Back from the holidays in Brasil and after seeing the neofascist Jair Bolsonaro rise to power in Brasília, I cannot avoid the subject of how he got to be elected, to my shame and sorrow.
The definition of Fake News is unclear and can change depending on whom you ask. It is used in increasingly politicised ways across much of the world.
And, although its leap to prominence is largely due to 140-character Twitter posts coming out of the White House and now from the Planalto ('Brazilian government), it now has widespread implications for journalism, politics, and how people everywhere share information online.
But what exactly is "fake news" and what effect is it having globally?
There may be a fundamental problem that fake news became a catch-all term to mean anything that we don't particularly like to read. But the term "fake news" was originally used to refer to stories that were entirely fabricated, largely for the purposes of tricking Facebook's algorithm to reach a larger online audience and generate more advertising revenues.
But fake news gradually shifted to describe any kind of myth or disinformation, and it has been co-opted by Donald Trump's and Jair Bolsonaro's supporters.
Let's talk about American President, as the Brazilian is just beginning to protagonize my country's descent into hell.
The Trump administration has used the term "fake news" to describe media reports it doesn't like, or articles that question the veracity of the president's statements, or that portray him unfavourably.
Trump himself has levied the label at CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, and other mainstream, US media outlets, and often in the form of an all-caps zinger at the end of his infamous Twitter posts.
Much of the debate over fake news revolves around being in a post-truth environment where anything goes, and [where] alternative media and politicians, such as Trump and Bolsonaro, are wilfully engaging in misleading, deceitful and deceptive political communication".
But while it has been packaged in a new and highly politicised way - especially following the US election and concerns in Europe over Brexit - the manipulation of information by politicians and other actors has been around for some time.
This phenomenon is also not confined to the United States and Brasil alone, it is a global phenomenon
Specialists say that about half of the most widely shared stories on Facebook on the eve of a referendum in Italy in 2017 were false, and that fake news has been particularly harmful in the Philippines, where it is poisoning online information like in Brasil.
Last year The Manila Times columnist Yen Makabenta accused Philippines President Rodrigo Dutertre and his predecessor, Benigno Aquino, of bringing the country into "the age of post-truth politics": "The two presidential luminaries have midwived this development with a cascade of fake news, fake facts and alternative truths that, perhaps not surprisingly, has earned the Philippines the distinction of being the country where people have the least trust in each other".
The same could be said for Brasil and the USA.
In the Philippines, the problem has become so pronounced that the University of the Philippines launched a web-based, educational television network earlier this year with the expressed purpose of fighting disinformation. We should do the same in Brasil and in the United States.
Specialists say that the audiences in sub-Saharan Africa region have also become accustomed to distortion in the media. Rumours that circulated in the press about the death of Zimbabwe's long-standing president, Robert Mugabe is one of many examples.
The Zionist lobby uses fake news all the time with the name of hasbara. Even in the world of football. The last to taste its poison was Mohammed Salah. The Egyptian player was accused of threatening to quit Liverpool if the club hired the "Israeli player Moanes Dabour", the best scorer on the Austrian league. The problem was, is, that all the newspapers in the world published the fake news without even checking who Dabour was, how Salah really felt about him and the most important of all, who had spread the "news". As it happens, the "rumour" seems to have come from Israeli conservative newspaper The Jerusalem Post. And it targeted Salah because he doesn't hide his feelings about Israeli genocidal occupation of the West Bank and of the Gaza blockade. Nobody cared to check who Moanes Dabour was. The player is an Israeli-Palestinian. Dabour comes from a Palestinian family that survived the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and composes the population of 20% of Christians and Muslins arabs of Israel. Therefore, there is no reason for Salah or whoever is against Israeli crimes to boycot him. However, the fake news became "news" in the international mainstream media anyway.
The Zionist lobby uses fake news all the time with the name of hasbara. Even in the world of football. The last to taste its poison was Mohammed Salah. The Egyptian player was accused of threatening to quit Liverpool if the club hired the "Israeli player Moanes Dabour", the best scorer on the Austrian league. The problem was, is, that all the newspapers in the world published the fake news without even checking who Dabour was, how Salah really felt about him and the most important of all, who had spread the "news". As it happens, the "rumour" seems to have come from Israeli conservative newspaper The Jerusalem Post. And it targeted Salah because he doesn't hide his feelings about Israeli genocidal occupation of the West Bank and of the Gaza blockade. Nobody cared to check who Moanes Dabour was. The player is an Israeli-Palestinian. Dabour comes from a Palestinian family that survived the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and composes the population of 20% of Christians and Muslins arabs of Israel. Therefore, there is no reason for Salah or whoever is against Israeli crimes to boycot him. However, the fake news became "news" in the international mainstream media anyway.
