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
5 - The White Helmets PR machine and the Jo Cox Fund
Having
perfected the blueprint of “humanitarian” regime change in the
Balkans, many of the same players, along with their proteges and the
reincarnations of certain pro-intervention NGOs, have since been
sought to apply this model to other “rogue” states deemed
regime-change targets, such as Syria.
In
Syria, the White Helmets have been crucial to these efforts aimed at
disguising the destruction and plundering of the Syrian state as an
exercise in “humanitarianism.” Unsurprisingly, the White Helmets’
reputation as “humanitarians” and “good-doers” has been
promoted by a highly sophisticated and interconnected nexus of NGOs
that have consistently perpetuated falsehoods about the Syrian
conflict in service to reviving this blueprint — first developed in
Kosovo — once more in Syria. Many of the NGOs at the heart of this
nexus count among their most influential members the same four
individuals who formed the Jo Cox Fund in 2016.
Of the
organizations most deeply involved in this effort, several stand out
for their capacity to shift public opinion, their creation and
co-opting of popular movements, and their ability to manipulate
popular sentiment through the use of petitions, social media
campaigns and other related strategies. Groups like Purpose, Avaaz
and Change.org are arguably the most notable of these organizations
and two of the founders of the Jo Cox Fund are intimately involved in
their leadership.
For
instance, Tim Dixon, once a speechwriter for Australian prime
ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, is an experienced corporate
and political strategist who shifted his focus to “humanitarian”
NGOs after 2010 — co-founding Purpose Europe after joining Purpose
New York in 2011, and subsequently the pro-intervention Syria
campaign. Dixon also shares deep connections to Avaaz, which helped
create Purpose, through Dixon’s collaboration with his
“professional associate” Jeremy Heimans, who helped found Avaaz
and co-founded Purpose.
Dixon
has also collaborated with Brendan Cox for years, as together they
have been “instrumental” in reshaping the “refugee” narrative
“through opinion research, message development, popular
movement-building and campaigning to reach mainstream audiences.”
Then, after Jo Cox’s death, Dixon, Brendan Cox and Gemma Mortensen
— another Jo Cox Fund co-founder — created the organization More
In Common, which claims to work “to build stronger and more
inclusive democratic societies that are resilient to the threats of
populism and division.”
However,
as will be shown in a moment, the connections among these three
significantly pre-date More In Common, as all three were intimately
involved in the pro-intervention “humanitarian” group Crisis
Action Network.
Avaaz
and Purpose often focus the campaigns they develop at “rogue”
nations that challenge U.S. empire. As journalist and researcher Jay
Taber wrote for Cory Morningstar’s Wrong Kind of Green: “When
challenges to U.S. hegemony arise — such as in Bolivia, Libya,
Syria, Burundi and Congo — Avaaz and Purpose create campaigns to
discredit and destabilize these independent governments.” By
dressing up these campaigns that are American empire-driven in the
illusion that they are entirely “people driven” by local
communities, these groups are capable of falsifying narratives about
a country’s political climate on a massive scale.
Avaaz
and Purpose have used campaigns they have created to great effect
within Syria, particularly through campaigns that sprang up early on
in the Syrian conflict in support of the so-called “revolution,”
as well as through their creation of the Bambuser platform that
allowed Syrian opposition “activists” to upload video footage
that on several occasions was later shown to be falsified.
Eventually, in 2018, the platform was closed down but not before a
number of the falsified videos had been downloaded by watchful
researchers and journalists.
Shortly
after the creation of Bambuser, Avaaz campaign manager Pascal
Vollenweider had bragged that Avaaz had helped “kickstart” the
Syrian “revolution” by equipping these “citizen journalists”
and giving them the tools to produce multimedia used to further false
narratives about the reality of the Syrian conflict.
