An Old CIA Intellectual Continues to Promote Fake Atrocity Stories and Advance War Propaganda in Retirement

From 1983 until 2021, Carl Gershman served as director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was established by Congress to take over the CIA’s covert propaganda initiatives.

The NED packages itself as a champion of human rights, though it finances groups that primarily publicize the atrocities—both real and imagined—of U.S. government enemies in support of regime-change operations.

Today, Gershman continues to serve U.S. imperial objectives under the guise of standing up for human rights as a senior fellow with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, headquartered in Montreal.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who heroically rescued thousands of Jews in Hungary during the Nazi Holocaust and was then allegedly killed in the Soviet Gulag.

Instead of universally supporting human rights, however, the Wallenberg Centre follows in the footsteps of the NED and many privately funded NGOs and think tanks in only publicizing human rights abuses committed by adversaries of the West, like China and Russia, while lending support to imperialistic foreign policies.^[1]

The Wallenberg Centre has issued reports accusing China and Russia of committing genocide and employs as fellows intellectuals who have served as cheerleaders for U.S.-NATO wars like Michael Ignatieff along with liberal war hawks like Robert Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the UN who said that the Canadian government should “give Ukraine every weapon it asks for.”^[2]

The chair of the center, Irwin Cotler, is a mentor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who has a) advanced a fake narrative to justify harsh sanctions on Russia; b) supported a terrorist group, mujahadin e-khalq (MEK), that long worked to destabilize Iran’s fiercely independent government,^[3] c) backed a coup that brought down Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s leftist leader; d) defended a coup plotter in Venezuela, Leopoldo Lopez, who incited violent protests against the country’s socialist government; and e) promoted military intervention in Libya under a false humanitarian pretexts that destroyed the entire country.

The Canada Files called Cotler a “fake humanitarian who supports terrorists while befriending dictators.”^[4]

The same is true of Gershman who, as head of the NED, has supported some of the same terrorist groups and dictators as Cotler—ones who help advance U.S. hegemonic ambitions and allow Western multinational corporations to loot their countries.

On November 16, Gershman published an article in the right-of-center Jewish Tablet magazine that showed off his skills as a long-time CIA propagandist. The article was entitled: “Who Is Committing Genocide? China, Russia, and Iran.”

The article starts by condemning Western leftists for accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza when Gershman says that Benjamin Netanyahu rightly called Hamas “the new Nazis” for butchering so many Jews on October 7. Gershman undercuts his argument, however, by falsely claiming that Hamas had “beheaded infants and small children,” which the Israeli government has failed to corroborate.^[5] Gershman also misleadingly makes it seem like the Hamas attack of October 7 occurred in a political vacuum.

While Gershman rightfully condemns anti-Semitic tropes embedded in Hamas’s charter, such as the claim that Jews, “with their money,” control all world media, and were behind the French and communist and all other world revolutions,^[6] he does not go into a) the 1948 Nakba and history of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 Six-Day War and Israeli efforts to strangle Gaza’s economy; b) Israel’s efforts to restrict Gazans’ movements; c) Israel’s housing of an estimated 5,200 political prisoners prior to October 7; d) Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders; and e) Israel’s use of Gaza as a testing ground for new weapons and merciless bombing in the 2009 Operation Cast Lead and 2014 Operation Protective Edge, which created a motive for the October 7 massacre.^[7]

Gershman further does not address the fact that Israel’s right-wing leaders helped to create Hamas and continuously funded it in order to a) undercut the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as part of a strategy of dividing and conquering the Palestinians; and b) create a viable threat to its citizens that could be invoked as a pretext for endless war and the pursuit of their dreams of a Greater Israel.

While Gershman acknowledges that thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war since October 7, he blames all those deaths on Hamas because he says that they used the Al-Shifa Hospital that Israel bombed as an alleged command center and fired rockets from schools and hospitals—which he implies Israel was justified in destroying.

Similar kinds of arguments were adopted by defenders of U.S. policy in Vietnam in the 1960s who claimed the U.S. was justified in bombing urban centers and villages that provided a base of operation for the Vietcong.^[8]

In a recent report published by Consortium News, investigative journalist Gareth Porter, whose career dates back to the Vietnam era, wrote that “when the history of supposedly damning revelations about Al-Shifa Hospital providing cover for Hamas military activities are examined  more carefully it becomes clear that it has been no more than a thinly veiled excuse for the IDF to attack and close down Gaza’s most important provider of medical care for the population of Gaza.”

