PR
Sky deletes its video of Falter claiming he was only trying to cross the road
Page now gives 404 result after overwhelming evidence challenging claims emerged
As Skwawkbox reported earlier today, ‘Campaign against Antisemitism’ (CAA) chief executive Gideon Falter’s claim that he had been prevented by police from crossing a road after just happening to ‘come across’ a pro-Palestine march looks to have fallen apart after a huge volume of eyewitness, photographic and video evidence emerged challenging the veracity of the claim.
Falter, whose CAA group has been shown to have taken large amounts of funding from a ‘quasi-governmental’ Israeli organisation and featured prominently in the campaign to take down then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, has also been shown to have made false claims of antisemitic speech – leading to the prosecution, conviction and unanimous acquittal on appeal of a Foreign Office official. His claim about Saturday’s events fuelled calls for the banning of pro-Palestinian marches and the removal of Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley – who just happens to have previously refused the demands of right-wing, pro-Israel campaigners and politicians for the marches to be banned.
And now Sky News, which had run hard with the false claims and the ensuing narrative, has deleted its video of Falter’s staged stunt. Footage and photographs shot by bystanders strongly suggest that Falter was at the site of the march for some time before the incident – and that he was there with bodyguards and had already tried to disrupt it, a stark contrast with his narrative that he had just bumped into the march on his way home from synagogue.
While emails containing the link will still show a preview of the original content, clicking through to the link leads to a ‘404’ ‘page not found result, as the combined screenshots below show:
It will be interesting to see whether the rest of the so-called ‘mainstream’ media follow suit, or leave up the misleading video and claims despite the flood of contrary evidence.
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Labour shrinks Starmer’s wife so he doesn’t look so short on Xmas card
Cringeworthy insecurity, apparently – and poor editing work (again)
The Labour party – presumably on the orders of, or at least after consultation with, Keir Starmer and his team have edited a photograph of the ‘Kid Starver’ used on official Christmas cards – shrinking Starmer’s wife so she looks shorter than him instead of considerably taller, at least in heels.
Analysis of the image shows up Mrs Starmer’s apparent change in height – and also that she’s been dimmed down significantly while he has been lightened, presumably to make his wrinkles less obvious. The clumsy editing has also broadened Starmer’s left arm unnaturally:
For those who prefer a moving image to show up the difference, see the video below by ‘The Agitator‘:
This is not the first time Labour has had to resort to shoddy photoshopping to cover for Starmer’s, well, shortcomings. In 2020 (and again in 2021), the party couldn’t find any photos of huge crowds cheering for Starmer’s Labour (there aren’t any) – so edited out references to his predecessor from a photo of a crowd at a Jeremy Corbyn rally:
Conversely, when Starmer’s real self is on show in a string of outrageous or embarrassing comments and performances, his supporters have even tried to claim that AI has been used to create the video evidence, such as when he told Islamophobe Trevor Phillips that he wanted to treat the UK families of refugees as terrorists if he gets into government.
Starmer’s insecurity about his height is reminiscent of short film stars, such as western movie actor Alan Ladd, who famously stood on a box so he looked taller than Sophia Loren in the film Boy on a Dolphin, despite her being a good two inches shorter than him.
Starmer has also taken to being photographed from comically low angles, to create the appearance of greater height:
Nothing wrong with being short, of course, but the show of insecurity about it speaks volumes and not about anything desirable in a so-called ‘leader’ – and it raises questions (again) about issues with the appalling treatment of women by Starmer and his acolytes.
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Video: Amnesty shows Israel killed journalist, maimed another, in Lebanon
Warning: distressing footage – forensic examination of footage from 13 October attack, on Lebanese territory, on clearly marked journalists, shows Israeli tank fired once, then again less than a minute later; Amnesty calls for war crime investigation
Detailed analysis by Amnesty International of footage surrounding a 13 October attack on a group of clearly marked journalists shows Israeli tank crew knowingly fired two shells, less than a minute apart, at the group as they filmed in southern Lebanon. One journalist was killed and the other lost her leg in the needless and deliberate assault.
Amnesty has now published its findings under the title “Deadly Israeli Attack on Journalists In Lebanon Must be Investigated as a War Crime”:
Israel has relentlessly bombed schools, hospitals, news offices and homes in Gaza, killing thousands of civilians, mostly women and children – and at least sixty-eight journalists, more than were killed in any other conflict since 1990. Now it has been shown to have committed another wanton Lebanon attack on journalists doing their job, taking another life and wrecking more. The far-right Israeli regime is out of control and flouting international law, while lying wildly and incompetently to try to salvage its public image.
The same story has been seen time and again, including the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, targeted last year as she covered an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in West Bank.
Despite this, western politicians continue to cover for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals – and UK journalists appear to be ignoring the murder of their colleagues.
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Video: Israel’s ‘minister for Hamas rape propaganda is ‘proud to be a racist’
May Golan was withdrawn by Israel in May as proposed new New York consul after outrage over racist rally – now she’s pushing wild claims about Hamas atrocities
Israel’s ‘Minister for the advancement of women’, May Golan, has been at the forefront of the apartheid regime’s latest attempt to dig itself out of the pit of its PR and propaganda disaster over the 7 October Hamas raid.
Among a long list of failed propaganda attempts, the Israeli regime has been caught out trying to fake a ‘Hamas ambush’, faking a ‘recording’ of Hamas operatives, faking ‘evidence’ that Israel did not bomb a hospital and kill five hundred or more refugees – and seeing the news that Israel forces killed many of the Israelis who died during the raid, including the child it used for its atrocity-propaganda push, spread rapidly despite the silence of so-called ‘mainstream media.
So the regime’s latest tactic is to push claims that Hamas committed ‘widespread’ rapes during the raid – and, as so often, its ‘evidence’ is a single ‘eyewitness’. Israel has even been caught using an old image of a killed Kurdish woman soldier that it claimed was an Israeli rape victim. The ‘commissioner’ appointed to ‘investigate’ the rapes is an Israeli lawyer who has previously written a position to justify Israel circumventing the human rights of Palestinian captives and who runs an agency closely linked to Israel’s far-right government – and the commission did not even take any testimony from witnesses.
And one of the main faces of the latest propaganda push is May Golan – a woman who has told a far-right Israeli rally that she is ‘proud to be a racist’ and that ‘it’s our right to be racist’:
So great was outrage at her racism earlier this year that Israel withdrew its proposal to make her its consul in New York – yet despite this very recent history, her claims have been transmitted without scrutiny by the BBC and other UK and international ‘mainstream’ media, and with no mention of her record. Some media have even claimed ‘witnesses upon witnesses’ have testified to the commission about sexual assault by Hamas, even though it heard none.
Israel’s propaganda disaster continues – but so-called ‘mainstream’ media and commentators are slavishly, even enthusiastically, pushing the latest unevidenced narrative.
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Israel plans to install Blair as ‘coordinator’ to ‘legitimise’ war on Gaza
Former PM accused of lies and war crimes that led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths would add ‘greater legitimacy’ to genocide in Gaza, says Times of Israel
Israel plans to install Tony Blair as ‘humanitarian coordinator’ in Gaza in what it hopes will,
provid[e] its war effort with greater legitimacy
according to the Times of Israel, quoting the Ynet news outlet and ‘unnamed senior officials’. The Israeli government has already been in touch with Blair and discussions have been underway for weeks, with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu hoping,
to leverage Blair’s experience as former envoy to the region for the Middle East Quartet to temper international concerns over the civilian cost of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
International concerns are about the mass murder of Gazan civilians, including over five thousand children – but the Netanyahu regime appears to think that a PR exercise and a new coat of Blair-coloured paint will be enough to let Israel get on with its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza – which leaked intelligence ministry plans show it hopes will lead to clearing all of Gaza’s population that survives the mass bombing permanently into a permanent ‘tent city’ in the desert of southern Egypt.
The paper claims that the emphasis of the appointment will be “providing medical treatment and medicines, and on the possibility of evacuating the wounded and sick from the Strip” – but with no mention of actually ending the slaughter.
Shortly after the 7 October incident in southern Israel Blair – who has an office in Israel – issued a statement that claiming it meant that “decades of conventional western diplomacy around the Israel/Palestinian issue will need to be fundamentally re-thought“, apparently already justifying Israel’s onslaught and attempting to pre-empt international outrage at the mass murder of civilians:
As the full nature of the barbarity and disgusting savagery of Hamas’ attack on Israel becomes clear, which the perpetrators know full well will result not only in grief and tragedy for Israelis but also for the people of Gaza, it becomes clear also that decades of conventional western diplomacy around the Israeli/Palestinian issue will need to be fundamentally re-thought.
Tony Blair
However, eye-witnesses have attributed many, even most, of the Israeli deaths at the kibbutz to indiscriminate Israeli gunfire and shelling. No evidence has been provided for the more lurid Israeli claims of atrocities, with US president Joe Biden’s office being forced to admit he had not seen pictures he had claimed to see of mutilated babies and raped women. Israeli media recently admitted that claims of rape of Israeli women had evaporated.
A video circulated by supporters of Israel, which had been subtitled to suggest that it showed a Hamas operative threatening a woman with rape, has been shown by a Reuters fact check to say no such thing – in fact, the operative was telling another to leave the woman behind because she is female. Israeli survivors of the IDF onslaught – as well as at least one of the hostages so far released by Hamas – have commented on how kindly and politely they were treated by the Hamas fighters.
The plan exposes yet again the arrogance and contempt of the Israeli regime and the UK political establishment. Blair is widely despised as a war criminal because of his role in the 2003 Iraq invasion – and the lies about non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that he and his team told to justify it – that led to at the least several hundred thousand civilian deaths, with some believing the death toll to be as high as a million.
War criminals appointing war criminals, to legitimise war crime, about sums up the diseased national and international political order – and will do nothing to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza who are being murdered in their thousands in their homes, schools and hospitals to drive them out of their homeland.
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