It’s isn’t just Rachel Maddow. They go on to talk about how the whole of the American mainstream media, including MSNBC, has been corrupted by corporate power, and now reflects nothing but establishment propaganda. Just like the corporatist, Clintonite wing of the Democrats. They also talk about the terror Black and Latino neighbourhoods are living in, thanks to Trump, ICE and the anti-immigrant rhetoric. They conclude by discussing how whole neighbourhoods in Houston and elsewhere in Texas have been gutted by Hurricane Harvey, but aren’t receiving any help, because they’re working class areas and only the business and affluent centres are prioritised. And the immense environmental damage that has been caused by Big Oil, but which goes unchallenged and undocumented, because Big Oil owns everything in those areas, right down to schools and hospitals.
Abby Martin is the courageous and fiercely intelligent host of The Empire Files on TeleSur English and previously, RT. This series unflinchingly exposes what the American military-industrial complex is doing across the world through coups, ‘regime change’ and foreign wars and military interventions. Including the real situation in Israel, where the Israelis have subjected the indigenous Palestinians to nearly 70 years of massacres, brutality and ethnic cleansing.
She also shows how ordinary Americans are being exploited at home, as big business seeks to strip them of welfare, workers’ rights and shift the tax burden on to them, while further destroying any affordable healthcare provision and privatising the public schools. She was so much a threat to the American establishment, that half the report concocted to show that RT was just a propaganda operation being used by Putin to destabilise America was about Martin personally.
I’ve already put up a three-part blog post about a previous 30-minute long segment from the Jimmy Dore Show, in which he and Martin discuss her work and the crimes of American imperialism. I think this segment may have been part of the same interview, but the two have been edited and split into separate parts.
The two begin by discussing how MSNBC, the formerly liberal network, is now just the mirror image of the right-wing Fox Network. Martin is particularly unimpressed by the way MSNBC tried to discredit Bill Binney by calling him a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Bill Binney was the NSA official, who constructed the ‘Thin Spread’ mass surveillance software keeping tabs on people’s electronic information and communications. He’s been praised by Edward Snowden, one of the other whistleblowers on the use of mass surveillance software by the intelligence agencies. They then talk about the lies and propaganda about RT, and how the government is trying to shut it down by having it register as a foreign agent. Martin states that MSNBC is now just the other arm of Fox News, but just parrots Democrat propaganda.
As for Rachel Maddow, one of the lead presenters on MSNBC, and a staunch supporter of Killary and the corporatist Democrats, Martin states that she’s a careerist hack. However, she and the other hacks with her realised that they have to double down and try to explain away why Killary lost to Trump. But they’re so trapped in the elitist bubble, that they have absolutely no idea. One of the reasons Clinton lost was because she didn’t bother going to certain states, like Wisconsin. Martin and Dore joke about whether it was Putin, who stopped her going there. Did he steal her map, hack into her computer and wipe the entry for it?
They then move on to the question of the future of journalism. Martin states that journalism has always been antithetical to business, this is why it’s been corrupted by government and folded into big business conglomerates through mergers. It’s why Martin herself joined RT. She talks about how it was a long time before she realised how compromised journalism actually was, however. She talks about how she went on tour with John Kerry. But journalism hasn’t just been corrupted by the Democrats, nor the Republicans. She states that the future of journalism lies with us, referring to alternative media and the power of the internet. She states that now we don’t need to get a press handout from Monsanto to talk about what they’re doing, or get a statement from the government: they can just talk to the government’s victims.
She then goes on to talk about ‘fake news’, and how this is being hijacked by the establishment to close down alternative media. Bill Kristol, one of the founders of the Neocons and the head of the Project for the New American Century, has said that he’s going to set up a thinktank to combat ‘fake news’. She and Dore also talk about how the alternative media are being forced to brand themselves to survive, so they have to set up Patreon accounts so people can fund them. But she has a lot of hope for citizen journalism. There is just a need to invest in it, and to follow those journalists we admire. We have to create our own networks. The Intercept, which has done some good work, was forced to rely on a billionaire, and now they have to go begging for money.
Martin then turns to Project Censored, which she praises as a very good, worthwhile alternative to mainstream journalist training. She advises aspiring journos not to go to journalism school, as they will just get into debt up to their behinds, and will be hit over the head with how to be journalists. Only to get a job as an unpaid intern at the end of it. Project Censored, on the other hand, takes in anyone, and you can go in at different levels – as a researcher, or writer, for example. Every year they published the five most censored stories. One of these is that there are 3,000 towns in America, whose water has a higher lead content than that of Flint in Michigan. She and Dore then discuss the alternative, drinking bottled water. Martin refuses to drink most of these brands, because they’re all owned by Nestle. Nestle owns the majority of water bottling plants. They just suck out the aquifers of local towns, which get nothing in return, except for a councillor, who’s on their payroll. And this is apart from the slave labour involved in their chocolate. She states that there is now only one party, and that she has always advised against voting for the lesser of two evils.
