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The first time I met Tuvaal I was just a wee young kid. She was working in Scotland and was attending the same left-wing socialist gathering my father and I were at. We remain in touch.
She is Jewish Israeli and a vocal socialist activist in Israel and a member of the Israel-Palestine section of International Socialist Alternative. She fights for various causes, including Palestinian human rights – and when I spoke to her recently, she described her anger and frustration with the recent events inside Israel and the illegally occupied territories. During our lengthy conversation she explained her understanding of how the sequence of events unfolded that led to the increased brutal violence against Palestinians in the past few weeks.
Before the vicious Israeli attacks against Palestinians, Tuvaal talked positively about the many jointly held demonstrations that had taken place, between Israelis and Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah district in Jerusalem, against the planned evictions of Palestinian residents.
She pointed out that racist laws, for instance, allow a right-wing NGO to buy the homes of Palestinian families, kick families out and let Jewish settlers move in their place.
“I view these laws as enshrining ethnic cleansing,” she asserted.
“For the past few weeks, Palestinian youth have been heroically defying the Israeli regime and its armed forces; first, protesting against provocations by Israeli police in Al-Aqsa mosque, protests which despite being answered with brutal oppression, won victories against the police. Then, the protesters moved to demonstrate against the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. Attacked by both Israeli armed forces and the neo-fascist settlers, the protests persisted, in turn, inspiring many more protests around the world.”
During a recent demonstration called, ‘Stop the expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah – oppose the war on Gaza’, saw more than 200 Jewish and Palestinian protestors, peacefully marching together around the neighbourhood, meeting families who were about to be evicted. They chanted in Arabic and Hebrew, “Settler thieves, leave our homes!” and “No to Israeli armed forces and settlers in Sheikh Jarrah – No to the occupation”.
Tuvaal described the feeling of unity and solidarity – and then came the brutal and vicious Israeli response.
“Israeli armed forces decided to violently disperse the peaceful protesters – a deliberate act of provocation. While the settlers stirred up trouble, the armed forces attacked Palestinian youths, and fired stun grenades and water cannons targeting the protesters. The use of stun grenades caused many injuries.”
After the violent dispersion, Tuvaal confirmed Israeli settlers “had fired live ammo at the Palestinian residents’ homes.” At this point in our conversation Tuvaal wanted to make clear that she condemned any attack on civilians, whether perpetrated by Israelis or Palestinians.
When I asked about the current mood of Israelis, Tuvaal admitted the Palestinian response to Israeli brutality had stirred up a nationalist mood amongst Jewish Israelis – and then went onto say that this isn’t very difficult to do considering the entrenched right-wing political landscape of the nation and the lack of a strong left voice.
She described how far right forces, including settlers in mixed Palestinian and Jewish cities and neighbourhoods, as well as organised settler forces from the settlements in the West Bank, have exploited the current events – using it as an opportunity to increase violent attacks on Palestinians and to undermine the coexistence of Jews and Palestinians in these cities. Specific incidents of brutal violence have been witnessed. The horrific shooting of a young man in Lyd by settlers. The horrifying lynching of a taxi driver in Bat Yam, who was beaten for an hour by a mob – and the police nowhere in sight.
“The Israeli police are also responsible for causing provocation and unrest in Palestinian cities and villages. They violently attack protestors against the war on Gaza. Whilst they defend the violent actions of settlers, they carry out their own actions of violence against Palestinians.”
Although many Israelis support the actions against Palestinians in Gaza, many in the Jewish community are opposed to the “racist attacks” against Palestinians in ’48 territories’.
“Jewish bus drivers have been escorting Palestinian colleagues to their homes and ensuring their safety. Unions have strongly condemned the violence against Palestinians and have issued messages published across many social media platforms of solidarity between Palestinians and Jews. Our task on the socialist left is to broaden the message: from solidarity with neighbours and colleagues, to solidarity against the brutal attacks on Gaza and against the bloodshed instigated by the Israeli regime.”
Although the current ceasefire has been welcomed by all parties, Tuvaal stresses that Jewish activists, although small in number, remain firmly opposed to the Israeli regime and its brutal actions and policies targeting Palestinians. They are trying to expose the regime and highlight the ongoing crimes it is committing. The challenges are there. The Israeli media, for instance, “is firmly aligned to the Israeli leadership and army propaganda.”
“The ceasefire would not have been achieved without the fearless, determined mass movement of Palestinians, including the inspiring one-day general strike held a couple of days before it was announced. It also wouldn’t have been achieved without the incredible solidarity movement, with mass demonstrations held all over the world. However, the ceasefire does not mark the end of the Israeli state’s aggression towards Palestinian people – the occupation, siege, ethnic cleansing, house demolitions, and poverty. But it also does not mark the end of rebellion against these oppressions. The mass movement continues on Friday, after the ceasefire was announced, mass demonstrations were held in Al-Aqsa, in the West Bank, and in Umm El-Fahm (inside 48 borders). The evictions in Sheikh Jarrah still loom over the families’ heads – but the weekly protests will continue. We, socialists – Palestinian and Jewish – who oppose the occupation, will continue fighting against it, wherever and however we can.”
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Shahbazz Afzal is an independent writer and political activist.
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***
Researchers used a pseudo virus made of a cell surrounded by spike proteins but without a viral component to demonstrate the spike proteins can damage human cells and alter mitochondrial function
Many of the long-haul symptoms attributed to COVID-19 may be the result of endothelial damage that triggers poor flow through the capillaries, inflammation and tissue hypoxia
Data show up to 10% of all people who contracted COVID experienced long-haul symptoms, but none of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s patients who were treated within the first five days of infection developed persistent symptoms
As researchers are seeking another target for future vaccine development, French authorities announced five people developed myocarditis after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. Twelve VAERS reports in the U.S. listed myocarditis
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During 2020, many people learned more about coronaviruses, and specifically the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Pictures of the spiked virus have been plastered across the news media.
The image is reminiscent of a chain mace, or flail. This was a medieval weapon with a spiked steel ball at the end of a chain or leather strap. The image may be frightening. It turns out researchers believe the spikes are responsible for significant vascular damage leading to severe disease.1
Most people will be infected at least one time in their lives by some type of coronavirus. If the COVID-19 pandemic is the first time you’ve heard about coronaviruses, you should know the first one was discovered in chickens in 1930.2 A few decades later the first human coronavirus was identified.3
Currently, scientists have identified four types of coronaviruses that are endemic and can cause up to 15% of common colds.4 Interestingly, if all coronaviruses have originated in the wild, the rate at which the virus is mutating has accelerated dramatically in 20 years.
In the last two decades, three new coronaviruses have emerged: SARS in November 2002;5 MERS in September 2012;6 and SARS-CoV-2 in December 2019.7 The symptoms of COVID-19 from an infection with SARS-CoV-2 can vary to a great extent.
Some people carrying the virus have had no symptoms. Others report fever, headache, body aches, dry cough, loss of appetite and loss of smell.8 In others, more severe symptoms can develop that affect the respiratory tract and lead to pneumonia.
Approximately 36% of individuals have experienced gastrointestinal symptoms or neurological symptoms, either with or without respiratory symptoms.9 A recent paper published in Circulation Research10 revealed it is the spiked proteins on the virus that play a key role in your symptoms.
Spiked SARS-CoV-2 Damages More Than Your Lungs
A team of researchers including scientists from the University of California San Diego evaluated the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in animals. The researchers were not surprised by the clinical findings, but the data revealed a detailed explanation of how the spike (S) protein triggers damage to the vascular system.11
The researchers created a pseudo virus, or cell surrounded by the spike proteins that did not contain a virus.12 Using an animal model, the researchers administered the pseudo virus into the lungs and found the virus was not necessary to create damage. Instead, the spike protein was enough to cause inflammation.
The experiment was then replicated in the lab using cell cultures. The team exposed healthy endothelial cells that line your arteries to the spiked pseudo virus. Past studies had demonstrated that exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus elicited damage to the cells by binding to angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2).
However, the team found the cells responded in a similar way when exposed to the pseudo virus. When the S protein attached to the ACE2 receptor it disrupted signaling to the mitochondria and caused damage and fragmentation. The alterations in mitochondrial function were confirmed as part of the inhibition of ACE2 signaling in the lab.
The results also revealed that the virus could induce endothelial cell inflammation and endotheliitis. The protein reportedly decreased ACE2 levels and impaired nitric oxide bioavailability.13 Co-senior author of the study, Uri Manor, explained in a press release from Salk Institute:14
“If you remove the replicating capabilities of the virus, it still has a major damaging effect on the vascular cells, simply by virtue of its ability to bind to this ACE2 receptor, the S protein receptor, now famous thanks to COVID. Further studies with mutant spike proteins will also provide new insight towards the infectivity and severity of mutant SARS-CoV-2 viruses.”
Long Haul Symptoms May Be Related to Vascular Damage
Some of the symptoms from COVID-19 that last weeks or months for some people may be the result of vascular damage. People who have had these symptoms have been given the name “long haulers.”15
In theory, they have recovered from the worst symptoms of the illness and test negative. Yet, they continue to have symptoms without an active infection. According to a paper in JAMA,16approximately 10% of people who have had COVID-19 may experience long haul symptoms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention17 report that a combination of the following symptoms without an active COVID infection can appear weeks after the infection and last for months. Symptoms may worsen after physical or mental activity.
Brain fog described as difficulty thinking or concentrating
Chest pain
Cough and difficulty breathing
Depression or anxiety
Dizziness when first standing
Fast beating heart or pounding heart
Fatigue
Fever
Headache
Joint or muscle pain
Loss of smell or taste
Shortness of breath
The predominant pathophysiology of COVID-19 includes endothelial damage and microvascular injury, stimulation of hyperinflammation and hypercoagulability.18 A recent review in Physiological Reports19 examined how the capillary damage and inflammation from endotheliitis triggered by COVID-19 could contribute to the persistent symptoms by interfering with tissue oxygenation.
The combined effects of capillary damage in multiple key organs may accelerate hypoxia related inflammation and lead to long haul symptoms. Although exercise temporarily worsens long haul symptoms and some have rejected high-intensity interval training (HIIT) as an option, one paper published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine from Denmark suggests the opposite.20
The authors of this study argue that the pathophysiology of COVID-19 may be overcome by the physiological effects of HIIT and it should be considered as one of the rehabilitation choices to potentially reverse these symptoms. They propose that exercise could increase viral clearance and modulate TNF-alpha and interleukin-1 beta signaling.
This may in turn reduce vascular inflammation. They acknowledge that HIIT is the most controversial type of exercise intervention to be prescribed after COVID-19, due to the risk of sudden cardiac arrest secondary to cardiovascular damage.
Several experts21,22 recommend even those accustomed to high intensity exercise should first complete a cardiovascular exam and approach their return to physical activity gradually. They cite a small retrospective study of 28 people with a history of COVID-19 in which the researchers concluded that “comprehensive cardiopulmonary rehabilitation after COVID-19 is safe, feasible, and effective.”23
Early Treatment May Reduce the Number of Long Haulers
In my interview with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko in March 2021, we discussed the treatment of COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine. At that point, Zelenko had treated 3,000 patients with symptoms of COVID-19 and only three of his high-risk patients had subsequently succumbed to the disease.
While the focus of the interview was on treatment protocols and the use of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, Zelenko shared an interesting statistic about his protocol. In the early months of COVID-19, Zelenko decided to treat his high-risk patients as early as possible, without waiting for severe symptoms. This turned out to be one key to his significant success.
Without waiting for test results that often took five days, by which time high-risk patients were exhibiting more severe symptoms, he started treatment immediately. His understanding of the mechanism behind hydroxychloroquine and zinc led to using the combination alongside azithromycin, to prevent bacterial pneumonia and other bacterial infections common with COVID.
What is interesting are the statistics for Zelenko’s patients with long haul symptoms. As I’ve discussed, approximately 10% of the population that is infected with COVID-19 will go on to experience persistent symptoms.24 However, Zelenko has treated 3,000 patients and none who received treatment within the first five days went on to develop long-haul symptoms.
While he has had patients with persistent symptoms from COVID-19, they sought medical care after the first five days of symptoms, which meant the inflammatory process had advanced. From his experience, and the experience of the patients he treated, early intervention with the protocol nearly eliminated the risk of persistent symptoms.
Researchers Find Another Vaccine Target
During vaccine development, researchers and pharmaceutical companies have focused on the spike protein that surrounds the virus. It appears that this is how the virus enters the cells and it seemed reasonable if the virus could not replicate inside the cells, the infection could be stopped.
However, as has been discovered, the virus has more than just a single spike protein.25 There are four proteins that form the structure surrounding the RNA. There is an envelope (E), a membrane (M) and a nucleocapsid (N), in addition to the spike (S). Your immune system recognizes all four of these proteins. Researchers have discovered humans make more antibodies to the N protein than the S protein.26
However, it seemed counterintuitive to address the N protein since this is found inside the structure with the viral RNA. Therefore, any antibodies your body makes against the N protein will not block the virus from entering the cells.27 New information has revealed that once the N protein antibodies get inside the cell they are recognized by an antibiotic receptor, TRIM21.
This antibody receptor shreds the N protein, which then reaches the surface of an infected cell. Your body’s T cells recognize the fragments and kill the cell along with any virus. This has suggested to researchers that inducing N protein antibodies may be another way of stimulating the immune response against SARS-CoV-2.
Another benefit of focusing on the N protein is that it has a lower mutation rate.28 In other words, as the virus mutates in the wild the current vaccine may no longer have any effectiveness against it, in much the same way that the flu vaccine must be altered each year to address influenza variants. The sequence in the N protein is more stable, so researchers postulate that a vaccine may be effective for a longer period.
List of Current Vaccine Side Effects Is Growing
Early in May 2021, reports from France indicated five cases of myocarditis were found in those who had taken the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle that can have lifelong effects as it weakens the muscle and creates scar tissue.29
The national medicines safety agency (ANSM) released their weekly vaccine update, saying “five cases have been declared in France.”30 The agency didn’t feel there was enough information to conclude the vaccine had played a role but would continue to monitor reports.
Over 13.5 million doses of COVID vaccines have been administered in France since April 22, 2021. The ANSM reports 16,030 adverse events from those who had been vaccinated. Israel has also reported several cases of myocarditis after people receive their second dose.
A review of the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) shows 12 reports of myocarditis were recorded in the U.S. by April 30, 2021. According to Our World in Data,31 by April 30, 2021, 30.32% of the population in the U.S. had been fully vaccinated. VAERS also showed there were 157,277 adverse events reported by April 30, 2021.32
These numbers are likely far lower than the actual number of people who have experienced adverse events from the vaccines. Research data33 show health care providers identify and report vaccine adverse events in woefully low numbers. In fact, the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine was recently paused to teach doctors how to report vaccine injuries.34 The pause has since been lifted in the U.S.
It is crucial to report a vaccine injury or side effect to VAERS, as the data are essential in helping individuals, doctors and researchers make informed decisions. You can make your own report online or using a PDF by going to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.35 You’ll find more information about adverse events and how vaccines affect your health at the National Vaccine Information Center.36
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UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock suggested critics of the vaccine passport policy were “crazies” after he retweeted a post which disparaged those who have security and privacy concerns about the program.
Mail on Sunday commentator Dan Hodges urged people to “ignore the crazies” as he effusively praised the NHS tracking app for being a centralized surveillance hub.
“OK, ignore the crazies. Just downloaded the NHS App,” tweeted Hodges. “It’s amazing! You take a photo of your drivers licence, do a cool face scan, and everything’s there. Covid records, medical records, everything. I now want Covid passports just so I can use it…”’
OK, ignore the crazies. Just downloaded the NHS App. It’s amazing! You take a photo of your drivers licence, do a cool face scan, and everything’s there. Covid records, medical records, everything. I now want Covid passports just so I can use it…
His tweet was subsequently retweeted by Matt Hancock, who over the last year has become the face of the UK’s coronavirus response.
“Why did @MattHancock RT a contrarian, ratioed tweet disparaging “crazies”?” asked Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo.
Why did @MattHancock RT a contrarian, ratioed tweet disparaging “crazies”?
He shows profound disrespect to the MPs, many from his own party, who reject Covid passes & want a serious debate; & the anti-ID British public. His attitude will fall down on him like a ton of bricks. pic.twitter.com/BGBLcJHrRE
“He shows profound disrespect to the MPs, many from his own party, who reject Covid passes & want a serious debate; & the anti-ID British public. His attitude will fall down on him like a ton of bricks,” she added.
As we document in the video below, attempts have been made to discredit opposition to the vaccine passport by demonizing critics as anti-vaxxer extremists.
However, the program would serve to introduce a Chinese Communist-style social credit score system with potentially horrendous implications for basic liberties and freedoms.
The British government lied for months in claiming that no vaccine passport was being developed for domestic events, despite that being the plan all along.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is investigating reports that some teenagers and young adults vaccinated against COVID may have experienced heart problems, according to the agency’s advisory group.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in a May 17 statement said, reports of myocarditis to date seemed to occur predominantly in adolescents and young adults, more often in males than females, more often following the second dose and typically within four days after vaccination. Most cases appeared to be “mild” and follow-up is ongoing.
Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. According to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections, but “more commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”
The CDC’s Vaccine Safety Technical (VaST) Work Group has reviewed post-authorization COVID vaccine safety data on a weekly basis since the first COVID vaccine was rolled out in the U.S. in December 2020. At the time, vaccine recipients had to be 18 years old or older.
On May 13, the CDC signed off on expanded use of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for ages 12- to 15-year-olds. The Pfizer vaccine so far is the only COVID vaccine to have received EUA for young teens.
The CDC said its monitoring systems had not found more cases of myocarditis than would be expected in the population, but members of the committee on vaccinations said healthcare providers should be made aware of the reports of the “potential adverse event.”
“We look forward to seeing more data about these cases, so we can better understand if they are related to the vaccine or if they are coincidental,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s Committee on Infectious Diseases.
“Meanwhile, it’s important for pediatricians and other clinicians to report any health concerns that arise after vaccination,” Maldonado said.
As The Defender reported, details leaked from an Israeli Health Ministry report in April raised concerns among experts about a possible link between the Pfizer’s COVID vaccine and myocarditis.
The preliminary report by a committee tasked with monitoring vaccine side effects found 62 cases of myocarditis, including two deaths, in people who received the Pfizer vaccine. Fifty-six of the cases occurred after the second dose of the vaccine, and 55 cases occurred in men — most between the ages of 18 and 30.
Israel’s pandemic response coordinator, Nachman Ash, confirmed “tens of incidents” of myocarditis occurred in vaccinated people, primarily after the second dose, but emphasized the health ministry had yet to draw any conclusions.
Israeli researchers presented their findings to the Israeli Health Ministry Director-General, Pfizer, the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
EU regulators in May called on Pfizer and Moderna to provide additional data related to the companies’ COVID vaccines and a potential link to heart inflammation, after the agency completed a safety review of all four COVID vaccines authorized for emergency use in the EU.
Because Moderna and Pfizer use the same mRNA technology for their vaccines, European regulators asked Moderna to monitor for similar cases of heart inflammation.
On April 27, Reuters reported the U.S. Department of Defense was investigating 14 cases of heart inflammation among people who were vaccinated through the military’s health services.
A search in VAERS revealed 288 cases of pericarditis and myocarditis reported in the U.S following COVID vaccination between Dec.14, 2020 and May 14. Of the 288 cases reported, 158 cases were attributed to Pfizer, 110 cases to Moderna and 19 cases to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine.
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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In March, Governor Greg Abbott announced that Texas would open for business 100 percent without a statewide mask mandate. The pro-lockdown “experts” were shocked. If a state as big as Texas joined Florida and succeeded in thumbing its nose at “the science” – which told us that for the first time in history healthy people should be forced to stay in their houses and wear oxygen-restricting face masks – then the lockdown narrative would begin falling apart.
President Biden famously attacked the decision as “Neanderthal thinking.” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa warned that, with this order, Abbott would “kill Texans.” Incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky tearfully told us about her feelings of “impending doom.”
When the poster child for Covid lockdowns Dr. Fauci was asked several weeks later why cases and deaths continued to evaporate in Texas, he answered simply, “I’m not sure.” That moment may have been a look at the man behind the proverbial curtain, who projected his power so confidently until confronted with reality.
Now a new study appearing as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, highlighted recently in Reason Magazine, has found “no evidence that the reopening affected the rate of new COVID-19 cases in the five-week period following the reopening. …State-level COVID-19 mortality rates were unaffected by the March 10 reopening.”
In other words, not only did the doom and gloom predicted by the lockdown fanatics fail to materialize, but the steady, seasonal downward trend of the virus toward extinction continued regardless of government action. As we have repeated for a year on the Liberty Report, the virus was going to virus regardless of anything we did about it. And Texas proved it.
However, some very important questions remain to be answered as the Covid panic across the United States is finally starting to recede.
First, will anyone be held responsible for the thousands who died because of the prohibition on safe treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that have since been shown to be effective against Covid-19? As soon as Donald Trump mentioned that hydroxychloroquine might be effective against the virus, the “experts” circled the wagons. It was banned for use, until it later was quietly un-banned.
The politicization of medicine is anti-science, anti-human, and anti-American. Will those who needlessly died due to this politicization finally get their justice?
Second, though Abbott deserves credit for taking the bold step, shouldn’t he be held accountable for closing the state in the first place? After all, when someone has been punching you in the face and then they stop, do you thank them for letting up or do you ask why they punched you in the first place? Will all the tyrannical rule-by-decree orders across the United States be stricken from the books? Or will they just be allowed to do this again for any reason they choose?
Third, thanks to Senator Rand Paul, we are now all aware of Dr. Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research on viruses in China. Will we be able to find out exactly why we are being forced to pay for the mad scientist research into how to create more deadly viruses? Can we opt-out of this funding?
Though Greg Abbott deserves much criticism for shutting Texas down, his re-opening decree effectively ended Covid tyranny across the country. We are thankful for that. Now we must resolve to never let this happen again.
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THE HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier strike group is due to set off on its maiden voyage heading towards the South China Sea.
The biggest military deployment in decades, the voyage is symbolic of Britain’s future direction for the next generation — a clear demonstration that Global Britain with its Indo-Pacific tilt is being military-led.
There’s a certain air of imperial vanity about all this — a delusional fantasy singing to the tune of right-wing nationalism.
But there is a hard edge here as Boris Johnson’s return “east of Suez” takes on particular significance in the new scenario of a cold war on China.
The aircraft carrier itself is massive, its flight deck the length of three football pitches.
It is kitted out with state-of-the-art technologies and is carrying 18 F-35 fighter jets — 10 of these are from the United States Air Force.
The group contains three destroyers, again one of which is American, two frigates and a nuclear-powered submarine armed with Tomahawk missiles.
The cost is huge: over £6 billion for two aircraft carriers together, plus £1bn spent so far on the F-35s.
We are supposed to buy 138 in total which makes an additional £13bn — a colossal misallocation of funds much of which were squeezed out from the taxpayers in the name of austerity.
Involving 1,600 personnel altogether, the running costs alone amount to 15 per cent of the military budget or by rough calculation £8bn or £9bn.
The route travels through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Gulf, round India then up through the Malacca Straits into the South China Sea, passing numbers of trouble spots on the way.
The 28-week voyage will take in 90 port visits in 40 different countries — more than a fifth of the world’s nations — with the aim of rebuilding military and diplomatic relations.
With fighter jets, destroyers and the latest naval technology on display, and Merlin helicopters and drones on board, there’s an arms sales element, and in a further boost to Britain’s military industrial complex, BAE Systems is to assist Japan and South Korea in building fighter jets.
Along the way, the strike group will serve as a focal point for regional joint military exercises.
The military manoeuvre planned in the South China Sea with the US and probably other states, possibly even Japan, will be highly provocative and dangerous.
The area is a tinderbox: as warships and coastguard vessels mill around in the waters, there is a high risk of accident which could rapidly escalate into war — in which case, we could find ourselves in armed conflict with another nuclear-armed state.
Global Britain has been in the pipeline for years: the decision to build the aircraft carriers, just like the renewal of Trident, came from the same place as the command to launch the war on Iraq, namely, the Tony Blair government.
Following Brexit, Johnson promised Britain’s return to its rightful place as an independent power, leading the world.
As can be seen from the involvement of US personnel and military hardware to boost the QE’s firepower, nothing could be further from the truth.
Now the Tories’ Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy identifies China is a systemic competitor “challenging our prosperity, security and values.”
The Indo-Pacific tilt follows the US plans for an “Asian Nato” initiated by Donald Trump in the form of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue — the Quad — involving Australia, US, Japan and India.
This loose grouping was intended to draw India into a closer relationship with the US, hence the term Indo-Pacific.
Quad diplomacy has now been made a priority by Joe Biden who, within his first 100 days in office, upgraded the dialogue into a heads of state meeting.
At the same time, his success in involving Japan in military drills indicates a hardening of the Quad agenda.
Biden so far has not changed Trump’s key policies on China: not on tariffs, not on restrictions on Chinese tech companies, holding to the view of China as the “greatest strategic challenge” to the US.
He has even stepped up the action sending warships and destroyers into the Taiwan Straits and, taking a more ideological approach, he clearly aims to shift international opinion against China as an existential threat to the entire world.
The US Establishment has been taking stock: the unipolar moment has gone; China clearly was able to withstand Trump’s pressure.
Recognising the US can no longer go it alone, hard-line cold warriors are calling on key allies to form a single economic, technological and military bloc — a “summit of democracies” aligned according to America First priorities and sharing the military costs of the agenda — so as to exert enough pressure on China to bring it to heel, subordinate to US leadership.
Biden’s distinctive global China containment strategy is unfolding in a reordering the regions of Asia, looking to finally demolish the cornerstones of their post-war and post-colonial order: in the Middle East, the division between the Gulf states and Israel over Palestine; the principle of non-alignment long held by India; south-east Asia’s military independence, and Japan’s Article 9 of the constitution, known as the Peace Clause, by which it renounced war as a sovereign right.
Claiming “Britain is back” as it travels across Asia — through the Middle East, India, south-east and east Asia, the aircraft carrier group will in reality be delivering the “warlord” agenda of world division.
Global Britain will bolster its military presence in the Middle East to allow the US to focus more on China and seek ways to influence India’s dialogue with China on issues such as Afghanistan, nuclear deterrence, vaccines and so on.
In south-east Asia, the strike group will mark the 50th anniversary of the Five Power Defence Arrangement that Britain has with Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand, in an exercise designed to shift towards a Nato-style alliance long sought by the US.
And through the renewal of military links, Britain will encourage the Japanese to actively participate overseas in regional naval exercises, breaking the post-war constraints.
The Anglo-Japanese link has historical significance given that it was the alliance with Britain that saw Japan’s emergence an aggressive militarist imperialist state in the early 20th century.
Travelling from the Middle East in a wide semi-circle round China to Japan, the armada is symbolic of Britain’s new role as subcontractor-in-chief of US anti-China foreign and military policy.
How will China react? It should be noted that even the announcement that the Queen Elizabeth would sail through the South China Sea back in February 2019 saw China cancel the visit by the trade secretary at the time.
It seems beyond the wit of the vast majority of Labour MPs to take all this in.
However, what trade unions and the labour movement need to think about is whether, given the precarious state of the economy post-Brexit, we can really afford to run the risk of more serious rupture with the fastest-growing economy in the world.
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Once again, tensions are increasing in bilateral relations between the US and Germany due to Nord Stream 2. The pipeline project is unacceptable for Washington, but it serves European and Russian interests, ensuring energy security and lowering costs. The Biden government is not willing to back down in its decision to prevent the project from being completed and still taking coercive measures, which will be responded by Berlin.
Last week US State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter said the Biden government will use all available tools to try to prevent Nord Stream 2 from completing. In response, Steffen Kotre, an affiliate of Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a member of the German Parliament’s energy committee, said that Berlin needs to think about countermeasures to be taken if new American sanctions are implemented. These are his words: “It’s common knowledge that the construction of the pipeline is coming to a close. (…) Given the German government is opposing US’ aggressive actions against Nord Stream 2 only rhetorically, there is a growing concern about the project not be completed, so it would be politically correct to initiate countersanctions”.
Kotre says that with the abandonment of coal industry and Merkel’s disdain for nuclear energy, Nord Stream 2 becomes an even more necessary project for German energy security, as the country is currently under strong threat in this sector – in addition to other European nations. The pipeline, Kotre points out, “[will] help to mitigate the consequences of this”. This means that all possible measures to guarantee the completion of the gas pipeline must be taken by Berlin, considering that it is a highly strategic topic.
In addition to Kotre, another member of the AfD, Waldemar Herdt, spoke publicly in favor of measures to protect the pipeline and said that Berlin will not give up on the construction because there are no plausible arguments against the pipeline – only American impositions. In his words: “It is pointless to pressure Germany; Nord Stream 2 will be completed [because] we have no alternative, [and] the Germans will work with the Russians (…) [Nord Stream 2] is not a whim, the German economy needs it (…) It is less expensive, more ecological, more practical than other energy supply options. There are no arguments against this project, but for Washington’s orders: do as you are told”. In addition, praise was given to the way the German government has been handling the case. According to Herdt, when facing the US to ensure the completion of Nord Stream 2, Germany is fighting for its interests for the first time since World War II.
Another reason for the recent unrest in the German Parliament was the statements by Antony Blinken after his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The U.S. secretary of state said that Washington considers it to be in the national interest to waive sanctions on some corporate agents involved in the construction of the pipeline, mainly Nord Stream 2 AG and its CEO, Matthias Warnig. Biden’s promise seems to contradict his own Department’s statement that it will use all “available tools” to prevent the pipeline. However, Biden only listed the main companies that operate in the construction, still maintaining a wide range of agents available for sanctions. For example, on the same occasion, Blinken stated that more than ten vessels involved in the construction will continue to be sanctioned and did not exclude the possibility of further coercive measures against other agents. Apparently, the American strategy will take form in waiving sanctions against the main corporate agents to try to ease tensions with Germany and Russia, but, at the same time, maintaining sanctions against smaller but strategically important agents, undermining the construction of the gas pipeline in a more tenuous and less aggressive way.
In fact, Berlin is defending its interests for the first time in decades – and parliamentary pressure for countersanctions is very important. The possibility of Germany sanctioning the US is a great mark in bilateral relations, as it shows that the German government is increasingly committed to the interests of its people more than to American profits. Obviously, it is too early to say that the demands of parliamentarians will have real effects on the decisions of the federal government – especially considering that they are statements by a right-wing party.
However, considering the firm role played by the government so far, at no time renouncing its interest in the pipeline, it is indeed possible that sanctions will be authorized. It is necessary to point out that parliamentarians made these statements knowing that the main American sanctions would be eased and even so they suggested countermeasures – which indicates that the Germans are not willing to tolerate any sanctions and will not be satisfied with a simple relief for the main companies.
Germany is a nation that is truly allied with the West and committed to liberal values. Berlin has always been willing to cooperate with Washington on all points, but it is not permissible for such cooperation to become submission and abuse. Nord Stream 2 is a German national priority – an economic, social, and environmental necessity that cannot be reduced to international rivalries. Certainly, the US will respond appropriately if there are German sanctions, which could lead to a real trade war – but, apparently, Berlin is really willing to continue to fight for its own interests.
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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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Israeli police are now threatening to carry out mass arrests against Palestinian citizens of Israel — arrests intended to punish those who took part in sit-ins and other protests in solidarity with Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and Gaza.
This latest attack on Palestinian rights comes just days after Israeli police once again attacked Palestinians at Al Aqsa Mosque, and after the Israeli military viciously bombed Gaza for 11 days, killing 248 Palestinians and wounding more than 1,900, destroying 16,800 Palestinian homes and displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Outrage against Israel’s ongoing apartheid system and routine attacks on Palestinian rights and lives is mounting worldwide, setting the stage for a new burst of energy in the global movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli regime — a nonviolent movement in support of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and equality.
Renewed calls for BDS have emerged in the reshaped new political moment following the ceasefire that began on May 20 after President Joe Biden, who has essentially continued Donald Trump’s policy of pandering to Israel, finally put his foot down following outrage by a critical mass of congressional Democrats and protests in the U.S. and around the world, and said he expected “significant de-escalation” of Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complied with Biden’s directive and agreed to the ceasefire with Hamas.
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) introduced legislation to prevent Biden from selling $735 million in weapons to Israel. That doesn’t count the $3.8 billion in military assistance the U.S. government provides Israel annually, which funds the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.
In the occupied territories, Israel regulates the entries and departures of the Palestinians and controls the borders, airspace, shoreline and waters off the Gaza coast. Israel expels Palestinians from their homes and facilitates illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
Palestinians are forced “to live in constant uncertainty, making it difficult to perform simple tasks and make plans,” according to B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization. “A Palestinian leaving home in the morning cannot know whether he or she is going to make it [to] work — on time or at all — or to keep a medical appointment, visit family or catch a movie. She might make it, or she might be delayed at a checkpoint for hours, detained and humiliated by soldiers. She may have to turn around and go back the way she came. She may get arrested.”
Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in “Operation Guardian of the Walls” — the Israeli military’s name for its most recent 11-day assault on Gaza — has led to renewed calls for BDS against the Israeli regime.
The BDS Movement
In 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for boycott, divestment and sanctions. They described BDS as “non-violent punitive measures” that would last until Israel fully complies with international law by (1) ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling its barrier wall; (2) recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
“A particularly important source of Palestinian hope is the growing impact of the Palestinian-led nonviolent BDS movement,” Omar Barghouti, co-founder of BDS, wrote in The Nation. BDS “aims at ending Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid and defending the right of Palestinian refugees to return home.”
The BDS movement is largely modeled on the boycott that helped end apartheid in South Africa. As has been confirmed most recently by Human Rights Watch, Israel also maintains a system of apartheid.
In 2001, the National Lawyers Guild sent a delegation to the region and published a report that documented a system of apartheid in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. It detailed illegal Jewish settlements and bypass roads, the restricted movement of Palestinians, discriminatory land policies, the differential treatment of Jews and Palestinian non-Jews, and Israeli policing of Palestinians’ political expression. It analyzed the indiscriminate and excessive use of lethal force against Palestinians and their property, delays and prevention of medical treatment, and Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians.
Ronnie Kasrils, minister for intelligence services in South Africa from 2004-2008, equated the South African anti-apartheid struggle with the BDS campaign against Israeli apartheid.
“It is imperative that we of the international community redouble our efforts to aid the Palestinian people in solidarity actions. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign remains the most formidable weapon in our arsenal,” Kasrils wrote at Common Dreams. “It worked to bring about the demise of South African Apartheid behind the internal people’s resistance struggle, and is growing in scope and efficacy, to the extent that Israel has identified the non-violent global movement as a strategic threat. Israel, like apartheid South Africa must pay for its crimes — above all by sanctions.”
Boycotts involve the withdrawal of support for Israel and Israeli and international companies that are violating Palestinian human rights, including Israeli academic, cultural and sporting institutions. Divestment campaigns ask churches, universities, banks, pension funds and local councils to withdraw their investments from all Israeli and international companies complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. Sanctions campaigns pressure governments to cease military trade and free-trade agreements and urge them to expel Israel from international fora.
BDS has had a significant impact on Israel. The BDS campaign played a major role in the 46 percent decrease in foreign direct investment in Israel in 2014, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Among the individuals and entities who have answered the call for divestment include George Soros, TIAA-CREF public sector pension fund, Bill Gates Foundation, Norwegian bank Nordea, and Dutch pension giant PGGM. Many churches, including the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA and several Quaker meetings have divested from companies targeted by the BDS movement. Veolia, the French multinational utility company, withdrew from Israel, resulting in billions of dollars in lost contracts. Major international trade union federations in South Africa, Europe, Latin America, India, Canada and the United States endorse BDS.
There is substantial opposition in the United States to Israel’s occupation. In a 2018 poll, 40 percent of Americans overall and 56 percent of Democrats supported the imposition of sanctions or even more serious penalties on Israel to end the occupation.
The Israel Lobby vs. BDS
Boycotts constitute protected freedom of speech, assembly and association under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They have long been used to fight injustice and achieve social change. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that “speech on public issues occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values, and is entitled to special protection.” The high court ruled that advocating and supporting boycotts “to bring about political, social, and economic change” — like boycotting Israel — are unquestionably protected by the First Amendment.
Biden is staunchly against the BDS movement. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at his confirmation hearing that both he and Biden “resolutely opposed” BDS. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, vehemently denounced BDS at her confirmation hearing, as did Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in written answers to questions from senators before her hearing.
The success of the BDS movement has motivated Israel apologists to sponsor anti-boycott legislation on the state, local and federal levels. These forces include right-wing Christian Zionist organizations and other Israel lobby groups, often funded by the Israeli government.
“Politicians are pushing unconstitutional laws to stop the movement for Palestinian freedom and shield Israel from criticism,” according to Palestine Legal, an organization that protects the civil and constitutional rights of people who support Palestinian freedom. Since 2014, Palestine Legal has kept track of bills targeting advocacy for Palestinian rights.
“Early efforts focused on defunding universities to punish or deter support for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. Subsequent legislative efforts aimed to prohibit state contracts with or state investments in entities that support BDS,” Palestine Legal explains. “Some anti-boycott laws include written certification requirements, mandating that potential contractors pledge not to boycott Israel, and some call on the state to compile public blacklists of entities that boycott for Palestinian rights or support BDS,” according to Palestine Legal.
Thirty-one states have anti-BDS legislation in effect. Since 2014, 219 anti-boycott bills have been introduced but only 50 of them have been passed, thanks to strong opposition by grassroots and civil liberties groups.
The anti-boycott laws vary in how they define boycotts and the scope of the boycotts at which they are directed. Some bills target boycotts of Israel or goods and services from Israel, and others aim at boycotts of allied countries. The legislation often punishes boycotts of territories controlled by Israel, reaching boycotts of services or products from or to unlawful Israeli settlements. Many bills threaten criminal penalties and economic sanctions. “This legislation also has a broader intent to chill and intimidate activists and their would-be supporters into believing that BDS is now ‘illegal,’” Palestine Legal’s website says.
Some legislation, like the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which was introduced in Congress in 2017 and again in 2019, would have gone even further, with criminal penalties and jail time for furnishing information in support of a boycott of Israel. The Act was defeated in January 2021.
The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 contains several anti-boycott provisions. It includes a statement opposing “politically motivated actions” that would penalize or limit commercial relations with Israel, including BDS campaigns. The law says that discouraging boycotts for Palestinian rights is a primary U.S. objective when negotiating foreign trade agreements. This Act went into effect in 2016. In 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Legislative Affairs provided Congress with its Report on Politically Motivated Acts of Boycott of, Divestment from, and Sanctions Against Israel, as mandated by the Act. It reported on a pro-BDS bill in Ireland. The report also detailed Kuwait’s actions in support of the boycott against Israel, which was upheld by a German court. Responding to U.S. pressure, Germany passed an anti-BDS law.
What to Boycott
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling for a boycott of Israeli and international companies that are complicit in violations of Palestinian rights. Although virtually all Israeli companies are complicit in Israel’s system of apartheid and occupation, the BNC is targeting boycotts at a small number of products and companies which have a direct role in Israel’s crimes in order to achieve the greatest impact.
BNC is asking individuals to boycott Pillsbury (whose products are made on stolen Palestinian land in illegal Israeli settlements), SodaStream (which is actively complicit in the Israeli policy of displacing Indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Negev), Puma (which sponsors the Israel Football Association, including teams in Israel’s illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory), Sabra (whose hummus is a joint venture between PepsiCo and the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that gives financial support to the Israeli army), Hewlett-Packard (which helps run the biometric ID system that Israel employs to restrict the movement of Palestinians), Ahava (whose cosmetics are produced in an illegal Israeli settlement), AXA (which invests in Israeli banks that finance the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources), and all Israeli produce in your local supermarket (which are often mislabeled “Produce in Israel” when they in fact come from the occupied Palestinian territories).
The world watched horrified as Israeli forces once again slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, which is often called the world’s largest open-air prison (one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, containing more than 5,000 inhabitants per square kilometer), until Biden told Netanyahu to stop. This latest violence has galvanized even more people in the United States and around the world to stop Israel’s brutality against the Palestinians. In this moment of mass outrage, as more people join the BDS movement and work together to overcome the strategies of repression and criminalization aimed to thwart it, BDS has the potential to grow and become an even more powerful force in the Palestinian struggle to end Israel’s occupation and system of apartheid.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.
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Iran, if Israel is concerned, is busy producing nuclear weapons, conventional weapons, drones and little else.
On May 23rd, nine people were wounded in an explosion at a factory in the city of Shahin Shahr in the central Iranian province of Isfahan.
According to Iranian state media, the factory produces industrial and commercial explosive materials, including fireworks and gunpowder, as well as various chemicals. The factory operates under the supervision of the National Security Council.
Meanwhile, Amichai Stein, a correspondent for the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, claimed that Iran was manufacturing drones at the facility. It is not a speculative conclusion to consider that Stein’s words suggest that the blast at the Iranian factory could be the result of Israeli “interference”. The journalist linked the explosion to a recent incident, in which the Israeli military shot down an armed drone near the city of Beit She’an. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of launching it from either Iraq or Syria.
In Syria, also on May 23rd, other unidentified combat drones carried out a series of strikes on the outskirts of the town of al-Bukamal in southern Deir Ezzor. The town is held by Damascus’ forces and it is right next to the Iraqi border. The strikes destroyed a number of newly-built hangars in al-Hamdan desert. The strikes didn’t result in any human losses.
A day earlier, an unidentified combat drone targeted a pickup vehicle to the east of al-Bukamal, inside Iraqi territory. Israel and the US were both blamed by Iraqi sources. No casualties were reported.
ISIS is still quite active near and inside Deir Ezzor, but drone attacks by the terrorist group are uncommon.
In the days leading up to the drone raid, ISIS carried out a series of attacks on Syrian Arab Army (SAA) forces.
The first one happened on May 18th, and eight SAA soldiers and pro-government fighters were reportedly killed in an ambush by ISIS cells in the Maskanah desert in southern Aleppo.
On May 20th, terrorists attacked a position of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the Durihim desert in the southern countryside of Aleppo.
May 22nd saw ISIS attack a convoy of tankers moving oil from northeastern Syria to government-held areas near al-Manakhir in southern Raqqa.
On the same day, three pro-government fighters were reportedly killed in the Ma’adan desert in southern Raqqa after being struck with an IED.
Syria is looking to contain the terrorists, and active negotiations with Iran are on-going on the matter, as well as on other security issues. This includes Israel, which is vehemently attempting to stop any active cooperation between Syria and its allies.
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The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
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“The total amount of third world debt has already been repaid six times over in interest.”(1)
As of 2020, the total amount of debt owed by developing countries was $11 trillion.(2) The cost of interest on this debt was hundreds of billions of dollars per year, or over $1 billion per day. This is many times greater than the aid given by rich countries.(3) This post summarises the main reasons why countries should not have to repay all of their debts.
Borrowing Money for Weapons: Paying For Your Corrupt Boss’ Crimes
“For years, rich countries willingly provided loans to the dictatorship in our country. Now, we are asked to pay for the bullets which were fired at us.”(4)
A close look at the reasons for lending in specific cases highlights the unfairness of the system. It has been estimated that from 1960-1987, developing countries borrowed $400 billion to spend on weapons. Much of Iraq’s debt was due to money lent to finance Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran in the 1980s.(5) We saw in earlier posts that most money spent on weapons by the poorest countries comes straight back to much richer countries, lining the pockets of shareholders and executives of weapons companies.(6) The Indonesian dictator, Suharto, received loans for tanks and warplanes that were used to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people. The Indonesian people are expected to repay those loans. The same is true of many countries that used to be run by dictators. Britain and the US helped to keep these dictators in power, against the wishes of their people, yet the people are still expected to repay their dictators’ debts.
We saw in an earlier post that sanctions (depriving a country of basic essentials) can cause devastation, yet people from many countries, including Iraq, Panama and Vietnam, have been expected to repay loans whilst suffering from sanctions imposed by rich nations.
White Elephants – The money goes to companies and consultants from rich countries
Large amounts of money has been lent to finance huge projects that are of little value to ordinary people. These are known as white elephants. The most obvious of these would be nuclear power plants that were finished 20 years behind schedule and cost many times their original estimate, producing some of the most expensive energy on Earth. Forty-five thousand dams have been built, displacing fifty million people and costing $2 trillion. Many went way over budget, such as a South American dam that was expected to cost $3.6 billion but ended up costing $21 billion. It was described by the former Paraguayan minister of energy as “possibly the largest fraud in the history of capitalism.” Some dams were designed so badly that they unexpectedly flooded thousands of square miles of land, and produce much less energy than expected. Where private contractors are running these powerplants, governments have ended up with contracts where they have to pay for energy that is not used.
Railroads have been constructed that run “from no place to nowhere.” Again, many of the loans for these projects went into the pockets of wealthy shareholders and executives of construction companies in rich countries, together with consultants from those countries. There is even a capital city in Nigeria called Abuja that was built in the middle of nowhere and seemed for many years to have no purpose. The Nigerian people have a joke about the city. They ask God if ordinary people will ever see the benefits of Abuja. He responds “Not in my lifetime.”(7)
The System Is Rigged Against Borrowing Countries
When a developing country borrows money from international lenders, it usually does so using an established currency, such as US dollars. The exchange rate with its own currency can fluctuate. Some borrowing countries are actually encouraged to change their exchange rate (this is known as devaluing their currency) making loans more expensive to repay. The interest rate is often high and can also fluctuate.
Some loans are used to grow crops for export, but the price of these crops also varies. In 1999, Nicaraguan coffee sold for $1.44 per pound. By 2002, this price had dropped to $0.40 per pound. This means they have to sell three times as much coffee to pay their debts. All three of these factors, exchange rate, interest rate and prices, are beyond the control of the borrowing country – they are controlled by traders and banks in rich countries. In theory these rates can go either way, but in practice poor countries have repeatedly lost out.(8) Conditions can easily change sufficiently that poor countries can no longer afford to repay debts, through no fault of their own.
If the price of coffee drops below the price of production, then it does not matter how much coffee is sold – there is zero profit, and coffee sales cannot be used to repay the debt. Most developing countries have provided enough coffee, cocoa, cotton, cobalt, gold, oil and diamonds (and everything else that they export) to pay back their original loans many times over, yet they still have huge debts. Unlike businesses, countries cannot declare bankruptcy. Banks try not to write-off debts, so they keep lending ever-more money to borrowers to pay off their earlier debts, together with the interest on those debts. The debt just keeps getting bigger. An observer in Nigeria pointed out:
“We borrowed $5 billion. We have paid back $16 billion, but we still owe $28 billion”.
Rich People Keep Stealing the Money
Nigeria provides a good case study of debt and capital flight. The best estimate of the total wealth stolen by corrupt dictators and their cronies since 1960 in Nigeria is $120 billion.(9) This is enough to repay their debts many times over. The same is true in many poor countries. Two leading experts wrote:
“Of the money borrowed by African governments in recent decades, more than half departed in the same year, with a significant portion of it winding up in private accounts at the very banks that provided the loans in the first place”(10)
The Destructive Power of Compound Interest
The effect of compound interest on loans to developing countries is extremely important. If a country borrowed $1 million in 1980 at 7% interest, the total debt would now be approximately $16 million. When interest rates are very high, the debt increases more rapidly. If we re-do the same calculation at 14% interest, the total debt would be $250 million. If the interest rate on a loan is even one per cent too high, then the borrower pays a considerable amount of extra interest over a long period of time.
The system of excessive interest on international loans is a deliberate mechanism to transfer wealth from poor countries to rich ones, or from governments to rich people.In the 1980’s and 1990’s, many South American countries experienced serious problems due to excessive interest on their debts.(11) In an extreme example, the Argentinian government was paying 45% interest on loans (known as dollar bonds). Many of these bonds were owned by wealthy Argentinians. The leading expert on the system, Michael Hudson, has explained that these bonds are actually a complex mechanism to help the rich take their money out of the country.(12)
It’s All About Conditions
Most people think of loans as having two parts, the capital and the interest. In the international world there is a third part – the conditions that come with the loan. This is arguably the most important part. Countries that want to borrow can be more easily persuaded to follow the guidance of advisors from rich countries, to privatise their industries, and to open up their markets for further exploitation by big corporations. In order to qualify to have the debts written off, countries have to implement these same policies.(13) The manipulation of these debts is a means of helping rich countries and their corporations take control of resources and trade in poor countries. Many of these countries have effectively been conquered economically.
Governments from developing countries have been advised to decrease spending on basic necessities (known as austerity), but at the same time they have been forced to keep paying their debts. Nicaragua spends four times as much on debt as on education.(14) One expert on Mozambique said:
“A large share of the government revenues of Mozambique have to be spent on servicing the debt. Little is left for health, education and water provision.”(15)
The interests of banks and investors are considered more important than the lives and health of billions of people.
Debts can, and should, be written off
If we write off all debts that were spent on weapons, that were used to support murderous dictators, that were stashed in personal offshore bank accounts in tax havens, that were spent on grand schemes of little benefit to the population, that lined the pockets of Western consultants, or that have grown enormously due to excessive compound interest, the amount outstanding would be very much less than the amount that rich countries still want repaid. If we then deduct the amount already repaid, it would almost certainly be less than zero. Governments and banks in rich countries do not want to do these calculations, because they do not want to admit that the whole system is so corrupt. When researchers examine in detail what happened to the original money that was loaned to specific countries, they conclude that much of the outstanding debt should be canceled.(16) For example, when loans to Ecuador were analysed, some of them violated international law, as well as domestic laws in lending countries, and laws in Ecuador.(17) In total, $3 billion of Ecuador’s debt was illegitimate. The technical term for this is odious debt.
Writing off debts is nothing new. This has been a regular process for thousands of years,(18) and various multi-billion dollar loans to the US and Europe have been written off over the years.(19) Our politicians occasionally write off some of the debts of the poorest countries, but they are rarely as generous as they claim. In some cases, aid is reduced by the same amount as the debt written off, so poor countries get no real benefit. Some schemes do not end debts altogether. They merely reduce them to a level that rich countries consider ‘sustainable.’ What this really means is the greatest amount of interest that can be extorted each year without quite tipping a country into revolution and civil war. The debt written off in recent years is just a small fraction of the amount owed.(20)
The propaganda related to debt is very powerful. Most people have been conditioned to believe that we all have a moral obligation to repay debts.(21) The idea that debts are a powerful mechanism for controlling or exploiting others is rarely discussed. We need to change the whole framework of discussions around debts, and force lenders to accept responsibility for their criminal or unethical practices. In business, it is accepted that debts can be written off. Lenders accept that when they make a loan, there is a risk that they will not get their money back. The same should be true of international lending.
This is a Huge Problem for Some Rich Countries Too
These issues became much more apparent to people in rich countries, when Greece was forced to pursue austerity, in 2010, as a condition of its debt arrangements. Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain also suffered. This had devastating consequences for the people of these countries, particularly the poor. Their situation is particularly difficult as they use the Euro as their currency, which gives them much less control over their finances.
A golden rule for all countries should be to borrow as little as possible in foreign currencies. If a country can create its own currency, it can be used to pay local people to do most of the things needed for development. It is straightforward to set up a national healthcare network, to set up a national system of schools and universities, to train doctors and engineers, to build a country’s infrastructure, or to begin the process of industrialization. It has been done successfully even in very poor countries. Forcing countries to borrow money denominated in US$ is a deliberate strategy by the US to maintain its power.(22)
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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.
The battery pack of a Tesla Model S is a feat of intricate engineering. Thousands of cylindrical cells with components sourced from around the world transform lithium and electrons into enough energy to propel the car hundreds of kilometers, again and again, without tailpipe emissions.
Each of the ten chapters provides factual information as well as analysis on the following topics: What Is Covid-19, what is SARS-CoV-2, how Is it identified, how is it estimated? The timeline and historical evolution of the Corona Crisis, the devastating economic and financial impacts, the enrichment of a social minority of billionaires, how the lockdown policies trigger unemployment and mass poverty Worldwide, the devastating impacts on mental health.
Try to find an American institution that is not corrupt.Even when presented with the Covid threat the US public health system could not rise above the greed for profit.Effective cures, such as HCQ and Ivermectin were demonized and in many states prohibited.Most Covid deaths are the result of non-treatment.
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) is altering its practices of data logging and testing for “Covid19” in order to make it seem the experimental gene-therapy “vaccines” are effective at preventing the alleged disease. They made no secret of this, announcing the policy changes on their website in late April/early May, (though naturally without admitting the fairly obvious motivation behind the change).
On Samos this led to the refugees from Gaza working closely with Sofiane from Open Doors to raise money and to get it through to Gaza without delay. In less than a day money was raised and sent and used to provide food parcels for those with nothing. No NGOs or the like, just ordinary people using their networks and local knowledge to get help to where it is most needed.
The claim often heard from those attempting to pass more gun control legislation is that all they’re trying to do is get the “weapons of war off our streets,” but it’s simply untrue that “weapons of war” are available to the general public. You’d last about three minutes in a conventional war with an AR-15, even with one of the most aggressive builds you can get your hands on (that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for guerilla uprisings to defeat powerful enemies).
The word ‘irony’ sums up much that is probably inherent in human nature and manifest at times in human history, when one considers the on-going conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. Historical pogroms had been launched against Jews – ‘pogroms’ used in the widest sense of its meaning as violent attack, expulsion, or marginalisations – then the history is a long one.
Governments around the world have enforced unprecedented restrictions on people’s lives, imposing lockdowns that closed down most of society for months at a time. Stopping people from visiting their family, isolating the elderly in care homes and destroying millions of people’s livelihoods. These draconian laws were brought in to control an alleged pandemic created by a new virus called SARS-CoV-2 that creates the respiratory illness of Covid 19.
