowback from Western Imperialist Recruitment of Salafi Terrorists

I’ve mentioned several times over the past week or so the hypocritical smears the Tory press – the Torygraph, Scum and Heil – have published claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was a supporter of IRA terrorism, and, by implication, of the Manchester terror attack last Monday. Corbyn wasn’t. He did support attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Troubles through negotiation, something Thatcher and the Tories loudly denied they were doing, but did anyway. Both the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times have hailed the Labour leader as a man, who strove for the best for the people of Ireland and Ulster. Ian Paisley’s wife even said that Corbyn was courteous and polite.

So, not quite the fanatical supporter of Irish nationalist terrorism these papers wanted to smear him as.

And the Tories, under Thatcher, did their own supporting of terrorist violence in Ulster. Peter Taylor’s 1999 documentary, Loyalists, featured interviews with leading Ulster Loyalist politicos and terrorists, one of whom admitted that they were getting information from British intelligence in the late 1980s allowing them to kill members of the IRA and other Republicans.

And that hasn’t been the only incident, where terrorists supported by the British state have committed atrocities. The last one was just a week ago. In Manchester.

Jim Kavanagh writing in Counterpunch has a piece pointing out that the family of the suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, were members of a Libyan Islamist terrorist group, who were given sanctuary in Britain as part of NATO’s recruitment of such terrorists in their campaign to overthrow Colonel Qaddafy. He attacks the racist double standards of the western media, for giving massive attention to attacks like this in the West, while paying much less attention to the other victims of Islamist violence in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Such as Mali, where 100 people, mostly Russians, Chinese and Africans, were butchered by two Islamist terrorists at the Bamako hotel a few years ago.

He reminds his readers that, despite Qaddafy’s own political posturing, Libya was a secular state with the highest standard of living in Africa. And Qaddafy himself hated and persecuted the Islamists. The late ‘mad dog of the Middle East’ and his son, Saif, even tried to warn Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that if he was killed, the terrorists would move on to attack Europe and there would be a massive influx of refugees into the continent.

Kavanagh also reproaches American liberals for believing that you can be politically liberal, and still support western imperialism. He states that Barack Obama and Killary, whose gloating over the death of the Libyan dictator was particularly repulsive, have so far presided over more carnage than Donald Trump. American liberals are deluded if they believe that they can unleash and then contain the Islamist terrorists they have recruited, armed and trained at will. He compares terrorist atrocities like that committed in Manchester to the film ‘Groundhog Day’, whose hero is doomed to go through the same day again and again. And this, he feels, will continue until something immeasurably more horrific finally wakes Americans up to the horrific reality.

He states

‘Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked,” to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, as Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”

Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by “the West” to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.‘

‘The jihadi attackers in Mali and the jihadi bomber in Manchester were direct products—not accidental by-products, but deliberately incubated protégés—of American-British-French-NATO regime change in Libya, a project that was executed by the Obama administration and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton.

Before the glorious revolution, Libya under Ghaddafi had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa, according to the UN Human Development Index. Before the jihadi onslaught backed by NATO bombing campaign, Ghaddafi’s Libya was an anchor of stability in North Africa, as even the U.S. and British governments knew and acknowledged, per a 2008 cable from American foreign service officer Christopher Stevens, published by Wikileaks:

Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent…Muammar al-Qadhafi’s criticism of Saudi Arabia for perceived support of Wahabi extremism, a source of continuing Libya-Saudi tension, reflects broader Libyan concern about the threat of extremism. Worried that fighters returning from Afghanistan and Iraq could destabilize the regime, the [government of Libya] has aggressive pursued operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows, including more stringent monitoring of air/land ports of entry, and blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.

The US-British-French-NATO humanitarian intervention put an end to that by overthrowing the Libyan government under entirely phony pretexts, in contravention of fundamental international law, and in violation of the UN resolution they claimed as a justification. The executioners and beneficiaries of that aggression where the jihadis who have been rampaging from Mali to Manchester. It’s a bright, clear line.

Ghaddafi himself warned Tony Blair that “an organization [the LIFG].has laid down sleeper cells in North Africa called the Al Qaeda organization in North Africa.” Ghaddafi’s son, Saif, warned that overthrowing Libya’s would make the country “the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean” and “You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.”’

