The Real News Network: CNN Kept Silent over Islamist Slaving Since 2011

Over the past few days I’ve put up pieces reporting and commenting on the demonstrations against the slave auctions in Libya in Paris, Rome and London. These auctions are being held by the Islamist savages, who were helped into power as Britain and America’s proxies in the West’s campaign to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi was a brutal dictator, but under his rule Libya became the most prosperous country on the African continent, its people had free healthcare and education. And, as this report shows, Gaddafi was no racist and made great efforts to benefit the entire African continent.

And the Islamists not only despise him, but are doing their very best to destroy the modern, relatively tolerant nation he created.

And the situation has been made worse by the silence of the mainstream media over the massacres committed against Black Libyans and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, and their enslavement. And as this report shows, the media, or at least CNN, has kept silent for a very long time.

In this piece from the Baltimore-based Real News Network, anchor Eddie Conway talks to Glen Ford, one of the editors of the Black Agenda Report. Ford tells how CNN was aware of the atrocities against Blacks in Libya as far back as 2011. The Islamists despised Blacks, and so lynched and massacred them. These atrocities included the destruction of whole towns, such as Tawergha. This was a Black town with a population of 40,000. The Islamists destroyed it, butchered its people, and those, who survived were either enslaved or dispersed elsewhere in Libya. And Ford makes it clear that this was not done in secret. The Islamists put up flyers and notices announcing what they intended to do.

CNN did not report on this, and the other horrors, because it had reporters embedded in the Islamist terror gangs that were responsible for the ethnic cleansing and enslavement. The news got out thanks to that beacon of capitalism, the Wall Street Journal.

Ford also gives the reasons why the Islamists are targeting Blacks. He states that the Islamists hated Gaddafi because he came out of Arab socialism, and like many Arab socialist leaders was influenced by Egypt’s Nasser. They also hated him because he was pro-African, and their attacks on Blacks from further south in the continent is part of their venomous rejection of Gaddafi and his policies.

Conway and Ford also talk about how another African dictator, the ruler of Rwanda, is also exploiting the humanitarian crisis in the Libya. He’s promised to take in refugees, if the UN will pay for them. However, Ford points out that Rwanda’s ruler is responsible for the deaths of 6 million people in one of the largest genocides, and thousands more have been forced to flee into exile. He also says that once the money is paid, the refugees are not allowed to settle in Rwanda, but are then moved somewhere else.

The programme concludes that the ultimate responsibility for this carnage lies with the Western powers, America, Britain and their allies in Libya, who supported the Islamists, and the French in Rwanda, who are supporting the dictator there as part of a policy of recolonization all over the Continent.

I’m not surprised that Gaddafi was part of the tradition of Arab Socialism. It explains how it is that Libya had free healthcare and education. And it also explains part of the sheer animosity towards him by America and the West. True, Gaddafi himself was confrontational, and was certainly not averse to using terror and assassination when it suited him. But American foreign policy has always been against secular, nationalist Arab governments, including socialist administrations, as the next thing to Communism. He was overthrown because his government, simply by its nature, defied American imperialism. Quite apart from the fact that he was planning to reject the petrodollar for the Gold Dinar, and thus undermine America’s economic dominance through control of the main currency used in the oil industry.

As for the use of Islamist rebels, the US has been doing that ever since Ronald Reagan and Thatcher sponsored the Mujahideen in the Afghan War against the Soviets. And the Americans were warned by the Russian ambassador that once the Islamists had finished with the Russians, they would come for America. Thus the Russians knew that America would suffer an attack like 9/11. But Reagan and Thatcher had already decided these monsters were the forces of good and freedom, and so didn’t bother listening. They even heaped praised on Osama bin Laden.

This piece is also important for showing up the lies, omissions and distortions in the western media. These barbarities have been going on for the past six years, but it is only now that a mainstream newspaper has covered them. Conway and Ford state that it was due to the fact that CNN had its reporters embedded with the Islamists. That’s certainly a powerful factor. And it’s not used by the Islamists to control the media. The editors of Counterpunch, in their book End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate, have several chapters on the way the American military is manipulating the media to promote its version of events in the Middle East. And this includes embedding journalists within army units. Once inside, the journos share a common bond with the soldiers around them, who are also responsible for their lives. So there’s a bias, as well as a vested interested, in presenting them in a positive light.

