Saturday, December 29, 2018

Syria: Has Trump Out-manoeuvred the Generals?

Trump Scores, Breaks Generals’ 50-Year War Record

by Gareth Porter - The American Conservative


December 28, 2018

His national security team had been trying to box him in like every other president. But he called their bluff. 

The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team.

But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story.

They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone.

The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.

The relationship between Trump and his national security team has been tense since the beginning of his administration. By mid-summer 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford had become so alarmed at Trump’s negative responses to their briefings justifying global U.S. military deployments that they decided to do a formal briefing in “the tank,” used by the Joint Chiefs for meetings at the Pentagon.

But when Mattis and Dunford sang the praises of the “rules-based, international democratic order” that has “kept the peace for 70 years,” Trump simply shook his head in disbelief.

By the end of that year, however, Mattis, Dunford, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believed they’d succeeded in getting Trump to use U.S. troops not only to defeat Islamic State but to “stabilize” the entire northeast sector of Syria and balance Russian and Iranian-sponsored forces. Yet they ignored warning signs of Trump’s continuing displeasure with their vision of a more or less permanent American military presence in Syria.

In a March rally in Ohio ostensibly about health care reform, Trump suddenly blurted out,

“We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon—very soon we’re coming out.”

Then in early April 2018, Trump’s impatience with his advisors on Syria boiled over into a major confrontation at a National Security Council meeting, where he ordered them unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy.

Trump opened the meeting with his public stance that the United States must end its intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly. He argued repeatedly that the U.S. had gotten “nothing” for its efforts, according to an account published by the Associated Press based on interviews with administration officials who had been briefed on the meeting. When Dunford asked him to state exactly what he wanted, Trump answered that he favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and an end to the “stabilization” program in Syria.

Mattis responded that an immediate withdrawal from Syria was impossible to carry out responsibly, would risk the return of Islamic State, and would play into the hands of Russia, Iran, and Turkey, whose interests ran counter to those of the United States.

Trump reportedly then relented and said they have could five or six months to destroy the Islamic State. But he also made it clear that he did not want them to come back to him in October and say that they had been unable to defeat ISIS and had to remain in Syria. When his advisors reiterated that they didn’t think America could withdraw responsibly, Trump told them to “just get it done.”

Trump’s national security team had prepared carefully for the meeting in order to steer him away from an explicit timetable for withdrawal. They had brought papers that omitted any specific options for withdrawal timetables. Instead, as the detailed AP account shows, they framed the options as a binary choice—either an immediate pullout or an indefinite presence in order to ensure the complete and permanent defeat of Islamic State. The leave option was described as risking a return of ISIS and leaving a power vacuum for Russia and Iran to fill.

Such a binary strategy had worked in the past, according to administration sources. That would account for Trump’s long public silence on Syria during the early months of 2018 while then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Mattis were articulating detailed arguments for a long-term military commitment.

Another reason the approach had been so successful, however, was that Trump had made such a big issue out of Barack Obama giving the Pentagon a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. As a result, he was hesitant to go public with a similar request for a Syria timetable. As CNN reported, a DoD official who had been briefed on the meeting “rejected that any sort of timeline was discussed.” Furthermore the official asserted that Mattis “was not asked to draw up withdrawal options….”

Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Chiefs, also told reporters,

“The president has actually been very good in not giving us a specific timeline.”

Nevertheless, without referring to a timeline, the White House issued a short statement saying that the U.S. role in Syria was coming to a “rapid end.”

Mattis and Dunford were consciously exploiting Trump’s defensiveness about a timeline to press ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it. That is what finally happened some weeks after Trump’s six month deadline had passed. The claim by Trump advisors that they were taken by surprise was indeed disingenuous. What happened last week was that Trump followed up on the clear policy he had laid down in April.

The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations created. Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and Africa, Trump’s national security team is committed to doing the opposite.

Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective. That means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture. If he can fill key positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war state we find ourselves in today.

Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to The American Conservative. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Can Canada Post Workers Get Fair Representation from Government Appointed Arbitrators?

Government-named arbitrator to dictate Canada Post workers’ contract

by Louis Girard  - WSWS


29 December 2018

Following the stipulations of the strikebreaking legislation the federal Liberal government rammed through parliament in late November, a government-appointed “mediator-arbitrator” has now been tasked with dictating the labor contracts for 50,000 Canada Post letter carriers, mail sorters, truck drivers, and post office clerks.

The arbitrator, former Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) Chair Elizabeth MacPherson, acted as mediator between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) for seven days ending December 17. Under the Liberals’ anti-strike law, this mediation process could have been extended for a further seven days. But all parties to the talks agreed this was pointless.

Through months of negotiations, government-owned Canada Post refused to even begin to address postal workers’ key concerns.

These include a spike in injuries, forced overtime, two-tier wages, and precarious employment.

Instead, Canada Post management relied, as it has for decades, on the readiness of the government of the day, whether Liberal or Conservative, to illegalize postal workers’ job action.

CUPW has praised MacPherson as “very knowledgeable” and touted her decades of experience in labour negotiations. In fact, as a federal mediator and later CIRB chair, she has worked to contain and suppress the class struggle and police Canada’s anti-worker labour laws. Named by the previous Harper Conservative government in 2011 to arbitrate a dispute between Air Canada and its 6,800 flight attendants, MacPherson imposed a concessionary contract on the workers they had twice rejected.

The criminalization of the postal workers’ five-week campaign of rotating strikes and the impending imposition on them of contracts dictated by an appointee of the big business Liberal government constitute an attack on the entire working class.

The “right” to strike is increasingly a legal fiction not just for postal workers, but for all workers across Canada. Federal and provincial governments—including union-backed, ostensibly “progressive” Liberal, NDP and Parti Quebecois governments—routinely adopt “emergency” laws illegalizing strikes. And for every law adopted, at least two or three are threatened, with the aim of browbeating workers into “voluntarily” abandoning job action and selling themselves short in contract negotiations.

Quebec construction workers, CP Rail workers, Nova Scotia and Ontario public school teachers, and Ontario college instructors have all been targets of recent anti-strike laws. Earlier this month, the Ontario Conservative government adopted an emergency law outlawing a threatened strike by six thousand Ontario Power Generation workers.

Second and no less importantly, the issues at the core of the dispute between postal workers and Canada Post are those that face workers, both in the public and private sectors, across Canada and internationally: declining real wages; employer demands for cuts in pensions and benefits; the proliferation of two-tier and precarious employment; the dismantling of public services; and the use of technological change to slash jobs and increase the pace and regimentation of work.

Canada Post’s push to exploit the growth in online shopping and compete with private sector parcel-delivery giants like UPS has resulted in a soaring accident rate. Postal workers suffer disabling injuries more than five times the average in federally-regulated industries, making work at Canada Post even more dangerous than mining or longshoring.

