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German politician ‘filmed taking Russian money’ (www.telegraph.co.uk)

submitted 7 months ago by rimu@piefed.social to c/world@lemmy.world

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A German politician has been filmed taking large sums of cash from a Kremlin-supporting broadcaster, Czech intelligence has claimed.

Petr Bystron, who is standing for Alternative for Germany (AfD) at European parliamentary elections in June, allegedly received €20,000 (£17,000) in cash from the manager of a Russian propaganda network while sitting in a parked car, recordings indicate.

Mr Bystron, who also sits on the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, has previously denied allegations of taking Russian money as a “defamation campaign”.

The Security Information Service (BIS), the Czech Republic’s domestic intelligence agency, now says Mr Bystron met with Artem Marchevsky, who allegedly managed a Kremlin-backed propaganda front called Voice of Europe, at least three times in the past six months.

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[-] DdCno1@kbin.social -4 points 7 months ago

They are relying entirely on numbers provided by Hamas. There is no independent third party counting casualties in the strip.

[-] Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Conflating the Gaza Ministry of Health with Hamas is a very common propaganda tactic. The truth is that they operate under the de-facto government of Gaza, which is Hamas, but they don't work for them as in pushing their agenda. Your statement of the numbers being "provided by Hamas" is entirely false tho.

The numbers they provided in the past passed verification by third party investigations (Examples: 2014 war comparison with B'Tselem and analysis of the current war's numbers by The Lancet) and are considered to be reliable. During an active war, independent verification is pretty much impossible tho.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

Okay, so where should casualty figures come from?

[-] DdCno1@kbin.social -2 points 7 months ago

It's fine to admit that we simply don't know until the war is over. Only then can a true count be possible, without terrorists interfering.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

And who will make the count then?

[-] DdCno1@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

Ideally an independent party, like an NGO with no affiliations to Hamas and Israel.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

And how would they make such a count? Dig all the bodies out of the rubble and find where all the unmarked mass graves are?

[-] DdCno1@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

Head count of the survivors vs. pre-war records.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

The pre-war records kept by Hamas? Who you said can't be trusted?

[-] DdCno1@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

Think about this for a second. Hamas has an interest in accurate internal head counts for e.g. tax purposes - they were the de-facto government of the strip, after all. Their public statements cannot be trusted.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

So they wouldn't want to know what their head count is now? Or they're just lying about it now but weren't lying about it then? You're not really making much sense.

[-] DdCno1@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not just deliberately doing the old "just asking questions" thing and are legitimately having difficulties with understanding relatively simple concepts.

There is a difference between their internal numbers and their outside communication. It's quite easy to keep an accurate head count during peace time and they did that, for taxing purposes alone - and to maintain the level of control that they wanted as the rulers of an oppressive police state. Just in case you didn't know what kind of place Gaza was before the war.

However, they actually have no idea right now, because it's war, it's chaotic, with shifting front lines, people being displaced, caught under the rubble, disfigured bodies with no identifying marks, families getting torn apart and not knowing what happened to their loved ones, etc.

You know, the same chaos as in every other war. You can't keep accurate records under these conditions, especially considering that everything even remotely resembling an official Hamas government office has been bombed to smithereens or overrun by ground troops - but Hamas pretends that they do, with precise casualty figures published incredibly frequently. That's not how this works. Israel needed months for an accurate count of their deaths from just October 7th, despite the fact that the fighting within Israel lasted only for a day or two. Ukraine has huge "unknowns" about their population in occupied areas and where there has been or is fighting.

Yet Hamas of all people somehow are omniscient record keepers - and barely anyone is willing to question it. We then get a game of telephone of increasingly reputable parties repeating Hamas numbers to one another, until people can naively say that "the BBC" or "the UN" is reporting something, oblivious to the actual source of the information. It's as if nobody learned how to properly trace sources at school or university.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

Don't they have to communicate with the outside to give people those internal numbers? At which point, they will be a lie?

this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024

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