Well, We All Knew What Was Coming

“Yes-ss, man-cub, please go to sleep, please go to sleep, sleep little man-cub rest in piece. Sleep. Ss-sleep”

There it is: Two days later, they are telling us that the NICE murderer was depressed about the break-up of his marriage ‘he drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs. He was not a Muslim – he was a shit’: Truck terrorist’s cousin reveals he is an ‘unlikely jihadist’ who beat his wife and never went to the mosque. 

So, relatives of the truck driver call him a shit because he didn’t observe the laws of Islam? If they think their own relatives are shits for not observing Islam then it says a whole lot of they view every other non-Muslims:

It’s known that the ‘sinning’ are the most dangerous, as they will commit Jihad to make up for their sins. Those carrying out Jihad are allowed not to follow the rules to help blend in an “Infidel” society. The sinning Muslims are the most dangerous, as they will commit Jihad to make up for their sins.

You know, the Dallas police shooter (if there was any: a ‘Manchurian Candidate’) was described within hours by the Dallas police chief himself: The Black Suspect ‘hates white people‘ and ‘wants to kill them’. There you have it!

Have you all seen the gruesome scene from NICE: carnage on the road, bodies everywhere, including children. After seeing all this, any attempt and excuse Muslims and their allies make in order to defend their barbaric cult is evil and sickening!

The world is in a very intense spiritual warfare, where Muslims are sacrificing non-Muslims and themselves on a daily basis for their evil god. Yet, who frequently appear on the mainstream news to explain things to us are the so-called “counter-terror experts”. These experts don’t want us to know the truth, because it drums up business for them. They want no end to terrorism, because they can sell their good-for-nothing books, and people will pay them to give soft talks on terrorism, as they’ll be asked to appear on mainstream news. Even a child can see what is going on, no one needs to read those empty books or listen to the monotonous analysis of the wicked experts.

Whether we like it or not: 99.9 % of “True Muslims” hate everyone of us and themselves (They have to!) This is the bare naked truth they desperately attempt to conceal from us.

— French Lawmakers Told Bataclan Terrorists Tortured, Disemboweled Victims

According to this testimony, Wahhabist killers apparently gouged out eyes, castrated victims, and shoved their testicles in their mouths. They may also have disemboweled some poor souls. Women were stabbed in the genitals – and the torture was, victims told police, filmed for Daesh or Islamic State propaganda.

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Now a Plot to Block Brexit: Bitter Losers Gang Up to Scupper EU Pull-out 17 Million Voted For

• British and European politicians are plotting to block UK’s exit from the EU
• As Labour went into meltdown, campaign started for a second referendum
• Tony Blair, Nicola Sturgeon, and pro-Remain MPs said rethink was needed
• A top Brussels diplomat has said he thinks the UK will never quit the union

British and European politicians are plotting to block the UK’s exit from the EU.

On a chaotic day in which the Labour Party went into meltdown, a campaign was started to force a second referendum.

Tony Blair, Nicola Sturgeon, some pro-Remain MPs and a senior German official said a rethink was needed now the consequences of quitting the Brussels club were clear.

Twenty one Labour frontbenchers have now resigned in a bid to replace Jeremy Corbyn with a pro-EU party leader.

Continue reading…

— 3M+ ‘Remain’ Petition Uses ‘Script’ To ‘Fake’ Signatures: 25,000 From North Korea, 2,800 From Uninhabitable Antarctic

— Brexit: Yet Another Example of Biased Polling

— Brexit Fueled by Backlash Against Media Bias and Deception

„The media usually takes a politically-correct line on these issues, citing only left-wing “experts. People don’t put much faith in experts, and even less faith in what left-leaning newspapers like the Guardian and the Washington Post claim the “experts” believe.„

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WikiLeaks: Buying Silence: How The Saudi Foreign Ministry Controls Arab Media

On Monday, Saudi Arabia celebrated the beheading of its 100th prisoner this year. The story was nowhere to be seen on Arab media despite the story’s circulation on wire services. Even international media was relatively mute about this milestone compared to what it might have been if it had concerned a different country. How does a story like this go unnoticed? 

Today’s release of the WikiLeaks “Saudi Cables” from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs show how it’s done.

The oil-rich Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its ruling family take a systematic approach to maintaining the country’s positive image on the international stage. Most world governments engage in PR campaigns to fend off criticism and build relations in influential places. Saudi Arabia controls its image by monitoring media and buying loyalties from Australia to Canada and everywhere in between.

Documents reveal the extensive efforts to monitor and co-opt Arab media, making sure to correct any deviations in regional coverage of Saudi Arabia and Saudi-related matters. Saudi Arabia’s strategy for co-opting Arab media takes two forms, corresponding to the “carrot and stick” approach, referred to in the documents as “neutralisation” and “containment”. The approach is customised depending on the market and the media in question.

“Contain” and “Neutralise”

The initial reaction to any negative coverage in the regional media is to “neutralise” it. The term is used frequently in the cables and it pertains to individual journalists and media institutions whose silence and co-operation has been bought. “Neutralised” journalists and media institutions are not expected to praise and defend the Kingdom, only to refrain from publishing news that reflects negatively on the Kingdom, or any criticism of its policies. The “containment” approach is used when a more active propaganda effort is required. Journalists and media institutions relied upon for “containment” are expected not only to sing the Kingdom’s praises, but to lead attacks on any party that dares to air criticisms of the powerful Gulf state.

