In Part 1 of this series we examined the evidence that strongly suggests Hamas‘ 7th of October Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Israel was assisted by an Israeli LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) False Flag operation.
In Part 2 we looked at the potential motives of the Israeli far-right Zionist movement and Hamas for their possible complicity in an Israeli LIHOP.
We also considered the vision of a New Middle East (NME), as proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), as a suspected LIHOP motive.
However, Netanyahu’s proposed NME model isn’t the only potential NME that could have provided motivation.
In addition, there are other objectives that may have elicited widespread support for an Israeli LIHOP from global ‘influencers.’
We will examine those possible motives in this article.
The Multipolar New Middle East Motive
Following the International Criminal Court’s (ICJ’s) provisional measures order stating that South Africa’s accusation of genocide against Israel is “plausible,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the UN Security Council:
Last week’s clear and repeated rejection of the two-state solution at the highest levels of the Israeli government is unacceptable. [. . .] This refusal, and the denial of the right to statehood to the Palestinian people, would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security. The entire population of Gaza is being subjected to destruction on a scale and speed unprecedented in history. Nothing can justify the collective punishment of the people of Gaza.
With some considerable justification, the Palestinian Authority (PA) permanent representative to the UN, Riyad Mansour, said that the world was calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Indeed, that appears to be the case. A full ceasefire is something few people on this planet would disagree with.
But with Netanyahu’s far-right government stubbornly refusing to budge, how is that possibly going to happen?
An influential Western think tank called the Lowy Institute believes the situation in Gaza and the Middle East warrants a re-imagining of the international order. With Rothschild & Co. as its “partner” organisation, the Australian-based Lowy Institute is funded by the Rothschilds, by British-Australian multinational company Rio Tinto, and by the Australian government. Other Lowy members and contributors include KPMG, Google, Amazon, HSBC, Mastercard and the Australian central bank.
Noting how the slaughter in Gaza had been broadcast to television audiences globally, the Lowy Institute stated:
The conflict in Gaza has become the latest theatre of nightmares in an increasingly fragmented and chaotic world. The sheer horror of Hamas’ terrorist assault on southern Israel, and the mounting number of Palestinian civilian casualties arising from the Israeli response, have stunned television audiences around the globe and left policymakers flatfooted. [. . .] [T]he conflict has become a microcosm of global disorder and anarchy. It has highlighted the breakdown of international norms, the diminished authority of the United States, and the growing divide between the West and the Global South. [. . .] Hamas’ brutal actions have revealed the limits of American authority, in the Middle East and beyond. The United States remains by far the strongest power in the world, but its relative influence is much diminished. [. . .] [T]he liberal vision of a US-led “rules-based international order” has suffered another devastating setback. Outside Washington’s allies, few believe this order possesses either moral legitimacy or political credibility. Its “rules” are seen as self-serving — a code of the West, by the West, for the West. Rarely has the United States, and the West in general, seemed more out of sync with the rest of the world. [. . .] [T]here is no replacement on the horizon. The “multipolar order” dreamt up by Russian and, to a lesser extent, Chinese policymakers is an illusion. [. . .] [T]he usual recipes for international problem-solving are no longer fit for purpose. Looking ahead, the choice is stark. Leaders can cling on to anachronistic tropes — the “rules-based order,” the illusion of “universal” values, the myth of great power (“multipolar”) governance, and an obsessive preoccupation with geopolitical competition. Or they can get real and accept that today’s threats and challenges — from conflict in the Middle East to anthropogenic climate change — require fundamentally different, more inclusive and cooperative approaches.
It is very important to understand the argument presented by this Rothschild think tank. It is firmly stating not only that the global geopolitical dominance of the US-led “rules-based international order” is over but also that the “diminishing authority of the United States” is observable through the lens of the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.
