Tag: propaganda

Israeli intel campaign used US comedian in effort to flip Iranian scientists

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.

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.

Keep reading

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

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.

Keep reading

Climate Change Group Increasingly Partnering With Mainstream Media

The separation between advocacy and unbiased, independent journalism at a network news operation is being called into question by CBS News’s use of a climate change group as a “partner” in its reporting.

The network has disclosed in recent weeks in both on-air and online reports its coordination with Climate Central, a nonprofit that calls itself “policy-neutral,” though it clearly promotes the notion that mankind is headed for certain disaster because of human impact on the environment.

Fox Digital reported:

CBS News has cited Climate Central research dozens of times since 2021, according to Grabien transcripts. But it wasn’t until July that the network began consistently referring to “our partners at Climate Central” on air.

Last month, CBS News published a story about melting glaciers that also aired on “Sunday Morning.” Ben Tracy was the correspondent on the segment, with his byline at the top of the article. A disclaimer at the bottom read, “Story produced by Chris Spinder, in partnership with Climate Central. Editor: Chris Jolly.”

However, according to Fox’s story on the practice, Tracy and Spinder no longer work for CBS News, but for Climate Central. Only Jolly is a network staffer, according to his LinkedIn page.

Climate Central’s website promotes its “Partnership Journalism” program, which it says contributes “guidance” to reporting and presenting “joint features” about climate to news outlets.

CBS is not its only partner. Fox says Climate Central’s website explains the “Partnership Journalism” program like this:

A partner outlet contributes local reporting, including field reporting, photography and some editing for a story. We contribute data and charts plus a science reporter and an editor. For a text story, we help craft a feature in a way that puts climate change in appropriate and accurate context. For broadcast media, we provide story and interview suggestions and help develop and review scripts. Climate Central’s researchers assist with fact-checking.

The nonprofit’s website says it has garnered more than 50,000 mentions in more than 170 countries with “[a]rticles, stories, and segments using Climate Central content to communicate climate change impacts and solutions reach local audiences nearly every day.”

The organization has been busy for nearly two decades disseminating climate change examples and theories that now routinely show up everywhere from network reporting to comments by local weather forecasters.

Keep reading

Military Pursues AI Systems To Suppress Online Dissent Abroad

The U.S. military wants artificial intelligence to do what human propagandists cannot: create and spread influence campaigns at internet speed while systematically suppressing opposition voices abroad, according to internal Pentagon documents obtained by The Intercept.

The classified wishlist reveals SOCOM’s ambition to deploy “agentic AI or multi-LLM agent systems” that can “influence foreign target audiences” and “suppress dissenting arguments” with minimal human oversight. The military branch seeks contractors who can provide automated systems that operate at unprecedented scale and speed.

“The information environment moves too fast for military remembers [sic] to adequately engage and influence an audience on the internet,” the document said.

“Having a program built to support our objectives can enable us to control narratives and influence audiences in real time.”

As reported by The Intercept, the proposed AI systems would extend far beyond simple content generation. SOCOM envisions technology that can “scrape the information environment, analyze the situation and respond with messages that are in line with MISO objectives.” More controversially, the systems would “suppress dissenting arguments” and “access profiles, networks, and systems of individuals or groups that are attempting to counter or discredit our messages.”

The Pentagon plans to use these capabilities for comprehensive social manipulation, creating “comprehensive models of entire societies to enable MISO planners to use these models to experiment or test various multiple scenarios.”

The systems would generate targeted messaging designed to “influence that specific individual or group” based on gathered intelligence.

SOCOM spokesperson Dan Lessard reportedly defended the initiative, declaring that “all AI-enabled capabilities are developed and employed under the Department of Defense’s Responsible AI framework, which ensures accountability and transparency by requiring human oversight and decision-making.”

The Pentagon’s move comes as adversaries deploy similar technology. Chinese firm GoLaxy has developed AI systems that can “reshape and influence public opinion on behalf of the Chinese government,” according to recent reporting by The New York Times. The company has “undertaken influence campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.”

