{"id":174045,"date":"2017-07-31T07:20:00","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T07:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=174045"},"modified":"2026-08-16T08:13:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T08:13:34","slug":"jo-cox-her-assassination-the-white-helmets-humanitarianism-and-regime-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=174045","title":{"rendered":"Jo Cox, Her Assassination, the White Helmets, \u201cHumanitarianism,\u201d and Regime Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vanessa Beeley and Whitney Webb — Mint Press July 30, 2018<\/h1>\n
\"Labour<\/a>

Labour MP Jo Cox, who was allegedly murdered by Thomas Mair. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Just over two years ago, the senseless and savage murder of British Labour Party MP Jo Cox stunned Britain and much of the world. After her death, families, friends and colleagues pledged that her memory would live on, thanks in part to the memorial funds posthumously set up in her honor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among those memorial funds, the Jo Cox Fund is by far the most notable, having greatly surpassed its \u00a31.5 million ($1.97 million) fundraising goal. That money, according to the fund\u2019s GoFundMe page<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, was divided among three organizations that had been \u201cclose to her [Cox\u2019s] heart:\u201d the Royal Voluntary Service, Hope Not Hate, and the White Helmets of Syria, with funds raised in excess of that goal being used to establish the Jo Cox Foundation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though Jo Cox was undeniably a vocal supporter of all three of those causes, the past two years have revealed a concerted effort on the part of powerful interests, including globalist billionaires and prominent figures of the Western political elite, to exploit Cox\u2019s death for the purpose of furthering the long-standing Western agenda of effecting regime change in Syria.<\/span><\/p>\n

These figures \u2013 George Soros, Bill Gates and the Clintons among them \u2013 have used their influence and their vast resources of capital in order not only to help enact the \u201chumanitarian\u201d regime change model in Syria, but to shield from criticism their assets in the country, including suspected child traffickers profiting from the misery of Syrian children.<\/span><\/p>\n

The crux of this effort centers around the controversial \u201chumanitarian\u201d group that fraudulently<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>calls itself the Syrian Civil Defense, better known as the White Helmets, whose ties to both terrorist elements within the Syrian opposition and Western governments pushing for Syrian regime change have been well-documented.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through their receipt of money raised from the Jo Cox Fund and the group\u2019s well-publicized efforts aimed at commemorating Cox\u2019s death, the murdered MP\u2019s posthumous and saint-like reputation has been instrumental in shielding the group from legitimate criticisms both within the U.K. and beyond, preventing genuinely independent inquiries into the group\u2019s dubious activities in Syria and its documented receipt of over \u00a338.4 million ($50.3 million) in U.K. government funds.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who was Jo Cox?<\/h2>\n

Prior to her untimely and tragic death, Jo Cox was a \u201ctireless advocate\u201d for the Syrian opposition following the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian conflict, even going so far as to promote Western military intervention to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, Cox consistently called<\/a><\/strong><\/span> for the U.K. to unilaterally establish a \u201cno-fly zone\u201d in Syria with U.S. support and argued that the U.K. military could achieve an \u201cethical solution<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u201d to the Syrian conflict by intervening in the war in order to \u201ccompel\u201d the Syrian government to negotiate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cox was deeply connected to the Fabian Society<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, the claimed representative of \u201cmodern Labour\u201d in the U.K. This society has certainly furthered U.K. imperialist politics, which included the \u201cpatriotic funding of war machines,\u201d according to author Dr. P. Wilkinson<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, who analyzed the impact of Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s election as Labour Party leader in 2015 upon the Blairite factions within the party. While the Fabian Society can lay claim to some good work on child poverty, as an example, more recently it has been instrumental in the expansion of Global Britain\u2019s economic and military interests.<\/span><\/p>\n