It notes that, other than “Washington’s allies,” the whole world now knows the “rules-based international order” has no “moral legitimacy or political credibility.” Unlike previous conflicts, such as the destruction of Libya or of Iraq or the use of terrorist proxies in Syria, all of which equally revealed the lack on any Western “moral legitimacy,” Western audiences have now been shown this evident fact on their TV screens. Having completely ignored or denied the violent crimes of Western imperialism for generations, finally, on this occasion, at this time, the Western legacy media has decided reveal the full horror of Western military power.
According to the Lowy Institute, acceptance of the seemingly intractable conflict in the Middle East now means that “the usual recipes for international problem-solving are no longer fit for purpose.” A new system of global governance is required, Lowy contends.
The Institute asserts that “more inclusive and cooperative approaches” to international order are now necessary. It further claims that the alternative of the multipolar world order has been “dreamt up” by the Russian government and, “to a lesser extent,” the Chinese government.
But that isn’t true at all. The notion of a multipolar global order can be traced back to the “three-power world” envisaged by the Rhodes-Milner Group between WWI and WWII and also to the regionalised world envisaged by the Rockefellers in the 1960s and, more recently, to the WEF’s so-called Great Reset, which outlines a world of smaller regions, or poles.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the Iran-Saudi agreement was an exemplar of the “wave of reconciliation” spreading throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). With Syria rejoining the Arab League and Saudi Arabia agreeing to end its blockade of Qatar—a major financier of Hamas—Wang’s hopes seemed well-placed.
The Chinese-backed Iran-Saudi deal was followed in September 2023 by publication of the Chinese government’s vision for a new model of global governance, titled “A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions.” That document states:
After the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, China asserted that peace and development are the underlying trends of the times. It advocated multipolarity and greater democracy in international relations [. . .]. China has initiated a range of visionary initiatives, including [. . .] the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, and promoted a set of approaches to global governance.
In their 2020 book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, WEF representatives Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret wrote:
In this messy new world defined by a shift towards multipolarity and intense competition for influence, the conflicts or tensions will no longer be driven by ideology (with the partial and limited exception of radical Islam), but spurred by nationalism and the competition for resources. If no one power can enforce order, our world will suffer from a global order deficit. — [C19: TGR: P76]
Just three years later, the Chinese government wrote:
The governance deficit is more severe. The world is facing multiple governance crises. The energy crisis, food crisis, and debt crisis are intensifying. Global climate governance is urgently needed. [. . .] The Covid-19 pandemic is a mirror through which we have observed that the global governance system is falling further behind. [. . .] It has to be reformed and improved.
In order to fix the “global governance” or “global order” deficit, the Chinese government stressed its desire to:
[M]ake sure that the future of the world is determined by all, that international rules are written by all, that global affairs are governed by all, and that the fruits of development are shared by all.
Of course, by “all,” China didn’t literally mean “all” of us. The world numbers eight billion humans. We can’t “all” decide what every single one of our fellow human beings can or cannot do, should or should not do. Thus, when the Chinese government says the future will be “determined by all” it does not genuinely mean “all.” It simply means that our (s)elected representatives will decide everything for us in a supposedly “new” system of multipolar global governance.
The Chinese government is not proposing to upend the existing global governance system. China’s Global Community of Shared Future “does not mean that the international system should be dismantled or started afresh.” Instead, its aim is to make “global governance more just and equitable.”
This will be achieved by ridding the world of “might is right” in a “zero sum game” of winners—but mainly losers. In its place, every nation will work together for the “common good.” China’s approach is relatively straightforward:
China maintains that for the world, there is only one system, which is the international system with the United Nations at its core, that there is only one order, which is the international order based on international law, and that there is only one set of rules, which is the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. China actively participates in and leads the reform of the global governance system.
Naturally, some of us might feel that global governance is an appalling idea and one of the most dangerous and oppressive concepts ever conceived by humanity. But our view is no more up for discussion in the Chinese government’s “Shared Future” than it is in the WEF’s “Great Reset.”
The model of multipolar global governance advocated by the Chinese government is set to be “only one [global] order” with just “one set of rules.” According to its “Shared Future” document, this multipolar global governance system “is the international system with the United Nations at its core.” The only proposed difference between this vision and the so-called US-led “rules-based international order ” is allegedly that the supposed “international rules” will be “written by all.”
