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Star of David

Best of the Web: Israel in the Middle East: A civilizational and metaphysical war

Alastair Crooke
Strategic Culture Foundation
Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Israel's flag
President Trump's 'deal of the century' has been published this week. Mostly, it has been examined as a purely political project - whether in terms of the domestic needs of Trump and Netanyahu, or as a maximum squeeze on Palestinians, which may, or may not, work. But there is another (implicit) dimension, lying - a little out of sight - behind these explicit politics.

It has been argued, by at least one US historian, that the U.S. is no ordinary nation-state, but should be understood as a system leader, a 'civilizational power' - like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. The 'system leader', historically, has always sought to embed its particular civilizational vision onto those distant 'lands' that serve, or abut, its empire: which is to say that the universalistic vision may be bound to one state, but is forcefully unfurled across the globe, as 'our' inevitable destiny.

It is not hard to see what we are talking about when it refers to America: politically it is liberal markets, liberal capitalism, individualism and laissez-faire politics - and the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too, if you like. For most Americans, their victory in the Cold War spectacularly affirmed the superiority of their civilizational vision, through the defeat and implosion of communism. It was not just a political defeat for the USSR, more significantly, it represented a triumph for America's full cultural paradigm: It was a Civilisational 'win'.

Comment: And don't miss: 'Greater Israel': The Zionist plan for the Middle East

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Eye 2

Best of the Web: The 'resistance' will do anything and everything in their power to get Trump out

C. J. Hopkins
Dissident Voice
Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
Trump
I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I'm a little worried about Donald Trump. I'm worried he may be on the verge of a sudden, major heart attack, or a stroke, or a fatal golfing accident.

Food poisoning is another possibility. Or he could overdose on prescription medication. A tanning bed mishap is not out of the question.

He could accidentally hang himself during autoerotic asphyxiation, or get shot by a lone-wolf white supremacist terrorist trying to start the RaHoWa. The Russians could spray him with that Novichok perfume.

There are any number of ways he could snuff it.

I don't mean to sound alarmist, but the Resistance is running out of non-lethal options for removing Donald Trump from office. Here they are, in no particular order ...

Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 1

Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 1 is winning the 2020 election, which isn't looking very promising. The Democratic Party is in shambles. According to the polls, their current front-runner is a senile, hair-sniffing, finger-sucking freak who never met a credit card company or a healthcare lobbyist he didn't like, and who rivals even Donald Trump when it comes to incoherent babbling.
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Vinyl

Best of the Web: British Groundhog Day: Muslim dupe on police watch-list randomly stabs multiple people in London, UK govt sez 'Islamic terrorism'


RT
Sun, 02 Feb 2020 19:42 UTC

Comment: Y'all know the script by now. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseum...


london stabbing terror attack
© Simon Dawson / ReutersA police forensics officer gestures near the site where a man was shot by armed officers in Streatham, south London, Britain, February 2, 2020.
London police have shot a man dead in the city's Streatham area in a "terrorist-related" incident. Several people have been stabbed, and video footage shared on social media shows armed police and ambulances on the street.

Armed police officers descended on the London suburb of Streatham on Sunday afternoon, and shot a knife-wielding criminal dead.

The Metropolitan Police said on Twitter that a "number of people have been stabbed," and that the incident has been declared "terrorist-related."

Video footage shared on social media shows a man lying on the ground outside a shuttered pharmacy, as armed police officers train their weapons on his unmoving body.


Comment: Question: given that stabbings in London are so common these days, including incidents where multiple people are stabbed, what prompted the authorities to respond within minutes to this particular stabbing with a veritable army of special armed police, helicopters, and ambulances?

Maybe it's nothing; maybe they're just super-organized and ready-to-go on a Sunday afternoon to any and all potential terror attacks...

In any event, it's all getting a bit old, no?

This stabby-jihadi too was on a 'watch-list', by the way.