Keep reading

The U.S. Should Be Skeptical about ‘Iran-Backed’ Militants

Israel carried out airstrikes on Thursday that killed the civilian political leaders of Yemen’s Houthi movement. Though they grossly violated international law, the bombings were nonetheless celebrated in Washington.

Corporate media like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported the strikes as a “symbolic and psychological blow” that demonstrated “improved Israeli intelligence” against the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors, while neocons like Mark Dubowitz of the mysteriously funded Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think tank, applauded the attack on the “Houthi-controlled terror leadership.”

But despite the “mission accomplished” attitude from Israel and its neoconservative loyalists in America, the attacks will likely do very little to stop the Houthis, whose campaigns reflect Yemen’s own history of resistance rather than Iranian control. The group remains extraordinarily independent, producing much of their own weaponry and pursuing a strategy driven by their own political grievances with Israel and the United States.

Their central grievance is the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide and famine currently being perpetrated against the Palestinians in Gaza, with whom the Houthis identify—because, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein explains, “what was done to Gaza was done to them.”

Before Israel set out to fulfill the demands of its ultra-nationalist politicians to “destroy all of Gaza’s infrastructure to its foundation” and “erase the Gaza strip from the Earth,” Yemen was the country considered to have the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with over 23 million people in need of humanitarian assistance by 2022.

Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, like Gaza’s today, has been entirely man made. More specifically, it has been perpetrated by Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel. They imposed a brutal blockade and bombing campaign that reportedly caused the deaths of nearly 377,000 people in Yemen between 2015 and 2021, more than 85,000 of whom were children who starved to death.

The Houthis’ identification with the Palestinians of Gaza is therefore neither rooted in religious “fundamentalism” nor in subservience to Tehran—it reflects a deep sense of solidarity forged through parallel suffering at the hands of U.S.-backed clients in the Middle East. This explains why, despite the assassination of its civilian leadership, the Houthis have vowed to “escalate [their] operations as long as Israel continues its policy of genocide and starvation.”

The corporate media largely ignores these motivations, obfuscating the political grievances of Israel’s enemies by recasting them as irrational and intractable. Treating the Houthis as mere Iranian proxies has about as much explanatory power—and serves the same propagandistic function—as George W. Bush’s claim that America suffered the 9/11 attacks because “they hate us for our freedoms.”

By erasing the role of U.S. military action on behalf of Israel in generating the very groups that threaten it, Israel and its American lobby are able to portray Houthi attacks as further evidence of a region-wide Iranian conspiracy to destroy Israel. This axis of resistance, the story goes, simply can’t be reasoned with and potentially threatens the United States as well, therefore requiring unlimited funds and unconditional support from American taxpayers.

As the Israeli government pushes President Donald Trump to attack its regional adversaries, Washington ought to be skeptical of Israel’s intelligence about them, especially regarding the purported threat posed by the so-called “Iran-backed” network of militant groups.

Keep reading

What Is JewBelong’s Deal?

I’m sure you’ve seen the hot-pink billboards. Failing that, you may have seen the hot-pink Instagram posts.

In case you haven’t: On top of a bright-pink background, white letters spell out phrases like, “This year, we didn’t need the Grinch to steal Christmas. The Hamas kids did that for him.” Or, “When your parents said ‘find yourself’ in college, they didn’t mean to find your inner terrorist.” They range from cliché but harmless—“Anyone who hates Jews clearly hasn’t tried my Bubby’s brisket”—to a bit menacing, with one since-deleted post reading, “Trust Me. If Israel Wanted to Commit Genocide in Gaza, It Could.” When I went to their website for this piece, I was greeted with a pink pop-up with white lettering that said, “We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jewish hate isn’t an overreaction.” OK!

The Instagram graphics, like their physical billboard counterparts, are the work of JewBelong. The nonprofit—founded by Archie Gottesman and Stacy Stuart, who worked together penning eye-catching ad campaigns for Manhattan Mini Storage—has existed for several years. As Fast Company reported in 2015, the organization hoped it would “take some of the stress and complexity out of Jewish life.” In the article, the two founders called their program Marketing Jewru, but by the next year, it was JewBelong.

