In my first column after the events of Jan. 6th, 2021, I criticized those who called the protest a “coup,” pointing out that, “Some of the same politicians and bureaucrats denouncing the ridiculous farce at the Capitol as if it were the equivalent of 9/11 have been involved for decades in planning and executing real coups overseas. In their real coups, many thousands of civilians have died.”
The media at the time played up the violence committed by a relative few at the protest to stoke a national outcry and demands for “justice.” More than 1,500 Americans were charged over the incident and nearly 500 were imprisoned, including outrageous prison sentences for relatively minor crimes like entering the Capitol building through doors opened by the police, and filming the event.
While most Democrats and Republicans in Congress harshly denounced the January 6th “insurrectionists,” a few Members displayed the appropriate skepticism over accepted government narratives. Rep. Thomas Massie, for example, was relentless in his search for answers to a simple but critically important question: How many of the “insurrectionists” were actually undercover FBI agents and other law enforcement officers and what role might they have played in inciting the violence.
Massie grilled then-Attorney General Merrick Garland several times, but Garland would not budge. He refused to say whether there had been any undercover federal agents in the crowd, though of course he must have known.
Last week we learned a little more of the truth. With the release of the FBI’s long lost “after action” report, we now know that more than 250 undercover agents were in the crowd. According to the report, they were given roles including crowd control that they were not suited for. Some agents cited in the report complained of political biases in the Bureau against conservatives. What other tasks might have been given to a “politicized” FBI undercover team?
In addition to the undercover agents, there were more than two dozen paid informants in the Jan. 6th crowd. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who chairs the subcommittee investigating the matter, asks an important question: “With that many paid informants being in the crowd, we want to know how many were in the crowd, how many were in the building, but I also want to know, were they paid to inform or instigate?”
Were they paid to inform, or to instigate? That is a good question. We do know that the event was used by the incoming Biden Administration to demonize and persecute the political opposition. There is no telling how many Americans would have liked to use their First Amendment guarantee of free speech to criticize the Biden Administration but were silenced by fear of persecution, or worse. It’s easy to conclude, seeing so many arrested and handed long sentences for non-violent “crimes,” that it’s better to keep quiet. At the time, the US was still in the grip of Covid tyranny, where speaking out against “the Science” could get you “cancelled” or worse. This was another way to silence people who were not “going along with the program.”
In the end, January 6th, 2021, was a coup of sorts. It was a coup against the First Amendment. The lesson for all of us is that if we do not regularly but peacefully exercise our First Amendment guarantees we will definitely lose them, regardless of who is in power.
Recognition of Palestine is a repeat of the West’s Oslo ‘peace’ fraud
26 September 2025
Britain’s Keir Starmer is already pulling the rug from under his own grudging declaration. The only hope of change is of the unintended consequences variety
Middle East Eye – 26 September 2025
The reluctant recognition of Palestinian statehood by Britain, France, Australia, Canada this week is a con – it is the same switch and bait that has been blocking the creation of a Palestinian state for three decades now.
Imagine that these four leading western countries had recognised Palestine not in late 2025, when Palestine is in the final stages of being eradicated, but in the late 1990s, during a period of supposed Palestinian state-building.
That was when the Oslo accords were signed with western backing. The Palestinian Authority was established under Yasser Arafat with the apparent aim that Israel would gradually withdraw from the territories it still occupies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and begin ruling an emergent Palestinian state.
At Israel’s insistence, let us note, the Oslo accords carefully avoided any mention of the ultimate destination of this process. Nonetheless, the message from western politicians and media was the same: this was heading towards a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.
Looking back, it is evident why that did not happen when it still looked feasible.
The Israeli leader of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, told the Israeli parliament that his vision was not of a state but of “an entity which is less than a state”: a glorified Palestinian local authority utterly dependent on its bigger neighbour, Israel, for its security and economic survival.
After Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli gunman, his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was propelled into power by a majority of the Israeli public on a mandate to stop the Oslo process in its tracks.
He repeatedly reneged on commitments to withdraw Israeli soldiers and Jewish settler-militias from the occupied West Bank. In fact, in this period of supposed “peace-making”, Israel colonised Palestinian land at the fastest rate ever.