I think that journalists need to understand the era that we are living in and check an information at least twice before serving it to the public, in order to be sure. News consumers in countries with free public spheres generally tend to be more concerned about fake news and media credibility, and will actively seek out the Truth. Inversely, in states with less freedom, fighting fake news may be less of a priority, but it must be a priority in the USA and in Brasil, with those dangerous irresponsible men in power.
However, the danger doesn't only come from them. Fears that fake news is having an effect on political outcomes in European countries, especially those holding elections this year has prompted calls to action from European officials.
Andrus Ansip, vice president of the European Commission, recently warned Facebook and other social media sites to take stronger action against the spread of fake news on their platforms.
The European Union also announced it would devote more money and resources to its East Stratcom Task Force, which works to combat fake news allegedly coming from Russia.
The culture, media, and sport committee in the UK parliament has launched an inquiry into the effect of fake news on democracy, while the German justice minister has proposed fining social media websites if they do not remove fake news content or hate speech from their platforms.
But there is a line not to cross. Countries must seek to balance freedom of expression and Freedom of the press with combating hate speech and fake news. Any effort to regulate social media should not go too far, either, since it can lead to censorship, she said.
How can we fight such propaganda, such fake news? Investing in journalism. Investing in media pluralism. Investing in media literacy.
The effect of fake news is compounded by how quickly it spreads on social media, and by long-standing problems plaguing media organisations around the world, including budget and job cuts, a failing business model, and the public's growing distrust of the press.
According to surveys in America and Europe, trust in media declined overall across all countries.
Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute said that to fight the fake news phenomenon, journalists should promote greater transparency in their work, and develop a robust corrections policy when mistakes do occur. That may include "making [corrections] more detailed, explaining why the error was made, who made it within the newsroom, and how exactly the existing procedures failed."
Actually, the focus on fake news could potentially serve as a catalyst to reinvigorate the field of journalism. If we want journalism to continue, we must invest in quality journalism, we must invest in investigative journalism, but also we have to find new models for media to continue because the old traditional models are over.
Journalists should be using the fake news crisis to think of ways to strengthen the autonomy of the press, and make sure they are fulfilling their duty as a check on power.
Recent history has shown that when journalists fail to do that, the dissemination of false information can have harmful and even deadly consequences, he said.
Recent history has shown that when journalists fail to do that, the dissemination of false information can have harmful and even deadly consequences, he said.
That includes mainstream media outlets that reported a non-existent link between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of that country as fact, or people and organisations downplaying the effect of climate change, or Salah's threat to leave Liverpool.
If you have situations where you have propaganda and manipulation and deception, and if you have a media which is not very good at correcting that or preventing politicians and lobbyists from engaging in that, this ultimately becomes corrosive on the public sphere. Democracy was something that had to be struggled for, fought for over a long period of time … and I think it can be lost easily and it can certainly be lost in these situations that I've mentioned above.
Populist, right-wing politicians are on the rise across the globe - not unlike the recently inaugurated president of Brasil and the president of the United States - and one of the central tenets of their message is shooting the mainstream messenger: Accusing the news media of being purveyors of fake news and making them the story. It happened in November 2018 in Germany, when leaders of far-right, Eurosceptic parties from France, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands attended a conference and thrust the media straight into the spotlight.
This "Western Media" has historically posited itself initially as the opposite of the news as used to be broadcast in the Soviet Bloc, or China, or "Third World" in general, which was branded as "state-controlled," "propaganda," and therefore false, and thereby posited itself as "independent", "objective", "fair" and "truthful."
This "Western Media" has historically posited itself initially as the opposite of the news as used to be broadcast in the Soviet Bloc, or China, or "Third World" in general, which was branded as "state-controlled," "propaganda," and therefore false, and thereby posited itself as "independent", "objective", "fair" and "truthful."
That political branding has now reached the point of normative self-designation of truth. It was, perhaps paradoxically - perhaps not, a rank charlatan like Donald Trump, now the president of the United States, who first put this "Western Media" on the defensive by out-branding them with his own "alternative facts". His lies and charlatanism are one brand of news as opposed to "Western Media."
This very "Western Media" is now in a state of self-defensive shock. It thinks itself under the threat of manipulative disinformation, as best evidenced in the Cambridge Analyticas scandal where we learned private companies "mine data" from social media in order to manipulate critical masses of voters in national elections as it happened in the United States and in Brazil. This "Western Media" has found a match for itself, a brand new competitor that is outperforming them in their old-fashioned practices and branding.
Let's take the example of the two mainstream western international news broadcasts - CNN on America and the BBC in Europe and elsewhere - treatment of Israeli crimes in Palestine.
