Censorship, fake news, perception management

[blindpig]

Google pockets $45m to fuel Netanyahu’s propaganda denying Gaza famine

Official records show a six-month hasbara campaign funding ads across major platforms to whitewash Israeli war crimes

News Desk

SEP 4, 2025


(Photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Google is executing a $45-million advertising contract with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to spread propaganda denying famine in Gaza, Drop Site News reported on 3 September.

The six-month campaign, launched in June, is run through Google’s YouTube and its Display & Video 360 service, and is described in the government contract as hasbara.

The details were disclosed in official Israeli government contract filings from the state advertising bureau, Lapam, which reports directly to Netanyahu’s office.

A video produced by Israel’s Foreign Ministry declaring “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie” was placed on YouTube in late August, gaining over six million views.

Its wide reach was fueled by the ongoing ad campaign coordinated by Lapam.

Records show $3 million was also spent on ads with X, while the Israeli digital advertising company Outbrain (that recently acquired the French company Teads) is set to receive about $2.1 million. Other ads accuse the UN of “deliberate sabotage” of aid deliveries and promote the US-backed, deadly Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid scheme.

Campaigns have also sought to discredit the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), which documents Israeli war crimes, labeling it tied to “extremist ideologies.”

The propaganda drive comes as famine spreads across Gaza. In late August, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) officially declared famine in Gaza City and its surrounding towns for the first time, and warned that Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis were next by the end of September. By then, a total of over 640,000 people will face “catastrophic levels” of food insecurity – classified as IPC Phase 5 – across the strip.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Friday that the strip faced “a descent into a massive famine.” The Health Ministry in Gaza reports at least 367 deaths from hunger and malnutrition, including 131 children, since October 2023.

Despite these figures, Israeli officials have openly called for starvation as policy. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender.”

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu declared that Palestinians “need to starve” and should flee under an emigration plan.

The June contract disclosures link the Google campaign not only to Gaza but also to Operation Rising Lion – Israel’s 12-day war with Iran that killed at least 1,000 Iranians, including women and children.

The deal notes the request was “for campaigns following Operation ‘Rising Lion’ as well as for ongoing activities.”

An August editorial by Misbar found Israeli ads across Google and Meta to be “large-scale propaganda” justifying the bombardment as essential for Israeli and western security. Google and Lapam did not respond to requests for comment.

https://thecradle.co/articles/google-po ... aza-famine

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Darryl Cooper: Blocking The Real WW2 History That We Need To See

Roger Boyd

Sep 05, 2025
When an individual makes statements that would be expected to see him swiftly removed from social media platforms, and many others who have made lesser such statements have been de-platformed, one has to ask who his continued media access serves. Especially when media personalities with huge audiences, such as Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, have him on their shows and treat him with an unquestioning respectfulness. That is Darryl Cooper, who criticizes the highly misleading official narrative of WW2 but then replaces it with another set of lies.





Cooper starts with the Western myths about WW1 that are used to cover up the real nature of that war, a war between the imperial powers of the United Kingdom (population 46 million), Germany (68 million), Austria-Hungary (52 million), France (40 million), Russia (170 million) and the declining Ottoman Empire (25 million) driven by the great success of the Germans in the second “scientific” industrial revolution at which the British were lagging far behind. Also, by the industrialization of the colossus Russia which threatened to overwhelm the power of Germany and Austria-Hungary combined; both of which it bordered. The British needed to keep German power down and the Germans needed to knee cap Russia before it industrialized and modernized further given its huge population. That the war was triggered by the assassination in Sarajevo is more chance than anything, the kindling of imperial rivalry was bone dry and the war could have started earlier for example during the Agadir Crisis of 1911.


From Okutu on Twitter

No nation, including Germany, could be individually blamed for starting what turned into a World War, but that is exactly what happened at Versailles. In addition, throughout 1914-1917 the US operated firmly on the side of the UK and France. Through such things as the respecting of the Anglo-French maritime blockade of Germany, while continuing to ship goods to the two allies and provide financing for those goods. With the Russian February 1917 revolution and the rapidly deteriorating fighting ability of the Russian Army, it looked as if the German side would be able to take Russia out of the war and focus all of its resources on the Western Front; while also breaking the Allied blockade through access to Russian resources. Leading to a German victory, or a stalemate, both of which would have been ruinous for the US bankers that had extended massive credits to the UK.

So President Wilson, who had been elected on an anti-war ticket only the previous November dragged the US population unwillingly into war with Germany in April 2017. Even with the full support of the US industrial powerhouse and US troops starting to arrive in France, the German 1918 Spring Offensive threatened to break through to Paris. Once this petered out, and the massive waves of fresh US troops and supplies were pouring into France, the German fate was sealed. When the Germans agreed to the armistice in November they had no idea that they would be treated as the single cause of the war and dealt with so extremely harshly. The allocation of massive post-war reparations that were not payable on the day they were implemented, and the loss of significant portions of German territory (disconnecting East Prussia from Germany and giving Alsace Lorraine to France that had been gained in the 1970 war with that country), while Germany was also not allowed a significant military, were widely seen as punitive terms and humiliating by the German population. Even the industrial Ruhr was administered by the League of Nations until 1935, not the German state.



At the same time, Germany was stripped of all of its overseas imperial possessions which were predominantly taken over by the United Kingdom (South West Africa, Togoland), together with other powers (e.g. German East Africa was split between the UK and Belgium, Cameroon went to the French, in the Pacific the Marshall Islands, the Carolines, the Marianas, the Palau Islands all went to the Japanese, German Samoa to New Zealand and German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and Nauru to Australia). These were technically under “League of Nations Mandates” but were to all intents and purposes handed over to other imperial powers. The formation of a union between Germany and Austria was also forbidden. Austria-Hungary was also ripped apart, to create Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

The taking away of so much productive capacity, together with the colossal reparations destroyed; the German economy during the 1920s. And just as it was recovering through some debt relief the economy was hit with the Great Depression. Unlike in previous wars, the US would not forgive the wartime debts of the UK and France, forcing them to push for the reparation payments so that they could repay the US banks. An attempted communist revolution in 1918 and 1919 had been put down with the support of the Social Democrats who had sided with the German elite and military, with the use of both the military and the paramilitary Freikorps. The latter murdered the KPD leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, as well as many others.

On all the above I am very much in alignment with Mr. Cooper. What Mr. Cooper will not agree with was that the European elites were also very much ready for a war as a way to focus the population on nationalism and an external enemy, while facilitating a crack down at home against the burgeoning threat of the working people to their elite exploiters. Across Europe and the US, the post-WW1 period was used to crush the proletarian movements; with Mussolini in Italy, Wilson in the US, David Lloyd George in the UK, Clemenceau in France, and Ebert in Germany. The Soviet Union managed to resist the attempts of the Mensheviks and Russian imperialist elites (the Whites), the Poles, the British Empire, the US, the French Empire, Japan, Greece, Estonia, Serbia, Italy, Romania and Ukrainian separatists to destroy it. At the cost of colossal destruction, war losses and widespread famine and deaths from disease as well as the loss of territories that became the Baltic States and Finland, the loss of a huge chunk of what is now Belarus and Ukraine to Poland, and the loss of Bessarabia to Romania. This severely destroyed nation managed to recover somewhat during the New Economic Plan of the balance of the 1920s, before leaping forward in the mass industrialization of the 1930s. An industrialization that allowed the Soviets to withstand the ferocity of, and then destroy, the Nazi plague.

Cooper very much ignores the role of the German oligarchy (and even US elite members such as Ford) in nurturing Hitler and his Nazis through the 1920s and early 1930s, and the huge support provided by them to the Nazis during the elections of the early 1930s. In 1930, the first post-Great Crash election, the SPD (Social Democrats) gained 24.5% of the vote, with the Nazis at 18.3%, and the socialist KPD 13.1%. In July 1932, the Nazis gained 37.3%, the SPD 21.6%, and the KPD 14.3%. In the November election of the same year, Nazi support actually fell to 33.1%, the SPD gained 20.4%, and the KPD 16.9%. The Nazis had passed their peak, even with massive oligarch support, with over 6 million Germans unemployed. Big business acted and pressured President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. After which political violence, together with the Reichstag Fire (set by the Nazis themselves) that facilitated the suspending of civil liberties, gained the Nazis 43.9% of the vote in the March 1933 election; even under such circumstances the Nazis could not gain a majority of the vote. A fact very much ignored by Cooper. The Nazis then banned all opposition parties.

The German population did not vote into power the Nazis, it was the German oligarchy (the bourgeoisie and the Junkers) that placed Hitler in power. In mid 1934, in the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler destroyed the SA Brownshirts that were the wing of the Nazis that wanted the oligarchy smashed. Their time of usefulness had expired now that Hitler commanded the German army, and they stood in the way of Hitler fully implementing a fascist state and military Keynesianism that greatly benefitted the oligarchy while smashing independent trades unions and disciplining the workers. Real wages fell 25% between 1933 and 1938, while longer workdays were implemented, business profits rapidly rose and the Nazis privatized state owned businesses on very favourable terms. The big German corporations benefitted greatly from tariff protections, cartels, monopolies, government subsidies, advantageous contracts, the suppression of trade unions, and even slave labour. This directly contradicts Cooper’s attempt to paint Hitler as some kind of socialist, as Weidel of the AfD does. Cooper may quote from Hitler’s writing and speeches, but does not validate whether or not in fact the words are just propagandist rhetoric by contrasting them with Hitler’s actual policies and political-economic outcomes. Howard K. Smith very eloquently described what Nazism really was in his 1942 book “The Last Train From Berlin” where he detailed his experiences as a correspondent in Berlin from 1940 to 1942.

In actual fact, Nazism is the most reactionary and vicious form of capitalism that has ever existed, and Hitler has destroyed systematically every element in his state which was, in any degree, revolutionary … The rulers of German society not only did not struggle against the Nazi rise to power in the early 1930’s; they suborned, abetted and aided Hitler to gain power with all their vast resources of money and influence—a strange manner of revolution, indeed! And, contrary to the views of the majority of observers, Nazism was not a vast social change. Superficially, things appeared to be altered: people were put in gay uniforms; there were new salutes and a new flag, and new, but empty ideas—empty baubles on a highly and cheaply decorated Christmas tree meant to hide, by its brightness, the basis of corrupt German society which Hitler left intact. The only actual change that occurred with the rise of Hitlerism consisted in this: the old, corrupt system of acquisition was dying, and Hitler was called upon—and he and his followers were ready to accept their historical assignment—to save that moribund society by reinforcing its most unsalutary features and crushing all opposition to unlimited militarism, by which, alone, his system could be preserved for any period of time. The only new feature the Nazis introduced was a set of measures to make permanent the existing basis of society; to freeze solid the little fluidity German society possessed before 1933. To use a simile applied by one acute observer. Hitler locked himself and the German ruling classes in the top storey of society and threw the key out of the window. (pp. 179-180)

Smith also puts the lie to the position of Cooper that the German people supported Hitler when he states that, “Also, whether one likes it or not, the Nazis came to power against the will and violent opposition of the German working class which acted with singular unity at the last, late moment” (p. 181). Let’s remember that in a free and fair election, even with massive resources provided by the German oligarchs, the Nazis could only gain a maximum of 37.3% of the vote; and even that fell to 33.1% four months later. At no time did a majority of Germans express electoral support for the Nazis. After 1934, Hitler was a dictator in charge of extensive tools of authoritarian control and propaganda. In 1941, even after the great German victories in Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, Smith could detect no great enthusiasm for the war.

