Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, violating multiple verbal promises given to Soviet leaders. The CIA and its sister organization, the NED, sponsored color revolutions in multiple former Soviet bloc countries. The CIA “engineered” the 2014 coup in Ukraine, according to former US Ambassador Chas W. Freeman. The US armed the Azov battalion that was killing Russian speakers in the east of Ukraine. (See also this and this.) In 2019, the RAND Corporation recommended arming Ukraine as the best way to weaken Russia; RAND predicted the actions would result in a war in which Russia would have the advantage. The New York Times andWashington Post reported on extensive CIA meddling in Ukraine since at least 2014. The New Yorkerreported on CIA and National Security Agency efforts to hide what they had done in Ukraine.
Jack Matlock, former US ambassador the the USSR, said in a 2024 interview: “Why don’t we understand that trying to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and put military bases there would be, in their case, absolutely unacceptable and worthy of defense?” Matlock said the US backed the 2014 coup, and, “Obviously, to any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin, that would have been an absolutely impossible, hostile act, which they had to react to. And in particular, they were not going to lose their naval base in Crimea.” Finally, Matlock said the Ukrainians are “dominated in their thinking by neo-Nazis—we tend to ignore that, or when Putin points it out, we say he’s lying. He’s not lying.” And Matlock wrote: “I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.”
See this for dozens of mainstream news articles about the presence of Nazis in Ukraine and US support for them.
With the support of the CDPQ—known for its disregard for workers—Joly began a major expansion of the company’s operations. Since his purchase of Intelcom, the company has built sorting centres in Montréal and Toronto, representing investments of $31 million. During this period, the number of employees grew from 300 to 2,500, plus another 3,000 “independent” contractors—a euphemism for precarious gig workers.
My last post was a response to an essay by one Hamza Shehryar. Someone who writes about "film, culture, and global politics." In the essay Shehryar insists that Israel didn't kill Charlie Kirk. In fact, the "conspiracy theory" that Israel killed Kirk is harmful to the Left and to the anti-genocide movement in general, because it is not true, it is "antisemitic" and it helps to divide the anti-genocide movement.
Shehryar never explains how it's antisemitic. Throughout the piece he admits that Israel assassinates lots of people. He condemns Israel for all sorts of cruelties and barbarisms. So, why the specific accusation that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk is antisemitic is entirely unclear.
He spends a bit of time explaining that Pestilence Naziyahoo repeatedly going on social media to deny any part of Charlie Kirk's assassination is proof that Naziyahoo/Israel didn't do it. According to Shehryar, Naziyahoo is playing 5th-dimensional chess with the anti-genocide movement. Naziyahoo is deliberately trolling when he gives oxygen to this false and antisemitic conspiracy theory with his constant professions of innocence.
Of course, if the theory ISN'T false, then it couldn't be antisemitic. (How it's antisemitic in any case remains a mystery. Again, Shehryar admits that Israel kills lots of people all the time.)
But Naziyahoo's 5th-dimensional chess playing is still brilliant because, according to Shehryar, Naziyahoo isn't stupid. As I said in my own post, Naziyahoo might very well be stupid. He might just be a corrupt, insane, stupid asshole possessed of ruthlessness and cunning. Donald Trump, Stephen Harper, Doug Ford, ... hell, we all know of all sorts of people who are imbeciles who have clawed their way to the top of an insane system.
Here's Caitlin Johnstone on Naziyahoo's repeated claims of non-involvement:
One of the weirdest things happening right now is how Israel’s prime minister keeps going out of his way to make public statements saying that Israel was definitely not behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
In a two-minute video uploaded onto his Twitter account on Wednesday, Netanyahu complained that “Somebody has fabricated a monstrous big lie that Israel had something to do with Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder,” saying the allegation “is insane, it is false, it is outrageous,” and that “Charlie loved Israel.”
A few days earlier, Netanyahu appeared on the highly sympathetic Newsmax to spend another couple of minutes ranting about how “insane”, “stupid” and “ridiculous” it is to claim that Israel was behind Kirk’s death, saying he “can’t believe that people are saying that.”
This is like repeatedly going out in public to yell “I did not have a sex dream about my cousin!” so that nobody thinks you had a sex dream about your cousin. People are going to walk away with the strong impression that you probably had a sex dream about your cousin.
But the main prop to Shehryar's stupid essay is the fact that Charlie Kirk was a committed pro-Israel Christian zionist to the end of his life.
Some point towards a seemingly mysterious change in Kirk’s attitudes regarding Israel, even though, until the moment he was killed, he spoke candidly, often with joy, about his contentment at the destruction of Gaza and the killing of Palestinian civilians.
“I used to say: ‘If you, as a gay person, would go to Gaza, they would throw you off of tall buildings.’ Now they don’t have any tall buildings left,” he gleefully exclaimed at an event, not long before he was killed. He quickly followed that comment up with: “Maybe you shouldn’t kill Jews, stupid Muslims.” Is this the behaviour of someone so “anti-Israel” that they must be taken out?
The picture at the top of this post is the comedienne Gilda Radner, playing her character "Emily Litella." I was just a wee lad when the first line-up of Saturday Night Live was on. But I did recall Radner/Litella would speak at length about a subject that she'd misunderstood and when her mistake was pointed out to her, she'd stop cold, process it and smilingly tell the audience "Nevermind."
Shehryar and St Clair have made as big a mistake as anything the fictional Emily Litella made but they don't have the sense of shame to simply stop.
Because the fact of the matter is that Kirk was planning on breaking with Israel. Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone has a detailed summary of the subject covering three whole articles.
Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization, America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator speaking on the condition of anonymity. The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it.
The Grayzone has spoken to five people with intimate knowledge of Kirk’s meeting with Ackman, which was held in early August. According to one source, Kirk was left upset after the gathering turned into an “intervention” where he was “hammered” for his increasingly skeptical views on the US special relationship with Israel, and for platforming prominent conservative critics of Israel at his TPUSA events.
A pre-eminent funder of right-wing Zionist and anti-Muslim causes across the Atlantic, Shillman’s millions helped transform Kirk from a young age into one of Israel’s most effective gentile assets.
However, as Kirk drifted from the official, Netanyahu-enforced line on Israel in the past year, expressing frustration with onerous demands from Zionist donors and hosting the leading conservative critics of Israel at his TPUSA events, Shillman apparently grew resentful.
Do you see what happened there? Shehryar wrote an entire essay condemning as an antisemitic conspiracy theory the idea Israel would have any reason to kill Charlie Kirk. But he exposes himself as COMPLETELY IGNORANT of the FACT that Kirk was angrily breaking with Israel-firsters. Whereas Emily Litella would humbly acknowledge her error and say "Nevermind" Shehryar's falsehoods remain on the site without any corrections.
I realize that a lot of this post is a repeat of the previous one. But I was moved to write it because CounterPunch is supposed to be an analysis AND a NEWS site. And Jeffrey St Clair, on October 1st (when Shehryar's shitty article was published) posted a story that COMPLETELY IGNORED the Grayzone's reporting of Charlie Kirk's break with zionism from MID-SEPTEMBER! Even if Shehryar's mistake is only based on abysmal ignorance as opposed to being zionist propaganda, it is inexcusable. Shehryar was specifically writing about the thesis that the Grayzone was the leading leftist source for and he pretends that he had no idea of what they were actually saying because either he's a lazy idiot or (more likely) he's a paid shill for Naziyahoo's genocidal Israel. Which makes the lazy, stupid, narcissist Jeffrey St Clair a conduit for either journalistic garbage, or zionist hasbara.
It being the case that Shehryar either has shit for brains or he's a pro-genocide scumbag, what is the potential damage from his shitty essay?
Charlie Kirk was a scumbag. A racist, sexist, Christo-fascist, oligarch-serving, right-wing USA-first, nationalist. USA-FIRST. In his deluded worldview, Charlie Kirk (for whatever reasons) thought that Israel enjoyed an oversized influence on the USA's foreign policy, and (when one considers attacks on free speech and other issues) domestic policy as well.
Whatever his motivations were, the fact that Kirk was thinking of breaking with the "no daylight between the USA and Israel" official consensus was a good thing. I find it sickening that Hamza Shehryar is seeking to destroy a left-right consensus on Israel by writing an article based on falsehoods and absolutely baseless arguments about "antisemitism" and "dividing the left."
It's bad enough that liberals and so-called progressives have embraced war and imperialism simply because Democratic politicians are in power when they could be embracing right-wingers who have finally soured on the Forever Wars and who have been distrustful of pro-war propaganda about "defending democracy" and "protecting America" and "global responsibilities." To see a hack like Hamza Shehryar trying to drive a wedge between US-Americans uniting against US-backed, Israeli genocide.
Like it or not, we'll always have conservatives.
I've written a few times about the various studies that show that conservatives have larger amygdala's than non-conservatives. You can look for those posts if you want to. Most people who I've spoken to about this think that I'm insulting conservatives when I say that. Because they're missing the point. Having your antenna more attuned to threats doesn't make you inferior or stupid. Being more quick to anger and acting aggressively can sometimes be a rational survival mechanism. [Democrats believed Trump stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton and they whined online and committed themselves to the shithead Mueller's inquiry and then continued to whine and moan when it inevitably came to nothing. MAGA-heads believed Biden stole the election from Trump and they rioted and invaded the Capital Building. Which side stood up for their beliefs more?]
I say all this because I think that if conservatives have turned against the "Forever Wars" because of the weight of the evidence [whereas worthless liberals and "progressives" have decided that imperialism is okay if a Clinton or an Obama or a Biden is doing it], and if they have turned against their Book of Revelations support for Israel because it just seems that deliberately starving children to death or shooting them in the head when they come to a food distribution to try to avoid starving to death seems wrong. And God Bless Such Conservatives if that is the case.
The Left and the Right could UNITE on opposition to genocide, and so a shameless piece-of-shit, Hamza Shehryar, enabled by another useless-piece-of-shit, Jeffrey St Clair, writes a shitty article on how claiming that Israel killed Charlie Kirk is an anti-Semitic trope that divides the left causes some progressives and leftists to believe that, thereby slowing or stopping the bipartisan consensus that Israel is evil, and, therefore, the loss of any political support for continued USA financing of Israeli debt or currency or weapons.
It was so counter-productive in the extreme to post Shehryar's stupid, ignorant post!
[Candace Owens is a real piece of work. But on Gaza, she's right. And she's been exposing the reality of Kirk's angry separation plan from zionist-firsters and the lies of those who would deny it. The official narrative about the Kirk assassination is ridiculous and to me, it seems that the most likely beneficiary of it is Naziyahoo's Israel.]
Hamza Shehryar is a writer and journalist. He covers film, culture, and global politics.
I honestly don't really know that Israel killed Charlie Kirk. But if you want to insist that Israel didn't do it, you'll have to do much better than this! Let's begin ...
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
