Month: October 2023

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Spiked Opposition

Imagine being invited to debate disinformation on the BBC, after three and a half years of non-stop covid lies, and the best example of BBC fake news you can cite is one of the few cases of objective reporting.

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

I don’t really like ad feminam or ad hominem attacks. I sympathise instinctively with anyone who has put their head above the parapet and argued eloquently against the madness of covid-themed tyranny. In the end, the debate over covid restrictions boiled down to a battle between technocracy and natural humanity that transcends complex and emotionally charged geopolitical conflicts.

I began writing this blog over a week ago after I saw a clip of Laura Dodsworth discuss misinformation and censorship in the context of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill with BBC veteran Paul Mason. To her credit, Laura argued against the bill, but missed a golden opportunity to expose the BBC’s grotesque bias over covid. I held off publishing this post last week because Laura still comes across as an eminently likeable and honest person. Unlike many noteworthy covid dissidents such as Dr Peter McCullough or Prof Sucharit Bhakdi, Laura does not have a dedicated Wikipedia page. Her own website reveals little information about her past political affiliations and has yet to be subjected to a media smear campaign. Then I caught a glimpse of Baroness Claire Fox pushing almost the same line asking a Pro-Palestinian activist why he did not dissociate himself from extremists chanting ” From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” or waving Hamas flags. This is rich coming from an unrepentant IRA apologist. Then Scottish comedian and free speech advocate, Leo Kearse, toed the same line with his mildly amusing quip about Gays for Palestine not being thrown off buildings in Gaza because they've all razed to the ground. Lo and behold, Leo also has a column on Spiked.

Have you ever wondered why the pseudo-progressive intelligentsia has devoted so many resources to vilify some dissident thinkers, while they give others a free pass? As the former head of Pfizer’s research division specialising in respiratory diseases, Dr Mike Yeadon is certainly well-qualified to contribute to scientific debates over the efficacy of covid restrictions, but Wikipedia dismisses him as a conspiracy theorist who has made unfounded claims about vaccine harms. In trendy metropolitan elite circles, any mention of some outspoken covid critics, such as the late Nobel Laureate, Prof. Luc Montagnier, or investigative journalist Dr Naomi Wolf, is to invite ridicule. Yet some regular pundits on mainstream TV seem to get away with deceptively bold critiques of government policies. This leads us to the curious case of Laura Dodsworth and her association with Spiked Online.

The Spiked sect grew out of the tiny Revolutionary Communist Party, which disbanded in the early 1990s. When I briefly flirted with this grouplet as a naïve and disillusioned student in 1985, they positioned themselves to the left of the larger neo-Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party. While the SWP supported a United Ireland, but condemned all attacks against civilian targets, the RCP gave its unconditional support to the IRA in the struggle against British imperialism. Fast forward 40 years and the Spiked Gang now give their unconditional support to the State of Israel in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the escalation of hostilities in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has already poisoned community relations in many cosmopolitan cities. Whatever the truth about Israeli or Hamas war crimes may be, there is no justification for intimidating other civilians either for their religious affiliation or their stance on this conflict. There is no excuse for vandalising Jewish-owned shops, but who is stoking all this hatred and, more important, who will benefit most from the ensuing culture of fear and intimidation? That’s the common thread between the covid and Middle East crises. The mainstream media suppresses rational discussion over objective truth, while spreading fear of your neighbours by redefining hate speech as anything that runs against the mainstream narrative. Thus, it was hateful to oppose mask mandates as bare human faces may have exposed some vulnerable people to airborne pathogens, but it was not hateful to ridicule and ostracise anyone who refused to take government-injectables. As for British Muslims, they can quickly go from heroes to zeroes in the eyes of the bien-pensant establishment left. One minute they are victims of Islamophobia, racism, foreign wars or the legacy of British imperialism, the next they are reactionary homophobes and/or antisemites.

Now I do not claim to know the whole truth about the tragic explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital that caused hundreds of deaths, but aerial footage shows vast swathes of the densely populated Northern Gaza Strip have been flattened. Both the IDF and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as Hamas itself have denied responsibility. Could a makeshift surface-to-surface missile hit a car park or could it only have been Israel’s more advanced Iron Dome System?

