The Peace Press — Saturday, June 12, 2021 edition

As per most substantive policies, the policy of Biden = the policy of Trump. Although shallow, naive, politically idiotic partisans who are swayed by rhetoric alone in every election cycle (and who unfortunately constitute the majority on either the Left or the Right or other) believe there is a world of difference between Biden and Trump, the reality is that from a substantive policy standpoint, Biden’s policy is a virtual replica of Trump’s policy. Why? Because the unelected blob including the military doesn’t change no matter who gets elected. Change comes from what you do and perist in doing and not from who you elect. You are responsible. Partisan politics only saps a movement’s energy as it is systemically designed to do. Key point to note for those on the Left (or the Right or other): If there were no Republicans elected and there were only Democrats elected to power, NOT MUCH WOULD CHANGE!!!!!! Change comes from what you do passionately and persist in doing if only you can persuade many others to your viewpoints over time — — -thereby progressively moving human thought in the direction you choose to lead. Remember that voting and walking away is only slightly less irresponsible than not voting at all. Genuine change requires sustained effort from you joined with many others over a long duration of time — — there is no easy, lazy shorcut like the ballot box has always promised to be. Nonsense!!! Change comes from sustained social movements engendering wide appeal and not from politicians who only do what is politically safe to do.

Iran: The United States withdrew from the JCPOA with Iran, imposed new sanctions and then made new demands on Iran — — — that Trump policy continues today under Biden.
Yemen: We are still helping the Saudis.
Syria: Our troops are still in Syria to overthrow Assad because he refused to allow an oil pipeline across his nation
Afghanistan: Biden promises to withdraw by September, Trump had promised by this past May.
Venezuela: The sanctions that we continued and new ones added by Trump continue under Biden.
Israel: Trump fell to his knees to kiss the Israeli backside as does Biden — — both avidly supported military sales and continued financial support to that rogue, oppressor, Apartheid nation.
China: Still ramping up a Cold War with China under Biden.
Russia: Still antagonizing Russia by our meddling policies in Ukraine and other nations that border Russia.
Prosecution of journalists: The Imperialist prosecution of Julian Assange continues unabated.
American Global Hegemony: A bipartisan project dedicated to enforcing a perpetual state of U.S. global domination.

On most policies, is there any real substative difference between Trump and Biden? If you are swayed by entertaining rhetoric alone (and many are), then for you there may be a difference but for those focused on substantive policy, there is no substative difference in policy between Biden and Trump outside of the change in the window dressing.

“We’re now in a situation where many ostensible “peace” groups seem tied to the Democratic Party while the Biden administration pursues militaristic policies, writes Dave Lindorff.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/06/10/peace-washing-is-a-network-of-major-donors-neutralizing-activism-in-the-peace-movement/
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President Joe Biden has proposed his first budget and the Pentagon won’t go without. Biden followed his Republican predecessor in pushing higher military spending. Although the proposed increase, from $740 billion to $753 billion, isn’t a lot, he invited Congress to spend more by playing the Washington game of underestimating expenditures for politically popular programs.

The president evidently has few progressive impulses when it comes to military outlays. He appears to be a disciple of famed Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-Wash.), a fervent backer of the expansive and expensive welfare-warfare state.

https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2021/06/07/cut-military-spending-but-restrain-foreign-policy-first/
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“Biden and Putin might see at least a modicum of common interest in developing a useful dialogue on regional issues (like Ukraine), as well as a more obvious strategic interest in avoiding mutual annihilation. On Monday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan defended Biden’s summit initiative, stressing the need for “strategic stability and progress on arms control.” Sullivan described Putin as “a singular kind of personalized leader, so a chance “to come together at a summit will allow us to manage this relationship … most effectively.”

For his part, President Putin commenting in St. Petersburg on Friday on what issues will enjoy pride of place at the summit, also spoke of “strategic stability [and] settling international conflicts in the hottest spots,” disarmament and terrorism. Acknowledging the political pressures any US president faces in trying to carve out a more sensible relationship with Russia, Putin conceded that “to a certain extent, Russian-American relations have become hostage to internal political processes in the United States itself.” He added:”

https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/06/08/biden-putin-summit-boon-or-bust/
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“Washington already has been through one cold war with Moscow. With an increasingly powerful China on the horizon, America should avoid a repeat.”

“Unfortunately, Washington and Brussels squandered Putin’s early goodwill. The once‐​great Russian bear was down, and it seemed for the count. So Western governments ran roughshod over their prostrate counterpart. The allies lied to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin about expanding NATO, dismantled long‐​time Russian friend Serbia, promoted “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, promised to bring both into the transatlantic alliance, and encouraged a street putsch against an elected, though corrupt, generally pro‐​Russian president in Ukraine. All the while the West justified its behavior by insisting that no one is entitled to a sphere of influence and Washington was representing all mankind when it intervened in other states’ affairs.

