Aside from the Skripal poisoning, one of the major issues this week has been Cambridge Analytica and their datamining of Facebook to get the personal particulars of something like 50 million people, so that they could be targeted for political manipulation. Kitty’s article is a long one, but she makes some very good points. Not least is that GCHQ and the other western intelligence services discussed ways of using the internet to target particular individuals to manipulate them or disrupt groups that posed a threat to national security. She also connects this to ‘behavioural economics’ and the infamous Nudge Unit, which uses subtle psychological techniques to manipulate people into making decisions the government wants. With those two, we are well into the kind of dystopian future, where a totalitarian government manipulates the minds of its subjects portrayed in the Beeb’s classic SF series, Blake’s 7. Some of this datamining appears to have been done to benefit Russian oil interests. Michelle, one of the great commenters here, posted this to her piece, commenting on the immense value of personal information on the Net:
“The Wiley disclosure certainly had quite a media make over, he sits in a trendy bare room with a big photo shoot light for the Guardian and in a graffiti tunnel for ITV news, yet with all his intellectual prowess his deductive reasoning interestingly falls short on his employer making a link with Russian oil: “It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”
The spotlight on this company must be just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2010 I had blogged about the EU intending to make it clear how internet users would have their digital data exploited and the New York Times had a comment re the intended EU overhaul of privacy regulations. I had written that the publishers value was not based on content or brand but on the information that can be collected about each digital visitor, as we click away our preferences and online patterns are being delivered up to the advertising market because the ability to sell this information about us is the true value a publisher holds. Here is the comment in the New York Times (20 Nov 2010) about the E.U´s intention to overhaul the online privacy rules to protect personal data which would hamper the “development of services” – a great euphemism for snooping:
“Rules requiring Internet companies to secure users’ consent upfront could hamper the development of services that align online advertising with Web users’ personal interests, as reflected in the Web sites they visit or the preferences they express in social networks and other online forums. From a marketer’s perspective, this could dilute one of the big advantages of the Web over traditional media.”
Evidently the misuse of data has been understood for many years, (as you have pointed out Sue), I also noted in 2010 a New Scientist article: “EVERY move you make, every twitter feed you update, somebody is watching you. You may not think twice about it, but if you use a social networking site, a cellphone or the internet regularly, you are leaving behind a clear digital trail that describes your behaviour, travel patterns, likes and dislikes, divulges who your friends are and reveals your mood and your opinions. In short, it tells the world an awful lot about you.”
So how did the ‘security services’ miss Cambridge Analytica’s flagrant misuse of data when it has been clearly understood even in the public realm for almost a decade? These supposed revelations at this juncture come at a time when the hype to cold war status is already far too high…”
And the Americans are not alone in using Cambridge Analytica, it seems. I found this report by RT about our government also using them and their parent company, SCL, to gather data on us. RT’s presenter, Polly Boiko, states that the two were hired by the Ministry of Defence, and paid for providing staff with training and for keeping government secrets on their computer, amongst other services. Yvette Cooper has demanded a wider investigation into their activities. They have also been hired by some very dodgy governments around the world. Like Kenya, where Cambridge Analytica was hired by the ruling party to gather data on its opponents, and create a psychological strategy that would allow them to hold on to power. The company has been accused of stirring up ethnic tensions as part of this. They were also hired by Ukraine to undermine the breakaway Donetsk Republic. This ended in failure, but the company’s report not only went to the Ukrainians who commissioned it, but was also shared with the British government. She concludes that the next stage of the scandal will probably be the company’s connections to the world’s governments.
This has been touched on today in the I newspaper, which reported that Israel had also hired the company to swing elections Nigeria and St. Kitts and Nevis.
This is a real threat to democracy, but I doubt that many people are paying attention, because of the way May and her team are ramping up tensions with Russia to distract everyone from just how terrible they are. And if the MOD have been using them to gather data on British citizens, then the immediate comparison that comes to my mind is with the Stasi and the other totalitarian secret police. It ain’t Corbyn who’s a threat to democracy, but Cambridge Analytica and their Tory government paymasters.
My thanks to Michelle, one of the great commenters on this blog, for pointing this out.
Craig Murray, formerly our man in Uzbekistan, before he was thrown out and smeared for having a conscience about dealing with dictators, has an important post up at his blog. And it contradicts what Boris Johnson is trying to tell us all that the Russians are definitely responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Porton Down have submitted their evidence at the court case, which was to decide if they could be permitted to take further blood samples from the Skripals for testing. Their evidence states
The Evidence
16. The evidence in support of the application is contained within the applications themselves (in particular the Forms COP 3) and the witness statements.
17. I consider the following to be the relevant parts of the evidence. I shall identify the witnesses only by their role and shall summarise the essential elements of their evidence.
i) CC: Porton Down Chemical and Biological Analyst
Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the
findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples
tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent OR CLOSELY RELATED AGENT.
The emphasis is Murray’s. He points out that this means that Porton Down have not positively identified the toxin used as a Novichok, as it could be a closely related agent. And even if it were a Novichok, this would still not mean that it was necessarily manufactured in Russia. The poison could have been produced by any number of states or terrorist/ criminal organisations. This contradicts what Johnson has been telling the rest of the world, including the journos at the German magazine, Deutsche Welle, where he told them that the poison was very definitely Russian.
He concludes
This constitutes irrefutable evidence that the government have been straight out lying – to Parliament, to the EU, to NATO, to the United Nations, and above all to the people – about their degree of certainty of the origin of the attack. It might well be an attack originating in Russia, but there are indeed other possibilities and investigation is needed. As the government has sought to whip up jingoistic hysteria in advance of forthcoming local elections, the scale of the lie has daily increased.
On a sombre note, I am very much afraid the High Court evidence seems to indicate there is very little chance the Skripals will ever recover; one of the reasons the judge gave for his decision is that samples taken now will be better for analysis than samples taken post mortem.
Murray also states that for the last few days he’s come under a Denial Of Service cyberattack, as well as some form of ‘ghostbanning’ for his posts on Facebook and Twitter. He therefore asks people to reblog and repost his article, for which he waives all copyright.