The attack on Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in Iran, on April 11, targeting underground centrifuges operating under (IAEA) safeguards, was an act of nuclear terror with the potential to kill and harm many thousands of human beings and irreparably contaminate the environment. Although Israel has not confirmed or denied responsibility, the media have almost universally attributed the attack to Israel, citing senior American and Israeli intelligence officials confirming Israel’s involvement.
The creation of events that will promote irreconcilable interpretations in different interpretive communities has become a cottage industry for the rich and powerful. The radically divergent tales concerning mass shootings and attacks on minorities does wonders to exacerbate rifts between groups in the United States who might otherwise find common ground. These deep fissures in the basic assumptions about events render cooperation between these groups impossible.
As reported at RAIR in April of last year, Prof. Montagnier presented a powerful case that the coronavirus was created in a lab. His comments at the time offended the left-wing establishment so much that they aggressively attempted to discredit his statement. Now, the media is backpedaling on the origin of the coronavirus after prominent scientists called for further scrutiny.
Five months into the vaccination campaign, statistics tell a frightening story. Seneff cites researchshowing deaths are 14.6 times more frequent during the first 14 days after the first COVID injection among people over the age of 60, compared to those who aren’t vaccinated. That is extraordinary. You can read the full paper here.
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Afghan conundrum is mutating
The commencement of the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has got off to a flying start. So far there has been no hiccup. One significant landmark has been the vacation of the big American base at Kandahar, southern Afghanistan.
There is some poignancy here. A recent despatch by the Washington Post reported that “The battle against the Taliban has seesawed for months on the outskirts of Kandahar city. The second-largest city in Afghanistan, Kandahar holds strategic and symbolic value. Its province was once home to the busiest NATO base in the country, shares a long, porous border with Pakistan and was where the Taliban movement first formally mobilised.”
The fact that in a matter of some three weeks alone since the troop pullout began formally on May 1, twenty percent of the withdrawal process has been successfully completed is a matter of satisfaction for the Pentagon and the Biden Administration as well as the US’ allies in Europe.
It emerges that the latent fear in Washington and Brussels that the Taliban might taunt, harass and humiliate the retreating western forces (which includes NATO troops as well), is steadily receding. Consequently, there is a growing measure of confidence about what the future portends, which is reflected in the NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg’s statement last week about an open-ended presence of the alliance in Afghanistan beyond September, even if in a modified role.
Notably, Stoltenberg was speaking during a meeting in Paris with the French President Emmanuel Macron. Germany is already on board as regards continued NATO presence in Afghanistan.
Evidently, Pakistan is compelling the Taliban to “cooperate” with the US and NATO’s revised troop withdrawal schedule, notwithstanding the threatening complaints voiced by the latter from time to time as regards the Biden administration’s retraction from the core commitment given under the Doha pact by the American side on the timeline of completion of Pentagon troop withdrawal by May 1.
Put differently, Pakistan has risen to the western expectations as regards a safe and orderly drawdown (unlike in Vietnam.) This raises in turn new possibilities. Just as Americans have a saying that there’s nothing like free lunch in a transactional relationship, it is legitimate for the Pakistani side alsoto explore the quid pro quo by the Biden administration. In fact, the US-Pakistan relationship historically becomes a chronicle of “free lunches” with conditions attached.
Inevitably, a dialectics came into being over time between the two inseparable partners indulging in “free lunches” and “quid pro quos” and sustaining and mutually reinforcing each other. All evidence points toward that familiar pattern returning in the problematic US-Pakistan relationship. This will cause some worry in both Kabul and New Delhi — and, perhaps, in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran as well.
Thus, the repeated visits by the British top brass to Rawalpindi in the recent months must be highlighted here. To borrow the infinitely sad words expressed by the late Princess Diana in her interview with the BBC about “three people in a relationship,” there has always been a hovering British presence in the US-Pakistan relationship — which is on call, but keeping the head just below the parapet, while all dressed up raring to go at short notice.
In particular, when it comes to the Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship, the vexing issues have been historically bequeathed to the region by Lord Curzon. Therefore, as the search for an Afghan settlement intensifies, Britain’s role becomes important.
Unsurprisingly, at the controversial meeting in Kabul on May 10 between Pakistani army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Afghan President Ashraf Ghania, also present was Britain’s chief of defence staff General Nicholas Patrick Carter. (Gen. Carter and Gen. Bajwa also met separately.)
Quite obviously, London was working hard in setting up the Ghania-Bajwa encounter in Kabul for some two months since the consultations in early March that General Carter had in the Pakistani GHQ in Rawalpindi with the Pakistani COAS.Gen. Carter is well-regarded in Kabul and makes a perfect mediator. Ghania later warmly referred to the general’s presence at his May 10 meeting with Bajwa at the presidential palace: “General Carter is a mutual friend. We’ve known each other for over 10 years, since he commanded the ISAF forces in Kandahar. He’s a wonderful man. It sometimes takes special people in history to come together in a crisis.”
Indeed, the indications are that Britain is quietly working behind the scene to bring about an understanding over the disputed Durand Line (which Kabul doesn’t recognise), which is of course a British legacy and remains intractable in the absence of a new security arrangement. The Kabul elite have generally viewed Gen.Carter’s efforts in a positive spirit, given the realisation that the Durand Line question is of fundamental importance and will continue to cast shadows on Afghan-Pakistan relations unless some mutually acceptable arrangement could be worked out alongside any Afghan peace agreement.
Ideally, Pakistan would like to host a meeting between Ghania and Taliban chief Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada in the near term as a confidence building measure. Conceivably, Kabul is veering round to the view that an understanding over the Durand Line question would be the price to pay for Pakistan’s good-neighbourly behaviour and scrupulous non-interference in Afghan affairs, especially its projection of power across the Khyber, henceforth. But then, this is a chicken-and-egg situation and that is why the old colonial power’s mediatory role can be useful to instil mutual confidence.
Indeed, Britain would also like to take a “hands-on” role in all this. For, there is every indication that Britain will work shoulder to shoulder with the US in any future special forces operations in Afghanistan in the period ahead beyond September 11 when the western troop withdrawal will be notionally over and behind us.
It is useful to factor in that post-Brexit Global Britain aspires to be an active participant in the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy to contain China’s rise. In anticipation of the shape of things to come, in a major reorganisation in March as part of a larger strategic shift amid great-power competition, emphasising special-operations units, British special-operations forces will henceforth see changes modelled on their US counterparts.
The 70-page MOD document titled Defence in a competitive age, presented before the House of Commons in March, views China and Russia as Britain’s most important threats, and although the British military will downsize, it expects to be more competitive against Moscow and Beijing. The British special-operations or special-operations-capable units can be divided into two tiers — the first tier comprising the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), and Special Forces Support Group (SFSG), which focus on counterterrorism, hostage rescue, intelligence gathering, and direct action, while the second tier includes the Royal Marines Commandos, Parachute Regiment, and the 18 Signals Regiment. A Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing provides air transportation and support to all of the above units.
All these come under the the Strategic Command that supervises joint and national mission formations and overseas operations. Interestingly, only a fortnight after the visit of General Carter to Rawalpindi in early March to meet Gen. Bajwa, the latter had another visitor from Britain — General Sir Patrick Nicholas Yardley Monrad Sanders, Commander Strategic Command, UK.
The ISPR readout said, “During the meeting (on March 25), matters of professional and mutual interest and regional security issues were discussed. The visiting top UK military commander acknowledged and appreciated Pakistan Army’s sincere efforts in the fight against terrorism and efforts for bringing peace and stability in the region, especially the Afghan peace process.”
Without doubt, these visits by the two topmost generals of the British armed forces in such quick succession to Rawalpindi — the chief of defence staff and the consider of the strategic command — were in the context of planning the future security operations in Afghanistan following the US withdrawal of troops. The Pentagon is well aware that the British are pioneers in special operations — be it in Afghanistan or in its neighbouring regions.
Now, all this probably accounts for the intense curiosity about some secret joint activity being undertaken by the US and Pakistani military feverishly in Pakistan’s FATA region bordering Afghanistan — precisely, from Shelozan to Tari Mangal and Jazo Maidan areas — to construct military bases on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line.
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Featured image: A Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle being loaded on to a flatbed trailer, Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan. (File photo)
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“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation
We’ve all been there before.
You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.
You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.
For better or worse, from the moment you’re pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
This is what I call “blank check policing,” in which the police get to call all of the shots.
So if you’re nervous about traffic stops, you have every reason to be.
Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.
Try to assert your right to merely ask a question during a traffic stop and see how far it gets you.
Juanisha Brooks—black, 34 years old and on her way home at 2:20 am—was pulled over, handcuffed, arrested and charged with resisting arrest, eluding the police, reckless driving and failure to use headlights after repeatedly asking police why she had been stopped. When Brooks—a Department of Defense employee—filed a complaint, prosecutors conceded that the traffic stop had been carried out without “proper legal basis” and dropped all charges.
Caron Nazario, a uniformed Army officer returning home from his duty station, was stopped for not having a rear license plate (his temporary plates were taped to the rear window of his new SUV). Nazario, who is Black and Latino, pulled over at a well-lit gas station only to be pepper sprayed, held at gunpoint, beaten and threatened with execution.
Despite complying with all police orders when ordered to show his identification and exit his parked vehicle, Jeriel Edwards was subjected to excessive force and brutality, including being thrown to the ground, tasered, and placed in a chokehold that rendered him unconscious and required his hospitalization for three days. Although dash cam video of the arrest confirms that Edwards was peaceful, did not defy police orders, and did nothing to provoke police, a federal court ruled that Edwards’ trouble understanding police directions during the encounter constituted “resistance” that justified the force used by the four police officers involved in the violent arrest. Edwards is African-American.
Gregory Tucker, also black, was stopped by police for a broken taillight, only to be thrown to the ground, beaten and punched in the face and body more than 20 times, then arrested and hospitalized for severe injuries to his face and arm, all for allegedly “resisting arrest” by driving to a safe, well-lit area in front of his cousin’s house before stopping.
No wonder Americans are afraid of getting pulled over by police.
Mind you, all of these individuals complied with police. They just didn’t do it fast enough to suit their purposes.
At a time when police can do no wrong—at least in the eyes of the courts, police unions and politicians dependent on their votes—and a “fear” for officer safety is used to justify all manner of police misconduct, “we the people” are at a severe disadvantage.
Add a traffic stop to the mix, and that disadvantage increases dramatically.
This free-handed approach to traffic stops has resulted in drivers being stopped for windows that are too heavily tinted, for driving too fast, driving too slow, failing to maintain speed, following too closely, improper lane changes, distracted driving, screeching a car’s tires, and leaving a parked car door open for too long.
Motorists can also be stopped by police for driving near a bar or on a road that has large amounts of drunk driving, driving a certain make of car (Mercedes, Grand Prix and Hummers are among the most ticketed vehicles), having anything dangling from the rearview mirror (air fresheners, handicap parking permits, toll transponders or rosaries), and displaying pro-police bumper stickers.
Equally appalling, in Heien v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court—which has largely paved the way for the police and other government agents to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance—allowed police officers to stop drivers who appear nervous, provided they provide a palatable pretext for doing so.
Levar Jones was stopped for a seatbelt offense, just as he was getting out of his car to enter a convenience store. Directed to show his license, Jones leaned into his car to get his wallet, only to be shot four times by the “fearful” officer. Jones was also unarmed.
Bobby Canipe was pulled over for having an expired registration. When the 70-year-old reached into the back of his truck for his walking cane, the officer fired several shots at him, hitting him once in the abdomen.
Dontrell Stevens was stopped “for not bicycling properly.” The officer pursuing him “thought the way Stephens rode his bike was suspicious. He thought the way Stephens got off his bike was suspicious.” Four seconds later, sheriff’s deputy Adams Lin shot Stephens four times as he pulled out a black object from his waistband. The object was his cell phone. Stephens was unarmed.
Sandra Bland, pulled over for allegedly failing to use her turn signal, was arrested after refusing to comply with the police officer’s order to extinguish her cigarette and exit her vehicle. The encounter escalated, with the officer threatening to “light” Bland up with his taser. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her jail cell. “You’re doing all of this for a failure to signal?” Bland asked as she got out of her car, after having been yelled at and threatened repeatedly.
Keep in mind, from the moment those lights start flashing and that siren goes off, we’re all in the same boat. However, it’s what happens after you’ve been pulled over that’s critical.
Survival is key.
Technically, you have the right to remain silent (beyond the basic requirement to identify yourself and show your registration). You have the right to refuse to have your vehicle searched. You have the right to film your interaction with police. You have the right to ask to leave. You also have the right to resist an unlawful order such as a police officer directing you to extinguish your cigarette, put away your phone or stop recording them.
However, there is a price for asserting one’s rights. That price grows more costly with every passing day.
If you ask cops and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with police, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings.
Unfortunately, there are no longer any fail-safe rules of engagement for interacting with the police.
In the American police state, compliance is no guarantee that you will survive an encounter with the police with your life and liberties intact.
More often than not, it seems as if all you have to do to be shot and killed by police is stand a certain way, or move a certain way, or hold something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or ignite some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.
Now you can make all kinds of excuses to justify these shootings, and in fact that’s exactly what you’ll hear from politicians, police unions, law enforcement officials and individuals who are more than happy to march in lockstep with the police.
However, to suggest that a good citizen is a compliant citizen and that obedience will save us from the police state is not only recklessly irresponsible, but it is also deluded and out of touch with reality.
In a nutshell, the following are your basic rights when it comes to interactions with the police as outlined in the Bill of Rights:
You have the right under the First Amendment to ask questions and express yourself. You have the right under the Fourth Amendment to not have your person or your property searched by police or any government agent unless they have a search warrant authorizing them to do so. You have the right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent, to not incriminate yourself and to request an attorney. Depending on which state you live in and whether your encounter with police is consensual as opposed to your being temporarily detained or arrested, you may have the right to refuse to identify yourself. Not all states require citizens to show their ID to an officer (although drivers in all states must do so).
As a rule of thumb, you should always be sure to clarify in any police encounter whether or not you are being detained, i.e., whether you have the right to walk away. That holds true whether it’s a casual “show your ID” request on a boardwalk, a stop-and-frisk search on a city street, or a traffic stop for speeding or just to check your insurance. If you feel like you can’t walk away from a police encounter of your own volition—and more often than not you can’t, especially when you’re being confronted by someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear—then for all intents and purposes, you’re essentially under arrest from the moment a cop stops you. Still, it doesn’t hurt to clarify that distinction.
While technology is always going to be a double-edged sword, with the gadgets that are the most useful to us in our daily lives—GPS devices, cell phones, the internet—being the very tools used by the government to track us, monitor our activities, and generally spy on us, cell phones are particularly useful for recording encounters with the police and have proven to be increasingly powerful reminders to police that they are not all powerful.
Knowing your rights is only part of the battle, unfortunately.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the hard part comes in when you have to exercise those rights in order to hold government officials accountable to respecting those rights.
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The battery pack of a Tesla Model S is a feat of intricate engineering. Thousands of cylindrical cells with components sourced from around the world transform lithium and electrons into enough energy to propel the car hundreds of kilometers, again and again, without tailpipe emissions. But when the battery comes to the end of its life, its green benefits fade. If it ends up in a landfill, its cells can release problematic toxins, including heavy metals. And recycling the battery can be a hazardous business, warns materials scientist Dana Thompson of the University of Leicester. Cut too deep into a Tesla cell, or in the wrong place, and it can short-circuit, combust, and release toxic fumes.
That’s just one of the many problems confronting researchers, including Thompson, who are trying to tackle an emerging problem: how to recycle the millions of electric vehicle (EV) batteries that manufacturers expect to produce over the next few decades. Current EV batteries “are really not designed to be recycled,” says Thompson, a research fellow at the Faraday Institution, a research center focused on battery issues in the United Kingdom.
That wasn’t much of a problem when EVs were rare. But now the technology is taking off. Several carmakers have said they plan to phase out combustion engines within a few decades, and industry analysts predict at least 145 million EVs will be on the road by 2030, up from just 11 million last year. “People are starting to realize this is an issue,” Thompson says.
Governments are inching toward requiring some level of recycling. In 2018, China imposed new rules aimed at promoting the reuse of EV battery components. The European Union is expected to finalize its first requirements this year. In the United States, the federal government has yet to advance recycling mandates, but several states, including California—the nation’s largest car market—are exploring setting their own rules.
Materials scientist Dana Thompson develops solvents for extracting valuable metals from spent car batteries. (Source: FARADAY INSTITUTION)
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Featured image: A shredded electric vehicle battery can yield recyclable metals, but it is often cheaper for batterymakers to use new materials. (Source: ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY)
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An international survey of 2,002 people found that people who had previously had COVID-19 experienced “significantly increased incidence and severity” of side effects after the COVID-19 vaccine
Dr. Hooman Noorchashm has repeatedly warned the FDA that “clear and present danger” exists for those who have had COVID-19 and subsequently get vaccinated
At issue are viral antigens that remain in the body after a person is naturally infected; the immune response reactivated by the COVID-19 vaccine may trigger inflammation in tissues where the viral antigens exist
The inner lining of blood vessels, the lungs and the brain may be particularly at risk of such inflammation and damage, which could lead to major thromboembolic complications
Noorchashm believes that people should be screened for SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins prior to COVID-19 vaccination, while vaccination should be delayed for people with symptomatic or asymptomatic COVID-19 infections, as well as those who have recently recovered from the virus
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In their race to vaccinate the entire U.S. adult population, health officials are urging everyone to get a COVID shot, regardless of whether or not they’ve already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funded propaganda to convince people to get the vaccine.
This is an important distinction, however, with at least one scientist warning the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that “clear and present danger” exists for those who have had COVID-19 and subsequently get vaccinated.
That scientist — Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, a cardiac surgeon and patient advocate — warned the FDA that prescreening for SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins may reduce the risk of injuries and deaths following vaccination, as the vaccine may trigger an adverse immune response in those who have already been infected with the virus.1
Unfortunately, health agencies continue to assert that everyone should get vaccinated, even if they’ve already acquired natural immunity via previous infection.
CDC: Get Vaccinated Even if You’ve Had COVID
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admits that it’s rare to get sick again if you’ve already had COVID-19. Despite this, they say those who have recovered from COVID-19 should still get vaccinated:2
“You should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19. Even if you have already recovered from COVID-19, it is possible — although rare — that you could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 again.”
Your immune system is designed to work in response to exposure to an infectious agent. Upon recovery, you’re typically immune to that infectious agent. This is why, for instance, proof of prior diagnosis with chickenpox, measles and mumps is allowed instead of vaccination to enter most U.S. public schools3 — once you’ve had the disease and recovered, you’re immune.
If you’ve had COVID-19, you have some level of immunity against the virus. It’s unknown how long it lasts, just as it’s unknown how long protection from the vaccine lasts. According to the Public Health Agency of Sweden:4
“If you have had COVID-19, you have some protection against reinfection. This means that you are less likely to become infected and seriously ill, and less likely to infect others if you are exposed to the virus again.
Over time, the protection that you get after an infection wanes and there is an increased risk of getting infected again. At present, we estimate that the protection after having had COVID-19 lasts at least six months from the time of infection.”
People With Prior COVID Have More Vaccination Side Effects
An international survey of 2,002 people who had received a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine found that people who had previously had COVID-19 experienced “significantly increased incidence and severity” of side effects after the COVID-19 vaccine.5 Those who had previously had COVID-19 had a greater risk of experiencing any side effect, along with the following, specifically:
Fever
Flu-like illness
Local reactions
Breathlessness
Fatigue
Severe side effects leading to hospital care
The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were linked to a higher incidence of side effects compared to the viral vector-based COVID-19 vaccines, but the mRNA side effects tended to be milder, local reactions. Systemic reactions, such as anaphylaxis, flu-like illness and breathlessness, were more likely to occur with the viral vector COVID-19 vaccines.
According to the researchers, the findings should prompt health officials to reevaluate their vaccination recommendations for people who’ve had COVID-19:6
“People with prior COVID-19 exposure were largely excluded from the vaccine trials and, as a result, the safety and reactogenicity of the vaccines in this population have not been previously fully evaluated. For the first time, this study demonstrates a significant association between prior COVID19 infection and a significantly higher incidence and severity of self-reported side effects after vaccination for COVID-19.
Consistently, compared to the first dose of the vaccine, we found an increased incidence and severity of self-reported side effects after the second dose, when recipients had been previously exposed to viral antigen.
In view of the rapidly accumulating data demonstrating that COVID-19 survivors generally have adequate natural immunity for at least 6 months, it may be appropriate to re-evaluate the recommendation for immediate vaccination of this group.”
Surgeon Warns of Immunological Dangers, Blood Clots
Noorchashm has written multiple letters to the FDA, warning them that people should be screened for SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins prior to COVID-19 vaccination. Without such screening, he wrote in one letter to the FDA, “this indiscriminate vaccination is a clear and present danger to a subset of the already infected.”7
He describes the case of 32-year-old Benjamin Goodman of New York, who died within one day of receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. “There will be many more in the coming months as we carelessly and indiscriminately vaccinate the already infected, millions a day … It is a near certainty,” he continued.8 At issue are viral antigens that remain in the body after a person is naturally infected.
The immune response reactivated by the COVID-19 vaccine may trigger inflammation in tissues where the viral antigens are present. The inner lining of blood vessels, the lungs and the brain may be particularly at risk of such inflammation and damage.9 According to Noorchashm:10
“Most pertinently, when viral antigens are present in the vascular endothelium, and especially in elderly and frail with cardiovascular disease, the antigen specific immune response incited by the vaccine is almost certain to do damage to the vascular endothelium.
Such vaccine directed endothelial inflammation is certain to cause blood clot formation with the potential for major thromboembolic complications, at least in a subset of such patients. If a majority of younger more robust patients might tolerate such vascular injury from a vaccine immune response, many elderly and frail patients with cardiovascular disease will not.”
What’s more, Noorchashm quotes one of his previous medical school professors, who said, “the eyes do not see what the mind does not know.” In the case of a vaccine-induced antigen specific immune response, which may trigger thromboembolic complications 10 to 20 days after vaccination, including in those who may already be elderly and frail, the reaction isn’t likely to be registered as a vaccine-related adverse event.
Immediately Delay Vaccination for These Key Groups
In his repeated letters to the FDA, Noorchashm suggests that the FDA “immediately and at the very minimum” delay COVID-19 vaccination for people with symptomatic or asymptomatic COVID-19 infections, as well as those who have recently recovered from the virus.
Because so many cases are asymptomatic, he recommends clinicians “actively screen as many patients with high cardiovascular risk as is reasonably possible, in order to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2, prior to vaccinating them.”11 As it stands, Noorchashm points out that by ignoring what he believes to be an imminent risk for a sizable minority of people, the FDA’s credibility, and that of the mass vaccination campaign in general, is at grave risk:12
“Can you imagine if the public, without having received any real warning from FDA, becomes aware of an increasing number of such vascular/thromboembolic complications? What do you suppose will happen to the level of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ then?
And, what kind of accountability do you think the public will demand from our experts and federal regulators — especially if they knew, or should have known, that this immunological danger might exist?
The aim of benefiting the majority of our public and saving the nation from this pandemic by quick and aggressive vaccination is an ethically sound one — but where we know of real or likely risks of harm and mortality, we ought to mitigate the risks to those in potential harm’s way.
So doing is the only reasonable, ethical, and likely legal option you can pursue as public health regulators — for in America, we no longer sacrifice the lives of minority subsets of people for the benefit of the majority.”
At least 62 cases of myocarditis, or heart inflammation, in people who received the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are being investigated by the Israel Health Ministry. Most of the cases occurred in men under the age of 30 who were in good health, and two deaths have been reported as a result.13,14
No Proof of Efficacy in People Who’ve Had COVID-19
In a high-profile report issued by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, 15 scientists stated that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had “consistent high efficacy” of 92% or more among people with evidence of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection.15
But according to Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky, “That sentence is wrong. There is no efficacy demonstrated in the Pfizer trial among participants with evidence of previous SARS-CoV-2 infections and actually there’s no proof in the Moderna trial either.”16 In France, the health body la Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) does not recommend routinely vaccinating those who have already recovered from COVID-19, stating:17
“At this stage, there is no need to systematically vaccinate people who have already developed a symptomatic form of Covid-19 unless they wish to do so following a decision shared with the doctor and within a minimum period of time. 3 months from the onset of symptoms.”
When Massie realized that vaccination didn’t change the risk of infection among people who’ve had COVID-19, he was alarmed and contacted the CDC directly, recording his calls.
“It [the CDC report] says the exact opposite of what the data says. They’re giving people the impression that this vaccine will save your life, or save you from suffering, even if you’ve already had the virus and recovered, which has not been demonstrated in either the Pfizer or the Moderna trial,” Massey says in a “Full Measure” report.18
CDC Allows Misinformation to Continue
Massie spoke with multiple officials on numerous occasions, who acknowledged the misinformation and implied that it would be fixed.19,20 It wasn’t until Massie’s final call with the CDC, to deputy director Dr. Anne Schuchat, that it was acknowledged that a correction was necessary.
“As you note correctly, there is not sufficient analysis to show that in the subset of only the people with prior infection, there’s efficacy. So, you’re correct that that sentence is wrong and that we need to make a correction of it. I apologize for the delay,” Schuchat said. January 29, 2021, the CDC did finally issue a correction, which reads:21
“Consistent high efficacy (≥92%) was observed across age, sex, race, and ethnicity categories and among persons with underlying medical conditions. Efficacy was similarly high in a secondary analysis including participants both with or without evidence of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
Instead of fixing the error, Massie believes the wording just phrases the mistake in a different way and still misleadingly suggests vaccination is effective for those previously infected.22 Meanwhile, increasing numbers of breakthrough COVID-19 cases among the fully vaccinated are being reported, which the CDC has been reporting.
As of April 26, 2021, there have been 9,245 reported cases of COVID-19 in fully vaccinated individuals, including 132 deaths.23 Note this is not total deaths from the vaccine, which is rapidly approaching 4,000.
However, May 14, 2021, the CDC announced it will no longer report breakthrough cases unless they involve hospitalization or death,24 which will obscure the actual number of breakthrough cases occurring, artificially driving down rates and making the vaccines appear to be more effective.
The CDC also changed recommendations on PCR tests for the fully vaccinated, which will further drive down the appearance of breakthrough cases by making them less likely to “test positive.”
PCR tests recommended by the WHO used to be set to 45 cycle thresholds (CTs),25 yet the scientific consensus has long been that anything over 35 CTs renders the test useless,26 as the accuracy will be extremely low, with false positives artificially driving up case numbers.
In April 2021, the CDC recommended the CT be lowered to 28, but only for people who are fully vaccinated.27 Under this guidance, someone with a CT of 30 would not be considered to have COVID-19 if they were fully vaccinated, but if they were not, then their test would be “positive.”
This is beyond obvious that they are rigging the system to create data that fit their fake narrative, which is pushing the entire population to get a vaccine they don’t need, will harm or kill them and which will generate tens of billions of dollars in annual recurring revenue for the drug companies.
In return, the drug companies have no legal risk for any complications, adverse effects or deaths and are given billions of dollars in free advertising from the U.S. taxpayers to get this dangerous gene therapy.
The Big Lie — Natural Infection Isn’t Adequate
Why is it that the media continue to promote the fake narrative that natural immunity — the type acquired by getting infected by and recovering from a virus — isn’t as powerful or long-lasting as vaccine-acquired immunity?28,29 Do you think it might be to support vaccine sales?
Did they forget that COVID-19 vaccines aren’t intended to be a long-term solution, and have NEVER been shown to provide immunity benefits? The original warp speed test only showed reduced symptoms.
Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla exacerbated this charade by stating that not only will people need a third booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine within 12 months of being fully vaccinated, but annual vaccination will probably be necessary.30
Robust natural immunity has been demonstrated, however, for at least eight months after infection in more than 95% of people who have recovered from COVID-19.31,32 A Nature study also demonstrated robust natural immunity in people who recovered from SARS and SARS-CoV-2.33
There continue to be many unanswered questions surrounding COVID-19 vaccines, many of which most of the public has never heard of, such as imprinting and Th2 immunopathology. If you choose to get a COVID-19 vaccine, you’re participating in a giant experiment, acting as a guinea pig to see what will ultimately bear out.
That being said, if you or someone you love have received a COVID-19 vaccine and are experiencing side effects, be sure to report it. Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is calling on all who have suffered a side effect from a COVID-19 vaccine to do three things:34
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One could not accuse US Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of having a sense of irony. For some time, she has felt her party to be the hostage of a ghoulish monster who refuses to be slayed. And she fears her party has fallen out of love for the rule of law.
In being ousted from the third spot in the leadership of the Republican Conference in the House, Cheney has found a new morality. In her floor speech, she called Donald Trump’s canard of a stolen election a “threat America has never seen before.” Opposing Trump’s interpretation of the result was a “duty”.
“I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins in the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”
After her speech, she told reporters that she would “do everything” she could “to ensure that the former president never gets anywhere near the Oval Office.
Cheney’s seemingly shabby treatment led such papers as the Washington Post to remark that truth was again under assault. “Truth is the issue upon which Cheney has made her stand – truth and her unwillingness to be silent for the supposed good of the team.”
Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes, saw the event as a “confirmation that the Republican party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal”. Eric Lutz, writing in Vanity Fair, called the Cheney display “defiant”, laying “bare the cowardice of her colleagues who, with their vote on Wednesday, affirmed what had long been clear: The GOP is the cult of Trump now, and fealty the price of admission.”
This is gruesomely fascinating on a few levels, given that Cheney comes from a family rather snotty about such concepts as the rule of law, verisimilitude and the Constitution. Her father Dick Cheney, the Vice Presidential dark operator in the administration of George W. Bush, was not exactly strong on such ideas, and proved rather subversive and illiberal in a number of ways. Old Dick, along with his lawyer David Addington and John Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, did much to read executive power in a manner most imperial in nature.
For Dick Cheney, US executive power needed to be restored after the damaging effects of Watergate and the Vietnam War. The time that followed, he lamented to reporters on Air Force Two in 2005, proved to be “the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy”.
It is true to say that Trump also preferred a broad reading of executive power, one all too readily articulated by former Attorney General William Barr. But Cheney, Addington and Yoo were responsible for views that justified the bypassing and defanging of Congress, wiretapping of US citizens, torture of terrorist suspects, the establishment of military commissions, the breaching of international treaties and the waging of illegal wars. Such conduct has caused more than a smattering of commentary urging the prosecution of both Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush for a range of offences in both domestic and international law.
It would be churlish to claim that a father’s blackened record should somehow compromise that of his daughter’s. But the co-authored father and daughter work Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America repeats the old neoconservative interventionist sins that were so important in laying the ground for a Trump victory in 2016. Father Dick and Daughter Liz supply an apologia for such murderous disasters as Iraq while piling into President Barack Obama whom they stop short of accusing of treason. “The touchstone of his ideology – that America is to blame, and her power must be restrained – requires a wilful blindness about what America has done in the world.”
In 2009, Liz Cheney, along with fellow neoconservative Bill Kristol, co-founded Keep America Safe, an outfit steeped in a tattered worldview that proceeded to leave many Americans behind. As Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlanticnoted in a battering piece on Liz Cheney in 2013, “Most Americans understand that investing trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives in Iraq was a historic blunder.” Not for Liz, who finds wars stirringly necessary.
Over the years, Rep. Cheney barely warranted a mention after securing the seat her father once occupied. As the third-ranking member of minority party leadership, she was a middleweight power with exaggerated expectations. Then came President Trump. The neoconservatives were outflanked. Fires were lit, casting light upon her cause. That cause, simple as ever, was an anti-Trump, using truth and democracy as crutches of polemical convenience.
To date, Rep. Cheney is pursuing a cause of martyrdom that is, like many such causes, futile. It was a martyrdom that was “well-planned”, as Republican political consultant Keith Naughton noted in The Hill. “There are no reports she actually worked the GOP caucus, canvassing and counting heads. Cheney didn’t fight back, she planned to lose.” In losing, she hopes to rebuild a neoconservative base that has withered into oblivion.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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A sure sign of a country’s collapse is the open corruption of its public and private institutions.When corruption no longer has to be hidden but can be openly flouted, the values and standards that comprised the country’s soul have eroded away.
Try to find an American institution that is not corrupt.Even when presented with the Covid threat the US public health system could not rise above the greed for profit.Effective cures, such as HCQ and Ivermectin were demonized and in many states prohibited.Most Covid deaths are the result of non-treatment.
Throughout the alleged “Covid Pandemic” regulatory agencies, health bureaucracies, medical associations, state governors, media, and Big Pharma have acted to prevent any alternative to a vaccine.
From day one the emphasis was on the profits from a vaccine.To get people to submit to an experimental and untested vaccine required the absence of cures. To keep the road open only for a vaccine even supplements such as NAC, which has shown effectiveness as both preventative and treatment of Covid, has been challenged by the FDA in its use as a supplement.In response, amazon.com, a major online marketer of dietary supplements removed NAC from its offerings. See this.
The generation of fear was essential to stampeeding people to line up to be vaccinated.The fear was supplemented by threats of inability to travel, to attend sports events, to resume working at one’s job.
A Covid test, known as PCR, was intentionally run at high [amplification threshold] cycles known to result in a very high percentage of false positives.These false positives guaranteed a high infection rate that scared people silly.Economic incentives were used for hospitals to report all deaths as Covid deaths, thus greatly exaggerating Covid’s mortality.
As you might have noticed, last winter had no reporting of flu cases as flu was added to the Covid statistics.
A number of reports have been published that the Covid vaccine does not prevent some vaccinated people from coming down with Covid.Other reports say that vaccinated people become spreaders of Covid.There are also reports of a large number of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccine. See this.
In order to suppress the facts and keep the Covid vaccine selling, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which supported running the PCR test at high cycles in order to inflate the number of Covid cases, runs the PCR test at much lower cycles in the case of infected vaccinated people in order to minimize the number of vaccinated people who came down with Covid.
To further create an artificial picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness, asymptomatic and mild infections are excluded from the reporting of vaccinated people who catch Covid.Only vaccinated people who catch Covid who have to be hospitalized or die from Covid are counted among the people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated.However, unvaccinated people with only minor symptoms or false positives from a high cycle PCR test are added to the number of Covid cases. See this.
This is obvious and blatant manipulation of statistics in order to scare people about Covid while reassuring them about the vaccine’s effectiveness. Overstating the number of cases among the unvaccinated while simultaneously understating the number of people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated is shameless and protects the contrived picture of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
The falsification of statistics in order to produce massive public fear and the prevention of treatment with known safe and effective cures in order to maximize death rates produced billions of dollars in profits for Big Pharma and associated industries, with Moderna’s CEO topping the list of nine new billionaires made rich from the rollout of Covid vaccines.These billionaires rode to their riches on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who died from an enforced lack of treatment —mandated deaths to protect vaccine profits. See this.
Will anything be done about this extraordinary corruption of the American public health system?
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***
Here is something that can be said with great confidence. It is racist – antisemitic, if you prefer – to hold Jews, individually or collectively, accountable for Israel’s crimes. Jews are not responsible for Israel’s war crimes, even if the Israeli state presumes to implicate Jews in its crimes by falsely declaring it represents all Jews in the world.
Very obviously, it is not the fault of Jews that Israel commits war crimes, or that Israel uses Jews collectively as a political shield, exploiting sensitivities about the historical suffering of Jews at the hands of non-Jews to immunise itself from international opprobrium.
But here is something that can be said with equal certainty. Israel’s apologists – whether Jews or non-Jews – cannot deny all responsibility for Israel’s war crimes when they actively aid and abet Israel in committing those crimes, or when they seek to demonise and silence Israel’s critics so that those war crimes can be pursued in a more favourable political climate.
Such apologists – which sadly seems to include many of the community organisations in Britain claiming to represent Jews – want to have their cake and eat it.
They cannot defend Israel uncritically as it commits war crimes or seek legislative changes to assist Israel in committing those war crimes – whether it be Israel’s latest pummelling of civilians in Gaza, or its executions of unarmed Palestinians protesting 15 years of Israel’s blockade of the coastal enclave – and accuse anyone who criticises them for doing so of being an antisemite.
But this is exactly what has been going on. And it is only getting worse.
Upsurge in antisemitism?
As a ceasefire was implemented late last week, bringing a temporary let-up in the bombing of Gaza by Israel, pro-Israel Jewish groups in the UK were once again warning of an upsurge of antisemitism they attributed to a rapid growth in the number of protests against Israel.
Hmm. Pro-Israel groups say there's been a surge of antisemitism in the UK because of the large numbers attending protests against Israel killing Palestinians in Gaza: 'Demos are being held all over the country every day about this issue' https://t.co/oPxFs7GcOF
These groups have the usual powerful allies echoing their claims. British prime minister Boris Johnson met community leaders in Downing Street on Thursday pledging, as Jewish News reported, “to continue to support the community in the face of rising antisemitism attacks”.
Those Jewish leaders included Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, a supporter of Johnson who played a part in helping him win the 2019 election by renewing the evidence-free antisemitism smears against the Labour party days before voting. It also included the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which was founded specifically to whitewashIsrael’s crimes during its 2014 bombardment of Gaza and has ever since been vilifying all Palestinian solidarity activism as antisemitism.
My latest: Anti-Palestinian bigotry from a self-styled antisemitism watchdog is the latest move to dress up bullying and threats as victimhood https://t.co/KRaPEuA1jy
In attendance too was the Jewish Leadership Council, an umbrella organisation for Britain’s main Jewish community groups. In an articlein Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on this supposed rise in antisemitism in the UK, the JLC’s vice-president, Daniel Korski, set out the ridiculous, self-serving narrative these community groups are trying to peddle, with seemingly ever greater success among the political and media elite.
Popular outrage over Gaza
Korski expressed grave concern about the proliferation of demonstrations in the UK designed to halt Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. During 11 days of attacks, more than 260 Palestinians were killed, including at least 66 children. Israel’s precision air strikes targeted more than a dozen hospitals, including the only Covid clinic in Gaza, dozens of schools, several media centres, and left tens of thousands of Palestinians homeless.
The sense of popular outrage at the Israeli onslaught was only heightened by the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had clearly engineered a confrontation with Hamas at the outset to serve his immediate personal interests: preventing Israeli opposition parties from uniting to oust him from power.
In his naked personal calculations, Palestinian civilians were sacrificed to help Netanyahu hold on to power and improve his chances of evading jail as he stands trial on corruption charges.
Of the ceasefire, Israel says it has met its 'goals': over 230 killed in Gaza, including 65 children; hospitals wrecked; tens of thousands homeless; electricity and water in even shorter supply – and most importantly, Netanyahu has scuppered Israeli opposition efforts to oust him
But for Korski and the other community leaders attending the meeting with Johnson, the passionate demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians are their main evidence for a rise in antisemitism.
‘Free Palestine’ chants
These community organisations cite a few incidents that undoubtedly qualify as antisemitism – some serious, some less so. They include shouting “Free Palestine” at individuals because they are identifiable as Jews, something presumably happening mostly to the religious ultra-Orthodox.
But these Jewish leaders’ chief concern, they make clear, is the growing public support for Palestinians in the face of intensifying Israeli aggression.
Quoting David Rich, of the Community Security Trust, another Jewish organisation hosted by Johnson, the Haaretz newspaper reports that “what has really shaken the Jewish community … ‘is that demos are being held all over the country every day about this issue’ [Israel’s bombardment of Gaza].”
Revealingly, it seems that when Jewish community leaders watch TV screens showing demonstrators chant “Free Palestine”, they feel it as a personal attack – as though they themselves are being accosted in the street.
One doesn’t need to be a Freudian analyst to wonder whether this reveals something troubling about their inner emotional life: they identify so completely with Israel that even when someone calls for Palestinians to have equal rights with Israelis they perceive it as a collective attack on Jews, as antisemitism.
Exception for Israel
Then Korski gets to the crux of the argument: “As Jews we are proud of our heritage and at the same time in no way responsible for the actions of a government thousands of miles away, no matter our feelings or connection to it.”
But the logic of that position is simply untenable. You cannot tie your identity intimately to a state that systematically commits war crimes, you cannot vilify demonstrations against those war crimes as antisemitism, you cannot use your position as a “Jewish community leader” to make such allegations more credible, and you cannot exploit your influence with world leaders to try to silence protests against Israel and then say you are “in no way responsible” for the actions of that government.
If you use your position to prevent Israel from being subjected to scrutiny over allegations of war crimes, if you seek to manipulate the public discourse with claims of antisemitism to create a more favourable environment in which those war crimes can be committed, then some of the blame for those war crimes rubs off on you.
That is how responsibility works in every other sphere of life. What Israel’s apologists are demanding is an exception for Israel and for themselves.
Lobby with the UK’s ear
In another revealing observation seeking to justify claims of an upsurge in antisemitism, Korski adds: “We don’t see the same kind of outpouring of emotion when it comes to the Rohingya or the Uighurs or Syria, and it makes a lot of Jews feel this is about them [as Jews].”
But there are many reasons why there aren’t equally large demonstrations in the UK against the suffering of the Rohingya and the Uighurs – reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism.
The oppressors of the Rohingya and the Uighurs, unlike Israel, are not being generously armed by the British government or given diplomatic cover by Britain or being given preferential trade agreements by Britain.
How can British "enhanced military collaboration" with the IDF now be deemed legal? They just bombed Al Jazeera and AP's offices using the £500bn worth of arms Britain has sold them – with no conditions on use! #FreePalestine
But equally importantly, the states oppressing the Rohingya and Uighurs – unlike Israel – don’t have active, well-funded lobbies in the UK, with the ear of the prime minister. China and Myanmar – unlike Israel – don’t have UK lobbies successfully labelling criticism of them as racism. Unlike Israel, they don’t have lobbies that openly seek to influence elections to protect them from criticism. Unlike Israel, they don’t have lobbies that work with Britain to introduce measures to assist them in carrying out their oppression.
The president of the Board of Deputies, Marie van der Zyl, for example, pressed Johnson at the meeting this week to classify all branches of Hamas, not just its military wing, as a terrorist organisation. That is Israel’s wet dream. Such a decision would make it even less likely that Britain would be in a position to officially distance itself from Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, where Hamas runs the government, and even more likely it would join Israel in declaring Gaza’s schools, hospitals and government departments all legitimate targets for Israeli air strikes.
Pure projection
If you are lobbying to get special favours for Israel, particularly favours to help it commit war crimes, you don’t also get to wash your hands of those war crimes. You are directly implicated in them.
David Hirsch, an academic at the University of London who has been closely connected to efforts to weaponise antisemitism against critics of Israel, especially in the Labour party under its previous leader Jeremy Corbyn, also tries to play this trick.
He tells Haaretz that antisemitism is supposedly “getting worse” because Palestinian solidarity activists have been giving up on a two-state solution. “There used to be a struggle in Palestine solidarity between a politics of peace – two states living side by side – and a politics of denouncing one side as essentially evil and hoping for its total defeat.”
But what Hirsch is doing is pure projection: he is suggesting Palestinian solidarity activists are “antisemites” – his idea of evil – because they have been forced by Israel to abandon their long-favoured cause of a two-state solution. That is only because successive Israeli governments have refused to negotiate any kind of peace deal with the most moderate Palestinian leadership imaginable under Mahmoud Abbas – one that has eagerly telegraphed its desire to collaborate with Israel, even calling “security coordination” with the Israeli army “sacred”.
A two-state solution is dead because Israel made it dead not because Palestinian solidarity activists are more extreme or more antisemitic.
In calling to “Free Palestine”, activists are not demanding Israel’s “total defeat” – unless Hirsch and Jewish community organisations themselves believe that Palestinians cannot be free from Israeli oppression and occupation until Israel suffers such a “total defeat”. Hirsch’s claim tells us nothing about Palestinian solidarity activists, but it does tell us a lot about what is really motivating these Jewish community organisations.
It is these pro-Israel lobbyists, it seems, more than Palestinian solidarity activists, who cannot imagine Palestinians living in dignity under Israeli rule. Is that because they understand only too well what Israel and its political ideology of Zionism truly represent, and that what is required of Palestinians for “peace” is absolute and permanent submission?
Better informed
Similarly, Rich, of the Community Security Trust, says of Palestinian solidarity activists: “Even the moderates have become extremists.” What does this extremism – again presented by Jewish groups as antisemitism – consist of? “Now the movement [in solidarity with Palestinians] is dominated by the view that Israel is an apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist state.”
Or in other words, these pro-Israel Jewish groups claim there has been a surge in antisemitism because Palestinian solidarity activists are being influenced and educated by human rights organisations, like Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem. Both recently wrote reports classifying Israel as an apartheid state, in the occupied territories and inside Israel’s recognised borders. Activists are not becoming more extreme, they are becoming better informed.
My latest: A new report by human rights group B'Tselem calling Israel an apartheid state will make it harder to smear Israel's critics as antisemites for arguing that the Jewish state is a racist endeavour https://t.co/ubVRYd3nhj
And in making the case for a supposed surge in antisemitism, Rich offers another inadvertently revealing insight. He says Jewish children are suffering from online “abuse” – antisemitism – because they find it increasingly hard to participate on social media.
“Teenagers are much quicker to join social movements; we’ve just had Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, #MeToo – now Jewish kids find all their friends are joining this [Palestinian solidarity] movement where they don’t feel welcome or they are singled out because they’re Jewish.”
Fancifully, Rich is arguing that Jewish children raised in Zionist families and communities that have taught them either explicitly or implicitly that Jews in Israel have superior rights to Palestinians are being discriminated against because their unexamined ideas of Jewish supremacy do not fit with a pro-Palestinian movement predicated on equality.
This is as preposterous as it would have been, during the Jim Crow era, for white supremacist Americans to have complained of racism because their children were being made to feel out of place in civil rights forums.
Such assertions would be laughable were they not so dangerous.
Demonised as antisemites
Zionist supporters of Israel are trying to turn logic and the world upside down. They are inverting reality. They are projecting their own racist, zero-sum assumptions about Israel on to Palestinian solidarity activists, those who support equal rights for Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.
As they did with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, these Jewish groups are twisting the meaning of antisemitism, skewing it from a fear or hatred of Jews to any criticism of Israel that makes pro-Israel Jews feel uncomfortable.
As we watch these arguments being amplified uncritically by leading politicians and journalists, remember too that it was the only major politician to have demurred from this nonsensical narrative, Jeremy Corbyn, who became the main target – and victim – of these antisemitism smears.
Now these pro-Israel Jewish groups want to treat us all like Corbyn, demonising us as antisemites unless we fall silent even as Israel once again brutalises Palestinians.
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Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: ISRAELI BORDER POLICE OPERATING IN THE CITY OF LYDDA (LOD), MAY 11, 2021. (PHOTO: TWITTER/@IL_POLICE)
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According to the Swedish Public Health Agency, PCR technology cannot distinguish between viruses capable of infecting cells and viruses that have been neutralized in the immune system. As a result, these tests “cannot be used to determine whether someone is contagious or not.” They emphasize what many other experts in the field have been emphasizing during the entire pandemic, that,
“RNA from the virus can often be detected for weeks (sometimes months) after the illness but does not mean that you are still contagious. There are also several scientific studies that suggest that the contagion of COVID-19 is greatest at the disease period.”
Even if RNA is detected at anytime, this does not mean you are infectious and capable of infecting others.
This is true, PCR tests can be positive for up to 100 days after an exposure to the virus. PCR tests do nothing more than confirm the presence of fragments of viral RNA of the target SARS CO-V2 virus in someone’s nose. While a person with COVID-19 is infectious for a one-to-two week period, non-viable (harmless) viral SARS CO-V2 fragments remain in the nose and can be detected by a PCR test for up to 100 days after exposure.
A recent article published in The Lancet medical journal explains that PCR tests can be “positive” for up to five times longer than the time an infected person is actually infectious. They explain that up to 75% of “positive” individuals are most likely post-infectious.
As a result the Swedish government recommends assessing COVID infections, and freedom from infections,
based on stable clinical improvement with freedom from fever for at least two days and that at least seven days have past since the onset of symptoms. For those who have had more pronounced symptoms, at least 14 days after the illness and for the very sickest, individual assessment by the treating doctor.”
Even if and when RNA from the the virus is detected, which the PCR test does quite well, whether or not a sample is actually infectious (containing a viable virus, capable of replicating) needs to be confirmed by lab culture. Only 44% of the “positive” samples using a Ct of 18 returned a viable lab culture, according to Dr. Jared Bullard, a paediatric infectious disease specialist and a current witness for the Manitoba government. The Manitoba government is being sued for the measures they’ve taken to combat COVID.
What is a Ct? It refers to cycle threshold. The PCR tests are not designed to detect and identify active infectious disease. Instead, it identifies genetic material, be it partial, alive, or even dead. PCR amplifies this material in samples to find traces of COVID-19. If the sample taken from a nasal swab contains a large amount of COVID virus it will react positive after only a few cycles of amplification, while a smaller sample with small amounts of genetic material will require more cycles to amplify enough of the genetic material to get a positive result. Since the PCR test amplifies traces of COVID-19 through cycles, a lower number of cycles needed to get a positive result suggests the presence of a higher viral load for the person being tested and therefore a higher contagion potential.
An article published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that among positive PCR samples with a cycle count over 35, only 3 percent of the samples showed viral replication. This can be interpreted as, if someone tests positive via PCR when a Ct of 35 or higher is used, the probability that said person is actually infected is less than 3%, and the probability that said result is a false positive is 97%. In this case false positive means a person is not infectious or capable of transmitting the virus to others. (source)
Dr. Anthony Fauci himself told This Week in Virology in July 2020, “If you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more … the chances of it being replication-competent are minuscule.” Why then has our national testing standard never reflected this? PCR providers should work with other labs to perform a random viral culture, as mentioned by Bullard above, on those who received positive results, to validate their tests in terms of being an indicator of infectiousness.
There are many questions to be asked here. Labs are not supplying Ct information associated with each test. In some cases should labs be counting “positive” results as “cases” when they come from a high Ct number? We just found out that high Ct numbers around 30+ can often be non infectious or incapable of spreading the virus, this nuance is important considering public health policy is being decided off of cases alone.
What percentage of cases have been a result of a lower cycle threshold, let’s say below 20? These would be the cases, at least some of them, that would be more accurate in identifying a person who is actually infectious. If these tests, as the Swedish government says, cannot be used properly to identify an infectious person, even at a low Ct why haven’t we just put measures in place that apply to symptomatically sick people?
Manitoba has confirmed that it utilizes Ct’s of up to 40, and even 45 in some cases. It’s an important question given the fact that health policy has been based on the number of cases present in a region.
Here in Ontario, Canada outdoor amenities like golf courses, basketball courts, tennis courts, parks and more have been closed based on case counts, even though COVID spreading outdoors is extremely unlikely.
Indoors, infected individuals who are asymptomatic are more than an order of magnitude less likely to spread the disease compared to symptomatic COVID-19 patients. A meta-analysis of 54 studies from around the world found that within households – where none of the safeguards that restaurants are required to apply are typically applied – symptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 18 percent of instances, while asymptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 0.7 percent of instances.
This is why many academics have urged authorities to stop the testing of asymptomatic individuals. Combine this fact with the fact that the chances of asymptomatic spread is low, and with the fact that there is a lack of clarity around PCR testing, and we see why doctors are bring up the question.
Health policy has been guided and dictated by the number of “cases.” It’s why lockdowns and mask mandates have been put in place regardless of the damage they cause and have caused. What if the majority of “positive” cases during this pandemic have been people who are not capable of spreading the disease – who are not even sick? It would represent an astronomical mistake on the part of multiple governments and the World Health Organization (WHO). Should we not be focusing on perhaps limiting the spread via symptomatic people, instead of punishing and restricting the rights and freedoms of people who are not sick?
This has been an issue for quite some time, as far back as 2007, Gina Kolata published an article in the New York Times about how declaring virus pandemics based on PCR tests can end in a disaster. The article was titled Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t. You can read that full story here if the previous link doesn’t work.
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The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) is altering its practices of data logging and testing for “Covid19” in order to make it seem the experimental gene-therapy “vaccines” are effective at preventing the alleged disease.
They made no secret of this, announcing the policy changes on their website in late April/early May, (though naturally without admitting the fairly obvious motivation behind the change).
The trick is in their reporting of what they call “breakthrough infections” – that is people who are fully “vaccinated” against Sars-Cov-2 infection, but get infected anyway.
Essentially, Covid19 has long been shown – to those willing to pay attention – to be an entirely created pandemic narrative built on two key factors:
Inflated Case-count. The incredibly broad definition of “Covid case”, used all over the world, lists anyone who receives a positive test as a “Covid19 case”, even if they never experienced any symptoms.
Without these two policies, there would never have been an appreciable pandemic at all, and now the CDC has enacted two policy changes which means they no longer apply to vaccinated people.
Firstly, they are lowering their CT value when testing samples from suspected “breakthrough infections”.
From the CDC’s instructions for state health authorities on handling “possible breakthrough infections” (uploaded to their website in late April):
For cases with a known RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) value, submit only specimens with Ct value ≤28 to CDC for sequencing. (Sequencing is not feasible with higher Ct values.)
Throughout the pandemic, CT values in excess of 35 have been the norm, with labs around the world going into the 40s.
Essentially labs were running as many cycles as necessary to achieve a positive result, despite experts warning that this was pointless (even Fauci himself said anything over 35 cycles is meaningless).
But NOW, and only for fully vaccinated people, the CDC will only accept samples achieved from 28 cycles or fewer. That can only be a deliberate decision in order to decrease the number of “breakthrough infections” being officially recorded.
Secondly, asymptomatic or mild infections will no longer be recorded as “covid cases”.