Weirdly, or not, just like the London stabber-jihadi incident two months ago, an 'echo' stabbing incident occurred almost simultaneously across the English channel (this time in Ghent, Belgium, rather than The Hague, Holland)...
Police in the Belgian city of Ghent have shot and injured a knife-wielding woman, after she stabbed two people. The incident took place around an hour after a "terrorist" knifeman was shot dead by police in London.

According to Belgian news site HLN, a dark-skinned woman attacked two passers-by with a knife on the Bevrijdingslaan street in central Ghent. The woman reportedly stabbed one of her victims in the stomach.

Armed police officers neutralized the woman with a gunshot to the hand, and she was taken into custody.


Notice that the Belgian cops just shot the knife out of her hand, rather than riddle her body with bullets, a practice UK police seem to have picked up from the Americans. Why not just subdue the attacker then interrogate him/her?

Oh yeah, those 'suicide vests'...

Update 23:00 CET

Imagine our shock to learn that he was released from prison just a few days ago...


Update 3 February

'ISIS' has 'claimed responsibility' for the 'terror attack'...


That's according to the media anyway, which are citing 'ISIS News Agency, Amaq', if such really even exists. It has no surviving websites or social media accounts because they've either long since been taken down or tracked, located and droned.

As with ALL 'ISIS terror attacks' therefore, tracking the source of these claims-on-behalf-of-ISIS-by-Amaq... leads to a dead-end at SITE Intelligence 'terrorist watch group' subscriber-only website, an Israeli-owned corporation registered in Bethesda, Maryland, which is of course home to the NSA...

SITE Intelligence ISIS Mossad
Update 3 February 22:15 CET

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Cell Phone

Best of the Web: Zerohedge on their Twitter suspension

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Fri, 31 Jan 2020 19:57 UTC
twitter censorship
First it was Facebook, then all of New Zealand; now Twitter has decided to suspend Zero Hedge.

Just as in the prior bans, which were eventually overturned, so in this case it is unclear what prompted Twitter's abrupt censorship: the only notification we received from twitter was the following:

twitter ban zerohedge

Comment: Bloomberg reports that the suspension is permanent:
A Twitter spokesperson said in an email to Bloomberg that the @zerohedge account, which had more than 670,000 followers, "was permanently suspended for violating our platform manipulation policy."

In an email to Bloomberg from the author known as Durden, he said he believed the suspension was "unjustified, and likely motivated by reasons other than the stated ones."

"We are confident that we did not violate any of the stated Twitter terms: we neither incited harassment, nor did we 'dox' the public official, whose contact information is as of this moment listed on the Wuhan institute's website," he wrote in the email.


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Star of David

Best of the Web: Trump's 'Deal of the Millennium' Shows The "Two State" Solution Was Always a Lie

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk
Sat, 01 Feb 2020 21:30 UTC
trump kushner netanyahu
© Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs/FlickrUS President Donald Trump (L), Jared Kushner (C), US President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
I have read through the entire 181 pages of Trump's "peace deal" for Israel, and it is breathtaking. It is not just that the "solution" it proposes is ludicrously one-sided, it is the entire analysis of the problem to be solved which reads as pure, unadulterated zionist propaganda.

For example, the word "violence" is used repeatedly. But it only ever refers to violence by Arabs. There is not one single mention of violence by Israel against the Palestinians, even though the ratio of killing between Israelis and Palestinians over the last ten years is approximately 80:1. The only mention of violence against Palestinians at all relates to Kuwaiti expulsion of Palestinian refugees after the first Gulf war.

The analysis of the refugee issue is the same. Nowhere can the paper bring itself to note the key historic fact, that the Palestinian refugees were expelled from Israel. The paper treats Palestinian refugees as if they had simply materialised as an inconvenient phenomenon, like a plague of locusts. This "othering" of Palestinian refugees permeates the entire paper:

Comment: Amen

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Light Saber

Best of the Web: Craig Murray: The FBI has been lying about Seth Rich

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk
Sat, 01 Feb 2020 18:18 UTC
Seth Rich
© LinkedInSlain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.