‘Michelle’, another of the great commenters on this blog, sent me the link below to a report by Asa Winstanley in the Electronic Intifada on a forthcoming Al-Jazeera documentary exposing the activities of the Israel lobby in spying on anti-Israel activists in America, and their attempts to bring the United Arab Emirates into line with Israeli and American foreign policy. And, of course, suppress Al-Jazeera.
This is being done through the Neocon organisation, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is gathering the data of pro-Palestinian activists and the BDS movement in the US. The top civil servant at the Israeli Ministry of Strategy Affairs is Sima Vaknin-Gil, an Israeli army officer, whose boss is an ally of Netanyahu. The Ministry is in charge of propaganda against the BDS movement. Vaknin-Gil has said that she wants to create an army of pro-Israeli trolls to flood the internet, while being formally separate from the Israeli state.
The Foundation also receives funding from Sheldon Adelson, the American casion magnate, who makes it very clear that he stands for ‘Israel first’.
The documentary also shows pro-Israel lobbyist Max Adelstein, who works for AIPAC, the big pro-Israel lobby group in the US, boasting of how he is also working to bring the UAE into closer alignment with America and Israel.
The film also shows Jonathan Schanzer, the Senior Vice-President at the Foundation, telling his minions how they are to smear pro-Palestinian activists. And he reveals how the smears increasingly aren’t work. This part of the report says
According to the source, Schanzer admits to the undercover reporter that “BDS has taken everybody by surprise.”
He calls the response by Israel lobby groups “a complete mess,” adding, “I don’t think that anybody’s doing a good job. We’re not even doing a good job.”
According to the source, Schanzer laments that attempts to smear Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine as linked to extremist Islamic terrorism have failed to gain traction.
He is also said to regret that the Israel lobby’s habitual tactic of falsely alleging Palestine solidarity activists are motivated by anti-Jewish hatred is losing its impact.
“Personally I think anti-Semitism as a smear is not what it used to be,” he is said to tell the undercover reporter.
Schanzer’s views echo a secret report endorsed by the Israeli government and distributed to Israel lobby leaders last year. That report, a leaked copy of which was published by The Electronic Intifada, concludes that Israel’s efforts to stem the growth of the Palestine solidarity movement have largely failed.
And the Emirates’ links to the Trump administration are also being investigate by Robert Mueller, who is moving away from the supposed Russian influence to include them through their connections to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
It also discusses Al-Jazeera documentary, The Lobby, which showed Shai Masot conspiring with members of the Conservative and Labour parties. This new documentary was supposed to be shown five months ago, but has not yet come out.
The Israel lobby has also been active travelling to Qatar to get the film suppressed, and supposedly received assurances that it won’t, though the Qataris deny this. Al-Jazeera’s investigation has been decried by Noah Pollak, another Neocon, as a foreign espionage investigation on American soil. The Israel lobby is pressuring the US government to force Al-Jazeera to register as an arm of the Qatari government.
I am frankly completely unsurprised that the Neocons were up to their neck in this. The Neocon project always was a Zionist outfit. It all started with an article in the late ’60s by their chief ideologue, William Kristol, about ways to get the American public to back Israel. Which included the vast majority of Jewish Americans at the time, who were completely indifferent in Israel, a foreign country they had never seen and had no desire to emigrate to.
As for AIPAC, there’s more than a whiff of double standards here. One of the left-wing American news channels pointed out that FARA, the piece of American legislation dating from World War II, which demands that foreign lobbyists register with the US authorities, should cover them. But it doesn’t. Because of their very powerful influence since the 1950s.
What is encouraging, however, is Schanzer’s admission that the lies and smears he and his scummy friends have been directing against pro-Palestinian activists, that they’re all connected to Islamist terror groups, or anti-Semites, increasingly aren’t working.
And when they fail completely, how is this going to make McNichol and the kangaroo courts persecuting decent, anti-racists and campaigners against anti-Semitism, who’ve been libelled by the Israel lobby because of their anti-Israel activism, going to look?
‘Michelle’, one of the great commenters to this blog, sent me a link to this article by Robert Parry last week. I hadn’t really had time to read it and post it up until now. But the question it raises is acutely relevant. Since Killary lost the election to Trump, the Western media and political-industrial class has been baying that it’s all the Russians’ fault. That Vladimir Putin and RT are spreading ‘fake news’ all over America and the rest of the western media. They’re interfering in our politics. Just this morning the British press reported that Theresa May had joined the attack, claiming that Russia was the biggest threat to western democracy. Or some similar rubbish that sounds like something from the Cold War.
There’s no evidence that the Russians have been trying to interfere in American politics any more than usual. And May has very good, personal reasons for trying to deflect attention away from her on to a perceived Russian threat. Her government is in meltdown, with 40 of her MPs having signed a ‘no confidence’ letter against her. If they find eight more Tories to add their signatures, then May has to give herself up for re-election as the head of her party.
Hence the fear, and the determination to seize on a spurious Russian threat to western democracy in order to distract people from how precarious her ‘strong and stable’ government is. Quite apart from its horrific policies that are privatising the NHS, education, destroying the welfare state and killing the unemployed and disabled through benefit sanctions.
In fact, it isn’t the Russians who have repeatedly and blatantly interfered in American politics. It’s the Israelis, as Robert Parry shows. Parry was the reporter, who revealed many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s. This was Reagan’s dirty little secret about how he was allowing the Contras in Nicaragua to support their war against the Sandinistas by exporting drugs to America’s ghettoes. And how, in order to secure the release of US squaddies taken hostage in Lebanon, he sent a shipment of armaments to Iran.
Parry’s article discusses the way that both the Democrats and the Republicans prostrate themselves before AIPAC, the big Israeli lobbying group in America, and solicits donations from millionaires and billionaires like Sheldon Adelson. Adelson is the proprietor of a chain of casinos, and makes no secret of the fact that he is ‘Israel first’. And congress has repeatedly issued invitations for Netanyahu, whom I’ve heard described by at least one Jewish academic as ‘that b***ard Netanyahu’ to address them. They’ve invited him over three times, the same number as Winston Churchill.