That’s right. Even if a sample collected at the low CT value of 28 can be sequenced into the virus alleged to cause Covid19, the CDC will no longer be keeping records of breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalisation or death.
As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. Previous case counts, which were last updated on April 26, 2021, are available for reference only and will not be updated moving forward.
Just like that, being asymptomatic – or having only minor symptoms – will no longer count as a “Covid case” but only if you’ve been vaccinated.
The CDC has put new policies in place which effectively created a tiered system of diagnosis. Meaning, from now on, unvaccinated people will find it much easier to be diagnosed with Covid19 than vaccinated people.
Consider…
Person A has not been vaccinated. They test positive for Covid using a PCR test at 40 cycles and, despite having no symptoms, they are officially a “covid case”.
Person Bhas been vaccinated. They test positive at 28 cycles, and spend six weeks bedridden with a high fever. Because they never went into a hospital and didn’t die they are NOT a Covid case.
Person C, who was also vaccinated, did die. After weeks in hospital with a high fever and respiratory problems. Only their positive PCR test was 29 cycles, so they’re not officially a Covid case either.
The CDC is demonstrating the beauty of having a “disease” that can appear or disappear depending on how you measure it.
To be clear: If these new policies had been the global approach to “Covid” since December 2019, there would never have been a pandemic at all.
If you apply them only to the vaccinated, but keep the old rules for the unvaccinated, the only possible result can be that the official records show “Covid” is much more prevalent among the latter than the former.
This is a policy designed to continuously inflate one number, and systematically minimise the other.
What is that if not an obvious and deliberate act of deception?
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We have all been born and raised under a government that wields the power of assassination. State-sponsored assassinations at the hands of the U.S. government — and specifically the Pentagon and the CIA — have become a rather ho-hum affair. They have become fully accepted as part and parcel of American life.
Yet, when we stop to reflect on this phenomenon, we can’t help but come to the realization that this is truly an extraordinary power. It is an omnipotent power that enables the federal government to snuff out a person’s life simply on a determination that he is a communist, a terrorist, a threat to “national security,” or whatever other designation the government establishes.
The Framers and the American people in 1789 were totally opposed to living under a government that wielded the power of assassination. Don’t forget, after all, that after the break from England, Americans had lived under the Articles of Confederation for some ten years. Under the Articles, the federal government’s powers were so weak that it didn’t even have the power to tax, much less the power to assassinate.
That’s the way our American ancestors wanted it. They believed that the biggest threat to their freedom and well-being lay not with some foreign regime but rather from their very own government. That’s why they chose to live under a government with very few and very limited powers. In doing so, they felt safer and more secure.
When the delegates met in Philadelphia in what became known as the Constitutional Convention, it was with the purpose of simple amending the Articles to make the system work more efficiently. Instead, they came up with a proposal for a different type of governmental system — a limited-government republic — which would replace the Articles.
The American people were leery because the federal government under this new system would have more powers, including the power to tax. They were concerned that this new government would end up destroying their freedom and their well-being.
But proponents of the Constitution assured Americans that this would not be a government that wielded general powers — that is, powers that would enable federal officials to do whatever they wanted in the best interests of the nation. Instead, its powers would be limited to the few powers enumerated in the Constitution itself.
The American people were especially concerned about the power of assassination. The last thing they wanted was to live under a government that wielded the power to snuff out people’s lives for arbitrary reasons. In fact, if Americans had been told that this new federal government would wield the power of assassination, they never would have approved the deal. They would instead have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation.
Americans ended up approving the deal and accepting the new government under the assumption that its powers would be limited to those enumerated in the Constitution, which did not include the power of assassination.
To ensure that federal officials got the message, however, Americans demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights, which included an express prohibition against assassination within the Fifth Amendment, which reads in part: “No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.”
Due process of law is a term that stretches all the way back to Magna Carta in the year 1215. Over many centuries of resistance by British subjects against their own kings, due process came to encompass two principles: notice and trial.
Thus, under the Fifth Amendment before the federal government could assassinate someone, it would be required to provide him with formal notice of the offense for which they wish to assassinate him and then guarantee him a trial to determine whether he in fact was guilty of committing the offense.
Notice something important about the Fifth Amendment: Its protections apply to everyone, not just American citizens.
With the Sixth Amendment, the accused could elect to have a jury of ordinary citizens, rather than a judge or tribunal, determine his guilt or innocence. Our American ancestors simply didn’t trust judges or tribunals to make that decision.
Since a jury’s verdict of acquittal was final and non-appealable, juries were also empowered with the ability to judge the law itself in criminal cases. If they found the purported offense unconscionable, they could elect to acquit even if the accused had actually committed it, in which case there was nothing the judge or the government could do about it. The accused would walk out of the courtroom a free person.
After World War II, the federal government was converted into a third type of governmental system — a national-security state. Under this type of government, the federal government — specifically the CIA and the Pentagon — acquired the omnipotent power of assassination.
The conversion to a national-security state was justified under the rubric of the Cold War. The idea was that since the Soviet Union and the communist world were able to operate with omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination, the only way to prevent America from being conquered by the communists would be to adopt their same type of governmental structure — a national-security state, which came with the omnipotent power of assassination.
The conversion to a national-security state was done through legislation, not through constitutional amendment. Nonetheless, owing to the overwhelming and ever-growing power of the national-security establishment — i.e., the military, the CIA, and the NSA — the legislative conversion to a national-security state was held to operate as a nullification of the Fifth Amendment.
Today, the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s power of assassination is omnipotent. They are the final determiners of whether any particular person is going to have his life snuffed out. Their power of assassination is non-reviewable by any court in the land, including the nation’s highest court, the U.S. Supreme Court.
And that’s how we have come to live under omnipotent government, a type of governmental structure that wields the power to assassinate anyone it wants with impunity, simply by designating a person a communist, a terrorist, a threat to “national security,” or whatever.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
The creation of events that will promote irreconcilable interpretations in different interpretive communities has become a cottage industry for the rich and powerful. The radically divergent tales concerning mass shootings and attacks on minorities does wonders to exacerbate rifts between groups in the United States who might otherwise find common ground. These deep fissures in the basic assumptions about events render cooperation between these groups impossible.
Two common themes among conservatives are that attacks on minorities, and major mass shootings, are fake, false flag operations, and that climate change is a fraud used for the interests of the rich and powerful.
Let me start with a disclaimer. As no open, international investigations have ever been conducted concerning the incidents that I describe, my interpretation is by nature speculative. I would venture, however, that the critical points that I make, purposely are left out of coverage in both the mainstream media and in conspiracy blogs.
What is clear is that public intellectuals and reporters intentionally avoid difficult questions concerning these incidents, falling back on the argument that it is disrespectful of the families of those who were killed to suggest that the event was fabricated.
In the case of Sandy Hook, it is certainly possible that the attack was by a loner suffering from mental illness. Yet the vicious manner in which the mere suggestion that there might have been an incentive to create an event so as to increase police powers raises questions as to the motivations of those who deny even the possibility of a conspiracy.
In the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing, significant evidence exists that chronology of the bombing is inconsistent. The remarkably clean manner in which the entire event was pinned on Chechens who supposedly killed a police officer while trying to steal his gun sounds rather far-fetched. It is undeniable, however, that the Boston Marathon bombing was used to carry out an unprecedented lockdown of the entire city of Boston without any constitutional guarantees for citizens, or due process.
That event was a frightening adumberation of the lockdowns of the United States in the name of COVID19 seven years later.
The significance of the Boston Marathon as commemoration of Patriot’s Day (granted it was held a few days earlier that year), a critical day in Boston history when American militia opened fire on the British at Lexington, was completely ignored by the media when they pinned the story on two terrorist bombers.
Yet, it was on Patriot’s Day, April 19, 1993 that the Federal government brutally crushed the Branch Davidians at Waco, an assault that included a needless fire which left dead seventy-six people.
It was on Patriot’s Day, April 19, 1995, that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was destroyed in an attack attributed to Timothy McVeigh—an incident about which many questions still remain unanswered.
In addition, two days after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, a massive explosion (employing ammonium nitrate just like the explosion in Oklahoma) near Waco, Texas, killed fifteen people. None of these facts were mentioned in the media.
The Las Vegas shootings (October 1, 2017) suggest a possible strategy behind these attacks. The suspect Stephen Craig Paddock supposedly killed more than 60 people in less than 15 minutes of shooting from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This fact alone raised serious questions among experts.
As he committed suicide we never learned Paddock’s version of the story.
The striking part of the story is the contradictory reports from eyewitnesses.
Although they have vanished from the internet, there were videos posted of both real shootings with live ammunition in one part of the hotel and in other areas the sounds of gunfire were broadcast over a speaker.
The intension of such an approach (which may well have been used in other incidents) might well have been to create divergent interpretations of the event from the start. Those who argued that there was a real shooting had facts to back up their claims. Those who suggested that the shootings were a fraud, a false flag, were given also solid evidence.
A similar game appears to be under way concerning climate change.
Scientific evidence for catastrophic climate change in terms of spreading deserts, the warming and the acidification of oceans, the spread of micro-plastics through the water and soil, and the long-term warming of the atmosphere is indisputable. The campaigns of fake scientists receiving corporate funding to dismiss this complex phenomenon has not succeeded in convincing the public.
Because the launch of the COVID19 operation is directly linked to climate change, specifically to the need to assure the wellbeing of the 0.5% at the expense of the rest of the Earth, in light of the impending collapse of the ecological system, the highest priority is to make sure that no political figure emerges who addresses both COVID19 fraud and the threat of climate change.
Climate change advocates covered by the media, and funded by foundations, must argue for big green projects led by financial institutions that Bill Gates and friends can control, and they must back the COVID 19 myth.
The conservatives claim that climate change is a conspiracy cooked up by the rich and powerful to oppress us and they present evidence in alternative news to support their perspective.
The assumption among the progressives, however, is that granted the scientific evidence for climate change, the conservatives must be “crazy” or “stupid.” Whether it is Rachel Maddow or Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, or even socialist activists, the assumption is the same.
But might there be a more complex game at play?
Let us consider the case of the forest fires that swept the Earth in 2018, specifically the California wildfires. The gradual warming of the Earth, the reduction in rainfall, and the siphoning of water from aquafers for use in commercial agriculture is clearly the cause of the increase in forest fires globally.
But can we be certain that the argument made by conservatives that the California wildfires were started by arson, or enhanced thereby, with the purpose of frightening citizens into adopting a response to climate change commandeered by corporate power is ludicrous?
When RepresentativeMarjorie Taylor Greene claimed that the wildfires were started by lasers in orbit owned by the Rothchilds as part of a conspiracy to get a high-speed rail project approved by the state of California, she set off a firestorm in the liberal media. Everyone, literally everyone, rushed out to attack her as a “nut” without considering for a moment that perhaps some part of her story might be accurate.
I have read her claims carefully, and I have read related materials concerning the political conflicts in California at the time, and I do not find her argument convincing. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that because progressive causes attack her for anti-Semitism, and climate change advocates attack her for her ignorance of science, that her claims are unfounded.
In the first photo, we see that the houses in a development have been cleared down to the foundations in a manner that would be absolutely impossible in a forest fire, while the trees nearby stand virtually untouched.
This photograph, from a mainstream media source (Reuters), presents information that immediately raises serious questions.
The second photographs indicates what appears to be melted aluminum that flowed from the automobiles burned in the forest fire. It is similarly improbable that a forest fire would burn at a temperature sufficient to melt steel or aluminum.
Following the basic principle of Occam’s razor, I would like to propose a more probable explanation for what happened. Perhaps the California wildfires, which are slowly increasing due to climate change, were purposely enhanced by artificial means, and in this case the houses were destroyed either by a strike from low-orbit military satellites, or were simply demolished in manner so as to suggest that such an attack had happened. Similarly, weapons were employed that were hot enough to melt metal, or perhaps this photograph was simply inserted in the article so as to suggest such an interpretation.
The real conspiracy might not be the alleged Rothschild family’s ambitions in California, but rather the creation of an event that will be read in a radically divergent manner by different interpretive communities, so as to inhibit the formation of a broad consensus on the danger of corporate power and to discredit the real threat of climate change by creating real examples of falsified climate disaster.
Operation Civil War
The media of the left and of the right are cranking out stories about a possible civil war in the United States like there is no tomorrow. There are real reasons for fearing that such a domestic conflict may be in the offing. Already the low-intensity killings involving police and other vigilante groups are approaching the level of “Bleeding Kansas” in scale.
We must also ask ourselves whether the fascination of the mainsteam media with this theme suggests a more devious plan to divide and conquer. Forcing authority figures to put their reputations on the line pushing a COVID19 narrative that they do not buy has completely discredited the Federal Government, universities, the mainstream media and all the experts we rely on. The stage is set for open defiance of the entire system—which was perhaps the plan all along.
Civil war would serve to tear institutions apart and create an environment in which the super-rich, unimpeded, can push through even more radical institutional change. The actual class war between a handful of multibillionaires and the rest of the country would be hidden behind orchestrated fighting between “white nationalist terrorists” and “black lives matters” minorities that would be narrated in different media so as to stoke emotions, and to blind people to the real agenda.
This work is rendered easier by of the mistaken assumption of the upper middle class that they are on the same side as the super-rich, that Bill Gates or Elon Musk are just like them, only more successful.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The super-rich have so completely monopolized the financial system, and amassed such wealth, that for them the difference between a Harvard Professor, a US senator, a successful real estate mogul and a homeless man is insignificant. They have launched against the rest of humanity that targets not only workers and immigrants, but the entire upper middle class as well.
It is critical for the strategy, however, that the upper-middle class, all those with measly assets under one brick (100 million dollars) be convinced that they are on the side of the super-rich, and not on the side of the working class.
The new economic reality, however, is clear. The forced quarantine at airports, the forced lockdowns of schools, even in upper-middle class neighborhoods, makes it clear that policy is made for a handful of people and that even families with millions of dollars of assets are not significant for the planners.
The decision of Princeton University to require COVID19 vaccines of all students over the summer, or be denied registration, indicates just how extreme the concentration of wealth and power has become.
Most people assume that the students at elite Ivy League colleges are so privileged that they could not possibly be sacrificed for corporate profits through the use of dangerous “vaccine.” If Princeton students must to take the vaccine, obviously students in India, Brazil, Spain and Japan will have to too.
As far as the super-rich are concerned, however, the lawyers, doctors, bankers and professors who send their children to Princeton are no consequence. They are betting that the lag time between the start of this COVID19 operation and the point when educated people finally grasp the new political reality will be sufficient to vaccinate the vast majority of humanity.
The Collapse of civilization
Ultimately, the contagion of massive fictions in the United States cannot be explained simply in terms of the economic interests of the rich. Much of the scientific evidence about COVID19 is accessible on the internet with a bit of effort and anyone who reads it with care will be forced to admit that the testimony of hundreds of scientists is convincing. Moreover, advocates for mandatory vaccines are never forced to enter into public debates with the medical experts who criticize the entire COVID19 regime.
Educated Americans willingly refuse to read these scientific materials, or to engage in a thoughtful discussions with their peers.
American lawyers and doctors, executives and professors resemble the characters in “The Sleepwalkers” (Die Schlafwandler), an novel by the Austrian writer Hermann Broch that describes the lives of the ruling class of Germany caught up in the collapsing cultural order before the First World War. Broch’s novel describes the bizarre psychological state of the educated classes of Germany. People lived like sleepwalkers; functional in society, competent at their jobs, even capable of appreciating fine music and art. Yet those same intellectuals were in the most profound sense blind, completely oblivious to the signs of systemic collapse. Because they could perform sophisticated jobs while remaining oblivious to the spread of militarism, the end of the rule of law and the demands on the economy made by overproduction, they made the unthinkable possible.
The Origin of this crisis is not corrupt politicians and CEOs, or bad policies and poor planning.
Deep down the entire system, the civilization, is decaying. The educated and informed who could be leaders are left confused, engaged in self-destructive acts as a result. We see unfolding the human version of colony collapse disorder, when the majority of worker bees in a honey bee hive inexplicably disappear, leaving behind the queen, plenty of food, and a few nurse bees.
We cannot even start to get a handle on this civilizational crisis because our discussions of politics and economics have been stripped of all discussion of philosophy and literature, aesthetics and history. The push for the efficient and practical forced on education by corporations has left us blind and helpless, unable to grasp the invisible shifts taking place at a subterranean level within society.
Paul Levy argues that our current society is wracked by the psycho-spiritual disease “wetiko” (the native American term) which is impervious to the anti-psychotics dished out by therapists like candy at Halloween. Wekiko is a disease in our civilization that feeds like a parasite on the spirit, a collective psychosis that has seized control of the entire system of things.
Levy notes that for those captured by wekiko,
“You’re blind and you do not know you are blind, and in fact imagine that you can see clearly. You come to believe that you can see more clearly than those who are clear-sighted. You then become unaware of what it is to be sighted, as you have no reference point for comparison. You do not see how you are unwittingly colluding with wetiko’s pernicious effects and thereby you are unaware of how you are having negative or ill effects upon others and the world.”
Such words describe perfectly the vast majority of the ruling class in the United States who, now spiritually crippled, are leading the entire population of the Earth to the edge of the cliff.
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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
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For a moment we can breathe and we can try to sleep. How long this moment will last we don’t know.
For 10 days the people of Palestine have been terrorised. Over 200 people including over 60 children have been murdered in Gaza. Over a dozen murdered on the West Bank. Injuries run into thousands across the whole of Palestine.
Yet again mobile phones and WhatsApp and other messaging systems have proved their value. But what a double edged knife. Yasser, explains;
“As the electricity system was damaged and cut back to 4 hours each day it was not always easy to contact my wife and my 3 young daughters from Belgium where I have just got asylum and now organising our family unification here. I cannot describe my feelings of fear. I knew from the calls that our neighbourhood was being bombarded. I saw our neighbour’s homes smashed to pieces; I saw young guys I hung around with crawling wounded along the street. For 10 nights my family were in such danger. My children screamed for hours every night as the Israeli bombs and rockets poured down. Whenever my mobile rang my heart rate soared to new heights. Was this going to be the call to tell me what I dreaded every breathing moment.
During these days I would meet with my friends in one house in Antwerp and we would stay together. We came from different parts of Gaza so we would open our phones to the different news channels so we could hear all the news coming out. When we slept, two or three would stay awake so we would miss nothing. If the bombs were falling in northern Gaza they would wake me so I could check on my family. If the attacks were in southern Gaza my friend from Rafa was awakened to listen to the news, and so ten nights passed. I was often shivering and trembling because of what was happening next to my family and I would imagine that they had died because of what I was watching; hearing the screams here and there; seeing people dying with their children under the rubble of their bombed buildings and streets. I hope this war will never return again. Thanks to God, my family have survived. So far…..”
Without exception, every refugee on Samos from Gaza has faced the same horrors these past 10 days. Yasser speaks for many. He continues:
“We have been disgusted by the position taken by many countries in the West where governments such as Greece have shouted their support for Israel’s violence and have presented it as conflict between two equal partners. Israel has one of the most powerful, modern armies in the world.
We, the Palestinians have no chance in a conflict with this sort of power.
But we are not without hope. Over recent days we have seen more people in more countries coming out to protest against the violence and cruelties of the Israeli state. More and more are seeing and rightly describing Israel as an apartheid state. Yet again I find it difficult to express how much that this international solidarity of people has meant for us over these past days. We don’t feel so lonely.
Never let us be lonely. Please. We will not be freed by wars and armies. “
The ceasefire means there are no bombs today. But we now must face the huge damage done which has to be confronted now. Without delay if the horror is to be controlled.
Yasser again:
“More than 45,000 refugees fled their homes and the places where they live and went to UNRWA schools to protect them from the shells, rockets and inevitable death or injury. There are huge numbers of children now homeless, without food, without clothes, without blankets. They are still terrified. These children are innocent of what is happening in Gaza. Young children want to play, laugh and have fun. Now we must stand by them as much as we possibly can.”
On Samos this led to the refugees from Gaza working closely with Sofiane from Open Doors to raise money and to get it through to Gaza without delay. In less than a day money was raised and sent and used to provide food parcels for those with nothing. No NGOs or the like, just ordinary people using their networks and local knowledge to get help to where it is most needed. The feedback from Gaza was humbling. It was the solidarity which brought joy as much as the food.
These initiatives must continue. The ceasefire has done nothing to change the incredible challenges to life that the people of Gaza in particular now face. Over the years we have developed wide range of survival skills including the ability to transfer money in and out of Gaza. So there is no need only to think of channeling funds through big NGOs but to use local networks that exist throughout Gaza and Palestine as a whole. If you are not able to connect to such a network then please feel free to contact Yasser who will with his friends do all they can to help you. This is the way of solidarity and not charity.
Please dig deep. Your help is needed. Your solidarity is yearned for.
Thank you.
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While it is understood that viruses mutate, causing variants, French Virologist and Nobel Prize Winner Luc Montagnier contends that “it is the vaccination that is creating the variants.”
As Senator, Vice President, and now President, your self-promoted/displayed empathy has a problem. You can’t seem to connect the Israeli military powerhouse’s occupation to the oppression and destruction of innocent Palestinian civilians, illegal seizure of Palestinian land/water, and daily violations of U.S. and international law.
The number of reported adverse events following COVID vaccines surpassed 200,000 according to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data comes directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Oregon is telling workplaces, businesses and places of worship that mask-less people can now enter such establishments, but only with proof of a full COVID-19 vaccine.
Israel’s crimes against the people of Palestine reveal a record of barbarism and cruelty unmatched in the modern world except for the unrivaled chronical of suffering resulting from murderous wars perpetrated by U.S. imperialism in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Nicaragua, and beyond.
Lawyer Thomas Renz discusses why he and a group of lawyers have filed a temporary restraining order against various government agencies in an Alabama court to halt vaccinations of children.
In this interview, return guest Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT for over five decades, discusses the COVID-19 vaccines. Since 2008, her primary focus has been glyphosate and sulfur, but in the last year, she took a deep-dive into the science of these novel injections and recently published an excellent paper on this topic.
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who’d like to see the country return to normal ASAP, there’s plenty of good news to report this week. As cases and fatalities have continued to drop, the cloud of fear that has enveloped the nation for the last 14 months, is gradually lifting.
Dozens of medical experts issued a warning this month about COVID-19 vaccines, slamming the jabs as “unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe” and likely to lead to “foreseeable mass deaths.”
Trump’s decision on January 31, 2020 was taken immediately following the announcement by the WHO Director General of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) (January 30, 2020). In many regards, this was an act of “economic warfare” against China.
The most influential organization in the world with nominal responsibility for global health and epidemic issues is the United Nations’ World Health Organization, WHO, based in Geneva.
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The claim often heard from those attempting to pass more gun control legislation is that all they’re trying to do is get the “weapons of war off our streets,” but it’s simply untrue that “weapons of war” are available to the general public. You’d last about three minutes in a conventional war with an AR-15, even with one of the most aggressive builds you can get your hands on (that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for guerilla uprisings to defeat powerful enemies). The truth is that the only people with “weapons of war” on America’s streets are, increasingly, the police.
And just as when “all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail,” militarized police have become more willing to use their new weapons when carrying out law enforcement tasks. For example, the number of SWAT raids in the United States grew dramatically from about 3,000 in 1980, to a whopping 50,000 SWAT raids in 2014, according to The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
None of this is an argument for disbanding or even “defunding” the police, the latter of which is merely a slogan to mask the former. However, being in favor of there being a well-equipped police department isn’t an argument for ensuring that police are armed to the teeth with military-grade hardware. Indeed, normal police (as opposed to, for example, small, specialized riot control units) might have their jobs become more difficult through an escalated arms race and eroded community trust.
To say that the militarization of the police is nothing new is to ignore America’s recent history as well as the long-standing model of a peace officer. As the police have militarized and the Pentagon backs major players in Hollywood, the focus has shifted from one who keeps the peace to one who enforces the law – and that’s an important difference.
What Is the Difference Between a Law Enforcement Officer and a Peace Officer?
The model for police, and the constables and sheriffs before them prior to the late 20th Century, was that of a peace officer. In many states, it’s not even true that police are law enforcement officers – even though it’s a term frequently used by the police and their fans in the “Blue Lives Matter,” “Thin Blue Line,” and “Back the Blue” movements.
It’s a subtle, but important, distinction: Is the role of the police to enforce the law or to keep the peace?Consider the difference between the police force of a typical American city and the fictional Andy Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show. The former is concerned primarily with enforcing the law for its own sake and catching as many “lawbreakers” as possible. The latter, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with keeping the peace. Sometimes that means looking the other way when laws get broken.
This isn’t simply a matter of how pleasant or unpleasant it is to deal with the police. Law enforcement officers might be writing parking tickets in the middle of a burglary epidemic due to their need to enforce all the laws all the time. Conversely, a peace officer is going to ignore a lot of low-level, habitual crime – even when there are clear victims (for example, vandalism or loitering) – because he emphasizes going out and catching violent and dangerous criminals. There’s no impulse to arrest a guy who habitually smokes weed on a street corner if he’s providing the police with valuable information leading to the arrest of violent criminals.
Peace officers might have the need for a sidearm and a shotgun, but they have little or no need for, say, a tank, to say nothing of the variety of nasty DARPA weapons police departments are increasingly wanting and getting.
None of this is to suggest that the world is better off with nothing at all than with “law enforcement” type officers. Nor is it to suggest that we replace existing police departments with something along the lines of what anti-police protesters have requested – an army of highly educated social workers and psychologists who will mostly look the other way when violence occurs. The law enforcement model is deeply flawed, but is potentially appropriate, particularly in large cities with high rates of violent crime.
Further, while “broken window” policing is largely derided by general detractors of police, it’s worth noting that this type of policing was instrumental in transforming New York City from “Fear City” into a nice place to live and maybe even raise a family. There is no single model of policing that is appropriate for every city and every situation.
The Origins of Militarized Police
Before we begin talking about the militarized American police, it’s worth mentioning that United States law specifically prohibits the military from enforcing the laws in the U.S. That’s why we don’t have the Army enforcing the law, and also why we don’t have a military-style gendarmerie as is common in Europe. This law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, was passed after the removal of federal troops from the Southern states following the end of Reconstruction. With rare exception, the federal government is not allowed to use the Army or the Air Force to enforce the law and the Navy has strict regulations for both the Navy and Marine Corps regarding the use of either for domestic law enforcement.
However, this law has been somewhat undermined due to police forces becoming so much like the military, which began during Prohibition in the 1920s. Organized crime got its first foothold in American life thanks to the lucrative black market in liquor. This was also the golden age of bank robbery with figures like Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger becoming folk heroes. The Thompson submachine gun and the Browning Automatic Rifle were increasingly used by organized crime and the “stars” of bank robbery.
The Prohibition Era saw domestic police departments wielding automatic weapons for the first time. There was nothing nefarious about this from the perspective of local police departments. In fact, it was the police departments most regularly in contact with vicious organized crime, such as Chicago and Kansas City, who led the way in arming their officers with automatic weapons and armored vehicles. At least two rounds of ammunition, the .38 Super and the .357 Magnum, were developed with the express purpose of being able to penetrate the early bulletproof vests worn by gangsters in the Prohibition Era.
Overall crime increased by 24 percent during the first two years of Prohibition. This included a nine-percent increase in theft and burglary, a 13-percent increase in homicides, and a 13-percent increase in assault and battery. Overall, police department costs increased by 11.4 percent. However, because the police were busy fighting the scourge of demon alcohol, it was difficult for them to target crimes unrelated to this. In fact, a study of South Carolina counties that enforced Prohibition versus those who didn’t found a whopping 30- to 60-percent increase in homicides in the counties who enforced the law. All of this is according to Charles Hanson Towne in The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: The Human Side of What the Eighteenth Amendment Has Done to the United States.
The militarization of the police during Prohibition is a nuanced topic. On the one hand, city police certainly should have been equipped with the materiel needed to combat organized crime. No reasonable person thinks that law enforcement should simply be outgunned by criminals for the sake of “not militarizing the police.” However, it is worth noting that the police were confronted with this kind of a threat due to the black market created by alcohol prohibition. The end of Prohibition not only saw a steep decline in crime and organized crime, but also a falling back on the militarization of the police.
This era of militarization drew to a close with the end of Prohibition itself. However, the militarization of police would resume again a few decades down the line.
The Second Wave of Militarized Police
The second wave of police militarization begins with the race riots in the 1950s and 1960s, with the Watts Riots in 1965 gaining a sort of gravitas. The LAPD used military-style weapons and tactics to end the riots. What’s more, an increasingly militant civil rights movement was seen by the CIA as an arm of international Communism. While there is some merit to this view, it’s certainly true that it led to a philosophy of increasingly militarized police.
The militarization of police is not by any means based on manufactured and artificial paranoia. Even in the case of Prohibition, it’s a simple fact that organized crime used weapons with firepower far in excess of what the police had access to. Similarly, the second wave of militarized police was partly in response to an increasingly militarized organized crime thanks in part to the beginnings of the War on Drugs.
Unrelated to the War on Drugs, the 1986 FBI Miami shootout was a game-changer for law enforcement budgets. Police outnumbered suspects by a factor of four. Despite this, they were pinned down by suppressive gunfire. The incident lasted five minutes and 145 rounds were fired. The suspects were hit multiple times, but continued to fight in part because the officers’ and agents’ service revolvers did not have sufficient stopping power. In response, there was a movement to increase the firepower of service revolvers. This is when semi-automatic pistols began to replace the revolver and larger magazines became the rule. Rifles, shotguns, and heavier body armor also saw increased adoption after this shootout.
Another incident accelerating the militarization of police is the North Hollywood shootout of 1997. This bank robbery left two dead (the perps) and 20 wounded – 12 police officers and eight civilians. It lasted 44 minutes, an eternity in terms of police shootouts, with approximately 2,000 rounds fired. The perps got off approximately twice as many rounds as the police officers on the scene, but the game-changer was the arrival of the SWAT team, who had much more appropriate weaponry. This led to everyday police officers getting equipment that was customary for SWAT teams in the 1990s.
We again arrive at a place to examine this topic with some nuance: Current organized crime presents a threat to public safety, as well as police officers – who should be equipped with the necessary tools to combat this threat and maintain public order. However, it’s not clear that small towns are in need of SWAT units, nor that any city needs a tank. What’s more, there has been a massive expansion of SWAT team use that seems inappropriate.
One can certainly be critical of the desire of every police department to have every tool under the sun – and to use them with gusto – without having to demand stripping the police of very necessary tools required to combat what are effectively small paramilitary organizations. A lack of perfection in urban policing is not an argument for no policing whatsoever, it is an argument for greater oversight and civilian diligence.
The 1033 Program
The 1033 Program was enacted in the wake of the 1997 North Hollywood shootout. Created by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997, it allowed law enforcement agencies to get their hands on military hardware. Unsurprisingly, the preference was given to law enforcement engaged in anti-drug and counter-terror activity, underscoring the vital role of wars on abstract concepts in increasing the militarization of the police force. Bill Clinton – he of the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge – signed the bill into law.
$5.1 billion in material was transferred from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement between 1997 and 2014, with ammunition being the most common requisition. 8,000 law enforcement offices participate as of 2014.
Also included in this total are 20 different school law enforcement agencies. The Los Angeles School Police Department has requisitioned 61 assault rifles and three grenade launchers. Ten school police departments in the State of Texas and have requisitioned 25 automatic pistols, 64 M16s, 18 M14s, and tactical vests.
One of the big game-changers for militarization of police was the 9/11 attacks. This greatly eroded the Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. Now police – local, state and federal – need to suspect “terrorism.” This provides the same convenient cover for police overreach that was previously offered by the War on Drugs.
Civil asset forfeiture (CAF) is a major driver in the militarization of the police force. Put simply, CAF is a legal principle that allows police to seize money and property from “suspected” criminals, which they can do without a warrant because the suspect’s property doesn’t have the presumption of innocence. Note that police do not have to convict or even indict. Indeed, indictments are not even filed in over 80 percent of all cases. Police can simply seize property, more or less at will, with some property harder to seize than others. Seizure of anything under $20,000 will almost certainly stand because that’s about what it’s going to cost you to fight CAF in court.
Most of the money raised through civil asset forfeiture is filed under “other.” This can be anything from a $600 coffee maker to a tank. Because the burden of proof is so low and the benefits are so high, CAF is effectively a legally allowed form of theft by police officers, allowing them to purchase military-grade hardware with stolen property. Here is a short list of military hardware purchased with civil asset forfeiture funds:
$5 million helicopter for the Los Angeles Police Department
$1 million mobile command bus for Prince George County, Maryland
$227,000 for a tank in Douglasville, GA, a town with a population of 32,000
$54,000 for 27 M-4 assault rifles in Braselton, GA, a town with a population of 9,476
While not the sole, nor even the primary, means by which the police are becoming militarized, this is a significant method for police departments to bankroll their own militarization.
Highlights of Police Militarization
It’s one thing to discuss police militarization simply in terms of weapons acquisition. It’s another to discuss police militarization in terms of actual incidents. Some high-profile incidents involving heavily militarized police are worth examining.
MOVE: In 1985, the Philadelphia police came into conflict with a militant black nationalist organization called MOVE over the clearing of a building. An armed standoff resulted in shots exchanged between the compound’s inhabitants and the police. Eventually, this erupted into a firefight involving both semi-automatic and automatic weapons. On the orders of the police commissioner, the building was bombed twice. The resulting fire spread to a total of 65 different houses in the neighborhood and caused 11 deaths, including five children under 13. Over 250 were left homeless due to the fires.
Ruby Ridge: This is notorious within in the Second Amendment and liberty movements, so it hardly needs to be repeated. In 1992, the United States Marshal Service attempted to serve a bench warrant at Ruby Ridge, the home of Randy Weaver and his family. His wife Vicki and his 14-year-old son Sammy were shot by USMS and FBI agents armed with M16s, sniper rifles and weaponized vehicles. Randy Weaver’s attorney made accusations of criminal wrongdoing and a resulting 14-day Senate investigation called for sweeping law enforcement reforms to avoid another similar incident. Federal officers also killed the Weaver family dog.
Branch Davidians: This is perhaps one of, if not the, archetypal example of a militarized police force greatly overreaching. Armed with .50 caliber rifles, M728 Combat Engineer Vehicles (which are effectively tanks) and M79 grenade launchers, the FBI and ATF engaged in a firefight with Branch Davidians inside. Controversy remains to this day with regard to who fired first and who started the fire that consumed the building, leaving 82 members of the church dead.
These are the big three, but there are many smaller events also worth mentioning. During the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, private Blackwater contractors patrolled the streets with automatic weapons. They were accused of summary execution of looters. In a low point for militarized police in 2014, a SWAT team in Cornelia, Georgiaseverely mutilated the face of an 18-month-old baby boy with a flash bang grenade in a fruitless search for drugs.
The Role of SWAT Teams
SWAT teams are effectively the military of the police force. Begun in 1965 in Philadelphia, SWAT teams were conceived as a way to restrain urban unrest, deal with hostage situations or handle barricaded marksmen like Charles Whitman.
In December 1969, the LAPD’s SWAT team squared off with the Black Panthers, with Daryl Gates requesting and receiving permission to use a grenade launcher. In May 1974, the same SWAT team had a several-hours-long gun battle with the Symbionese Liberation Army.
However, SWAT teams gradually began to tackle missions that were not, strictly speaking, appropriate for the tools in their toolbox. What’s more, once LAPD’s SWAT team became famous, every city seemed to want one. The number of SWAT teams in cities of 50,000 or more doubled between the mid-80s and late-90s, at which point 89 percent of all cities of this size had a SWAT team.
Only 7% of all raids were done for situations SWAT was invented for – namely barricades or hostage situations
Even smaller cities have SWAT teams now, which raises the question of why. Mission creep is the short answer, with SWAT teams now being used for operations far beyond the original scope of their work. Put simply, the SWAT team was not created to serve every search warrant that comes across the desk of a small-town police force.
SWAT teams ostensibly exist to respond to “high risk” scenarios. But there are seemingly no guidelines for what makes a situation high risk. Sometimes local SWAT teams use a threat matrix. However, these matrices are highly subjective and vulnerable to abuse. Partial responses are discouraged. Either the SWAT team is not deployed at all or there is a full-throttle response.
To use one example of why these matrices don’t work, let us consider the presence or absence of weapons. There is no way of knowing whether or not weapons will be present. So officers must subjectively guess whether or not they believe weapons will be present. Unfortunately, officers are pretty bad at this guessing game. According to an ACLU report, SWAT officers believed weapons were present in 35 percent of cases, but only actually found them in a scant 13 percent. In 36 percent of cases where SWAT was deployed to find drugs, no drugs were found.
No-Knock Raids
One of the most concretely damaging aspects of a militarized police force is the no-knock raid or no-knock warrant. This is precisely what it sounds like: Rather than announce their presence to serve a warrant, police come in, oftentimes literally with guns blazing. The presence of police might be announced in a perfunctory and formal way – i.e., announcing “police department” before using a battering ram to fell a door or throwing a flash bang grenade.
It’s difficult to know just how many of these there are every year, simply because the definition is somewhat elastic. However, an estimate presented in an Associated Press article claims that the number of no-knock warrants has exploded from around 1,500 annually in the early 1980s to over 45,000 by 2015.
Indeed, knocking and announcing is one of the oldest standards in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, going back to Semayne’s case in 1604. It was more recently affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Miller v. United States, which states that police are required to provide notice before entry. Federal law 18 U.S.C § 3109 codifies this practice, however, the courts have carved out some exceptions: Wilson v. Arkansas provides for an exception to prevent the destruction of evidence. Hudson v. Michigan allows the admissibility of evidence obtained through illegal entry.
The theory behind no-knock warrants is that police can seize evidence before it is destroyed or else leverage the element of surprise to maintain the safety of officers. The reality is very different.
No-knock warrants are illegal in two states: Oregon, where they are banned by statute, and Florida, where they have been ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court. 20 states routinely allow no-knock warrants without a statute explicitly authorizing them, while another 13 have such statutes on the books.
Burglars have used no-knock warrant fraud to rob law-abiding homeowners. Conversely, home owners have shot at officers believing they were being victimized by a home invasion. Officers routinely lieunderoath to obtain such warrants and injure innocent people, including children and even infants in the process. And, of course, dogs are routinely shot.
No-knock raids are a demonstrably dangerous, highly corrupt system of law enforcement with little benefit for public safety.
Fusion Centers: Surveillance and Snooping
As the military’s tools for surveillance become more powerful, this too will trickle down to the local police.
In at least one case, it already has. Fusion Centers are hubs for local, state and federal police to share information. They’re effectively intelligence-gathering done by various police agencies who pool their resources. While this isn’t an uncommon practice, the Fusion Centers have virtually no oversight and are filled with zeal for the War on Terror. While its primary existence was to surveil in the fight against terrorism, Fusion Centers have quickly ballooned to gather intelligence on just about anything – and it’s not just the police. The military participates in Fusion Centers, as does the private sector, which means they’re a privacy nightmare.
The federal government has pushed Fusion Centers and largely bankrolled them. Hundreds of FBI agents work with Fusion Centers, with the federal government providing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid. In the case of the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, the federal government created a Fusion Center at the state level, only eventually turning control of an ostensibly state agency to the state. 30 percent of these “state” agencies are physically located in federal office space.
Private sector companies collect, store and analyze data for Fusion Centers. This would be dangerous on its own, but the lack of any oversight makes it particularly troublesome. Even if a private sector has the best of intentions, malicious third-party actors could access some of your most sensitive data if it’s been datamined by a Fusion Center. A company without the best intentions can do all kinds of “government-approved” snooping into your personal affairs.
Another nasty surveillance tool currently being deployed by the police is the Stingray phone tracker. This is effectively a phony cell phone tower that snoops on cell phone calls, which can extract significant information about you from your cell phone. Originally to be used only in terrorism investigations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the LAPD “has been using it for just about any investigation imaginable.” They can also be used to jam or otherwise interfere with your phone signal. Stingrays are highly mobile and can be mounted to just about any vehicle.
All of this is part of an overall drive for increased police surveillance starting at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and trickling down. “Total Information Awareness” was one of the more Orwellian euphemisms of the early Bush and Department of Homeland Security years. It was quickly renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, then codenamed “Basketball.” Its goal is to know everything, or at least as much as it can. In 2012, the New York Times reported that this program was “quietly thriving” at the National Security Agency.
The Information Awareness Office, established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA – who we will discuss more later), oversaw Total Information Awareness. They collect emails, social network identities, records for phone calls and credit card purchases, medical records and a host of other information with no need for a warrant. Congress defunded this program, but it exists under the auspices of a number of different agencies according to Edward Snowden.
Technologies developed by the Information Awareness Office (and in the wake of Snowden’s revelations, it’s worth noting that these are just the technologies that have been made public) includes:
Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery: A tool for connecting dots between sparse information, such as cell phone records, web pages, emails or social media posts.
Genisys: A massive database for storing the large amount of data needed to fuel Total Information Awareness.
How much of this has trickled down to your local police department is largely unknown.
The Detriments of a Militarized Police Force
There are a number of negative consequences arising from the existence of a militarized police force.
Civil Liberties: Chief among the problems presented by a militarized police force are civil liberties. Militarized police seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids using the military to enforce domestic law in most cases and under ordinary circumstances.
Surveillance: The militarized police force also uses military-style forms of surveillance. A January 2017 report from the Cato Institute accused militarized police of “mission creep,” going beyond simple weapons and tactics and into surveillance.
Force: Veterans on the police force tend to have more complaints about excessive force and are more likely to discharge their weapons, according to a report from the Marshall Project.
Alienation: Militarized police are the antithesis of community policing, which leverages good community relations and the resources flowing from those relations to prevent and solve crimes. Military-style training for police, battle dress uniforms and even just the color black might provoke more aggression from officers. Named missions such as “War on Drugs” likewise make community policing more difficult.
Killing Dogs: There’s significant evidence suggesting that the more militarized a police force is, the more likely it is to shoot a dog. Yes, really. The Puppycide Database Project tracks these things.
Lack of Oversight: At the local, state and federal levels, there is little-to-no oversight when it comes to the militarization of the police. Most states do not keep tabs on the statistics of their SWAT teams. Where they do, reports are frequently incomplete and little-to-no action is taken on their basis. No federal agency collects information about local SWAT teams. There is little oversight of 1033 or SWAT teams either by the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security.
All of this is perhaps why, under the Obama Justice Department, there was a push toward demilitarization of the police force. In 2015, the Task Force for 21st Century Policing recommended restriction of military hardware such as grenade launchers and armored vehicles. President Donald Trump has since reversed this, reinstating the entire 1033 program and remilitarizing police.
DARPA: Police Militarization of the Future
Since there is a clearly established pipeline running from the Pentagon’s latest and greatest toys, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the weapons being developed by the Pentagon today are going to be used on the streets of America in the very near future.
In fact, there’s an entire department of the Pentagon dedicated to developing futuristic weapons to help the United States win the new arms. It’s called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, commonly known as DARPA. This agency has not only developed weapons, but also a number of contemporary technologies most people take for granted – such as GPS, graphic user interface, the mouse, and even the internet itself. Recent research includes more intuitive prosthetic limbs as well as brain implants that will help those with memory loss regain their memory.
But DARPA isn’t just working on projects like these with the promise to revolutionize medicine and increase the quality of human life. They also work on some rather nasty little projects that will almost certainly trickle down to your local police department through the 1033 program. Some of the futuristic weapons currently in development by DARPA include:
Active Denial System: The active denial system is an invisible ray gun heating the skin of people in a given area to 130 degrees. The targets instinctively flee, something that DARPA calls the “goodbye effect.” The end result can leave second- or third-degree burns on up to 20 percent of the body’s surface. The weapon has already been tested in Afghanistan.
Taser X12: Nearly everyone is familiar with the Taser. The Taser X12 is effectively that in 12-gauge shotgun form. This extends the reach of a Taser weapon from about 20 feet to about 100 feet.
Skull Piercing Microwaves: Yep, you read that right. One of the projects DARPA is working on right now leverages the audio effect of microwaves. This creates shockwaves inside the skull, which are read by the brain as sound. This can result in discomfort, incapacitation and brain damage.
Long-Range Acoustic Device: Sirens might not sound like a big deal, but the current ones being worked on by DARPA are so loud they can cause permanent hearing damage very quickly. Pittsburgh police already used this against protestors in 2009. More advanced sonic weapons can be deadly, including the Thunder Generator developed by the Israelis
Voice of God: This one sounds impossible, but it’s not. The Voice of God is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a weapon beaming words directly into your head so that you think God is talking to you. This leverages the same technology in LRADs, but for different effect.
These are just a few of the weapons that we know about. It’s likely that there are far more frightening classified weapons coming down the pike over the next decade.
The tendency is strongly in the direction of increasingly militarized police. This renders the notion of “weapons of war on our streets” as a gun grabber argument exceptionally weak. They have weapons far in excess to that of the average citizen or even the average criminal. This means resisting them can easily be deadly, even when you’re within your legal rights.
We once again believe that the solution to overly militarized police is not the total elimination of the police, nor the radical disarming of the police. Rather, what is required is greater civilian attention to what police are doing. Police ought to be held accountable, through established civilian channels of oversight, not the court of public opinion. What’s more, care must be taken to ensure that the police are not afraid to ruthlessly enforce the law when the situation calls for it for fear of being taken to task by civilian oversight committees that have never walked a beat. Part of what makes the problem so difficult to solve is that there are no easy solutions.
There are, however, some quick wins. There is absolutely no reason for civil asset forfeiture to continue, nor should local smokies have access to equipment designed for federal law enforcement to snoop on organized crime and terrorist organizations. DARPA toys shouldn’t be in the hands of local police, either. Local police already have a number of riot dispersal tools at the ready. Where rioting is allowed to fester, it does so because of weak-willed civilian governments unwilling to allow the police to maintain public order.
Some have argued that an end to qualified immunity would do the trick. However, anytime a position is supported by the far left, it is worth examining the position further, no matter how reasonable it may seem.
What Is Qualified Immunity?
First, let’s talk about qualified immunity. Qualified immunity sounds like some arcane and esoteric application of the law that protects police and other government officials from all scrutiny and consequences.
What it means, however, in very simple terms, is that government officials cannot be held civilly liable in court unless their actions “violated a clearly established right” – i.e., where their conduct is “obviously unlawful.” It applies to all local, state, and federal executive branch officers, but it does not protect these officials from criminal prosecution (aside from prosecutors, who have absolute immunity). Police are protected, as are mayors, governors, medical board inspectors, prison guards, school administrators, and everyone else who is in the business of enforcing laws and regulations, including private individuals who act jointly with government officials.
Proponents of qualified immunity argue that it simply protects officials from having their lives and finances ruined in civil court, where standards of evidence and the bar for conviction are much lower. And again, it does not totally and wholly protect them from civil lawsuits, just in most cases where officials are reasonably acting in good faith. In the case of police, this allows them to work without having to balance their actions against losing their house and their children’s college fund. This is important because police often have to make heat-of-the-moment decisions in fractions of a second. And proponents argue this doctrine simply protects police from being “test cases” for what are and are not constitutional protections.
Opponents of qualified immunity argue that it’s an act of judicial policymaking because it’s not the result of a law passed by Congress, nor is it written in the Constitution. Thus the current doctrine as applied today in courts leads to hair-splitting and it is often impossible for plaintiffs to meet the burden. It’s also applied inconsistently and can greatly depend on the judge or judges involved in the case. And perhaps most importantly, this liability shield extends to everyone who is in the business of enforcing laws and regulations – not just the police.
All of this raises a point worthy of consideration: The usual suspects will cry and rage at your ability to legally own an AR-15, a right codified by the United States Constitution. Rare is the gun grabber who makes any kind of stink when police use directed energy weapons. Remember that gun grabbers aren’t against guns – they’re just against yours.
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The word ‘irony’ sums up much that is probably inherent in human nature and manifest at times in human history, when one considers the on-going conflict between the Palestinians and Israel.
Historical pogroms had been launched against Jews – ‘pogroms’ used in the widest sense of its meaning as violent attack, expulsion, or marginalisations – then the history is a long one.
King Edward I in 1290 signed an edict expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England;
Pope Innocent the III had issued a decree against Jews, placing them in servitude for the killing of Christ; Czarist Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church pursued an exclusionary policy towards Jews;
More recently there is the Holocaust; and other instances which could be cited mainly in and around Europe of anti-Jewish actions being perpetrated.
In what can be termed historical Palestine, prior to 1948 Jews, Arab Palestinians and Christians lived peacefully with the Jewish population being about a mere 6% of the total in Palestine. The road to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 might be said to have been signposted with Jewish hopes which followed certain critical stages.
Following the end of the Ottoman Empire, there was a new carving out of territories for the ‘Great Powers’ and in 1917 there was the Balfour Declaration announcing an intent to create a national homeland for Jews; in 1920 there was the San Reno Conference and by 1924 the then League of Nations approved the British Mandate for Palestine. Here comes trouble. Between 1936 to 1939 the Palestinians resisted British policy in Palestine. By the Post World War 11 era the world’s conscience had been touched and galvanised in favour of a Jewish state and by 1948 Zionists saw and grasped the opportunity. The on-going conflict had emerged since the inception of the Jewish state, for reasons such as:-
The displacement and expulsion of several hundred thousand Palestinians to make space for the new Jewish arrivees.
The anti-democratic embrace of the idea that one ethnicity can reserve for itself the exclusive right to citizenship at the expense and to the disadvantage of the prior inhabitants of the land.
The need to corral the expelled Palestinians, and deny them the right of return to their homeland.
The list of causes for the conflict could be significantly expanded – but this brief commentary is about the inherent ‘irony’ existing in the state of Israel.
International Law and the mandate
1947, the United Kingdom had relied on Article 10 of the UN Charter:-
“The General Assembly may discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of the present Charter or relating to the powers and functions of any organs provided for in the present Charter, and, except as provided in Article 12, may make recommendations to the Members of the United Nations or to the Security Council or to both on any such questions or matters.”
Wherein commences a problem ( the problem?). A number of Arab States had opposed the British Mandate being brought to the floor of the General Assembly for reason that under Article 12.1 of the UN Charter there is express provision that while the Security Council is exercising the functions assigned to it by the Charter in relation to any dispute or situation, the General Assembly must not adopt any recommendation regarding that dispute or situation unless requested to do so by the Security Council. The preexisting system of mandated territories under the law as applied via the League of Nations did not provide for any mandated territory to be transferred via the new UN schema of law. Here is how the problem commenced and continues to this day in point of law.
Articles 75 to 79 of the UN Charter address the UN Trusteeship system, which is the successor to that which had existed under the former League of Nations system as mandated territory. Under Article 79, the terms of trusteeship agreements were to be agreed by “…the States directly concerned, including the mandatory power in the case of territories held under mandate by a Member of the United Nations”. Additionally, the agreements had to be approved by the Security Council in the case of territorial areas deemed to be strategic areas (see: Article 83) and note the provisions of Article 85 with regards to the General Assembly’s role.
Before the UN in 1947 adopted a crucial Resolution on Palestine, the UK had made known that it wanted to withdraw from Palestine, terminate the Mandate and avoid the transfer into an international Trusteeship System.
On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a Plan as Resolution 181 (II). That resolution recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States with a Special International Regime being established for the city of Jerusalem.
By 1948 Jewish re-population and de-population of the Palestinian Arabs, throughout the various iterations of the conflict really does constitute – at least the Alpha – if not fully yet the Omega of the issue. A book would have to be written if I were to continue explaining the issue from its root causes. I simply want to lay an adequate historical and legal plinth to afford a credible shift leading logically to the main point of the ‘irony’ of that which was mentioned in the title at the start of this commentary.
Ironies.
Lack of sympathy and/or support for fellow oppressed people
At a time when Apartheid South Africa was seeking to perpetuate White minority rule, it was Israel which traded with and provided the scientific means to the racist regime to acquire nuclear weapons, as shown here and here.
Establishment and perpetuation of Apartheid policies in Israel
The position of the recognition of the 1967 borders under international law as constituting the boundaries for Israel, is simply ignored and greater settler colony expansion is taking place on Palestinian lands.
When the Jewish ‘nation-state law’ was passed in Israel in 2018 the Arab members of the parliament ripped it up and shouted, “Apartheid”. Indeed, reservation for a certain group based on ethnicity in these circumstances can, quite accurately, be so termed.
Expulsion of Palestinians from their homes while promoting more illegal Jewish settlements ( contrary to international law)
To say the least, is it not truly ironic, that a group of people, undeniably historically displaced and dispossessed for centuries, would embrace policies such as declaring “Jewish settlement as a national value” while mandating that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”?
Beyond the immediate former proclamation, is it not, within historical context – ironic in the extreme for the Zionists to tell the Palestinians to forget their expulsion as of 1948 – being a diaspora people who kept a dream of return with collective memory alive over 2,000 years — long enough to remove people who historically really never did Jews any harm?
Conclusion
International Refugee Law weighs heavily in favour of the right of return. Which version would you presently embrace Israel – the one before 2,000 years ago – or – from 1948 onwards? Change course Israel – or – continue fighting as Apartheid South Africa did over many years, being truly reflective of what you are doing now – fighting, however ironic the fight may be – to the end.
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Courtenay Barnett is a graduate of London University. His areas of study were economics, political science and international law. He has been a practising lawyer for almost fully forty years, has been arrested for defending his views, and has argued public interest and human rights cases.
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Chlorpyrifos insecticides were introduced by Dow Chemical in 1965 and have been used widely in agricultural settings. Commonly known as the active ingredient in the brand names Dursban and Lorsban, chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate insecticide, acaricide and miticide used primarily to control foliage and soil-borne insect pests on a variety of food and feed crops. Products come in liquid form as well as granules, powders, and water-soluble packets, and may be applied by either ground or aerial equipment.
