Article in Wired magazine by “Beth Mole”

Speaking at an anti-vaccine rally in 2022, Malone spread dangerous falsehoods about mRNA Covid-19 vaccines: “These genetic vaccines can damage your children. They may damage their brains, their heart, their immune system and their ability to have children in the future. Many of these damages cannot be repaired.”

By the way, besides being a pro-pharma propaganda rag, Wired magazine appears to have ties with, shall we say, “the intelligence community”

Hold on to your horses there, “Beth Mole”, Tech Bro.

What do you think myocarditis is? What do you think blood clots do? What do you think the damage to the pituitary/hypothalamac/gonadal axis is? What do you think that passing a decidual clot in a pre-menopausal girl is? Do you think these are not damaging? And you got your training in Pathology and Medicine where?

This is just one of many examples currently being pushed by dead media to delegitimize the current Secretary of Health and Human Services and build the false narrative that both RFK jr and his appointees are wild-eyed crazies.

NBC news, for example, just invents quotes that I did not write concerning Measles and Measles vaccines. Measles vaccines are 60 – 80 % effective, depending on the study and context. That means that, on average, if you expose 100 people to an infectious dose of measles, 20 – 40 of them will get infected. Technically, that is what is called in the business a leaky vaccine. Measles vaccines are live attenuated, and at a low frequency will genetically revert and can cause measles, and others can be infected when this happens. The recent West Texas outbreak happened in a Mennonite community. Mennonites historically, for decades, do not generally vaccinated their children. This has nothing to do with RFK jr. It is a historic fact. An immigrant family introduced wild-type measles into that Mennonite community, and it spread like wildfire – measles virus is extremely infectious but rarely lethal. Some in the surrounding region who thought they were protected became infected. See above statistics. Two young girls died. Their medical records demonstrated that their immediate cause of death were 1) inadequately treated mycoplasma pneumonia, and 2) inadequately treated hospital acquired E coli pneumonia. Not measles.

Another example, from the “Associated Press”, states that “Malone, who runs a wellness institute and a popular blog, rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as he relayed conspiracy theories around the outbreak and the vaccines that followed.” Apparently the Associated Press is confused about the difference between myself and Dr. Peter McCullough. I do not run a “wellness institute”, whereas Peter is the CSO for The Wellness Company. The capabilities of these reporters and their editors to even factcheck their own work product appears to be…. limited.

I have previously written about the roll up smear in our book PsyWar, Enforcing the New World Order, and here is a relatively mild example of that strategy being deployed by the generally more centrist “News Nation”.

The wrap-up Smear is a deflection tactic whereby a smear is made-up and leaked to the press. The press then amplifies the smear and publishes it, which conveys legitimacy. Then another organization or author can use the press coverage of the smear as a validation to write a summary story which is the wrap-up smear.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

Article in Wired magazine by “Beth Mole”

Speaking at an anti-vaccine rally in 2022, Malone spread dangerous falsehoods about mRNA Covid-19 vaccines: “These genetic vaccines can damage your children. They may damage their brains, their heart, their immune system and their ability to have children in the future. Many of these damages cannot be repaired.”

By the way, besides being a pro-pharma propaganda rag, Wired magazine appears to have ties with, shall we say, “the intelligence community”

Hold on to your horses there, “Beth Mole”, Tech Bro.

What do you think myocarditis is? What do you think blood clots do? What do you think the damage to the pituitary/hypothalamac/gonadal axis is? What do you think that passing a decidual clot in a pre-menopausal girl is? Do you think these are not damaging? And you got your training in Pathology and Medicine where?

This is just one of many examples currently being pushed by dead media to delegitimize the current Secretary of Health and Human Services and build the false narrative that both RFK jr and his appointees are wild-eyed crazies.

NBC news, for example, just invents quotes that I did not write concerning Measles and Measles vaccines. Measles vaccines are 60 – 80 % effective, depending on the study and context. That means that, on average, if you expose 100 people to an infectious dose of measles, 20 – 40 of them will get infected. Technically, that is what is called in the business a leaky vaccine. Measles vaccines are live attenuated, and at a low frequency will genetically revert and can cause measles, and others can be infected when this happens. The recent West Texas outbreak happened in a Mennonite community. Mennonites historically, for decades, do not generally vaccinated their children. This has nothing to do with RFK jr. It is a historic fact. An immigrant family introduced wild-type measles into that Mennonite community, and it spread like wildfire – measles virus is extremely infectious but rarely lethal. Some in the surrounding region who thought they were protected became infected. See above statistics. Two young girls died. Their medical records demonstrated that their immediate cause of death were 1) inadequately treated mycoplasma pneumonia, and 2) inadequately treated hospital acquired E coli pneumonia. Not measles.

Another example, from the “Associated Press”, states that “Malone, who runs a wellness institute and a popular blog, rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as he relayed conspiracy theories around the outbreak and the vaccines that followed.” Apparently the Associated Press is confused about the difference between myself and Dr. Peter McCullough. I do not run a “wellness institute”, whereas Peter is the CSO for The Wellness Company. The capabilities of these reporters and their editors to even factcheck their own work product appears to be…. limited.

I have previously written about the roll up smear in our book PsyWar, Enforcing the New World Order, and here is a relatively mild example of that strategy being deployed by the generally more centrist “News Nation”.

The wrap-up Smear is a deflection tactic whereby a smear is made-up and leaked to the press. The press then amplifies the smear and publishes it, which conveys legitimacy. Then another organization or author can use the press coverage of the smear as a validation to write a summary story which is the wrap-up smear.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

If there’s one thing the ‘impartial’, ‘independent’ ‘free press’ can’t stand, it’s someone – citizens, journalists, politicians, celebrities, anyone – protesting the West’s wars.

The one-size-fits-all smear deployed to define and dismiss the concerns of these troublemakers – people who often pay a high price for their dissent – is ‘narcissist’.

Consider the case of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which last week attempted to break the Israeli naval blockade to deliver baby formula and food to Gaza’s starving population. And that, by the way, is not hyperbole. In May, the World Health Organisation reported that ‘half a million people’ in Gaza were ‘in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death’. The flotilla was led by the UK-flagged vessel Madleen, with renowned Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg onboard.

Perhaps shaken by his recent, uncharacteristic display of principled moral outrage, the eponymous host of Piers Morgan Uncensored, last week wrote on X:

‘Oh shut up, @GretaThunberg – you attention-seeking narcissist. What an insult to the actual hostages in Gaza who really WERE kidnapped. This stupid stunt is all about your ego, and will make zero difference to the plight of innocent Palestinians caught up in this dreadful war.’

In the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill felt Morgan’s pain in a piece titled, ‘Greta Thunberg’s narcissism has escalated to terrifying levels.’

The ‘terrifying’ Thunberg, no less! O’Neill opined:

‘Of all the smug stunts of the faux-virtuous activist class, this is surely the most preposterous. The idea that 12 woke fainthearts from Europe might “liberate” Gaza would be funny if it were not so dangerous.’

That was not the intention at all, of course. The intention was to raise awareness of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – in that aim, the flotilla was a great success.

The Mirror noted that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs had branded the Madleen a ‘selfie yacht’. By eerie coincidence, much of the ‘mainstream’ media followed suit.

In the Daily Mail, Sam Greenhill’s headline read: ‘Israeli forces storm Greta’s “selfie yacht” and make her watch Hamas terror footage.’ (Greenhill, Daily Mail, 10 June 2025). Greenhill commented:

‘Critics suggested it had been a “gap-year protest”, and the Israeli government said Ms Thunberg had been “feeding her ego” rather than the people of Gaza.’

What could be more natural, more ‘mainstream’, than passing on, with approval, a slur supplied by a government committing genocide?

If ‘kidnapping’ won’t do for Piers Morgan, let’s try ‘hijacking’. Journalist Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News commented:

‘Let’s be clear: Israel, an occupier, has no authority under international law to board or divert the Madleen.

‘This is a hijacking, plain and simple. A hijacking of a UK-registered ship, with multiple *European* citizens on board.’

Hasan invited readers to imagine the Western response if Iran had rammed and hijacked a boat full of European citizens in international waters in the same way.

Morgan’s fiercely expressed idea that Thunberg was merely engaged in an attention-seeking ‘stunt’ reverses the truth. Narcissists do not seek attention by taking on a genocidal army that has devastated both Gaza and previous vessels attempting the same journey. On X, Alonso Gurmendi of the London School of Economics noted that there had been five similar flotillas prior to the Madleen’s voyage. Israel used force against four of them:

‘2010: 10 killed

‘2011: no incidents

‘2015: crew detained for 6 days

‘2018: crew tasered

‘2025: drones shot at the ship’

In the 2010 attack on the Mavi Marmara, 10 activists were killed by Israeli forces with dozens wounded. Last month, the Conscience, a vessel carrying human rights activists and humanitarian aid for Gaza, organised by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was attacked by Israeli drones in international waters off the coast of Malta:

‘The Freedom Flotilla Coalition reported that the ship was struck twice by drones at around 00:23 (CEST), with both attacks targeting the vessel’s generators at the front of the ship. The strikes caused a fire and a breach in the hull, placing the vessel at imminent risk of sinking.’

Given the genocidal actions of the Israeli army over the last 20 months – including ‘at least 220 journalists killed’ since 7 October 2023, as Channel 4’s Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson noted last week on X – no-one on the Madleen had any compelling reason to feel safe. Far from being an attention-seeking ‘stunt’, Thunberg and her companions showed real courage.

In the Telegraph, former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore pumped bile:

‘What matters above all are the images of the selfie-yacht and the attention they can garner. Being boarded and detained (or, as she puts it, “kidnapped”) by Israeli forces gave her exactly what she had hoped for to kick against…’

Thunberg’s ‘stunt’, it seems, had been ‘self-aggrandising and vacuous’. In a comment that typifies the tendency of hard-right merchants of smear to overreach, Moore added:

‘Watching footage of this climate activist and her mates all chucking their expensive phones into the sea as they were about to be taken by the Israelis showed that, of course, when the chips were down, environmental concerns went out of the window.’

And, as ever, the young and compassionate – people who aren’t just banking a salary, people who care – are just naïve fools blundering in the dark:

‘The omnicause burns itself out in the end because it has no actual strategy. It simply signifies tribal loyalty. It gobbles everything up and spits out its participants, who simply move on to the next “wrong” thing.’

But it is right to protest Israel’s genocide, which is wrong, just as the insane indifference to the destabilisation of the climate is wrong. In 42 seconds, in this video on X, Thunberg explains why it is absolutely coherent to protest both of these crimes.

When working for the Guardian, Moore distinguished herself by tweeting of Julian Assange in 2012:

‘He really is the most massive turd.’

Moore then commented to a colleague:

‘I never met him. Did you?’

Moore later wrote in the New Statesman:

‘O frabjous day! We are all bored out of our minds with Brexit when a demented looking gnome is pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the secret police of the deep state. Or “the met” as normal people call them.’

Jake Wallis Simons, who writes regularly for the Jewish Chronicle (JC), which he edited from December 2021 until January 2025, has been busy smearing Thunberg in the Daily Mail and Telegraph with damning articles titled:

‘Greta Thunberg is deeply immature, lacks all shame … and there is a dark truth about her crusade to Gaza’ (Daily Mail, 7 June 2025)

‘It’s staggeringly offensive of Thunberg to claim she’s been “kidnapped” when we know what real kidnap looks like’ (Daily Mail, 10 June 2025)

‘Greta’s blind eye to murder’ (The Telegraph, 10 June 2025)

In September 2024, when Wallis Simons was editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, no dissident, wrote an open letter to him on social media, under the comment:

‘I have today told the editor of the Jewish Chronicle that I can no longer continue my relationship with the paper.’

Freedland’s reasoning:

‘Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.’

Jonathan Cook commented:

‘One such example was a tweet (since deleted) from Wallis Simons last December, when Israel had already killed thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. Over a video of a huge explosion killing untold numbers of Palestinians in Gaza City, the JC’s editor wrote: “Onwards to victory.”’

It seems Wallis Simons has Thunberg all worked out:

‘Let’s stop beating around the selfie yacht. It was never truly about the climate, any more than it was truly about the conflict in the Middle East. Closing her eyes to the October 7 footage crystallised the sustaining principle of Greta Thunberg: she is absorbed in a world of her own. It is a world that began with hating her teachers; went on to hating the establishment; and has ended with hating the Jews and the West, powered by endless selfies.’

Without a trace of evidence, then, Thunberg is reflexively smeared as an anti-semite. Cook noted the sudden obsession with selfies:

‘Strangely, journalists who had barely acknowledged the tsunami of selfies taken by Israeli soldiers glorifying their war crimes on social media were keenly attuned to a supposed narcissistic, selfie culture rampant among human-rights activists.’

Ricky Hale said it best on X:

‘Amazing that we live in a time when starving people are being lured into the open to be gunned down by Israel and the media thinks the villain of the story is a tiny autistic woman who tried to feed them.’

Of Tans and Byronic Haircuts

Thus, if it was not already the case, Thunberg has joined the long list of dissidents dismissed as self-aggrandising ‘narcissists’.

In 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek featured an article entitled, ‘The Unbearable Narcissism of Edward Snowden.’

In 2016, Labour MP Chris Evans noted Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘self-indulgence, egotism, arrogance and narcissism’.

