Puppet MastersS


Propaganda

Washington Post soft-pedals Gaza dispatch: ugly and dishonest

injured gaza child
© Islam Abdel Karim for The Washington PostHamada Baker, 13, rests on the terrace of a hotel, after he was hit in the chest by shrapnel from an Israeli missile fired at a port in Gaza.
There's something deeply ugly, verging on mendacious, about this eye-witness account of the strike against four children on Gaza's beach by William Booth in the Washington Post. It begins with what appears to be context but is, in fact, simply an effort to deflect criticism from Israel and blame the victims.

He starts with this: "It is not unusual for militants to launch rockets from sites near my hotel."

So had rockets been launched from the spot where the children were killed? Here's the account of veteran Guardian/Observer correspondent Peter Beaumont:
The building that was hit was just a shipping container next to where one of the kids' father keeps his boat and stores fishing nets. The kids were just playing hide and seek there. They shoot missiles (against Israel) from this neighborhood but none from that location.
So how is Booth's introduction relevant in any way to the story? Yes, militants have fired rockets from the neighbourhood (after all, from where else but "neighbourhoods" are they likely to fire rockets in one of the most densely populated places on earth). But, as Beaumont points out, they were not being fired from the area that was attacked by Israel.

Israel is supposedly using precision missiles. So this was deliberate targeting of that area, an open area from which no rockets had been fired and where children regularly play. If Booth believes that rockets fired from the general area somehow justify Israel's missile strikes on the children (and if not, why mention it?), then why the hell is he staying in the al-Deira hotel, which is presumably as likely to be hit as the harbour where the children play?

There is also something unpleasant in his style of writing here. Note this line as the injured children are brought to his hotel.
Two young terrified kids were bleeding and injured, and they were quickly bandaged on the floor of the terrace, where guests usually eat skewers of grilled chicken, suck on water pipes and watch the sun go down.
That incidental reference to the chicken and water pipes is added for colour. It's a journalistic technique we use when there's not much happening and you want to set a scene to draw the reader into the story. But here it's entirely unnecessary. The action - the bleeding children and the dead bodies nearby - are what will draw the reader in, as any rookie journalist would know. So when I see Booth pausing from his description to talk about how the guests entertain themselves in the evenings, I sense - both as a journalist and a reader - that his attention is not fully on the events at hand.

I'd like to believe this is his way of responding to the shock of the events he's just witnessed. But I suspect something else is at work here, something revealing about the business of journalism.

Most of the time, we write not for ourselves or our readers but for our editors - in short to keep our jobs. Here Booth was called on to stop being the careerist and connect with his humanity. That, rare though it is in journalism, was what the moment required: to see, really see the desperate, terrified little boys in front of him. Instead, all he could think about was technique and what his editors might want.

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books)

Propaganda

NYT propaganda: Gaza headline sanitized to whitewash Israeli war crime

Yesterday (7/16/14) the New York Times posted its first account of the Israeli strike that killed four young Palestinians on a beach in Gaza. The headline looked like this:
NYT headline
That headline appropriately conveys the horrors witnessed and documented by the Times reporters.

But at some point - around 9:00 pm, according to the website Newsdiffs - the headline was changed to the version that appears on the front page of the New York Times today: "Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife."
NYT headline
Was there something wrong with noting in the headline that the boys were killed? Do readers learn more being told they were "drawn into strife"?

Comment: "Drawn into strife"?! What does that even mean? The NYT is a spineless slime-swamp of a newspaper.


Card - VISA

Sanctions? What sanctions? Visa, MasterCard say its business as usual with Russia

No to Credit Cards
© Intellectual Philanthropy OrgAs far as Russia goes, not exactly.
The latest round of unilateral US sanctions against Russia will not affect the operations of international payment systems Visa and MasterCard in the country, the world's top two credit and debit card companies said.

"The new US sanctions package does not affect Visa operations in Russia. We are continuing to service transactions in a normal way," a spokesman for Visa said on Thursday.

MasterCard told Itar-Tass that the sanctions were "applied to certain banks' access to the US capital market and do not affect our business."

Previous rounds of sanctions forbid the companies from dealing with Bank Rossiya and later SMP, Sobinbank and InvestCapitalbank. In those instances, the banks saw their card services stop with virtually no warning.