Hitler did not, and—I am convinced of it after living in Germany for two war years—has not yet won the German workers to his cause. In the year 1940, after eight years of Nazi rule, a German S.S. man I knew told me there was but one dull element in National Socialism’s bright, triumphant perspective at that moment (this was just after France had fallen and Nazism was enjoying its happiest period). That, he said, was the German workers. They were following, but reluctantly. (p. 181)

What Cooper also does not mention is the widespread support for Hitler (and Mussolini) among the Western elites, as a bulwark against the communist “menace”. The Western elites stood aside as Germany rearmed, had allowed the return of the Saarland to Germany, stood aside as Germany and Austria combined in the Anschluss in 1938, facilitated the transfer of the Czech defensive works to Germany, and then stood aside again as Germany took all of Czechoslovakia. The latter doubling the capacity of the Nazi military industry. They had also not intervened when Germany and Italy helped the fascists gain control of Spain in early 1939. The Western elites were also extremely anti-semitic and talked about the leadership of the Soviet Union as “Jewish-Bolsheviks”. Was all of this not strengthening Germany for a fight with the Soviet Union, one perhaps that the West could join in with if Germany started to lose? The British had repeatedly refused to join a new Entente of Britain, France and the Soviet Union to block Nazi Germany during the 1930s. One could have thought that they were going out of their way to help the Germans become as strong as possible, as Anna Louise Strong in “The Soviets Expected It” pointed out:

Tory Britain hastened to build up Hitler. British diplomacy granted to Hitler Germany everything that it had refused for more than a decade to the German republic: the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Nazi-terrorized plebiscite in the Saar, German rearmament and naval expansion, the Hitler-and-Mussolini intervention in Spain. British finance, which had strangled the struggling German democracy with demands for impossible war reparations, supported Hitler’s regime with heavy investments and loans. It was no secret to any intelligent world citizen that the British Tories made these concessions to Hitler because they saw in him their “strong-arm gangster” who would eventually fight the Soviets, which important sections of British capital have always seen as the greatest foe. (pp. 93-94)

As I have covered in an earlier piece, the Polish elite were ridiculously arrogant and delusional; assuming that they did not have to pick sides between the Germans and the Soviets while also being extremely obstinate and pig-headed in response to Germany’s requests for land access to East Prussia and better treatment of the German minority in Poland. If Poland had joined with Germany against the Soviet Union, Hitler may very well have gained his lebensraum. Instead, Germany invaded and the Soviet Union rapidly moved in to put a much greater distance between the border and Moscow. While also removing the Baltic States as possible German allies and blocking the possibility of further German moves south east into the Balkans.

During this time, and all the way until April 1940 there was the “Phoney War” on the Western front, with Britain and France making no move to attack the lightly guarded German western border. The Soviets had been negotiating with the Finnish, who they had given independence to after the 1917 revolution, in a swapping of territories to move the Finnish border farther away from Leningrad. The Finns were surprisingly belligerent, resulting in the Soviet invasion of November 30th 1939 which ended on March 13th 1940 with the Finnish having to accept worse terms. Interestingly, the Western media was filled with the need to support the Finns against the Soviet Union; with an expeditionary force of 135,000 British and French troops being put together. The Soviets managed to finish off the Finns before that force could be sent though. This was very strange behaviour for two nations formally at war with Germany, but not at war with the Soviet Union; depleting the forces that could defend against Germany. Unless the British and French really wanted to informally ally with Germany against the Soviet Union, tying down a chunk of the Soviet military far away from the German threat. Whilst also showing that they would not “stab Germany in the back” if it attacked the Soviet Union.

The Finns accepted defeat on March 13th, and the Germans invaded Norway on April 9th (with the invasion ordered by Hitler on April 1st)! Then between May 10th and June 25th the German army crushed the French and British forces in France; with a significant chunk of the French leadership seeming to favour a quick surrender. Hitler had removed the possibility of the stab in the back by the taking of France. Churchill only became British PM on May 10th, as the appeaser/fifth columnist Chamberlain was forced to resign. At this time, there were still significant elements of the British ruling class who wanted to sign a peace treaty with Hitler, including the foreign secretary Lord Halifax. Such a treaty would have provided Germany with the resources of the Western world with which to attack the Soviet Union. Perhaps this is why Cooper hates Churchill so much, as Churchill kept Britain fighting on and the resources of the British Empire away from the Germans. It is obvious that Churchill had no problem with fascism, he had been a very enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini and hated communism, but he saw the deep depravity of the Nazi version of fascism. I have written about the incompetence, casual racism, and civilizational superiority of Churchill, but for this one decision we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Now Hitler had telegraphed his genocidal intentions in Mein Kampf, where he called for an all out war against the Jewish population and the creation of lebensraum in the east through the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Slav populations all the way to the Ural Mountains; copying the example of the US with respect to the Amerindian populations. Then we also have very explicit German planning for the starving of the Soviet population and the Einsatzgruppen death squads that perpetrated the “Holocaust of bullets” across the Soviet Union. Here Cooper wades into outright Holocaust denialism, including even the rejection of the evidence of the murder of millions in the death camps; referencing the discredited work of David Irving. That it did not get him completely de-platformed is quite phenomenal, and raises the question of whether he is useful to the US oligarchy in associating anyone who questions the WW2 narrative with anti-semitic Holocaust denial; a very useful idiot?

The Allies did not really start fully supporting the Soviet Union until the German defeat at Stalingrad, it was if they were waiting to see if the Nazis would fully destroy the Soviets for them. When Germany proved not up to the job, the Allies then aligned themselves with the winning side, but then did not open up the Second Front until the Soviets had already crushed the German military machine. Cooper works very hard to try to paint the Soviets as much worse than the Nazis, repeating all the Nazi and Cold War lies and more to vilify the nation that sacrificed so much to save the world from the Nazi menace.

Howard K. Smith provides a fascinating commentary of the way in which the German invasion of the Soviet Union very quickly sucked up all the resources of Germany, its allies and the conquered territories. The very rapid fall in meat rations, the colossal destruction of the German locomotive stock; these were being felt within only a few months of the German invasion. The Germans had assumed a swift victory, and even by late 1941 it was becoming obvious that the task was beyond the productive and manpower capacity of the Axis.

But quick, easy triumph ended with Russia. The Generals did their job well at first, encircling and destroying Red divisions on the border and deeper inside Russia. But both the Generals and Hitler had underestimated the strength of Russian numbers and war material, but mostly the spirit of resistance of Soviet soldiery. (p. 215)

It was the Soviets who destroyed the Nazi war machine, and then the Japanese Army of Manchuria. It was the Chinese who fought the vast majority of the Japanese armed forces. The Western Allies helped Nazi Germany gain strength and would have been happy to help it destroy the Soviet Union, but those plans failed. And then Hitler turned West and Churchill blocked an alliance between Germany and the British Empire. We could also note that the US has been goading Japan into a war because it wanted an excuse to destroy the competing Japanese Empire. In the end both the German and Japanese fascists were destroyed as competitors, while the British Empire sank under its indebtedness and the unwillingness of British troops to fight for Empire after the defeats of Germany and Japan. With those defeats, the rapid about-face of the West back to the Cold War against communism that had reigned in the pre-war years.

Darryl Cooper very carefully crafts his podcasts over many weeks to be extremely entertaining and engrossing, but that does not mean that they cannot also be highly misrepresentative and manipulative. It is very obvious that his blind spot is communism, and that fascist Germany did not win WW2. He has worked hard to create an image of the honest nerd, and is extremely clever in weaving right-wing propaganda within somewhat factual narratives that selectively utilize and misrepresent quotes and references.

A good example is his coverage of the reprisals against the Germans in the concentration camps, in “MartyrMade #24 - Enemy: The Germans' War, Prologue”, which he uses to whip up sympathy for the German camp guards. What he does not cover is exactly what had happened in those camps and what the Allied soldiers had seen to make them attack the camp guards. He very selectively quotes a US soldier who recounts the reprisals, while leaving out the following from the same interview, “The first thing I saw was a stack of bodies that appeared to be about 20 feet long and about as high as a man could reach, which looked like cordwood stacked up there … And the thing I’ll never forget was the fact that on closer inspection we found the people whose eyes were still blinking maybe three or four bodies deep inside the stack.” The reality of these camps was also caught on film, so there is absolutely no excuse for such manipulative misrepresentation. Nazi-propaganda clear and simple, but he is very, very good at it.

The actual history of the inter-war period and WW2 is extremely interesting in the ways that it so contradicts the official narratives and exposes the Western imperial oligarchies’ manipulations and readiness to align with Nazi Germany until that Germany turned on them. And the role of the German and other oligarchies in nurturing the Nazis, bringing them to power and then helping to build up Nazi Germany. But you will hear nothing of that from Mr. Cooper, who instead will feed you a “Nazi Germany as Victim” narrative with a side helping of “Communists/Jewish Bolsheviks are Evil”.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/darryl ... e-real-ww2

[blindpig]

Witness for the Prosecution:

NPR slants the case against Mumia Abu-Jamal
Jim Naureckas


After attacks from police groups, National Public Radio quickly backed away from its plan to air commentaries by Pennsylvania death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal, an African-American journalist, received a death sentence after being convicted in the December 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner—in a trial marred by gross procedural errors.

NPR vice president Bill Buzenberg explained the 1994 decision not to air Abu-Jamal by saying it was “not appropriate to use someone in the commentator’s role who is the focal point of a highly polarized and political controversy without at the same time providing the context of the controversy and without other voices involved in that controversy.”

Many of those who had hoped Abu-Jamal’s commentaries would give mainstream audiences a rare insider’s view of death row were curious to hear how NPR would cover Abu-Jamal as a news story. The answer: It didn’t. From May 1994, when NPR announced the cancellation of the commentaries, until August 17, 1995, Abu-Jamal’s scheduled execution date, Nexis transcripts reveal not a word on NPR about this “highly polarized and political controversy.”

As the execution date approached, the case garnered increasing attention, until NPR‘s silence became deafening. Only on August 19, after Abu-Jamal had won a stay to complete his appeals, did NPR air a story on his case—a lengthy feature by NPR‘s Scott Simon. But rather than dealing with the controversy in a balanced fashion, Simon skillfully provided a brief for the prosecution under the pretense of covering both sides.

Disputed facts
Simon’s presentation of the “facts” is carefully constructed to evoke pity for Faulkner and hatred for Abu-Jamal, presenting prosecution claims as undisputed fact. In a detailed enumeration of Faulkner’s wounds, for example, Simon states that Faulkner was “shot once in the back at close range”—even though the officer’s jacket showed no trace of the gunshot residue that such a shot would have left.

After describing Faulkner’s shooting, Simon reveals that Faulkner also shot Abu-Jamal—with the obvious implication that the officer fired in self-defense. Abu-Jamal’s lawyers’ contention that Faulkner fired the first shot that night is never mentioned, nor does Simon note that the prosecution’s version of how Abu-Jamal was shot does not match the path the bullet took through his body.

Faulkner was shot after he pulled over William Cook, Abu-Jamal’s brother, on a traffic violation. Simon notes that there was “some sort of struggle” between Faulkner and Cook; he doesn’t mention that this struggle, according to one witness, amounted to Faulkner beating Cook in the head with his flashlight.