This is exactly the “more inclusive and cooperative” approach to “global order” that the Lowy Institute claims is essential. Clearly, the Lowy Institute is trying to create a false dichotomy between the Western vision of the new global order and multipolarity. This claim by Lowy appears to be part of the Russia and China blame game favoured by the Western establishment. Acknowledged agreement would undermine the adversarial narrative that the Lowy Institute evidently wants Western electorates to believe. But the agreement between East and West on humanity’s “shared future” is glaringly obvious.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin famously said, “[T]here are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” While the constantly shifting post-WWII regional geopolitics of the Middle East could never be described as uneventful, decades of US domination in the region have been overturned in what feels like a matter of months.
First, Al-Aqsa Flood and the Israeli response ended any possibility of Abraham Accord-like “normalisation” between Saudi Arabia and Israel without a firm commitment from Israel on negotiating a genuine independent Palestinian state. The UAE, while more enthusiastic about the Abraham Accords, can no longer ignore the Palestinian issue either.
If Hamas’ objective was to drag Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and hence the Arab League, back to its 2002 Beirut summit commitment, it succeeded. Or, rather, it is more accurate to say, Israel’s response to Al-Aqsa Flood ended any prospect of “normalisation” without establishing Palestinian sovereign rights. Or so it would seem.
On 1st January 2024, Egypt, the UAE and Iran officially joined the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—economic bloc, forming a new and yet to be formally named BRICS+ group. Saudi Arabia initially seemed hesitant to join. For a country so closely aligned to US regional interests, its wavering was perhaps understandable.
Saudi Trade Minister Majid al-Qasabi made comments at Davos in mid-January indicating that the Kingdom had let the 1st January deadline pass without officially accepting the invitation. For its part, Russia, through presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, said it considered Riyadh’s membership “very important” and was working to ensure Saudi accession. The diplomatic efforts bore fruit: On 31st January it was announced that Saudi Arabia had officially joined the BRICS+ alliance.
Meanwhile, Iran and Saudi Arabia are strengthening their trade and economic relationship. Their rapport has enabled Saudi Arabia to suddenly offer itself as a diplomatic channel between the US and Iran. At the same time, while the US continues to try to maintain it its hitherto close relationship and defence and security agreements with Saudi Arabia, Riyadh’s reinvigorated support for Palestinian statehood has become non-negotiable.
With the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia seemingly flourishing and with those two nations and the UAE and Egypt aligned with BRICS+ interests, Israel’s Western backers are not only seen as marginalised but are actively being marginalised on the visible global stage.
But perhaps not all is as it seems?
In December 2023 a UN resolution saw 153 of the world’s 195 countries united against Israel’s attack on the Palestinians, demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Notably, even the Western legacy media, such as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Sky News and others, were increasingly featuring the horrors of the Gaza slaughter and telling their readers that the US was looking “increasingly isolated on the world stage.”
That same month, a few weeks before the Davos meeting, the global “Superclass“—as David Rothkopf generously described them—convened at the Doha Forum in Qatar. Recognising that fragmentation is “rippling through geopolitics” and that it was beginning to “polarize the global order,” the theme of Doha, in keeping with China’s stated multipolar plan, was “Building Shared Futures.”
Despite the US administration’s ongoing military support for the Israeli government’s attack on Palestinian civilians, the Netanyahu far-right coalition is now openly defiant of US Middle East foreign policy. A rift between the two administrations was already becoming evident. The Zionists have harshly criticised US policy toward Iran and, even more strikingly, Israel has refused to join the Western powers’ sanction against Russia and hasn’t offered military support to Ukraine.
The fissure between the the US and Israel appears to have widened as a result of Israel’s brutal response to Al-Aqsa Flood. While the US administration advocates a two-state solution that would see the formation of an independent Palestinian state, Netanyahu has absolutely ruled out this possibility:
I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over the entire area west of [the river] Jordan — and this is irreconcilable with a Palestinian state.