In contrast, the fresh sanctions targeting Gazprombank and Vnesheconombank (VEB), which helped finance the Sochi Winter Olympics, will be preventing the banks from raising medium and long-term financing from US institutions. None of the banks' assets, however, will be frozen.

Gazprombank, Russia's third largest bank by assets, is closely associated with natural-gas giant Gazprom.

Comment: All the righteousness about Crimea's "annexation" and how the pro-Russian fighters are thwarting democracy in Ukraine, melt away when there a profits to be made.


Headphones

Welcome to Las Vegas, wiretapping capital of the U.S.

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© Reuters/Richard Brian
Welcome to Las Vegas, where the 'Entertainment Capital of the World' is also the wiretapping capital of the country, according to a new report unveiling the number of wiretap authorizations by law enforcement in each state.

The Administrative Office of US Courts (AO) released its annual report to Congress this week, highlighting intercepted wire, oral, or electronic communications. The Wiretap Report 2013 is a compilation of data provided by federal and state officials on orders authorizing or approving the various forms of wiretapping for the calendar year. It does not cover interceptions regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the type of surveillance used by the National Security Agency and made famous by documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

According to the report, the number of federal and state wiretaps increased five percent between 2012 and 2013, for a total of 3,576 authorizations last year. Of those, about 40 percent were approved by federal judges, with the rest approved by courts at the state level.

When it came to the main offense cited in each wiretap authorization request, 87 percent were for criminal drug-related offenses, followed by "other major offenses" - which includes smuggling and money laundering - at 3.9 percent, and homicide and assault at 3.7 percent.

Black Magic

Hitler mentality: Mothers of all Palestinians must be killed says Israeli MP

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Israeli psychopath Ayelet Shaked
A well-known Israeli politician and parliament member has branded Palestinians as terrorists, saying mothers of all Palestinians should also be killed during the ongoing Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, Daily Sabah reported.

Ayelet Shaked of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to "little snakes."
"They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists," Shaked said, adding, "They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists."
The remarks are considered as a call for genocide as she declared that all Palestinians are Israel's enemies and must be killed.

Comment:
In a recent article, Joe Quinn summed up the mind of psychopaths like Ayelet Shaked:
"As clinical studies on the psychopathic mind make clear, psychopaths periodically experience a compelling drive to give vent to their destructive instincts. In the case of psychopaths in positions of power, this usually means some kind of 'war' where innocent civilians (aka 'non-combatants') are targeted for the most brutal suffering. In the specific case of the Israeli psychopathic 'elite', the psychological profile goes something like this:

Netanyahu and his ilk have a deep, almost unconscious desire to obliterate the Palestinians, to 'erase them from the pages of history', because the Palestinians stand in the way of them achieving their goal of a idealized Jewish state where they reign supreme. The Israeli/Zionist ideologues are frequently and privately enraged at the Palestinians because the Palestinians force the Zionists to struggle to find a way to achieve their racist goals without tarnishing their own self-image as 'seeking peace' 'defending the Jewish people' being 'the only Democracy in the Middle East' etc. To the psychopaths in Israel therefore, all Palestinians are 'evil', but there's a problem: the Palestinians are not evil and their cause is just by normal human standards.

If it was up to them, the psychopaths in Israel would just kill all the Palestinians and be done with it. But they can't because they are constrained by human rights, innocence, respect and other 'silly' ideals adhered to by normal people, and to which the psychopaths must also pay lip service if they are to maintain their mask of humanity on the world stage.

To get what they want therefore, the Israeli psychopaths must solve the problem of the Palestinians not conforming (in reality) to the evil image the Israelis have of them, that would allow the Israelis to freely express their destructive urges and achieve their idealized vision of a Jewish state. The solution that psychopathic types everywhere invariably come up with is to 'create their own reality' where they literally manufacture a 'reality' to fit the demonized image they have of the 'enemy' that stands in their way. At that point, they have the 'just cause' to attack the 'enemy' whose mere existence has been 'unfairly' thwarting their attempts to get what they want i.e. achieve their psychopathic agenda."
Psychopathic 'Morality': The Truth Behind the Kidnapping and Murder of 3 Israeli Teens


Whistle

UK Deputy Prime Minister slams Israeli attacks against Palestinians as 'indiscriminate and disproportionate'

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© Reuters / Stefan WermuthBritain's deputy prime minister Nick Clegg
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has lashed out at the Gaza military operation, urging Israel to cease its offensive.

Speaking in his weekly phone-in program on radio LBC, Clegg said that Israel had gone too far in its attacks after four Palestinian children were killed on a beach by Israeli shells.

He also accused Israel of imposing a "disproportionate form of collective punishment" on to Gaza citizens, which would lead to "truly unimaginable" and "unacceptable" humanitarian crisis.

The statements echo the guidelines set out by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to define breaches of international law.

In a paper defining international conventions during war, the ICRC classifies collective punishment as a war crime, as it constitutes 'cruel treatment'.

Stormtrooper

U.S. government caught adding propaganda to Russian-related Wikipedia pages

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© AFP Photo / Getty Images / Mark Wilson
Several Wikipedia entries on Russia were edited by someone using the IP address of the US House of Representatives. Crimea was called "'de jure' part of Ukraine, illegally annexed by Russia" and RT host Abby Martin became "a Russian propagandist."

The new 'propagandist changes' have been recorded by a Twitter bot that watches for anonymous Wikipedia edits from various IP addresses from the US Congress, reported Mashable, a British-American news website, technology and social media blog.

According to this Twitter bot, someone used the IP of the US House of Representatives and re-edited at least 13 articles on Monday July 14.

A few moments after the changes were made; another user re-edited all the articles back. The versions could be seen in Wikipedia section "Difference between revisions."
User talk:143.231.249.138 Wikipedia article edited anonymously by US House of Representatives http://t.co/pix4jtEyPT

- congress-edits (@congressedits) July 16, 2014

Green Light

U.S. privately gave 'green light' to Israel for its 'genocidal attack'

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© PressTV
A senior lecturer at the University of Sydney says the United States privately gave "the green light" to Israel for its "genocidal attack" on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Tim Anderson told Press TV in a phone interview on Monday that Israel "can't take a step without getting the green light from Washington" as he commented on the recent deadly attacks by the Zionist regime on Gaza.

"We can take it for granted that Washington would have been informed about it and has given the green light privately to this operation against Gaza," he added.

At least 39 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have lost their lives in the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll from Israel's attacks on the besieged enclave to 175. Over 1,270 others have also been injured and Palestinian families are fleeing their homes in northern Gaza.

Meanwhile, Palestinian fighters have launched more rockets into Israel in retaliation for the bombardment of Gaza.

Eye 2

Ex-U.S. presidential candidate: 'Zionists control U.S. political apparatus'

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© PressTV
The US government's support for Israel in the massacre of Palestinians is another example of the influence of Israel lobby in the United States, where "Zionists control the political apparatus in Washington, D.C.," a former US presidential candidate says.

Since July 8, Israeli warplanes have struck more than 1,300 targets across Gaza, which is home to around 1.7 million Palestinians. According to latest figures, released by the Palestinian Health Ministry, the strikes have so far claimed the lives of 220 with more than 1,600 others injured.

Hamas rejected an Egyptian-proposed Gaza ceasefire with Israel on Wednesday, saying they had only found about it through the media and was angry that it did not deal with some of the group's major demands, including a conclusive end of Israel and Egypt's blockade on Gaza, and the release of certain prisoners from Israeli jails.

"The current assault on Gaza and a request for a ceasefire, it seems to always be on Israel's terms," said Merlin Lloyd Miller, and independent film director, writer, and producer who was the 2012 US presidential nominee of the American Third Position Party.

Quenelle

Putin's six-day tour of Latin America ends with creation of BRICS and signing of energy agreements as opposition to Western powers gains strength

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© AFP Photo(L to R) Russia's President Vladimir Putin, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, China's President Xi Jinping and South Africa's President Jacob Zuma join their hands during the official photograph of the 6th BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, on July 15, 2014
A six-day tour by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Latin America ended with a long anticipated creation of the BRICS bank and the signing of energy agreements, as Russia looks to build alliances to counter Western influence.

The Latin America tour started with the visit to Cuba, where Putin signed a new agreement on oil exploration in Caribbean waters which contain most of the estimated 124 million barrels of the Island's crude. The exploration will take place a few dozen miles from the US coast.

"We will provide support to our Cuban friends to overcome the illegal blockade of Cuba," Putin said on July 11, referring to the US ban on trade with the island nation.

Earlier on July 12 Russia wrote off 90 percent of Cuba's $32 billion soviet era debt putting the remaining 10 percent in investment of joint infrastructure projects in the island.