“Let’s face it, Judaism can be a little/lot intimidating,” their website reads:

JewBelong is out to change that by helping you find the joy, meaning and relevance that Judaism has to offer. Our explanations and meaningful rituals are just the beginning. We exist for Jewish people, for people who aren’t Jewish but are part of a Jewish community, for anyone who has felt like a Jewish outsider, and especially for Disengaged Jews (DJs for short). That’s literally why our name/tagline is JewBelong: for when you feel you don’t! 

On its face, making Jewish life more accessible and welcoming is fairly unobjectionable (though there are certainly Jewish individuals who would object to the idea). And having a website that simply offers explanations of Jewish holidays isn’t harming anyone, and could even serve as a useful resource. (Other websites like My Jewish Learning do the same thing, albeit with less snark.)

From the start, though, two contradictions were baked into JewBelong’s mission.

The first is the question of why some Jews don’t feel they belong in a broader community of Jews, be it locally or globally. In 2015, Gottesman blamed Judaism’s marketing. Is that the issue? In 2016, writing in Haaretz, Rokhl Kafrissen suggested that the actual issues were the costs of raising children at all and in particular to having Jewish education and experiences (the ninth of JewBelong’s “New Ten Commandments” is to send children to Jewish summer camp and Hebrew school).

Kafrissen also points to Jewish philanthropists’ focus (and money spent) on fighting intermarriage and supporting Jewish continuity—traditionally understood as Jews marrying, giving birth to, and raising other Jews—instead of funding Jewish education. To that group, Kafrissen argues, ignorance about Judaism is all right so long as Jews marry and raise other Jews. (“Jewish grandchildren” is the second of JewBelong’s New Ten Commandments). To this, I would add that I have never interviewed a Jewish person who said they were checked out—excuse me, “disengaged”—because of marketing. But I have spoken to more than I can count who were treated as though they did not, in fact, belong because they were the product of intermarriage, or because they themselves were intermarried. And I doubt any of them would have felt like a bright billboard telling them they belong was an antidote to that.

Keep reading

AAP Received Tens of Millions in Federal Funding to Push Vaccines and Combat ‘Misinformation’

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which is suing U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and has called for the end to religious exemptions, received tens of millions of dollars in federal funding in a single year, according to public records.

AAP, which represents 67,000 pediatricians in the U.S., received $34,974,759 in government grants during the 2023 fiscal year, according to the organization’s most recent tax disclosure. The grants are itemized in the AAP’s single audit report for 2023-2024.

Documents show some of the money was used to advance childhood vaccination in the U.S. and abroad, target medical “misinformation” and “disinformation” online, develop a Regional Pediatric Pandemic Network, and highlight telehealth for children.

However, not all of the money could be tracked through public records.

The federal grants are in addition to financial contributions the AAP receives from several major pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, GSK, Merck, Moderna and Sanofi.

Sayer Ji, founder of GreenMedInfo and co-founder of Stand for Health Freedom, said the joint funding that the AAP receives from taxpayers and Big Pharma “reflects a troubling alignment between its policy positions and the interests of its largest funders — both federal agencies and pharmaceutical corporations.”

Keep reading

Changing Names Won’t Fix MSNBC’s Reputation As A Left-Wing Propaganda Machine

MSNBC may be undergoing a major rebranding, but its role as a left-wing propaganda operation is here to stay.

On Monday, the network announced that it will be transitioning to “My Source News Opinion World,” or “MS NOW” later this year. The name change comes as part of the outlet’s move to Versant, a new media company separate from NBCUniversal and NBC News that is expected to include the Golf Channel, CNBC, GolfNow, and SportsEngine.

These changes demonstrate our focus on “building our individual identity and vision for the future while laying a foundation for the continued growth and success of our businesses,” Versant CEO Mark Lazarus reportedly wrote in memo to network staff.

While it may be getting a new name and paint job (that are already receiving mockery online), the outlet seemingly has no plans to abandon its role as a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party. MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler all but confirmed as much in an internal memo obtained by NBC News, in which she wrote, “While our name will be changing, who we are and what we do will not.”

“Our commitment to our work and our audiences will not waiver from what the brand promise has been for three decades,” Kutler wrote. The network additionally confirmed in its announcement that the “same familiar and trusted hosts and journalists who make sense of what is happening in Washington, across the country, and around the world will still be here.”