Chlorpyrifos is used on a wide variety of crops including apples, oranges, strawberries, corn, wheat, citrus and other foods families and their children eat daily. USDA’s Pesticide Data Programfound chlorpyrifos residue on citrus and melons even after being washed and peeled. By volume, chlorpyrifos is most used on corn and soybeans, with over a million pounds applied annually to each crop. The chemical is not allowed on organic crops.
Non-agricultural uses include golf courses, turf, green houses, and utilities.
Human health concerns
The American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents more than 66,000 pediatricians and pediatric surgeons, has warned that continued use of chlorpyrifos puts developing fetuses, infants, children and pregnant women at great risk.
Scientists have found that prenatal exposures to chlorpyrifos are associated with lower birth weight, reduced IQ, the loss of working memory, attention disorders, and delayed motor development. Key studies are listed below.
See these comments to regulators from the Endocrine Society citing “ample evidence that chlorpyrifos has extensive effects on neurological and endocrine systems with demonstrated evidence of harm to humans and wildlife.”
Chlorpyrifos is also linked to acute pesticide poisoning and can cause convulsions, respiratory paralysis, and sometimes, death.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reached agreement with Dow Chemical in 2000 to phase out all residential uses of chlorpyrifos because of scientific research showing the chemical is dangerous to the developing brains of babies and young children. It was banned from use around schools in 2012.
In October 2015, the EPA said it planned to revoke all food residue tolerances for chlorpyrifos, meaning it would no longer be legal to use it in agriculture. The agency said “expected residues of chlorpyrifos on food crops exceed the safety standard under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.” The move came in response to a petition for a ban from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network.
In November 2016, the EPA released a revised human health risk assessment for chlorpyrifos confirming it was unsafe to allow the chemical to continue in use in agriculture. Among other things, the EPA said all food and drinking water exposures were unsafe, especially to children 1-2 years old. The EPA said the ban would take place in 2017.
Trump EPA delays ban
Following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the proposed chlorpyrifos ban was delayed. In March 2017, in one of his first formal actions as the nation’s top environmental official, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rejected the petition by environmental groups and said the ban on chlorpyrifos would not go forward.
The Associated Press reported in June 2017 that Pruitt had met with Dow CEO Andrew Liveris 20 days before halting the ban. Media also reported that Dow contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural activities.
In February of 2018, EPA reached a settlement requiring Syngenta to pay a $150,000 fine and train farmers in pesticide use after the company failed to warn workers to avoid fields where chlorpyrifos was recently sprayed and several workers who entered the fields were sickened and required medical care. The Obama EPA had initially proposed a fine nearly nine times larger.
In February 2020, after pressure from consumer, medical, scientific groups and in face of growing calls for bans around the world, Corteva AgriScience (formerly DowDuPont) said it would phase out production of chlorpyrifos, but the chemical remains legal for other companies to make and sell.
According to an analysis published in July 2020, U.S. regulators relied on falsified data provided by Dow Chemical to allow unsafe levels of chlorpyrifos into American homes for years. The analysis from University of Washington researchers said the inaccurate findings were the result of a chlorpyrifos dosing study done in the early 1970s for Dow.
In September 2020 the EPA issued its third risk assessment on chlorpyrifos, saying “despite several years of study, peer review, and public process, the science addressing neurodevelopmental effects remains unresolved,” and it still could be used in food production.
The decision came after multiple meetings between the EPA and Corteva.
Groups and states sue EPA
Following the Trump administration’s decision to delay any ban until at least 2022, Pesticide Action Network and Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit against the EPA in April 2017, seeking to force the government to follow through with the Obama administration’s recommendations to ban chlorpyrifos. In August 2018, a federal appeals court found that the EPA broke the law by continuing to allow use of chlorpyrifos, and ordered EPA to finalize its proposed ban within two months. After more delays, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced in July 2019 that EPA would not ban the chemical.
Several states have sued the EPA over its failure to ban chlorpyrifos, including California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, Vermont and Oregon. The states argue in court documents that chlorpyrifos should be banned in food production due to the dangers associated with it.
Earthjustice has also filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court seeking a nationwide ban on behalf of groups advocating for environmentalists, farmworkers and people with learning disabilities.
On April 29, 2021, the U.S. Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Ninth Circuit issued a decision, finding the EPA had engaged in an “egregious delay” that exposed a generation of American children to unsafe levels of chlorpyrifos.” He ordered the EPA to issue a final regulation within 60 days that modifies or revokes the registration for chlorpyrifos.
Medical and scientific studies
Developmental neurotoxicity
“The epidemiological studies reviewed herein have reported statistically significant correlations between prenatal exposures to CPF [chlorpyrifos] and postnatal neurological complications, particularly cognitive deficits that are also associated with disruption of the structural integrity of the brain…. Various preclinical research groups throughout the world have consistently demonstrated that CPF is a developmental neurotoxicant. The developmental CPF neurotoxicity, which is well supported by studies using different animal models, routes of exposure, vehicles, and testing methods, is generally characterized by cognitive deficits and disruption of the structural integrity of the brain.” Developmental neurotoxicity of the organophosphorus insecticide chlorpyrifos: from clinical findings to preclinical models and potential mechanisms. Journal of Neurochemistry, 2017.
“Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants—manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers.” Neurobehavioural effects of developmental toxicity. Lancet Neurology, 2014.
Childrens’ IQ & cognitive development
Longitudinal birth cohort study of inner-city mothers and children found that “higher prenatal CPF [chlorpyrifos] exposure, as measured in umbilical cord blood plasma, was associated with decreases in cognitive functioning on two different WISC-IV indices, in a sample of urban minority children at 7 years of age…the Working Memory Index was the most strongly associated with CPF exposure in this population.” Seven-Year Neurodevelopmental Scores and Prenatal Exposure to Chlorpyrifos, a Common Agricultural Pesticide. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2011.
Birth cohort study of predominantly Latino farmworker families in California associated a metabolite of organophosphate pesticides found in the urine in pregnant women with poorer scores in their children for memory, processing speed, verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning and IQ. “Our findings suggest that prenatal exposure to OP [organophosphate] pesticides, as measured by urinary DAP [dialkyl phosphate] metabolites in women during pregnancy, is associated with poorer cognitive abilities in children at 7 years of age. Children in the highest quintile of maternal DAP concentrations had an average deficit of 7.0 IQ points compared with those in the lowest quintile. Associations were linear, and we observed no threshold.” Prenatal Exposure to Organophosphate Pesticides and IQ in 7-Year-Old Children. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2011.
Prospective cohort study of women and their children findings “suggest that prenatal exposure to organophosphates is negatively associated with cognitive development, particularly perceptual reasoning, with evidence of effects beginning at 12 months and continuing through early childhood.” Prenatal Exposure to Organophosphates, Paraoxonase 1, and Cognitive Development in Childhood. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2011.
Prospective cohort study of an inner-city population found that children with high levels of exposure to chlorpyrifos “scored, on average, 6.5 points lower on the Bayley Psychomotor Development Index and 3.3 points lower on the Bayley Mental Development Index at 3 years of age compared with those with lower levels of exposure. Children exposed to higher, compared with lower, chlorpyrifos levels were also significantly more likely to experience Psychomotor Development Index and Mental Development Index delays, attention problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder problems, and pervasive developmental disorder problems at 3 years of age.” Impact of Prenatal Chlorpyrifos Exposure on Neurodevelopment in the First 3 Years of Life Among Inner-City Children. Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006.
Longitudinal birth cohort study in an agricultural region of California extends “previous findings of associations between PON1 genotype and enzyme levels and certain domains of neurodevelopment through early school age, presenting new evidence that adverse associations between DAP [dialkyl phosphate]levels and IQ may be strongest in children of mothers with the lowest levels of PON1 enzyme.” Organophosphate pesticide exposure, PON1, and neurodevelopment in school-age children from the CHAMACOS study. Environmental Research, 2014.
“Our findings indicate that prenatal CPF [chlorpyrifos] exposure, at levels observed with routine (nonoccupational) use and below the threshold for any signs of acute exposure, has a measureable effect on brain structure in a sample of 40 children 5.9–11.2 y of age. We found significant abnormalities in morphological measures of the cerebral surface associated with higher prenatal CPF exposure….Regional enlargements of the cerebral surface predominated and were located in the superior temporal, posterior middle temporal, and inferior postcentral gyri bilaterally, and in the superior frontal gyrus, gyrus rectus, cuneus, and precuneus along the mesial wall of the right hemisphere”. Brain anomalies in children exposed prenatally to a common organophosphate pesticide. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012.
Fetal growth
This study “saw a highly significant inverse association between umbilical cord chlorpyrifos levels and both birth weight and birth length among infants in the current cohort born prior to U.S. EPA regulatory actions to phase out residential uses of the insecticide.” Biomarkers in assessing residential insecticide exposures during pregnancy and effects on fetal growth. Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, 2005.
Prospective, multiethnic cohort study found that “when the level of maternal PON1 activity was taken into account, maternal levels of chlorpyrifos above the limit of detection coupled with low maternal PON1 activity were associated with a significant but small reduction in head circumference. In addition, maternal PON1 levels alone, but not PON1 genetic polymorphisms, were associated with reduced head size. Because small head size has been found to be predictive of subsequent cognitive ability, these data suggest that chlorpyrifos may have a detrimental effect on fetal neurodevelopment among mothers who exhibit low PON1 activity.” In Utero Pesticide Exposure, Maternal Paraoxonase Activity, and Head Circumference. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2003.
Prospective cohort study of minority mothers and their newborns “confirm our earlier findings of an inverse association between chlorpyrifos levels in umbilical cord plasma and birth weight and length…Further, a dose-response relationship was additionally seen in the present study. Specifically, the association between cord plasma chlorpyrifos and reduced birth weight and length was found principally among newborns with the highest 25% of exposure levels.” Prenatal Insecticide Exposures and Birth Weight and Length among an Urban Minority Cohort. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2004.
Lung Cancer
In an evaluation of over 54,000 pesticide applicators in the Agricultural Health Study, scientists at the National Cancer Institute reported that the incidence of lung cancer was associated with chlorpyrifos exposure. “In this analysis of cancer incidence among chlorpyrifos-exposed licensed pesticide applicators in North Carolina and Iowa, we found a statistically significant trend of increasing risk of lung cancer, but not of any other cancer examined, with increasing chlorpyrifos exposure.” Cancer Incidence Among Pesticide Applicators Exposed to Chlorpyrifos in the Agricultural Health Study. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2004.
Parkinson’s Disease
Case-control study of people living in California’s Central Valley reported that ambient exposure to 36 commonly used organophosphate pesticides separately increased the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. The study “adds strong evidence” that organophosphate pesticides are “implicated” in the etiology of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease. The association between ambient exposure to organophosphates and Parkinson’s disease risk. Occupational & Environmental Medicine, 2014.
Birth outcomes
Multiethnic parent cohort of pregnant women and newborns found that chlorpyrifos “was associated with decreased birth weight and birth length overall (p = 0.01 and p = 0.003, respectively) and with lower birth weight among African Americans (p = 0.04) and reduced birth length in Dominicans (p < 0.001)”. Effects of Transplacental Exposure to Environmental Pollutants on Birth Outcomes in a Multiethnic Population. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2003.
Neuroendocrine disruption
“Through the analysis of complex sex-dimorphic behavioral patterns we show that neurotoxic and endocrine disrupting activities of CPF [chlorpyrifos] overlap. This widely diffused organophosphorus pesticide might thus be considered as a neuroendocrine disruptor possibly representing a risk factor for sex-biased neurodevelopmental disorders in children.” Sex dimorphic behaviors as markers of neuroendocrine disruption by environmental chemicals: The case of chlorpyrifos. NeuroToxicology, 2012.
Tremor
“The present findings show that children with high prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos were significantly more likely to show mild or mild to moderate tremor in one or both arms when assessed between the ages of 9 and 13.9 years of age….Taken together, growing evidence suggests that prenatal exposure to CPF [chlorpyrifos], at current standard usage levels, is associated with a range of persistent and inter-related developmental problems.” Prenatal exposure to the organophosphate pesticide chlorpyrifos and childhood tremor. NeuroToxicology, 2015.
Cost of chlorpyrifos
Cost estimates of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the European Union found that “Organophosphate exposures were associated with 13.0 million (sensitivity analysis, 4.24 million to 17.1 million) lost IQ points and 59 300 (sensitivity analysis, 16 500 to 84 400) cases of intellectual disability, at costs of €146 billion (sensitivity analysis, €46.8 billion to €194 billion).” Neurobehavioral Deficits, Diseases, and Associated Costs of Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals in the European Union. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 2015.
“In March 1972, Frederick Coulston and colleagues at the Albany Medical College reported results of an intentional chlorpyrifos dosing study to the study’s sponsor, Dow Chemical Company. Their report concluded that 0.03 mg/kg-day was the chronic no-observed-adverse-effect-level (NOAEL) for chlorpyrifos in humans. We demonstrate here that a proper analysis by the original statistical method should have found a lower NOAEL (0.014 mg/kg-day), and that use of statistical methods first available in 1982 would have shown that even the lowest dose in the study had a significant treatment effect. The original analysis, conducted by Dow-employed statisticians, did not undergo formal peer review; nevertheless, EPA cited the Coulston study as credible research and kept its reported NOAEL as a point of departure for risk assessments throughout much of the 1980′s and 1990′s. During that period, EPA allowed chlorpyrifos to be registered for multiple residential uses that were later cancelled to reduce potential health impacts to children and infants. Had appropriate analyses been employed in the evaluation of this study, it is likely that many of those registered uses of chlorpyrifos would not have been authorized by EPA. This work demonstrates that reliance by pesticide regulators on research results that have not been properly peer-reviewed may needlessly endanger the public.” Flawed analysis of an intentional human dosing study and its impact on chlorpyrifos risk assessments. Environment International, 2020.
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Our world, once thriving with energy and life, has now become a dystopian landscape of barren streets and masked people with a look of foreboding in their eyes.
Governments around the world have enforced unprecedented restrictions on people’s lives, imposing lockdowns that closed down most of society for months at a time. Stopping people from visiting their family, isolating the elderly in care homes and destroying millions of people’s livelihoods.
These draconian laws were brought in to control an alleged pandemic created by a new virus called SARS-CoV-2 that creates the respiratory illness of Covid 19.
The numbers of so called ‘cases’ and deaths ‘attributed to Covid’ are churned out daily by the media fanning the fear. The hurricane force driving this pandemic is the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction test (RT-PCR). So, it’s vitally important that we understand exactly how the RT-PCR test works and its limitations.
The PCR test was invented by the late American Kary Mullis in the mid 1980’s for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1993 in Chemistry. Mullis died in August 2019.
One of the PCR’s applications is to increase genetic material found in crime scenes in order to help the police identify the criminal. The PCR test increases the amount of genetic material by using a Cycle Threshold (CT). Each CT rate doubles the amount of genetic material.
The CT rate that PCR tests are run at relating to whether someone has SARS-CoV-2 in the sample, is vitally important. Dr. Roger Hodkinson, a pathologist knowledgeable in PCR, told me that PCR tests should be below 32 cycles. If you run a PCR at over 32 CT, you start to get a lot of false positives. The higher the CT the greater the liklihood of false postive results.
The importance of the CT value was shown in a landmark court case in Portugal in November 2020. Four German tourists were forced to quarantine in a hotel in the Azores after one of them tested positive with a PCR test. The Germans brought a court case stating that they were ‘illegally confined’ in the hotel.
The Germans won their case when the Lisbon Appeal Court ruled that they were illegally held in a hotel based on a PCR test. The judges referred to a study of the PCR test by the Oxford Academic at the end of September. The study showed that any asymptomatic person being tested with a PCR test at a 35 CT or higher ‘’the probability of…receiving a false positive is 97% or higher.’’
Although it is unknown exactly at what CT value the German tourist’s PCR test was run at, virtually all European and US labs are running PCR tests at 35 CT or above, often at 40 CT.
The judges were also critical of the fact that the supposed infected person was never seen by a doctor. Only a doctor can make a medical diagnosis. This very important court case was totally ignored by the mainstream media (MSM).
Another problem with PCR tests is getting false positives from the DNA of other organisms, often referred to as cross reactions. There are billions of different DNA’s from the multitude of life forms on our planet. Some of the cells in other organisms will have parts of their genetic sequence that are identical to SARS-CoV-2. A PCR test can give a positive for a partial genetic sequence match with DNA contamination from a plant, animal or other life form.
This was further verified by the late President of Tanzania John Magufuli. Magufuli wanted to test the reliability of the PCR test. His government randomly obtained samples from different non-human entities. Three that were tested was a goat, a sheep and a pawpaw ( a type of fruit). The samples were given human names and ages. In May 2020 Magufuli stated that the pawpaw and goat tested positive.
Due to the highly sensitive nature of PCR, it can also pick up viral fragments that may represent a recent SARS–CoV–2 infection. Let’s say you were sick with Covid 19 and then made a full recovery. Even 3 or 4 weeks later, you could still test positive, because the test cannot differentiate between a ’live’ or dead virus.
It’s also incorrect to assume that a positive PCR test equates to a clinical diagnosis of a disease in people. Positive results are not ‘cases’, they are simply positive results, many of which are actually false positives. Never in the history of medicine would a medical diagnosis be based solely on a PCR test. You need the skill and expertise of a doctor to evaluate symptoms and examine the patient. Dr Hodkinson added, “in medicine we don’t treat the numbers, we treat the whole patient”.
We keep hearing the number of supposed ‘cases’ by governments and media worldwide, but a positive PCR is never automatically considered a case in medicine. A case is someone who is visibly sick and/or is presenting to hospital, not a healthy person who happened to test positive with a test that is prone to many errors.
January 2020 – The Corman/Drosten PCR Protocol
In January 2020 a scientific paper was published by Eurosurveillance which is a scientific journal. Its commonly referred to as the Corman-Drosten paper, although other scientists contributed to it. Both Christian Drosten and Victor Corman are German virologists.
The RT-PCR test protocol in this paper was recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to countries worldwide. This test was incorrectly said to be the ‘Gold Standard’ for testing people for SARS-CoV-2. The established ‘Gold Standard’ is DNA sequencing by the Sanger method.
In November 2020 an extensive review of the Corman-Drosten PCR protocol was carried out by many scientists (PCR experts) and was submitted to Eurosurveillance. The report cited 10 major flaws with the Corman-Drosten paper and asked Eurosurveillance to retract it. I will cover 3 of these major flaws, but a link to the full review report is provided at the end of this article.
In January 2020 Drosten did not have a sample of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) to design a PCR test that would accurately test for the virus. The Drosten test was based on, quote ‘’…in silco (theoretical) sequences, supplied by a laboratory in China, because at the time neither control material of infectious (‘live’) or inactivated SARS-CoV-2 nor isolated genomic RNA of the virus was available to the authors.
The Drosten paper recommends a CT value of 45 Cycles. As mentioned previously, any PCR test run at 35 CT (or over), will return an enormous number of false positives. Quote …if someone is tested by PCR as positive when a threshold of 35 cycles or higher is used (as is the case in most laboratories in Europe & the US) ( including NHS laboratories in the UK ) , the probability that said person is actually infected is less than 3%, the probability that said result is a false positive is 97%. A reasonable CT value should not exceed 30. …a CT value of 45 is scientifically and diagnostically absolutely meaningless.
No Standard Operational Procedure (SOP) for laboratories to run the PCR tests. Quote, There should be a SOP available…so that all laboratories are able to set up the identical same test conditions. To have a validated universal SOP is essential, because it facilitates data comparison within and between countries…It points to flawed science that such an SOP does not exist. The laboratories are thus free to conduct the test as they consider appropriate, resulting in an enormous amount of variation.
It defies belief that the WHO would recommend a PCR protocol with a CT value of 45, unless their intention was to create as many false positives as possible.
German/American Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich
Reiner Fuellmich is the lawyer who successfully won lawsuits against Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen. Fuellmich created the German Corona Investigative Committee on July 10th 2020 with three other people, with Viviane Fischer and two other attorneys, Dr. Justus P. Hoffman and Antonia Fischer.
They decided to ask three questions. How dangerous is the virus really? How reliable is the Drosten-PCR test? How much damage do these anti-corona (Lockdowns) measures do, both to the economy and to the health and wellbeing of the world’s population?
As Fuellmich says: Now the latter is very easily answered. This is probably the worst crisis that the world has ever been in. With so many people dying…completely in vain, people who didn’t get an operation, surgical procedures that were postponed…doctors and nurses whom I have known for years tell me, Reiner, there’s something wrong, this entire hospital is almost empty, there’s no one here.
… I called a good friend of mine, someone who knows a lot about medicine, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg. Wodarg is the doctor who stepped in 12 years ago when we had a very similar situation with the Swine Flu (2009). …the same people who advanced the theory of ‘’everybody’s going to die’’, did it back then. Including Prof Drosten, including Neil Ferguson of Imperial College of London (UK).
They all pushed this story, but eventually that (the Swine Flu) turned out to be just the common flu. By the way, that’s what this looks like, the WHO issued a statement which confirmed Professor John Ioannidis study, from Stanford University, that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid 19 is between 0.14 and 0.15, which is about the same as the flu. Bear in mind that both Ioannidis and wHO based their projections on the worldwide official figures of Covid deaths that are based on the totally flawed PCR tests. Once you remove a large percentage of the deaths as false positives, the IFR would be far lower.
Fuellmich spoke with many other experts, including Professor Sucharit Bhakdi (retired from the University of Mainz) and Dr. Mike Yeadon, former Vice president of Pfizer.
They all came to the same conclusion, whatever we’re dealing with, this is no worse than the common flu.
Fuellmich and his team decided early on to focus on the many flaws with the PCR test as the most important evidence that proves that there was no medical pandemic. As Fuellmich says, There’s a false positive PCR pandemic, not a Covid pandemic. It (the PCR test) is not even approved for diagnostic purposes – that is why this test only has a so-called emergency use authorization in the US, and not full approval.
Fuellmich is part of a team of over 30 lawyers, from Germany, the US and Canada. In the US and Canada, the lawyers will be leading class action lawsuits representing many people whose livelihoods were destroyed by the lockdowns. Fuellmich says that this is a deliberate crime against humanity; ‘’this has nothing to do with the world’s health.’’
Summation
I would like you to consider a question.
Why do you think that governments around the world ignored the hundreds of scientists that were telling them about the many flaws that the PCR test has relating to testing people for SARS-CoV-2?
One thing we now know for certain, there never was a pandemic. There was the illusion of a pandemic created by the PCR testing fraud. The mass testing of millions of healthy people which produced millions of false positives. In unison with a campaign of fear promoted by governments through the media.
Recently I was walking with my 3 yr. old niece Emily in a large town in the UK. What was once a bustling shopping centre was now just rows of closed shops. I recalled that there was an open-air food vendor marketplace which was open.
As we drew closer, we could hear someone singing. There was a well-dressed young lady, an aspiring singer and actress. She then started singing ‘’Somewhere over the Rainbow’’ from the Wizard of Oz. She sang quite beautifully so quite a crowd had gathered.
For those few minutes everyone’s hearts and spirits were lifted, even Emily started dancing. I began thinking of the performing arts, the dancers, actors, singers and theatre. So many people’s lives have been damaged by these appalling and unnecessary lockdowns.
We have learned a few important lessons from this though. Firstly, our need as human beings to embrace each other. To reach out to each other, have a hug, shake hands and talk to each other without a disgusting mask on.
It has also shown us that we should never allow any government to take away our inalienable human rights ever again. We should never allow a government to dictate to us where we can go or who we can see. Governments should never be allowed to force us to take experimental vaccines in order to access public services, or to travel anywhere we chose to go.
Let’s rise up and remove the shackles of false fear and embrace each other. In the immortal words of Martin Luther King… Let freedom ring…from every mountainside, let freedom ring. when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city…we will be…free at last. Free at last.
In the spirit of celebrating our humanity, I would like to leave you with part of the beautiful poem ‘’Song of Myself’’ by Walt Whitman
I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.
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You can contact Gavin Phillips at [email protected]. Gavin encourages whistleblowers to contact him so we can expose this Covid fraud. Twitter: @photopro28, Telgram: Gavin Phillips
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The Associated Press news agency has faced fierce criticism from journalists and academics for sacking a newly graduated news associate over her pro-Palestinian activism while at university.
Emily Wilder, a Jewish American who graduated from Stanford University last year, started her position at AP on 3 May. Just 16 days later, she was fired.
Wilder was told that her dismissal, announced in an AP staff memo that has been widely shared online, was over a violation of the company’s social media policy.
Speaking to Middle East Eye, the news agency confirmed that she was dismissed for violations of AP’s social media policy, stating that the violations had occurred “during her time at AP”.
While the agency did not explain which posts in question may have violated the policy – just that she had “showed clear bias” – Wilder has said that she is certain it was the opinions she shared on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory that led to her sacking.
On Sunday, Wilder posted on Twitter a critique of the language used within mainstream media when covering issues related to Israel and Palestine.
“‘Objectivity’ feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim,” she wrote. “Using ‘israel’ but never ‘palestine,’ or ‘war’ but not ‘siege and occupation’ are political choices – yet media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased.”
“objectivity” feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim. using “israel” but never “palestine,” or “war” but not “siege and occupation” are political choices—yet media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased
The discussion over the problematic language used to cover events in Israel and Palestine is one that Middle East Eye has covered extensively in recent weeks.
But the day after Wilder made that post, a group named the Stanford College Republicans began sharing screenshots of other posts in which the then-college student had criticised Israel’s occupation and related policies, as well as a picture of Wilder taking part in a pro-Palestine protest in New York City.
While at Stanford from 2016-2020, Wilder was a leader in Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization with ties to Hamas affiliates, and which is notorious for inflicting acts of intimidation and violence against pro-Israel students.
— Stanford College Republicans (@Stanford_GOP) May 18, 2021
The group also accused Wilder of being “a leader” of pro-Palestinian groups, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine – a group which they claimed without evidence had links to Hamas – during her time at Stanford between 2016 and 2020.
The attention to her previous posts quickly grew, as critical stories about Wilder’s hiring were published online by right-wing sites, including Fox News, the Washington Free Beacon and the Federalist.
‘The campaign against me’
In some of the articles, the websites attempted to link Wilder’s hiring to Israel’s recent air strike on a high rise building hosting the Associated Press’s Gaza bureau, as well as several other media offices, including one belonging to MEE.
Appalling. Not less than a week after Israel fired a rocket and destroyed the AP office in Gaza, the @AP fired a brilliant young writer because conservatives complained she supported justice in Palestine as a college student. https://t.co/ZdIJ6ZeYJU
Meanwhile, Wilder, speaking to the Washington Post, said that she was told implicitly that a review of her social media activity was initiated by the AP after her old posts had been publicised by various websites.
“This was a result of the campaign against me,” she said. “To me, it feels like AP folded to the ridiculous demands and cheap bullying of organizations and individuals.”
A spokesperson with the AP, however, told MEE that her dismissal was strictly in the interest of the safety of the agency’s other journalists around the world.
“We have this policy so the comments of one person cannot create dangerous conditions for our journalists covering the story,” said Lauren Easton, global director of media relations and corporate communications.
“Every AP journalist is responsible for safeguarding our ability to report on this conflict, or any other, with fairness and credibility, and cannot take sides in public forums,” she continued.
But Liz Jackson, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, a US-based legal advocacy group, slammed Wilder’s sacking as “censorship” with an anti-Palestine bias.
“This epitomizes the censorship endemic to public conversation on Palestine. First the @AP is bombed by Israel, and then, in response to a rightwing cancel campaign, it fires its own reporter because she was too vocal about Palestinian lives as a college student,” Jackson said in a post to Twitter on Thursday.
“Emily Wilder has a rich background advocating for freedom as a Jewish Palestine solidarity activist and as a talented reporter covering mass incarceration, policing and social movements. The @AP should reinstate her immediately,” she continued.
Scores of other activists, rights groups and journalists have also spoken up against Wilder’s sacking.
“Not looking good for the @AP,” New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted, sharing a story about Wilder.
“So let me get this straight. The @AP just fired a young reporter because she was part of Students for Justice in Palestine in college?” AJ+ producer, Dena Takruri asked. “The same AP that just had its office in Gaza bombed by Israel?”
The AP fired a junior reporter over a bad faith tweet thread that ended with this pic.twitter.com/QSGpmlzYZU
Meanwhile, others questioned what the reaction might have been if the issue had been in reverse.
“I know this is trite to say but just f**king imagine what would happen if the AP fired someone for having been a member of a Zionist group in college,” journalist Ashley Feinberg posted.
“This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around ‘cancel culture’,” Wilder said, speaking to SFGate. “To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be.
“But when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture – specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine – it’s always the same side.”
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While Israel’s large arsenal of nuclear weapons is exempt from any discussion, its government drives the suspicion of Iran’s nuclear energy program, writes Mehrnaz Shahabi.
The attack on Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in Iran, on April 11, targeting underground centrifuges operating under (IAEA) safeguards, was an act of nuclear terror with the potential to kill and harm many thousands of human beings and irreparably contaminate the environment.
“Former Mossad chief Danny Yatom expressed concerns about the leak about Israeli involvement to the Times, warning that it could impact Israel’s operational capability, in an interview with Army Radio on Monday. ‘If indeed this thing is the result of an operation involving Israel, this leak is very serious,’ said Yatom. ‘It is detrimental to the Israeli interest and the fight against Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. There are actions that must remain in the dark.’”
Western members of the UN Security Council and signatories to the JCPOA, media establishments, pundits and human rights organizations, i.e, the frontline crusaders against “Iran’s nuclear threats” and “human rights violations,” have failed to condemn this abhorrent crime.
This is not the first time Israel is targeting nuclear plants. Bombing Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and an alleged nuclear fuel plant in Deir al-Zour in Syria in 2007 were precedents. Since 2010, Israel has started a campaign of assassination of Iranian scientists and targeted Iran’s civilian nuclear infrastructure.
On July 2, 2020, in a wave of terrorist attacks on Iran’s industrial, military and nuclear sites, a bomb blast caused a powerful explosion and fire in Natanz nuclear plant which destroyed a large number of centrifuges. Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, told The New York Times that Israel had detonated a bomband U.S. and Israeli officials had expressed certainty that Israel was responsible for the incidents at the military and nuclear sites.
Anti-aircraft guns guarding Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2006. (Hamed Saber, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
All these Israeli acts of aggression, with potentially catastrophic human and environmental consequences, and in clear violation of international law and the UN Charter, have been met with total impunity, often with the stated rational that Israel is trying to stop Iran and other Middle Eastern countries from developing nuclear weapons.
However, Israel — leading the scaremongering and fabrications against Iran’s civilian nuclear program for years and actively sabotaging the 2015 nuclear deal — is the ONLY country in possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
Israel has adamantly refused to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Neither has it signed and ratified the Biological Weapons Convention nor ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Started Half Century Ago
Israel’s nuclear weapons program started in the 1950s, assisted by the French who helped construct the Dimona nuclear reactor and secret reprocessing plant for separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The program accelerated in the wake of the 1967 war. Julian Borger in The Guardian on Jan. 15, 2014, provided a valuable outline of “The truth about Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal,” explaining how,“Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world.”
Israel’s theft and secret acquisition of material and expertise for its nuclear warheads by a sophisticated spy ring named Lakam (acronym for Science Liaison Bureau), although amply documented, remains an open secret. The same countries that secretly sold or turned a blind eye to Israel’s illegal trafficking of nuclear material and technology — the U.S., Britain, Germany and France and even Norway — are now the staunchest protagonists against Iran’s civilian nuclear program, and continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s acts of nuclear terror. Borger wrote:
“In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them. … At a meeting in 1976 …. the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel’s bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America’s nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.”
Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who’s-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry “chemist,” but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam. …
On Sept. 22, 1979, a U.S. satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate adviser at the time and after being briefed on the incident by U.S. intelligence agencies and the country’s nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place. …Israeli sources told [Seymour] Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.”
Mordechai Vanunu, who had worked as an engineer in the secret Negev Nuclear Research Centre near Dimona in the 1970s, on a trip to London in September 1986, blew the whistle to Sunday Times journalist, Peter Hounam, revealing 57 covertly taken photographs and a detailed descriptionof his knowledge of the Israeli nuclear weapons program including separation of lithium-6, needed for the production of tritium, an essential ingredient of fusion-boosted fission bombs. From the information provided by Vanunu it was possible to estimate that Israel had sufficient plutonium for about 150 nuclear weapons.
Vanunu’s revelations were published by The Sunday Times in October 1986. Vanunu was lured to Rome by Mossad agents, kidnapped and taken to Israel on Sept. 30, 1986.
Convicted of espionage and treason, Vanunu was placed in solitary jail for 18 years. His terms of release on April 21, 2004, have barred Vanunu from speaking to journalists, leaving Israel or traveling to the West Bank. Thirty five years after his initial imprisonment, repeated court hearings continue to rule he is bound by the terms of his release, unable to leave Israel or talk to journalists because of his possession of secrets and sensitive information dangerous to Israeli state’s security.
Iran, on the other hand, has been a longstanding member of the NPT. Despite an early history of covert activity in the 1990s in order to avoid the U.S.’ heavy-handed obstructions of Iran’s legitimate purchases and contracts for its newly fledged civilian nuclear energy program, there has been no credible evidence of a weapons dimension to Iran’s nuclear program.
Historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter, in his seminal book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (2014) comprehensively argues how what is cited as evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, such as the alleged smuggled laptop and Parchin test chamber, were concocted by Israel and the U.S. to create the fabricated crisis around Iran’s nuclear program.
History of Co-operation & Concessions
May 27, 2005: Javad Zarif (left), then Iran’s UN ambassador, at the conclusion of the 2005 review conference of parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, UN headquarters in New York. (UN Photo)
Iran has been fully cooperating with the IAEA and the West to address every concern about Iran’s nuclear energy program and these attempts at transparency and confidence building have been thwarted by the U.S. under pressure from Israel.
In 2002, the National Council of Resistance or Modjahedin-e-Khalgh (MEK), which until Sept. 28, 2012, was on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list, “revealed” to the IAEA the existence of two nuclear sites: Natanz uranium enrichment plant and Arak’s heavy water reactor, both still under construction. However, Iran was not obliged to allow inspection or even inform the IAEA of the existence of these facilities until six months before the introduction of nuclear materials. Iran was not a signatory to the new Safeguards Agreement introduced in 1992.
As the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) document further chronicles,
“To boost confidence in its nuclear programme during the course of two years of negotiations with the EU3 (France, UK, Germany), the Iranian government voluntarily suspended its nuclear enrichment programme and in December 2003 also voluntarily implemented the IAEA’s Additional Protocol for more intrusive inspections than those required under the NPT until February 2006, when under U.S. pressure, Iran’s file was reported to the UN Security Council.”
Iran “offered to implement this again subject to the return of its nuclear file from the Security Council to the IAEA,” the document says. It goes on:
“Iran has invited Western companies to develop Iran’s civilian nuclear programme. Such joint ventures would create the best assurance that the enriched uranium would not be diverted to a weapons programme. …. but the U.S. and its allies have refused Iran’s offer.”
The nuclear swap (Tehran Agreement) deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil in 2010, according to which Tehran agreed to swap 1200kg of its low enriched uranium with uranium rods already enriched to 20 percent for cancer treatment, was a huge compromise on the part of Iran, again rejected by the U.S.
In September 2011, then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, speaking to the UN General Assembly, announced Iran’s preparedness to suspend the enrichment of uranium to the higher percentage of 20 percent if the West provided Iran with uranium rods enriched to that level “If they give us the 20 percent (enriched) fuel, we will immediately halt 20 percent (enrichment),” he said.
This offer too was ignored by the Obama administration. On Jan. 1, 2012, Iran announced the domestic testing and production of its first fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor.
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, seated, saying goodbye to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Vienna, July 14, 2015, after Zarif read a declaration of the nuclear agreement in his native Farsi. (State Department)
After two years of extensive negotiations, Iran and the Security Council members plus Germany reached a time-bound agreement in 2015, which heavily — and very controversially in Iran — curbed Iran’s civilian nuclear program and placed it under the most stringent inspections in the history of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in return for removing Security Council, U.S. And European Union sanctions and recognizing Iran’s right to enrichment.
In the face of powerful patriotic sentiments from many Iranians, Iran also accepted the intrusive inspections of the Additional Protocol, which would allow access to any sites including military sites, should the IAEA present evidence of suspicious nuclear-related activity.
This concession, in circumstances of the military siege of the country and the fresh experiences of the aggressive bombardments of military and critical infrastructure of Iraq and Libya, is felt by many Iranians to be a dangerous colonial imposition under circumstances in which the other parties to the deal, Germany excepted, are all nuclear armed, as is Israel, Iran’s main regional adversary.
While, its large arsenal of nuclear weapons are exempt from any discussion and question, Israel drives the suspicion and the crisis over Iran’s nuclear energy program. According to Kelsey Davenport, director for non-proliferation policy with the Arms Control Association, “Iran is a unique case in that some key locations are subject to 24-hour surveillance and inspection teams are continually in Iran to verify its compliance with the agreement.”
All IAEA reports under the nuclear deal, from 2016 to September 2019, certified Iran’s full compliance with its commitments. The U.S., however, from the start, under pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia, obstructed an effective removal of sanctions, particularly financial and banking sanctions, and prevented its European allies to enter trades and investments in Iran through introducing a climate of uncertainty and fear of secondary sanctions.
The U.S., in February 2016, stopped nationals of countries in the Visa Waiver Program Act from entering the U.S. without a visa if they had traveled to Iran after March 1, 2011. Dual nationals of VWP and Iran were also barred.
Former President Donald Trump’s announcement on May 8, 2018, of the U.S.’ withdrawal from the JCPOA and the imposition of the “highest level of economic sanctions” on Iran, was followed by then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech to the Heritage Foundation on May 21 presenting a “New Iran Strategy.”
In his typical, puffed-up, bullish style, Pompeo presented Iran with its “terms of surrender” in the form of 12 demands, which included: stopping enrichment and closing Iran’s heavy water reactor, providing unqualified access to all sites in the country, stopping Iran’s conventional defensive missile program, and ending support to strategic regional allies vital to Iran’s security and national and regional identity.
Iran’s response to these “maximum pressure’ policies was to continue with all its commitments under the JCPOA, for another year. On the anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from the deal, in May 2019, Iran gave an ultimatum that unless other signatories reversed their aggressive non-compliance, Iran would use its right under articles 29 and 37 of the JCPOAto withdraw in part or in whole from its commitments under the deal, and on July 1, 2019, Iran began its incremental withdrawals.
The assassination on Jan 3, 2020, of Iran’s revered General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Qods Force that is at the forefront of the fight against ISIS, led to a several millions strong mobilization of grief and anger in Iran and throughout the region. It has had unintended consequences for the perpetrators. It has crystalized a more determined resistance to colonial rule and the dominant colonial discourse — a discourse that has continued, despite the velvet gloves, into the Joe Biden administration.
Demonstrations in Iran over the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. (Fars News Agency, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The new administration has reiterated Pompeo’s terms of surrender of Iran and made the fulfillment of its obligations, i.e., the removal of sanctions, conditional on Iran relinquishing its defensive missile program, its vital regional alliances and extending the timeframe and Iran’s obligations under the JCPOA. Iran’s response has been to refuse to accept any demands and to insist on the verified, full removal of all sanctions. Rooted in this emergent and growing national consciousness is a mood for no compromise, empty promises or neo-colonial threats.
Iran’s response to Israel’s nuclear terror on April 11, which was intended to undermine any possibility of the revival of the JCPOA that doesn’t meet Israel’s demands, has been to increase its enrichment level at Natanz to 60 percent. This reflects the very powerful effect of the wave of anti-colonial consciousness and resistance, which is in no mood for an unequal compromise and understands that a strong lever is the necessary ingredient in negotiations, as well as that a more equal balance of power is the only effective guarantee for self-defense.
On April 28, Israel’s intelligence minister, Eli Cohen, repeated the Israeli threat that should the U.S. re-enter the JCPOA and remove the sanctions on Iran, Israel would hit Iran’s nuclear plants with long range missiles. This threat too was met with silent acquiescence on the part of the U.S. and its Western allies, the same kind of silence that has met Israel’s continued acts of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, house demolitions, settlement building, administrative detention of children, Gaza blockade, use of phosphorous bombs, flooding and contamination of agricultural land, raiding Al-Aqsa Mosque in the holy month of Ramadan, torching trees and agricultural crops and bombarding residential apartment blocks in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israel’s free license to act with impunity is fast sliding into war. Only fools would believe that attacking Iran’s enrichment plants, its critical infrastructure, shipping, and scientific and military personnel, would remain unanswered, and could not spill over into a destructive regional war with global consequences, from which use of nuclear weapons can not be excluded.
The gravity of what is at stake demands action. The only possible path to avoiding a catastrophic war and reaching a just peace in the Middle East, is, in the first instance, the demand that Israel disarm its nuclear weapons and place its nuclear facilities under the same scrutiny as demanded from Iran. That would be in line with the longstanding goal, backed by the UN Security Council, of a Middle East Free of Nuclear Weapons.
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Mehrnaz Shahabi is an Iranian-British peace activist and independent researcher. She has published articles on Iran-related issues on various progressive website.
Featured image: IAEA safeguard inspectors in a 2005 training exercise at Slovakia’s Mochovce nuclear power plant. (Dean Calma, IAEA, Flickr)
Call for Nuclear Disarmament of Israel and a Nuclear-Free Middle East
We, the undersigned, strongly condemn the sabotage in the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in Iran on 11 April 2021, as a form of nuclear terror. This attack has been almost universally attributed to Israel, including by the Israeli media, and confirmed by US and Israeli intelligence officials. Such attacks carry a serious risk of high level radioactive leakage which could potentially endanger the lives of thousands of innocent human beings and irreparably contaminate the environment causing long-term genetic malformations and disease, with far-reaching destructive consequences into the future.
It has been repeatedly verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran’s nuclear programme is peaceful and under a strict monitoring regime. Israel, in contrast, is the only nuclear weapons state in the Middle East as it is in possession of a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, which is the reason for the country’s refusal to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The deafening silence of the self-proclaimed international community in response to Israel’s nuclear terror could set a deadly precedent for its repetition and escalate into an endless chain of retaliations and an arms race in the already war-ravaged Middle East. Therefore, we call on the UN and the Security Council to responsibly and unreservedly condemn and hold Israel accountable for repeated dangerous and profoundly irresponsible attacks on civilian nuclear installations and the assassination of Iranian scientists. In addition, we urge UN member states to embark, as a matter of urgency, on the long-delayed task of nuclear disarmament of Israel and placing its nuclear programme under the supervision and monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in line with the long-standing drive to creating a Nuclear Free Middle East.
Abrahamian, Professor Ervand (Distinguished Professor of History, Baruch College and City University, NewYork)
Adib-Moghaddam, Professor Arshin (professor in Global Thought & Comparative Philosophies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London)
Azad, Dr Bahman (Executive Secretary, US Peace Council)
Baraka, Ajamu (National Organizer, Black Alliance for Peace, USA)
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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As Senator, Vice President, and now President, your self-promoted/displayed empathy has a problem. You can’t seem to connect the Israeli military powerhouse’s occupation to the oppression and destruction of innocent Palestinian civilians, illegal seizure of Palestinian land/water, and daily violations of U.S. and international law. Israel’s military is deliberately bombing these families, the offices of American media, international medical facilities, and many local hospitals and water and electricity facilities with fighter jets and missiles made in America.
To know about what is happening daily, you do not need to rely on the evidence compiled by the U.S. mainstream media or foreign reporters on the ground in Gaza or your own intelligence agencies, just take it from the Israeli media and Israelis themselves.
Stop repeatedly mumbling the usual mantra to escape your presidential responsibilities for the military weaponry and political cover, including the U.S. Veto at the U.N. By your failure to act you have backed this Israeli-initiated aggression, as you have invariably favored prior illegal Israeli military attacks against U.S. ally Lebanon, and Syria and Iran in recent decades.
Although the Netanyahu regime prohibits Israeli journalists from entering Gaza or the West Bank to report reality, enough of the Israeli media carries the horrific devastation in Gaza with casualties and critical property destruction hundreds of times greater than that inflicted by the primitive Hamas rockets, 90% of which are shot down by the U.S.-funded “iron dome” anti-missile systems. The rest, with very few random exceptions, fall onto the desert floor, sometimes back into Gaza.
Israel needs these feeble, homemade rockets as the pretext for its massively greater attacks again and again against the civilian population during the past fifteen years. How else can it engage in such slaughter of entire extended families asleep in their crowded homes, destruction of schools, health clinics, media offices – against what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has called a wholly defenseless, captive people? Israel is just defending itself, you keep saying, ignoring the imperial racist premise in that statement.
As Representative Cori Bush (D-MO) declared this week:
“These atrocities are being funded by billions of our own American tax dollars while communities like mine in St. Louis are hurting and are in need of life-affirming investment here at home.”
The expanding Jewish Voice for Peace, whose views represent a larger polling of American Jews than does AIPAC, joined over 70 U.S. advocacy groups in support of a Congressional resolution opposing your latest $735 million weapons shipment to Israel. You know federal law prohibits U.S. weapons delivered to a foreign country from being used for offensive purposes – a law continually and openly violated by Israel with impunity.
Having such precision instruments of war, and because it has Gaza under the strictest, most intrusive surveillance of any encircled, besieged territory in history, Israeli destruction of critical civilian infrastructure – electricity, water, sewage, and medical facilities – can be considered deliberate. The Israeli military knows about every street, home, apartment building, business, and government site, including who moves inside this tiny enclave. They have embedded spies, informants, a 24/7 electronic watch, and even updated Palestinian DNA samples. Indeed, Israeli government spokespersons boast about giving warnings to the occupants of some of the targets, such as those in the 14-story building housing AP, Al Jazeera, many residential apartments, and doctors’ offices, before turning it into rubble. They know exactly what they are striking – warnings or no warnings. So far, half of the fatalities are children, women, and those sick from the raging, Covid-19 pandemic, who have little or no access to vaccines.
You have two dozen Democratic Senators demanding a ceasefire and you still will not come out strongly for a transition toward a vigorous peace process leading to your stated two-state solution. You have none of President Eisenhower’s steadfastness who in 1956 declared a firm stop to the aggressive Israeli, French, and British bombing of Suez in Egypt.
You know full well what started this latest round of hostilities. Read this excerpt from the New York Times:
“…it was the outgrowth of years of blockades and restrictions in Gaza, decades of occupation in the West Bank, and decades more of discrimination against Arabs within the state of Israel, said Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Parliament and former chairman of the World Zionist Organization. ‘All the enriched uranium was already in place,’ he said. ‘But you needed a trigger. And the trigger was the Aqsa Mosque.’”
Mr. Burg was referring to the Israeli police invasion of the 8th century Aqsa Mosque – Islam’s third holiest site – during Ramadan, tear gassing and wounding over 300 praying faithful with stun grenades and rubber bullets. Together with Israeli street gangs in East Jerusalem and the intensifying displacement of Palestinian families there, the provocations proved to be the tipping point for panicked Palestinians.
You know this and much more from your confidential briefings. Still, you are hesitating. You are intimately aware of why Prime Minister Netanyahu timed and choreographed these bloody, brutal assaults. It is to position himself more successfully in forming a governing coalition of extremists to avoid a fifth election and ward off an ongoing prosecution for corruption by Israeli law enforcers. He provoked, for his political ambitions, the terrifying of the country he leads.
I am attaching an open letter I sent to President Obama on December 19, 2016, asking him to adopt Jimmy Carter’s urgent plea for you to take “the vital step – to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.” As you know, Mr. Carter negotiated the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. He referenced President Obama’s support of the long-standing United Nations Resolution 242, which called for a “complete freeze on settlement expansion on Palestinian territory that is illegal under international law.” In 2011, President Obama also made clear that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines” as two states.
In dire contrast, your Administration has been signaling a diplomatic withdrawal from this conflict to focus on China and East Asia. You’d be well advised to generate some residual fortitude, and empathy, and uphold the legal responsibility to reverse your total support for whatever Israel has done since you began your Senate career in 1973.
From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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The destruction of a rare bookstore selling English books isn’t the worst tragedy to hit Gaza this week. But for its people, it is a manifestation of a multidimensional war that disconnects besieged Palestinians from the world.
Hanya Aljamal couldn’t help crying while leafing through the pages of one of the last books she picked up from Samir Mansour bookstore in Gaza on her last visit a month ago.
Among all the books that helped her to endure the Palestinian strip’s 14-year siege, Man’s Search for Meaning stood out as a spiritual guide on how to survive harrowing circumstances. In the case of the book’s author, Viktor Frankl, it was the mass murder of six million Jews, the Holocaust, that took away his parents and his wife to concentration camps.
“Nothing in the world makes this okay, no possible reason can,” Aljamal, a 24-year-old translator and writer, thought to herself while reading the book.
Almost a month later, Samir Mansour Library, the only bookstore where she could pick up an English copy of Frankl’s book in Gaza, was to be destroyed by an Israeli air strike. As her friends sent pictures of the books buried in the rubble on May 18, Aljamal wept again – this time fearing that her sadness was invalid as people were dying all over the densely populated territory.
This wasn’t the first tragedy in Gaza in the last ten days, of course. The loud rockets that keep Aljamal up at night have wiped out entire families, including 67 children.
Recalling the book, Aljamal sobs in a voice note sent to TRT World, “I think about what’s happening to us right now and I think this is not okay too.”
Every destruction leaves another mark. “You never get used to it,” she says.
On top of the killings, the destruction of the Samir Mansour bookstore, which housed the largest English collection of literature in Gaza, makes her think that it’s a manifestation of Israel’s multidimensional war that takes aim at making Gaza even more isolated.
Samir Mansour, the owner of the publishing house and bookstore that owns the largest collection of English literature in besieged Gaza looks at a book in front of the remains of his store that has been destroyed by Israeli air strikes. May 20. 2021, Gaza, Palestine. (Mohammed Samir Mansour)
“Even under blockade, it made us feel as a part of the world,” she says.
Whenever she walked past, she used to check the books on display in the big glass window and sometimes find herself absorbed by the enclave’s only English selection for hours. Mansour’s bookstore, also a publishing house, says they were unable to save any books from the large collection.
“Israel aims to kill. If not, it aims to make life unbearable,” Aljamal says.
Samir Mansour’s bookshop was not the only one affected. Others, including the Iqraa library, were either completely or partially destroyed in Al Thalatiny Street, lovingly known as al Maktabat street, which literally translates to “the bookstores street.”
Even though Gaza’s siege has been a reality for over a decade, this is one of the times when people in Gaza feel what that siege truly means. The enclave’s borders are impassable, and no watercraft is allowed to set sail to help transport passengers to other places.
What can leave Gaza now are only the rockets bound for Israel. Before the firing of the first rocket, Hamas, the group that controls the enclave, warned Tel Aviv to withdraw its security forces attacking worshippers in Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque.
Instead, Israeli police stormed the mosque, firing stun grenades at worshippers on a night that Muslims consider the holiest of the year. Tel Aviv’s brutal offensive has killed over 227 Palestinians so far and Hamas air strikes have killed 12 people in Israel.
What can enter Gaza is also limited. The international aid that has been restricted under the blockade since 2007 is now largely blocked from reaching Gaza.
An English copy of British crime novelist Agatha Christie’s book “Curtain” buried in the rubble of the Samir Mansour publishing house and bookstore that housed the largest collection of English literature, May 20. 2021, Gaza, Palestine. (Mohammed Samir Mansour)
But up until the bombardment, the 21-year-old bookshop was able to provide a fair amount of things Gazans craved due to the siege: getting Palestinian voices out from Gaza. and bringing the world’s literature into Gaza.
“Samir Mansour bookstore and other libraries gave us a reason to live,” one writer from Gaza, Hedaya Shamun, says. Under a blockade, getting published is a massive challenge; holding physical copies of prints is a luxury.
“I was over the moon when my novel was printed in Egypt. But I couldn’t get a copy of the book except after 6 months – it was transferred from a friend to a friend until they could give me some amount of copies,” Shamun recounts her previous experience with publishing.
“I couldn’t prepare for the signature party because I didn’t have any copies of the books,” she says. The writer was exhausted from the cost of printing her successive book, Daughter of the Sea.
But the bookshop’s owner, Mansour, then made things easier for Shamun. He printed Shamun’s novel and placed them in his bookstore, too.
“He gave me a good amount of copies so I was able to launch my own signature parties [this time],” she says.
Khatwa company, which shared the Kahil building with the Samir Mansour bookshop and publishing house, spray-painted its number on the rubble after an Israeli air strike turned the building in Gaza into a heap of rubble on May 18, 2021. (Mohammed Samir Mansour)
Efforts to rebuild amid a destruction
The shop was home to literary community meetings until the day the Israeli army informed Mansour that the Kahil building, where the bookstore is located, would be bombed alongside some educational centres belonging to the Islamic University.
“The occupation’s destruction of the library will negatively affect the community of readers and writers, which publishes books in its various fields and gives it the opportunity to participate in international exhibitions,” says Mohammed Samir, Mansour’s son.
Mohammed, who used to work with his father before the bombing, is extremely sad that Mansour’s childhood dream has gone to waste. The loss of their extensive collection is of huge regret to everyone.
The shop had already survived a major assault by Israel on Gaza in 2014; other buildings had not been so lucky. While a lot of the enclave was reduced to rubble, some places that came off worse had been rebuilt – but this was all before this latest operation which Palestinians confirm as the worst in its ferocity.
