Top UK whistleblower, ex-ambassador Craig Murray blocked by Facebook

Top UK Journalist Craig Murray Blocked by Facebook After Criticizing Israel

Eric Zuesse

Russia Insider,

3 May, 2018

Murray is a heavy-hitter in the alternative media with huge credibility. The former UK ambassador and ally of Julian Assange writes mostly for his personal blog, which averages about 1.5 million views per month, an astonishing amount, eclipsing most mainstream pundits. Obviously people appreciate what he has to say. Facebook doesn't.

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On April 23rd, the great independent investigative journalist, Craig Murray — a former British diplomat — headlined at his blog, "Condemned By Their Own Words”, and he posted there the translated-to-English transcript (excerpted below) to this Israeli radio Hebrew broadcast on April 21st, in which an Israeli Brigadier-General, named Fogel, explained why Israel’s troops are doing the right thing to shoot and even to kill Gazans who come (an unspecified) too close to the wall which separates Israel from Gaza:

Any person who gets close to the fence, anyone who could be a future threat to the border of the State of Israel and its residents, should bear a price for that violation. If this child or anyone else gets close to the fence in order [the soldier thinks possibly] to hide an explosive device or [to] check if there are any dead zones there or to cut the fence so someone could infiltrate the territory of the State of Israel to kill us …

Nesiel [the interviewer]: Then, then his punishment [for being suspected] is death?

Fogel: His punishment is death. As far as I’m concerned then yes, if you can only shoot him to stop him, in the leg or arm – great. But if it’s more than that then, yes, you want to check with me whose blood is thicker, ours or theirs. It is clear to you that if one such person will manage to cross the fence or hide an explosive device there …

Nesiel: But we were taught that live fire is only used when the soldiers face immediate danger. … It does not do all that well for us, those pictures that are distributed around the world.

Fogel: Look, Ron, we’re even terrible at it [at suppressing those pictures]. There’s nothing to be done, David always looks better against Goliath. And in this case, we are the Goliath. Not the David. That is entirely clear to me. … It will drag us into a war. I do not want to be on the side that gets dragged. I want to be on the side that initiates things. I do not want to wait for the moment where it finds a weak spot and attacks me there. If tomorrow morning it gets into a military base or a kibbutz and kills people there and takes prisoners of war or hostages, call it as you like, we’re in a whole new script. I want the leaders of Hamas to wake up tomorrow morning and for the last time in their life see the smiling faces of the IDF[Israel’s army]. That’s what I want to have happen. But we are dragged along. So we’re putting snipers up because we want to preserve the values we were educated by [that Israel’s soldiers are jury, judge, and even executioner, when suspecting a Gazan — Gaza is Israel’s free-fire zone].

The interviewer didn’t challenge any of that, though he didn’t like “those pictures are distributed around the world.” Israel wants all nations to block the truth.

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Murray closed by adding a very brief comment of his own: “There is no room to doubt the evil nature of the expansionist apartheid state that Israel has now become. Nor the moral vacuity of its apologists in the western media.” Since this was, of course, a damning statement about mainstream ‘news’ media in The West, these mainstream ‘news’ media, including Facebook, can be expected to dislike that — and they evidently do.

On April 25th Murray headlined "Blocked By Facebook and the Vulnerability of New Media”, and he reported: 

This site’s visitor numbers are currently around one third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause is not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook:

What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way. The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing – it shows you it is shared – and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you.

Twitter have a similar system known as “shadow banning”. Again it is secretive and the victim is not informed. I do not appear to be shadow banned at the moment, but there has been an extremely sharp drop – by a factor of ten – in the impressions my tweets are generating.

I am among those who argue that the strength of the state and corporate media is being increasingly and happily undermined by our ability to communicate via social media. But social media has developed in such a way that the channels of communication are dominated by corporations – Facebook, Twitter and Google – which can in effect turn off the traffic to a citizen journalism site in a second. The site is not taken down, and the determined person can still navigate directly to it, but the vast bulk of the traffic is cut off. What is more this is done secretly, without your being informed, and in a manner deliberately hard to detect. The ability to simply block the avenues by which people get to see dissenting opinions, is terrifying.