In the video below, Jimmy Dore, Steffi Zamorano, Ron Placone and Dave Riemitz comment on the Clintonite Democrats’ anger that Bernie Sanders has been invited to appear as the guest speaker on the opening night of a new Women’s March planned for the end of October. This follows the previous Women’s March against the election of Donald Trump. Dore himself states that the original lacked a focus, and so it became a protest against nothing in particular. He isn’t against it. He just thinks that it could be done better.
Dore notes that the march’s organisers, or at least very many of them, are women of colour, a fact which serves to refute some of the objections made by the Corporate Dems, and show up their own racial prejudices in turn. The veteran feminist, Gloria Steinem, made Sanders an honorary woman for the event, which, remarks Dore, should make his appearance OK. But Neera Tanden, one of the Clintonite Dems, objected on the grounds of Sanders’ gender, asking if no women could be found to open the event. To which Tamika D. Mallory, one of the Black ladies organising it, responded by saying that there were going to be sixty speakers, or whom only two were male. Stephanie Schriock, the head of Emily’s List, also complains about Sanders’ speaking at the event. Dore then shows what a hypocrite she is with a piece from about a year or two ago, in which Emily’s List invited Bill Clinton to speak at their gala dinner about the need for female leadership in 2016. Cue more crude and bawdy jokes about what precisely Bill meant for female leadership. Clearly, the Clintonite Dems don’t have a problem with men speaking at feminist events. They just have a problem with Bernie Sanders speaking. As for their complaint about having Bernie as their main male speaker, Mallory points out that Sanders isn’t. Their main, headline speaker is another woman of colour, Maxine Waters, and states she finds it strange that her presence at the event is overlooked by the Clintonites, who focus on that of a White man. And Nomiki Konst, one of The Young Turks reporters, in reply to the moaning from Schriock, states that Emily’s List is an institution that has been criticising for giving their financial backing to wealthy women, while raising money from young women and women of colour. Another commenter, Katie Halper, asks her audience to imagine what it would be like if neoliberal feminists were as offended by poverty as they are by Sanders speaking at the event.
And the final piece that blows their complaints out of the water is the fact that Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and two other ladies were also asked to attend, but turned it down.
Dore ends the video by stating that Clinton and her cronies are the type of people the Democrats need to get rid of. They should leave and join the Republicans. The Democrat party should be taken over by the Progressives, or it will die. And it’s pretty much dead already. But America’s most popular politician is still treated abysmally by the Democrats. Dore’s last comment is a joke that he expects Rachel Maddow, a very establishment Democrat broadcaster, will cover this.
I’ve put this up because Killary was in Cheltenham today at the Literary Festival, trying to sell her book to the British reading public. Well, Dore remarks in the video that perhaps Clinton turned down her invitation to appear at the women’s march as she couldn’t sell her book. The Women’s March in America was accompanied by similar women’s marches in other countries across the globe, including ours. And just as the Clintonites tried to smear Sanders’ supporters as a misogynist, so the Blairites in the Labour party tried to smear Corbyn and his supporters.
As for Hillary herself, she’s a corrupt corporatist, who represents only extremely rich, entitled women like herself. The neoliberal policies she and her husband have championed have caused nothing but poverty in America and abroad. She’s also a hawkish warmonger, who is not ashamed to boast that she count Henry Kissinger, who has the blood of untold millions on his hands, as a friend. She and politicians like her, regardless of their gender, should be thrown out of power, and replaced by those, who genuinely do understand and want to improve conditions for the poor and working people. And if the Dems had chosen Bernie instead Killary, we just might now have him as president and not the genocidal maniac inching the world towards nuclear holocaust.
Here’s another very important clip from the Jimmy Dore Show. It’s one that should be viewed by everyone interested in what the various wars we’re fighting around the world are really about. Dore and his co-host, Ron Placone, discuss a review of Anand Gopal’s book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes by Ryan Grimm in The Intercept. And its more of what the mainstream media aren’t telling us about these wars.
Dore starts the show by making the point that mainstream media never reveals the truth about the reasons behind America’s various wars in the Middle East and the Maghreb. They don’t mention the petrodollar, Libya, or the reason why Iran’s now a theocratic state under the ayatollahs. It’s because America – and Britain – over threw its democratically elected prime minister, Mossadeq.
And this is just as devastating. Gopal’s book reveals that the Taliban surrendered several times to America and its allies, only to be rebuffed. It was traditional in Afghan civil wars for the losing side to surrender to the victors. They would, in turn, incorporate them into the new government. Dore makes the point that this is a sensible system for governing a country, where people still have to live together as neighbours after the fighting. The Taliban tried to do this with the Allies, and were rebuffed. Several times. He also points out that the Taliban itself withered away, as its members put down their guns, either going back and vanishing into the rest of the population, or heading over the border into Pakistan.
However, America and the Allies offered rewards for those informing on the Taliban. With the real Taliban having vanished, and al-Qaeda down to a mere handful of people, the venal and unscrupulous amongst the Afghan population used the system to settle personal feuds. They smeared their neighbours as Taliban, for them to be killed or arrested by the US forces, and get the reward money. This naturally has created massively hostility against Allied forces. When America and the Allies first defeated the Taliban, the Afghans were glad to see them go. Now, having had their peace overtures repulsed, and the country reduced to more chaos and warfare, the Taliban have returned with popular backing.