In pursuit of U.K.\/NATO military intervention, Cox vocally denounced Assad and \u2014 throughout her short career in Parliament \u2014 had maintained that the Syrian president had \u201chelped nurture ISIS [Daesh] and been its main recruiting sergeant.\u201d She had also asserted that the Syrian government had killed seven times more civilians<\/a><\/strong><\/span> than the infamous terror group and the hundreds of other militant, extremist groups and foreign mercenaries in Syria at the behest of their backers among NATO member states and Gulf States with Israel as their hospital wing<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, treating armed militants, including Nusra Front in Israeli medical centres.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cox\u2019s precarious positioning of facts upon a mountain of misleading information has been discredited over time, as the Syrian Arab Army and its allies have waged a successful and authentic \u201cwar on terror\u201d inside Syria and on its borders. All such wild accusations and Coxian theories have been eroded with each liberation of occupied Syrian territory and reintegration of armed militants into Syrian society via the Russian-brokered Amnesty and Reconciliation agreements.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cox failed to pinpoint the U.K. Government\u2019s involvement in the bankrolling<\/a><\/strong><\/span> of the various extremist and terrorist factions that invaded Syria from 2011 onwards. Armed militants, who have committed all manner of atrocities against the Syrian people, Cox claimed to defend. Cox, like so many regime-change promoters, had never been to Syria. She relied upon the narratives emerging from Syria produced by the U.K. FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)-manufactured and financed White Helmets<\/a><\/strong><\/span> and a number of other U.K. state-funded entities<\/a><\/strong><\/span> on the ground in Syria. The U.K. Government was engineering a shadow state inside the borders of a sovereign nation and Cox supported this blatant violation of international law either deliberately or unwittingly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite all evidence to the contrary<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, Cox claimed that Syria was not another Iraq. This is a familiar mantra often repeated by those who support the regime change war in Syria and one that is verifiably false. It appears that Cox had never perused the Bush\/Blair communications revealed in the Chilcot report<\/a><\/strong><\/span> that demonstrated the progression from Iraq to Iran and Syria in the U.K.\/U.S. drive towards hegemony in the region. Syria was in Bush\u2019s crosshairs<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span>, as described in a TIME <\/em>article, as far back as 2006 but this was overlooked by Cox. Tony Blair must have been proud of the efforts made by Cox to expand \u201cGlobal Britain\u2019s<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u201d interests inside Syria:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Syria<\/a><\/p>\n

