blumenthal, Max

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yt grayzone 9 20 25

kirk horowitz, ackman; trump afraind of bibi canary bds

tampa pro gaza comedian vs bad hombre lost debate

senate of not prez

Billionaire Bill Ackman convened stormy Israel ‘intervention’ with Charlie Kirk, sources say - The Grayzone

billionaire Bill Ackman convened stormy Israel ‘intervention’ with Charlie Kirk, sources say

Max Blumenthal·September 15, 2025

A month before Charlie Kirk’s killing, billionaire pro-Israel moneyman Bill Ackman arranged an intervention in the Hamptons during which sources say he and others “hammered” Kirk for the conservative leader’s growing criticism of Israeli influence in Washington. Kirk came away fretting about Israeli “blackmail,” sources say, as he contemplated a Catholic conversion.

On September 11, one day after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, billionaire pro-Israel moneyman Bill Ackman took to Twitter/X to trumpet his relationship with the late conservative operative. “I feel incredibly privileged to have spent a day and shared a meal with @charliekirk11 this summer. He was a giant of a man.”

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.

Since publishing this report, The Grayzone has learned from one attendee of the Hamptons event that Ackman convened the influencers under the auspices of a discussion about Zohran Mamdani and the supposed threat he posed to the West if elected mayor of New York. But the meeting went off the rails when Ackman personally confronted Kirk about his views on Israel. The public face of UK Lawyers for Israel, Natasha Hausdorff, joined in the argument, and began “screaming” at Kirk, according to the attendee.

When his hosts presented him with a detailed list of every offense he supposedly committed against Israel, Kirk was “horrified,” said one person. Ackman also allegedly demanded Kirk rescind his invitation for Tucker Carlson to speak at his upcoming America Fest 2025 in December.

“The whole thing was a disaster,” said an attendee.

The Grayzone reported on September 12, citing a longtime associate of Kirk, that Netanyahu had offered to organize a massive infusion of pro-Israel money into TPUSA, and that Kirk refused. Another longtime friend of Kirk has told The Grayzone that the conservative activist also rejected an offer Netanyahu delivered two weeks before his death to meet with him in Jerusalem.

Kirk, according to one person with inside knowledge of the meeting with Ackman, said he left feeling as though he’d been subjected to “blackmail.”

In a series of text messages with The Grayzone, Ackman described these account of his meeting with Kirk as “totally false.” He pledged to release a public statement providing his own account of the event, but refused The Grayzone’s request for clarification or further details. He would not accept phone calls from this reporter.

“I think I can easily put this to bed,” Ackman promised, “I have receipts as they say.” He did not abide when asked to provide the so-called “receipts.”

In an apparent bid to reinforce the pro-Israel tone at the Hamptons meeting, Ackman hosted a coterie of pro-Israel operatives and conservative influencers at the off-the-record engagement. One was Instagram influencer Xaviaer DuRousseau of Prager U.

Reached by phone by The Grayzone, DuRousseau sounded flustered when asked about his presence at the meeting. He repeatedly demanded to know how this reporter obtained his number, and eventually hung up, refusing to answer questions about the event.

Several Instagram posts by DuRousseau show him and his friend, conservative influencer Emily Wilson, in the Hamptons on August 8 outside Topping Rose House, a posh hotel and restaurant in Bridgehampton, New York.

Two weeks after the meeting, DeRousseau was reportedly junketed on an all-expenses-paid trip by the Israeli government to visit a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “aid” hub guarded by the IDF on the Gaza frontier. There, he recorded an Instagram video denying that the population of the besieged Gaza Strip was experiencing a famine.

The Grayzone received a similarly agitated response from Wilson, known online as Emily Saves America. Following a phone call and exchange of text messages in which this reporter asked her numerous times about her attendance of the meeting in the Hamptons, Wilson refused to comment. Instagram photos place her in the Hamptons at the same time as DuRousseau.

CJ Pearson, a leading youth coordinator for the Republican National Committee, immediately referred The Grayzone to his communications director when asked if he attended the Hamptons gathering.

The strong-arm tactics of the pro-Israel billionaires who helped fuel the growth of TPUSA were said to have contributed to Kirk’s alienation with evangelical Christianity, which emphasizes uncritical support for Israel as a bedrock principle. Several sources with access to Kirk said he had begun attending Catholic mass with his wife, Erika, and was considering a conversion before his death.

Bree Solsdadt, a Catholic Twitter/X influencer, has publicly corroborated this account of Kirk’s religious realignment. Kirk’s friend, the podcaster and former TPUSA personality Candace Owens, also alluded to the shift when she reflected that he was undergoing a “spiritual transformation” before his death.

Israel-centric influencer summit in the Hamptons

The Grayzone has obtained a partial list of attendees alleged to have been in attendance at the Bridgehampton meeting convened by Ackman this August. They include:

Seth Dillon – Dillion is the CEO of Babylon Bee, the conservative answer to the liberal The Onion satire outlet. Dillon and his crew have derisively mocked famine-stricken Palestinians and their supporters in the West, since Israel’s slash-and-burn campaign began in the besieged Gaza Strip. An evangelical Christian with Jewish heritage, he has claimed, “I did not cease having Ashkenazi blood when I put my faith in Jesus Christ (also a Jew).” Dillon did not answer calls from The Grayzone.

Xaviaer DuRousseau – DuRousseau is employed by Prager U, the premier right-wing “edu-tainment” hub targeting the minds of American youth. His boss, Marissa Streit, is a veteran of the Israeli army’s Unit 8200 cyber-spying division. A Black self-described former progressive, DuRousseau now appears firmly in the pocket of right-wing Zionist forces. During his Israeli government-funded visit to a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “aid” hub inside Gaza, DuRousseau falsely claimed the United Nations and Hamas were to blame for the hunger sweeping the local population. “If I were Israel, I wouldn’t even provide matching socks to Gaza, but here’s all the aid that y’all claim doesn’t exist,” he said in an Instagram video filmed in front of boxes of aid blocked from entering Gaza. “Instead of Hamas distributing the ramen noodles,” DuRousseau continued, “their leaders are eating it all and that’s why they’re on Ozempic.”

A post shared by Xaviaer DuRousseau 𓀀 (@xaviaer)

DuRousseau vigorously defended his close friend, podcaster Emily Wilson, after she stated that “if everyone in the state [of Alabama]” wanted the return of chattel slavery, “go ahead, why do I give a shit?”