But Dore states, you are not going to hear it from the mainstream news, such as MSNBC and Rached Maddow, because the media automatically backs the American war machine. And that war machine must be kept fed. He notes that Congress, with the backing of the Democrats, has just voted another $100 billion for the defence budget, in addition to what had already been voted for it last year. America already spends more on defence than the next 13 countries on the list combined. And the country and her allies have been in Afghanistan for 16 years. In other four years, the war will get a gold watch and be able to retire.
That’s it. There are absolutely no good reasons anymore for us to be anywhere in the Middle East. I backed the invasion of Afghanistan because I believed that it was a justified response to an act of war by al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. I heard a few years ago from a friend that the Taliban tried to stop the invasion by offering to surrender Osama bin Laden, claiming that they didn’t know that he had been planning the attack. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not. But after this, it looks much more credible.
We’re not helping anyone in Afghanistan by staying there, except perhaps an already corrupt government, propped up by us, western mercenaries, and the opium trade, which has flourished more than it ever did previously. Dore states that the only areas in Afghanistan, which weren’t troubled by fighting, were those where there wasn’t a western military presence.
Of course, there are other, corporate reasons why we’re still there. Trump announced that America would stay in the country to exploit its valuable mineral resources, in order to defray the costs of the invasion. As well as the gas pipeline that was supposed to be built, but wasn’t, as Dore also mentions.
But the humanitarian reasons touted as justification for the invasion have vanished. We’ve long outstayed our welcome. As Grimm’s review concludes, we’re losing to an enemy who’s already surrendered. A hard thing to do. We’re just killing and maiming people for the benefit of the military-industrial complex. And our boys and girls are also being killed and maimed.
They’re coming back traumatized and with terrible injuries, not for defending their country and its allies, as they and we have been told. They’re being mutilated and killed purely for the profit of the big arms manufacturers.
Disgusting.
Dore encourages everyone watching this to pass it on. I agree. We are not going to hear about this from mainstream media, which includes the Beeb.
General Smedley Butler was right. War is a racket. We need to get out, bring our troops back home, and close all the wars and interventions in which we’re currently involved down.
Until then, there will never be peace across the world.
Okay, the BBC have started running trailers for the new series of Have I Got News For You that’s due to begin on Friday. The trailer jokes about how the programme won’t be dominated by fake news, before going into a series of clips in which the panellists are dubbed over by a voice with a Russian accent, going on about how wonderful Putin’s Russia is.
Ho ho! We all know how corrupt the Russian media is, ever since the days of the Soviet Union, if not the Tsar. So all good fun and fair comment, eh?
Well, no. I stopped watching the show last year, because I got sick and tired of the way it retailed fake news, cleverly masked as fair comment on the news stories of the week, and wrote a post about it. Jokes like that are dangerous, because they promote a very false image of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, as well as ramping up international tensions, which could all too easily lead to war. Remember, last year a NATO general wrote a whole book about how, by next month, we would be at war with Russia. Considering the stupid actions of Trump and the American military-industrial complex and its poodles in the media, I don’t know if that was a genuine prediction or a prepared script that has been laid down for NATO to follow.
But let’s take the connection between Russia and ‘fake news’. This has been heavily promoted by the Democrats to excuse their defeat in the American presidential elections. They lost, not because they had no policies that would really benefit the poor, not because Hillary Clinton is a corporatist hawk, who has been paid obscene amounts by the Wall Street banks for making sure they can get away with wrecking the economy and impoverishing the country’s working people. Or the way she sneered at implementing single-payer healthcare, and has worked for companies like Wallmart, which stamped on trade unions. No! It was all because the Russians hacked into the Democrats’ computer and handed all the incriminating evidence of their crooked deals with industry and to rig the nominations to keep Bernie Sanders out, and then gave it to WikiLeaks. Except that there’s no evidence of this, and WikiLeaks itself has denied this, saying instead that they were given the material in a Chicago park by a Democratic insider, who was annoyed at the way the party was being run.
And there’s more, much more. Since then the Democrats and their corporate shills, like Rachel Maddow, have been not only banging on about this, but also about how they supposedly hacked into Trump, and have some kind of hold over him, blackmailing him to support their interests. There’s no evidence for that, but nevertheless, that’s what’s being sold the American public. There are two videos from the Jimmy Dore show where he reports on the finding by an American media monitoring organisation that stories about Russian hacking now comprise over 50 per cent of the stories covered by Maddow on her show. Despite the fact that figures from the FBI and CIA have said that it’s all rubbish.
Dore points out how McCarthyite this all is, and how it is dangerously ratcheting up tensions with Putin in a new ‘Red Scare’.
Added to this already volatile situation is the current war in Ukraine. If you believe the media, including Private Eye, Putin doing the same thing as Hitler did to Czechoslovakia. He using the supposed persecution of his people in that country to invade and overthrow its democratically elected government and annex the entire nation.