Furthermore neither Facebook nor Twitter contact you when they block traffic to your site to tell you this is happening, let alone tell you why, and let alone give you a chance to counter whatever argument they make. I do not know if I am blocked by Facebook as an alleged Russian bot, or for any other reason. I do know that it appears to have happened shortly after I published the transcript of the Israeli general discussing the procedures for shooting children.

This hidden, never-explained, but clearly systematic, news-suppression, exemplifies the widespread and coordinated operation by the major media, against any independent sites which document things that the Establishment, the aristocracy, the “Deep State,” or however you call the controlling owners of the corporations that advertise in and own the media, hire their journalists and editors to block from reaching the public. 

This is a multifaceted but coordinated operation, of censoring-out the key truths, which are those truths that none of the controlling owners want the public to know (such as Craig Murray has now, apparently, done once too often for Facebook to continue allowing). It’s how they are enabled to use the government so that it serves them, and not the public-at-large. This is, likewise, the source of the obscene inequality of wealth that results, the vast economic inequality that they all benefit from at the public’s expense. Money is power, and they have it. And they use it, against the powerless. Though the controlling owners compete amongst themselves to sell to the public, they all suppress these key truths from reaching the public; because, if they did not, then the ‘wrong’ politicians would get elected to public offices. Whereas some of the ‘right’ politicians are Republicans, and some are Democrats, they all serve the same aristocracy, just different sides of it. Because, otherwise, they wouldn’t stand even a chance to be elected.

Here’s another example of how this works: The CIA is a branch of the U.S. federal government that virtually only serves America’s aristocracy, which is why it lies — consciously misrepresents — in almost everything it says publicly about international relations, such as it did in 2002, when it asserted that Saddam Hussein still had and still was building weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. government, of which the CIA is a part, used that ‘information’ to ‘justify’ invading and occupying a nation (Iraq) which had never invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States. That’s aggression. They’re doing the same in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, etc. It’s key truths that are kept hidden from the public. The key truths are the ones that expose and disprove the lies that the Establishment push.

Wikipedia is an example of this. Wikipedia is edited by the CIA, not only in the sense that anyone (including you) can edit what is on Wikipedia, but also in the sense that Wikipedia itself blocks edits or changes that introduce facts and evidence which disprove some of the allegations that are made in Wikipedia articles, and that Wikipedia doesn’t tell such a person why a revision or addition to the article was rejected and will not be considered by Wikipedia: the secret people who control the articles, and the secret process by which they do it, are secrets, disclosed to no outsiders, but known to the people who control Wikipedia. The perpetrators know what the key truths are, but the public do not, because the media hide the key truths.

Furthermore, major news media that report things which aren’t so, are no longer simply burying their after-the-fact ‘corrections’ so that perhaps only 1% of the people who were deceived by an article get to see that it had been false, but now also by simply refusing to issue any ‘correction’ at all — they’re totally ignoring the reader’s right not to be deceived by that major news medium. (Most such ‘news’ media have also terminated or else severely limited their reader-comments section, because otherwise a reader-comment could slip through that disproves the given ‘news’ article, and the aristocratically controlled media’s goal is to block those truths from reaching their audience.)

The Washington Post, which made famous the accusation that non-mainstream newsmedia are fake news, is itself a leader of fake ‘news’, and was so during 2002 and early 2003, by stenographically reporting to its readership the George W. Bush administration’s falsehoods about “Saddam’s WMD” and the rightfulness for America to invade a country (Iraq) that had never invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States.

