Tag: THE NEW YORK TIMES

Another alleged Syrian chemical attack but this time Western media is silent (VIDEO)

Another alleged Syrian chemical attack but this time Western media is silent (VIDEO)

A woman lies on a stretcher inside a hospital after what the Syrian state media said was a suspected toxic gas attack in Aleppo, Syria November 24, 2018. © Reuters

Alleged Syrian gas attacks are typically met with heartbreaking media reports and US-led missile strikes but a suspected chlorine attack in Aleppo has gone largely ignored in the West. How could this be?

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Unverified picture of a victim of suspected toxic gas attack in Aleppo © Sana via ReutersSyria blames foreign states for Aleppo ‘toxic gas attack’, calls for UN to step in

Shelling, which targeted residential areas of Aleppo on Saturday night, appears to have included a chemical attack. At least 46 people, including 8 children, were hospitalized with symptoms of chlorine gas poisoning, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

https://www.rt.com/news/444916-syria-aleppo-chlorine-attack-west/

The attack on the city, which was liberated by the Syrian government two years ago, is believed to have been launched from an area within Idlib, the last Syrian stronghold of jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

So where are the emergency UN Security Council sessions? The defiant New York Times op-eds? The retaliatory Tomahawk strikes against the last jihadist enclave in Syria?

“They don’t care, because the attack is coming from the wrong side, as it were. If you check the mainstream media coverage globally, it’s a non-event,” global affairs analyst and founder of the 21st Century Wire Patrick Henningsen told RT. Henningsen also noted that the incident demonstrated that “the so-called rebels have the means, the motive and the opportunities to carry out chemical attacks against Syrians.”

But for the children poisoned in the attack, the incident was far from a “non-event.”

“It feels like something is burning inside and my eyes are hurting,” a boy, identified only as Hamza, told a film crew which documented the aftermath of the attack.

“I was at home, then a severe headache kicked in. I started to cough, but couldn’t bear it. Medicines didn’t help, so I was taken to hospital,” a woman said while speaking through an oxygen mask.

Despite crickets from the West, action has been taken to hold the belligerents accountable. Moscow announced on Sunday that the Russian Air Force had struck targets in Idlib’s demilitarized zone, from where Syrian militants are believed to have launched the chemical attack.

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Facebook hired PR firm to label its critics ‘agents of Soros’

Facebook hired PR firm to label its critics ‘agents of Soros’

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg © Reuters / Leah Millis

In a bid to counteract negative publicity, social media giant Facebook hired a PR agency to discredit critics by claiming that they were agents of liberal billionaire George Soros, a New York Times report has revealed.

Facebook hasn’t been the most popular company as of late. Repeated privacy and data-leaking scandals followed by half-hearted apologies, and an ongoing effort to clamp down on alternative news pages have kept Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the headlines for all the wrong reasons this year.

The backlash was visible at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in July, when protesters held up signs depicting Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as giant octopuses, with their tentacles encircling the globe. Facebook complained to the Anti-Defamation League, who called the posters “a classic anti-Semitic trope.”

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Behind the scenes, Facebook prepared to meet the protesters on their level. When combating protest from activist groups like Freedom from Facebook and Color of Change, Facebook hired Definers Public Affairs – a Washington DC PR firm – to smear and discredit its critics, according to a New York Times report published Tuesday.

Definers’ key tactic: identify an enemy.

The agency cast billionaire liberal financier George Soros as the puppet master behind the opposition to Facebook. It circulated a document this summer connecting Soros to the anti-Facebook movement, and pressed journalists to look into financial links between the billionaire and the activist groups.

Daily Caller journalist Joe Gabriel Simonson recalled being contacted by “a PR guy” who kept “bringing up Soros.”Simonson was encouraged for one article to link Soros with Latino protesters complaining about Facebook requiring proof of ID to buy political ads.

“It was odd and we didn’t end up going with that angle,” he tweeted on Wednesday.

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As well as pushing the Soros-did-it angle to the press, the Times claims that Definers wrote their own articles bashing rival tech companies, including Google and Apple, and publishing them on NTKNetwork.com, a site designed to look like a news site. Facebook denied ever requesting that Definers write such hit-pieces, and severed its ties with the company late Wednesday night.

Facebook’s labeling of Soros as the boogeyman was not a random decision. The billionaire has been a vocal and public critic of Facebook, which he described, in a speech at the Davos economic forum this January, as a “menace” to society, that has “neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of (its) actions.”

“Their days are numbered,” Soros’ speech concluded.

