The US authorities claim the forced internet closure of Press TV and other affiliated online news services was based on alleged violation of American sanctions. The sites have since come back online by deftly switching to other internet domains beyond US control.

Nevertheless, the temporary blackout of a nation’s news channels is a deeply sinister sign of how far Washington is prepared to go in pushing information warfare under the guise of “complying” with sanctions probity.

If the United States designates foreign nations as “enemy” or “terrorist” – which it has done with regard to Iran – then, of course, it follows logic under pseudo-legal sanctions for such draconian actions to be taken in censoring public broadcasting from that nation.

But there’s a bigger picture. The latest American move against Iran can be seen as a gambit for a much broader front in information warfare against other nations. In particular, Russia and China.

Both of those nations are increasingly labelled in hostile terms as enemies, allegedly posing threats to American national security and the security of “allies”. Indeed, the hostile rhetoric is intensifying and becoming ever more frenetic, accusing Russia and China of endangering “rules-based order” and the very foundations of “Western democracy”.

What really galls Washington and its Western vassals in the European Union and the NATO military axis is that Russia and China have both developed impressive news media services that operate internationally and in English and other major languages. Those media outlets have broken the Western monopoly on information available to the world.

For decades, Washington and its allies could loudly proclaim this or that through their controlled news media and there was little chance to challenge or correct.

© SPUTNIK

US-EU Summit; Critical Race Theory; Wildfires Out West; NATO and China

That media monopoly is no longer. Western narratives on international events are contradicted by alternative perspectives from Iran, Russia and China. Oftentimes the Western narratives, for example, the war in Syria, are shown to be completely false and exposed as propaganda masquerading as “news”.

Such competition for news and views should be seen as a healthy democratic choice. But it is intolerable to the United States and its Western lackeys because such alternative information fatally undermines imperial agendas for foreign intervention. In fact, furthermore, Western governments can be seen by their own citizens as acting criminally in violating international law, for example, in imposing crippling sanctions against Iran’s people.

This, by the way, is why brave truth-tellers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are persecuted. It is another example of Western powers censoring sources of critical information that illuminates their war crimes and other imperial vices.

Iran’s news channels and regional affiliates have provided informative coverage on a swathe of issues, ranging from the international nuclear accord which Washington sabotaged and is wrangling over with criminal sanctions, to the war on Yemen in which the United States, Britain and France are implicated for complicity in war crimes.

The Americans and their Western partners cannot argue against the truth which exposes their depredations and sordid machinations.

So, the only line of action is to shoot the messenger in order to delete the indicting message.

This has been going for some time already, whereby US big tech and social media companies have been surreptitiously censoring alternative foreign and domestic news services under the cynical guise of “community standards” and other bogus pretexts. That can be seen as American information warfare conducted in the private commercial realm.

But now the American government is openly wielding blanket censorship by closing down Iranian news services on the internet.

Washington’s increasing belligerent logic towards Russia and China is formulating a rationale for the same draconian censorship against these two nations.

© REUTERS / CARLOS BARRIA

Pentagon Warns Middle East Countries Against Security Cooperation With Russia, China

The US empire wants to criminalize Russia in order to justify NATO military expansion and to sabotage Moscow’s relations with Europe. And America’s minion-politicians in Europe are colluding in their own self-sabotage.

Perhaps more than this, the US empire is desperate to undermine China’s ascent to economic and geopolitical power by criminalizing Beijing over an array of allegations, including the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.

For Washington to succeed in its agenda it needs to win what it would call the information war. And that means shutting down news and views from Russia and China.

That’s why the latest American media offensive against Iran could be just the opening of a much bigger front.

The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

According to the report, declassified on Tuesday, Venezuela and Cuba made efforts to meddle in the 2020 US elections, acting in their own financial interests. It adds that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro had intentions to influence former US President Donald Trump’s image, but had no possibility to do so. The report also accuses Russia of attempting to support Trump, denigrate current US President Joe Biden, and sow discord in US society.

“By this report, they try to find arguments for their unipolar position, interference into other countries’ internal affairs and other governments’ policy”, Daza said.

The Venezuelan MP also said that the report is “banal” and cannot be taken seriously, adding that the “USA strives for hitting the image of countries that run independent policies such as Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Cuba”.

According to Daza, the USA is trying to resist a movement that has emerged in the United Nations to save the principles of the UN Charter and that opposes restrictive measures against countries Washington considers as ideological enemies.

During what can only be described as a bizarre example of coup de théâtre in Tel Aviv on April 30th — billed officially at a press conference — the Israeli Prime Minister left no stone unturned in impugning the Iran nuclear deal, signed during Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office, claiming that “Iran did not come clean about its nuclear program.”

Netanyahu’s case against the Iran nuclear deal, which he claims is now irrefutable based on a large cache of classified documents stolen from the Iranians by Mossad, is — it should be stressed — yet to gain the support of most of its signatories, specifically Russia, France, the UK, Germany and China. It is supported by the Trump administration, however, with the President coming out in support of Netanyahu’s claims during his own press conference outside the White House soon afterwards, right on cue.

