From
the Kosovo Protection Corps in the Balkans to the White Helmets of
Syria, a group of well-connected people with the fundings of
governments and elite billionaires have sought to wage a war on
public opinion and have recently exploited Jo Cox’s death to do so.
by
Vanessa Beeley and Whitney Webb
Part
7 - A closer look at Crisis Action
The
smart-power complex that generates support for the White Helmets is
vast and powerful. At the center of the NGO Hydra is an organization
that remains in the shadows, a more clandestine behavioral insight
guru that motivates and directs other members of the cartel, rather
than taking center stage.
Crisis
Action brings together Tim Dixon, Gemma Mortensen and Brendan Cox,
who was instrumental in the incubation of this influential body of
policy makers. Cox was executive director from June 2006 to January
2009. As Gemma Mortensen says, “We [Crisis Action] need to stay
behind the scenes because that is the way in which partners will
genuinely see that we are in it for the benefit of the collective
work, not to promote ourselves”
Gemma
Mortensen was with Crisis Action from August 2006 to August 2015. She
joined in 2006 as a Senior Political Analyst and progressed to U.K.
Director, before becoming Executive Director in 2009. Crisis Action
describes itself as a “global network of the leading human
rights, humanitarian and foreign policy organizations; harnessing
their expertise to mount joint campaigns to ensure world leaders
uphold their collective obligations to protect civilians in
situations of conflict.” Another catalyst for global change in
a direction that will be governed by the sponsors’ objectives.
In 2013
Crisis Action was awarded a Ford Foundation grant as one of the seven
NGOs to reshape the global human rights movement. Its “innovative
model for conflict prevention” has been recognized by the 2012
MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions and the 2013
Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship. According to the
Crisis Action annual report for 2017, Mabel Van Oranje is on the
Board, thus almost closing the circle of the Jo Cox Fund originators’
involvement in this behind-the-scenes conflict “management” team.
Crisis
Action partners are an impressive collection of “all the big human
rights organizations,” including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International, Oxfam, Save the Children, Mercy Corps, International
Crisis Group, and many more NGOs that work as extensions of U.S./U.K.
state foreign policy in a chosen conflict zone. In fact, the Crisis
Action network is one of the most expansive webs of the NGOs
prevalent in providing cover for multiple regime-change wars.
Among te
Syria-related NGOs we find: Syria Campaign, Avaaz, 38 Degrees (branch
of Avaaz), UN Foundation, Mosaic Syria, Chatham House, InterAction.
These also include the Muslim Council of Britain, heavily influenced
by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, which have
long been an instrument of destabilization in Syria and the region
for the U.S. coalition.
Many of
these Crisis Action partners were listed as supporters of the White
Helmets in the run-up to the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, when the
White Helmets failed in their bid to join such luminaries as Henry
Kissinger and Barack Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize podium. Many
observers were horrified to see Greenpeace (member of the Crisis
Action coalition) publicly support the White Helmets.
When
members of the public wrote to Greenpeace to question its judgment,
they all received a standard response. This response, that basically
dismisses criticism of the White Helmets as being generated by the
“extreme right” or “supporters of Syria or Russia”, is the
same argument used across all platforms defending the White Helmets.
This uniformity of response might suggest that it is coming from a
central source, perhaps the “friends at the Syria Campaign”, and
being fed to the organizations caught wittingly or unwittingly in the
web of the anti-Syria soft power complex.
Greenpeace
appeared to make no effort to engage with the questions, the evidence
presented or the concerns of the public regarding the White Helmets.
If the response is indicative of Greenpeace’s actual position, at
the very least that is negligence on their part, at worst they must
be considered to be compromised by their association with Crisis
Action. As a major behavior influencing organization, Greenpeace owes
it to their public sponsors to not mislead or misrepresent events in
Syria. Particularly when that misrepresentation will inevitably
support narratives provided by the White Helmets, designed to
maintain external military and economic pressure upon Syria and its
allies and to prolong the war, rather than foster peace.
“Thanks
for your message. I’m sorry to hear that you disagree with us
posting about the work of the White Helmets.
We
have looked at the claims made against the White Helmets, but found a
lack of evidence and inconsistency in the allegations. Opposition
also seems to be based on opposition to NATO policy, which in turn
seems to be based on support for the Syrian government and the
Russians.
The
people making these claims are also questionable. For example,
extreme right wing US politician Ron Paul, who thinks global
warming is a hoax.
The
White Helmets have the support of our friends at the Syria
Campaign, and also the late MP Jo Cox, who was very
knowledgeable on these issues. They also have 133
organisations backing their bid for the Nobel Peace Prize,
which includes a number of highly respected organisations from around
the world.” (emphasis added)
The list
of the organizations and individuals backing the White Helmets is
certainly impressive and comprises many key actors from the Crisis
Action NGO pool or those otherwise linked to Jo Cox. Another example
of the exploitation of the murder of Jo Cox and the harnessing of her
high profile and contacts to expand the support base for the U.K/U.S.
White Helmet project in Syria. The Crisis Action machiavellian
efforts certainly seem to have paid dividends for the White Helmets
and their backers. Would we see such efforts being made for Syrian
Arab Red Crescent (SARC) or even for the REAL Syria Civil Defence,
whose name has been stolen by the White Helmets and their marketing
teams?