Recent comments by US president Joe Biden, accusing Israel of acting “over the top” and calling for a sustained ceasefire only serve to emphasise the visible divisions. While Biden’s rhetoric stands in stark contrast to US continued military assistance to Israel, clearly the US administration is happy to publicly air accusations levelled against Israel.
Midst US/Israel tensions, Israel’s relationship with China, on the other hand, has improved markedly:
In May 2013, China and Israel signed cooperation agreements in various fields including trade, investment, technology, education, and agriculture in Beijing. In March 2017, China and Israel jointly announced the establishment of a comprehensive innovation partnership, aiming to strengthen technological innovation and deepen cooperation in areas such as basic science, modern agriculture, clean energy, and biomedicine under the framework of BRI. [. . .] China’s interactions with Middle Eastern countries have remained stable, with a significant increase since the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China has closer interactions with countries such as Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Israel.
To put the increasing Israel/China amity into perspective, between 1992 and 2017, the volume of overall trade between them multiplied 200 times over. The blossoming trade relationship includes the Chinese Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) construction of Israel’s enormous automated port in Haifa as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
As reported by Dr Nadia Helmie, associate professor of political science at Beni Suef University, the director of the Northeast Asia Department at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hagai Shagrir, said in 2023:
The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative brings more business opportunities to Israeli companies in the field of infrastructure projects, and Israel considers itself part of the 21st century Maritime Silk Road, which makes its way from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean. [. . .] The Belt and Road Initiative is a long-term vision and a positive initiative.
The proposed Eilat-Ashdod Port Railway, sometimes referred to as the Red-Med Railway, is a potential BRI alternative to Suez that could largely negate the need for the Ben Gurion Canal. Though progress on the railway has stalled, the current situation certainly reignites the possibility of this BRI infrastructure proceeding.
It was broadly recognised at the Doha Forum that Israel’s genocidal attack on the Palestinians ended the current “normalisation” process. The Qatari news outlet Al-Jazeera reported that Israel’s actions were viewed in Doha to be moving the region toward a “multipolar world away from the hegemony of the United States.”
While the opinion of the Lowy Institute is notable, in Western-aligned policy think-tank terms, the expressed opinions of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) carry even more weight. Speaking at the Doha Forum, Galip Dalay, consulting fellow on regional order in the Middle East for Chatham House, said:
Maybe ten or twenty years ago you probably would tend to discuss it [the Middle East] more as a US-centric region. [. . .] But now the idea of the process of multipolarity in the region’s relationship with foreign powers [is] gaining currency. We have seen that China has increased its footprint in the region’s economy [and] Russia in the region’s security.
In recognition of this 21st century geopolitical reality in the Middle East, Dalay continued to discuss the impact of Israel’s ‘plausible’ genocide of Palestinians:
[. . . Israel’s actions in Gaza] are dramatically changing all aspects of these questions. [. . .] Normalisation [between Saudi Arabia and Israel] can no longer happen with no regard to the Palestinians. [. . .] The US has recently been engaged in activities to [. . .] contain the role of Russia and China in the region. [. . .] [T]he IMEC [India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor] with India [. . .] was premised on the idea of trans-regional connectivity [from] India to Europe, through the Middle East. [. . .] [T]he logic of it was that it would rival, or contain, China’s role in the region. [. . .] This project [IMEC] is obsolete for all means and purposes at this stage.
According to Galip Dalay, Israel’s horrific military response to Al-Aqsa Flood is strengthening the case for a multipolar world order and bolstering Russia and China’s influence in the Middle East. It is directly undermining US strategies to contain that influence—IMEC, for example—and is effectively advancing Iran’s political cause in the region.
The temptation among some analysts is to assume that leading and seemingly Western-aligned organisations, such as the World Economic Forum, are opposed to this geopolitical and global economic shift toward a multipolar global governance order. Evidently, this simply is not the case.