Except that Putin isn’t. He is in Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainian population, who are genuinely being persecuted by the Ukrainian government. However, Crimea was never historically part of Ukraine, is overwhelmingly Russian, and was only given to Ukraine in 1950 or so. And its people voted, perfectly constitutionally, to leave Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.
As for the current Ukrainian government, they are anything but nice, western-style democrats. The Orange Revolution was not a spontaneous revolution at all, but a carefully funded astroturf coup staged by George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s quango in charge of fomenting coups against governments the American state doesn’t like. Which means, in practice, those countries that try to stop American corporations exploiting them and treating their people as slaves.
The Ukrainian government also contains genuine Nazis from the Pravy – ‘Right’ – Sektor. These organisations dress in the costume and use the regalia – the flags, signs and insignia – of the Ukrainian SS auxiliaries during the Second World War. These organisations, and the leaders they revere, where responsible for some of the pogroms and actively aided the Holocaust during the Nazi invasion. And they are still bitterly anti-Semitic today.
But from Reagan onwards, the American government has supported elements of the Ukrainian far right, and its leaders, like Vladimir Stetso, as freedom fighters.
None of this is being reported in Private Eye, or mentioned on the BBC, not even on Have I Got News For You. Indeed, Private Eye, in their ‘Letter from Ukraine’, actively retailed the narrative that democratic Ukraine is under attack from Putin’s Russia. This is all to serve British, and indeed, western, corporate and military interests.
And so Have I Got News For You, and its hosts, are actively feeding us fake news, all the while pretending to be acting as a kind of humorous check, holding politicians accountable through satire and humour. But there are limits to the joking, beyond which they clearly don’t want to go. And the jolly irreverence then becomes actively dangerous, as it adds an entirely spurious verisimilitude to the lies they are telling about Russia, Ukraine and the former eastern bloc.
I had enough of this a couple of years ago, and have stopped watching it. I am not saying it doesn’t do some good, and that the team and panellists don’t genuinely hold some politicos to account. I’m just saying that it’s also peddling fake news, and that, if you watch it, you need to be very careful about what Hislop, Merton and the guest presenter for that week say.
This is yet another video about the expansion of the American war machine and war propaganda by the Jimmy Dore Show. In this video, he discusses the report that AFRICOM, the part of American High Command responsible for Africa, has decided to put troops back into Somalia after 24 years. The troops are apparently there at the request of the Somalian government, and will be there for training purposes. The article does reveal that American troops have also been deployed several times within that space of 24 years in minor missions, such as scouting for bombing sites.
The US troops are being deployed to help the Somali government against the Islamist group, al-Shabaab. The article states that al-Shabaab, although sharing a similar Islamist ideology with ISIS and al-Qaeda, aren’t actually part of those organisations. Most of the time, they’ve been confined to Somalia. They arose after a long period of stable anarchy ended when a new government fought a war to gain power. It was this war that produced them. On those rate occasions when al-Shabaab has spread abroad, it’s mostly been into Kenya in reprisal for attacks made by the Kenyans and the African Union.
Dore makes the point that they’re not part of ISIS and al-Qaeda, but the American government has claimed that they are so that they can used the license granted to George Bush to fight terrorism. Dore states that this is indeed Orwellian. It’s endless war for endless peace, one of the slogans of Oceania in 1984.
So if al-Shabaab aren’t really an international terrorist organisation, what’s the real reason Trump’s sending troops there? You need to ask! It’s oil. Massive reserves have been found by BP off the country’s coast. In Puntland province, the reserves are sufficient to make the country one of the top 20 oil producing countries. Dore against makes the point that whenever there’s a war in the Middle East or Somalia, it’s all sponsored by Saudi Arabia about the petrodollar.
Dore is joined on the programme by Steffi Zamora and Ron Placone, whose voice can be heard off-screen. They make the point, with Dore, that there is no anti-war party in America. Both Republicans and Democrats are strongly in favour of war. The Democrats so much so, that when anti-war protesters turned up at their convention they turned the lights out and sound cannons on them, and painted them as riotous – throwing chairs around – and misogynist. But as Steffi Zamora reminds Dore’s viewers, the people of America are very strongly opposed to war. But the media does not want to show this. MSNBC, and news anchors like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are not going to say anything against more war. Dore also makes the point that YouTube are also trying to drive out those voices on the internet that oppose the war by demonetising them, in order to starve them of the advertising revenue that sustains them. What they’re getting isn’t sufficient to support their show, but they thank everyone who is supporting them. And, faced with silence about the war from the mainstream media, he asks the rhetorical question if it’s any wonder people are now getting their news from YouTube.
As well as appearing on Counterpunch’s website, Theodore A. Postol also appeared on RT, and his analysis of the Sarin gas attack in Syria was also covered by Jimmy Dore. Postol is the emeritus professor of Science, Technology and National Security at MIT. He concluded that, contrary to what the American government and Syrian rebels were saying, the poison gas that killed the people of Khan Shaykhun was not dropped as a bomb from a plane, but was released from an improved ground-based weapon, about 12 cm long. Trump and the American media have claimed that the attack was the responsibility of Assad, and launched an attack by Tomohawk missiles on the air force base, from which the attack was supposedly launched, in reprisal.