The question is why would the author of a State of Fear and Free Your Mind cite the Al Ahli hospital blast as an example of BBC fake news? Why would she be so certain that the IDF did not fire missiles into Northern Gaza with massive civilian casualties, but yet failed dismally to cite countless outright untruths spouted by BBC talking heads during the covid era? What about the endlessly repeated claims that the mRNA jabs prevent the spread of covid and saved millions of lives, based on wild exaggerations of the numbers who might have died of/with covid, or Devi Sridhar’s infamous claim on children’s TV that the mRNA shots were safe and effective for children, despite the fact that no healthy children had died with covid before 2021 and there has since been a marked rise in children and young adults with myocarditis and a disturbing number of unexplained sudden deaths.

Andrew Bridgen MP had the courage to raise these issues in the House of Commons and has been the target of a concerted smear campaign. Although Ms Dodsworth attended a few anti-lockdown protests and boycotted the 2021 Spectator’s Festival of Ideas over their covid pass policy, she’s steered clear of all scientific questions relating to the jabs that governments wanted to inject into us at all costs. Did Laura ever ask why governments would go to such extreme lengths to impose medical martial law or was it just the woke left latching onto the latest fad?

Future historians may well debate why the BBC suppressed dissident voices much more strictly on the covid fiasco than on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leo Kearse may have a point in claiming that Palestinian Lives Matter, with Greta Thunberg’s full blessing, is the new Black Lives Matter. The only trouble with this analogy is that countless thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza at the mercy of the IDF over the last ten days, while the US and the Israeli air forces bomb neighbouring Syria. On cue, Joe Biden reads a speech calling for another $106 billion to help Ukraine and Israel to defeat the enemies of freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese warships have quietly sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean as President Xi Jinping promises to defend Iran in the event of a US or Israeli attack. World War Three is sadly no laughing matter. We’re not talking about the sad case of a former drug addict, George Floyd or scenes of disaffected urban youngsters looting and burning down retail outlets. We’re talking about an escalation of the Middle East quagmire that could cost millions of lives. I fear many analysts fall into the trap of siding either with the Collective West, aligned with Israel, or with the new Collective East and South, aligned with the Palestinian cause. Neither side will win. The Chinese are still doing big business with the USA. President Xi Jinping was happy to welcome California Governor, Gavin Newsom to Beijing the other day. What we are witnessing is the demise of the American World Order and the rise of a global technocracy. The elites are quite happy to see much of the Middle East go up in flames and then to build their brave new network of smart cities modelled on Doha and Dubai. Affluent Israelis can easily migrate to Ukraine, while poorer Israelis may perish if Iran ever retaliates with Chinese support.

This is not the time to support Israel or Hamas, but to avert World War Three before it’s too late. Alas Spiked talking heads, as edgy as they may appear to the uninitiated, are controlled opposition. That’s why they’re always on the telly.

Categories
Power Dynamics War Crimes

Can we let the War Party win again?

Who benefits from more death and destruction in the Middle East?

Rubble litters a street between smoldering buildings hit by an Israeli airstrike in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

It’s easy to jump on bandwagons in righteous indignation against the latest demons guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity. Alas recent history has taught us over and over again that we cannot trust the objectivity and impartiality of the mainstream media to verify the authenticity of some of the most gruesome videos of crimes attributed to either side.

The technocratic coup of early 2020 that saw the roll-out of medical martial law amid a coordinated propaganda campaign gave rise to a new alliance among critical thinkers. We buried our differences over complex geopolitical matters in a battle between the Biotech Mafia and natural humanity. For three short years, the Middle East conflict almost disappeared from our TV screens with blanket wall-to-wall propaganda over novel respiratory viruses, Ukraine and climate change. Many heroes of the fledgling medical truth movement such as Mark Steyn and Robert F Kennedy Jnr. have sided firmly with the Israeli government and given their unconditional support for any military actions it may have to take to defend Israel’s right to exist. I find this stance very disturbing in the light of the recent Ukrainian quagmire for a heavy-handed invasion of Gaza could well backfire, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. In an increasingly unstable world, we should never assume the Collective West will always win. Let us not forget Benjamin Netanyahu used his own people as guinea pigs by enforcing one of the strictest covid regimes.