Emily Wilson aka Emily Saves America– Wilson is a Los Angeles-based self-described libertarian podcaster and social media influencer with over 500,000 followers on Instagram. On September 9, she recalled on Twitter/X how “a HUGE black guy” robbed her when she was 13. “I hate to say it but things like that just change the way you see certain people. After that I always thought, ‘oh, you guys just hate me,’” she reflected. This month, she and DuRousseau recorded a in which they framed pro-Palestine activist Greta Thunberg’s hairstyle as evidence of her being “slow and short bus.”

“I don’t hang out with anyone really less attractive than me,” Wilson stated in a separate appearance.

Arynne Wexler – A former Goldman Sachs trader seeking cachet in the world of online influencers, Wexler is a vociferously Zionist, self-described “non-lib girl in a crazylib world.” In an interview with pro-Israel podcaster Dave Rubin, Wexler that “we need to bring bullying back” to enforce social norms, crack down on conspiracy theories, and stop the rise of antisemitism. Wexler has praised Ackman’s pro-Israel activism on multiple occasions. She did not answer calls from The Grayzone.

Natasha Hausdorff – The legal director of Zionist advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel, Hausdorff is arguably the best-known figure associated with the organization. She was described in one headline by Israel’s most widely-read newspaper, the Adelson-owned Israel Hayom, as “the British attorney who fights Israel’s wars.”

Nate Friedman – Friedman is a young ultra-Zionist influencer best known for New York City man-on-the-street confrontations with Palestine solidarity activists, whom he’s accused of being paid protesters.

Ory Rinat – Rinat was the former to Jared Kushner, the Trump son-in-law and advisor, before moving on to serve as White House chief digital officer during Trump’s first term. A Jewish pro-Israel operative said to have close ties Netanyahu’s government, Rinat now serves as CEO of Urban Legend, a PR firm which commands “an army of 700 social media influencers who command varying degrees of allegiance from audiences that collectively number in the tens of millions,” according to Wired.

CJ Pearson – The chair of the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council, Pearson appeared in photos in the Hamptons alongside Wilson and DeRousseau. The Grayzone is awaiting further information from Pearson’s communications director.

CJ Pearson (left) with Emily Wilson, Xavaier DeRousseau, and an unknown person in the Hamptons

Bill Ackman’s war

As The Grayzone reported on September 12, Kirk was besieged with angry calls and messages from pro-Israel donors to his organization following TPUSA’s Student Action Summit this July in Tampa, Florida. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also phoned him, according to a longtime friend of Kirk, and offered to orchestrate a massive infusion of pro-Israel money into his organization.

A longtime friend of Kirk told The Grayzone the mounting pressure had left him “angry” and “frightened.”

Kirk vented about the pro-Israel intimidation campaign in an August 6 discussion with Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host who was also growing more critical of Israeli influence in Washington.

“It’s all of the sudden, ‘Oh, Charlie: he’s no longer with us.’ Wait a second—what does ‘with us’ mean, exactly? I’m an American, okay? I represent this country,” Kirk.

“The more that you guys privately and publicly call our character into question—which is not isolated, it would be one thing if it were just one text, or two texts; it is dozens of texts—then we start to say, ‘whoa, hold the boat here,’” Kirk continued. “To be fair, some really good Jewish friends say, ‘that’s not all of us’… But these are leaders here. These are stakeholders.”

He went on: “I have less ability… to criticize the Israeli government than actual Israelis do. And that’s really, really weird.”

Kirk delivered his comments around the same time as the tumultuous meeting in the Hamptons with Ackman and the crew of pro-Israel influencers.

A month earlier, Kirk had opened the stage at his TPUSA Student Action Summit for a cathartic outpouring of frustration and rage about Israel’s political hammerlock on the Trump administration. At the conference, speakers from Carlson and to the anti-Zionist Jewish comedian Dave Smith slammed Israel’s blood-soaked assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, branded Jeffrey Epstein as an Israeli intelligence asset, and openly taunted Zionist billionaires like Ackman for “getting away with scams” despite having “no actual skills.”

The mockery by Carlson was particularly galling for Ackman. One day after TPUSA’s conference, Ackman staged a 4,000 word Twitter/X meltdown defending his financial acumen, while insisting that he earned his vast fortune because, “I inherited good genes.”

In fact, the 59-year-old manager of the Pershing Square Capital hedge fund had presided over a precipitous decline in his own personal fortune through a series of bad bets. Between 2015 and 2018, amid a bull market, Ackman’s fund tallied embarrassingly negative returns that cost him an eye-popping $12 billion in losses. His to short the multi-level marketing company Herbalife backfired, resulting in a devastating squeeze that cost him heavily. Ackman’s financial mishaps forced him to slash one fifth of his staff in 2018.

The billionaire also took issue with Carlson’s contention that he had been part of convicted sex offender and late Zionist financier Jeffrey Epstein’s “constellation of people.” Yet Carlson’s remarks were grounded in fact. Indeed, Ackman’s wife, the celebrity Israeli designer Neri Oxman, had gifted an artistic orb to Epstein after he plowed $125,000 in donations into her Media Lab at MIT. She was invited to lunch with Epstein on several occasions, according to the Boston Globe, and complied with MIT’s requirement to keep her gift to Epstein confidential.

Ackman has significantly elevated his public profile by leading fellow Zionist billionaires in a ruthless crackdown on post-October 7 Palestine solidarity activism in the US. By leveraging his fortune, Ackman helped dislodge the political scientist Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University, his alma mater, accusing her of adopting an insufficiently draconian policy toward students protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza.

After weeks of pummeling from Ackman, GOP members of Congress, and pro-Israel media, Gay finally quit when conservative activists produced evidence that she had plagiarized in her academic writing. While Ackman claimed victory, he howled with indignation when Business Insider returned the favor with a detailed article which documented multiple cases of plagiarism by his own wife, the designer Oxman. According to the outlet, Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing.”

Ackman responded by announcing that he would fund a plagiarism review of every MIT faculty member. He also delivered a 77-page lawsuit threat to Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider, accusing them of publishing claims “designed to cause her harm, principally because the reporters do not like me, my support for Israel, and my advocacy.” He quickly dropped the lawsuit, however, claiming he did so because Springer is “an important advocate against antisemitism.”