If postal workers were to defy the Liberals’ anti-strike law and appeal for support from workers across Canada in opposing the criminalization of workers’ struggles, two-tier wages and other concessions, and the dismantling of public services, there is no question that they could and would win mass support.

But from the get-go, the CUPW leadership has done everything to limit and isolate the postal workers’ struggle. In doing so, they have reprised the ruinous strategy that CUPW pursued in 2011 and which culminated in the union accepting sweeping concessions, including pension cuts and the further expansion of two-tier wages.

As in 2011, and despite being armed with a massive strike mandate, CUPW limited job action to a campaign of rotating local strikes and with the publicly stated goal of “not harming the public,” i.e., having as little impact as possible on Canada Post’s operations.

Although it was obvious the post office viewed government intervention as its trump card, CUPW President Mike Palacek and the rest of the union officialdom kept studiously silent on the threat of a back-to-work law, even after Trudeau publicly signaled such action was imminent.

And when the government introduced its Bill C-89 in parliament, the union continued to keep postal workers on a tight leash, refusing to call a national strike or even mass membership meetings so workers could discuss the way forward.

Instead, behind a bluster of hot air about “all options being on the table,” Palecek, a former leader of the pseudo-left Fightback group, prepared to order postal workers to submit to the Liberals’ strikebreaking law, just as his rightwing predecessors in the CUPW leadership had instructed them to obey Harper’s law in 2011.

This was underscored by Palecek’s claims that the union would defeat the Liberal law in the courts and his boasts that the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), a staunch Liberal ally, stood with the postal workers.

To provide CUPW with some cover for its abject surrender to the Liberals’ back-to-work law and abandonment of postal workers’ demands, Palecek’s CLC “allies” subsequently organized a series of sparsely attended “community pickets.”

When several of these “community pickets” briefly disrupted the entry and exit of mail delivery trucks at postal sorting plants, Canada Post responded with court injunctions.

This only underscores that a real struggle against management and the Liberal government will entail a clash with the apparatus of state repression, and thus requires the mobilization of the entire working class in mass actions and political struggle. Such a course is directly the opposite of that pursued by CUPW, the CLC and unions around the world. Their response to the class-war assault on the working class has been to lurch ever-further right, integrating themselves evermore completely with management and the state.

As for overturning the Liberals’ strikebreaking law in the capitalist courts, such claims have been a standard union justification for bowing to back-to-work legislation for years. Time and again, the courts have upheld anti-worker laws. But even when they haven’t, it has made little to no difference for workers. In 2016, a judge ruled the law Harper had used to criminalize the 2011 postal strike—legislation which, unlike the Liberals’ Bill C-89, made no pretense to “fairness”—was unconstitutional. But he ordered no changes to the concessionary contract that was subsequently imposed on postal workers or any other form of redress.

Under the Liberals’ back-to-work law, as under the one the Conservatives’ adopted in 2011, CUPW and Canada Post can continue negotiating while the arbitrator drafts new contracts. In 2012, the union ultimately reached a settlement with Canada Post, accepting a contract imposing historic concessions. It defended this betrayal with the claim that a “negotiated settlement” was preferable to one dictated from start-to-finish by a Conservative-named arbitrator.

It appears Palecek, who won the union presidency in 2015 by appealing to rank-and-file anger against the previous leadership, will adopt a different tack. So as not to have to take direct responsibility for imposing concessions, the CUPW leadership will choose to let MacPherson dictate postal workers’ wages and working conditions.

Either way, the results for postal workers will be the same. Their just demands will remain unfulfilled, and additional rollbacks will be imposed, further emboldening Canada Post, the Liberal government and big business as a whole.

If their struggle is not to be suppressed, postal workers must seize leadership of it from the CUPW apparatus. At every workplace, postal workers should establish rank-and-file action committees independent of CUPW to mobilize support among all sections of postal workers and the working class for a national strike in defiance of the Liberals’ Bill C-89. Such a strike should be conceived of as the spearhead of a working-class counter-offensive against capitalist austerity and the criminalization of worker resistance.

The Left's Political Betrayal of Platform Promises

Campaigning From the Left and Governing From the Right in Canada

by TRNN


December 28, 2018

Canadian MP Niki Ashton tells Paul Jay both the NDP and the Liberals have been guilty of making progressive promises during election campaigns and legislating from the center-right once in power. - Part (1/2)


We’re in Vermont at the Sanders Institute Gathering. There’s a couple of Canadians here; Naomi Klein, and also MP Niki Ashton. She’s one of the longest-serving members of the New Democratic Party.

For our American audience, NDP, the New Democratic Party, is the Canadian social democratic party. It’s a little different than, perhaps, some of the social democratic movements in the United States, because the NDP has actually taken power in various provinces over the years. But it’s kind of controversial. What have they actually done when they had that power? And just what does, what does it mean when you get the kind of social democratic campaigning, and then you actually have to govern? And so we’re going to talk about that, and the implications for that in terms of U.S. politics, but also Canada.



Niki Ashton has been a key member of the NDP caucus, having served as an NDP critic for Aboriginal Affairs, Status of Women, Post-Secondary Education and Youth, and is currently the critic for Jobs, Employment, and Workforce Development, and the deputy critic for Reconciliation between Canada and Indigenous Peoples.

Grasping the Breadth of the Integrity Initiative

Integrity: Grasping The Initiative

by Tim Hayward


December 15, 2018


This is my first personal blogpost since April. At that time I referred to a ‘coordinated smear campaign’ against anti-war journalists, tweeters and academics, whose number included myself and other members of the SPM Working Group.

The portrayal of us as “useful idiots” for some or other official enemy, I suggested, was evidently a strategic communication. We now know a lot more about the coordination of that strategy, thanks to recently accessed documents exposing the Institute for Statecraft’s "Integrity Initiative" (here, here and here).

Numerous points of interest and concern emerge, one of which regards the high profile attack launched at our Working Group on the front page of The Times. Two of its authors, we learn, are named in the newly available documents. They – Deborah Haynes and Dominic Kennedy – have not so far responded to invitations to clarify their association with the “Initiative”.

What we do know from the documents is that a coordinated network was very closely following all public comments on such critical events as the Skripals poisoning in Salisbury, on which SPM produced its first Briefing Note, and the chemical attack in Douma this year, which was the focus of SPM’s second Briefing Note.

The working group’s third Briefing Note will be released soon [update, 21 Dec 2018, it is now published here]. Meanwhile, for anyone wishing to catch up with others’ comments on the “Integrity Initiative”, links to discussions of the issue will be maintained here below.

Briefing Note on the Integrity Initiative: comments and discussion

December 21, 2018 

This page is for public comments and discussion relating to the Briefing Note on the Integrity Initiative, by Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason, Piers Robinson, for the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media.