Above is a presentation slide showing just one of the Bush\/Blair communiques as revealed by the Chilcot report. Blair suggests offering Syria and Iran a \u201cchance at a different relationship,\u201d one that would be soured by President Assad\u2019s refusal to comply with the conditions of that \u201cdifferent relationship\u201d \u2014 conditions included favoring the Qatar\/Turkey oil pipelin<\/strong><\/span>e<\/a> preferred by the U.S. coalition. Assad said \u201cno,\u201d and he said \u201cno\u201d to abandoning his allies in the region or reneging on his commitment to the Palestinian cause. In 2002, Blair had even included an honorary knighthood<\/a><\/strong><\/span> in his early sweeteners to persuade Assad to embrace the \u201cdifferent relationship.\u201d Blair soon changed tack when it was recognized that Syria would not abandon its principles so easily. Plan B, which was regime change, was put into effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cox voted against<\/a><\/strong><\/span> the proposed bombing of Syria in 2015, not because she thought it was a bad idea but because she wanted David Cameron\u2019s government to go further and send British troops into Syria to save the \u201cmoderates.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In October 2015, Cox co-wrote an article with Andrew Mitchell, former Conservative Secretary of State for International Development (2010-12) and Libya war-hawk. The article was published in The Guardian<\/em><\/a><\/strong>, whose record on manufacturing consent<\/a><\/strong><\/span> for U.K. state \u201chumanitarian\u201d intervention is legendary. The title said it all \u2013 \u201cBritish Forces could help achieve an ethical solution<\/strong> in Syria\u201d (emphasis added).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Cox and Mitchell argued that Syria was this generation\u2019s moral test, its \u201cresponsibility.\u201d \u00a0With little regard for the reality on the ground in Syria, Cox and Mitchell merged the threat of international terrorism with the perceived<\/em> threat from the Syrian government and Syrian Arab Army. The Labour and Tory MPs laser-focused on the refugee \u201ccrisis.<\/em>\u201d No context was provided, only emotional humanitarian flag-waving that ignored the fact that the refugee crisis<\/em> was actually caused by a far greater percentage of non-Syrian refugees driven from Libya, Central Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq by previous NATO \u201cethical interventions.\u201d \u00a0Cox and Mitchell erased the U.K. government\u2019s criminal record under international law with customary virtue-signalling.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026[T]here is nothing ethical about standing to one side when civilians are being murdered and maimed. There was no excuse in Bosnia, nor Rwanda and there isn\u2019t now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Like so many neocons, Cox fundamentally argued that the only pathway to peace was the removal of Assad and victory for the \u201crebels.\u201d They gave little or no consideration to the reality that this would inevitably lead to the rise of violent sectarianism under an alleged \u201cmoderate\u201d Islamist governance, which would plunge Syria into the same terrorist vacuum that Libya has been dealing with since NATO\u2019s \u201cethical solution\u201d reduced that prosperous sovereign nation down to a failed state.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even after Cox\u2019s untimely death, her colleagues insisted that her \u201clegacy\u201d should be Britain going to war in Syria. Just prior to her death, Cox had been working on a paper entitled \u201cThe Cost of Doing Nothing<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.\u201d Posthumously this paper was completed by Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, ex-military chair of the Foreign Affairs committee, and Alison McGovern, a Blairite MP who was elected chair of the all-party parliamentary group \u201cFriends of Syria,\u201d founded and previously chaired by Jo Cox.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to a report<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>by journalist and academic Paul Dixon, \u201cthe report was due to be published on the day of the Chilcot inquiry on 6 July 2016, to counter growing British scepticism about foreign military interventions.\u201d Tugendhat, in particular, had argued (in a 2015 paper entitled \u00a0<\/em>\u201cClearing the Fog of Law<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u201d) against the human-rights laws that, in his opinion, curtailed and restricted British military action, he argued that \u201cjudicial imperialism should urgently be reversed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In an article written for the Telegraph<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span>, Tugendhat stated that \u201chis friend\u201d Jo Cox would \u201cnever want Britain to withdraw from the world \u2014 we must be ready to intervene.\u201d A jingoistic argument was deployed by Tugendhat to justify British imperialism:<\/span><\/p>\n

We wanted to show that Britain\u2019s history of intervention, military and otherwise, is common to both our political traditions and has been an integral part of our foreign and national security policy for over two hundred years.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

During her life, Cox had been an advocate of war to bring peace<\/em> in Syria. Furthermore, as this article series will show, her monstrous murder has been weaponized and politicized by the neocon war hawks in British politics in order to further the imperialist ambitions of the U.K. government in Syria and beyond. Significant media coverage, for instance, has been given to Cox\u2019s \u201ccompassion,\u201d but little coverage has been given to her pro-interventionist policies \u2014 which she often promoted in apparent ignorance of reality and historical context. The use of the \u201chumanitarian\u201d pretext to promote war is hardly a new concept, but the sudden and shocking death of Jo Cox has been exploited in order to elevate it and shield it from honest criticism. Indeed, one could argue that to criticize Jo Cox posthumously is akin to questioning a \u201cSaint.\u201d Who could find fault with her campaign against \u201cgenocide,\u201d her pleas for safe havens for refugees, her apolitical stance on the world\u2019s \u201cinhumanity?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Nevertheless, despite the possibility of being labeled insensitive and cynical, the question that should be asked is who determines the meaning of the terms so liberally used by Cox and her colleagues? What are the implications of this humanitarian<\/em> hyperbole for U.K. government policy? Indeed, in the past, misplaced or even misleading \u201ccompassion\u201d has been used to encourage us not only to betray the principles<\/a><\/strong><\/span> of international law but also to justify the escalation of armed conflict<\/a><\/strong><\/span> that has brought only greater inhumanity<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the case of Syria, such pro-interventionist \u201chumanitarians\u201d have largely promoted policies that have only deepened the suffering for the vast majority of Syrian people. What diplomatic efforts have been deployed? What rational, Syria-centric, political resolution has been proposed for discussion? What respect has there been for the self-determination of the Syrian people?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"White<\/a><\/p>\n