Not only are prominent Western policy think tanks openly discussing the end of the US-led order and strategically planning for its multipolar replacement, so-called Western-centric groups like the WEF are thinking the same way. With regard to the BRI, which China and Russia consider to be among the multipolar “visionary initiatives,” the WEF states:
The World Economic Forum shares the goals of the BRI and offers its full support to achieve success.
It should therefore come as no surprise to hear Børge Brende, the WEF President, speaking on a Doha Forum-related podcast, say [go to 07:35 minutes]:
Multipolarity is potentially a positive thing for the world, moving forward, with the big caveat that we also need the world to be multilateralist on top of it, where we agree on some rules.
This suggests a radically different “New Middle East.” As BRICS+ members Saudi Arabia, Russia, the UAE and Brazil will collectively control more 37% of the global oil export market and, with Egypt joining the alliance, the BRICS+ group—or whatever it may be renamed—will have geopolitical control of the Suez-reliant trade routes. If we then consider the potential impact of the BRI and Israel’s participation, the potential NME that could emerge represents a seismic geopolitical shift.
This may seem like a positive development for the Palestinians, as it appears to be predicated upon acceptance of a Palestinian state. We can certainly hope that is the case. But in the hard-nosed reality of regional geopolitics, the Arab League nations have already demonstrated their willingness to form trade partnerships and alliances with scant disregard for Palestinian interests.
In addition, China’s regional ambitions don’t necessarily benefit the Palestinians either. Many of the facial recognition cameras and associated “identification” software systems used by Israel to oppress and target Palestinians are supplied by the “multipolar” Chinese majority state-owned technology corporation Hikvision.
Amnesty International has called this surveillance operation “automated apartheid.” Referring to Hikvision’s part in the Palestinian “lockdowns” and oppressive restrictions and its complicity in the targeting of Palestinians, Hikvision-Israel states:
Hikvision is committed to serving various industries through its cutting-edge technologies of machine perception, artificial intelligence, and big data, leading the future of AIoT [artificial intelligence of things]: Through comprehensive machine perception technologies, we aim to help people better connect with the world around them.”
Israel’s state partnership with the Chinese state is restricting Palestinians’ movements, identifying them for both Israeli settler violence and state violence and cutting them off from “the world around them.” We shouldn’t just assume that the transition to a multipolar version of the NME will automatically benefit oppressed people.
By historically allying itself with the power of the US, Israel has sought to contain the regional power of Iran, a country that does not recognise Israeli sovereignty. But, as noted by economist Philip Pilkington, in a multipolar global governance order, in an essentially BRICS-led NME, as a valued BRI partner, Israel would be afforded another potential method of “containment” with regard to Iran.
Due to US hostility, Iran’s interests are served by closer trade relations with the BRICS+ group—most notably with China. The two nations have a strategic partnership that has seen Iran participate fully in both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the BRI. In addition to being an organisation for economic partnership, the SCO is also a defence partnership and a potential counterweight to NATO.
Israel is already positioning itself as a valuable BRI partner, which is something China prioritises. In addition, Israel has a well-formed financial sector with close financial ties to Western financial markets. Pilkington argues that Israel is in a position to become the key Middle East financial hub. As such, unless Iran decides to act independently of the SCO and thus jeopardise its lifeline economic partnerships, Israel wouldn’t necessarily need the protection of US military might.
Israel has already established itself as a financial technology (fintech) leader in the Middle East and, indeed, globally. Through such initiatives as the China-Israel Innovation Center (CIIC), Israel fintech companies have not only attracted inward investment from BRICS+ nations but have established solid links in the Haidian district of Beijing, known as China’s “Silicon Valley.”
Israel is leading on digital payment technology development and pushing ahead with exploration of its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), called the Digital Shekel. Iran is equally eager to push forward with BRICS+ fintech innovations, particularly a CBDC. There are many indications that Pilkington’s thesis may be sound.
In addition, contrary to the fake narratives we are fed in the West, many powerful globalist forces, such as the 200 leading global corporations represented by the WEF, and formative Western policy thinks tanks, like the Lowy Institute and Chatham House, are supportive of the shift away from a US-led rules-based international order and toward the “more inclusive and cooperative” model nominally offered by multipolarity.
It is obvious that Al-Aqsa Flood was exploited as a casus belli by the Israeli state. But it is less obvious that Israel’s subsequent plausible genocide of the Palestinians was designed to benefit US-led regional geopolitical interests. Israel’s extreme violence is evidently benefiting the emergence of a global multipolar order and, with it, an NME potentially dominated by the Belt and Road Initiative.
Therefore, we should also consider the possibility that Palestinians are being sacrificed to give birth to the multipolar world order and that globalist forces have potentially influenced an Israeli LIHOP operation to set the transformation in motion. The staunch advocates of multipolarity, especially those in the West who see it as a potential solution to the travesties of Western imperialism, will bridle at this suggestion. But that is no reason to overlook the possibility. We should consider all potential suspects wherever they reside.
The Global Information Control Motive
At the World Economic Forum’s recent Davos 2024 gathering, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave a keynote speech in which she said:
For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation [. . .]. And this makes the theme of this year’s Davos meeting even more relevant. Rebuilding trust. [. . .] This is a time to build trust. [. . .] Many of the solutions lie not only in countries working together, but crucially, on businesses and governments, businesses and democracies working together. It has never been more important for the public and private sector to create new connective tissue [. . .]. While governments hold many of the levers to deal with the great challenges of our time, businesses have the innovation, the technology, the talents to deliver the solutions we need to fight threats like climate change or industrial-scale disinformation [. . .], because our democracies and our businesses have interests that align.
While von der Leyen highlights the partnership between “businesses and democracies,” that partnership also extends to the countries she has repeatedly referred to as autocracies. This censorship and information control partnership is truly global and is not restricted to so-called Western “democracies.”
If we consider this global public-private partnership (G3P), its desperation to tackle “disinformation”—in an attempt to regain “trust”—in no way signifies that it is remotely concerned about the spread of false or misleading information. The G3P has no interest in either objective reporting or information accuracy. Rather, it is engaged in a global censorship campaign exclusively focused on regaining control of information for its own benefit.
To “trust,” in this context, means to “believe.” All that matters to the G3P is that you believe whatever it tells you. The G3P constantly offers purported rationales to convince us to accept the alleged need for it to control information. Both Al-Aqsa Flood and the Israeli response to it have been exploited as further claimed justifications for curtailing free speech. Nothing could be more anti-democratic.
On 13th October 2023, three months prior to her recent Davos address, von der Leyen spoke of Israel’s military response to Al-Aqsa Flood:
We should observe very closely those who stand to gain from a perpetuating conflict in the Middle East, like Iran and Russia. So now is the time to work even more closely with Israel and with countries in the region for stability and against terror. [. . .] We are deeply concerned by the spread of online hate speech and fake news, which are proliferating at worrying speed and are even difficult to keep track of. We are already in contact with social media platforms to remind them of their obligations. There is no place and zero tolerance for hate in Europe, both online and offline, against anyone.
While von der Leyen claimed to have “zero tolerance” for hate, she offered some geopolitical bogeymen—Iran and Russia—for everyone to “hate.” She raised the fearful spectre of a widening conflict, potentially leading to global war, and the return of international terrorism—after its pseudopandemic hiatus—and suggested that this somehow legitimised the EU’s despotic claimed right to control information “both online and offline.”
The EU pounced on the heady emotional environment “triggered” by Al-Aqsa Flood to pressurise social media platforms to police alleged disinformation. For example, it has launched formal investigations of Elon Musk’s ‘X’ platform for suspected breaches of the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA). The EU claims it is concerned that “violent terrorist content” and so-called “hate speech” is spreading online.
In the months since Al-Aqsa Flood, while Palestinian news sites, activists, journalists, students, and Arab citizens in Israel have had their online accounts censored or shut down, social media sites like Meta and ‘X’ have allowed the most extreme calls for violence against Palestinians—including calls to flatten, erase or destroy Gaza—to freely circulate on their platforms.