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© Reuters / Charles PlatiauFacebook’s vaunted transparency tool spectacularly fails to catch fake ads by ‘US Senators & ISIS’

To that end, Soros has indeed financed some anti-Facebook initiatives. Color of Change director Rashad Robinson told the Guardian that his organization, which has run online campaigns accusing Facebook of racial discrimination, privacy violations, and hate speech infractions, is partly funded by Soros.

Robinson sees Facebook’s targeting of Soros – who is Jewish – as anti-Semitic.

“This narrative has really dangerous anti-Semitic undertones about Jewish people controlling the world,” he told the Guardian. “It’s also deeply anti-black – the idea that our strategies, our ideas, our vision are somehow built off some puppet master… That Facebook would employ a right-wing firm to say that is deeply troubling.”

Soros, an investor who made his fortune shorting the British Pound in 1992, has attracted persistent criticism for funding liberal causes worldwide. Soros’ pro-migration lobbying has seen his Open Society Foundations NGO expelled from his native Hungary. His organization has funded protests against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the US, and President Trump has said that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Soros had been financing Central American migrant caravans surging toward the US border.

Soros’ defenders have repeatedly argued that the depiction of him as a liberal ‘puppet master’ is a thinly-veiled anti-Semitic slur – despite the fact that Soros has also been called an “enemy of Israel” by Israeli Prime MInister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his work opposing Israel’s mass deportations of African asylum seekers.

Journalist Tim Miller called the criticism of Soros “a good sign of the moral rot on the right,” before the New York Times report revealed that Miller had taken a job with Definers to spread the same rot he complained about on Twitter.

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In a blog post detailing its relationship with Definers, Facebook said that, while it asked the agency to encourage the press to investigate the link between the anti-Facebook campaign and a “well-known critic of our company,” it did not spread misinformation.

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Midterm madness shows US media more divisive than the American people

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By Robert Bridge

As witnessed by the midterm elections, the US is cracking up along political and cultural lines. The mainstream media must accept a large part of the blame for this dangerous period of partisanship that only promises to worsen.

Ever since Donald Trump crashed the White House, the US media has dropped all pretensions of being a fair and impartial observer of the political scene. The gloves of objectiveness have come off and journalists now compete in the political ring as full combatants, as opposed to neutral ringside announcers reporting the action as it happens.

That much was proven on Monday, the day before midterms, when popular Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro appeared on stage with Trump at a political rally in the blood-red state of Missouri. This stunt unleashed the predictable howls of protest from sea to shining sea.

“By taking part in the rally, Mr. Hannity was crossing the line that had traditionally separated those in the news media… from the people they are supposed to cover,” The New York Times wailed. “Fox News entered new territory — a thicket in which it’s hard to tell where the network ends and the president begins.”

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Although it was surreal to see Hannity at a rally stumping for the Republicans (a move that Fox News said it did not condone, calling it an “unfortunate distraction”) it was not surprising given the guerrilla-style reporting that passes for journalism these days. Media partisanship has delivered a broadside to the US political system, and the fact that there are media trenches in the first place explains everything we need to know.

Even before Trump got elected, the mainstream media was priming its audiences to disavow the maverick from Manhattan. Did this have anything to with his promise to ‘drain the swamp’ known as Washington, DC? It is a very tantalizing explanation. Whatever the case may be, the left-leaning media organized and published stunningly flawedmedia polls predicting a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

As we now know, just the opposite transpired as Trump sailed to easy victory. The half-deranged disappointment felt by the Democrats was intensified by the unsubstantiated claim that Russia – not the American voter – was responsible for putting Trump into the Oval Office.

That fantastic media story, which can best be described as the conspiracy theory of the century (admittedly, the century is young), snowballed into an FBI investigation known as ‘Russiagate’. Entering its second year, this media-inflamed show trial – starring a colorful cast of porn stars and Ukraine-linked businessmen – has failed to produce a shred of evidence pointing to collaboration between Trump and the Kremlin. Yet the Mueller show grinds on, driving a wedge between Americans, while bringing relations with Russia to the boiling point. And lest we forget, while peddling the ‘Russia meddling’ smokescreen, the media was able to ignore the explosive claim that Hillary Clinton used her personal computer to send and receive top secret government emails, which was the real story all along.

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At this point, battle lines between the Trump administration and the mainstream media were drawn in the sand. The Republican leader, assaulted on a daily basis by every tentacle of America’s six-headed media monster, understandably began denigrating it as ‘fake news’. This led to some very intense press conferences, especially with CNN, which many on the right have come to call the ‘Clinton News Network’.

