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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
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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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.
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Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that may be even more useful against COVID-19 than hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). However, like HCQ, use of ivermectin has been globally suppressed, discouraged and even warned against, despite decades of safe use for other ailments
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
What makes ivermectin particularly useful in COVID-19 is the fact that it works both in the initial viral phase of the illness, when antivirals are required, as well as in the inflammatory stage, when the viral load drops off and anti-inflammatories become necessary
A scientific review funded by the WHO found ivermectin reduced COVID-19 deaths by 75%. It also increased viral clearance. A meta-analysis of a greater number of studies found a 68% reduction in deaths
Despite robust scientific support for ivermectin, the WHO, the U.S. FDA and NIH all refuse to recommend the drug on grounds of insufficient evidence
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When it comes to the treatment of COVID-19, many Western nations have been hobbled by the politicization of medicine. Throughout 2020, media and many public health experts warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), despite the fact that many practicing doctors were praising its ability to save patients. Most have been silenced through online censorship. Some even lost their jobs for the “sin” of publicly sharing their successes with the drug.
Another decades-old antiparasitic drug that may be even more useful than HCQ is ivermectin. Like HCQ, ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential drugs, but its benefits are also being ignored by public health officials and buried by mainstream media.
Ivermectin is a heartworm medication that has been shown to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro.1 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-19.2,3
In the video above, Dr. John Campbell interviews Dr. Tess Lawrie about the drug and its use against COVID-19. Lawrie is a medical doctor and Ph.D. researcher who has done a lot of work in South Africa.
She’s also the director of Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd.,4 which is based in the U.K., and she helped organize the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) panel5 and the International Ivermectin for COVID Conference, held April 24, 2021.
Ironically, as a consultant to the World Health Organization and many other public health organizations, her largest clients are the very ones who are now actively suppressing the use of this drug.
Ivermectin Useful in All Stages of COVID
What makes ivermectin particularly useful in COVID-19 is the fact that it works both in the initial viral phase of the illness, when antivirals are required, as well as the inflammatory stage, when the viral load drops off and anti-inflammatories become necessary.
According to Dr. Surya Kant, a medical doctor in India who has written a white paper6 on ivermectin, the drug reduces replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by several thousand times.7 Kant’s paper led several Indian provinces to start using ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and as treatment for COVID-19 in the summer of 2020.8
In the video, Lawrie reviews the science behind her recommendation to use ivermectin. In summary:
A scientific review by Dr. Andrew Hill at Liverpool University, funded by the WHO and UNITAID and published January 18, 2021, found ivermectin reduced COVID-19 deaths by 75%. It also increased viral clearance. This finding was based on a review of six randomized, controlled trials involving a total of 1,255 patients.
Lawrie’s meta-analysis, published February 8, 2021, found a 68% reduction in deaths. Here, 13 studies were included in the analysis. This, she explains, is an underestimation of the beneficial effect, because they included a study in which the control arm was given HCQ.
Since HCQ is an active treatment that has also been shown to have a positive impact on outcomes, it’s not surprising that this particular study did not rate ivermectin as better than the control treatment (which was HCQ).
Adding two new randomized controlled trials to her February analysis that included data on mortality, Lawrie published an updated analysis March 31, 2021, showing a 62% reduction in deaths.
When four studies with high risk of bias were removed during a subsequent sensitivity analysis, they ended up with a 72% reduction in deaths. Sensitivity analyses are done to double-check and verify results.
WHO Still Refuses to Recommend Ivermectin
Curiously, when the WHO finally updated its guidance on ivermectin at the end of March 2021,9,10 they gave it a thumbs-down, saying more data are needed. They only recommend it for patients who are enrolled in a clinical trial. Yet they based their negative recommendation on a review that included just five studies, which ended up showing a 72% reduction in deaths.
Lawrie points out discrepancies in this WHO analysis, such as two studies deemed by Lawrie to have a high risk of bias being listed by the WHO team to have a low risk of bias. (In the interview, she explains why she considers them to have a high risk of bias.)
What’s more, in the WHO’s summary of findings, they suddenly include data from seven studies, which combined show an 81% reduction in deaths. The confidence interval is also surprisingly high, with a 64% reduction in deaths on the low end, and 91% on the high end.
What’s more, their absolute effect estimate for standard of care is 70 deaths per 1,000, compared to just 14 deaths per 1,000 when treating with ivermectin. That’s a reduction in deaths of 56 per 1,000 when using ivermectin. The confidence interval is between 44 and 63 fewer deaths per 1,000.
Despite that, the WHO refuses to recommend this drug for COVID-19. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, a WHO representative to the Philippines, commented that using ivermectin without “strong” evidence is “harmful” because it can give “false confidence” to the public.11
As noted by Daniel Horowitz in an April 1, 2021, article in The Blaze,12 “That sure sounds a lot like telling people if they wear a mask indoors, they won’t get COVID. Tragically, when they invariably do get the virus, the global health elites have nothing to treat them with.”
Doctors Urge Acceptance of Ivermectin to Save Lives
As mentioned earlier, in the U.S., the FLCCC has also been calling for widespread adoption of ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19.13,14
FLCCC president Dr. Pierre Kory, former professor of medicine at St. Luke’s Aurora Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has testified to the benefits of ivermectin before a number of COVID-19 panels, including the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in December 2020,15 and the National Institutes of Health COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel January 6, 2021.16 As noted by the FLCCC:17
“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.
Dr. Kory testified that Ivermectin is effectively a ‘miracle drug’ against COVID-19 and called upon the government’s medical authorities … to urgently review the latest data and then issue guidelines for physicians, nurse-practitioners, and physician assistants to prescribe Ivermectin for COVID-1918 …
… 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.
… data from 18 randomized controlled trials that included over 2,100 patients … demonstrated that Ivermectin produces faster viral clearance, faster time to hospital discharge, faster time to clinical recovery, and a 75% reduction in mortality rates.”19
A one-page summary20 of the clinical trial evidence for Ivermectin can be downloaded from the FLCCC website. A more comprehensive, 31-page review21 of trials data has been published in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology.
At the time of this writing, the number of trials involving ivermectin has risen to 55, including 28 randomized controlled trials. A listing of all the Ivermectin trials done to date, with links to the published studies, can be found on c19Ivermectin.com.22
The FLCCC’s COVID-19 protocol was initially dubbed MATH+ (an acronym based on the key components of the treatment), but after several tweaks and updates, the prophylaxis and early outpatient treatment protocol is now known as I-MASK+23 while the hospital treatment has been renamed I-MATH+,24 due to the addition of ivermectin.
The two protocols25,26 are available for download on the FLCCC Alliance website in multiple languages. The clinical and scientific rationale for the I-MATH+ hospital protocol has also been peer-reviewed and was published in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine27 in mid-December 2020.
NIH Loosens Restrictions, FDA Warns Against Prophylactic Use
In mid-January 2021, the NIH did revise its guidelines on ivermectin, in large part thanks to the data presented by Kory and others. However, while the NIH no longer warns against its use, they also do not outright recommend it, and they did not grant ivermectin emergency use authorization.