One of
those Avaaz-sponsored campaigns, “Smuggle Hope into Syria,” was
initially highly effective in promoting the false narrative of a
people-driven revolution waged by heroic “rebels” and centered
around “Danny” Abdul Dayem’s efforts to raise $2.5 million for
communication equipment needed by “citizen journalists” who were
promoting the “rebel” cause. However, one of “Danny’s”
videos that had aired on CNN was exposed as fake soon after, as were
similar Avaaz and Purpose-backed videos produced by other “citizen
journalists” like Khalid Abu Salah.
Since
then, Avaaz and Purpose have heavily promoted a NATO-imposed “no
fly zone” in Syria, without ever mentioning the dangers such a
policy would pose to the Syrian civilians or the fact that such
measures are historically precursors to large-scale military action.
Furthermore, without ever providing proof, Avaaz has routinely
accused Russia and the Syrian government of committing “coordinated
atrocities” against media personnel and journalists in rebel-held
areas of Syria. In addition, Avaaz has directly raised more than $2
million for the White Helmets.
Another
organization that has operated in Syria and elsewhere among similar
lines is Change.org, whose Chief Global Officer from 2016 to 2017 was
Gemma Mortensen, another co-founder of the Jo Cox Fund. Change.org
has been found to deliberately manipulate petitions on its page when
they challenge the Western narrative on Syria, such as their removal
— during Mortensen’s tenure — of a petition campaigning against
the White Helmets’ nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, despite
the fact that the petition garnered more than double the number of
signatures than had the petition calling for the group to be given
the prize. At the time, Change.org claimed the petition rejecting the
White Helmets’ nomination for the prize had “violated community
standards.”
However,
the most influential of this type, at least where Syria is
considered, has been the Syria Campaign. The group was co-founded by
Dixon and Mortensen in 2014 with funding from Ayman Asfari, the
Syrian-in-exile oil baron living in England, who has donated almost
£700,000 since 2009 to the U.K. Conservative Party. As was noted in
Part I of this series, Asfari has been very influential in driving
the false narratives about the Syrian conflict that are promoted by
Western governments.
With
Asfari’s funding, the Syria Campaign has officially sought to
amplify “moderate” and “democratic” voices in the Syrian
opposition. In practice, the Syria Campaign, along with its
progenitor Purpose, have managed public relations for the White
Helmets, creating high-quality multimedia content and even the
group’s website, in order to promote the White Helmets in the
mainstream media and on social media — essentially directing the
group’s branding thousands of miles away from Syria, in their New
York office.
Most
notably, however, the Syria Campaign has led the lion’s share of
White Helmet fundraising efforts from individual donations in the
West in order to secure the “funding that they [the White Helmets]
so desperately deserve.” Even though the White Helmets have
received millions of dollars from NATO member states and Gulf states,
the Syria Campaign urges would-be donors to “give generously.”
In
addition, just like Avaaz, Purpose and the White Helmets themselves,
the Syria campaign has actively pushed for a “no fly zone” in
Syria, one that would require the deployment of 70,000 U.S. soldiers
to enforce and would risk embroiling the U.S. in a full-scale war
against the Syrian state and Russia. More recently, it promoted the
hashtag #Act4Daraa, which sought to pressure the UN Security Council
to prevent the Syrian government’s now-successful effort to
eliminate Western sponsored extremist and ISIS pockets in Syria’s
south.
Furthermore,
the Syria Campaign has been intimately involved in attempting to
silence critics of the White Helmets. In its report titled “Killing
the Truth: How Russia is fuelling a disinformation campaign to cover
up war crimes in Syria,” the Syria Campaign calls for technology
and social media companies to block criticism of the White Helmets
and pro-intervention narratives as they are “polluting the public
debate central to any healthy democracy.” The report — which
mentions Vanessa Beeley, co-author of this article series, by name —
further urges news organizations to “not give conspiracy theorists
a platform in the name of balance,” as alternative narratives
“cloud the truth.” In effect, the Syria Campaign has been at the
forefront of attempts to silence those who are exposing the murkier
aspects of the White Helmets and the billionaire network pulling
their strings.
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