Although I admit the 45th president of the United States may have some character flaws, I fail to understand why the media has declared a permanent open season on this man. After all, like it or not, Trump won the election fair and square. And let’s give credit where credit is deserved: there are no wars (yet) on the horizon, while the economy, stupid, is roaring. Nevertheless, fair, balanced and objective news reporting has been jettisoned in favor of fantasy. This radical flight from fancy is at least partially responsible not only for the political psychosis that has attacked the nation’s frontal lobe, but for leading the country to the very doorstep of civil war.

In the not-so-distant past, the media could be counted upon to tame the more impulsive reactions of the electorate, blunting controversy with reasoned argument and substantiated reporting. Today, by comparison, it is the media that is responsible for inflaming the passions of the dual constituencies.

An ideal solution to this media mayhem, where the Republicans and Democrats both enjoy their own private propaganda services – is to let journalists from Fox News and CNN labor together inside of the same four walls. I only slightly jest. But think about it. Such a move would help encourage what is so missing today in the torched media landscape: the eradication of barriers and meeting the ‘enemy’ for face-to-face debate. Today, the media seems to be arguing for argument’s sake, not for the sake of promoting the public good.

The bifurcation of the mainstream media into two hostile camps exactly mirrors what is happening in society at large. This is no coincidence. Voters from both sides of the political aisle (the fact that there are only two political sides to choose from also greatly complicates the situation) have barricaded themselves inside of an electric moat known as ‘social media’, which is in reality anything but social. Each side hunkers down behind their Facebook and Twitter accounts, lobbing the occasional verbal grenade from inside their heavily defended echo chambers. The media is equally guilty of such behavior with all of the disastrous consequences we are experiencing today.

In such a sheltered and bitter world, there is no chance for honest conversation among the people nor the media. Political debate has been reduced to short and snarky 280-character ripostes, while the walls between the two camps continue to grow higher. Those inside the media world, where subjective passions must take a backseat to objective reporting, should have resisted the temptation to take sides in the political debate. Instead, they now finds themselves serving as mere pawns on one or the other side of the great game. The public can see through the ridiculous charade, which only damages the credibility of the mainstream legacy media.

This dangerous new development, where the media and the people are split into parallel universes or alternative realities, each clinging to their own false narratives, can only end in disaster for America’s great experiment in democracy.

@Robert_Bridge

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Final CNN & Rasmussen midterm polls vary wildly in predictions as Americans prepare to vote

Final CNN & Rasmussen midterm polls vary wildly in predictions as Americans prepare to vote

One day before Americans head to cast their ballots in the crucial midterm congressional elections, two final polls conducted by CNN and Rasmussen have predicted wildly different results.

The final generic poll conducted by left-leaning CNN has put Democrats 13 points ahead of Republicans. Meanwhile, a separate poll carried out by the more right-leaning Rasmussen agency has suggested that Republicans are leading, but by a much smaller margin of one point.

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The results are a reminder of the folly of relying entirely on polling, which was highlighted after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, despite the vast majority of polls suggesting that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was almost certain to win the presidency.

Online, Twitter users reacted with surprise to the vast disparity between the two polls, wondering whether there have ever been two polls so far apart on the eve of an important election and suggesting that at least one of the pollsters would end up looking stupid when ballots are counted.

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Democrats are hoping to wrestle control of the House of Representatives from Republicans in a ‘blue wave’ of wins in the midterm elections held across the country tomorrow, which have been billed as a kind of referendum on US President Donald Trump after two years in office.

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‘Die Jew Rats’ synagogue vandal was anti-hate-crime intern & Democratic activist

‘Die Jew Rats’ synagogue vandal was anti-hate-crime intern & Democratic activist

Synagogue vandal James Polite seen alongside his former mentor, New York Democrat Christine Quinn © Facebook / Abraham Aali and Reuters / Andrew Kelly

In a bizarre twist, the man who spray painted anti-Semitic graffiti on a Brooklyn synagogue turned out to be “queer,” black, former anti-hate-crime intern, James Polite: a 26-year-old with loving Jewish foster parents.

Less than a week after a gunman murdered 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, anti-Semitic graffiti was found scrawled inside Union Temple in Brooklyn’s predominantly Jewish Prospect Heights neighborhood. The graffiti read “Die Jew Rats” and “Hitler.”

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A Democratic political event scheduled at the synagogue on Thursday night was canceled, and police investigated the incident as a hate crime. After being caught on the synagogue’s CCTV cameras, James Polite was arrested on Friday.