Asaad
Hanna, the White Helmet Media and Advocacy Manager, is a regular
contributor to Chatham House, according to his own CV. Chatham House
is a U.K. government-linked policy influencer that has consistently
promoted the White Helmets, even screening their Oscar-winning
Netflix Documentary in October 2016, despite the mounting controversy
surrounding the group of questionable “humanitarians.”
It is
noteworthy that Hanna states that he is “managing a team of 150
media people in Syria and the office of the headquarters out of
Syria.” As Peter Ford, former U.K. ambassador to Syria from
2003 to 2006, pointed out in Whitewashing the White Helmets: “They
[the White Helmets] have a press department 150 strong, bigger than
that for the whole of the UK ambulance service.”
InterAction,
another “united voice for global change” and Crisis Action
partner, was on the verge of giving Raed Saleh, leader of the White
Helmets, the 2016 “Humanitarian Award” when he was unexpectedly
deported from Dulles Airport because of his “extremist
connections.”
Crisis
Action lays claim to being a member of the NPIC (Not for Profit
Industrial Complex) while stating: “We receive financial support
from a range of foundations, governments and private individuals,
many of which provide unrestricted multi-year funding. In addition,
all of Crisis Action’s core partners make an annual financial
contribution, with the exception of those located in the Global
South.”
Crisis
Action plays a pivotal role in swaying policy makers towards the
agenda of their powerful donors and sponsors, which include Ford
Foundation, Humanity Utd, Rockefeller Foundation, Skoll Foundation,
George Soros Open Society Foundation, Sundance Institute, and a
number of other major foundations. Canada, Sweden, Norway and
Switzerland sponsor Crisis Action via their foreign affairs
ministries.
According
to its report and statements from its sponsors, Crisis Action has
heavily influenced and covertly managed events in Sudan, Congo, Gaza,
Afghanistan, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Libya and Syria.Crisis Action claims
to amplify the voices of Syrian heroes — which include the White
Helmets, lauded by Crisis Action as an “awe inspiring feature of
the last six years”. This will be further explored in Part 3.
As
already mentioned, Crisis Action supported the White Helmet
nomination for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, which “they sadly didn’t
win” and celebrated the Oscar win for the Netflix documentary.
Crisis Action worked with partners to secure a series of high-level
meetings for the White Helmets in Brussels, Paris and London. Is this
the extreme level of PR marketing and brand management we should
expect for a “grass-roots” bunch of “bakers, tailors,
engineers, students, carpenters, painters and pharmacists,” as the
script goes?
With
emphasis added, the Crisis Action Report states: “Crisis Action
was privileged to work with the White Helmets, providing them
platforms to engage decision-makers from Berlin to Washington DC.
Their powerful testimony of their work put a human face on a grim
conflict, shattering the prejudice that all Syrians are refugees or
rebels, and motivating politicians and individuals to act
on Syria who wouldn’t have done so otherwise.”
Crisis
Action also collaborated with Bond, which is the umbrella group for
British overseas development agencies, “to help shape a vision
for Britain’s role in the world, post-Brexit. In the face of
growing nationalism and antipathy towards immigrants,” Bond and
Crisis Action collaborated to help their “partners” to influence
the U.K.’s main political parties on the refugee crisis, aid, and
climate change.
Ciaran
Norris was political affairs advisor at Bond from 2014 to 2016,
before he became director of the Rising Global Peace Forum (RGPF)
from 2016 to 2017. Norris is currently head of external affairs at
Oxfam. While Director at RGPF, Norris awarded the Peace Prize in 2016
to Jo Cox and the White Helmets: “The volunteers of Syria Civil
Defence (aka The White Helmets) and the late Labour MP Jo Cox – who
championed their heroism amongst so many other causes – are the
perfect examples of people dedicated to peace. In our view, there
could be no more deserving recipients for this prize and it is all
the more significant that we recognise them together.”
A
#LoveLikeJo tribute video emerged from this prize-giving ceremony,
featuring Alison McGovern MP, White Helmet Munir Mustafa, and Nick
Martlew, and was chaired by Norris. The panel reflected on the life
of Jo Cox bringing the White Helmets more publicly into the fold of
the global change manufacturers.
Munir
Mustafa has since featured in Robert Stuart’s forensic
investigation into BBC Panorama’s “Saving Syria’s Children”
that has caused substantial waves among corporate media hierarchy in
the U.K. Stuart’s work has involved “analysis of the 30
September 2013 BBC Panorama documentary ‘Saving Syria’s Children’
and related BBC News reports, contending that sequences filmed by BBC
personnel and others at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013
purporting to show the aftermath of an incendiary bomb attack on a
nearby school are largely, if not entirely, staged.” As a part
of his investigation, Stuart exposed Mustafa as having connections to
armed, extremist groups in areas occupied by the White Helmets. This
inconvenient truth was overlooked by the organizers of the RGPF.
The
global policy-influencing market is a very lucrative one for the
board members and employees of Crisis Action. According to its 2017
annual report, Crisis Action received £3.1 million from its
government and foundation sponsors. Their salaries and related costs
came to a whopping £2.33 million, a huge percentage of their income.
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