In this video, Dore savagely critiques the statements of Trump, Sean Spicer and other members of the White House. He makes the point that the American government is simply interested in regime change in Syria. They are not interested in protecting civilians, as is shown by the American military’s own cavalier indifference to the number of civilian deaths their strikes have brought about in Syria and Iraq. Nor are they against chemical weapons. The American armed forces have used depleted uranium, which has caused birth defects in Iraq.
He also points out that the White Helmets, the rescue team that moved into treat the survivors, are hardly an impartial source. They are allied with the Islamist rebels – al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, ISIS and the western forces seeking to overthrow Assad. This is ignored by the American media, who don’t have reporters in the country. And those reporters that have been there, such as Eva Bartlett, who has appeared on Dore’s show, have been dismissed.
Dore also criticises the American media for their complicity in promoting every war since Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in the 1980s. The reporters on these programmes, such as CNN, MSNBC, and so on, earn $30,000 a day and are not willing to do anything that might jeopardise their position. If they do, they’re sacked. This is what happened when Phil Donohue opposed the Iraq Invasion on his show, stating clearly that all the pretexts for it were false. The broadcaster immediately took him off the air. They claimed that it was because of low ratings, a lie, as he had the highest ratings on the network. A little while later an internal memo surfaced stating that the real reason he was sacked was because the network did not want someone who was against the invasion, and therefore appeared unpatriotic, to front their network.
Dore urges his viewers not to believe CNN, MSNBC and the other news networks, nor Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer and other celebrity broadcasters, as they are also lying to support the war. Nor should the mainstream newspapers, like the New York Times also be believed, as they too have published nothing but lies and propaganda for the various wars. As are the corporate, establishment Democrats. This is all about what Chomsky called ‘manufacturing consent’. He shows a clip of Postol on RT stating his conclusions and that the report claiming the attack was launched from the air is so poor, that none of the intelligence analysts he knew would have signed off on it. Dore states that this evidence will be dismissed, despite the professor’s immense expertise, because he’s only a professor and he contradicts what the government and media are saying. He also points out that the American establishment has also been trying to close RT down, just as YouTube is trying to close down the alternative news outlets on their platform, both left and right, because they’re producing better, more objective news than corporate television. YouTube has blocked adverts on these news shows, so that they don’t get the advertising revenue they need. Nevertheless, Dore vows that he’ll continue making these programmes.
Dore points out the similarities to the 2013 poison gas attack, which again was a false flag operation designed to draw America into the war by the rebel forces. He also makes the point that it is like the Iraq war all over again. While he doesn’t know quite what form the government will take if the rebels win, he believes it will probably be a Sunni theocracy where women have no rights, just like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are pushing this war. As for the rebels themselves, these so-called moderates beheaded a child on a roundabout, but this was glossed over by the American media.
This is more about Syria, I’m afraid. But I feel I have to write about this, no matter how tiresome it might be, because I’m afraid that the British people, as well as those of America and Europe, are being dragged by the political class and the military-industrial complex into another illegal and genocidal war. The last time it was Iraq. This time the imperialists and profiteers have their sights set on Syria.
In this clip from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Steffi Zamorano, Ron Placone and Bob Reinitz rip into Brian Williams, a news presenter on MSNBC. As you know, a few days ago Trump launched a missile strike against a Syrian air base under the pretext of punishing Assad for his poison gas attack. A gas attack that has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda false flag attack, with the bodies of the victims those of people, who had been kidnapped and then butchered from a pro-Assad village.
Williams showed the footage of the missiles’ launch from an American warship, and then went into raptures about it. Literally. He waxed lyrical, describing them as ‘beautiful pictures’. At one point, he even had the audacity to quote Leonard Cohen, ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’ One of the team on the programme makes the comment that Cohen wrote one of the most beautiful love poems, but Williams just wants to rave about weapons.
Dore makes the point that Williams is hardly an unbiased observer. He worked for General Electric, which is a major defence contractor. And General Electric used to own NBC. Williams was a cheerleader for the Iraq Invasion, bringing on generals, who would demand that the situation required more armaments and personnel. Of course they did. These generals were also in the pay of the armaments companies, so it was in their interests, and those of their corporate paymasters, to push for war. Williams, however, kept silent about all this. Which, in Dore’s view, constitutes journalistic malfeasance. Williams also lied about his own military exploits. He claimed to have been aboard a military helicopter when it came under fire. That was revealed as lie in an article in one of the New York papers. But it didn’t stop Williams carrying on with the pretence.