The West was blind to its hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the war in Georgia, triggered by Tbilisi’s attack on separatist territory containing Russian soldiers, an oblivious John McCain declared that “in the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.” He apparently forgot that five years before he fervently demanded that the U.S. invade Iraq. (In fact, he was a great enthusiast for war, advocating that America attack multiple countries.”

One can only imagine how Washington — and especially McCain — would have responded had Russia behaved like America: Expanded the Warsaw Pact into Central America. Sponsored revolutions against elected governments in Ottawa and Mexico City. Proposed Warsaw Pact membership for Canada and Mexico. Dismantled the Washington‐​friendly state of Colombia. The shrieking would have been heard across the Atlantic, and citations of the Monroe Doctrine would have filled newspapers, airwaves, and cyberspace. McCain would have led a mob from Capitol Hill to the White House demanding war, instant and total.”

https://www.cato.org/commentary/time-make-deal-vladimir-putin#
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Conflict is both undesirable and imprudent, but appears inevitable given our current leadership.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-coming-war-with-china/
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The United States faces no major threats in the world today, but the American Empire faces several including from people like me who intend to bring the American Empire to its knees. Every principled patriot should dedicate themselves to demolishing the Empire in defense of the Republic — — what’s left of it.

“The Pentagon is implementing recommendations from a task force review to better prioritize China, which it views as the top ‘pacing challenge”

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/06/09/secdef-austin-tells-the-pentagon-to-start-acting-like-china-is-top-priority/
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“Last year saw a tripling in exports to Beijing of “dual use” items defined as “civilian goods with a military purpose,” Mark Curtis reports. “

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/06/09/uk-hypes-china-threat-while-selling-country-billions-in-military-related-equipment/
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“At some point before the summer of 2018, an arms deal from the US to Saudi Arabia was sealed and delivered. A 227kg laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin, one of many thousands, was part of that sale. On August 9th, 2018 one of those Lockheed Martin bombs was dropped on a school bus full of Yemeni children. They were on their way to a field trip when their lives came to a sudden end. Amidst shock and grief, their loved ones would learn that Lockheed Martin was responsible for creating the bomb that murdered their children.

What they might not know is that the United States government (the President and the State Department) approved the sale of the bomb that killed their children, in the process enriching Lockheed Martin, which makes millions in profits from arms sales every year.”

https://original.antiwar.com/Danaka_Katovich/2021/06/08/arms-sales-what-we-know-about-bombs-being-dropped-in-our-name/
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“Rather than acknowledge our failure and try to understand it, General Mark Milley offers up euphemisms and obfuscation.”

“The present generation of senior U.S. military officers has an aversion to confronting uncomfortable truths. Rather than the straightforward language once prized by such exemplars of their profession as Ulysses S. Generals Grant and William T. Sherman, they rely on weasel words. As a result, they sound less like soldiers and more like politicians. On that score, Milley is by no means the only offender.

When U.S. forces entered Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, they had two principal objectives: first, to destroy al-Qaeda; and second, to overthrow the Taliban and install in Kabul a legitimate and democratic political order backed by effective security forces. Those twin goals defined the mission. Nearly 20 years later, neither one has been accomplished.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-military-whispers-past-the-afghan-war-graveyard/
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Do you think the war crimes that the U.S. inflicts will cease once U.S. troops depart that nation? Probably not. When will we actually end the war on Afghanistan?

“Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Thursday said the US military has already begun so-called “over the horizon capabilities” for operations in Afghanistan, which is Pentagon jargon for spying on and bombing the country from outside its borders.

Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee that combat and surveillance missions are being conducted in Afghanistan by aircraft that were either launched from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf or from airbases that are located in Gulf nations.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said the “vast majority” of MQ-9 Reaper drone missions inside Afghanistan are being flown from outside the country.”