As a result, many patients in the U.S. still struggle to access the drug, as many doctors are unwilling to prescribe it off-label against health officials’ recommendations.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has adopted an even less favorable stance, March 9, 2021 actually issuing a consumer warning March 5, 2021, to not use ivermectin as a prophylactic.28 The FDA also has not approved ivermectin for prevention of or treatment for SARS-CoV-2.29
The International Ivermectin for COVID Conference
April 24 through 25, 2021, Lawrie hosted the first International Ivermectin for COVID Conference online.30 Twelve medical experts31 from around the world shared their knowledge during this conference, reviewing mechanism of action, protocols for prevention and treatment, including so-called long-hauler syndrome, research findings and real world data.
All of the lectures, which were recorded via Zoom, can be viewed on Bird-Group.org.32 In her closing address, Lawrie stated:33
“The story of Ivermectin has highlighted that we are at a remarkable juncture in medical history. The tools that we use to heal and our connection with our patients are being systematically undermined by relentless disinformation stemming from corporate greed.
The story of Ivermectin shows that we as a public have misplaced our trust in the authorities and have underestimated the extent to which money and power corrupts.
Had Ivermectin being employed in 2020 when medical colleagues around the world first alerted the authorities to its efficacy, millions of lives could have been saved, and the pandemic with all its associated suffering and loss brought to a rapid and timely end.
Since then, hundreds of millions of people have been involved in the largest medical experiment in human history. Mass vaccination was an unproven novel therapy. Hundreds of billions will be made by Big Pharma and paid for by the public.
With politicians and other nonmedical individuals dictating to us what we are allowed to prescribe to the ill, we as doctors, have been put in a position such that our ability to uphold the Hippocratic oath is under attack.
At this fateful juncture, we must therefore choose, will we continue to be held ransom by corrupt organizations, health authorities, Big Pharma, and billionaire sociopaths, or will we do our moral and professional duty to do no harm and always do the best for those in our care?
The latter includes urgently reaching out to colleagues around the world to discuss which of our tried and tested safe older medicines can be used against COVID.”
During the conference, Lawrie proposed that doctors around the world join together to form a new people-centered World Health Organization. “Never before has our role as doctors been so important because never before have we become complicit in causing so much harm,” she said.
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England’s NHS vaccine passport has arrived, and with it the promise of a return to international travel unencumbered by swab tests or lengthy periods of quarantine. Most people will have received this news with excitement, but it’s my job to look closer at what’s going on behind the app. And what I found is troubling.
Instead of impact assessments that provide us with reassurance that risks have been responsibly mitigated, the vaccine passport has been released with a privacy notice that appears to contradict the caution and care the UK government has so far professed to be applying to this controversial technology.
Yet that’s not what we see in the new app service’s privacy notice – which is, in its most generous interpretation, rather sloppy. The stated purpose for the vaccine passport is to make it an integral part of “unlocking” society – but that comes with serious surveillance and discrimination concerns.
Trying out the NHS app
On April 28, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, made the casual announcement that the NHS App – not the NHS Covid-19 app – was going to be extended to function as a vaccine passport for international travel. This was my cue to install the app and try it out.
Logging in, I discovered the app already knew about my first COVID-19 vaccination, listed alongside all my prescriptions going back 15 years – not information I would normally choose to share at border control.
My app then updated itself on May 15. A new “Check your COVID-19 vaccine record” tab had appeared, showing my vaccination information on a screen by itself – a sensible update. There was also a web version of the service, with terms of use and a privacy policy that I found reassuring in many ways.
The vaccine passport function is an extension of the NHS app – not the NHS COVID-19 app.Thomas Holt/Shutterstock
But this was not the vaccine passport functionality, it has now turned out. The next app update, on May 18, added yet another tab: “Share your COVID-19 status”. Initially it adds “for travel”, but the new privacy notice that accompanies it tells a different story:
As the country resumes normal functions, this data will be useful for further aspects of unlocking as they arise.
International travel was merely an example of how the data would be used. Here lie significant problems that critics have been concerned about for some time. For one, the broader use of vaccine passports raises issues of discrimination between those who have and have not been offered vaccinations.
But using vaccine passports in scenarios other than international travel also necessarily increases surveillance, seeing as you’ll need to prove that the vaccine certificate on your phone truly belongs to you. When we travel internationally, we’re used to carrying a passport along with flight tickets and required vaccination certificates – but for events and social gatherings, we don’t expect to have to identify ourselves.
Concerning privacy policy
The latest privacy policy also contains a long and confusing list of personal data under “The Personal Data we collect and how it is used”, some of which look worryingly sensitive – such as ethnicity, vehicle registration plate, national insurance number, employer, biometric and genetic information and criminal convictions.
The list isn’t an exhaustive collection of all types of “special category data”, which receive extra legal protection due to their sensitivity, so until we receive clarification it’s unclear why such data are even listed. The NHS has expressed that it does not collect this list of data.
The service is designed as a simple and easy means to enable users to show their covid vaccine status for international travel. It does not collect data on national insurance numbers, car registrations, employer or occupation details or any such equivalent data.
It’s possible that this confusing list of data items is just copied from a previous privacy policy and pasted into this one – a practice apparently used for some sections of the UK’s Brexit agreement, as was revealed in December 2020. If this is the case, it would reveal a privacy-as-afterthought attitude that’s at odds with how widely used and far-reaching this app looks set to become.
There is reference to a data sharing agreement in the privacy policy, which could reveal the wider scope of the vaccine passport. This data sharing could also be related to the wide range of data stored in the “COVID data store”, run by the government’s digital health agency, NHSX.
Also concerning is the fact that the data governance of the vaccine passport itself is managed by the Department for Health and Social Care rather than being left with the NHS England data service. This puts a UK government department in charge of a service that works only for England – again, it’s unclear why this is the case.
All this leaves me with enough unease about the vaccine passport that I do not intend to sign up to it unless circumstances force me to use it for international travel, and I may still prefer the paper alternative in that case.
Possible reassurances
Is there anything NHSX could do to reassure me? Absolutely. A data protection impact assessment should be produced and published. This would tell us all about what data is actually used, including an explanation of why data collection is both necessary and proportional.
I’d be looking out for an assessment of the risk of “function creep”: the widening of the scope of use, which could see our tickets for international travel converted into something more sinister and concerning. It would also need to address general impacts to rights and freedoms, such as those related to equality.
Performing such an impact assessment is actually specifically legally required, and should already have been done. Publication is unfortunately not compulsory, but we still don’t know whether one was done at all.
For now, however, it appears that the UK government has definitively abandoned its previous cautious position on vaccine passports, without providing any reassurances that would enable broad public support.
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Eerke Boiten is Professor of Cybersecurity, School of Computer Science and Informatics, De Montfort University.
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The public debate about the future of the US nuclear arsenal is largely a controversy about strategy. But the outcome also has major implications for dollars and cents. The United States plans to spend more than $1.5 trillion over the next several decades to sustain and upgrade its nuclear delivery systems, associated warheads, and supporting infrastructure. The biggest bills for this effort, which are slated to hit over the next 10 to 15 years, pose a growing threat to other military and security priorities amid what most experts believe will be flat defense budgets. The cost of ongoing programs to buy new fleets of ballistic missile submarines, long-range bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles has generated the most attention.
Meanwhile, the exploding price tag of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s long-term plan to sustain and modernize the nuclear warheads and production facilities—now an exorbitant $505 billion—flies under the radar.
Now more than ever it’s important to scrutinize the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is a semiautonomous agency of the Energy Department. Most of the agency’s budget goes to contractors, though their contract mismanagement has repeatedly landed them on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list. Some projects have significantly exceeded initial cost estimates—in one case nearly eight times more than the initial price tag. While cost breaches of this magnitude at the Defense Department would have triggered a review that might have cancelled the programs, the National Nuclear Security Administration was able to waste billions with no threat of closure.