‘Manchester is the latest iteration of a scenario we’ve gone through so many times now, like some groundhog-day dream. At the end of my post two years ago, I was urging and hoping that Americans would wake up. But a lot of American liberals and lefties, including Berniebots, still like to imagine there’s a political space they can inhabit called Progressive Except Imperialism. There isn’t. Imperialism with Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare—even single-payer healthcare—is imperialism, and it’s reactionary and supremacist. Equal-opportunity imperialism is imperialism. African-American, women, Latinx, or LGBTQ presidents, generals, and drone operators do not make it any less criminal, or dangerous, or any less inevitably erosive of all those cherished progressive domestic programs.‘

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/29/no-laughing-matter-the-manchester-bomber-is-the-spawn-of-hillary-and-baracks-excellent-libyan-adventure/

The recruitment of Islamist terrorists goes back further than Blair, Bush, and Obama and Killary, right back to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher gave sanctuary in this country to Islamist terrorists as part of the proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. She and Ronnie celebrated them, because they were anti-Communists fighting against ‘the Evil Empire’. And the Russian ambassador told the Americans that once the Salafists had finished with them, they would come for America.

And this came horribly true on 9/11. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the Saudi-backed terrorists believed they could bring down the other superpower, America.

As for Thatcher, one of the terrorists she gave asylum to in Britain was a monster, who blew up a plane-load of schoolchildren flying to Moscow in order to kill the Soviet officers also on board.

And the same Islamists she settled in Britain became part of the wider underground of radicalised Islamist discontent.

Corbyn never supported terrorism. But Thatcher, and her New Labour protégé, Tony Blair, certainly did. And the results were Loyalist terrorists acting as Thatcher’s death squads in Ulster, and Islamist terrorism in Britain.

And Theresa May made it all easier for the Manchester bomber and those like him by cutting the numbers of the police force, armed forces and border guards. And when members of Her Majesty’s finest tried to warn of her of this danger, she sneered at them.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised to reverse all this. Which, despite all the Tory screaming and posturing, trying to portray them as the party of great war leaders since Churchill, Corbyn and the Labour party represent this country’s best hope of peace and security.

Vote Labour on June 8th.

Lobster on the British State Supporting Loyalist Terrorism in Northern Ireland

Last week, the Torygraph, Scum and Heil all tried smearing Jeremy Corbyn as a supporter of terrorism and the IRA in Northern Ireland. This was due to his sincere efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Troubles, and release people he believed had been wrongfully convicted.

Mike and Eoin Clarke have effectively demolished this smear, as I pointed out in a post yesterday. You can read what Mike and Eoin have to say at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/27/dont-believe-the-warmongers-on-jeremy-corbyn-get-your-story-straight/

However, the Conservative party and the British state certainly supported terrorism in Ulster, Loyalist terrorism. They gave intelligence information on the IRA and other Republican organisations to Loyalist paramilitaries, effectively using them as death squads for a series of ‘extra-judicial executions’. Or what is usually called assassinations.

This came out very strongly in a documentary series broadcast in 1999, Loyalists, which featured a series of interviews with Ulster Loyalist terrorists and politicians. This was discussed in an article on the British state’s dirty little war in Northern Ireland by the editor, Robin Ramsay, ‘Northern Ireland Redux’ in Lobster, 38, Winter 1999: 23-25. This stated

Peter Taylor has made more TV programmes about Northern Ireland since 1969 than any British journalist. His most recent was the documentary, Loyalists, earlier this year, a series of interviews with Loyalist paramilitaries and politicians. This was followed by a book, Loyalists (Bloomsbury, 1999), which contained some of the interviews in that programme. Like the TV programme, this is fascinating stuff for anyone interested in events in Northern Ireland. But the book and TV programme are not identical. The most striking section of the TV programme was an interview with a UDA? UFF? member (I didn’t tape it and can’t remember the details) who described the torrent of official information they were receiving from their British military and intelligence connections in the late 1980s – more material than he knew what to do with, he said. This section is missing from the book. It’s not that Taylor actually tries to avoid this area: it just doesn’t get its due. the biggest story, the most important development, in our knowledge of the Loyalist paramilitaries in the past ten – may be twenty – years gets three and a bit pages from Taylor.