In 2001, during his time in opposition, Netanyahu was secretly caught on camera, explaining how he achieved this reversal.
He said he had held on to Palestinian territory, in violation of the Oslo accords, by imposing “my own interpretation to the agreements” so that vast swaths could continue to be defined as “security zones”. He added: “I halted the fulfilment of the Oslo accords.”
Was there not pushback from western powers, he was asked. “America is something that you can easily manoeuvre and move in the right direction,” he replied.
Sabotaging peace
What that meant in practice, since the effective end of the Oslo process a few years later, was a series of US presidential initiatives ever-less favourable to the Palestinians.
In 2000, Bill Clinton’s Camp David summits between Israeli and Palestinian leaders failed to hammer out even a minimalist Palestinian state that Israel was willing to accept.
George W Bush’s Road Map for Peace in 2003 half-heartedly tried to resuscitate Palestinian statehood but was stymied by the US accepting 14 impossible Israeli “preconditions” for negotiations, including continuing settlement expansion.
Barack Obama entered office with a grand vision of peace that was quickly sunk by Israel’s refusal to stop expanding its illegal settlements and stealing more land in the West Bank needed for a Palestinian state.
Donald Trump’s 2020 hyped “deal of the century” plan – conducted over the heads of the Palestinian leadership – dressed up annexation of large parts of the West Bank as Palestinian statehood.
Trump’s team also considered a plan to economically incentivise – on the most charitable interpretation – Gaza’s Palestinians to relocate to Egypt’s Sinai desert.
In reality, these two decades of time-wasting while Israel carried on brutalising the Palestinians and taking their land, incentivised not peace but greater Palestinian resistance, culminating in Hamas’ one-day break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023.
Israel’s response was a genocide in Gaza – one in which Joe Biden became an active partner from the outset, sending bombs to help level the enclave and providing diplomatic cover. Meanwhile, Israel accelerated its de facto annexation of the West Bank undisturbed.
Trump’s latest contribution has been unveiling a “Gaza Riviera Plan“, in which whoever survives of the 2.3 million Palestinians there is “cleaned out” and the enclave rebuilt with Gulf money as a playground for the rich.
Reports this week of a watered-down version of the plan suggest Tony Blair, the war criminal who oversaw the destruction of Iraq two decades ago with George W Bush, may be appointed effective “governor” of a Gaza in ruins.
Hollowed out
So why now, after 30 years of the West conspiring in this slow-motion eradication of Palestine – a state long recognised by the rest of the world – have several western capitals broken ranks with the US and recognised Palestinian statehood?
The short answer is that such recognition is now relatively cost-free.
In typical fashion, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made the announcement as he pulled the rug from under his own act of recognition by dictating what kind of state Palestine would have to be.
Not a sovereign one, in which the Palestinian people made their own decisions, but one that echoed Rabin’s “entity less than a state”.
Starmer insisted Hamas – Gaza’s elected government and one of Palestine’s two main political factions – could play no part in running this state. The Palestinian state would also, of course, have no military to defend itself from the genocidal state next door.
A report this week in the Telegraph indicates that, even after formal recognition, Starmer is still imposing new conditions designed to hollow out his declaration. They include:
demands for new Palestinian elections – elections that can only take place with Israel’s permission, which it will not give;
an overhaul of any latent Palestinian nationalism Israel objects to in the Palestinian education system, even as Israel’s own education system has long been laced with genocidal incitement;
a requirement that the Palestinian Authority not compensate families of anyone Israel declares a “terrorist” – which pretty much covers any Palestinian killed or jailed by Israel.
In other words, the Palestinian state “recognised” by Starmer is envisioned as the same sham, completely dependent “entity” Israel has been abusing for 30 years.
That was always the West’s two-state “vision”.
‘Reward for terror’
But the deeper truth Starmer’s recognition is intended to obscure is that, if there is no Palestinian territory left – Gaza is razed and its population dead or cleansed, and the West Bank annexed – statehood becomes moot.
That is what is meant when the media talk about recognition being chiefly “symbolic”. Starmer and others see it as amounting to little more than a retrospective rap on knuckles for Israel not playing fair.