Sadly, many on the other side of the Palestinian debate fell for the covid psyop hook, line and sinker. As much as I believe Israel has committed many war crimes against the Palestinian people (namely the descendants of the region’s pre-1948 inhabitants), I can’t help but notice the Palestinian liberation movement’s close links with the illiberal forces of Islamic fundamentalism and the neo-Bolshevik left with many still donning facemasks. How can they advocate self-determination for Palestinians if they want to abolish all nation states? How can they support the religious rights of Muslims if they also want to impose gender-bending ideology on young children? Besides, does self-determination mean anything at all if we do not have fundamental freedoms such as bodily autonomy or intellectual freedom? Did Socialist Worker sellers care much about free speech when censorship only affected dissident scientists and gender-critical feminists? Oddly the same BBC that failed to report massive anti-lockdown protests in its main news bulletins and spent countless millions on propaganda against antivaxxers, gave extensive coverage of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London, Glasgow and elsewhere yesterday. Far be it from me to praise the BBC, but its journalists have questioned the morality of collective punishment and interviewed many critics of the Israeli government, much to the chagrin of staunch Zionists. By contrast, on covid we only ever heard one side of the argument with only guarded critiques of lockdowns, but not a whisper of uncontested criticism of the mRNA injections.

On the subject of corporate disinformation, who would butcher innocent babies and senior citizens to defeat an imperialist occupier? In the age of high-definition TV screens bringing selective heart-rending imagery of atrocities into living rooms across the westernised world, it beggars belief that any combatants could not be aware that beheading new-born babies would be a public relations disaster and would inevitably embolden Israel with the full support of its Western allies to crush Hamas and Hezbollah by inflicting collective punishment on all Gaza residents. Two wrongs do not make one right when it comes to targeting civilians. If it’s wrong for Hamas to target revellers at a music festival, it’s equally wrong to bomb densely populated areas of the Gaza strip where collateral damage is unavoidable or to force over a million Gazans to leave their homes within 48 hours despite the lack of infrastructure in neighbouring Egypt.

The claims and counterclaims on both sides of the decades-old conflict over the self-determination and livelihoods of rival ethno-religious groups have exposed the ideological hypocrisy of many mainstream politicians. For once, the progressive alliance of green, social democratic and neoliberal parties that championed global convergence with the phasing out of nation states are divided. How can they advocate open borders and multiculturalism in the West, but also support ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, either to defend Israel’s right to exist or to evict Jewish settlers on land once owned by Palestinians. Alas lasting peace will only come to the Levant when the diverse Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities can reconcile their differences and agree to difficult compromises. Historically, Christian and Jewish communities were spread over a wide area of the Ottoman Empire, which would later become Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. All this changed with the emergence of Israel as a Jewish state, the protracted Lebanese civil war and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism amid a battle for control over copious oil reserves and decades of Western interventionism. The Middle East is probably the world’s most militarised region. Saudi Arabia alone, spends more than the UK or France on its armed forces. Tiny Qatar has a huge $15 billion defence budget representing 7% of its GDP and Israel spends around $23 billion on defence or 4.5% of its GDP, but can count on generous logistical support from the US. Yet despite its massive military budget and substantial soft power, the world’s leading superpower has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in Afghanistan and Syria. Their long occupation of Iraq succeeded only in enriching military contractors like Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and McDonnell Douglas, and fomenting Islamic militias like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Over $100 billions of military aid has failed dismally to thwart the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine. With Saudi Arabia now selling oil in yuan and rupees and poised to join an expanded BRICS alliance, the petrodollar era is over.

Slowing but surely, we’re inching towards a post-American world. While the Anglo-American cultural legacy will live on in the same way as Latin survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the global Deep State owes no special allegiance to North Americans or Western Europeans. Indeed, Israel itself may have outlived its purpose as an outpost of the US-centred world order that grew out of the ashes of the Second World War.  Benjamin Netanyahu’s government may soon find itself isolated if it overplays its hand in the coming ground offensive against the Gaza insurgency, scuppering any chance of reconciliation and potentially drawing other big players such as Iran and Russia into the fray, with the tacit support of China.