In other words, MS NOW will be no different than its soon-to-be predecessor when it comes to spewing endless amounts of propaganda on behalf of the outlet’s Democrat allies.

This is hardly a shock, especially when considering the doozies the network and its “talent” have put out over the years.

This past spring, for example, MSNBC took part in a media-wide campaign fomenting fears that President Trump’s tariffs would immediately “turbocharg[e]” inflation and destroy the economy. Like many of their ill-fated predictions, they turned out to be wrong.

Not long before that, NBCUniversal (MSNBC’s current parent company) was forced to settle a $30 million defamation lawsuit involving MSNBC’s “familiar and trusted” personnel. As The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman reported, several of the network’s hosts (namely, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Nicolle Wallace) “falsely accused a Georgia doctor of unnecessarily — and without authorization — performing hysterectomies on illegal immigrants in an ICE facility.”

Keep reading

Creative Chaos: Inside The CIA’s Covert War To Topple The Syrian Government

For over a decade, the dominant Western narrative on the Syrian War has been simple: a peaceful uprising turned into a brutal civil war because of Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless crackdown on his own people.

But in Creative Chaos: Inside the CIA’s Covert War to Topple the Syrian Government, the Libertarian Institute’s latest book, William Van Wagenen methodically dismantles this mainstream version of events, exposing it as a convenient fiction crafted to justify one of the most disastrous regime change wars of the modern era.

His central thesis is clear: the war in Syria was not an organic revolution but a deliberate effort by Washington, Israel, and their regional partners to weaken Iran by toppling Assad’s government. 

And when peaceful protests were hijacked by Islamist militants, instead of helping restore stability, the US and its allies deliberately prevented Assad from crushing the insurgency—even as it became dominated by al-Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated groups.

Now, years later, the result is a fractured Syria, ruled by jihadist warlords and occupied by foreign powers, with Israel consolidating its hold over strategic territory.

How and why did this disaster for Syria’s people come to pass? And why were the non-interventionists who called out Washington’s lies always right about the war and its likely outcome?

Regime Change: The Blueprint for Syria’s Destruction

Van Wagenen carefully documents how regime change in Syria had been a goal of US foreign policy long before the Arab Spring. The Bush administration set the groundwork, but the Obama administration accelerated the effort, seeing it as a way to strike a blow against Iran without a direct war.

His research confirms that the US and its allies—including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Türkiye—actively supported and armed the so-called “moderate opposition,” despite overwhelming evidence that jihadists controlled the rebellion almost from the start.

Instead of letting the Assad government restore order, Western intelligence agencies funneled billions in arms, logistics, and training to extremist groups, ensuring the war would drag on.

The leaked 2012 email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton (which Van Wagenen references) makes this reality undeniable: “AQ [Al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

This stunning admission exposes the real nature of US policy in Syria: at the same time they fought them on the other side of the line in Iraq, Washington was directly supporting al-Qaeda-linked groups because they served its geopolitical interests.

Note: For those who haven’t read the Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton’s book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror, this was a reversion to form rather than a policy innovation: Washington had, as a rule, favored the fundamentalist and radical Sunni sects over secular alternatives in the region going back decades.

Keep reading

“Learn To Code” Propaganda Turned Out To Be Terrible Advice 

For about a decade, big tech firms, the government, and corporate media outlets pushed endless streams of propaganda at young people to “learn to code,” luring them with promises of six-figure salaries and job security.

That hype fueled a boom in computer science majors, with the number of undergraduates more than doubling since 2014. But the coding-boom narrative has since collapsed, and a growing number of computer science graduates are finding few opportunities – some even ending up in fast-food jobs at chains like Chipotle. 

“Learn to code” actually turned out to be very terrible advice. 

Take the corporate media news matrix: According to Bloomberg data, the story count of “learn to code” exploded between 2015 and early 2021. Post 2021, those stories have dramatically subsided as reality sets in, and layoffs at major tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft, combined with the rapid adoption of AI coding tools, have left many graduates unable to land jobs, according to The New York Times.  

Keep reading