The agency’s past failures to complete major projects on time and on budget raise questions about its ability to execute a workload that has grown to unprecedented post-Cold War heights. Since the end of the Obama administration, the National Nuclear Security Administration weapon-activity spending has grown by roughly 70 percent. Last year, the agency requested a multibillion-dollar boost while sitting on $8 billion in unspent funds from past years.
Against this backdrop, nuclear-weapon hawks in Congress successfully pushed through a consequential change last year that gave the Pentagon much greater influence over the development of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget. This power grab will not only make it harder to rein in increasingly out-of-control agency spending but put other Energy Department national security programs at greater risk. As Congress moves to write annual defense authorization and appropriations legislation this summer, lawmakers should take steps to undo the Pentagon’s expanded authority and institute reforms in an attempt to reign in wasteful spending at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Recent budget history of the National Nuclear Security Administration. This story begins in February 2020 when the Trump administration prepared its fiscal year 2021 budget request for the National Nuclear Security Administration. It requested $15.6 billion for the nuclear-weapon activities account, a staggering increase of $3.1 billion, or 25 percent, from the fiscal year 2020 appropriations and $2.8 billion more than planned a year earlier. The dramatic increase was propelled in part by cost overruns in programs inherited by the Trump administration and the cost of the additional capabilities the administration proposed.
The budget request was reportedly a controversial issue within the Trump administration and was not resolved until days before its public release on February 10, 2020. When nuclear-weapon spending boosters in Congress, along with the National Nuclear Security Administration leadership and some Pentagon officials, worried an initial version of the budget request was too low, they successfully convinced then-President Donald Trump to increase it.
One of the agency’s chief advocates, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman James Inhofe (Republican from Oklahoma), alleged that the Energy Department cut the Nuclear Weapons Council out of the budget development process until the last minute. The Nuclear Weapons Council is a powerful Pentagon body that coordinates the Defense and Energy Departments’ nuclear-weapon-stockpile responsibilities. In response to the turmoil, then-chair of the council Ellen Lord issued new planning guidance to ensure that the council reviewed the budget earlier.
Problem solved, right? Apparently not.
Inhofe, with the support of then-committee ranking member Senator Jack Reed (a Democrat from Rhode Island), included provisions in the Senate version of fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to alter the relationship between the Energy Department and the Pentagon. Most egregiously, the provision would have given the Nuclear Weapons Council (helmed by an undersecretary of defense) the power to overrule the energy secretary (a cabinet member) on the size and scope of the National Nuclear Security Administration budget.
Inhofe claimed the aim of the legislation was to ensure greater coordination between the Defense and Energy Departments and strengthen transparency to Congress. But a plain reading of the language suggests a far more sweeping intent than streamlining nuclear bureaucracy. Namely, the legislation removed obstacles to continued astronomical National Nuclear Security Administration budget growth, even if that growth would force other Energy Department national security programs to foot the bill. Indeed, the Trump administration proposed to cut the Energy Department’s program to clean up legacy nuclear waste from the Cold War arms race to pay for a last-minute, unplanned increase. The increase also required transferring money away from the Pentagon budget, notably the Navy’s shipbuilding account.
Inhofe’s gambit sparked a flurry of bipartisan opposition in the Senate and House. The final Senate version of the authorization bill excised the language giving the council the power to veto the energy secretary on the National Nuclear Security Administration budget. The lower chamber’s authorization bill included a provision that would expand the membership of the council, and its appropriations legislation sought to bar the council from expanding its budget role.
The final version of the authorization bill, however, retained much of the Senate language, and the House provisions were dropped from the final appropriations bills.
The National Nuclear Security Administration budget must now go to the Nuclear Weapons Council before it goes to the Office of Management and Budget. The energy secretary must note any potential disagreement of the council in the final budget submission. And if the council disagrees with the proposed submission, then the council’s preferred budget must be sent to Congress along with the actual request.
If executed as written, the new law effectively makes the Nuclear Weapons Council the decision authority for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget. As a result, the energy secretary and the Office of Management and Budget will have reduced leverage in the development of the budget. It will also make it difficult for the president to overrule the council without getting into a messy public spat with congressional nuclear hawks about why they are going against the advice of the Pentagon.
Contrary to Inhofe’s conspiratorial claims, the main problem in need of a solution isn’t that the Defense Department is being cut out of the development of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear modernization budget or that better coordination is needed. The central problem is that the agency’s nuclear modernization budget is skyrocketing.
The growth of the agency’s weapon-activity budget almost defies belief. Projected spending on nuclear-weapon activities has risen to $505 billion, according to the agency’s 25-year plan published last December. That represents a staggering increase of $113 billion from the 2020 version of the plan.
$113 billion. In one year.
This kind of stunning growth illustrates what critics of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s excessive plans have been warning about for years: low-balled cost estimates, an inexecutable program, damaging opportunity costs, and a significant agency credibility deficit. The mounting price tag and impracticality of the scope of and scheduled goals for many of the agency’s nuclear warhead and infrastructure replacement efforts merit far greater scrutiny than Congress has provided to date.
Needed now: National Nuclear Security Administration budget reform and oversight. The Nuclear Weapons Council does not need expanded authority. Quite the opposite in fact. The council includes the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Nuclear Security Administration administrator, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and the commander of US Strategic Command. Together, these individuals oversee one slice of the total national defense budget. An increasingly large slice to be sure. But just one slice.
The council focuses on ensuring that existing nuclear-weapon sustainment and modernization plans proceed full steam ahead. Assessment of affordability and especially opportunity costs is a lower priority. As Senators Lisa Murkowski (Republican from Arkansas) and Joe Manchin (Democrat from West Virginia) wrote last year, the Nuclear Weapons Council “has a narrower focus than the Secretary of Energy, and its recommendations would likely prioritize nuclear weapons at the expense of other critical missions undertaken by” the Energy Department.
If Congress allows Pentagon leaders to add their own spending priorities to other agencies’ budgets without any requirement to propose offsets, spending on nuclear weapons will likely go in only one direction: up.
Instead of giving the Pentagon more free rein, Congress should roll back the Nuclear Weapons Council’s expanded powers and seek greater oversight of how the body generates requirements for the arsenal and for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
As former agency administrator Frank Klotz noted last year, most of the voting seats on the council belong to the Pentagon, making it “just an invitation for the [Defense Department] to constantly grade the National Nuclear Security Administration’s homework without its homework being graded in a reciprocal sort of way.”
To address this problem, the deputy energy secretary and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget should be added to the council as full voting members. (Current law only allows the Office of Management and Budget to participate in the council’s deliberations in an advisory capacity.) This would ensure a much-needed, greater focus on affordability and balancing nuclear-weapon spending against other national security priorities.
Given that the council’s actions also impact US arms control and nonproliferation strategy, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security and the deputy national security advisor should also be added to the council as advisors.
The National Nuclear Security Administration has a long history of mismanaging its significant resources. In response, Congress should offer reform and oversight, not a blank check to steal resources from other national security priorities.
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Kingston Reif is the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, in Washington, DC, where his work focuses on nuclear disarmament, preventing nuclear terrorism, missile defense, and the defense budget. Follow him on Twittter: @KingstonAReif.
