Saturday, September 13, 2025
Friday, September 12, 2025
NEO: Peotests in Indonesia : Deaths, Lies and Videos
Protests in Indonesia: Death, Lies and Videos
September 12, 2025
There is reason to believe that unfriendly external forces are trying to sow “controllable chaos” in the country.
Timeline of events
From August 25 to August 29, mass protests took place in Jakarta and other cities in Indonesia. They were sparked by a demonstration in front of the parliament building against high salaries and housing allowances for parliamentarians. Now the protest agenda has expanded to include a variety of economic issues. The most serious protests swept through the cities after a man died after being struck by a police car at protests in Jakarta on August 28. He turned out to be a 21-year-old taxi driver.
The protesters were silenced only after the army joined in restoring order on August 29, operating carefully, but effectively. Now, after the protests, huge amounts of rubbish, rubble, and burnt items are being cleaned up in the cities. The transport infrastructure of Jakarta alone requires repairs that will take at least a week.
An unpeaceful protest
It is now safe to say that, from the very beginning, on August 25, the protests very quickly turned violent. The protesters attacked the police, vandalized various objects and threw things at passing cars, smashed a street surveillance camera etc. At that time, the police detained 351 people (155 adults and 196 minors, whose extensive participation became an important tool for coordinating the protests). Seven of the detainees were entirely under the influence of drugs.
Legitimate questions arise: if the protesters allegedly opposed specific economic issues, then why did they smash infrastructure, burn public transport stops, break windows, damage walls with graffiti? It was not a peaceful protest, but a textbook example of “controlled chaos”. The protests also targeted police stations and municipal authorities in Jakarta, Bandung, Makassar, Yogyakarta, Medan and other cities, as well as suburbs. Even the resort-filled Bali was affected, and there tear gas was used against the thundering crowd.
It was not a peaceful protest, but a textbook example of “controlled chaos”
These events were very clearly staged, taking place simultaneously in different places – as if on command – and in waves. The protesters smashed, set fire to, attacked the houses of parliamentarians, looted and vandalized the residence of the finance minister. Stones, sticks, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails were used against the police. At least three employees of the municipal parliament in Makassar were killed in an arson attack on the building, and several more were seriously injured and in critical condition. The protesters (whom certain media outlets persistently refer to as “students”) used Molotov cocktails, which were thrown through the windows. What a terrifyingly familiar style… Who made them, who taught them how to do it? And then, as in other places, the building was looted and everything the looters could possibly snatch disappeared from the charred building, including – no matter how wild it may sound – parts of the air conditioners.
À la color revolution
It can be noted that the protesters are well coordinated, and there are more experienced instructors among them. Everyone is conveniently and continuously shooting videos, and some of the posters are in English (probably so that Western TV channels can pick them up right away). In short, directions were given online, and during interrogations detainees admit that they learned about where to attack and where there is an opportunity to steal from information online. They constantly try to frame the police – a classic move. The protesters were taught to practically throw themselves at the guards’ feet and with Indonesian flags in their hands. Why were they carrying them if they are protesting against the state, against their country? But no, that is the way it is supposed to be, that is how they were taught so it could be shown on Western TV channels later. And, as usual, the instructors threw young people with inexperienced minds filled with misinformation, students and underage teenagers, onto the barricades. It looks absurd when they try to talk about “police reform” and the like on social media, even though they are clueless about public administration and politics due to their age and lack of education. The police blocked minors wherever they could. The online channels that gathered them have already been identified.
Against this background, a sea of affiliated pseudo-researchers and unscrupulous media outlets can be expected to cry out in unison, as if they had not heard about looters, arson and the dead, but sympathize with the protests and put forward their “demands” to President Prabowo Subianto. Some Western information and analytical resources even openly justified the attacks, and yet they play the same footage, quoting individual “students” and an Indonesian stand-up comedian, who, it turns out, is also “protesting”. Some Indonesian actors, directors and producers were quick to speak out for the protests and post relevant posts on Western social networks. Show business, as it often happens, is the first to show its rotting colors along with unscrupulous media. They are not with the state, but instead choose those who kill, rob, destroy everything in their path and masterfully send the crowd to face tear gas and water cannons.
Meanwhile, they are trying to present the taxi driver as an “innocent” victim, and a whole information campaign has been launched in the media. Everything is exaggerated, and the style is wholly recognizable. Now they claim that he was allegedly not a protester, which begs the question: what else would he have been doing there, in the midst of the demonstrators, when the police began to gather and disperse them? “Human rights activists”, what do you think? Atnike Nova Sigiro, a member of the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission, says that the police should not defend themselves from the madding crowd at the protests, but show “politeness and care”. I would like to ask if she is in her right mind. Maybe we should also give coffee with milk to the protesters? But the media is echoing her words. She is not saying anything about the innocent people who died horribly in the fire in Makassar. She should go there and look at their disfigured corpses, and only then make comments. Alas, nobody remembers them, and only the mayor of Makassar came to the hospital to see the wounded.
* * *
So far, the Indonesian state is holding its own. Also, in response to recent events, the government has already demanded that social networks operating in Indonesia open local representative offices and moderate content due to the widespread spread of misinformation. This is an important measure. Indonesia is a regional power and one of the leaders of the Global South, and will most certainly defend its right to independently determine its path for development, along with foreign and domestic policy. It would also be wise to also learn from one’s own and others’ mistakes to become stronger to withstand the turmoil of the modern world.
Ksenia Muratshina, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
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Thursday, September 11, 2025
C.Punch: Crying Antisemite to shield Israeli Genocide and Mass Murder. 09-09-2025
September 9, 2025
Crying Antisemite to Shield Israeli Genocide and Mass Murder
Image by Levi Meir Clancy.
History teaches us that atrocities are too often recognized only after the fact. From the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, slavery, the Holocaust, Srebrenica and Rwanda, became part of our collective conscience only after the full scale of the crimes could no longer be denied. Gaza genocide is following that same tragic script—except this time—the world is watching in real time.
Nearly two years into the wanton devastation, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) announced on August 31st that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the definition of genocide under UN Conventions. In light of world powers’ inaction amid famine and war crimes, the question is no longer whether genocide is taking place; but whether the 1948 UN Convention is enforced for some, and a lie for the rest.
The IAGS ruling transforms the genocide in Gaza from a polemic political debate into a legal fact. This is not merely an opinion but the scientific assessment of an international body composed of the world’s foremost experts on Genocide and war crimes. Its members represent the academic community that has studied all known genocides and war crimes. For such a body to speak with this level of clarity is extraordinary. It affirms what Palestinians, Israeli rights groups, international human rights organizations, Israeli Holocaust Scholar, and international jurists have long argued: Gaza is not a war zone; it’s a genocide field.
The live-streamed catastrophe in Gaza is unprecedented. As of May 2025, Israel had dropped more than 100,000 tons of explosives on an area of 365 km2. This is an astounding 548 pounds (250 Kilograms) per m2, or 11 ft2.
By comparison, the total bombs unleashed on Germany during World War II are estimated at 1,415,745 tons, or about 3.96 tons per km2. Gaza, by contrast, is only 0.001 of Germany’s area (357,022 km²). Yet Israel has dropped nearly seventy times more explosives on Gaza than the Allies, combined, inflicted on Germany—7.92 pounds per m2 in Germany versus 548 pounds per m2 in Gaza.
For another perspective, in a period of more than three and a half years, the U.S. dropped roughly 864,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam with an area of 157,880 km2 during Operation Rolling Thunder, (ORT), between February 1965 to October 1968. Until now, ORT was the most intense air campaign in history. Meanwhile, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, in less than two years and proportional to its size, exceeded the most intense bombing in history by one hundred times—5.5 pounds per m2 in Vietnam versus 548 in Gaza.
Gaza today stands as the most ruthlessly bombarded place in history. The devastation is multiplied many times over, not only by the far greater destructive power of modern explosives, but also by population density: 196 people per km² in Germany, 120 per km² in North Vietnam, and 6,300 per km² in Gaza. This means that every bomb aims to maim and murder civilians, in a captive population, confined and defenseless. By any moral measure, such systematic bombardment is not war, it is unadulterated textbook case of genocide. Thus, the IAGS declaration.
The result so far is more than 64,300 murdered Palestinians, 20,000 of which are children and thousands unaccounted for still buried under rubble. By September 5th, 376 had starved to death, including 134 children. In addition, over 161,000 have been injured, many suffering amputations, blindness, and permanent disabilities.