According to Porter, Israeli intelligence has acknowledged that it does not have proof for its allegations about Hamas using the Al-Shifa Hospital as a command center, and that Hamas commanders move around frequently, largely in underground bunkers, rather than operating out of one particular above-ground command center.^[9]

Gershman then is functioning as a propagandist for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Biden administration, which has offered the same false justifications for the bombing of the Al-Shifa Hospital as Israel has.

Even worse, Gershman is helping to incite a war on Iran by repeating disinformation advanced in The Wall Street Journal that the Tribe of Nova massacre on October 7 was perpetrated by Iran, which Gershman says controls Hamas.

However, the U.S. and Israeli governments conceded they had no proof that Iran was behind the October 7 massacre—which Iran was surprised by. Hamas paratroopers who infiltrated Israel were trained in Malaysia. Evidence that the Iranian government promotes genocide is generally absent from Gershman’s article, marking the title of his piece as thoroughly misleading and fitting the definition of yellow journalism.

False Accusations Directed at Russia

The distortions extend to Gershman’s discussion of the Russia-Ukraine War. He accuses Russia of committing genocide as a result of a) its deportation of 10% of Ukraine’s population; b) the systematic bombing of civilian targets; c) the destruction of entire cities; and d) the transfer of 700,000 children to Russia where they are to be forcibly Russified.

Gershman in turn claims that Russian leader Vladimir Putin demonstrated genocidal intent by denying that Ukraine has ever existed as a real country and by “providing a dehumanizing portrait of Ukrainians as deracinated people detached from the soil and representing an alien threat to Russia’s identity and redemptive mission.”

Gershman offers as proof of Putin’s genocidal intent a supposedly incendiary speech, referenced in a podcast by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, by a Russian TV commentator suggesting Ukrainians should not exist at all and be killed by firing squad. When and where this speech was given; the commentators’ connection to the Russian government, and who was listening to the speech remain unclear.

Gershman also invoked a speech by Putin in which Putin allegedly claimed that Ukraine did not exist as a real country. An analysis of that speech, however, found that Putin said that the modern Ukrainian state took shape due to Bolshevik policies, some of which he was critical of, and that parts of southeastern Ukraine (now retaken by Russia) had historically been Russian land, and that the people identified there as Russians and Orthodox Christians—which is accurate.

Putin himself accused Ukraine of committing genocide in eastern Ukraine when it began shelling city centers and unleashed neo-Nazi regiments following a 2014 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratic leadership and thrust the country into conflict.

Gershman never mentions this coup or a UN report cited by Swiss diplomat Jacques Baud in his book, Operation Z, which points to the fact that it was Ukraine—not Russia—that was responsible for 84% of civilian casualties from artillery strikes in eastern Ukraine from October 1, 2019, to March 30, 2020 alone. Baud wrote that “the Ukrainian government is massacring its own people with the help, funding and advice of the military of NATO and the countries of the European Union that defend its values.”^[10]

These comments contradict Gershman’s one-sided narrative about the war in Ukraine, which casts Russia as the aggressor and blames Russia for all the atrocities and destruction of cities when Ukraine and its neo-Nazi Azov regiments caused their share of atrocities and destruction.

Putin’s argument, which Gershman never considers, is that Russia was coming to the defense of the peoples of eastern Ukraine who were being terrorized by the Ukrainian government with U.S. backing. Putin stated that, “for nine years, “they [Ukraine backed by the U.S.] bombed, shot and used tanks. War, a national war against Donbas, was unleashed. And no one counted the dead children in Donbas. No one in other countries, especially in the West, cried for the dead. The war started by the Kyiv regime with the active direct support of the West is now in its tenth year, and a special military operation is aimed at stopping it.”

This is not only how Putin but also many of the people of eastern Ukraine see things, though not Gershman who has long advocated hawkish positions against Russia, which, in July 2022, he accused of “unleashing a terror that Europe had not seen for 80 years.”

Gershman’s source for the claim that Russia transferred 700,000 children to Russia where they are to be forcibly Russified is a blog by Timothy Snyder that advocates for more U.S. military aid to Ukraine and only briefly mentions the alleged deportations without having carried out any original research on the topic.^[11]

Russia has claimed that these transfers were of war orphans in eastern Ukraine who were taken care of in Russia and given opportunities for recreation. This assessment was given weight by UNICEF’s director for emergency operations, Manuel Fontaine, who found no evidence of Russia kidnapping children in an assessment confirmed by the U.S. State Department.

At the Donbas Express, a music camp located just outside of Moscow, U.S. journalist Jeremy Loffredo met youth from war-torn regions who were flourishing thanks to free music instruction provided by Russia, and grateful to be in a secure environment. Loffredo and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone claimed that U.S. intelligence was behind the false claims repeated by both Snyder and Gershman, conduits for U.S. intelligence misinformation—a role that Gershman has played for decades.