A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have "Seth Rich" as their heading. The emails were provided in, to say the least, heavily redacted form.

Comment:

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Ice Cube

Best of the Web: The Chinese coronavirus outbreak is not the zombie apocalypse

Robert Bartholomew Ph.D.
Psychology Today
Mon, 27 Jan 2020 15:23 UTC
It's time to take a deep breath and dial down the hysteria.
stock markets coronavirus
Confirmation bias in action
I am not downplaying the seriousness of the new Coronavirus that has been spreading around the world. People are dying and every death is a tragedy, but it is not the end of civilization as we know it, contrary to some media outlets which risk causing undue alarm and panic. The headlines are ominous: "Wuhan is Ground Zero for Deadly Coronavirus." "Situation in China is Grave." One paper carried an image of a Wuhan medic breaking down in tears. Another showing a pile of corpses was fake. The Daily Mail quoted a researcher as saying, "'This time I am scared,' expert who helped tackle SARS warns." Another scientist reportedly simulated a similar epidemic that he projected would kill 65 million people. What the headline didn't say is that it was a worst-case scenario for a virus deadlier than SARS and easier to catch than the flu, an extremely unlikely scenario.

It's important to put the risk into perspective. The Coronavirus does not appear any worse than the annual flu. The key difference is that there is no vaccine, and one will likely take months to develop. It sounds even more daunting and sinister because it's new, mysterious, and originates from a foreign country. Adding the mystique is its suspected origin: a snake at an exotic animal market in the city of Wuhan, which sold everything from cow's heads to camels, foxes, badgers, and an array of rats and reptiles.

Comment: The reason why "the new Information Age is rife with misinformation, disinformation, rumors, fake news, political agendas, conspiracy theories, deep fakes, and photoshopped images that can spread panic faster than any virus..." is because officialdom - especially in the West, though not exclusively - lies so much of the time.

When they keep pushing paranoid conspiracy theories about 'Russian meddling' and 'Kremlin influence operations' onto people - to say nothing of straight-up lies to justify wars of aggression and lining Big Pharma's pockets - major public distrust and mass social hysteria about anything and everything is the natural result.

So in a sense the real virus at work here isn't even the coronavirus; it's the mind virus spread down and out by psychopaths in power. Having said that, the fear of the threat of mass casualties posed by the coronavirus is very real in parts of East Asia.

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Ambulance

Best of the Web: Pentagon AGAIN increases casualty numbers from Iranian airstrikes against US base in Iraq, this time to "50, as of today" - UPDATE: Now it's 64!


The Guardian
Wed, 29 Jan 2020 11:04 UTC

Comment: UPDATE January 31

We're losing track of how many times the number has been revised. It seems American troops keep getting injured by that Iranian attack.

What were the Iranians using, time bombs?

Here's the latest revision:
The U.S. military has once again raised the number of U.S. service members who suffered traumatic brain injuries in Iran's missile strike on an Iraqi base earlier this month.

Pentagon spokesman Thomas Campbell said that as of January 30, "a total of 64 U.S. service members have been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI."

In remarks that have angered many U.S. veterans groups, President Donald Trump initially claimed that no Americans were harmed in Iran's January 8 attack on the Ain al-Asad air base in western Iraq.

The military later said that 11 troops had suffered injuries, then raised it to 34 before saying on January 28 that 50 personnel had been injured.

Trump has downplayed the injuries, saying he "heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things."
This is the FIFTH time the Pentagon has revised its casualty estimate upwards since the airstrikes on January 8th...


al-asad airbase iraq iran airstrikes
© AP
The Pentagon said on Tuesday 50 US service members were now diagnosed with traumatic brain injury after missile strikes by Iran on a base in Iraq earlier this month, 16 more than the military had previously announced.

Donald Trump and other top officials initially said Iran's 8 January attack had not killed or injured any US service members.

"As of today, 50 US service members have been diagnosed" with traumatic brain injury, the Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Campbell said in a statement about injuries in the attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq.

