This past summer marked the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, the supposed peace agreements that were intended (or were they?) to end the incessant hostilities between Zionist Israel and the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories.
Below are two different video news reports ostensibly covering the negotiations and eventual signing of these peace accords.
The first report is from CBN, a supposedly Christian news organization. As such, I expect them to maintain a high level of honesty, even-handedness, and truthfulness.
The second report is from Mondoweiss. (I will also disclose that it is produced and narrated by a friend of mine, Umna Patel.) Mondoweiss is a secular organization claiming to tell both sides of the story when it comes to Israel-Palestine.
While watching these two videos, ask yourself: Which one tells me about the details of the Oslo Accords? Which report best informs me about this piece of Middle East history, the role played by Oslo, and its long-term effects? Which one attempts to explain the specifics of why the Accords did not bring peace?
I’ll give you a hint on what I consider a dead give-away in rating these two clips.
Notice that the CBN report starkly portrays the characters involved as good guys in white hats (Israel) and bad guys in black hats (Palestinians). Period. There is no nuance or explanation. We are only told that Palestinians are inclined to violence and that they hate Israel. (Really, is anything in life that simple?)
In the CBN report, Israel is always the innocent victim of irrational Palestinian hatred. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are always bent on destroying Israel.
Sadly, the supposed “Christian” account is pure propaganda.
It’s the secular Mondoweiss account that informs and explains the real story in a balanced fashion.
Twitter suspensions have been in the news lately. But I am sure that most people have never heard about the suspension of Said Arikat, a reporter for the Palestinian publication, Al-Quds newspaper.
Journalist Said Arikat
Arikat is a veteran journalist who has covered the US State Department for the past 20-years.
He was suspended without explanation, but his removal is very much in keeping with the anti-Palestinian bias of US mainstream media.
I’d bet my bottom dollar that he is the latest victim of the pro-Zionist, Israel lobby in this country — a collection of organizations that work hard to hide Israel’s human rights abuses and silence Palestinian voices.
In yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there is no outcry over Twitter’s arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, longtime D.C. correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper.
It was big news when Elon Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of at least nine tech journalists last week (over alleged dox-ing) and then reinstated them this week after Twitter users demanded as much.
But in yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there has been scarcely any attention given to the arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, a fixture at the State Department briefings as the longtime Washington correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper, a Palestinian publication.
Arikat said he woke up on December 3 to read a notice from Twitter that his account had been “permanently suspended after careful review”. No reason was given; and despite the assurance that he could appeal the suspension if he thought the decision was wrong, Twitter has not responded to numerous letters Arikat has sent the media giant.
The only reason for Arikat’s suspension would seem to be that he is Palestinian and speaks up for Palestinians. His case has elicited no concern in the press. Let alone efforts to discover the pretext for the action.
Al-Quds is clearly being targeted as a Palestinian source. Today there is news that Facebook has shut down the official page of the Al-Quds newspaper.
Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who for many years gave US presidents their daily CIA briefings. He is also a specialist in the internal
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern (Photo by Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images)
affairs of the former Soviet Union – now Russia.
Mr. McGovern’s latest article at the Antiwar.com website is titled “Brainwashed for War with Russia“. He helpfully unpacks the step-by-step process of misinformation, distortion, and out-right lies that have been fed to the American public by our corporate media about the war in Ukraine.
The facts are simple but largely unknown by the average American.
First, he USA instigated this war by provoking Russia.
Second, the American news media is controlled by the military-industrial complex which wants to sell more weaponry to an every expanding war in Ukraine.
Therefore, we are propagandized to hate Putin, to cheer for Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and to remain catatonic as the US congress approves tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine.
Below is an excerpt from McGovern’s article (all emphasis is mine):
Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden – I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.
Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders, and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the US cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”
The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former National Intelligence Director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former National Intelligence Officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Absent a miraculous appearance of clearer heads with a less benighted attitude toward the core interests of Russia in Ukraine, and China in Taiwan, historians who survive to record the war now on our doorstep will describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok. Objective historians may even note that one of their colleagues – Professor John Mearsheimer – got it right from the start, when he explained in the autumn 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.”
Historian Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.” (Had she lived, she surely would have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine into account). Tuchman wrote:
“Wooden-headedness…plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”
Six Years (and Counting) of Brainwashing
Thanks to US media, a very small percentage of Americans know that:
Click here to read the entire piece and discover what most American’s don’t know about Ukraine.
The Australian blogger/journalist Caitlin Johnston encourages her readers to reproduce and circulate her writing free of charge. Regular readers of this blog will know that I cite Ms. Johnston regularly.
The anti-democratic actions that Ms. Johnston discusses are bipartisan in nature. Both parties are equally guilty. Both Democrats and Republicans are in lock-step in their calls for censorship and the silencing of anyone who criticizes and opposes US foreign policy.
