Will

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

British prime minister Andy Burnham has once again revived the incendiary claim that Russian disinformation is an especial threat to British democracy.

At the United Nations a few weeks ago he announced plans for a National Centre for Information Defence “to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks”.

For the new British prime minister, as for his predecessors, this is all about Moscow and the UK’s favourite bogeyman, Vladimir Putin. At the UN, Burnham promised British expertise to other European nations to protect them from Kremlin disinformation.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that another foreign actor is meddling even more aggressively in British politics – and neither Burnham nor MI5 have a word to say about it.

Any evidence of Russia disinformation-peddling in the UK pales in comparison to Israeli influence operations – and that’s just the ones we know about. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, noted that Russian disinformation was neither sophisticated nor successful. The same cannot be said for Israel’s handiwork.

Israel has been using “hasbara” trolls on social media platforms to manipulate public debates in Britain for years – the thrust of the accusation against Russia. But in Israel’s case, it goes much further than that.

This year the Israeli state massively increased its public diplomacy budget to $730 million to expand its influence operations. That includes flying even more politicians, clergy, academics and influencers to bombard them with pro-Israel propaganda they are then likely to spread back home.

According to foreign minister Gideon Saar, Israeli advocacy should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors”.

There was already plenty of evidence through the late 2010s, as I reported at the time, that Israel was helping to organise, stoke and amplify a campaign to smear its arch-critic, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite, in order to prevent him from reaching No 10 Downing Street.

Not least, Israel did so by advancing a new, bogus definition of Jew hatred through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Usefully, for Israel, that definition largely ignores hatred of Jews to focus instead on criticism of Israel.

That was the most blatant meddling possible in what remains of Britain’s democratic processes. UK politicians and media not only failed to oppose it, but actively sought to amplify the smears.

This week the fanatically pro-Israel US lobby group the Anti-Defamation League revealed that it had been working with leading AI firms, which are increasingly being integrated into social media platforms, to suppress what it calls “antisemitism” – or what the rest of us would refer to as criticism of Israel.

CEO Jonathan Greenblatt observed: "We've had excellent collaboration with Silicon Valley." The platforms, he said, would tackle content the ADL doesn't like “right in the source code” – that is, before users can see it.

That is likely not only to remove criticism of Israeli atrocities and criticism of western governments, such as the UK’s, for colluding in Israel’s genocide but turn social media into a playground for bots and Israel apologists, giving them free reign to spread their propaganda without challenge.

This is an extract from my latest article Worried about Russian meddling in UK politics? Wait till you see what Israel is up to. Find a link to the full article in the reply post ⬇️

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Whether people believed this story was a great litmus test of stupidity.

And many of the west's most prestigious and honored "experts" not only believed it but eagerly spread it, starting with @TimothyDSnyder and metastastizing through the usual gang of disinformation agents.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Had it not been for Boris Johnson and Victoria Nuland -- who personally forced Zelensky to reject the deal Ukraine and Russia were about to sign in Istanbul in 2022 -- this horrific war that has killed more than a million and consumed much of Ukraine would have been long over.

[Jean-Luc Mélenchon @JLMelenchon]

La mentalité des dirigeants européens est pourrie d'atlantisme. Ils continuent à penser que le monde d'avant continue.

Les américains ajoutent et enlèvent des sanctions selon ce qui les arrange. Ce sont les européens qui en ont supporté le poids.

La stratégie des dirigeants européens est lamentable.

[Richard @ricwe123]

So here we have Pierre de Gaulle, the grandson of Charles de Gaulle, saying:

"It makes me smile when people talk about Russian interference because it suits our political elites and allows them to avoid telling the truth to the French people.
Most of our politicians took part in the Young Leaders program, sponsored by the CIA"

[Will @larry_spangler1]

@WTrinityRL Yorkshire Yorkshire Yorkshire!

[Will @larry_spangler1]

@liamgallagher @charlie_lawson1 Ignore him. I'm sure Andy and Steve were big fans

[Liam Gallagher @liamgallagher]

@charlie_lawson1 Like your fucking acting skills

[Paul Synnott @dublinbhoy_1888]

@IrelandFootball

[Trip Gabriel @tripgabriel]

The NYT confirms Haaretz's report that Benjamin Netanyahu was secretly warned before Oct. 7, 2023 by the Emirati president that Hamas planned a major attack, per 2 sources

The warning was not shared with Israeli security chiefs, per 5 ex-officials

https://t.co/BCnwcyzg8C

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

Hearing from several sources around Ireland hotel that agents are telling players you must play our you'll never play for a US owned team in the UK.

How grim and predictable from faceless agents who profit in the background.

[ALX (x/acc) 🎃🇺🇸 @alx]

Hillary Clinton wanted to drone strike Julian Assange.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

The guy who bailed out his Wall Street donors as they threw 10 million families out of their homes is now chiding “the left” for making materialist arguments about improving people’s economic situation rather than telling morality stories. Truly unreal.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

Virtually every line of Trump’s UN address contained a lie

Trump increased the fabricated death toll from January’s riots in Iran to 72,000, and bizarrely claimed, “Recently, 10,000 were killed for protesting”

He also said “many babies” were killed on Oct 7, when only one was

[Aaron Maté @aaronjmate]

If they’re looking for an icebreaker, I’d start off by sharing how much they’ve each gotten from the CIA:

[Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 @jacksonhinkle]

📍🇨🇳🇺🇸 NEW:

The leader of the free world, Xi Jinping, arrives in the US, greeted by war criminal Trump.

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

Hubris: Four Zionist billionaires used their corrupting influence as proxies for an oppressive foreign regime to censor a popular US musician for daring to speak out against the regime’s apartheid and genocide, and in the process mobilized millions against the regime, against obsequious collaborators in the music industry, and against the corrupt billionaires themselves. In their dark room machinations, the blood-soaked oligarchs did not count on the people who, in the words of Macklemore’s song Hind’s Hall, “are in the streets” and “won’t leave.”

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

oh this is why they were farming the interview. i give a nuanced answer about acts of terror this admin has caused and they clickbait it. he asked, i gave a nuanced answer. we’ve armed al qaeda since 9/11, we made its former commander the president of syria.

[Camila Lourdes Galarza @sovietwithsazon]

Only in a country where the left’s politics are completely consumed by celebrity culture can a government official who voted to fund the Iron Dome, Israel’s most important technology in its ability to wage genocide with impunity, moral grandstand and pretend she’s less complicit in said genocide and the crackdown on free speech than some D-list singer.

Let’s be very clear: the reason we’re even in a wave of brutal McCarthyism—where artists are canceled for saying Free Palestine and Palestinians are snatched up by ICE—to begin with is because an administration that *she* served as the sheepdog and told us to keep voting for wanted to commit genocide without Columbia students yelling at them for it.

[Kit Klarenberg @KitKlarenberg]

Britain strikes back against Trump's recent comments on the Falkands and united Ireland the only way it knows how. By, erm...letting a paedophile off scot free