This story shows how much we really need alternative news networks, like RT, the Real News, Al-Jazeera, and alternative news shows like The Young Turks, the David Pakman Show, the Jimmy Dore Show and Sam Seder’s Majority Report and Secular Talk. These are the only shows and networks that are reporting and discussing the horror committed by western imperialism abroad, and the poverty and exploitation of working people in the west itself. All to boost those big, big profits.

They’re reporting what you’re not going to see on CNN, Fox, MSNBC or the Beeb over here. And it shows. More people are becoming aware of this, which is why Google and Facebook are trying to close them down, and the republicans and Democrats are screaming ‘Fake news!’ and ‘Russian propaganda!’ at RT.

Barack Obama and the Corporatist Democrats Attack Free Speech

It’s very clear that in the next few years under Trump, the treasured freedoms enshrined in the US Constitution and the civil rights women and people of colour have fought so hard for are going to come under sustained attack. In many ways, Trump will just be continuing the rise of an exclusive nationalism and an all-pervasive surveillance state that began under George Dubya as he launched his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unfortunately, it seems that the corporatist wing of the Democrat party, led by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, also wants to close down Americans’ freedom of speech and information by singling out dissenting journalists, news organisations and demanding a greater role for the state in telling you what information you should believe on the Web.

There were a couple of very important articles about threat to freedom of thought in last weekend’s Counterpunch. This followed an article on Thanksgiving by Craig Timberg in the Washington Post that claimed, on the authority of a group of media researchers, Propornot, that there were about 200 or so journalists, magazines, websites and organisations disseminating fake news intended to serve the Russians’ nefarious interests. Renee Parsons in her article discusses how the 200 websites identified by Timberg as outlets for Russian propaganda don’t actually show any evidence that they are acting on false information provided by Russian state media outlets like RT or Sputnik. And a careful reading of Timberg’s article also shows that, actually, RT and Sputnik haven’t invented any stories either. What they have done instead is identify items that the rest of the media ignored or paid little attention to, and made them more prominent. Or, to put it another way, they scooped the rest of the media.

As for Propornot itself, the organisation’s website states that it is “Your Friendly Neighborhood Propaganda Identification Service, Since 2016!” And the only person identified with it is the satirist and comedian Samantha Bee, who is the anchor on the news comedy show Full Frontal. Propornot are frightening, as they call on Barack Obama and Congress to investigate how the Russians manipulated information sources to upset the American political process. Which shows that it’s a body of Clintonian Democrats desperately trying to find suitable media scapegoats with the new, anti-Russian McCarthyism for her defeat by Donald Trump.

The site is even more malign, in that it appeals to the American public to identify not only those individuals and organisers echoing Russian propaganda, but also ‘sympathisers’. She states

If there is any doubt whether the Timberg article and Propornot itself is a partisan effort, the YYY implication is that anyone “echoing a Russian propaganda line” such as those who speak “how wonderful, powerful, innocent and righteous Russia and Russia’s friends are: Putin, Donald Trump, al-Bashar Assad, Syria, Iran, China, radical political parties” will be considered tools of Russia as compared with those who speak “how terrible, weak, aggressive, and corrupt the opponents of Russia are: the US, Obama, HRC, the EU, Angela Merkel, NATO, Ukraine, Jewish people, US allies, MSM and Democrats” will be considered enemies of the State. Anyone with such information is encouraged to ‘come tell us at Propornot about it.”

This came nearly two months after Obama made a speech to a political organisation about the internet, in which he made it clear that he wanted to set up some kind of official body to manage what they trust on the Web. She states

During a visit to the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh on October 13th, the President, known for his smooth, glib reassurances so successful at placating the public, suggested that “we are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to” and that “democracy requires citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions” and further that “those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.” The President continued that “there has to be some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests.”

The President’s statement does not adequately capture what democracy requires of its citizens and reads more like what George Orwell epitomized as ‘political speech’ deliberately meant to confuse and demean citizen awareness. What Obama failed to acknowledge is that every American has a right, an obligation as an engaged citizen to determine for themselves what is a lie, distortion or truth; that ‘fake news’ is in the eye of the beholder and what a citizen believes and what they do not believe is their business and requires no justification to the government or anyone else. Most importantly, it was the President’s obligation to say that with a tremendous divergence of opinion on the www, some of it wacky, some of it conspiratorial, some of it incredibly incisive and intelligent and important – all of it is protected by the First Amendment.