Janice Turner commented on Corbyn in The Times:

‘He’s beloved of narcissists and conspiracists, such as Julian Assange, George Galloway, John Pilger and Ken Livingstone …’

Narcissists all! In the Observer, Charles Jennings described how Pilger’s narcissism was obvious from ‘his tan, his Byronic haircut, his trudging priestly delivery and his evident self-love’. (Jennings, The Observer, 24 January 1999) We knew Pilger well; he was one of the most generous, compassionate people we have met. What was so striking, even startling, about him was his willingness to risk his access to ‘mainstream’ media by exposing their lethal propaganda – he savaged the hands that fed him. That is forbidden, of course, and it cost him his columns in the Guardian and the New Statesman. None of his critics would be willing to pay a fraction of that price.

In 2020, Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer of the conspicuously humble and selfless Jeremy Corbyn:

‘Many things have been said about his character over the years, but one thing has not been said enough: he is a narcissist.’

Julian Assange, of course, has been endlessly labelled the same way. A typical headline from the Daily Mail in 2011 read:

‘The WikiFreak: In a new book one author reveals how she got to know Julian Assange and found him a predatory, narcissistic fantasist’

In the Sunday Times, Katie Glass described Russell Brand as ‘an exhibitionistic narcissist obsessed with celebrity’. (Katie Glass, ‘The ultimate Marmite Brand,’ Sunday Times, 22 September 2013)

And according to the Guardian, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was a peddler of ‘strutting and narcissistic populism’.

Readers might wonder where that leaves us at Media Lens. Alas, in his Guardian column, then Associate Editor Michael White observed that Media Lens ‘betrays the narcissism of small difference that is so destructive on the left’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

If there’s one thing the ‘impartial’, ‘independent’ ‘free press’ can’t stand, it’s someone – citizens, journalists, politicians, celebrities, anyone – protesting the West’s wars.

The one-size-fits-all smear deployed to define and dismiss the concerns of these troublemakers – people who often pay a high price for their dissent – is ‘narcissist’.

Consider the case of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which last week attempted to break the Israeli naval blockade to deliver baby formula and food to Gaza’s starving population. And that, by the way, is not hyperbole. In May, the World Health Organisation reported that ‘half a million people’ in Gaza were ‘in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death’. The flotilla was led by the UK-flagged vessel Madleen, with renowned Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg onboard.

Perhaps shaken by his recent, uncharacteristic display of principled moral outrage, the eponymous host of Piers Morgan Uncensored, last week wrote on X:

‘Oh shut up, @GretaThunberg – you attention-seeking narcissist. What an insult to the actual hostages in Gaza who really WERE kidnapped. This stupid stunt is all about your ego, and will make zero difference to the plight of innocent Palestinians caught up in this dreadful war.’

In the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill felt Morgan’s pain in a piece titled, ‘Greta Thunberg’s narcissism has escalated to terrifying levels.’

The ‘terrifying’ Thunberg, no less! O’Neill opined:

‘Of all the smug stunts of the faux-virtuous activist class, this is surely the most preposterous. The idea that 12 woke fainthearts from Europe might “liberate” Gaza would be funny if it were not so dangerous.’

That was not the intention at all, of course. The intention was to raise awareness of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – in that aim, the flotilla was a great success.

The Mirror noted that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs had branded the Madleen a ‘selfie yacht’. By eerie coincidence, much of the ‘mainstream’ media followed suit.

In the Daily Mail, Sam Greenhill’s headline read: ‘Israeli forces storm Greta’s “selfie yacht” and make her watch Hamas terror footage.’ (Greenhill, Daily Mail, 10 June 2025). Greenhill commented:

‘Critics suggested it had been a “gap-year protest”, and the Israeli government said Ms Thunberg had been “feeding her ego” rather than the people of Gaza.’

What could be more natural, more ‘mainstream’, than passing on, with approval, a slur supplied by a government committing genocide?

If ‘kidnapping’ won’t do for Piers Morgan, let’s try ‘hijacking’. Journalist Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News commented:

‘Let’s be clear: Israel, an occupier, has no authority under international law to board or divert the Madleen.

‘This is a hijacking, plain and simple. A hijacking of a UK-registered ship, with multiple *European* citizens on board.’

Hasan invited readers to imagine the Western response if Iran had rammed and hijacked a boat full of European citizens in international waters in the same way.

Morgan’s fiercely expressed idea that Thunberg was merely engaged in an attention-seeking ‘stunt’ reverses the truth. Narcissists do not seek attention by taking on a genocidal army that has devastated both Gaza and previous vessels attempting the same journey. On X, Alonso Gurmendi of the London School of Economics noted that there had been five similar flotillas prior to the Madleen’s voyage. Israel used force against four of them:

‘2010: 10 killed

‘2011: no incidents

‘2015: crew detained for 6 days

‘2018: crew tasered

‘2025: drones shot at the ship’

In the 2010 attack on the Mavi Marmara, 10 activists were killed by Israeli forces with dozens wounded. Last month, the Conscience, a vessel carrying human rights activists and humanitarian aid for Gaza, organised by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was attacked by Israeli drones in international waters off the coast of Malta:

‘The Freedom Flotilla Coalition reported that the ship was struck twice by drones at around 00:23 (CEST), with both attacks targeting the vessel’s generators at the front of the ship. The strikes caused a fire and a breach in the hull, placing the vessel at imminent risk of sinking.’

Given the genocidal actions of the Israeli army over the last 20 months – including ‘at least 220 journalists killed’ since 7 October 2023, as Channel 4’s Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson noted last week on X – no-one on the Madleen had any compelling reason to feel safe. Far from being an attention-seeking ‘stunt’, Thunberg and her companions showed real courage.

In the Telegraph, former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore pumped bile:

‘What matters above all are the images of the selfie-yacht and the attention they can garner. Being boarded and detained (or, as she puts it, “kidnapped”) by Israeli forces gave her exactly what she had hoped for to kick against…’

Thunberg’s ‘stunt’, it seems, had been ‘self-aggrandising and vacuous’. In a comment that typifies the tendency of hard-right merchants of smear to overreach, Moore added:

‘Watching footage of this climate activist and her mates all chucking their expensive phones into the sea as they were about to be taken by the Israelis showed that, of course, when the chips were down, environmental concerns went out of the window.’

And, as ever, the young and compassionate – people who aren’t just banking a salary, people who care – are just naïve fools blundering in the dark:

‘The omnicause burns itself out in the end because it has no actual strategy. It simply signifies tribal loyalty. It gobbles everything up and spits out its participants, who simply move on to the next “wrong” thing.’

But it is right to protest Israel’s genocide, which is wrong, just as the insane indifference to the destabilisation of the climate is wrong. In 42 seconds, in this video on X, Thunberg explains why it is absolutely coherent to protest both of these crimes.

When working for the Guardian, Moore distinguished herself by tweeting of Julian Assange in 2012:

‘He really is the most massive turd.’

Moore then commented to a colleague:

‘I never met him. Did you?’

Moore later wrote in the New Statesman:

‘O frabjous day! We are all bored out of our minds with Brexit when a demented looking gnome is pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the secret police of the deep state. Or “the met” as normal people call them.’

Jake Wallis Simons, who writes regularly for the Jewish Chronicle (JC), which he edited from December 2021 until January 2025, has been busy smearing Thunberg in the Daily Mail and Telegraph with damning articles titled:

‘Greta Thunberg is deeply immature, lacks all shame … and there is a dark truth about her crusade to Gaza’ (Daily Mail, 7 June 2025)

‘It’s staggeringly offensive of Thunberg to claim she’s been “kidnapped” when we know what real kidnap looks like’ (Daily Mail, 10 June 2025)

‘Greta’s blind eye to murder’ (The Telegraph, 10 June 2025)

In September 2024, when Wallis Simons was editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, no dissident, wrote an open letter to him on social media, under the comment:

‘I have today told the editor of the Jewish Chronicle that I can no longer continue my relationship with the paper.’

Freedland’s reasoning:

‘Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.’

Jonathan Cook commented:

‘One such example was a tweet (since deleted) from Wallis Simons last December, when Israel had already killed thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. Over a video of a huge explosion killing untold numbers of Palestinians in Gaza City, the JC’s editor wrote: “Onwards to victory.”’

It seems Wallis Simons has Thunberg all worked out:

‘Let’s stop beating around the selfie yacht. It was never truly about the climate, any more than it was truly about the conflict in the Middle East. Closing her eyes to the October 7 footage crystallised the sustaining principle of Greta Thunberg: she is absorbed in a world of her own. It is a world that began with hating her teachers; went on to hating the establishment; and has ended with hating the Jews and the West, powered by endless selfies.’

Without a trace of evidence, then, Thunberg is reflexively smeared as an anti-semite. Cook noted the sudden obsession with selfies:

‘Strangely, journalists who had barely acknowledged the tsunami of selfies taken by Israeli soldiers glorifying their war crimes on social media were keenly attuned to a supposed narcissistic, selfie culture rampant among human-rights activists.’

Ricky Hale said it best on X:

‘Amazing that we live in a time when starving people are being lured into the open to be gunned down by Israel and the media thinks the villain of the story is a tiny autistic woman who tried to feed them.’

Of Tans and Byronic Haircuts

Thus, if it was not already the case, Thunberg has joined the long list of dissidents dismissed as self-aggrandising ‘narcissists’.

In 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek featured an article entitled, ‘The Unbearable Narcissism of Edward Snowden.’

In 2016, Labour MP Chris Evans noted Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘self-indulgence, egotism, arrogance and narcissism’.

Janice Turner commented on Corbyn in The Times:

‘He’s beloved of narcissists and conspiracists, such as Julian Assange, George Galloway, John Pilger and Ken Livingstone …’

Narcissists all! In the Observer, Charles Jennings described how Pilger’s narcissism was obvious from ‘his tan, his Byronic haircut, his trudging priestly delivery and his evident self-love’. (Jennings, The Observer, 24 January 1999) We knew Pilger well; he was one of the most generous, compassionate people we have met. What was so striking, even startling, about him was his willingness to risk his access to ‘mainstream’ media by exposing their lethal propaganda – he savaged the hands that fed him. That is forbidden, of course, and it cost him his columns in the Guardian and the New Statesman. None of his critics would be willing to pay a fraction of that price.

In 2020, Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer of the conspicuously humble and selfless Jeremy Corbyn:

‘Many things have been said about his character over the years, but one thing has not been said enough: he is a narcissist.’

Julian Assange, of course, has been endlessly labelled the same way. A typical headline from the Daily Mail in 2011 read:

‘The WikiFreak: In a new book one author reveals how she got to know Julian Assange and found him a predatory, narcissistic fantasist’

In the Sunday Times, Katie Glass described Russell Brand as ‘an exhibitionistic narcissist obsessed with celebrity’. (Katie Glass, ‘The ultimate Marmite Brand,’ Sunday Times, 22 September 2013)

And according to the Guardian, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was a peddler of ‘strutting and narcissistic populism’.

Readers might wonder where that leaves us at Media Lens. Alas, in his Guardian column, then Associate Editor Michael White observed that Media Lens ‘betrays the narcissism of small difference that is so destructive on the left’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

The post featured two images that placed de León’s photo alongside CPJ’s logo and depicted a fabricated conversation between a CPJ Latin America researcher and the journalist, according to CPJ’s review of the post, which has since been removed. 

Mary Lawlor, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, said the post “appears to delegitimize” journalistic work and called for an investigation. 

“Online smear campaigns threaten journalists across Guatemala through intimidation and threats of violence, putting independent outlets like Prensa Comunitaria at serious risk,” said CPJ Latin America Program Coordinator Cristina Zahar, in São Paulo. “Guatemalan authorities must act swiftly to identify and hold accountable those responsible and ensure the safety of Quimy De León and all journalists who carry out essential reporting.”

CPJ’s message to the prosecutor’s office and Santiago Palomo, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo’s communications secretary, did not receive a reply. 

In addition to the de León posts, anonymous social media accounts known as “net centers” have flooded the social platform X since February with posts falsely accusing Guatemalan journalist Nelton Rivera of collaborating with organized crime and calling for his arrest. Some of the posts included manipulated images showing Rivera behind bars next to jailed journalist José Rubén Zamora. 

Rivera is co-director of Km. 169, which publishes Prensa Comunitaria and Ruda.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Since February, social media accounts known in Guatemala as “net centers” have targeted Rivera, co-director of the news agency Km. 169, which publishes the independent news websites Prensa Comunitaria and Ruda. The accounts flooded social media platform X with false and defamatory posts accusing the journalist of accepting foreign funding, collaborating with organized crime, and serving as a mouthpiece for the government.

“Authorities must take immediate steps to end these coordinated attacks and protect Nelton Rivera from efforts to silence him through public defamation and legal threats,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in São Paulo. “Criminalizing journalists through smear campaigns and anonymous networks is a serious threat to press freedom in Guatemala.”

The campaign escalated in March and April, with dozens of posts reviewed by CPJ spreading manipulated images, threats of prosecution, and calls for Rivera’s arrest. Several posts include images showing Rivera behind bars next to prominent jailed journalist José Rubén Zamora, suggesting he will be imprisoned next.

Net centers, which are troll farms that use anonymous or pseudonymous accounts to spread disinformation and attacks on journalists and others, have been linked to political actors and officials inside the public prosecutor’s office. CPJ and other organizations have documented their involvement in past campaigns that preceded criminal charges against journalists — including those from elPeriódico, the newspaper founded by Zamora.

CPJ reached out to the Guatemalan prosecutor’s office for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Investigative journalism is crucial for uncovering corruption and holding power to account,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Efforts to discredit public interest reporting and target journalists through smear campaigns create a chilling effect on press freedom. CPJ urges the Indian ruling party BJP to respect journalists’ role in democracy and refrain from weaponizing their authority to intimidate the press.” 

Mangnale, the South Asia regional editor at the investigative news outlet Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), is known for his reporting on alleged corporate malfeasance, financial irregularities, and corruption involving the Adani Group, one of India’s largest conglomerates.  

The official BJP account on social media X amplified Dubey’s claims, alleging that Mangnale fundraised for the opposition party and gave “Chinese money” to a person accused of involvement in the 2020 Delhi riots.

The BJP cited a report by French news outlet Mediapart in its claim; Mediapart refuted the allegations, saying the BJP “wrongly exploited” its report to discredit independent journalism.

These developments come after the U.S. Justice Department indicted Gautam Adani, chairperson of the Adani Group, and his associates in November 2024 for allegedly bribing Indian officials to secure contracts and misleading U.S. investors about the company’s anti-corruption practices.

Mangnale told CPJ that he anticipates these recent developments could trigger new legal cases or intensify existing ones against him.

In May 2024, Indian authorities summoned Mangnale for questioning about alleged involvement in terrorism in connection to his work with Newsclick. Formal charges have not yet been filed. He was also among several high-profile journalists in India to be targeted with Pegasus spyware. 

CPJ’s emailed requests seeking comments from Dubey and BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

We look at the smear campaign faced by the only Palestinian American in Congress and a vocal critic of Israel, Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, after she defended the rights of student protesters. Tlaib recently criticized Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel over charges Nessel filed against 11 mostly students and alumni who were involved in a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Michigan. Nessel then accused Tlaib of antisemitism despite the congressmember never mentioning Nessel’s religion. Key media figures like CNN’s Jake Tapper have parroted the claim that Tlaib said Nessel is biased because she is Jewish, despite the original article’s author fact-checking the narrative. “This is not at all what happened. She’s talking about an anti-Palestinian bias,” says Steve Neavling, an investigative reporter who first published Tlaib’s comments in the Detroit Metro Times. “It was a very unusual, surreal experience for me as a journalist to see so many lies being peddled about an interview that I witnessed.” We also speak with Prem Thakker, a political correspondent for Zeteo News who has documented the smear campaign, about his efforts to get an update on the U.S. investigation into the killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza. “I have not gotten an answer. It’s been over 240 days.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We go to Gaza to speak with Palestinian journalist Maha Hussaini after the International Women’s Media Foundation came under fire for rescinding its Courage in Journalism Award to her following a smear campaign. Hussaini is an award-winning journalist and human rights advocate who has extensively documented Israel’s war on Gaza since October, including reporting on the mass displacement of Palestinians while being repeatedly displaced herself. “This is not the first time, by the way, that I have been subjected to such smear campaigns,” says Hussaini, who recounts a career spent defending her work against attacks and intimidations from Israel and its supporters. Hussaini speaks to us from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza and reports on dire conditions there. “The war waged on the Gaza Strip is not a war against particular armed factions, but against the entire population of 2.3 million residents,” Hussaini says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In a bid to deter Israel from slaughtering the 1.5 million Palestinians cloistered in Rafah thousands joined an emergency march in Toronto Monday evening. During the four-hour long march “Spiderman for Palestine” and another individual climbed atop scaffolding in front of a (closed) entrance to Mount Sinai Hospital to waive a Palestinian flag as they did at numerous other spots.

In response Canada’s genocide apparatus whipped up faux outrage that a public institution with Jewish roots was targeted. As he’s done in the past, Singh followed the apartheid lobby in smearing justice minded activists, claiming the march “targeted” the Toronto institution “because of its ties to the Jewish community.” But Singh’s statement is baseless, as is detailed in this article and this interview with a member of the Jews Against Genocide coalition.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter how many Palestinian children Israel kills. Singh remains committed to taking his cues from Canadian groups promoting the slaughter. It doesn’t matter how many Palestinian hospitals the apartheid lobby enables Israel to destroy. Singh acts like they are troubled by a Spider-Man costumed flag waiver outside a closed hospital entrance. Under the cover of opposing “antisemitism”, Singh continues to promote genocidal anti-Palestinianism.

Singh’s smear has, unsurprisingly, been cited by right wingers and Israeli nationalists to justify more racism and killing. In the National Post Chris Selley cited Singh’s endorsement of the Mount Sinai libel. So did the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs after Canada’s Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia Amira Elghawaby questioned the Mount Sinai hoax. In a post calling for her ouster, CIJA cited Singh’s post echoing their baseless claim about the hospital. If CIJA’s attacks on Elghawaby lead to a bout of Islamophobia Singh will be partly to blame. Singh’s smear also contributed to an alleged hate crime with an individual calling the Toronto police to threaten to kill protesters for targeting the hospital.

Singh’s Mount Sinai libel illustrates the remarkable disconnect between the popular uprising and parliamentary social democracy. Over the past 20 weeks there have been hundreds of mass protests across the country yet I’m only aware of one MP attending a Palestine protest. NDP MP Matthew Green spoke during a march in Toronto on November 12. (Conversely, the PM, Deputy PM, ministers and MPs have attended far smaller and less numerous pro-genocide rallies.)

One reason MPs have not attended the demonstrations is out of a concern for being smeared (Green was forced to release a statement defending himself after speaking in Toronto). By besmirching Monday’s anti-genocide march Singh is making it even more difficult for MPs to attend protests (presumably he has privately warned NDP MPs against attending). The dearth of political participation reduces media coverage and the impact of the protests. It also enables the increasing criminalization of the protests. It’s no coincidence that after the remarkable smear against Monday’s demonstration the Toronto police threatened $10 000 fines to anyone leading chants on the moving truck at the front of Saturday’s march.

In Vancouver the city’s police department released a statement prior to Saturday’s demonstration calling on protesters not to obstruct hospitals. In effect, the smear (somewhat contradictorily) is being broadened into the notion that the anti-genocide marches are “targeting” hospitals.

(A prominent genocide campaigner in Vancouver, Bob Mackin, posted the police statement with a note that the city’s St Paul’s hospital — which has Catholic roots but may have Jewish staff — is 1.3km from the announced starting point of the march. He followed that up with a post noting the protesters passed the central intersection of Burrard and Robson, meaning “The VPD request to avoid impeding routes used to access the hospital fell upon deaf ears.”)

According to social media company’s data, 2.4 million viewed Singh’s anti-genocide smear on X. That is far more interaction than his usual posts with the comments and quote tweets overwhelmingly hostile. In addition, as mentioned above, 6,000 individuals have emailed Singh requesting he delete his post.

His lack of action demonstrates how much he, and other politicians, fear the apartheid lobby’s reaction. Removing his post would draw into question their big “antisemitism” lie tactic. It would help disable the power of the lie to intimidate.

Millions of Canadians oppose the smears based on lies and the justifications for genocide that go along with them and would cheer Singh deleting the post. He should embrace the truth and do what’s right.

Please take a minute to email Singh and all the NDP MPs to demand he remove his anti-Palestinian post.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Tucker Carlson.

Few U.S. colleges have generated more controversy for their response to Israel’s war on Gaza than the University of Pennsylvania. Penn’s president Liz Magill faced criticism for her answers about hypothetical scenarios of antisemitism posed during a congressional hearing by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who has herself faced criticism for embracing antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Stefanik’s line of questioning last month was part of a wider campaign in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel: demonizing pro-Palestine activism. Stefanik conflated calls for “intifada” — an Arabic word for “uprising” — with antisemitic attacks and asked Magill, along with other university presidents, if these purported calls for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment. Magill, by all accounts, stumbled through a non-answer.

Under pressure from billionaire donors and pro-Israel lobby groups, Magill and Penn board chair Scott Bok resigned four days after the hearing.

News of the resignations was framed as part of the university’s failure to handle antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7. But the effort to oust Magill began months before the Hamas attack, according to public letters and people familiar with the fight over Israel and Palestine at Penn. As early as August, Magill had drawn the ire of pro-Israel lobbying groups, nonprofits, and university donors after rebuffing their efforts to cancel a literary festival on campus called Palestine Writes.

The story of what happened at Penn was distorted to obscure the earlier round of anti-Palestinian attacks against the literary festival, said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal who works on speech and academic freedom. Palestine Legal advised the festival and urged Magill to resist censoring the event.

Sainath, who attended the festival to conduct research for a novel, said that media reports ran with unverified claims that Palestine Writes had stoked antisemitism, even suggesting that the festival was linked to the Hamas attack.

“You could really see how pretty much every newspaper was just adopting the framework of these Israel lobby groups as a given, as if the festival was antisemitic,” she said. “People were just really upset in part about a large number of Palestinians potentially coming to campus to talk about Palestinian literature.”

That coverage amplified the attacks that led to the congressional hearings, eventually precipitating Magill’s resignation. University officials squandered an opportunity to correct false claims that students had called for the genocide of Jewish people, Sainath said: “They kind of went along with it and fell into this trap.”

A banner for the University of Pennsylvania on campus in Philadelphia on Dec. 8, 2023.

Over the summer, wealthy donors, along with local and national Jewish groups, lined up to take issue with the university’s plans to host a festival in September celebrating Palestinian authors.

One of the leaders of the informal network of critics was Marc Rowan, CEO of the investment firm Apollo Global Management. Rowan serves as advisory board chair of the university’s Wharton School, which he attended, and was previously a member of Penn’s board of trustees. He also chairs the board of the UJA-Federation of New York, an influential Jewish group involved in pro-Israel advocacy.

Another major force against the festival was billionaire Republican donor Ronald Lauder, also a Wharton alum, who pushed Magill to cancel Palestine Writes in a meeting in Philadelphia and two subsequent phone calls.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Anti-Defamation League of Philadelphia sent two letters to Magill in August complaining of “a high likelihood” that the festival would “promote inflammatory and antisemitic narratives about Israel.” They alleged that some of the speakers, including Marc Lamont Hill; Noura Erakat; Maysoon Zayid; Huwaida Arraf; Roger Waters; and the festival’s executive director, Susan Abulhawa, had a “history of antisemitism,” citing criticisms of Zionism and Israel’s human rights abuses. The groups said the university should issue a statement “questioning the judgment” of the departments working with the festival, which included Penn’s English, near Eastern languages and civilizations, and cinema and media studies departments.

Festival organizers pushed back. In a September 2 letter to Magill and other university leaders, Abulhawa described the complaints as part of “a campaign to discredit and denigrate” the literature festival. “We categorically reject this cynical, sinister, and ahistorical conflation of bigotry with the moral repudiation of a foreign state’s criminality, particularly as most of us are victims of that state,” she wrote. “Every instance of the examples listed in the original letter refers to Zionism, Zionists, or Israel. Situating those individual Palestinians and our allies in league with actual antisemites is wholly irresponsible and dangerous.”

Ten days later, Magill and other university leaders issued a statement distancing Penn from the festival, citing concerns raised about certain speakers “who have a documented and troubling history of engaging in antisemitism by speaking and acting in ways that denigrate Jewish people.” The university condemned antisemitism, the officials wrote, but supported the free exchange of ideas. “This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”

When it became clear that Palestine Writes would go forward as planned, Rowan, Lauder, and other trustees organized an open letter to Magill reiterating concerns about the festival. The letter eventually gained more than 4,000 signatories, including prominent alumni.

The festival began on September 22 and went off mostly without a hitch, despite threats against organizers and at least two high-profile attendees who were kept from attending in person. Gary Younge, a sociology professor at the University of Manchester; Waters of Pink Floyd; and author Viet Thanh Nguyen were scheduled as plenary speakers. Nguyen was the only one of the three who could attend in person. Younge said his visa was inexplicably revoked prior to his trip to the U.S., and Waters said the university prohibited him from stepping on campus; he spoke to the festival online from the Philadelphia Airport. The university countered that Waters was originally set to attend virtually and a last-minute change would have required additional security. Festival organizers disputed the university’s account.

Attendees and festival board members who spoke to The Intercept described Palestine Writes as a multigenerational, multicultural event that welcomed everyone and fostered an important cultural space on campus, particularly for Palestinian students.

But in the weeks following October 7, media outlets and critics linked the festival to the Hamas attack and said it had fomented an unsafe campus environment for Jewish students. In a letter to the university newspaper published October 12, Rowan and other donors called on Magill and Bok to resign and urged alumni to “close the checkbooks” and halt donations. “It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival on UPenn’s campus to the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis,” Rowan wrote.

Appearing on CNBC, Rowan said his appeal to alumni was a “difficult call for a place that I love for the last 40 years.” He insisted the issue wasn’t about free speech, which he supported — it was about university leaders saying they condemned antisemitism but allowing the literature festival to happen.

“There has been a gathering storm around these issues,” Rowan said. “Microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage, and yet violence — particularly violence against Jews, antisemitism — seems to have found a place of tolerance on the campus, protected by free speech.” Magill was “not capable of exercising moral leadership,” he said, “because she feels academic pressure and peer pressure.”

Lauder threatened to cut additional funding in a letter to Magill on October 17, saying that she was forcing him to reexamine his financial support “absent unsatisfactory measures to address antisemitism at the university.” The letter brought him great sorrow, Lauder wrote. “I am so sorry you did not cancel the event.”

That university administrators, media outlets, and politicians accepted that narrative uncritically underscored the hysteria of the moment, said Bill Mullen, a board member of Palestine Writes. “It’s amazing to me that people can get away with this without being fact-checked,” he said. “You just have to say antisemitism and you terrify people into not asking questions.”

“The attack on Palestine Writes was a very targeted attack on Palestinian writers and intellectuals. And since October 7, we have literally seen Israel murdering Palestinian poets and writers and journalists,” Mullen added. “They wanted to silence these voices.”

After Magill and Bok resigned, Julie Platt, vice chair of the university board, was named interim board chair. Platt also serves as board chair of the Jewish Federations of North America. Penn named J. Larry Jameson, the dean of its medical school, as interim president.

Since the resignations, the university has further aligned itself with pro-Israel lobbying groups and donors. Last week, a delegation of faculty took a three-day “solidarity tour” of Israel that included meetings with Israeli government officials and a visit to the Gaza envelope.

Rowan, meanwhile, has sought to guide a transformation at Penn. Days after Magill’s resignation, he sent a letter to trustees raising concerns about the university’s culture and “political orientation,” warning that it had “allowed for preferred versus free speech” and asking how the university considered “viewpoint diversity” in hiring.

An anonymous petition circulated that called on the university to fire three faculty members who had protested in support of Gaza on campus, including festival organizer Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature; her husband, a poet and professor of creative writing; and another professor of Persian literature. Fakhreddine, one of several Penn faculty named in the congressional hearing, said that she has since been doxxed and received death threats.

At its annual convention last week in Philadelphia, the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly passed an emergency motion defending speech on Palestine and supporting Fakhreddine and others at Penn facing retaliation for criticizing Israel’s war on Gaza.

University faculty have pushed back against interference by donors and trustees. The executive committee of Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors called on the university to address harassment, intimidation, and threats against faculty and warned of “the chilling effects of statements by trustees, donors, and university administrators on teaching, learning, and scholarship.”

Palestine Writes is now battling a court order that it remove from its website a logo for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, which had awarded a grant to the organization. After the dustup over the festival reached the mainstream, the council sent a cease-and-desist letter, which was immediately published by the Anti-Defamation League with unredacted contact information for Abulhawa. In November, a judge on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas ordered the logo removed, saying she understood why the council would not want to be affiliated with the festival in the current political climate.

The issue reached the office of Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who publicly denounced Magill and the university after the congressional hearing. The governor’s office represented the arts council in court proceedings against the festival.

“It was just so eye-opening to me that something as simple as a literature festival could be so threatening to pro-Israel supporters,” said Marie Kelly, a board member for Palestine Writes. The festival was a historic celebration and affirmation of Palestinian culture, Kelly said. “That’s not anything that any pro-Israel academic, millionaire, or politician can take away.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Responding to a question about the withdrawal, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a press briefing on Thursday in Beijing that “China firmly opposes attempts to smear and sabotage Belt and Road cooperation or stoke bloc confrontation and division” without naming any country.

It is unclear whether the statement was directed at Italy or a third party that, in Beijing’s opinion, may have interfered to dissuade Rome from participation. 

Also on Thursday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, addressing broader relations between China and the European Union during a summit with top EU officials in Beijing, said that the two sides should be partners and “eliminate all kinds of interference.” 

The first in-person EU-China summit in four years aimed to promote “constructive and stable EU-China relations,” according to an official statement.

Lack of tangible benefits

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in her first public comments on leaving the BRI said “The tool of the [BRI] ... has not produced the results that were expected.”

Italy exported 16.4 billion euros (US$17.7 billion) worth of goods to China last year but imported 57.5 billion euros ($62 billion) of China-made products, making a large deficit, according to official data.

Meloni was speaking to reporters in Rome on Thursday after media reports that her government had formally notified Beijing of the decision earlier this week. 

“I think that we should ... improve our cooperation with China on trade [and] the economy,” Reuters quoted the prime minister as saying. 

Italy joined China’s mega scheme in 2019, the only member of the Group of Seven major developed economies, or G7,  to do so. At the time, the United States warned Rome that “the Chinese Communist Party is trying to leverage its economic presence in Italy to serve its own strategic purposes.”

Italy’s BRI membership expires in March, 2024, and Meloni had indicated that she wanted to leave.

“This decision was largely expected for months and was only a matter of time,” said Filippo Fasulo, a political scientist from the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) in Milan.

“In the last months, negotiations have been underway to understand the best way to terminate the agreement without causing diplomatic clashes,” Fasulo, co-head of the think tank’s Geo-economics Center, told Radio Free Asia.

A Chinese geopolitical commentator agreed that the move, while significant, “was not entirely unexpected due to Italy’s growing skepticism about the tangible benefits from the deal.”

“Italy’s decision to leave the BRI aligns with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's critical view of the partnership and broader Western concerns about Beijing's influence,” said Andy Mok, a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization in Beijing.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the BRI – Xi Jinping’s signature mega project.
China said it has benefited more than 150 countries in the world with infrastructure contracts worth over US$2 trillion to develop projects such as seaports, railways and bridges. Critics meanwhile accuse Beijing of setting up debt traps and expanding geopolitical and economic influence.

Restarting the relationship

“China may react to Italy's exit with skepticism, but a complete breakdown in bilateral relations seems unlikely,” said Mok.

“Italy's strategic approach in exiting the BRI, aimed at maintaining political dialogue, suggests a cautious balance to avoid severe economic retaliation from China,” the political commentator added. 

“High-level diplomatic engagements and efforts to balance Italy's geopolitical stance indicate a continued interest in a robust, albeit recalibrated, relationship with China.”

Filippo Fasulo from Italy’s ISPI said that he would not expect Beijing to respond with serious punitive economic measures.

“Italy and China had consultations before this decision and it is not in the interest of China while attempting to improve its relations with the EU to retaliate against one of its principal members,” he said.

He also noted that there are “signals,” like the decision by Chinese authorities to waive visitor visas for Italian citizens as of Dec. 1, that indicate the main differences between the two governments might have already been settled.

In the Italian expert’s opinion, “Italy’s participation, even if ineffective, was highly politicized and symbolic.”

However, the country needs to maintain the relationship with the world’s second largest economy.

“Now, it is possible to restart this relationship, as other countries are doing, bearing in mind the context of the great power competition and Italy's network of alliances,” Fasulo said.

The EU said in a statement after the Dec. 7 summit with Xi Jinping that China is the bloc’s major trading partner but “the relationship is critically and structurally imbalanced.”

“The EU stressed to China the importance of achieving a more balanced economic relationship with a level playing field and reciprocity,” it said. “The EU does not intend to decouple or to turn inwards.”

Andy Mok in Beijing said “Europe’s initial declaration to decouple from China was a fantasy.”

“‘De-risking’ is a flawed political compromise. But strategic interdependence is a historic inevitability,” he noted.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

On October 23, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, editor of the Weekly Blitz, published a separate article in the right-wing digital media outlet HinduPost, reviewed by CPJ, alleging Saer Khan had been deported from Hungary to the United Kingdom, where he was “funding and promoting pro-Hamas and anti-Israel rallies.”

Saer Khan, an independent investigative journalist, told CPJ by phone that he denied all allegations, which also extended to accusations of involvement in drug trafficking and fraud. He said he has been targeted in a campaign that seeks to discredit his work and could potentially endanger his safety.

Saer Khan said he believed he was being targeted in retaliation for his upcoming report on alleged high-level government corruption in Bangladesh to be published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). On September 25, two days before the latest round of Weekly Blitz articles against him, the journalist sent a series of emails requesting comment from the subjects of his investigative article.

In recent years, the Weekly Blitz has repeatedly published articles, reviewed by CPJ, accusing Saer Khan, along with other journalists critical of the Bangladesh government, of criminal activities.

On March 17, four unidentified men beat Mahinur Khan, Saer Khan’s brother, with iron rods in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, accusing the latter of “writing about the PM [prime minister]” and “against the government.” As of November 22, no suspects had been held accountable, Saer Khan said.

Choudhury told CPJ via email that the Weekly Blitz stood by its reporting and was unaware of Saer Khan’s upcoming report for the OCCRP.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

A nonprofit think tank that serves as a fiscal sponsor for hundreds of progressive causes around the world was recently severed from access to vital financial services due to its support of a French NGO working on Palestinian issues.

In February, the Alliance for Global Justice, or AFGJ, issued a statement announcing that the company that handled its credit card transactions had blocked its ability to process donations. The move came after a “pro-Israel” group accused one of the organizations sponsored by AFGIJ, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, of serving as something of a front for a leftist Palestinian militant group that is designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization.

“Groups like Alliance for Global Justice provide terror groups with the funding that is critical to their operations and the fact that they do so with U.S. taxpayer subsidies,” an attorney for Zachor Legal Institute told the Washington Examiner. The article also noted that Zachor Legal Institute had filed a complaint asking the IRS to investigate AFGJ’s nonprofit status and accusing the organization of supporting terrorism.

The Alliance for Global Justice provides fiscal sponsorship for roughly 150 grassroots nonprofit organizations around the world, mostly in Latin America. The abrupt severance of a critical financial lifeline came as a shock to the organization, which survives on individual donor support.

“They cut off our ability to accept credit card donations without warning or cause, which absolutely affected our ability to fundraise and support sponsor organizations — many of which need this money to literally pay rent and keep their lights on,” said Camille Landry, outreach coordinator for AFGJ, adding that AFGJ’s own operations had come to “a screeching halt” as a result of the shutdown.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

India TV journalist Jayprrakash Singh tweeted the footage, claiming that Yogi Adityanath put the ashes of the police constable who was martyred in the Umesh Pal murder case in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh on his forehead. (Archived link)

उत्तरप्रदेश के प्रयागराज में राजू पल विधायक हत्या के गवाह उमेश पाल हत्याकांड में शहीद हुए पुलिस कांस्टेबल की राख को सर माथे पर लगाते हुए योगी आदित्यनाथ –कहा–कुछ तो बड़ा ही होकर रहेगा, बहुत जल्दी कोई बड़ी सूचना भी मिल सकती है।।#Umeshpal #UmeshPalCase #PrayagrajEncounter pic.twitter.com/PxKuBwwpKY

— Jayprrakash Singh (@jayprakashindia) March 3, 2023

Jan Ki Baat Editor Pooja Kushwah also tweeted this video with this claim. (Archived link)

A user named Thakur Ankit Singh also promoted the video with the same claim. (Archived link)

A number of verified handles also amplified the clip and accompanying claim. 

Fact Check 

Alt News performed a search using keywords related to the viral video. This led us to a tweet by Times Group journalist Sameer Dixit dated March 22, 2022 containing the same clip. Dixit wrote that Yogi Adityanath had put ashes on his forehead after Holika Dahan. In other words, this video is at least one year old. It is now being shared with a misleading claim by linking it to the police constable martyred in the recent Umesh Pal murder case.

बस यही फ़र्क है एक दिन के हिन्दू बनने में, और सनातनी हिंदू के जो कर्म – धर्म से परंपरा का पालन हमेशा करते हैं….#योगी_आदित्यनाथ ने होलिका दहन के बाद राख को माथे पर लगाया.. #परंपरा pic.twitter.com/gOTbP6Doo7

— Sameer Dixit (@sameerdixit16) March 22, 2022

Alt News could not find any more information about this video. However, it is certain that this video is not related to the recent Umesh Pal murder case.

It can be concluded with certainty that a one-year-old video of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath applying ashes on his forehead after Holika Dahan is being falsely shared with a misleading claim. 

The post Umesh Pal murder: Did Yogi Adityanath smear himself with ashes from dead cop’s pyre? Old video viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Janine Jackson interviewed Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer, on the nomination of Gigi Sohn to the FCC, for the February 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Gigi Sohn was nominated by Joe Biden to fill the vacant fifth seat at the Federal Communications Commission in October of 2021, and renominated for a third time last month. Sohn is a veteran legal telecom expert, a fellow at Georgetown Law, co-founder of the group Public Knowledge, and for years an advisor to former FCC chair Tom Wheeler.

Hundreds of groups, officials, companies—left, right and center—have publicly endorsed her. So why has her nomination languished?

Therein lies the tale—a disheartening one of outsized corporate power and the denaturing of government’s public interest obligation, and of transparently scurrilous right-wing attacks, and lagging, inadequate response.

And back of it all, the critical fight for a media universe that lives up to the promise to be open, diverse, creative and liberatory, and not yet another sphere of corporate power and might makes right.

Here to bring us up to date on the attacks on Gigi Sohn’s FCC nomination, and why it matters is, Evan Greer. She’s director of Fight for the Future, and she joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Evan Greer.

Evan Greer: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Fast Company (2/2/23)

JJ: I want to talk about the nature of the latest round of attacks on Gigi Sohn that you call out in your Fast Company piece with Yvette Scorse, from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. But before we got to Fox and Breitbart and “she-male” and “sex trafficking,” it seems like there was another plan to say that Sohn was just too left, and would censor conservative voices, and hated rural people, and that was what made her unqualified, right? This is almost like a plan B, if you will.

EG: Yeah, for sure. And to really understand both what’s going on in this situation, and just the utter hypocrisy behind it, you have to go back even a little further to remembering why the Federal Communications Commission is important, and what the recent history there is.

Some of your listeners probably remember that, as you mentioned, during the Obama administration, millions of people from across the political spectrum spoke out and fought really hard for the enactment of strong oversight of the telecom industry.

And that fight was mostly talked about as the net neutrality fight, and it certainly did have to do with those net neutrality rules, although it also had to do with, again, the broader battle around the FCC’s ability to protect the public interest from what are effectively natural monopolies in these giant telecom companies, like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc.