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/06/10/us-has-already-started-afghanistan-operations-from-outside-of-the-country/
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“U.S. Iran policy is marred by many flaws, and some of the worst are threat inflation, imperial arrogance, and hypocrisy. Alarmist media reporting routinely overstates the threat that Iran poses to the US and the world, and hawkish politicians and pundits are only too eager to use this alarmism to agitate for more aggressive policies and to scuttle ongoing diplomacy. Even when Iran behaves like a normal state and abides by international law, their actions are spun as being somehow menacing and challenging to the United States. At the same time, the US tramples on the rules of the system that it claims to uphold so that it can pursue its economic war against Iran. The economic war itself is an illegitimate policy of collective punishment that the US has been waging for the last three years in a vain bid to compel deeper concessions from their government, and after almost half a year Biden has done nothing to change that policy. If we are ever going to have a peaceful and sane policy towards Iran, all of these flaws need to be rooted out.”

https://original.antiwar.com/Daniel_Larison/2021/06/08/flaws-in-us-iran-policy/
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“More than a million people have been killed. Tens of millions more have been displaced, resulting in the massive refugee crisis that afflicted Europe in the last decade.

This is because the U.S. government has spent the last 20 years waging wars and interventions across these regions against an endlessly shifting series of enemies. They claim to be doing all this to defend the American people against international terrorist groups. In truth, the entire War on Terrorism has been at the expense of the actual security of the United States and the people of the Middle East and Africa. “

https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2021/06/09/how-america-destroyed-the-middle-east/
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“It has become common for writers, correspondents, and foreign policy analysts to view the new cold war in the same lens as the first one: That of a competition or standoff between “Russia and The West” (and I am as guilty of employing that shorthand as anyone). Yet do current European trends justify viewing the current great power competition in such broad strokes? In other words, are our European allies in lockstep behind the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s desire to turn the world’s largest nuclear power into a pariah state?

If the public statements of French President Emmanuel Macron are anything to go on, the answer is “probably not.” During his 2017 campaign for the French presidency, Macron described the foreign policy of his immediate predecessors (Sarkozy and Hollande) as a form of imported “neoconservatism” and, by way of contrast, pledged he would pursue a Gaullist policy that would move away from the narrow confines of cold war era Atlanticism. In the succeeding years, Macron has criticized NATO (in blunt terms that de Gaulle himself might have used) as having “experienced brain death.” In a conversation with the Financial Times this past February Macron said, “Nobody can tell me that today’s Nato is a structure that, in its foundations, is still pertinent. It was founded to face down the Warsaw Pact. There is no more a Warsaw Pact.””

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/06/09/cracks-in-the-cold-war-consensus/
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“It has become common for writers, correspondents, and foreign policy analysts to view the new cold war in the same lens as the first one: That of a competition or standoff between “Russia and The West” (and I am as guilty of employing that shorthand as anyone). Yet do current European trends justify viewing the current great power competition in such broad strokes? In other words, are our European allies in lockstep behind the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s desire to turn the world’s largest nuclear power into a pariah state?

If the public statements of French President Emmanuel Macron are anything to go on, the answer is “probably not.” During his 2017 campaign for the French presidency, Macron described the foreign policy of his immediate predecessors (Sarkozy and Hollande) as a form of imported “neoconservatism” and, by way of contrast, pledged he would pursue a Gaullist policy that would move away from the narrow confines of cold war era Atlanticism. In the succeeding years, Macron has criticized NATO (in blunt terms that de Gaulle himself might have used) as having “experienced brain death.” In a conversation with the Financial Times this past February Macron said, “Nobody can tell me that today’s Nato is a structure that, in its foundations, is still pertinent. It was founded to face down the Warsaw Pact. There is no more a Warsaw Pact.”

Remember, folks, even PBS is a tool of the propagandists. PBS may put a kinder, gentler, more intellectual-appearing face on its disinformation program, but it too disseminates much U.S. Imperialist propaganda.”

“A PBS Frontline special is the latest vehicle in a PR campaign to legitimize rebranded Syrian al-Qaeda, HTS, and market its leader Mohammad Jolani as a competent American “asset.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/06/09/washington-positioning-syrian-al-qaeda-mohammad-jolani-asset/
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The drug wars — — — — — racist, invasive, oppressive and Imperialist — — — — no government or corporation on any other person than you can decide what to ingest into your own flesh and blood. Your body is sovereign and outranks any law anywhere passed by any other persons. Only you have the authority to decide for yourself what you ingest into your own body. Abolish the DEA!!!
You may disobey any unjust law at any time you choose. Only just laws are worthy of obedience. Where there is no victim, there is no crime.

“Guatemala was a struggling Third World nation striving to overcome decades of genocide and civil strife. Unfortunately, it was also increasingly victimized by chemical warfare. To blight any suspected marijuana or poppy plants, the US government was dousing broad swaths of Guatemala with toxins to preemptively destroy anything growing below. The year before I visited, a group of Guatemalan beekeepers sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), claiming that the spraying had destroyed half of their industry. Herbicides had contaminated local drinking water and many residents had required hospitalization after exposure to the chemicals. A Guatemalan human rights commission asserted that the spraying had destroyed so many farmers’ corn and bean crops that serious food shortages could result.