At the end of November 2018, the US mainstream media demonstrated once again that it has a Palestine problem. CNN suspended the contract of commentator and Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill, after he gave a speech at the United Nations in which he criticised the Israeli occupation and the abuse of Palestinian rights.
Let's take the example of the two mainstream western international news broadcasts - CNN on America and the BBC in Europe and elsewhere - treatment of Israeli crimes in Palestine.
The Listening Post; Israel-Päelstine, the conflict and the coverage (25', 2015)
At the end of November 2018, the US mainstream media demonstrated once again that it has a Palestine problem. CNN suspended the contract of commentator and Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill, after he gave a speech at the United Nations in which he criticised the Israeli occupation and the abuse of Palestinian rights.
Hill based his speech very much on facts. He cited Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinians; the use of arbitrary violence by the Israeli security apparatus; the use of torture against Palestinian detainees; the denial of due process to Palestinians by Israeli courts; the restriction on movement in the occupied territories, etc - all violations that have been well-documented and condemned by the UN and a myriad of human rights organisations.
Yet CNN, which last year adopted a new slogan - "Facts first" - did not seem to agree with these facts. After pro-Israel organisations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned the speech, the TV station was quick to sever its ties with Hill.
While CNN did not announce why it chose to do so, it is clear to many of us it caved in to pressure from pro-Israel groups. Hill was accused of being anti-Semitic for using the phrase "free Palestine from the river to the sea", which supposedly is a "Hamas slogan" and a call for the destruction of Israel. Well, it is neither.
Throwing accusations of anti-Semitism at people criticising Israel and supporting the Palestinian right to self-determination is a convenient tool of the Zionist lobby. But calling for the freedom of Palestinians and for the recognition of their rights is not anti-Semitic; it is pro-Palestinian.
Conflating anti-Semitism with pro-Palestinian positions and criticism of Israel is not only ill-intentioned but also dangerous, as it does a disservice to Jews who have really faced hate speech and hate attacks.
In Palestine, the Israeli authorities have brought this tactic to the extreme and have already passed a number of laws curbing freedom of speech. This means that those of us who dare criticise Israeli policy or call for resistance to Israeli occupation, even if in the form of a poem, face the risk of imprisonment.
In the USA, those who do so clearly face the risk of being fired, as in the case of Professor Hill and as in the case of many others before him - and probably many others after. The way CNN (mis)handled this situation offers us an opportunity to discuss how media organisations succumbing to Israel's campaign of silencing critics is particularly problematic.
For a long time, mainstream media organisations in the West, like the CNN, have been hiding behind the veneer of objectivity when it comes to issues such as the Palestinian struggle.
These outlets claim to be covering these issues objectively - applying certain procedures and high standards of verification that supposedly guarantee full and balanced reporting. With that grand declaration of objectivity, they then claim to present the true picture of what is going on. But they often Don't.
The language employed by many mainstream media networks in the West when reporting on Palestine is often imprecise and misrepresents certain objective realities. CNN and its peers often talk of a "conflict" between Palestinians and Israelis, skipping the fact that the latter are - legally and objectively speaking - occupiers. They talk of "contested lands" - as if there is no illegal settler-colonialism going on in Palestine, pushing Palestinians out of their land. They would often call the Israeli army's violence against peaceful protesters "clashes" (as if the two sides are equal) and conveniently use the passive voice in titles reporting killings of Palestinians (as if Israeli soldiers were not the ones who shoot Palestinians dead).
Claiming objectivity but then, clearly using obfuscating language and intentionally skipping certain facts is not only damaging to the media profession but also spreads disinformation. The firing of Professor Hill has exposed once again this disingenuity, the apparent political bias, and perhaps even the fear of the Israeli lobby within Western mainstream media.
It also shows that even media institutions that claim to be fighting for freedom of speech, to be delivering "facts first", to be "speaking truth to power" can also partake in the silencing of critical voices. What is particularly disconcerting, in this case, is that CNN is not only succumbing to political pressure and Israel's speech policing policies but also perpetuating them - even if indirectly
CNN is clearly not ready to take on the "controversial" topic of the Palestinian question and pursue "facts first". Instead, it has chosen to stay on the political "safe side": report only on certain events with bias, obscuring the real dynamic of relations between oppressor and oppressed and using a certain preset discourse.
Unfortunately, this "safe side" logic has also been adopted not only by media outlets but also by Western institutions - both academic and political ones - and even by governments. Just recall all those fake condemnations by political leaders in the West during Gaza's Great March of Return, when in one day Israeli snipers shot dead more than 50 unarmed, peaceful Palestinian protesters and wounded hundreds of others, with local hospitals unable to cope. They all called on Israel to exercise "restraint" and threw in there for "balance" and "objectivity" a reference to Hamas, which killed no Israelis that day - or any other day of the march for that matter.