China and the Fake Uyghur Genocide

Gershman claims that leftists who accuse Israel of genocide are hypocrites because they have been “conspicuously silent on the genocide that China has been carrying out against the Uyghurs, a Muslim people no less.”

But has China really been committing genocide against the Uyghurs?

Gershman’s sources are politicized parliamentary tribunals in countries like Canada and Lithuania and a special Uyghur tribunal chaired by British Barrister Geoffrey Nice, who previously prosecuted Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in a heavily politicized “show trial.”

A review of the proceedings of the special Uyghur tribunal shows that the charge of genocide— involving the intention of systematically killing a particular ethnic group—is nowhere corroborated. Some of the witnesses testified about being unjustly accused of terrorism and detained, forced to eat pork and subjected to torture and in at least one case rape, which horrible is it may be, is not the same as genocide.^[12]

The first witness, Ton Zwaan, a professor of genocide studies at the University of Amsterdam, ironically, said explicitly that the Chinese authorities had “refrained from genocidal mass killing.”^[13] James A. Millward, a professor of Chinese and Central Asian History at Georgetown University, provided a particularly interesting historical analysis that contrasted the relatively enlightened People’s Republic of China (PRC) policy toward the Uyghurs after China’s 1949 revolution with the Sinicization campaign adopted by Xi Jinping beginning in 2013, which has resulted in an attempt to impose Chinese culture on the Uyghurs.

While this Sinicization campaign may be objectionable, it clearly does not constitute genocide. It also does not seem to be any worse than the post-coup Ukrainian government’s attempts to impose the Ukrainian language on the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine and outlaw the Russian Orthodox Church—about which Gershman expresses no concern (as with any atrocity committed by the Ukrainian government).

Ukraine’s behavior actually appears to be worse than China’s if we consider the forgotten fact that Uyghur separatists were trained by jihadists in Afghanistan; carried out terrorist acts targeting Han Chinese; and were supported by the CIA at varying points in an attempt to destabilize the PRC.^[14]

Gershman does not see fit to discuss the existence of Ukrainian government hit squads trained by the CIA that have assassinated police officers, mayors and journalists considered to be pro-Russian, nor an incident in May 2014 follwing th Maidan coup that he glorifies where Ukrainian neo-Nazis torched a trade union building in Odessa, killing around 50 civilians and injuring hundreds more.

A witness at the Uyghur tribunal noted that an advocacy group had compiled a list of 341 Uyghurs who were imprisoned, or their fate was unknown (indicating they could have been killed), since Xi’s repression campaign was launched.

This total appears to be far below the number of dissidents languishing in Ukrainian jails, unworthy victims about whom Gershman and his friends at the Wallenberg Centre show no concern for.^[15]

A Trotskyist Turned Neo-Con

Ironically, Gershman started out as a young man on the left, serving as chairman of the youth organization of the Socialist Party from 1970 and 1974 when he considered himself a Trotskyist.

Trotskyists were known for their ideological dogmatism, inability to compromise, and extreme positions, which made migration for many into the neo-conservative camp easy.

After liberal-progressive George McGovern’s resounding defeat in the 1972 election, Gershman allied with the hawkish Henry “Scoop” Jackson/Daniel Patrick Moynihan wing of the Democratic Party. From 1976-1980, he was executive director of the Social democrats, USA which was firmly anti communist.

In 1975, Gershman wrote a book celebrating the history of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) penetrating foreign labor unions and opposing communism.

George Meany, the AFL-CIO’s president from 1955 to 1979, is the hero of the story dating from his emergence as an “opponent of American isolationism prior to Pearl Harbor.” Another hero is CIA asset Irving Brown who purged communists from labor unions in Italy and France and directed the breaking of communist-led strikes.^[16]

Gershman’s neo-conservatism was reflected in a 1977 pamphlet that he co-wrote with Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington exposed to have worked for the CIA in the Dominican Republic, entitled “Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power.”

It claimed that the victory of the pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) over the U.S. and South Africa-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) “exposed the total disorientation of American liberals still reeling from Vietnam” and “increased Africa’s vulnerability to a fate considerably worse than colonialism.”^[17]

Gershman wrote another pamphlet in 1977 sponsored by the Social Democrats USA, “After the Dominoes Fell,” criticizing anti-war activist Noam Chomsky and detailing the political repression gripping Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia following the communist victory in the Indochina War.