Aljamal, the Gazan translator, witnessed how long it took Gaza to get back on its feet amid a dire lack of funds.
“There is ten times more destruction this time,” she says in despair. “I keep thinking that if we survive, Gaza won’t.”
But the Mansour family is determined to keep rebuilding the bookstore and keep the literary spirit alive, even though the destruction is ongoing around them. They have the support of hundreds of booklovers inside and outside of Gaza.
A crowdfunding page set up by two human rights lawyers has already collected over $8,000. The funds will eventually allow Mansour to rent a new plot and rebuild a library and bookshop. “All of the heart, creativity, and talent poured into this magical place is gone,” the page called for action.
“Please help us raise funds to rebuild Gaza’s community bookstore, bombed to pieces,” Clive Stafford Smith, one of the crowdfunders said.
“Who really believes you can bomb the world to peace?”
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While it is understood that viruses mutate, causing variants, French Virologist and Nobel Prize Winner Luc Montagnier contends that “it is the vaccination that is creating the variants.”
The 2008 Nobel Laureate made the explosive comments as part of a larger interview with Pierre Barnérias of Hold-Up Media earlier this month. The clip was exclusively translated for RAIR Foundation USA, and is quite damning for the agenda-driven left-wing establishment.
As reported at RAIR in April of last year, Prof. Montagnier presented a powerful case that the coronavirus was created in a lab. His comments at the time offended the left-wing establishment so much that they aggressively attempted to discredit his statement. Now, the media is backpedaling on the origin of the coronavirus after prominent scientists called for further scrutiny.
Vaccines are Creating the Variants
Prof. Montagnier referred to the vaccine program for the coronavirus as an “unacceptable mistake”. Mass vaccinations are a “scientific error as well as a medical error,” he said. “It is an unacceptable mistake. The history books will show that, because it is the vaccination that is creating the variants,” Prof. Luc Montagnier continued.
The prominent virologist explained that “there are antibodies, created by the vaccine,” forcing the virus to “find another solution” or die. This is where the variants are created. It is the variants that “are a production and result from the vaccination.”
Antibody-Dependent Enhancement
Prof. Montagnier said that epidemiologists know but are “silent” about the phenomenon, known as “Antibody-Dependent Enhancement” (ADE). In the articles that mention ADE, the concerns expressed by Prof. Montagnier are dismissed. “Scientists say that ADE is pretty much a non-issue with COVID-19 vaccines,” an article at Medpage Today reported in March.
Prof. Montagnier explained that the trend is happening in “each country” where “the curve of vaccination is followed by the curve of deaths.”
The Nobel Laureate’s point is emphasized by information revealed in an open letter from a long list of medical doctors to the European Medicines Agency. The letter stated in part that “there have been numerous media reports from around the world of care homes being struck by COVID-19 within days of vaccination of residents.”
Earlier this month, RAIR reported on a statement by French Virologist Christine Rouzioux:
“…the rise in new cases is occurring in vaccinated patients in nursing homes in ‘Montpellier, in the Sarte, in Rheims, in the Moselle…”
Prof. Luc Montagnier continued to say that he is doing his own experiments with those who become infected with the coronavirus after getting the vaccine. “I will show you that they are creating the variants that are resistant to the vaccine,” he said.
Watch the clip (transcribed below):
Many thanks to HeHa and Miss Piggy for the translation!
(Questions are bolded)
If we look at the curve from the WHO, since the vaccinations started in January, the curve showing new infections (contamination) has exploded, along with deaths.
Notably among young people.
—Yes. With thromboses, etc.
How do you view the mass vaccination program? Mass vaccination compared to treatments that work and aren’t expensive.
—It’s an enormous mistake, isn’t it? A scientific error as well as a medical error. It is an unacceptable mistake. The history books will show that, because it is the vaccination that is creating the variants.
—For the China virus, there are antibodies, created by the vaccine. What does the virus do? Does it die or find another solution?
—The new variants are a production and result from the vaccination. You see it in each country, it’s the same: the curve of vaccination is followed by the curve of deaths.
—I’m following this closely and I am doing experiments at the Institute with patients who became sick with Corona after being vaccinated. I will show you that they are creating the variants that are resistant to the vaccine.
Should we be vaccinating during a pandemic?
—It’s unthinkable.
—They’re silent… many people know this, epidemiologists know it.
—It is the antibodies produced by the virus that enable an infection to become stronger.
—It’s what we call Antibody Dependent Enhancement, which means antibodies favor a certain infection. The antibody attaches to the virus, from that moment it has the receptors, the antibodies, we have them in the macrophage etc.
—It pokes the virus and not accidentally, but because of the fact that they’re linked to the antibodies.
—It is clear that the new variants are created by antibody-mediated selection due to the vaccination. OK?
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Renee Nal is an investigative journalist and documentary film producer.
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In this interview, return guest Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT for over five decades, discusses the COVID-19 vaccines. Since 2008, her primary focus has been glyphosate and sulfur, but in the last year, she took a deep-dive into the science of these novel injections and recently published an excellent paper1 on this topic.
“To have developed this incredibly new technology so quickly, and to skip so many steps in the process of evaluating [its safety], it’s an insanely reckless thing that they’ve done,” she says. “My instinct was that this is bad, and I needed to know [the truth].
So, I really dug into the research literature by the people who’ve developed these vaccines, and then more extensive research literature around those topics. And I don’t see how these vaccines can possibly be doing anything good. When you weigh the good against the bad, I can’t see how they could possibly be winning, from what I’ve seen.”
Significant Death Toll Will Rise in Months and Years to Come
Five months into the vaccination campaign, statistics tell a frightening story. Seneff cites research2 showing deaths are 14.6 times more frequent during the first 14 days after the first COVID injection among people over the age of 60, compared to those who aren’t vaccinated. That is extraordinary. You can read the full paper here.
Other data,3,4 reviewed in the video above, show that after COVID-19 vaccines were implemented, overall death rates have increased, with the exception of a few areas. Interestingly, Seneff believes she may have discovered why. It appears countries in which COVID-19 vaccines have not raised mortality rates are also not using glyphosate.
“I immediately suspected glyphosate when I started to see COVID-19,” Seneff says. “I’ve written a book on glyphosate called ‘Toxic Legacy,’ and I have an entire chapter in that book on the immune system. Glyphosate, I believe, is a train wreck for the innate immune system, and when your immune system is weak, your body has to overreact to the virus. It can’t kill the virus.
So, it ends up [causing] collateral damage and wrecking your tissues. You get into this cytokine storm kind of situation where you destroy your lungs and you can’t cope. It’s not really the virus. It’s the immune reaction to the virus that’s killing you, and that’s because your immune system is too weak. If you have a strong innate immune system, I believe you wouldn’t even get symptoms from COVID-19.
When you look at the statistics on which countries are hit hard and just can’t get ahead of this virus, they’re clearly the countries that use a lot of glyphosate and developing biofuels based on glyphosate-exposed plants. So, I think that’s a critical piece of the puzzle as well. Glyphosate is in the atmosphere … [and] people are breathing it. So now you’re getting a direct attack on the lungs immune system, which makes you very susceptible to COVID.”
Ultimately, Seneff believes, as I do, that the COVID-19 “vaccines” will end up killing far more people than the disease itself, and will in fact make the disease worse. Seneff cites a disturbing case history of a cancer patient in the U.K. who was treated for severe COVID-19 for 101 days.
The antibody cocktails they gave him didn’t work, and after his death, they concluded that the predominant SARS-CoV-2 variant in his body had a dozen different mutations in the spike protein. Somehow, his body figured out how to evade the antibodies, which is a critical piece of the puzzle.
“I think the vaccines are doing the same thing,” Seneff says, adding that, among the immune compromised, only 17% of vaccinated individuals actually produce antibodies.5 Surprisingly, these people may actually have drawn the short end of the stick. The antibodies may not work because their immune function is low, thereby allowing the virus to build resistance and mutate.
“I think you have a lot of immune compromised people in a country where glyphosate is destroying people’s immune system, and that gives tremendous opportunity for the virus to mutate. The vaccine is going to accelerate that process because we’re vaccinating immune compromised people left and right.”
COVID-19 Vaccines Are a Public Health Disaster
The typical unprecedented vaccine takes 12 years to develop, and of all the unprecedented vaccines in development, only 2% are projected to ever make it through phases 2 and 3 of clinical testing.
The COVID-19 vaccine was developed with Operation Warp Speed in less than one year, which makes it virtually impossible for this vaccine to be adequately tested for safety and efficacy.
Hundreds of millions of people are now being vaccinated around the world, based on nothing more than preliminary efficacy data. Disturbingly, while sudden death is one apparent side effect, the vast majority of side effects won’t be known until a decade or more from now.
Seneff predicts that in the next 10 to 15 years, we’ll see a sudden spike in prion diseases, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases at younger ages, and blood disorders such as blood clots, hemorrhaging, stroke and heart failure.
“It’s a nightmare,” she says. “And I can see how it can happen. Basically, the vaccine is so unbelievably unnatural, and it has a single-minded goal, which is to get your body to produce antibodies to the spike protein. The RNA has been manipulated. It’s not natural RNA because it has methyl-pseudouridine on it … And the goal is to keep it alive.
Normally, if you get injected with RNA, you have enzymes in your system, in your tissues, that will immediately break it down. Your body knows it must get rid of the RNA. What you do with the vaccine is you make sure [your body] can’t get at it …
Then there’s the lipid [that the RNA is encased in]. The lipids are very abnormal, very weird … They’re not natural but they have some cholesterol in there, probably to help it look like a natural LDL particle so that your cells will take it up. It’s not being taken up by the ACE2 receptor.
It’s not being taken up the same way that the virus is being taken up. It’s a totally different mechanism that brings it into all the cells. You’ve gone past all the mucosal membranes. Usually, a virus is going to come into the lungs or any kind of cavity where there’s a mucosal system that’s going to hit the virus first.
The virus [will trigger] your natural mucosal system to respond to it and clear it if you’re a healthy person, and that’s the end of it. [With the vaccine], we never get a chance to do that. You’re just getting it shot right into your muscle, past all the barriers and the muscle goes crazy … sending out all kinds of alarms.”
Understanding Your Immune System
As your cells start producing the viral spike proteins, your immune cells rally to mop up the proteins and dump them into your lymphatic system. This is why many report swollen lymph nodes under the arms. This is also a sign of breast cancer. The antibody response is part of your humoral immunity. You also have cellular immunity, which is part of your innate immune system.
Your innate immune system is very powerful. And, if you’re healthy, it can clear viruses without ever producing a single antibody. Antibodies are actually a second-tier effect when your innate immune system fails. The problem is your innate immune system is definitely going to fail if you get a COVID-19 shot, because it’s bypassing all of the areas where your innate immune system would be brought to bear.
Your body will essentially believe that the innate immune system has failed, which means it must bring in the backup cavalry. In essence, your body is now over-reacting to something that isn’t true. You’re not actually infected with a virus and your innate immune system has not failed, but your body is forced to respond as if both are true.
How COVID-19 Vaccine Circumvents Healthy Immune Responses
But there’s more. As explained by Seneff, the synthetic RNA in the mRNA vaccines contains a nucleotide called methyl-pseudouridine, which your body cannot break down, and the RNA is programmed to trigger maximum protein production. So, we’re looking at completely untested manipulation of RNA.
It is very important to recognize that this is a genetically engineered mRNA for the spike protein. It is in no way shape or form the same that SARS-CoV-2 produces. It’s been significantly altered to avoid being metabolized by your body. Additionally, the spike protein your body produces in response to the COVID-19 vaccine mRNA locks into your ACE2 receptor.
This is because the genetically engineered NEW spike protein has additional prolines inserted that prevent the receptors from properly closing, which then cause you to downregulate ACE2. That’s partially how you end up with problems such as pulmonary hypertension, ventricular heart failure and stroke.6,7
As noted in a 2020 paper,8 there’s a “pivotal link” between ACE2 deficiency and SARS-CoV-2 infection. People with ACE2 deficiency tend to be more prone to severe COVID-19. The spike protein suppresses ACE2,9 making the deficiency even worse. As it turns out, the vaccines essentially do the same thing.
How Long Might Effects Last?
As mentioned, RNA is highly perishable, so to get it past the enzymes that would normally break down free mRNA, it’s encased in a lipid nanoparticle combined with polyethylene glycol or PEG. The PEG helps protect the RNA from breaking down. The RNA can easily enter the cell via natural endocytosis pathways, taking advantage of the nanoparticle design made to look like an LDL particle.
They strategically chose a cationic lipid, meaning it’s positively charged. “Usually you have phospholipids in your membranes that are negatively charged,” Seneff explains. The problem with cationic lipids is they disturb the plasma membrane and cause an immune response.
However, that may also be a key reason for why they were used. Typically, conventional vaccines contain an aluminum adjuvant to initiate an immune response. Aluminum was not appropriate for the COVID-19 vaccines, but the cationic lipids serve a similar function spectacularly well.
Being extremely toxic to the cell membranes, the positively charged lipids trigger immune cells to rush in to aid the cells and mop up the spike protein now being produced, while also being the vehicle that allows the RNA to slip into the cells. Once inside the cell, the mRNA delivers the instructions to produce enormous amounts of spike proteins.
Importantly, there’s no telling how long these instructions will persist. Manufacturers are guessing the synthetic RNA may survive in the human body for about six months, but we really don’t know if that’s true or not.
Again, the alterations they’ve done to the synthetic RNA are meant to prevent it from breaking down. It could be years or even decades that these spike proteins are being produced, and you will find out shortly why this is a really bad scenario.
“The really worrisome thing, which I talk about in the paper, is there’s potential for it to become integrated into your DNA,” Seneff says. “If that happens, it will last your entire lifetime, and you may pass this new genetic code on to your offspring.”
Tracing Spike Protein From Cells to Lymph to Spleen
As explained by Seneff, your immune cells mop up mRNA and spike protein and dump them into your lymphatic system. From there, they make their way into your spleen, where they can remain for quite a long time.
“There are all these different immune cells that have different roles, but it’s the dendritic cells and the macrophages that are initially going into the muscle, picking up the mRNA, taking it over to the lymph system, traveling through the lymph system to the spleen and piling it up there. The spleen was the highest concentration of all the organs they looked at in animal studies. The liver was second.
It wasn’t the COVID-19 vaccine, but it was a messenger RNA vaccine. So, it was the same concept. The other vaccines, the ones that are based on a DNA vector, they also go to the spleen. I think they like it when they see that it’s going to the spleen because you have these germinal centers in the spleen that are focus groups for making antibodies.
So these dendritic cells are in these germinal centers in the spleen, and then they bring in the B-cells and T-cells, and those are the ones that make and perfect the antibodies, because you need to go through a whole training mode to get the antibiotics to be exactly matched to that particular spike protein. That happens predominantly in the spleen.”
Potential Vaccine Shedding Mechanism Revealed
Seneff also sheds light on the mysterious reports of unvaccinated individuals experiencing unusual bleeding symptoms after spending time in proximity to a newly vaccinated person. She believes this may be due to exosomes being released from the lungs.
“If you are a person who’s producing these exosomes from your spleen and shipping them out, there’s no reason why you can’t ship them out to the lungs. In fact, they’ve shown experimentally that those exosomes do get released from the lungs,” Seneff says.
So, to be clear, what’s being “shed” or spread by vaccinated individuals is the spike protein — which is itself toxic — not the SARS-CoV-2. So, it’s not an infection but rather the shedding of a toxic protein.
“If you’re breathing it in, you could be getting an increased risk, it seems to me. I mean, it sounds really farfetched, but it looks like it could happen, just from the logic of what goes on in biology. It could happen that you would breathe in these exosomes containing these misfolded prion proteins, which are not good for you, and exactly what happens when they go into the lungs, I don’t know. I have no idea.”
Can mRNA Vaccines Change Your DNA? That Is the Question
Getting back to the potential issue of gene editing, I’ve been accused of being scientifically ignorant for stating that COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines but rather a form of gene therapy. But when you delve into the genetics and molecular biology of this vaccine you discover that they are in fact a form of a stealth gene editing tool that can change your DNA and integrate instructions to make even more spike proteins.
It’s counterintuitive because, typically, mRNA cannot be integrated directly into your genes because you need reverse transcriptase. Reverse transcriptase converts RNA back into DNA (reverse transcription). Seneff, however, discovered there’s a wide variety of reverse transcriptase systems already embedded in our DNA, which makes this possible. She explains:
“There was this long period of time in which we had the mantra that transcription is DNA to RNA to protein. That’s basic biology — DNA, RNA, protein. But then, in 1970, David Baltimore at MIT… discovered reverse transcriptase in retroviruses (RNA tumor viruses), which he won the Nobel Prize for.
It turns out, and I didn’t know this until I started digging into these vaccines, that we actually have plenty of reverse transcriptase in our own cells. We have plenty of it. And it’s these long interspersed nuclear elements (LINEs) and short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs) that are able to take our RNA back to DNA and to put that DNA back into the genome.”
LINEs and SINEs are sequences of nucleotides, pieces of DNA, and they make up a huge percentage of the genome. For example, LINE1 is 10% of your genome. Most of the time they’re inactive and scientists were puzzled about what they actually do. They’re rather strange, as they fold DNA backward and stick it back in different areas. For example, in people with Alzheimer’s, the amyloid beta protein gets duplicated all over the place in their genome.
“They get like a big fat genome with extra copies with different variations in those copies. And they do that through RNA,” Seneff says. “So, you have a mechanism for evolution. The primary mechanism, I would guess, is through taking the DNA, turning it into RNA, mutating the RNA because RNA mutates much more easily than DNA does, and then turning it back into DNA and sticking it back into the genome.”
In a nutshell, LINEs and SINEs appear to be activated when an alternative solution for a problem is needed. One such problem could be glyphosate exposure. When the body is too sick to function normally, it finds a way around the problem by mutating proteins. “It’s a process that we use to deal with environmental toxic chemicals that we’re confronted with generally,” Seneff says.
So, in summary, mRNA can be reverse transcribed and converted back to DNA by LINEs and SINEs in your body. This cloned DNA can then be integrated into your genome. In this way, it truly is genetic editing.
Are We Creating a Generation of Super-Spreaders?
What comes next is truly chilling. Seneff cites research10 showing that sperm has this ability to take exogenous mRNA, either from a virus or an mRNA vaccine, and reverse transcribe it into DNA and then produce plasmids that contain this cloned DNA. The sperm then releases these plasmids around the egg, which takes them up.
The egg hangs on to those plasmids and puts the new code into the cells of the growing fetus. Hypothetically, a man having been vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine could produce a child born with the genetic code to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
This is not a good thing, because this means the child will not have antibodies against the spike protein. Since it’s part of their genetic code, it registers as one of their own proteins and their body won’t produce antibodies against it. If that child is exposed to SARS-CoV-2, their immune system won’t react at all. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but it’s bound to be severely problematic in one way or another.
“Exactly how sick they’ll get or whether they’ll get sick at all, I don’t know,” Seneff says, “but their immune system won’t react and they’ll be able to carry that virus for their entire life and then pass [that genomic trait] on down to their children …
Now, if I don’t react to [the virus] and I let it grow, what happens? Do I get sick? To what extent is the illness [COVID-19] the consequence of the immune response, rather than the virus itself? We don’t know that, really, but many say the real problem is the overactive immune response.
People are dying of the immune response to COVID, they’re not dying from the virus. The virus is not killing them. It’s the immune response to the virus that’s killing them. So, if you don’t have an immune response, what happens? Nobody knows.”
Even if such a child were to be unaffected by the virus, we could be looking at a serious problem, as they could turn into lifelong super-spreaders and a chronic hazard to everyone around them. At least that’s what happened in cows.
Seneff recounts a story of herds plagued by a viral diarrhea. They finally realized that “killer calves” were the problem. Calves were being born that had viral protein integrated into their genome. When exposed to the virus, these calves, unable to clear the virus naturally, then spread it to the adult cows, which got sick.
“I don’t see why the same thing couldn’t happen with COVID — that a baby could be born who has this humanized version of that protein, catches the [wild] virus and then it spreads it to the adult population,” Seneff says.
Such children would be true super-spreaders, and the indoctrination we’re currently seeing, where children are told their mere presence could pose a mortal risk to the people they love, would then turn into grim reality. The calves in question were euthanized to safeguard the rest of the herds. How would we address human equivalents?
Hopefully, this nightmare scenario will not occur, but it appears biologically possible, and that is the problem. The fact that the available science allows for this kind of speculation is reason enough to put the brakes on this vaccination campaign. We have no clue what the long-term consequences are. We don’t even know what the short-term consequences are, other than more vaccinated people are dying, collectively, compared to unvaccinated ones.
Spike Protein Appears Highly Problematic
A particularly fascinating part of Seneff’s paper addresses the toxicity of the spike protein. A key problem with all of these gene-based COVID-19 vaccines is that the spike protein itself appears toxic, and your body is now a spike protein-producing factory.
“Right. They have done studies where they only expose the [animal] to the spike protein, showing it was toxic in the brain and the blood vessels. So, it’s causing immune reactions all by itself that is damaging to the tissues.
It’s basically a toxic molecule, and I think it’s toxic possibly because of it being a prion protein …
I’m going to do more research on it. I don’t know enough yet, but it looks horrendous to me. I think it may be the most worrisome thing. There are two big things that are going to happen in the future.
They’re going to take time [to develop], so we’re not going to see it immediately. And, of course, we’re not going to blame the vaccine because rates will start going up for these horrible diseases and no one will link them to it.”
Why Spike Protein May Cause Serious Neurodegenerative Disease
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CKD), the human version of mad cow disease, is a prion disease. Other human forms of prion disease include Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). “You have all these horrible neurodegenerative diseases and each one is tied to specific prion proteins,” Seneff says. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein also appears to be a prion protein, although this has yet to be thoroughly verified.
Disturbingly, the spike protein produced by COVID-19 vaccines, due to the modifications made, may make it more of a prion than the spike protein in the actual virus, and a more effective one.
“Papers are showing that those germinal centers in the spleen … are a primary source of the prion proteins that eventually get taken up the vagus nerve and delivered to the brainstem nuclei. That’s how you can get Parkinson’s disease, for example …
There’s so much we need to learn, but it looks to me like it’s a setup here. They’re really inviting this kind of thing to happen with these vaccines, where they’re focusing on those germinal centers [because] those are the very same place where these prion proteins often get started.”
Why Long-Term Neurological Damage Is To Be Expected
In her paper, Seneff describes key characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that suggests it’s a prion:11
“Neurological symptoms associated with COVID-19, such as headache, nausea and dizziness, encephalitis and fatal brain blood clots are all indicators of damaging viral effects on the brain. Buzhdygan et al. (2020) proposed that primary human brain microvascular endothelial cells could cause these symptoms …
In an in vitro study of the blood-brain barrier, the S1 component of the spike protein promoted loss of barrier integrity, suggesting that the spike protein acting alone triggers a pro-inflammatory response in brain endothelial cells, which could explain the neurological consequences of the disease.
The implications of this observation are disturbing because the mRNA vaccines induce synthesis of the spike protein, which could theoretically act in a similar way to harm the brain. The spike protein generated endogenously by the vaccine could also negatively impact the male testes, as the ACE2 receptor is highly expressed in Leydig cells in the testes …
Prion diseases are a collection of neurodegenerative diseases that are induced through the misfolding of important bodily proteins, which form toxic oligomers that eventually precipitate out as fibrils causing widespread damage to neurons …
Furthermore, researchers have identified a signature motif linked to susceptibility to misfolding into toxic oligomers, called the glycine zipper motif … Prion proteins become toxic when the α-helices misfold as β-sheets, and the protein is then impaired in its ability to enter the membrane.
Glycines within the glycine zipper transmembrane motifs in the amyloid-β precursor protein (APP) play a central role in the misfolding of amyloid-β linked to Alzheimer’s disease. APP contains a total of four GxxxG motifs. When considering that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is a transmembrane protein, and that it contains five GxxxG motifs in its sequence,12 it becomes extremely plausible that it could behave as a prion.
One of the GxxxG sequences is present within its membrane fusion domain. Recall that the mRNA vaccines are designed with an altered sequence that replaces two adjacent amino acids in the fusion domain with a pair of prolines.
This is done intentionally in order to force the protein to remain in its open state and make it harder for it to fuse with the membrane. This seems to us like a dangerous step towards misfolding potentially leading to prion disease …
A paper published by J. Bart Classen (2021) proposed that the spike protein in the mRNA vaccines could cause prion-like diseases, in part through its ability to bind to many known proteins and induce their misfolding into potential prions.
Idrees and Kumar (2021) have proposed that the spike protein’s S1 component is prone to act as a functional amyloid and form toxic aggregates … and can ultimately lead to neurodegeneration.”
So, in summary, the take-home here is that COVID-19 vaccines, offered to hundreds of millions of people, are instruction sets for your body to make a toxic protein that will eventually wind up concentrated in your spleen, from where prion-like protein instructions will be sent out, leading to neurodegenerative diseases.
Vaccine Remedy May Be Worse Than the Disease
In her paper, Seneff goes into far more detail in her description of the spike protein as a metabolic poison. While I recommend reading Seneff’s paper in its entirety, I’ve extracted key sections below, starting with how the spike protein can trigger pathological damage leading to lung damage and heart and brain diseases:13
“The picture is now emerging that SARS-CoV-2 has serious effects on the vasculature in multiple organs, including the brain vasculature … In a series of papers, Yuichiro Suzuki in collaboration with other authors presented a strong argument that the spike protein by itself can cause a signaling response in the vasculature with potentially widespread consequences.
These authors observed that, in severe cases of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 causes significant morphological changes to the pulmonary vasculature … Furthermore, they showed that exposure of cultured human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 subunit was sufficient to promote cell signaling without the rest of the virus components.
Follow-on papers showed that the spike protein S1 subunit suppresses ACE2, causing a condition resembling pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a severe lung disease with very high mortality … The ‘in vivo studies’ they referred to … had shown that SARS coronavirus-induced lung injury was primarily due to inhibition of ACE2 by the SARS-CoV spike protein, causing a large increase in angiotensin-II.
Suzuki et al. (2021) went on to demonstrate experimentally that the S1 component of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, at a low concentration … activated the MEK/ERK/MAPK signaling pathway to promote cell growth. They speculated that these effects would not be restricted to the lung vasculature.
The signaling cascade triggered in the heart vasculature would cause coronary artery disease, and activation in the brain could lead to stroke. Systemic hypertension would also be predicted. They hypothesized that this ability of the spike protein to promote pulmonary arterial hypertension could predispose patients who recover from SARS-CoV-2 to later develop right ventricular heart failure.
Furthermore, they suggested that a similar effect could happen in response to the mRNA vaccines, and they warned of potential long-term consequences to both children and adults who received COVID-19 vaccines based on the spike protein.
An interesting study by Lei et. al. (2021) found that pseudovirus — spheres decorated with the SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein but lacking any viral DNA in their core — caused inflammation and damage in both the arteries and lungs of mice exposed intratracheally.
They then exposed healthy human endothelial cells to the same pseudovirus particles. Binding of these particles to endothelial ACE2 receptors led to mitochondrial damage and fragmentation in those endothelial cells, leading to the characteristic pathological changes in the associated tissue.
This study makes it clear that spike protein alone, unassociated with the rest of the viral genome, is sufficient to cause the endothelial damage associated with COVID-19. The implications for vaccines intended to cause cells to manufacture the spike protein are clear and are an obvious cause for concern.
Commercial Vaccines Are Not as ‘Clean’ as Trial Vaccines
Seneff’s paper also highlights the unknown hazard of injecting fragmented RNA, found in greater quantity in the commercially manufactured Pfizer vaccine compared to the vaccine used in the initial trials:14
“The EMA Public Assessment Report … describes in detail a review of the [Pfizer] manufacturing process … One concerning revelation is the presence of ‘fragmented species’ of RNA in the injection solution. These are RNA fragments resulting from early termination of the process of transcription from the DNA template.
These fragments, if translated by the cell following injection, would generate incomplete spike proteins, again resulting in altered and unpredictable three-dimensional structure and a physiological impact that is at best neutral and at worst detrimental to cellular functioning.
There were considerably more of these fragmented forms of RNA found in the commercially manufactured products than in the products used in clinical trials. The latter were produced via a much more tightly controlled manufacturing process …
While we are not asserting that non-spike proteins generated from fragmented RNA would be misfolded or otherwise pathological, we believe they would at least contribute to the cellular stress that promotes prion-associated conformational changes in the spike protein that is present.”
More Information
Seneff and I cover a great deal more than I’ve covered in this article, including how the vaccines may trigger autoimmune problems by way of molecular mimicry. This includes things like celiac disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and lupus. So, if you have ANY interest in learning more about this vaccine I strongly suggest you watch the entire video.
We also discuss how the shots are causing idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), a rare blood disorder in which you end up with blood clots, a drop in platelet count and hemorrhages, all at the same time.
How Can You Protect Yourself From the Vaccine or Exposure to Those That Were Vaccinated?
Indeed, that is the question of the day. We talked about shedding from the vaccine. Obviously, the vaccine does not classically shed virus particles but it can easily cause people to shed spike proteins, and it is these spike proteins that may cause just as much damage as the virus.
While Seneff’s paper didn’t delve deeply into solutions, it provides a major clue, which is that your body has the capacity to address many of these problems through a process called autophagy. This is the process of removal of damaged proteins in your body.
One effective strategy that will upregulate autophagy is periodic fasting or time-restricted eating. Most people eat more than 12 hours a day. Gradually lowering that to a six- to eight-hour window will radically improve your metabolic flexibility and decrease insulin resistance.
Another beneficial practice is sauna therapy, which upregulates heat shock proteins. I have discussed this extensively in previous articles. Heat shock proteins work by refolding proteins that are misfolded. They also tag damaged proteins and target them for removal.
Another vital strategy is to eliminate all processed vegetable oils (seed oils), which means eliminating virtually all processed foods as they are loaded with them. Seed oils will radically impair mitochondrial energy production, increase oxidative stress and damage your immune system.
Seed oils also are likely to contain glyphosate, as it is heavily used on the crops that produce them. Obviously, it is important to avoid glyphosate contamination in all your food, which you can minimize by buying only certified organic foods.
Finally, you want to optimize your innate immune system and one of the best ways to do that is to get enough sun exposure, wearing in your bathing suit, to have your vitamin level reach 60 to 80 ng/ml (100 to 150 nmol/l).
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.
The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.
In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.
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This article was originally published by Duluth Reader in September 2010, updated version on Global Research on January 11, 2021
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In 1973, Dr. D. L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University, published a ground-breaking psychiatric study in the January 19 issue of Science magazine. The article exposed a serious short-coming in the psychiatric hospital system at the time, and therefore it became very controversial. Dr. Rosenhan designed the study to try to answer the question in the title of this article: “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?”
The now famous (some of the offended or embarrassed psychiatrists preferred to call it “infamous”) experiment that was carried out involved 12 different psychiatric hospitals and 8 different people, mostly professionals (including the author). Each of the eight were totally and certifiably sane “pseudo-patients”.
Each one secretly gained admission to one or two different mental hospitals by falsely complaining to a psychiatrist that they had been hearing voices over the past few weeks. The “voices” in each case were saying only the three words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” No visual hallucinations or other psychological abnormalities were relayed to the examining psychiatrist. Except for the fake “chief complaint”, the intake histories relayed by the patients were entirely truthful. Each individual was immediately admitted to the target psychiatric hospital, much to the surprise of most of the pseudo-patients.
All but one of the admitted “patients” were given a diagnosis of “schizophrenia”. The other one was labeled “manic-depressive”. When they were discharged, the eleven had discharge diagnoses of “schizophrenia, in remission,” despite the fact that absolutely no psychotic or manic behaviors had been observed during their stays.
After admission, the pseudo-patients all acted totally sane, each emphasizing to the hospital staff member that the voices had disappeared. When given the chance, each also asked about when they could be discharged. Those questions were largely ignored by staff.
Despite the fact that each one acted totally normally throughout, hospital stays averaged 19 days, ranging from 7 to 52 days.
The patients engaged in all the normal ward activities except for the fact that they never swallowed the variety of antipsychotic pills that had been prescribed for them. The only obvious difference between the behaviors of the experimental group and the regular patients was that each of them took notes during their hospitalizations. On several occasions, a staff member wrote in the patient’s chart: “the patient engages in note-taking behavior”. Otherwise none of the staff seemed interested in any of the patient’s behaviors.
Although the pseudo-patients planned to secretly smuggle out their daily notes, they eventually stopped trying to hide the fact that they were recording their impressions of their stays, and they soon stopped the smuggling operations – with no consequences.
The average daily contact with the therapeutic staff averaged only 6.8 minutes per day (mean 3.9 – 25.1 minutes) and that included the admission interviews, ward meetings, group and individual psychotherapy contacts, case conferences and discharge meetings.
The group observed that attendants only came outside the locked “cage” 11.5 times per 8-hour shift but usually the staff only interacted minimally with the patients when doing so. The staff psychiatrists rarely interacted meaningfully with any patient. If any interaction occurred, it was usually rather patronizing.
None of the professional therapeutic staff ever suspected that any of the 12 were pseudo- patients, whereas many of the actual patients knew for certain that they were faking. These patients (who were probably actually swallowing their medications) often said things like: “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.” The therapeutic staff never tumbled to the subterfuge. The only people who recognized normality were those who themselves had been labeled “insane”.
Upon the publication of the Rosenhan paper, there arose an enormous uproar from the psychiatric community about the “ethics” of performing such a study. Rosenhan was attacked viciously by those who had been fooled or had themselves jumped to erroneous psychiatric diagnoses in the past.
Because of the controversy, Rosenhan announced that a follow-up study would be done in a certain research and teaching hospital whose staff had heard about the first stu but doubted that such errors could occur in their own hospital. The staff was led to believe that sometime in the next 3 months there would be one or more pseudo-patients attempting to be admitted. However, by design, no pseudo-patients actually attempted admission.
Among the total of 193 patients that were admitted for psychiatric treatment during the 3-month period, 41 genuine patients (20 % of the total) were suspected, with high confidence, of being pseudo-patients by at least one member of the staff. 23 of the 41 were suspected of being fake patients by a psychiatrist, and 19 were suspected by both a psychiatrist and one other staff member. On the bright side, their heightened vigilance saved 41 normal people from receiving a diagnosis of permanent mental illness and the prescribing of brain-altering drugs.
Among the conclusions the reader can draw from these two experiments are these important and quite logical ones:
1] The sane are not “sane” all of the time, nor are those labeled “insane” actually insane all of the time
Therefore, definitions of sanity or insanity may often be erroneous.
2] Sanity and insanity have cultural variations
What is viewed as normal in one culture may be seen as quite aberrant in another. As just one example, there was a famous experiment contrasting American and British psychiatrists and each country’s diagnostic differences. The two groups studied identical video-taped interviews of a group of psychiatric patients. In that series of cases, American psychiatrists diagnosed “schizophrenia” far more often than did British psychiatrists.
3] Bizarre behaviors in people constitute only a small fraction of total behavior
For example, violent, even homicidal people are nonviolent most of the time.
4] Psychiatric diagnoses, even those made in error, carry with them personal, legal and social stigmas that can be impossible to shake and which often last a lifetime
It is a fact that hallucinations can occur in up to 10% of normal people. Vivid flashbacks in patients with PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) have, in the past, been commonly and tragically misdiagnosed as “hallucinations”. Therefore, those unfortunate patients can be permanently labeled (and then permanently over-drugged) as a chronic “schizophrenic of undetermined etiology rather than as an otherwise normal patient with a history of psychological trauma that was having temporary “flashbacks”. (Note that combat-traumatized war veterans prior to the 1990s were often mis-diagnosed – and therefore mis-treated – as schizophrenics.).
Hallucinations can normally occur during certain phases of sleep, half-waking states, sleep deprivation, or from drug effects – either because of neurotoxic or psychotoxic effects from brain-altering, psycho-stimulating prescription (or illicit) drugs or from withdrawal from sedating antipsychotic drugs. It is not uncommon for Novartis’s Ritalin; cocaine; Shire’s Adderall; speed; or Eli Lilly’s Prozac; Pfizer’s Zoloft; Sandoz/Novartis’s Paxil; Forest Lab’sLexapro; Solvay/Abbott’s Luvox; to cause (drug-induced) psychotic episodes.
It is also well known that drug-induced mania (and thus a false diagnosis of bipolar disorder “of unknown etiology”) can occur from even standard doses of most psycho-stimulating antidepressant drugs, especially the SSRIs (“selective” serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But mania can also occur during withdrawal from “minor” tranquilizer drugs (such as the Valium-type benzodiazepines) or “major” tranquilizers (such as antipsychotics like Pfizer’sGeodon; Smith Kline & French’s (GSK) Thorazine; Janssen’s (& Johnson) Haldol; Janssen/J & J) Risperdal;Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa; Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (GSK) Abilify; AstraZeneca’s Seroquel; Sandoz’s (Novartis) Clozaril; etc.)
One well-done study showed that a significant percentage of patients admitted from one psychiatric hospital emergency room was ultimately discharged with a diagnosis SSRI-induced mania and not “bipolar disorder of unknown etiology”. The cause of those ER visits was not a mental disorder but rather a drug-induced neurological disorder that was self-limited and best treated by stopping or tapering-down the offending drug.
Rosenhan rightly points out, reminding readers of Jack Nicholson’s and the Chief’s characters in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”:
“How many people…are sane but not recognized as such in our psychiatric institutions? How many have been needlessly stripped of their privileges of citizenship, from the right to vote and drive or of handling their own accounts? How many have feigned insanity in order to avoid the consequences of their behavior and, conversely, how many would rather stand trial for a crime than live interminable in a psychiatric hospital because they were wrongly thought to be mentally ill? How many have been stigmatized by well-intentioned, but nevertheless erroneous, diagnoses?”
To those concerns, I would add, how many patients have suffered the brain-disabling and neurotoxic and neurodegenerative consequences of dangerous, dependency-inducing, and very powerful psychiatric drugs that, if used long enough can easily produce dementia as well as deadly withdrawal effects when the dosages are cut down or stopped?
Rosenhan’s study has far more implications for our society today than in 1973. Back then there was only small numbers of relatively untested psychiatric drugs to be concerned about compared to the hundreds of even more toxic drugs that are being given to more and more people. Both the old “obsolete” drugs and the “modern”, over-hyped drugs in the current psychiatrist’s armamentaria have been discovered to be brain-damaging and often addictive.
However, today there are scores and scores of what the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries euphemistically call “second and third generation”, “novel” or “atypical” psychostimulants, anti-depressants or anti-psychotics (see lists above) that were never tested for long-term safety or efficacy before they were granted marketing approval by the FDA. Many of them are commonly used in hugely expensive cocktail combinations which likewise have never been tested for long-term OR short-term safety in the animal labs, much less thoroughly tested in human long-term clinical trials.
All of these psychiatric drugs enter the blood stream and then go everywhere the blood goes, including liver, kidneys, heart, brain, etc. Psych drugs are bio-accumulative substances that are considered hazardous materials by professional waste management crews at manufacturing sites. Such chemicals need to be handled with extreme care – unless, of course, they are prescribed by unaware physicians or nurse practitioners for lifetime use by poorly-informed, obedient patients who may not have adequate liver detoxification capabilities and who might also be taking other prescription drugs with unknown drug-drug interactions. The irony of that reality should give us all pause.
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Choice quotes from Rosenhan’s original article entitled “On Being Sane in Insane Places”. (Science magazine 1973, Vol. 179 p. 250 – 258)
“It is commonplace, for example, to read about murder trials wherein eminent psychiatrists for the defense are contradicted by equally eminent psychiatrists for the prosecution on the matter of the defendant’s sanity.”
“Psychological suffering exists…but do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?… Psychiatric diagnosis betrays little about the patient but much about the environment in which an observer finds him.”
“The view has grown that psychological categorization of mental illness is useless at best and downright harmful, misleading, and pejorative at worst.”
“Despite their public ‘show’ of sanity, the pseudo-patients were never detected, and each was discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia ‘in remission.’”
“Once labeled schizophrenic, the pseudo-patients (in the study group) were stuck with that label. If the pseudo-patient was to be discharged, he must naturally be ‘in remission’; but he was not sane, nor, in the institution’s view, had he ever been sane.”
“It was quite common for fellow patients to ‘detect’ the pseudo-patient’s sanity. The fact that fellow patients could recognize normality when staff did not raises important questions.”
“Physicians are more inclined to call a healthy person sick (a false positive) than a sick person healthy (a false negative). The reasons for this are not hard to find: it is clearly more dangerous to misdiagnose illness than health. Better to err on the side of caution, to suspect illness even among the healthy.”
“’Patient engaged in writing behavior’ was the daily nursing comment on one of the pseudo-patients who was never questioned about his writing. Given that the patient is in the hospital, he must be psychologically disturbed. And given that he is disturbed, continuous writing must be a behavioral manifestation of that disturbance, perhaps a subset of the compulsive behaviors that are sometimes correlated with schizophrenia.”
“One tacit characteristic of psychiatric diagnosis is that it locates the sources of aberration within the individual and only rarely within the complex of stimuli that surrounds him.”
“Often enough, a patient would go ‘berserk’ because he had, wittingly or unwittingly, been mistreated by, say, an attendant.”
“Never were the staff found to assume that they themselves or the structure of the hospital had anything to do with a patient’s behavior.”
“A psychiatric label has a life and an influence of its own. Such labels, conferred by mental health professionals, are as influential on the patient as they are on his relatives and friends, and it should not surprise anyone that the diagnosis acts on all of them as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, the patient himself accepts the diagnosis, with all of its surplus meanings and expectations and behaves accordingly.”
“There is enormous overlap in the behaviors of the sane and the insane. The sane are not ‘sane’ all of the time. Similarly, the insane are not always insane. It makes no sense to label (anyone as)permanently depressed on the basis of an occasional depression…”
“I may hallucinate because I am sleeping, or I may hallucinate because I have ingested a peculiar drug. These are termed sleep-induced hallucinations (or dreams) and drug-induced hallucinations, respectively. But when the stimuli to my hallucinations are unknown, that is called craziness, or schizophrenia.”
“The average amount of time spent by attendants outside of the cage was 11.3 percent (range, 3 to 52 percent). It was the relatively rare attendant who spent time talking with patients…”
“Those with the most power have the least to do with patients, and those with the least power are the most involved with them.”
“Neither anecdotal nor ‘hard’ data can convey the overwhelming sense of powerlessness which invades the individual as he is continually exposed to the depersonalization of the psychiatric hospital.”
“Heavy reliance upon psychotropic medication tacitly contributes to depersonalization by convincing staff that treatment is indeed being conducted and that further patient contact may not be necessary.”
“The facts of the matter are that we have known for a long time that diagnoses are often not useful or reliable, but we have nevertheless continued to use them.”
“Finally, how many patients might be ‘sane’ outside the psychiatric hospital but seem insane within it…”
“It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.”
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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired rural family physician from Duluth, Minnesota. For the past decade since his retirement, Dr Kohls has written a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His column, titled Duty to Warn, has been re-published and archived at websites around the world.
Dr Kohls practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career, primarily helping psychiatric patients who had become addicted to their cocktails of dangerous, addictive psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His Duty to Warn columns often deal with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-prescribing, over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing and sickness-promoting food industry.
Dr Kohl is a a frequent contributor to Global Research
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.
***
VAERS data released today showed 227,805 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, including 4,201 deaths and 18,528 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and May 14, 2021.
The number of reported adverse events following COVID vaccines surpassed 200,000 according to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data comes directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Today’s data show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and May 14, a total of 227,805 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 4,201 deaths — an increase of 144 over the previous week — and 18,528 serious injuries, up 1,338 since last week.
This week’s data showed 943 total adverse events, including 23 rated as serious, among 12- to -17-year-olds.
In the U.S., 268.4 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of May 14. This includes115 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 144 million doses of Pfizer and 9 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine.
Of the 4,201 deaths reported as of May 14, 23% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 16% occurred within 24 hours and 38% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
This week’s VAERS data show:
20% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
54% of those who died were male, 44% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased.
The average age of death was 74.7 and the youngest deaths reported include two 15-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1187918 and 1242573 ) and a 16-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1225942). There were other reported deaths in children under 16 that could not be confirmed or contained obvious errors.
Of the 2,275 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 51% were reported after Pfizer-BioNTechvaccinations, 42% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 192 cases, or 10%, of Bell’s Palsy cases were reported in conjunction with J&J.
COVID vaccines may not work for millions with underlying conditions As The Defender reportedMay 19, some experts are questioning the CDC’s recommendation that immunocompromised people get vaccinated after new research showed 15% to 80% of people with underlying health disorders and those on immunosuppressive medications mount few, if any, antibodies to COVID vaccines.
Yet, current CDC guidelines indicate those with compromised immune systems should be vaccinated for COVID even though “no data are available to establish COVID vaccine safety and efficacy in these groups” as people with compromised immune systems or those who take immunosuppressants for a medical condition were largely excluded from vaccine clinical trials.
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician, said it’s the responsibility of the CDC to determine the risks and benefits of every vaccine for different groups of people. For COVID vaccines, Nass said, the CDC has failed to publish that information, or tell the public which groups might be at a higher risk of suffering an adverse reaction that far outweighs any potential benefit.
Ninth fully vaccinated yankee player tests positive for COVID
As The Defender reported May 19, a ninth, fully vaccinated member of the New York Yankees organization tested positive for COVID. Most of the reported cases were asymptomatic. All nine were vaccinated with the J&J shot, making these cases what the CDC calls “breakthrough” infections.
Some in the medical community claim this is proof COVID vaccines work –– because none of the nine became seriously ill or were hospitalized. A CNN article today quoted an infectious disease physician who said the mild cases were evidence the vaccines worked. But Dr. Meryl Nass, told The Defender that the data on COVID infections show young, healthy athletes wouldn’t be expected to become seriously ill from COVID, regardless of vaccination status.
Nass said the breakthrough cases raise questions about COVID test accuracy and the vaccine’s ability to prevent the virus and its transmission.
Employers may be held liable for “any adverse reaction” if they mandate COVID vaccines
On May 20, The Defender reported that new guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will hold employers liable for adverse reactions if they require employees be vaccinated for COVID as a condition of employment, which could negatively impact the employer’s safety rating.
In the Frequently Asked Questions section of OSHA’s website having to do with COVID safety compliance, a question was asked whether an adverse reaction to a COVID vaccine had to be recorded if an employer mandated vaccination as a condition for employment.
“If you require your employees to be vaccinated as a condition of employment (i.e., for work-related reasons), then any adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related. The adverse reaction is recordable if it is a new case under 29 CFR 1904.6 and meets one or more of the general recording criteria in 29 CFR 1904.7.”
Conversely, OSHA said it will exercise enforcement discretion and will not require adverse reactions be recorded when an employer only “recommends” that employees receive the vaccine, while noting that for this discretion to apply, the vaccine must be truly voluntary.
In determining whether a vaccine is “voluntary,” the website states, “an employee’s choice to accept or reject the vaccine cannot affect [his or her] performance rating or professional advancement,” and that an “employee who chooses not to receive the vaccine cannot suffer any repercussions from this choice.”
If employees are not free to choose whether or not to receive the vaccine without fearing negative recourse, then the vaccine is required and employers should refer to the section on COVID vaccines as a condition to employment.
J&J knew about issues at plant manufacturing its vaccine seven months before shut down
On May 20, The Defender reported that the House Select Committee on Coronavirus launched a probe into Emergent BioSolutions — the plant manufacturing J&J’s vaccine — last month after the company acknowledged “serious deficiencies” in the company’s manufacturing that caused a mix-up of AstraZeneca and J&J doses.
During a congressional hearing Wednesday, it was revealed that J&J had documented serious contamination risks at the Emergent Baltimore plant in June 2020 — seven months before a contamination incident ruined 15 million doses of COVID vaccine and derailed the company’s vaccine production plans.
A memorandum released prior to the hearing raised questions about J&J’s lack of oversight of the Baltimore facility, large bonuses paid to top executives despite failures, and described other evidence recently obtained by the House panel in their ongoing investigation into Emergent.
According to Business Insider, CEO of Emergent, Robert Kramer, admitted to the House of Representatives during the hearing that more than 100 million doses of J&J’s vaccine are on hold due to possible contamination.
It was the first time Kramer admitted the high figure of potentially spoiled vaccines after The New York Times reported in April the facility may have jeopardized 62 million vaccine doses in addition to ruining 15 million doses through cross-contamination with AstraZeneca vaccine ingredients.
“No one is more disappointed than we are that we had to suspend our 24/7 manufacturing of new vaccine,” Kramer said. “I apologize for the failure of our controls.”
Eric Clapton blames propaganda for severe adverse reaction to AstraZeneca
On May 17, The Defender reported that 76-year-old Eric Clapton suffered a severe adverse reaction after getting the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine that left him fearing he would never play again.
“Needless to say the reactions were disastrous, my hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks. I feared I would never play again,” Clapton said. “But the propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone.”
Days after Clapton’s criticism of vaccine “propaganda,” the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. vaccine makers are sponsoring ad campaigns targeting the roughly one-third of Americans who are reluctant to get a COVID vaccine.
Pfizer, Moderna, Regeneron and other pharmaceutical companies are sponsoring ads on TV, radio and social media praising COVID vaccines and medications in an effort to increase vaccinations. Unlike ads for drugs where brand names are featured, general “get the vaccine” ads don’t have to follow legal guidelines, which include listing the drug’s potential side effects.
74 days and counting, CDC ignores The Defender’s inquiries
According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”
On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. After repeated attempts, by phone and email, to obtain a response to our questions, a health communications specialist from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force contacted us on March 29 — three weeks after our initial inquiry.
The individual received our request for information from VAERS, but said she had never received our list of questions, even though employees we talked to several times said CDC press officers were working through the questions and confirmed the representative had received them. We provided the list of questions again along with a new deadline, but never received a response.
The Defender also followed up with the CDC’s media department, which told us the COVID response unit would be informed that the health communications specialist never responded. No explanation was given as to why our inquiries were ignored. We were told to call back, which we did numerous times.
On May 19, a CDC employee said our questions had been reviewed and our inquiry was pending in their system, but would not provide us with a copy of the response. It has been 74 days since we sent our first email inquiring into VAERS data and reports.
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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Oregon is telling workplaces, businesses and places of worship that mask-less people can now enter such establishments, but only with proof of a full COVID-19 vaccine.
The Oregon Health Authority announced the order Wednesday, following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently loosening guidance on mask wearing, as virus infection and death rates drop across the country.
The agency says such establishments now have the “option” to adjust their masking guidance to allow fully vaccinated people to no longer wear a mask in their establishments. However, in doing so such establishments “must have a policy in place to check the vaccination status of all individuals before they enter their establishment.”
Furthermore, such establishments that do not create such policies “will maintain the same masking guidance listed below, regardless of an individual’s vaccination status,” the agency also said.
The statewide policy is the first of its kind in the country, according to the Epoch Times newspaper.
The policy is also raising concerns about those who don’t want to get vaccinated over such concerns as side effects, efficacy, and only Food and Drug Administration emergency-use approval for the shots.
The American Civil Liberties Union argues having so-called “vaccine passport systems” will create two tiers of unvaccinated and vaccinated people.
A spokesperson for business group Oregon Business and Industry, Nathaniel Brown, told the New York Times the group has “serious concerns about the practicality of requiring business owners and workers to be the enforcer.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said last weekend that local governments, not the federal government, will be driving “vaccine mandates.”
“We’re not counting on vaccine mandates at all. It may very well be that local businesses, local jurisdictions will work toward vaccine mandates. That is going to be locally driven and not federally driven,” Walensky told NBC.
New York is considering a similar passport – the Excelsior Pass – that local governments are considering requiring for sports events, weddings and businesses, the newspaper also reports.
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Syrians went to their embassy, or consulate, in dozens of countries abroad to vote for president on May 20, while the domestic vote will take place May 26. Some voiced their vote for President Bashar al-Assad was based on his ability to steer Syria out of a 10-year crisis, and their recollection that conditions in Syria were better before the crisis.
Syrian voters in Lebanon compared the benefits of the Syrian government, such as free healthcare and free education, with the non-existent situation in Lebanon, where even Lebanese children have no state education provided, and there are no free Lebanese public hospitals. Voters began waiting in lines from 5 am outside the Syrian embassy in Yarze, north of Beirut. Lebanese security forces were deployed to ensure the safety of the voters as groups of men attacked Syrians in their cars with stones and sticks.
Over 1 million Syrians are living in Lebanon, some having registered as refugees, and the rest as economic migrants who fled terrorist occupations and lost income due to the crisis. Lebanon’s population is just about 3 million, and with 1 million Syrians weighing heavily on Lebanon’s infrastructure and resources as the country fell into financial and political collapse.
Some Syrians did not vote, fearing the Lebanese army checkpoints, who would discover they had an expired residency permit because of strict laws which make it difficult to live legally in Lebanon. Protesters tried to block buses and cars carrying hundreds of Syrians heading to vote, many of whom carried banners in support of President Assad.
The Syrian Social Nationalist Party was also present. It is a secular party with members and offices around the world. The SSNP fought terrorism inside Syria and Lebanon. They are part of the resistance movement in the region, against the occupation of Palestine, and are the oldest political party in the region, dating from 1932.
Besides the incumbent President Assad, the others campaigning for the position are Abdullah Salloum Abdullah, former state minister of parliamentary affairs, and Mahmoud Ahmad Marei, who heads the National Democratic Front, an opposition party.
