Youtube says that the British documentary on "Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby" is not available "in your country" due to copyright restrictions. Smell the rat, do you? Conspiracy theorist! Here it is at information clearinghouse. Here it is at Pulse.
I’ve watched about half of it, and it’s great. It’s about my favorite subject, money. Channel 4 says– are you sitting down?– that politicians respond to financial contributions. Haaretz is upset:
A television program purporting to expose the unknown power and influence Britain’s pro-Israel lobby has triggered a wave of condemnation by British Jews, some of whom accused the report of stoking anti-Semitism…
"What did the program say?" [Jonathan] Hoffman [of the Zionist Federation] wrote on the Web site CiF Watch. "Well there were the allegations about money of course – no conspiracy is complete without some filthy lucre and if there is an Israel connection – so much the better..
Yes but what if it’s true, what if it’s about money and politics and a special interest that involves Jews? Do you not then report it? And let me repeat: it is impossible to talk about the Israel lobby without talking about contributions.
So which Zionist billionaire owns U Tube?
Google owns YouTube, and I’m not sure who actually owns Google, but the corporation seems to have some Zionist leanings anyway, pulling their ad engine from Mondoweiss being one notable example.
Anyway, the video was on Channel 4′s official documentary channel, and along with their other YouTube videos have all been blocked from viewing here in the US on the grounds of “copyright restrictions” within the past few hours, as I just watched “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby” there earlier today. It would be great to see some investigative reporting here to find what strings were pulled to make this happen.
Sergei Brin and Larry Page are both Jewish. Brin is a Russian emigre. Their ties to Israel don’t seem to suggest a fervent Zionism, either religious or nationalist.
I don’t think Larry Page is Jewish as a matter of fact.
I think the issue is that Google is closely aligned with national security (hence the pass on anti-trust for the big G., a privilege formerly enjoyed by Microsoft).
SEE: “ADL, YouTube launch partnership to fight video abuse”, By Max Socol, “Jerusalem Post”, 12/15/08
(excerpts) The Anti-Defamation League announced Sunday its recent expansion into the world of YouTube, the on-line video-sharing site.
The US-based advocacy group has officially partnered with the digital mediapowerhouse in an effort to combat hate speech and other forms of abuse.
As the largest Web-video hub, YouTube relies primarily on its users to hunt down and delete inappropriate content, or to ban abusive members. While the extent of the ADL’s role in that process is not yet known, the organization has already made a place for itself in YouTube’s new “Abuse and Safety Center,” where users are given advice directly from the ADL on how to confront hate speech…
…YouTube’s community guidelines define hate speech as “content that promotes hatred against members of a protected group” – a religious or ethnic minority, for example – without discussing the question of intent.
It is not clear what role, if any, the ADL will have in reshaping YouTube policy in this regard. As of now, the ADL appears merely to be supplementing YouTube’s current abuse-protection measures…
link to haaretz.com
link to palestinethinktank.com
“Yes but what if it’s true, what if it’s about money and politics and a special interest that involves Jews? Do you not then report it? And let me repeat: it is impossible to talk about the Israel lobby without talking about contributions.”
Exactly. And what if it’s about the grotesquely expanding inequality of income and wealth in this country and in Britain? It is also “impossible to talk about the Israel lobby without talking about” this inequality in which an alarmingly high proportion of the billionaires and other super-rich are Jews with close ties to Israel.
“Free-market” capitalism, as practiced in the US and Britain, is the lifeblood of the Israeli hegemon.
“A remittance State” is the correct name for Israel.
it is available by bittorrent at link to onebigtorrent.org
Thanks for the heads-up.
In the USA the working–lower middle-and middle-middle class pay a disproportionate share of all federal taxes; 47% of Americans pay no tax, and the top 15% pay very little compared to their income; and corporations very often pay no tax at all, and even when they do they just pass it on to the lower middle to middle class in increased prices:link to ntu.org
47% of Americans pay no tax,
So that’s what you guys talk about at the tea-parties, when you’re not bagging tea.
Citizen, I really hate to tyell you this, but it’s only at Mondowiess that anybody imagines that wingnuttia goes with anti-Zionism.
Anyway, watch out for the welfare queens in their Jew-canoes.
Moose, I missed you! Anyway, Citizen is almost right: it’s 43% — up from 21% between 1950 and 1990. From CBS last tax day:
This is fertile soil for BDS.