It is a cost-free exercise because, while Israel feigns indignation about recognition serving as a supposed “reward for terrorism”, it and its patron in Washington know nothing tangible is really at stake.
If the Trump administration were vehemently opposed even to symbolic recognition – as earlier administrations appear to have been, when statehood might have been realisable – who really imagines Starmer or Canada’s Mark Carney would have dared step out of line?
Further, recognition sends an entirely false message to their own publics that these western capitals are “doing something” for the Palestinians. That they are standing up to Israel, and behind it the US.
Starmer is especially keen to send such a message when he is about to face an annual Labour party conference two years into a genocide he has been openly backing.
Recognition is a giant deflection exercise, an image-laundering operation, that ignores the substantive reality: that, aside from this “symbolic” act, these western states continue to arm Israel, train Israeli soldiers, provide Israel with intelligence, trade with it, give it diplomatic support.
Starmer still warmly greets in Downing Street the Israeli president, Yitzhak Herzog, who at the outset of the slaughter in Gaza offered the central rationale for genocide, arguing that no one in Gaza – not even its 1 million children – were innocent.
Not only will recognition of Palestine not improve the situation of Palestinians but it will not demand any change of behaviours from Israel and its western patrons either. It will continue to be business as usual.
Complicity in occupation
But there is a final reason why some western governments are now raising their voices in support of Palestinian statehood. To save their own skins.
Unlike Washington, which treats with open contempt international law and the international courts invested with upholding it, many US allies fear their vulnerability.
Unlike the US, they have ratified the Convention Against Genocide and they are subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which can put their officials on trial for complicity in war crimes.
This month was marked not just by the recognition of Palestine by Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Portugal and a handful of small states.
Far less noticed, 18 September was the deadline set by the United Nations General Assembly for Israel to honour a ruling last year from the International Court of Justice that it withdraw its “unlawful presence” from the occupied territories.
It is not just that Israel is flouting this resolution – the international community’s attempt to implement the World Court’s ruling. Over the past year Israel has headed in exactly the opposite direction: it has intensified its destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and is poised to annex the West Bank.
Entirely separate from the issue of genocide, the UN resolution also requires states to end arms transfers to Israel and enforce sanctions until it ends the occupation.
Britain and the others presumably hope that they can cook the books to argue that they did not understand there was a genocide in Gaza until it was all but over – at the point, a year or two down the road, when the ICJ issues its ruling.
But they cannot make that same argument – “We did not know”– about the World Court ruling on the illegality of the occupation.
It should hardly need pointing out that dismantling the occupation of the Palestinian territories is the flip side of establishing a Palestinian state. They go hand in hand.
Britain and others need an alibi – feeble as it is – to argue that they are respecting the ICJ ruling and not complicit in aiding the occupation, even as their actions prove the precise opposite.
They are not only helping to prop up the genocide in Gaza. Their trade ties, arms sales, intelligence-sharing and diplomatic manoeuvres are also essential to the maintenance of Israel’s illegal occupation.
Pariah status
If there is a small hope to be derived from these western states’ grudging recognition of Palestinian statehood, it is of the unintended consequences variety.
Recognition may yet force on their leaders linguistic and legal gymnastics so extreme that they are further discredited with their publics and pressure grows inexorably for more meaningful change.
But no one should take Starmer, Macron, Carney and the others at their word. If the establishment of a “viable” Palestinian state were really their goal, these leaders would already have imposed on Israel sanctions and diplomatic isolation.
They would be shunning visits from Israeli officials, not welcoming them. They would be vowing to uphold the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu, not allowing him, as France did in July, to use its air space to travel to the US.
They would not be turning a blind eye to Israel’s repeated attacks on aid flotillas to Gaza on the high seas. Rather, like Spain and Italy, they would at the very least be seeking to protect their own citizens. Better still, they would have set up by now their own naval armadas to bring food to a starving population in Gaza.
They would be drawing parallels with Russia – and impose a trade embargo on Israel, ending its economic privileges, to echo the more than a dozen EU rounds of measures against Moscow.
Instead, they are still aiding Israel as it demolishes the last buildings in Gaza, while it starves the population and ethnically cleanses them.