In May 2024, the Washington Post revealed Ackman as a leading member of a Whatsapp group of 50 ultra-wealthy Zionists coordinating counterinsurgency-style actions against student anti-genocide protesters at Columbia University.

According to the report, the millionaire cabal sought to buy off Black celebrities as propaganda puppets and dangled bribes before New York City Mayor Eric Adams to deploy the NYPD against student protesters. “Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted,” the Post reported.

This June 14, as Israel reeled at the Iranian response to its unprovoked assault days earlier, Ackman launched his next campaign: “@Israel needs our help to destroy Iran’s nuclear threat to the world…” the hedge funder declared on Twitter. “Israel does not have the equipment and armaments to complete the job. We do, and it does not require boots on the ground.”

Multiple sources, including a Trump administration official, have revealed to The Grayzone that Kirk personally visited Trump inside the White House to lobby him against attacking Iran. Trump “roared” at Kirk, one said, and shut down the conversation.

A month later, Kirk allowed the simmering rage within the conservative grassroots over Israel’s stranglehold on Washington to pour out at his TPUSA summit. Soon after, he was summoned to the Hamptons for a face-to-face with one of Netanyahu’s most influential allies in the US. Before Ackman and a cast of avaricious young influencers under Israel’s sway, he defied the billionaire power broker, then returned home to prepare for what would be his final speaking tour.

Following Kirk’s killing, Ackman ponied up a $1 million payout for anyone who provided information leading the capture of the shooter. That money may wind up with the father of the suspect, Tyler Robinson, who reportedly turned him in.

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https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/

https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuela-coup-leader/254387/

Project — Before the fateful day of January 22, fewer than one in five Venezuelans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the 35-year-old was an obscure character in a politically marginal far-right group closely associated with gruesome acts of street violence. Even in his own party, Guaidó had been a mid-level figure in the opposition-dominated National Assembly, which is now held under contempt according to Venezuela’s constitution.

But after a single phone call from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself as president of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom dweller was vaulted onto the international stage as the US-selected leader of the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.

Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times editorial board hailedGuaidó as a “credible rival” to Maduro with a “refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward.” The Bloomberg News editorial board applauded him for seeking “restoration of democracy” and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a new democratic leader.” Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the US government’s elite regime change factories.Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly demonstrated his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power.

“Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance,”Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian sociologist and leading chronicler of Venezuelan politics, told the Grayzone. “It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between laughable and worrying.”

Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the investigative outlet, Mision Verdad, agreed: “Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,” Sequera remarked to the Grayzone, “He’s a known character there, is predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.”

While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.

“‘These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,” wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster. According to Leon, Guaidó’s party remains isolated because the majority of the population “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solution.’”

But this is precisely why he Guaidó was selected by Washington: he is not expected to lead Venezuela towards to democracy, but to collapse a country that for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US hegemony. His unlikely rise signals the culmination of a two-decades-long project to destroy a robust socialist experiment.

Targeting the “troika of tyranny”

Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, the United States has fought to restore control over Venezuela and is vast oil reserves. Chavez’s socialist programs may have redistributed the country’s wealth and helped lift millions out of poverty, but they also earned him a target on his back. In 2002, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition briefly ousted him with US support and recognition before the military restored his presidency following a mass popular mobilization. Throughout the administrations of US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Chavez survived numerous assassination plots before succumbing to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, has survived three attempts on his life.

The Trump administration immediately elevated Venezuela to the top of Washington’s regime change target list, branding it the leader of a “troika of tyranny.”Last year, Trump’s national security team attempted to recruit members of the military brass to mount a military junta, but that effort failed. According to the Venezuelan government, the US was also involved in a plot codenamed Operation Constitution to capture Maduro at the Miraflores presidential palace, and another called Operation Armageddon:{ to assassinate him at a military parade in July 2017. Just over a year later, exiled opposition leaders }:{ with drone bombs during a military parade in Caracas.}:

More than a decade before these intrigues, a group of right-wing opposition students were hand selected and groomed by an elite, US-funded regime change training academy to topple Venezuela’s government and restore the neoliberal order.

Training from the “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions”

On October 5, 2005, with Chavez’s popularity at its peak and his government planning sweeping socialist programs, five Venezuelan “student leaders” arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to begin training for an insurrection.

The students had arrived from Venezuela courtesy of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. This group is funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change; and offshoots like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. According to leaked internal emails fromStratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,”“[CANVAS] may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that gained international fame – and Hollywood-level promotion – by mobilizing the protests that eventually toppled Slobodan Milosevic. This small cell of regime change specialists was operating according to the theories of the late Gene Sharp, the so-called “Clausewitz of non-violent struggle.” Sharp had worked with a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Col. Robert Helvey, to conceive a strategic blueprint that weaponized protest as a form of hybrid warfare, aiming it at states that resisted Washington’s unipolar domination.

A fence covered with posters of Slobodan Milosevic behind bars, titled “When?” and “People’s Movement Otpor” in Belgrade, Serbia, March 30, 2001. Darko Vojinovic | AP]

Otpor was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID and Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute. Sinisa Sikman, one of Otpor’s main trainers, once said the group even received direct CIA funding. According to a leaked email from aStratfor staffer, after running Milosevic out of power, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ;export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Stratfor revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005 after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.

While monitoring the CANVAS training program, Stratfor outlined its insurrectionist agenda in strikingly blunt language: “Success is by no means guaranteed, and student movements are only at the beginning of what could be a years-long effort to trigger a revolution in Venezuela, but the trainers themselves are the people who cut their teeth on the ‘Butcher of the Balkans.’ They’ve got mad skills. When you see students at five Venezuelan universities hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the training is over and the real work has begun.”

Birthing the “Generation 2007” regime change cadre

The “real work” began two years later, in 2007, when Guaidó graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to Washington DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George Washington University under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund who spent more than a decade working in Venezuelan energy sector under the oligarchic old regime that was ousted by Chavez.

That year, Guaidó helped lead anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). This privately-owned station played a leading role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez. RCTV helped mobilize anti-government demonstrators, falsified information blaming government supporters for acts of violence carried out by opposition members, and banned pro-government reporting amid the coup. The role of RCTV and other oligarch-owned stations in driving the failed coup attempt was chronicled in the acclaimed documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

That same year, the students claimed credit for stymying Chavez’s constitutional referendum for a “21st century socialism” that promised “to set the legal framework for the political and social reorganization of the country, giving direct power to organized communities as a prerequisite for the development of a new economic system.”

From the protests around RCTV and the referendum, a specialized cadre of US-backed class of regime change activists was born. They called themselves “Generation 2007.”

The Stratfor and CANVAS trainers of this cell identified Guaidó’s ally – a street organizer named Yon Goicoechea – as a “key factor” in defeating the constitutional referendum.The following year, Goicochea was rewarded for his efforts with the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, along with a $500,000 prize, which he promptly invested into building his own Liberty First (Primero Justicia) political network.

[milton prize px]

no lnx pix

Goicoechea receives the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, May 15, 2008. Seth Wenig | AP

Friedman, of course, was the godfather of the notorious neoliberal Chicago Boys who were imported into Chile by dictatorial junta leader Augusto Pinochet to implement policies of radical “shock doctrine”-style fiscal austerity. And theCato Institute is the libertarian Washington DC-based think tank founded by the Koch Brothers, two top Republican Party donors who have become aggressive supporters of the right-wing across Latin America.

Wikileaks published a 2007 email fromAmerican ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield sent to the State Department, National Security Council and Department of Defense Southern Command praising “Generation of ’07” for having “forced the Venezuelan president, accustomed to setting the political agenda, to (over)react.” Among the “emerging leaders” Brownfield identified were Freddy Guevara and Yon Goicoechea. He applauded the latter figure as “one of the students’ most articulate defenders of civil liberties.”

Flush with cash from libertarian oligarchs and US government soft power outfits, the radical Venezuelan cadre took their Otpor tactics to the streets, along with a version of the group’s logo, as seen below:

Otpor | Venezuela px]

“Galvanizing public unrest…to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez”

In 2009, the Generation 2007 youth activists staged their most provocative demonstration yet, dropping their pants on public roads and aping the outrageous guerrilla theater tactics outlined by Gene Sharp in his regime change manuals. The protesters had mobilized against the arrest of an ally from another newfangled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group “gathered funds from a variety of US government sources, which allowed it to gain notoriety quickly as the hardline wing of opposition street movements,” according to academic George Ciccariello-Maher’s book, “Building the Commune.”

While video of the protest is not available, many Venezuelans have identified Guaidó as one of its key participants. While the allegation is unconfirmed, it is certainly plausible; the bare-buttocks protesters were members of the Generation 2007 inner core that Guaidó belonged to, and were clad in their trademark Resistencia! Venezuela t-shirts, as seen below:

Juan Guaido | Protest

Is this the ass that Trump wants to install in Venezuela’s seat of power?

That year, Guaidó exposed himself to the public in another way, founding a political party to capture the anti-Chavez energy his Generation 2007 had cultivated. Called Popular Will, it was led byLeopoldo López, a Princeton-educated right-wing firebrand heavily involved in National Endowment for Democracyprograms and elected as the mayor of a district in Caracas that was one of the wealthiest in the country. Lopez was a portrait of Venezuelan aristocracy, directly descended from his country’s first president. He was also thefirst cousin of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the US-based Human Rights Foundation that functions as a de facto publicity shop for US-backed anti-government activists in countries targeted by Washington for regime change.

Though Lopez’s interests aligned neatly with Washington’s, US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks highlighted the fanatical tendencies that would ultimately lead to Popular Will’s marginalization. One cable identified Lopez as “a divisive figure within the opposition… often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry.” Others highlighted his obsession with street confrontations and his “uncompromising approach” as a source of tension with other opposition leaders who prioritized unity and participation in the country’s democratic institutions.

Leopoldo Lopez | Wealth

Popular Will founder Leopoldo Lopez cruising with his wife, Lilian Tintori.]

By 2010, Popular Will and its foreign backers moved to exploit the worst drought to hit Venezuela in decades. Massive electricity shortages had struck the country due the dearth of water, which was needed to power hydroelectric plants. A global economic recession and declining oil prices compounded the crisis, driving public discontentment.

Stratfor and CANVAS – key advisors of Guaidó and his anti-government cadre – devised a shockingly cynical plan to drive a dagger through the heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country’s electrical system by as early as April 2010.

“This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system,” the Stratfor internal memo declared. “This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate. At that point in time, an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

By this point, the Venezuelan opposition was receiving a staggering $40-50 million a year from US government organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, according to a report by the Spanish think tank, the FRIDE Institute. It also had massive wealth to draw on from its own accounts, which were mostly outside the country.

While the scenario envisioned by Statfor did not come to fruition, the Popular Will party activists and their allies cast aside any pretense of non-violence and joined a radical plan to destabilize the country.

Towards violent destabilization

In November, 2010, according to emails obtained by Venezuelan security services and presented by former Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and several other student activists attended a secret five-day training at the Fiesta Mexicana hotel in Mexico City. The sessions were run by Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the US government. The meeting had reportedly received the blessing ofOtto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bush’s Department of State, and theright-wing former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

At the Fiesta Mexicana hotel, the emails stated, Guaidó and his fellow activists hatched a plan to overthrow President Hugo Chavez by generating chaos through protracted spasms of street violence.

Three petroleum industry figureheads – Gustavo Torrar, Eligio Cedeño and Pedro Burelli – allegedly covered the $52,000 tab to hold the meeting.Torrar is a self-described “human rights activist” and “intellectual” whose younger brother Reynaldo Tovar Arroyo is the representative in Venezuela of the private Mexican oil and gas company Petroquimica del Golfo, which holds a contract with the Venezuelan state.

Cedeño, for his part, is a fugitive Venezuelan businessman who claimed asylum in the United States, and Pedro Burelli a former JP Morgan executive and the former director of Venezuela’s national oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA). He left PDVSA in 1998 as Hugo Chavez took power and is on the advisory committee of Georgetown University’s Latin America Leadership Program.

Burelli insisted that the emails detailing his participation had been fabricated and even hired a private investigator to prove it. The investigator declared that Google’s records showed the emails alleged to be his were never transmitted.

