By Hans Vogel for the Saker Blog

What is a journalist?

Essentially, a journalist is a person who writes articles for a newspaper or a website. Journalists come in two varieties: reporters, who tell what they see on location, and investigative journalists, who work with looser deadlines. The latter has a broader perspective, trying to give the public a fuller picture of what is truly going on. It is the latter kind of journalist that is often at odds with authority since they tend to uncover what the powerful would prefer to remain hidden from the public. Albert Londres was such a journalist, and so were Emil Ludwig and I.F. Stone: heroes of a bygone age, and universally respected for their honesty, stamina and rigor. Woodward and Bernstein, of Watergate fame, carried on this tradition.

Since then, however, with the press all over the West getting concentrated in ever fewer hands, life has become difficult for that kind of journalist. Just look at Julian Assange. For doing what Woodward and Bernstein did half a century ago, he was thrown in jail on imaginary and trumped-up charges and now faces life imprisonment.

Just like they are helping to destroy the freedom of speech in the US at the behest of the imperial overlord in Washington in the Assange case, British judges are now doing the same for the Netherlands at the request of the Dutch government. Recently, Dutch investigative journalist Micha Kat, living in exile in Northern Ireland, was arrested for “terrorism.” The Dutch government has been trying to silence Mr. Kat for nearly two decades and now, at their wits’ end, have decided to label him a terrorist. Yet, Mr. Kat, like Julian Assange, has never hurt a fly, never propagated violence, and never incited anyone to commit a terrorist act. However, like Julian Assange, Micha Kat is an investigative journalist and as such, at least in the eyes of the Dutch government, he “destabilizes” society. On 3 September, the judge will decide whether or not Mr. Kat is to be extradited.

One of the last surviving members of Theo van Gogh’s group of maverick journalists, Micha Kat has been exposing the systemic corruption of the Dutch judiciary. Although the Netherlands enjoys a great international reputation as an enlightened nation with a decent government and an impeccable human rights record, the reality is quite different.

Theo van Gogh was killed in broad daylight by an alleged Muslim fanatic with close ties to Dutch intelligence, yet none of the big media (all state-controlled or owned by a few powerful press lords) ventured to look into the case. In the Netherlands Maarten van Traa, a politician who investigates drug dealing networks in which state agencies are involved can die in a suspicious car crash, and no one will ask questions. Mr. van Traa, a prominent Social Democrat, presided over the parliamentary investigation committee into the dealings of the IRT, the police task force set up to uncover illegal drug transports. The investigation showed that the task force members themselves were importing cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Colombia, in cooperation with port officials and even the Royal Netherlands Navy, which flew the drugs from the West Indies to naval bases in Europe. Several cabinet ministers had to resign, while the Minister of Internal Affairs (under which the Police resort), Mrs. Ien Dales in 1994 suddenly died from a massive heart attack. In 1997 while driving home one night Mr. Van Traa died when his car was hit by a truck. In Colombia, this would be called a camionazo (assassination by means of a truck), a routine settling of accounts in drug-dealing circles, but in the Netherlands, the police produced a report stating that there was no foul play involved and that was the end of the affair.

In the Netherlands, a person (Hüseyin Baybaşin) can be sentenced to life in prison for murder, without any hard evidence whatsoever, just on the basis of a few doctored sound tapes, and the media remain silent. In what really has become a festering ulcer of the most incredible kind of judicial corruption Mr. Baybaşin, a Turkish national, businessman, and leader of a Kurdish nationalist movement, was given a life sentence for something he never did. His lawyer maintains that the outrageous sentence (life sentences are never handed out in the Netherlands) is the result of blackmail. Threatening to disclose evidence of the sexual activities with local minors by a high official in the Dutch Justice Ministry, the Turks thus succeeded in silencing a prominent member of their Kurdish minority.

In the Netherlands, the highest official of the Justice Ministry could (from 2002 to 2012) be a notorious pedophile and even suspected accessory to murder. Yet when Micha Kat exposed this outrageous situation, he was vilified in the most abject manner. From the point of view of the political establishment, this was understandable, because Joris Demmink, the Justice Ministry Secretary-General, according to persistent rumors might even be the uncle of Dutch King William Alexander. That would certainly explain the total impunity and immunity that Demmink has always enjoyed, despite all the convincing evidence.