The Briefing Note is work in progress, and the Working Group can be contacted at piers.robinson@sheffield.ac.uk. For further information about the Working Group visit http://syriapropagandamedia.org/

Read the full Briefing Note



[Update 22 Dec 2018: currently the full set of II documents is available at https://fdik.org/Integrity_Initiative/]

Discussions of Institute for Statecraft’s “Integrity Initiative”


Mark Curtis (28 December 2018) Twitter and the smearing of Corbyn and Assange: A research note on the “Integrity Initiative”, Mark Curtis: British foreign policy declassified

Free West Media Staff (28 December 2018) UK info war against Russia targets young children, Free West Media

Derek Royden (28 December 2018) The new Agitprop? The Integrity Initiative exposed, Nation of Change

David Miller, with Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton (26 December 2018) Inside the Integrity Initiative, the UK gov’s information war on the public, Moderate Rebels

Constanze Kurz (25 December 2018) Der hausgemachte Desinformationsskandal, Frankfurter Allgemeine [in German]

Russia Today (24 December 2018) Why is paid Integrity Initiative hitman Ben Nimmo still used as ‘independent’ expert by MSM? RT Question More

Johanna Ross and Kit Klarenberg (24 December 2018) UK academics unveil report on Integrity Initiative as Sunday Times attacks Sputnik journalists, Radio Sputnik

Chris Donnelly (Director of Institute for Statecraft and its “Integrity Initiative”) On Disinformation, Youtube video

The Bulgarian Times (23 December 2018) The British Integrity Initiative as an attempt to enforce global censorship, The Bulgarian Times [in Bulgarian]

John Pilger (22 December 2018) A Look Back at 2018, Look Forward to 2019, Going Underground, RT

Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason, Piers Robinson (21 December 2018) Briefing note on the Integrity Initiative, Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media [readers’ comments on the Briefing Note are posted here]

Jens Berger (20 December 2018) Die Infokrieger im Dienste ihrer Majestät, NachDenkSeiten [in German]

Alan MacLeod (19 December 2018) The Integrity Initiative in Context, Conversation with Slava Zilber

Russia Today (19 December 2018) ‘Striking images to help public relate’: UK Integrity Initiative’s post-Skripal psyop leaked, RT

Mark Galleotti (19 December 2018) The Integrity Initiative and Me (and Jeremy Corbyn), In Moscow’s Shadows

David Jamieson (19 December 2018) State-backed Integrity Initiative confirms meeting with Herald journalist for Scotland briefing, CommonSpace

Margaret Kimberley (19 December 2018) Freedom Rider: UK and US PSYOP Collusion, Black Agenda Report

Piers Robinson (19 December 2018) Interview: There’s desire to ramp up public perception of Russia being a threat in the international system, Radio Sputnik

South Front (19 December 2018) British Foreign Secretary Confirms Integrity Initiative Documents, Blames Russia For Everything, South Front

RT (19 December 2018) Do it CIA style: UK-funded ‘Integrity Initiative’ planned to infiltrate European media, leaks reveal, RT News

Piers Robinson (18 December 2018) On the emerging Integrity Initiative scandal, Fault Lines

Kit Klarenberg (18 December 2018) Integrity Initiative: The Times Meets Ukrainian Kidnappers, Propaganda Follows, Sputnik

South Front (17 December 2018) Hackers Uncover More Documents Throwing Light On British Propaganda Campaign Against Russia, South Front

Johanna Ross with Kit Klarenberg (17 December 2018) Anonymous leaks 3rd batch of Integrity Initiative documents, Radio Sputnik

Mohamed Elmaazi and Max Blumenthal (17 December 2018) Inside the Temple of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative and the UK’s Scandalous Information War, Grayzone

Edward Lucas (17 December 2018) Don’t swallow Labour’s claims of ‘black ops’, The Times [making a case in favour of the II, behind a paywall]

Ian Shilling (17 December 2018) The #Russiagate Hoax and the “Integrity Initiative” to Gaslight the public with more “Russia Threat” lies, Investment Watch

David Scott (16 December 2018) Half a League Onwards: A glimpse of the policy protocols of the Integrity Initiative, UK Column

Mail Opinion (16 December 2018) Minister’s flimsy defence of infowars attack on Jeremy Corbyn as embarrassing as Tory leadership farce, Daily Record

John Ferguson (16 December 2018) Tory minister ‘misled Parliament’ over Government-funded infowars attack on Jeremy Corbyn, Daily Record

David Scott (15 December 2018) Integrity Initiative: Ministry of Defence Parliamentary answer now in doubt, UK Column

Moon of Alabama (15 December 2018) The ‘Integrity Initiative’ – A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The “Russian Threat”

Ally Tibbitt (15 December 2015) Scottish charity at centre of ‘propaganda’ row probed by regulator, The Ferret

David Miller (14 December 2018) interviewed by George Galloway, Mother of All Talk Shows, Talk Radio [item from 23 minutes; interview from 27 minutes.]

Kit Klarenberg (14 December 2018) Integrity Initiative: Spanish Cluster Misled UK Parliament Over Assange, Russia, Sputnik

Anonymous (14 December 2018) The documents of ‘Integrity Initiative’, Part 3

Moon of Alabama (14 December 2018) Newly Released ‘Integrity Intitiative’ Papers Include Proposal For Large Disinformation Campaigns

Craig Murray (13 December 2018) British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft

Kit Klarenberg (13 December 2018) Integrity Initiative: Foreign Office Funded, Staffed by Spies, Housed by MI5? Sputnik

Emily Thornberry (12 December 2018) Letter to Alan Duncan, Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

David Miller (12 December 2018) (Interview:) Integrity Initiative Operations Are ‘Outrageous in Democratic System’, Sputnik News

George Galloway (12 December 2018) A very British coup: The spies who went out to the cold – by George Galloway, RT [Yes, Russia Today. Where is the Western media coverage?]

UK Parliament (12 December 2018) Institute for Statecraft: Integrity Initiative, Hansard

Stephen Daisley (11 December 2018) The deep state needs to step up its campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, Spectator Blog [defending II]

South Front (10 December 2018) British Anti-Russian Propaganda Network Is Now Used To Target Jeremy Corbyn And Labour Party, South Front

David Scott (10 December 2018) Integrity Initiative: Just how well connected are the “Gateside Three”? UK Column

Aaron Bastani (10 December 2018) Undermining Democracy, Not Defending It: The ‘Integrity Initiative’ is Everything That’s Wrong With British Foreign Policy, Novara Media

James Landale (10 December 2018) Russia hack ‘bid to discredit’ UK anti-disinformation campaign – Foreign Office, BBC [Note the perspective adopted in this piece. See also how the report was edited to shift the perspective (courtesy News Sniffer)]

Emily Thornberry (9 December 2018) Response to reported government funded attacks on the Labour Party, Labour Party

John Ferguson (9 December 2018) Secret Scottish-based office led infowars attack on Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, The Daily Record

Conrad Landin (9 December 2018) Researcher at government-funded think tank behind fake news story that Kremlin aided Corbyn’s rise, Morning Star

Ben Gelblum (9 December 2018) Labour demand government explains £2m taxpayers’ cash funding infowars unit which smeared Corbyn and Labour, The London Economic

Alejandro López (6 December 2018) Hackers reveal British government’s interference in Spanish politics, World Socialist Web Site

David Scott (5 December 2018) Integrity Initiative: Follow the money, UK Column

Mike Robinson (2 December 2018) Integrity Initiative: A Look Into the Deep State? UK Column

John Ferguson (2 December 2018) Derelict Scottish mill is shadowy hub in UK’s fight against Putin’s propaganda machine, Daily Record

Anonymous (29 November 2018) Documents of “Integrity Initiative” Part 2, live link at SPM site

Chris Williamson MP (28 November 2018) UK Government ‘Black Propaganda’ and Scrapping Universal Credit, Going Underground, RT (video)

David Miller (26 November 2018) The Integrity Initiative is a British state-funded propaganda operation, Radio Sputnik podcast

Integrity Initiative (26 November 2018) Statement on Russian media publication of hacked II documents

Moon of Alabama (24 November 2018) British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

South Front (23 November 2018) Documents Confirm: UK Is Engaged In Large-Scale Secret Propaganda War Against Russia, South Front

Anonymous (5 November 2018) Documents of ‘Integrity Initiative’, Part 1

Friday, December 28, 2018

The Temple Keepers: Behind the Institute for Statecraft's 'Integrity Initiative'

The Integrity Initiative and the UK’s Scandalous Information War

by Mohamed Elmaazi and Max Blumenthal  - MintPress News


via Grayzone Project

December 18, 2018

The carefully concealed offices of a covert, British government-backed propaganda mill at the center of an international scandal the mainstream media refuses to touch.

Recent hacked documents have revealed an international network of politicians, journalists, academics, researchers and military officers, all engaged in highly deceptive covert propaganda campaigns funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and hardline national security institutions. This “network of networks”, as one document refers to them, centers around an ironically named outfit called the Integrity Initiative. And it is all overseen by a previously unknown Scotland-based think tank, the Institute for Statecraft, which has operated under a veil of secrecy.

The whole operation appears to be run by, and in conjunction with, members of British military intelligence. According to David Miller, professor of political sociology in the school of policy studies at the University of Bristol and a member of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, the Integrity Initiative “appears to be a military-directed push.”

“The most senior government people are professional propagandists and spooks,” Miller explained. 
“The ‘charity’ lead on this [Chris Donnelly] was also appointed as a colonel in military intelligence at the beginning of the project — a truly amazing fact that suggests this is a military intelligence cut out.”

A minister for the UK FCO has officially confirmed that it has been funding the Integrity Network.

In addition to conducting diplomacy, the FCO oversees both the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) the UK equivalent to the National Security Agency, and the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) commonly known as MI6.


 SOURCE | National Intelligence Machinery, UK government briefing November 2010


The think tank that oversees the Integrity Initiative, the Institute for Statecraft, has also received funding from the British Army and Ministry of Defense.

The entire extremely shady enterprise, as Miller explained, is an elaborate front for the British military-intelligence apparatus. Its covert coordination with friendly politicians and mainstream journalists recalls the Cold War-era intrigue known as Operation Mockingbird.

That scandal involved the unmasking of “more than 400 American journalists who…in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency,” as Carl Bernstein revealed in a 1977 Rolling Stone report.

The exposing of the Integrity Initiative has just scratched the surface of what appears to be a much more sophisticated, insidious, and extremely online version of Operation Mockingbird. With new internal documents appearing each week through a hacker’s organization called Anonymous Europe, the revelations are yielding one of the most potentially explosive national security scandals in recent times.

But even as members of Britain’s parliament thunder with demands for official accountability, the UK and US mainstream media still strangely refuses to touch the story.

Smearing left-wing political figures in NATO member states


The Integrity Initiative claims that it is “counter[ing] Russian disinformation and malign influence,” and indeed, the main players behind it appear intent on hyping the Russian threat to justify ramped up military budgets and a long-term war footing.


An Institute for Statecraft memo emphasizes the need for 
“ramping up” anti-Russian messaging


But the Integrity Initiative has also trained its fire on perceived subversives inside NATO member states, including the UK.


An article attacking left-wing activists that was listed in the 
“Recent Posts” section of the Integrity Initiative website

The Integrity Initiative waged a successful covert campaign to destroy the appointment of Pedro Baños to Director of Spain’s National Security Department on the bogus grounds that he was “pro-Kremlin,” thus interfering in the affairs of a fellow EU and NATO member. It carried out the hit job through a hand-picked “cluster” of Spanish politicians and operatives to flood social media and sympathetic outlets with messages demonizing Baños.


An Integrity Initiative document detailing how the group’s clusters 
destroyed a Spanish national security appointee.

The Integrity Initiative appears to have employed the same tactics to smear left-wing journalists and political figures across the West, including the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

Member of Parliament Chris Williamson – a close ally of Corbyn – is now openly and indignantly calling for “a public inquiry into the Integrity Initiative and similar information war efforts being funded by our government.”

It is not necessarily illegal for the FCO to direct propaganda towards its own citizenry, according to Miller of the Organization for Propaganda Studies. However, he said that “it is not legal for ministers to effectively direct a charity. Thus, if the MoD through military intelligence are effectively running a charity, that would be contrary to law.”

An abandoned mill in Scotland covers for an active office in London’s “Temple”


To conceal its potentially illegal activities, the Institute for Statecraft has employed a web of deceptions. Not only did they hide their government funding, the outfit listed a fake location as its address.

Mohammed Elmaazi, a co-author of this piece, discovered the elaborately hidden location of the Institute for Statecraft inside a posh warren of barristers’ offices in London. Elmaazi’s swift ejection from the premises confirmed the lengths that this shadowy organization continues to go to to avoid public scrutiny.

The Institute for Statecraft, is a registered charity in Scotland, whose registered office is listed as being an old mill in Fife Scotland involved in the “manufacture of wood and other products.” David Scott of UK Column news, visited the registered office in Fife only to find a “an empty, semi-derelict, partly demolished, building.”


 The partially demolished address at Gateside Mills. 
Photo | David Scott

While the address in Fife, Scotland appears to be a derelict building, the London address listed in the hacked documents is fully operational, so far as Elmaazi could tell.

He located the offices belonging to The Institute for Statecraft at the Embankment at Two Temple Place in London. It shares offices in the basement of a “spectacular neo-gothic mansion” which is owned or leased by The Bulldog Trust, an organization dedicated to “promoting culture and philanthropy”. This area, known as “the Temple,” is filled with barristers’ chambers and used to serve as the precinct for the Knights of Templar.


