Posts
Israel Using ‘Planned Provocations’ to ‘Get the US into a War With Iran’
10
May, 2018
The
escalation of violence near the Golan Heights and Damascus this week
is part of a neoconservative plan to lasso the US into war with Iran,
an expert told Sputnik.
Mark
Sleboda, a security and international affairs analyst, says the most
recent escalation of violence between Israel and Syria
shows Israel intends to start a conflict with Iran and seek
US support for a larger war campaign.
What
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "wants, more
than anything else, is to get the US into a war
with Iran," Sleboda told Radio
Sputnik's Loud & Clearon Thursday.
"There
are plenty of neocons in Washington surrounding [US]
President [Donald] Trump that want the same thing and are all too
willing to play along with this," the analyst said.
Almost
immediately after Trump began his speech announcing the US' exit
from the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, on Tuesday, Israeli
authorities put their soldiers on "high alert" in the
Golan Heights, citing heightened Iranian activity across Israel's
northern border.
Israel
also said Tuesday that Iran might conduct missile attacks, prompting
the opening of bomb shelters and the movement of military
assets to the Golan Heights. The Golan was seized by Israel
from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and has been occupied
by Israel ever since.
Within
hours of Trump's announcement, Damascus accused the Israel
Defense Forces of firing on targets south of the
Syrian capital in the al-Kiswah area. Western media later called
one of the targets an Iranian convoy.
If
it seems like these developments were orchestrated, it's because
they probably were, Sleboda told hosts Brian Becker and John
Kiriakou.
"In
fact, the Russian Duma member who heads up the Foreign Relations
Committee specifically called out that this looks like a
planned provocation intended to be conducted in stages
up an escalatory ladder," the Moscow-based analyst noted.
"Israel,
which has previously claimed that it was attacking Syria —
it's attacked Syria illegally, aggressively, over 100 times
since 2011, since the conflict began," Sleboda said
of Israel's involvement in the Syrian civil war. "But
they've been ramping it up."
It appears that the ABC is not sufficiently hawkish for the Guardian Mark Soeboda is a "blantantly pro-Kremlin apologist".
This must be a prime example.
RN
breakfast program under fire for introducing Mark Sleboda as a
‘Moscow-based political analyst’ but not disclosing his work for
the state-owned RT
A
political analyst interviewed on ABC radio about the weekend protests
against Russian president Vladimir Putin is a mouthpiece for the
Kremlin, Russia experts have said.
Mark
Sleboda, described by the ABC simply as a “Moscow-based political
analyst”, was interviewed on Monday morning by Radio National host
Fran Kelly.
Asked
for his views on the anti-Putin demonstrations and the release of
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny from custody, Sleboda said
the protests were small and “lucky to have pulled 6,000 people”.
He dismissed the suggestion people had stayed away due to fear. “I
don’t think there’s any cause for people to be frightened,” he
said.
Better question. Why do we even allow Western state media to broadcast in Russia and the Rest of the world? twitter.com/chrizap/status…
“Putin’s
approval has increased since the last election due to his handling of
the economy and foreign policy,” he said. He defended the arrest of
Navalny on the grounds he had broken the law by demonstrating and he
said the opposition leader had been barred from running in the
election because he had “twice been convicted of fraud”.
Alexey
Muraviev, associate professor of national security and strategic
studies at of Curtin University, said he fundamentally disagreed with
much of what Sleboda said and he did not sound like an independent
analyst.
•
Sign
up to receive the top stories in Australia every day at noon
“When
he says that Navalny broke the law by protesting, that’s the
official government line and the reality is every time something
happens Navalny just gets neutralised by Putin forces.”
The
ABC did not disclose during the nine-minute interview or on its
website that Sleboda is an analyst for the state-owned
English-language television channel Russia Today, now known as RT.
RT
is a powerful PR arm of the Russian government which is used as a
weapon in the global information war.
Kelly
noted that Navalny’s supporters had chanted “Out with the Tsar”,
a reference to the fact that Putin has been either prime minister or
president of Russia “for almost 20 years and will be in until
2024”.
Sleboda
responded that it was “exactly the same amount of time that Angela
Merkel has been the leader of Germany”.
Kelly:
“Will Angela Merkel be in for 24 years?”
Sleboda:
“She just renewed for her fourth term, so 23 or 24, yes.”
Merkel,
who was sworn in for a fourth term earlier this year despite her CDU
party losing ground in September’s election, has been chancellor of
Germany since 2005 – 13 years.
Muraviev
said Sleboda did not utter “a single discordant note in terms of
the official positions of the Putin administration”.
He
said it was surprising to hear the US-born commentator expressing
views that were “effectively reflective of the official position of
the Kremlin”.
Russia's
Alexei Navalny arrested as 1,600 detained nationwide
“He
spoke as the promoter and the defender of the official position of
Putin’s government,” Muraviev told Guardian Australia.
“Some
of the statements he made were way too categorical, he debated, he
argued, he advocated.
“To
me he sounds either incredibly ill-informed or incredibly naive or
somehow politically biased.”
Kyle
Wilson, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s
Centre for European Studies, said Sleboda was not a critical source
the public broadcaster should rely on.
“In
my view there is a question mark about the credibility of Sleboda as
a commentator for two reasons,” Wilson told Guardian Australia.
“Firstly he has for some years been a commentator for Russia Today
and he represents the more extreme end of the spectrum in terms of
offering the Kremlin view.
“Second
he has an association with Alexander Dugin, who is a xenophobic,
hard-right, nationalist ideologue about whom even the Kremlin has
some doubts.
“So
it seems to be reasonable to assume that Mark Sleboda is an
apologist, a blatantly pro-Kremlin apologist.
“ABC
radio is far more effective in dealing with matters that are
extremely controversial when it offers a range of opinion.
“But
to give a platform on a mainstream program to a Kremlin apologist
doesn’t seem to be the most effective way of presenting
controversial issues.”
The
ABC said in a statement: “This was just one interview in the ABC’s
long-term and comprehensive coverage of this area, which has involved
interviewing a variety of analysts from a range of different
perspectives. We will continue to cover these issues from an array of
viewpoints.”
In
2014 Russia Today’s British channel was censured by the UK media
regulator for coverage involving Sleboda. It was found to have
breached the broadcasting code on impartiality over its coverage of
the Ukraine crisis, including for one report in which Sleboda
described the Ukrainian administration as a “putsch government”
that came to power with the help of “a number of extremists”.
The Guardian doesn't even have the decency to link to actual interview. Heaven forbid that people should be heard in their own words.
The ABC interview is HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.