False witnesses
In outlining the evidence against Abu-Jamal—ostensibly for the purpose of explaining why Abu-Jamal needed a good lawyer—Simon says: “Three eyewitnesses in different locations who did not know each other came forward and identified Mumia Abu-Jamal was the man they had seen at the shooting.”

In fact, only two eyewitnesses—out of at least 10 people at the scene—positively identified Abu-Jamal as the shooter. Simon appears to be hiding behind the phrase “seen at the shooting”; his third witness actually initially identified Abu-Jamal as being the driver of the pulled-over car, not as the shooter.

Of two witnesses who identified Abu-Jamal, whose veracity Simon has implicitly vouched for, one was a prostitute whose story progressively changed after repeated arrests by police. The other witness was a convicted arsonist on probation whose story also changed to match the police version.

Simon does note later that “over the years,” people have come forward to say they saw the shooter flee the scene—which would clear Abu-Jamal, since he collapsed to the pavement after being shot by Faulkner. In fact, police inquiries immediately after the shooting turned up witnesses who said they saw someone fleeing the scene.

Simon also notes that a gun registered to Abu-Jamal was found at the scene of the shooting. But he fails to mention that the police never performed elementary tests to determine whether the gun had been fired, or if Abu-Jamal was the one who fired it.

Simon does consider the defense’s point that the coroner identified the fatal bullet as coming from a .44 caliber gun, whereas Abu-Jamal’s gun was a .38. He then brings on Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Kaufman to rebut the defense, who says that the coroner later said that the bullet might have come from a .38 after all—“so I think that there’s a lot less there than meets the eye.” Note the reversal here of the burden of proof; the question Simon’s source addresses is not whether the prosecution proved that the bullet came from Abu-Jamal’s gun, but whether the defense proved that it did not come from his gun.

The unmentioned confession
Simon also interviews police officer Gary Bell, who recounts Abu-Jamal’s supposed hospital-bed confession: “I shot the motherfucker, I hope he dies!” This story has been so thoroughly discredited that even Abu-Jamal’s staunchest opponents, such as Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham, no longer point to it as an indication of guilt (New York Times, 8/13/95). Simon therefore has to make a show of challenging Bell’s account.

Several minutes after airing Bell’s gripping account, Simon asks him why he waited more than two months to report this vital evidence. Bell responds that he had been assigned with other officers to look after the widow.

Our job, at that point, was to stay with her 24 hours a day to take care of anything—any of her needs that she had…. I don’t know if I was just preoccupied with that, or the whole situation, but I didn’t—it didn’t dawn on me to call right away to talk to anybody about it.

A moving story, certainly—but Simon might have followed up by asking Bell why, in his report to police a week after the shooting, he inexplicably made no reference to the confession. Or why the officer who was specifically assigned to guard Jamal, Gary Wakshul, filed a report immediately afterward that stated that “the negro male made no statements.”

Instead, Simon cuts to prosecutor Joseph McGill, who claims that a security guard “who had no connection with police” had also heard the confession. In fact, the security guard, Patricia Durham, did know Faulkner, sometimes had coffee with him, and acknowledged crying when he died. Simon also seems to endorse McGill’s claim that Durham had “reported [the confession] within 24 hours.” Durham actually said she had written a handwritten note about the event within 24 hours—a note that was never produced. Other than this purported document, she never mentioned the “confession” until after Bell had.

Silence equals guilt
In concluding his report, Simon states, “Mr. Jamal has never said in any courtroom, article, or interview, what he did, saw or heard the night of the killing for which he’s been convicted.” He then plays tape of Faulkner’s widow, Maureen Faulkner, who declares:

I’m challenging him to get up on the stand and tell what happened on December 9, 1981. He is the only one who has not been heard in fourteen years. What is Mumia Abu-Jamal afraid of? If he was there at the scene of the crime, and he did not commit the crime, why doesn’t he get up and tell who did it?
No one can deny the frustration and grief felt by the widow of a police officer cut down at the age of 25. But why does Simon choose to end his report by implying that a defendant who exercises his Fifth Amendment rights is guilty? It is standard practice that defendants do not make public statements about their cases, since anything they say, as the Miranda formula famously warns, can be used against them in a court of law.

Following the airing of this report, at least one letter was sent detailing NPR‘s omissions and errors. Simon chose not to acknowledge this on the air, but instead remarked a week later (NPR, 8/26/95) that the response of his audience could best be summarized in one letter. He then read the listener’s letter, which accurately recapitulated the brief for the prosecution that Simon had presented:

Let me get this straight: It was his registered handgun; he was identified by three separate witnesses; he was shot by his own purported victim; he raved about his accomplishment in the hospital; he refuses to discuss his alleged innocence.
The letter-writer can’t help but conclude: “Why the heck are we discussing this?” Indeed, no other reasonable conclusion is available from the selective evidence and distortions presented by NPR.

https://fair.org/extra/witness-for-the-prosecution/

Whadda ya expect from liberals? You know who's side they are on...

[blindpig]

AP Jerusalem chief participated in secretive Israeli govt anti-BDS event, leaked files reveal
Max Blumenthal·September 6, 2025

AP’s Israel-Palestine news director, Josef Federman, has spun data to minimize the Gaza death count. Leaked documents show he appeared on a panel aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative” during a gov’t-sponsored propaganda conference chaired by an ex-IDF official who legitimized killing journalists.

The Israeli massacre of five journalists in broad daylight on August 24, 2025 at Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis city prompted a sternly worded statement to the Israeli government from the Associated Press and Reuters, which each employed a reporter murdered by the IDF. The AP subsequently published a detailed investigation demonstrating that the Israeli military knowingly attacked a civilian target, then carried out a double tap strike after a rescue team and journalists arrived on the scene.

While the AP’s statement of outrage about the killing of its photographer in Gaza, Miriam Dagga, has brought the leading wire agency’s tension with the Israeli government to its height, the relationship with Tel Aviv was not always so adversarial.

The Grayzone has reviewed leaked documents revealing that the AP’s news director for Israel-Palestine, Josef Federman, participated in a private 2018 panel discussion aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative.” His host was a secretive Israeli government outfit dedicated to combatting the global BDS campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Called the Global Coalition For Israel (GC4I), the event was convened in Jerusalem on June 18, 2018 by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy – the de facto propaganda arm of the Israeli government.

The moderator of the panel in which Federman participated was Avital Leibovich, the former spokeswoman for the IDF who has ardently defended the Israeli policy of defining Palestinian journalists as terrorists in order to assassinate them.

Federman has presided over the AP’s coverage of Israel-Palestine since 2014. Throughout Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023, Federman has helped shape a narrative that has subtly but effectively advanced Tel Aviv’s objectives, regurgitating the baseless and comprehensively debunked claim that “Israelis were raped or sexually assaulted” on October 7; legitimizing Israel’s violent invasion and theft of Syrian land as a historical “shift,” and relying on bogus data from an Israel lobby-affiliated researcher to minimize the civilian death count in Gaza – a grim toll which now includes one of his colleagues at AP.

Federman’s penchant for uncritically quoting notoriously mendacious Israeli military officials has helped secure his reputation for biased coverage.



Federman’s participation in the 2018 Israeli government anti-BDS event appears to contradict clearly stated AP guidelines on conflicts of interest. According to the AP’s website, “We avoid addressing, or accepting fees or expenses from, governmental bodies; trade, lobbying or special interest groups; businesses, or labor groups; or any group that would pose a conflict of interest.”

In response to a detailed query from The Grayzone about Federman’s participation in the semi-covert conference, AP Vice President of Corporate Communications Lauren Easton stated, “Josef Federman is a professional journalist and a former chairman of Israel’s Foreign Press Association. It is not uncommon for journalists to speak about their work at conferences and other events. It remains AP policy to refrain from accepting honoraria, and that policy was followed here.”

The details of the GC41’s gathering were gleaned from a massive tranche of documents extracted by hackers from Israel’s Ministry of Justice in 2024. A full schedule and list of GC4I conference participants has never been seen before by the public.

View GC4I’s 2018 schedule here.



AP, other agencies join semi-secret Israeli gov’t event chaired by ex-IDF official who justified killing journalists

When GC4I gathered in 2018, it met at the Mamilla Hotel Conference Hall in Jerusalem for two days of discussions and briefings on the fight to crush the growing Palestine solidarity movement and its BDS campaign. The conference opened with an address by Sima Vaknin-Gil, then the Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. A former Israeli intelligence official, Vakhnin-Gil had emerged as one of the most influential coordinators of the country’s propaganda efforts abroad, especially in the US, where she helps the Israeli government evade the Foreign Agent Registration Act law.

Her speech was followed by a discussion moderated by celebrity Republican pollster Frank Luntz on the feasibility of defining the BDS movement as a “hate group.” Further panels focused on “developing relations in the corridors of power” and “how…legislation in Europe and the United States can be used to reduce funding for organizations delegitimizing Israel.”

On the second day of the GC41 conference, Federman joined a panel aimed at “discuss[ing] the difficulties of reporting fairly and accurately on Israel, while dealing with issues such as BDS, delegitimization, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”

The panel was explicitly aimed at helping the Zionist operatives gathered at the GC4I “understand the shortcomings in Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative, what reporters are looking for when writing an article and why the anti-Israel camp’s narrative resonates in the Western world.”

Avital Leibovich, a former IDF spokeswoman who moved on the American Jewish Committee, chaired the panel. During her stint at the IDF, Leibovich played a leading role in justifying Israel’s deliberate killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip. In 2012, for example, she fired off a letter to the New York Times which smeared Palestinian journalists slain at the hands of the Israeli military: “Such terrorists who hold cameras and notebooks in their hands, are no different from their colleagues who fire rockets aimed at Israeli cities and cannot enjoy the rights and protection afforded to legitimate journalists,” she wrote.

In 2016, Leibovich appeared at Washington DC’s Newseum amid protests – including by this reporter– and condemnation from the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, which urged the institution in a May 31 letter “not to provide a platform to someone who has justified, on record and to a world audience, Israel’s grave violations of international law and war crimes, and in particular attacks against journalists and press freedoms.”

Chaired by Leibovich, the 2018 GC4I panel featured featured the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of RT, Paula Slier, and Laurent Lozano, who held the same position at Agence France Press, alongside the AP’s Federman. Slier has since left RT, while Lozano is currently AFP’s bureau chief in Dakar, Senegal.

Reached by The Grayzone, Slier described the gathering as “a very pleasant experience.”

She said she considered her participation in a semi-covert Israeli government conference as a normal part of her duties as a correspondent in Jerusalem. “It was a chance for them to hear how foreign channels worked in Israel,” Slier commented. “I used to participate and attend all conferences – whether they were pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian – I thought it important to engage with everyone, and it was also an opportunity to talk about RT.”

GC4I launched at “secret conference” with “closed sessions” on criminalizing BDS

GC4I’s first gathering took place in 2010, at a time of heightened Zionist anxiety about the rising global grassroots movement to boycott Israel. A who’s who of Israeli lobbyists from the US, UK and Australia were on hand, alongside Israeli officials from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the newly created Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

“The aim was to end the perceived lack of co-ordination within the pro-Israel movement, a concern frequently voiced by Israel-advocates,” wrote researcher Hil Aked.

Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle gained access to a 2014 GC4I meeting in London, England. He described it as a “secret conference…held in closed sessions amid heavy security.”