Syrian Ambassador to Lebanon Abdul Kareem Ali said, “We are asking Western countries and the countries that support terrorism to re-assess their position towards Syria.” The UN, the EU, and the US say conditions in Syria are not ready for the return of refugees. The US and EU have enacted sanctions against the Syrian government which are a humanitarian threat to the Syrian people. The Syrian crisis was supported by the US, UK, and other western nations in an attempt to overthrow the existing secular government in Syria, intending to install a pro-US puppet government made up of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in echoes of the similar project they undertook in Egypt during the “Arab Spring”. The US project was successful in Egypt, only to be met by an uprising by the Egyptian people who overthrew President Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood administration.
Mahmoud Ahmed Marei is the first opposition figure in the history of Syria’s presidential elections. The National Democratic Front candidate has explained that the Syrian national opposition is not attached to Western agendas to thwart the democratic process in Syria. He makes a distinction between “national opposition” which is largely based inside Syria, and “foreign-backed opposition” which wants to apply Western agendas and to divide the country into segments. The candidate stresses that his campaign prioritizes ending the occupation of illegal forces in Syria, such as the US and Turkish forces, which occupy considerable swathes of land in northern and eastern Syria. Marei’s main goal is a national dialog conference to be held in Damascus with the Syrian government and opposition working together to reconcile differences for a peaceful solution to the 10-year crisis. He also calls for the release of all political detainees, as well as those kidnapped by rebel groups.
Denmark has begun the tell Syrians to go home, as other western countries feel the burden of hosting economic migrants. Ambassador Ali called on Syrians in Lebanon to return home, as over a million Syrians living in neighboring countries including Lebanon have returned in the past year and a half.
US, UK, Canada, Turkey, Germany and other western allies have closed Syrian embassies; therefore, preventing any vote, or participation in democracy among Syrian expatriates. The Biden administration has said it will not recognize the result of Syria’s presidential election. Germany banned any voting at Syrian missions in their country.
The countries which had voting at Syrian embassies: Russia; Australia; Japan; Malaysia; Sweden; Spain; Cyprus; Argentina; India; China; Iran; Indonesia; Armenia; Brazil; Egypt; United Arab Emirates; Iraq; Kuwait; Bahrain; Oman; Algeria; Lebanon; Jordan; Sudan, France.
Lebanon is a sectarian form of government and remains deeply divided over the secular government in Damascus. Over 800,000 Syrians are registered as refugees with the United Nations, but Lebanese officials believe the total number of Syrians in Lebanon exceeds one million.
The highly sectarian Lebanese Forces Party leader Samir Geagea called on the Lebanese government to deport all Syrians who vote for President Assad. Lebanese Forces Party extremists attacked cars and buses with pictures of President Assad at intersections in and around Beirut and in the eastern Bekaa region. In another attack, a Lebanese driver ran into a group of Syrians hitting one man.
Videos on social media have circulated widely showing buses and lines of cars carrying Syrian voters being attacked by anti-Syrian Lebanese wielding sticks. One such video showed Lebanese security forces standing near a car with smashed windows in Sassine Square in Beirut. Jounieh, just north of Beirut, has also been the scene of violent attacks on Syrians by sectarian extremists. Another video shows six men surrounding a vehicle and kicking through its windshield while attacking the passengers inside. Cars that carried posters in support of President Assad were attacked by mobs as they passed through neighborhoods populated by anti-Syrian Lebanese.
Local Lebanese media aired videos showing men beating passengers sitting in cars on the highway north of Beirut who displayed support of President Assad. The state-run Lebanese National News Agency reported that “some people were injured.”
After 10-years of fighting terrorism, which split the country, Syria is succeeding in electing its president, in conformity with the 2012 Syrian constitution. Syria now looks forward to rebuilding what the west destroyed. Important allies, such as Russia and Iran, have fought to give the Syrian people a chance to return to the stability they once knew.
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Israel’s crimes against the people of Palestine reveal a record of barbarism and cruelty unmatched in the modern world except for the unrivaled chronical of suffering resulting from murderous wars perpetrated by U.S. imperialism in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Nicaragua, and beyond.
The offspring of the Zionist movement, the state of Israel, has spawned a history of terrorism as vicious as it is pernicious. Settler colonial projects are racist and genocidal. They involve the ethnic cleansing of native populations.
Israel’s history mirrors America’s. Beginning with the first English colony at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, settlers moved ever westward, bringing disease, forced population transfers, massacres, wars, broken treaties, reservations, and genocide to Native Americans. The European invasion produced a holocaust for indigenous peoples on this continent that has yet to be acknowledged, let alone redressed, by the American government.
In historic Palestine, the colonists were European Zionists who set out to create a Jewish state on a land inhabited by an Arab population. The unrelenting colonization of Palestine was undertaken by a people who claim victimhood. The Nazi holocaust has long been referred to by Zionists as a justification of the creation of a Jewish state as well as a means to prevent criticism of Israel. However, the project of Zionist colonialization predates the Nazi holocaust by more than half a century, preceding the publication of Theodore Herzl’s book The JewishState in 1897. For Zionists, any criticism of Israel is labeled an expression of anti-Semitism, providing a shield for their criminality.
Victimization propaganda is clearly exemplified by Israel’s repeated assertion that it bombs the Gaza Strip as an act of self-defense in response to rockets fired by Hamas, as if the settler state does nothing to provoke the missile barrage.
It does plenty. And it has done so since its vile inception.
The Zionist movement introduced terrorism to the Middle East during its ‘War of Independence’ against the British when the Irgun and Stern paramilitary gangs murdered British commanders, shot British constables, hung captured British soldiers, assassinated a United Nations representative, and bombed crowded Palestinian venues.
The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, causing the deaths of 91 people including Arab, British, Jewish, Armenian, Egyptian, Russian, and Greek residents, workers, and visitors on July 22, 1946.
Zionist terrorists belonging to the Stern gang assassinated United Nations representative Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden on September 17, 1948. Bernadotte was on a mission to mediate the conflict that erupted after the U.N. General Assembly, in a corrupted vote, partitioned Palestine on November 29, 1947 giving 56% of the most fertile land to Jewish settlers and 44% of the land to the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.
The Irgun and Stern gangs bombed Arab fruit and vegetable markets, busses, coffee shops, and homes slaughtering Palestinians throughout the 1930s. Two notorious right-wing terrorists, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, became Prime Ministers of Israel.
The Zionist terror campaign to cleanse indigenous Arabs and Christians from the land they inhabited for centuries developed in three phases. The first phase began before the United Nations partition resolution in 1947. The second phase took place six months prior to the end of the British Mandate and withdrawal of British troops on May 14, 1948. And the third phase commenced with the declaration of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, when the nascent Jewish state implemented ‘Plan Dalet’ to drive Palestinians from their homeland.
A horrific massacre was carried out by the Irgun gang in the village of Deir Yassin where 107 unarmed men, women, and children were murdered in cold blood on April 9, 1948. Other massacres were perpetrated by Haganah and Palmach troops.
Over 500 Palestinian villages were occupied and depopulated. More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee for their lives in the onslaught. The armies of five Arab countries intervened to stop the rampage of Zionist forces and were defeated. By the end of 1948, a terrible Nakba, or catastrophe, befell the Palestinian people as 78% of historic Palestine was lost.
Israel’s expansionist machinations did not stop there.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister unleased the Haganah and Mossad in 1950 to conduct a covert terrorist bombing campaign against Iraqi Jews in order to induce the Jewish community living in Iraq to flee to Israel.
In another infamous act of terrorism, the Palestinian village of Qibya was attacked by Israeli troops who murdered 69 defenseless men, women, and children on October 14, 1953. Leading the attack was Ariel Sharon.
In 1956, Israel, supported by the British and the French, attacked Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez canal. The assailants were forced to cease their attack by an irate President Eisenhower, who vehemently opposed the operation. It was the last time an American president stood up to Israel and the American Zionist lobby.
In 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in a six-day war that brought defeat and humiliation to Arab armies. Israel conquered the remaining 22% of Palestine, Syria’s Golan Heights, and Egypt’s Sinai desert. Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 and returned the Sinai to Egypt as the result of the Camp David Accords of 1978.
During the war Israel attacked the USS Liberty in international waters near the Sinai, killing 34 American crew members and wounding 171 others. Israel was never held accountable for the attack.
Immediately after the war, Israel launched a settler movement in the newly occupied territories that involved construction of huge Jewish only settlement blocks and bypass roads connecting the colonies. A massive separation wall was constructed on Palestinian land in 2002. Approximately 622,670 settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem as of 2019, rendering proposals for a two-state solution void of any viable meaning.
In 1972, Israel began an ongoing program of assassinating Palestinian leaders. The extra-judicial executions are part of a terror campaign that included the murder of Yasir Arafat and Khalid al-Wazir of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Wadie Haddad and Abu Ali Mustafa of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Kamel Nasser, a Palestinian Christian poet. Israel assassinated the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. The Mossad tried and failed to kill Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in 1997.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria went to war against Israel to recapture land lost in 1967 and were defeated. Both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union went on nuclear high alert during the conflict. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries slapped an oil embargo on the United States as punishment for its support of Israel during the war.
In 1978, Israel invaded South Lebanon in the “Litani River Operation” to drive PLO fighters away from its southern border. Between 1,100 and 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed and 250,000 displaced by the invasion.
In 1979, Benjamin Netanyahu organized the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism. At the conference, Netanyahu, a disciple of Irgun and Stern terrorists Began and Shamir, announced a “war on terror” by which he meant a war on Palestinian resistance fighters who would henceforth be criminalized as “terrorists” justifying preemptive military strikes, assassinations, home demolitions, preventive detention, torture, and suspension of civil and human rights. Known as the “Likud Doctrine”, the “war on terror” would be adopted as the “Bush Doctrine” after 9/11 by neoconservative allies of Israel.
In 1981, Israel bombed a nuclear facility in Iraq. The attack was supported in Congress by Joe Biden who called himself “Israel’s best Catholic friend.”
In 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon, leading to an occupation that continued until their army was driven out by Lebanese resistance fighters led by Hezbollah in 2000. An estimated 17,825 Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians were killed and 30,203 were wounded during the invasion. In one horrifying incident, Israeli troops commanded by Ariel Sharon surrounded the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila near Beirut allowing right-wing Christian Phalange militias to enter the camps and massacre 3,500 Palestinian civilians. Photographs of the carnage shocked the world, revealing Israel’s responsibility for the savage crime.
On December 9, 1987, Palestinians revolted against brutal conditions spawned by twenty years of military occupation. The first Palestinian Intifada was met with brutal repression. Israel’s military was ordered to shoot protesters, deliberately break the bones of captured Palestinians with batons and rocks, routinely torture prisoners in Israeli jails, abduct and torture children, and demolish homes.
One of the most notorious massacres of Palestinians was perpetrated by an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein on February 26, 1996 in Hebron. Goldstein, an American physician from Brooklyn, New York, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque and shot 29 Palestinian men and boys to death. He wounded another 125 Muslims worshipers during the rampage. Goldstein was a member of the Jewish Defense League, a para-military organization founded by the fascistic Rabbi Meir Kahane. The city of Hebron remains on military lock down to this day as a handful of Jewish settlers terrorize the Palestinian population.
The Jewish fundamentalist settler movement comprises ultra-nationalist groups such as Gush Emunim founded by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, an unapologetic Arab killer, who believe it is their duty to “redeem,” meaning steal, the “Promised Land” for “God’s Chosen People.” Gush is one of the most violent settler groups in the West Bank. The history of armed settler violence is extreme. Settlers routinely gun down Palestinians, firebomb their homes, cut down their olive and citrus trees, some over 100 years old and considered sacred, and steal Palestinian land.
On April 18, 1996, Israeli troops shelled a United Nations compound in Southern Lebanon killing 106 Lebanese civilians, half of whom were children. The dead were among 800 civilians who took shelter from an Israeli bombardment of their towns and villages. The Qana massacre was ordered by Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who accused Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields, a persistent Israeli lie meant to excuse the murder of civilians.
On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon provoked a massive revolt by invading the Haram al-Sharif compound which houses Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, surrounded by hundreds of armed police. The Al-Aqsa Intifada was the second Palestinian uprising fought to win freedom from Israel’s malicious occupation.
In 2002, Ariel Sharon waged war to destroy the Oslo peace process, obliterate the Palestinian Authority, and crush the Al-Aqsa Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli military targeted Palestinian security forces and conducted massacres in Bethlehem, Nablus, Ramallah, and Jenin refugee camp. The atrocities were supported by George W. Bush.
In 2003, right-wing pro-Israel neoconservative zealots in Washington carried out their plans for war in Iraq by decimating an independent Arab nation supportive of Palestinian independence as part of a fraudulent “War on Terrorism.” The fragmentation of Iraq was supervised by U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer, whose directives followed the blueprint advocated in the Yinon thesis, a policy document that advocated the breakup of Arab countries posing a threat to Israeli hegemony. Over one million Iraqis died as the result of the U.S. destruction of Iraq. The dirty war in Syria is the latest application of the Yinon thesis.
In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a young American peace activist was deliberately crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she tried to block the demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza. Rachel belonged to the International Solidarity Movement, a pacifist organization that opposes the occupation of Palestine. Another youthful ISM peace activist from Britain, Thomas Hurndall, was shot to death by an Israeli sniper as he tried to escort Palestinian children to safety during an Israeli siege in Gaza.
On July 12, 2006, Israel launched a war against Hezbollah that involved the terror bombing of Southern Lebanon and Beirut, causing 1,109 deaths, 4,399 injuries, and 1 million displaced persons with devastating damage to buildings, homes and infrastructure, an Israeli specialty.
With the victory of Hamas in Palestinian national elections held in 2006, Israel imposed a near-starvation blockage on Gaza in 2007, blocking land, sea, and air transportation to the coastal enclave. Gaza, with a population of 2 million Palestinians, 45% of whom are under the age of 14 years, is the largest open-air prison in the world. It is also the poorest, with its inhabitants facing hunger and darkness. The blockade was imposed after the United States attempted to provoke a Palestinian civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. In the fighting, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and the PA exerted authority on behalf of Israel over enclaves in the West Bank.
Not content with starving and humiliating the people of Gaza, Israel launched a series of military campaigns designed to annihilate resistance in the strip.
All of which were genocidal attacks on a captive population conducted under the pretext of fighting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Thousands of Palestinians were killed, injured, crippled, disfigured, and driven from their homes. The infrastructure of Gaza was destroyed and its people only survived because of an elaborate tunnel system built by Hamas that supplemented the small amount of aid allowed into the strip. Egypt’s dictatorial President Sisi attempted to flood the tunnel system at Israel’s behest in 2015.
In 2011, Israel began relentlessly bombing Syria acting as a jihadist air force in the U.S. dirty war against the Assad government. Israel has also provided medical treatment for jihadist fighters.
In 2018, Palestinians launched the “Great March of Return” to reclaim land stolen from them in 1948 and 1967 and to demand an end to the siege in Gaza. Israel brutally repressed peaceful demonstrators by murdering 267 Palestinians and injuring 20,000 to 30,000 others. Some protesters are crippled for life. Others had limbs amputated. The Gandhian approach to civil disobedience can only work if an oppressor has a moral conscience. Israel has none.
In 2021, Israeli operatives killed Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Israel fears that its nuclear monopoly would be broken if Iran developed the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, neutralizing its ability to attack Arab and Muslim countries at will.
Israel’s murderous past proved to be an ominous prelude to what lie ahead.
In May 2021, Israel escalated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, sent its police into the Al-Aqsa Mosque to smash Muslims who protested the evictions of families from their homes, perpetrated genocidal bombings of Gaza in response to rockets fired by Hamas protesting the Al-Aqsa assault, and unleased rabid mobs of right-wing Jewish extremists and armed settlers against Palestinians living in Israeli cities.
Israel committed atrocities by bombing Gaza’s civilian population and destroying infrastructure needed to sustain life. To hide its crimes, Israel bombed Al Jazeera and Associated Press media outlets in Gaza, and declared the strip a “closed military zone” off limits to journalists. The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s farms and infrastructure precipitated a humanitarian crisis as residents are without water, electricity, sanitation, adequate food, and medicine.
Entire families were eradicated in Gaza by Israeli air strikes. Dozens of men, women, and children have been buried alive under the rubble of collapsed apartment buildings.
Imposing a starvation blockade and bombing a defenseless population are crimes against humanity and war crimes. The attacks are savage and sadistic. Israel’s strategic aim is to cripple Hamas and make Gaza uninhabitable. Inflicting collective punishment on a captive population is genocide.
Israel’s war on the Palestinian people is abetted by the United States. Joe Biden’s late calls for a “cease fire” were a rhetorical deception meant to provide Israel with an opportunity to attack Hamas and punish the people of Gaza.
During the Israeli bombardment, 265 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza, including 63 children. Over 72,000 Gazans have been displaced from their homes. Israeli occupation forces shot 10 Palestinian protesters dead in the West Bank. In Israel, 12 Israelis and 2 migrant workers were killed by Hamas missiles.
Palestinians have responded with protest marches and a general strike across the West Bank, Israeli cities, and the Gaza Strip unifying resistance to occupation. Massive pro-Palestinian solidarity protests have taken place in Australia, Bangladesh, Britain, Canada, Chile, France, Jordan, Italy, Germany, Kenya, Morocco, New Zealand, Sudan, South Africa, Switzerland, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and beyond.
In the United States, protesters took to the streets of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Dearborn, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington in solidarity with Palestine.
The message is clear. Millions of people are disgusted by the racist brutality of the Israeli terror state and angrily demand “freedom for Palestine.”
The butchers who run the terror state of Israel and their enablers in Washington have isolated themselves around the world. The U.S. empire is unsustainable. The cost in lives and treasure is too great to endure. Its people will no longer tolerate endless wars, particularly in the Middle East.
In an unprecedented move, members of Congress led by Bernie Sanders are questioning military aid to Israel considering the assault on Gaza. Minnesota representative Betty McCollum introduced a bill designed to restrict military aid to Israel used to violate Palestinian human rights in April 2021, a month prior to the latest Zionist atrocities.
Israel is wedded to imperialism. When America’s empire is finally compelled to stop supporting the apartheid state, Israel will suffer an existential catastrophe, because it has no other friends in the world.
The Zionist project in Israel is a chronicle of relentless barbarity and deceit. Zionism’s core ideology is racist and genocidal. The Zionist state is an apartheid state, a pariah state, a terror state. It is condemned by its own heinous philosophy to provoke contempt and revulsion. The apartheid terror state will not survive the historical reckoning that awaits it.
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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His recent book is titled, The Politics ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com
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The current situation of Israeli house demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah is highlighting the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their indigenous lands in order to protect the demographic dominance of the Israeli Jewish population. The system well under way and being strengthened each year is that of apartheid.
Historical moments
In pre World War I Europe, the various empires were contesting most indigenous lands around the world. The Middle East had newly discovered resources of oil and the militaries of the world were changing from coal fired to oil powered ships of war. In the eyes of the British empire, as well as the burgeoning interests of the U.S. in Saudi oil, a Jewish state made sense, an outpost to keep the Arabs under control as well as to protect the transportation of oil by pipelines to the Mediterranean coast.
A long history of demographic fears is apparent in most of the contributors to the establishment and maintenance of the Israeli state. Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizman all understood that the indigneous Palestinian population would be hostile to their development of a Jewish state in the region. Arguments made to the British government of the period varied, but arguably the ones carrying the most weight were the imperial desires of the British to control the Middle East for its oil resources, oil transportation routes, and its general transportation routes through to Persia and India.
The Balfour letter of 1917 promoted the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, a promissory note, indicating “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” As is common with empires various other intrigues carried on simultaneously, the two most notable being the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide the Ottoman empire into areas of French and British control, as well as the MacMahon-Hussein correspondence recognizing a post war Arab state in former Ottoman lands.
The Balfour letter carried the day. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles went against Woodrow WIlson’s ideals of all nationals having a right to determine their own status and led to the establishment of the French and Palestinian mandates in the Middle East. From then on the British to varying degrees both allowed Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and later fought against the same immigrants, the various Jewish militant groups being described as terrorists at the time. The British also significantly suppressed any Palestinian expressions of independence.
After World War II the recognition of the holocaust gave impetus and sympathy to the Jewish cause. The UN Partition Plan – a plan, not a law – tentatively divided the mandate into two separate states. Britain pulled up stakes and departed, followed by the nakba of 1948 creating the new Israeli state. At the time as many as 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed and as many as 750 000 Palestinians were expelled from the new Israeli territories. Prior to this David Ben Gurion had set plans for expulsion understanding there would be Palestinian resistance.
A large part of the demographic fear had been reduced, but the continued presence of Palestinians remaining in their homeland has since then slowly created an apartheid state, and has since then created a slow moving set of rules and regulations assisting with the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the state and what might be considered by Israel a partial solution – apartheid.
Modern apartheid
Within the past year two significant pronouncements have been made firmly establishing the idea of Israel as an apartheid state. B’tselem, a Jewish human rights organization issued a statement with the summary,
“Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: it is one regime between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.”
Human Rights watch, an international organization headquartered in New York, issued a much larger report declaring that the Israeli government is committing crimes of apartheid.
Apartheid has been a significant part of Israeli plans to ethncially cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population. After the nakba, the more ‘modern’ form of this has been since the 1967 Israeli attack against neighbouring Arab countries and the “occupation” of lands previously controlled by Egypt and Jordan – the ever increasing establishment of settlements in occupied Palestine. The result has been the establishment in conjunction with this of many small non-contiguous bantustan like areas denying any possibility of a Palestinian state, all under the control of the Israeli military complex.
Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, is the current hot spot for house demolitions and the slow creep of ethnic cleansing although similar destruction is served up on an ongoing basis over most remaining Palestinian towns. Gaza, already an open air prison on subsistence rations at best, is being attacked once again as the Israeli’s lash out at Palestinian resistance.
Global apartheid
Apartheid in Israel has its most significant comparisons with the apartheid of South Africa. Many similarities are found between the two systems; there are some differences, but also some of those differences are only by degree.
In the 2012 production “Roadmap to Apartheid” (Journeyman Films, available on Vimeo by subscription) describes many of the similarities while recognizing the demographic aspect of the situation:
“The whole framework of Israeli law is designed to prevent the growth of the non-Jewish population and maintain Jewish numerical and political supremacy – and that’s the framework in which we can understand everything we see inside Israel as well as in the Westbank and Gaza.” [Ali Abunimah]
The structures of apartheid are highly comparable between the two systems: identity passports, passes, and special permits are required; military control of checkpoints where abuse, beatings, and humiliation are used to create fear; the contradictory descriptors of “present absentees” and “foreign natives”.
Ideological similarities can also be found. The idea of a god given land is common to both. The rhetoric of being the victim is used to deny criticism of their actions. In contradiction to that both argue for an “iron fist” used to suppress any resistance.
In a recent Independent Jewish Voices webinar (The fight over BDS: lessons from the South African anti-apartheid movement. April 26, 2020. Available on Youtube.) more similarities can be found. Reactionary campaigns, an international propaganda war is carried out: in South Africa it occurred with TV and magazines, later becoming covert with the establishment of their own false front organizations and assassination of opposition leaders. For Israel, the modern computer web allows for similar hasbara actions as well as using other covert actions.
The hasbara arguments are similar to both situations. The arguments included the notions of being singled out for attack, of using double standards. Opponents are accused of using inflammatory language and of being against society in general. For South Africa, the Soviet Union was the threat to be blocked; now it is Iran, and, well for sure under the auspices of the U.S. empire, Russia.
The South African BDS movement did not target foreign domestic support as much as Israel does. Israeli attempts to criminalize BDS and raise the spectre of anti-Semitism are additions to their current struggle against the small successes of the BDS movement. Along with the anti-Semitism charge, South Africa did not contain as large a religious component whereas in the U.S. the Christain evangelical movement is generally in full support of Israeli ideology replete with all its very real racism.
A common thread
It could be argued it is just a rhetorical continuity, but there is a common thread between South Africa, Israel, and on into the five eyes of the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. The thread should be obvious – British inspired imperial racism and its desire to conquer and control large regions of the world. The five eyes countries are themselves wonderful examples of the application of an apartheid racist system of governance.
Racism is obvious in the U.S. but the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population and its apartheid results are compounded by the racism of slavery. Canada presents a much more clear comparison as a colonial-settler state using the elements of apartheid to – for the most part – successfully ethnically cleanse itself of its indigenous population.
Canada has many elements of an apartheid system based on its British heritage of racist supremacy. The current system, similar to that in the other five eyes countries, is the use of the polite term “reservations” to designate the small left over parcels ‘given’ to the indigenous people. It sounds so much better than bantustans or enclaves – or concentration camps. In order to remove the Indians from their land many tactics were used: military force, starvation, broken promises, disease (purposely contaminated).
Once removed, more tactics were developed to maintain the system: different levels of identification (status, non-status), removal of children, denial of language rights, banishing religious ceremonies, denial of voting, denial of access to the law, removal of tribal hereditary chiefs to be replaced by band councils, more easily controlled by the government. One of the larger elements is the Indian Act of 1876, now institutionalized in the Constitution, effectively limiting what any band can or cannot do without Federal authorization.
Beyond these ‘legal’ systems, many of them supposedly overcome in law although still highly institutionalized within government systems, is the ongoing use of military force. Most recently that has been seen with the struggle of the Wet’suwet’in people attempting to stop a pipeline from crossing their unceded territory (as much of British Columbia is). Protests of support broke out across much of Canada, but the government’s response was to use paramilitarized – and generally racist – police forces to harass and intimidate the protestors.
Canada remains an apartheid country, a well tended one. Arguably it presents a good example for Israel to follow. Currently the two countries have a strong security relationship. Officially Canada supports the two state solution for Israel and all parliamentary parties support this idea without recognizing its impossibility under the current situation. In the meantime the same old tired rhetoric is handed out about the right to defend oneself without recognizing that one side is a colonial settler system with a predominant military force and the support of powerful and wealthy overseas allies, while the other is mainly a bunch of terrorists.
Canadian media is fully complicit with these efforts to present Israel as a beleaguered victim of terrorism, the lone democracy in the Middle East. It is neither the victim nor a democracy – it is the perpetrator of human rights abuses, and within the constructs of a racist apartheid theological state cannot be considered democratic.
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Lawyer Thomas Renz discusses why he and a group of lawyers have filed a temporary restraining order against various government agencies in an Alabama court to halt vaccinations of children.
Among their reasons for filing the order: FDA Emergency Use Authorization in this case is illegal; children have virtually zero chance of getting or transmitting covid; the vaccines are experimental and children should not be experimented upon, the vaccines already have an inordinately high rate of serious adverse reactions and deaths.
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Petition for Temporary Restraining Order
I. Summary
Plaintiffs bring before the Court today a request for a Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), and the relevant subagencies and personnel including but not limited to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), the DHHS Secretary, the DHHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and the DHHS Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, seeking temporary injunctive relief against any existing or further authorization for use in children under the age of 16, of any of the COVID-19 “vaccines”1 that have been approved under the Emergency Use Authorization (“EUA”) provided in 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3. In this Motion, Plaintiffs ask only that the status quo be maintained – that the EUAs not permit the use of COVID-19 vaccines in children under the age of 16, and that no further expansion of the EUAs to children under the age of 16 be granted prior to the resolution of these issues at trial. Such relief would protect the lives and safety of millions of children in the American public for whom serious illness and mortality from COVID-19 represent a zero percent (0%) risk statistically, but who face substantial risks from these experimental injections.
Plaintiffs not only face the imminent threat of irreparable injury of various types absent a TRO, but they also represent a diverse cross-section of the American public. They are doctors and other medical professionals. They are parents and children. They are coaches and mentors. They are healthy, and they suffer from underlying conditions. They are from various states. They are from various walks of life. They are individuals and organizations. They are experts and they are lay people. Most or all have been fully vaccinated in the past. And they all have one thing in common. Absent the requested relief, each of their lives stands to be inexorably and irreparably altered forever.
Plaintiffs will bring suit in the near future. The case will challenge the EUAs for the injections on several counts. It will be made clear to the Court in that case, based on the law and well-founded scientific evidence, that: the EUAs should never have been granted, the EUAs should be revoked immediately, the injections are dangerous biological agents that have the potential to cause substantially greater harm than the COVID-19 disease itself, and numerous laws have been broken in the process of granting these EUAs and pushing these injections on the American people.
In the specific instance of minor Plaintiffs under 16, the Court must consider that an “EUA requires that an intervention address a serious or lifethreatening condition2, and for known and potential benefits of the intervention to be balanced against the known and potential harms.” There is not even a pretense of a factual basis that COVID-19 represents a serious or life-threatening condition for children under 16, since the CDC acknowledges they face 0% risk of mortality from COVID-19 statistically.
The Complaint will include claims for, inter alia (1) a declaration that the extension of the EUAs for the COVID-19 vaccines making them available for use in children under the age of 16 violates 45 CFR § 46.401, et seq., which applies to “all research involving children as subjects, conducted or supported by [DHHS]”; (2) an order enjoining the use of COVID-19 vaccines in children under the age of 16, until such time as the DHHS Secretary has complied with 45 CFR § 46.401, et seq.; and (3) claims for civil money damages against individual government officials within DHHS, in their personal capacities, for violations of the Constitution, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
On May 11, 2021, without any prior notice, the FDA extended the EUA issued for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for use in 12 to 15 year-old children. Given the extreme exigencies, Plaintiffs are seeking the temporary relief set forth herein even before filing their Complaint. Studebaker Corp. v. Griffin, 360 F.2d 692, 694 (2d Cir. 1966); United States v. Lynd, 301 F. 2d 818, 823 (5th Cir. 1962) (“The grant of a temporary restraining injunction need not await any procedural steps perfecting the pleadings”); National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws v. Mullen, 608 F.Supp. 945, 950 n. 5 (N.D. Cal. 1985) (“[o]wing to the peculiar function of the preliminary injunction, it is not necessary that the pleadings be perfected, or even that a complaint be filed, before the order issues”).
II. Plaintiffs
1. America’s Frontline Doctors (“AFLDS”) is a non-partisan, not-forprofit organization of hundreds of member physicians that come from across the country, representing a range of medical disciplines and practical experience on the front lines of medicine. AFLDS’ programs focus on a number of critical issues, including:
Providing Americans with science-based facts about COVID-19;
Protecting physician independence from government overreach;
Combating the “pandemic” using evidence-based approaches without compromising Constitutional freedoms;
Fighting medical “cancel culture” and media censorship;
Advancing healthcare policies that protect the physician-patient relationship;
Expanding COVID-19 treatment options for all Americans who need them; and
Strengthening the voices of front-line doctors in the national healthcare conversation.
AFLDS’ core beliefs, shared by each of its member health care professionals, include the following:
That the American people have the right to accurate information using trusted data derived from decades of practical experience, not politicized science and Big Tech-filtered public health information.
That critical public health decision-making should take place away from Washington and closer to local communities and the physicians that serve them. They are steadfastly committed to protecting the physician-patient relationship.
That front-line and actively practicing physicians should be incorporated into the nation’s healthcare policy conversation.
That safe and effective, over-the-counter COVID preventative and early treatment options should be made available to all Americans who need them. They reject mandatory government lockdowns and restrictions not supported by scientific evidence. They support focused care for the nation’s at-risk population, including seniors and the immunecompromised.
AFLDS, through its member physicians, is deeply committed to maintaining the physician-patient relationship in the face of government encroachment.
Each of AFLDS’ member physicians is also deeply committed to the guiding principle of medicine, “FIRST, DO NO HARM”. They take gravely their ethical obligations to their patients. It is axiomatic that a physician’s duty is to his or her patient.
AFLDS has recommended that the experimental Covid-19 vaccines be prohibited for use in the under-20 age category, and strongly discouraged for use in the healthy population above the age of 20 through the age of 69. These recommendations have two sound and broadly scientific foundations upon which they are based. First, there is the undeniable fact that the Covid19 vaccines are experimental and either lack clinical testing or have presented serious risks for young people in the 12 to 15 age group. The risks and safety evidence based upon such trials as there are, cannot justify the use of these vaccines in younger persons. Because AFLDS has taken the science-based position that it is unethical even to advocate for Covid-19 vaccine administration to persons under the age of 50, its and its membership cannot administer it or support any agency that attempted to do so for juvenile persons in the 12 to 15 age category.
It should be noted here that AFLDS is NOT against vaccines generally as a class of medical interventions. It has praised the speedy progress of the vaccine development program. It has taken care to ensure clarity in its position regarding support of the proper use of approved vaccines and the proper application of emergency use authorizations. It holds sacrosanct the relationship between doctor and patient where truly informed decisions are to be made, taking into consideration all of the factors relating to the patients’ health, risks, co-morbidities and circumstances.
Given these considerations it would be grossly unethical and therefore impossible for AFLDS members to stand idly by while their patients and their patients’ families are subjected to the imminent risk of experimental COVID-19 vaccine injections being administered to minor children. If the EUAs are allowed to stand unrestrained and extended to young children in the 12-15 year age group, AFLDS member physicians will be forced into further untenable positions of unresolvable conflict between their ethical and moral duties to their patients, and the demands of many of the hospitals in which they work.
Many of AFLDS member physician’s employers subscribe to and follow the recommendations of the American Medical Association (“AMA”). In a special meeting in November of 2020, the AMA’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, updated a previously published Ethics Opinion in the AMA Code of Medical Ethics as opinion 8.7, “Routine Universal Immunization of Physicians.”
In this updated opinion, the astonishing position was taken that not only do physicians have an ethical and moral obligation to inject themselves with the experimental COVID-19 vaccination, but they also have an ethical duty to encourage their patients to get injected with the experimental COVID-19 vaccination. The ethics opinion repeatedly uses the phrase “safe and effective” as a descriptor for the experimental COVID-19 vaccination.
The AMA’s ethics opinion goes on to state that institutions may have a responsibility to require immunization of all staff!
“Physicians and other health care workers who decline to be immunized with a safe and effective vaccine, without a compelling medical reason, can pose an unnecessary medical risk to vulnerable patients or colleagues,” said AMA Board Member Michael Suk, MD, JD, MPH, MBA. “Physicians must strike an ethical balance between their personal commitments as moral individuals and their obligations as medical professionals.”
The ethical opinion adopted by the AMA House of Delegates says that doctors “have an ethical responsibility to encourage patients to accept immunization when the patient can do so safely, and to take appropriate measures in their own practice to prevent the spread of infectious disease in health care settings.
[. . .]
“Physician practices and health care institutions have a responsibility to proactively develop policies and procedures for responding to epidemic or pandemic disease with input from practicing physicians, institutional leadership, and appropriate specialists,” says the updated opinion. “Such policies and procedures should include robust infection-control practices, provision and required use of appropriate protective equipment, and a process for making appropriate immunization readily available to staff. During outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease for which there is a safe, effective vaccine, institutions’ responsibility may extend to requiring immunization of staff. 3 (emphasis added)
It is clear from this ethics opinion that AFLDS member physicians would be considered by their employers to be both morally and ethically bound by a duty to encourage 12-15 year old minors to receive the experimental COVID-19 vaccination injection.
The AMA even offers a “COVID-19 VACCINE SCRIPT FOR PATIENT INQUIRIES”.4 Despite being styled as a script for inquiries, the script clearly intends for phone messages and office websites to lead with the following message for every caller, not simply those who wish to inquire about vaccines.
The proposed script reads: “We are encouraging our patients to receive the COVID-19 vaccine when it is available and offered to them.”5
To the extent that the AFLDS member physicians either lack control of their office website or telephone system, or are simply unaware of the message that has been placed there absent their knowledge and consent, the member physicians will have been forced unwittingly into an utterly untenable position. Such would create an unresolvable conflict for the member physicians, and deep confusion for their patients, who would thereby be receiving irreconcilable and contradictory messages from the same office.
To illustrate just how unresolvable these conflicts are, it is necessary to consider the massive power of big pharmaceutical companies over the institutions who employ the physicians and the ease with which a physician’s career can be destroyed through widely unregulated reporting which opens an investigation that can and often does render the physician virtually unemployable. Not only do physicians have to choose between their ethical obligations to their patient to do no harm and their current job; the reality is that many of them will be choosing between their patients and their medical career.
It is critical to point out that for AFLDS member physicians, the practice of medicine is not simply a job. Neither is it merely a career. Rather, it is a sacred trust. It is a true high calling that often requires a decade or more of highly focused sacrificial dedication to achieve. The depth and the horror of the bind that this ethics opinion places the member physicians of AFLDS in, simply cannot be overstated.
To grasp the irreparable nature of the harm they face, one must consider the ease with which even an anonymous report can be made that may injure or haunt a physician’s career.6 The National Physicians Database (“NPDB”) was created by Congress with the intent of providing a central location to obtain information about practitioners. However, as Darryl S. Weiman, M.D., J.D. pointed out, the “black mark of a listing in the NPDB may not accomplish what the law was meant to do; identify the poor practitioner.”7 Weiman goes on to point out that “It is the threat of a NPDB report which prevents the open discussion, fact-finding, and broad based analysis and problem solving which was the intent of the meaningful peerreview of the HCQIA.”8
The gross imbalance of equities between an individual physician and the various large institutions and pharmaceutical companies which exert tremendous sway over his or her professional calling has many physicians fearful of pushing back against such ethical binds as have been described above.9 Many physicians have a family and medical school debts to consider and should never be forced into such a bitter double bind.
The types of harm the AFLDS member physicians are inevitably subjected to by this extension of the EUAs to inject 12-15 year old minors with the experimental COVID-19 vaccine is truly irreparable. Such harm strikes at the moral and ethical underpinnings of their calling as a physician and drives irreparable wedges into the sacred doctor-patient relationship that cannot be healed and certainly cannot be addressed with monetary damages.
2. Dr. Scott Jensen, MD is a board-certified family medicine physician of 40 years. Dr. Jensen resides and practices in the state of Minnesota, where he was honored as the “Minnesota Family Physician of the Year” in 2016. Dr. Jensen is well aware the children in the 0-16 year old age group have a 0% chance statistically of dying from COVID. As to the EUAs for the experimental COVID-19 vaccines, Dr. Jensen is keenly aware of the risks and benefits of these investigational agents as well as the current vaccine schedule for other diseases. Given that the statistical chance of death for children ages 0 to 16 is 0%, Dr. Jensen believes it would be reckless to subject anyone in that age group to the experimental COVID-19 vaccine. To recommend something that he considers reckless would violate his oath as a doctor and place him in an untenable position. It would place his young patients in that age group at risk and create similar conflicts to those described in the preceding paragraphs relating to the AFLDS member physicians. In addition, and based on the facts and statistics set forth in Dr. Jensen’s Declaration attached hereto and incorporated herein by reference as Exhibit A, Dr. Jensen believes the use of coercion in the 0-16 year old age group that is not at risk of harm from COVID-19 would irreparably undermine public trust in all vaccines. He therefore requests an immediate temporary restraining order to halt the extension of the EUAs of the experimental COVID-19 vaccine for any and all ages under 16.
3. Ellen Millen (Ellen) is a resident of Huntsville, Alabama. Ellen is the Guardian of three siblings ages 5, 4 and 4. These children have been entrusted to her by Child Protective Services and she is responsible for making medical decisions for them. Ellen has obtained a medical exemption for vaccines and neither she nor their biological parents wish the children to receive the experimental COVID-19 vaccination. Ellen stands not only for the children currently in her care but for those who may be placed in her care in the future. She stands for her 22-year-old son and four other children who are unable to stand for themselves in opposing the application of the experimental COVID-19 vaccination to children of all ages who are at NOstatistical risk of death from COVID-19. Without a temporary restraining order as requested in this motion Ellen knows that the children in her care will face overwhelming pressure to receive the experimental COVID-19 vaccination injection from friends, parents of friends, sports organizations, summer camps, schools and colleges. The fear and pressure that this fragile at-risk population of children will be subjected to if the temporary restraining order is not granted is greater than that which is often faced by children from intact nuclear families. The nature of their placement outside of their home and away from their biological family leaves them particularly susceptible to the pressures and the fear mongering that they will receive from peers and authority figures. The harm that they will undergo emotionally, mentally, and/or physiologically is precisely the type of harm considered irreparable by the law in this case. The trauma that is created in this type of a situation will quite likely be carried for life, and no amount of damages can possibly erase the effects. Ellen’s Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated here by reference as Exhibit B. Ellen seeks an immediate temporary restraining order to halt the extension of the EUAs for the experimental COVID-19 vaccines for any and all children 15 years old and younger.
4. Jody Sobczak (Jody), of Huntsville Alabama, is the father of two minor children ages 15 and 17. Jody has researched the experimental COVID-19 vaccines and fiercely opposes their use in healthy children of any age. He knows that his own children are placed at immediate and irreparable risk of harm by extending the EUAs for the experimental COVID-19 vaccines to adolescents. Jody is well aware that there are safe and effective alternative treatments readily available, and he adamantly opposes the suppression of those treatments in favor of experimental and potentially life-threatening agents. Jody’s Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein as Exhibit C. Jody seeks an immediate temporary restraining order to halt the extension order of EUAs for the experimental COVID-19 vaccines for any and all children 15 years old and younger.
5. Deborah Sobczak (Deborah), of Huntsville Alabama, is the mother of two minor children ages 15 and 17. Deborah has researched the experimental COVID-19 vaccines and also fiercely opposes their use in healthy children of any age. She knows that her own beloved children are placed at immediate and irreparable risk of harm by extending the EUAs of the experimental COVID-19 vaccine to adolescents. Deborah is well aware that there are safe and effective alternative treatments readily available and she adamantly opposes the suppression of those treatments in favor of experimental and potentially life-threatening agents. Deborah’s Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein by reference as Exhibit D. Deborah seeks an immediate temporary restraining order to halt the extension of the EUAs for the experimental COVID-19 vaccines for any and all children 15 years old and younger.
6. Lyle Bloom (Lyle), of Huntsville, Alabama, is the father of two children ages 10 and 16, and the father of one young adult age 21. Lyle has researched the experimental COVID-19 vaccines and fiercely opposes their use in healthy children of any age. He knows that his own children are placed at immediate and irreparable risk of harm by extending the emergency use authorizations of the experimental COVID-19 vaccine to adolescents. Lyle is well aware that there are safe and effective alternative treatments readily available and he adamantly opposes the suppression of those treatments in favor of experimental and potentially life-threatening agents. Lyle’s duly executed Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein as Exhibit E. Lyle seeks an immediate temporary restraining order to halt the extension of EUAs of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines for any and all children 15 years old and younger.
7. Julie Bloom (Julie), of Huntsville Alabama, is the mother of two children ages 10 and 16, and the mother of one young adult age 21. Julie has researched the experimental COVID-19 vaccines and also fiercely opposes their use in healthy children of any age. She knows that her own beloved children are placed at immediate and irreparable risk of harm by extending the EUAs for the experimental COVID-19 vaccines to adolescents. Julie is well aware that there are safe and effective alternative treatments readily available and she adamantly opposes the suppression of those treatments in favor of experimental and potentially life-threatening agents. Julie’s duly executed Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein as Exhibit F. Julie seeks an immediate temporary restraining order to halt the extension of EUAs for the experimental COVID-19 vaccines for any and all children 17 years old and younger.
8. Andrea McFarlane, RN (Andrea) of Huntsville, Alabama currently works as a trauma/ICU nurse at Vanderbilt. She is the mother of 4 children, 10, 12, 14 and 16. As a nurse, Andrea has seen tremendous pressure placed on staff to get the experimental COVID-19 vaccines. Even medical staff that have had COVID-19 are pressured relentlessly to take the experimental COVID-19 vaccines. It is well known among the staff that taking the experimental COVID-19 vaccines will leave you sick for days, and they accommodate for the expected sick reactions in their staffing plans. Andrea is also in school and as a student she is pressured and incentivized to get “vaccinated”. As a mother, Andrea knows only too well the tremendous pressure her boys will be under to get “vaccinated”. They will be under social and school pressure and Andrea deeply fears for their safety. She has studied the vaccine. She knows that it is experimental and that it has proven harmful in many cases. She knows that her children are not at risk from COVID-19 and believes it should be illegal and that it is immoral to give an experimental and untested vaccine to children who are not at risk. She believes that if the TRO is not granted, not only will her children be at grave risk of irreparable harm, but she will be subjected to pressure in her profession to comply with an immoral policy. We know that the AMA through their ethics opinion set forth above in this Motion has already opined that institutions will likely have an obligation to require that their staff get injected with the experimental COVID-19 vaccinations. Should this happen, Andrea will be unable to work because she will not follow a policy that she believes is immoral. Andrea’s duly executed Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein by reference as Exhibit G. Andrea is asking that this Court immediately impose the requested TRO in order to protect her children as well as herself from the grave risk of immediate and irreparable harm.
9. Jennifer Greenslade (Jennifer), of Remlap, Alabama, has an autoimmune disorder for which she takes medicine on a daily basis. She has researched the experimental COVID-19 vaccines and is aware that to take it would be to inject herself with an unknown agent that is largely unstudied but which carries risk to anyone with an autoimmune disease. She fears deeply for her own health and the health of her children, ages 9 and 12. The type of disease she has can be hereditary and nobody knows how it might interact with her children’s health, whereas COVID-19 itself poses no risk of death to her children whatsoever. Jennifer has two cousins who did allow themselves to be injected with the experimental COVID-19 vaccines. They were both healthy prior to the injection. They became extremely ill after being injected and spent weeks on the brink of death in the ICU. They are now out of the ICU but neither of them can walk and they require care from their children. This type of vaccine related injury constitutes irreparable harm. Her cousins were in good health and now they are unable to walk even though they survived the initial onslaught of the vaccine related sickness. Jennifer’s health is not strong and her children may have inherited her autoimmune disorder. If they are pressured or mandated to take the vaccine and experience reactions similar to Jennifer’s cousins’ reactions, she and her children might not survive. For a mother of two small children it is a stark and terrifying concern to think that they may be killed or paralyzed or that she may be rendered unable to care for them or worse. Jennifer’s duly executed Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein by reference as Exhibit H. She is seeking an immediate temporary injunction on behalf of herself, her children, and other similarly situated parents against the extension of the EUAs for children 15 and younger, who are at no risk from COVID-19.
10. Steven M. Roth, MD (Dr. Roth), of Alabama, has been a practicing emergency medicine physician for 13 years. Aspart of his practice, Dr. Roth sees patients of all ages. He is aware of the risks and benefits of these investigational agents as well as the current vaccine schedule for other diseases. Based on the most recent numbers from the CDC from May 5, 2021, anyone under the age of 16 has statistically NO risk of dying of Covid-19.
Dr. Roth has not seen a COVID-19 patient in many months, but he is currently seeing many patients who come to the emergency department as post-COVID-19 injection patients. All of these patients came in with COVID19 like symptoms that occurred within 48 hours of the injection. All these patients required hospital admission. Several of these patients progressed to death, caused by the vaccine.
Dr. Roth’s concern is that based upon what he is seeing in the community, and because of the schools asking that students take the experimental COVID-19 injections and putting obstacles around those who do not take it, young people are being pressured to take an experimental injection, and many are succumbing to that pressure. This is deeply disturbing to Dr. Roth, because it is universally known that children virtually never die from COVID-19 and given that children have a very strong immune system, they are more likely than adults to have an over-reaction to the shot. This means that there is not only no benefit, but also an increased risk for children who receive the experimental COVID-19 injections. Also, with all prior viruses and vaccines, it has been accepted in the medical community that natural immunity is superior to vaccination, and there is no basis to believe that would be different with SARS-CoV-2. Because of these factors, it is actually not preferable to give the vaccine even if it was definitely safe, which these are not.
In addition, Dr. Roth is extraordinarily concerned that there have been no animal studies, nor long-term studies, of the COVID-19 vaccines, especially since prior coronavirus vaccines all caused death in the animals subjected to them.
Dr. Roth is aware of many thousands of physicians who agree with him, but who are under great pressure to say nothing. Dr. Roth has chosen to speak out now, at great personal cost to himself, because the alternative is unbearable. Dr. Roth could not live with himself if he stood by and allowed these experimental COVID-19 injections to be inflicted upon children universally, resulting in death and destruction over the years. He considers it immoral and unconscionable that this experimental therapy will be given to children. Not only are children NOT at risk of death from COVID-19, but they are also NOT mini-adults. Their organs are still forming, and they are even more vulnerable than adults to developing auto-immune disease in this situation.
Dr. Roth would be deeply and directly affected by a change in FDA guidelines regarding vaccines for young people, and as a result he is imploring this Court to grant an immediate TRO to halt the approval of the infliction of the experimental COVID-19 injections upon children. In addition to the direct threat of irreparable harm posed to Dr. Roth’s young patients, an additional unwelcome consequence of using coercion to mandate or pressure the participation of healthy young people who are statistically at NO risk is the risk of sharply reducing the public trust in all vaccines. This would also create what can only be described as irreparable harm to the public generally. Dr. Roth’s duly executed Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein by reference as Exhibit I.
11. Matt Schweder (Matt) of Lexington, Kentucky, is the father of one minor daughter, age 15, and an adult son, age 25. Matt’s son is in the Advanced Nurse Practitioner Program at Vanderbilt University. Matt’s daughter is an active student and plays soccer for her high school. Matt has, until recently, coached girls select soccer for a number of years and he is very aware of the extraordinary power of peer pressure in the life of young adolescents. Matt’s daughter is subjected to a barrage of peer pressure regarding vaccinating, which is a constant source of conversation for her friends, who have been taught to fear that which should hold no fear. In addition, her school system bombards her with weekly emails, pressuring and shaming her and her family into allowing themselves to be experimented on with the experimental COVID-19 injections. The pressure is so intense that one of Matt’s daughter’s friends was forced to take the injection by his own mother, against his will, at the age of 16, and Matt’s daughter had to undergo the trauma of knowing that her friend had become part of this dangerous human experiment even though he was adamantly opposed to doing so. Matt has conducted his own research into COVID-19, and he is well aware that children under the age of 16 have a 0% chance statistically of dying from COVID-19. Matt knows that safe and effective treatments for COVID-19 are available and he fiercely opposes the suppression of these treatments in favor of using untested and potentially life-threatening agents against children who are not at risk. As a father, Matt has witnessed the growing concern his son has, that his school or potential employer might decide to make the experimental agents mandatory, which would put his education to waste. The damages that Matt and his family face are irreparable if this EUA is permitted to be inflicted upon minor children, whose only risk of death comes from the vaccine itself. Therefore, Matt urgently moves this Court to find for his children and the children of America and immediately grant the TRO sought by this Motion. Matt’s Declaration is attached hereto and incorporated herein by reference as Exhibit J.
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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.
***
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who’d like to see the country return to normal ASAP, there’s plenty of good news to report this week. As cases and fatalities have continued to drop, the cloud of fear that has enveloped the nation for the last 14 months, is gradually lifting. More and more people are getting together with friends, eating out at restaurants and traveling. This has caused a dramatic change in the public’s mood which is noticeably brighter and more positive. But, what’s even more remarkable than the sudden shift in attitude, is what’s happening off the radar. Restrictions are loosening, masks are being discarded, and power-mad governors are being openly challenged. For the first time in over a year, it’s starting to look like the country might get its act together and shake off this Covid nightmare. With that in mind, here are a few of the “good news” stories that you might have missed.
“Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is championing a joint resolution to end the state of emergency declared by President Donald Trump on March 13, 2020, officially declaring the COVID-19 pandemic an emergency and giving the White House unique powers meant to curb the threat posed by the China-originated virus.
In a press release, Gosar’s office explained, “After over a year of living under an emergency declaration with Congress failing to do its due diligence to decide if the emergency should continue, this resolution will force Congress to debate and vote on termination.”
Gosar explained that “Over a year later, with cases failing, vaccine rates rising, and states reopening, it is prudent for Congress to consider the merit of this emergency continuation….The National Emergencies Act was never intended to give the President endless and unlimited authority over Americans’ lives.”
Pennsylvania voters became the first in the nation to curb their governor’s emergency powers, approving constitutional amendments proposed by Republican lawmakers angry over Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. (The referendum initiative prevailed on a statewide ballot by a 7% margin: 53% “Yes”, 46% “No”) The Legislature’s top Republicans characterized the vote as a victory for individual rights and freedoms, a move to re-establish checks and balances to ensure a functioning, collaborative government…”
This is a big win for ordinary people who are distrustful of scheming politicians who use public health crises and other emergencies to grab as much power as possible, especially dimwits like Wolf who abused his authority by closing churches and businesses, shutting down schools and mandating the wearing of masks.
As the AP points out: “Wolf vetoed more than a half-dozen different bills designed to restrict his authority.”… Even now, after suffering a humiliating defeat at the ballot box, Wolf still claims he has his authority rests on an arcane “public health law and is unaffected by the ballot questions.” In other words, Wolf thinks he can ignore the will of the voters and do whatever the hell he wants, which is why it is so important that he–and the other aspiring tyrants across the country– be booted from office at the first opportunity. Here’s how Judge Napolitano summed it up at Lew Rockwell:
“No matter the exigency — war, floods, pandemic, fear, myth — individual natural rights,… trump the unconstitutional words of government officials and invalidate their efforts to enforce compliance. … The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and every public official, federal and state, is bound by it.
If government officials could declare an emergency whenever they wished and thereby be relieved of the obligation to defend the Constitution — and the rights it guarantees — then no liberty is safe.
Because our rights are natural and individual and because we did not all consent to their suspension, no government may morally or constitutionally suspend them, and we must resist all efforts to do so.”
(“The Government’s Emergency Powers Myth“, Lew Rockwell)
“The Utah Legislature passed a measure Wednesday that would bar public schools and universities from implementing mask mandates…
“At some point this has to end,” Peterson said. “What this bill is really about is making sure we have those assurances to our students that they can go forward next fall and get right into the school year without the thought of masks and what that might mean.”
