Puppet Masters

'The EU is a nightmare': Salvini campaigns to form a broad nationalist alliance

RT
Mon, 08 Apr 2019 17:05 UTC

© Reuters/Alessandro Garofalo
L to R: Olli Kotro from the Finnish ECR party, Joerg Meuthen from the the German EFDD party, Mateo Salvini from Italy's Lega Nord and Anders Vistisen from the Danish ECR party.

Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini launched his campaign to build a populist voting block in the EU, kicking off the initiative Monday by hosting a meeting with four like-minded European political parties.

Fresh from discussions with Marine Le Pen of France's National Rally, Salvini is striving to bring together the largest anti-immigration and euroskeptic parties in the EU, believing the alliance "will be a great event for Europe for the next 30 years."

The move reflects the general rise in popularity among sovereignist parties, and has the potential to make serious waves in the EU in the wake of the parliamentary elections in late May.

Expressing a desire to bring about "radical change," Salvini claims to be interested in more than a change in EU leadership and says he wants to build a new Europe.

"We can propose a new Europe because we have never governed (in Brussels). We are working for a new European dream. To many citizens and people today, the EU is a nightmare and not a dream."

Monday's meeting included representatives of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Danish People's Party, and the Finns Party. Joerg Meuthen of the AfD told reporters that the new alliance would be called the European Alliance for People and Nations, and will initially include at least 10 parties.

The UK has a sinister plan to curtail free speech on the web

RT
Mon, 08 Apr 2019 01:00 UTC

Plans by the UK government to regulate the internet with an independent watchdog, apparently due to widespread concerns over harmful content, should be a worrying wake-up call for advocates of free speech, an analyst tells RT.

John Wight, a writer and political commentator, argues that the mainstream media and their governments in the West do not want to take responsibility for creating the conditions for public cynicism. He claims they are ostensibly trying to curb dissent with this controversial intervention on freedom of expression.

It's a very serious and sinister undertaking by the British government to try and control the last free space of communication that exists in society in the UK and in the West.

Legitimate concerns surrounding the 'abuse' of freedom of speech disseminating across the internet has increased pressure on governments and tech firms, such as Facebook and Google to take action. Real questions are being asked about whose responsibility it should be to regulate online content.

Comment: See also:

The beginning of the end for Manu? French prosecutor opens probe into Macron officials in 'Benalla scandal'

France 24
Mon, 08 Apr 2019 18:28 UTC

The Paris prosecutor has opened a preliminary investigation into alleged perjury related to the so-called "Benalla scandal" involving former and current officials from President Emmanuel Macron's administration.

The prosecutor did not make clear in its statement who was targeted by the investigation. However, it said it had opened the probe at the request of the Senate, where lawmakers had suspicions about statements made under oath by Alexandre Benalla, Macron's ex-security aide; Vincent Crase, a former staffer in Macron's party; and Patrick Strzoda, Macron's chief of staff.

The Senate had also flagged Alexis Kohler, the presidency's top official, as well as Lionel Lavergne, the head of his security staff, to the prosecutor's office for having "withheld information" from a parliamentary investigation.

Comment: With his country in a weekly uproar from the Gilets Jaunes protests, Macron cannot afford yet another scandal.

The increasingly dangerous Iran obsession

Daniel Larison
American Conservative
Mon, 08 Apr 2019 18:43 UTC

The Trump administration is reportedly going ahead with its terrible idea of designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group:

The Trump administration is preparing to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, U.S. officials said, a step that would vastly escalate the American pressure campaign against Tehran but which has divided U.S. officials.

The decision, which could be announced as early as Monday, would mark the first time that an element of a foreign state has been officially designated as a terrorist entity.

Designating the IRGC as a terrorist group is a bad idea that has been kicking around for more than a decade, and previous administrations correctly chose not to do this because it is a very dangerous move that will achieve very little. Pentagon officials have been against it because they are understandably worried that this could expose U.S. forces to retribution. It is possible that it could encourage some governments to designate our soldiers as terrorists as well. Labeling part of another state's military terrorists is what you do if you are looking to provoke an attack or launch an attack on that state.

Lavrov: Trump's recognition of Golan annexation violates UN Charter

PressTV
Sun, 07 Apr 2019 18:28 UTC

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has condemned US President Donald Trump's recognition of the Israeli regime's "sovereignty" over the occupied Golan Heights, stressing the need for a political solution to the conflict in Syria in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 2254.

"We reject the US president's decision on the occupied Syrian Golan, which flagrantly violates the UN Charter," Lavrov said at a joint press conference with his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi in Amman on Sunday.

On March 25, Trumped signed a proclamation, formally recognizing Israel's sovereignty over Golan Heights. The announcement came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House.

Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in a statement, called the US decision a "blatant attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity" of Syria.

"The liberation of the Golan by all available means and its return to the Syrian motherland is an inalienable right," according to the statement carried by Syria's official news agency SANA, which added, "The decision ... makes the United States the main enemy of the Arabs."

The Arab League condemned the move, saying that "Trump's recognition does not change the area's status."

War with Russia is not 'inevitable.' Keep repeating that

Jim Jatras
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 06 Apr 2019 18:14 UTC

Well, that didn't take long! No sooner had Robert Torquemada Mueller wrapped up his obscenely expensive inquisition without finding any so-called collusion with Russia than the obstacles to rapprochement between Washington and Moscow immediately dissipated. Calls for a new détente issued from sound thinkers such as Daniel R. DePetris of The American Conservative (Trump now has his "first opportunity to settle on a Russia policy without the risk of an extreme political backlash") and Srdja Trifkovic of Chronicles:

'Now that the Russian Collusion Myth has been revealed to be a mendacious conspiracy by the Deep State, the Democratic Party and the media, President Donald Trump needs to move on with his election promise to improve relations with Moscow. That is a geopolitical and civilizational necessity.'