The entire major media, and almost all of the ‘alternative’ media, are owned or otherwise controlled by the ruling aristocracy and censor out crucial facts which disprove allegations that the government (the ruling aristocracy) wants the public not to know. Above all, they exclude articles like the present one, which (like all articles I do) is being submitted to all of them for publication free-of-charge. So: wherever this article is not published, you know that fake ‘news’ is published. For example, that’s how America now is invading and occupying many countries — all on the basis of lying, because none of these nations invaded the United States, ever, and none is invading the United States now; America’s invasions, in recent decades, have all been blatant violations of international law. If the American people knew this, then would we vote for the politicians who tolerate it, and who vote for it? That explains the ‘news’ media.

And this explains America as the permanent-war-for-permanent-‘peace’ champion of the entire world. Of course, if international law were equitably enforced, then every U.S. President in recent decades would be and die in prison. So, obviously, only the few (and none of them are anything close to being “mainstream”) honest newsmedia will publish this article. You can web-search for this article to find out which ones they are. All the others don’t want you to know the truths that this article reports and (via its links) documents.

Is this article alleging a conspiracy? No major corporation exists that doesn’t carry out conspiracies, because doing that is essential to their success. The very allegation that conspiracies don’t exist amongst the most powerful people and even within and between the most powerful organizations, is ludicrous, but the aristocracy everywhere brainwashes the public everywhere, to think that only the ‘they’ perpetrate conspiracies, the ‘we’ don’t. They all do; it’s the way that the world actually works, which is the reason why the aristocracy hide this — the most basic fact about the world. They do it in order to block the public from understanding how things actually happen. And they block the public from understanding that no mere mass of people conspires — ‘the Jews’ ‘the Masons’, etc. — but that only the very few people at the very top can, and do, and that they actually must, in order to remain successful and in power. It’s called, and it is, in fact, “strategizing.” That is what a conspiracy does, anywhere: it develops and executes strategy. To keep the public dumb and misled, the hired propagandists allege the exact opposite.

So: just web-search for this article, and you will see yet more evidence that what it says is true — that it is hidden, not published, by all the ‘respectable’ news-outlets. Like most of the articles I write, it is sent to all of them as a dare — and none of them accepts the dare and publishes anything from me. This is one of the ways I know that what I write about the way that the ‘news’ media work, is true, and that what they say about the way that they work, is false. I am continually testing them, and hoping for one of them to prove me wrong, just one time. It hasn’t happened, yet.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

See Carig Murray’s article here

Condemned By Their Own Words

Blocked By Facebook and the Vulnerability of New Media

Craig Murray,

26 April, 2018

This site’s visitor numbers are currently around one third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause is not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook:

What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way. The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing – it shows you it is shared – and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you.

Twitter have a similar system known as “shadow banning”. Again it is secretive and the victim is not informed. I do not appear to be shadow banned at the moment, but there has been an extremely sharp drop – by a factor of ten – in the impressions my tweets are generating.

I am among those who argue that the strength of the state and corporate media is being increasingly and happily undermined by our ability to communicate via social media. But social media has developed in such a way that the channels of communication are dominated by corporations – Facebook, Twitter and Google – which can in effect turn off the traffic to a citizen journalism site in a second. The site is not taken down, and the determined person can still navigate directly to it, but the vast bulk of the traffic is cut off. What is more this is done secretly, without your being informed, and in a manner deliberately hard to detect. The ability to simply block the avenues by which people get to see dissenting opinions, is terrifying.

Furthermore neither Facebook nor Twitter contact you when they block traffic to your site to tell you this is happening, let alone tell you why, and let alone give you a chance to counter whatever argument they make. I do not know if I am blocked by Facebook as an alleged Russian bot, or for any other reason. I do know that it appears to have happened shortly after I published the transcript of the Israeli general discussing the procedures for shooting children.

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Finally, a change of policy on this blog.

For thirteen years now it has operated with a policy of not accepting donations, except for occasional legal funds. It has now reached a size and cost, not least because of continual attacks, that make income essential. It is also the case that due to change in personal circumstance I am no longer in a position to devote my time to it without income – the need to earn a living caused the blog to go dark for almost five months last year, and the last six weeks this journalism has stopped me doing anything else to pay the rent. So, with a certain amount of pride swallowed, here is your chance to subscribe: