Al Jazeera news

2023 - 3 - 28

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Gold Mafia The Podcast: The Skeleton Key (Aljazeera.com)

The six-part series shows how government officials and businesspeople are profiting off the illegal movement of gold.

We take you inside a scheme to wash millions of dollars by trading gold from Southern Africa to the Middle East and back again. Peter Charley is the show’s Executive Producer, Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s Head of Audio, and Phil Rees is Al Jazeera’s Director of Investigative Journalism. The AJ I-Unit goes undercover to expose some of Africa’s biggest gold smugglers and money launderers.

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Israelis need to see through the biggest lie of all (Aljazeera.com)

Israel cannot be a 'Jewish state' and a democracy, an occupier and a liberal society.

Under intensified street pressure, Netanyahu finally backed down on Monday and delayed the parliamentary vote over his agenda in the hope of defusing tensions. They threatened to paralyse the state, shutting down ports, Tel Aviv airport, and universities, until their demands are met. In 2022, Netanyahu led a populist campaign of lies against Israel’s elites, media and judiciary in a successful attempt to regain the premiership he had lost a year earlier. In return, he is helping them impose their ultrareligious agenda on state and society and further marginalise Israel’s Palestinian minority. He has thus far insisted that there is no personal agenda behind his judiciary agenda, which aims to subjugate the courts to the whims of the ruling majority. It is no coincidence that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has thus far lied his way through a crisis of his own creation.

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Bush did what Putin's doing — so why is he getting away? (Aljazeera.com)

The answer: hypocrisy, even in the way the West's narrative describes the Iraq invasion and Ukraine war.

[more than 15,000 Iraqis lost](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/29/iraq.suzannegoldenberg#:~:text=As%20many%20as%2015%2C000%20Iraqis,the%20dead%20were%20civilian%20noncombatants.) their lives in violent conflict as a result of Washington’s “shock and awe” tactic to overwhelm the country with its military might. [branded as heroic](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/king-charles-tribute-ukraine-heroes-minute-silence-war-anniversary-b1062883.html) for standing up to Russian occupation. Putin similarly claimed he was liberating Ukraine and [curbing “terrorism”](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/russia-blames-ukraine-fighting-near-border) in the region. “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades,” said Charlie D’Agata, a senior CBS News correspondent, reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.”You know, this is a relatively civilised, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.” When the ICC’s top prosecutor wanted to investigate alleged war crimes by US soldiers in Afghanistan in 2020, Washington imposed sanctions on her — much like Putin’s Russia has opened a case against the current ICC prosecutor. At least 800,000 Iraqis were killed as a consequence of Bush’s alleged divinely inspired invasion of Iraq. From an oppressive occupation to sectarian governance, the Iraq war has continued to ruin the lives of millions. My own family is now scattered around the world, from Canada to Australia, as a result of the brutal invasion. The reality is that both leaders used false narratives to build public support for wars that have redefined their respective regions. Yet far from facing accountability, Bush has been allowed to redefine his own narrative as an immigrant-loving artist. Images of Baghdad’s night sky lit up by flames, as bombs were indiscriminately dropped more regularly than a ticking clock on the City of Peace, are forever etched in our memories. It has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, with millions of others displaced and their lives ruined.

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