When was the last time you saw a major news network host a guest critically analyzing the war in Ukraine, explaining how the USA provoked Russia’s attack and why Russia will eventually win?
Here is Caitlin’s article:
Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are always the same people calling for the censorship and deplatforming of anyone who criticizes the western empire?
It’s a ubiquitous mind virus throughout western society. Anyone — and I do mean anyone — who aggressively and consistently criticizes the foreign policy of the US and its allies in front of a sizeable audience gets branded a Russian agent by empire apologists, and this consensus is accompanied by the steadily growing opinion that Russia’s operatives and useful idiots should be banned from western platforms.
Defenders of the western empire won’t admit to wanting all empire critics silenced, but that’s what you get when you combine (A) the fact that they view everyone who criticizes the empire with sufficient aggression as a Russian agent with (B) their opinion that those given to Russian influence ought to be censored. Whenever I criticize the foreign policy of the western empire I get its apologists telling me I’d never be allowed to criticize my rulers like that if I lived in a nation like Russia or China, when they know full well that if it were up to them I wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the western empire here either. They are the same as the tyrants they claim to despise.
The trouble with “western values” is that westerners don’t value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.
In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It’s the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.
People tell me “Move to Russia!” or “Move to China!” depending on what aspect of the empire’s global power agendas I happen to be criticizing at the moment, and I always want to tell them, no, you move to Russia. You move to China. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. You don’t belong here.
In school we are taught that our society values truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful, and adversarial journalism, then we grow up and we see everyone rending their garments because institutions like CBS News or Amnesty International let slip one small report which doesn’t fully comply with the official line of our rulers. We see Russian media banned and censorship protocols expanded to the enthusiastic cheerleading of mainstream liberals. We see astroturf trolling operations used to mass report and shout down those who scrutinize the establishment line about Ukraine on social media. We see Julian Assange languishing in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of unauthorized journalism.
It’s obvious with a look around that the “western values” we’re all told about are not actually terribly common in the west. Look at the west’s major media platforms and they virtually never platform anyone who is meaningfully critical of the real centers of power in western civilization. Look at western governments and they continually dance to the beat of oligarchy and empire regardless of how people vote in their supposedly free democratic elections. Look at the internet and it’s actually very difficult to find authentic criticisms of imperial power unless you already know where to look.
Some of us bought into those western values we were taught about in school, but it’s not the people you’ve been trained to expect. It’s we marginalized outsiders who are adamantly opposing censorship, propaganda and the empire’s war on the press while continuously working to shine the light of truth on the mechanisms of power from the fringes, while we are being yelled at and accused of treason by mainstream sycophants who have far more in common with the autocrats they claim to oppose than with the western values they purport to uphold.
In the wake of yesterday’s murder of Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military, Mr. Levy recalls the numerous innocent Palestinians who have also been murdered recently in the West Bank.
Ms. Abu Akleh is not an outlier. Rather, her circumstances are characteristic of Israel’s ongoing colonial atrocities. The Palestinians are a subordinate, oppressed, occupied people. Israel holds all the power.
Below is Mr. Levy’s article (all emphasis is mine):
Al Jazeera reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh
The relative horror expressed over the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh is justified and necessary. It is also belated and self-righteous. Now you’re appalled? The blood of a famous journalist, no matter how brave and experienced she was – and she was – is no redder than the blood of an anonymous high school student who was traveling home in a taxi full of women in this same Jenin a month ago when she was killed by gunfire from Israeli soldiers.
That is how Hanan Khadour was killed. Then, too, the military spokesman tried to cast doubt on the shooters’ identity: “The matter is being examined.” A month has passed, and this “examination” has yielded nothing, and never will – but the doubts were planted, and they sprouted in the Israeli fields of denial and suppression, where no one actually cares about the fate of a 19-year-old Palestinian girl, and the country’s dead conscience is silenced again. Is there a single crime committed by the military that the right and the establishment will ever accept responsibility for? Just one?
Abu Akleh seems to be another story: an internationally known journalist. Just this past Sunday a more local journalist, Basel al-Adra, was attacked by Israeli soldiers in the South Hebron Hills, and no one cared. And a couple days ago, two Israelis who attacked journalists during the Gaza war last May were sentenced to 22 months in prison. What punishment will be meted out to soldiers who killed, if indeed they did, Abu Akleh? And what punishment was given to whoever decided on and carried out the despicable bombing of the Associated Press offices in Gaza during the fighting last year? Has anyone paid for this crime? And what about the 13 journalists who were killed during the Gaza war in 2014?And the medical personnel who were killed during demonstrations at the Gaza border fence, including 21-year-old Razan al-Najjar, who was shot dead by soldiers while wearing her white uniform? No one has been punished. Such things will always be covered by a cloud of blind justification and automatic immunity for the military and worship of its soldiers.