Those who do not stand on the "safe side" of things - people like Marc Lamont Hill - have been taking clear positions on Palestine, based on facts and critical thinking. They - like others throughout history who stood up for oppressed peoples' rights - are vilified and viciously attacked, but they will persevere and continue to speak truth to power, objectively and factually.
Meanwhile, Western institutions (academic, media and others) will eventually have to engage in self-scrutiny because they are not only regularly succumbing to political pressures and adopting misrepresentations, but are also complicit in reproducing Israel's policing and silencing strategies.
The Listening Post: Censored and Surveilled, the digital occupation of Palestine
Last year the BBC aired an informed and informative weeklong series on disinformation and fake news, "a global problem," as they rightly put it, "challenging the way we share information and perceive the world around us."
What's real? What's distortion? The series teaches us. I watched as many of the episodes in this series as I could, and the rest I followed on the BBC website. In one episode we learn how "Nigerian police say false information and incendiary images on Facebook have contributed to more than a dozen recent killings in Plateau State - an area already torn by ethnic violence."In another episode, we learn how in Egypt fake news becomes a weapon of choice to crush dissent. In yet another piece we learn how "smartphones are making it easier for millions of Indians to communicate and share messages on social media. But misinformation is spreading fast and can often turn deadly."
The series then moved to tell us how "a BBC investigation has found that Russian media and officials presented false claims about a US-funded laboratory in neighbouring Georgia." In another episode, we were told about how "fake news in Turkey is rampant, and targets many, including the BBC. But some are fighting back."
There was something strange about this series. It is all about non-British, and non-European countries - about India, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Turkey and Thailand, which is of course perfectly fine for, no doubt, fake news is a global issue that includes these countries.
But targeting these non-European countries as the site of fake news par excellence implicitly puts European media and the BBC in particular as the arbiter of truth manifest. Fake news is something that backward black and brown people do, while real news is what the BBC and the rest of white people tell us.
This deliberate exoticism and exorcism of the fake news as something that happens among the dark people and not among the British sounds strange. To a thorough international journalist and an Iranian pair of ears old enough to know the US-UK military coup against Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, and the function of official propaganda of their news media in that treacherous act, it could sound even stranger and they have the right to think that the mainstream official media, the BBC in this particular case, could use a bit of historical memory to learn some humility.
Long before "fake news" had a name, the BBC was a master of fake news, in fact fake news of the most dangerous, the most vicious consequences, casting nations, not just individuals, into direct calamities.
Let's leave Palestine aside for a while and focus on the harmul role of the BBC as the propaganda machine of British imperialism around the globe as a whole and how it facilitated the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953 in Iran, in particular, by doing precisely what it now goes around finding darker nations doing - indulgind in fake news and propaganda.
The role of BBC in the overthrow of Mosaddeq was not out of character or unusual. In a piece titled Why the taboo tale of the BBC's wartime propaganda battle must be told published by The Guardian, David Boyle writes about characters like Noel Francis Newsome (1906-1976), who "as director of European broadcasts ... led what is still the biggest broadcasting operation ever mounted, in 25 different languages for a total of just over 25 hours a day, across three wavelengths."
Such pieces of truth are sources of embarrassments for the BBC today, for "it was he who set out the strategy to use news as a weapon on war - it had to be not just true but also recognizably British. It was Newsome and Ritchie (his deputy Douglas Ritchie) who really created the myth of the BBC, by using news as a weapon - not quite what the myth suggests - with all the resources of culture and music and humor."
As a matter of fact, Hitler's propaganda chief Goebbels warned in 1944: "There is one way in which the British, despite the narrowness of their political thinking, are ahead of us - they know that news can be a weapon and are experts in its strategy."
This is not any brown or black person talking - these are white Germans talking about white British leading the BBC.
What the British and the BBC did in Iran against Mossadeq was perfectly in tune with their larger wartime and post-war propaganda machinery. Here the role of BBC in vilifying and demonising the character of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq is not even the issue. At issue is a more direct role that BBC Persian has played in that fateful event.
After years of speculative suspicion dismissed as conspiracy theories, BBC Radio 4 finally admitted, in a programme called Document, and subtitled A very British coup, the fact of this treacherous act of the BBC. "Documents reveal," BBC now admitted, "the true extent of Britain's involvement in the coup of 1953 which toppled Iran's democratically elected government and replaced it with the tyranny of the Shah.
The programme then explicitly explains: "Iran had just nationalised the very oil fields that had powered Britain through two world wars. Downing Street wanted them back. London paid Iranian agents to sow seeds of dissent in Tehran. Then, to win American support for a coup, the men from the Ministry fanned fears of a Russian invasion." Then comes the punch line: "Even the BBC was used to spearhead Britain's propaganda campaign. In fact, Auntie agreed to broadcast the very code word that was to spark revolution." By "revolution" of course they mean the coup.