I never went to a tea party, and I never bagged tea. I never expressly or impliedly said
welfare queens, large or small, were moved by any type of Jewish “canoe.” All you do
in response to what I say is call me names, in this case imagining I go to right wing tea parties, am a wing-nut, and against the spirit and intent of welfare laws, and somehow
you link all that to anti-semitism, your “Jew-canoes.” Readers will notice as usual you don’t respond at all to what I actually say, nor do you counter what I say except by
calling me the bug-a-boos you dream up in your head. Talk about wing nuts.
Yeah… and I know its strange and potentially hypocritical of me to stand in the way of an attack on another commenter, but I don’t think that’s fair to Citizen. I don’t agree 100% with Citizen but I think mostly, he’s on track. If you want to beat up on an actual neoconservative, go after Michael LeFavour or OhioJoes, huh? I believe Citizen is one of the good guys.
What’s great is that Dispatches is sort of like the common man’s 60 Minutes, which means lotsa people are going to watch this.
Cut off the tax benefit of giving money to Israel — a foreign country, for crissake — and some of this will get reduced. Cut off foreign aid and our own money laundered through the Israeli PM’s office and Israeli banks wont come back to us for another wash.
The programme was a bit rubbish. As a Brit, who lives in Britain. I was dissapointed. It showed that some Jews are Rich. It showed that some rich Jews support Israel. It showed that some rich Jews support political parties. and that was pretty much it.
They said that 1 or 2 jews decided to stop funding a political party possibly because of their comments about Israel which is far from illegal.
Every piece of evidence they got for the program was in the public domain, transparently and easily available. The ending was quite telling when the (right wing, daily mail writing) presenter essentially said: ‘We tried really hard to find a conspiracy but there just isn’t one there….’. Well, FFS! I just wasted an hour of my life watching a programme that could have been really investigative and uncovered all sorts of shocking rubbish about the pro-israel lobby and the best they can come up with is that a few rich jews happen to support both Israel and political parties and there’s no conspiracy. Well great, thanks for getting my hopes up channel 4!
The most shocking things they had to say was about US-based organisations (HonestReporting and CAMERA), so much for the UK Israel lobby….pah!
This resonates with Yanks, Danielf90, because of the fiction over here that the press is the Fourth Estate, the fourth arm of the government, and is required as a check and and balance on government excesses, including untoward influence. Britain has the War Secrets Act, and can shut things down; you dont have our supposed press freedoms, nor do you have the indignant sense that you are owed them. We do, at least some of us.
Danielf90, a conspiracy is not necessary, systemic operation can be just as clandestine right out in the open. The process of how things function is just as damaging – if not more so. So nothing needs to be hidden per se, it just has to function in silence – and individuals can just keep saying “oh well, that is how things work,” but it makes it no less damaging. So saying that those with money and specific interests are the only ones listened to means you have a racket going on, the majority are hurt by it – but this is just supposed to be the way things naturally function.
What we have here Danielf90 (in the states) is a false idea how things function, people want to hold on to a fantasy – primarily because that is what they are taught both formally and informally all of their life. However, the press at least in the predominant sense of the main stream has never been the “fourth estate” (as a whole, there are some muckrakers inside but they are severely limited), as an example – we do not need “War Secrets,” we have “National Security.” The government is supposed to be “of, for and by the people,” but it is not (never has been). We have people running around saying they fear “socialism,” while the current system is doing just fine bilking them for everything they have and giving it to a privileged few. We have no crown and queen, we have a royal committee.
But the British government really is NOT in the hands of the Israel lobby and this is quite a formidable anti-Israel lobby in the UK too. You also have balance this with the fact that even with the BBCs generally neutral reporting, most of Britain supports Israel (in general) and so policy is generally going to be in that direction.
80% of conservative MPs and a similar proportion of Labour MPs are part of their ‘Friends of Israel’ groups probably because they see themselves as friends of Israel. The ‘Friends of Palestine’ parliamentary groups aren’t exactly tiny either and many MPs are members of both.
I was just dissapointed because the programme was just quite badly made and came to rubbish conclusions.
I had it up in my browser yesterday at this Youtube address. Now it just hangs.
Informationclearinghouse.com uses this disclaimer: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I think the channel 4 program would clearly fall under this statute. Does anyone know if there are actually legitimate copyright issues in Great Britain? I will be shocked and awed if this doesn’t turn out to be a case of Zionist censorship, but it would nice to be certain.
Lots of other Dispatches programs are floating about.
