Facebook shuts down
Palestinian news outlet, citing "hate speech"; Al Jazeera doco on Lobby
suppressed
Newsletter published on 31 March 2018
(1) Big Brother - in
your pocket, in your hand
(2) Facebook
alternative $2/month
(3) Alternative
Social Media that don't censor you
(4) Facebook shuts
down Palestinian news outlet, calls it “hate speech”
(5) Al Jazeera
documentary on the US Israel lobby - suppressed
(6) Robert Fisk calls
for screening of Al Jazeera documentary
(1) Big Brother - in
your pocket, in your hand
From: bronek [mailto:bronekc@me.com]
Sent: Fri, 16 Mar 2018 16:50:30 -0400
This is George Orwell's dream!
How much info is Google getting from your phone?
Feb. 07, 2018 - 5:06 - Google doesn't have a camera in every
home, but it does have a phone - and tracking mechanism - in millions of
pockets.
Youtube to correct “conspiracy” topics with Wikipedia
"facts"
(2) Facebook
alternative $2/month
They do not censor, data mine, sell your data to a third
party, of give any data to the government. They servers are offshore and are
exempt from the US government and court orders and the patriot act.
(3) Alternative
Social Media that don't censor you
From: bronek <bronekc@me.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2018 20:15:32 -0400
Subject: Fwd: Internet Alternatives: A Growing List
Alt-Tech. S.L., Alt-Tech, February 20, 2018.
If you're new to @Gab, Gab is the Free Speech version of
Twitter. There's a growing eco-system of Alt Tech companies supporting Free
Speech, unlike the censors at Big Social:
Facebook can be replaced by http://socialcross.org/ [Christian];
Twitter can be replaced by Gab;
Reddit can be replaced by Voat;
Imgur can be replaced by Kek.gg;
Chrome can be replaced by Brave;
YouTube can be replaced by Bitchute or http://yandex.ru/ [from
Russia];
Google can be replaced by Startpage, Duckduckgo, or http://yandex.ru/
Wikipedia can be replaced by Infogalactic;
GoFundMe can be replaced by MakerSupport.
Snapchat, Skype, Windows Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger,
Yahoo! Messenger, Threema, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger replaced by Telegram
[from Russia]; and 4Chan stands alone.
(4) Facebook shuts
down Palestinian news outlet, calls it “hate speech”
From: "Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics and Engineering
Physics)"
Subject: Facebook says, Palestinian journalism is "hate
speech"
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2018 18:04:24 +0000
Facebook labels Palestinian journalism “hate speech”
Ali Abunimah
Media Watch
27 March 2018
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/facebook-labels-palestinian-journalism-hate-speech
Facebook is defending its decision to shut down the page of a major Palestinian
news outlet, describing the action as a move against “hate speech.”
On Saturday, the social media giant closed without warning
the page of the Safa Palestinian Press Agency, which had 1.3 million followers,
as well as Safa’s account on the photo sharing site Instagram.
(5) Al Jazeera
documentary on the US Israel lobby - suppressed
From: "Come Carpentier comecarpentier@gmail.com
[shamireaders]" Date: Tue, 13 Mar
2018
What’s in Al Jazeera’s undercover film on the US Israel
lobby?
Asa Winstanley
The Electronic Intifada
5 March 2018
The leading neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense
of Democracies is functioning as an agent of the Israeli government, Al
Jazeera’s forthcoming investigation on the US Israel lobby will reveal.
According to a source who has seen the undercover
documentary, it contains footage of a powerful Israeli official claiming that
“We have FDD. We have others working on this.”
Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former Israeli military intelligence
officer, is said to state that the foundation is “working on” projects for
Israel including “data gathering, information analysis, working on activist
organizations, money trail. This is something that only a country, with its
resources, can do the best.”
Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, commonly known as
FARA, US organizations and individuals who work on behalf of foreign governments
are required to register with the counterintelligence section of the Department
of Justice.
A search on the FARA website shows that the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies is not registered.
Al Jazeera’s film reportedly identifies a number of lobby
groups as working with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated
data gathering techniques. The documentary is also said to cast light on covert
efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel.
Israel lobby groups have placed intense pressure on Qatar,
which funds Al Jazeera, to shelve the film, fueling speculation it may never be
aired.
