YouTube is an incoherent as well as an extremely biased organisation.

Just over a week ago I uploaded a very brief newsreel about the funeral of Shiekh Abbas Musawi, an early leader of the Lebanese political party which has a military wing.

I had discovered the reel late last year but uploaded it just before the delayed funeral in February of Musawi's successor Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

But when I noticed that the video did not materialise, I checked and discovered that YouTube had frozen the upload, claiming that it was suspected of infringing their policy on "violent organisations".

I did not appeal until a few days ago.

Their joke of an "appeal" does allow you to provide any written points, but I presume that a human intervenes at this point.

My appeal was allowed.

However, the appeal only allowed the newsreel to stay on my channel as a "private" upload, meaning that it could not be viewed by the public.

I appealed again.

This time, and again with I presume human intervention, YouTube decided to totally remove the newsreel and issue. a "warning". A warning is different from a "strike" which puts a channel at risk of being taken down if it gets up to 3 strikes.

You will note the arbitrariness of this decision.

1. If you appeal and we don't like the content we will impose a more severe "punishment".

2. Hassan Nasrallah's funeral was streamed live on numerous YouTube channels including those in the mainstream.

Was hours of such streaming "glorifying" Hezbollah?

3. I have previously uploaded funerals of the following:

. Bashir Gemayel, the assassinated Maronite Christian warlord
. Naval crew of the Israeli Naval Destroyer INS Eilat
. Memorial service in Israel for the crew of the INS Dakar

I set the INS Dakar video to Maurice Ravel's version of the "Kaddish" and the Eilat one to Barbra Streisand singing "Avinu Malkeinu".

Gemayel would qualify as having presided over a "terrorist" organisation. The military wing of the Kataeb Party (or Phalangist Party) committed several massacres and other forms of terrorism during the Lebanese Civil War.

Israel as a state has always had a terrorist doctrine which legitimises the objective of killing innocent civilians during military operations. Israel's "sacred terrorism" as an early prime minister named Moshe Sharett termed it, has been set out or acknowledged by a range of its political and military leaders beginning with David Ben Gurion who recorded in the Independence Diaries that "women and children" were legitimate targets and extending to the contemporary "Dahiya Doctrine" (Lebanon) and "Mowing the Lawn Doctrine" (Gaza), the latter of which has evolved into an outright policy of genocide.

Frankly, the case that the Israeli state is a terrorist one can be proven beyond a shadow of doubt.

But the designation of what is a terrorist entity is full of contradictions.

Hezbollah exists because of Israel's repeated invasions of Lebanon and the long-term Zionist objective of colonising south Lebanon up to the Litani River.

But the United States, at the urging of the Israel lobby in America and Canada, removed the designation of terrorist organisation from Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which targeted American military, diplomatic and corporate personnel during the era of the Shah because it commits acts of terror against the Islamic government of Iran.

Anyway, the revelant newsreel is uploaded at my channel on the Rumble platform.

I will find time to write an email and a letter to YouTube HQ reflecting on what I have jotted down here. They are as loathsome as the arbiters of Facebook who ruled at the outset of the Russian intervention in Ukraine that posts which praised the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the context of the conflict would not be censured.

That just about says it all.

In the meantime, we should all contemplate how a one-minute newsreel about the funeral of Abbas Musawi in 1992 which would have been broadcast on mainstream news channels around the world can all of a sudden be considered as praising a "criminal organisation".

© Adeyinka Makinde (2025)

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Immediate Thoughts About The Confrontation Between Trump and Zelensky

Volodmyr Zelensky (left) and Donald Trump at the White House on Friday, February 28th, 2025.

I jotted down the following yesterday on a private social media page soon after watching the confrontation between U.S. President Donald Trump and his vice president on the one hand and Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky on the other:

No question that Trump and his vice president Vance were rough with Zelensky in front of the media.

They were "rude", "brusque" and "abrupt".

But Zelensky DESERVED it.

This corrupt and self-entitled weasel of a man has presided over the catastrophic loss of Ukrainian men on the battlefield, as well as the inevitable dismemberment of Ukraine because he WILLINGLY accepted the role of Ukraine as a proxy against Russia at the behest of the previous U.S. administration.

The United States PROVOKED this conflict through the long-term aim of expanding NATO to Russia's borders. The countdown to strife was escalated by the US-backed coup d'etat in February 2014 which overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine who was purportedly "pro-Russian" but who in fact was for Ukrainian neutrality.

This coup which used neoNazi and ultranationalist Ukrainian militias who brought to power a Russophobic Ukrainian nationalist regime whose subsequent policies ALIENATED and MARGINALISED the Russian-speaking Ukrainian population who took to arms in a bid to SECEDE from Ukraine.

The 2014 coup effectively kickstarted the Ukrainian civil war in which Russia only decided to intervene in a major way in 2022.

Zelensky has played a major part in PREVENTING peace and PROLONGING the war.

How so?

Zelensky was elected on a PEACE platform. The idea was that he would seek to follow the Minsk peace accords signed between the Ukrainian government and Russian-speaking secessionists of the Donbas.

The Minsk agreements were underwritten by the French and German governments but as Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel later admitted, the agreement including the "Steinmeier Formula" were never taken seriously and instead were looked on as devices through which the US-led NATO would buy time and build up the Ukrainian armed forces.

Zelensky did not insist on peace and has continued on this path for TWO reasons:

1. Fear for his life

2. Personal profit

When soon after his election Zelensky went to the parts of the Donbas occupied by the Ukrainian military and pleaded with troops to withdraw, he was met with resistance on the ground by so-called "veterans", a euphemism for ultranationalist troops. They told him to his face that they would not withdraw (captured on film) and later on his life was threatened by ultranationalists including Dmytro Yarosh.

Fast forward to April 2022 when Russia and Ukraine reached a provisional PEACE settlement after the Istanbul talks Boris Johnson, acting as an emissary for NATO, flew into Kiev to STIFLE the agreement which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives subsequently lost in the battlefield.

Zelensky was again threatened by figures on the extreme political right in Ukraine and he passed a law FORBIDDING negotiations with Russia while Vladimir Putin was leader of Russia.

In the meantime Zelensky, whose political career was initially bankrolled by the corrupt oligarch Ihor Kolomoiski, has succeeded in increasing his personal wealth, a lot of which has come from taking a percentage of the money flowing in from the US, NATO and EU countries. 

In fact in January 2023 when ex-CIA director William Burns visited Kiev, he did so to request that Zelensky and others tone down the level of corruption.

He played his part in PROVOKING a Russian intervention by increasing the launching of attacks in the Donbas (confirmed by statistics provided by the OECD) and by declaring in January 2022 that Ukraine would join NATO. He has also played his part in prolonging a conflict in which close to a million Ukrainian military personnel have been killed.

The level of Ukrainian deaths far EXCEEDS those of Russia.

Trump and Vance KNOW this and they both know that Zelensky KNOWS this.

Yet, all Zelensky has continually done is to ask for more and more aid when in fact Ukraine does not have the capacity to mobilise, train and equip an army after Russia has succeeded in DESTROYING no less than THREE constituted Ukrainian armies since February 2022.

The war has been LOST for a longtime now.

Ukraine has absolutely no chance of winning. It has lost a generation of males and is forced to kidnap men off the streets to continue a losing struggle in which Russia has ESCALATION DOMINANCE.

So yes, Zelensky DESERVED the humiliating treatment meted out by Trump and Vance, although Trump needs to take RESPONSIBILITY for the US's role in Ukraine's destruction.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2025).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.