Yet today Burelli makes no secret of his desire to see Venezuela’s current president, Nicolás Maduro, deposed – and even dragged through the streets and sodomized with a bayonet, as Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi was by NATO-backed militiamen.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Pedro Mario Burelli

@pburelli

.@NicolasMaduro, jamas me has hecho caso. Me has fustigado/perseguido como @chavezcandanga jamás osó. Óyeme, tienes sólo dos opciones en las próximas 24 horas:

Como Noriega:pagar pena por narcotráfico y luego a @IntlCrimCourt La Haya por DDHH.

O a la Gaddafi.

Escoge ya!

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The alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another destabilization plan revealed in a series of documents produced by the Venezuelan government. In May 2014, Caracas released documents detailing an assassination plot against President Nicolás Maduro. The leaks identified the Miami-based Maria Corina Machado as a leader of the scheme. A hardliner with a penchant for extreme rhetoric, Machado has functioned as an international liaison for the opposition, visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.

maria corina machado | george bush

Machado and George W. Bush, 2005.]

“I think it is time to gather efforts; make the necessary calls, and obtain financing to annihilate Maduro and the rest will fall apart,” Machado wrote in an email to former Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria in 2014.

In another email, Machado claimed that the violent plot had the blessing of US Ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. “I have already made up my mind and this fight will continue until this regime is overthrown and we deliver to our friends in the world. If I went to San Cristobal and exposed myself before the OAS, I fear nothing. Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed his support and he pointed out the new steps. We have a checkbook stronger than the regime’s to break the international security ring.”

Guaidó heads to the barricades

That February, student demonstrators acting as shock troops for the exiled oligarchy erected violent barricades across the country, turning opposition-controlled quarters into violent fortresses known as guarimbas. While international media portrayed the upheaval as a spontaneous protest against Maduro’s iron-fisted rule, there was ample evidence that Popular Will was orchestrating the show.

“None of the protesters at the universities wore their university t-shirts, they all wore Popular Will or Justice First t-shirts,” a guarimba participant said at the time. “They might have been student groups, but the student councils are affiliated to the political opposition parties and they are accountable to them.”

Asked who the ringleaders were, the guarimba participant said, “Well if I am totally honest, those guys are legislators now.”

Around 43 were killed during the 2014 guarimbas. Three years later, they erupted again, causing mass destruction of public infrastructure, the murder of government supporters, and the deaths of 126 people, many of whom were Chavistas. In several cases, supporters of the government were burned alive by armed gangs.

Guaidó was directly involved in the 2014 guarimbas. In fact, he tweeted video showing himself clad in a helmet and gas mask, surrounded by masked and armed elements that had shut down a highway that were engaging in a violent clash with the police. Alluding to his participation in Generation 2007, he proclaimed, “I remember in 2007, we proclaimed, ‘Students!’ Now, we shout, ‘Resistance! Resistance!’”

Guaidó has deleted the tweet, demonstrating apparent concern for his image as a champion of democracy.

On February 12, 2014, during the height of that year’s guarimbas, Guaidó joined Lopez on stage at a rally of Popular Will and Justice First. During a lengthy diatribe against the government, Lopez urged the crowd to march to the office of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz. Soon after, Diaz’s office came under attack by armed gangs who attempted to burn it to the ground. She denounced what she called “planned and premeditated violence.”

Leopoldo Lopez | Juan Guaido

Guaido alongside Lopez at the fateful February 12, 2014 rally. Photo | PanAm Post]

In a televised appearance in 2016, Guaidó dismissed deaths resulting from guayas – a guarimba tactic involving stretching steel wire across a roadway in order to injure or kill motorcyclists – as a “myth.” His comments whitewashed a deadly tactic that had killed unarmed civilians like Santiago Pedroza and decapitated a man named Elvis Durán, among many others.

This callous disregard for human life would define his Popular Will party in the eyes of much of the public, including many opponents of Maduro.

Cracking down on Popular Will

As violence and political polarization escalated across the country, the government began to act against the Popular Will leaders who helped stoke it.

Freddy Guevara, the National Assembly Vice-President and second in command of Popular Will, was a principal leader in the 2017 street riots. Facing a trial for his role in the violence, Guevara took shelter in the Chilean embassy, where he remains.

Lester Toledo, a Popular Will legislator from the state of Zulia, was wanted by Venezuelan government in September 2016 on charges of financing terrorism and plotting assassinations. The plans were said to be made with former Colombian President Álavaro Uribe. Toledo escaped Venezuela and went on several speaking tours with Human Rights Watch, the US government-backed Freedom House,the Spanish Congress and European Parliament.

Carlos Graffe, another Otpor-trained Generation 2007 member who led Popular Will, was arrested in July 2017. According to police, he was in possession of a bag filled with nails, C4 explosives and a detonator. He was released on December 27, 2017.

Leopoldo Lopez, the longtime Popular Will leader, is today under house arrest, accused of a key role in deaths of 13 people during the guarimbas in 2014. Amnesty International lauded Lopez as a “prisoner of conscience” and slammed his transfer from prison to house as “not good enough.” Meanwhile, family members of guarimba victims introduced a petition for more charges against Lopez.

Yon Goicoechea, the Koch Brothers posterboy and US-backed founder of Justice First, was arrested in 2016 by security forces who claimed they found a kilo of explosives in his vehicle. In a New York Times op-ed, Goicoechea protested the charges as “trumped-up” and claimed he had been imprisoned simply for his “dream of a democratic society, free of Communism.” He was freed in November 2017.

View image on Twitter

@YonGoicoechea

Hoy, en Caricuao. Llevo 15 años trabajando con @jguaido. Confío en él. Conozco la constancia y la inteligencia con la que se ha construido a sí mismo. Está haciendo las cosas con bondad, pero sin ingenuidad. Hay una posibilidad abierta hacia la libertad

5:10 PM - Jan 19, 2019

136 people are talking about this

David Smolansky, also a member of the original Otpor-trained Generation 2007, became Venezuela’s youngest-ever mayor when he was elected in 2013 in the affluent suburb of El Hatillo. But he was stripped of his position and sentenced to 15 months in prison by the Supreme Court after it found him culpable of stirring the violent guarimbas.

Facing arrest, Smolansky shaved his beard, donned sunglasses and slipped into Brazil disguised as a priest with a bible in hand and rosary around his neck. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he was handpicked bySecretary of the Organization of American States Luis Almagro to lead the working group on the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis.