After recounting how in 1989 the UDA/UFF were getting official, classified intelligence material from the security forces, he writes

“To republicans and nationalists it was clear evidence of collusion between members of the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries’ (emphasis added).

Not so: it was clear evidence to anyone.

Taylor describes how, using state intelligence, the UDA’s ‘targeting’ of the Nationalist community improved: fewer Catholics were murdered at random, more IRA members. Another way of describing these events would be this: the British Army was running the UDA’s assassins against the IRA – and successfully, too. In effect, in the late 1980s the British state decided that while they could not kill the IRA openly (the late Alan Clark MP’s solution: let the SAS loose), they could get the Prods to do it for them. A case can be made that part of the reason we have an IRA cease-fire at present is the inroads made into the IRA’s ranks by this joint Army-UDA assassination programme. (P. 23).

Any positive benefits that may have resulted from this – few innocents killed, the IRA being brought round to the bargaining table – have to be set against the fact that under Thatcher, the British state was supporting terrorism and had overturned the rule of law in Northern Ireland.

This adds a whole new dimension to Tory hypocrisy.

At the same time they were demonising the Labour party for openly stating that negotiations needed to be held with the Republicans, if peace was ever to be achieved in Northern Ireland, the Tory party and Thatcher were secretly holding such talks.

Just as the Tories were also using Loyalist terrorists as their death squads.

Tony Greenstein on Zionist Lies and Smears in New Statesman

The other day I put up a long piece attacking the outrageous bias against Jeremy Corbyn in Private Eye. This clearly chimed in with what very many of my readers have observed, and feel strongly about, and I got comments about it from Florence and Jeffrey, amongst others. Michelle also sent in this comment, remarking on the way the supposedly left-wing New Statesman, was also biased against Corbyn, and linking to a piece on it by Tony Greenstein, another blogger. She wrote:

Hi Beastie, it seems to be a generic problem for the ‘intellectual’ press, in similar vein here’s a piece on the NewStatesman with similar tactics by Tony Greenstein:
http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-lies-deceit-of-new-statesman_8.html?m=1

Mr Greenstein’s article is well worth reading. The article is about his disgust with the increasingly right-ward bias of the Staggers. He was particularly angered by its printing of an article claiming that anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour party by Simon Johnson. Johnson’s a senior member of a pro-Zionist Jewish organisation. Greenstein states that Johnson’s group is unelected and unrepresentative. Greenstein was so annoyed by the article, and its uncritical repetition of these false allegations, that he wrote a letter of complaint to the Staggers, the text of which he includes in that blog post. He decided to put it up himself, as he felt sure that the Statesman’s editors weren’t going to print it.

Like many of the others accused of anti-Semitism by the Zionists, Mr Greenstein is Jewish. He’s a member of the Jewish Labour party organisation, and is also active against racism and Fascism. But he’s been suspended because of supposed anti-Semitism. This is because he’s a fierce critic of Israeli racism and its persecution and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians. Greenstein describes just how nasty this racism is in his piece. He also remarks on how ridiculous it is that, under the Israeli law of return, he has the right to return to a country that he has never visited, while Palestinians, who were born in Israel, but who fled or were driven abroad by the Israelis, are banned from settling in the country of their birth.

This clearly is monstrous, just as it is monstrous that accusations of anti-Semitism should be levelled at Mr Greenstein, simply for speaking for speaking the truth. As for the allegations of anti-Semitism, he’s in good company. Other victims of that accusation include Jackie Walker, who is half-Jewish on her father’s side, and whose partner is Jewish. Ms Walker is also a woman of colour. Her mother was a Black woman, who was thrown out of America for activism in the Civil Rights movement. And Ms Walker has similarly been active against racism and Fascism in this country. In America, the head of Bernie Sanders’ Jewish Outreach department in his campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination, was also forced to resign because of allegations of anti-Semitism. She was also Jewish, and very active in her community. And Sanders is himself Jewish.