Anyone who steps out of line and does not kowtow to the Israel lobby is duly punished. They’ll be vilified as ‘anti-Semites’, even if they are decent people, who are disgusted by anti-Semitism. Parry gives an example of two Republican politicos, Paul Findley and Charles Percy, both from Illinois, when they tried to open negotiations with the PLO in the early 1980s. The Israel lobby responded by donating handsomely to their opponents, so that both were defeated, Findley in 1982, Percy two years later. Findley later published a book about his experiences in 1985, entitled They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby. It was then comprehensively trashed in the pages of the New York Times by Adam Clymer, who denounced it as ‘one-sided’.
After that, American politicians were much less likely to confront the Israel lobby. Parry notes how Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both visited Israel, Obama in 2008, Romney in 2012, in order to secure Netanyahu’s blessing.
Israel was also involved in the October Surprise. This was the deal Ronald Reagan made with the Iranians to stop Jimmy Carter being re-elected. At the time, the new Islamic revolutionary regime had Americans in Iran captive as hostages. Carter was negotiating for their release, but Reagan arranged for arms to be sent to the Ayatollahs to keep the hostages captive for longer. This was to present Carter as ineffectual and incompetent, and allow Reagan to win the election.
And it worked.
The Israelis were also in on Reagan’s dirty little deal. The Israeli president, Menachem Begin, and many other leading Israeli politicos and officials hated Carter, because he had brokered the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt. As part of the deal, Israel had been forced to hand back the Sinai to Egypt. Begin was afraid Carter would push for Israel to retreat back to its 1967 border, and would recognise a Palestinian state. So he connived with Reagan to scupper Carter’s chances at re-election.
Israel’s part in these manoeuvring was later revealed by Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli intelligence official, who had been part of the negotiations. So the Israelis then did their level best to discredit him in turn. And in the same decade, the Israelis also mounted internal spying missions in America. One of these involved Jonathan Pollard, who fed the Israeli spooks highly sensitive American documents.
Parry’s article also describes how the Americans themselves manipulate and interfere in other countries’ politics, often for regime change, using the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID – the US Agency for International Development. It was these agencies which were responsible for the ‘Maidan Revolution’ in the Ukraine, which ousted the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Victor Yanukhovych.
He also describes how the Neocons collaborated with the Likudniks in 1996 to secure Netanyahu’s re-election in Israel, and how the same politicos and apparatchiks turned instead to the policy of regime change. Instead of negotiating with Arab governments, they were to be overthrown. By 1998 the Project for the New American Century, led by the neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan, were putting pressure on Bill Clinton to invade Iraq. Five years later, they got their wish, and a new president, George Dubya Bush, launched the invasion. He also states that it was due to Israel that Barack Obama decided to ally with the Sunni forces in the region, including those fighting Assad in Syria. Which makes America ally with al-Qaeda. Parry then brings the story up to last year’s election, when Clinton and Trump both presented themselves as pro-Israel. Both Clinton and Trump attacked Iran as the prime supporter of terrorism in the world, even though it’s actually the Sunni kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
He then goes on to discuss the lies spread by US intelligence and the Clintonite wing of the Democrats that it was the Russians, who hacked into the computers at the Democratic National Convention to leak the incriminating documents. In fact, WikiLeaks have repeatedly denied that they received the documents from the Russians.
The article concludes
The U.S. intelligence community also has accused the Russian government of raising doubts in the minds of Americans about their political system by having RT, the Russian-sponsored news network, hold debates for third-party candidates (who were excluded from the two-party Republican-Democratic debates) and by having RT report on protests such as Occupy Wall Street and issues such as “fracking.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making opening remarks at a joint White House press conference with President Donald Trump on Feb. 15, 2017. (Screenshot from White House video)
The major U.S. news media and Congress seem to agree that the only remaining question is whether evidence can be adduced showing that the Trump campaign colluded in this Russian operation. For that purpose, a number of people associated with the Trump campaign are to be hauled before Congress and made to testify on whether or not they are Russian agents.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other establishment-approved outlets are working with major technology companies on how to marginalize independent news sources and to purge “Russian propaganda” (often conflated with “fake news”) from the Internet.
It seems that no extreme is too extreme to protect the American people from the insidious Russians and their Russia-gate schemes to sow doubt about the U.S. political process. But God forbid if anyone were to suggest an investigation of Israel-gate.
All of this is demonstrably true. And there’s probably more, if you want to look for it. The other year the Israel lobby brought down a Black, Green party politico by presenting her as an anti-Semite and funnelling money into her opponents when she dared to criticise the Israel lobby.
We’ve also seen it in this country, where Al-Jazeera caught various members of the Tory party conspiring with officials at the Israeli embassy to remove awkward members of the Tory party. And there is the continuing witch hunt and vilification as anti-Semites people in the Labour party, like Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Mike from Vox Political, because they dared to criticise Israel for its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians.
These smears have nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Semitism. Those smeared in the Labour party have, by and large, been decent, anti-racist, men and women. Very many of them, like Walker and Greenstein, are self-respecting Jews. Those smeared included the secular as well as the Torah-observant and even devoutly Orthodox. Many of them have been victims themselves of anti-Semitic violence and abuse.
I’ve blogged before about how the British comedian, Alexei Sayle, who’s the son of Jewish Communists from Liverpool, has remarked on how most of those accused of anti-Semitism by the Israel lobby are Jewish. Well, you can expect that. The last thing Israel and its cheerleaders want is for ordinary Brits and Americans, whether Jewish or not, to realise that Judaism does not equal Zionism, and that to many Jews Zionism is an abhorrent blasphemy.
So decent anti-racists are vilified in Britain and America, and Russia misrepresented as the new threat to democracy, by a corrupt and desperate corporate political class trying to find a scapegoat for its increasing popularity. While a complicit media looks the other way, preferring to join in the creation of a new Cold War, rather than reveal Israel’s very real interference in American and western politics.
This is the amended version of an article I posted earlier, when I had yet to hear from Mike himself about what happened. This was because his blog was extremely difficult to log onto late last night, so I feared Mike had been personally libelled by Stevens – he hadn’t – and that the internet was censoring his replies. It probably wasn’t either, but it has in the past.
Yesterday, Chris Stevens, the Tory councillor for Horley in Surrey, went off on a rant denouncing the articles journos like Aditya Chakrabortty and bloggers, vloggers and disability activists like Mike had put up describing how Tory welfare policies are killing the sick and disabled as ‘inflammatory rubbish’.