Yeah, I have it posting and functioning on my site through Viddler. If they think they can take it down from there, I would like to see them try it…lol
Oh, and by the way, if you want to proliferate the video, there is an embed code on my site
I can confirm that I also watched this on that same official Youtube link yesterday outside the UK, the one currently ‘not available in your country due to copyright restrictions’. However I rule out any conspiracy theories b/c UK television programs are frequently restricted overseas. They muste have just temporarily forgotten to put on the ‘restrict mode’ on that particular video.
Thanks for the info, jan_gdyn. However, just because many are restricted overseas doesn’t mean that this one wasn’t because of political pressure. A better test would be to check how many other Dispatches programs have been similarly restricted. I guess this falls into the category of trying to prove a negative, and we may never know with a degree of comfortable certainty.
German/European copyright laws was my special subject in my post graduate studies. Obviously there must quite a few copyrights on the documentary. There would be in Germany and there must be in England.
Special subject means a special topic you could choose from either economics or law.
More on this:
link to arabnews.com
Anshel Pfeffer comments in Ha’aretz on the Osborne report: Is the Israel lobby doing more harm than good? link to haaretz.com
What is important about the Dispatches program is its frankness – a clear delineation of the quid pro quo at work between israeli agents, their money and the politicians and other leaders who do their bidding.
As for the tax issues referenced in the comments above, what people seem to forget is that income tax is but one slice of the pie. People have to pay sales tax, Social Security tax, local, state, etc. and there is essentially a Debt Tax that we all pay. All of these taxes hit low and middle income earners harder than they do the rich. The rich may have a total tax burden that is on a percentage basis greater in terms of the Income Tax, but they have the money and the means to hide their assets and wiggle out of much or most of their overall tax burden. Only a VAT tax or Flat Tax of 25% on those earning over $250,000 will ever get the rich to pay their fair share.
The idea is, and it is perfectly “legal,” that you are paying it all so you can continue to be impoverished – how can you have a system with a few flourishing without it? The answer is you cannot, someone always pays, this is true nationally and internationally. However, this is the “home of the brave and the land of the free,” you just keep believing that…
THE GREAT DEAL
From my perspective it’s absolutely correct to point out direct (personal) versus indirect (mainly on purchases) taxes. Obviously the lower orders have not the least chance to deduct the indirect taxes they pay from their overall tax load. So don’t keep your eyes on income tax only, but on the larger rather complex systems.
I support much more simplified and more transparent tax laws. But: How many jobs depend on our complex tax systems? Another lobby? But even to us non-experts it’s not so impossible to reduce the load, at least over here in Germany. I hate to do it, that is dig through our complex tax laws, but whenever I needed it, I found the appropriate loops myself. The programs now available don’t do that job for you. So reducing taxes is a more common sport and not only the elite’s.
Also deeply interwoven in the larger lobby discourse is the discourse about democracy, at least it feels to me. Thus I agree with VR above that “National Security” seems to function at times as a code at time guarding special interests, and not just the Jewish Lobby’s. …
National Security: lobbies again, special interests. And as someone from the US military, I deeply respect by now, keeps repeating: Live isn’t fair.
That was meant to be: Life isn’t fair, of course.
The Guardian’s newspaper’s Comment is Free area is like nothing you’ll ever read in a U.S. paper. Here’s the main page:
link to guardian.co.uk
can someone of jewish background (speak hebrew) translate this for me… it is from a jewish friend who is basically a zionist and every once and a while he sends me something… the title for it is:
banned un watch-speech
link to hosem.gotdns.com
thanks…
figured it out already thanks…. un watch….. wikipedia has an overview on them… anyone have an overview on wikipedia? lol….
The Pro-Israel lobby in Britain:
link to opendemocracy.net
I’ve watched this programme on YouTube (via another blogger) and thought it was so-so. I’ve also just looked it up on InformationClearingHouse, via Phil’s link, and found it was fully available, although there was a strange note under the article (a screenshot from YouTube) giving the same message.
On the other hand, I found today, on War in Context, a programme ‘Death in Tehran’ (3 part video about Neda Soltan) also blocked to me. When I went over to Frontline. PBS, link to pbs.org
it was again blocked.
Is this a symptom of the beginning of the cyber-war between the US, Israel and Iran?
I live in the Philippines. Can’t you leave us out of it?
@cogit8 (but more to others)
“The Guardian’s newspaper’s Comment is Free area is like nothing you’ll ever read in a U.S. paper. Here’s the main page:
link to guardian.co.uk
The Guradian’s Comment is Free feature is absolutely as you say.