“We have the resources. We have the intelligence. Most important, we have unbounded determination,” Ronald Lauder, the billionaire Zionist financier and Netanyahu confidant, told the crowd of Jewish communal leaders and Israeli officials in London.

Lauder pledged to leverage his fortune to criminalize the BDS movement: “We will draft and lobby for legislation that will withhold government funding from academic institutions that boycott Israel.”

Reporting back to Jewish Federation at home, minimizing deaths in Gaza
Well before he emerged in the Middle East as a reporter, Josef Federman enrolled as a graduate student at Israel’s Hebrew University.

He grew up in Westborough, Massachusetts, where his parents helped found the B’nai Shalom Congregation, a Reform Jewish synagogue. Federman has returned on two occasions to deliver lectures at the synagogue, once in 2021 to discuss the Abraham Accords alongside an Israeli academic, and again in March 2024, during the height of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, for an event titled, “Reporting from Israel.” That speech was co-sponsored by the Jewish Federations of Central Massachusetts, a top sponsor of pro-Israel lobbing inside the US.

Two months later, the Israeli government seized camera equipment from the AP to prevent it from live-streaming video from the Israeli side of the northern Gaza frontier. While Israel announced that it would return the equipment and allow the broadcasts to continue, the event eerily foreshadowed the Israeli military’s double tap strike on the Reuters live position at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis this August 24.

The following month, Federman published a piece of “AP data analysis” that relied on dubious statistics to advance one of Israel’s most important propaganda objectives in Gaza. According to the headline of Federman’s piece, “Women and children are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises.” The article therefore implied that all men in Gaza between the ages of 18 and 59 were possible militants. Throughout the piece, Federman referred to Gaza’s Health Ministry as “Hamas-run,” casting doubt on its casualty counts.

To legitimize his conclusions, Federman turned to Gabriel Epstein, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, or WINEP, the most prolific think tank of the Israel lobby in Washington DC. WINEP director Robert Satloff, a veteran Israel lobbyist, praised the AP’s Federman for “tak[ing] a big step toward setting the record straight.”

Another researcher cited in the article, Michael Spagat, defended the quality of death counts by Gaza’s Health Ministry. Months later, in September 2024, Spagat revised his view of the death toll, declaring, “I now believe that the true death toll almost certainly exceeds the official total.”

This August, a review of an internal Israeli intelligence database further discredited Federman’s analysis, revealing that 83% of those killed by the Israeli military in Gaza were civilians.

Today, Federman’s “data analysis” on the Gaza death has been discredited by virtually every expert outside the Israel lobby, and by the gruesome reality on the ground. However, a revealing post remains on his personal LinkedIn page which shows him liking a rant by Idit Shamir, consul general of Israel in Toronto, mocking the official death count in Gaza:

“Isn’t it curious?” wrote the Israeli official. “Hamas is clueless about Israeli hostages’ status but has a crystal-clear count of Palestinian casualties before Israeli strikes even occur!”



Now that a fellow AP reporter, Miriam Dagga, has joined the tens of thousands of civilians murdered by Israel in Gaza over the past two years, Federman’s agency has been forced to release a rare expression of outrage at Tel Aviv. The indignation offers a stark contrast from the comity Federman displayed when he bantered at an Israeli government conference with the former IDF official who legitimized the policy that would claim Dagga’s life.

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/09/06/ap-j ... ked-files/

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Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi (left) stands next to former Israeli intelligence minister Gila Gamliel (right) in an undated photo shared to Twitter/X by the apparent Persian-language account of Benjamin Netanyahu’s digital advisor, Hananya Naftali. The image was implied to relate to Pahlavi’s proposed “Cyrus Accords” peace treaty with Israel. Pahlavi was part of a “post-regime” delegation to Israel that met with Gamliel in the last week.

Israeli intel campaign used US comedian in effort to flip Iranian scientists
Jack Poulson and Lee Fang·September 8, 2025

A mysterious online campaign linked to Israel’s intelligence services attempted to recruit Iranians to overthrow their government. Some appear to have been placed by an Atlanta-based comedian and influencer.

This article was originally published by Jack Poulson and Lee Fang at All-Source Intelligence.

Desi Banks, an Atlanta comedian and content creator, is known for his light-hearted comic sketches and currently has more than nine million followers on the social media platform Instagram. There is no public record of Banks commenting on sensitive Middle East issues, and each of his ad campaigns on Meta’s platforms relates to his work as an entertainer.

The comedian, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, seems to have served a surprising role in an apparent Israeli intelligence operation over the last year to recruit members of Iran’s security and intelligence services – including those working in nuclear centers – into aiding the overthrow of their government. Would-be defectors were offered both money and the protection of their families.

Google advertising transparency records show that a production company owned by Banks, Desi Banks Productions LLC, served a set of four Persian-language recruitment ads across at least 19 countries, including the U.S., Sweden, France, Germany, India, and numerous others across the Middle East and Africa.

The four ad campaigns included both overt and deceptive redirections into recruitment pages purporting to be run by Israel’s foreign intelligence services, the Mossad. Others advertise lucrative, tax-free jobs at apparently fictitious international consulting firms.

The most aggressive campaign redirected users to the Mossad’s official, Persian-language recruitment form, advising viewers to activate their virtual private network (VPN) before clicking. According to Google’s ad disclosure portal, this campaign was the sole instance of a Google ad directly linking to the Mossad’s official website, mossad.gov.il.

Germany-based family members of Iranian nuclear engineers appear to be a major focus of the effort, as Germany is the only country identified by the Google ad transparency portal as being targeted with all four ad campaigns.

“You are just one click away from making history,” read the Mossad recruitment ad, captioned atop a darkened cartoon of a man walking down a multi-lane road. “Call Now. The future belongs to you.”

This direct call to espionage was targeted to viewers in at least 18 countries, including the United States.

Another of the four international recruitment campaigns used an image of an infant to lure viewers into a Google recruitment form which encourages Iranians to help overthrow their current government.

“If you care about your child’s future, watch this video,” read the banner text of the image of the infant, bringing its viewers into the Google recruitment form instead of playing the promised video when clicked. “Sometimes a click is the start of a transformation,” the ad foreshadowed.



“The last days of the regime are near,” declared the Farsi Google recruitment form payload. “Today is the time to act. It would be a betrayal of Iran not to take action at this crucial moment. Do not be fooled by the regime’s nationalist messages.”

Decorated with the crossed flags of Iran and Israel, the sign-up page cautioned potential recruits to understand that, while they “may think this is a trap,” they would be protected by security measures and rewarded with “numerous other benefits” which would be shared through “direct communication.”


A recent banner image from Blue Message’s central Google recruitment form. The image was replaced with an understated analogue earlier this month.

“To get started, just send us an anonymous Gmail address via the form below,” read the emoji-laden text. “ Next, within a few days, you will receive an email from us that will fully explain the next steps,” it continued.

The Google form further beckoned those in Iran and the Iranian diaspora to sign up for the primary Telegram channel of the campaign, @bluemessageofficial, which currently has more than 2,200 subscribers. Prior to centralizing on a Google submission form, the “Blue Message” campaign encouraged defecting members of Iran’s security services to upload their biographies through the now-defunct website payameabi.com, whose URL was derived from the Romanized Persian translation of “Blue Message.”

“Blue Message is a recruitment center for esteemed personnel and employees of Iranian security and intelligence agencies,” read an early-April cache of the website. “We assure you that if you or one of your family members work in nuclear centers or power plants, you can cooperate with us with a high security factor,” stated the Blue Message website, adding that, “All you have to do is contact us through the secure form.”

The highest production value propaganda was published to the Blue Message Telegram and X accounts on January 28, in the form of an artistic, nearly two-minute portrayal of an Iranian nuclear engineer named Amir deciding to defect to Israel to give his newborn child a better life. “I am waiting for your call,” the engineer cried out to the Israeli government, after sending his defection message “into the heart of Tel Aviv.”


A composite of three images from a video published by the “Blue Message” campaign on January 28, depicting an Iranian nuclear engineer named Amir defecting to Israel to give his newborn child a better life.

Numerous X accounts parodied Amir’s description of his defection request, posting images of Iranian missiles ready to reach into “the heart of Tel Aviv.” Another X user replied that the video was a “Classic honeypot.”

Subsequent animations published by Blue Message during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June were less sophisticated. “Betrayal means forgetting what they did with the women of your country for 47 years,” read one of the three messages, alongside an animated photo of an Iranian woman. “Now is the right time to join us,” continued the call for defection, before linking to the central Google recruitment form, alongside a hashtag for Operation Rising Lion.

The Persian Blue Message X account went a step further on June 18, replying to its own posting of the animation with a message stating that “individuals who intend to collaborate” could, due to “special circumstances,” directly make use of the Mossad’s Persian-language contact form.

Blue Message the same day reshared a video posted by the apparent Persian-language account of Netanyahu digital advisor Hananya Naftali, which promised friendship between Israel and the people of Iran. The same account served as an outlet for Israeli military propaganda during Rising Lion and has, in recent days, promoted Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi’s proposed “Cyrus Accords” with Israel. Pictures of Pahlavi standing next to former Israeli intelligence minister Gila Gamliel, the current minister of science and technology, were widely shared from of a “post-regime” delegation which arrived in Israel earlier this month.

Perhaps the only previous reporting on the “Blue Message” campaign came in January from Al Manar, the news agency of the Lebanese political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah. Referring to the campaign’s X account as engaging in “Israeli Cyberwarfare,” the news agency wrote that, “This account is managed by Israeli intelligence with the aim of recruiting agents, and its center is Tel Aviv.” (Blue Message’s Arabic-language X account, @risalazarqa, has focused on recruitment in Lebanon.)

A Persian post in late July from the X account @Its_Ali_IR similarly provided a “serious warning” that, “The account below [@payameabi], with a Mossad link and Google form, is collecting information and inviting betrayal.” The previous day, X’s affiliated large language model, Grok, concluded that “This account (payameabi) appears to be part of an Israeli (Mossad) information campaign to invite Iranians to cooperate against the Islamic Republic regime.”

Numerous other accounts on X have expressed skepticism that Blue Message is affiliated with the Israeli government, suggesting that it could be a counterintelligence operation run by Iran.

But Blue Message would not be the first Israeli psychological warfare effort attempting to instigate a coup d’etat in Iran. The Washington Post obtained an audio recording of an Israeli operative threatening an Iranian general on June 13, at the start of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran. “I can advise you now, you have 12 hours to escape with your wife and child. Otherwise, you’re on our list right now,” the operative said, pressing the general to make a video denouncing the Iranian government.

“Hello dear Iranians everywhere in beautiful Iran!” opened the Telegram channel’s first message, on June 7, 2024, before providing detailed advice on how to request cooperation with the Israeli government through the same Google form.

“For greater security, it is recommended that loved ones who are in Iran activate their VPN before clicking on the form link,” continued the message.

Beyond the ever-challenging question of attribution, the effectiveness of the Blue Message campaign is also uncertain. The most recent post to the campaign’s Telegram channel, on July 15, provided subscribers with the “anonymous quiz” question of, “How many people do you think contacted us through the Blue Message campaign and secure form since the war?”

While the answer to the quiz question was not provided, Telegram showed that the question was viewed 804 times, receiving 117 answers.