And some of the gentiles, who have been accused of anti-Semitism, are also obviously anything but. Ken Livingstone’s GLC, as I’ve said before, was notorious for being ‘right-on’. It was anti-racist, anti-sexist, and very pro-gay rights, to the fury of Maggie Thatcher. In his book, Livingstone’s Labour, ‘Red’ Ken states that he was opposed to all forms of racism, whether anti-Semitism, or against Blacks and the Irish. He also devotes sizable sections of two chapters describing and attacking the recruitment of Nazis responsible for the persecution of the Jews during the Third Reich, by us to serve in British intelligence against the threat of Communism in the Cold War.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but in my experience, avowed Jew-haters tend not to go on anti-Fascist marches and demos, risking personal violence by some extremely nasty characters with long histories of racist attacks. I don’t think many people, who despise their ethnic or religious heritage, actively join groups for the people of that community, or readily identify themselves as belonging to that group. Rather, they do the opposite, and try to deny that they belong to it. At the most extreme of this, is some of the self-hating Jews, who deny their heritage completely and join Neo-Nazi organisations. There was a case a while ago in America of the leader of a group of Nazis over there, who committed suicide after it got out to his fellow stormtroopers that he was Jewish.

I admit that’s an extreme case, but none of the people accused of anti-Semitism are remotely like it. Quite the opposite. And considering how serious the charge of anti-Semitism is, after the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and similar genocidal organisations, it should be used sparingly against those who really are. Otherwise, it’s a very gross slander.

And Mr Greenstein also points out that by using the accusation to slander those who aren’t, there is the danger of the boy, who cried ‘wolf’. If you abuse the term so frequently, then it loses its seriousness, and clears the way for the genuine anti-Semites and Nazis to make their claims without fear of opposition, because the term has been so abused so as to become meaningless.

Secular Talk: Saudi Arabia Seeking to Get Nuclear Weapons

This video from the atheist news site, Secular Talk, comes from 20th May 2015. And it’s really scary. It’s about a report in the Sunday Times that the Saudis are so upset about the deal between America and Iran, allowing the Iranians to develop nuclear power, that they are approaching Pakistan to acquire nukes themselves. Saudi Arabia also bankrolled much of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb programme. The fear is that this will start an arms race in the Middle East, with Turkey and Egypt also racing to acquire the wretched things. And America looks the other way, because Saudi Arabia is ‘our oil buttbuddies’.

The show’s presenter, Kyle Kulinski, states very clearly why Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is a monumentally bad idea. As an atheist, he is mostly concerned about their religious fanaticism. Iran is another fundamentalist Muslim country, but they’re actually far more liberal than the Saudis. And many of them are secular. This is true. The shahs during their modernisation programme did try to create something like a Western-style civil society away from the religious establishment, while trying to retain their religious sanction as ‘the Shadow of God on Earth’. And the ubiquity of religion under the Islamic Regime has instead put many Iranians off. A few years ago, Private Eye published a piece from Iran in their ‘Letter from …’ foreign affairs column. This piece, by an anonymous Iranian, reported the widespread dissatisfaction with the mullahs’ corruption, and that only one per cent of the population actually bothered to go to the mosque. This is in contrast with the highly religious Saudi state, whose government includes people actively funding Islamist terrorism in the form of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Kulinski believes the Saudis are far more unstable than the former Soviet Union, which was an atheist state and so didn’t believe in an afterlife. And because of this, he considers that the Soviets were much less likely to start a nuclear war. And even if the Saudis don’t start one now, we can’t be sure of what their leaders would be like in the future. Not all of the secular leaders in the Middle East were entirely sane, like Colonel Gaddafy. And apart from the Saudis, there’s President Erdogan of Turkey, who is also an Islamist and unpredictable.

Kulinski makes it clear that he thinks even America having nukes is a bad idea. But it’s even worse for a country as unpredictable as Saudi Arabia to join the nuclear club. What if their government gets overthrown, he wonders, and we’re called in to combat the new regime? In the meantime, this story has not been reported anywhere else, which is also frightening as no-one’s doing anything about it. The Republicans are worried about Iran having nukes, while Obama’s deal has actually prevented them from getting them. The real danger, if this story is to be believed is Saudi Arabia.

I actually wonder how credible the story is. Lobster accused the Sunset Times under Andrew Neill of running propaganda for MI5 and British intelligence, though gave no examples. So it might be true. Or it could simply be a secret service scare story, for whatever reason. I hope it was the latter.