The New York Times also reports: "The British, too, sought to sway the shah and assure him their agents spoke for London. A British agent, Asadollah Rashidian, approached him in late July and invited him to select a phrase that would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC's Persian-language program - as proof that Mr Rashidian spoke for the British."
The same fact is reported by The Guardian: "Another man, Asadollah Rashidian, allegedly approached the shah and invited him to select a phrase that would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC's Persian language service as proof that Rashidian spoke for British intelligence."
The issue of the BBC role in Iranian and other countries' politics has become so prevalent that scholars have conducted thorough research on the veracity of the matter and published meticulously documented books on the subject.
In an edited volume by Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb, Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan contact zones at the BBC World Service 1932-2012, we learn how "when it came to reporting adversely on Mossadeq, for two weeks all Iranian broadcasters disappeared. The BBC had no choice but to bring in English people who spoke Persian because the Iranians had gone on strike." In their introduction, the editors cite Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970), whom they identify as "journalist, spy, and British diplomat," as having said: "for the cost of a small cruiser you could recruit the services of a battle fleet" as justification for the British government funding of the BBC.
Two other scholars, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh have published an even more detailed study, Persian Service: The BBC and British Interests in Iran (2014) in which they examine "the perception" that BBC has been not just a neutral chronicler but in fact an active agent in the politics of Iran and its region at large. They concentrate on BBC Persian Service, trying to craft a neutral ground on which to interrogate both the objectivity of BBC and its perception as a soft power tool in the arsenal of British colonial and postcolonial interests.
The result is a non-committal prose that itself is implicated in equivocating between fact and fake news. In their own words they are trying to find a balance in the "inelegant dance between financial control versus editorial independence" of BBC coverage of four major episodes in recent Iranian history: the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the CIA-MI6 coup against Mossadegh in 1951-1953, the 1979 revolution, and the Green Movement of 2009.
Between fact and fake we think and live. After all, George Orwell learned much about Newspeak and Doublespeak while working for the BBC Indian Department. Some suspect his Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four was modeled on the BBC building in Portland Place, London. Imagine that: the BBC that was the model of Orwell's Ministry of Truth now preaches the world about "fake news!"
After the overthrow of Mosaddeq, the BBC continued to echo the official line that there had been no military coup but a spontaneous revolt against a "dictatorial regime." And throughout the crisis, the Foreign Office and the British ambassador explicitly forbade the BBC to send to Tehran any reporters sympathetic to Iran.
One must remember these historical facts as an act of corrective lenses.
Today the BBC should be neither demonised nor valorised, for it is neither as demonic as its conspiratorial detractors contend nor as angelic as the BBC self-promotional advertisements sing and dance. It is just one click away from the next fusion of fact and fantasy.
My dear reader, you may roam the globe from one news media to another, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to Europe and North America, with each professional news media giving you a fragment of truth and a lot of fake news. Watch and read them all, trust none completely, nor do privilege anyone of them with your particular dis/trust. Dis/trust them all equally.
Apart from the Iran case, it is known that the BBC spreads fake news just as the CNN and the New York Times do many times. From the uncritical parroting of the British government’s Iraqi weapons of mass destruction claims to the unchallenged lies spouted by war-mongering politicians, that Libya’s dictator (who was armed and trained by Britain, incidentally) was going to commit a “bloody massacre” in Libya’s Benghazi region. (A postwar British government report confirmed that the “ethnic cleansing” claim was based on what they cautiously called poor intelligence. The cruel irony is that after the BBC helped whip up support for the invasion, it reported on a real ethnic cleansing of black Libyans committed by the Islamist terrorists organized by the US and Britain to topple Gaddafi.)
The BBC also bullies oponents with false information. During an interview with the antiwar leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, BBC presenter Andrew Neil claimed that ISIS existed in Iraq beforethe 2003 invasion by the US and Britain. Corbyn stated, in gentle terms, that US-British foreign policy had smashed up Iraq and Libya. This, said experts cited by Corbyn, had created a political vacuum filled by ISIS, an organization that would not have existed. Neil replied: “I’m struggling to find the role of foreign policy. See, Islamic State was founded well before the invasion of Iraq.”
It is a clear example of fake news, perhaps caused by laziness and ignorance. Maybe whoever handed Neil the copy had taken the absurd claim from the Wikipedia entry for the Islamic State of Iraq. When one Googles the name of the organization (in the UK), the Knowledge Panel states that it was founded in 1999. The entry for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) makes the tenuous link between ISIS, “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Iraq-based Jordanian who allegedly founded in 1999 al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (later known as Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn). Wikipedia’s chronology goes something like this: Zarqawi’s group pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in Iraq which in turn splintered into ISIS (or ISIL).