 A Christmas themed projection lights up the walls of 2 Temple Place. 
Photo | Mohamed Elmaazi

Elmaazi found the offices on December 6, having nearly given up and becoming convinced that he would discover nothing more than was found at the derelict house in Fife. When he arrived at the location, preparations were underway for some sort of Christmas-themed event to be held in the main building on the ground floor. But upon discovering the signs pointing downstairs to the basement, Elmaazi found himself staring at a door with a sign that read, “The Institute for Statecraft/The Fore.”


 Photo | Mohamed Elmaazi

No Comment


Elmaazi rang the Institute for Statecraft’s doorbell and was eventually let in by a well-dressed elderly gentleman in a beige overcoat. The man claimed that he worked neither at The Institute nor at The Fore but at “another organization.” He then called out for “Charles.” Having walked in, Elmaazi could see a few smaller offices to the side, with a larger planned office with tables and computers around the corner.

A man whom Elmaazi presumed was “Charles” came around the corner and called out, “Yes?” He seemed somewhat confused by the journalist’s presence, understandably so as he was there without an appointment. When “Charles” confirmed that he worked with the Institute for Statecraft, Elmaazi identified himself as a journalist and asked if he would be willing to be interviewed.

The request was met with a curt refusal.

“Charles” then guided Elmaazi sternly with his hand back to the entrance. When the journalist repeated his request, he was met with stone silence. And that was that.

A “Charles Hart” is listed as the chairman of the Institute for Statecraft, but no photo is available to confirm that Hart was the same “Charles” that Elmaazi met.

The neocon connection


Two buildings away from the Institute for Statecraft, separated only by the British American Tobacco, lies the offices of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). This think tank is key organ of the Western foreign policy establishment, pushing military interventionism and promoting the Saudi-backed Syrian opposition-in-exile.

Among the funders of IISS is the Smith Richardson Foundation.

This foundation also happens to be a supporter of the Integrity Initiative, providing it with £45,000 (about $56,600 USD) for covert propaganda activities in Europe and the US.




The Smith Richardson Foundation was founded by billionaire heir to the Vicks fortune, H. Smith Richardson, in 1935. In 1973, the founder’s son, Randolph Richardson – a free market fundamentalist and long-time patron of neoconservative ideologue Irving Kristol – inherited the organization.

Kristol’s son, William Kristol, is a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century which openly called for the US to assert itself as the single global hegemon following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Recipients of funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation include a who’s who of neoconservative and militaristic right-wing institutions. The foundation has bankrolled neoconservative outfits like the American Enterprise Institute (to the tune of nearly $10 million since 1998), the Hudson Institute, the Institute for the Study of War, Freedom House, the Hoover Institution, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, along with Democratic Party-aligned think tanks like the Center for New American Security and the Center for American Progress.

“To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,” wrote Kelley Vlahos in a profile of Nadia Schadlow, a former Trump administration deputy national security advisor who previously worked as the senior program director for Smith Richardson.




Smith Richardson compliments a roster of international funders backing the Integrity Initiative’s parent organization:

  • HQ NATO Public Diplomacy, £12,000 for each inaugural workshop = £168,000
  • Partner institutions £5,000 for each inaugural workshop = £70,000
  • NATO HQ for educational video films – free provision of camera team
  • Lithuanian MOD to provide free all costs for their stratcom team for a monthly trip to support a new hub/cluster creation and to educate cluster leaders and key people in Vilnius in infowar techniques = £20,000
  • US State Dept, for research and dissemination activities (excluding any activity in USA) = £250,000
  • Smith Richardson Foundation, £45,000 for cluster activities in Europe and USA
  • Facebook, £100,000 for research and education activities
  • German business community, £25,000 for research and dissemination in EU countries

A covert asset in the Bernie campaign?


Elmazi, the co-author of this piece, was not the only reporter to gain momentary access to the Institute for Statecraft’s hidden location at 2 Temple Place. On December 11, five days after Elmazi’s visit, Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio entered the covert propaganda mill’s neo-gothic offices. As soon as he identified himself as a journalist, he was angrily ejected by an Institute for Statecraft staffer named Simon Bracey-Lane.

“You need to leave right now!” Bracey-Lane barked at Klarenberg. “You haven’t arranged to see us! Go! Right now! Please leave immediately! Leave!”

Bracey-Lane is a 20-something British citizen with no publicly acknowledged experience in intelligence work. But as Klarenberg noted, there are some unusual details in the young staffer’s bio.

In 2016, Bracey-Lane appeared out of nowhere to work in Iowa as a field organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign for president.


 Simon Bracey-Lane being interviewed in Bernie Sanders’ 
Iowa field office on January 27, 2016

“I spent a year working, saving all my money, just thought I was gonna go on a two month road trip from Seattle to New York and I thought, you know what? I’m gonna stay and work for the Bernie Sanders campaign,” Bracey-Lane told a reporter for AFP on January 27, 2016.

He said that after he decided to work for Bernie, he first went to England to “get a visa and get everything legal,” then came back to join the campaign in earnest.

Bracey-Lane also claimed to AFP, “I’m not sure there’s a place for me in British politics… I’ve never been struck by an urge to work in my own political system.”

However, a February 1, 2016 profile of Bracey-Lane by Buzzfeed’s Jim Waterson said the Brit-for-Bernie “was inspired to rejoin the Labour party in September [2015] when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday.”

It is clearly odd for Bracey-Lane to tell one reporter that he had never had any interest in British politics, while claiming to another that he had been eager to support Corbyn before he joined the Bernie campaign. What’s more, as Klarenberg reported, Bracey-Lane went on to establish a get-out-the-vote effort for various progressive politicians and parties in Britain’s 2017 general election, gaining inside access to a wide array of campaigns.

The contradiction in Bracey-Lane’s narrative raises serious questions about his real role on the Bernie campaign, as does his suddenly transition from progressive politics to a staff position at a military-backed propaganda farm that waged a covert information war on Corbyn and other left-leaning politicians across the West.

An Institute for Statecraft document on “roles and relevant experience” of the outfit’s “expert team” notes that Bracey-Lane conducted a “special study of Russian interference in the US electoral process.” The document does not make clear when that study was conducted, however, it is listed directly next to its author’s history of work with the Bernie campaign.



“At Thanksgiving, I was asked, why are you meddling?” Bracey-Lane remarked to Reuters, referring to his work for Bernie Sanders.

“Which is an interesting way to phrase it, but I was happy to answer: it needs meddling with.”

Those comments take on an entirely different meaning now that the former Bernie field worker has been outed as part of a British military-intelligence influence operation.

In the coming days, the Grayzone will take a closer look at the Integrity Initiative’s activity inside the US, and whether it is interfering in American politics as it has done in other NATO member states.