Mandy Smithberger is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight, in Washington, DC, where her work focuses on Pentagon reform and the defense budget. You can follow her work @StrausReform.
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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***
US foreign policy is increasingly promoted by billionaire funded foundations. The neoliberal era has created individuals with incredible wealth and through “philanthropy”, they flex their influence and feel good at the same time. While these philanthropists can be liberal on some issues, they universally support U.S. foreign policy and the “free market”. Because many of these super-rich individuals made their wealth through investments and speculation, most do not like a planned economy, socialized services beyond the private sector or greater government control.
These mega wealthy individuals, and the people who run their foundations, are often intricately connected to the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Grants are given to projects, campaigns and organizations which align with their long-term goals. In this direct way, supposedly independent ThinkTanks and NGOs are influenced if not controlled. There is much truth in the old saying, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.”
Independent Nicaragua
Nicaragua is a good example. For historical and contemporary reasons, Washington is hostile to the Nicaraguan government. The Sandinista Front ousted the US supported dictator in 1979 and governed until 1990. Then, following a decade of US sponsored “Contra” war and economic sanctions, the Sandinistas were voted out of office. Next, after 16 years of neoliberal governments, the Nicaraguan people voted to return the Sandinistas to power in 2006. Since then, the Sandinista Front (FSLN) won the election with more support in 2011 and more again, 73%, in 2016.
Nicaragua has a capitalist economy, but the government provides many social services, including health care and education, along with community-based policing and an impressive 90% food self-sufficiency. Nicaragua maintains an independent foreign policy which sometimes aligns with Cuba, Venezuela and other independent movements in Latin America.
Nicaragua has made plans for a trans-oceanic canal. Because this would compete with the Panama Canal and be independent of heavy U.S. influence, the United States does not approve. With the financial collapse of the canal’s Chinese investor, the plans have been suspended if not cancelled. Regardless of whether the plan is implemented, the US foreign policy establishment and associated media is hostile to the Nicaraguan government for daring to plan this project.
US Targets Nicaragua
US meddling in Nicaragua is thinly veiled behind the US funded “civil society”, a “new generation of democratic leaders” and an “ecosystem of independent media”. In September 2016, a high USAID official told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that 2,200 youth had received leadership training.
U.S. governmental hypocrisy is quite astounding. Imagine if Nicaragua (or Russia or any other country) trained thousands of US activists to “promote democracy” in the USA.
In December 2018, the US ratified the “Nicaragua Human Rights and Anticorruption Act” which imposes sanctions and commits the US to preventing Nicaragua receiving a loan, financial or technical assistance from US dominated financial institutions.
In August 2020, journalist Ben Norton at the Grayzone reported details of a new US AID “task order” called Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN). The document “outlines plans for a US regime-change scheme against Nicaragua’s elected leftist government”. In short, Washington is not just hostile but actively trying to undermine, destabilize and replace the Sandinista administration.
The Foreign Policy Establishment, Nicaragua and Elliott Abrams
A key institution of the foreign policy establishment is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Its role and importance are analyzed in the book “Wall Street’s Thinktank”. CFR events and publications, including “Foreign Affairs” magazine, give a good picture of key foreign policy priorities and debates.
Hostility to the Nicaragua government is reflected in CFR reports and publications.
One important example is an article by Elliott Abrams. Abrams has been a major foreign policy official for forty years. He was convicted of lying to Congress yet he is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In September 2015 he wrote an article published at CFR titled “The Sandinistas Attack the Miskito Indians – Again”. He ends the article with an appeal to environmental or human rights groups:
“The open question is whether anyone – groups defending the environment, or defending Indian rights or human rights more generally, or fighting against Sandinista repression – will help them.”
Seemingly in response to Elliott Abrams’ suggestion, several major foundations have financed reporting on Nicaragua emphasizing conflict and tensions in the indigenous Miskitu zone.
In the fall of 2018, the Oakland Institute received a grant of $237,294 for “Land Dispute Project – Nicaragua” from the Howard G Buffett Foundation. This year Oakland Institute published “Nicaragua’s Failed Revolution.” The subtitle of the report is “The Indigenous Struggle for Saneamiento”, with “saneamiento” being the final step of the process toward regaining indigenous rights.
The funding for these reports came from foundations where the key players are interconnected with the foreign policy establishment. For example, Howard W. Buffett, the former Executive Director at the Howard G Buffett Foundation, is a member of CFR. Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), is a writer for CFR publications and speaker at CFR events.
We do not know if they were influenced by Elliott Abrams’ appeal, but the anti-Sandinista message was likely heard way or another. Land disputes involving indigenous groups are widespread in the Americas, including North America. Research and reports could be done regarding almost every country. But instead of researching and reporting on indigenous land conflict in Colombia or Honduras or British Columbia, the billionaire foundations funded reports on Nicaragua.
The Miskitu indigenous in Nicaragua are not new to conflict. During the 1980’s the CIA manipulated them to advance their proxy Contra army. Many Nicaraguans died as a result. Now, 35 years later, people such as Elliott Abrams are trying to use the Miskitu all over again. The Miskitu may have valid issues and complaints. But are the advocates seeking a solution or are they seeking to exacerbate the conflict? There is a big difference.
Economic warfare and “Conflict Beef”
The United States is increasingly using sanctions and economic warfare to hurt those governments deemed to be “adversaries”. Some right wing foreign policy advisors would like to amplify the economic damage to Nicaragua. Some would like to prevent the US from importing beef from Nicaragua.
Cattle ranching is a major part of the economy in Nicaragua. Previously Nicaragua exported lots of beef to Venezuela. But with the extreme economic hardships, exports have declined. Nicaragua has helped filled the gap by exporting larger quantities of high-quality beef to the USA.
On 21 October PBS Newshour showed a 9 minute video about “Conflict Beef”. The documentary said the increase in Nicaraguan exports is “coming at a high cost for indigenous communities that are being run off their land to make way for cattle ranches”. This accusation, and the suggestion that perhaps Nicaraguan beef should not be imported, was a core message of the video which merged journalism with activism.
Subsequent research including interviews with indigenous leaders from the area reveal that the PBS Newshour report is fundamentally inaccurate. Journalist John Perry, based in Nicaragua, gives details in the article Progressive Media Promoted a False Story of Conflict Beef from Nicaragua published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Some of the reported violence was made up; some was exaggerated. The claims of “genocide” are not credible.
The exaggerated and untrue accusations in the PBS report are based on four sources. Lottie Cunningham is an indigenous attorney who heads up the Center for Justice and Human Rights on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN). Her organization is a US AID recipient and she is close to the US Ambassador to Nicaragua. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has issued press releases based soley on her accusations. Judging by this “Conflict Beef” report, her accusations are sometimes exaggerated and sometimes untrue.
Another source for this report is Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute. The Institute received a grant of nearly one quarter million dollars for their research on Nicaraguan “land conflict”.
Much of their information came from the Oakland Institute report and the claims of Lottie Cunningham, a USAID grant recipient and recipient of the Lush Spring Prize sponsored by Lush Cosmetics. Recently published interviews with numerous elected indigenous leaders from Nicaragua’s autonomous zones indicate that Lottie Cunningham is viewed with skepticism if not hostility. The leaders believe that her organization, Center for Justice and Human Rights in the Atlantic District of Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN), does not represent the interests of indigenous communities and is actually promoting violence and publicity for personal gain.