This July 26, Smolansky held what he called a “cordial reunion” with Elliot Abrams,the convicted Iran-Contra felon installed by Trump as special US envoy to Venezuela. Abrams is notorious for overseeing the US covert policy of arming right-wing death squads during the 1980’s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. His lead role in the Venezuelan coup has stoked fears that another blood-drenched proxy war might be on the way.

David Smolansky

@dsmolansky

Cordial reunión en la ONU con Elliott Abrams, enviado especial del gobierno de EEUU para Venezuela. Reiteramos que la prioridad para el gobierno interino que preside @jguaido es la asistencia humanitaria para millones de venezolanos que sufren de la falta de comida y medicinas.

10:46 AM - Jan 26, 2019

2,619 people are talking about this

Four days earlier, Machado rumbled another violent threat against Maduro, declaring that if he “wants to save his life, he should understand that his time is up.”

A pawn in their game

The collapse of Popular Will under the weight of the violent campaign of destabilization it ran alienated large sectors of the public and wound much of its leadership up in exile or in custody. Guaidó had remained a relatively minor figure, having spent most of his nine-year career in the National Assembly as an alternate deputy. Hailing from one of Venezuela’s least populous states, Guaidó came in second place during the 2015 parliamentary elections,winning just 26% of votes cast in order to secure his place in the National Assembly. Indeed, his bottom may have been better known than his face.

Guaidó is known as the president of the opposition-dominated National Assembly, but he was never elected to the position. The four opposition parties that comprised the Assembly’s Democratic Unity Table had decided to establish a rotating presidency. Popular Will’s turn was on the way, but its founder, Lopez, was under house arrest. Meanwhile, his second-in-charge, Guevara, had taken refuge in the Chilean embassy. A figure named Juan Andrés Mejía would have been next in line but reasons that are only now clear, Juan Guaido was selected.

“There is a class reasoning that explains Guaidó’s rise,” Sequera, the Venezuelan analyst, observed. “Mejía is high class, studied at one of the most expensive private universities in Venezuela, and could not be easily marketed to the public the way Guaidó could. For one, Guaidó has common mestizo features like most Venezuelans do, and seems like more like a man of the people. Also, he had not been overexposed in the media, so he could be built up into pretty much anything.”

In December 2018, Guaidó sneaked across the border and junketed to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to coordinate the plan to hold mass demonstrations during the inauguration of President Maduro. The night before Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony, both Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called Guaidó to affirm their support.

A week later, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart – all lawmakers from the Florida base of the right-wing Cuban exile lobby – joined President Trump and Vice President Pence at the White House. At their request, Trump agreed that if Guaidó declared himself president, he would back him.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met personally with Guaidó on January 10, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Pompeo could not pronounce Guaidó’s name when he mentioned him in a press briefing on January 25, referring to him as “Juan Guido.”

Embedded video

Dan Cohen

@dancohen3000

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just called the figure Washington is attempting to install as Venezuelan President "Juan *Guido*" - as in the racist term for Italians. America's top diplomat didn't even bother to learn how to pronounce his puppet's name.

1:58 PM - Jan 25, 2019

By January 11, Guaidó’s Wikipedia page had been edited 37 times, highlighting the struggle to shape the image of a previously anonymous figurewho was now a tableau for Washington’s regime change ambitions. In the end, editorial oversight of his page was handed over to Wikipedia’s elite council of “librarians,” who pronounced him the “contested” president of Venezuela.

Guaidó might have been an obscure figure, but his combination of radicalism and opportunism satisfied Washington’s needs. “That internal piece was missing,” a Trump administration said of Guaidó. “He was the piece we needed for our strategy to be coherent and complete.”

“For the first time,” Brownfield, the former American ambassador to Venezuela, gushed to the New York Times, “you have an opposition leader who is clearly signaling to the armed forces and to law enforcement that he wants to keep them on the side of the angels and with the good guys.”

But Guaidó’s Popular Will party formed the shock troops of the guarimbas that caused the deaths of police officers and common citizens alike. He had even boasted of his own participation in street riots. And now, to win the hearts and minds of the military and police, Guaido had to erase this blood-soaked history.

On January 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidó’s wife delivered a video address calling on the military to rise up against Maduro. Her performance was wooden and uninspiring, underscoring the her husband’s limited political prospects.

At a press conference before supporters four days later, Guaidó announced his solution to the crisis: “Authorize a humanitarian intervention!”

While he waits on direct assistance, Guaidó remains what he has always been – a pet project of cynical outside forces. “It doesn’t matter if he crashes and burns after all these misadventures,” Sequera said of the coup figurehead. “To the Americans, he is expendable.”

Top Photo | Venezuela’s self-declared interim leader Juan Guaido, center, greets supporters after a rally at a public plaza in Las Mercedes neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela, Jan. 26, 2019. Fernando Llano | AP]

Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000.

Max Blumenthal is the founder and editor of GrayzoneProject.com, the co-host of the podcast Moderate Rebels, the author of several books and producer of full-length documentaries including the recently released Killing Gaza. Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal.

Source | GrayZone Project

https://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451

theil, hu rights fdn crytpo

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/TeleSUR-English-Removed-From-Facebook-for-the-Second-Time-20180813-0009.html

no lnx img]

TeleSUR English Removed From Facebook for Second Time

Published 14 August 2018

Comments

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This is the second time the teleSUR English page has been taken down by Facebook moderators.

teleSUR English's page has been removed from Facebook for the second time this year without any specific reason being provided. It should be noted that the first time this occurred back in January 2018, Facebook did NOT provide any explanation in spite of our best efforts to understand their rationale. This is an alarming development in light of the recent shutting down of pages that don't fit a mainstream narrative.

This is currently the only communication we have received from Facebook:

"Hello,

Your Page "teleSUR English" has been removed for violating our Terms of Use. A Facebook Page is a distinct presence used solely for business or promotional purposes. Among other things, Pages that are hateful, threatening or obscene are not allowed. We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group, or that are set up by an unauthorised individual. If your Page was removed for any of the above reasons, it will not be reinstated. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in the permanent loss of your account.

The Facebook Team"

Shortly after the news, the administrator of Revolution News informed from his personal Facebook page that he had received a warning from Facebook seconds after he had scheduled this very article to go on the Facebook page of Revolution News.