Recently, Micha Kat has been exposing the highest COVID official in the country, Jaap van Dissel, director of the state Health Authority RIVM. The “Dutch Fauci” has been accused of being a child molester, satanist, and murderer. As member of a group of pedophiles, Van Dissel is alleged to have raped and killed children in the Dutch town of Bodegraven during the 1980s. One of the survivors of these orgies (now living in exile in Spain) has been trying to obtain an official investigation into these crimes. Yet the police, the local prosecutor, and the political authorities are refusing to budge. Obviously, if the “Dutch Fauci” were to be officially exposed as a sadistic pedophile, this would spell disaster for the government’s COVID agenda calling for a permanent medical dictatorship.

Together with Joost Knevel (the surviving orgy victim) and “conspiracy theorist” Wouter Raatgever (now in jail after a sentence based on trumped-up charges), Micha Kat had mounted a weekly video show (censored on Youtube, of course) that was becoming more and more popular by the week. One of the most widely watched truly militant shows critical of the new COVID dictatorship, this so-called “Red Pill Journaal” has now been silenced, because Micha Kat was placed under a gag order.

For a long time now, those with eyes to see have been able to witness the demolition of free speech in the West. It is not just the US government or its British satrapy that has been engaged in the assault on journalists and independent press outlets. Julian Assange is only its most visible and, by now symbolic, victim. Another is Thierry Meyssan, exiled from France upon the order of former president Nicolas Sarkozy who (karma is a bitch) has now been exposed as a common criminal and has been sentenced to a lenient prison term. There is also the German whistle-blowing journalist Udo Ulfkotte, who in 2017 after publishing his book Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists) suddenly fell ill and died.

It is not an exaggeration to say that real investigative journalism no longer finds a home in the state- and corporate-controlled media in the West. This is not to so say that it finds one anywhere else. It is just that media and politicians in the West continue to extoll the virtues of their liberal societies that supposedly are a beacon of light to the poor and huddled masses in the rest of the world. The fact is that today, investigative journalists need to put in a lot of energy to run websites of their own, soliciting their readers to make contributions. If these independent journalists overstep the bounds of what the big censor lords of the internet deem appropriate, they run the risk of being excluded from payment platforms such as Paypal, on which they rely for a livelihood.

The few that manage to sail around these and other obstacles are serious problems and still need to be silenced. One way is to charge them with “terrorism” or being a threat to national security. Apart from this being quite an honor bestowed on a person, it is sheer lunacy to suppose that the security of any state can be jeopardized by just one single individual. The fact that none of the state- and corporate-controlled media dares point this out is further proof of their utter corruption and uselessness as a source of information. If legal action fails, then there are other means of silencing wayward journalists: accidents, suicides, and sudden illnesses.

On 21 July, The Dutch state-owned media and MSM were overjoyed to report Mr. Kat’s arrest and were unanimous in slandering him. These same media have always remained utterly silent, and continue to remain silent on all the important issues that Mr. Kat has been raising over the years. At the same time, they have been howling in indignation over alleged human rights violations in Russia (Pussy Riot, Mr. Navalny), Belarus, China, and any other country with a government, not to the liking of the Washington regime.

For now, the fate of Micha Kat, whose health, like Julian Assange’s has suffered from the persecution by the Dutch state (last year he had a heart attack), is in the hands of a judge in Northern Ireland. One can only hope that judge will have the brains, conscience, spinal column, common sense, and the knowledge to see through the untenable arguments presented by the Dutch government. It would certainly do Mr. Kat no harm if the utter perversion of the case against him became more widely known.

In case the judge would allow his extradition, it is certain that Micha Kat, who is completely innocent of any and all charges against him, is going to be subjected to total isolation and other forms of torture and that his life expectancy will decrease dramatically. It would be a tragedy if his name were added to the growing list of journalists murdered by evil regimes.

Make no mistake, the Dutch regime is as evil and corrupt as any in the US Empire.