The lead journalist was Nate Halverson for REVEAL at the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). CIR is well funded, with a budget around $10M, and large grants from dozens of individual foundations: Hearst ($625K), Soros ($325K), Gates ($247k), Ford ($250K), Pierre Omidyar ($900K), etc.
Another journalist, Camilo de Castro Belli, appeared in the video. He is the son of author and Sandinista critic Giacondo Belli and a “Central America Fellow” at the neoliberal Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute is funded by grants from the Rockefeller, Ford, Gates and other US philanthropy foundations.
Key allegations in the “Conflict Beef” story are untrue. The beef for export comes from cattle that are NOT from the indigenous zones. The cattle are individually tagged and regulated by the national IPSA (Institute for Agricultural Protection and Health) which is in turn audited by the US Dept of Agriculture. Nicaraguans are currently in discussion with European regulators in preparation for export there. This video, from one of the Nicaraguan beef producers, gives a sense of the professionalism.
Even the introduction of the PBS video is untrue. They sensationally claim that a young Miskitu girl was shot in the face by someone “sending a message” to the community. The girl was accidentally shot while playing with another youth who had his father’s gun. This version is confirmed by the president of the local indigenous community who knows the family of the girl victim. The girl survived the incident, and the family accepted a bribe to fabricate the false story.
Another claim that “dozens of armed men attacked another Indigenous village in northeast Nicaragua, killing four people in the Mayangna community” is false. A version of this same story was repeated twice in the Oakland Institute report and sent by Lottie Cunningham (CEJUDHCAN) to the United Nations Human Rights Council who dutifully issued a press release. This despite the fact the claims had been quickly exposed as false be the president of the Mayangna indigenous community. But media quickly jumped on the story, reportedly after two phone calls from people and no verification.
When a government is targeted by Washington, as the Sandinista government clearly is, the media attitude seems to be “guilty until proven innocent”.
This story about “conflict beef” reveals how big foundations influence reports which promote the US foreign policy goals on Nicaragua: to defame and economically punish those who are too independent.
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Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Michal Shlapentokh-Rothman / Prezi
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ExxonMobil is the world’s single largest producer of single-use plastics, according to a new report published today by the Australia-based Minderoo Foundation, one of Asia’s biggest philanthropies.
The Dow Chemical Company ranks second, the report finds, with the Chinese state-owned company Sinopec coming in third. Indorama Ventures — a Thai company that entered the plastics market in 1995 — and Saudi Aramco, owned by the Saudi Arabian government, round out the top five.
Funding for single-use plastic production comes from major banks and from institutional asset managers. The UK-based Barclays and HSBC, and Bank of America are the top three lenders to single-use plastic projects, the new report finds. All three of the most heavily invested asset managers named by the report — Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Capital Group — are U.S.-based.
“This is the first-time the financial and material flows of single-use plastic production have been mapped globally and traced back to their source,” said Toby Gardner, a Stockholm Environment Institute senior research fellow, who contributed to the report, titled The Plastic Waste Makers Index.
The report is also the first to rank companies by their contributions to the single-use plastic crisis, listing the corporations and other financiers it says are most responsible for plastic pollution — with major implications for climate change.
Graph Credit: The Plastic Waste Makers Index: Revealing the Source of the Single-Use Plastics Crisis, Mindaroo Foundation.
“The trajectories of the climate crisis and the plastic waste crisis are strikingly similar and increasingly intertwined,” Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, wrote in the report’s foreword. “Tracing the root causes of the plastic waste crisis empowers us to help solve it.”
The world of plastic production is concentrated in fewer hands than the world of plastic packaging, the report’s authors found. The top twenty brands in the plastic packaging world — think Coca Cola or Pepsi, for example — handle about 10 percent of global plastic waste, report author Dominic Charles told DeSmog. In contrast, the top 20 producers of plastic polymers — the building blocks of plastics — handle over half of the waste generated.
“Which I think was really quite staggering,” Charles, director of Finance & Transparency at Minderoo Foundation’s Sea The Future program, told DeSmog. “It means that just a handful of companies really do have the fate of the world’s single-use plastic waste in their hands.”
Graph Credit: The Plastic Waste Makers Index: Revealing the Source of the Single-Use Plastics Crisis, Mindaroo Foundation.
Meanwhile, the report suggests that public policy responses to the threats posed by plastic pollution have focused further along the supply chain, where things become more fragmented.
“Government policies, where they exist, tend to focus on the vast number of companies that sell finished plastic products,” the report finds. “Relatively little attention has been paid to the smaller number of businesses at the base of the supply chain that make ‘polymers’ — the building blocks of all plastics — almost exclusively from fossil fuels.”
While there are about 300 polymer producers currently operating worldwide, just three companies — ExxonMobil, Dow, and Sinopec — combined are responsible for roughly one out of every six pounds of single-use plastic waste, the report concludes.
In 2019, for example, more than 130 million metric tons of plastic was used just once and then discarded. ExxonMobil, the report concludes, was responsible for creating 5.9 million tons of that single-use plastic waste in 2019, with Dow right behind it, generating 5.6 million tons that year.
Neither ExxonMobil nor Dow responded immediately to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, 20 of the world’s largest banks lent nearly $30 billion that was used for the production of new single-use plastics, the report finds. That funding represents about 60 percent of the commercial finance that funds single-use plastics. An additional $10 billion in investment in new single-use plastics has come from 20 institutional asset managers, like Vanguard and BlackRock.
“Through our Investment Stewardship program, Vanguard regularly engages with companies on issues that are financially material to their long-term value and sustainability, including climate issues and environmental matters,” Vanguard spokesperson Alyssa Thornton said in an email to DeSmog. “We expect company boards to oversee climate and environmental risks and provide investors with clear disclosures of their risk oversight and decision-making processes. Importantly, we do not dictate company strategy, or operational or financial decisions; rather, we hold company board’s responsible for being aware of such risks and opportunities as part of a foundation for making the most sustainable long-term decisions.”
Barclays did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Graph Credit: The Plastic Waste Makers Index: Revealing the Source of the Single-Use Plastics Crisis, Mindaroo Foundation.
Virtually all single-use plastic comes from fossil-fuel based feedstocks, the report adds.
“One of the key findings of the report is that single-use plastics today is 98 percent fossil fuel-based,” Charles told DeSmog. “And that in itself is really, we say, the source of the plastic waste crisis. And that’s because if you’re only making new plastics from new fossil fuels, you’re taking away the commercial incentive, you’re undermining the commercial incentive to collect this plastic and to turn it into recycled plastic products.”
The report grades plastic manufacturers based on their preparation to transition away from fossil fuels and towards recycling — and found that most of the largest producers not only have made very little progress in that direction to date, they haven’t even set targets that would push them towards a “circular” model involving recycling.
“Over 50 of these companies received an ‘E’ grade — the lowest possible — when assessed for circularity, indicating a complete lack of policies, commitments, or targets,” the report found. “A further 26 companies, including ExxonMobil and Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Corporation, received a ‘D-’ due to their lack of clear targets/timelines.”
In fact, fossil fuel producers appear to be counting on that failure to move towards recycling. “Two of the biggest markets for fossil fuel companies — electricity generation and transportation — are undergoing rapid decarbonization, and it is no coincidence that fossil fuel companies are now scrambling to massively expand their third market — petrochemicals — three-quarters of which is the production of plastic,” Gore wrote. “They see it as a potential life raft to help them stay afloat, and they’re telling investors that there’s lots of money to be made in ramping up the amount of plastic in the world.”
In a statement on the report, the American Chemistry Council pointed to the use of plastics in products like solar panels and wind turbines to highlight the role that plastics — though not single-use plastics — play in renewable energy. “The world needs plastic to live more sustainably, and America’s plastic makers are leading the development of solutions to end plastic waste,” the Council said. “We’re innovating and investing in efforts to create a more circular economy, where used plastics are systematically remanufactured to make new plastics and other products. In the last three years, the private sector has announced $5.5 billion in U.S. investments to dramatically modernize plastics recycling.”
Meanwhile, the plastics industry remains on track to continue rapidly increasing the amount of new plastic it produces each year, meaning more fossil fuel use — even while other industries are seeking to trim or eliminate their reliance on fossil fuels.
“Our numbers suggest a 30 percent increase in capacity compared to 2019,” Charles told DeSmog. “Now that is not out of line with the historical rate of growth, it’s about 5 percent per year. But if we are to see 5 percent growth in fossil fuel-based, that is a real threat towards the growth of circular plastics and recycling. So I think that’s a real cause for concern.”
As of 2019, plastic producers had created 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic — and 91 percent of it was never recycled, according to one peer-reviewed study. Even from the start, a NPR and PBS Frontline investigation found, industry insiders were skeptical that recycled plastic could compete against new production, with one industry insider warning in a speech — in 1974 — that “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis.”
So where does the money for all this come from?
The financing of single-use plastics is complex, involving not only lending and investment by Wall Street fund managers and big banks, but also privately held companies. The report’s list of the top 10 equity owners of polymer producers includes not only state actors and massive asset managers like BlackRock but also private individuals like James Arthur Ratcliffe — co-founder and majority owner of INEOS, a UK-based petrochemical company.
“Transitioning away from the take-make-waste model of single-use plastics will take more than corporate leadership and ‘enlightened’ capital markets: it will require immense political will,” the report says. “This is underscored by the high degree of state ownership in these polymer producers — an estimated 30 percent of the sector, by value, is state-owned, with Saudi Arabia, China, and the United Arab Emirates the top three.”
The report calls not only for more disclosures from companies and financiers about their ties to plastic production, it also calls for global action to respond to the plastic pollution crisis — starting with a focus on the companies most responsible.
“A Montreal Protocol or Paris Agreement-style treaty may be the only way to bring an end to plastic pollution worldwide,” the report says. “The treaty must address the problem at its source, with targets for the phasing out of fossil-fuel-based polymers and encouraging the development of a circular plastics economy.”
That’s in part because the plastic waste crisis and the climate crisis share one other thing in common — their impacts are global in scope.
“The plastification of our oceans and the warming of our planet are amongst the greatest threats humanity and nature have ever confronted,” Dr. Andrew Forrest, chairman and founder of the Minderoo Foundation, said in a statement accompanying the report. “And we must act now.”
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Sharon Kelly is an attorney and freelance writer based in Philadelphia. She has reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, National Wildlife, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other publications. Prior to beginning freelance writing, she worked as a law clerk for the ACLUof Delaware.
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Children’s Health Defense and Millions Against Medical Mandates invite parents, healthcare practitioners, military members and others to comment on their petition calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to immediately remove COVID vaccines from the market.
Amid growing safety concerns, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Meryl Nass, on behalf of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), filed a Citizen Petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking the agency to immediately revoke the Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for COVID vaccines and to refrain from licensing them.
Millions Against Medical Mandates (MAMM), a coalition of health freedom organizations and individuals, joins CHD and other vaccine safety and health freedom groups in inviting the public, including healthcare workers, parents and military members, to submit comments on the petition.
Citing the extremely low risk to children from COVID, the petition calls on the FDA to immediately refrain from allowing minors to participate in COVID vaccine trials and to immediately revoke all EUAs permitting vaccination of children under 18.
“It’s time for the FDA to make a dramatic course correction before more deaths and injuries occur,” said Maureen McDonnell, MAMM founder.
The petition also urges the FDA to revoke its tacit approval for pregnant women to receive COVID vaccines.
The law stipulates that to grant EUA status, no other effective intervention may exist. The petition calls upon the FDA to immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of chloroquine drugs, ivermectin and any other safe and effective drugs against COVID.
“It’s time for the FDA to make effective COVID treatments available and to revoke the vaccine EUAs,” said CHD President and General Counsel Mary Holland. “It’s shocking that the FDA has ignored the unprecedented reports of injuries and deaths for five months.”
CHD and MAMM are asking the FDA to take these seven actions:
FDA should revoke all EUAs and refrain from approving any future EUA, NDA [new drug application] or BLA [biologics license application] for any COVID vaccine for all demographic groups because the current risks of serious adverse events or deaths outweigh the benefits, and because existing, approved drugs provide highly effective prophylaxis and treatment against COVID, mooting the EUAs.
Given the extremely low risk of severe COVID illness in children, FDA should immediately refrain from allowing minors to participate in COVID vaccine trials, refrain from amending EUAs to include children, and immediately revoke all EUAs that permit vaccination of children under 16 for the Pfizer vaccine and under 18 for other COVID vaccines.
FDA should immediately revoke tacit approval that pregnant women may receive any EUA or licensed COVID vaccines and immediately issue public guidance to that effect.
FDA should immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of the chloroquine drugs, ivermectin and any other drugs demonstrated to be safe and effective against COVID, to comport with current scientific evidence of safety and efficacy at currently used doses and immediately issue notifications to all stakeholders of this change.
The FDA should issue guidance to the secretary of the defense and the president not to grant an unprecedented presidential waiver of prior consent regarding COVID vaccines for service members under 10 U.S.C. § 1107(f) or 10 U.S.C. § 1107a.
The FDA should issue guidance to all stakeholders in digital and written formats to affirm that all citizens have the option to accept or refuse administration of investigational COVID vaccines without adverse work, educational or other non-health related consequences, under 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(e)(1)(a)(ii)(III) 1 and the informed consent requirements of the Nuremberg Code.
Pending revocation of COVID vaccine EUAs, FDA should issue guidance that all marketing and promotion of COVID vaccines must refrain from labeling them “safe and effective,” as such statements violate 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3.
The petition is available for review and comment. CHD urges parents, healthcare practitioners, military members and others to comment and to share the comment link with friends and colleagues.
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Thanks to its very name — renewable energy — we can picture a time in the not-too-distant future when our need for non-renewable fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal will vanish. Indeed, the Biden administration has announced a breakthrough target of 2035 for fully eliminating U.S. reliance on those non-renewable fuels for the generation of electricity. That would be accomplished by “deploying carbon-pollution-free electricity-generating resources,” primarily the everlasting power of the wind and sun.
With other nations moving in a similar direction, it’s tempting to conclude that the days when competition over finite supplies of energy was a recurring source of conflict will soon draw to a close. Unfortunately, think again: while the sun and wind are indeed infinitely renewable, the materials needed to convert those resources into electricity — minerals like cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, and the rare-earth elements, or REEs — are anything but. Some of them, in fact, are far scarcer than petroleum, suggesting that global strife over vital resources may not, in fact, disappear in the Age of Renewables.