Whatever practical purpose the cotton masks might have served during the pandemic, there’s no longer any need for them. On this point, there should be universal agreement. The cases and deaths have dropped precipitously and the virus is in full retreat. We need to set aside the divisive symbols of mass intimidation and move on. There has never been a more polarizing and infuriating symbol than the mask, which many see as the basic foundation upon which the Covid-hysteria was built. Abandoning the mask, is not just sign that we have put this sad chapter of collective madness behinds us, but that we are determined to resume normal personal interactions like ordinary people in a free country.
“Just three weeks after adding Ivermectin, Delhi now leads India out of the deadly second surge of the COVID pandemic. Cases that had peaked at 28,395 on April 20 plummeted nearly 80% to just 6,430 on May 15. Deaths peaked May 4, and now they are also down 25%.
Next–
“Ivermectin is a heartworm medication that has been shown to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro. In the U.S., the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) has been calling for widespread adoption of Ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19…
A scientific review by Dr. Andrew Hill at Liverpool University, funded by the WHO … found ivermectin reduced COVID-19 deaths by 75%. …
Dr. Pierre Kory, former professor of medicine at St. Luke’s Aurora Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (said)
“The data shows the ability of the drug Ivermectin to prevent COVID-19, to keep those with early symptoms from progressing to the hyper-inflammatory phase of the disease, and even to help critically ill patients recover.
… numerous clinical studies — including peer-reviewed randomized controlled trials — showed large magnitude benefits of Ivermectin in prophylaxis, early treatment and also in late-stage disease. Taken together … dozens of clinical trials that have now emerged from around the world are substantial enough to reliably assess clinical efficacy.” (“More Good News on Ivermectin”, Mercola.com)
Is an inexpensive and time-tested “miracle drug” being deliberately suppressed to advance Big Pharma’s pernicious vaccine agenda?
“The #Covid vaccine push is just about over in the United States. First doses are down 70% from the April peak, to the lowest levels since mid-January – and that includes a temporary bump last week from the hideous decision to allow 12-15 year-olds to get the shot….
The plunge comes despite an incredibly aggressive and expensive marketing and promotional campaign. At this point the public health folks have to see they are pushing on a string….(The only choice left is… ) Coercion. Mandatory vaccinations are out but they can try to get schools and businesses to do the dirty work”
“To date, 18 states that had mask orders covering the general public have fully lifted them. Eleven states did not impose mask mandates at any point during the pandemic….
Most states that have completely reopened have done away with their mask mandates or never instituted one in the first place. But mask mandates, at least for those who are not vaccinated, may persist in parts of the country.
Here’s where states stand on coronavirus restrictions and reopening:”
“Legislators, students, community representatives and others will speak on the topic of informed consent at a health freedom rally at Rutgers University this Friday, May 21 at 11 a.m. ET, in protest of the university’s COVID vaccine mandate. The Rutgers announcement prompted Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) chairman and chief legal counsel, to send a letter to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway to remind him that mandating Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) products violates federal law.
Kennedy informed Holloway that COVID vaccines, which are EUA products and therefore by definition experimental, cannot be mandated. Under federal law, individuals have the right to accept or refuse EUA products. “Under the Nuremberg Code, no one may be coerced to participate in a medical experiment. Consent of the individual is absolutely essential,” Kennedy wrote
The college and university mandates have sparked a new wave of voices in the health freedom movement, as many college students are speaking out against mandating an experimental vaccine for a virus that has a 99.74% survival rate….
Holland said CHD’s view is that EUA vaccine mandates are clearly unlawful. She cited the legal precedent set by the courts when the U.S. Department of Defense tried to compel soldiers to take the EUA anthrax vaccine. A federal court decided federal law did not permit EUA vaccine mandates, and said soldiers could not be used as guinea pigs.”
Comment: Now that the pandemic has eased, the Emergency Use Authorization (EAU) should be repealed and vaccine manufacturers should be forced to complete Phase 3 trials and prove that their product is safe before it is used on the public. That should happen immediately.
“It’s ‘reckless’ to vaccinate children for COVID-19,” said Former HHS coronavirus advisor, Dr. Paul Alexander on Fox News’” “Kids have a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying if they’re COVID-infected,” he added….The risk to children is so small, there is no reason to put our children in harm’s way at this point.”
“Dr. Fauci has said many things before that he has reversed and flip-flopped on, and in this case, he makes absolutely no sense to me, and to many scientists,…“Remember the retraction of the double-mask idiocy? Remember when he said Covid is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu? Now they are talking about a third vaccine booster shot and it suggests that those in charge are flying by the seat of their pants and do not know what they are doing.”
Alexander wrote …that the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) …“essentially means that all persons taking Covid vaccines at present are in a large Phase III trial. The efficacy and safety results will be known in 2-3 years and perhaps longer for the longer-term adverse effects that become known at a later date.”
His paper continues, “Exposing children to an untested Emergency Use medication implies that there is a dire risk to the children without it. There are no data to support such a potential risk.”…
“The key for parents to understand is this: These do not provide you the type of safety data to give you the level of confidence to put these vaccines in your children’s arms, because children have 70 to 80 years more life to live. They could be devastated by these vaccines if something goes wrong.”
Comment: Children are at zero risk of dying from Covid-19. The survivability rate for children under 17 is 99.997%. Doctors, however, do not rule out the possibility of long-term adverse effects from vaccination including blood clots, fertility issues or autoimmune disease. This is a risk we don’t need to take.
“In short, the available evidence and science indicate that COVID-19 vaccines are unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe… Actors authorizing, coercing or administering experimental COVID-19 vaccination are exposing populations and patients to serious, unnecessary, and unjustified medical risks.”
They pointed to risks of “lethal and non-lethal disruptions of blood clotting including bleeding disorders, thrombosis in the brain, stroke and heart attack,” “antibody-dependent enhancement of disease,” autoimmune reactions, and potential effects of “vaccine impurities due to rushed manufacturing and unregulated production standards.”
“Contrary to claims that blood disorders post-vaccination are ‘rare’, many common vaccine side effects (headaches, nausea, vomiting and hematoma-like ‘rashes’ over the body) may indicate thrombosis and other severe abnormalities,” the experts said. “Clotting events currently receiving media attention are likely just the ‘tip of a huge iceberg.’”…
With the mRNA vaccines, the risk of severe adverse events is virtually guaranteed to increase with every successive injection. In the long term, they are therefore even more dangerous than the vector vaccines . Their apparent preferment over the latter is concerning in the highest degree; these vaccines are not safe.”
Readers might want to skim these articles again to get a sense of the seismic shift that is currently taking place across the country. Wherever there has been push-back accompanied by conservative leadership, government restrictions and mandates have been lifted. But wherever leftists have their grip on the levers of power, people remain defacto prisoners of the state forced to follow the arbitrary edicts of liberal governors acting far-beyond their constitutional authority. What should be obvious to everyone by now, is that the real heroes of this drawn-out catastrophe, are the leaders like De Santis and Noem who stood firm and defended the basic rights of their people even while the media and the public health officials heaped criticism on them. We owe a debt of gratitude to these and the many others who put their careers and reputations on-the-line in order to do the right thing and preserve the values upon which America was founded.
Thanks to all who fought back.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Mike Whitney is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Each year, more than 165 million Americans get the flu shot. There were 85 reported deaths following influenza vaccination in 2017; 119 deaths in 2018; and 203 deaths in 2019
Between mid-December 2020 and April 23, 2021, at which point between 95 million and 100 million Americans had received their COVID-19 shots, there were 3,544 reported deaths following COVID vaccination, or about 30 per day
In just four months, the COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all available vaccines combined from mid-1997 until the end of 2013 — a period of 15.5 years
As of April 23, 2021, VAERS had also received 12,618 reports of serious adverse events. In total, 118,902 adverse event reports had been filed
In the European Union, the EudraVigilance system had as of April 17, 2021, received 330,218 injury reports after vaccination with one of the four available COVID vaccines, including 7,766 deaths
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In a May 5, 2021, Fox News report, Tucker Carlson asked the question no one is really allowed to ask: “How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccine?”1
If you haven’t paid attention, the answer to this verboten (forbidden) question may shock you. Carlson points out (inaccurately, if you ask me) that vaccines have been shown to be generally safe, citing statistics on how many Americans have died after the seasonal influenza vaccine in recent years.
Each year, more than 165 million Americans get the flu shot, and according to the U.S. vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS), there were 85 reported deaths following influenza vaccination in 2017; 119 deaths in 2018; and 203 deaths in 2019. “How do those rates compare to the death rates from the coronavirus vaccine?” Carlson asks. The answer is, there’s really no comparison.
How Many Have Died From COVID Vaccines?
Between mid-December 2020, when the first COVID-19 shots were rolled out, and April 23, 2021, at which point between 95 million and 100 million Americans had received their COVID-19 shots, there were 3,544 reported deaths following COVID vaccination.2
That’s 182 more deaths than cited by Carlson. As of April 23, 2021, VAERS had also received 12,618 reports of serious adverse events. In total, 118,902 adverse event reports had been filed. If, like Carlson estimates, about 30 people per day are dying from the shots, these numbers will grow by the hundreds each week.
Carlson also cites data from an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which found that VAERS catches a mere 1% of vaccine injuries,3,4 primarily because it’s a passive system and reports are filed voluntarily.
Many Americans don’t even know that the system exists, or that they can file a report, and most doctors won’t file reports when injuries are brought to their attention because the medical system doesn’t reward such fastidiousness. At most, 10% of vaccine side effects are ever reported to VAERS, according to a 2005 study in the BMJ.5
What this means is that side effects may actually be 10 times or even 100 times higher than reported. We could, in reality, be looking at anywhere from 126,000 to 1.2 million serious side effects, and anywhere from 35,440 to 354,400 vaccine-related deaths.
While Carlson refuses to speculate about what the actual death toll might be, he does stress that what we’re seeing is clearly out of the norm, and by a tremendous margin. In just four months, the COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all available vaccines combined from mid-1997 until the end of 2013 — a period of 15.5 years.
Gamble Your Life or Lose Your Freedom?
While the data show there are clear risks, Americans are urged, cajoled, shamed and threatened into getting the shot in any number of ways. President Biden recently warned that people who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 “can still die every day” from the infection, adding “This is your choice: It’s life and death.”
Carlson accurately points out that while unvaccinated people can indeed die of COVID-19, not everyone is at equal risk of complications and death. Old and chronically ill individuals are at greatest risk, while young and/or healthy individuals have a very low risk, and those who have had COVID-19 and recovered are immune.
For those who are young and/or healthy and/or immune, risking death or injury from the “vaccine” doesn’t make much sense. I would argue it makes no sense whatsoever, as there are also several proven-effective treatments, both early at-home treatments and in-hospital treatments. So, there’s no need to risk your health and life by taking COVID gene therapy.
As noted by Carlson, the young, healthy and already immune can add up to hundreds of millions of people in the U.S., yet policy makers are “not even acknowledging that these categories of people exist,” he says.
They’re pretending that everyone’s risk is the same and, therefore, everyone must get vaccinated, or at bare minimum, they want 70% of the American adult population vaccinated by July 4, 2021.
Carlson points out that this policy might be deemed acceptable if it could be conclusively shown that the “vaccines” are safe, and if we had a thorough understanding of the long-term effects of these mRNA and viral vector DNA shots. However, we can’t and we don’t.
Thousands have died, and many of the side effects reported defy easy explanation. For example, COVID shots now account for one-third of all tinnitus side effects in VAERS. Oxford and UCLA researchers, who are now tracking side effects across eight different countries, report finding that “women aged 18 to 34 years had a higher rate of deep vein thrombosis than men of the same age,” Carlson says. Why? No one knows.
Stunning Lack of Reaction to Mounting Death Toll
Perhaps most stunning of all is that these thousands of deaths and serious reactions are receiving no attention whatsoever. In 1976, the U.S. government vaccinated an estimated 45 million people against pandemic swine flu.
The program was canceled, Carlson reports, after only 53 people died. Authorities decided the vaccine was too risky to continue the campaign. Now, health authorities are shrugging off more than 3,500 deaths after COVID-19 vaccination as either coincidental or inconsequential.
Folks, this is 70 times more deaths than the swine flu vaccine, which was halted. If this isn’t insanity on steroids, please tell me what is. Maybe murder? This doesn’t even include the deaths of thousands, and potentially tens of thousands of miscarriages, which is now becoming rapidly recognized as a possible complication of COVID-19 “vaccines.”
In fact, an April 2021 report in The New England Journal of Medicine6 said that miscarriage was the most common condition reported after a COVID vaccine, and that “there is probably substantial underreporting of pregnancy- and neonatal-specific adverse events” connected with the vaccine. But rather than posting a warning that the vaccine may be causing miscarriages, health officials simply urged “continued monitoring” of the issue.
EU Reports Hundreds of Thousands of Side Effects
In the European Union, we find more of the same. Its EudraVigilance system, to which suspected drug reactions are reported, had as of April 17, 2021, received 330,218 injury reports after vaccination with one of the four available COVID vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson), including 7,766 deaths.7
Of these, Pfizer’s mRNA injection accounted for the largest number of deaths at 4,293, followed by Moderna with 2,094 deaths, AstraZeneca with 1,360 deaths and Johnson & Johnson with 19 deaths. The most commonly reported injuries were cardiac-related problems and blood/lymphatic disorders.
In related news, the Israeli People Committee (IPC), a civilian body of health experts, has published a report detailing side effects from the Pfizer vaccine, concluding “there has never been a vaccine that has harmed as many people.” The Committee received 288 reports of death, 90% of which occurred within 10 days after the vaccination; 64% of them were men.
This contradicts data from the Israeli Ministry of Health, which claims only 45 deaths were vaccine related. According to this report (translated from Hebrew):8
“According to Central Bureau of Statistics data during January-February 2021, at the peak of the Israeli mass vaccination campaign, there was a 22% increase in overall mortality in Israel compared with the previous year.
In fact, January-February 2021 have been the deadliest months in the last decade, with the highest overall mortality rates compared to corresponding months in the last 10 years.
Amongst the 20-29 age group the increase in overall mortality has been most dramatic. In this age group, we detect an increase of 32% in overall mortality in comparison with previous year.
Statistical analysis of information from the Central Bureau of Statistics, combined with information from the Ministry of Health, leads to the conclusion that the mortality rate amongst the vaccinated is estimated at about 1: 5000 (1: 13000 at ages 20-49, 1: 6000 at ages 50-69, 1: 1600 at ages 70+).
According to this estimate, it is possible to estimate the number of deaths in Israel in proximity of the vaccine, as of today, at about 1000-1100 people.”
Reproductive Effects
In the U.S., we’re now starting to see thousands of reports of menstrual problems among women who have received the COVID-19 vaccine. As reported by The Defender:9
“Women have reported hemorrhagic bleeding with clots, delayed or absent periods, sudden pre-menopausal symptoms, month-long periods and heavy irregular bleeding after being vaccinated with one or both doses of a COVID vaccine.
There’s no data linking COVID vaccines to changes in menstruation because clinical trials omit tracking menstrual cycles. But two Yale University experts wrote in The New York Times … there could be a connection.
‘There are many reasons vaccination could alter menstruation,’ wrote Alice Lu-Culligan, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Yale School of Medicine, and Dr. Randi Epstein, writer in residence at Yale School of Medicine.
‘Periods involve the immune system, as the thickening and thinning of the uterine lining are facilitated by different teams of immune cells and signals moving in and out of the reproductive tract,’ Lu-Culligan and Epstein explained.
‘Vaccines are designed to ignite an immune response, and the female cycle is supported by the immune system, so it’s possible vaccines could temporarily change the normal course of events.’”
Even more bizarre, there are hundreds of anecdotal reports of women who have not gotten the vaccine, but spent time in close proximity to someone who did, who are experiencing the same kind of abnormal menses and bleeding irregularities. Some doctors are hypothesizing that some sort of shedding may be taking place, although the mechanism is unknown. As yet, it’s too early to speculate further.
Interestingly, a Chinese study10 published in Reproductive BioMedicine Online, which looked at sex hormones and menstruation in unvaccinated women of reproductive age who were diagnosed with COVID-19, found 28% had a change in the length of their cycle, 19% had prolonged cycles and 25% had a change in menstrual blood volume.
The researchers hypothesize that “the menstruation changes of these patients might be the consequence of transient sex hormone changes” caused by a temporary suppression of ovarian function during infection.
Dr. Natalie Crawford, a fertility specialist, told The Defender11 that the menstrual irregularities seen in female COVID-19 patients may be linked to a cellular immunity response, and since the vaccine instructs your body to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which your immune system then responds to, the effects of the vaccine may be similar to the natural infection.
Death Tally May Spike During Fall and Winter
While the death toll from COVID-19 vaccines is already at a historical level, I fear it may shoot far higher as we move through fall and winter. The reason for this is because one of the greatest risk factors and wild cards of these vaccines is antibody‐dependent enhancement (ADE) or paradoxical immune enhancement (PIE).
The 2003 review paper “Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of Virus Infection and Disease” explains it this way:13
“In general, virus-specific antibodies are considered antiviral and play an important role in the control of virus infections in a number of ways. However, in some instances, the presence of specific antibodies can be beneficial to the virus. This activity is known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) of virus infection.
The ADE of virus infection is a phenomenon in which virus-specific antibodies enhance the entry of virus, and in some cases the replication of virus, into monocytes/macrophages and granulocytic cells through interaction with Fc and/or complement receptors.
This phenomenon has been reported in vitro and in vivo for viruses representing numerous families and genera of public health and veterinary importance … For some viruses, ADE of infection has become a great concern to disease control by vaccination.”
Fall and winter are the seasons in which most coronavirus infections occur, be it SARS-CoV-2 or other coronaviruses responsible for the common cold. If ADE does turn out to be a common problem with these injections, then vaccinated individuals may be at significantly higher risk of severe COVID-19 and a potentially lethal immune reaction due to pathogenic priming.
Another potential risk is that of Th2 immunopathology, especially among the elderly. As reported in a PNAS news feature:14
“Since the 1960s, tests of vaccine candidates for diseases such as dengue, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have shown a paradoxical phenomenon: Some animals or people who received the vaccine and were later exposed to the virus developed more severe disease than those who had not been vaccinated.
The vaccine-primed immune system, in certain cases, seemed to launch a shoddy response to the natural infection …
This immune backfiring, or so-called immune enhancement, may manifest in different ways such as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a process in which a virus leverages antibodies to aid infection; or cell-based enhancement, a category that includes allergic inflammation caused by Th2 immunopathology.
In some cases, the enhancement processes might overlap … Some researchers argue that although ADE has received the most attention to date, it is less likely than the other immune enhancement pathways to cause a dysregulated response to COVID-19, given what is known about the epidemiology of the virus and its behavior in the human body.
‘There is the potential for ADE, but the bigger problem is probably Th2 immunopathology,’ says Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist and expert in coronaviruses … at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In previous studies of SARS, aged mice were found to have particularly high risks of life-threatening Th2 immunopathology … in which a faulty T cell response triggers allergic inflammation, and poorly functional antibodies that form immune complexes, activating the complement system and potentially damaging the airways.”
Recognize Cheap Brainwashing Propaganda for What It Is
Carlson ends his segment with a crude, cuss-filled ad “brought to you by people who are smarter than we are,” in which people who are supposedly doctors and nurses belittle those who read about side effects online or hear about risks from friends, and demand, while giving you the finger, that you just “grow up and get the vaccine.”
If you did not watch Carlson’s report, you need to STOP now and watch the video below to see this unbelievable ad. It is queued up to start at the ad. It is beyond shocking that they believe they can get away with this type of abuse.
“It doesn’t make you laugh,” Carlson says. “It makes you nervous. Why are they talking to you that way? Why are they giving you the finger on TV? No matter how many fingers they give you, it doesn’t change what remains true for the country.
If American citizens are going to be forced to take this vaccine, or any other medicine, they have the absolute right to know what it is and what its effects might be.
And they have an absolute right to ask that question, without being silenced or mocked or given the finger. And no amount of happy talk or coercion or appeals to false patriotism can change that. Period.”
In my view, there are still so many potential avenues of harm and so many uncertainties, I would encourage everyone to do your homework, keep reading and learning, weigh the potential pros and cons, ignore all pressure tactics and take your time when deciding whether to get any of these COVID-19 gene therapies.
Last but not least, if you or someone you love has already received a COVID-19 vaccine and are experiencing side effects, be sure to report it, preferably to all three of these locations:15
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At the time of writing, there are essentially four distinct phases in the engineered destabilization of the global economy.
The First phase was launched in late January, when the Trump administration announced (Jan 31, 2020) that it will deny entry to foreign nationals “who have traveled in China in the last 14 days”. This immediately triggered a crisis in air transportation. China-US trade as well as the tourism industry were affected.
The second phase was initiated on February 20th 2020, following WHO Director General’s Dr. Tedros warning that a pandemic was imminent, which served to trigger the beginning of the 2020 Corona Financial crash.
The third Phase was launched with the March 11, 2020 lockdown and closing down of 190 national economies, with devastating social consequences and
A Fourth phase was initiated in October-November coinciding with the so-called “Second Wave”.
A “Third Wave” was launched in early 2021.
Video
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The Disruption of US-China Trade
Trump’s decision on January 31, 2020 was taken immediately following the announcement by the WHO Director General of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) (January 30, 2020). In many regards, this was an act of “economic warfare” against China.
And then, following Trump’s January 31st 2020 decision to curtail air travel and transportation to China, a campaign was launched in Western countries against China as well against ethnic Chinese. The Economist reported that “The coronavirus spreads racism against and among ethnic Chinese”
“Britain’s Chinese community faces racism over coronavirus outbreak”
“Chinese communities overseas are increasingly facing racist abuse and discrimination amid the coronavirus outbreak. Some ethnic Chinese people living in the UK say they experienced growing hostility because of the deadly virus that originated in China.”
And this phenomenon happened all over the U.S.
China Town, San Francisco
US-China Trade. America’s Dependence on “Made in China”
What the Trump administration failed to comprehend is that the United States is heavily dependent on commodity imports from China.
The unspoken truth is that America is an import led economy (resulting from offshoring) with a weak manufacturing base, heavily dependent on imports from the PRC. Despite America’s financial dominance and the powers of the dollar, there are serious failures in the structure of America’s “Real Economy” which have been exacerbated by the corona crisis.
US imports from China have declined significantly as a result of the “pandemic”, the impacts on US retail trade are potentially devastating. This process of disruption affecting production, supply lines, international transport started in early February, following Trump’s declaration on January 31st 2020
Political and geopolitical factors played a key role including the anti-Chinese campaign launched in February 2020 as well threats by the Trump administration, claiming that China was responsible for “spreading the virus”.
The impacts on bilateral US-China trade were devastating: US commodity imports from China declined by 28.3% (average over first three months of 2020 in relation to first 3 months of 2019).
Following the March 11 lockdown and closure of the global economy, the decline of US imports from China in March 2020 were of the order of 36.5% (in relation to March 2019). The decline in China’s exports to the US recorded in April and May were of the order 7.9% to 8.5% in relation to April-May 2019.
Moreover, according to figures quoted by the the Financial Times (largely attributable to the deep-seated financial crisis which started in February 2020), the value of (announced) Chinese direct investment projects into the US had fallen by about 90%: $200 million in the first quarter of 2020, down from an average of $2 Billion per quarter in 2019.
“Chinese direct investment into the US stood at $5bn, a slight drop from $5.4bn in 2018 and well off a recent peak of $45bn in 2016, when Chinese companies were much more free to acquire US counterparts”
What has transpired is a major redirection of China’s exports to the European Union (EU) and the rest of the World, which inevitably affects “Made in China” retail trade throughout the US.
The geopolitical implications are far-reaching, while the real economy in the US is in a shambles, China has now become the EU’s largest trading partner.
The February 2020 Corona Financial Crash
Speculative trade and financial fraud played a key role. On Thursday the 20th of February afternoon in Geneva, (CET Time) the WHO Director General. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus held a press conference. I am “concerned”, he said, “that the chance to contain the coronavirus outbreak” is “closing” …
“I believe the window of opportunity is still there, but that the window is narrowing.”
These “shock and awe” statements contributed to triggering panic, despite the fact that the number of confirmed cases outside China was exceedingly low: 1076 cases outside China, for a population of 6.4 billion. (Excluding the Diamond Princess, there were 452 so-called “confirmed cases” Worldwide)
The statement by Dr. Tedros (based on flawed concepts and statistics), set the stage for the February financial collapse triggered by inside information, foreknowledge, derivative trade, short-selling and a galore of hedge fund operations.
COVID-19 was narrowly identified as the catalyst of the financial crash.
Who was behind this catalyst?
Who was behind the fear campaign which contributed to triggering chaos and uncertainty on financial markets?
The small number of confirmed cases outside China (1076) did not in any way confirm the spread of a Worldwide epidemic. But this did not prevent the markets from plummeting.
The markets had been manipulated. Whoever had foreknowledge (inside information) of the WHO Director General’s February 20th, 2020 statement would have reaped significant monetary gains.
Was there a conflict of interest (as defined by the WHO)? The WHO receives funds from the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates has “60% of his assets invested in equities [including stocks and index funds]”, according to a September 2019 CNBC report.
The stock market crash initiated on February 20th referred to as the 2020 Coronavirus Crash (February 20-April 7, 2020), was categorized as:
“the fastest fall in global stock markets in financial history, and the most devastating crash since the Wall Street Crash of 1929.”
The cause of the financial crash was (according to “analysts”) V. The Virus, namely, the “massive spread” of the epidemic outside China. But that was an outright lie: there were only 1076 cases Worldwide for a population of 6.4 billion outside China. (see Chapter III). Media disinformation played a key role in spearheading the fear campaign
Insider Trading and Financial Fraud
The possibility of financial fraud and “inside trading” (which is illegal) was casually dispelled by financial analysts and media reports.
Without the human hand, there is no causal relationship between a microscopic virus and the complex gamut of financial variables.
The “killer virus” fear campaign coupled with Dr. Tedros’ timely “warnings” of the need to implement a Worldwide pandemic indelibly served the interests of Wall Street’s institutional speculators and hedge funds. The financial crash led to a major shift in the distribution of money wealth. (See analysis in Chapter V)
In the week following the February 20-21 WHO announcement, the Dow Jones collapsed by 12% (CNBC, February 28, 2020). According to analysts, the plunge of the DJIA was the result of the Worldwide spread of the virus. A nonsensical statement in contradiction with the (small) number of WHO Covid positive estimates (1076 outside China), most of which were based on the faulty PCR test.
On Monday, February 24th upon the reopening of stock markets, there was an unprecedented plunge in the Dow Jones attributable to the “impending dangers” that “Covid was spreading Worldwide creating uncertainties in financial markets”.
.
“Stocks fell sharply on Monday ( February 24) as the number of coronavirus cases outside China surged, stoking fears of a prolonged global economic slowdown from the virus spreading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 1,031.61 points lower, or 3.56%, at 27,960.80.” (CNBC) (emphasis added)
Dow Jones Industrial Average December 2019 – March 2020
Also on February 24th, Trump requested a $1.25 billion emergency aid.
According to the BBC, Worldwide stock markets saw sharp falls “because of concerns about the economic impact of the virus”, suggesting that the Virus was “the invisible “hand” responsible for the decline of financial markets.
COVID-19 was narrowly identified as the catalyst of the financial crash.
Who was behind the fear campaign which contributed to triggering chaos and uncertainty on financial markets coupled with bankruptcies and a massive redistribution of money wealth?
March 11, 2020: The Covid-19 Pandemic, Lockdown, Closing Down of 190 National Economies
On March 11, 2020: the WHO officially declared a Worldwide pandemic at a time when there were 118,000 confirmed cases and 4291 deaths Worldwide (including China). (March 11, 2020, according to press conference). What do these “statistics” tell you?
The number of confirmed cases outside of China (6.4 billion population) was of the order of 44279 and 1440 deaths (figures recorded for March 11 by the WHO, (on March 12). (There is a contradiction in the number of deaths outside China recorded by the WHO. In Tedros’ WHO press conference: 4291 outside China). (See Chapter III).
Immediately following the March 11, 2020 WHO announcement, the fear campaign went into high gear. As in the case of the February 20-21 crash, the March 11 statement by the WHO Director General had set the stage.
Stock markets crashed worldwide. On the following morning, the Dow (DJIA) plummeted by 9.99% (A decline of 2,352.60 to close at 21,200.62) Black Thursday, March 12, 2020 was “the Dow’s worst day” since 1987. Financial fraud was the trigger. A massive transfer of financial wealth had taken place in favor of America’s billionaires. (see chapter V)
“Stay at Home” confinement instructions were transmitted to 193 member states of the United Nations. Politicians are the instruments of powerful financial interests. Was this far-reaching decision justified as a means to combating the Virus?
The decision was based on a flawed lockdown model designed by Imperial College London.
Unprecedented in history, applied almost simultaneously in a large number countries, entire sectors of the World economy were destabilized. Small and medium sized enterprises were driven into bankruptcy. Unemployment and poverty are rampant.
In several developing countries, famines have erupted out (see analysis below). The social impacts of these measures are devastating. The health impacts (mortality, morbidity) of these measures including the destabilization of the system of national health care (in numerous countries) far surpass those attributed to Covid-19.
Economic Warfare
The instructions came from above, from Wall Street, the World Economic Forum, the billionaire foundations. This diabolical project is casually described by the corporate media as a “humanitarian” public health endeavor. The “international community” has a “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). An unelected “public-private partnership” under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has come to the rescue of Planet Earth’s 7.8 billion people. The closure of the global economy is presented as a means to “killing the virus”.
Sounds absurd. Closing down the real economy of Planet Earth is not the “solution” but rather the “cause” of a process of Worldwide destabilization and impoverishment, which in turn will inevitably have an impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality. In this regard, what must be addressed is the causal relationship between economic variables (i.e purchasing power) and the state of health of the population.
The national economy combined with political, social and cultural institutions is the basis for the “reproduction of real life”: income, employment, production, trade, infrastructure, social services.
Destabilizing the economy of Planet Earth cannot constitute a “solution” to combating the virus. But that is the imposed “solution” which they want us to believe in. And that is what they are doing.
The Lockdown and the Process of Engineered Bankruptcy
There is an important relationship between the “Real Economy” and “Big Money”, namely the financial establishment.
What is ongoing is a process of concentration of wealth, whereby the financial establishment, (i.e. the multibillion dollar creditors) are slated to appropriate the real assets of both bankrupt companies as well as State assets.
The “Real Economy” constitutes “the economic landscape” of real economic activity: productive assets, agriculture, industry, goods and services, trade, investment, employment as well social and cultural infrastructure including schools, hospitals, universities, museums, etc. The real economy at the global and national levels is being targeted by the lockdown and closure of economic activity.
The lockdown instructions transmitted to national governments have been conducive to the destabilization of “the national economic landscape”, which consists ofan entire economic and social structure. The “stay at home” lockdown prevents people from going to work. From one day to the next, it creates mass unemployment (Worldwide). In turn, the lockdown is coupled with the closure of entire sectors of the national economy.
The lockdown immediately contributes to the disengagement of human resources (labor) which brings productive activity to a standstill. On the one hand the channels of supply and distribution are frozen, which eventually leads to potential shortages in the availability of commodities.
In turn, several hundred million workers Worldwide lose their jobs and their earnings. While national governments have set up various “social safety nets” for the unemployed, the payment of wages and salaries by the employer is disrupted which in turn leads to a dramatic collapse of purchasing power.
It’s a payments crisis. Wages and salaries are not paid. Impoverished households are unable to purchase food, pay their rent or monthly mortgage. Personal and household debts (including credit card debts) go fly high. It’s a cumulative process.
The globalization of poverty leads to a decline in consumer demand which then backlashes on the productive system, leading to a further string of bankruptcies. Inevitably, the structure of international commodity trade is also affected.
Global Indebtedness
The Global Money financial institutions are the “creditors” of the real economy which is in crisis. The closure of the global economy has triggered a process of global indebtedness. Unprecedented in World history, a multi-trillion bonanza of dollar denominated debts is hitting simultaneously the national economies of 193 countries.
The creditors will also seek to acquire ownership and/or control of “public wealth” including the social and economic assets of the State through a massive indebtedness project under the surveillance of creditor institutions including the IMF, the World Bank, the regional development banks, etc.
Under the so-called “New Normal” Great Reset put forth by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the creditors (including the billionaires) are intent upon buying out important sectors of the real economy as well as taking over bankrupt entities (See Chapter IX)
Crisis of the Global Economy. The Evidence
In the sections below we review the dramatic impacts of the closure of the global economy focussing on bankruptcies, global poverty, unemployment, the outbreak of famines as well as education.
Most of the figures quoted below are from UN, government and related sources, which tend to underestimate the seriousness of this ongoing global crisis, which is literally destroying people’s lives.
Indebtedness in all sectors of economic activity Worldwide is the driving force.
What is presented below is but the tip of the iceberg. Much of the data corresponds to the first 6-8 months of 2020. The devastating impacts of the Second Wave lockdown which are ongoing are yet to be assessed:
Bankruptcies
The wave of bankruptcies triggered by the closure of the World economy affects both Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) as well as large Corporations. The evidence suggests that small and medium sized enterprises are literally being wiped out.
According to a survey by the International Trade Centre, quoted by the OECD, pertaining to SMEs in 132 countries:
two-thirds of micro and small firms report that the crisis strongly affected their business operations, and one-fifth indicate the risk of shutting down permanently within three months. Based on several surveys in a variety of countries, McKinsey (2020) indicates that between 25% and 36% of small businesses could close down permanently from the disruption in the first four months of the pandemic. (OECD Report, emphasis added)
According to Bloomberg: “Over half of Europe’s small and medium-sized businesses say they face bankruptcy in the next year if revenues don’t pick up, underscoring the breadth of damage wrought by the Covid-19 crisis.
One in five companies in Italy and France anticipate filing for insolvency within six months, according to a McKinsey & Co. survey in August of more than 2,200 SMEs in Europe’s five largest economies.
The surveys tend to underestimate the magnitude of this unfolding catastrophe. The numbers are much larger than what is being reported.
In the US, the bankruptcy process is ongoing. According to a group of academics in a letter to Congress:
“we anticipate that a significant fraction of viable small businesses will be forced to liquidate, causing high and irreversible economic losses,. “Workers will lose jobs even in otherwise viable businesses. …
“A run of defaults looks almost inevitable. At the end of the first quarter of this year, U.S. companies had amassed nearly $10.5 trillion in debt — by far the most since the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis began tracking the figure at the end of World War II. “An explosion in corporate debt,” Mr. Altman said” (NYT, June, 16, 2020).
With regard to small businesses in the US:
almost 90% of small businesses experienced a strong (51%) or moderate (38%) negative impact from the pandemic; 45% of businesses experienced disruptions in supply chains; 25% of businesses has less than 1-2 months cash reserves.“ (OECD)
The results of a survey of over 5 800 small businesses in the United States:
… shows that 43% of responding businesses are already temporarily closed. On average, businesses reduced their employees by 40%. Three-quarters of respondents indicate they have two months or less in cash in reserve. … (OECD)
“half of all US small business owners in the entire country believe that they may soon be forced to close down for good. Not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s did we see anything like this”
The COVID-19 crisis has severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which are in emerging and developing countries…(ILO, 2020a). …
Among the most vulnerable are the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who are working in sectors experiencing major job losses or have seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns.
The COVID‐19 crisis is disproportionately affecting 1.25 billion workers in at-risk jobs, particularly in the hardest-hit sectors such as retail trade, accommodation and food services, and manufacturing (ILO, 2020b). Most of these workers are self-employed, in low-income jobs in the informal sector… Young people, for example, are experiencing multiple shocks including disruption to education and training, employment and income, in addition to greater difficulties in finding jobs.
The ILO does not in any way explain the political causes of mass unemployment, resulting from actions taken by national governments, allegedly with a view to resolving the Covid pandemic. Moreover, the ILO tends to underestimate both the levels as well as the dramatic increase in unemployment.
Governments are under the control of global creditors. What is contemplated for the post-Covid era is the implementation of massive austerity measures including the cancellation of workers’ benefits and social safety nets.
Unemployment in the U.S.
In the US, “more than 30 million people, over 15% of the workforce, have applied for unemployment benefits… ” (CSM, May 6, 2020).
Announced in early December: “”More than 10 million Americans are projected to lose their unemployment benefits the day after Christmas unless Congress acts to extend key pandemic-related programs – a prospect that as of now looks uncertain at best.” (US News and World Report)
The cliff edge looms as coronavirus cases surge around the country and applications for unemployment benefits rise with states and localities reimposing virus-related restrictions. The lapse is also set to occur as protections for renters, student loan borrowers and homeowners expire – a potential devastating confluence of events for both individuals, whose savings have been ravaged by the pandemic, and the economy at large, which is gradually clawing its way back from the coronavirus-induced recession.
When the programs lapse at the end of December [2020], an estimated 12 million people could lose jobless benefits, according to the Century Foundation. (US News and World Report
Greece, Spain and Portugal … have once again seen large rises in youth unemployment since the start of the pandemic. Greece saw a surge from 31.7 percent in March to 39.3 percent in June, while Spain and Portugal had similar increases, from 33.9 percent to 41.7 percent and 20.6 percent to 27.4 percent, respectively.
Unemployment in Latin America
In Latin America, the average unemployment rate was estimated at 8.1 per cent at the end of 2019. The ILO states that it could rise by a modest 4 to 5 percentage points to 41 million unemployed.
In absolute numbers, these rates imply that the number of people who are looking for jobs but are not hired rose from 26 million before the pandemic to 41 million in 2020, as announced by ILO experts.
These estimates of the ILO and the World Bank are misleading. According to the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), the increase in unemployment for the Latin American region is of the order of 24 million, with jobs losses in Colombia of the order of 3.6 million, Brazil, 7.0 million and Mexico 7.0 million.
Even these figures tend to underestimate the dramatic increase in unemployment. And the situation is likely to evolve in course of the Second Wave lockdown which has triggered a renewed wave of bankruptcies.
According to a Survey conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) the increase in unemployment in Mexico was of the order of 12.5 million in April, i.e. in the month following the March 11, 2020 lockdown and closure of the national economy.
The Outbreak of Famines
Famines have erupted in at least 25 developing countries according to UN sources. According to the FAO July 17, 2020
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) identifies 27 countries that are on the frontline of impending COVID-19-driven food crises, as the pandemic’s knock-on effects aggravate pre-existing drivers of hunger.
No world region is immune, from Afghanistan and Bangladesh in Asia, to Haiti, Venezuela and Central America, to Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Syria in the Middle East to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Liberia Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe in Africa.
The joint analysis by FAO and WFP warns these “hotspot countries” are at high risk of – and in some cases are already seeing – significant food security deteriorations in the coming months, including rising numbers of people pushed into acute hunger.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has potentially far-reaching and multifaceted indirect impacts on societies and economies, which could last long after the health emergency is over. These could aggravate existing instabilities or crises, or lead to new ones with repercussions on food security, nutrition and livelihoods.
With over two billion people, or 62 percent of all those working worldwide, employed in the informal economy according to ILO data, millions of people face a growing risk of hunger. Earnings for informal workers are estimated to decline by 82 percent, with Africa and Latin America to face the largest decline (ILO 2020). (FAO, p. 6)
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Famine and Despair in India
The social and economic impacts of the March 11 Lockdown in India are devastating triggering a wave of famine and despair. “Millions of people who have lost income now face increased poverty and hunger, in a country where even before the pandemic 50 percent of all children suffered from malnourishment”
This strike is against the devastating health and economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 and the lockdown on the working people of the country. This has been further aggravated by a series of anti-people legislations on agriculture and the labour code enacted by the central government. Along with these measures, the National Education Policy (NEP) imposed on the nation during the pandemic will further cause irreparable harm to the equity of and access to education.
“The pandemic has spread from major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and other urban centers to rural areas where public health care is scarce or non-existent. The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritizing the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.”
Food Insecurity in the U.S.
Nutrition and food insecurity is not limited to developing countries. In the US, according to Stephen Lendman:
“Around one in four US households experienced food insecurity this year — over 27% of households with children.
A Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research study estimates the number of food insecure households with children at nearly 30%. Black families are twice as food insecure as their white counterparts. Latino households are also disproportionately affected.”
“As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the globe, a majority of countries have announced the temporary closure of schools, impacting more than 91 per cent of students worldwide… Never before have so many children been out of school at the same time…
Colleges and universities are also paralysed. Students are denied the right to education. While UNESCO confirms that more than one billion learners are affected, it offers no concrete solution or critique. The official narrative imposed by the so-called “public / private partnership” which is imposed on national governments has been adopted at face value.
School closures have been implemented in 132 countries. See diagram below (UNESCO, May 2020).
The Macro-Economic Implications: Supply, Demand and The Fiscal Crisis of the State
The above review of the economic and social impacts points to a complex process. Large sectors of the World population have been precipitated into poverty and despair.
I will attempt to conclude this chapter with some simple concepts which describe the nature of this Worldwide crisis.
The Lockdown has triggered a process of Worldwide economic destabilization which directly affects both “Supply” and “Demand” relations. It’s the most serious economic crisis in World history affecting simultaneously more than a 150 countries.
“Supply” pertains to the production of goods and services, namely the activities of the “Real Economy”.
“Demand” pertains to the ability of consumers given their purchasing power to acquire goods and services.
Both supply and demand relations are in jeopardy.
Worldwide, large sectors of industry, agriculture and urban services stand idle. The lockdown initiated in March 2020 has triggered bankruptcies and unemployment, which in turn have been conducive to a process of disengagement of human resources (labor) and productive assets from the economic landscape.
The freeze of air-travel, the contraction in international trade in the course of the last year has also contributed to a massive decline in production and investment.
As documented in this chapter, the consequences are twofold:
On the supply side, a massive contraction in the production and availability of goods and services (commodities) is unfolding. Entire sectors of the global economy are “not producing”: scarcities of certain commodities and services have emerged.
On the demand side, mass unemployment and poverty triggered by the lockdown has contributed to an unprecedented collapse in purchasing power (of families and households Worldwide), which in turn has led to the collapse in the demand for goods and services. People do not have money to buy food.
The collapse in purchasing power resulting from mass unemployment has in turn led to a mounting personal debt crisis.
The Fiscal Crisis of the State
Public sector activities (funded by the State) including health, education, culture, sports and the arts are also in jeopardy.
Since the onset of the corona crisis, the public debt in country after country has gone fly high.
Why? The answer is obvious.
Bankrupt companies no longer pay taxes.
Unemployed workers (without earnings) no longer pay taxes.
Tax dollars are no longer coming into the coffers of the State.
The increase in global unemployment and poverty coupled with bankruptcies have led to an unprecedented fiscal crisis.
The creditors of the state are “Big Money”. Ultimately they call the shots. What is unfolding is the “privatization of the State” including the “Welfare State”.
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The election for Syria’s President begins for ex-pats tomorrow and in Syria on the 26th of May.
The US, UK and other western countries will no doubt dismiss the election results because:
1) most surely current President Dr. Bashar al-Assad will win, and
2) because the US has no puppet candidates in the race.
Also, the “great champions of freedom and democracy” – the governments of the US, UK and Germany – are forbidding Syrians in their countries from voting.
The US et al will NOT condemn any elections for leader in their great ally, best weapons buying customer, and the current killers of Yemen – Saudi Arabia – you know why?
Because Saudi Arabia has no elections for leader! Never have, never will have elections because Saudi Arabia is, and has been, ruled by a single family of absolute dictators whose power is protected by the US and UK in perpetuity.
The photos are from the Syrian Presidential elections in 2014. (After almost four years of brutal, Western-backed Salafist war against the people of Syria, with the aim of regime change.)
It was semi-miraculous that they could hold them at all at that time. This was prior to the Russians coming in to help fight ISIS and al Qaeda. The “rebels” still held much of the country and were creating one mini “Saudi Arabia” after another in their areas, usually driving out religious minorities – often killing them outright; establishing a harsh interpretation of sharia law as the rule of law including having many Saudis as the sharia court judges; forcing women to be fully covered (in secular Syria women may wear what they wish) … while the US and its allies were calling them “freedom fighters”.
The US backed “freedom fighters” refused to allow their people to participate in the 2014 election. Some of the groups like Ahrar al-Sham (that’s received advanced weapons and all kinds of other support from the US) put up billboards proclaiming “Democracy is haram” (forbidden by Islamic law).
Not only did Obama, Biden, Hilary Clinton, and John Kerry’s favorite headchopping “moderate rebels” refuse to let their people vote, they made many attacks on Syrians who were voting. They killed a reported 150 people that day at voting centers or on their way to them.
The Syrian election was observed by many foreign delegations but it was the results in Lebanon which really proved their validity. The turnout was massive among Syrian ex-pats and refugees, braving a punishing summer heat wave and some standing in line for 15 hours. There was much singing and dancing. The lines were reportedly almost 2 km long and the polls had to open the next day to handle the flood. Now retired Virginia state Senator Richard Black met with Syrians in Beirut and some women showed him where they had nicked their index finger with a sharp knife so they could vote for Bashar al-Assad with their blood. Western journalists in their reporting of the huge crowds with often jubilant voters tried in vain to portray them as being forced. What a horrid and criminal joke western ‘news’ media is.
And still the US and other western countries, determined to undermine the legitimacy of the Syrian government and leader in their hoped-for regime change terrorist-proxy war, condemned the election as invalid.
The democratic structures there are imperfect but they are there which is more than can be said for America’s puppet regimes in the region.
So cheers to you Syria and may God be with you. Who leads Syria is not for the hypocritical war mongering West to decide.
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Janice Kortkamp, an antiwar, anti-imperialist Virginian, is a citizen journalist, forced to assume mass communications functions due to the collapse of honest journalism in the US and much of the Western world. Janice in her own words: “I’m an independent researcher and writer regarding the Middle East, particularly Syria. I’ve traveled throughout much of Syria in five, month-long trips, usually on my own with Syrian friends as translators and guides.”
All images in this article are from The Greanville Post
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This started becoming clear on May 12th, and has become increasingly confirmed by events since then.
On May 12th, Al-Arabia, CBS News, and other media, reported Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz as promising that “The army will continue to attack to bring a total, long-term quiet.” And, “Only when we reach that goal will we be able to speak about a truce.” Britain’s Guardianreported his speech as having said that “Israel vows not to stop Gaza attacks until there is complete quiet.” Britain’s The Express reported him as saying that “There is no end date and we will not receive moral sermons from any organization on our right to protect the citizens of Israel. Only when we reach that goal will we be able to speak about a truce.”
In other words, Israel is promising that until Gazans are totally conquered, there will be no “truce”: Israel will continue this until total victory is achieved — conquest, surrender by all Gazans.
Throughout the conflict, U.S. President Joe Biden has said that America’s policy is to request that there be a truce. However, ever since at least May 12th, Israel has made clear that a “truce” will occur only when the Gazans are totally defeated, so that there is, in Gaza, “a total, long-term quiet.” Does that differ from Israel’s announcing that they are ethnically cleansing Gazans from Gaza?
The difference would be equivalent to the difference between offering Gazans a choice ultimately between remaining quiet in the world’s largest-ever open-air prison, versus becoming totally exterminated by their enemy. What type of choice is that, actually?
Palestinians confined to Gaza have faced several devastating onslaughts by the Israelis, as well as a crippling blockade by Tel Aviv and Cairo that has resulted in the collapse of the coastal strip’s economy. Monitors and advocates across the world have decried the grave humanitarian crisis prevailing in Gaza that has resulted directly from its being deprived of needed goods including construction material, electricity, food, water and medicine.
In a report on Gaza last November, local human rights monitor B’Tselem noted:
“Israel used its control over the crossings to put Gaza under a blockade, turning almost two million people into prisoners inside the Gaza Strip, effecting an economic collapse and propelling Gaza residents into dependency on international aid.”
The UNRWA, created in 1949 to provide short-term relief for Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict, runs schools, hospitals and social services in five areas including the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
It is largely propping up Gaza, subject to a total blockade by air, land and sea since 2007. Political stalemate, conflict with Israel and divisions among Palestinian factions have left the territory an economic ruin, without health and social services and with almost no access to clean water and only four or five hours of electricity a day.
With no peace in sight, a generation is growing up in Gaza who have only known the fenced-in territory and never met an Israeli.
So, if that is the reality there, then how is this ‘choice’ anything other than an ethnic cleansing of Gaza, turning it into a prison that’s designed for its inhabitants to be “quietly” exterminated until Israelis can then ultimately take over that land and make it a new land for settlement by Israelis?
At one point in the zeros the Israeli military made a plan to only allow enough food into Gaza to keep the population from becoming malnourished, but nothing more. No chocolate for the children. It was one of the creepiest moments in the history of colonialism.
The unemployment rate in Gaza is 50%, the highest in the world. Half the population depends on food aid. The aquifer is polluted and increasingly salty from rising seas owing to climate change, so truly clean water is available to only about 5 percent of the population. Israel has several water purification plants. The Palestinians of Gaza do not.
There is no equivalence between Israel and Gaza. Israel has the best-equipped military in the Middle East and has several hundred nuclear bombs, Its gross domestic product (nominal) per capita is on the order of $42,000 per year.
The nominal GDP per capita in Palestine is $3000, and those who live in Gaza earn less yet.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke today with Israeli Minister of Defense Benjamin “Benny” Gantz. Secretary Austin underscored his continued support for Israel’s right to defend itself, reviewed assessments of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and urged de-escalation of the conflict.
The United States Government has ‘urged de-escalation’ but “underscored [its] continued support for Israel’s right to defend itself,” while exterminating Gazans.
However, on the morning of Thursday, May 20th, CNBC reported that, “Israel launched a fresh wave of airstrikes over the Gaza strip early Thursday in what it says are continued operations to take out Hamas targets.” That action by Netanyahu — a flagrant disregard for what U.S. President Biden had publicly instructed him to do (and the United States Government donates annually $3.8 billion to Israel for purchase of U.S.-made weapons) — was very embarrassing for Biden. However, Biden had not publicly threatened Netanyahu, but had only instructed him. Therefore, the question, at this point, was whether Netanyahu’s disobedience would be publicly punished (such as by means of applying U.S. sanctions against Israel and against Netanyahu personally). Which was the master, and which was the slave, in the U.S.-Israel relationship? Absent a public punishment of Israel for its disobedience, Israel would appear to be the master, and the U.S. its slave.
Also on May 20th, Al Jazeera, a news-operation that represents the royal family of Qatar, headlined “Death, destruction in Gaza as Israel defies truce call: Live”, and reported that, “Israeli fighter jets continued to pound the Gaza Strip on Thursday, … as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied calls for a de-escalation.” This was specific public recognition that Israel was defying the publicly announced policy of the U.S. Government.
It’s good to know what America stands for, and has been standing for, at least after the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, if not ever since Harry S. Truman became America’s President in 1945. The United States has certainly been like this, continually, for a very long time.
It is now out in the open. If Biden will retaliate strongly against Israel, he will change U.S. foreign policy since 1945. If he fails to retaliate at all, he will be profoundly embarrassed. If he continues to try to walk the fence on this matter, then, since it’s all out in the open now, the United States itself will be profoundly embarrassed. No matter what he does, the future will not be like the past. This juncture is a historical turning-point, whichever way he might turn.
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President Joe Biden continues to proclaim endless support of apartheid Israel, but millions have decided that defense of Palestinian rights and lives is the only civilized response to barbaric aggression.
There aren’t many issues which clearly and unequivocally delineate right from wrong. The question of justice for the Palestinian people and their right to be protected by international law is one which gives no wiggle room for ifs, ands, or buts. Israel’s apartheid system is of such long standing and is so brazen that millions of people feel not only outrage but an insult to their own personal integrity and now speak up though they once demurred.
The state of Israel periodically decides to bomb Gaza, evict Palestinians from their homes, or attack the al-Aqsa mosque. They have done all of those things in recent weeks, during the holy month of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr celebration no less. Israel continues its practice of violating international law by carrying out collective punishments against civilian populations.
As always, the deaths are disproportionately among Palestinians. The dead are largely on one side while the other suffers few casualties.
The attacks on Palestinians have been ongoing since the Nakba catastrophe of 1948 but are always followed by protest and condemnation from throughout the world. From the moment the state of Israel came into being it carried out massacres, invasions, and theft of land. Each time its protectors in the United States come to its aid. The U.S. uses its veto power on the United Nations Security Council to prevent the international community from using its voice and gives the impression that war crimes are accepted when the opposite is true.
President Joe Biden continues in the path of his predecessors, proclaiming endless support of apartheid Israel. A State Department spokesperson couldn’t bring himself to even express mild concern over the deaths of Gazan children.
Some of the usual suspects are still at large, so craven that they won’t even speak up for themselves. The Reuters news agency described the Israeli destruction of a building housing the Associated Press and Al Jazeera in Gaza in a twisted passive voice. “Gaza tower housing AP, Al Jazeera collapses after missile strike — witness.” The Israeli government sent a message to the international media that they would be targets, and Reuters obeyed the dictate by violating the most basic rules of journalism. They are so fearful that they wouldn’t explain the basic who, what, when, where, why and how that every school child knows are an integral part of reporting.
While the corporate media continue tales of phony equivalency and act as stenographers for the state, thousands of people ignored them and took to the streets in protest. It is true that Israel continues its stranglehold on politics in the U.S. and throughout the NATO imperialist alliance. While officials throughout these nations ignored the reality of deaths of Gazan civilians, including entire families, protests took place in Washington, London, Paris and other cities in defiance of political leadership.
What of Black political leadership in this country? Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) rose to the occasion with clear condemnation of Israel on the floor of congress. Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Andre Carson and Cori Bush all made unequivocal statements decrying Israel’s actions. This development is an important one, as the hangover from the Israeli lobby targeting of CBC members is seeming to dissipate. These CBC members are like millions of people, appalled by scenes of the Israeli Defense Forces violating the sanctity of al-Aqsa and lynch mobs attacking Palestinians at will.