Top Photo | Grayzone Project

Mohamed Elmaazi obtained his LLB from SOAS and Masters in International and Comparative law from the American University in Cairo. He worked in human rights law for a number of years before shifting to journalism. He occasionally reports for The Real News Network and currently contributes to Open Democracy, The Canary, and the Grayzone. You can follow him on Twitter @MElmaazi
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty One Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, and The Management of Savagery, which will be published later this year by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the forthcoming Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

Source | Grayzone Project


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Father Christmas Lands US Weapons in Kiev

Ho Ho!… Washington Bears Gifts for Kiev’s Neo-Nazi Warmongering Regime 

by Finian Cunningham - SCF


December 27, 2018

Oh what a lovely big stocking-filler for the Kiev regime this week from Washington.

Just in time for Christmas too, and only weeks after President Petro Poroshenko tried to incite a war with Russia from a naval provocation in the Kerch Strait.

First we had US government envoy Kurt Volker announcing this week that an additional $250 million in military weapons were being packaged in Congress for Ukraine.

Then the DC-based international lending institutions, the IMF and World Bank, signed off on multi-billion-dollar loans for Poroshenko’s regime.



US government-owned Radio Free Europe describe
the new financial loans as a “victory” for Poroshenko.

The apparent investor confidence bestowed by the Washington-based “development agencies” will boost the incumbent president’s re-election prospects in the forthcoming ballot in March. Up until recently, Poroshenko was trailing in opinion polls and looked set for a trouncing defeat in the election. How convenient that the IMF and World Bank – under the control of US government – should step up to the plate with a very big helping hand. And that’s not seen as interference in a country’s sovereign affairs?

Since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 against the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, it is estimated that the US has provided the cabal that seized power with up to $1 billion in military aid. And those dubious gifts keep coming, with the envoy Kurt Volker this week announcing to a forum in Brussels that the US Congress is processing an additional $25o million.

It doesn’t seem to bother American lawmakers that the Kiev regime is dominated by Neo-Nazi demagogues and paramilitaries who worship Stepan Bandera and other Ukrainian collaborators in the Third Reich’s Final Solution. Just recently President Poroshenko was photographed inspecting Ukrainian special forces some of whom were donning insignia of the Third Reich’s SS.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out in his annual press conference this week, the Kiev regime has been waging a war and a blockade against its own Ukrainian citizens in the eastern Donbas region for over four years, in which civilians continue to be killed on a daily basis.

One reason why that war remains largely unknown in the West is because Western news media don’t report on it. Or when they do, they distort with lies that Russia has “invaded Ukraine”. This is similar to how the Western news media largely “forgot” to report on the war in Yemen, and when they have bothered to mention Yemen at all, they again distort by calling it a proxy war with Iran.

The Ukraine war against the ethnic Russian people of eastern Ukraine is driven by a rabid Russophobia subscribed to by the Kiev regime consistent with the exterminatory mentality of the Third Reich with whom their antecedents collaborated with during the Second World War.

The criminal recklessness of Washington knows no bounds. Just as President Donald Trump announces this week that he is pulling out American troops from Syria (illegally present there for the past four years), the same administration is stepping up its military involvement in Ukraine.

After the November 25 incident in the Kerch Strait when three heavily armed Ukrainian warships violated Russia’s maritime border, one might have thought that the US backers of the Kiev regime would have prevailed upon it with caution not to incite Russia. Not a bit of it, it seems. The US is giving notice that it is increasing its already hefty military support. That amounts to a green light from Washington to the Kiev regime to continue its provocations.

The timing of the IMF and World Bank financing is also blatant, and equally reprehensible. The IMF said it had approved $4 billion in new money for the Kiev regime, the first tranche of which will be disbursed by December 25, Christmas Day in the Western calendar! Together, the IMF and World Bank loans will enable the Kiev regime to seek taking on even more debt from other international sources, their approval acting as an endorsement of “sound economy”.

Ukraine is already lumbering from huge national debts of around $115 billion. The IMF and World Bank are therefore pushing the country into deeper arrears. No doubt that is part of the threadbare pattern of how Western capital will strip the country of its resources and the populace thrown into debt slavery.

Nevertheless, grave legal questions arise. It is understood that the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF and World Bank, officially affiliated with the United Nations, are forbidden from lending money to states which are in the midst of armed conflict. How is it then possible that those institutions are bank rolling the Kiev regime given the latter’s horrendous assault on its own people in eastern Ukraine, its explicit affiliation with Neo-Nazi ideology, and its brazen attempts to provoke a war with Russia?

Furthermore, IMF lending was supposedly put on hold in 2017 because the Kiev regime was not complying with demands to crack down on corruption and implement political reforms. If anything the economic and political corruption in Ukrainian territory under the control of the Kiev regime has become an even bigger, more rampant problem. The IMF and World Bank announced their “financial goodies” this week without providing any evidence of purported conditional improvements.

This all makes for a grim prognosis over the coming months. The Kiev regime has no intention to go back to the 2015 Minsk accords which called for a negotiated political settlement in Ukraine. As Putin remarked recently, as long as the current cabal in Kiev remains in power then conflict will be the order of the day.

The US government and the Washington financial institutions are ensuring that the cabal remains in power with their generous rewards of military and capital injections. More disturbing is that the Kiev regime will feel emboldened to take its warmongering against Russia to an even more reckless level.

Father Christmas is supposed to reward good boys and girls. For Washington, the gifts are evidently doled out for a Neo-Nazi rogue regime with blood on its hands.

Year of Smears: Behind Brit Media's Anti-Corbyn Crusade

Labour and anti-Semitism in 2018: The truth behind the relentless smear campaign against Corbyn 

by Jonathan Cook

via Middle East Eye

27 December 2018

Bombarded by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism menace

End-of-year polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and political trends over the past year and predict where things are heading in the next.

But a recent poll of European Jews – the largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a new, leftwing form of anti-semitism.

The survey was conducted by the European Union’s agency on fundamental rights and was given great prominence in the liberal-left British daily the Guardian.

The newspaper highlighted one area of life in which Britain scored worse with Jews than any of the other 12 member states surveyed. Some 84 per cent of Jews in the UK believe there is a major problem with anti-semitism in British politics.

As a result, nearly a third say they have considered emigrating – presumably most of them to Israel, where the Law of Return offers an open-door policy to all Jews in the world.

Britain scored only slightly better on indices other than politics. Some 75 per cent said they thought anti-semitism was generally a problem in the UK, up from 48 per cent in 2012. The average score in the 12 EU states with significant Jewish populations was 70 per cent.

‘Playing with fire’


Jeremy Corbyn, head of the UK’s opposition Labour party, has faced a barrage of criticism since he was elected leader more than three years ago for presiding over a supposedly endemic anti-semitism problem in his party.

The Guardian has been at the forefront of framing Corbyn as either indifferent to, or actively assisting in, the supposed rise of anti-semitism in Labour. Now the paper has a senior European politician echoing its claims.

Relating to the poll, Vera Jourova, the EU’s commissioner for justice, helpfully clarified what Britain’s terrible results in the political sphere signified.