Entire neighborhoods, 92 percent of Gaza’s housing are destroyed or damaged. Almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forcibly displaced, some multiple times, moving between bombed-out ruins and tent camps. Survivors in Gaza no longer speak of homes, only of rubble and graves.
IAGS underscored Israel’s targeting of children, stressing that children are “essential to the survival of any group as such, since the physical destruction of the group is assured where it is unable to regenerate itself.”
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant on charges of crimes against humanity, including starvation of civilians. The International Court of Justice, in three separate rulings, confirmed it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide and ordered immediate access to food aid.
The ICC findings should have ended the debate. Under the Genocide Convention, states are obligated to prevent and stop genocide, not bankroll it. Nevertheless, Israel is enabled to continue the genocide with billions in arms, funding, and diplomatic shield from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. History will condemn who supply the planes and bombs that kill journalists, flattened schools, destroy hospitals and bury Gaza’s children under broken concrete. Trump can’t hide behind “Israel had total control of Congress” to escape his moral and legal accountability.
The IAGS resolution cuts through the excuses. It declares unequivocally that Israel is committing genocide. For too long, truth-tellers have been intellectually terrorized with accusations of antisemitism. When the world’s leading Holocaust and genocide scholars agree that this is genocide, weaponizing “antisemite” is exposed not only as dishonest, but as complicit in silencing free speech to shield the Israeli genocide and mass murder.
C. Punch: U.S. attacks on Venezuela are a threat to All of Latin America and the Caribbean. 09-09-2025
September 9, 2025
U.S. Attacks on Venezuela Are a Threat to All of Latin America and the Caribbean
The moment of the attack on the vessel from Venezuela. (The White House).
One of President Trump’s first executive orders since returning to the presidency in January was the designation of certain drug cartels as “terrorist” organizations. In doing this, Trump signaled a renewed war on drugs with the possibility of the United States military acting unilaterally throughout Latin America.
As with much of Trump’s foreign policy, it was not immediately clear how literally one should take his threats to strike cartels and deploy special forces south of the U.S.-Mexico border. After all, the United States already has partnerships with repressive forces from Mexico to Colombia, which it established through an earlier war on drugs in the 1970s. Could these threats of military action in Latin America be nothing more than a bargaining tactic meant to secure more economic and geopolitical advantages for U.S. imperialism in Latin America?
If Trump’s recent military aggression toward Venezuela is any indication, the administration’s threats to launch a new war on drugs at the expense of any vestige of regional sovereignty should be taken very seriously.
Following the deadly U.S. attack on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on September 2 — justified under dubious claims that the boat was trafficking drugs with the backing of Venezuela’s government — the Trump administration has consistently said that it is prepared to carry out more such strikes. In an interview with Fox News on September 3, Pete Hegseth said, “President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not been.” Since that interview aired, Hegseth’s official title was changed from Secretary of Defense to Secretary of War. In a video about the rebrand of his department, Hegseth promises “We’re gonna go on offense, not just defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The escalation is not just rhetorical. The United States has deployed 10 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico for further military action in the region, and on September 6, U.S. sailors and marines carried out amphibious landing exercises in Puerto Rico, leading many people to speculate that the administration may be preparing for a regime change operation in Venezuela. Some foreign policy analysts have noted that the current level of U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean is not nearly enough to carry out a full-scale invasion of Venezuela. However, a report in CNN based on anonymous sources suggests that the administration is seriously considering military strikes within the country. Part of the calculation, according to the report, is that such strikes may be enough to squeeze Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro into conceding power.
It may be too soon to predict how exactly the escalations against Venezuela will play out. But what should be clear is that the Trump administration is committed to establishing a new Monroe Doctrine of hegemonic dominance over Latin America. This policy will be built up through a new war on drugs, which is deeply intertwined with the war on immigrants that continues to escalate within the United States. Venezuela is currently in the eye of the storm, but there are greater implications for the entire region.
