Reality check: Hasbara vs Facts I

 

 

Backed by the US, the Israeli Prime Minister has, once again, urged all "responsible nations" to back fresh sanctions against Iran during his visit to his British counterpart in London, which was met by large protests.

This fear mongering about Iran to distract from Israel's land theft in Palestine - Israeli parliament has just passed a bill formally "legalizing" theft of privately owned Palestinian land - is straight from the Netanyahu hasbara playbook.  

Can he still fool anyone? 

Yehuda Shaul: Netanyahu wants to repress my group, Breaking the Silence. May, don’t help him.
Philip Weiss: Israel's efforts to erase Palestinian history reflect 'incremental genocide.
"While the Knesset legalized the robbery of [Palestinian] land for eveerybody to see, the Prime Minister toured the world, complaining about the revelations of Breaking the Silence." Published in Haaretz, 10/02/17.

Harsh realities have long mocked United States “elites’” ritual description of their nation state as a benevolent beacon and agent of freedom, democracy, and justice at home and abroad. The mythology doesn’t square with stark disparities, such as, the following dark truths about the USA behind the nationally narcissistic fantasy and hasbara to promote itself beyond its borders:
Globally unmatched and hyper-racialized incarceration rates.
The top 0.1% of Americans own as much as the bottom 90%, biggest gap since the Great Depression
The loss of 93 American lives to gun violence each day.
Rampant domestic police-statism and ubiquitous related public and private surveillance.
Transparently plutocratic electoral and policymaking systems and outcomes the mark the country as “an oligarchy” and “not a democracy” regardless of which party or party configuration holds sway in elected offices.
The maintenance of more than 1000 U.S. military installations across more than 100 “sovereign” nations. Under Obama, the US has extended secret "special forces" operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world's population.
An empire (“defense”) budget that accounts for nearly half of world military spending and for 54 percent of U.S. federal discretionary spending.
A recently discovered and unprecedented decline even in the life expectancy for American working class whites.
A labor market in which 94 percent of jobs created over the last eight years have been temporary, part-time, and contingent, non-life time contract and “gig” jobs.
The reliance of 1 in 7 citizens on food banks in “the world’s richest country.”
The rampant pollution and poisoning of air, land, water, and food, contributing to sky-high cancer rates.

Still, symbols and marketing matter in selling the American System and U.S. power at home and abroad.  And the perceived character of the U.S. president is a big part of that marketing and public relations.

Therefore, nothing was better for portraying the United States as something it is not – a wise and benevolent, forward-looking agent and embodiment of freedom and democracy – than the replacement of George W. Bush by the neoliberal Wall Street darling Barack Obama in the White House in 2008-09.

It’s not that U.S. policy changed to any significant degree with the shift from George W. Bush to Obama. It did not. Obama wa just “a far more disciplined student than W. Bush, and a man capable of penning his own rhetorical flourishes.”
Following the public relations disaster of George W. Bush, Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls "leadership" throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee's decision was part of this: the kind of cloying reverse racism that beatified the man for no reason other than he was attractive to liberal sensibilities and, of course, American power, if not to the children he kills in impoverished, mostly Muslim countries.
This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. "When Obama walks into a room," gushed George Clooney, "you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere." Clooney said and did it. Indiscriminately, like too many others.

Now the American System is saddled with the public relations and marketing dilemma that is the openly white-supremacist, misogynist, eco-cidal, authoritarian, stupid, reckless and Tweeter-addicted. A “man out of his depth”.  A man who told the CIA, without false shame, that the Islamic State arose because the U.S. failed to “keep the oil” when it invaded Iraq and said that “maybe we’ll have another chance” to take Iraq’s oil.
Trump poses a threat to Brand the United States. 

Trump poses a threat to the longstanding bipartisan U.S. ruling class doctrine that the United States is the world’s great beacon and agent of democracy, human rights, justice, and freedom. 
American Reality has never really matched the doctrine, but it is especially difficult to credibly align those claims with a candidate and now a president like Trump, who has openly exhibited his even neo-fascist sentiments and values. 
If the US system of government under Obama as under George W. Bush and under Bill Clinton and their predecessors was an oligarchy with a façade of democratic and constitutional process, Trump is not only ripping that façade away for the entire world to behold; he is taking US system’s ugliest features and intensifying them.
Perhaps Obama's greatest "legacy", after all, is the co-option and disorientation of any real opposition.