The undeniable wisdom of such recommendations was instantly recognized by the Washington establishment. Not only did Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans back off their Nazi-Putin paranoia, Trump's own team, starting with National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed copies of DePetris' and Trifkovic's musings onto their boss's desk.

Another IDF Twitter fail: Posts meme depicting 'Iranian woman breeding terrorism' - backlash is immediate

RT
Mon, 08 Apr 2019 17:27 UTC

An IDF tweet that appears to show a silhouette of a woman pregnant with 'terror' with a slogan accusing Iran of 'breeding' terrorism, has triggered uproar, with some accusing Israel of hitting rock-bottom with Nazi-style rhetoric.

Israel, infamous for its overly simplistic ways of describing the perceived Iranian threat, has done it again - tweeting an outline of a pregnant woman who is about to bear 'terror'. "Iran breeding in the Middle East" the IDF said next to its schematic meme, unleashing a hailstorm of criticism from Twitter users, who did not appreciate the pun.

Comment: Nothing new here, just more widely publicized. These tee shirts were the height of IDF fashion in 2009.

© If Americans Knew
Tee shirts on sale in Israel:
(L)"One shot,two kills)
(C) "Better use Durex" (condom brand)
(R) "The smaller, the harder"

How Rachel Maddow turned into Infowars

Peter Van Buren
Strategic Culture Foundation
Fri, 05 Apr 2019 18:03 UTC

Though she doesn't often bring it up these days, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow remembers how the media abetted the Bush administration's lies justifying the 2003 Iraq invasion. That was when elite (in many cases handpicked) journalists spent months serving as stenographers for the push to war, parroting every carefully crafted leak without question. They dismissed skeptics as disloyal and spiked stories that would have raised questions about the narrative. When they got caught, they declared "never again."

Yet with Rachel Maddow as their poster child (along with David Corn, Luke Harding, Chris Hayes, the entire staff at CNN, and hundreds more), journalists over the last two years repeated every mistake their predecessors had made in 2003.

They treated gossip as fact because it came from a "source" and told us to just trust them. They blurred the lines between first-hand knowledge, second- and third-hand hearsay, and "people familiar with the matter" to build breaking news out of manure. They marginalized skeptics as "useful idiots." (Glenn Greenwald, who called bull on Russiagate from the beginning, says MSNBC banned him after he criticized Maddow. He'd been a regular during the Bush and Obama years.)

Danish paper exposes criminal liar Bill Browder

Flemming Rose
Berlingske
Fri, 05 Apr 2019 17:47 UTC

This is a reply to a comment piece by Bill Browder.

Bill Browder is a PR genius. Whenever anyone challenges his facts or questions his motives, they are branded as Russian agents, the Kremlin's puppets or Putin's useful idiots. This is useful in deflecting attention away from Browder and towards Evil itself: Putin, the Kremlin, the FSB and the Russian state.

It is also a well-known trick. If you can present your story as a fight of good against evil, as an image that is purely black and white, you don't need to worry about the devil in the details. Browder has excelled in doing this.

And that was what I was trying to bring attention to in my comment piece on Browder and the gaps and misinformation in his story.

Consequently, I am somewhat satisfied to read his response, as it clearly illustrates my point.

Browder uses nearly a third of his response to speculate about my motives and who I might have been hired by.

I have been there before. Once, in an angry outburst, Mikhail Gorbachev's close advisor Anatoly Chernyaev called me a CIA agent. During the Muhammed crisis, I was branded a fascist, a Nazi and a neo-conservative, and I was given the special honour of being called an agent of both the Mossad, the CIA and the FSB.

Comment: Browder is a notorious fraudster and conspiracy theorist. Everyone who questions him is working for Putin, apparently. But those alleged Russian agents must be really threatening to the thin-skinned Browder, who uses empty legal threats to blacklist films and books that expose his blatant lies and self-aggrandizement. If there's any justice in the world, one day Bill Browder will be behind bars, disgraced as one of the biggest liars of the 21st century.

Council of Europe chief warns 'Ruxit' together with Brexit will be a disaster

RT
Sun, 07 Apr 2019 17:41 UTC

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

If Russia is forced to leave the Council of Europe around the same time the UK leaves the EU, it will have disastrous consequences for the continent, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjorn Jagland, has warned.

"I believe many people do not understand what a blow it will be for Europe if we get Brexit and Ruxit at the same time. However, it can happen soon," he told Norwegian news agency NTB, about the possibility of Russia leaving the organization this summer.

Jagland also maintained that the only way to avert this "looming" disaster is to fully reinstate the rights of the Russian delegation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which it was deprived of following Russia's reunification with Crimea.

Back in 2014, after Crimea reunited with Russia as a result of the referendum - a move that European nations treated as "annexation" - Moscow's delegation was stripped of its voting rights in PACE as well as being deprived of the right to take part in the Council of Europe's (CE) monitoring missions or joining the PACE ruling bodies, under rules that Russia called "politically motivated" and "discriminatory."

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sbc

Puppet Masters

'The EU is a nightmare': Salvini campaigns to form a broad nationalist alliance

The UK has a sinister plan to curtail free speech on the web

The beginning of the end for Manu? French prosecutor opens probe into Macron officials in 'Benalla scandal'

The increasingly dangerous Iran obsession

Lavrov: Trump's recognition of Golan annexation violates UN Charter

War with Russia is not 'inevitable.' Keep repeating that

Another IDF Twitter fail: Posts meme depicting 'Iranian woman breeding terrorism' - backlash is immediate

How Rachel Maddow turned into Infowars

Danish paper exposes criminal liar Bill Browder

Council of Europe chief warns 'Ruxit' together with Brexit will be a disaster

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