Meanwhile, followers and supporters of teleSUR English sent out tweets and posts on Facebook and Twitters and other social media websites denouncing the unexplained action by Facebook and arguing that such move is rooted into Facebook's own bias against outlets and news organizations that do not fit within the mainstream media landscape.

View image on Twitter

Max Blumenthal

@MaxBlumenthal

Facebook has just deleted the page of @telesurenglish. A network source tells me FB justified eliminating the page on the vague basis of "violation of terms." The NATO-backed @DFRLab is currently assisting FB's purge. This is deeply disturbing.

3:35 PM - Aug 13, 2018

1,074

1,239 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Also, several news outlets such as RT and Venezuelanalysis, which its own Facebook page was removed briefly last week, Democracy Now! and others reported on the news and expressed concern over the removal of teleSUR English page.

@RT_com

.@telesurenglish Facebook page gone without explanation https://on.rt.com/9cbs

6:22 PM - Aug 13, 2018

Facebook vanishes Venezuela-based left-leaning news network again — RT World News

Telesur English, a multi-state funded Latin American news network, says that Facebook has removed its page for the second time this year “without any specific reason being provided.”

rt.com

68 people are talking about this

blog ~ attack alek boyd

http://alekboyd.blogspot.com/2013/05/max-blumenthal-electronic-intifada-islamophobia.html

recent 7/15 event uprising

Max Blumenthal (born December 18, 1977) is an American author, journalist, and blogger. Formerly a writer for The Daily Beast and Al Akhbar, he is the author ofRepublican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (2009).^[1][2][3][4] and Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013). He used to work for the progressive^[5] organization Media Matters for America.^[6]

[hide]

Background

Max Blumenthal was born on December 18, 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Jacqueline (Jordan) and Sidney Blumenthal, former administration presidential aide to Bill Clinton.

Blumenthal graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a B.A. degree in history.^[7]

Career

Blumenthal won the Online News Association's Independent Feature Award for his 2002 article on Salon.com, Day of the Dead.^[8][9] The piece stated that the killing of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico was connected to the policies of corporate interests in the border city.^[10] Blumenthal contributed to The Huffington Post from 2009 to 2011.^[11]

In 2011, Blumenthal wrote a story claiming that Israeli forces trained American police departments in anti-protester techniques, including torture, quoting Fordham University Law Professor Karen J. Greenberg.^[12]Contacted by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Adam Serwer of Mother Jones, Greenberg told Goldberg that "I never made such a statement", while she told Serwer "I did not intend to assert these allegations as fact…the entire sense of the quote is inaccurate."^[13][14] Blumenthal responded that he quoted Greenberg accurately and speculated that she had been "intimidated by Goldberg and the pro-Israel forces he represents".^[15][16]

Blumenthal joined Lebanon's Al Akhbar in late 2011 primarily to write about Israel-Palestine issues and foreign-policy debates in Washington, noting on leaving in mid-2012 in protest of its coverage of the Syrian civil war that it "gave me more latitude than any paper in the United States to write about ... Israel and Palestine".^[17] He ended his association with Al Akhbar in June 2012, over what he viewed as the newspaper's pro-Assad editorial line during the Syrian uprising that he said was spearheaded by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb.^[17][18]

In 2013, Blumenthal appeared in ninth place on that year's Simon Wiesenthal Center list of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs, reasons given being that chapter titles in the book Goliath were used to "equate Israel with the Nazi regime" and that Blumenthal had quoted "approvingly characterizations of Israeli soldiers as 'Judeo-Nazis.'"^[19]

During the Russel Tribunal on Palestine, Blumenthal made a comparison between Israel and ISIL. In a follow-up, journalist Rania Khalek created the Twitter hashtag JSIL; "The Jewish State of Israel in the Levant".^{[20][better source needed]} Max also took pride in being awarded ninth place on 'Top Ten 2013 anti-Semitic, anti-Israel slurs' list published by The Simon Wiesenthal Center.^[21][22]

In November 2014, after being invited by Inge Höger and Annette Groth, members of the Parliamentary left to talk with them in the German parliament, the Bundestag, Blumenthal and Canadian-Israeli journalist David Sheen found that senior German left-wing politician Gregor Gysi, himself critical of what he termed Israel's violation of international law, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after 1967, tried to cancel the meetings on the grounds that the two held radical views on Israeli settlements,^[23][24] and he wished to dissociate the Left from anti-Israel campaigning.^[24] There ensued an incident, later dubbed "toiletgate", where Blumenthal and Sheen confronted Gysi, imputing to him the suggestion that he had called one of them an anti-Semite. It was further argued that he had employed methods typical of the Stasi. Gysi fled, chased by the two down a parliament corridor and into a bathroom, where he locked himself in a toilet stall. Experts said the presence of the two might have harmed Germany's image in Israel.^[24] German media denounced Blumenthal and Sheen as "anti-Semites" and the talks they had been scheduled to deliver were cancelled.^[25] They were banned from setting foot in the Bundestag in the future. In an e-mail explaining the ban, Bundestag president, Norbert Lammert stated: "Every attempt to exert pressure on members of parliament, to physically threaten them and thus endanger the parliamentary process is intolerable and must be prevented”.^[25][26][27]

Blumenthal caused controversy in late 2014 and early 2015 when he compared decorated Navy SEAL Chris Kyle to mass murderer Lee Malvo via Twitter, and in an interview on The Real News, criticized the filmAmerican Sniper which depicts Kyle's tours of duty in Iraq. Blumenthal said the movie heavily distorts the historical, political and social truth of the war on Iraq, that the film falsely portrays all Iraqis including even children and women as "endemic terrorists," and that the movie is a "bogus whitewash of the atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Falluja."^[28][29]

Videos

2007-2008

Blumenthal made a short video which he titled Generation Chickenhawk. It featured interviews with convention attendees at the July 2007 College Republican National Convention in Washington, D.C. Blumenthal asked why they, as Iraq War supporters, had not enlisted in the United States Armed Forces.^[30][31][32] In 2007, Blumenthal made a short video called Rapture Ready, about American Christian fundamentalists' support for the State of Israel.^[30] He also attended the June 2007 Take Back America Conference (sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future), where he interviewed Barack Obama supporters and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Blumenthal says that conference organizers were angered by Blumenthal's video, and refused to air it.^[30]

In 2008, he posted video footage of Christian preacher Thomas Muthee praying over Sarah Palin (then a candidate for Governor of Alaska) and asking God to keep her safe from witchcraft.^[33]