And people - inside and outside - fear for the near future, the ascension of a new Hitler.
Speaking of which, a German, Ulrich von Volker, has his own theory about the resemblance between the two pranksters:  Is there reason to worry?
He is too american to be compared to foreign leaders.
Stop comparing Trump to foreign leaders. He's a distinctly American, by Adam H. Johnson, a media analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Furthermore, as long as, on the other side of the world, Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin keeps close watch on the White House.
Of course Trump wouldn't mind to push the red botton - he is a daredevil, after all. But I don't believe that the corporations would let him bring them down. Unless they plan to tear the world apart to rebuild it from scratch for a handful of survivors.
PS1. Angela Keaton :  "If your antiwar activism is dependent on who is in office, the problem is you."

Reminder of what it means to be a great human&artist

Donald Trump reportedly asked a foreign policy expert three times why the US can't use nuclear weapons during his presidential campaign.

While world leaders may have been right to criticise Trump's line of questioning amid global promises to reduce nuclear stockpiles, why are world nuclear powers expanding and updating their arsenals instead?

In last week Reality Check, Mehdi Hasan exposes the hypocrisy of the global nuclear elite.

Tinha me prometido não falar mais de Obama, mas é difícil, pois sua herança maligna o torna onipresente em todos os atos do atual presidente que todos abominam. Eu também o abomino, porém, minha lucidez continua. Tenho a obrigação jornalística de mostrar o perigo de medidas condenáveis tomadas por qualquer que seja o dirigente, já que, fatalmente, as consequências de tais medidas são drásticas no momento e se-lo-ão sempre.
Quem cala, consente. Certo? Parafraseando o dissidente soviético Yevtushenko: "Quando a verdade é substituída pelo silêncio, o silêncio mente." 
O culto à figura presidencial é inerente à infantilidade que reina nos EUA em todas as classes sociais. E todos os homens que ocuparam a Casa Branca se aproveitaram dessa debilidade geral. Sem contar o maniqueísmo, que é algo que poderia ter sido criado ou patenteado por um gringo predador de recursos naturais e pensamentos, se Maniqueu não tivesse nascido primeiro e a expressão derivar do nome dele. Daí o silêncio que reinou sobre os mal feitos do governo USA precedente. O silêncio da mídia conivente será julgado severamente caso Trump utilise as ferramentas totalitárias que Obama reforçou até dezembro do ano passado.

As John Pilger put it so well, one of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and  reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, who expanded USA's favourite military pastime, bombing, and death squads ("special operations") as no other president has done since the Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday - reported the NYTimes - he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the "terrorist target". A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama's drones killed 4,700 people. "Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that," he said, but we've taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda."
Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: "Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically... In the propaganda system... it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.
Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning "genocide" against his own people. This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story; and Nato - led by Obama and Hillary Clinton - launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten".
It was Obama who, in 2011, announced what became known as the "pivot to Asia", in which almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to "confront China", in the words of his Defence Secretary. There was no threat from China; the entire enterprise was unnecessary. It was an extreme provocation to keep the Pentagon and its demented brass happy.
In 2014, Obama's administration oversaw and paid for a fascist-led coup in Ukraine against the democratically-elected government, threatening Russia in the western borderland through which Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, with a loss of 27 million lives. 
It was Obama who placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and it was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any administration since the cold war - having promised, in an emotional speech in Prague, to "help rid the world of nuclear weapons".
The lies about Russia - in whose elections the US has openly intervened - have made the world's most self-important journalists laughing stocks. In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honourable exceptions.
The obsession with Trump is a cover for many of those calling themselves "left/liberal", as if to claim political decency. They are not "left", neither are they especially "liberal". Much of the USA's aggression towards the rest of humanity has come from so-called liberal Democratic administrations - such as Obama's.
While they "heal" and "move forward", will the anti-Trumpists reflect upon this?
More to the point, as I said before, a genuine movement of opposition against trumpism must arise. Nevertheless, it should not be hysterical. It should but eloquent and thorough.
 

Noam Chomsky on the decline of the American Empire (05/12/16)

PALESTINA

Nigel Wilson: Israeli settlement law 'violates rights and dignity'
Ma'an: Israeli forces deliver land confiscation notices 
in Ramallah-area
Ben White: Israeli torture of Palestinian children 'institutional'
Air strike on Gaza Strip tunnel kills two Palestinians
Gaza's starman aims to fight occupation with science
OCHA
PCHR:  Weekly report on Israeli Human Rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Terriotory  

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

B'Tselem

 Breaking the Silence

BRASIL

DIRETAS, JÁ!

Caros Amigos 

Carta Capital 

 Piauí

Intercept Brasil bota os pingos nos is: Confira aqui uma lista das falas de Moro e o contexto por trás das bordoadas.
“Não estou fazendo política com a Lava Jato”
Moro é criticado no meio jurídico pela forma como conduz a operação, entidades como a OAB-RJ já se posicionaram contra a “divulgação seletiva” de informações da Lava Jato.
O ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal Gilmar Mendes já expressou seu desacordo com a postura do juiz. “E as investigações do vazamento daquelas prisões preventivas, onde estão?”, provocou o ministro.
“Muitas vezes as pessoas acham que é vazamento, mas não é, é uma decisão nossa de tornar a informação pública.”
Essa foi a resposta de Moro quando confrontado sobre supostos vazamentos de informação que teriam partido de seu gabinete. O caso mais emblemático foi a publicação da conversa telefônica entre o ex-presidente Luiz Inácio Lula e a então Dilma Rousseff. Moro retirou o sigilo do processo e o grampo se tornou público. É por isso que ele não considera um “vazamento”.
No entanto, em março de 2016 ele precisou pedir desculpas ao STF pela atitude neste caso. Em junho do mesmo ano, o ministro Teori Zavascki anulou o grampo publicado pelo juiz.

Ministro Gilmar Mendes e Sérgio Moro no Senado, em dezembro de 2016.

“Eu estava em um evento público, ele estava sentado do meu lado. O que posso fazer? Nós conversamos. E ele não está sob minha jurisdição, o Supremo é que está com o caso dele. E você pode ter certeza que nós não falamos sobre o caso.”

A fala é em relação à foto do juiz conversando de forma descontraída com o ex-governador de Minas Gerais e ex-candidato à Presidência Aécio Neves (PSDB). Os dois estavam em uma cerimônia de premiação organizada no fim do ano pela revista Istoé.
Aécio é citado em delações da Odebrecht e da OAS, que estão sob a alçada de Moro. A descontração entre juiz e investigado foi duramente criticada em redes sociais.

Sérgio Moro ao lado de Aecio Neves (PSDB) e Michel Temer (PMDB) durante entrega do prêmio Brasileiro do Ano, da revista Istoé.

“Eu não me sinto nem um pouco culpado pelo impeachment. Eu não tenho nada a ver com isso. Só estava fazendo meu trabalho sobre um caso específico.”

Apesar de dizer não ter nada a ver com o impeachment, é impossível dissociar a imagem de Moro ao processo de afastamento de Dilma, principalmente porque muitos manifestantes usavam máscaras com o rosto do juiz e até mesmo um boneco inflável do “Super Moro” participou dos atos. Na época, Moro se disse “tocado” pelas “homenagens” feitas nas manifestações pró-impeachment.
“Você não pode acreditar nas teorias da conspiração que surgem sobre a Lava Jato, algumas delas soam loucas.”
Foi o que disse quando questionado sobre as acusações de que sua atuação na liderança da operação seria influenciada por empresas norte-americanas interessadas no pré-sal. A acusação partiu da filósofa Marilena Chauí em um vídeo publicado no YouTube.
No dia 24 de janeiro, o ex-presidente Lula deu uma palestra em São Paulo onde reafirmou as acusações de Chauí: “Cada vez mais tenho convicção de que tem dedo estrangeiro nesse negócio da Lava-Jato. Tem interesses, sobretudo no pré-sal, de que esse país não seja protagonista”.