There are many problems with this narrative. Firstly, US intelligence admitted in statements and documents obtained by the Washington Post’s Thomas E. Ricks, that Zarqawi’s profile had been artificially inflated by the US so that the violence wrought by the 2003 invasion could be blamed on him. Secondly, there was no “al-Qaeda.” Britain’s former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, wrote shortly before his death that al-Qaeda meant “the computer file” or “database” of terrorists armed and trained by the US (and Britain) to fight the Soviets in the ‘80s. In his book Al-Qaeda, expert Jason Burke agrees that Bin Laden’s network never called itself “al-Qaeda.” Thirdly, the Bin Laden network denied the authenticity of the letter in which Zarqawi allegedly pledged allegiance to them (as the BBC itself reported). In addition, a US intelligence document says that by late-2004, Zarqawi’s group was “referred to as al-Qaida in Iraq”: note “referred to,” not actuallyal-Qaeda in Iraq (in keeping with Ricks’s discovery about exaggerating Zarqawi’s influence).
Zarqawi’s alleged group (“al-Qaeda in Iraq”) did not splinter into ISIS until 2007, according the US Army—long after the US-British invasion. So, there was no Daesh-Islamic State in Iraq prior to 2003. The interview with Corbyn was conducted at the end of May 2017, just before the UK general election. Neil’s producers and editors presumably wanted to make Corbyn’s antiwar position—the violence abroad provokes violence at home—seem untenable and thus make him even more off-putting to voters than the media already do.
Neil’s second prong in the anti-Corbyn assault was his effort to undermine Corbyn’s claim that suicide bombers attack Western interests because we attack the Muslim-majority Middle East. Neil went on to quote what he claimed was ISIS: “Some might argue that your foreign policies are what drive our hatred. But this particularly reason for hating you is secondary. Even if you were to stop bombing us, we would continue to hate you. Our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”
The only problem with this is that it is fake news quoted from Issue 15 of Daesh’s magazine Dabiq. But ISIS warned its followers that Issue 15 was a fake, not authorized by them (as we shall see). The forgery was likely the result of US Cyber Command or related psychological operations (PSYOPS). In April 2016, the New York Times reported that the US Cyber Command was disrupting ISIS and ISIL operations: “The goal of the new campaign is to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State to spread its message, attract new adherents, circulate orders from commanders and carry out day-to-day functions, like paying its fighters.”
Two months after the Pentagon announced its cyberwar, ISIS issued a statement confirming that Issue 15 of Dabiq is a forgery and was not authored by them: “Brothers and sisters, We noticed that dubious attempts were made to spread a fake Dabiq magazine issue (claimed to be ‘Issue 15’, with two varying covers) … We would like to clarify that Al-Hayat Media Center has not yet released any new Dabiq issues. We advise you not to download this fake magazine for your own safety.”
Corbyn knew nothing of this and was put on the spot by Neil. It was unfair of Neil to quote a forgery at Corbyn and then repeatedly state “it’s not foreign policy!” (i.e., to blame for suicide bomber attacks).
One could expect this kind of agenda and/or sloppiness from Fox News, Globo, Record and CNN anchors, but not from the respectable BBC or certain “progressive” alternative media. But, unfortunately, it happens more than it should in the UK, in the USA, all over the world, thanks for journalists not checking their sources properly.
However, despite all the flaws of professional media, between the BBC and Facebook, choose BBC's information and confirm the facts with Al Jazeera, of course.
Or watch Channel 4, if you live in the UK, and the Real News, if you live there or abroad.
The British scientist who created the WEB, Tim Berners, is concerned over fake news
Italy's fake news battle (8', 2017)
Press TV: Iran vs Britain; a History of Distrust (49')
PALESTINA
Scars of Freedom (23')
The November 12 botched Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip delineated Tel Aviv’s failure to utilize its army as a tool to achieve Palestinian political concessions.
Now that the Palestinian popular resistance has gone global through the exponential rise and growing success of the Boycott Movement, the Israeli government is fighting two desperate wars.
Following the Gaza attack, Palestinians responded by showering the Israeli southern border with rockets and carried out a precise operation targeting an Israeli army bus.
As Palestinians marched in celebration of pushing the Israeli army out of their besieged region, the fragile political order in Israel, long-managed by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was quickly unraveling.
Israeli leaders are in a precarious situation. Untamed violence comes at a price of international condemnation and a Palestinian response that is bolder and more strategic each time.
However, failing to teach Gaza its proverbial ‘lesson’ is viewed as an act of surrender by opportunistic Israeli politicians.