And during the Trump administration, Ajit Pai, the chair that Trump nominated, swept through the Senate very, very quickly, and within months had already begun the process of repealing those rules.

We are now two years into the Biden administration, and Biden does not even have a fully functional FCC.

So those delays—we’re going to talk in a moment about the smears that Gigi Sohn has faced, but I think it’s important that we first just talk about the impact of that, which is that this agency, that plays an essential role in protecting the public interest and protecting us from being, frankly, scammed and screwed over by these large and incredibly powerful monopolies, has been totally unable to do their job, because of the dark money–funded smear campaign that has slowed down Gigi Sohn’s nomination.

And I think it’s important to understand that, because folks like Ajit Pai, who is a former top lawyer for Verizon, and had tremendous conflicts of interest for the job, again, were approved very, very quickly by the Senate, because, historically, confirmation processes for these types of roles have been largely pro forma, just sort of a, yeah, sure, we’ll approve your guy, you approve our guy, and all is well and good.

And this has been the exception to that, where Gigi Sohn has faced relentless smear campaigns, some of which we know is funded directly by the telecom industry, because it’s coming from groups that they’ve effectively used as their mouthpieces in the past, folks like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and others, that have taken large amounts of money from the industry, and routinely put out statements more or less in line with their policies.

And so they started a lot of the attacks on Sohn, calling her left wing, playing into these tropes around claims of anti-conservative bias, saying that she supports censorship.

All of that’s completely ridiculous. Sohn, like myself, is a staunch defender of the First Amendment, and has actually been very outspoken about the need for protecting speech from across the political spectrum. It’s actually rare these days in DC to have someone that does stand up for the free speech rights, even of their political opponents. And Gigi is really one of those people who has a strong dedication to free speech and free expression.

But the folks that are laundering these attacks don’t really care about their veracity. The goal is just to create confusion, and they’ve been very successful in creating a lot of flack that has now been picked up by the right-wing media, who are emboldened by these telecom-funded attacks, and they’ve really taken that and run with it. And they’ve now run off the deep end, and we can talk about that a bit more in a minute.

Gizmodo (12/1/21)

JJ: Thank you very much for pointing to the complicated nature of it, because, yeah, it’s very hard to push a line that Gigi Sohn would censor conservative voices when you have public support for her from the likes of Chris Ruddy, the head of Newsmax, and Preston Padden, the former Fox and ABC executive, who are coming forward, saying she’s never said anything that indicated to me that she would censor conservative voices.

And then the anti-rural thing was just a textbook thing where you circulate a video that you deceptively edited, and folks just run with it.

But now we see a certain kind of machine has been activated. You know, copycat headlines. The Daily Mail, for Pete’s sake, is involved. So let’s talk about, then, what you call going off the rails, the nature of this current attack, and, just because it’s what listeners may have seen, what the heck does Gigi Sohn have to do with sex trafficking?

EG: Absolutely nothing. But again, that doesn’t deter these outlets that tend to play pretty fast and loose with the facts. But let me explain what these attacks are, and what the argument that they’re trying to make is, and then I’ll very quickly explain why that’s a load of bleep, if you will.

So as you mentioned, in the last week and a half, we saw a bunch of far-right-wing news outlets publish more or less identical articles claiming that Gigi Sohn, this nominee, has opposed efforts to combat sex trafficking. That’s the argument that they’re making.

Now, even these outlets that, again, don’t particularly care about the facts, have a fair amount of trouble backing up that claim, because, again, it’s utterly nonsensical. But what they’re basically saying is, they’re attacking Gigi, who was sitting on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF, which is an organization probably many of your listeners know about, maybe even have donated to. They’re like an ACLU for the internet. They have been staunch defenders of free speech, and opponents of government censorship and surveillance, unapologetically, for many years.

Appeal (1/26/18)

And EFF is one of dozens of human rights organizations from around the world that oppose a piece of legislation called SESTA-FOSTA. This was legislation that created a carve out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act around content online that could theoretically be related to sex trafficking. The bill was so poorly written that, again, it was opposed by the entire human rights community, and, in fact, the US Department of Justice came right out and said, a couple years later, that the law has been utterly ineffective in aiding them in actual prosecutions of real sex trafficking and other related crimes. It’s actually made it harder for them to do so.

So EFF and many organizations oppose this law, not because they oppose efforts to combat sex trafficking, but because they opposed a terrible law that actually made it harder to combat sex trafficking, while in the process opening the floodgates for widespread online censorship of a wide range of content that had absolutely nothing to do with sex trafficking, like LGBTQ content, content related to sexual health, content related to learning about consent, and positive models for healthy and consensual adult relationships.

This is the type of stuff that got scrubbed off the internet by a ham-fisted law that, again, was opposed by many organizations, not just the EFF.

But these headlines gloss over all of that, and just wave their hands and try to say, Gigi Sohn, SESTA-FOSTA, sex trafficking.

But here’s the thing, is that none of this actually matters at all to Gigi’s candidacy for a role at the FCC, because even if she had taken a position on SESTA-FOSTA, which she never has, and even if, somehow, her role on the board of a highly respected organization like EFF implicated her in every single one of EFF’s positions on many, many issues, the FCC has absolutely no jurisdiction in this area whatsoever. They have nothing to do with the online content moderation rules of platforms like Facebook or Instagram or YouTube.

The FCC is laser-focused on providing oversight of telecom companies, the companies that connect us to the internet, your phone company, your cable company. And so this is just completely smoke and mirrors. This is an issue that the FCC doesn’t even touch, and it’d be like complaining that you don’t like Gigi’s position on climate change, another area that the FCC has no jurisdiction over.

So it’s a completely non-substantive attack. It’s very much driven by these homophobic tropes that we’ve seen going more and more mainstream, among both Republican lawmakers and the right-wing media ecosystem, that’s about conflating queerness with predatory behavior, and conflating queerness with deviance and harm.

And so that’s really what this is all about. These attacks are thinly veiled homophobia, because Gigi Sohn is not just a highly qualified nominee for the FCC, she’s also the first openly gay nominee for the position.

And so that’s really what this comes down to, is folks are weaponizing homophobia to try to derail what is a highly qualified nominee for an agency that needs to be fully staffed in order to advance the important priorities that the Biden administration has laid out, around ensuring that everyone has access to affordable broadband, around restoring net neutrality and broadband privacy rules, and updating the maps.

This whole smear around rural folks is ridiculous, because Gigi has actually an impeccable track record on working across the aisle to expand broadband access into rural communities. That’s something she’s really passionate about.

Evan Greer: “Senate Democrats, …have been pretty slow to stand up and speak out and condemn these attacks for what they are.”

So, again, when you get into the substance of it, you actually find, as you mentioned, that people from across the political spectrum really support Gigi’s candidacy, but what’s been slowing her down is these dark money smear campaigns, the homophobic smear campaigns, and, to be frank, the silence of Senate Democrats, who have been pretty slow to stand up and speak out and condemn these attacks for what they are, and who have repeatedly delayed the confirmation proceedings at the behest of the disingenuous opposition coming from Republicans and right-wing media outlets.

So Gigi now does have a hearing coming up on Valentine’s Day, so hopefully that’ll be a match made in heaven, and we will put some of this behind us, and we’ll see Senate Democrats stand strong against these attacks. But it has been a harrowing experience to see how an LGBTQ nominee, who’s highly qualified for their position, has been so viciously smeared in this blatantly homophobic way, and that Democrats have not come to her defense as loudly and swiftly as they absolutely should.

JJ: I have to say, I would kind of add elite media to the shamefully silent crowd. Not that they aren’t dutifully recounting the slurs, and even the complaints about the slurs, but large scale, I see a failure to identify astroturf at every occurrence, to say that this group that calls itself “decency” or “accountability,” they won’t let us know whether they’re in fact bankrolled by cable companies and ISPs, and we’re not going to evince a lot of curiosity about that.

I would like to see more from corporate media, and separating out in terms of seeing the homophobia for itself, first of all, as corrosive to any kind of conversation that we’re trying to have, but in this context, also identifying it as the smoke screen that it is.

And I wonder what you would like to see media doing in this instance.

EG: Yeah, I think this is a really valid point, and I think it’s a broader systemic problem with our media ecosystem. And in some ways, this is one of the reasons why, again, it’s so important that we have a fully functional FCC, whose role it is to ensure fairness in internet rules, etc., to allow the fostering of independent media.

But I agree. I think a big part of the problem is a lot of reporting is, to create this “fair and balanced” perception, is very much a “he said, she said” of lobby groups, where they’ll say, Evan Greer of Fight for the Future said this, and so-and-so of such-and-such organization said that.

And maybe sometimes they’ll include, “and that organization is funded by the industry,” but that’s more of a footnote. And that doesn’t necessarily give readers context, right? That just leaves them thinking, OK, well, this group is saying this, and that group is saying that, and of course they all have their various different interests, but I’m left not being sure what’s true.

And I do think that outlets could do a lot more to unpack what is the real context around this, and not just say this group said this and that group said that, but help readers truly understand what the motivations are at play, and, frankly, call out BS when it is as obvious as it often is.

And in this circumstance, I think it is very, very clear, and there could be more incisive reporting on just how blatant the smear campaign has been.

JJ: I find a big picture problem to be a tacit acceptance of the idea that there are just some folks who want regulators who oppose regulation, and that in the interest of fairness, those folks should have their perspective represented in regulatory policy.

This seems like one of the “so big that it’s off the page” presumptions that, of course, for balance, we should have, directing regulatory agencies, people who have said, explicitly or implicitly, that they just oppose regulation of industry, period.

I just find that a weird situation.

EG: It’s an even weirder situation than that, in some ways, because that deregulatory instinct, that has tended to come from the libertarian right, has been replaced in a lot of ways by what is actually, I would argue, an even more concerning turn toward right-wing politicians wanting to use the regulatory state to enact their frightening moral vision on the rest of us, right?

Vox (1/17/23)

Where we see folks like Ron DeSantis, very happy to use his state government apparatus to criminalize and crack down on venues that host drag shows, or other types of speech that he doesn’t like, or to reform the education system in his vision.

And so, I’m actually someone that is generally pretty skeptical about granting (especially federal) regulatory agencies too much power. But that’s what, again, is so absurd in this situation, when we’re talking about the types of rules that the Federal Communications Commission can and does put into place. They’re not limiting speech. They’re not restricting what you, a person, can do on the internet. They are holding your cable and phone company accountable so that you have freedom.

And I think that’s what’s been so absurd, is the far right has, again, really spread the smear, this idea, that Gigi Sohn and the Biden FCC are going to take over the internet and regulate it, when really what they’re doing, or what they want to do, is preserve the internet as a free and open place, where anyone can run a website and the government can’t shut it down, and nobody can shut it down, and can’t lean on telecom companies to censor content.

So a lot of these politics have just gotten very topsy-turvy, where it’s actually often, at this point, Republicans who are looking to use the regulatory state to bully corporations into doing things that they want them to do, or stop them from doing things they don’t want them to do.

So I think we just shouldn’t take them very seriously when they say, oh, well, we need a light-touch regulation, when these are some of the same folks that are looking to use the coercive power of the state to silence actual speech, to ban books, etc.

I think we, as progressives, need to reclaim our passion and commitment to free expression as a value, and be very clear that, actually, I want a fully functional FCC because I think it’s the FCC’s job to preserve free speech and free expression, and that’s why I’m fighting for this and that’s why I care about it, and not let people that are actually very into censorship go around laundering these bogus claims of anti-conservative bias or censorship from someone like Gigi Sohn, when it just couldn’t be further from the truth.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Evan Greer. She’s director of Fight for the Future. They’re online at FightForTheFuture.org. Evan Greer, thank you so much for taking time for us this week on CountersSpin.

EG: Anytime. Thanks so much for having.

The post ‘Gigi Sohn Has Faced Relentless Smear Campaigns, Some Funded by the Telecom Industry’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The post Slanting History to Smear Hulu’s 1619 Series appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Timothy Messer-Kruse.

"There's a clear path forward to avoiding a devastating and completely avoidable recession: Chair Powell and the Fed should stop raising interest rates," Mabud added.

The latest push for an end to interest rate increases came as fresh data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Tuesday showed that wage growth continued to cool at the tail-end of 2022, an outcome that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has explicitly been aiming for even as experts have rejected the notion that wages are responsible for current inflation levels.

According to the BLS Employment Cost Index (ECI)—a measure watched closely by Fed policymakers—wage growth climbed just 1% in the final three months of 2022 compared to the previous quarter, a slower pace than analysts expected.

"The Fed has lost its excuse for a recession," Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, tweeted in response to the new BLS figures. "Over the last three months, inflation has come down exactly as a soft landing would predict, wage growth didn't persist but moderated with the reopening to solidly high levels within late 1990s ranges, and the economy added 750,000 new jobs."

"Too many hard-working families have everything to lose if the Fed stays the course with higher rates that only push the economy closer to a recession."

Though Powell has insisted that Fed decision-making will be driven by economic data, he made clear last month that the nation's central bankers don't think inflation has slowed enough to justify a rate-hike pause or reversal, brushing aside the recessionary risks of more monetary tightening.

On Wednesday, the Fed is widely expected to institute a 25-basis-point rate increase followed by another of the same size at its March meeting, bringing the total number of rate hikes to nine since early 2022.

Even the central bank's own models predict a sharp increase in the unemployment rate—and potentially millions of lost jobs—if Fed policymakers drive interest rates up to their desired range of between 5% and 5.25%.