Even if the smoking Israeli bullet that killed Abu Akleh is found, and even if footage is found that shows the face of the shooter, he will be treated by Israelis as a hero who is above all suspicion. It’s tempting to write that if innocent Palestinians must be killed by Israeli soldiers, better for them to be well-known and holders of U.S. passports, like Abu Akleh. At least then the U.S. State Department will voice a little displeasure – but not too much – about the senseless killing of one of its citizens by the soldiers of one of its allies.
At the time of writing, it was still unclear who killed Abu Akleh. This is Israel’s propaganda achievement – sowing doubts, which Israelis are quick to grab onto as fact and justification, though the world does not believe them and is usually correct. When the young Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura was killed in 2000, Israeli propaganda also tried to blur the identity of his killers; it never proved its claims, and no one bought them. Past experience shows that the soldiers who killed the young woman in a taxi are the same soldiers who might kill a journalist. It’s the same spirit; they are permitted to shoot as they please. Those who weren’t punished for Hanan’s killing continued with Shireen.
But the crime begins long before the shooting. The crime starts with the raiding of every town, refugee camp, village and bedroom in the West Bank every night, when necessary but mainly when not necessary. The military correspondents will always say that this was done for the sake of “arresting suspects,” without specifying which suspects and what they’re suspected of, and resistance to these incursions will always be seen as “a breach of order” – the order in which the military can do as it pleases and the Palestinians cannot do anything, certainly not show any resistance.
Abu Akleh died a hero, doing her job. She was a braver journalist than all Israeli journalists put together. She went to Jenin, and many other occupied places, where they have rarely if ever visited, and now they must bow their heads in respect and mourning. They also should have stopped spreading the propaganda spread by the military and government regarding the identity of her killers. Until proven otherwise, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the default conclusion must be: the Israeli military killed Shireen Abu Akleh.
Today an Israeli army sniper shot and killed the Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. She was covering the most recent Israeli military attacks against the Jenin refugee camp for Al Jazeera.
Ms. Abu Akleh was unarmed. She was wearing a clearly visible, blue “Press” jacket when she was murdered.
Israeli soldiers shoot, wound, and murder unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on a regular, perhaps even a weekly, basis.
But Ms. Abu Akleh’s murder is receiving noticeably more attention than the regular victims because she has been a high profile figure among Palestinians for decades.
As always, the Israeli press and military leaders are claiming that she was shot accidentally by a Palestinian gunman. After all, isn’t the Israeli army the “most moral army in the world,” as they say?
Watch this news panel of chattering dunderheads, otherwise known as “experts,” blather on about the impossibility of anyone in the Israeli army ever doing such a horrible thing!
The propagandistic i24 News, pearl-clutching is disgusting to watch, for none of these so-called experts has obviously taken the time to give their attention to the eye-witness accounts of the other journalists who were also being shot at.
Watch the video clip below to see those interviews yourself.
At least 4 Al Jazeera reporters came under repeated rifle fire for a sustained period of time. The shootings were obviously not an accident. They were deliberately targeting this group of journalists, all of whom were wearing blue Press jackets.
The shooting was deliberate, pre-meditated murder, pure and simple.
Two journalists were hit by this rifle fire. One was hit in the back and survived. The other, Ms. Abu Akleh, was fatally hit in the head/face.
This is not unusual. Israeli soldiers commonly aim for the victim’s face and head.
A third journalist drew repeated rifle fire whenever she tried to move in any direction. The shots aimed at her clearly demonstrate that the shootings, and the resulting murder, were intentional.
The journalists reported that there were no Palestinian fighters anywhere near them.
The Israeli military and its state propaganda machine specialize in two things: killing Palestinians and lying to the world about the horrible things they do.
The cold-blooded murder of a middle-aged, Palestinian Christian woman, who was doing her job reporting on Israeli violence in the West Bank, is only the most recent public instance of the continuing war crimes that Israel commits week in and week out in the Occupied Territories.
We cannot allow them to continue to get away with this!
Call your elected representatives and tell them that all American support and foreign aid to Israel must stop now.
Tell them that you do not want your tax dollars given to a racist, apartheid state that uses US weaponry to commit crimes against humanity.
Naturally, the American media continue to pump out false information about the origins and continuation of the war in Ukraine.
Remembering and reminding people of recent history does not make anyone a “Putin-puppet.” In fact, such facile and feeble accusations are a principle indicator that the accuser, without anything more substantive to say, is actually another US government stooge furthering the American party line.
Below is an excerpt from a recent post by the Australian journalist/blogger Caitlin Johnstone. She nails all the relevant issues with precision and accuracy.
Everything she says and documents has been maligned by one US news outlet or another as “Russian propaganda.” That, my friends, is a lie.
But, then, lies are a mainstay of all propaganda, including American propaganda, which is being manufactured fast and furious by the corporate media these days.