Don’t believe a word Starmer and the rest tell you. There is as much chance of Palestinian recognition tempering their complicity in Israel’s crimes as the Oslo “peace” process – celebrated by their predecessors – did a generation ago.
In fact, the evidence suggests that, as happened with Oslo, Israel will use this latest “concession” from the West to the Palestinians as the pretext for expanding and intensifying its atrocities, with Washington’s blessing. Already, Israel is reported to have shut the main crossing into the West Bank from Jordan, to further strangle what little aid is reaching Gaza and heighten the West Bank’s isolation.
Starmer, Macron and the rest are war criminals who in a rightly ordered world – one where international law had clout – would already be in the dock. Their current manoeuvrings must not be allowed to let them off the hook.
It is interesting how President Donald Trump keeps whining about the 20 alleged Israeli hostages that are reportedly still held by Hamas in Gaza, demanding that they be released immediately, while ignoring the hundreds of unarmed Palestinians that are being murdered daily by Israeli military and armed contractors as well as by deliberate starvation. Also, the thousands of Palestinians who had nothing to do with Hamas or Gaza and are nevertheless being held without charge in Israeli prisons under horrific conditions including torture are of no interest to the US president and his team. Trump is of course profoundly ignorant, demonstrated most recently during his 55 minute rambling speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he attacked both the UN institutionally as well as nearly every delegate and nation represented in the room, minus the Palestinians, of course, for whom he had blocked the issuance of visas guaranteeing that they would have no voice or presence in New York. Trump’s recent performances have also reflected an increase in his demands to harden sanctions and isolate Russia economically, something which is in no one’s interest but the odious President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and the powerful Jewish lobby in the US and Europe.
Never satisfied with anything that he encounters where he is not kowtowed to or flattered, Trump is now having the US Secret Service investigate alleged United Nations sabotage behind three alleged personal insults experienced by him during his UN visit, including a non-functioning escalator stairway, a failure of the auditorium sound system, and a misfunction of the teleprompter (which was apparently being operated by a White House staffer). An always low-class Trump characteristically threatened the teleprompter operator personally by stopping his speech and announcing to the entire assembly “Whoever is operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.”
And Trump also goes well beyond that habitual mouthing off the first thoughts to appear in his large but dysfunctional head in that he lacks any real moral code and/or compassion apart from his cardinal rule, which appears to be “Give Israel whatever it wants!” Indeed, beyond that ongoing foreign policy disaster vis-Ã -vis Gaza, Trump has a viciousness that rises to the surface on a regular basis, including during his speech at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, where he made clear that Kirk’s path of dialogue with critics was not his way, that he “hated” all his “opponents.”
And Trump’s team also makes sure that everyone understands that America is carrying the flag for the Jewish state. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during his recent visit to Israel, said that a diplomatic solution to the Gaza war may not be possible because “Hamas is a terrorist group, a barbaric group, whose stated mission is the destruction of the Jewish State.” He thus confirmed, first of all, that he fails to understand that it is Israel that has been the terrorist state targeting all its neighbors for the past 80 years. He also confirmed the Trump administration’s full political and military support for the genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel is engaged in while also providing money and weapons that enable the actual killing to implement “the final solution” for Palestine. Presumably the removal of Palestinians will permit the construction of the Trump Gaza Resort to begin while Jews from Brooklyn can settle an Arab-free West bank, eliminating the possibility of some kind of Palestinian state forever, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised while listing his accomplishments last week.
And there was more action in compliance with Israeli demands apart from the appalling Trump speech. On Friday September 19th, the United States vetoed a crucial United Nations Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, even as Israel was expanding its final ground offensive on Gaza City. The resolution, had been approved by 14 of the 15 members of the council on the day before, calling for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza respected by all parties”, as well as the release of all captives held by Hamas and the end of restrictions on food, medicine and other humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Drafted by the council’s 10 elected rather than its 5 permanent members, the resolution cited the “catastrophic” humanitarian situation in Gaza after nearly two years of unrelenting war, which has killed at least 65,141 people, according to Palestinian health officials, though the “official” number is disputed and the true total of deaths undoubtedly numbers in the hundreds of thousands, with most of the bodies still buried under the rubble or incinerated or torn about by the heavy US-provided ordnance being employed by Israel.