Recent layoffs across the tech industry as well as data signaling a hiring deceleration have also intensified fears of a Fed-induced economic crisis.

"The Fed has every reason to halt further job-killing interest rate hikes as key indicators show inflation is slowing while the economic recovery remains fragile," said Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security and Corporate Power program at Accountable.US. "Too many hard-working families have everything to lose if the Fed stays the course with higher rates that only push the economy closer to a recession."

"Repeated interest rate hikes have done little to curb corporate greed that even Fed economists admit is what's really driving high costs on everything from groceries to gas," Zelnick continued. "The Fed faces a choice: back down and let policy and lawmakers continue to take impactful steps to rein in corporate profiteering—or keep needlessly threatening jobs and an economic downturn with further rate hikes.”

For months, economists and lawmakers have vocally questioned the Fed's aggressive rate hikes and laser focus on the labor market given the myriad causes of the 2021 inflation spike, from pandemic-induced supply chain snags to corporate profiteering to Russia's war on Ukraine to the climate crisis.

Some experts, however, have argued that the Fed's seemingly misguided approach is perfectly understandable when considering that a central goal of the institution is to help the rich "conserve and increase their concentrated wealth."

"Chair Jerome Powell and the Fed are willing to impose significant costs on workers and families in order to reduce inflation," Gerald Epstein and Aaron Medlin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst wrote in The American Prospect earlier this month. "This focus on inflation, by promoting high unemployment, contradicts the dual mandate given to the Fed by Congress."

"Why does the Federal Reserve treat its high-employment mandate so cavalierly when inflation is above 2%?" the pair continued. "The answer stems from the fact that since its founding, Fed officials have seen the world through 'finance-colored' glasses. Financiers do not like high inflation. Like all creditors who lend money today to be paid back in the future, financiers hate getting paid back in dollars that are worth less than the dollars they lent out in the first place."

In a blog post on Monday, Economic Policy Institute research director Josh Bivens noted that the Fed's dual mandate is "meant to balance the risks of inflation versus the benefits of fast growth and low unemployment."

"Right now, the benefits of low unemployment are enormous, and the risks of inflation are retreating rapidly," Bivens wrote. "If the Fed lets the current recovery continue apace by not raising interest rates further at this week’s meeting, 2023 could turn out to be a great year for the economic fortunes of American families."

"The Fed should stand pat on interest rate increases," he added. "If they instead insist on raising rates, this will pose a dire threat to what could be an excellent 2023 for the economic prospects of America's working families."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The post An Elegy from Hell: Pompeo Smear Khashoggi appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Charles Pierson.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Xi becomes the first Chinese leader since Chairman Mao to hold three terms in office after he was re-elected by delegates at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing last weekend.

Western media rushed to predict that China would become more autocratic and repressive, without providing any substantiation for its lurid claims, and while ignoring the phenomenal economic and developmental successes of the People’s Republic under Xi during the past decade.

The U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations cited the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which predicted that China would become “more assertive and aggressive” in its foreign relations over the next five years.

The BBC ran a particularly scurrilous hit piece by its veteran anti-China apparatchik, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, which alleged that President Xi’s policies are “creating the hostile world that he claims he is defending against”.

Quoting Susan Shirk, a “China expert” dredged up from the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s, the BBC accused China of “self-encirclement”, “picking fights” with neighboring countries, “ramping up tensions with Taiwan” and “taking on America and trying to run it out of Asia”.

“It is a kind of self-encirclement that Chinese foreign policy has produced,” the so-called China expert obligingly commented for the BBC.

The negative focus on China’s government sounds absurdly misplaced coming from U.S. and British media whose own nations are assailed with political crises over governance. Polls show unprecedented numbers of American citizens losing faith in their political parties and election system. In Britain, the country is reeling from the sacking of a third prime minister in as many years.

But what’s asinine about the smears against Xi purportedly turning China into a more aggressive power is that they turn reality on its head.

This week sees the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED) holding a summit for “world democracy” in Taiwan. The event is being attended by over 300 activists and policymakers from some 70 nations to “promote freedom” and other virtue-signaling causes.

The NED describes itself as a “non-governmental organization” even though it is bankrolled by the U.S. government and works closely with the Central Intelligence Agency. As American author, the late William Blum pointed out, the NED took over the CIA’s covert roles in the 1980s because it was more politically palatable given the agency’s notoriety for fomenting deadly coups and assassinations.

Taiwan is officially recognized under international law as an integral part of China, albeit having an estranged relationship since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The One China Policy is recognized legally by the United Nations and by most governments including the United States since the late 1970s.

Washington nevertheless maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” whereby it proclaims to support Taiwan’s defense from China’s ambitions to incorporate the island territory under Beijing’s sovereign authority.

President Joe Biden has stretched this duplicity to breaking point by declaring on four occasions since he took office in January 2021 that the US would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the Chinese mainland. Despite subsequent White House denials, Biden’s utterances are a flagrant violation of the One China Policy and a brazen attack on Chinese sovereignty.

Since the strategic Pivot to Asia in 2011 taken by the Barack Obama administration, Washington has ramped up arms sales to Taiwan. The flow of arms and covert stationing of U.S. military trainers to Taiwan continued under Trump and now Biden.

The calculated signals from Washington are promoting a more secessionist political climate in Taiwan, which feels emboldened that it has America’s backing to declare independence from China. Beijing has repeatedly warned against U.S. incitement in its backyard.

When Democrat House of Representatives Leader Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August, the incident infuriated Beijing to mount massive military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. For a few days, it looked as if an invasion could take place.

Since President Xi was first elected in 2013, he has strongly asserted China’s historic right to rule over Taiwan, preferably by peaceful means but also through force of arms if necessary. He repeated that aim during a keynote address to the 20th Congress.

Any reasonable observer can see that Beijing’s resolve is being cynically provoked by Washington’s interference in China’s internal affairs with regard to Taiwan’s sovereign status. Arming the island to the teeth with American missiles and thumbing noses at Beijing with pro-separatist political delegations would be not tolerated in the slightest if the shoe were on the other foot. Indeed, the U.S. would have gone to war against China already in a reverse scenario.

For the Western media to make out that Xi is taking China in a more aggressive direction is a ludicrous distortion that conceals who is the real aggressor – the United States and its NATO partners who relentlessly accuse Beijing of expansionism. The only “expansionism” China is engaging in is building mutual trade and commerce with other nations through its global Belt and Road Initiative.

The National Endowment for Democracy [read “Destabilization”], the CIA’s very own Trojan horse, is this week calling on “activists” in Taiwan to overthrow autocracy. It is a veritable call to arms by the CIA conducted on Chinese sovereign territory.

Not only that, the NED summit declares that Taiwan and Ukraine are “two major frontlines of the struggle for democracy”.

NED was a major driver of the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 which ushered in a fascist anti-Russia regime in Kiev and which led to the current war with Russia. The Americans are blatantly using the same playbook for Taiwan.

And yet China and President Xi are being smeared as the aggressors!

Beijing might be better taking Taiwan now – once and for all – before it festers anymore under American influence.

As Russia is finding out, to its cost, delaying the disease can lead to more fatal conditions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Finian Cunningham.

For months now we have seen a well orchestrated smear campaign aimed against the government of Ukraine by small but influential groups on both the far left and far right.

One of those progressives leading the Smear Ukraine Campaign is rock and roll legend Roger Waters. One of his high-profile, far-right counterparts is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene’s an idiot, but Waters is a widely respected musician-activist. However, he recently penned an open letter to Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska. In the letter Water asked Zelenska to beg her husband, President Volodymyr Zelensky, to stop accepting weapons from NATO countries and make peace with Russia. (Waters has written no similar open letters to Jill Biden or Russian President Vladimir Putin’s longtime mistress Alina Maratovna Kabaeva.)

In the letter, Waters makes a couple of curious assertions.

The major one is that President Zelensky is little more than a puppet manipulated by “forces of extreme nationalism.” Nazis, for short. Putin has made the same allegation, which is reportedly why he sent Russian troops into Ukraine more than six months ago—to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Putin has repeatedly talked about the “neo-Nazis who settled in Kyiv and took the entire Ukrainian people hostage.”

More than 300 scholars of genocide, Nazism and World War II labeled these claims “Russian propaganda.” In a joint statement, the scholars noted: “We do not idealize the Ukrainian state and society. Like any other country, it has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups….Yet none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine.”

FactCheck.org asked one of these scholars, Eugene Finkel, an associate professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, to elaborate. He had this to say:

“Neo-Nazi, far right and xenophobic groups do exist in Ukraine, like in pretty much any other country, including Russia. They are vocal and can be prone to violence but they are numerically small, marginal and their political influence at the state level is non-existent…I would consider the KKK in the US and skinheads and neo-Nazi groups in Russia a much bigger problem and threat than the Ukrainian far right.”

Indeed, Ukraine’s far right parties—National Corps, Svoboda, Governmental Initiative of Yarosh, and the Right Sector—formed a nationwide united party for the 2019 elections and managed to win only 2.15 percent of the popular vote, meaning they received no representation in the Ukrainian parliament. Zero.

However, Waters isn’t entirely wrong. After wrongly accusing Ukraine of being governed by fascists, he rightly accuses the US and NATO of “throwing fuel, in the form of armaments, into a fire fight.” Of course the US is only too happy to spend tens of billions of dollars waging a proxy war against Russia while its own citizens go without basic services like running water, health care and decent public schools. That’s the American Way. Waters is well aware of this.

As for a way out, Waters says he would like to see the Minsk Agreements put into effect, but it was Putin, not Ukraine, who pronounced those agreements null and void.

What’s puzzling is why Waters and many others on the far left have bought into this fascist-Ukrainian-regime-is-the-real-aggressor nonsense? Perhaps it is the only way these leftists can morally justify their opposition to arming Ukrainian forces.

The far left has long objected to the working class (of whatever nation) going off to die in wars that ultimately benefit only the ruling class—which is most if not all wars. Similarly, the far left abhors the thought of the  military-industrial-media complex raking in huge profits at the expense of working class Ukrainian and Russian lives. Last, the far left cannot abide that the US is using this proxy war as an opportunity to secure its place as lone Superpower. (Now we just need to needle China into starting a war with Taiwan. Oh yes, Nancy Pelosi is already on that.)

If the smear campaigners can paint the conflict as a war pitting fascists against fascists, well then of course the US and the West should stay out. It hardly matters which fascist regime wins.

The smear campaigners are wrong to say that Ukraine has no right to seek NATO membership when it is obviously in its interest to do so. Ukraine also has a right to defend to its sovereign territory.

We can argue over why the US ruling class is so hellbent on arming Ukraine—not because we care about Ukrainian lives—but as an opportunity to make billions of dollars for military contractors, while, better yet, knocking down Russia a peg or two, and widening the buffer between NATO and Russia.

But let’s stop lying about Ukraine being a fascist state that deserves to be defeated and at least partially swallowed up by Russia.

It’s simply not true.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chris Orlet.

• Disinformation: Deliberately incorrect information shared with intent to deceive.  
• Misinformation: Incorrect information spread without malice.

Guidance for media outlets

• Consider smear campaigns against employees as an attack on the newsroom and  freedom of expression.
• Ensure that journalists are aware of how their online personal data can be used against them and help them remove it from the internet.
• Encourage robust digital security for journalists’ online accounts, including personal ones.
• Weigh the benefits of speaking out for journalists under attack. A public statement of support may be useful, according to the International Press Institute, though it may also spur further harassment in some cases.

Guidance for journalists

• Research whether other journalists covering your beat have been targeted and set reminders or automate regular internet searches to monitor disinformation about issues you cover.
• Remove or protect online personal data such as photos, addresses, and telephone numbers, since abusers can use this information to harass you.
• Secure all online accounts by turning on two-factor authentication (2FA) and creating long, unique passwords.
• Learn how to protect yourself during a targeted online attack.
• Speak with your newsroom to see what support they will offer you if you are targeted by a smear campaign.
• Online harassment can take a toll on your mental wellbeing. Consider coming offline until the attacks have died down.

Relevant CPJ Resources

Editor’s checklist: protecting staff and freelancers against online abuse

Protecting against online harassment

Protecting against targeted online attacks

Removing personal data from the internet

Online harassment and how to protect your mental health

Digital safety kit

The Committee to Protect Journalists is a member of the Coalition Against Online Violence, a collection of global organizations working to find better solutions for women journalists facing online abuse, harassment and other forms of digital attack.

Journalists in need of emergency assistance can email emergencies@cpj.org.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman hit back Thursday after the campaign of Dr. Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, misleadingly accused the Pennsylvania frontrunner of employing two convicted murderers on his staff.

"Does Dr. Oz believe that the wrongfully convicted should die in prison? Does this man have any compassion?"

Oz's campaign failed to mention that the brothers, Dennis and Lee Horton, were granted clemency after successfully arguing they were wrongfully convicted of second-degree murder and spent 27 years behind bars.

"This smear is a sad and desperate attack from Dr. Oz's shambolic campaign," Fetterman said in a statement. "Going after two campaign staffers is a new low for Dr. Oz. Dennis and Lee, who were wrongfully convicted, are two of the kindest, hardest-working people I know—fighting for their release was one of the proudest moments of my career and I'm honored to have them on this team."

"Does Dr. Oz believe that the wrongfully convicted should die in prison? Does this man have any compassion?" he asked. "He's making a predictable and fear-mongering

attack against two men who spent 27 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit."

Oz's calumny—which came as aggregate polling showed him trailing the Democrat by eight points with just about two months until the November midterm elections—follows another dubious attack in which the TV doctor made comments many observers said mocked Fetterman's recent stroke.

"I survived a stroke. Plenty of others have dealt with health challenges too," Fetterman said Wednesday during a campaign event. "Can you imagine if you had a doctor who mocked you for it?"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The New York Times (7/2/22) attributed a spike in mentions of Nazism at the start of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Putin describing Ukraine as “full of Nazis,” but did not discuss Western media comparing Putin to Hitler.

Earlier this month, a New York Times (7/2/22) report, “How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis,” argued that falsely branding people as Nazis is inherently propagandistic:

The lie that the government and culture of Ukraine are filled with dangerous “Nazis” has become a central theme of Kremlin propaganda about the war.

To say Ukraine is “filled” with Nazis is an obvious exaggeration, although even a relatively small number of Nazis has wielded disproportionate influence in the Ukrainian government (Kyiv Post, 3/26/19; Euronews, 8/4/21). Nevertheless, FAIR (3/7/14, 1/15/22, 1/28/22, 2/23/22) has covered the Western media’s denial of the far-right’s role in the Ukrainian 2014 coup, as well as their complicity in amplifying Ukrainian neo-Nazi publicity stunts during the war. 

But if it’s true that falsely associating a government with Nazism is a manipulation worthy of condemnation, how then should one judge Western media efforts to tie Russian President Vladimir Putin to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler?

FAIR (3/30/22) has previously noted how evidence-free caricatures in Western media of Putin as irrational (and perhaps psychotic) make diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis seem pointless. Tracing a connection between Putin and Hitler is an even more insidious attempt to make the idea of a negotiated end to the war seem like a moral outrage.

‘Striking similarities’

In the early days of the Ukraine crisis, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul implied to guest host Ali Velshi on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show (3/11/22) that Putin was worse than Hitler, because Putin was killing his own people, while Hitler “didn’t kill ethnic Germans.” McFaul’s comments were later shared without attribution or pushback by the Maddow blog on Twitter (3/12/22)—suggesting that Maddow’s show endorsed McFaul’s comparative ranking of Putin and Hitler—before being removed following social media backlash and a correction by the Auschwitz Memorial. (Many of the Jews killed by Hitler were, of course, ethnically German, as were countless other victims of Hitler, if that makes a moral difference.)

Historian Richard J. Evans (New Statesman, 4/9/22) listed several ways Putin could be compared to Hitler, including the argument that genocide was at “the heart of the Nazi project,” and Russia’s actions in Ukraine amount to genocide because Ukrainians “are being killed because they are Ukrainians, and for no other reason.” Furthermore:

Both men had imposed dictatorial rule over their respective countries, both men suppressed dissent and eliminated independent media, both men had no hesitation in murdering people they considered a threat to their rule. Both Hitler and Putin invaded a series of neighboring countries, both used lies and disinformation to justify their actions, both used a symbol–in Putin’s case “Z,” in Hitler’s the swastika–to advertise support for their aims. Both men had no hesitation in causing death and destruction on a massive scale to further their ends.

Many of these features would seem to apply to virtually any authoritarian ruler, from Augusto Pinochet to Ferdinand Marcos—though not every dictator has a distinctive logo, were they all Hitler as well? 

Political scientist Alexander Motyl wrote an op-ed for The Hill (5/3/22), “Putin’s Russia Rose like Hitler’s Germany—and Could End the Same,” that argued that the “striking similarities between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Adolf Hitler’s Germany are not accidental,” because their “imperial mindsets, militaristic ambitions, personality cults and demonization of minorities (Jews and Ukrainians)” made it “almost inevitable that Hitler and Putin then embarked on major wars.”

“We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust…But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin,” wrote Timothy Snyder for the New York Times (5/19/22).

Historian Timothy Snyder’s New York Times op-ed (5/19/22), “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist,” averred that we “err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust,” but claimed there are similarities between “Mr. Putin’s war” and “Hitler’s main war aim” of conquering Ukraine in 1941. In any case, Snyder suggested that, as with Hitler,(“ABC World News Tonight” OR “CBS Evening News” OR “The Situation Room” OR “Special Report” OR “The Beat” OR “Nightly News” OR “All Things Considered” OR “NewsHour”) AND (“Oil” OR “gas”) w/100 (“prices” OR “cost”) there was no point in negotiating with Putin, because the only way to deal with such leaders is to hand them a military defeat: “The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him,” he asserted, warning that if “Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.”

‘More dangerous’ than Hitler

In the London Telegraph (5/10/22), Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki argued that Putin is “more dangerous” than Hitler (or Stalin), because not only does Putin “have deadlier weapons at his disposal, but he also has the new media at his fingertips to spread his propaganda.” While it “seems impossible that Hitler or Stalin could return in our time,” Morawiecki wrote, they apparently did so when the “inconceivable became fact when rockets fell on Kyiv, Kharkiv and other cities of a sovereign, democratic state in the heart of Europe.” (Serbia was also, like Ukraine, a sovereign state with an at least nominally elected government—but NATO rockets falling on its cities during the Kosovo War did not seem to herald the second coming of World War II–era dictators.) 

Morawiecki claimed that Putin’s “Russkiy Mir” ideology is “the equivalent of 20th-century Communism and Nazism,” and a “cancer” that poses a “deadly threat to the whole of Europe.” It is “not enough to support Ukraine in its military struggle with Russia,” he declared; nothing less than rooting out this “monstrous new ideology entirely” would be satisfactory to him.

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is a violation of international law, condemned by 141 out of 193 countries in a UN General Assembly vote. But claims that Russia is committing genocide—a charge that carries automatic repercussions under international law—have to reckon with the comparison between the Ukraine invasion and the largest US military operation of the 21st century, the Iraq War. The UN’s count of civilian deaths in the first four months of Russia’s war was 4,677; the tally in the first four months of Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, a project that monitored press accounts of civilian casualties, was 8,576. 

Both numbers are horrific, and each surely underestimates the true civilian toll of these wars. But if Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, what was the US doing in Iraq?

“I know it’s hard…to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,” a US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told Newsweek (3/22/22). “But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians.”

If one genuinely wants to compare Putin’s brutality to Hitler’s, one has to look at the actual civilian toll of World War II. In the European theater alone, tens of  millions of civilians were killed; some 14 million of these deaths were inflicted in the Soviet Union, which comprised both Russia and Ukraine. When you assert that the enemy of the day is as bad as Hitler, you’re also asserting that Hitler is no worse than the enemy of the day.

A parade of new Hitlers

Political scientist Michael Parenti pointed out in Against Empire that the corporate media often demonize the leaders of Official Enemy states as an evil personification of the entire population in order to justify US aggression against them, and there are few better ways to vilify foreign leaders in the West than by making exaggerated accusations that they are Adolf Hitler reincarnate. The glib trope demonstrates how frivolously historical comparisons are thrown around to advance US geopolitical goals. 

British journalist Louis Allday (Ebb Magazine, 3/15/22) compiled a list of instances where Western journalists and officials have compared foreign leaders to Hitler—with Hitler sometimes coming off better in the comparison. Hitler-like leaders include Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milošević, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and even Cuba’s Fidel Castro. 

If we take all of these allegations at face value, we should all be shocked by how many Hitlers have emerged after World War II. Or one could reasonably infer that Western journalists and officials will compare any foreign leader they dislike to Hitler, trivializing the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the suffering endured by their victims. Allday argues that these flippant Hitler comparisons are “effectively tantamount to a form of Holocaust denial and even an insidious rehabilitation of Nazism.”

Diplomacy = ‘appeasement’

One inevitable feature of these Hitler comparisons is frequent reference to “appeasement” when reporting on the US’s dealings with foreign leaders. This presents any attempt at diplomatic negotiations with foreign leaders opposed by the US as a misguided or unprincipled effort to placate an irrational or evil dictator bent on expansionist conquest. 

Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, as it amassed troops near its border, British Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace worried that “there was a whiff of Munich in the air.” This was a clear reference to what is commonly perceived to be a failed policy of diplomatic efforts to prevent World War II in the West, when European powers agreed to let Hitler annex part of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement (BBC, 2/13/22). 

Ian Bond (Guardian, 2/22/22), the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, wrote that although Putin is “not a charismatic madman,” there are still “echoes of 1938 in current developments,” as what “Putin has in common with Hitler” is a “mystical belief in a nation stretching beyond his country’s current borders.”  Bond criticized Western officials for appearing to focus on “accommodating” Putin instead of deterring him, arguing that deterrence is “impossible” if “leaders keep telling Putin what they are not prepared to do” by ruling out in advance escalation into World War III.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt (5/9/22) made it seem as if US leaders can only choose between their “old strategy” of “appeasement,” which supposedly caused Putin to “become more aggressive,” and their “new strategy” of “confrontation,” which would risk “a fight with a nuclear power that many Americans and Europeans do not want.” 

This is a false dichotomy. Although establishment Western pundits and officials like to claim that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked,” FAIR (1/28/22, 3/4/22) has pointed out that this self-serving narrative omits a record of conscious provocations against Russia via NATO expansion towards Russian borders, in violation of promises made to Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Leonhardt falsely described the US’s previous foreign policy toward Russia as a “strategy of non-confrontation ” rather than encirclement and antagonism. 

(A poll of Ukrainians conducted by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center—6/9-6/22—found 58% thought the US bore “some” or “a great deal of responsibility” for the current conflict, along with 55% for NATO, while 82% said the same of Russia. This majority opinion in Ukraine would be difficult to utter in an establishment US media outlet.)

According to a Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center poll, 58% of Ukrainians believe the US bears “a great deal/some responsibility” for the war in Ukraine.

Accusations of “appeasing” Russia or Putin have been raised towards influential Western officials who have either engaged in diplomacy or advocated de-escalation through negotiations. Zelenskyy has made contradictory remarks throughout the conflict, arguing that diplomacy is the only way to end the war, while also advocating for escalation through more NATO military support and setting up a “no-fly-zone.” Western media outlets (e.g., Reuters, 5/26/22; Newsweek, 5/26/22) amplified Zelenskyy’s Munich references, with no pushback, when he criticized former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for advocating Ukrainian territorial concessions as a path to ending the war. Zelenskyy mocked Kissinger, stating that his “calendar is not 2022, but 1938,” and suggesting that Kissinger was speaking to an audience “in Munich back then.” 

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has also had to defend her record of diplomacy with Putin numerous times from charges of “appeasement,” as Zelenskyy blamed her and former French president Nicholas Sarkozy for not doing enough to prevent the situation. Other op-eds (Politico, 5/23/22; Bloomberg, 6/9/22) denounced her as the “Neville Chamberlain of our time”–evoking the British prime minister who met with Hitler at Munich–because of her insufficiently aggressive policy. 

Russia’s ‘appeasement’ history

Comparisons that depict diplomacy with Russia as a reenactment of Munich gloss over Russia’s unique history with Nazi Germany. The popular narrative of “appeasement” in 1938 often omits that World War II might not have happened if Britain and France had accepted Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s offer to form a military alliance to preemptively attack Nazi Germany in August 15, 1939 (Telegraph, 10/18/08). Britain and France’s rejection of Stalin’s offer arguably led to the USSR signing a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany (also known as the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact) on August 23, 1939; it was this agreement that set the stage for WWII, not Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in Munich.

World War II is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, because approximately 26 million Soviet citizens died in the conflict, while around three-quarters of all Nazi wartime losses came from fighting the Red Army (Washington Post, 5/8/15). But there are other historical memories that drive Russia’s perception of threats coming from the West. Another fact seldom recalled in US media is that Russia was invaded by the US and 14 other nations in 1918, who were intervening on behalf of the White Russian Army against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (National Interest, 9/3/19; Consortium News, 7/18/18). 

“The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people,” Putin said in his February 24 speech.

Indeed, Putin cited Russia’s history of being invaded by the West in the 20th century as a major reason behind the timing of his decision to preemptively invade Ukraine. In his speech announcing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Putin invoked his own version of the “appeasement” trope in justification of military aggression:

The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people. In the first months after the hostilities broke out, we lost vast territories of strategic importance, as well as millions of lives. We will not make this mistake the second time. 

Recreating empire?

An oft-repeated corollary to the Western media’s frequent Hitler comparisons is that there was little point before the invasion in addressing Russia’s security concerns surrounding NATO expansion and the US’s unilateral abandonment of arms control treaties, since Putin supposedly wanted to recreate the Soviet Union or Russian Empire despite his repeated explicit denials. Putin’s alleged belief that the modern state of Ukraine has no right to exist, the argument goes, is proof of his supposed Hitlerian expansionist ambitions.

“Talk of ‘de-Nazification,’ while absurd on a factual level, is nonetheless revealing. It tells us that Putin is acting on his long-held belief that the Ukrainian government has no right to be independent. It hints at his ultimate goal: to transform Ukraine into a vassal of a new Russian empire,” wrote Zack Beauchamp for Vox (2/24/22).

The two sources Western media most cite to make this claim are Putin’s speech (2/21/22) recognizing the independence of the separatist Donbas republics, and an essay he wrote last year (7/12/21) titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp (2/24/22) wrote that Putin “believes that Ukraine is an illegitimate country that exists on land that’s historically and rightfully Russian.” Ha’aretz (3/17/22) published an op-ed comparing Putin’s July essay, with its “Hitlerian motifs,”  to Hitler’s Mein Kampf—particularly “the notion of an artificial and tragic division of a people that must be rectified by reunification.”

Perhaps the most frequent purveyor of this narrative is Timothy Snyder (4/18/18), who claimed that the war in Ukraine is a “colonial war”:

In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, [Putin] argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.

However, when one actually reads both sources, rather than relying on secondhand sources to explain what Putin meant, it quickly becomes apparent that these are blatant misrepresentations of what Putin said. Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is long and convoluted, but although Putin talks about Russia and Ukraine’s shared historic, religious and linguistic heritage, and claims that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era,” he also stresses that Russia has acknowledged new geopolitical realities:

Things change: Countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!… The Russian Federation recognized the new geopolitical realities: and not only recognized, but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country. 

This point was repeated in Putin’s later speech (2/21/22), where Putin blamed the existence of the modern Ukrainian state on Vladimir Lenin and the USSR. Putin’s claim was not that Moscow should continue to govern all of Ukraine, however, but that Russia’s recognition of Ukrainian independence was an act of political generosity, in contrast to what he presented as Kyiv’s ungenerous treatment of the residents of Donbas:

Despite all these injustices, lies and outright pillage of Russia, it was our people whdoo accepted the new geopolitical reality that took shape after the dissolution of the USSR, and recognised the new independent states. Not only did Russia recognise these countries, but helped its CIS partners, even though it faced a very dire situation itself. This included our Ukrainian colleagues, who turned to us for financial support many times from the very moment they declared independence. Our country provided this assistance while respecting Ukraine’s dignity and sovereignty.

Putin’s efforts to justify Russia’s invasion are not based on events that happened centuries ago; his historical accounts in these two texts, however self-serving, are not linked to attempts to justify violence. Rather, the speech (2/24/22) that declared the “special military operation” did so on the grounds that the “eastward expansion of NATO” that began in 1999 is “a matter of life and death,” and a “red line” for Russia’s security that had been crossed despite several warnings. 

He also maintained it was to “protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime” in the Donbas region. Such concerns are generally dismissed as pretextual in the West, but the UN’s count of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian civil war—3,321 as of January 2019 (UN OHCHR, 9/23/21)–is comparable to the UN civilian death toll from the Russian invasion, with a tiny fraction of the international outrage.

The cost of ‘appeasement’ charges

The hyperbolic comparisons between Russia and Vladimir Putin to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, as well as constant accusations that anyone who attempts to negotiate with Russia for a peaceful end to the war is engaged in “appeasement,” have cost the world opportunities to de-escalate. The Biden administration has not encouraged the Ukrainian government to engage in serious negotiations with Russia (Jacobin, 5/30/22), no doubt well aware that doing so would bring more Chamberlain analogies. 

Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, cohosts of the Citations Needed podcast (10/9/19), point out that the emotionally manipulative and thought-terminating comparisons to Hitler and Munich are designed to suggest that 

every so-called dictator is a new Hitler and every negotiation, every potential negotiation even, with those countries is a new Munich, is a new abdication of world responsibility that will inevitably lead to what else: a new Holocaust. 

The extreme caricatures of Putin as equal to or worse than Hitler are setting up Ukraine and the world for a grim fate. A BBC report (6/20/22) last month featured NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urging the West to “prepare to continue supporting Ukraine in a war lasting for years,” while the head of the British Army, Gen. Patrick Sanders, asserted that the “UK and allies needed to be capable of winning a ground war with Russia.” The frequent Nazi comparisons and Munich references made by Western media paint those who would prefer a negotiated settlement to years of bloodshed, the risk of World War III and nuclear war as “appeasers” of a Hitlerian dictator with genocidal ambitions.

Featured Image: Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Clive Rose, Alexander Nemenov and Kirill Kudryavtsev, via Getty Images

The post Calling Putin ‘Hitler’ to Smear Diplomacy as ‘Appeasement’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Joshua Cho.

Supporters of Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn and other critics of the telecommunications industry's efforts to thwart her U.S. Senate confirmation this week called out not only those behind the smear campaign but also Democratic leaders.

"Dem leadership is nowhere to be found defending their nominee."

The digital rights group Fight for the Future tweeted late Thursday that President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) promised to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules, of which Sohn was a chief architect.

"But instead they're sitting on the sidelines while Big Telecom mounts a massive dark money-funded smear campaign against their nominee to the FCC, Gigi Sohn," Fight for the Future added. "Where's the leadership? Do what you said you would do."

Fight for the Future director Evan Greer said Thursday that "it is absolutely absurd that millions of people from across the political spectrum fought for and won net neutrality at the FCC."

Ajit Pai, who chaired the FCC during the Trump administration, "repealed it, Dems promised to restore it, and they've so far failed to do so by caving to industry pressure and slow-walking" Sohn's nomination, Greer added.

"The only reason for this is corruption. Plain and simple," she charged, adding that it is a "good time to remember that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon etc. are huge donors to Democratic leadership and candidates. They've got their hands all up in there."

The campaigner also said that while the telecom sector and others—including the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)—attack Sohn, "Dem leadership is nowhere to be found defending their nominee."

Greer pointed to a piece that Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice campaigns for Color of Change, wrote for The Root last year, declaring that the FOP is "one of the largest and most powerful hate groups in the country" and "acts as the guardian, enforcer, and perpetuator" of "racist police culture."

The FOP has openly opposed Sohn, citing her "forceful advocacy of end-to-end encryption and 'user-only-access'" and claiming that her employment history, public policy stances, and social media activity "indicated serious animus towards law enforcement officers and the rule of law."

The FOP on Wednesday released polling it commissioned from Morning Consult, which asked U.S. registered voters various questions, including some about Sohn.

"In the poll, 65% of voters had no opinion on this nominee. But after seeing information and social media posts about her extreme positions on policing issues, 6 in 10 said they would be less likely to support the nomination," said FOP national president Patrick Yoes. "For those who say Ms. Sohn's nomination will impact their vote in the Senate's midterm elections, 60% say they are more likely to vote for a Republican candidate—which is very significant in states like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, and Washington."

Critics framed the FOP polling as part of the ongoing efforts to tank Sohn's nomination.

"The smear campaign against [Sohn] has been beyond ridiculous," said Techdirt founder Mike Masnick. "Everyone who knows anything about her knows that it's pure nonsense, that she's beyond qualified, and that she will do an amazing job."

"The smear merchants are doing it *because* they know she'll do a good job," added Masnick, who was responding on Twitter to similar comments from technology writer Karl Bode.

Bode had tweeted of the FOP polling that "this is part of a manufactured smear campaign being run by AT&T and Comcast against a highly qualified and extremely popular FCC nominee literally everyone in the telecom/media space knows would be great on telecom monopolization, broadband affordability, and media consolidation."

Writing for Techdirt on Friday, Bode blasted the FOP's "not-at-all-scientific poll" as well as the "grotesque campaign" by telecom giants to "spread harmful gibberish in a bid to either flip or provide flimsy justification" for right-wing Democratic senators opposing her nomination.

He also wrote:

The Biden team isn't faultless here either. It took the Biden administration nine months to even nominate Sohn, giving the telecom industry… ample time to galvanize opposition. Team Biden also hasn't done anything to defend Sohn publicly, or apply any meaningful pressure on the Senate confirmation voting process. Nor have Sohn's future FCC colleagues voiced any public support, despite the shamelessness of the attacks.

Which, in turn, is fairly reflective of how the federal government doesn't really take stuff like telecom monopolization and telecom consolidation seriously, especially in an era where "Big Tech" has sucked all the oxygen out of the D.C. policy room. And again, this is all occurring in an era when D.C. pretends to be interested in "bipartisan antitrust reform," revealing the hollowness of the gambit.

In a series of tweets Friday, Bode warned that "it is going to be an EXTREMELY long and painful decade if Democratic strategists don't start pulling their heads out of their asses and start displaying something vaguely resembling urgency, passion, and creativity."

"The phony appeal of authoritarianism can only be defeated if the [Democratic National Committee] shakes off corruption and truly represents the public interest," Bode added. "You don't accomplish this by letting a hugely popular media and telecom reformer drown under unopposed GOP/telecom propaganda attacks."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Since January 18, when Șercan published an article alleging that Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, she has been the target of harassment and smears campaign, according to Șercan, who spoke with CPJ by phone and email, a detailed account written by Șercan for her outlet, independent news website PressOne; and local reports. Șercan received a series of threatening email and social media messages and several intimate photos of her were shared on various adult and news websites.

Șercan believes the actions are part of a broader campaign in retaliation for her reporting, she told CPJ. She additionally claims that screenshots she provided to the police were leaked from her file and published on other websites, and that she believes “Romanian authorities first orchestrated and then disguised an operation meant to discredit” her.

“The threats and the suspicion of leaking evidence from a criminal investigation represent yet another attempt to silence me and make me abandon my work,” Șercan told CPJ, adding that she had her mobile phone analyzed by two independent cybersecurity teams, but they were unable to find proof of hacking, leading her to believe that police supplied the screenshots.  

“Romanian authorities must ensure that Emilia Șercan can continue her reporting without fear and intimidation and investigate the journalist’s claims that state officials may have been involved in the campaign,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “It is totally unacceptable to harass an investigative journalist with information and photos involving her private life.” 

On January 19 and February 2, Șercan received an email – reviewed by CPJ – calling her names and threating her privacy if she continued investigating the prime minister. She filed two criminal complaints with police.

An unknown person sent Șercan a private Facebook message on February 16, which contained five intimate photos of her from around 20 years ago. On February 17, she contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation into the two previous criminal complaints and shared screenshots of the messages, which included the photos.

On February 18, the screenshot appeared on a Romanian language news website in Moldova, and then was shared by more than 70 Moldovan and Romanian websites. Șercan filed a third criminal complaint with police, and a fourth complaint for the possible leak.

In response to CPJ’s questions, the Bucharest police confirmed that a criminal investigation is ongoing but did not provide any further details.

In 2019, Șercan received death threats after she reported on alleged plagiarism by a former education minister, the dean of the police academy, and graduates of the country’s national security and intelligence academies, as CPJ documented at the time. As a result of the criminal investigation into the death threats, a police officer pled guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison and the dean and vice dean of the police academy were sentenced to three years for inciting blackmail, according to Șercan and news reports. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Progressives on Monday were joined by critics from across the political spectrum in denouncing Republican senators' attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's record as a public defender and on the federal bench at her confirmation hearing to join the U.S. Supreme Court, as lawmakers including Sen. Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley suggested Jackson is overly sympathetic to accused and convicted criminals, including child abusers.

On the first day of the judge's confirmation hearings, Hawley listed a number of cases that Jackson heard involving child pornography possession, accusing her of flouting federal sentencing guidelines and recommendations by prosecutors when she decided the offenders' punishment.

"The United States v. Cooper, there the defendant... distributed dozens of images of child pornography, possessed over 600. The federal guidelines recommended 151 to 188 months in prison," the Missouri Republican read from his notes on Jackson's career. "The prosecutor recommended 72 months. Judge Jackson gave the defendant 60 months."

Hawley listed several other cases in which he felt Jackson was too lenient, while Grassley (R-Iowa) questioned whether the judge could be an effective Supreme Court justice considering that as a former public defender, she may have "policy disagreements" with the United States' "criminal laws."

The senators' statements followed earlier complaints from Republicans about Jackson's work representing people detained at Guantanamo Bay, which lawmakers reportedly plan to bring up during the confirmation hearings.

Critics on Monday condemned Hawley's claims of Jackson's leniency regarding child abuse as particularly inflammatory, considering, as sentencing experts including Ohio State University law professor Douglas Berman recognize, federal guidelines for sentencing child pornography offenders are "dysfunctional and unduly severe":

In the nine cases, Judge Jackson followed the prosecutors' sentencing recommendations in two cases, and sentenced below the prison term suggested by the government in seven others. One case, U.S. v. Hillie, distorts the average deviation from the prosecutors' recommendations, as the government there sought a sentence of 45 years and Judge Jackson imposed a sentence of "only" 29.5 years. Leaving that case out of the average, in the other eight cases, Judge Jackson's sentence was only about 1.8 years below the recommendation of prosecutors (and about 0.6 years above the defense recommendations).

"Judge Jackson's record in these [child pornography] cases does show she is quite skeptical of the ranges set by the CP guidelines, but so too were prosecutors in the majority of her cases and so too are district judges nationwide (appointed by presidents of both parties)," Berman wrote last week.

As UC Irvine School of Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky wrote at Common Dreams on Monday, in five of the cases Hawley has zeroed in on as the Senate considers Jackson's nomination, the judge "imposed the sentences that were the same as or greater than what the United States probation office recommended."

"Lacking any grounds for opposition, Republicans are resorting to slime," Chemerinsky wrote.

Observers warned that Hawley's attempt to smear Jackson's record may have implications beyond the judge's potential confirmation, noting that the senator's focus on the sentences appear designed "to create an association between [Jackson] and this broader trope"—"that public institutions are overrun with child predators," an idea that formed the foundation for the QAnon conspiracy theory which has been linked to several acts of violence, including the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Progressive attorney Christine Pelosi denounced Hawley's attacks as "vile."

"I had hoped my colleagues in the other chamber could not debase themselves any further," added Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.).

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was among the critics who noted that the right-wing National Review published an essay condemning Hawley's earlier statements against Jackson, with contributing editor Andrew McCarthy calling them "meritless to the point of demagoguery."

"Do you know how terrible you have to be for the National Review to call you out for lying?" Jones asked on social media Monday. "Josh Hawley is an Olympic liar."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.