So Mike yesterday put up a list of some of his own ‘inflammatory rubbish’ articles to prove exactly that that is precisely what they are not. He states in his brief introduction to the list that it isn’t exhaustive, but it makes his point.
It may not be exhaustive, but it is a long, long list. And as you can expect from Mike, the articles come from reputable sources.
I’ve had repeated difficulty getting on to the article, although that’s been easier than the article before it, where he denounced and refutes Stevens’ rant. This looks to me very, very much like net censorship.
Here’s the link to Mike’s list of articles about the Tories’ chequebook euthanasia of poor and disabled.
As for Stevens, I put up an article last night attacking him for his vilification of journos and bloggers like Mike, comparing him to Chris Davies, the MP for Mike’s part of Wales, who libelled him as an anti-Semite. These were based on the gross smears made by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, whose name is a deliberate misnomer. They are in reality an Israel lobby group, who were founded to manipulate public opinion after they found out that severely normal Brits despised the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the murder of Palestinian civilians. Very many of the people they have libelled as anti-Semites, perhaps even the majority, are Jews – secular, Liberal, Torah-observant or ultra-Orthodox. It doesn’t matter. One word out of place, and decent people are presented as something monstrous, close to Nazis. Even when Jewish critics of Israel have themselves been victims of anti-Semitic abuse and violence, as some of those who supported Mike in his struggle against this libel have been.
‘Michelle’, one of the many great commenters on this blog, told me that on Question Time Stevens was so upset that he shouted at Chakrabortty. This uncomfortable reality was too much for the delicate soul to bear. It’s all very reminiscent of the old joke about the incompetent vicar, whose curate one Sunday finds in the vicar’s written for his sermon ‘Point weak here – so shout’.
I’m sick and tired of Tory shouting and vilification. I’m sick of it from Stevens, sick of it from Davies, sick of it from IDS, Damian Green and the other murderous apparatchiks in the DWP, and heartily sick of it from Theresa ‘Goody-Two Shoes’ May.
They should all do the decent thing and resign. Immediately.
Hat tip to Michelle, one of the great commenters on this blog, for letting me know about this article.
Priti Patel has finally done the decent thing, and resigned following the revelation of her highly secretive visit to Israel, where she met met leading politicians, while telling everyone she was just on a holiday. Part of the reason behind Patel’s little trip seems to have been to get the British government to divert some of the money it gives for international aid to Israel, so it can spend it on the IDF’s continuing occupation of the Golan Heights. This is territory which Israel nicked from the Syrians during the Six Day War.
Israel is already massively supported by Britain, the US and the EU, where it is treated almost as a member, despite not having formal membership. The IDF is one of the main instruments of the country’s brutal repression and ethnic cleansing of its indigenous Arab people, the Palestinians. During its independence campaign in 1948, the Israeli armed forces were responsible for a series of massacres, rapes and beatings against the Palestinians. The most notorious of these was Deir Yassin. But that was only one massacre out of many. Very many. Israeli soldiers killed people sheltering in a mosque, shot and threw handgrenades at women and children, and in one horrendous incident killed a group of Palestinians, who were coming towards them to offer them rice in the hope of getting some mercy. The IDF today enforces the brutal apartheid regime against the Palestinians, including the fouling of cisterns and wells to make the water undrinkable, and the demolition of houses and seizure of property by Israeli colonists.
I have no desire whatsoever to see my government give aid money to the IDF. And I very much doubt I’m alone.
This isn’t about anti-Semitism. I am very much aware that there is and always has been a very strong Jewish opposition to the ethnic cleansing and terror, which not only includes American and European Jews, but also Israelis such Ilan Pappe and human rights organisations such as BT’salem. Anyone, who dares to criticise Israel, is smeared and abused as an anti-Semite. But many anti-Zionist Jews, or simply Jews critical of the occupation of the West Bank and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, feel that they are particularly singled out for abuse and vilification. Tony Greenstein, a veteran anti-Zionist and anti-Fascist campaigner, has quoted in his blog the left-wing comedian, Alexei Sayle. Sayle, the son of Jewish Communists, has said that it seems to him that the majority of people smeared as anti-Semites in the Labour Party were Jews.
Returning to Patel, an article by Adam Ramsay on the Open Democracy site, reveals that she has very extensive links to some very shady right-wing lobbying groups and thinktanks.
Before she was elected MP in 2010, Patel worked for the PR form Weber Shandwick, whose clients included British American Tobacco. Not only does the company produce a highly addictive and lethal drug, it also has links to the dictatorship in Myanmar and child labour. The article notes that some of the PR company’s employees were uncomfortable dealing with BAT. Not so Patel. She was perfectly relaxed.
BAT in their turn fund the right-wing think tanks the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs. In 2002, while Patel was working there, Weber Shandwick merged with the Israeli lobbyists Rimon Cohen, whose clients include the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, the illegal Migron settlement on the West Bank, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Whom Patel coincidentally met on her jaunt.
Weber Shandwick’s clients also included Bahrein, and just months after her election, the Bahreini’s flew her there to meet some of their ministers. This is a Gulf kingdom widely criticised for human rights abuses. In 2012 she went on another trip, this time to the United Arab Emirates, as part of the All Party Group, which went there. She made two return trips in 2013 and 2014. The first time she went with the World Consulting and Research Corporation, based in New Delhi. This outfit describe themselves as a brand equity and management organisation. The second trip was courtesy of Sun Mark Ltd., who are regular donors to her office. Weber Shandwick also added the Dubai firm Promoseven to its list of clients about the same time it merged with Rimon Cohen.
In 2014 she also attended a meeting in Washington, courtesy of the right-wing, and highly secretive British think tank, the Henry Jackson Society. The meeting was organised by AIPAC, the very powerful Israeli lobbying organisation in the US, about security in the Middle East. As for the Henry Jackson Society, they are so secretive about the source of their funds that they withdrew it from two parliamentary groups, rather than reveal where it comes from. Earlier this year the Charity Commission announced they were investigating it following allegations that it was being paid by the Japanese government to spread anti-Chinese propaganda.