As an example, both Cox and the White Helmets were committed advocates of a No-Fly Zone over Syria<\/a><\/strong><\/span> \u2014 the White Helmets still are, of course. Despite the very real risk of escalating tensions with Russia, which intervened at the request of the Syrian government in September 2015, Cox argued strongly<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, in 2015, for a No-Fly Zone, defying even possible UN vetoes:<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not about escalating a conflict directly to take on Russia. This is about a deterrence effect to stop the Syrian regime targeting their own civilians.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A \u201cNo-Fly Zone\u201d is recognized by many acclaimed journalists and analysts as nothing less than a \u201cdeclaration of war<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.\u201d Even Hillary Clinton, neocon warhawk extraordinaire, conceded the certainty that a No-Fly Zone would kill more Syrian civilians:<\/span><\/p>\n

To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we\u2019re not putting our pilots at risk \u2014 you\u2019re going to kill a lot of Syrians.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The precedent of Libya<\/a><\/strong><\/span> stands as a horrifying example of the death and destruction that is a consequence of such a policy, yet Cox was willing to endorse such wholesale devastation, which would inevitably affect more innocent lives in Syria and further fragment an already destabilized nation. Notably, she did so by promoting \u201chumanitarianism,\u201d despite the clearly inhuman consequences of such a policy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, Cox campaigned tirelessly for refugee rights. However, she did not highlight the British Government\u2019s role in creating <\/em>the refugee crisis in Syria by financing, promoting<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>and equipping the \u201cmoderate\u201d opposition that drove civilians from their homes and into refugee status. Neither did she highlight the British government\u2019s role in NATO-member-state interventions that further exacerbated the refugee crisis in countries like Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Central Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond the conflict itself, Syrians have endured almost eight years of crippling economic sanctions<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, sanctions that were imposed by the U.K. and its allies in the U.S. regime-change coalition. As history has shown<\/a><\/strong><\/span> time and again, sanctions never damage a target government but instead wind up punishing the innocent people who resist any kind of foreign meddling in their sovereign affairs. These particular sanctions have decimated the Syrian state medical sector, by destroying hospitals and reducing the nation\u2019s ability to treat its population for all manner of chronic illness and to counter the trauma of an externally waged war. Why did Jo Cox never argue that these sanctions should be lifted if she truly cared for the plight of the Syrian people? Indeed, why were the solutions she supported largely policies that \u2014 in practice \u2014 would deepen and prolong the conflict, and why did she invoke the well-being of the Syrian people to promote them?<\/span><\/p>\n

Jo Cox and the White Helmets<\/h2>\n

Beyond her public calls for intervention, Cox also founded and co-chaired<\/a><\/strong><\/span> the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) \u201cFriends of Syria\u201d from 2015 until her death a year later. \u00a0She was again partnered in this endeavor by Andrew Mitchell, who was also co-chair of the APPG.<\/span><\/p>\n

During that time, Cox hosted several events<\/a><\/strong><\/span> on behalf of the group, many of them promoting pro-regime-change speakers from groups like the European Council on Foreign Relations and the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces. More recent events<\/a><\/strong><\/span> hosted by the group have included speakers from the U.S. think-tank Atlantic Council, largely funded by U.S. weapons manufacturers; and the filmmakers of the second Oscar-nominated White Helmets documentary, Last Men in Aleppo<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span>, a revisionist project that attempted to erase from public consciousness the existence of Nusra Front and over 50 other extremist groups that occupied East Aleppo for almost five years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Watch |\u00a0Channel 4 tribute to Jo Cox, honoring the White Helmets as \u201cimpartial, neutral rescuers\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n