Far from being an archetypal tattooed skinhead, Polite is a black former Democratic intern who had his college education bankrolled by the New York Times’ ‘Neediest Cases Fund.’

Polite had a rough upbringing, according to a 2017 New York Times profile. He told the Times he identifies as “queer” and felt misunderstood at home. As a young teenager, he requested that he be placed in foster care, and spent the following years shunted from home to home.

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“Nobody gotta die. Mexico, latin America, carribean (sic) vs. Jew n*gger pigs. One person touch me this whole shit a smoking,” he wrote.

In the comments, friends urged Polite to seek professional help, and his one-time mentor Quinn wrote after his arrest that she was “simply and utterly devastated.”

“I knew this young man,” she wrote. “And while he has experienced hardship that most people can’t ever imagine, his actions are inexcusable.”

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While Polite’s life seems to have gone down a dark path, from New York Times poster boy to synagogue vandal, he is not the first unlikely suspect to be busted for hate crimes in recent years. Last year, Israeli police arrested a 19-year-old Israeli Jew in connection with hundreds of bomb threats made to Jewish community centers across America.

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YIKES: Leftists Lose Their Minds, Bash The New York Times After Beto O’Rourke Exposé

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By EMILY ZANOTTI

Don’t touch their beloved Beto!

Leftists on social media lost their minds Monday after The New York Times released an exposé, detailing Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke‘s, early career in real estate development, and revealing for the first time this campaign that O’Rourke isn’t a blue collar hero but rather the son-in-law of a billionaire.

The NYT reports that O’Rourke’s father-in-law proposed gentrifying a neighborhood in El Paso by force, bulldozing public housing to make way for restaurants, a shopping district, and an art walk. Beto, the Times claims, served as the “pretty face” for the plan while also serving in city government, and often tangled with low-income El Paso residents protesting the plan.

“What might not have been entirely clear to everyone at the meeting was that the plan’s success was largely dependent on the city’s ability to convince property owners in the most blighted areas to turn over their holdings to the private trust. In the case of recalcitrant owners, eminent domain would be used,” the Times reported.

Beto, who was an El Paso councilman at the time his father-in-law was looking to make the big changes, eventually abstained from voting on the matter, but not until after it was pointed out that publicly defending the development was, for Beto, a conflict of interest.

The New York Times is, by no means, a right-leaning publication, and is likely pulling — perhaps quietly — for Beto O’Rourke to unseat Ted Cruz. But leftists lashed out immediately, regardless, accusing the paper of trying to tank Beto’s upstart campaign just days before Election Day.

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Some Twitter users even compared The New York Times’s “hit job” on Beto to a piece the paper published on a suddenly re-opened investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s handling of classified information, a development that happened just days before the 2016 Presidential election, through no fault of The New York Times.

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The good news for the NYT, at least, is that it probably won’t be held responsible for Beto O’Rourke’s likely loss to Ted Cruz. Despite raking in more than $38 million just last quarter (and spending $22 million of that), O’Rourke is running at least 6 points behind the incumbent Republican in most polls.

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(from tomfernandez28.com) – New York Times Published Trump Assassination Fantasy Before Mail Bomb Scare

By Justin Caruso

The New York Times published a fictional story Tuesday that fantasized about President Trump’s assassination at the hands of the Secret Service and a Russian operative — one day before the nation was gripped by news of apparent mail bombs sent to prominent Democratic figures.

In an article published in the New York Times‘ Book Review, five writers conjured up fantasy scenarios about President Trump’s future with the Russia investigation.

One writer, Zoe Sharp (pictured), took liberal fantasizing to the next level and wrote a story that ends with President Trump being assassinated by a Russian agent. The Times’ editors illustrate the piece, titled “How It Ends,” with a Russian flag sticking out of a pistol barrel.

In the story, the Russian attempts to shoot the president, but his gun misfires. A Secret Service agent then offers his own pistol to the Russian:

The Russian waited until they were a few steps past before he drew the gun. He sighted on the center of the president’s back, and squeezed the trigger.

The Makarov misfired.

The Secret Service agent at the president’s shoulder heard the click, spun into a crouch. He registered the scene instantly, drawing his own weapon with razor-edge reflexes.

The Russian tasted failure. He closed his eyes and waited to pay the cost.

It did not come.

He opened his eyes. The Secret Service agent stood before him, presenting his Glock, butt first.

“Here,” the agent said politely. “Use mine. …” [emphasis added]

This assassination fantasy was published just one day before the media exploded with criticism for President Trump’s rhetoric after a series of apparent mail bombs sent to many Democrat political figures Wednesday, including one sent to CNN’s New York office.

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