Covert agent of Israel
Sima Vaknin-Gil, who holds the rank of brigadier-general in
Israel’s military, is now the top civil servant at Israel’s Ministry of
Strategic Affairs.
The ministry is in charge of running a covert campaign of
sabotage against BDS, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in support
of Palestinian human rights.
Vaknin-Gil’s ministerial boss is Gilad Erdan, a close ally of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Soon after she was appointed to lead the ministry at the
start of 2016, Vaknin-Gil promised to “create a community of fighters” who would
“flood the internet” with Israeli propaganda that would be publicly distanced
from the government.
As well as getting funding from Sheldon Adelson, the
anti-Palestinian billionaire and number one donor to Donald Trump’s presidential
campaign, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has close ties to the United
Arab Emirates.
In hacked emails last year the Emirati ambassador in
Washington encouraged the foundation to push for moving a US military base from
Qatar to his own country.
The film will also reportedly show undercover footage of a
junior Israel lobbyist boasting of how close Israel’s ties are with the United
Arab Emirates and other Gulf regimes.
(6) Robert Fisk calls
for screening of Al Jazeera documentary
Subject: Documentary of Israel's influence on U.S Government
still not aired
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2018 16:12:48 +0000
Will a Hard-Hitting Investigation Into Israel's Influence in
US Government Ever See the Light of Day?
By Robert Fisk,
The Independent
29 March 2018
According to Swisher, if his documentary on the American
lobby doesn’t air soon, 'it might prove to be ammunition sought by a group of
zealous US politicians who wish to declare Al Jazeera a foreign entity, and
label us journalists as ‘spies’'
So when am I going to be able to watch Al Jazeera’s
hard-hitting investigation into Israel’s powerful lobby in the United States?
Remember Al Jazeera? The tough, no-holds-barred Middle East satellite channel
that transformed Qatar into a media empire whose reports frightened dictators
and infuriated potentates and presidents alike? Why, George W Bush once wanted
to bomb its headquarters in Doha – so it must have been doing something right.
It even has an office in Jerusalem.
But something seems to be amiss. Not Al Jazeera’s disastrous
American venture, which was supposed to break free of the dross on CNN and Fox
News and ended up looking just like CNN or Fox. Nor the tragicomedy of its
journalists’ imprisonment in Sissi’s Egypt, banged up by Cairo’s farcical laws
and the stupidity of Al Jazeera’s own management in Qatar.
No, I’m talking about a documentary called The Lobby,
directed by one of Al Jazeera’s top journalists, Clayton Swisher, the man whose
exclusive (and book) on the “Palestine Papers” blew open the secret and
scandalous American-led negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinian
authority between 2000 and 2010. But after months of postponement, The Lobby,
which secretly filmed pro-Israeli US activists and Israeli government officials
and was completed last autumn, is still no nearer to being shown – and Swisher
himself has taken a paid leave of absence. He even chose to explain his
frustration in an article for the progressive American Jewish magazine Forward,
which has always maintained a liberal and often very critical view of
Israel.
“Don’t mistake me – I love Al Jazeera,” Swisher told me this
week. “I love working for Al Jazeera. They’ve done fantastic things. And they
look after their staff very well. But our new documentary doesn’t seem to be
getting on air.”
In his published explanation, Swisher described how his
award-winning investigative unit – which he says operates “without [Qatari]
government interference” – sent an undercover reporter to look into “how Israel
wields influence in America through the pro-Israeli American community. But when
some right-wing American supporters of Israel found out about the documentary,
there was a massive backlash. It was even labelled as antisemitic in a spate of
articles.”Nothing surprising there, you might think. Any reporters who have
dared to criticise Israel grow used to the vile smear of antisemitism thrown
over them – but there was an even more disturbing background to Swisher’s
attempts to get his documentary on the air.
The programme’s completion, he writes, “came at a time when,
due to an arbitrary blockade on Qatar imposed by the United Arab Emirates and
Saudi Arabia, Qatar had been pursuing an end to its siege by appealing to the
US. According to reports, Qatar sought to offer its own side of the narrative in
this conflict by hosting thought leaders, including from the American Jewish
community. From reports in the Israeli press, I learned that [Harvard Professor
Alan] Dershowitz had been brought to meet with the Qatari emir [Tamim bin Hamad
Al Thani], and that the American Jews had brought up what they saw as Al
Jazeera’s antisemitism in those meetings. Of course, our documentary is not
antisemitic. It is an exploration of how Israel, a foreign government,
influences US foreign policy.”
Ironically, one of the Saudi-UAE demands for a return to
normal relations with Qatar was to shut down Al Jazeera.
Most of Swisher’s staff within Al Jazeera are American or
British, and he recruited a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld,
to meet and mix with members of pro-Israeli groups in Washington. When this was
discovered – partly because Swisher, for legal reasons, contacted those
appearing in the programme to say that his team had used secret filming during
their investigations – there was uproar.Kleinfeld, who apparently used the name
“Tony Kleinfeld”, was accused of being “pro-Palestinian” but of “embedding
himself with the Washington pro-Israel crowd” while spending “months of his life
under a new and meticulously fabricated persona to infiltrate pro-Israeli
groups”.
The concern of Israeli lobbyists was not without reason.
Recipients of legal letters from the documentary group – referring to the
secretly recorded Israeli activists – included AIPAC, the Israeli-American
Council, the Sheldon Adelson-created Maccabee Task Force, the Israel Project,
the Zionist Organisation of America and other groups. Although Swisher’s
reporters had exposed genocide in Myanmar, presidential corruption in the
Maldives and paedophilia in British youth football, another documentary under
Swisher’s direction concentrated on Israel’s influence over Britain and included
a secretly filmed sequence in which Israeli official Shai Masot discussed how to
“take down” British MPs regarded as pro-Palestinian, including Sir Alan Duncan.
Masot was forced to resign and the Israeli ambassador to London, Mark Regev,
issued a formal apology.
According to Swisher, if his documentary on the American
lobby doesn’t air soon, “it might prove to be ammunition sought by a group of
zealous US politicians who wish to declare Al Jazeera a foreign entity, and
label us journalists as ‘spies’”. In response to antisemitism claims after the
London documentary, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom ruled that the programme
was “a serious investigative documentary”. It was the same question, Swisher
says, that he and his team sought to answer in the American edition of The
Lobby: “whether the Israeli government was funding or involved in lobbying
efforts in the US under the guise of a domestic lobbying group”.
Swisher says that several “leaders of Jewish American
organisations” met with Qatar’s registered agent and lobbyist, Nick Muzin – a
former aide to US Senator Ted Cruz, who supported American recognition of
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – “to see if he could use his ties with the
Qataris to stop the airing”. Since October, Swisher says, “we’ve faced a series
of unexplained delays on broadcasting our project, the likes of which I’ve never
experienced. I was repeatedly told by everyone to ‘wait’, and was assured our
documentary would eventually see the light of day. Then, as now, I took my
senior management at its word. To my own specially trained ears, ‘wait’ did not
constitute ‘stop’. In fact, it must not constitute ‘stop’.”
Almost every journalist I’ve met in the Middle East has
encountered similar problems. When I worked for the The Times, I alerted the
then editor, Charles Douglas-Home, to evidence that Israeli officers had secretly buried at
least seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners – done to death in an
interrogation centre – at night in a Sidon graveyard in 1983. He wanted me
to spend as many weeks as necessary to find out if the story was true. Then,
months later, when witnesses emerged with evidence of the burial, including the
gravedigger – the bodies still had their hands tied behind their back with nylon
rope when they were brought to him – I called my editor. My witnesses were being “visited” by armed
members of the Israeli Shin Beth intelligence agency, I told him, and I was
being trailed around Sidon by Israeli-registered vehicles. It was time to run
the story.
To my shock, Douglas-Home – an editor who otherwise loyally
stood by me in every Middle East dispute over my work – replied that he wasn’t sure “how we’re justified in
running a story like this so long after the event”. In other words, we had
to be sure of our facts on such an important story – but by taking the time to
do just that, the story was now out of date.
After much argument – during which I suggested to the
Israelis that they might like to institute a military inquiry into the deaths if
they wanted to avoid a scandal (they said, mysteriously, that it was already
under way, although I doubted this) – the story ran. A deputy editor, I was
told, had tried to cut the report by two-thirds. He was overruled. Then the
story ran. In full.So, old story, new story. I’ve appeared many times on Al
Jazeera. And never been told to mince my words. Nor would I. But a lot of us are
waiting to see Swisher’s new documentary. If we don’t, we’ll know what to think
of Al Jazeera.
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