Reprinted from articles in the right-wing Commentary magazine, the Gershman article quoted a Vietnamese refugee who characterized the Vietnamese communist government as “the most inhumane and oppressive,” and waxed nostalgic for the South Vietnamese gangster regime of Nguyen Van Thieu, whom Gershman praised for allowing publication of 27 daily newspapers which the communists shut down.^[18]

A Harvard and Yale graduate, Gershman participated in the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama, for voting rights, founded an education initiative for inner-city youth in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, and was a member of the governing council of a Jewish lobbying organization affiliated with Commentary.

In the early 1980s, he worked as an aide to Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations was a key sponsor of the Contra War in Nicaragua. In 1979, Kirkpatrick had written an influential article in Commentary, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which claimed that totalitarian regimes of the left could never be reformed while right-wing authoritarian regimes backed by the U.S. could be made to transition to democracy.

The influence of Kirkpatrick remains evident today in Gershman’s vitriolic denunciation of leftists, a trademark of neo-conservatives, and his double standard on human rights, which mirrors Kirkpatrick, who supported the massive human rights crimes of the Nicaraguan Contras.

Gershman, unfoundedly, accuses Russia, China and Hamas of committing genocide while either overlooking or justifying massive crimes by strategic allies of the U.S., such as Ukraine and Israel, on almost entirely specious grounds.

Characteristically, Gershman ended his Tablet magazine article by warning about the rising threat of “isolationism” in the U.S., which is what his work has always been intended to combat.

He wrote: “May the stirrings of alarm provoked by the horrible events of Oct. 7 awaken us before it’s too late to respond to the sobering challenges that lie ahead.”

Gershman and those who think like him are stuck in a time warp believing that it is the 1930s again, despite the world having changed and the phony human rights veneer underlying Western empires having run its course.

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1. For the larger pattern, see Alfred de Zayas, The Human Rights Industry (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023); Glen Diesen, The Think Tank Racket (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023). ↑

2. Those weapons have been used to commit legions of human rights abuses, including the shelling of city centers in Donetsk. Rae’s is further is quite an unbelievable statement in light of the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was shown on camera giving a standing ovation to an SS Nazi Gestapo soldier in Canada’s parliament despite the fact that the Wallenberg Centre is named after a Swedish diplomat who saved Jews from the Nazi SS. For a critique of Ignatieff’s pro-war writings, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux: Humanitarian Intervention and the Liberal Embrace of War in the Age of Clinton, Bush and Obama,” The Asia Pacific Journal, June 16, 2013, https://apjjf.org/2014/11/24/Jeremy-Kuzmarov/4132/article.html

   ↑

3. According to The Canada Files,Cotler, with Alan Dershowtiz and Elie Wiesel, lobbied the State Department to have it remove MEK from its terrorism list. Cotler served as an unofficial adviser to Moshe Ya’alon, an Israeli official accused of war crimes in the Occupied Territories. Cotler was also a close friend of Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, a close ally of the U.S. and UK governments, who is most likely responsible for more deaths than anyone else in this era. Kagame, who came to power in Rwanda in 1994 with the help of the CIA and helped open up the mineral rich Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to foreign corporate exploitation precipitated multiple wars of aggression, killing numerous heads of state and implementing the use of open-air crematoria to better dispose of Hutu victims of Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) death squads that he oversaw. This is repulsive, considering whom the Wallenberg Centre is named after. ↑

4. See Bruce Katz, “Irwin Cotler as a False Humanitarian: Cotler supports terrorists while befriending dictators,” The Canada Files, December 27, 2020, https://www.thecanadafiles.com/articles/hjklj

   ↑

5. Gershman’s allegations that Hamas committed mass rapes on October 7 are also not corroborated by independent news reports. A CNN report provided testimony from an eyewitness to the murder of girls in Kibbutz Be’eri who saw semen on a girl’s back after she had been killed. However, the credibility of the eyewitness and other sources has elsewhere been questioned. Gershman inflates the numbers of Israelis killed on October 7 and ignores reports determining that shelling by Israeli tanks was responsible for many of the casualties incurred in Israeli kibbutzim. ↑

6. Hamas disgracefully also invokes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous early 20^th century Russian forgery alleging that Jews have a secret plan to control the world. I am in agreement with Gershman that leftists should not celebrate Hamas or present it as progressive or celebrate the killing of Israeli civilians. But if Gershman is so concerned about anti-semitism, why is he silent about the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s government and military? and by the fact that the Ukrainian leader whom he worships cheered on a living member of the SS Gestapo in Canada’s parliament? ↑