It doesn’t allow anti-Semitism, in the true sense, but does allow both critical and sympathetic opinions on Israel. Out of the three articles about Dispatches featured on that link, 2 are sympathetic to Israel, and one only is by the presenter himself, Peter Oborne.
All Comment is Free articles generate a huge number of comments, which are moderated, but most are published. Most criticise Israel, but there are the usual hasbara.
@MRW
“What’s great is that Dispatches is sort of like the common man’s 60 Minutes, which means lotsa people are going to watch this.”
When are you going to get over the idea that US TV programmes are better than anyone else’s? They’re 90% crap, and I don’t exclude 60 Minutes.
Until recently, I lived in Spain (Majorca) for half of each year. There, every Sunday morning, I read the local rag ‘Something-something des Baleares’ to find some very perceptive and informative articles about world events that I could find nowhere else.
Majorca is an island with about 1% of the population of the US (if that) but the local newspapers (and there are several) treat their readers seriously, and (mostly) tell the truth.
And if I want a cheap meal there, I don’t go to McDo’s. Enough said.
I know where I would rather live.
Since I’m on a roll now, I will leave you with this:
Comments from:
link to usmediaandisrael.com
Mark 11.12.09 at 10:44 am
Good point. My eye-opening happened about five years ago when then press secretary (Ari Fleischer) was asked about an Israeli gunship attack in an apartment complex in Ramalah. Israel was trying to kill a Palestinian leader who wasn’t there at the time. Their Black Hawk gunship dropped out of the sky, fired two missiles killing and wounding 20 women and children. Fleischer’s single-sentence to this cited attack was “I guess that was a bit heavy-handed.”
Nobody but nobody in the press called him on this flippant response to innocent deaths.
. 2 Carole 11.12.09 at 4:13 pm
Point of interest: A few months after writing that linked article
link to cbsnews.com
criticising media’s biased coverage of Israel, Tom Fenton “ended” his 34-year career with CBS.
. 3 Joyce in Rome 11.13.09 at 5:57 am
I often experience a Rashomon effect reading about an event reported in European and New York newspapers. The versions are totally different, as if they are describing separate incidents. I agree – the US media are like lapdogs to the Israel lobby.
. 4 BT in Cambridge 11.14.09 at 10:03 am
My epiphany occurred a couple of years ago. An Israeli settler driving back to his (illegal) settlement in the West Bank came upon two teenage boys who had set afire two tires in the road. The Israeli took out his AK47 killed one and shot the other in the back, paralyzing him for life. The Israeli courts gave him a 5 month SUSPENDED sentence. Not unlike Alabama in the 1870’s. No outrageous response in the US media–I read about it in a paragraph on page 4 of the Boston Globe.
. 5 joe 11.16.09 at 8:27 am
Americans are uninformed idiots.
. 6 Martha 11.19.09 at 3:32 am
As you have done, it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
. 7 Chris 11.20.09 at 1:40 am
Well said Martha
Are pro-Israel activists inside Google censoring Youtube, Google Blogs, Google News and other Google services with an Israeli agenda in mind? Will Google be transformed into an even more oppressively controlled and narrow media property than ABC, CBS, Fox News, etc.? Since Google is rapidly becoming the most powerful media property on the planet, it seems important to get to the bottom of these issues. Where precisely do Sergey Brin and Larry Page stand on these matters? Which documents and channels are being censored on Google and on what grounds? The editorial process at Google should be fully transparent and accountable, including the identities and affiliations of the editors and censors.
Many times the issue is susceptibility to outside suggestion or pressure. As an example you have Google Earth which was manipulated by ZOA in regard to names of cities in Israel. At one time there was Palestinian towns – cities etc., and the ZOA did not want it noted that they built their cities on ethnically cleansed areas.
ZOA CONVINCES GOOGLE TO CHANGE THE EARTH
So that now, because of pressure, one cannot even get the correct historical data of the earth in this area. You see it in other areas Like Facebook, in regard to East Jerusalem naming it for Israel of Palestine, etc. I am afraid not only are their internal challenges in these organizations but also tremendous external pressure – what we need is opposing force to this onslaught.
Sean, this really could be a copyright issue. Why doesn’t somebody contact C4 or the author?
Things (like UTube) that become effective monopolies generally attract the attention of government regulators at some point.
Microsoft learned this to its sorrow, and I suspect Google soon will, too.
The suckers just tried to cut me off with my video link – uh oh, too bad I am back…LOL
(Used to be v…)