While Israel is experiencing such limitations on the traditional battlefield, which it once completely dominated, its war against the global Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) is surely a lost battle.
Israel has a poor track record in confronting civil society-based mobilization. Despite the vulnerability of Palestinians living under Israeli Occupation, it took the Israeli government and military seven long years to pacify the popular Intifada, the uprising of 1987. Even then, the jury is still out on what truly ended the popular revolt.
It should be accepted that a global Intifada is much more difficult to suppress, or even contain.
Yet, when Israel began sensing the growing danger of BDS – which was officially launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005 – it responded with the same superfluous and predictable pattern: arrests, violence and a torrent of laws that criminalize dissent at home, while unleashing an international campaign of intimidation and smearing of boycott activists and organizations.
That achieved little, aside from garnering BDS more attention and international solidarity.
The war on the Movement took a serious turn last year when Netanyahu’s government dedicated a largesse of about $72 million to defeat the civil society-led Campaign.
Utilizing the ever-willing US government to boost its anti-BDS tactics, Tel Aviv feels assured that its counter-BDS efforts in the US is off to a promising start. However, it is only recently that Israel has begun to formulate the wider European component of its global strategy.
In a two-day conference in Brussels last year, Israeli officials and their European supporters unleashed their broader European anti-BDS Campaign. Organized by the European Jewish Association (EJA) and the Europe Israel Public Affairs group (EIPA), the November 6-7 conference was fully supported by the Israeli government, featuring right-wing Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, Ze’ev Elkin.
Under the usual pretext of addressing the danger of anti-Semitism in Europe, attendees deliberately conflated racism and any criticism of Israel, of its military Occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.
The EJA Annual Conference has raised Israel’s manipulation of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ to a whole new level, as it drafted a text that will purportedly be presented to prospective members of the European Parliament (MEPs), demanding their signature before running in next May’s élections.
Those who decline to sign – or worse, repudiate the Israeli initiative – are likely to find themselves fending off accusations of racism and anti-Semitism.
This was certainly not the first conference of its kind.
The anti-BDS euphoria that has swept Israel in recent years, yielded several crowded and passionate conferences in luxurious hotels, where Israeli officials openly threatened BDS activists, such as Omar Barghouti. Barghouti was warned by a top Israeli official in a 2016 conference in Jerusalem of “civil assassination” for his role in the organization of the Movement.
In March 2017, the Israeli Knesset passed the Anti-BDS Travel Ban, which requires the Interior Minister to deny entry to the country to any foreign national who “knowingly issued a public call to boycott the state of Israel.”
Since the ban went into effect, many BDS supporters have been detained, deported and barred from entering the country.
While Israel has demonstrated its ability to galvanize self-serving US and other European politicians to support its cause, there is no evidence that the BDS Movement is being quelled or is, in any way, weakening.
On the contrary, the Israeli strategy has raised the ire of many activists, civil society and civil rights groups, angered by Israel’s attempt at subverting freedom of speech in western countries.
Only recently, Leeds University in the UK has joined many other campuses around the world in divesting from Israel.
The tide is, indeed, turning.
Decades of Zionist indoctrination also failed, not only in reversing the vastly changing public opinion on the Palestinian struggle for freedom and rights, but even in preserving the once solid pro-Israel sentiment among young Jews, most notably in the US.
For BDS supporters, however, every Israeli strategy presents an opportunity to raise awareness of Palestinian rights and to mobilize civil society around the world against Israeli occupation and racism.
BDS’ success is attributed to the very reason why Israel is failing to counter its efforts: it is a disciplined model of a popular, civil resistance that is based on engagement, open debate and democratic choices, while grounded in international and humanitarian law.
Israel’s ‘war-chest’ will run dry in the end, for no amount of money could have saved the racist, Apartheid regime in South Africa when it came tumbling down decades ago.
Needless to say, $72 million will not turn the tide in favor of Apartheid Israel, nor will it change the course of history that can only belong to the people who are unrelenting on achieving their long-coveted freedom.
We all can do our part boycotting Israeli products and cultural & artistic & sport events.
Now that the Palestinian popular resistance has gone global through the exponential rise and growing success of the Boycott Movement, the Israeli government is fighting two desperate wars.
Following the Gaza attack, Palestinians responded by showering the Israeli southern border with rockets and carried out a precise operation targeting an Israeli army bus.
As Palestinians marched in celebration of pushing the Israeli army out of their besieged region, the fragile political order in Israel, long-managed by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was quickly unraveling.
Israeli leaders are in a precarious situation. Untamed violence comes at a price of international condemnation and a Palestinian response that is bolder and more strategic each time.
However, failing to teach Gaza its proverbial ‘lesson’ is viewed as an act of surrender by opportunistic Israeli politicians.
While Israel is experiencing such limitations on the traditional battlefield, which it once completely dominated, its war against the global Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) is surely a lost battle.
Israel has a poor track record in confronting civil society-based mobilization. Despite the vulnerability of Palestinians living under Israeli Occupation, it took the Israeli government and military seven long years to pacify the popular Intifada, the uprising of 1987. Even then, the jury is still out on what truly ended the popular revolt.
It should be accepted that a global Intifada is much more difficult to suppress, or even contain.
Yet, when Israel began sensing the growing danger of BDS – which was officially launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005 – it responded with the same superfluous and predictable pattern: arrests, violence and a torrent of laws that criminalize dissent at home, while unleashing an international campaign of intimidation and smearing of boycott activists and organizations.
That achieved little, aside from garnering BDS more attention and international solidarity.
The war on the Movement took a serious turn last year when Netanyahu’s government dedicated a largesse of about $72 million to defeat the civil society-led Campaign.
Utilizing the ever-willing US government to boost its anti-BDS tactics, Tel Aviv feels assured that its counter-BDS efforts in the US is off to a promising start. However, it is only recently that Israel has begun to formulate the wider European component of its global strategy.
In a two-day conference in Brussels last year, Israeli officials and their European supporters unleashed their broader European anti-BDS Campaign. Organized by the European Jewish Association (EJA) and the Europe Israel Public Affairs group (EIPA), the November 6-7 conference was fully supported by the Israeli government, featuring right-wing Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, Ze’ev Elkin.
The EJA Annual Conference has raised Israel’s manipulation of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ to a whole new level, as it drafted a text that will purportedly be presented to prospective members of the European Parliament (MEPs), demanding their signature before running in next May’s élections.
Those who decline to sign – or worse, repudiate the Israeli initiative – are likely to find themselves fending off accusations of racism and anti-Semitism.
This was certainly not the first conference of its kind.
The anti-BDS euphoria that has swept Israel in recent years, yielded several crowded and passionate conferences in luxurious hotels, where Israeli officials openly threatened BDS activists, such as Omar Barghouti. Barghouti was warned by a top Israeli official in a 2016 conference in Jerusalem of “civil assassination” for his role in the organization of the Movement.
In March 2017, the Israeli Knesset passed the Anti-BDS Travel Ban, which requires the Interior Minister to deny entry to the country to any foreign national who “knowingly issued a public call to boycott the state of Israel.”
Since the ban went into effect, many BDS supporters have been detained, deported and barred from entering the country.
While Israel has demonstrated its ability to galvanize self-serving US and other European politicians to support its cause, there is no evidence that the BDS Movement is being quelled or is, in any way, weakening.
On the contrary, the Israeli strategy has raised the ire of many activists, civil society and civil rights groups, angered by Israel’s attempt at subverting freedom of speech in western countries.
Only recently, Leeds University in the UK has joined many other campuses around the world in divesting from Israel.
The tide is, indeed, turning.
Decades of Zionist indoctrination also failed, not only in reversing the vastly changing public opinion on the Palestinian struggle for freedom and rights, but even in preserving the once solid pro-Israel sentiment among young Jews, most notably in the US.
For BDS supporters, however, every Israeli strategy presents an opportunity to raise awareness of Palestinian rights and to mobilize civil society around the world against Israeli occupation and racism.
BDS’ success is attributed to the very reason why Israel is failing to counter its efforts: it is a disciplined model of a popular, civil resistance that is based on engagement, open debate and democratic choices, while grounded in international and humanitarian law.
Israel’s ‘war-chest’ will run dry in the end, for no amount of money could have saved the racist, Apartheid regime in South Africa when it came tumbling down decades ago.
Needless to say, $72 million will not turn the tide in favor of Apartheid Israel, nor will it change the course of history that can only belong to the people who are unrelenting on achieving their long-coveted freedom.
We all can do our part boycotting Israeli products and cultural & artistic & sport events.
BRASIL
The Intercept Brasil
As primeiras medidas do neofacista Bolsonaro
Uma lembrancinha pré-natalina que ainda vale
Primeiro foi o general Augusto Heleno, ministro-chefe do Gabinete de Segurança Institucional que fez declarações apontando dificuldades para a transferência da embaixada brasileira em Israel de Tel Aviv para Jerusalém, em franca contradição com o presidente Jair Bolsonaro. Agora, é o general Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, ministro da Secretaria de Governo, que faz ressalvas. O tema divide o governo, cria atritos entre os militares, o corpo diplomático e isola o Brasil da comunidade internacional. A aliança de Bolsonaro com Trump e Netanyahu pode custar caro.
As primeiras medidas do neofacista Bolsonaro
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário