Ukraine: The Disinformation War, by Declan Hayes
Radio 4’s hit piece was a personalized attack on a number of British-based academics, who had been recently named and shamed in the British House of Commons for not being sufficiently Russophobic
Ukraine: The Disinformation War was the title of the latest piece of disinformation the state funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) showcased to support Britain’s Ukrainian war and to suppress dissent on its home front.
Radio 4’s hit piece was a personalized attack on a number of British-based academics, who had been recently named and shamed in the British House of Commons for not being sufficiently Russophobic; the House of Commons is the lower house of the British Parliament; it is where Wee Joe Devlin, a member for Belfast, was beaten within an inch of his life by his fellow MPs for denouncing British war crimes in Ireland as more of his fellow MPs called for him to be summarily murdered. As several MPs have recently been convicted of child sex rape charges and more are facing trial for sexually assaulting their fellow MPs, its pronouncements should be discounted accordingly.
As, of course should those of the BBC for reasons adumbrated below and for others which Justin Schlosberg, Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward outlined in their tweets following this further attack on them by the BBC and its dark allies.
In its pretenses to impartiality, the BBC claim that these academics are so “driven by a conviction that Western governments are responsible for many of the world’s ills” that they “have shared misinformation in their attempts to raise questions about the official narrative of the war” leading “their detractors [to] say they are useful to Vladimir Putin” and for the academics to counter claim “there’s a McCarthyist witch hunt against them”.
Within that pre-cut British imperialist box, a few carefully edited soundbites from Schlosberg and their other targets, as well as a deluge of disinformation from their targets’ students and critics comprise this BBC kangaroo court by radio.
J’accuse
Hayward’s primary crime seems to be he mentioned a contentious 2018 chemical gas attack in Syria to opine that there are at least two versions to what actually happened. For the record and for reasons I address below, I believe all such attacks were orchestrated by the Syrian rebels, aided and abetted by the BBC and MI5. Hayward, importantly, is not that forthright. He believes, on the evidence in front of his nose, and as one who writes academic articles on disinformation, that further inquiries are needed to fully unmask the real culprits, whoever they may be, of the 2018 Douma and 2022 Bucha attacks. Hayward is, in essence, agnostic as, perhaps, academics and the BBC should be.
With regards to the Bucha atrocities, which I addressed in an earlier article, and which the BBC is using to attack Hayward et al, though a full investigation is likewise needed into unmasking those culprits, the British regime have vetoed such a call in the UN. But, as such an investigation must be impartial to be worthwhile, that would, of course, exclude the BBC and those they use to fatten out hit pieces like this.
Round Up the Usual Suspects
In their efforts to discredit Hayward et al, the BBC interviews James Roscoe, Britain’s UN Ambassador, who dutifully trots out the British government’s line on Bucha. Marianna Springs, who studied French in school, gets a long innings as one of the BBC’s standing army of disinformation specialists; certainly if Springs wants to be a disinformation specialist, the BBC is the right place to learn the ropes from those who covered up for child rapist Jimmy Savile for decades.
Nader Hashemi, an American itinerant academic with no Syrian connections, is wheeled out to say how horrified he is that Hayward can mention the Douma attack, “a border line genocide”, in passing and how concerned he is that Hayward’s fleeting mention of the Douma war crime might be putting young minds at risk.
Kvitka Perehinets, one of Hayward’s Ukrainian students, is wheeled out to tell the BBC’s worldwide audience, as she has already told Hayward’s academic bosses, that Hayward should be silenced. Although Perehinets’ family are currently fighting Russian speakers in Ukraine’s East, Perehinets does not make it clear if Hayward should be dispatched with a bullet to his head or simply disgraced by being strapped to a lamp post as he undoubtedly would be in government held Ukraine.
Pride of place in the written version of the BBC’s hit piece went to Hayward critic Mariangela Alejandro, a young, purple haired Mexican student with a nose ring, a baby’s dummy around her neck and a cute purple amethyst ring on her marriage finger. Mariangela informs us that she had heard Hayward was a good lecturer but that, shortly into his course. things started to get “weird” as “he goes from talking about global financial markets [and] poverty, into this realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia.”