Dore points out the obscenity of Williams’ remarks, but makes the point that he’s no different from many other ‘leftie’ journalists, all repeating the same chorus of demands for war. These include Rachel Maddow, another supposedly liberal news presenter, who supported Killary against Bernie Sanders. Dore states that all the journalists on television are doing it. He then points out the difference between American coverage of the weapons’ launch, and al-Jazeera’s. American television shows them being launched. But only al-Jazeera show the chaos and bloodshed when they land. He also points out that the rebels America is fighting with against Assad are al-Qaeda and ISIS, and that the war is for the profit of the oil industry, the Saudis and the Israelis. He reminds his viewers how the media does not show the victims of American bombing in Iraq, where millions have been killed, Yemen or Libya. He states that an American bombing attack killed 150 people in Raqqa. They were told to stay in their homes for safety, but were killed anyway. As for American support of Islamist terrorists, he points out that this has not worked well In Libya, which is a failed state. He goes on to quote one of the members of The Young Turks, Steve Oh, who talked about how the media was able to get away with this because Americans didn’t know much about these places.
Here he was challenged by Steffi Zamorano. She stated that she believed Americans did understand what was going on in the Middle East, and did not like it. There were, she pointed out, countless peace demonstrations and protests going on all over the US, but these were being deliberately ignored by the mainstream media in order to make the protestors feel isolated.
I’ve put up a number of blog posts recently arguing that the accusations that Russian hacking was responsible for the embarrassing leaks of information about Killary’s corruption and corporate interests are lies concocted by the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies for their own purposes. Quite apart from them being a deliberate strategy by Clinton herself and the corporatist Democrats to deflect attention from her numerous failings and abysmal failure to govern in the interests of ordinary voters against big business.
It also seems that the CIA and the rest have also put together a very short, two-page dossier, claiming that the Russians have recorded Trump performing various perverted or scatological acts during his visits there, and are using it to blackmail him. In this segment from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian shows how this is sheer rubbish.
He firstly argues that Trump himself is such a shameless figure with no qualms about lying about Muslims and Latinos, claiming the latter are largely rapists, that even if the story about him urinating on the bed is true, he wouldn’t be at all worried about this coming out.
He also plays a very interesting clip from the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, in which a journalist, Richard Engel, goes through these allegations and states why he doesn’t believe them.
Engel says that he’s heard these allegations for months now, complete with details about where some of these events supposedly occurred, and naming the individuals that were allegedly involved. But when he’s tried to corroborate them, he’s been unsuccessful. He finds it extremely suspicious that this information is supposedly coming out now. He thinks it’s because the intelligence services are angry at Trump, and are trying to warn him to pay more attention to and support them.
The reaction from Rachel Maddow herself is also very revealing. MSNBC as a channel supports the Democrats, although as Dore, The Young Turks and others have argued, this is not the same as being left-wing or liberal. MSNBC isn’t. It has staunchly supported Hillary Clinton against the party’s progressive wing, headed by Bernie Sanders. And Maddow herself earns $30,000 a day, far more than the average American earns in a year.
He points out that Maddow really doesn’t want to hear this, and curtly thanks Engel for his information with the comment that it’s blackmail, ‘even if it isn’t true’. It clearly shows the network’s bias towards the Clintons and these allegations.
This is important, as these allegations of Russian hacking and blackmailing of the president elect are being used to promote a far more aggressive policy towards Russia, one that could take us to war. But as has been pointed out time and again, there seems to be little foundation, if any, to these rumours. At the end of last week, the newspapers announced that a British diplomat, Steel, who had obtained information about the Russians’ hacking, had fled into hiding. This seems to add verisimilitude to the allegations. Despite this, Craig Murray, the former British diplomat, who took custody of the WikiLeaks material, has said that it didn’t come from the Russians. It came from disaffected Democrat insiders. And now this journalist, who makes the point that most of the other foreign correspondents aren’t in Syria, has been unable to verify the stories of Trump’s mucky shenanigans. Even when he checked with the Russians and senior intelligence officers.
These allegations about the Russians are, simply put, rubbish. It’s disinformation – false information put out by the western intelligence agencies and the corporatist Democrats. It serves the Clintonites by reinforcing their power in the party and that of big business, and the American secret state and military-industrial complex in their campaign to shore up American global military power.
Trump is truly a foul man, and his policies are going to hurt millions of Americans. But in this matter he’s the innocent victim, however, bizarre that sounds. The Democrats and spy agencies are lying. They are pushing us towards confrontation with Russia, a confrontation that could result in nuclear war.
In this video from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his team comment on media censorship and lies about the war in Syria. They start off by playing a clip of Wesley Clarke talking about how a general he was interviewing told him, and handed him a paper, showing that America was going to invade seven countries including Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Iran. The general did not know why these countries were targeted for invasion, and there was no new evidence against them which would justify invasion.
Dore also makes the point that Obama, despite all his rhetoric about ‘hope’ and ‘change’, has expanded the number of wars being fought by America from two to eight. If this had occurred under Trump, the public would be horrified, by as it has been done under supposedly liberal Barack Obama, it’s been apparently acceptable.
Dore also describes how Google, which owns YouTube, are attempting to stifle independent comment and reporting on the war on Syria by demonetising videos that are critical of American support for the rebels. This has been done not just to Dore, but also to another poster.
He then shows another video of a rare instance where a reporter in the mainstream media has criticised the official reporting of the civil war. The presenter, Ken or Ben Swan shows scenes of a crowd in east Aleppo celebrating that part of the city’s liberation by Assad and the Russians from the rebel groups supported by America. He makes the point that if Assad is as bitterly hated by his own people, as the media claims, then why should they be celebrating his victory?
Swan goes further and demolishes the notion of ‘moderate’ rebels, who America and the West are supposedly helping to defeat Assad. In fact, these moderate rebels don’t exist. The Free Syrian Army was disbanded last year. They gave their weapons, which had been supplied by America, to the Al-Nusra Front, which is the name for the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. And the biggest force now fighting Assad is ISIS. But the mainstream media simply refers to them as ‘rebels’. It does not tell the American public that their government is supporting ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Swann also shows footage of the buses that were sent into eastern Aleppo by Assad to evacuate the civilians there. These were attacked and set on fire by the rebels. It was done deliberately to prevent the civilians from leaving, as the rebels hide behind them.
Dore makes the point that you will not hear any mention of the above on any of the mainstream channels, such as CNN, MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and so on, and jokes about Swan himself being assassinated.
Here’s the video, which contains strong language.
Although Dore is commenting from an American perspective, the same is very much true of British journalism on Syria, with some exceptions. The I did report the attacks on the buses sent into evacuate the civilians in eastern Aleppo. However, we have had various Tory MPs jumping up and down demanding that we send planes in to bomb Assad and support the non-existent ‘moderate’ terrorists, who are going to liberate Syria for Islamism. With the exception of the I, and possibly the Independent, I don’t recall anyone making the point that ISIS is now the largest opposition group, and that if we send troops into the country, we will joining forces with them.
The media are deliberately feeding the American and British peoples lies to promote a war that has absolutely nothing to do with spreading democracy.
I was sent this clip from RT’s Going Underground by one of the great commenters on this blog. In this piece, the anchor Arshid Rattansi talks to Max Blumenthal about highly politicised nature of the anti-Semitism allegations. Blumenthal argues that they are being made to defend Israel from criticism, particularly after the Gaza conflict, and shows that those accused also include religious Jews, and those of Jewish descent, whose anti-racist beliefs and pride in their heritage should not be questioned.
Max Blumenthal describes himself in the clip as ‘an anti-Zionist’ Jew. He’s the author, according to a pop-up text in the show, of Life and Loathing in the Greater Israel. He says he was struck by the strong similarity between the accusations of anti-Semitism, directed at Jeremy Corbyn and the plot of the book, A Very British Coup, by the former Labour MP, Chris Mullens. In Mullens’ book, a former steelworker, Harry Perkins, becomes the British Prime Minister, and embarks on a very left-wing, Marxist programme, nationalising industry and setting up anti-nuclear zones. Perkins is very popular, and to topple him from power, the British establishment, the press and the right-wing of the Labour party, aided by the security agencies, manufacture quotes smearing him as an anti-Semite.
Blumenthal states that this is what is being done to Jeremy Corbyn, including groups within the Labour party that are close to the Zionist lobby. These are the Blairites in the Progress party-within-the-party and Labour Friends of Israel. Corbyn himself has said nothing anti-Semitic and has attended a meeting of the Labour Friends of Israel. On the other hand, he has embraced much of the programme of the BDS campaign – Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, which seeks to persuade firms and consumers from dealing with firms or purchasing goods made in the occupied West Bank. He has also opened his office to anti-Zionist Jews, including Blumenthal himself. Blumenthal also makes the point that this started two years ago in 2014 when Ed Milliband, who was also Jewish, criticised the Israeli attack on Gaza. Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, who has joined in these allegations, was previously one of the spokesmen for Likud regime defending Israel’s actions during the attack. The definition of anti-Semitism used to justify these actions is highly partisan and politicised. It is not the definition used by some Jewish journalists and philosophers, which is that it is hatred of ‘Jews simply as Jews’, but hatred of the state of Israel. Regev even falsely accused Corbyn’s spokesman, Seaumas Milne in an interview, of saying that he wanted Israel’s destruction, before having to take that back 35 minutes later.
Some of those accused of anti-Semitism include Jews, and people of Jewish descent, whose character should be beyond reproach. In Britain, these include Jacqui Walker. Walker is a black woman of Jewish heritage, who is an anti-racist activist. She was suspended on these charges for a tweet she made saying that slavery was the Black equivalent of the Holocaust. Rattansi states that this isn’t anti-Semitic, just a very strong statement condemning slavery. In America, Bernie Sanders, also Jewish, has been attacked for being anti-Semitic for being critical about Israel. He was also forced to sack his ‘Jewish Outreach Officer’, Simone Zimmerman. Zimmerman is a very religious Jew, who is active in her community. But she also committed the heinous sin of objecting to Israel. Blumenthal states that Sanders and Corbyn have had some contact, but that criticism of Israel is far more muted in America, because AIPAC, the Zionist lobby in America is much more powerful than BICOM, its British equivalent. Blumenthal mentions an awkward moment during an interview Bernie Sanders gave to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Sanders’ raised the point that Comcast, the parent company, was owned by someone, who donated to AIPAC, and that one of its leading journalists, Wolf Blitzer, was also a leading journo and researcher for the lobbyists, and that therefore the show would not broadcast any material critical of Israel. Blumenthal makes the point, however, that there is a grassroots movement in the Democrats away from supporting Israel. This is largely from younger people, who are more secular, and because the country has become much more diverse.