I’d much prefer a more innocent world with a mosaic of diverse self-governing communities living side by side with full mutual respect for each other’s different ways of life. I’d love to believe in a peace-loving democratic Israel besieged by primitive Arab neighbours eager to “drive the Jews into sea”. Alas today’s Levant has been shaped by centuries of rival empires, rapid urbanisation, immense oil wealth and, dare I say, population growth. The latter challenge may be one of the most controversial, especially in the light of the recent covid regime that saw us divided into essential and non-essential workers and reclassified human beings as bio-hazards. Saudi Arabia’s population has grown from 3 million in 1950 to 36 million today with most of its citizens concentrated in a few urban areas surrounded by inhospitable desert. The people count of Israel (without the West Bank and Gaza) has grown from just 1.4 million in 1950 to 9.6 million today. That increases reliance on expensive irrigation systems and energy-intensive desalination plants to tackle water scarcity. While the nomadic herders of North Yemen can cope with rudimentary technology, the 2.3 million residents of the compact Gaza Strip cannot survive long without clean drinking water, electricity and imported resources essential to modern life. A complete blockade of Gaza is effectively a death sentence for those unable to flee or take advantage of emergency supplies.

We live in dangerous times and my voice in the wilderness will ineluctably fall on deaf ears. However, only an immediate cease-fire agreed by the Israeli Government, its Arab neighbours, Iran and Hamas can save us from an all-out war that could kill millions more and potentially go nuclear.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Do 7 million British children need more drugs?

In the recent spat over Laurence Fox’s crass remarks on GB News about journalist Ava Evans, most pundits have completely missed the woke journalist’s most outrageous assertion on prime-time BBC TV and it did not relate to sexual desirability. When asked in a panel discussion with comedian, Geoff Norcott, why she opposed the idea of a Minister for Men to deal with issues that disproportionately affect men such as suicide, Ms Evans, also known online as Ava Santina, opined in her usual condescending manner that it just fed into the culture wars, but we needed a more inclusive Minister for Mental Health, before claiming that 7 million children were awaiting prescriptions for mental health. These words just rolled off her tongue. Was I listening to a radical feminist or a representative of a pharmaceutical multinational? True to form, this weekend the venerable BBC ran a story about the shortage of ADHD medications, rather than questioning why so many youngsters need to be on stimulants or given subjective psychobabble labels at all. The establishment has normalised mental illness in the same way as they are now trying to normalise non-binary gender identities.

Let’s put things into perspective. In the UK as a whole there are around 13.5 million under 18-year-olds. In England alone, that’s around 12 million. Is Ms Evans suggesting over half of children should be on psychoactive drugs? Does she think they best way to deal with naughty boys is to drug them into submission?

Unsurprisingly, Ms Evans bought the pandemic narrative hook, line and sinker, uncritically promoting mRNA jabs for under 11s as a regular contributor to left-branded Joe. When the mask mandate ended, she told her social media followers she would keep wearing a face mask to protect herself against the worst virus of all, men. Seriously, what has happened to the cultural left? Their most enthusiastic supporters are wealthy professionals and corporate executives. Statistically, the richer you are in the UK, the more likely you are to support toxic woke ideology. The Tories may still try to appeal to their socially conservative base by talking tough on immigration or giving petrol vehicles another five years on the roads, but they’ve gone along with World Economic Forum diktats with the same zeal as most other Western countries. In power, the Tories, Labour, LibDems, Greens and SNP are little more than different flavours of the same UniParty. They let local authorities and big businesses roll out socially disruptive policies not because of any groundswell in grassroots support, but because paid experts  wanted them. Your primary school children are not learning about anal sex because the gay couple next door, minding their own business, petitioned parliament, but because lavishly funded transnational pressure groups, such as Stonewall, have infiltrated local and national administrations. The mass medication of atomised children is probably one of the biggest scandals of our times. Yet nobody picked up Ms Evans on her desire to drug over half of Britain's children or dared question the long-term effects of lockdown-era isolation. Children need friends, family, outdoor adventure and, above all, hope of a future worth living independent of busy-body control freaks.