Symptoms of concussive injuries include headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and nausea.


Comment: "As of today..."

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? The situation is always... fluid. Dynamic narratives are always... shifting.

The inability of the top authorities in the NATO sphere to speak plainly about even the smallest things is why conspiracy theories, paranoia, hysteria and chaos in general are proliferating across the West.


Comment: At this point we can no longer rely on the Pentagon's claim of zero US deaths. We have their claim versus the Iranian claim (of 80 or so US deaths). So that remains unknown, for now.

The dodgy PR campaign over this also makes us wonder just how far off is the official death toll for US soldiers in the Iraq War 2003-2011. Officially, it's 3,836, but given how drastically they under-reported Iraqi deaths in that war, and how readily and craftily they lie about the small things, and how sensitive they are about the optics of Americans coming home in coffins...

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Attention

Best of the Web: Twitter suspends independent news outlet Zero Hedge - Fake news site BuzzFeed doxxes 'Tyler Durden'

Ian Miles Cheong
The Post Millennial
Sat, 01 Feb 2020 11:12 UTC
zero hedge twitter
Twitter has suspended the independent news outlet Zero Hedge. The publication, which enjoyed a following of over 673,000 followers on Twitter, was unceremoniously nuked from the social media platform following its report that the origins of the deadly coronavirus (2019-nCoV) may have a man-made origin, in addition to reports that the Chinese government may be suppressing the total number of people infected by the deadly illness that is sweeping throughout Wuhan.

According to the pseudonymous Zero Hedge writer, Tyler Durden, mainstream media outlets have been pushing back against the story by pointing fingers at Zero Hedge for covering the topic that has received widespread attention on social media due to the postings of Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding and Dr. Anand Ranganathan, who highlighted studies noting the coronavirus' strange properties.

Given Twitter's lack of transparency in suspending, it cannot be confirmed if Zero Hedge's new articles and the subsequent backlash from websites like Politifact contributed to the social media's decision to ban it, or if it was taken down by mass reports. Twitter quietly implemented a new report function that allows U.S.-based users to report tweets for being "misleading about a political election."

Comment: Here's the article on SOTT it is suspected Zero Hedge was suspended for. In the comment at the foot of the article, you'll find more information on Zero Hedge's suspension from Twitter. Spoiler alert: Buzzfeed ratted them out. Not only that, their article 'doxxed' Zero Hedge's creator and lead editor, publishing his real name.

See also:

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Eye 2

Best of the Web: Soros in NYT op-ed: 'Zuckerberg is only in it for the money! He must be removed from Facebook, one way or another'


RT
Fri, 31 Jan 2020 23:50 UTC

Comment: Chutzpah!


soros zuckerberg
© Reuters / Lisi Niesner / Erin Scott(L) George Soros (R) Mike Zuckerberg
Billionaire speculator George Soros has called for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his COO to be deposed, accusing them of seeking to "maximize profits" without regard for consequences, in perhaps the most ironic attack ever.

Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg "follow only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences," Soros snarled on Friday in a New York Times op-ed. While his detractors might have used those exact words to describe the financier's own "guiding principle," Soros meant it as a scathing condemnation.

"One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook."

Soros doesn't just want Zuckerberg and Sandberg removed from power - he wants "those who spread false information" punished more severely. Lest one think he's merely referring to users who circulate viral hoaxes, the iron-fisted philanthropist made it clear he had set his sights on Section 230, the now-well-known US law that protects social media platforms from liability for content their users post. Facebook, he said, should be treated as a publisher, not a platform, and "held accountable for the content that appears on its site."

Comment: The pot can't help but call the kettle black. The real target of course is what Soros and like-minded people call 'fake news' - that is, information published outside the control of official/corporate channels. This attack of his against Zuckerberg is intended to pressure him into doing more of this kind of thing:

Warning: Do NOT Read This! NewsGuard 'News Rating Agency' Gives SOTT.net Red 'Fake News' Label

See also:

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