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Four mistruths about Venezuela's humanitarian aid showdown debunked


Venezuelanalysis.com
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 15:33 UTC
USAID supporters

Volunteers supporting self-declared "Interim President" Juan Guaido line up next to USAID personnel in Cucuta, Colombia (Version Final)
February 23 saw the latest attempt by the White House, its right-wing regional allies, and self-proclaimed "Interim President" Juan Guaido to oust the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro, this time by trying to undermine Maduro's authority and forcibly violate Venezuela's borders under the pretext of bringing in "humanitarian aid."

Given that not a single truck, boat or plane entered the country, and that Venezuela's armed forces remained steadfast in their defence of the national sovereignty, it can be said that Trump's and Guaido's primary objectives were a failure.

They did, however, achieve some level of success in their secondary goal of further satanizing Maduro in the eyes of the world.

By provoking a series of violent confrontations along the Colombian and Brazilian borders, the Trump-backed opposition has managed to manufacture a false narrative designed to delegitimize the Maduro government and justify further foreign military intervention. This narrative has been uncritically disseminated by the international corporate media. In what follows, we debunk four lies repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream press.

Comment: It appears that what was in the trucks was actually nails and equipment for barricades. See also:

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Pirates

Map shows the trillion-dollar reason why the US is backing terrorism in Western China

Tony Cartalucci
New Eastern Outlook
Mon, 25 Feb 2019 20:19 UTC
Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP)
© People's Daily Online
East Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) Turkistan Islamic Party as a separatist organization founded in 1989 by Uygur militants in western China hope to establish a caliphate in Xinjiang.
As part of a larger, concerted effort to encircle and contain China, an ongoing disinformation campaign has been waged by the Western media against Beijing's massive global infrastructure building spree known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

A recent and particularly appalling example of this comes from a Business Insider article titled, "This map shows a trillion-dollar reason why China is oppressing more than a million Muslims."

The article has been widely circulated by the Western-funded fronts cited in the article itself, including Human Rights Watch (HRW) whose executive director - Kenneth Roth - would claim in a social media post:
"China's mass detention of Uighur Muslims is driven [not] only by Islamophobia but also by the centrality of their Xinjiang region to China's Belt and Road Initiative."
map Xinjiang
© Reuters/Insider Inc.

Comment: Fighting alongside US-sponsored Islamist groups in Syria assures Uyghur militants reciprocal support in Xinjiang. Terrorist efforts to sabotage BRI and establish a caliphate would provide the US with a strategic foothold in China - as they've had in Eastern Syria for years - and disruption of the OBOR economic engine.

See also:

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Bullseye

Et tu, Bernie? Sanders chided for joining US hawks in Venezuelan regime change push


RT
Sun, 24 Feb 2019 00:32 UTC
Bernie Sanders
© Getty Images/AFP/Win McNamee
Senator Bernie Sanders
The self-described democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is now getting grief from his supporters for apparently aligning himself with the Trump administration and its regime change efforts in Venezuela.

Having announced a 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this week, Sanders (I-Vermont) digressed from his twitter storm about healthcare, wage inequality and taxing the rich to endorse US "humanitarian aid" for Venezuela, which the Trump administration is using to bolster the self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido.

"The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters," Sanders tweeted on Saturday.


While the tweet received praise from accounts favoring regime change, and drew some mockery from conservatives, there has been a veritable avalanche of disappointment from the Vermont senator's sympathizers - as well as journalists and celebrities opposed to the regime change operation.

Comment: Bernie has been called out on this one. Surely he must know by now how Washington coups work, just like he knows how he was robbed by the DNC in 2016 - something he kept quiet about until recently. Elliott Abrams will do for Venezuela what he did for the Contras in Nicaragua if he gets his way - run guns under the guise of humanitarian aid.

See also:

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Eye 2

France's Macron leads the pack of western leaders who malevolently confuse anti-Zionism with antisemitism

Jonathan Cook
Mondoweiss
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00 UTC
Macron
© Udovic Marin /AFP/Getty Images
French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during the 34th annual dinner of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF - Conseil Representatif des Institutions juives de France) on February 20, 2019.
How far the international community's approach towards Israel has reversed trajectory over the past half century can be gauged simply by studying the fate of one word: Zionism.

In 1975 much of the world broke ranks with the United States and Europe at the United Nations general assembly to declare that Zionism, Israel's founding ideology, "is a form of racism and racial discrimination".

Western publics were generally shocked. Zionism, they had been told, was a necessary liberation movement for the Jewish people after centuries of oppression and pogroms. Its creation, Israel, was simply the righting of terrible wrongs that had culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

But Zionism looked very different to those countries around the globe that had been exposed to centuries of European colonialism and the more recent advent of US imperialism.
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Bad Guys

Attacking Iran: Fake news about a terrorist connection could serve as a pretext for war

Philip Giraldi
The Unz Review
Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00 UTC
bombing city
Observers of developments in the Middle East have long taken it as a given that the United States and Israel are seeking for an excuse to attack Iran. The recently terminated conference in Warsaw had that objective, which was clearly expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it failed to rally European and Middle Eastern states to support the cause. On the contrary, there was strong sentiment coming from Europe in particular that normalizing relations with Iran within the context of the 2015 multi party nuclear agreement is the preferred way to go both to avoid a major war and to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation.

There are foundations in Washington, all closely linked to Israel and its lobby in the U.S., that are wholly dedicated to making the case for war against Iran. They seek pretexts in various dark corners, including claims that Iran is cheating on its nuclear program, that it is developing ballistic missiles that will enable it to deliver its secret nuclear warheads onto targets in Europe and even the United States, that it is an oppressive, dictatorial government that must be subjected to regime change to liberate the Iranian people and give them democracy, and, most stridently, that is provoking and supporting wars and threats against U.S. allies all throughout the Middle East.

Comment: See also:

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Gold Coins

Damning: US forces in Eastern Syria made a 'gold for safe passage' deal with Daesh - with plundered gold


Sputnik
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 13:08 UTC
US helicopters in Syria
© AFP 2018 / JOSEPH EID
Earlier, local sources speaking to Syrian media alleged that US forces had used choppers to transfer large boxes of the precious metal from the al-Dashisha area in al-Hasakah, northeast Syria as part of a loot-for-amnesty deal.

The US military has made another deal with Daesh (ISIS)* involving dozens of tonnes of gold in exchange for safe passage for militants and commanders in Deir ez-Zor Province, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) has reported, citing local sources.

According to SANA's information, US helicopters transported a cache of gold bullion under the cover of night on Sunday, with the gold earlier stored in the al-Baghouz area of the Deir ez-Zor countryside where the terrorists were holed up.

According to SANA's estimates, the US has now transferred a total of about 50 tonnes of the precious metal (worth about $2.13 billion as of this writing) out of Syria. Daesh is thought to have accumulated the gold through its campaign of plunder and terror across Syria and Iraq between 2015 and 2017.
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Chess

Rebooting Afghan-Islamist-Wahhabi ideology and US military hub to encircle Iran: Pakistan becomes Saudi Arabia's new client state

Alastair Crooke
Strategic Culture Foundation
Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00 UTC
John Bolton
© Flickr
The Wall Street Journal has an article whose very title - Ambitions for an 'Arab NATO' Fade, Amid Discord - more or less, says it all. No surprise there at all. Even Antony Zinni, the retired Marine General who was to spearhead the project (but who has now resigned), said it was clear from early on that the idea of creating an "Arab NATO" was too ambitious. "There was no way that anybody was ready to jump into a NATO-type alliance," he said. "One of the things I tried to do was kill that idea of a Gulf NATO or a Middle East NATO." Instead, the planning has focused on 'more realistic expectations', the WSJ article concludes.

Apparently, "not all Middle Eastern nations working on the proposal, want to make Iran a central focus - a concern that has forced the US to frame the alliance as a broader coalition", the WSJ recounts. No surprise there either: Gulf preoccupations have turned to a more direct anxiety - which is that Turkey intends to unloose (in association with Qatar) the Muslim Brotherhood - whose leadership is already gathering in Istanbul - against Turkey's nemesis: Mohammad bin Zaid and the UAE (whom Turkish leadership believes, together with MbS, inspired the recent moves to surround the southern borders of Turkey with a cordon of hostile Kurdish statelets).
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Bomb

Boom! Candace Owens drops bomb - Michael Cohen approached her to lie about 'racist Trump'

Cristina Laila
The Gateway Pundit
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 23:52 UTC
Candice Owen
Candace Owens taunted Michael Cohen Wednesday morning after Trump's former lawyer testified that Donald Trump is a "racist" and a "con man."

Michael Cohen, a convicted liar who was just disbarred, testified in a public Congressional hearing on Wednesday.

In his opening statement, Cohen called President Trump a "racist" a "con man" and "a cheat."

Candace Owens immediately dropped in with a little surprise.
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Quenelle

"Free Assange first": Twitter schools hypocritical UK Foreign Sec over 'media freedom' event


RT
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 21:08 UTC
Jeremy Hunt
© Reuters / Toby Melville
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt
UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt's tweet about a media freedom event was met with swift mocking on social media, as many reminded him of WIkiLeaks founder Julian Assange's situation and the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

"Free media is the lifeblood of democracy," Hunt tweeted as he announced the "first ever ministerial-level media freedom conference" in London in July, adding the hashtags #DefendMediaFreedom and #JournalismIsNotACrime.

Social media users were quick to respond, calling on Hunt to "Free Assange first," and asking whether the WikiLeaks founder would be giving a speech at the event.

Comment: See: All Your Meme Are Belong to Us: EU Plans 'European Firewall' to End Free Internet



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Star of David

About time! Israeli AG prepares to indict Netanyahu on bribery charge this week


Sputnik
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 21:03 UTC
netanyahu
© Associated Press / Abir Sultan/Pool
The Israeli prime minister reportedly shortened his visit to Russia and will return to Israel tonight because of the reports of an indictment, per the Times of Israel.

The bribery scandal that's surrounded Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may finally reach a head, as Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is poised to recommend bribery charges, according to Israeli media reports.

Citing Israel's Army Radio, the Times of Israel reported Wednesday that the attorney general is getting ready to file charges on Case 4000, which alleges that Netanyahu took regulatory steps to help Shaul Elovitch in exchange for the telecommunication mogul's news site, Walla, covering Netanyahu in a more favorable light.

Comment:

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