The oligarchs behind the “humanitarian” regime change network now exploiting Jo Cox’s death to push for UK Labour split
Only
by masking their otherwise unpopular policies in the cloak of Jo
Cox’s tragedy, and humanity’s natural empathy for good samaritans
and the downtrodden, has this small group of powerful individuals
been able to launder disastrous wars and military adventurism as “the
right thing to do.”
by
Vanessa Beeley and Whitney Webb
Part
5 - The many hats of Pierre Omidyar
Undeniably
a formidable force in the promotion of the “Jo Cox Four” and the
White Helmets, Jeffrey Skoll is not the only eBay billionaire
involved in manufacturing consent for Syria regime change or in
promoting the activities of the founding members of the Jo Cox
Foundation. Indeed, Pierre Omidyar — the founder of eBay who was
responsible for hiring Skoll and allowing him to amass his fortune —
also shares many of the same connections to these individuals and the
“humanitarian” regime change network currently exploiting the
death of Jo Cox.
Like
Skoll, Omidyar is also increasingly well-connected to the U.S.
political establishment and was directly involved in promoting regime
change in Ukraine alongside the Obama era U.S. State Department.
Omidyar has a close relationship to Obama, having attended the same
elite Hawaii school and having made more visits to the Obama White
House between 2009 and 2013 than Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg, or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He also donated $30
million to the Clinton global initiative and directly co-invested
with the State Department, funding groups – some of them overtly
fascist – that worked to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically
elected government in 2014.
Even
after Obama left office, Omidyar continues to fund USAID,
particularly its overseas program aimed at “advancing U.S. national
security interests” abroad. Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative, a
venture-capital fund that operates in his home state of Hawaii,
cosponsors one of the Pentagon’s most important contractor expos, a
direct connection between Omidyar and the military industrial complex
that profits from U.S.-backed regime-change wars.
However,
Omidyar’s very clear connections to the U.S. political
establishment and U.S.-led regime-change efforts have often been
obfuscated by reports on Omidyar’s “philanthropy.” Indeed,
Omidyar has been heavily promoted as an “entrepreneurial”
philanthropist, having won the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and
received accolades in the mainstream press for his unique “way of
giving.”
One of
Omidyar’s charitable groups, the Omidyar Network, has given
large grants to George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (where Jo
Cox Fund founder Mabel van Oranje once worked) and the Tides Center,
and has collaborated with the U.K. government and the Ford
Foundation. Notably, another arm of Omidyar’s charitable network,
Humanity United, provided a considerable portion of the funds that
established the Clinton-promoted Freedom Fund, whose inaugural CEO
was Nick Grono, one of the founders of the Jo Cox Fund.
Another
“philanthropic” project of Omidyar’s is the New York-based
publication, the Intercept. That publication was largely founded with
the intent of publishing the leaked U.S. government documents
provided by Edward Snowden, but over 90 percent of those leaks have
yet to be made public over five years after the Intercept’s
founding, leading critics to accuse Omidyar of seeking to “privatize”
those leaks.
Yet,
of the documents that have been published, one published last year
exposed the opposition paramilitary group, the Free Syrian Army, as
taking marching orders from the Saudi royal family. However, that
document was published by the Intercept only after the U.S. State
Department itself began to report more honestly on the nature of
these so-called “rebels,” even though the Intercept had the
document in its possession since 2013.
Furthermore,
Intercept writers covering Syria frequently promote Syrian “rebels”
and the opposition while also promoting pro-regime change talking
points. For instance, Murtaza Hussain – a long-time writer at the
Intercept – has written numerous stories downplaying the terrorist
and Wahhabist elements of the Syrian “rebels.” In the last three
years, Hussain has written pieces portraying known Al-Qaeda
propagandists, such as Bilal Abdul Kareem, and Al-Qaeda-linked
organizations, such as the White Helmets, in an overwhelmingly
positive light — failing to mention in both cases the significant
evidence tying these entities to known terrorist groups.
In
another piece, published in August 2016, Hussain gave voice to
al-Nusra Front leadership in a lengthy interview that largely
whitewashed the group’s Wahhabist leanings and links to terrorist
acts in Syria. In September 2016, on Twitter, Hussain asserted that
Saudi Arabia’s funding of armed factions was not necessarily “good”
but that “there is little to indicate they contribute to
terrorism.”
Hussain
is by no means the only Intercept writer who has taken such a
pro-opposition stance regarding Syria. A now infamous Intercept
piece on Syria, published last September, committed glaring factual
errors on basic facts about the war, while also mistranslating a
speech given by Assad so as to link him to American white
nationalists. In addition, last year, the paper hired Maryam Saleh, a
journalist who has called Shia Muslims “dogs” and has taken to
Twitter in recent months to downplay the role of the U.S. coalition
in airstrikes in Syria. Saleh also has ties to the U.S.-financed
propaganda group Kafranbel Media Center, which also has close
relations with the terrorist group Ahrar al-Sham.
Even
“anti-interventionist” Intercept journalists like Jeremy Scahill
and Glenn Greenwald have come under fire this past year for allegedly
promoting inaccurate statements that supported pro-regime-change
narratives in Syria, particularly in regard to an alleged
chemical-weapons attack in Douma. That attack is now widely believed
to have been staged by the White Helmets.
Given
Omidyar’s connections to the political establishment, his past
efforts aimed at affecting Western-backed regime change, and the way
in which the publication he owns has peddled misinformation on Syria,
Omidyar — like Skoll — is very much a part of “humanitarian”
regime-change complex that uses billionaire “philanthropy” as a
disguise for the manipulation of public sentiment in order to justify
foreign military intervention to a Western audience.
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