Keep this in mind…
Tag: propaganda
Israeli official says government cannot confirm babies were beheaded in Hamas attack
The Israeli government has not confirmed the specific claim that Hamas attackers cut off the heads of babies during their shock attack on Saturday, an Israeli official told CNN, contradicting a previous public statement by the Prime Minister’s office.
“There have been cases of Hamas militants carrying out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities. However, we cannot confirm if the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children,” the official said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that people had been beheaded by Hamas in an appearance beside Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday, but did not specify if they were children.
The explosive allegations that children had been decapitated at the kibbutz of Kfar Aza emerged Tuesday in Israeli media. Israel Defense Forces later described the scene as a “massacre” in a statement to CNN. Women, children toddlers and the elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action,” the IDF said.
Tal Heinrich, a spokeswoman for Netanyahu, said on Wednesday that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated” in Kfar Aza.
Shani Louk Is Still Alive, Mother Reveals
The mother of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old German national believed to have been kidnapped by Hamas fighters during the militant group’s surprise attack on Israel on Saturday, said on Tuesday that her daughter is alive.
Louk, a tattoo artist, was attending the Tribe of Superova music festival in the plains of the Negev Desert near Urim, close to the Gaza Strip, on Saturday when Hamas fighters stormed the event. She’s believed to have been seized by the militants and paraded through the streets in the back of a pick-up.
Her mother, Ricarda, feared she was dead after seeing a video showing Louk unconscious in a car after being kidnapped by Hamas fighters. In an appeal shared on social media, she said the family was sent a video “in which I could clearly see our daughter unconscious in the car with the Palestinians and them driving around the Gaza Strip.”
While the video doesn’t show the woman’s face, Louk’s family said they were able to identify her by her dreadlocks and tattoos. In the clip, she asked for anyone to send help or news about her daughter.
On Tuesday, Louk’s family announced they had proof that Louk—who grew up in Israel—was alive. Swiss German-language news website Blick reported that her mother said she was in a hospital in Gaza with serious head injuries.
Zelensky Bizarrely Blames The Israel-Gaza Conflict On Putin
Clearly, Ukraine’s war effort will suffer even further setback given that the attention of international media coverage has seemingly in an instant switched from the Russia-Ukraine war to the shocking scenes to have emerged from Israel. The world has pivoted from the battlefields of the Donbas to beholding scenes of southern Israel and the Gaza Strip.
On social media for example, masses of Americans have switched their Facebook profiles from Ukrainian flags to Israeli flags, or on the other side of it… to Palestinian flags. Perhaps trying to regain some of the lost spotlight and media focus, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has bizarrely laid blame on Russia for the outbreak of fresh conflict in the Middle East.
Zelensky said in Monday statements that Moscow stoke war in the region in an effort to weaken global unity and spread destabilization.
“Based on available information — very clear information — it is in Russia’s interests to inflame war in the Middle East to create a new source of pain and suffering that would weaken global unity, create divisions and help Russia in undermining freedom in Europe,” Zelensky said in a nightly video address.
Of course, he cited no evidence for the claims. The new talking point seems a desperate attempt to link ‘the current thing’ to the Russian invasion and the plight of Ukrainians. Zelensky in a series of messages has expressed solidarity with Israeli victims of Hamas terror.
Israeli army says it does not have ‘confirmation’ about allegations that ‘Hamas beheaded babies’
The Israeli army has no information confirming allegations that “Hamas beheaded babies,” Israeli army spokesperson unit told Anadolu on Tuesday.
It was alleged that Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, “beheaded many Israeli babies” on the Israeli side during the early Saturday morning attack launched from Gaza.
When Anadolu contacted the Israeli army spokesperson unit over the phone and asked about the allegations, she said “We have seen the news, but we do not have any details or confirmation about that.”
The situation escalated with a Saturday surprise attack from Palestinian group Hamas in the Gaza Strip on southern Israeli towns. Israel retaliated with massive airstrikes in Gaza and placed the enclave under total blockade.
More than 1,900 people have so far been killed in the violence, including at least 900 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis, according to authorities.
The Mad Propaganda Push To Normalize War-Profiteering In Ukraine
There’s been an astonishingly brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine as Kyiv coordinates with the arms industry and western governments to convert the war-ravaged nation into a major domestic weapons manufacturer, thereby turning Ukrainians into proxies of the military industrial complex as well as the Pentagon.
At an event in Kyiv which hosted 250 “defense” industry corporations from 30 different countries on Friday, President Zelensky gave a speech urging war profiteers to open factories in Ukraine to cut out the middleman of securing and delivering so many weapons from abroad. This is an investment that the arms industry would ostensibly have plenty of time to set up, given that western officials are now going out of their way to communicate to the public that this war will stretch on for many more years to come.