The EU doesn’t seem at all concerned about this strand of so-called “hate speech.” Its selection of the “content” it wishes to censor is evidently politically biased and has nothing to do with alleged concerns about hateful rhetoric.
It appears that Palestinians’ digital right to free speech was removed, all because some foreign governments decided to label much of it as either “disinformation” or “violent terrorist content.” By flexing its DSA muscles, the EU is rebuilding “trust” by trying to limit and control the information we access and the topics we discuss on social media. By controlling the narrative, it hopes to manipulate our minds, silence our speech, and quash our ability to act upon our ideals.
As we noted in Part 1, a conspicuous aspect of the legacy media’s reporting of Al-Aqsa Flood is its incessant use of propaganda and disinformation. These tactics are deployed to manipulate the online conversation in an effort to justify censorship.
For example, two journalists at the UK-based Daily Mail uncritically reported Ben-Zion’s allegations of Hamas decapitating babies, as did many other legacy media outlets, including CNN and Fox News. Yet, when it later emerged that there was no evident basis for the story, the same legacy media claimed:
Reports that Israeli soldiers discovered babies that had been beheaded in the Kfar Aza kibbutz are circulating on social and traditional media outlets around the world. [. . .] Claims Hamas fighters beheaded babies have only been reported by one journalist. [. . .] Sky’s Data and Forensics unit [. . . ] adds: “Social media has been awash with misinformation about the situation in Israel and Gaza since the war broke out.”
Claiming that the story was “only reported by one journalist” was deliberately misleading—a hallmark of disinformation. Sure, the story originated with one journalist, but it was picked up on and reported by almost the entire legacy media. Each outlet circulated its own version of this “fake news,” both online and off. While it was true that social media was “awash with misinformation,” in this case and in many others that “misinformation” emanated directly from the mouths and keyboards of legacy media.
The Washington Post (WP) is a voice of the US establishment. In an article titled “A flood of misinformation shapes views of Israel-Gaza conflict,” WP wrote:
[A] volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders. Tech platforms, diminished from waves of layoffs, have receded from policing falsehoods, disinformation and hate speech online. [. . .] [A] barrage of images, memes and testimonials is making it difficult to assess what is real. Activists in the region warn that viral horror stories that turn out not to be true may lead people to further distrust authority figures — and could spark hate, violence and retaliation against innocent people.
This WP article was parroting the claims of the EU and other intergovernmental organisations and governments. In reality, state-aligned propaganda outlets created and reported a fake story, spread it across their social media accounts and then attacked social media users for spreading the propaganda these very media outlets had concocted.
The global legacy news agencies then tried to further manipulate us by dispatching “fact checkers” to convince us that we the people cannot “sort fact from fiction.” We were told by these “fact checkers” to believe that our consequent “distrust [in] authority figures [. . .] could spark hate, violence and retaliation against innocent people.”
The EU has warned of more terrorism as a consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood, as have a number of European government officials. We are clearly being cajoled into accepting claimed justification for a potential reinvigorated “war on terror.”
There is no clear evidence that elements within the EU actively promoted an Israeli LIHOP operation. That said, it is highly likely that, at some level, interested parties in EU member states would have been aware of any such operation if it existed. The EU has extensive links to Israeli intelligence. Other European states, such as the UK, have equally deep intelligence, defence and security agreements with Israel.
The legacy media’s propagandistic reporting of the Al-Aqsa Flood is part of a continuum that began with the pseudopandemic. The UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) said as much when, In late 2021, it stated:
Since the onset of the pandemic, the [. . .] (CTED) has explored its impact on global terrorism. In doing so, it has continued to collaborate with all its partners — including Member State [. . .], civil society organizations (CSOs), and the private sector. [. . .] Terrorists and violent extremists have also sought to exploit pandemic-related sociocultural restrictions that have led people around the world to spend increasing time online, by strengthening their efforts to spread propaganda, recruit, and radicalize via virtual platforms [. . .]. [T]here is as yet limited data on the long-term impacts of those recruitment and radicalization to violence efforts. Experts [. . .] suggest that pandemic-related changes in financial behaviours (especially the increase in the volume of contactless transactions and increased digital onboarding) have exacerbated terrorism-financing vulnerabilities, thereby impacting financial institutions’ ability to conduct customer due diligence (CDD) and detect anomalies.