The show has a caveat at the end, stating that they tried to get into contact with Comcast, who made the statement that they do not interfere in the editorial contents of their shows.
Here’s the interview:
CounterPunch have also published a series of articles about the anti-Semitism allegations, pointing out that these are all about the Zionist lobby trying to protect its own interests and Israel against what are perfectly legitimate criticisms. Blumenthal mentions that some of the allegations were made against people, who have criticised the Israeli premier, Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about this. I can remember going to a science talk given by a British scientist, who was a staunch supporter of multiculturalism and who had clearly worked in Israel. He had nothing but contempt for the man, whom he described as ‘That b*stard Netanyahu’. There was no condemnation of Israel qua Israel, and certainly no condemnation of the Jewish people. Just a fair comment about the brutal thug governing the country.
As for the extension of the definition of anti-Semitism from its accepted meaning ‘hatred of Jewish as Jews’ to ‘hatred of the state of Israel’, this also won’t wash. Those on the left, who object to Israel, do so because they see it as a White, colonialist settler state, like apartheid South Africa, or indeed the USA. They do not object to it, because its people are Jews.
Moreover, the accepted definition of anti-Semitism, as hatred of Jews simply because of their ethnicity, is that of the person, who first invented the term, Julius Marr. Marr was the founder and leader of one of 19th century Germany’s leading anti-Jewish groups, the League of Anti-Semites. Marr coined the term to describe hatred of Jews based on their racial heritage, rather than their religion. Again, his definition doesn’t have anything to do with the state of Israel. The only way an anti-Semitism allegation against someone based on their opposition to Israel would be correct by that definition, would be if their objection to it was purely or mainly because Israelis were Jewish. This doesn’t appear to be the case in most of these allegations, if any.
As for the suspension of Jacqui Walker for commenting that ‘Slavery was Black people’s Holocaust’, it’s extreme and highly emotive, but it’s one that has certainly been said before. I think it was first made by the highly respected civil rights pioneer, W.E.B. DuBois, after he became a citizen of Ghana after the War. He compared the treatment of Blacks under slavery to the atrocities against the Jews by the Third Reich. In 1994 Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade came under the spotlight once again with the TV adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade, and the exhibition of the same name at the City Museum. One particular point of controversy is the statue to Edward Colson on the city centre. Many Black Bristolians wish to see the statue removed. Colson was a wealth patron, who donated generously to charity for the people of Bristol. It was with money donated by him that Colston girls’ school was set up, which still continues today. He made his money from the slave trade, however, and that’s the reason why his statue is so controversial. Gregory presented a feature on Bristol’s legacy from the slave trade during which she interviewed Paul Stephenson, a Black civil rights activist in the city. Stephenson, obviously, had nothing but hatred and contempt for Colson, saying that he was responsible for ‘a holocaust in Africa’. As far as I know, no allegations were made of anti-Semitism against Stephenson for his remarks.
And their people’s experience of persecution and exile from their ancestral homeland through slavery and its aftermath has led some Black writers to identify with the Jewish people. Also back in the 1990s the Black British writer, Caryl Philips, that the historical experiences of Blacks and Jews in this fashion were so close, that sometimes he believed he was Jewish. This caused a little controversy, with Hilary Mantel, the Jewish author of Wolf Hall, writing in reply that Phillips shouldn’t be so daft, as the Jewish experience was unique to Jews. Phillips might be mistaken about the identity of Black and Jewish historical suffering, but he was not anti-Semitic. Far from it.
However, underlying these accusations is a renewed feeling of insecurity amongst Britain’s Jews. There have been reports that anti-Semitic attacks have gone up, especially after the Israeli attack on Gaza. A few years ago there were a couple of festivals celebrating the Jewish contribution to British culture. There was a festival of Jewish literature, which was a general festival of books by Jews. Non-Jews were welcome to come, and the writers speaking at this event included, I believe Howard Jacobson and Hilary Mantel. There was also a festival of Jewish comedy, which was featured on the One Show. It was also covered on Radio 4. The blurb for the radio programme about it stated that one of the reasons it was being staged was because Jews were facing competition as comedians from other ethnic groups. There has thus been some insecurity amongst British Jews about their place in Britain, partly caused by the growth of other ethnic groups in Britain’s changing diverse society. The allegations of anti-Semitism made by the Zionist lobby against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party reflect and draw on this insecurity. Of course, attacking Jews because of the actions of the Israelis is wrong, and should be condemned as anti-Semitic. But this does not make condemnation of Israel for its actions and treatment of the Palestinians anti-Semitic.
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