The Post-Partisan Emporium

Twisting the Terrorism Narrative Craig Murray Craig Murray in rubble in Baalbek, Lebanon, Nov. 22, 2024. (Niels Ladefoged via craigmurray.org.uk) There was absolutely nothing stopping them. But not one single member of Western mainstream media ever visited a bomb site in Lebanon to verify whether Israeli claims it was a Hezbollah base or missile site were true because they knew the answer is negative, as I found across dozens of bomb sites, and that is not the narrative they are paid to promote. But when a narrative they are paid to promote came to the fore, they flocked to Damascus – driving right past the bombed civilian homes, ambulance centres and schools of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to get there – to promote Syria’s new Israel-, U.S.A- and Turkey-sponsored “democratic” government of entirely “reformed” HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) Wahhabists. Now in the past I had unfortunate arguments with some who broadly take a similar view of politics to me – Vanessa Beeley comes to mind – because...

  Gymnastics on the Front Bench From one extreme to another Sophia Barnes In his 1957 work  Mythologies , the French philosopher Roland Barthes explored the role of ‘euphoria’ in creating the myths by which we make sense of experience. Questionable links between ideas become, by the magic of ideology, self-evident. We construct narratives that suit us and harmonise contradictions in the process. No one dares to deny these myths. A clear example of such ideological gymnastics can be found in the Labour Party’s proclaimed intentions concerning misogyny. In the wake of the recent unrest across the UK, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced plans to identify, tackle, and reduce online radicalisation. This includes treating  ‘extreme misogyny’  as a form of extremism. It will be interesting to see how the Government copes with the cognitive dissonance of declaring misogyny to be extremism while continuing with plans to protect Islam by law and criminalise ‘Islamophobi...

  Pole Shift by Karl Richter Arktos Journal Karl Richter argues that Iran’s response to Western blasphemy at the Olympics symbolizes the dying West and the rise of new global powers like Russia, China, and parts of the Islamic world. The picture shows the response of Shiite Iran to Western blasphemy at the opening of the Olympic Games: in Tehran, Leonardo’s famous  Last Supper , which was mocked in Paris with LGBT, pedophile, and Satanic symbolism, was adorned with a Quran verse: “The Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, is the Messenger of God.” (Surah 4, 171) It is strangely touching, but it also confirms an experience I had years ago in Lebanon. In the Shiite communities around Tyre and Kana — the biblical Cana — Christians and Shiites live in good harmony. There is no need for the hostility that Israel and most Western lying media invoke. The fronts have shifted. The old enemy images no longer hold true. Not just since yesterday. The great shift in values has been taking place over...

  American Pravda: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in San Bernardino  RON UNZ Being a college town, Palo Alto once offered a multitude of excellent new and used bookstores, perhaps as many as a dozen or so. But the rise of Amazon produced a great extinction in that business sector, and I think only two now survive, probably still more than for most towns of comparable size. Amazon and its rivals have obviously become hugely beneficial book-buying resources that I frequently use, but they fail to offer the benefit of randomly browsing shelves and occasionally stumbling across something serendipitous. So I regularly stop by the monthly used book sale put on by Friends of the Palo Alto Library, whose offerings are also very attractively priced, with good quality paperbacks often going for as little as a quarter. While browsing that sale a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a hardcover copy of  Newsroom Confidential , a short 2022 insider account of mainstream journalism by...