Venezuela is just the easiest target due to the longstanding bipartisan support for U.S. aggression against the country. This bipartisan hostility was shown clearly in Trump’s first term when Democrats supported a coup attempt, which ultimately failed. While Maduro has opened the way for U.S. imperialism to access Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, decades of tensions with Venezuela have left U.S. soft power and economic exploitation in the country far more limited than most anywhere else in Latin America. As a result, the Trump administration has less to lose in testing out interventionist action toward Venezuela. Similar actions would come with much greater costs to U.S. capital if tried in Mexico for example, which is far more subordinated to and compliant with U.S. imperialism
The United States has lost significant ground to its main capitalist rival, China, in terms of influence via soft power and access to markets in Latin America. As a result, many countries in the region have been hedging between the two powers and more overtly challenging U.S. dictates for the region. This is seen in Brazil’s challenge to Trump’s tariffs to try to shape the country’s political affairs and in criticism from a variety of Latin American leaders over Trump’s extreme anti-immigrant policies. These leaders have still conceded to U.S. imperialism far more than they’ve resisted, due in large part to the region’s economic subornation to the United States ,which Trump is now weaponizing with tariffs.
Nonetheless, the erosion of U.S. hegemony in the region compared to past decades is prompting Trump’s more aggressive approach. While Trump has mainly relied on economic aggression, the attacks on Venezuela show that military threats remain part of the imperialist toolkit. Whether or not Trump actually carries out intervention in Venezuela, the threats signal to every single government in Latin America and the Caribbean that the United States sees the entire region as fair game to pursue whatever acts of aggression and violations of sovereignty that it can get away with.
In response to the September 2 attack, a chorus of experts on U.S. foreign policy and international law have raised concerns about what kind of precedent the action sets. Even under the broad authority the U.S. executive branch has in carrying out military actions abroad, summary execution of alleged drug traffickers is a clear violation of the U.S. War Powers Act and international law.
Still, Trump and his cabinet have boasted that they can and will continue to flagrantly defy international norms. International law has always been applied selectively in the interests of U.S. imperialism, but presidents at least used to pretend that international norms should guide U.S. foreign policy. September 2 will certainly not be the last reminder that this administration is done playing by the old rules. If the Trump administration has its way, a new policy of “Peace Through Strength” will be written through violent intervention against the people of Latin America and the Caribbean.
C. Punch: ICE Deputy Director on Jeffrey Epstein: Criminals Flocking Together: 11-09-2025
September 11, 2025
ICE Deputy Director on Jeffrey Epstein: Criminals Flocking Together
An image is from Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday showing Epstein holding a novelty check, released with redaction by House Democrats. Image via Oversight Committee Democrats
Back in the old days parents taught their kids “birds of a feather flock together.” I thought this lesson was lost in America today, but one ICE official got it. Speaking on Fox News on July 14, 2025, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan said the agency was expanding its dragnet for arrests, because, “I think we all know that criminals tend to hang out with criminals,”. “And so when we start to build a case, we’re going to be going after everyone that’s around them. Because these criminals tend to hang out with like-minded people who also happen to be criminals.” Yep we all know it. Mom knew it and she warned you.
Criminals tend to hang with “like minded” criminals according to ICE. Mom taught us “birds of a feather flock together,” so stay away from the “bad kids,” because “everyone knows the bad kids gang up to do bad things.” Now I do not know all the piggies who ate their bacon with Epswine (Jeff, is it OK if I call you ‘Epswine’), but I do know that Mom would say any who partied with Epswine lean swinish. ICE agrees. Might one suggest pedophiles prefer to hang with others so inclined? The Beatles told us piggies will be swine:
Have you seen the little piggies crawling in the dirt?
And for all the little piggies, life is getting worse
Always having dirt to play around in
Have you seen the bigger piggies in their starched white shirts?
You will find the bigger piggies stirring up the dirt
Always have clean shirts to play around in
In their sties with all their backing
They don’t care what goes on around
In their eyes, there’s something lacking
What they need’s a damn good whacking
Everywhere there’s lots of piggies living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner with their piggy wives
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon
The denials about Epstein Files emanating from the swamp defies common sense insights stretching from Mom to ICE. Reports indicate Trump first slept with Melania on Epswine’s “Lolita Express.” Bill Clinton was there on other occasions. Say what you will about Jeff Epswine, he was a criminal pedophile of the first order. The odor of swine swirling about him would have surely put off any but those swine inclined. Swine don’t flock but they wallow together in their “pigsty,” playing piggy games, protected by power, and depraved by nature.