The United States predictably vetoed the effort, the sixth time it has done so to protect the Jewish state from the war crimes it is carrying out. Morgan Ortagus, US deputy special envoy to the Middle East, who is predictably Jewish, raised her arm to vote in something like a Nazi salute and announced that “US opposition to this resolution will come as no surprise. It fails to condemn Hamas or recognize Israel’s right to defend itself, and it wrongly legitimizes the false narratives benefitting Hamas, which have sadly found currency in this council.”
Ortagus also claimed that the starvation narrative is a fabrication, that the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s official declaration of famine in Gaza last month had employed “flawed methodology.” She instead chose to praise the work of the heavily militarized US and Israel backed GHF hubs, where, it has been demonstrated, hundreds of Palestinians have been deliberately targeted and killed while seeking food for their families.
How do the Jews and more particularly the Israeli Jews get away with it? Well, the Jewish billionaires who have corrupted the US political system and media have been able to control the narrative almost completely, though that advantage is beginning to fade as more ordinary Americans have come realize how completely awful the Gaza genocide is. Opinion polls reveal that disapproval of Israel is running at 60% among the American public. There is also a growing sense among the public that Israel and its Lobby in the United States have been manipulating and using the US ever since the founding of the Jewish state. Under Genocide Joe Biden and the feckless Donald Trump that manipulation has been wide out in the open and Israel is now in a position where it is even able to compel America to go to war on its behalf, admittedly a feat that it accomplished initially by way of a Jewish controlled Pentagon under George W Bush when Iraq was destroyed, killing as least half a million Iraqis based on lies generated to demonstrate how Baghdad was a threat potentially armed with “weapons of mass destruction.” Many observers now believe that Iran will be attacked by Israel before the end of the year and Donald Trump will jump right in under pressure from Netanyahu, another extreme case of the “tail wagging the dog!”
To be sure, the Israel Lobby is aware that public opinion is running heavily against the Jewish state and they have now stepped-up efforts to obtain even greater control over the message that is coming out from the media. Their latest success has related to TikTok which has been under attack by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and its hideous leader Jonathan Greenblatt during the past year for its allowing stories to appear critical of Israeli behavior.
Falling in line with Jewish demands, the White House has announced that the forced sale of TikTok will soon be finalized. To no one’s surprise, the new ownership is led by ultra-Zionist Jewish billionaire Larry Ellison – the largest individual donor to the Israel Defense Force – who will reportedly take full control of the US user data and the site algorithms which the White House says will be “retrained”. That means it will only include material that is positive on Israel.
Ellison, who made his fortune developing Oracle – a database system he originally built for the CIA – already controls CBS, Paramount, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, Nickelodeon (which makes kids shows) as well as Channel 10 in Australia and Channel 5 in the UK. Ellison is also expected to finalize control over Warner Bros. Discovery (including CNN, HBO and the Discovery channel) before the end of 2025.
Even before the forced sale is finalized, censorship of TikTok content critical of Israel has already begun. Fox – a Rupert Murdoch pro-Israel asset – is also seeking to join the Ellison consortium, a move that could further extend and solidify the Israeli-aligned information bubble.
The United States still has over three years of the Trump adventure left so more surprises are likely in store. Beyond the national and international news and entertainment media, Israeli-aligned Jewish billionaires already either own or control OpenAI, Google, Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Palantir, CBS, HBO, and most of Conde Nast (Reddit, Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair) as well as numerous Hollywood studios, regional papers and radio stations. The expansion into all these areas has been deliberate with the intention of using the control to support Israel and also keep the United States in the tight grip of the Jewish state and its domestic US lobby.
At this point my fellow Americans it is time to begin to fight back or surrender to the forces that will strip us of our free speech just for starters and which will create a United States which is controlled by a tiny little murderous fascist state in the Middle East that is willing to bribe and threaten its way to power and which does not in any way share the values upon which our nation was founded. Which way will we go?
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Britain’s Keir Starmer is already pulling the rug from under his own grudging declaration. The only hope of change is of the unintended consequences variety