Among his own remarks on Netanyahu’s claims, Trump repeated what has been one of the few consistent positions of his presidency, asserting that the Iran deal is a “horrible agreement for the United States.”

READ MORE: ‘Either a Liar or an Idiot’: Netanyahu’s Iran Claims Insult Integrity of IAEA

© REUTERS / Amir Cohen

Netanyahu Seeks to Prod Trump to Withdraw From Iran Nuclear Deal – Reports

What we have here evinces all the hallmarks of a ruse on the part of Netanyahu and Trump, two leaders currently engaged in a bromance that would scare the pants off your average ghost, what with their shared caprice and reckless disregard for international law. It is a ruse designed to up the ante when it comes to isolating and demonizing Iran, which combined with a recent bout of Israeli airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria, describes at this point seemingly inexorable march towards a full blown regional conflict.Making these gathering storm clouds even more concerning is that currently in Riyadh sits a leader, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, whose bellicosity towards Tehran is reflected in the hell Saudi Arabia has and continues to unleash upon men, women, and children in Yemen — a proxy war whose savagery has gone almost completely unremarked in the mainstream Western media. This is despite the fact that it could well be a prelude to the much more savage and destructive conflict that will ensue between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah on one side, and Israel and Saudi Arabia, backed by a neocon-dominated Trump administration in Washington, on the other, should it come to pass.

READ MORE: Saudi Arabia ‘May Hope Israel Will Do the Job for Them and Fight Iran’ – Analyst

Iran, a country with no extra-territorial ambitions, which has not started a war with any of its neighbours in generations, is now firmly in the crosshairs of Washington and its regional allies. Despite Tehran’s considerable role in fighting and defeating Salafi-jihadi terrorism in Iraq and in Syria, Trump alleges that Iran is a major sponsor of terrorism. The President here is, of course, referring to Tehran’s close ties to Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance and social movement born in the ashes of Israel’s invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon in the early 1980s.

© AP Photo/ DEBBIE HILL

Israel Eyeing ‘Regime Change’ in Iran, Analyst Says

One man’s terrorist, they say, is another man’s freedom fighter — and with the IDF’s penchant for shooting dead unarmed Palestinian civilians without compunction, legal or moral, where Israel and Hezbollah are concerned many will find it impossible to make the case for Israel.Significantly, the momentous and truly historic peace summit the world witnessed on the Korean Peninsula between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in, will likely not be replicated anytime soon in the Middle East. Not when the key regional actors include Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammad Bin Salman and Donald Trump, men for whom war and conflict would seem more desirable and feasible than diplomacy when it comes to resolving their issues with Iran and its allies.

This being said, a sober and serious analysis of the region leaves little doubt that the regional conflict between the aforementioned blocs is already underway, and has been for some time. As far back as the Obama administration, in the years leading up to the Iran Deal in 2015, Washington was doing its utmost to neuter Iran’s nuclear research program by nefarious means. US author and historian, Perry Anderson, reveals how the Obama administration “launched a massive joint US-Israeli assault on Iranian computer networks to cripple the development of its nuclear program. A blatant violation of what passes for international law, the projection of the Stuxnet virus was personally supervised by Obama.”

It is also a fact that Israel’s notorious intelligence agency, Mossad, has in the past assassinated Iranian scientists involved in the country’s nuclear program — a program that the Iranian government has always maintained is solely concerned with meeting the country’s domestic energy needs, thus freeing up more of its oil for export.

© AP Photo / Ebrahim Noroozi

Iran Vows ‘Surprising’ Response to Israel Amid Nuclear Deal Tensions

The uptick in aggressive rhetoric against Iran that we have seen, set alongside the celebratory scenes on the Korean Peninsula as peace and denuclearization beckons after many-many decades, it is entirely conceivable that if not before the Iranians now will be minded to actively embark on the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent, one that the Israelis already have in their arsenal.

Making a quick detour, the question of why certain countries are allowed their own nuclear deterrent and others not is one in whose answer we arrive at the reality of power politics as the arbiter of international affairs, rather than the UN Charter or international law.

The point is that the Iranians will be more than justified in arriving at the conclusion that the only reason peace has broken out between North and South Korea is because the DPRK managed to acquire its own nuclear missile capability.

Harsh logic maybe, but hard to refute all the same.

READ MORE: Israel Doesn’t Seek War With Iran — Netanyahu

What is abundantly clear is that something somewhere has to give. Iran is being backed into a corner for no other reason than it refuses to bow to US hegemony, along with the fact that it acts as the main bulwark of opposition to Israeli and Saudi regional ambitions.

In his bestselling book, ‘The Silk Roads’, Peter Frankopan writes, “The world is changing around us. As we move into an era where the political, military and economic dominance of the west is coming under pressure, the sense of uncertainty is unsettling.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that the old unipolar world is dying while the new multipolar world struggles to be born.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.