> Or that US propaganda is as effective and all-encompassing within US borders as Chinese propaganda is within Chinese borders.
Totally right! Now let me log off to catch the nightly 6 hour programming block of CIA/FBI/military dramas. It helps me forget about all those scary Chinese drones flying around. Oh and did you see the trailer for the latest Alex Garland movie about our brave soldiers in Iraq? True heroes!
Even prior to that, Iran was desperately trying to cultivate relations with the West in the 90s/00s before Bush suddenly declared them Axis 2.0 and created a massive security crisis on their doorstep.
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> What emerged out of this economic crisis was a reform movement led by Mohammad Khatami, who won a presidential election in 1997 on promises to cultivate civil society, fix the economy, and replace a "clash of civilizations" with a "dialogue of civilizations." The cultural transformation unfolded over the next several years was remarkable. The share of university graduates who were women topped 60 percent, a new generation of intellectuals began to favorably cite Western philosophers, and religion more or less stopped policing the daily lives of most Iranians. By 2000, the Economist was reporting that according to Iran's own clergy, fewer than 2 percent of Iranians attended mosque on Fridays. On the economic side, the neo-liberalization of Iran intensified; small-scale factories were exempted from labor laws, and state-owned industries were privatized (loosening the state's grip on the economy was thought to be the best way of decreasing state interference in Iranians' private lives). Iran's relationship with foreign nations, even the US, also improved considerably. President Clinton eased up on the economic sanctions that Reagan had put in place in 1987, and Khatami appeared on CNN to talk about his admiration for the American nation and people. Al Qaeda's attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, was met with a massive outpouring of sympathy for America in Tehran, with enormous crowds holding candlelit vigils and some sixty thousand people observing a moment of silence at a soccer match on September 23.
> Iraq's oil infrastructure was damaged when the CPA took over. The CPA effected selected repairs. But the IAMB found that the CPA had chosen not to repair the meters on the pipelines. The IAMB told the CPA that they were concerned that the lack of metering made auditing Iraq's oil exports unreliable – making it impossible to detect fraud, deception or smuggling. The minutes of the IAMB meeting make clear that the CPA had assured the IAMB that they were in the process of repairing the meters – in bad faith. The CPA's authority came to an end with the meters unrepaired. Estimates of how much oil revenue was siphoned off during the year of the CPA's administration go as high as $4 billion – comparable to the amount Saddam Hussein is suspected of stealing during the entire duration of the oil-for-food program.
> Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”
> Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was reminded of the case of Ankhi Das, Facebook’s former policy head for India — another rare instance in which a single country had its own dedicated representative within the company. Das resigned from her position in 2020 after a Wall Street Journal report found she had lobbied for the uneven enforcement of hate speech rules that benefited India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, which she supported personally. “Meta is the communications platform for much for the world, but of course not every voice is heard equally,” Brooking said in an interview.
> As recently as February 2023, Cutler’s name was floated as a possible next head of the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry, a government propaganda office tasked with surveilling and undermining protesters and activists abroad. The ministry has reportedly made extensive use of Meta’s platforms to infiltrate student groups and conduct propaganda campaigns. In June, Haaretz reported a project originally founded by the ministry had targeted Black lawmakers in the U.S. with “hundreds” of phony Facebook and Instagram accounts “to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative.” Meta later shut these accounts down.
> Israeli soldiers wore T-shirts with a pregnant woman in cross-hairs and the slogan "1 Shot 2 Kills," adding to a growing furor in the country over allegations of misconduct by troops during the Gaza war.
> Green Cross was founded in 1950 as Japan's first commercial blood bank and became a diversified international pharmaceutical company producing ethical drugs for delivery or administration by doctors and healthcare workers. Its founders included war criminals such as Masaji Kitano who performed torture and experiments on humans in the Japanese military's notorious Unit 731 during World War II. Also serving as a consultant for the company was Murray Sanders, the American officer and physician who had petitioned for Kitano's acquittal after the war.
> In the late 1980s, Green Cross and Takeshi Abe were at the center of a scandal in which up to 3,000 Japanese people contracted HIV through the distribution and use of blood products which were known to be unsafe.
I'll consider that a possibility when it comes from an independent party detailing exactly which processes failed, why, and what remediation is being done beyond sacrificial dismissals. The particular WCK strike you're referring to wasn't even the first one killing WCK workers, just the most high-profile among many others.
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> Yeah, it's really important to situate that attack on the World Central Kitchen in the context of these many other attacks that have occurred since October in Gaza. We've documented incidents of attacks on guest houses, on convoys of aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, MSF, the UN institution there UNRWA, the International Rescue Committee, and Medical Aid for Palestinians and another American aid group. And in every single one of these instances, these groups notified the authorities, the Israeli authorities multiple times about the GPS coordinate of the guest house, of the convoy that was moving. When it was convoys, they were taking agreed-upon routes that the Israelis had told them to take. And in every instance, these attacks occurred with zero prior warning to the aid organizations, and we're talking about, you know, 15 aid workers having been killed in these attacks and another including two children, family members, and another 16 injured.
https://x.com/AyalaHasson/status/1901001799412129830