One of the ways “neutralisation” and “containment” are ensured is by purchasing hundreds or thousands of subscriptions in targeted publications. These publications are then expected to return the favour by becoming an “asset” in the Kingdom’s propaganda strategy. A document listing the subscriptions that needed renewal by 1 January 2010 details a series of contributory sums meant for two dozen publications in Damascus, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Kuwait, Amman and Nouakchott. The sums range from $500 to 9,750 Kuwaiti Dinars ($33,000). The Kingdom effectively buys reverse “shares” in the media outlets, where the cash “dividends” flow the opposite way, from the shareholder to the media outlet. In return Saudi Arabia gets political “dividends” – an obliging press.

An example of these co-optive practices in action can be seen in an exchange between the Saudi Foreign Ministry and its Embassy in Cairo. On 24 November 2011 Egypt’s Arabic-language broadcast station ONTV hosted the Saudi opposition figure Saad al-Faqih, which prompted the Foreign Ministry to task the embassy with inquiring into the channel. The Ministry asked the embassy to find out how “to co-opt it or else we must consider it standing in the line opposed to the Kingdom’s policies”.

The document reports that the billionaire owner of the station, Naguib Sawiris, did not want to be “opposed to the Kingdom’s policies” and that he scolded the channel director, asking him “never to host al-Faqih again”. He also asked the Ambassador if he’d like to be “a guest on the show”.

The Saudi Cables are rife with similar examples, some detailing the figures and the methods of payment. These range from small but vital sums of around $2000/year to developing country media outlets – a figure the Guinean News Agency “urgently needs” as “it would solve many problems that the agency is facing” – to millions of dollars, as in the case of Lebanese right-wing television station MTV.

Confrontation

The “neutralisation” and “containment” approaches are not the only techniques the Saudi Ministry is willing to employ. In cases where “containment” fails to produce the desired effect, the Kingdom moves on to confrontation. In one example, the Foreign Minister was following a Royal Decree dated 20 January 2010 to remove Iran’s new Arabic-language news network, Al-Alam, from the main Riyadh-based regional communications satellite operator, Arabsat. After the plan failed, Saud Al Faisal sought to “weaken its broadcast signal”.

The documents show concerns within the Saudi administration over the social upheavals of 2011, which became known in the international media as the “Arab Spring”. The cables note with concern that after the fall of Mubarak, coverage of the upheavals in Egyptian media was “being driven by public opinion instead of driving public opinion”. The Ministry resolved “to give financial support to influential media institutions in Tunisia”, the birthplace of the “Arab Spring”.

The cables reveal that the government employs a different approach for its own domestic media. There, a wave of the Royal hand is all that is required to adjust the output of state-controlled media. A complaint from former Lebanese Prime Minister and Saudi citizen Saad Hariri concerning articles critical of him in the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat newspapers prompted a directive to “stop these type of articles” from the Foreign Ministry.

This is a general overview of the Saudi Foreign Ministry’s strategy in dealing with the media. WikiLeaks’ Saudi Cables contain numerous other examples that form an indictment of both the Kingdom and the state of the media globally.

Source

— WikiLeaks Begins Releasing Leaked Saudi Arabia Cables

Was the following BBC program influenced by the Saudis? Pay attention to the results of the vote on the motion after the debate:

—Should the West get out of bed with the House of Saud?

Another curiosity…

Why did “YouTube” decide to remove the following video I uploaded ( Saudi Arabian Family Hang an Ethiopian Woman From Hook) about the Saudi atrocities against Ethiopians? My upload was done on November 26, 2013, but YouTube decided to remove it two years later, after 7.000 views. The real reason? Mind you, extremely violent videos (including barbaric beheading) are all over the YouTube platform.

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The British Election Campaign Has Shown a Democracy in a Horrible State of Disrepair

My Note: Whenever I see, hear and observe David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage, I ask myself, “Woow, are these the best a country that prides itself as ‘Great’ Britain has to offer? God willing, on the other side of the Atlantic, we shall observe the same theater between Clinton and Bush next year. Turnout at general elections are getting lower and lower, yet these politicians and their controlled medias are more and more desperate to get the easily manipulable sheeple to vote without having the necessary leadership integrity and dignity. The truth is that many people are now seeing through this fake democracy. Tory, Labor or Lib-Dem, the political parties and their representatives are all the same and they have one common aim: consolidation of the society into a single liberal anti-Christ unit – whatever the choice the notorious dictatorship of liberal democracy rules – instead of rule by the people for the people there is a rule for the liberal elite. Don’t they, at least, have some sense of shame and humility when they dispatch their supremacist ‘election observers?’ to some of our “undemocratic” countries? 

It is often said that we get the politicians we deserve. But throughout this election I have kept wondering, ‘Are we really as bad as all this?’ The answer must be ‘yes’. This bland and empty ‘campaign’ has not only been the fault of the main parties competing to govern the UK – it has also been a reflection of what they believe we, the general public, now expect from our politics.

Of course the result is aggravating, in part because we keep trying to enjoy contradictory things. For instance at some point in recent years it was decided that any statement outside a vague centre-left orthodoxy constituted a ‘gaffe’. Such ‘gaffes’ get highlighted by the media who then seek denunciations of the ‘gaffe’ from any member of the public. The result is that politicians now treat words like landmines and try to speak only in the bland language of political orthodoxy. We are obviously not entirely happy with this arrangement because at the same time as having created this type of politics we complain that our politicians are all similar, dull identikit figures.

Or take the striking reluctance of the major party leaders to meet any ordinary voters. There was a time, not long ago, when even a Prime Minister could get up on a stage at election time, address an audience and take the risk that the audience might include doubters, hecklers and even political opponents. But then the cameras began to flock to anyone who challenged the politicians and presented them not as one person with an opinion, but as the authentic voice of the people and a possible game-changer in an election. After several rounds of this, the parties clearly recognised that the negatives associated with meeting the general public vastly outweighed any positives. This isn’t so much the case for the small parties, who have less to lose, but for the main parties, meeting just one angry member of the public can now derail a whole campaign.

So now it has proved possible to have an entire election campaign with only stage-managed events. The major party leaders need almost never meet the general public. And why would they when they can bus around ambitious, thrusting young party loyalists to form a pretend-public backdrop at their fake events? Whose fault is this? Well it is the media’s of course. But it is also the fault of us, the public, for pushing politicians away even as we complain that they are ignoring us. In the same way that it is our fault for wishing for impossible things from our leaders while giving them a pass for failing at possible things.

Consider the last week of stories. First there was the alleged ‘misspeak’ by David Cameron where he described as ‘career-defining’ what he quickly added was a ‘country-defining’ election. Cue a vast concentration of media attention. Was it a slip of the tongue? Or was it, to use one of the most idiotic motifs of political punditry, the mask slipping? Who knows? And how could anyone know? In any case it matters not a jot either way. But amid all the chatter, we forgot to recall that David Cameron is a human being, not an automaton.

Our insistence that our politicians must be ‘more human’ and yet not make any human slip-ups is literal in the case of Ed Miliband. On his way off-stage last week after an unusual orchestrated grilling on the BBC by invited members of the public, one of Miliband’s feet ever so slightly stumbled as he left the stage. Thank goodness for him that he didn’t actually fall. If he had done it would all be over by now. But this wasn’t even a stumble, it was an almost-stumble – a micro-stumble. Yet there was a story. What did this tell us about Ed Miliband asked the Conservatives, who hate it when this is done to them? In truth it told us no more than the endless, tedious obsession over how Ed Miliband once ate a bacon sandwich or the fascinating story of what Ed Miliband or David Cameron’s kitchens say about their ability to govern.

It is no coincidence that during this campaign of frippery the real stories were not even touched upon. There has been absolutely no debate over foreign policy in this election. It is as though the world is not there. While we concentrate on micro-stumbles and peoples’ kitchens we have become unsurprisingly small-minded and insular as a nation. The only time that defence came up as an issue during this campaign was when Michael Fallon slipped something about Ed Miliband’s relationship with his brother into a story about Trident. Inevitably the story became not about our nuclear deterrent but about whether this was a mean thing to do and whether Fallon should apologise to Ed Miliband.

You could argue that the British public no longer care about defence, security and foreign policy. But what about the issues we are thought to care about – for instance the issue which poll after poll consistently shows is the general public’s number one issue: immigration. The last Labour government oversaw a period of mass immigration unparalleled in our country’s history, the fall-out from which will pose challenges to this country for generations to come. Yet there was next to no debate when Ed Miliband had the temerity to attack the coalition government for failing to meet its own targets on immigration.

The gall of the Labour leader in saying this can hardly be believed. But he has a point. Because despite campaigning before the last election to bring migration into the UK down from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands, the post-2010 government failed magnificently in this aim, with net migration close to 300,000 last year. True they managed to successfully bring down non-EU migration, and of course they are in a coalition, and of course we are in the EU, but the Conservative party completely and wholly failed in their pledge. Perhaps it is because both main parties know how abysmally they have failed in this area – and how unpopular they are for having failed – that they ensured this subject wasn’t seriously debated. But we the public still allow them to get away with this.

It’s like the NHS, perhaps the one issue of substance which politicians feel any confidence about. As others have pointed out, if the NHS is so good it is odd that our politicians spend so much time trying to fix it, or pretending that their political opponents either have destroyed it, or are in the process of destroying it. They must know this isn’t true. But they say it because they believe that it is the only thing the general public care about and that they have us so long as they say at some point in any statement, ‘Our NHS is the envy of the world and we have to do everything in our power to protect it’. We have had no serious discussion about the NHS or its failings because the public don’t seem to want to hear it.

Even these things might be small-fry of course. Because our country may not even exist at the next general election if the Scottish Nationalists do as well as predicted – a fact that barely registers outside the ever more insular and rank politics north of the border. It is also possible – depending on who comes out as the biggest party after Thursday – that after this election this country might finally have a say in what our relationship should be with the European Union. Neither of these considerable issues has been seriously discussed in this campaign.

When I say we the general public are ‘unhappy’ about what we have helped create some people will say I am exaggerating. So let me put it another way. Can anybody think of any sane person who is actually looking forward to the prospect of voting tomorrow? I can think of no election in recent memory in which people from across the political spectrum have seemed so un-eager. Is any Labour voter seriously pumped-up at the prospect of a Miliband premiership? Are any Conservatives actually looking forward to a second term of Cameron government, as opposed to just thinking it would be better than Ed Miliband being in Number 10? The minor parties have had their surges but the inevitable pre-election squeeze means that very few of their voters can be going to the polls believing that their vote will make much of a difference.

I could go on. But in short, this campaign has shown a democracy in a horrible state of disrepair, particularly gruesomely in hoc to the shallows. It has shown a democratic process resolutely failing to engage people or show why politics matters. At some point the political parties should try to address this. But they will not be able to do it alone. The weeks and months ahead will also require us, the public, to work out what we want from our media and what we expect from our politics.

Source

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Calls for BBC Reporter to Resign After He Told Daughter of Holocaust Survivors in Paris

• Tim Willcox was covering yesterday’s Paris rally for the BBC News channel
• He spoke to participants during a live broadcast from the streets of Paris
• One woman he spoke to expressed fears Jews were being persecuted
• She told him ‘the situation is going back to the days of the 1930s’
• Willcox replied: ‘Many critics though of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well’
• Comments sparked anger and calls for him to resign
• Willcox has apologized for offense caused by poorly phrased question

Journalist Tim Willcox sparked anger during his coverage of yesterday’s rally in Paris, held in memory of the 17 victims of last week’s terror attacks, including four Jewish people in a siege at a Kosher supermarket.

During a live report from the streets of Paris, Willcox was speaking to a number of participants in the march, including one woman who expressed her fears that Jews were being persecuted, and ‘the situation is going back to the days of the 1930s in Europe.’

Many viewers also used the social network to express their anger and concerns over Willcox’s rally coverage, including historian and BBC presenter Simon Schama.

He wrote on Twitter: ‘Appalling of @BBCTimWillcox to imply any and all JEWS (not Israelis) responsible for treatment of Palestinians by hectoring lady in Paris.’

And added: ‘Then he had gall to patronise her at the end – “you see people see it from all sides” That Palestinian plight justifies anti-semitic murder?’

Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard also joined the debate, tweeting: ‘What is @BBCTimWillcox’s problem with Jews? Once is problematic. Twice is a pattern.’

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, which works to combat anti-Semitism in Britain, has circulated footage of the incident, and has called on those offended by it to formally complain to the BBC.

Director of communications, Jonathan Sacerdoti, told MailOnline Willcox’s Twitter apology was ‘not really good enough’.

‘It’s an admission he has done something wrong, but it’s incumbent on the BBC to make an on-air apology and to investigate his behaviour.’

The BBC’s Tim Wilcox projects the last two hundred years of European anti-Jewish ideology on an elderly French woman

Wilcox was interviewing a French Jewish woman with limited English skills at yesterday’s anti-terrorism rally. The rally, of course, came in the wake of the murder of four French Jews at a kosher supermarket, in the broader context of widespread violence against Jews in France by Islamists. When she noted that Jews are being targeted in France, Wilcox interjected that “many critics though of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.” The woman tried to object, but Wilcox added that surely she understands that people see such things from different perspectives.

My friend Hill Wellford commented on Facebook with a brief but extremely insightful analysis, which aptly sums up how Wilcox’s interjection reflects a strain of European thought that helped lead to the Holocaust, and which the Holocaust obviously did not extinguish: “Interesting that there are two contradictory assumptions made at the same time. First, that Jews aren’t really Europeans even when they live in Europe; instead, they are Israelis or at least some form of collectively non-European other. Second, that Jews in Israel/Palestine are not really from there, either, but are some sort of colonizers that is oppressing the natives. The assumption seems to be that Jews are a stateless people, deserving to call nowhere home, but a coherent one that must answer for its collective guilt.” Yes, that about sums up modern European anti-Semitism, which undoubtedly infects the consciousness even of those who don’t consciously harbor ill-will toward Jews, and which we saw in the U.S. reflected recently in the remarks of (thankfully now former) Yale Episcopal chaplain Bruce Shipman.

You can watch the interview on Youtube here.

Source

In The Information Age Disinformation/Misinformation Reign

My Note: In a rational world one could ask these days why governments, the united nations, the so-called humanitarian organizations and the mainstream media (including RT who made this report) are all involved in a conspiracy of silence concerning the ongoing cruel and inhuman treatment of poor Ethiopian immigrants by the Saudis. In a normal world, one would wonder why and how Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s ‘most flagrant human-rights abusers, is set to join the UN Human Rights Council. You would at least expect the weather report from ‘rainy’ Riyadh. Well, of course, we no longer live in a rational and normal world.

Thousands Protest Press Credibility in March Against Mainstream Media

Thousands of people in the UK and US united in their rejection of mainstream media in a mass protest. Protesters targeted the headquarters of media giants like Fox News, the BBC and NBS, decrying their narrow coverage of world affairs.

The March Against Mainstream Media (MAMM) organized the international protest via social media and challenged the established media to cover it.

In a statement posted on the MAMM website, the organization said big media outlets had two options: “report on the fact that thousands of people are currently protesting outside of their buildings because they are keeping important news from the public’s eyes,” or ignore them.

Across America people turned out brandishing banners, condemning established news channels.

“Boycott the media!” one banner read in High Point California, while in Kansas city supporters of the movement wearing Anonymous masks delivered the message “America deserves the truth!”

A recurrent theme that cropped up a number of times in the US protests was the media’s coverage of the stricken nuclear plants in Fukushima Japan that were damaged in the 2010 earthquake-triggered tsunami.

“The radiation from that plant is going to reach us and affect us, not just in California but worldwide.  How is it going to affect us, how is it going to affect our water, our food supply, and our way of life?” said one protester to KMPH Fox 24.

Meanwhile in London, supporters of the anti-establishment movement gathered outside the offices of the BBC in a sit-in-style protest.

Confidence in US mainstream media has been declining sharply over the past couple of years with only 44 percent of Americans trusting mass media, according to a Gallup poll in September. The figures for this year are a slight improvement on 2012 when the survey saw trust in the media fall to a record low of 40 percent.

However, a large amount of Americans (46 percent) believe media has become too liberal, compared to only 13 percent who regard mainstream news coverage as overly conservative.

Source

The BBC’s Christian Persecution Denial

While it is no secret that the so-called mainstream media habitually fails to report on the international phenomenon of Christian persecution, few are aware that they sometimes actively work to undermine the efforts of those who do expose it.

Consider a new report by the BBC titled “Are there really 100,000 new Christian martyrs every year?” by Ruth Alexander.

Regarding the all-important question of how many Christians around the world are killed, Alexander herself later quotes another source saying “there is no scientific number at the moment. It has not been researched and all experts in this area are very hesitant to give a figure.”

And this seems to be the real point.  Of all the questions and aspects of Christian persecution that objective researchers and reporters can explore and expose, why did the BBC pick the very one that 1) cannot be answered and 2) is ultimately irrelevant—at best academic, at worst cold and callous?

(The issue is less whether 100,000 Christians around the world are killed annually for their faith, but rather that any Christian, any human—even Alexander’s “paltry” 7,000—is being killed for their faith.)

The BBC naturally picked this “numbers” question because it best serves to minimize the specter of Christian persecution, specifically by prompting the casual reader to conclude, “Oh, well, things are certainly nowhere near as bad as I thought for Christian minorities outside the West—indeed, they’re 93% better!”

More importantly—and here we reach BBC policy—this number-crunching approach serves to exonerate the chief persecutor of Christians, the Islamic world, or, as Alexander is quick to conclude: “[t]his means we can say right away that the internet rumours of Muslims being behind the killing of 100,000 Christian martyrs are nonsense.” (Meanwhile, there’s this ongoing monthly series to deal with.)

Incidentally, since when do numbers matter to the supposedly “humanitarian-conscious” BBC and other “liberal” media where one life (provided it’s the “right” life) often gets nonstop coverage?  Would the BBC ever write a report dedicated to trying to show that the number of Palestinians killed in the conflict with Israel is actually 93% lower than widely believed?

Of course not. When it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, far from minimizing anything, the BBC regularly exaggerates to demonize Israel.

And therein lies the main lesson.  The BBC is not in the business of reporting facts but rather creating smokescreens, building and knocking down straw men, and chasing red herrings—all to further its narratives, in this case, that “only” 7,000-8,000 Christians are killed annually for their faith, and that the Islamic world is largely innocent—so what’s all the fuss about?

Continue reading…

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A Manipulation that Does Not Honor the BBC Television Station

My Note: Another proof of the anti-Christian agenda of the BBC. Of course, the BBC & co. The BBC won’t dare to report why the Saudi regime spends billions of pounds each year promoting Wahhabism to fund children’s education in British faith schools and mosques. The BBC, as taxpayer funded corporation (In 2012, the collected license fee was £3.6 billion) doesn’t inform British citizens that jihadists freely promote and sell DVDs and books inside mosques with hate-filled invective against Christians and Jews. The BBC won’t report the presentation of women as intellectually congenitally deficient and in need of beating when they transgressed Islamic dress codes. The BBC won’t seriously examine why U.K. Muslim men are estimated to be responsible for 96.2% of all reported rapes, or why British women were attacked with acid in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Yet, Christianity and Christians are “fair game” for insults, inaccurate portrayals, ridicules and derogatory stereotypes.

Iregard to the documentary titled “Although it is the poorest country of the EU, a church is built in Romania every three days”, presented by the BBC on 3 August 2013, and taken over with no critical discrimination whatsoever by some Romanian mass media sources, the Romanian Patriarchate explains:

The construction of new places of worship is not a caprice, but a liturgical must, especially in the urban areas, where the construction of churches was forbidden in the time of the communist regime. After 1990, at the initiative of the communities of faithful from all over the country supported by the local authorities, about 2000 places of worship were built or are being built, because those existent had no more room to accommodate the large number of Christians who attend the religious services. Their construction, painting and maintenance are financially sustained especially by the parochial communities who are their beneficiaries also.

As for the support from the state budget to the religious cults recognised (not only the Romanian Orthodox Church), according to the Ministry for Public Finances, this one amounts to 0.2% of the state budget or 0.08% of Romania’s GDP and it is the consequence of the confiscation of the church estates through the Law for the Secularisation of the Church Estates (1863) and by the communist regime of Romania beginning with 1948. A possible interruption of the support from the state budget to the religious cults may follow after the retrocession of all the church estates owned and exploited by the Romanian State.

As for the financial support from the State Budget for building the Cathedral for the Nation’s Salvation, this one is in accordance with the Law for Religious Affairs (489/2006) and Law for the Cathedral for the Nation’s Salvation (376/2007).

Moreover, the National Fund-Raising for constructing the Cathedral for the Nation’s Salvation has been taking place for over two years, with the participation of many donors, especially priests and faithful.

All the inaccurate information presented in the BBC documentary are taken from the same tendentious source (Secular Humanist Association of Romania), as Deutsche Welle television channel did in August 2011, who made a similar reportage, of which argumentation was discouraged by the Romanian Patriarchate at the time. For example two years ago, the Deutsche Welle reportage used the same pathetic and alarming rhetoric concerning the construction of the Cathedral for the Nation’s Salvation through the appreciation of the cost of its infrastructure, red-grey stage, to over 600 million euro. In reality, the cost estimated by experts amount to 100 million euro, and after achieving the infrastructure of the future Patriarchal Cathedral (finished in April 2013), it was diminished by 20%.

As for the explanation of the author of the BBC documentary, according to which the representatives of the Romanian Orthodox Church have not accepted an interview to express their point of view, we mention:

A few days after finishing the infrastructure of the Cathedral for the Nation’s Salvation, possibly at the suggestion of its opponents, two journalists from BBC – one from Romania, Mr Paul Andrei Lungu, and the other one married to a Romanian, Romanian language speaking and with a good command of the Romanian traditions, Mrs Tessa Dunlop – asked for the support of the Romanian Patriarchate to achieve as soon as possible a reportage both on the “popularity of the Romanian Orthodox Church and on the publicizing of the actions of the Romanian Orthodox Church” at the international level. The application of the two journalists caused confusion concerning their good intentions, taking into account their previous journalistic activity, the very short time established for filming (only a few days), contrary to the British Institution media usage, and their insistence to film at the building yard of the Cathedral for the Nation’s Salvation according to a rather strange plan. In this sense, very relevant is the fact that the BBC journalists asked for interventions at the Romanian Patriarchate to be allowed to film, through the representatives of the Romanian diplomacy in London and of the British diplomacy in Bucharest.

In conclusion, the authors of the BBC documentary succeeded in overshadowing the image of one of the most appreciated international institutions for the professionalism and accurate information presented, through the exclusive presentation of the information suggested by the representatives of an anti-religious and anti-clerical trend of Romania or through the interviews taken only from some interlocutors attentively selected for the purpose. The tendency to exaggerate and to convey the false message according to which Romania is the “poorest country of the EU” because of the Romanian Orthodox Church, a country with an educational, medical and social assistance system in crisis, with no proof in this regard, does not honor the British Television channel.

Moreover, we think it is a more dignified attitude for a Christian European people to build new churches, necessary to large communities, than sell empty churches because they lack faithful, to be changed into commercial or sporting spaces, as often happens in Great Britain and other secularized countries of the West, to the surprise of other religions.

THE PRESS OFFICE OF THE ROMANIAN PATRIARCHATE

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What Will Happen When ‘Bilderberger’ Jeff Bezos Takes Over The Washington Post?

Amazon.com founder and Bilderberg member Jeff Bezos is all set to take control of the Washington Post from the Graham family who have owned the media publication for four generations.

Bezos paid $250 million for the Washington Post, along with the Express newspaper and several local weeklies bundled in.

Interestingly, the Bezos deal comes on the heals of another major media move, with the New York Times announcing that it’s selling its ownership in The Boston Globe. When the NYT purchased The Boston Globe in 1993 it had paid $1.1 billion for it. 20 years later, it’s had to dump it for a paltry $70 million.

So is Jeff Bezos betting on a dead horse? Some believe that both the Graham family and New York Times have seen the writing on the wall, and that traditional print titles are nothing but a dying breed – and a liability.

When Don Graham took over the helm of his family’s icon newspaper title in 1979, the Washington Post shared the responsibility of setting America’s news agenda with another media giant, The New York Times. But the old media paradigm has shifted drastically in the 21st century, where titles like the Post and Times have to compete with online content.

Media power is no longer concentrated in the hands of four newspapers on either side of the Atlantic. The competition for the digital English language market is not only restricted to other US mainstream print publications online; it’s also spread across a wide sector of online majors like Gawker, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, to name only a few. Behind them are thousands of blogs and aggregators. Another rising trend is also cutting into America and the UK’s monopoly on English language news and commentary, as global English language news outlets continue to pop up in Europe, Asia, Russia and even Iran. All of this cuts into a market which used to be sewn up by a handful of majors.

Some pundits remained stunned that a dotcom kingpin is acquiring a major US news gathering institution like the Washington Post. For some, it brought back memories of AOL’s deal which scooped up another American media institution – Time Warner.

 

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Media: The Associated Press Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine

Associated Press feels the wrath of the Orwellian police state government it helped put into power

Associated Press reporters are outraged over recent revelations that the Obama administration engaged in a “sweeping seizure” of the private phone records of AP reporters as part of a Justice Department investigation. No probable cause was given to anyone, and hundreds of AP reporters were simply deemed guilty by the government as their phone call records were confiscated without explanation.

Politico is now reporting:

The behind-the-scenes anger — and heads-down determination of the AP staff members to keep doing their jobs amid the extraordinary public flap — comes as top executives from the wire service have mounted an aggressive public pushback against DOJ, calling its snooping a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” in a letter fired off to Attorney General Eric Holder. And yet something of a bunkerlike atmosphere has taken hold at the AP in Washington with no bureau-wide meetings or announcements about the DOJ’s action, AP sources told POLITICO.

But what’s not being reported is that the Associated Press helped create the very police state it now condemns for violating its freedoms and privacy.

How AP helped build a tyrannical government

Over the last several years, AP has come down on the side of big government on practically every story, routinely attacking the Bill of Rights, demonizing protectors of the Constitution and endorsing government monopolies over everything from health care to the money supply.

The AP, in fact, falsely refers to itself as a “news organization” when the truth is that it has functioned far more like a big government propaganda mouthpiece that anything resembling independent news reporting.

In addition, the AP all but declared war on alternative medicine back in 2009, and their reporters openly and willfully lie about water fluoridation, yet another big government program to poison the people.

The AP apparently thought that if it went along with the tyranny, it would be given a pass by the oppressive, criminal government now in power in the United States of America. But they were wrong: Going along with the police state does not make you immune to it, and now the AP is coming to learn that the hard way.

Suddenly the AP is crying wolf

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What is Media Manipulation?–A Definition and Explanation

If you don’t know, you should. Because media manipulation currently shapes everything you read, hear and watch online. Everything.

In the old days, we only had a few threats to fear when it came to media manipulation: the government propagandist and the hustling publicist. They were serious threats, but vigilance worked as a clear and simple defense. They were the exceptions rather than the rule—they exploited the fact that the media was trusted and reliable. Today, with our blog and web driven media cycle, nothing can escape exaggeration, distortion, fabrication and simplification.

I know this because I am a media manipulator. My job was to use the media to make people do or think things they otherwise would not. People like me are there, behind the curtain, pulling the puppet strings. But that is about to get harder: I’m spilling my secrets to you and turned my talents from exploiting media vulnerabilities to exposing them—for your benefit.

When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals scuttle election bids or knock billions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about ‘how the story unfolded’—media manipulation is the status quo. It becomes, as Daniel Boorstin, author The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, once put it, a “thicket …which stands between us and the facts of life.

Today the media—driven by blogs—is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online—and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning.

Everyone is in on the game, from bloggers to non-profits to marketers to the New York Times itself. The lure of gaming you for clicks is too appealing for anyone to resist. And when everyone is running the same racket, the the line between the real and the fake becomes indistinguishable.

The Rise of the Manipulator

At top of the pantheon of the media manipulators, of course, sits the late Andrew Brietbart. “Feeding the media is like training a dog,” he once said, “You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” And learned it did: they followed his lead exactly in the Shirley Sherrod story, and continue to fall for the manipulations of his student, James O’Keefe, who has ravaged NPR, ACORN, and many other liberal organizations.

But in this rising class, I also place some unlikely figures. Michael Arrington, former editor and founder of the popular blog TechCrunch. Manipulator is the only word for Arrington, a man who once said “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap” and made $25 million from around that fact. Nick Denton and his cabal of Gawker writers—partially paid by how many visitors their posts get—use the same tricks to get your attention and sell it to advertisers. You can see it in how Brian Moylan, one of Denton’s minions, once explained the art of online headlines: “[the key is to] get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.”

And the old threat of government abuse of the media? We know that the Bush administration was a pro at it. Think of Dick Cheney leaking bogus information to Judith Miller at the New York Times as an anonymous source and then citing himself (without disclosing the conflict) to justify the build up to the war in Iraq. He planted the information which he then alluded to as support. That happened in 2002. Today, this loop is even easier, because as political strategists like Christian Grantham admit, “Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs.”

So it goes: manipulators on both sides of the equation—the writers and the marketers and press agents—all influencing the news to their own benefit. I know because I used to be one of them. I plied the trade for bestselling authors and billion dollar brands. I can recognize manipulation when I see it…because I invented many of the plays myself.

Where It Comes From and What to Do About It

Media manipulation exploits the difference between perception and reality. The media was long a trusted source of information for the public. Today, all the barriers that made it reliable have broken down. Yet the old perceptions remain. If a random blog is half as reliable as a New York Times article that was fact checked, edited and reviewed by multiple editors, it is twice as easy to get coverage on. So manipulators (myself included) play the volume game. We know that if we can generate enough online buzz people will assume that where there is smoke there is fire…and the unreal becomes real.

This all happens because of the poor incentives. When readers don’t PAY for news, the creators of the news don’t have any loyalty to the readers either. Everything is read one off, passed around on Facebook and Twitter instead of by subscription. As a result, there is no consequence for burning anyone. Manipulators can deceive journalists because journalists are not held responsible for deceiving readers.

To combat these manipulations, we must change the incentives. If we want loyalty to the truth, we must be loyal to the people who provide us with it—whoever they are. This probably means paying for information in one form or another. It means we have to be more patient. Good information takes time to acquire after all. The idea that news can be given to us iteratively and reliably is preposterous. Screw Michael Arrington. I’d rather have my news right than first.

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The Illusion of Net Neutrality: Political Alarmism, Regulatory Creep, and the Real End to Internet Freedom

In The Illusion of Net Neutrality, coauthors Bob Zelnick and his daughter, Eva Zelnick, sound the alarm on how the ever-increasing threat of regulations, rules, and powerful competing interests could strip the Internet of its unfettered, open nature—the very framework that has allowed it to become a life-altering invention.  In just two short decades, this powerful global information and retail powerhouse has changed the way we communicate, how we stay informed on national and world events, how we manage our health and finances, and how we research virtually any subject—from genealogy to astrology.

In their riveting, cautionary treatise, the Zelnicks clearly and simply outline the technologies and factors that allowed the Internet to evolve and to become such a society-changing force in such a short period of time. They also carefully lay out the imminent threats that could rob the Internet of its full potential. They expose “network neutrality” for what is truly is, explain how FCC regulations would harm the Internet, and, in the end, make a strong, compelling case for an independent, unregulated Internet.

Bob Zelnick is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of national and international affairs at Boston University, and, as a former longtime ABC News correspondent, a frequent television analyst.

Eva Zelnick, who specializes in public policy and Internet-related issues, is a cum laude graduate of the University of Virginia and Boston University’s School of Law.

Source

Relevant reading

YouTube puts Germany into digital dark ages

 

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The World’s Changing — The Media Isn’t

What do Ethiopia, Israel and Christianity have in common? The answer is: the three are permanently ridiculed and bashed by the self-hating world liberal media,

What do negative media images, conveyed by mainstream Western Media about Ethiopia communicate? What darkness prevails in the mind of the producer(s)? What gains for whom derive from journalistic bombast and unmitigated stereotype of the whole Ethiopian nation?

Nouns and adjectives like famine, drought, hunger, disease, AIDS, tribe, tribalism, underdeveloped, third world, dictatorship, corruption, over population, war, civil war, etc., are yet pervasive when Ethiopia is the story.

Ethiopia’s image in the Western Media is not a self-portrait. It is not a what you see is what you get. Because media conditioning shapes, molds, and monopolizes those images, references to Ethiopia are received sometimes with disdain and contempt. Even some Ethiopian descendants, who have virtually no cultural and moral competence, actually contribute to how Ethiopia is projected globally. Ashamed of their recent “heritage and socioeconomic development” some popular Ethiopian news-makers and blogs side with media characterizations projected through stories, datelines, specials, documentaries and nightline episodes. This attitude, while supremely disturbing, also abets the media-as if they need assistance-in defaming Ethiopia.

Of course, I don’t dare to blame for Ethiopia’s woes solely on the Western medias. They have been sufficiently aided and abetted by inept, corrupt and short-sighted political leadership and intellectuals who in my opinion must take most of the blame. Political figures and leading personalities who sold their souls to the Devil are the first who are exposing their people to all sorts of ignorance and exploitation

Yet, this permanent portrayals of Ethiopia in a bad light can only spread and prolong ignorance in a world much closer in proximity than ever before a media industry that thrives on the negative.

Ethiopia’s negative and contrived image, promoted in the Mainstream Media, pervades the psyche, pre-empts behaviors, infers worthlessness, and devalues the mind, while it attenuates human spirituality and connectivity: key ingredients in equitable planetary wealth sharing.

I wonder why the likes of the BBC have devoted a great deal of their resources and energy toward painting Ethiopia in a negative light for such a long time.

Those so affected by this practice must not only instigate its demise, but also they must independently try to research, investigate and study why these media-outlets are meanwhile famous to report in a meanspirited manner about our country.

Ethiopians attack BBC’s doom-laden coverage

I was expecting to see Ethiopian blogs post this particular news. None of them did, what a shame!

Ethiopian tour operators, in London for this month’s World Travel Market, have addressed a furious open letter to the BBC’s Director General, concerning the Corporation’s recent coverage of the drought in Ethiopia. The letter, signed by some 25 companies, accuses the BBC of casually dramatizing its broadcasts with footage from the infamous 1984 famine.

“Ethiopia,” they wrote, “has changed beyond all recognition since 1984, yet the BBC insists on showing images from that time. They are very intrusive and are deeply upsetting to many millions of Ethiopians.”

But beyond the matter of stung pride, the tour operators insist that the “doom-laden scenario” implied by the BBC’s use of old newsreel damages the national image, deterring foreign investment and scaring off tourists. “Investment, trade and tourism are key to Ethiopia’s development,” they claim “more so than aid.”

Which is true. The tourism industry currently accounts for approximately five per cent of Ethiopia’s GDP and tourism is a “featured component” of the government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. With about 400,000 tourists a year, the country is still not exactly a hotspot, but adroit marketing of events like the 2007 ‘millennium’ and the annual Addis ‘Marathon’ (10km) have seen visitor numbers increase steadily over the last five years (visitors, incidentally, who invariably comment on green the country is).

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