US policymakers presumed that the solution was to further militarize the drug war. After farmers began shooting at the planes, the US government sent in Black Hawk helicopter gunships to accompany the crop dusters and suppress peasant revolts. I called the US embassy to ask about the controversy and was told that the complaints came from “illiterate Indians” and were nothing but “drug war disinformation.”

Outside of Guatemala City, I met farmers and small businessmen and pumped them for information on the US drug war. A manager of a large farm in central Guatemala told me that many of his shipments of yucca cane to Europe were rejected because they arrived in Rotterdam and were rotting as a result of DEA’s drug spraying.”

https://mises.org/wire/guatemala-human-rights-nightmare-us-drug-war
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Another example of how war, or drug wars, makes us less free not more free. Those who fight wars do not protect your freedom — — — -they endanger it.

“All wars have casualties. The war on drugs is no exception. From the impoverished farmers in Afghanistan who faced the choice of defying either the Taliban or the U.S. military, to those who will die in federal prison for non-violent drug offenses, many have been caught in the crossfire.

The war on drugs has impacted a myriad of domestic institutions within the United States. Nowhere is this more apparent than in analyzing the evolution of U.S. domestic policing.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/11/militarized-police-a-consequence-of-the-war-on-drugs/
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Even the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan possesses a human right to express himself freely whether by writing a book and publish it or in whatever forum he chooses including on social media. That is legal. Anyone who then physically assaults him for expressing himself freely is commiting a crime of assault and battery. Assault is illegal. This is why the First Amendment is first — — — — because it is the most important amendment of them all. The First Amendment protects even the vilest of speech. Deny the Klan the right to Free Speech and you deny it for all other people too, including Liberals or anyone who challenges existing narratives.
The best way to defeat hate speech is to drown it out with more speech that celebrates our diversity and reminds everyone what we all share in common — -our humanity. Censorship denies all persons the right to express themselves freely. Censorship, even when used to muzzle the extreme-Right, is still authoritarian and oppressive. Stand up against censorship of any kind!!!!

“For a decade now, and especially in the past four years, a sector of the left has tilted toward the promulgation of censorship. And with some chance of success, given the enormous power of the media outlets that are cooperating for reasons of their own, including the four horsemen of surveillance: Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. To see this sickly handshake is dismaying enough. How much worse to find the same restrictionist mentality creeping into a free-speech fortress like PEN America.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pence-pen-censorship-hawley/
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“We are not seeing a “civil war” inside Israel, but rather the Israeli settler state declaring a war on its colonized “citizens,” and Palestinians fighting for their liberation.”

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/this-isnt-a-civil-war-it-is-settler-colonial-brutality/
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“What explains the terrible passivity of the international community toward the plight of Palestinians? Imperialism is the main factor accounting for the sheer absence of meaningful advocacy for the Palestinian cause. The EU and USA don’t raise their eyebrows over the unquestionably brutal policies of Israeli apartheid because they benefit from the presence of a Middle Eastern state which remains incontestably committed to imperialist imperatives and narratives.”

https://original.antiwar.com/Yanis_Iqbal/2021/06/09/palestinian-liberation-struggle-and-the-importance-of-anti-imperialism/
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“Two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa have called the Israeli occupation of the West Bank “apartheid”, drawing parallels with South Africa’s system of institutionalised racial segregation that ended in 1994.

In an opinion piece published on Tuesday by GroundUp, a South African news website, former ambassadors Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, who also served as director-general of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry from 2000 to 2001, wrote that the situation in Israel-Palestine was one of inherent inequality.”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-south-africa-former-ambassadors-call-occupation-apartheid
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“The breadth of support for blocking the bomb sale shows that opposition to uncritical military support for Israel is growing.”

“ This week a group of 100 peace, human rights, and political groups released a letter urging the Biden administration to do just that. The letter had a broad range of signatories, including faith-based groups such as Churches for Middle East Peace, American Muslims for Palestine, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) and Jewish Voice for Peace Action along with more secular groups like Defense of Children International — Palestine, Justice Democrats, Indivisible, the Sunrise Movement, MoveOn, the Working Families Party, and Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN). Foreign policy think tanks like the Quincy Institute and the Center for International Policy also signed onto the letter. The breadth of support for the demands to block the bomb sale underscores the fact that opponents of uncritical military support for Israel are growing in strength, and are not going away.”