New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang didn’t get the memo announcing a political change and he issued the same tired statement about “standing with Israel” but ordinary people gave him a piece of their minds. He was disinvited from a Ramadan event and had to backtrack, calling his original comment “overly simplistic” and declared that he mourns for Palestinian lives too.
Israel may have finally gone too far. The moment when all of the people cannot be fooled has arrived. The proof of atrocities is too easy to find, and the deaths of little children are universally abhorred. Only those most slavishly devoted to the establishment are going along with the narrative of Israel’s alleged right to defend itself by destroying homes and hospitals.
The fence straddlers have had their day. The assault on the consciences of millions of people may have finally brought about the sea change that was needed. Defending the human rights of Palestinians is right, and any equivocation on the matter is wrong. The issue is black and white. There is no room for gray.
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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
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Dozens of medical experts issued a warning this month about COVID-19 vaccines, slamming the jabs as “unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe” and likely to lead to “foreseeable mass deaths.”
“In short, the available evidence and science indicate that COVID-19 vaccines are unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe,” Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics said in an open letter two weeks ago. “Actors authorizing, coercing or administering experimental COVID-19 vaccination are exposing populations and patients to serious, unnecessary, and unjustified medical risks.”
Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics, a group founded by Dr. Stephen Frost counts more than 160 medical experts from around the world among its signatories. Among its members are Dr. Mike Yeadon, Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi MD, former chair of the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former head of the health committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
The doctors have pennedmultipleletters to the European Medicines Agency on COVID-19 vaccine issues and are facing censorship, though their most recent letter can be found archived here. The group also can be found on Twitter. Their testimony reflects growing calls from experts, like Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay and Dr. Peter McCullough, to halt the jabs.
‘The tip of a huge iceberg’
In their letter earlier this month, Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics emphasized serious health implications of the vaccines for both the healthy and ill, saying that the shots “are not safe, either for recipients or for those who use them or authorize their use.”
They pointed to risks of “lethal and non-lethal disruptions of blood clotting including bleeding disorders, thrombosis in the brain, stroke and heart attack,” “antibody-dependent enhancement of disease,” autoimmune reactions, and potential effects of “vaccine impurities due to rushed manufacturing and unregulated production standards.”
“Contrary to claims that blood disorders post-vaccination are ‘rare’, many common vaccine side effects (headaches, nausea, vomiting and hematoma-like ‘rashes’ over the body) may indicate thrombosis and other severe abnormalities,” the experts said. “Clotting events currently receiving media attention are likely just the ‘tip of a huge iceberg.’”
“Due to immunological priming, risks of clotting, bleeding and other adverse events can be expected to increase with each re-vaccination and each intervening coronavirus exposure,” Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics added. “Over time, whether months or years, this renders both vaccination and coronaviruses dangerous to young and healthy age groups, for whom without vaccination COVID-19 poses no substantive risk,” they argued.
“Just as smoking could be and was predicted to cause lung cancer based on first principles, all gene-based vaccines can be expected to cause blood clotting and bleeding disorders, based on their molecular mechanisms of action,” they said. “Consistent with this, diseases of this kind have been observed across age groups, leading to temporary vaccine suspensions around the world.”
“Since vaccine roll-out, COVID-19 incidence has risen in numerous areas with high vaccination rates. Furthermore, multiple series of COVID-19 fatalities have occurred shortly after the onset vaccinations in senior homes,” the doctors said. “These cases may have been due not only to antibody-dependent enhancement but also to a general immunosuppressive effect of the vaccines, which is suggested by the increased occurrence of Herpes zoster in certain patients.”
“Regardless of the exact mechanism responsible for these reported deaths, we must expect that the vaccines will increase rather than decrease lethality of COVID-19,” they continued.
The group stressed that the jabs remain technically experimental – a fact that legally precludes mandatory vaccination in many cases:
“The vaccines are experimental by definition. They will remain in Phase 3 trials until 2023. Recipients are human subjects entitled to free informed consent under Nuremberg and other protections, including the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s resolution 2361 and the FDA’s terms of emergency use authorization.”
‘Full onslaught of the immune system’
Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics particularly warned about vaccines, like those produced by Pfizer and Moderna, that rely on the novel mRNA vaccination method.
“Initial experience might suggest that the adenovirus-derived vaccines (AstraZeneca/Johnson & Johnson) cause graver adverse effects than the mRNA (Pfizer/Moderna) vaccines. However, upon repeated injection, the former will soon induce antibodies against the proteins of the adenovirus vector,” according to the doctors. “These antibodies will then neutralize most of the vaccine virus particles and cause their disposal before they can infect any cells, thereby limiting the intensity of tissue damage.”
“In contrast, in the mRNA vaccines, there is no protein antigen for the antibodies to recognize. Thus, regardless of the existing degree of immunity, the vaccine mRNA is going to reach its target — the body cells,” they said. “These will then express the spike protein and subsequently suffer the full onslaught of the immune system. With the mRNA vaccines, the risk of severe adverse events is virtually guaranteed to increase with every successive injection.”
“Their apparent preferment over the latter is concerning in the highest degree.”
Unnecessary vaccines, ‘no medium-term or long-term data’
“In most countries, most people will now have immunity to SARS-CoV-2,” the experts additionally noted, pointing out that coronavirus has an estimated 99.8% survival rate globally. “Regardless of disease severity, they will now have sufficient immunity to be protected from severe disease in the event of renewed exposure. This majority of the population will not benefit at all from being vaccinated.”
For those at risk of severe infection, the virus remains treatable, Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics said. “A convergence of evidence indicates that early treatment with existing drugs reduces hospitalization and mortality by ~85% and 75%, respectively,” they explained, highlighting “many tried and true anti-inflammatory, antiviral, and anticoagulant medications, as well as monoclonal antibodies, zinc, and vitamins C and D.”
“Natural T-Cell immunity provides stronger and more comprehensive protection against all SARS-CoV-2 strains than vaccines, because naturally primed immunity recognizes multiple virus epitopes and costimulatory signals, not merely a single (spike) protein,” they continued.
The doctors’ letter also debunked claims that vaccination is necessary to prevent viral spread through asymptomatic infection.
“The vaccines have been touted as a means to prevent asymptomatic infection, and by extension ‘asymptomatic transmission,’” Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics said. “However, ‘asymptomatic transmission’ is an artefact of invalid and unreliable PCR test procedures and interpretations, leading to high false-positive rates. Evidence indicates that PCR-positive, asymptomatic people are healthy false-positives, not carriers.”
The group cited a Chinese study of nearly 10 million people, which found that asymptomatic COVID carriers virtually never transmit the virus. “In contrast, the papers cited by the Centre for Disease Control to justify claims of asymptomatic transmission are based on hypothetical models, not empirical studies,” they said. “Plainly stated, vaccines are not necessary to prevent severe disease.”
The experts raised concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines effectiveness as well, stating that “no medium-term or long term longitudinal data” proves vaccine efficacy. They criticized the coronavirus vaccine trials, observing that the European Medicines Agency “has noted of the Comirnaty (Pfizer mRNA) vaccine that severe COVID-19 cases ‘were rare in the study, and statistically certain conclusion cannot be drawn from it.’”
“The risk-benefit calculus is therefore clear, the experimental vaccines are needless, ineffective and dangerous.” “[U]rging vaccination to ‘protect others’ therefore has no basis in fact,” their letter concluded, offering a sobering warning to those pushing the shots.
“Actors authorizing, coercing or administering experimental COVID-19 vaccination are exposing populations and patients to serious, unnecessary, and unjustified medical risks,” they said. “Vaccine manufacturers have exempted themselves from legal liability for adverse events for a reason. When vaccine deaths and harms occur, liability will fall to those responsible for the vaccines’ authorization, administration and/or coercion via vaccine passports, none of which can be justified on a sober, evidence-based risk-benefit analysis.”
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Featured image: Dr Michael Yeadon, a former Pfizer vice president and co-founder of Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics (The Last American Vagabond / Odysee)
“What they need to do is they need to occupy the bases of the Canadian Armed Forces! They need to occupy the military hardware factories! They need to occupy their courts and stopthe shipping of these weapons to apartheid Israel! Anything less than that will not actually cleanse them from the blood on their hands as Canadians!”
As of 2:00 am on May 21 by the Israel-Palestine hour this morning, or 7:00pm EDT on Thursday, the two sides of the disputing rivals had ceased hostilities – at least for the time being.[1]
By the standard account, the bitter eruption rose up on May 6 when Palestinians rose up in protest to a Supreme Court of Israel ruling on the matter of evicting six Palestinian families from their housing units in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. This was followed the next day by Israeli police storming the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam and firing stun grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas at the worshippers in attendance.
Then on May 10, Hamas, the militant force governing over Gaza, wanted Israeli security forces removed from Sheikh Jarrah and the Temple Mount complex, location of the holiest site in Judaism which also housed Al-Aqsa Mosque. When Israel refused they fired rockets on targets in Israel. What followed was a campaign of airstrikes by Israel.
The following clip recorded by Middle East Eye is just a sample of what the last two weeks were like:
“I don’t know what to do.”
A 10-year-old Palestinian girl breaks down while talking to MEE after Israeli air strikes destroyed her neighbour’s house, killing 8 children and 2 women#Gaza#Palestine#Israelpic.twitter.com/jnZx8wruaX
Regrettably, violence in the region tends to spring up from time to time. And absent being held to account for past crimes by the UN, Washington, or really anyone, Israel will most likely continue on setting up more shelters on occupied land, and besieging the beleaguered Gaza, and ignoring the human rights of their Palestinian neighbours frankly at levels well beyond the harsh treatment of Blacks in modern day America.
But something is a little different this time. Despite Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ technology taking out as many as 90 percent of rockets, some projectiles, cruise missiles no less, are punching through and hitting Israel stronger than ever. The Palestinians in Israel are themselves taking action in the streets, in businesses, and synagogues. And even in the United States, while the President continues to disappoint with his tepid remarks about the right of Israel to defend itself, sharp and popular critics in Congress such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are speaking out loudly against continuing to arm Israel despite its ongoing abuses against Palestinians.
Do these and other unique scenarios marking this 11 day period of terror mean things will be different now or in the long term? This is the question running through this Global Research News Hour and its sixty minute broadcast.
On the show in our first half hour, Richard Falk, professor emeritus of law at Princeton university talks to listeners highlighting some of the less talked about elements of the past month, including how it was incited by right wing settlers and during the Islamic holy period known as Ramadan. He also discussed attacks on media and the prospects for victory for Palestinians in the long term.
Following that, we hear from Richard Silverstein, a progressive blogger focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict. He will dwell on the growth in Hamas’ arsenal, the growth of Palestinian solidarity in Israel, and the potential ability of the International Criminal Court to wound Israel’s prospects.
Finally, Palestine activist and commentator Laith Marouf joins us again to dwell on the motives of the new Palestinian resistance, the prospects for the conflict to intensify, and the goals of Canadians wishing to show their solidarity with the damaged but determined victims of 73 years of Israeli confrontation.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years and holds the title of professor emeritus. In 2008 he was also appointed by the UN to serve a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. He contributes regularly to Global Research.
Richard Silverstein is a political writer and commentator. Since 2003 he has authored the progressive Jewish blog Tikun Olam, which focuses on exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. He contributes regularly to Middle East Eye, and has contributed in the past to Truthout, Alternet, Haaretz, Mint Press News, Jewish Forward, Los Angeles Times, Comment Is Free and Al Jazeera English.
Laith Marouf is a long time multimedia consultant and producer and currently serves as Senior Consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre (www.cmacentre.org) and the coordinator of ICTV, in Canada (www.tele1.ca). Laith derives much of his understanding of Middle Eastern Affairs from his ancestral background of being both of Palestinian and of Syrian extraction. He is currently based in Beirut.
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The most influential organization in the world with nominal responsibility for global health and epidemic issues is the United Nations’ World Health Organization, WHO, based in Geneva. What few know is the actual mechanisms of its political control, the shocking conflicts of interest, corruption and lack of transparency that permeate the agency that is supposed to be the impartial guide for getting through the current COVID-19 pandemic. The following is only part of what has come to public light.
Pandemic declaration?
On January 30 Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the UN World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern or PHIEC. This came two days after Tedros met with China President Xi Jinping in Beijing to discuss the dramatic rise in severe cases of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan and surrounding areas that had reached dramatic proportions. Announcing his emergency PHIEC declaration, Tedros praised the Chinese quarantine measures, measures highly controversial in public health and never before in modern times attempted with entire cities, let alone countries. At the same time Tedros, curiously, criticized other countries who were moving to block flights to China to contain the strange new disease, leading to charges he was unduly defending China.
The first three cases in Wuhan were reported, officially, on December 27, 2019, a full month earlier. The cases were all diagnosed with pneumonia from a “novel” or new form of SARS Coronavirus. Important to note is that the largest movement of people in the year, China’s Lunar New Year and Spring Festival, during which some 400 million citizens move throughout the land to join families went from January 17 through February 8. On January 23, at 2am two days before start of actual New Year festivities, Wuhan authorities declared an unprecedented lockdown of the entire city of 11 million as of 10am that day. By then, hundreds of thousands if not several million residents had fled in panic to avoid the quarantine.
By the time the WHO declared its Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January, precious weeks had been lost to contain the disease. Yet Tedros effusively praised the “unprecedented” Chinese measures and criticized other countries for placing “stigma” on Chinese by cutting travel.
In reference to the Wuhan COVID-19 spread and why WHO did not call it a pandemic, the WHO spokesman, Tarik Jasarevic, stated “There is no official category (for a pandemic)…WHO does not use the old system of 6 phases — that ranged from phase 1 (no reports of animal influenza causing human infections) to phase 6 (a pandemic) — that some people may be familiar with from H1N1 in 2009.”
Then, in an about-face, on March 11, Tedros Adhanom announced for the first time that WHO was calling the novel coronavirus illness, now renamed COVID-19, a “global pandemic.” At that point WHO said there were more than 118,000 cases of COVID-19 in 114 countries, with 4,291 deaths.
2009 WHO H1N1 Swine Flu Fake Pandemic
Since an earlier WHO fiasco and scandal in 2009 over its declaration of a global pandemic around the “swine flu” or H1N1 as it was termed, the WHO decided to drop using the term pandemic. The reason is indicative of the corruption endemic to the WHO institution.
Just weeks before first reports in 2009 of a young Mexican child being infected with a novel H1N1 “swine flu” virus in Veracruz, the WHO had quietly changed the traditional definition of pandemic. No longer was it necessary a reported disease be extremely widespread in many countries and extremely deadly or debilitating. It need only be widespread, like seasonal flu, should WHO “experts” want to declare pandemic. WHO H1N1 symptoms were the same as a bad cold.
When then-WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan officially declared a Phase 6 global Pandemic emergency, that triggered national emergency programs including billions of dollars of government purchases of alleged H1N1 vaccines. At the end of the 2009 flu season it turned out the deaths due to H1N1 were tiny relative to the normal seasonal flu. Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, a German physician specialising in Pulmonology, was then chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In 2009 he called for an inquiry into alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the EU response to the Swine Flu pandemic. The Netherlands Parliament as well discovered that Professor Albert Osterhaus of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic as the key advisor to WHO on influenza, was intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1.
Many of the other WHO scientific experts who advised Dr Chan to declare pandemic were receiving money directly or indirectly from Big Pharma including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and other major vaccine-makers. The WHO Swine Flu Pandemic declaration was a fake. 2009-10 saw the mildest influenza worldwide since medicine began tracking it. The pharma giants took in billions in the process.
It was after the 2009 pandemic scandal that the WHO stopped using the 6 phase pandemic declaration and went to the totally vague and confusing “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.” But now, Tedros and WHO arbitrarily decided to reintroduce the term pandemic, admitting though that they are still in the midst of creating yet a new definition of the term. “Pandemic” triggers more fear than “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”
WHO’s SAGE Still Conflicted
Despite the huge 2009-10 conflict-of-interest scandals linking Big Pharma to WHO, today the WHO under Tedros has done little to clean out corruption and conflicts of interest.
The current WHO Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) is riddled with members who receive “financially significant” funds from either major vaccine makers, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BGMF) or Wellcome Trust. In the latest posting by WHO of the 15 scientific members of SAGE, no fewer than 8 had declared interest, by law, of potential conflicts. In almost every case the significant financial funder of these 8 SAGE members included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck & Co. (MSD), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (a Gates-funded vaccine group), BMGF Global Health Scientific Advisory Committee, Pfizer, Novovax, GSK, Novartis, Gilead, and other leading pharma vaccine players. So much for independent scientific objectivity at WHO.
Gates and WHO
The fact that many of the members of WHO’s SAGE have financial ties to the Gates Foundation is highly revealing, even if not surprising. Today the WHO is primarily financed not by UN member governments, but by what is called a “public-private partnership” in which private vaccine companies and the group of Bill Gates-sponsored entities dominate.
In the latest available financial report of WHO, for December 31, 2017, slightly more than half of the $2+ billion General Fund Budget of WHO was from private donors or external agencies such as World Bank or EU. Far the largest private or non-government funders of WHO are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation together with Gates-funded GAVI VaccineAlliance, the Gates-initiated Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM). Those three provided more than $474 million to WHO. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone gave a whopping $324,654,317 to WHO. By comparison, the largest state donor to WHO, the US Government, gave $401 million to WHO.
Among other private donors we find the world’s leading vaccine and drug makers including Gilead Science (currently pressing to have its drug as treatment for COVID-19), GlaxoSmithKline, Hoffmann-LaRoche, Sanofi Pasteur, Merck Sharp and Dohme Chibret and Bayer AG. The drug makers gave tens of millions of dollars to WHO in 2017. This private pro-vaccine industry support for the WHO agenda from the Gates Foundation and Big Pharma is more than a simple conflict of interest. It is a de facto high-jacking of the UN agency responsible for coordinating worldwide responses to epidemics and disease. Further, the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest at some $50 billion, invests its tax-exempt dollars in those same vaccine makers including Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline.
Against this background it should come as no surprise that Ethiopian politician, Tedros Adhanom, became head of WHO in 2017. Tedros is the first WHO director who is not a medical doctor despite his insistence on using Dr. as title. His is a doctor of philosophy in community health for “research investigating the effects of dams on the transmission of malaria in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.” Tedros, who was also Ethiopia Minister of Foreign Affairs until 2016, met Bill Gates when he was Ethiopian Health Minister and became Board Chair of the Gates-linked Global Fund Against HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria.
Under Tedros, the notorious corruption and conflicts of interest at WHO have continued, even grown. According to a recent report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in 2018 and 2019 under Tedros, the WHO Health Emergencies Program, the section responsible for the COVID-19 global response, was cited with the highest risk rating noting the “failure to adequately finance the program and emergency operations [risks] inadequate delivery of results at country level.” The ABC report further found that there has also been a “surge in internal corruption allegations across the whole of the organisation, with the detection of multiple schemes aimed at defrauding large sums of money from the international body.” Not very reassuring.
In early March Oxford University stopped using WHO data on COVID-19 because of repeated errors and inconsistencies the WHO refused to correct. The WHO test protocols for coronavirus tests have repeatedly been cited by various countries including Finland for flaws and false positives and other defects.
This is the WHO which we now trust to guide us through the worst health crisis of the past century.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) today filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama requesting a temporary restraining order against the emergency use authorization (EUA) permitting using the COVID-19 vaccines in children under the age of 16, and that no further expansion of the EUAs to children under the age of 16 be granted prior to the resolution of these issues at trial.
The case will challenge the EUAs for the injections on several counts, based on the law and scientific evidence that the EUAs should never have been granted, the EUAs should be revoked immediately, the injections are dangerous biological agents that have the potential to cause substantially greater harm than the COVID-19 disease itself, and that numerous laws have been broken in the process of granting these EUAs and foisting these injections on the American people.
AFLDS Founder Dr. Simone Gold spoke about the reasons for filing the motion:
“We doctors are pro-vaccine, but this is not a vaccine,” she said. “This is an experimental biological agent whose harms are well-documented (although suppressed and censored) and growing rapidly, and we will not support using America’s children as guinea pigs.”
She continued:
“We insist that the EUA not be relinquished prematurely; certainly not before trials are complete – October 31, 2022 for Moderna and April 27, 2023 for Pfizer. We are shocked at the mere discussion of this, and will not be silent while Americans are used as guinea pigs for a virus with survivability of 99.8% globally and 99.97% under age 70.
“Under age 20 it is 99.997% – ‘statistical zero’.
“There are 104 children age 0-17 who died from COVID-19 and 287 from COVID + Influenza – out of ~72 million. This equals zero risk. And we doctors won’t stand for children being offered something they do not need and of whom some unknown percentage will suffer.”
“My greatest concerns with the vaccination of children under the age of 18 is the fact that there is no prior study of these individuals before December of 2020.”
She went on to say:
“Children were not included in the trials, and the adult trials do not have any long-term safety data currently available.”
AFLDS Legal DirectorAli Shultz commented on AFLDS’ filing:
“Not many people could have taken this on. Dr. Simone Gold is a doctor, and a lawyer, and a fierce warrior who will stop at nothing to protect humanity.
“She has a certain finesse in developing the right team to see this medical/legal mission through.”
To read the motion and all supporting documents, click here.
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By hot and other means, Israeli war on Occupied Palestinians has been ongoing nonstop for 73 years.
Ebbing and flowing but never quitting, there’s no end of in prospect because of one-sided US/Western support for the worst of Israeli apartheid ruthlessness against long-suffering Palestinians their ruling regimes don’t give a damn about, never did, and won’t ahead without sustained intifada revolution for positive change unable to be achieved another way.
A permanent state of undeclared Israeli war exists like always before.
Halted Israeli aggression on Gaza and its people is temporary, never permanent.
It’s just a matter of time before its war machine goes wild again against the Strip and its beleaguered people for whatever invented pretext its ruling regime uses to justify what’s unjustifiable.
At the same time, Israel terrorizes millions of Palestinians throughout the Territories daily — how the scourge of Zionist apartheid always operates without mercy.
Instead of upholding and enforcing the rule of law, the West, its partners, most other world community nations, and UN pay lip service alone to Palestinian rights and well-being.
They’ve always been uncaring and dismissive toward long-suffering Palestinians under suffocating Israeli occupation.
They turn a blind eye to multiple daily incursions by Israeli soldiers and other security forces into Palestinian neighborhoods throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem — along with violent cross border raids into Gaza at Israel’s discretion.
Most often conducted pre-dawn, they burst into Palestinians homes violently, terrorizing families, traumatizing young children, arrests made solely for political reasons.
Thousands of Palestinian men, women, youths, and young children languish in Israel’s gulag as political prisoners – hundreds uncharged and untried for the “crime” of being Muslims on land Israel wants for exclusive Jewish use.
In stark contrast to how Jews are treated, a permanent state of undeclared war exists by Israel against millions of oppressed Palestinians — the world community doing nothing to challenge it.
At the same time, Israeli installed Palestinian puppet president/longstanding collaborator with the Jewish state Mahmoud Abbas acts as its enforcer against his own people.
Most PLO members are Israeli collaborators for special benefits afforded them.
Gazans have been illegally besieged for 14 years because the wrong party — Hamas — won the last democratically held Palestinian legislative election in January 2006.
Since that time, Israeli regimes banned free, fair, and open repeats of the 2006 process — with full support from the US-dominated West and partnered nations.
On Thursday, in response to a pause in Israeli war on Gaza —never a lasting halt to its aggression and state terror throughout the Territories — Biden’s impersonator delivered the following hollow remarks.
“…Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity and democracy (sic).”
“My (regime) will continue our quiet, relentless diplomacy toward that (sic).”
His regime blocked four Security Council statements for cessation of IDF terror-bombing and shelling of Gaza.
The White House also approved supplying Israel with $735 million worth of precision-guided missiles to continue mass-murdering Palestinian civilians.
Once again, the White House expressed full support for Israeli apartheid ruthlessness in less than so many words.
When US/Western officials express support for “Israel’s right to defend itself (sic),” it’s code language for OKing its aggression against Palestinians and neighboring states when preemptively attacking them.
Earlier on Thursday, White House press secretary Psaki said the Netanyahu regime “achieved significant military objectives” against besieged Gazans.
Saying it’s “in relation to protecting” Israelis ignored that the Jewish state’s only enemies are invented.
No real ones existed since the October 1973 Yom Kippur war.
So Israel, the US and West invent them to let their war machines run wild in defiance of peace, stability and the rule of law they abhor, ignore and consistently breach.
On Thursday, truth-telling Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported the following:
“Gaza’s destruction (by Israeli terror-bombing and shelling inflicted) an unbearable humanitarian and financial toll” on the Strip.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are needed rebuild what the Netanyahu regime destroyed or badly damaged, including housing for its residents, vital infrastructure, and restoration of terror-bombed medical facilities.
Because electrical power was destroyed or badly damaged, Gaza’s “three main desalination plants providing services for more than 400,000 people have suspended operations…”
“(M)ore than 100,000 cubic meters of untreated or partially treated wastewater are being discharged to the sea daily.”
“In total, about 800,00 people now have no regular access to water,” Hass explained.
At least 75,000 Gazans were displaced and are now homeless or living in temporary accommodations because their residences were rendered “unfit for habitation” from terror-bombing.
To silence or obstruct truth-telling journalism about days of IDF aggression, the Netanyahu regime destroyed 33 media offices.
It also terror-bombed the Qatari Red Crescent office in Gaza, causing major damage to its facility.
At least 50 government-run schools were badly damaged.
So were six hospitals, 11 other medical centers, dozens of mosques, businesses, factories, government buildings, and Gaza’s agriculture sector.
It’ll take years and significant donor aid to rebuild and repair what Israeli terror-bombing destroyed or badly damaged.
Whatever is achieved won’t matter.
It’s just a matter of time before Israel’s war machine rapes the Strip and its long-suffering people again.
It’s virtually guaranteed.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Jewish Voice for Peace is guided by a vision of justice, equality and freedom for all people. We unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter to those ideals.
We know that opposing Zionism, or even discussing it, can be painful, can strike at the deepest trauma and greatest fears of many of us. Zionism is a nineteenth-century political ideology that emerged in a moment where Jews were defined as irrevocably outside of a Christian Europe. European antisemitism threatened and ended millions of Jewish lives — in pogroms, in exile, and in the Holocaust.
Through study and action, through deep relationship with Palestinians fighting for their own liberation, and through our own understanding of Jewish safety and self determination, we have come to see that Zionism was a false and failed answer to the desperately real question many of our ancestors faced of how to protect Jewish lives from murderous antisemitism in Europe.
While it had many strains historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where Jews have more rights than others. Our own history teaches us how dangerous this can be.
Palestinian dispossession and occupation are by design. Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations, systematically separating Palestinians from their homes, land, and each other. Zionism, in practice, has resulted in massacres of Palestinian people, ancient villages and olive groves destroyed, families who live just a mile away from each other separated by checkpoints and walls, and children holding onto the keys of the homes from which their grandparents were forcibly exiled.
Because the founding of the state of Israel was based on the idea of a “land without people,” Palestinian existence itself is resistance. We are all the more humbled by the vibrance, resilience, and steadfastness of Palestinian life, culture, and organizing, as it is a deep refusal of a political ideology founded on erasure.
In sharing our stories with one another, we see the ways Zionism has also harmed Jewish people. Many of us have learned from Zionism to treat our neighbors with suspicion, to forget the ways Jews built home and community wherever we found ourselves to be. Jewish people have had long and integrated histories in the Arab world and North Africa, living among and sharing community, language and custom with Muslims and Christians for thousands of years.
By creating a racist hierarchy with European Jews at the top, Zionism erased those histories and destroyed those communities and relationships. In Israel, Jewish people of color – from the Arab world, North Africa, and East Africa – have long been subjected to systemic discrimination and violence by the Israeli government. That hierarchy also creates Jewish spaces where Jews of color are marginalized, our identities and commitments questioned & interrogated, and our experiences invalidated. It prevents us from seeing each other — fellow Jews and other fellow human beings — in our full humanity.
Zionist interpretations of history taught us that Jewish people are alone, that to remedy the harms of antisemitism we must think of ourselves as always under attack and that we cannot trust others. It teaches us fear, and that the best response to fear is a bigger gun, a taller wall, a more humiliating checkpoint.
Rather than accept the inevitability of occupation and dispossession, we choose a different path. We learn from the anti-Zionist Jews who came before us, and know that as long as Zionism has existed, so has Jewish dissent to it. Especially as we face the violent antisemitism fueled by white nationalism in the United States today, we choose solidarity. We choose collective liberation. We choose a future where everyone, including Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, can live their lives freely in vibrant, safe, equitable communities, with basic human needs fulfilled. Join us.
Zionism is a form of Jewish nationalism, and is the primary ideology that drove the establishment of Israel. Zionism began in the late 19th century in the context of a set of huge changes in political, cultural, social landscape of Jewish life in Europe, along with the general rise of nationalist movements and nation-state political forms. For Jews in Europe, this meant a sharp rise in violent antisemitism. Jewish people – even though they had lived in Europe for centuries – were fundamentally excluded from the ways European nations defined themselves. This resulted in violent, targeted, anti-Jewish massacres in Russia, known as pogroms; the development of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories like Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the re-emergence of older antisemitic tropes, like blood libels, which claim that Jewish people use the blood of Christian children in rituals.
Some Jewish people responded to this antisemitism by attempting to assimilate into the European countries they lived in; this often proved impossible. Many Jewish people – over 2.5 million – left as refugees, coming to the United States or other parts of Europe. Others, most famously the Bund, rejected the concept of nationalism altogether or turned to revolutionary socialism. And some, notably Theodore Herzl, often seen as the founder of Zionism, thought that Jews themselves constituted a separate people, and should therefore have a state of their own. Herzl and other early Zionist thinkers were also very influenced by European settler colonial thinking, often explicitly making the case that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a European colony similar to the British presence in India.
It is important to note that people who consider themselves Zionist have different interpretations of what that label means in the present political moment, to them personally, and historically. Moreover, over time, multiple strains of Zionism have emerged, including political Zionism, religious Zionism, and cultural Zionism.
Political: When people refer to “Zionism” today, this is often what they mean. Founded by 19th Century thinker Theodore Herzl, it sees the “Jewish problem” as having a solution in a “Jewish state.” As nationalism rose in Europe, many, including Herzl, saw Jews as outsiders to the nation, unable or unwilling to assimilate or be fully accepted as members of the nation-state. According to Herzl, this “problem” should be solved by a community of nations by establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
Religious: Many, but not all, forms of Zionism have their roots in theological interpretations. It is important to note that this form of Zionism is not exclusive to Jewish religious traditions. For example, some evangelical Christian denominations believe that in order to facilitate the second coming of Christ, Jews must “gather” in Israel as part of Biblical prophecy.
Cultural: Most often attributed to Herzl’s contemporary, Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg), this form of Zionism called for a spiritual and cultural center for Jewish people in Palestine, but not for a “Jewish state” in the same way Herzl did. Instead, this form of Zionism calls for Jews to share a national language and culture.
The political ideology of Zionism, regardless of which strain, has resulted in the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in the land of historic Palestine. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled as part of that process, their homes and property confiscated. Despite recognition of their rights by the United Nations, their rights to return and be compensated have long been denied by the US and Israel. In 1967, Israel occupied what is now known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories, putting millions of people under military rule. Longstanding systemic inequalities privilege Jews over Palestinians inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories.
“Anti-Zionism” is a loose term referring to criticism of the current policies of the Israeli state, and/or moral, ethical, or religious criticism of the idea of a Jewish nation-state. There has been debate, criticism and opposition to Zionism within Jewish thought for as long as it has existed. Jewish anti-Zionists span a political and religious spectrum, from religious and secular progressives who view opposition to Zionism as an anti-racist praxis, to ultra-Orthodox Jews who oppose Jewish dominion until the time of the Messiah, to anarchist Jews who oppose the very concept of nation-states, Jewish or otherwise. There are also many non-Jewish anti-Zionists whose perspectives may be informed by moral criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, problems with the impact of Zionist thinking in Israel on non-Jewish residents, and/or a criticism of ethno-nationalism more broadly. Many Palestinians take anti-Zionist positions or identify as anti-Zionist because of the current and historical practices of the Israeli state.
Criticism of Zionism is not to be conflated with antisemitism. States such as Israel and the United States are openly criticized in public life, and their political beliefs and policies are subject to critical debate, in accord with our basic First Amendment rights.
For more on the history of Jewish alternatives to Zionism, please see this blog post by former JVP staffer Ben Lorber.
For more on the problems of conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, please see this op-ed by NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.
For more on criticisms of Zionism, please see these excerpts from “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims” by Edward Said.
Why and How Did We Clarify Our Position on Zionism?
At its founding, JVP made a conscious choice as an organization to abstain from taking a position on Zionism, because we felt it closed off conversation in the Jewish community. Palestinian partners had long theorized Zionism as the root cause of the Palestinian condition, and more and more of our members not only agreed, but understood Zionism as damaging to Jewish identity and spiritual life. In 2014, it became clear that we needed to clarify our position in order to effectively continue doing our work.
We started by creating a committee through an application process that was purposely designed to represent the breadth of JVP membership. This group of staff, members and board met regularly over the course of two years to design a curriculum on Zionism. Over 700 members attended the webinars presenting the curriculum, and throughout the process, chapters met and discussed the ways JVP’s approach to Zionism impacted their work locally and nationally.
In addition, we held conversations about Zionism at the 2017 National Member Meeting, surveyed individuals who attended the webinars, and had our constituency groups – including Rabbis, artists, and students – hold independent discussions on Zionism, notes of which were shared with the JVP board.
We also gathered feedback from JVP staff, Palestinian members, activists and thinkers, along with feedback from Jewish people of color and Sephardi & Mizrahi Jews.
The board met over the summer and fall of 2018 to draft and finalize this statement.
What Do You See as the Harms of Zionism Against Jewish People? Isn’t Zionism a Movement for Jewish Self-Determination?
While Zionism is often referred to as a movement of “Jewish self-determination,” the Zionist movement defined this term in a narrow political sense, rejecting the diaspora as inherently toxic and unhealthy for Jews. The Classical Zionist concept known as shlilat hagalut (“negation of the diaspora”), demeaned centuries of a rich Jewish spiritual and cultural history – often to the point of using anti-Semitic imagery. For instance, famed Zionist journalist/ writer Micah Josef Berdichevsky claimed diaspora Jews were “not a nation, not a people and not human.” Hebrew literary icon Yosef Hayyim Brenner called them “gypsies, filthy dogs and inhuman,” while Labor Zionist AD Gordon referred to diaspora Jews as “a parasitic people.”
Zionism, as a political ideology and as a movement, has always hierarchized Jews based on ethnicity and race, and has not equally benefited or been liberatory for all Jewish people in Israel. Zionism is and was an Ashkenazi-led movement that othered, marginalized and discriminated against Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa that it termed Mizrahim (the ‘Eastern Ones’).
In the early 1950s, starting two years after the Nakba, the Israeli government facilitated a mass immigration of Mizrahim. Unlike their Ashkenazi counterparts, the new Mizrahi immigrants were not permitted to settle in the central cities or live in housing they could eventually come to own. Instead, the Israeli police were deployed to compel Mizrahi immigrants to remain in the transient camps and later development towns in Israel’s periphery, as a means to expand the state territory and prevent Palestinian return. During the 1950s Mizrahi immigrants were also subject to medical experimentation facilitated or performed by the Israeli government, and several thousand babies and toddlers were forcibly taken from their parents by the Israeli government. These children, two thirds Yemeni and a third from Tunisian, Moroccan, Libyan, Iraqi and Balkan families, were taken by physicians and social workers and given up for adoption by Ashkenazi families.
From the first waves of immigration in the 1980s, Ethiopian Jews have experienced racism on the part of the government and the Israeli public, exclusion from the public sphere, discrimination in education and employment, and exposure to physical and verbal violence. They also remain unrecognized as Jews by the Israeli religious establishment and religious councils because of racial prejudice. Ethiopian mobilization for racial justice consolidated since 2015 has called for an end to institutional discrimination, police harassment, arrests without cause, false accusations and indictments about assaulting police officers, and the denial of due process, all of which have long been experienced by the Ethiopian community.
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Featured image: Statue of the founder of Zionism Theodor Herzl, unveiled in 2012 at the Mikveh Israel synagogue in Tel Aviv. It is called “Herzl meets Emperor Wilhelm II”
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How many Americans have died after taking the Covid vaccine?
How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccines? Not Americans who’ve been killed by the virus, that’s a huge number, but how many Americans have died after getting the vaccines designed to prevent the virus? Do you know the answer to that question? Do you know anything about the downside? We know a lot about the upside of the vaccine. We’ve been completely in favor of vulnerable people taking vaccines.
But what about the potential risks? You’d think you would know more about that than you do. We talk about vaccines constantly, not just on this show, but in this country. Joe Biden was on TV yesterday talking about vaccines. He wants you to get one. Everyone in authority wants you to get one. In fact, you’ve probably already had your shot, and good for you. If you haven’t had your shot, you’re under enormous pressure to get your shot. You understand that soon you may not be able to fly on commercial airplanes or go to work at the office or send your children to school if you don’t have the shot. Meanwhile, the social pressure is enormous. Friends may have already informed you that you’re not welcome at their parties or weddings if you haven’t been vaccinated. There is a lot of pressure to comply. At some point, you probably will comply. It’s just too difficult not be to vaccinated in this country.
But before you make the appointment: do you know anything about the potential risks? Probably you don’t know much. We all assume the risks are negligible. Vaccines aren’t dangerous. That’s not a guess, we know that pretty conclusively from the official numbers. Every flu season, we give influenza shots to more than 160 million Americans. Every year, a relatively small number of people seem to die after getting those shots. To be precise, in 2019, that number was 203 people. The year before, it was 119. In 2017, a total of 85 people died from the flu shot.
Every death is tragic, but big picture, we don’t consider those numbers disqualifying. We keep giving flu shots, and very few people complain about it. So the question is how do those numbers compare to the death rate from the coronavirus vaccines now being distributed across the country? That’s worth knowing.
We checked today. Here’s the answer, which comes from the same set of government numbers that we just listed: Between late December of 2020, and last month, a total of 3,362 people apparently died after getting the COVID vaccines in the United States. Three thousand, three hundred and sixty-two — that’s an average of 30 people every day. So, what does that add up to? By the way, that reporting period ended on April 23. We don’t have numbers past that, we’re not quite up to date. But we can assume that another 360 people have died in the 12 days since. That is a total of 3,722 deaths. Almost four thousand people died after getting the COVID vaccines. The actual number is almost certainly much higher than that — perhaps vastly higher.
The data we just cited come from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System — VAERS — which is managed by the CDC and the FDA. VARES has received a lot of criticism over the years, some of it founded. Some critics have argued for a long time that VARES undercounts vaccine injuries. A report submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 concluded that “fewer than one percent of vaccine adverse events are reported” by the VARES system. Fewer than one percent. So what is the real number of people who apparently have been killed or injured by the vaccine? Well, we don’t know that number. Nobody does, and we’re not going to speculate about it. But it’s clear that what is happening now, for whatever reason, is not even close to normal. It’s not even close to what we’ve seen in previous years with previous vaccines.
Most vaccines are not accused of killing large numbers of people. The Menveo vaccine, for example, is given to people around the world, often children, to prevent bacterial meningitis. In this country, only one person died from that vaccine in the entire period between 2010 and 2015. One. So, compare that to what’s happening now. In just the first four months of this year, the U.S. government has recorded more deaths after COVID vaccinations than from all other vaccines administered in the United States between mid-1997 and the end of 2013. That’s a period of fifteen and a half years. Again, more people, according to VAERS, have died after getting the shot in four months during a single vaccination campaign than from all other vaccines combined over more than a decade and a half. Chart that out. It’s a stunning picture. Now, the debate is over what it means. Again, there’s a lot of criticism of the reporting system. Some people say “well, it’s just a coincidence that someone gets the shot and then dies, possibly from other causes.” No one really knows, is the truth. We spoke to one physician today who actively treats COVID patients. He described what we’re seeing now as the single deadliest mass-vaccination event in modern history. Whatever is causing it, it is happening as we speak. So you’d think someone in authority might want to know what’s going on.
If the vaccine injury reporting system is flawed — and it clearly is flawed — why hasn’t it been fixed? And more to the point, why has there not been an independent vaccine safety board to assess what’s happening. And reassure people who stumble across official government numbers on the internet. But amazingly, none of that has been done. No one even mentions the numbers. And in fact, you’re not allowed to. You’ll be pulled off the internet if you do. The people in charge do not acknowledge them. Instead, they warn us about what might happen if we don’t take the vaccine.
“People who are not fully vaccinated can still die every day from COVID -19,” Biden said. As a factual matter, that is true. But it’s also misleading. Not all Americans are at a similar risk of dying from COVID-19. Some are at relatively high risk: the old and the sick. They might want to get vaccinated, and most do. Some are at very low risk of dying: the young and the healthy. Others appear to be at essentially no risk at all: anyone who’s had COVID and recovered. Virtually all of those people are immune. That’s true for many viruses. Those second two categories — the young and healthy, and the previously infected — may add up to hundreds of millions of people in this country. The funny thing is, the White House – the official policy-makers who are designing the vaccine rollout – do not acknowledge that those categories even exist.
Health Authorities are pretending that everyone’s health and risk potential is exactly the same as everyone else’s. That’s why Joe Biden has demanded that 70 percent of all American adults — regardless of age, regardless of health condition, regardless of pre-existing antibodies — get the COVID shot by the Fourth of July two months from now, or else.
This might be an acceptable policy – it would never be an ethical policy – but it might be acceptable to the country if COVID vaccines we could show conclusively came with no risk, and if we truly understood the long-term effects of those vaccines. But neither one of those things is true. We know that according to the government reporting system, thousands of people have died after getting the shot. That is true in this country, where it’s hotly debated when it’s talked about at all, but it’s also true in European countries, whose record-keeping is, if anything, more reliable than ours. Many thousands of other people appear to have been injured after getting the vaccine. VAERS records nearly 900 non-fatal heart attacks in people who just received the shot. 2,700 people reported unexplained chest pain. In all, the vaccine, according to the government reporting system, appears to have contributed to at least 8,000 hospitalizations.
Some of the side effects defy explanation. Researcher Alex Berenson has noted that coronavirus vaccines now account for almost one-third of all tinnitus reports in the VAERS database. That’s the ringing in your ears. The American Tinnitus Association says it’s received “many questions” on the link.
Researchers at Oxford and UCLA have begun tracking coronavirus vaccine side effects across eight separate countries. They found, that “Women aged 18 to 34 years had a higher rate of deep vein thrombosis than men of the same age.” They also found that heart attacks were “common” in people aged 85 and older who had taken the vaccine. They found serious potential side effects in some children, “anaphylaxis [and] appendicitis were more common in young people.”
Vaccines are complicated medicines, and as with any drug, it can take a long time to get it precisely right. The dosage, for example. And this is not the first time people have been hurt during a vaccination campaign. That is bound to happen. What’s different this time, and so striking, is the reaction to these numbers. Here’s a contrast for you: in 1976, the U.S. government vaccinated 45 million people with a vaccine for the swine flu. Fifty-three people reportedly died after getting that shot. The U.S. government immediately halted the vaccination program. Authorities decided it was too risky, it wasn’t worth it.
Contrast that with what is happening now. This time, our health authorities have reserved their energy for anyone who dares to question vaccines. LifeSiteNews, a nonprofit news organization, just found itself permanently banned from Facebook. Why? Because it reported government numbers from the VAERS database.
When Joe Rogan asked whether healthy young people ought to get the vaccine, the media treated him like a criminal.
Almost everything they said was a lie that obscured a very simple and potentially relevant question that he asked, which is: should healthy young people receive the vaccine? We’re not precisely sure what the risks are. It is a lie to say there are no risks. There are risks in everything, including in getting a vaccine. So why not rationally weigh the risk/reward ratio, as we do with every decision we make. For that, he was denounced as an anti-vaxxer kook. A danger to public safety.
One of the very few elected officials in the country who has said a word about any of this, who has asked the obvious questions, not attacking vaccines, wondering about their effects, is Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Last week, Johnson asked Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, why so many Americans seem to be dying after the shot.
Maybe there’s a good answer for that, Collins wouldn’t even acknowledge that was happening. Instead, Collins fretted if the population focused too much on the harm from vaccines, people might be hesitant to get them.
“I challenged his use of the term ‘Vaccine Hesitancy,’” Ron Johnson told us in a conversation today. “I told him that based on the VAERS deaths, and my conversations with people who have chosen not to get vaccinated, a better description would be: ‘People who are hesitant to be coerced into participating in the largest drug trial in history.’”
Exactly. There’s a reason many states have more vaccine doses than they can use. Some people just don’t want the vaccine. That’s their right. Period. Not all of them are crazy. Health decisions used to be considered personal choices. We didn’t ask about them. They were considered personal as recently as last fall. In September of 2020, at the height of the presidential campaign, a CNN reporter asked Kamala Harris whether she’d be willing to take the coronavirus vaccine once it became available.
“Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us,” Harris responded. “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump.” A month later, at the vice presidential debate, Harris was if anything more emphatic on the subject. “If Donald Trump tells us we should take” the vaccine, she declared, “I’m not going to take it.”
Kamala Harris has, of course, since changed her mind. She’s no longer skeptical of the vaccine, nor does she tolerate the skepticism of others. Instead, she’s an enthusiastic participant in COVID theater.
Just today, Harris and her husband made a point of kissing each other in front of photographers while wearing masks. They did this despite the fact they’re married, that they live together, that they were standing outside at the time and despite the fact that they both have been vaccinated.
It doesn’t make you laugh. It makes you nervous. Why are they talking to you that way? Why are they giving you the finger on TV? No matter how many fingers they give you, it doesn’t change what remains true for the country: If American citizens are going to be forced to take this vaccine or any other medicine, they have an absolute right to know what the effects of it might be. And they have an absolute right to ask that question. Without being silenced or censored or mocked or given the finger. No amount of happy talk or coercion or appeals to false patriotism can change that. Period.
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“We know a lot about the upside of the vaccine. We’ve been completely in favor of vulnerable people taking vaccines,” Carlson said Wednesday, May 5, during his show at Fox News. “(But) do you know anything about the downside?”
Thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19 vaccine
He asked his viewers if they know how many Americans have died after taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
The short answer is 4,178. That’s according to the latest data posted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from reports received by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as of Monday, May 3. (Related: Global pattern of vaccine injury, death and deception haunts humanity.)
Carlson noted that VAERS, which is managed by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has received a lot of criticisms over the years because it tends to undercount vaccine injuries. He related that a report submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2010 concluded that “less than one percent of vaccine adverse events are reported” by the VAERS.
The Fox News pundit compared the reported figures to the other reported figures from other mass vaccination drives in the country. According to Carlson, more than 160 million Americans are getting influenza vaccines every flu season. He noted that “a relatively small number of people die after getting those shots.”
There were 203 deaths being linked to the influenza vaccine in 2019, 119 in 2018 and 85 in 2017. They may have also been undercounted by VAERS, but the difference compared to COVID-19 vaccine deaths is too wide to just simply ignore.
“It’s clear that what is happening now, for whatever reason, is not even close to normal. It’s not even close to what we’ve seen in previous years with previous vaccines,” Carlson said. “Most vaccines are not accused of killing large numbers of people.”
Carlson conceded that it’s hard not to get vaccinated in the U.S.
“We talk about vaccines constantly, not just on this show, but in this country. Joe Biden was on TV yesterday talking about vaccines. He wants you to get one. Everyone in authority wants you to get one,” he said.
There’s an enormous pressure to get vaccinated. Businesses are requiring their employees to get vaccinated before returning to work. Colleges and universities are mandating their students to get vaccinated if they want to study in person.
“If you haven’t had your shot, you’re under enormous pressure to get your shot. You understand that soon you may not be able to fly on commercial airplanes or go to work at the office or send your children to school if you don’t have the shot.”
Not everyone needs a COVID-19 vaccine
But not everyone needs a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Carlson.
“Not all Americans are at a similar risk of dying from COVID-19. Some are at relatively high risk: the old and the sick. They might want to get vaccinated, and most do. Some are at very low risk of dying: the young and the healthy. Others appear to be at essentially no risk at all: anyone who’s had COVID and recovered. Virtually all of those people are immune,” Carlson explained.
“Those last two categories – the young and healthy and the previously infected – may add up to hundreds of millions of people in this country.”
According to Carlson, the White House and the official policymakers who are designing the vaccine rollout do not acknowledge that those categories even exist. That’s why President Joe Biden wants 70 percent of all American adults – regardless of age, health condition and pre-existing antibodies – to get the COVID-19 vaccine by July 4.
Biden announced that goal on Tuesday, May 4, even as the pace of daily vaccinations slows – down to an average of 2.3 million reported vaccinations per day as of May 3 from a high of 3.4 million on April 13. The new vaccination target came exactly two months from Independence Day, a date the White House hopes will mark a turning point in the pandemic.
To administer tens of millions more vaccines in the next couple of months, Biden will direct thousands of local pharmacies to provide walk-in vaccinations to people without appointments. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will also support pop-up and mobile clinics.
“This might be acceptable if we could show conclusively that COVID-19 vaccines come with no risk, and if we truly understood the long-term effects of those vaccines,” Carlson said. “But neither one of those things is true.”
Carlson proceeded to mention some of the adverse events linked to COVID-19 vaccines.
Aside from the reported deaths, “many thousands of other people appear to have been injured after getting the vaccine,” Carlson said.
He noted that VAERS recorded nearly 900 non-fatal heart attacks in people who just received the vaccine while approximately 2,700 people reported unexplained chest pain. COVID-19 vaccines, according to VAERS, appeared to have contributed to at least 8,000 hospitalizations.
“If American citizens are going to be forced to take this vaccine or any other medicine, they have an absolute right to know what the effects of it might be. And they have an absolute right to ask that question – without being silenced or censored or mocked,” Carlson said.
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According to a report by credit rating and risk assessment company Moody’s Investors Service, more than half of U.S.-China trade flows are subject to tariffs. Much of the cost burden American businesses deal with is caused by Washington’s high tariffs against China. Because of this, U.S. importers have shouldered more than 90% of the cost incurred by Washington on Chinese goods.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, the U.S. waged a trade war with China. Initially, Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese products, citing the need to balance the trade deficit. Later, however, Washington used the tariff as a lever of pressure in many controversial economic and political issues. At the height of the trade war, virtually all Chinese exports to the U.S. were subject to tariffs of 10% to 25%.
Beijing cannot respond symmetrically to the U.S. tariff war because of the trade deficit. Instead, Beijing imposed retaliatory tariffs on key U.S. exports to China – primarily energy and agricultural products. According to Beijing, the imposition of retaliatory tariffs will make it difficult for American farmers, who traditionally vote for conservatives, to export more than half of their produce.
Ultimately, Trump agreed to repeal or cut some of the tariffs and in return China pledged to increase purchases of American agricultural and energy products. However, according to the Moody’s report, more than 60% of Chinese goods exported to the U.S. are still subject to increased tariffs. Although President Biden openly criticized the policies of the Trump administration, he has not ended confrontations with China in the areas of tariffs and technology.
Before the U.S.-China trade war, the average U.S. tariff on Chinese goods was 3.1%, while China’s tariff on U.S. goods stood at 8%. Today, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods are on average 19.3%, while Chinese tariffs imposed on U.S. goods are around 20.7%. In 2020, the U.S. trade deficit with China was $310 billion, but before the outbreak of the trade war the figure was $375.2 billion.
Much of the cost of the tariffs has been imposed against U.S. importers, Moody’s said. Currently, U.S. importers have to pay about 18.5% more for Chinese goods, while the revenue collected by Chinese exporters is only 1.5% more per product. This is because the U.S. cannot find an alternative to many of the Chinese goods subject to the tariffs.
The opposite is true in China as U.S. goods subject to tariffs are mainly raw materials and agricultural products that can be sourced from elsewhere, such as Brazil or Russia. The Moody’s report concluded that tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on China have harmed the U.S., especially as China easily found alternative sources.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis caused by it, Washington concluded a record-high stimulus package to support the economy. This saw dollar bills be printed into circulation. Such a policy can cause high inflation though, and for this reason U.S. authorities restrained price increases on essential commodities. However, tariffs on imported goods are another factor driving prices up. Ultimately, Washington will have to adjust its China policies to the new realities.
However, when it turns to high technologies, the U.S. still maintains an advantage over China, especially as the East Asian country is heavily dependent on the purchase of high-tech American goods. Last year, amid concerns about new U.S. restrictions, Chinese companies started hoarding chips, bringing the total amount of Chinese chip imports to $380 billion. Naturally, restrictions on access to American components and technology will create problems for the development of Chinese industry, but, American companies working with China will lose out. For example, Huawei alone buys components from U.S. companies totalling more than $10 billion a year. These funds can be spent on new Research and Development to increase the competitiveness of their own domestic products. Without these funds, American companies could eventually lose their competitive edge.
The U.S. Senate approved a program to invest $100 billion over five years to develop key technologies in which the U.S. competes with China. The money, as expected, is earmarked for basic research in the areas of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, chip manufacturing, biotechnology and new energy sources. Scepticism about the program remains though – after all, historically, all innovation in the U.S. has been primarily driven by private business and market principles. However, even assuming that the U.S. is using a Chinese solution to support the largest corporations in the country, the scale of this program is still not up to the task, especially when considering China plans to spend $1.4 trillion on the development of new infrastructure by 2025.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
In the US, “more than 30 million people, over 15% of the workforce, have applied for unemployment benefits… ” (