To briefly parse the President’s words, most of which are painfully obvious,

suggestions of a “curating function” as in some official government entity assigned for the purpose of “protecting” (“ added) the public interest and “some sort of way…sort through information that passes some truthiness test” are presented in the President’s usual folksy, innocuous dialectic used to serve the public pablum while a further shredding of their Constitutional rights slips by under their nose.

She states that this is a further attack on American’s Constitutional freedoms by Obama. Despite his election promises, Obama has not ended surveillance without warrant, restored habeas corpus and the prohibition against detention without trial, torture, and excessive secrecy of government branches. Moreover, the Constitution also explicitly forbids presidents from starting wars without the approval of Congress. This has also been violated by successive administrations, and Obama hasn’t restored this Constitutional provision either.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/obama-and-propornot/

Further information on Timberg and his witch-hunt is provided in the same issue by Pam and Russ Martens. They discuss the possible reasons for this article, including that discussed by Parsons, and first put forward by Max Blumenthal of AlterNet, that it’s the Democrats trying to blame the Russians for Killary losing the election. Other theories are that the mainstream media is also trying to ensure its survival in the age of the internet and alternative media by smearing its new media competitors. Glen Ford, the editor of the Black Agenda Report, one of the organisations smeared as a Russian propaganda outlet, has suggested that the corporatist Democrats are very close to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, and that had Hillary won the election, she would also have launched a similar attack on alternative news sources on the Net. The Martens also state that during his career, Timberg was the National Security deputy editor for the Washington Post, before taking up his current position as the paper’s technology editor. He has also made speeches about the facial recognition technology used for law enforcement, and interviewed the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, on the information revealed on the NSA’s programme of mass surveillance. This latter interview was done at the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank, that was secretly part-owned for several decades by the Koch brothers.

The Martens themselves believe that this latest McCarthyite smear is an attack on the news organisations that ran stories from the WikiLeaks materials exposing the massive corporate corruption in the Democrat party. Both the Washington Post and New York Times did report that information from WikiLeaks revealed that a Citigroup executive, had made the decisions on who Obama should hire as key personnel during his first term. Citigroup was one of the massive banks that had to be bailed out during the 2008 crash. And both the Washington Post and New York Times editorial boards supported Killary’s presidential campaign.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/timbergs-tale-washington-post-reporter-spreads-blacklist-of-independent-journalist-sites/

Fortunately, Timberg’s article has met with widespread derision and ridicule, with many of the commenters on the online version of the article criticising it as a piece of shoddy, McCarthyite journalism. Regardless of the precise motives for the attack – and the various theories put forward above aren’t mutually exclusive – it’s clear that the Clintonite wing of the Democrats are just as keen as the Republicans to subvert the Constitution for their own backers in big business and the surveillance state. Obama and Clinton have shown that they are determined to maintain the infringements on the Constitution introduced by George Dubya, and, indeed, expand them to smear their own enemies.

And unfortunately, this mindset appears to be spreading to the Blairites over here. Mike last week reported that Tom Watson had made a rant, attacking websites producing false information. By which he meant the pro-Corbyn site, The Canary. Tony Blair modelled New Labour on Bill Clinton’s New Democrats. Watson’s comments seem to show that the Blairites in the Labour party also want to crack down on British websites that don’t follow the required New Labour line. Just as Blair himself used to organise ‘negative briefings’ against ministers, who were deemed ‘off-message’.

If America and Britain are to have healthy, functioning democracies, where the people genuinely have power and not a narrow clique of politicos acting for the benefit of the corporate elite, it will mean purging the Democrats in the US of the Clintonites, and the Blairites in the Labour party over here, as well as defeating the Republicans and Conservatives.

The Real News on the Israel Lobby’s Attempt to Discredit Dr Cornel West

Earlier this morning I put up a piece commenting on a post Mike published yesterday about a piece in the Mail. This was another smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in Momentum. They were, once again, accused of being anti-Semitic and compared to the SA, the radical paramilitary wing of the Nazis, who were massacred by the SS in the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’. As I’ve said before, this is a gross libel. Those accused of anti-Semitism included principled anti-racist, anti-Fascist campaigners, many of whom, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, another Labour activist, are Jewish. They have been smeared as anti-Semites because they have dared to stand up to the Israel lobby over the persecution of the Palestinians.