A similar poll posted to X in October concluded with the embarrassing majority response that “no one” had contacted Blue Message. The poll’s replies were similarly filled with Persian insults, including that the Israel-allied campaign was wasting its money and that, “Israelis are child killers.”



https://thegrayzone.com/2025/09/08/isra ... -iranians/

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Fake news is growing at an alarming rate during Trump’s second term in office

Martin Jay

September 9, 2025

The Epstein case, the Trump assassination and Russian double agents being poisoned in the UK are all stories which read like spy novels. How much of these stories which we read about are actually true?

With the recent interview by prosecutors of Ghislaine Maxwell shocking some with its whitewash of Donald Trump with regards to the Epstein saga, one truth rings out for those who worry about the West’s democratic legitimacy. Fake news is unquestionably on the rise. For Maxwell to have struck a deal with Trump there must have been a media mind-set there all along which could distort a narrative so much that it makes Trump come out of the Epstein saga as innocent, despite the proven close proximity of these two men for decades.

It is believed that it was Maxwell who revealed details of a letter or note written to Epstein by Trump which included a drawing of a naked women. Trump, stupidly denied this and claimed he never did ‘doodles’ which only pushed a number of amateur hacks to dig up further examples of his doodles. But the jab at Trump was well thought out. It hit home as she was soon transferred to a lower security jail with better privileges and swiftly, it would seem, is being processed so that Trump can pardon her and she can leave the U.S.

The U.S. media, in reporting on the hours of interviews and the tome of a transcript which was leaked to them, are simply unable to do the most elementary thing that all journalists should do naturally when being offered information: be sceptical.

There is no trace of any scepticism though whatsoever which gives a clue just how journalists have sunk in the west as a profession which it was believed, once upon a time, was supposed to hold elites to account. What we are witnessing with the Maxwell interview is the most disingenuous pack of lies crafted specifically to clear Trump, Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton being packaged by journalists who know they are playing a nefarious role in re-writing the whole Epstein story. A whitewash on a grand scale which will probably work to get Trump, Clinton and Prince Andrew off the hook as it will be the media itself which repeats and endorses it over a longer period. It will stick.

Yet in recent times, such a scandal as Maxwell’s stunt, hardly stands alone. There have been a number of major media distortions to serve as a convenient support mechanism for elites both in the U.S. and in the UK.

Just recently in the US, fringe media outlets and their social media accounts have been looking at the so-called Trump assassination attempt in July 2024, questioning whether the President was actually shot at all or faked it using a trick mastered by Hollywood actors.

A retired police detective lieutenant named Duane Lee Proctor alleged U.S. President Donald Trump applied fake blood from a “blood capsule” during the assassination attempt that famously bloodied his ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

It’s hardly surprising the shooting has stirred such conspiracy theories though given the sheer level of media manipulation Trump is capable of and, perhaps also importantly, the willingness for big media to comply with the narrative offered.

Perhaps even more surprising, however, is the role of major news wire services who, over the decades have shamefully become voice pieces for western leaders and governments, abandoning their once revered role of holding the same to account in preference to being part of their PR apparatus. Associated Press, a major U.S. newswire which is so bad that it literally begs for money on its website homepage, last year was very quick to dismiss speculation and “false claims” just 4 days after the shooting yet oddly was unable to ask any questions that the most amateur sleuth might be tempted to ask about the whole incident, like, why was the shooter killed and not wounded by FBI snipers? Or even why FBI snipers already had their rifle crosshairs already on Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old nursing-home employee from suburban Pittsburgh and were apparently waiting for him to shoot first before they opened up?

The once credible AP news agency has fallen so much, that it’s hardly a shadow of its former self. A similar story can be told for two other global news wholesalers it competes with – Agence France Press (which is actually owned by the French state) and the once legendary Reuters.

Reuters recently made the news for its alarming and abysmal servitude to Israel when the IDF just recently shot one of its cameramen. Yet rather than actually report the basic facts, Reuters preferred to report directly from IDF media handlers replicating the fake news that they had prepared which claimed that it was a “Hamas camera” they had hit. This shameful example of supporting Israel and its fake news campaign was noted by many around the world leading even some journalists who had worked for Reuters to resign in protest, like Canadian Valerie Zink who actually went further and accused the news agency of actually assisting the IDF to murder well over 200 Gaza journalists.

Big media simply cannot be trusted to report the truth any more as they have sold their soul to huge institutions which can pay their bills and keep them in the game. Reuters, AFP and AP are no longer doing journalism by any stretch of the imagination and are desperate to take cash from anywhere they can find it to survive. Outfits like AP have downsized their international bureaus so much in recent years and brought in a new generation of younger, cheaper journalists to cope with lost subscriptions from clients who no longer rate them and want their dispatches. AP’s bureau in Beirut in recent years has shrunk so much in size that it can no longer even hold its archive of video tapes while a younger, cheaper ‘bureau chief’ was brought in whose journalistic credentials included sunbathing on a roof in northern Syria during the war and being a closet Hezbollah sympathiser.

In some cases, it is the newswires whose role seems to be to echo the narrative already provided by larger, local news outlets who know they are complicit in manufactured consent when reporting in a big story, which has numerous political dimensions.

AP is so bad, that in huge stories around the world it appears at best to simply copy/paste the narrative of national newspapers, perhaps explaining why the news organisation has had to downsize so dramatically. In May 2018, it would appear that it did precisely this in how it reported on the story of two Russian spies who had defected to the UK and were, so the story goes, poisoned by President Putin of Russia, red in tooth and claw over their betrayal.

The truth is even more sensational. According to a recent in-depth report by an American academic, the British public have been deceived entirely in how the case of Sergei and Yulia Skripal was reported. Jeremy Kuzmarov PhD, a respected academic well connected to the U.S. intelligence community, claims that the entire Skripal story is a major hoax, assisted by big media. The claim that the Skripals were poisoned by Putin’s agents, says Kuzmarov, is entirely false given that Sergei Skripal was too low a grade intelligence officer and only had a decade-old spy telephone directory to offer the British when he defected. Even reports of the Russian nerve agent Novichok being used is hilariously erroneous given that it normally kills people outright within minutes.

What AP, Reuters, AFP and all of the British press failed to notice was the somewhat oddly placed location of where the Skripals had been relocated to – Salisbury, a town in the west of England which just so happened to also have a British secret nerve agent laboratory just down the road to where they lived. Kuzmarov claims that in fact, it was the British themselves who tried to murder the Skripals using their own nerve agent, after they discovered that Skripal was actually a triple agent, feeding Russia with scraps of intel from the UK. The deception almost reads like a spy novel but its genius was its simplicity and the reprehensible role of press of course. His death from poisoning they could effortlessly blame on the Russians while a phalanx of British journalists working for the nationals would happily conspire to get the story straight – an operation the author claims was designed to shore up anti-Russian hate, four years before Putin ‘invaded’ Ukraine after NATO and the EU made it their puppet state on Russia’s border.

Whether it’s Trump’s links to the Epstein honey trap blackmail racket or his assassination, the Ukraine war or Putin’s agents’ attempted murder, big media has proved that it has no connection any more with facts as its business model has changed so dramatically and new people have been shipped in to work a different angle. The decline in governance and the inevitable fall of western economies can only mean more fake news is on the way.

But we can also be hugely sceptical about intelligence agencies whose trade is their treachery and who have a neat way of dealing with assets that have become liabilities.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... in-office/

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When You Try To Remove A Piece Of Art And Accidentally Make It Better

British judges have been harsh in their actions against pro-Palestinian protesters.

Banksy the artist pointed to this with a mural at a wall of the Royal Courts of Justice.



The mural in more detail.



As Banksy's art accused the British government to censor too much, said government responded by censoring Banksy.

New Banksy showing a judge hitting a protester with his gavel is COVERED UP by security guards after it is sprayed on Royal Courts of Justice - Daily Mail, Sep 8 2025

Attempts were made to remove the mural.



But what is left now is still sufficient, if not stronger, in making the point.



Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook - 16:19 UTC · Sep 10, 2025
Scrubbing the new Banksy mural from the Royal Courts of Justice is clearly insufficient.

Time to proscribe Banksy – and charge and jail anyone who retweets his mural under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act.

A picture of the original mural with a transparent background can be used to make stickers, backgrounds or other stuff.



Posted by b on September 11, 2025 at 10:05 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/09/w ... .html#more

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The Killing Of An American Fascist
Nate Bear
Sep 12, 2025



You’re probably bored of all the Charlie Kirk takes. Well too bad. Because as a person with a substack I am a TAKE MERCHANT at heart and I do not pretend otherwise.

So here is my take.

Charlie Kirk was a little fascist prick, there is no necessity in civil society for little fascist pricks to feel safe and the exhortations to feel sympathy for him and his family are FUNDAMENTALLY WEAK, LIBERAL AND ISRAELI IN CHARACTER.

It was expected that the American right would melt down over it. But we’ve had statements from the good and the fucking great of western centrism, from Starmer to Carney to Albanese, about the DEATH OF A NEO-NAZI PODCASTER AND PROPAGANDIST.

Of course we also had statements from Netanyahu and Ben Gvir because Kirk was an Islamophobic cheerleader for Israeli genocide and I don’t for a second believe this was some kind of 5D chess Mossad hit as conspiracy-heads are pondering.

The media also decided this was one of the most consequential things to have happened in years, news programmes in America, Australia and the UK quickly churning out Charlie Kirk themed broadcasts and deep-dives.

THE BBC NEWS HAD A CHARLIE KIRK SPECIAL.

What the fuck is going on?

I’ve lived in the US and have some friends and family there, but as a non-American I would have struggled to pick Charlie Kirk out of a line-up, my knowledge of him a smudge in the corner of my brain. If you’d have pushed me I’d probably have said he’s one of the MAGA cunts who comprises America’s neofascist youth blob. And I would have been right. But most people are not as online as me. Most people outside of America didn’t know the name Charlie Kirk. I suspect a good chunk inside America wouldn’t have either.

But now we all know his name. And this is a less than subtle signal about who, and what, western media demand we care about.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more minutes and column inches have been dedicated to Charlie fucking Kirk in 36 hours than to the entirety of the Gaza holocaust. I can guarantee more people know Charlie Kirk is dead than know Israel evaporated the prime minister of Yemen last week. Indeed the news of Israel eradicating a prime minister and almost the entirety of Yemen’s civilian government was barely a footnote in the same media now CANONISING A NEO-NAZI.

There was a school shooting in America THE VERY SAME DAY Kirk was turned into a human water feature that most people wouldn’t have heard about. A shooting Charlie Kirk would have enthusiastically defended as the price of gun ownership. Well in the end he became the statistic he argued for.

And the liberal condemnations. The ‘this is not who we are’ statements. The decrying of ‘political violence.’ Well fuck me. Others have said it much better, but Jesus Christ, do me a fucking FAVOUR. AMERICA IS POLITICAL VIOLENCE! It was born in it, is sustained by it and carries it out casually every single day of the fucking week. These moments always reveal the delusional esteem Americans hold themselves in. America just never wants to own its shit.

You’ll also probably have seen the takes worrying about what this is going to portend, the pretext this provides for X, Y, Z, about how things might now break apart.

One, all the bad things people are saying can now happen, from the expansion of the surveillance state to clamping down on social media to rounding up regime critics, are already happening.

Two, only a fascist culture worries that the death of a fascist will rupture the culture.

Only a fascist culture would dedicate so much air time to the death of a fascist while that culture arms a genocide.

Only a fascist culture produces a Charlie Kirk.

And he was a fascist. This knob-end hated everyone. Blacks, browns, trans, gays, Muslims, women. He loved whites with good genetic stock, genocides and school shootings. He said blacks couldn’t fly planes and things were better during slavery. He said no one should be protected in a pandemic. He started a ‘watchlist’ of academics that led to harassment from his acolytes, leaving a good number of his targets fearing for their lives. He said empathy was a mortal sin underpinning society’s problems. Whether he knew it or not, he was practically begging to be opened up.

And this point - whether he knew it or not - brings me to another. The game, the grift and the brand.

How much of what Kirk said was truly sincere and how much was just designed to build a political-cultural brand, only he knows. Knew.

And this is where we get to another of the reasons for the outpouring of liberal angst. Opinion as brand. Edgelord as media company. Polemicist as political influencer.

A simping New York Times piece eulogising Kirk written by cultural lib-in-chief Ezra Klein contained the blindingly revealing line: I envied what he built.

Liberals looked upon Kirk approvingly because he had located the holy grail: how to leverage the tools of new media to be an American changemaker. Liberal media types are desperate to figure this out. They were envious that Kirk had. Klein admits as much. Because for liberals there are no real principles, no real fights for justice, no revolutionary transformations. There is only THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS. And in this cutthroat marketplace, the winner takes all. It deeply wounds them that anyone, even a Nazi, should therefore lose to an assassin instead of an argument.

That could have been me, they think.

But sometimes Nazis get killed.

We’ve got major problems as a global society. Imperialism, wars, genocides, the death of public health, ecological collapse, the rise of fascism. Kirk was not helping any of this. On the contrary. He was the rise of fascism. Corrosive influences on civil society shouldn’t be graced with the presumption of safety. Speech should be free. The consequences of that speech can’t be assumed as such, especially when that speech is racist and fascist. And especially when it organises politically.

(If he was even killed for that reason. Some have suggested it was an internecine factional white supremacist thing. Always possible).

So this is my Charlie Kirk take.

He took up zero amounts of my emotional energy prior to the day he died, and he will now take up zero amounts moving forward.

But what he revealed was worth reacting to.

Because what he revealed was a political and media culture, from the liberals to the right, that looks and smells a lot like fascism.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-killi ... an-fascist

[blindpig]

Top US firm ends contract with Israel to whitewash Gaza war crimes

Tel Aviv significantly increased its propaganda budget this year in an effort to reverse declining popular support in the west for its genocide in Gaza

News Desk

SEP 17, 2025


(Photo Credit: SKDK)

US public affairs giant SKDK has ended a $600,000 contract with the Israeli government that “promoted Israel’s perspective” about the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, according to POLITICO.

“SKDK stopped this work on Aug. 31 and has begun the process of de-registering,” a spokesperson for SKDK told the DC-based magazine, declining to comment on the reasons why the contract was cut short early, saying only that the work “had run its course.”

According to POLITICO, the contract between Tel Aviv and SKDK was expected to run until March 2026.

The announcement followed a report by Sludge on 15 September that said the firm was involved in a bot program to boost pro-Israel content online.

“The contract, worth $600,000 from April 2025 through March 2026, also tasks SKDK with coaching Israeli civil society spokespeople for on-camera appearances, testing the effectiveness of social media influencers, and arranging tailored outreach to journalists at outlets including BBC, CNN, Fox, and the Associated Press to secure favorable coverage,” the Sludge report details.

However, SKDK and its parent company, Stagwell, denied this, insisting their work was limited to media relations. “Our work focused solely on media relations and nothing else,” the SKDK spokesperson told POLITICO.

An investigation by MintPress News in July revealed that Israel has spent millions of dollars per day on an expansive advertising campaign across YouTube, aimed at shifting European public opinion in support of its genocide and its unprovoked war against Iran.

In May 2024, Al-Jazeera found that Israel was using AI-powered “superbots” to target pro-Palestinian posts on social media, quickly replying with pro-Israel messages and amplifying specific narratives.

Since the start of its ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, the Israeli government has boosted its foreign PR budget by more than 2,000 percent for what’s officially known as “public diplomacy,” or hasbara in Hebrew.

Israel's massive hike in pro-genocide propaganda came as a response to dwindling popular support across western nations. According to a Gallup poll published in July, only 32 percent of the US population said they support Israel's actions in Gaza.

https://thecradle.co/articles/top-us-fi ... war-crimes

[blindpig]

Conflict Grifters And Counter-Hegemony
Nate Bear
Sep 17, 2025

In my last post about the killing of Charlie Kirk I said I’d written as much as I wanted to about him and he would now take up zero amounts of my emotional energy going forward. I lied. But in my defence, I didn’t know at the time I was lying. And I blame Nancy Fraser.

Nancy Fraser is the author of The Old Is Dying And The New Cannot Be Born, and this week I started reading it again after not picking it up for a few years. I’m compelled to come back to Kirk and specifically the reaction to his death, because in her book Fraser illuminates a dynamic that is clearly at play in the martyrdom narrative being constructed around Kirk.

Fraser explains how a central component of hegemony - the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural - is the politics of recognition. She defines this as a general sense for how society apportions respect and esteem to individuals and identity groupings. Respect and esteem, she says, are essential normative components out of which hegemonies are constructed.

In practice this simply means that a common set of ideas and practices about fairness, respect and rights sit at the centre of our shared cultural understanding. For example, we agree, broadly, that marginalising people who are openly racist is an important societal firewall. Because we don’t want society run by racists. We agree that a person’s gender, race, religion or sexual orientation shouldn’t affect their public standing or life chances. Because we don’t want bigots to run society. We extend legal protections to a broad range of identities, from gay people to immigrants, because we want the engine of society, in broad terms, to be fairness, not bigotry.

Now, these ideas and practices can break down under certain pressures, both legal and political, but they are broadly held as correct, aspirational and worth protecting. They are, in essence, the common cultural glue that holds together a liberal society. But this glue is starting to lose its power. It is starting to flake away. And conflict grifters like Charlie Kirk have squirreled into the cracks.

By espousing openly racist and bigoted views, these grifters challenge the politics of recognition that underpin liberal society. And they do it for this reason. They farm conflict for clicks, they target liberals for the likes. Because, and this is critical to understand, they have no interest in channelling the rage of their audience towards an analysis of the structural economic forces pressing down on their lives. They have no interest in elucidating the component parts of a neoliberal economics that leaves people angry and seeking scapegoats for their declining material conditions. They have no interest in a class-based approach and analysis to the problems of society.

Conflict grifters don’t farm outrage in spite of the economic settlement that neoliberalism has left us with, they do it as a consequence. The wreckage left by neoliberalism has provided the Charlie Kirks of this world the perfect platform to scapegoat identity groupings and leverage the politics of recognition in the name of (white) nationalist renewal. By fuelling the collapse of material conditions, neoliberalism has provided conflict grifters with the perfect audience and platform to get rich and famous by playing the bigot and claiming free speech.

And so to the reaction.

What we're watching are attempts by the counterhegemonic bloc, loosely defined as the white nationalist renewal bloc, to create a new hegemonic recognition norm. The fawning reaction. The demands to venerate Kirk. His putative positioning as a free speech martyr. The goal is to re-make ideas of respect and esteem. If a man that any decent civil society should ostracise can instead be made into a figure worthy of reverence, a new hegemonic recognition norm is established. In addition to this, making the death of a fascist something to lament under the auspices of free speech raises the quality of the arguments made not just by the dead fascist but by the living ones too.

All of sudden, outrageous ideas are normalised.

This is hegemony in construction.

But this isn’t just a Charlie Kirk thing. Attempts to construct and embed a new, nastier and more bigoted politics of recognition, as an attempt to influence policies and political outcomes, are underway across the west.

Look at Gaza. We’ve been instructed, literally at times under threat of arrest, to view genocide as the norm, to grant respect and esteem to the people doing a genocide, not to their victims.

Look at immigration. The tone of the debate, from the US, to the UK to the EU has turned increasingly hateful. An average Facebook post about the death of immigrants in the English Channel, in the Mediterranean or at the US border is now routinely met with thousands of laughing emojis and openly racist statements in the comments.

There are dozens and dozens of Instagram accounts with millions of followers now trading in casual racism, white supremacy and bigotry against groups considered woke or left-wing.

Firewalls are being breached.

Previously agreed standards of civility are breaking down.

And these efforts to construct a new politics of recognition are bleeding and have bled into politics, most obviously with Donald Trump and his cabinet of conflict grifting podcasters.

Which is why, despite some criticism, I stand by my article last week de-canonising Charlie Kirk. Because to do anything other than call him a fascist prick undeserving of our sympathy would help fuel the new hegemonic norms that would further an agenda of bigotry and harm.

The biggest lie of this whole affair is that it is all just a question of free speech.

It is in fact a question of norms, and attempts to create new, more hateful ones.

Anyone who cares about a decent future should see through this effort and thoroughly reject it.

Anyway, you should really read Fraser’s book.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/conflict- ... r-hegemony

*****

Let's reprise that song for Charlie:



If the shoe fits, wear it.

*******



Assaults On Free Speech Go Into Hyperdrive After Charlie Kirk Killing

When you see me refusing to play along with the campaign to canonize Charlie Kirk or respect the emotional hysteria around his killing, this is the main reason why.

Caitlin Johnstone
September 18, 2025

It’s amazing how aggressively free speech in the United States is being torn apart in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing.

Jimmy Kimmel was fired after President Trump’s FCC threatened ABC when the late night comic suggested that Kirk’s killer was a Trumper. I personally dislike Kimmel, but this is about as naked a government assault on free expression as you could possibly imagine.

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil has been ordered deported to Syria or Algeria after the Trump administration targeted him for political speech critical of Israel.

Trump has brokered a deal allowing TikTok to be purchased by a consortium that includes his billionaire buddies Larry Ellison and Marc Andreesen. US officials have acknowledged that Washington’s push to grab control of TikTok was because of the opposition to the Gaza holocaust that was circulating on the platform.


Oracle co-founder Ellison is a fanatical Zionist oligarch who has expressed support for the idea of a massive surveillance network to control all of society, and his son David just purchased Paramount, which owns CBS News. The younger Ellison has reportedly installed pro-Israel propagandist Bari Weiss to a senior leadership position within the network.

Trump says he has asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into bringing “criminal RICO charges” against Code Pink activists who chanted anti-genocide slogans at him while he was dining at a restaurant. Like pro-Palestine demonstrators are mafia kingpins or something.

Bondi said during a podcast that the Trump administration is going to start prosecuting “hate speech” against conservatives, alleging that such speech was responsible for Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

When asked by the press about Bondi’s comments, Trump said “We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe I’ll come after ABC.” Again, ABC was the network Jimmy Kimmel was fired from.

Trump henchman Stephen Miller said on a podcast that the White House is going to start targeting leftist “terrorist networks”, claiming on no basis whatsoever that Kirk’s assassination was the fault of a “vast domestic terror movement” which foments the kind of violence which led to Kirk’s death. Trump himself said that “a lot of people that you would traditionally say are on the left … [are] already under investigation,” and that he plans to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Vice President JD Vance has publicly been encouraging Trump supporters to try to get ordinary members of the public fired for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk, saying, “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

Trump’s Truth Social account recently shared a video calling for state censorship of media outlets and online influencers who share “propaganda”, falsely framing this authoritarian notion as a reboot of the Smith-Mundt Act and suggesting that it should be called the “Charlie Kirk Act”.

For chanting at him and inflicting “harm and terror” on his dinner, Trump and his Deputy Attorney General say they can charge activists with RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) crimes. All week, the administration has floated designating activist groups as

When you see me refusing to play along with the campaign to canonize Charlie Kirk or respect the emotional hysteria around his killing, this is the main reason why. His death is already being used to manufacture consent for sweeping acts of tyranny, and it was clear from day one that it would be.

The empire managers are always seeking excuses to suppress free speech, crush the left, and stomp out opposition to Zionism and the US war machine. They’ll use any chance they get to advance these goals, which are all ultimately about expanding power and control.

Many pre-existing agendas are being shoved forward by those in power, as always happens when emotions run hot over a traumatic event. I’ve said it many times before and I’ll surely say it many times again: it’s precisely when we are most tempted to abandon rationality and play along with the emotionality of the moment that we need to be thinking most clearly and critically.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/09 ... k-killing/

******

Colonization of the Mind
September 17, 2025


Colonization of the Mind - The Means, Roots, and Global Perils of U.S. Cognitive Warfare. Photo: Substack.

By S.L. Kanthan – Sep 14, 2025

The Means, Roots, and Global Perils of U.S. Cognitive Warfare (White Paper from China)

Chinese scholars have recently published an excellent white paper on the colonization of the mind by the US. It’s a long paper — 36 pages. So, I have tried to summarize the paper by copy-pasting some key points here. Here are a three links for the original paper in different formats: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3. Enjoy!


Excerpts from the paper:
Since World War II, particularly after the end of the Cold War, by leveraging its global supremacy in political, economic, military, and technological might, the United States has been exporting its ideology worldwide in an attempt to capture the minds of nations with American values, reshape peoples’ conceptions, and create philosophical dependence on an American-centric worldview.

“The critical question for the United States is not whether it will start the next century as the superpower with the largest supply of resources, but to what extent it will be able to control the political environment and get other countries to do what it wants” — Joseph Nye.

“Reinforcing American culture’s position as the ‘exemplar’ for all nations is an indispensable strategy for maintaining U.S. hegemony” — Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The United States discovered that relying solely on “hard power” in the forms of political domination, economic control, military deterrence, among others, could not establish or sustain a lasting and extensive colonial rule; instead, employing “soft power” such as culture and values would enable it to reap higher colonial rewards at lower costs.

Compelling global “voluntary” compliance and subservience under a sentimental veil — this is the U.S. style of “mind colonization.”

“The Four Freedoms” proposed by President Roosevelt became the theoretical cornerstone of the international human rights system. The United States’ ideological exportation during this period laid the historical groundwork for its wholesale pursuit of mind colonization in the decades that followed.

As one of the primary architects of the post- war international order, the United States has, on the one hand, been exporting its political and economic systems and American values like “democracy” and “freedom”, while on the other hand, purposefully and consciously deconstructing non-American ideologies and suppressing the indigenous cultures of other countries in a bid to foster global philosophical dependence and obedience. By resorting to an incessant stream of double-sided ploys of expansive construction and destructive deconstruction, the U.S. has accomplished much more than any former colonial empire had in attempting to colonize the mind.

The U.S. has leveraged control over new technological platforms and cutting- edge cognitive technologies to tighten its ideological governance of social media. Under pretexts such as “countering disinformation” and “countering foreign influence”, it manipulates information flows on social platforms to dominate global perception-shaping.

If U.S. hegemonic dominance on the world’s political, economic, and military scenes serves as the “hard prerequisites” for its ideological colonization, then the enabling conditions in language and culture, discourse narratives, mass media, and academic research constitute its “soft foundation”.

In carrying out its activities to colonize the mind, the U.S. wears black, white, gray, and other “masks” at different times, flexibly blending different “hues” to camouflage itself according to contextual needs and situations.

White propaganda. This constitutes the most overt dimension of American colonization of the mind, operating through public, transparent, and officially endorsed channels to disseminate publicly verifiable information designed to shape a positive national image and promote its values. (My comment: State Department, Voice of America, scholarships like Fulbright etc.)

Black propaganda represents the most covert, deceptive, and aggressive facet of mind colonization. Typically executed by intelligence and military agencies under strict secrecy, its core characteristic is clandestine operations-including but not limited to disinformation campaigns, intelligence gathering, and cyber-attacks.

Gray propaganda is conducted indirectly by the U.S. government through third-party entities such as corporations and NGOs to evade official accountability while creating the illusion of “non-governmental spontaneity”. Its objective is to covertly influence public opinion, shape political agendas, or support specific groups in target countries-all while allowing the U.S. to maintain plausible deniability.

“The distribution of languages in the world has reflected the distribution of power in the world” — Samuel P. Huntington. Following World War II, the U.S., on the strength of its economic, military, technological, and popular cultural dominance, vigorously promoted English worldwide, further elevating its status as the global lingua franca.

The U.S. systematically glorifies itself while energetically demonizing others, creating artificial binaries like “democracy vs. dictatorship”, “freedom vs. authoritarian- ism”, “market economies vs. non- market economies”, and “counter-terrorism states vs state sponsors of terrorism”.

He who controls the valves of information flows commands the initiative in shaping perceptions.

Today, the U.S. maintains an iron grip on global information and dissemination channels and platforms through its possession of numerous news agencies, powerful multinational media conglomerates, internet- based social media platforms, and a host of new tech giants. In the digital age, by leveraging platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), and YouTube, the U.S. has achieved a manipulation of public opinions characterized by “wherever algorithms and audience traffic go, there go the agenda and perceptions”.

“The Americanization of knowledge and university education sustains an Americanized global society, which in turn reinforces U.S. dominance in global political economy, cultural life, and military affairs through a mutually reinforcing process” — Oxford University professor Simon Marginson.

The United States’ drive to colonize the mind is designed to consolidate U.S. cultural hegemony, thereby reinforcing its political dominance and preserving its economic privileges.

As a mind colonizer, the U.S. relentlessly glorifies itself, cloaking its values in a guise of “universality” — portraying its national character as something “universal” and repackaging national interests as “international morality”, ultimately disguising cultural colonization as “value leadership”. The U.S. presents itself as the practitioner, spokesperson, and defender of noble values, all to consolidate its central position in the ideological-cultural sphere and cultivate “cognitive dependence” on the U.S.

The fundamental purpose of America’s ideological manipulation and cognitive shaping is to turn rules that serve U.S. interests into a universally accepted international system and order and, in this process, ensure its permanent enjoyment of various privileges.

The U.S. has consistently attempted to turn the UN and the international system it represents into tools for maintaining Western dominance, especially U.S. global hegemony.

In recent years, with the collective rise of the Global South, the U.S. has found this system increasingly restrictive to its privileges. It thus promotes “exceptionalism” and has withdrawn from international agencies to “extricate” itself from common rules that are universally observed by the international community.

Meanwhile, it has come up with the “America First” doctrine to put U.S. interests directly before those of other countries. More over, by extending its practice of “long- arm jurisdiction”, the U.S. is flagrantly placing its domestic laws above international law.

In its history, the U.S. repeatedly used “mind colonization” to pave the way for its aggression and plundering while cloaking these acts in “legitimacy”.

In the late 19th century, the Hearst media group echoed U.S. expansionist ambitions by playing up Spanish “atrocities” in Cuba and creating public opinion in support of the U.S. launching of the Spanish-American War and its subsequent grabbing of Caribbean markets.

During the 1970s, the U.S. used its media to propagate the “Arab oil weapon threat” narrative to help establish the petrodollar system that tied dollar hegemony to global energy trade.

In 2019, U.S.-funded NGOs incited public unrest in Bolivia, wielding the sword of “democracy” to overthrow a leftist government — a move strategically targeting the country’s largest lithium reserves in the world.

Today, the U.S., by continuing to employ this “public opinion first” strategy, has been sup- pressing Chinese enterprises like Huawei and TikTok in the name of “national security”.

All these are none other than moves to clear obstacles for American corporations to grab global markets.

From the two World Wars to the 1960s, the U.S. mainly employed newspapers and radio to “tell the American story to the world”. It established external publicity media mouthpieces such as Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Europe to launch a long-term propaganda war against the Socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.

Then, the “information control and cognition” paradigm gradually replaced the “propaganda and cognition” model to become the new mainstream communication theory. Theories such as social psychology, game theory, and perceptual phenomenology were introduced into the analysis of international strategic situations and political decision-making processes.



Cognitive Molding and “Cognition Warfare”
Shaping audiences’ emotions, attitudes, and behaviors has long been an important objective in U.S. journalism, advertising, propaganda, and other related fields. The concept of “cognitive warfare” had emerged as early as the 1990s.

However, it wasn’t until the early 21st century, with breakthroughs in technological research in such fields as psychological science, neuroscience, brain science, and artificial intelligence, and other cutting-edge technologies, that “shaping cognition” became a truly relevant strategic objective.

In 2022, the National Security Strategy report raised cognitive warfare to strategic importance on par with physical combat, which marked the complete independence of the cognitive domain. In 2023, multiple congressional reports re- focused on cognitive security.

Thus, technology-driven cognitive manipulation became a new tactic for mind colonization by the United States.

A series of American values like capitalist democracy, freedom, equality, human rights, along with individualism, egoism, materialism, and hedonism, constitute the crux of the U.S. drive to colonize the mind.

Backed by immense financial power, American media conglomerates have gained end-to-end control over
the entire chain-from news gathering, content production, and distribution to advertising and marketing. Their holdings of media resources span television, newspapers, radio, print, film, videos, and streaming platforms, enjoying access to a huge group of global users.

The U.S. advantage in dissemination is further embodied in its control over internet- based media, platforms, and companies. By controlling critical resources such as global internet root servers and domain names, the U.S. dominates the overall operation of the World Wide Web. Through legislative and many other means, the U.S. government keeps a tight grip on domestic internet tech giants and wields unchecked power over a huge amount of online information. Platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube, and Instagram — the world’s most popular social media platforms — provide new space and facility for the U.S. to construct information cocoons and shape user perceptions through algorithms and lies.

“The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment” — Elmer Davis, head of the U.S. Office of War Information during WWII.

In Allied victors like France and Britain, the US forced open local film markets as a condition for financial aid, helping Hollywood films to dominate these markets. For as long as several decades thereafter, American films- commanding over 70% of the global market-served as an important means to colonize the mind.

Countless films centering on “heroism” crafted an image of the U.S. as the “righteous defender of the world order” and cultivated awe for American military power.

After 9/11, Hollywood once again became a powerful propaganda tool for the U.S. war on terror, with the industry and military forming a mutually beneficial military-entertainment complex and each party partaking of what it needs.

With the advancement of digital technology, video games have also become an important tool for manipulating the mind. The America’s Army game series, developed under the guidance of the U.S. military with over $30 million of funding, simulates realistic combat as the core game and has attracted about 20 million players worldwide.

To entrench American ideology worldwide, the United States leverages its leading position across academic disciplines to propagate Western knowledge systems and cultural values among intellectual elites in various countries and regions through education, training, academic exchanges, research funding, and faculty deployments.

It aims to cultivate a vast, globally dispersed “pro-American” contingent among elite circles globally.