"Feeling the Hate" (2009)

In 2009, Max Blumenthal posted a 3-minute video on YouTube titled "Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem on the Eve of Obama's Cairo Address". The video was a montage of footage of drunken Jewish-American youth in Jerusalem in June 2009, shortly before Obama's Cairo address. The youths used expletives and racist rhetoric about Barack Obama and Arabs, which included referring to Obama as a "nigger" and suggesting that he is "like a terrorist".^[34] According to The Jerusalem Post, the video "garnered massive exposure and caused a firestorm in the media and the Jewish world".^[35] A Bradley Burston Op-Ed in Haaretz described the video as "an overnight Internet sensation".^[34]

The Huffington Post publicly stated that after reviewing the video, they found it lacked any newsworthy content and had no merits to be included on the site. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency quoted Blumenthal as stating: "I won’t ascribe motives to Youtube I am unable to confirm, but it is clear there is an active campaign by right-wing Jewish elements to suppress the video by filing a flood of complaints with Youtube".^[36]

Blumenthal stated he received death threats for his publication of the video.^[37] He identifies the radicalism of the interviewees with the "indoctrination" of Birthright Israel tours, a program in which several of the interviewees were participating.^[37]

Publications

Blumenthal says that the 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party is inspired by the work of psychologist Erich Fromm, who asserted that "the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings." Blumenthal says that in his view a "culture of personal crisis" has defined the American "radical right".^[38]

He released the book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel in 2013.^[39] In the preface to the book, Blumenthal wrote that it is "Americans’ tax dollars and political support that are crucial in sustaining the present state of affairs" in Israel and that, in the book, he wanted to show what that money is paying for and to present the facts, using the same journalistic methods used in his previous book, Republican Gomorrah, "as they really are today, in unadorned and unsanitized form, without sentimentality or nostalgia."^[40] Blumenthal sees it as “an unvarnished view of Israel at its most extreme.” It has been slammed as bigotedly anti-Israel to the point of being anti-Semitic, while James Fallows argues that his exposé "is no more “anti-Israel,” let alone anti-Semitic, than The Shame of the Cities and The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath were anti-American for pointing out extremes and abuses in American society."^[41]

Books

Max Blumenthal (2009): Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party New York. Nation Books. ISBN 978-1568583983
Max Blumenthal (2013): Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. New York: Nation Books. ISBN 978-1568586342

anti-muslim

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Neoconservative Honor Brigade

A look at the militant neoconservative network that has mobilized to defend the honor of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the world's leading Islamophobes, against my factual reporting.

byAvatar for Max BlumenthalMax Blumenthal4 days ago1 Like4,588 Views

Embed

My piece for Alternet calling into question Ayaan Hirsi Ali's claim that Muslims are "responsible" for most global conflict deaths and exposing her history of fraud and religious bigotry sent her anti-Muslim supporters into a rage. Leading the charge was her husband, the British right-winger and imperial cheerleader Niall Ferguson:

Ferguson has previously referenced IISS data on global conflict deaths in his own writing for the Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303945704579391492993958448

How did such apparently misappropriated IISS data wind up at the top of an anti-Muslim polemic by Ferguson's wife, Hirsi Ali, also published in the Wall Street Journal? Why was Ferguson so defensive about the dubious statistic?

On March 23, Hirsi Ali went on the Daily Show to claim: “If you look at 70 percent of the violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible.” Below, Ferguson attempted to spin her wild statement.

Acting apparently on Ferguson and Hirsi Ali's behalf, right-wing pro-Israel campus activist Daniel Mael accused me of lying about IISS comments in an article for the National Review.

I produced my original email query to IISS Media Relations and Communications Officer Kat Slowe, which I sent through an official media form. Following standard journalist protocol, I identified myself as a journalist and directly, exactly quoted the comments she supplied to me in writing and on the record.

Ferguson had previously accused me of collaborating with an Islamist-oriented "honor brigade" to shut down honest intellectual debate.

After a salvo of bogus claims, Ferguson promoted an earlier piece by Daniel Mael that painted me as (what else?) an anti-Semite.

Mael is a far-right pro-Israel campus activist who was accused of harassment by Brandeis University. Brandeis backed down only after Mael's friends at the pro-Netanyahu Emergency Committee for Israel hired the corporate law firm Covington & Burling to intimidate Brandeis administrators: http://www.cov.com/media_mentions/

Here is Daniel Mael claiming that Ayaan Hirsi Ali risks her life to keep Hamas from killing innocent civilians:

Delivered to Mael by her handlers, Hirsi Ali claimed to the young anti-Palestinian activist that "nerves and fatigue" caused her to hold Muslims directly responsible for most of the conflict-related deaths in the world:

Mael's attack piece was published in the Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine run by William Kristol, the orchestrator of Sen. Tom Cotton's notorious letter to the leaders of Iran. Kristol promoted Mael's piece here:

Niall Ferguson served as an advisor to John McCain's 2008 campaign for president. McCain was backed heavily by Kristol and his neoconservative political network.

On the McCain campaign, Ferguson worked alongside neoconservative cadre Michael Goldfarb, a close understudy of Kristol: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Goldfarb_Michael Goldfarb also happens to be the founder of the Free Beacon.

Before I published my piece on Hirsi Ali, she or someone close to her (Ferguson?) forwarded a query I had emailed her to the Free Beacon.

On her personal Twitter account, Hirsi Ali promoted the Free Beacon article attacking me for attempting to fact check her.

She did so by retweeting Avi Mayer, a professional social media troll paid by the Israeli government-funded Jewish Agency to propagandize on behalf of Netanyahu and the Israeli army.

In his 1500 page manifesto, Anders Breivik reprinted a far-right article declaring that Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

For her part, Hirsi Ali said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserved a Nobel Prize for overseeing the military assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014 that left over 2200 dead, most of them civilians.

At a recent Israeli government sponsored event, the anti-Islam atheist Hirsi Ali said she considered converting to Judaism.

Among those who mobilized to defend Hirsi Ali from my factual reporting was her close ally, the self-styled "New Atheist" Sam Harris.

Harris has a lengthy record of attacking Muslims, cheering on the self-proclaimed Jewish State and defending the foreign policy of George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian who said his faith influenced his decision to invade Iraq.