Patel’s holiday to Israel also seems to have been sponsored by Stuart Polak, the former head and honorary president of the Conservative Friends of Israel. In 2009 Peter Oborne wrote a piece about the extensive influence the CFI has in the Tory party. Ramsay also notes that trips to Israel funded by the CFI and similar groups are the most consistent entry in the MPs’ and MSPs’ register of foreign interests.
The article concludes
Much has been written about the weakness of the current Conservative government, as exhibited by this scandal, Boris Johnson’s blunders, and last week’s resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour. But here is the problem. When governments are falling apart, special interest groups run riot. Flagrant abuses usually happen at times when minor abuses are normalised. What other powerful lobby groups are pushing ministers around? How did it get to the point that Patel thought she’d get away with this?
It’s a good question, though you’d have to work extremely hard to find out. The Labour MP Colin Challen wrote a piece years ago in Lobster reporting that half of Tory funding remains mysterious. As for the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs, they’re extreme right-wing think tanks that provided much of the ideology of the New Right during Thatcher’s grotty rise to power and period in office. They want to privatise everything, including the NHS and schools, as well as social security. I know. I’ve got the IEA’s pamphlets about the last two. The IEA also produced another pamphlet addressing a question vital to today’s women: Liberating Women – From Feminism. Which has been the line the Daily Mail’s taken almost since it was founded.
Mike yesterday put up a piece commenting on the strange verbiage of Patel’s resignation letter, and the reply from Theresa May. Both contained passages stressing that Patel was usually open and transparent about her business. Mike commented that neither of these letters actually looked like they’d been written by the two.
Mike comments that neither May nor Patel have acted transparently and openly, and we still don’t know what Downing Street’s role in this whole affair may have been. The Jewish Chronicle suggests it’s rather more than May and Patel are telling.
He concludes
This matter has demonstrated that Theresa May’s government has no interest in transparency and openness. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The minority Prime Minister will be hoping that it will go away, following the resignation of the offending minister.
It won’t.
We need to know exactly what happened, when it was arranged, with whom, who knew about it, who was there at the time, what was said about it afterwards and to whom, and whether all the information has been made public. My guess that it hasn’t.
Recent events involving Boris Johnson have shown that ministers cannot expect to be able to lie to us and expect us to accept it. We need the facts.
And if Theresa May can’t provide the answers, it won’t be one of her ministers who’ll need to resign.
In this short clip from RT’s Going Underground, main man Afshin Rattansi reports on and comments on the British army’s latest attempts to recruit more squaddies, as well as the time when Donald Trump appeared to be an anti-war candidate. The clip was posted on July 15, 2017, when Defence Secretary Michael Fallon was attending an air tattoo here in the UK.
In order to find 12,000 new recruits for the army, the government started looking for them in sub-Saharan Africa. Rattansi then pointedly comments that if there are viewers from that region of the continent, from poor and starving nations like Malawi, Mozambique or Sierra Leone, and they fancy dying for Britain, they can get through to army recruitment on the following number.
He also talks about the army’s attempts to recruit child soldiers using a video, This Is Belonging. It shows one squaddy walking behind his a truck carrying a load of his mates. At first they tease him by slowing down, so that he thinks he can climb in, before speeding up and pulling slightly away. They then slow down again, he manages to climb him, and is greeted with cheers and comradely backslaps from his mates.
Rattansi discusses how this video has been criticised by an anti-war group, Child Soldier International, because it is aimed at young people aged 16-25. And in particular those from the poorest and least educated sections of society. The video is also targeted at the good folk of the northern towns, which have been hardest hit by Thatcherism.
He also quotes the response from the government’s outsourcing partner, Capita, which predictably finds nothing wrong in this.
He then goes on to say that there is evidence from America that when poor kids, like those targeted by Capita’s wretched film, do come back from fighting and dying, they vote for anti-war candidates. Like Donald Trump. ‘You do remember when Trump was anti-war, right?’ he asks. He then plays footage of Trump telling the crowd that if he gets in, he will not send any more troops to the Middle East. It’s unjust to the millions of people that’ve been killed there, as well as to America. Thanks to the wars in the Middle East, America’s roads and hospitals aren’t properly maintained. If he gets in, he’ll stop the war and spend the money on that instead.
Child Soldier International isn’t the only organisation that has expressed concern about the UK’s recruitment of child soldiers. The issue got into the papers, or at least the I a few weeks ago. We are the only nation in Europe, I believe, that recruits children of 16 years old. Michelle, one of the great commenters on this blog, has also posted comments talking about the concerns of peace groups about the way the British army goes into schools to recruit there.
This used to happen at my old school here in Bristol. I don’t remember it ever happening to us in the top streams, but certainly recruiting films were shown to the less bright in the lower bands. One of our art teachers, a woman of left-wing opinions, was outraged by this. Someone told me that her father had been an air-raid warden during the War, and so had seen the bits of bodies strewn amongst the rubble after a bomb strike. If that was the case, then it’s not hard to see why she hated war, and those who seduce the young into fighting in one, so much.
As for Trump, I do remember when he was anti-war. Just like he also suggested at one point he was in favour of Medicare for All. Now he’s turned out to be no such thing. It was all lies. The result has been that many of the people, who voted for him are seriously disillusioned, and this is contributing to opposition to Trump within the GOP. A few days ago I came across a video on YouTube with the title, ‘Trump Will Destroy Capitalism’. I don’t think he will, but he’s certainly doing his damnedest. And if he does destroy it, then it won’t come too soon.
I’ve put up a couple of pieces a few days commenting on Hillary Clinton’s appearance at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and how in her book, What Happened?, which she’s been touting at this and other events across the world, she blames everyone except herself for her failure to gain the presidency.
In this short piece, RT asks people coming out of another book signing, this time at the South Bank Centre, ‘what went wrong?’ A few people recognise that she stood on the wrong platforms and campaigned on the wrong issues. One individual remarks that you can’t win elections simply by promising more of what your predecessor did. One man also comments that it was ‘the Rust Belt, populism, you know, Donald Trump’.
Most of the women, and one or two men, reply that Hillary’s gender was against her. They state that America wasn’t ready yet for a female president, and possibly not ready for one after a Black man. A lady in a hijab states that American politics is dominated by White men, and so Hillary suffered what has always happened to women everywhere, and was ‘Trumped’ by a poorly qualified man. And a couple blamed it on the Russians.