I am not sure whether Epswine suicided in prison, but I have represented many a criminal who claimed he was sexually abused as a child, and when they got to prison they could hardly wait for the pedophiles to be in their cell block, to seek revenge. Society deemed them crooks upon conviction, but one cannot deny even crooks have their own sense of “justice.” “Death to pedos” was a core principle of the Convict Code.
The core fact of the “Epswine” matter: This is about the sexual abuse of children. Possibly hundreds or maybe thousands of them. Epswine’s sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell helped Epswine get victims. Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump (a former Democrat who spent part of 15 years enjoying life with Jeffrey Epstein who once called Trump “his best friend”), and Bill Clinton appear to be as debauched as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. The swamp scum is a bipartisan “rainbow” coalition. The old adage “where there is smoke there is fire,” resonates too.
What we know about Jeffrey Epstein is he had virtually zero marketable skills, but he had an uncanny ability to influence powerful people, he was an academically unremarkable college dropout who somehow went from preying on students at an elite academy he wasn’t even qualified to teach to being a billionaire financier to the stars.
How did that happen? Maybe ICE knows. We also know that Jeffrey Epstein ran a vast underage sex trafficking ring procuring somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000 underage girls for a host of wealthy clients in Manhattan and Palm Beach between the years of 1994 and 2004 and possibly much earlier and much later than that. One suspects Epswine’s upward progress was aided and abetted by his criminal connections to power.
We know these things about Epswine because federal prosecutors have told us as much and the victims have told us the rest. Yet somehow, Epswine had to be caught twice because the first time he got busted in 2006, he was inexplicably awarded a plea deal by a South Florida attorney and future Trump staffer named Alexander Acosta who allowed Epstein to serve a 13-month sentence for a 13-year crime in a luxury wing of a county prison that he paid to have built himself. Once again, one catches a whiff–stench, actually–of favoritism. Unequal justice under the swine contaminates the air and contributes to the “odour de swine.”
What we know about Donald J. Trump is that this is a man who has been accused of a variety of sexual predations dating back to the 1970s by over two dozen women. Smoke, fire? The accusations include multiple acts of sexual assault and at least two claims of rape, one made by Trump’s first wife in her 1989 divorce deposition (which was only retracted years later when she found herself in a lucrative business engagement with her ex-husband, hmmmm) and on the other, Trump was found liable in a court of law.
Trump now denies these allegations, but he has also bragged about them. He was recorded on tape boasting pompously about walking in on changing teenage beauty pageant contestants and his boastful King-like ability to grab women by the pussy. Not quite Epswine conduct, but, well you decide. Or ask Mom. Or ICE.
Reports say Epstein introduced Trump to at least one of his confirmed victims. Trump admits Epstein “stole” a young woman from his “Mar-a-Lago” club, apparently a place Trump and Epstein enjoyed some good times together. Surely not a pigsty? Swine in my club? I’m shocked. I’m shocked. How could I know?
Maxwell is in prison after being found guilty of conspiracy to entice and transport individuals under 17 with the intent to engage in illegal sexual activity, as well as sex trafficking of individuals under the age of 17 and 18. Recently Maxwell got an “upgrade,” to a cushier prison, after granting an “interview” to a DOJ Attorney associate of Trump, and one is told to deny one’s common sense and conclude, “nothing rotten here,” on appeals from the “swamp.” Right. Ask Mom what she thinks. Ask ICE.
Big piggies, little piggies, as Mom told us “swine do swine things together.” As Lord Acton taught us: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, that is why all powerful people are evil.”
And that is why powerful people must be bound down in the chains of the Constitution and the rule of law. And if caught, throw the book at them. Ordinary crooks do not swear to uphold the law, but those who do and violate it ought receive the harshest punishment as dirty, damnable double-crossers.
If they get a “cushy deal,” then the fix is probably in, you know it, your Mom knew it, and ICE knows it. One suspects all the alphabet agencies responsible to enforce the law know it.
Give the people the Epswine Files! All of them. And then the people will decide. I think they need, deserve and must get a “damn good whacking,” every single swine of them. Mom agrees, so does ICE.
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