Early on, the U.S. had positioned cultural exchange as the “fourth dimension of foreign policy”. Since 1948, the U.S. government has invested heavily in the Fulbright Program — viewed as a “model investment in long-term U.S. national interests” — sponsoring college students, scholars, cultural elites, and academic groups worldwide to study, visit, and research in America. By the late 20th century, the program had provided financial support to over 250,000 scholars from 140+ countries and regions.

Self-glorification and the vilification of others are the two most commonly seen sets of narratives in the U.S. efforts to colonize the mind.

Applying “double standards” to interpret and address international issues represents one of the most quintessential U.S. political strategies and serves as the most important narrative logic in its mind colonization endeavor.

From the use of radio waves and analog signals to the digital internet and now a new round of communication revolution led by artificial intelligence, the United States has consistently leveraged its monopoly over advanced communication technologies to rein- force its “soft power” with “hard power,” using its technological hegemony to advance its attempt to colonize the mind.

Riding on its monopoly in infrastructure, the U.S. selectively cuts or disrupts target countries’ channels of communication with the international community, creating a one- sided narrative environment in its favor, one that silences dissenting voices.

Faced with future competition, the U.S. is actively integrating cutting-edge cognitive science and technologies-such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology-into its strategic architecture for mind colonization.

In addition, the U.S. has frequently politicized, weaponized, and ideologized techno- logical issues, using “Chip Alliance”, “Clean Network Program”, etc. to construct exclusive technological “clubs” and entrench a new form of tech hegemony.

As American writer William Blum observes in Democracy: America’s Deadliest Export, since the end of World War II the United States has sought to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments and has brazenly interfered in the elections of at least 30 countries.

Out of its geopolitical and diplomatic needs, the United States often spreads political falsehoods and drives “cognitive wedges” between different interest groups — stirring up antagonism, inciting division, or engineering conflict to reap benefits, and even intervening directly to “discipline” those adversaries that refuse to fall in line.

Cultural Aphasia
Colonization of the mind means instilling blind confidence in U.S. culture around the globe, dismantling confidence in local cultures, dissolving the subjective cultures of target countries, eroding global civilization diversity, and exacerbating the antagonism and clash among civilizations.

Perennially impacted by American-style civilization, some developing countries have lost their national subjectivity and pride, suffering from rampant national nihilism. From the elite class to the general public, they imitate and even subsequently follow the U.S. and the West in every way, from thinking and ideas to food, clothing, housing, and transportation. This is the phenomenon of “post-colonial aphasia” as described by many scholars.

Conclusion: Breaking the Shackles of Mind Colonization and Promoting Inter-Civilization Exchanges and Mutual Learning

Independence of the mind is a prerequisite for independent development.
Cultural confidence is the foundation of national strength and prosperity.
Exchanges and mutual understanding are an effective instrument for inter-civilization coexistence.

https://orinocotribune.com/colonization-of-the-mind/

[blindpig]

Israel pays US influencers $7,000 per post to whitewash Gaza genocide: Report

Israeli officials describe social media as the 'eighth front' in their war to destroy Gaza and reshape West Asia

News Desk

OCT 2, 2025


(Photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO)

Israel is paying US social media influencers thousands of dollars per post to improve its image amid Tel Aviv’s efforts to destroy Gaza and starve its population, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft reported on 2 October.

Citing a document filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the institute wrote that, “influencers are likely being paid around $7,000 per post on social media such as TikTok and Instagram on behalf of Israel.”

The document showed payment invoices submitted by the public relations firm Bridges Partners to conduct a campaign known as the Esther Project. The invoices were submitted to Havas Media Group Germany – an international media group working for Israel.

The Esther Project is part of a broader effort to shape the public option that Israeli officials describe as the “eighth front” in its war against Gaza and neighboring states, including Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.

The invoices documented a sum of $900,000 to be used for “payments for influencers and production,” between June and November this year.

The document stated that payments were to be made to a group of 14–18 influencers to create content.

After subtracting administrative costs, an estimated $552,946 remained to pay the influencers between June and September of this year.

Bridges Partners expected the influencers to produce 75–90 posts in that time, meaning they were paid between $6,143 and $7,372 for each post.

The document did not detail which influencers are participating in the program, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a meeting last week gathering a number of young US influencers.


Bridges Partners describes its work as assisting with “promoting cultural interchange between the United States and Israel.” The firm was founded by Israeli consultants Yair Levi and Uri Steinberg in June 2025 in the US state of Delaware.

The Washington DC-based firm has employed Nadav Shtrauchler, a former major in the Israeli Army’s spokesperson unit, as well as Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a law firm that previously worked for the Israeli spyware company NSO Group.

Soon after its founding, Bridges Partners received “nearly $200,000 to recruit and coordinate US-based social media influencers,” the Times of Israel notes.

In a separate but related deal, the Israeli daily reports that Tel Aviv's government agreed to pay $1.5 million per month to Brad Parscale, a former campaign strategist for US President Donald Trump. Parscale, who registered his firm Clock Tower X LLC as a foreign agent for Israel, is being paid for “strategic communications” to combat anti-Semitism in the US.

The German firm Havas is also serving as intermediary between Israel and Parscale, whose firm plans to conduct SEO campaigns using the MarketBrew AI platform and efforts to shape outputs of GPT-based chatbots.

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-pa ... ide-report

[blindpig]

Larry Ellison's Spider Web

Stargate, CBS and CNN, TikTok, Marco Rubio, Tony Blair and Gaza!
Roger Boyd
Oct 03, 2025



Larry Ellison founded Oracle decades ago, and through that became a multi-billionaire. The latest estimate puts his net worth at US$344 billion, after he ramped Oracle stock with an utterly unbelievable deal with OpenAI to get Oracle stock that “AI” premium. Like so many of the new oligarchs that are as much stock pumpers and rentier monopolists as providers of any real beneficial products these days. Everything to keep the discourse of endless growth alive; without which their stock prices would be far, far lower.

With that kind of money, and with the great aid of the members of the US Supreme Court, Ellison can easily buy politicians. Previously Ellison had been the classic oligarch who donated to both political parties which are in reality two different wings of the oligarch-owned political machine. But in the past decade that changed. In 2016 he donated millions to the 2016 losing presidential campaign for presidency of Little Narco Rubio; now the US Secretary of State, who was vetted by Ellison for that position. In 2020 he hosted a fundraising dinner for Trump’s re-election campaign. He then poured tens of millions of dollars into the failed presidential campaign of Tim Scott.

He helped fund Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with Musk removing the Twitter ban on Trump, but did not take an active part in the 2024 presidential election. Then just after Trump’s inauguration he became part of the AI Stargate initiative with the CEO’s of OpenAI and Sofbank, announced in the Whitehouse with Trump. It is supposedly going to invest US$500 billion in AI infrastructure by 2029. Since then he has had very open and regular access to the president. In late September OpenAI announced five new data centre sites to be provided by Stargate, bringing Stargate to 7GW of planned capacity and US$400 billion plus of investments over the next three years. In reality, no one has a clue how such capacity can be built in the allotted time (it can’t) and how that massive amount of money will be raised (it won’t). Earlier in September, OpenAI signed a contract for US$300 billion worth of computing power over five years; and again no one has a clue how the data centre’s will be built in time and how the hell that amount of money will be raised. No worries, Oracle’s stock went up 30% in a day; massively adding to Ellison’s wealth. Its all part of the circular merry go round of AI bubble hype:



With stock prices being levitated by more and more unbelievable deals that assume US$1 trillion in financing and a slew of data centres that simply cannot be built in the time available. But that doesn’t stop the share prices of all involved being levitated; for now.

So now that Ellison has joined Musk in the stock-pumping with bullshit business, he also joined Musk in the media and political manipulation businesses. His son has recently purchased Paramount, that owns Paramount Pictures and CBS. Following on from his father’s true love of the Zionist regime (daddy Ellison’s parents are Jewish, and although he dropped the Jewishness he kept the Zionism), the son has installed a Zionist “ombudsman” at CBS and is about to make an uber-Zionist propagandist very rich and in editorial control of CBS. A bid for Warner Brothers Discovery is now rumoured, which owns CNN. With Larry himself now looking to also be a joint owner of the putative deal to spin off a TikTok USA, the Ellison family will very rapidly become an ultra neoliberal Zionist media baronial powerhouse. And all of the major social media platforms (Meta: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Threads; Alphabet: Google, YouTube; Snapchat: Snapchat; Advance Publications: Reddit; Amazon: Twitch; X Corp: X) will be owned/controlled either by Zionists or by someone who was reminded that he needs to be a dutiful Zionist (Musk). And CBS and CNN will be made even more into the propaganda arm of the Zionist regime and a US oligarchy that is moving hard right toward open techno-fascism.

But that is not enough for Larry! He also decided to buy ex British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) with GBP 270 million donated and pledged; massively increasing the resources of the TBI. In the 2010s Blair had sold himself to a Kazakh dictator for a measly GBP 16 million pounds; his money-grubbing has gone up in the world!

And lo and behold, the proposed neocolonial future of Gaza is based on a plan put forward by the “independent” TBI and Mr. Blair himself is being proposed as the neocolonial Viceroy of Gaza! And now as an advisor to Trump, Ellison is being touted as a “Shadow President”; Musk blew it and now Ellison has stepped in.

IN TRUMPWORLD, LARRY Ellison gets more credit than anyone else for operating in the shadows.

Over a drink earlier in Donald Trump’s second term, one of the president’s advisers described the Oracle cofounder, chairman, and chief technology officer to me as a literal “shadow president of the United States,” if not necessarily the shadow president.

And Mr. Blair is a big pusher of the new UK digital identity rollout:



And he has been shilling for Ellison’s business interests to get some nice juicy contracts from that:

Documents seen by The Mail on Sunday reveal the former prime minister urged Business Secretary Peter Kyle to consult a technology institute founded by his friend Larry Ellison in a private meeting last year.

Mr Ellison, the world’s second richest man, has donated or pledged a staggering £257million for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

He founded the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), a research centre in Oxford, and is chairman of tech giant Oracle, which has a £700million IT deal with four Whitehall departments.

Experts say Oracle is now in pole position to profit from plans to force millions of adults to sign up for a digital ID card.

Now Mr. Blair isn’t one to turn up any corrupt money-making opportunity using his old right wing Labour boys network. His son Euan, after earning a 2:1 honours degree from Bristol University incredibly got a US$100,000 scholarship for an MA at Yale! Euan was then able to create a startup, Multiverse, that has lost money every year while repeatedly receiving major funding; valuing Euan’s stake in the company at GBP 420 million. While also getting an MBE for “services to education”, after his company fed off the government subsidy and contracting trough. And which company will be providing the UK digital id app? Multiverse. Nothing like keeping corruption in the family.

Seems that Ellison is out-Musking Musk these days (and Blair is out-Clintoning the Clintons)! The Ellison spider web has certainly exploded in recent years! Say hello to a member of the small oligarch coterie that truly rules America; elections are nice but they are just for show. As is anti-trust legislation and “the constitution” when Supreme Court Judges can be bought for some luxury vacations and a few gifts worth all of a couple of million dollars; not even chump change to a multi-billionaire. And so many of those justices previously worked in private practices serving corporate entities and the rich; courtiers to the rich. It’s Back To The Future for the New Age of the Robber Barons!

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/larry- ... spider-web