The paper quoted her on Corbyn:

“I always use the phrase ‘Let’s not play with fire’, let’s be aware of what happened in the past. And let’s not make the same mistake of tolerating it. It is not enough just to be silent … I hope he [Corbyn] will pay attention to this survey.”

Labour party problem?


However, both Jourova’s warnings and an apparent perception among British Jews of an anti-semitism problem fuelled by Corbyn fly in the face of real-world evidence.

Other surveys show that, when measured by objective criteria, the Labour party scores relatively well: the percentage of members holding anti-semitic views is substantially lower than in the ruling Conservative party and much the same as in Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats.

For example, twice as many Conservatives as Labour party members believe typically anti-semitic stereotypes, such as that Jews chase money or that Jews are less loyal to Britain.

Prejudices in decline


Even more significantly, the percentage of Labour party members who hold such prejudices has fallen dramatically across the board since Corbyn became leader.

That suggests that the new members who joined after Corbyn became leader – a massive influx has made his party the largest in Europe – are less likely to be anti-semitic than those who joined under previous Labour leaders.

In other words, the evidence suggests very persuasively that Corbyn has been a force for eradicating, or at least diluting, existing and rather marginal anti-semitic views in the Labour party. More so even than the previous leader, Ed Miliband, who was himself Jewish.

But all of this, yet again, went unremarked by the Guardian and other British media, which have been loudly declaiming a specific “anti-semitism problem” in Labour for three years without a shred of concrete evidence for it.

Resurgent white nationalism


There are good grounds for Jews to feel threatened in much of Europe at the moment, with the return of ugly ethnic nationalisms that many assumed had been purged after the Second World War.

And Brexit – Britain’s planned exit from the European Union – does indeed appear to have unleashed or renewed nativist sentiment among a section of the UK population. But such prejudices dominate on the right, not the left. Certainly Corbyn, a lifelong and very prominent anti-racism activist, has not been stoking nativist attitudes.

The unexplored assumption by the Guardian and the rest of the corporate media, as well as by Jourova, is that the rise in British Jews’ concerns about anti-semitism in politics refers exclusively to Corbyn rather than a very different problem: of a resurgent white nationalism on the right.

But let’s assume that they are correct that the poll solely registers Jewish worries about Corbyn.

A separate finding in the EU survey underscored how Jewish opinion on anti-semitism and Corbyn may be far less straightforward than Jourova’s presentation suggests – and how precisely the wrong conclusions are likely to be drawn from the results.

Buried in the Guardian report was a starkly anomalous finding – from Hungary.

Anti-Jewish sentiment


Hungary is a country in which Jews and other minorities undoubtedly face a very pressing threat to their safety. Its ultra-nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, used the general election in April to whip up a frenzy of anti-Jewish sentiment.

He placed the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire George Soros at the centre of his anti-immigration campaign, suggesting that the philanthropist was secretly pulling the strings of the opposition party to flood the country with “foreigners”.

In the run-up to the election, his government erected giant posters and billboards all over the country showing a chuckling George Soros next to the words: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh.”

Raiding the larder of virtually every historic anti-semitic trope, Orban declared in an election speech:

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the world.”

All of this should be seen in the context of Orban’s recent praise for Miklos Horthy, a former Hungarian leader who was an ally of Hitler’s. Orban has called him an “exceptional statesman”.

The Hungary anomaly


So did Hungarian Jews express to EU pollsters heightened fears for their community’s safety? Strangely, they did not. In fact, the percentage who regarded anti-semitism as a problem in Hungary was only slightly above the EU average and far below the concerns expressed by French Jews.

Not only that, but the proportion of Hungarian Jews fearful of anti-semitism has actually dropped over the past six years. Some 77 per cent see anti-semitism as a problem today, compared to 89 per cent in 2012, when the poll was last conducted.

So, the survey’s results are more than a little confounding.

On the one hand, at least according to the British media and the EU, British Jews are in a heightened state of fear about the UK Labour party, where the evidence suggests an already marginal problem of anti-semitism is actually in decline. And on the other, Hungarian Jews’ fears of anti-semitism are waning, even though the evidence suggests anti-semitism there is on the rise and government-sanctioned.

Array of opponents


There is, however, a way to explain this paradox – and it has nothing to do with anti-semitism.

Corbyn’s socialist-lite agenda faces a devastating array of opponents that include British business; the entire spectrum of the UK corporate media, including its supposedly liberal components; and, significantly in this case, the ultra-nationalist government of Israel, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The British establishment fears Corbyn poses a challenge to the further entrenchment of neoliberal orthodoxy they benefit from.

Meanwhile, Israeli politicians loathe Corbyn because he has made support for the Palestinian people a key part of his platform, becoming the first European leader to prioritise a Palestinian right to justice over Israel’s right to maintain its 51-year belligerent occupation.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban, by contrast, is beloved of big business, as well as the country’s mainstream media, and, again significantly, the Israeli government.

Orban: Israel’s ‘true friend’


Rather than distancing himself from Orban and his Jew-baiting electioneering in Hungary, Netanyahu has actually sanctioned it. He has called Orban a “true friend of Israel”, thanked him for “defending Israel”, and joined the Hungarian leader in denouncing Soros.

Netanyahu, like Orban, intensely dislikes Soros’s liberalism and his support for open borders. Netanyahu shares Orban’s fears that a flood of refugees will disrupt his efforts to make his state as ethnically pure as possible.

Earlier this year, for example, Netanyahu claimed that Soros had funded human rights organisations to help African asylum seekers in Israel avoid a government programme to expel them.

Netanyahu has many practical and ideological reasons to support not only Orban but the new breed of ultra-nationalist leaders emerging in states like Poland, Italy, France and elsewhere.

Hostility to Muslims


Nativism in European states is primarily directed against Muslim and Arab immigrants arriving from the Middle East and north Africa, though domestic Jews could well become collateral damage in any future purge of “foreigners”.

Europe’s ultra-nationalist leaders are therefore more likely to sympathise with Israel and its own “Arab-Muslim problem”, especially since Netanyahu and the Israeli right have proved adept at falsely presenting the Palestinians as immigrants rather than the region’s native population.

Netanyahu would also like to see Europe paralysed by political differences, so it is incapable of lobbying for a two-state solution, as it has been doing ineffectively for many years; it is unable to agree on funding human rights activism designed to protect Palestinian rights; and it is too weak to move towards the adoption of sanctions against Israel.

But most importantly, Netanyahu and the Israeli right can identify with the anti-semitic view of “the Jew” shared by Europe’s hardline nationalists.

Ethnic purity and the Other


These far-right groups see Jews as outsiders, a discrete community that cannot be assimilated or exist peacefully among them, and one that has separate loyalties and should either be encouraged to leave or be sent elsewhere.

Netanyahu agrees. He also believes Jews are different, that they are a distinct and separate people, that their primary loyalties are tribal, to their own kind, and not to other states, and that they can only ever really be at home and properly Jewish in Israel, their true home.

Zsofia Kata Vincze, a professor of ethnology in Budapest, recently referred to the ideological affinity between Netanyahu’s Zionism and Orban’s Hungarian-Christian nativism:

“They found a common language very easily. They kept talking about mutual values, which are nationalism, exclusivism … Hungarian purity, Jewish purity … against the Others.”

Only ‘partial’ Jews


In fact, Netanyahu’s views are widely shared in Israel. A few years ago the celebrated liberal Israeli author A B Yehoshua outraged American Jews by saying they could only ever be what he called “partial Jews” outside Israel.

Speaking of the divide between them and Israeli Jews, he said: “In no way are we the same thing – we are total and they are partial.” He called the refusal of all Jews to live in Israel and become “complete Jews … a very deep failure of the Jewish people”.

The high levels of racism among Israelis towards non-Jews is highlighted in every poll.

According to one this month, more than half of Israeli Jews – or those willing to admit it – believed that “most Jews are better than most non-Jews because they were born Jews”. Only a fifth rejected the statement outright.

Some 74 per cent were disturbed by hearing Arabic, the mother tongue of the fifth of the country’s population who are Palestinian citizens. And a further 88 per cent did not want their son to befriend an Arab girl.

Anti-immigrant views


A separate poll this month found that, apart from Greeks, Israelis hold the most anti-immigrant views of 27 countries surveyed – more so even than Hungarians.

By immigrants, of course, Israelis mean non-Jews. They do not regard the millions of Jews who have arrived in Israel from Europe and the Americas over the past decades as immigrants. Instead they are viewed as olim, or those who “ascend” to Israel, supposedly returning to their Biblically ordained home.

It is this ideological affinity – between a European ultra-nationalism and the kind of Zionist ultra-nationalism dominant in Israel – that explains why the far-right in Europe venerates Israel while despising Jews, and why so many Israelis prefer an Orban to a Soros.

And it is also, of course, explains why Netanyahu and most Israelis detest Corbyn.

Legacy of Europe’s racism


Not only does Corbyn offer an inclusive domestic political agenda, unlike the Orbans of Europe, but worse he also refuses to shy away from confronting the legacy of European racism and colonialism.

The chief historic victims of that racism in Europe were Jews. But today that same European racism is channeled both into fervent support for Israel as a supposedly “safe haven” for Jews and into a general indifference – aside from handwringing – towards the Palestinians who for decades have been displaced and oppressed by Israel.

Corbyn represents a huge break with that tradition and is therefore a threat to Israel. That is why behind the scenes Israel has been seeking to redefine anti-semitism in a way that tars anti-racists like Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party.

The ‘ultimate’ anti-semitism


I have documented before in Middle East Eye Israel’s role in stoking the supposed “anti-semitism crisis” in Labour and in cornering the party into adopting a new, convoluted definition of anti-semitism that for the first time makes criticism of Israel the benchmark of anti-semitic discourse.

Last month Netanyahu made that conflation explicit in a video message to a conference in Vienna. While praising Orban, he averred:

“Anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, anti-Israeli polices – the idea that the Jewish people don’t have the right for a state – that’s the ultimate anti-semitism of today.”

But it is not just Netanyahu who is stoking the patently preposterous notion that anti-racists like Corbyn – those whose principles require that they reject Jewish privilege over Palestinians – are really secret Jew-haters.

If that were the case, the criticisms of Corbyn might not have as much traction with British Jews as this month’s EU poll suggests.

Media distortions


The UK media have played a vital role in promoting a false image of Corbyn, as a survey by the Media Reform Coalition found in September when it analysed British coverage of the Labour party.

The coalition, which is led by academics, concluded that there had been systematic “disinformation” from media outlets. Inaccurate and misleading reporting by the supposedly liberal Guardian was especially pronounced.

“Two thirds of the news segments on television contained at least one reporting error or substantive distortion,” its researchers also discovered.

These failures included “marked skews in sourcing, omission of essential context or right of reply, misquotation, and false assertions made either by journalists themselves or sources whose contentious claims were neither challenged nor countered.”

Covert propaganda


The group is reluctant to infer that these consistent media failures indicate an intention to smear Corbyn.

But revelations this month provide reason to believe that powerful interests in the UK are prepared to use dirty tricks to keep the Labour leader out of power.

According to hacked documents, a network of politicians, academics, journalists and military personnel in Britain and elsewhere have been engaged in covert propaganda to shore up pro-western narratives and smear dissidents through an organisation called Integrity Initiative.

In the UK, these operations have been overseen by an even more shadowy group called the Institute for Statecraft, with a fake address in Scotland. In fact, it is headquartered in London and staffed by former and possibly current military intelligence officers.

The UK government has been forced to admit that the institute has received substantial payments from the foreign office and defence ministry, and from the British army.

Much of what the Integrity Initiative is up to is unclear, but from public records – such as its Twitter history – it can be seen that it has repeatedly sought to damage Corbyn and his key advisers by implicating them in supposed Russian “disinformation” campaigns.

‘Fair or foul means’


It is worth recalling that shortly after Corbyn was elected Labour leader in summer 2015 an unnamed British army general was given a platform in the Establishment’s newspaper, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times, to denounce Corbyn. He warned that the army would use “whatever means possible, fair or foul” to prevent the Labour leader from becoming prime minister and being able to carry out his policies.

Certainly, the fingerprints of the British establishment now look all too visible on some of the recent efforts to malign Corbyn in the media.

Maybe not surprisingly, despite the huge implications of the story for British politics, it has been given only the barest reporting in that same media. At the time of writing, the Guardian had referred to the Integrity Initiative only in the most pro forma fashion – in the context of government denials of wrongdoing.

Is it credible that those covertly trying to paint Corbyn as a “Kremlin stooge” are not also seeking to exploit Israeli covert efforts to vilify the Labour leader as someone who encourages anti-semitism in his own party?

The real remedy


There is a serious, if rarely explored ideological tension between Israeli-style Zionism and a progressive or liberal outlook, just as there is between Orbanism and liberalism.

In a political climate where European nativists are on the rise, the stark choice facing Europe’s Jews is to double-down on their traditional left-liberal worldview or abandon it entirely and throw their hat in with Israel’s own nativists. Corbyn represents the first choice, Netanyahu’s hardline Zionism the second.

Bombarded by disinformation campaigns, it looks like many British Jews are being misled into seeing Corbyn as a threat – of a confected “leftwing anti-semitism” – rather than as the best hope of inoculating Britain against the resurgence of a very real menace of rightwing anti-semitism.

Jewish emigration to Israel will make matters far worse. It will pander to the prejudices of Europe’s white nationalists, weaken the European left, and bolster an equally ugly Jewish nationalism that requires the oppression of Palestinians.

You can also read Jonathan Cook's blog HERE. To join discussions about my work, please visit my Facebook or Twitter page.