It’s not just in this country that the Israel lobby is desperately trying to discredit its opponents with such smears. The major Zionist political group in America is AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee. This works to promote Israeli interests amongst American politicians, including through political donations. And they’ve been smearing those on the American Left as anti-Semites also when they’ve dared to criticise Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. One of Bernie Sanders’ staff, the woman in charge of the Jewish Outreach part of his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, was sacked after she was also smeared as an anti-Semite. This was despite the fact that she was not only Jewish, but also very active in her community.

One of the others Left-wing politicians on the other side of the Pond, who also was the victim of an attempt to discredit him, was Dr. Cornel West. Dr. West is a Black Christian theologian and politician. He was one of the major figures in Bernie Sanders’ election team. He’s everything the Republicans despise – anti-Racist, pro-welfare, pro-working class, anti-poverty, pro-feminist, pro-environment. I would also imagine that it drives them mad to hear this coming from a Christian theologian, when they want to have the absolute monopoly on Christian opinion in the United States. Dr. West angered AIPAC because he made a speech stating that the safety of ‘our dear Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel’ could not be secured with the occupation of Palestine, and that events in Gaza, the West Bank and other Palestinian areas had shown that for too long the humanity of ‘our dear Palestinian brothers and sisters’ had been denied. Dr. West describes everyone as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, following the pattern of the rhetoric in some Christian churches, though I don’t think it’s just rhetoric either, but a sincere expression of his desire to live in love and peace with the rest of humanity. He was also very clear in condemning anti-Semitism. He declared that it had gone hand in hand with every Christian civilisation, and many Islamic. And it was to be condemned.

So, a critic of Israel, but not an anti-Semite, nor even hostile to Israel. He stated clearly that Israel’s occupation of Palestine was acting against the safety of the Jewish people there. But it was too much for AIPAC. in this piece from The Real News, the anchor talks to Glen Ford, a Black newsman, about a letter condemning West’s comments from 50 Black Democratic politicians. Ford comments that this is common tactic of the opponents of Left-wing Black politicians – to set one Black man to discredit another. The letter was written by Bakari Sellers, a Black activist who is also a member and activist for AIPAC. The letter is mostly quotations from Hillary Clinton praising Israel, with approving comments from AIPAC through Sellers. Ford and the anchor agree that the real issue, as the letter seems to acknowledge, is West’s advocacy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign, which Sellers/ AIPAC denounce as a new form of anti-Semitism, and accuse it of going behind the back of official attempts to find a peaceful solution through negotiations. They state that peace can only come through these official overtures, and not private protests.

Ford and the anchor also discuss how the majority of Black politicians are supporters of AIPAC, but also afraid of them too. As are White politicians, and those of other ethnicities. Ford says that AIPAC isn’t afraid of, and actually boasts about, destroying politicians. He even compares them to ISIS. The willingness of Black Democratic politicians to support the Zionist lobby contrasts very much with the attitude of younger, more radical Blacks, such as the activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. This young people draw parallels between the American police’s brutal treatment of Blacks, and the brutal treatment of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians. This linking of the struggle for Black civil rights in America and the struggle of the Palestinians for dignity and independence was made as far back as 1967. This was when the student activists at the Student Non-Intervention Co-ordinating Committee – SNICC – expressed their solidarity with the Palestinians at the time of the Six Day War. However, since then AIPAC has been actively recruiting Black supporters on College campuses. One of these was Bakari Sellers, although his father was one of the pro-Palestinian members of SNICC.

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rvn87ozUBw

This is what’s really going on: the Zionist lobby, both here and in America, are bullies, attempting to destroy any politician or activist, Black or White, Jewish or Gentile, who dares to criticise their atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. They’re doing it to the Labour Left; they did it to Bernie Sanders, and his staff, including Dr. West. It makes no difference if you are sincere anti-racist, who has actively campaigned against anti-Semitism, and faced racial hatred yourself, as many of those, who’ve been smeared by the Zionists have. Many of the Jews and people of Jewish heritage, who’ve been libelled as such have been the victims of anti-Semitic abuse themselves. one of these was the Scots lady, who found her election to the NEC scuppered by Jim Murphy, because she was connected to Momentum, who were ‘anti-Semitic’.

These allegations of anti-Semitism are to direct attention away from, and render out of bounds, all criticism of Israel and its butchery and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine. The Palestinians the Israelis have expelled also include thousands of the country’s indigenous Jewish population. It’s a European-American colonialist settler state. And one reason the denunciations of anti-Semitism are now being made so frequently and so shrilly is that an increasing number of people, including Jewish Americans, are becoming aware of this and demanding change.