Zelensky’s speech twice made use of the phrase “defense-industrial complex”, and used the phrase “arsenal of the free world” no fewer than three times.
“Ukraine is developing a special economic regime for the defense-industrial complex,” Zelensky said. “To give all the opportunities to realize their potential to every company that works for the sake of defense — in Ukraine and with Ukraine or that wants to come to Ukraine.”
“Right now, the most powerful military-industrial complexes are being determined, as are their priorities and the global standard of defense. All of this is being determined in Ukraine,” Zelensky tweeted with photos from the event.
The “Trusted News Initiative” Is a Tool to Brainwash the World
If you follow mainstream media, it’s possible that you are the target of a brainwashing tool developed to get everyone on the same page regarding specific events. You may have seen this video, where members of the media parrot, word for word, a message that “someone” wants to get out.
Appalling, isn’t it?
It would be nice to think that this is a one-off, but really, it’s not. It’s propaganda 101. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi granddaddy of propaganda, was credited with the following statement:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Gee. Sound familiar?
UK Quietly Passes “Online Safety Bill” Into Law
Buried behind the Brand-related headlines yesterday, the British House of Lords voted to pass the controversial “Online Safety Bill” into law. All that’s needed now is Royal assent, which Charles will obviously provide.
The bill’s (very catchy) long-form title is…
A Bill to make provision for and in connection with the regulation by OFCOM of certain internet services; for and in connection with communications offences; and for connected purposes.
…and that’s essentially it, it hands the duty of “regulating” certain online content to the UK’s Office of Communications (OfCom).
Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Dawes could barely contain her excitement in a statement to the press:
“Today is a major milestone in the mission to create a safer life online for children and adults in the UK. Everyone at Ofcom feels privileged to be entrusted with this important role, and we’re ready to start implementing these new laws.”
As always with these things, the bill’s text is a challenging and rather dull read, deliberately obscure in its language and difficult to navigate.
Of some note is the “information offenses” clause, which empowers OfCom to demand “information” from users, companies and employees, and makes it a crime to withhold it. The nature of this “information” is never specified, nor does it appear to be qualified. Meaning it could be anything, and will most likely be used to get private account information about users from social media platforms.
In one of the more worrying clauses, the Bill outlines what they call “communications offenses”. Section 10 details crimes of transmitting “Harmful, false and threatening communications”.
It should be noted that sending threats is already illegal in the UK, so the only new ground covered here is “harmful” and/or “false” information, and the fact they feel the need to differentiate between those two things should worry you.
After all, the truth can definitely be “harmful”…Especially to a power-hungry elite barely controlling an angry populace through dishonest propaganda.
US Can’t Deal with Defeat
One could say that it is facing defeat — or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn’t look reality squarely in the eye. It prefers to look at the world through the distorted lenses of its fantasies. It plunges forward on whatever path it’s chosen while averting its eyes from the topography it is trying to traverse. Its sole guiding light is the glow of a distant mirage. That is its lodestone.
It is not that America is a stranger to defeat. It is very well acquainted with it: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — in strategic terms if not always military terms. To this broad category, we might add Venezuela, Cuba and Niger. That rich experience in frustrated ambition has failed to liberate Washington from the deeply rooted habit of eliding defeat. Indeed, the U.S. has acquired a large inventory of methods for doing so.
Defining & Determining Defeat
Before examining them, let us specify what we mean by “defeat.” Simply put, defeat is a failure to meet objectives — at tolerable cost. The term also encompasses unintended, adverse second-order consequences.
No. 1. What were Washington’s objectives in sabotaging the Minsk peace plan and cold-shouldering subsequent Russian proposals, provoking Russia by crossing a clearly demarcated red line, pressing for Ukraine’s membership in NATO, installing missile batteries in Poland and Rumania, transforming the Ukrainian army into a potent military force deployed on the line-of-contact in the Donbass ready to invade or goad Moscow into preemptive action?
The Mass-Media Memory Hole – Blair, Ukraine and Libya
A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.
Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:
‘When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building’.
(Orwell, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, 1949, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 34)
The interests of power, hinging on the domination of an ignorant population, are robustly maintained:
‘In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.’
(Ibid., p. 36)
As the Party slogan puts it:
‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
(Ibid., p. 31)
In today’s fictional ‘democracies’, the workings of propaganda are more subtle. Notably, there is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric of leaders’ professed concern for human rights, peace and democracy, and the realpolitik of empire, exploitation and control.
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.