Let’s recap: Since 2020, we have been asked to believe that the alleged pandemic required governments to lock us in our own homes and shut down our functioning economies. These government orders inevitably led to us conducting more aspects of our daily lives on the internet, which naturally increased our online activity. In particular, we shifted even further toward digital transactions. Although the UN has only “limited data” to back up its claims, it alleges that “terrorists” exploited this uptick in digital activity to spread recruitment propaganda and to gather funds by capitalising on weaknesses in the digital payment infrastructure. Shortcomings in the Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes of private financial institutions supposedly exacerbated this purported increase in the financing of so-called terrorists.
Not only does this scenario supposedly require that international organisations like the EU censor online communications, in keeping with UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, the EU also contends that it is now necessary to roll out digital identity wallets. These wallets have been developed by the EU in partnership with European defence contractors, such as Thales. The EU claims its needs to use digital ID to control and monitor our access to both public and private services, such as banking and the internet, for the purpose of improving CDD and tackling the alleged terrorist financing problem.
We have used the EU as a case study here, but this information control agenda is not confined to the EU; it is global. For example, in a joint statement issued just weeks before Russia formally entered the eight-year-long war in Ukraine, Presidents Xi and Putin declared:
The sides [Russian Federation and Chinese governments] reiterate their readiness to deepen cooperation in the field of international information security and to contribute to building an open, secure, sustainable and accessible ICT [information and communication technology] environment. [. . .] The sides [. . .] support the work of the relevant Ad Hoc Committee of Governmental Experts, facilitate the negotiations within the United Nations for the elaboration of an international convention on countering the use of ICTs for criminal purposes.
What is this proposed convention the leaders of China and Russia referred to? Its full name is the International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, but it’s commonly referred to as the UN Cybercrime Treaty. The purpose of this envisaged UN Cybercrime Treaty is to criminalise the sharing of information that “may have an adverse impact on States, enterprises and the well-being of individuals and society.” As we can see by the above statement, this is an objective that the Russian and Chinese governments equally support.
The “Ad Hoc Committee” that they mentioned and that the Chinese and Russian governments endorse, is not comprised of only “governmental experts,” however. The claim in the joint Russian and Chinese statement, that just governments are making these decisions, is deceptive. Proof lies in this UN statement:
[. . .] [N]on-governmental organizations in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council are invited to participate in the work of the Ad Hoc Committee [. . .]. [C]ivil society organizations, academic institutions and private sector organizations [. . .] are also invited to participate in the sessions.
The list of “stakeholders” currently participating in the “Ad Hoc Committee” and formulating a Global Cybercrime Treaty include Microsoft, Google, and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC UK), whose members include Deloitte, HSBC, IBM, AIG and the Bank of China.
The Chinese government is among those entities eager to use the proposed treaty to criminalise the “dissemination of false information.” What constitutes “false information”? The answer will be decreed by worldwide governments, intergovernmental organisations and their private partners (the G3P).
So, as we can see, the EU is by no means alone in its dictatorial wish to censor and control information “both online and offline.” Nearly every government and major corporation on Earth supports the implementation of global digital ID and all other oppressive components of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Governments insist that using digital ID to monitor and control all our transactions and financial activity is essential to prevent ostensible terrorist financing. As governments and their corporate partners see it, Al-Aqsa Flood was another “terrorist” attack that greatly benefited their interests.
What we have laid out is the “Shared Future” that multipolarity promises to deliver. All “stakeholders” and all nation-states are eager for us to accept—even eagerly embrace—multipolarity. Al-Aqsa Flood has evidently provided a massive boost in this multiyear transitional process—certainly to the Middle East’s transformation.
Truly, as Ursula von der Leyen advised, we should “observe very closely those who stands to gain from a perpetuating conflict in the Middle East.”