One of the women questioned is the head of Democrats Abroad, or at least the British chapter of it. She blames Killary’s defeat partly on the voter suppression and gerrymandering that went on. And a couple of people simply blame Russians. Nevertheless, she still has her supporters, with one Black young lady still saying that ‘we have faith’ in her.
Now it is true that Hillary’s gender was against her. America is a very masculine society, and politics over there, as they are in most White majority countries, is dominated by White men. And Killary was the victim of some very bitter, anti-feminist rhetoric when she and her husband became the first family back in the 1990s. One Republican Pastor angrily declared that she was the ‘type of woman, who turns to lesbianism, practices witchcraft, leaves her husband, and kills her children.’ And to a certain extent, some of those slurs have continued. There have been rumours throughout her political career that Shrillary’s a lesbian, and during Obama’s presidency these rumours became very specific. She was supposed to be having a lesbian affair with one of her advisors, Huma Abeddin. A male official, who had been sacked, also claimed that she and Nancy Pelosi were both man-hating lesbians, who delighted in humiliating men.
As for witchcraft, Alex Jones on his Infowars channel was coming out with all manner of complete and utter nonsense. He claimed that she, and Obama, were both demonically possessed. Or it could be that she was an evil alien, or under alien control. An invitation by a New York performance artist provided Jones with further ammunition to claim that she was involved in black magic. The performance artist specialised in ‘spirit cooking’ as part of her performances, which involved human blood. Jones pointed out that it was also what the black magician Aleister Crowley called his own vile magical cuisine, which used menstrual blood and semen. Hillary was therefore accused of performing various black magic rituals with this woman. In fact, she and Bill had been friends with her since the ’60s or ’70s, and as far as I could see, the ‘spirit cooking’ she talked about really was just weird performance art. It might have been inspired by Crowley, but as far as I could see it had very little to do with genuine occultism.
However, there are people in America more than willing to vote for a female candidate. I was told by one of the American postgraduate students on an archaeology course I did several years ago at Bristol Uni, that she was so sick and tired of every candidate being another White male that she would vote for anybody, who wasn’t. And the political landscape had shifted so much that she wasn’t the only female candidate for the presidency. The Greens put forward Jill Stein. As the candidate of a third party, Stein very much was an outsider, but she’s still blamed by Killary as part of the reasons for her defeat. In fact, as a feminist candidate, Stein was the stronger party. She was a doctor, who supported single-payer healthcare as well as protecting the environment, because her experience taught her that women particularly needed it.
Killary, by contrast, was very much a political insider. She was a professional businesswoman, who sat on the boards of multiple corporations. She was also very, very much in Wall Street’s pockets, having been paid hundreds of thousands for speeches she delivered at their various dinners. One of the companies she headed was Walmart, which does not recognise trade unions, and treats its staff extremely badly. Despite making a speech to trade unionists that she would defend their rights and those of their members, she had actually made no attempt to reverse Walmart’s union-bashing policy. And at a time more and more Americans were coming round to support single-payer healthcare, like the Germans have had for nearly a hundred and forty years, she blocked this and called it ‘utopian’.
People also remembered how racist Killary was. In her youth back in the ’60s she’d been a Goldwater Girl, supporting the pro-segregationist Republican Barry Goldwater. She and Bill were responsible for the 1990s legislation that led to a far greater proportion of young Black men being convicted of and serving longer prison sentences for drug offences that Whites. There was also a racist edge to her previous electoral campaign against Barack Obama. She promoted the whole Republican ‘birther’ nonsense, in which it was claimed that Obama, because of his Kenyan ancestry, was not born in the USA and was therefore not eligible to become president.
She also treated the traditional blue-collar Democrat supporters with a very obvious contempt. She stated that she wanted to appeal more to Republican voters, and was true to her word. She ignored, or only did the most cursory campaigning in traditionally Democrat strongholds, expecting the folks there to vote for her. Just as Blair and ‘Progress’ treated the British working class over here.
As for foreign policy, she boasted that she was proud to have Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s old adviser, as her friend and that she regularly spent her hols with him. This is the man, whose policy of backing Fascist dictators across the world, and support for carpet-bombing in Vietnam, has caused him to be denounced as the world’s biggest unindicted war criminal. He is really has shed enough blood, as Shakespeare put in MacBeth, to make ‘all the seas incarnadine, turning the green red’.
This was at a time when the American public was becoming increasingly war weary. People were becoming sick of waving their sons and daughters off proudly, only to see them coming back in coffins, or with shattered bodies and minds from a series of wars that seem to only profit multinationals.
In short, Killary was the consummate corporate and political insider. But she still claimed that she was an outsider, because of her gender. Well, her biological gender was immaterial. She was as hawkish as any of the men in Bush’s and Obama’s cabinets, and was responsible for much legislation that actively harmed women. Her claims of feminism rang very hollow to ordinary American women concerned about bread and butter issues. Like, you know, actually finding paying jobs, being able to afford to eat and have somewhere to live, pay the utility bills and being able to afford to see the doctor. Oh yes, and being able to see their daughters and sons go through college without being burdened by staggering amounts of debt.
As for the Russians being to blame, this is quite frankly a massive lie. Yes, Putin wants to influence what’s going on in the West. No, he wasn’t responsible for Killary’s defeat. Killary was damaged by the WikiLeaks revelations, which showed how she and the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, fiddled the internal election process to steal the nomination from Bernie, as well as the incriminating documents which showed just how far she was in Wall Street’s and corporate America’s pockets. This had nothing to do with Russian hacking. They were handed over by disgruntled insiders within the Democrat Party. But Killary couldn’t admit this, and so has started a bogus campaign to blame Russian.
And there’s more than a little bit of hypocrisy about this too. Killary’s got no problem with fiddling Russian politics. America poured millions into Boris Yeltsyn’s campaign to become president of the USSR during the 1990s, and so complete the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and the privatisation of its state concerns. All of which were sold at knock-down prices. The results were massive profits for the oligarchs, who bought them, the complete melt-down of the Russian economy, a massive surge in mafia violence as organised crime tried to take over industry. Millions of Russians were thrown out of work in a nation that had never developed unemployment benefit, ’cause the state’s policy was to have everyone in work. Left without benefits and with medicine increasingly privatised, there was a massive increase in sickness and suicide.
And she’s continued meddling in Russian/east European affairs. The Orange Revolution in Kiev against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president was carefully stage managed by Shrillary and the state department, down to the orange clothing being given out to protesters. It was an astro-turf coup, which carefully resembled a popular uprising but which was scripted by the American state and western capital. As for the composition of the new Ukrainian government installed with Killary’s help, these include Nazi thugs from the Pravy Sektor, real Fascists, who wear SS uniforms and scream Nazi slogans, and who have a bitter hatred of Jews, trade unionists and real democrats.
She was also caught on tape moaning about how she regretted not fiddling the elections for the Palestinian authority to get the right party in power.
Hillary’s a very intelligent woman. I think some of the misogynist abuse directed against her is because she’s probably the brighter than her husband, Bill. But intelligence does not equate with morality. Trump’s a grotesque monster, but he made some of the right noises. At one point he said he was in charge of single-payer healthcare, and that he didn’t want to start more wars. He’s since gone back on these promises. But despite the fact that Trump’s stupid with a disgusting attitude to women, these are issues that did appeal to many ordinary people. 45,000 people a year die in America because they can’t afford medical treatment. Bush’s wars abroad have pushed taxes up for the state to be able to pay for it, and the burden has fallen again on the ordinary man and woman in the street, just as it has over here. And if you’re a parent wondering if your child will come back for his or her tour of duty in one piece and compus mentus, Trump’s promise not to put boots on the ground in Syria is welcome indeed.
For some people, these are life and death issues, and the grotesque personality of the person proposing them won’t matter. And especially not after Clinton’s own dubious affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the rumours of indiscretions, if not something far worse, with other female staffers.
And let’s put some of the blame for Killary’s defeat on a factor, that I haven’t heard she herself has cited: the American Constitution. As one of the speakers in the above video shows, Killary actually got more votes than Trump. But she lost because of the electoral college, an antiquated and byzantine electoral organ that was set up to give the slave-holding states a disproportionate amount of power in the 19th century. Slaves couldn’t vote, but were defined as being partial humans for the purposes of voting, and the electoral college set up so that the southern states could still successfully field presidential candidates against those from the northern states, which had a far greater proportion of free and White men, and so a greater voting population.
This isn’t the only problem with the American Constitution. It was drafted at the end of the 18th century by patrician White men, who were terrified that the Revolution would see power slip from the hands of the monied, landed elite to ordinary working Americans – the ‘leather apron men’, as they referred to the industrial craftsmen, who flocked to town hall meetings and provided the basis for American popular democracy. And so checks have been placed within the Constitution that make the kind of radical change now desperately needed impossible. The result is that millions of ordinary Americans feel disenfranchised, and so stayed away from the election.
Hillary has no-one to blame but herself. She was a horrible Conservative, serving a stifling Conservative political and social order, who was beaten by another horrible Conservative, but one who actually understood how to appeal to the public.
But it ain’t just in Britain that Killary’s touring, telling little lies. She also appeared on Australia’s ABC television station to tell porkies Down Under. Michelle, one of the great commenters to this blog, sent me this link to an article in Medium by Caitlin Johnstone exposing five of the lies she told in her interview with Sarah Ferguson.
This week there’s been a massive international arms fair in London, in which the international ‘defence and security’ industry, otherwise known as the merchants of death, have been trying to flog their murderous wares to a range of governments, from the democratic through the autocratic to the just plain despotic. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he’d like to stop them, but has no powers to. The arms fair is conducted with the full support of Britain’s MOD and the intelligence services, who have and will step in to stop anything that looks like it might prevent Britain’s arms manufactures from selling their products to just about every evil butcher around the world, including the Saudis.
As the local authorities are unable to stop the fair, so ordinary people have stepped in to make their feelings about it known and raise awareness of its horrors. There has been a protest staged against the fair outside it for the past week. And they’ve produced several videos about the protests, and some of the issues surrounding the fair and the general arms industry.
War, the Pentagon and Hollywood Propaganda
The short video below, titled ‘Art and Militarism’ on YouTube, talks about the way the Pentagon has worked with Hollywood on blockbuster movies to promote the American military and the arms industry. These films have included the James Bond epics, Zero Dark 30, and X-Men. As part of this process of collaboration, the Pentagon is able to check and alter the scripts. With many of these movies the military’s aim has been to show off their equipment, and encourage recruitment. Top Gun was made with the collaboration of the American Navy, who saw it very much as a recruiting video. And it worked. There was a massive surge of young men wishing to fly combat aircraft, but they went into the USAF rather than the navy.
Art and Supervillains against the Arms Fair
This is another short video, which shows some of the artists, scholars and ordinary protesters in costume. One of the speakers makes the point that academics don’t usually get out of their classrooms much, but this time they have come down to make their voices heard. He also talks about the way the artists have also supported the protest with some of their works attacking the arms industry.
The video also includes some of the demonstrators marching in costume, including men dressed as Donald Trump and Tony Blair. There is also a young guy in a Dalek, flanked by another bloke dressed as a cyberman. This chap has a sign satirizing the whole fair by pretending to be about the loss of Dalek jobs. The arms industry and its agents and officials are making Daleks unemployed by killing men, women and children themselves. Later on in the video you see the man inside the Dalek costume forced by the rozzers to come out of it. And as this is the 21st century surveillance state, the police are also recording the proceedings.
A few days ago I put up a post about a piece from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, in which Seder commented on a piece in EcoWars and Politics magazines by John F. Kennedy, which gave the real reasons behind the calls for western intervention in Syria and attacks on Russia for human rights abuses in the killing of civilians in their own attacks on the militants fighting Assad.
As you might expect from our mendacious governments, it has nothing to do with any real concerns about human rights. It’s all about overthrowing Assad, isolating and weakening Russia, and securing a massive gas pipeline that the Qataris proposed nearly a decade and a half ago. This is planned to go through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. The Saudis, Jordanians and Turks were all in favour of it. Syria refused, on the grounds that they didn’t want to hurt their Russian allies. The moment Assad refused, the Americans and their allies, including ourselves and the French, began to plot Assad’s overthrow. An international alliance was set up called The Friends of Syria Coalition, or some such, a name which Seder rightly described as ‘Orwellian’, in that it meant precisely the opposite of what it said, in the same way that in Orwell ‘war=peace, and freedom=slavery’. This alliance was to campaign internationally for Assad’s removal. The CIA paid £60 million to Barada, a TV station in this country, to run propaganda pieces imploring the Syrian people to overthrow Assad. At the same time, the Saudis and other hardline nations began funding, equipping and training the various jihadist splinter groups, ultimately descended from al-Qaeda, to start a civil war. And the Saudis and other nations also told the Americans that if they invaded Syria, like they had Iraq, they’d also pay for it.
Since I put the original piece up, I’ve got a few more pieces of very relevant information about it from Michelle, one of the great commenters here, passing on comments from David Croswell, who clearly knows much more about this than I do. Michelle writes
Hi Beastie,
I agree with you on the importance of this piece, I put this out on Google plus Friday and received an interesting comment from another googlepuser David Croswell on Dore’s comments he said:
“Mostly right.
The gas field involved is the `South Pars’, the largest in the world.
There are only two countries that have access to this, and they are Qatar and Iran.
Syria is Iran’s number one ally in the Middle East, which is why you see an Iranian military supportive presence in Syria.
So, Assad’s veto on the Qatari pipeline wasn’t simply `for our friend, Russia’.
However, Iran and Russia have a cosy relationship, also, and are working in coordination, with Iran handling the Islamic public relations aspect in the central Asian nations, and, with their gas programme, now extending pipelines to Pakistan and India in the opposite direction to Europe, developing their market there.
So, this shows another factor to the U.S. aspect: In their ongoing campaign to isolate Iran to place it in a more vulnerable position, it is necessary to kick out the prop of their number one Middle Eastern ally, Syria.
In their intent to regain what they once had for next to nothing in Iran, the fourth largest oil production on the planet (Iran was where BP got started, which is why we always find the UK riding along), they’ll also have possession of the South Pars gas field.
Of course, isolating Russia financially and geopolitically, along the way, is a major goal.
So, all and all, the west are not the forces of goodness and niceness … at all.”
Hi again Beastie, the conversation/comments have continued from David Crosswell on my post, he also said:
“The Syrian fields in the Golan Heights are already being exploited by Israel, with Murdoch and Cheney being two major beneficiaries roped in, in order to horse-shoe support from the U.S./UK support base.
Also, the gas fields off the Gaza are being siphoned off, with American help.
This is what it’s all about.
Wars are not fought on principle any more, but for corporate profit, so the contention that the U.S. is an oligarchy is not at all far-fetched….”
I replied: “Wars have always been fought for power and profit, empires and their trading companies have been carving up peoples and their nations for centuries, hence their armed forces were just as much corporate employees then as they are now.
In the UK there is also a military recruitment crisis so the UK government is using non-subtle techniques to recruit amongst children still at school:
This adds much more information on the geopolitical manoeuvring here. And none of this is to our credit. We and the Americans have always been desperate to get our mitts on the Iranian oil industry. It was the reason we and the Americans sponsored a CIA-funded coup in Iran in 1958, which toppled the democratically-elected Iranian prime minister Mossadeq, and led to the installation of the Shah as the country’s absolute monarch. The Shah and his secret police, SAVAK, were so brutal that the Shah’s rule ended in a popular uprising in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which placed the mullahs and the Ayatollah Khomeini in control of the country. And one of annual holidays proclaimed by the new, theocratic regime celebrates the nationalisation of the oil industry.
The Neocons would love to invade Iran as well, and made plans to do so. The Iran regime is brutal and deplorable, but nevertheless it does contain a democratic element and is still freer and more liberal than the Saudis. It should be left to the Iranians to choose what form of government they wish to live under. And after the horrors created by the invasion of Iraq, no-one should have any illusion that any puppet regime created by the West after an invasion of Syria or Iran would be any better for the peoples of those nations. Assad’s Syria is a Fascistic state, but it’s secular nationalist, not theocratic, and definitely more liberal than Saudi Arabia. All that would result from another western invasion of these nations is yet another repeat of Iraq: the mass privatisation and looting of state industries to American and western multinationals, particularly the oil industry; more sectarian violence; killing, racketeering, prostitution and lawlessness by the ‘peace-keeping forces’, particularly the mercenaries; massive economic damage and sky-high unemployment due to the imposition of free-market capitalism; and a sharp decline in women’s status and opportunities. Women in Iraq before the invasion could have careers outside the home, and felt safe leaving work in the evening. That has all gone. As has the free education and health care that the regime also provided. If these also exist in Syria and Iran, you can expect them to disappear as well if the west invades.
The information about the Israelis’ exploitation of the oilfields in the Golan heights – taken from Syria – and Gaza also seems to me to be very relevant to the current attempts by the right, the Israel lobby and the Blairites to smear decent critics of Israel as anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. These slanders are risible, as so many of those libelled as such are anti-racists with a proud record of fighting against racism and anti-Semitism. The Jewish people smeared have included many, who are active members of their faith and community, and who had family murdered by the Nazis – real anti-Semites – in the Holocaust.
Much of this slander is because pro-Palestinian activists are having an effect in raising opposition to the Israeli colonisation of the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians. This is notably true in the case of the BDS movement, which has many Jewish supporters. This movement urges people not to deal with or purchase goods from Israeli businesses located in the Occupied Territories. So far, a third of the Israeli businesses set up there have been forced out, thanks to this campaign. And the Israel lobby has gone ballistic. New York City council recently condemned it at a meeting as an anti-Semitic hate group, despite the fact that many of its supporters present at the meeting were Jews, including six rabbis.
Now it seems that oil is also a factor here as well, and the Israelis’ determination to exploit this in the territories they have seized from other nations.
This is disgusting and outrageous, but I doubt it will ever be reported by a mainstream TV or broadcasting channel. We need to do what we can to stop our governments destroying more lives – those of innocent Syrians, as well as our own brave young people – just to make the petrochemical companies even more rich and bloated than they are already.
The protesters against Gulf War I were right: ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go. We won’t die for Texaco!’ Or BP, Esso, Gulf or anyone else.
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