A few members of the Nazi Azov battalion which is now part of the Ukrainian military. They have successfully battled the Russian-Ukrainian population of the eastern Donbas region to a standstill. Much of the destruction presented by American media as the result of Russian actions is actually the work of these Russia hating neo-Nazis, who have always been violent ethic-nationalists fighting for a “pure” Ukraine.
As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.
To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy warfor many years.
With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.
When he was asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:
I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.
I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.
When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:
In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and was “prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.”
But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.
“No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”
Yes, the US government engages in censorship just like the Russians. But, of course, the US corporate media will never admit to such things.
Of course, anti-war voices have been censored for a long time in this country. That’s why all of my favorite journalists work for independent news outlets and are never heard from on the major networks.
However, recently the censorship has become worse. Now independent reporting is being attacked wherever it appears. The video below offers two stories in one. First, independent journalist Abby Martin describes the erasure from the internet of the video archive from her old show “Breaking the Set” on RT television.
If you don’t think our government censors the news, listen to her story. She is not the only one who has experienced it recently.
Secondly, Aaron Mate discusses the role of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion in the Ukrainian national guard, as well as the influence of Nazi politicians in the Ukrainian government.
But, of course, the average American has no idea that we are supplying military weapons to a government that arms Nazis without hesitation. That’s because of CENSORSHIP.
Mate’s report on Ukrainian Nazis begins at the 20 minute mark.
Martin begins to tell her story of censorship at the 29 minute mark.
Former top Pentagon advisor retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor was recently interviewed by journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate at The Grayzone.
The Colonel offers a VERY different perspective on the war in Ukraine, Russia, Putin, NATO, and the US role in this conflict than you will ever hear from the monolithic, pro-war, propaganda machine called “news” in this country.
Colonel Macgregor’s interview takes up the first 60 minutes of this two hour video. Max and Aaron discuss the issues in the second hour.
I strongly encourage you to listen to the Colonel’s words. If only Biden were listening…
Our current American moment offers an glaring example of the corporate media’s power to generate, manipulate. and circumscribe public opinion.
If it’s not broadcast on the news, then it does not exist. Corporate editors at CNN, Fox, or whichever newsroom decide what we will care about today.
They only show us what they want us to see, knowing full well that the average American will never look any further than the edited images her favorite news channel shows to her.
The network news room also decides how we will think and feel about the events they have selected for us to see that day. We are all constantly being manipulated by the big business arms of major media outlets.
Tragically, the conservative wing of the Christian church is among the most easily manipulated because we confine ourselves to the most narrow, like-minded sources of information — Fox News and whichever “Christian” TV and/or radio stations we prefer, all of which are promotional arms of the Republican party.
Thus are we manicured, buffed, groomed, trimmed, and made to fit into the preconstructed box of conventional, American nationalism — including Christian nationalism.
This box guarantees that America always wears the white hat while America’s enemies (as defined by the American government and its communication stooges) always wear the black hats.
Yet, that brand of patriotic, nationalistic identity is as far removed from life in the kingdom of God as is the east from the west, or as far as heaven is removed from hell.
Yet, the wisdom available by way of God’s Image within us, an Image with which every human being is equally endowed, still shines brightly in many.
Anyone who has followed this blog knows how much I admire the investigative journalism of Abby Martin. Her program The Empire Files has long provided a wide-ranging, independent, internationalist perspective on world events. The very perspective that US corporate media will never provide.
Abby was recently interviewed by The Real News Network — another independent outlet I highly recommend — to discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the role played by the US and NATO in fostering this conflict.
I suspect that Abby is an atheist or agnostic, although I don’t know for sure. However, her humanistic moral compass points to true north. The following excerpt from her interview provides the most “Christian” analysis that I have yet to hear about America’s relationship to the war in Ukraine.
Abby begins by reminding everyone of the many bombs dropped regularly by the US and our allies around the world every day. The map below was drawn up yesterday. How many Americans are mourning for the brown and black bombing victims in Syria, Yemen, or Somalia?
I’ll tell you: few, if any.
The media ensures that our national heartache is very narrowly circumscribed, limited to only the “worthy victims” that the US government identifies as the victims of “our enemies.”
It also should be noted that these worthy victims are also white Europeans. People who look like us. That is a large part of what makes them “worthy.”
Ukrainians are not like the brown and black “hoards” fleeing as displaced refugees from the homelands that the US and its allies have demolished in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Those poor people are “unworthy victims” who deserve to be turned away at the border.
What condemnable, wicked rubbish is fed to us by our corporate masters under the label “news.”
And oh how completely we condemn ourselves by surrendering our loyalty to the deceitful siren songs of national pride and foreign policy preferences.
Now, please watch as Abby Martin reflects more of the mind of Christ regarding world affairs than I have ever heard from the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).
