Private Eye Cheers Defunding Campaign Against the Canary

I’ve blogged many times before about Private Eye’s hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and their poisonous support for the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Labour. One of those pushing it in the Eye is ‘Ratbiter’, revealed by Tony Greenstein a little while ago to be the pseudonym of Groaniad/Absurder hack Nick Cohen. Cohen, who isn’t actually Jewish despite his name, is clearly one of those miffed that Labour has elected someone who’s actually going to do something for Britain’s working people, and isn’t prepare to ignore or support crimes committed by the British establishment’s favourite colonialist state in the Middle East. He’s the author of a piece, ‘Faking Hell…’ in this fortnight’s issue of the satirical rag for 18th-31st October 2019, praising the Stop Funding Fake News organisation for their campaign to stop advertisers using those social media sites they consider to be outlets for fake news. Cohen’s article starts by praising the site for doing what he believes Google should be doing in preventing firms advertising with extremist web sites. He starts off by describing how those on the extreme right have had their advertising revenues hit, as firms like Sky, Macmillan Cancer Care, Which?, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Manchester United, Chelsea, Ted Baker, Experian and Ebay have requested Google to take down their advertising on Breitbart, Westmonster, and TR, the site of the notorious islamophobe and jailbird Tommy Robinson. Thanks to their campaign, Robinson’s site has lost 70 per cent of its income. Which might stop some of his jaunts abroad for a little while. But almost inevitable, the article goes on to attack The Canary. This has been a particular bete noir of the Eye for some time. They really don’t seem able to stand the idea that there are any social media sites supporting Corbyn, not least because they’re also a rival to the lamestream media. Which also includes Private Eye. Describing SFFN’s attacks on The Canary and its effects, Cohen says

While far-right sites target Muslim immigrants, far-left sites target Jews. “The Canary”, the campaign tells its followers and advertisers, “regularly publishes fake news and attempts to justify anti-Semitism”. it also feeds the conspiracy theories of the far left. One hideous example came when the campaign discovered that Unicef, which tends to the victims of the Syrian and Venezuelan regimes, was advertising on the Canary, which has denied the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and pretended that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in Douma. In August, the Canary cut its staff from 25 to seven. Perhaps inevitably, it blamed “political Zionists” targeting advertisers.

The toppling of the Canary is “the strongest evidence yet that the clickbait business model can be defeated”, the campaign said. Combine it with changes to Facebook’s algorithms to reduce the prominence of media businesses, and fake news in the UK is taking a hit.

Let’s go through and critique this pile of driveling hogwash. 

Firstly, the Canary isn’t a ‘far left’ site. As I understand it, it supports Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn’s programme of nationalisation, the restoration of the NHS, welfare state, worker’s rights and trade unions, isn’t extreme left, except in the addled brains of convinced Thatcherites. It’s actually a return to the social democratic consensus, which was actually the centre left before the appearance of Thatcher and her campaign of privatisation, deregulation and the destruction of the welfare state and the decimation of working class organisations.

Secondly, it doesn’t promote anti-Semitism. What it has done is attack, rebut and refute the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party and specifically Corbyn’s and his supporters. And these are very much politically motivated. It comes from the Blairites, who are determined to cling to power whatever the cost, the British political and media establishment, which is simply terrified of anyone giving back any power to working people, and the Israel lobby. And a large part of it comes from the Israel lobby. Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada, and the Jewish American academic and critic of Israel, Norman Finkelstein,  have described at length how Israel and its supporters have been smearing any and all critics of Israel as anti-Semites since the 1980s, even when they are anything but Jew-haters, as in the case of those above. It’s their only defence against the justifiable criticism and condemnation of Israel’s government for its crimes against the Palestinians. It’s hasbara, the Hebrew term for Israeli civilian propaganda. The campaign against Israel’s critics, including Corbyn, is run by a special department of the Israeli state. This is why one of those smeared as an anti-Semite is Cyril Chilson. Mr Chilson is the son of a Russian Red Army pilot and a holocaust survivor.  He’s Israeli, and served in the IDF and then an intelligence unit producing such propaganda. It’s because of his work for the Israeli military that he recognised the attacks on Corbyn and his supporters for what it was, and denounced it. And as result, this man, the son of people whose resistance and survival of Nazism was truly heroic, has been smeared as a Jew-hater. Disgusting.

Thirdly, the Anglo-American media have been producing fake news about Venezuela and Syria. Some of the footage of refugees supposedly fleeing persecution by Maduro’s regime was faked. Independent experts analysing the footage and evidence of the chemical weapons attack at Douma have come to the conclusion that this was also faked. Assad is a monster, who has killed and tortured in order to maintain power, and he does oppress his country’s Sunni Muslim population. But it doesn’t look like he was responsible for that atrocity. That lies instead with the ‘freedom fighters’ – ahem- which we’re supporting. You know, groups connected with ISIS and what evolved from the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. But the neocons have been pushing for the overthrow of the Syrian regime since the 1990s, because Assad is a Shi’a, like the Iranian regime, although of a much more radical branch of that faith. He’s therefore allied to Iran, which the Americans also want to overthrow. See the pieces produced by the Jimmy Dore Show about this.

Cohen in his attack on the Canary for rightly rejecting the received view of these events is therefore parroting Neocon propaganda.

Zelo Street has written extensively about Stop Funding Fake News, exposing how it attacks decent left-wing social media sites, while at the same time remaining very shadowy itself. No-one knows who runs it, as their identities and connections are very much hidden. The Sage of Crewe has therefore advised companies not to be influenced by their misinformation and pronouncements, until they themselves become much more transparent.

And then there’s Private Eye’s hypocrisy for printing this drivel.

Ian Hislop, the magazine’s editor, appeared on Radio 4 a few years ago in a piece about satire down the centuries, explaining that what his magazine attacked was humbug, double standards. Private Eye is one of the few mainstream magazines that tries to bring the public the news behind the news, exposing double-dealing, lies and hypocrisy in the press, the government and industry. But publishing this attack on the Canary is very hypocritical, consisting as it does of nothing but lies and propaganda.

The Defunding of Arab Satirists Al-Hudood

And it’s especially hypocritical as a few pages before Cohen’s wretched piece, there’s a little article in the magazine’s ‘Street of Shame’ column, ‘Joke Now, Pay Later’, about how the Arabic satirical website, Al-Hudood, was experiencing a funding crisis. Metro Bank has told them it will no longer act as their bank, and they have not been able to find anyone else to do so. There has been no explanation from the banks for this refusal to deal with them.

This seems to be the same tactics Stop Funding Fake News are taking with the Canary and other left-wing bloggers and vloggers: try to take them down through preventing people from supporting them financially. Perhaps whichever oppressive regime or organisation has leant on the banks to withdraw their support for al-Hudood also considers that they’re ‘fake news’ and a dangerous, extremist organisation.

Private Eye does much good in its exposure of some of the underhand dealings in Britain and around the world. But this attack on the Canary is, like their attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, just pure hypocritical establishment lies.

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.