7. Norman Finkelstein, an expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict, likened the eruption of Palestinian violence and killing of Jews on October 7, 2023, to slave revolts in the U.S. South during the antebellum era. Chris Hedges made comparisons to anti-colonial uprisings in places like Haiti, Kenya and Zimbabwe, where Black Africans took violent revenge on their white tormentors and in some cases tried to kill as many as possible. These analogies, unfortunately, hold weight as Gaza has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison. ↑

8. For a deconstruction of those specious arguments, see Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon, 1973). ↑

9. D. Gareth Porter, “Israeli Deceit & the Ongoing Battle of Shifa Hospital,” Consortium News, November 15, 2023, https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/15/israeli-deceit-the-battle-of-shifa-hospital/. All along, Porter wrote in a followup piece, Israel knew about a Hamas command center 8.5 kilometers from the Al Shifa hospital and was lying. Porter, “IDF Knew Real Hamas HQ While Lying About Al-Shifa,” Consortium News, November 23, 2023, https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/23/idf-knew-real-hamas-hq-while-lying-about-al-shifa/. Gershman was by implication lying to his readers too. ↑

10. Jacques Baud, Operation Z (Paris: Max Milo, 2022), 87. ↑

11. Snyder is a known Russophobe and Ukraine hawk often featured on liberal programs, including Democracy Now, who has advanced disinformation about Soviet history. Grover Furr wrote an entire book debunking Snyder’s claims about Joseph Stalin. ↑

12. Witnesses said they had to take Chinese classes and praise Xi Jinping. Some claimed to have lingering health problems because of their time at the so-called re-education camp. The tribunal relied in part on the testimony of Adrian Zenz, whom The Grayzone exposed as a the far-right evangelical ideologue, whose “scholarship” on China has been demonstrated to be deeply flawed, riddled with falsehoods and dishonest statistical manipulation. ↑

13. Zwaan said that Chinese authorities instead adopted heightened surveillance and forced re-education and labor in and restrictions and harassments, noting that “the victims may stay alive, but their freedom of living is nevertheless to a high degree destroyed.” Zwaan’s anti-CCP bias was evident in that he presented China as an imperialist power when it has only one overseas military base compared to the U.S. having over 800, and claimed that the cultural revolution under Mao Zedong led to the death of between 44 and 72 million people, a grossly inflated figure even according to such an anticommunist source as The Washington Post, and according to recent scholarship on the topic (Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder estimated that 1.6 million people died as a result of a conflict generated by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, an effort to reestablish the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which Walder says led to a rebellion within the CCP and among students that resulted in violence on both sides of the conflict.) ↑

14. On the latter, see the discussion in A.B. Abrams, Atrocity and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes the World Order (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023). ↑

15. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, in The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), explain the Western media’s and intellectuals’ distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, the former receiving all the attention because their persecutors were adversaries of the U.S. and the latter almost none because they were being persecuted by U.S.-backed governments or the U.S. itself. ↑

16. Carl Gershman, The Foreign Policy of American Labor (Washington, D.C.: Sage Publications, 1975). According to journalist Douglas Valentine, a preeminent expert on the CIA, Irving Brown made use of the CIA’s Mafia assets and was involved in drug smuggling for the CIA to raise revenues for black operations in Italy and France. ↑

17. Carl Gershman and Bayard Rustin, “Africa, Soviet Imperialism and the Retreat of American Power,” Commentary, October 1977 (reprinted by Social Democrats USA). Recent scholarship repudiates Gershman’s view. See Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Gershman and Rustin wrote: “And if a South African force did intervene at the urging of black leaders. to counter a non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political judgment is this immoral?” They also wrote: “the suppression of blacks by whites is not the only human rights issue in Africa. Virtually all governments in Africa are undemocratic to one degree or another, but nowhere does democracy have less chance of evolving than in the kind of totalitarian party dictatorships which the Soviet Union is in the process of trying to implant in Africa. Not to resist this development, but to concentrate solely on the black-white problem, undermines the moral credibility of the administration.”

18. Carl Gershman, “After the Dominoes Fell,” Social Democratic Papers 3, 1977. See also Carl Gershman, “After the Dominos Fell,” Commentary, May 1978, https://www.commentary.org/articles/carl-gershman-2/after-the-dominoes-fell/. Gershman laments that elementary school arithmetic in post-liberation Vietnam, according to one refugee teacher, is taught through problems like the following: “One Communist soldier kills fifteen American imperialist soldiers and shoots down three imperialist planes in one day. How many soldiers and how many planes will he account for in five days?” But Gershman does not ask why they would use such analogies or assess how the American invasion created hatred in Vietnamese society that played out after the war was over. ↑

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