Although one of my earlier articles debunked the conspiracy theory canard specifically for instances like this, the very short clip the Radio 4’s hit piece played suggests mentioning it may have been germane to Hayward’s lecture. If, as Mariangela alleges, Hayward’s lectures were the disjointed ramblings of a conspiracy theorist (sic), then that would have been picked up by the student evaluation forms and conveyed to the university’s top brass through the students’ class rep and the Students’ Union. Even if, as I doubt, Mariangela was the class rep, it was not her place to broadcast her criticisms to the BBC and thence to the world.
Send In the Clowns
Hayward is a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, whose affiliates include a number of mercenary fringe thinkers, as well as the afore mentioned Piers Robinson, who has now gone on to greater things. I mention Robinson here as the BBC made no effort to discover what has become of him, even though a 60 second Internet trawl would have solved that conundrum, to Robinson’s credit.
Because there is war is afoot, all sides will have their mercenaries and their idiots, useful or otherwise. That NATO, in President Putin’s own words, is infinitely better resourced than is Russia, it stands to reason that NATO has more brown envelopes to push the BBC’s way than do opposing or neutral outlets. That is not to say that every NATO journalist or blogger is a media whore. Far from it.
Justin Schlosberg, one of those the BBC hatcheted, was attacked for citing Patrick Lancaster, an American citizen journalist embedded on the Russian side of Ukraine’s lines. But, as Schlosberg’s tweets as well as my earlier article on citizen journalists, which explicitly mentioned Lancaster, make plain, Lancaster’s work only helps us to ascertain if there is anything to be seen that warrants further investigation if, in those immortal words, anyone had been raped and speaks English. Beyond that, Lancaster is irrelevant.
Though Lancaster is not the hill academics like Schlosberg should be crucified on, it is crucial to note that the BBC and other NATO outlets repeatedly used the work of the White Helmets and related terror groups in Syria. Because the BBC, as Robert Stuart’s sterling work clearly shows, not only used their footage but were deeply embedded with the White Helmets, ISIS and other terrorists, they are in no position to cast vitriol at Lancaster or at Schlosberg for mentioning Lancaster, almost in passing.
NATO, in any case, has its own cast of clowns, amongst the most elevated of whom is Scott Lucas, who was an American professor of American Studies at Birmingham University in England, with ties to the Toran Research Center, which has major links with Turkish Intelligence and with supposedly demobbed Syrian terrorists. Lucas regularly appears on the mainstream media, holding forth on Syria and other issues he has no expertise on.
Prominent journalist Peter Hitchens noted that, when he phoned up Lucas to discuss Lucas’ uninformed comments on the White Helmets’ murder gang, Lucas hung up on him. Though Lucas is a NATO lightweight, Hitchens is noteworthy as the BBC were forced to apologize to him over their coverage of NATO’s 2018 Douma chemical gas attack and to confess that Chloe Hadjimatheou, who ran that piece and who also did the Hayward/Schlosberg hit piece we are now discussing “failed to meet the Corporation’s editorial standards for accuracy by reporting false claims”. Hadjimatheou, in other words, has long been guilty of the same misinformation offenses she tries to concoct against Hayward et al. This, remember, is the same NATO media that swore black and blue that Tom Mac Master, a bearded American academic in Scotland, was a Syrian lesbian being oppressed by “Assad” in Damascus where, like Lucas and Hashemi, MacMaster had never been in his life.
Then we have bottom feeder Eliot Suck my Bellingcat Balls” Higgins, whom the Atlantic Council, the BBC and affiliated NATO front groups built into a citizen expert on all things military to justify their predetermined anti Syrian and anti Russian NATO narratives. Given that Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, could not even hack the easiest course at Britain’s easiest university, the only explanation as to why MI6 and allied media outlets and intelligence agencies push Bellingcat, Bana and others to prominence is to dumb down debate to the level of babbling infants so that no one worth their salt would bother getting involved in trying to stop NATO’s war crimes. The BBC hit piece on Hayward et al is a part of that process.