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/06/09/there-is-still-time-to-stop-the-735-million-arms-sale-to-israel/
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Kudos to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota who “hit back Wednesday at the dozen fellow House Democrats who accused her of “equating” the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban after she pointed out that the U.S. and Israeli governments have committed human rights atrocities — an uncontroversial statement that the right-wing media and Republican lawmakers rushed to warp and sensationalize.”

“We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.”

The reality is that the policy of the U.S. and Israel is exponentially worse than Hamas, the Taliban or Al-Qaeda — — — — — -in reality, the United States of America is the world’s greatest terrorist rogue nation.
WE ARE THE PRIMARY AGGRESSORS IN THE WORLD TODAY.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/06/10/truth-cant-be-hidden-omar-hits-back-dems-upset-critique-us-israel-atrocities
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“Instead of taking on Ilhan, lawmakers should focus on injustice, human rights abuses, and acts of violence being committed at home and abroad,” asserted Rep. Pramila Jayapal.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/06/10/progressives-rally-defend-ilhan-omar-after-bad-faith-attack-house-democratic
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“The erasure of Palestinian life has been ongoing since the start of the Nakba in 1948. This erasure is material — massacre-propelled ethnic cleansing — but it is also narrative.”

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/the-media-is-an-accomplice-in-erasing-palestinian-life/
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“The West — particularly the Big Three Brits, French, and Americans — have been underwriting Israel’s military-industrial complex from the first. It began with a British bargain with the devil of necessity. During World War II, as German Panzers raced towards Cairo and the Suez Canal, Palestine transformed into a garrison state seemingly overnight. Someone needed to buildup a war-supply economy for the overstretched British, in order to feed and equip the thousands of troops based or passing through the area. Only the Jewish community — bolstered by German immigrants and industrial infrastructure recently shipped in through an earlier deal with the Nazi regime — had the required resources, and willingness, to step up. Indeed, ironically, some Jewish experts from Europe’s largest munitions manufacturer — owned by a Hungarian Jewish billionaire forced to hand the firm over to the Nazis in 1944 — came to Palestine and helped lay the groundwork for Israel’s nascent war industry.

Furthermore, part of the reason the Zionist community began producing its own weapons in the first place had to do with British Mandate law. Since sectarian or ethnic-based militias or armies were illegal, so too was arming or training them. Even though London looked the other way when Jewish leaders violated such strictures, the very existence of the laws and power of the Royal Navy still made it quite difficult to import illicit arms.

So these future Israelis set about styling a future Israeli weapons industry.”

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2021/06/10/the-frankensteins-monster-of-the-west-the-idf-and-israeli-militarism-run-amok/
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“Over the past few weeks, a video has gone viral of a man named Yaakov Fauci, in a New York accent, asserting to a Palestinian woman whose house that he has forcibly taken, “If I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it.” The video has prompted global attention towards the violent dispossession occurring in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

Fauci’s candor has exposed the blatant ugliness of the forced removals of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, as well as the broader cruelty of the Zionist project that similarly stole homes from Palestinians, expelling and displacing them from 1948 to 1967 up until today to establish the modern state of Israel.

Interestingly enough, despite introducing himself as Jacob, Yaakov’s name is actually Justin. A search of Yaakov Fauci turns up an alias for a man from East Meadow, New York named Justin C. Fauci.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/06/09/israeli-home-thief-long-island-financial-fraudster/
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“Israel’s propaganda war, deployed during the recent violence, is a fundamental plank of the settler-colonial project”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-disinformation-censorship-discourse
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“Over 250 journalists, including reporters from The Washington Post, WSJ and LA Times, sign letter calling on media to stop obscuring oppression of Palestinians”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestine-journalists-demand-better-coverage-israel-occupation
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“A group of 24 members of the UK Parliament have written to President Joe Biden, who is at the G7 Summit in Cornwall, asking him to drop the U.S. prosecution of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/06/11/with-biden-in-uk-24-mps-call-on-him-to-let-assange-go/
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“Julian Assange’s father and brother traveled to Philadelphia on Friday on the next stop of their U.S. tour. Watch the video.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/06/11/watch-us-tour-for-assange-next-stop-philadelphia/
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“This why we are here tonight. Yes, all of us who know and admire Julian decry his prolonged suffering and the suffering of his family. Yes, we demand that the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him be ended. Yes, we honor him up for his courage and his integrity. But the battle for Julian’s liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher. It is the most important battle for press freedom of our era. And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for Julian and his family, but for us.

Tyrannies invert the rule of law. They turn the law into an instrument of injustice. They cloak their crimes in a faux legality. They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality. Those, such as Julian, who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.

The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/06/11/chris-hedges-assange-the-collapse-of-the-rule-of-law/