This link fillets Higgins’ foolish pronouncements on the Ghouta false flag chemical attack. Dr Neal Krawetz has slammed Higgins’ et al’s use of his image identifying software, and he has called them idiots not worth spending time on. But Profs Postol and Krawetz are, like Hayward et al, forced to waste their very valuable time clinically ticking off these useless idiots, who have no relevant experience or knowledge to promote or defend the White Helmets terror gang, but who are widely cited in the BBC and similar pro-war Western mainstream media to do just that.
Nader Hashemi, the American itinerant academic, who speaks about a Syrian “border line genocide” falls into the same useful NATO idiot camp. And so too does the odious Oliver Kamm, who took a day off from running his years-long clandestine vendetta against Neil Clark and getting Philip Cross to edit Wikipedia pages he disapproves of to weigh in on this latest BBC smear piece.
Muslim Brotherhood Royalty
Tim Hayward could do worse than to get his students to survey Robert Stuart’s sterling work, which is a damning indictment of the BBC’s misinformation. Central to Stuart’s work is Dr Rola Hallam who, as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s al Kurdi family ,was the BBC’s fixer in ISIS controlled Syria.
Dr Rola Hallam is the daughter of Mousa al Kurdi, one of the head honchos in the supposedly moderate wing of Syria’s Murder Inc who was finding evidence of chemical gas attacks wherever this clown chanced to look. During BBC Panorama’s farcical show, Rola, her BBC crew and her Hand in Hand for Syria stooges (who threatened to sue me and much more) sailed unimpeded through ISIS checkpoints. Hallam/Kurdi landed the lead role in that state controlled BBC farce. The BBC’s collusion with ISIS, as evidenced by their ability to sail through ISIS checkpoints and to work in ISIS strongholds, may be a further indication that the moderate and less moderate wings of Syria’s Murder Inc, just like the moderate and Nazi contingents of Zelensky’s junta, are in bed together and that the BBC should not pretend otherwise. Something there for Hayward and his purple haired students to chew over.
Ukraine to UK Universities
Although the attacks on Hayward et al could be viewed as a BBC storm in an academic tea cup, it is part of a much wider MI5 orchestrated campaign to kill the Western mind. Olexsandra Koval, the director of the Ukrainian Book Institute has declared that 100 million books, including all Russian classics, must be removed from circulation. These would come from “various genres, including children’s books, and love novels, and detective stories”. Although Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring would perchance call me a conspiracy theorist (sic) for my past defense of Masha and Mishka, there is much to learn in those lovely tales, just as there was in Soviet film, at least according to Hollywood’s own Martin Scorcese, who acknowledged Hollywood’s debt to Soviet director, montage inventor and pioneer film theorist Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who is best known for his seminal 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin.
But Zelensky’s Nazis will have none of that and nor apparently will their compromized BBC apologists, whose warped minds think that there is something unclean about Masha and Mishka for no other reason than they are the creations of Russian geniuses. If Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring wishes to understand what drives war crimes in Chiapas, as much as in Douma or Donbas, she might begin by looking at how everything Syrian and Russian is being marginalized, just as Mexico’s elite marginalized and murdered the Tzeltals, Tzotzils, Ch’ols, Tojolabals, Zoques, Lacandons, Mochós and Mams of Chapas.
As for Kvitka Perehinets, the young Ukrainian student, whose family are fighting Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine, as she is at a university, she might like to read some of the 100 million books Olexsandra Koval wants to torch. She could, of course, try talking to a Russian student but Russian students now, being Russian, are haram. As for the rest of us, though we must continue to call hate groups like NATO and their BBC mouthpieces to account for the sake not only of academics like Hayward who try to call them to account but even more so for the sake of young minds like those of Alejandro and Perehinets they warp and even much more so because of those unsung youngsters who die in Douma, Damascus and Donbas as a result of the BBC’s misinformation toxins.