To appreciate this unexpected paradox, it’s necessary to explore how wind and solar power are converted into usable forms of electricity and propulsion. Solar power is largely collected by photovoltaic cells, often deployed in vast arrays, while the wind is harvested by giant turbines, typically deployed in extensive wind farms. To use electricity in transportation, cars and trucks must be equipped with advanced batteries capable of holding a charge over long distances. Each one of these devices uses substantial amounts of copper for electrical transmission, as well as a variety of other non-renewable minerals. Those wind turbines, for instance, require manganese, molybdenum, nickel, zinc, and rare-earth elements for their electrical generators, while electric vehicles (EVs) need cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese, and rare earths for their engines and batteries.
At present, with wind and solar power accounting for only about 7% of global electricity generation and electric vehicles making up less than 1% of the cars on the road, the production of those minerals is roughly adequate to meet global demand. If, however, the U.S. and other countries really do move toward a green-energy future of the kind envisioned by President Biden, the demand for them will skyrocket and global output will fall far short of anticipated needs.
According to a recent study by the International Energy Agency (IEA), “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” the demand for lithium in 2040 could be 50 times greater than today and for cobalt and graphite 30 times greater if the world moves swiftly to replace oil-driven vehicles with EVs. Such rising demand will, of course, incentivize industry to develop new supplies of such minerals, but potential sources of them are limited and the process of bringing them online will be costly and complicated. In other words, the world could face significant shortages of critical materials. (“As clean energy transitions accelerate globally,” the IEA report noted ominously, “and solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars are deployed on a growing scale, these rapidly growing markets for key minerals could be subject to price volatility, geopolitical influence, and even disruptions to supply.”)
And here’s a further complication: for a number of the most critical materials, including lithium, cobalt, and those rare-earth elements, production is highly concentrated in just a few countries, a reality that could lead to the sort of geopolitical struggles that accompanied the world’s dependence on a few major sources of oil. According to the IEA, just one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), currently supplies more than 80% of the world’s cobalt, and another — China — 70% of its rare-earth elements. Similarly, lithium production is largely in two countries, Argentina and Chile, which jointly account for nearly 80% of world supply, while four countries — Argentina, Chile, the DRC, and Peru — provide most of our copper. In other words, such future supplies are far more concentrated in far fewer lands than petroleum and natural gas, leading IEA analysts to worry about future struggles over the world’s access to them.
From Oil to Lithium: the Geopolitical Implications of the Electric-Car Revolution
The role of petroleum in shaping global geopolitics is well understood. Ever since oil became essential to world transportation — and so to the effective functioning of the world’s economy — it has been viewed for obvious reasons as a “strategic” resource. Because the largest concentrations of petroleum were located in the Middle East, an area historically far removed from the principal centers of industrial activity in Europe and North America and regularly subject to political convulsions, the major importing nations long sought to exercise some control over that region’s oil production and export. This, of course, led to resource imperialism of a high order, beginning after World War I when Britain and the other European powers contended for colonial control of the oil-producing parts of the Persian Gulf region. It continued after World War II, when the United States entered that competition in a big way.
For the United States, ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil became a strategic priority after the “oil shocks” of 1973 and 1979 — the first caused by an Arab oil embargo that was a reprisal for Washington’s support of Israel in that year’s October War; the second by a disruption of supplies caused by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In response to endless lines at American gas stations and the subsequent recessions, successive presidents pledged to protect oil imports by “any means necessary,” including the use of armed force. And that very stance led President George H.W. Bush to wage the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and his son to invade that same country in 2003.
In 2021, the United States is no longer as dependent on Middle Eastern oil, given how extensively domestic deposits of petroleum-laden shale and other sedimentary rocks are being exploited by fracking technology. Still, the connection between oil use and geopolitical conflict has hardly disappeared. Most analysts believe that petroleum will continue to supply a major share of global energy for decades to come, and that’s certain to generate political and military struggles over the remaining supplies. Already, for instance, conflict has broken out over disputed offshore supplies in the South and East China Seas, and some analysts predict a struggle for the control of untapped oil and mineral deposits in the Arctic region as well.
Here, then, is the question of the hour: Will an explosion in electric-car ownership change all this? EV market share is already growing rapidly and projected to reach 15% of worldwide sales by 2030. The major automakers are investing heavily in such vehicles, anticipating a surge in demand. There were around 370 EV models available for sale worldwide in 2020 — a 40% increase from 2019 — and major automakers have revealed plans to make an additional 450 models available by 2022. In addition, General Motors has announced its intention to completely phase out conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035, while Volvo’s CEO has indicated that the company would only sell EVs by 2030.
It’s reasonable to assume that this shift will only gain momentum, with profound consequences for the global trade in resources. According to the IEA, a typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional oil-powered vehicle. These include the copper for electrical wiring plus the cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel needed to ensure battery performance, longevity, and energy density (the energy output per unit of weight). In addition, rare-earth elements will be essential for the permanent magnets installed in EV motors.
Lithium, a primary component of lithium-ion batteries used in most EVs, is the lightest known metal. Although present both in clay deposits and ore composites, it’s rarely found in easily mineable concentrations, though it can also be extracted from brine in areas like Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. At present, approximately 58% of the world’s lithium comes from Australia, another 20% from Chile, 11% from China, 6% from Argentina, and smaller percentages from elsewhere. A U.S. firm, Lithium Americas, is about to undertake the extraction of significant amounts of lithium from a clay deposit in northern Nevada, but is meeting resistance from local ranchers and Native Americans, who fear the contamination of their water supplies.
Cobalt is another key component of lithium-ion batteries. It’s rarely found in unique deposits and most often acquired as a byproduct of copper and nickel mining. Today, it’s almost entirely produced thanks to copper mining in the violent, chaotic Democratic Republic of the Congo, mostly in what’s known as the copper belt of Katanga Province, a region which once sought to break away from the rest of the country and still harbors secessionist impulses.
Rare-earth elements encompass a group of 17 metallic substances scattered across the Earth’s surface but rarely found in mineable concentrations. Among them, several are essential for future green-energy solutions, including dysprosium, lanthanum, neodymium, and terbium. When used as alloys with other minerals, they help perpetuate the magnetization of electrical motors under high-temperature conditions, a key requirement for electric vehicles and wind turbines. At present, approximately 70% of REEs come from China, perhaps 12% from Australia, and 8% from the U.S.
A mere glance at the location of such concentrations suggests that the green-energy transition envisioned by President Biden and other world leaders may encounter severe geopolitical problems, not unlike those generated in the past by reliance on oil. As a start, the most militarily powerful nation on the planet, the United States, can supply itself with only tiny percentages of REEs, as well as other critical minerals like nickel and zinc needed for advanced green technologies. While Australia, a close ally, will undoubtedly be an important supplier of some of them, China, already increasingly viewed as an adversary, is crucial when it comes to REEs, and the Congo, one of the most conflict-plagued nations on the planet, is the leading producer of cobalt. So don’t for a second imagine that the transition to a renewable-energy future will either be easy or conflict-free.
The Crunch to Come
Faced with the prospect of inadequate or hard-to-access supplies of such critical materials, energy strategists are already calling for major efforts to develop new sources in as many locations as possible.
“Today’s supply and investment plans for many critical minerals fall well short of what is needed to support an accelerated deployment of solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. “These hazards are real, but they are surmountable. The response from policymakers and companies will determine whether critical minerals remain a vital enabler for clean energy transitions or become a bottleneck in the process.”
As Birol and his associates at the IEA have made all too clear, however, surmounting the obstacles to increased mineral production will be anything but easy. To begin with, launching new mining ventures can be extraordinarily expensive and entail numerous risks. Mining firms may be willing to invest billions of dollars in a country like Australia, where the legal framework is welcoming and where they can expect protection against future expropriation or war, but many promising ore sources lie in countries like the DRC, Myanmar, Peru, and Russia where such conditions hardly apply. For example, the current turmoil in Myanmar, a major producer of certain rare-earth elements, has already led to worries about their future availability and sparked a rise in prices.
Declining ore quality is also a concern. When it comes to mineral sites, this planet has been thoroughly scavenged for them, sometimes since the early Bronze Age, and many of the best deposits have long since been discovered and exploited. “In recent years, ore quality has continued to fall across a range of commodities,” the IEA noted in its report on critical minerals and green technology. “For example, the average copper ore grade in Chile declined by 30% over the past 15 years. Extracting metal content from lower-grade ores requires more energy, exerting upward pressure on production costs, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste volumes.”
In addition, extracting minerals from underground rock formations often entails the use of acids and other toxic substances and typically requires vast amounts of water, which are contaminated after use. This has become ever more of a problem since the enactment of environmental-protection legislation and the mobilization of local communities. In many parts of the world, as in Nevada when it comes to lithium, new mining and ore-processing efforts are going to encounter increasingly fierce local opposition. When, for example, the Lynas Corporation, an Australian firm, sought to evade Australia’s environmental laws by shipping ores from its Mount Weld rare-earths mine to Malaysia for processing, local activists there mounted a protracted campaign to prevent it from doing so.
For Washington, perhaps no problem is more challenging, when it comes to the availability of critical materials for a green revolution, than this country’s deteriorating relationship with Beijing. After all, China currently provides 70% of the world’s rare-earth supplies and harbors significant deposits of other key minerals as well. No less significant, that country is responsible for the refining and processing of many key materials mined elsewhere. In fact, when it comes to mineral processing, the figures are astonishing. China may not produce significant amounts of cobalt or nickel, but it does account for approximately 65% of the world’s processed cobalt and 35% of its processed nickel. And while China produces 11% of the world’s lithium, it’s responsible for nearly 60% of processed lithium. When it comes to rare-earth elements, however, China is dominant in a staggering way. Not only does it provide 60% of the world’s raw materials, but nearly 90% of processed REEs.
To put the matter simply, there is no way the United States or other countries can undertake a massive transition from fossil fuels to a renewables-based economy without engaging economically with China. Undoubtedly, efforts will be made to reduce the degree of that reliance, but there’s no realistic prospect of eliminating dependence on China for rare earths, lithium, and other key materials in the foreseeable future. If, in other words, the U.S. were to move from a modestly Cold-War-like stance toward Beijing to an even more hostile one, and if it were to engage in further Trumpian-style attempts to “decouple” its economy from that of the People’s Republic, as advocated by many “China hawks” in Congress, there’s no question about it: the Biden administration would have to abandon its plans for a green-energy future.
It’s possible, of course, to imagine a future in which nations begin fighting over the world’s supplies of critical minerals, just as they once fought over oil. At the same time, it’s perfectly possible to conceive of a world in which countries like ours simply abandoned their plans for a green-energy future for lack of adequate raw materials and reverted to the oil wars of the past. On an already overheating planet, however, that would lead to a civilizational fate worse than death.
In truth, there’s little choice but for Washington and Beijing to collaborate with each other and so many other countries in accelerating the green energy transition by establishing new mines and processing facilities for critical minerals, developing substitutes for materials in short supply, improving mining techniques to reduce environmental hazards, and dramatically increasing the recycling of vital minerals from discarded batteries and other products. Any alternative is guaranteed to prove a disaster of the first order — or beyond.
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An iceberg bigger than Majorca that calved off an Antarctic ice shelf has been spotted by satellites, and declared the world’s largest iceberg.
The finger-shaped iceberg, which is about 4320 square kilometres in size, isn’t thought to have been caused by anthropogenic climate change.
Named A-76, the iceberg broke off the Ronne ice shelf into the Weddell Sea in recent days, according to the European Space Agency. The area has been spared an influx of warm ocean water affecting other parts of western Antarctica, which is threatening to release huge glaciers such as one called Thwaites.
“It’s not an area that is undergoing any significant change because of global heating. The main message is it’s part of a natural cycle,” says Alex Brisbourne, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey.
The tabular-shape of A-76 is typical of icebergs, and the horizontal lines on it are a sign of the stresses that caused it to break from the ice sheet, says Brisbourne. The part of the ice sheet that it calved from was floating, so the iceberg shouldn’t have any impact on sea level rise.
The finger-shaped iceberg is about 4320 square kilometres in size (Source: ESA/Earth Observation)
While A-76 is the largest iceberg in the world at the moment, it wouldn’t make the pantheon of the 10 biggest icebergs in history.
“In the grand context of things this is not humungous. Of course it’s an evolution in the ice shelf,” says Mark Drinkwater of the European Space Agency.
Drinkwater says that the Ronne ice shelf is in a fairly “steady state” where it expands after losing iceberg like this. One of its biggest calving events was in 1986, with icebergs totalling 11,000 square kilometres breaking off, followed by smaller ones in 1998, 2000 and 2015.
“It’s big enough to influence the ocean, and the salinity of the ocean. Depending on the trajectory, it could be as significant as A-68a,” says Brisbourne.
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Pain mixed with hope; defiance in the face of unimaginable odds; celebrities show solidarity with Palestine; large protests held in solidarity with Palestinians around the world; Palestinians strike across all of occupied Palestine from the river to the sea; intifada everywhere; a sea change in public perceptions of Palestine and Israel, so much so that NPR this morning called Hamas a “Nationalist Palestinian” movement, instead of the usual “terrorist” designation.
Designations in the media matter enormously. This is the fourth destructive Israeli war on the Gaza Strip since December 27, 2008 (lasting 22 days). Distorted takes on Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, especially by public officials and journalists, are still rampant, echoing the long-standing hasbara of the apartheid Israeli state and the political alliances Israel has forged in the West since the Nakba:
CNN reporter Robyn Curnow asked Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet living in his Sheikh Jarrah home in Jerusalem if he supported “violent protests in favor of his family”? Edward “Ned” Price, an American political advisor and a former intelligence officer serving as the spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, refused to condemn the killing of Palestinian children on the basis that he did not have “enough information about events on the ground.” Dominic Raab, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs who had been silent for months when Israeli settlers brutalized families in Sheikh Jarrah, condemned “the firing of rockets at Jerusalem and locations within Israel. The ongoing violence in Jerusalem and Gaza must stop.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used “some of his favorite buzz words: ‘concern,’ ‘sadness,’ and ‘empathy,’ while answering a question from New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh about the situation in Palestine, following with unwavering support for “Israel’s right to defend itself.” The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner, ran a series of articles with headlines including “Arab-Jewish Coexistence in Israel Suddenly Ruptured,” and “Israeli-Palestinian hostilities explode, with shocking communal violence.”
Two concepts/memes persist: One is Israel’s so-called “right” to exist as a Jewish state and thus defend itself with “violence” if need be (and concomitantly is licensed to march every Palestinian who resists to prison or death), and another is that Palestinian armed struggle for liberation is “terror” activity.
The first has a long history of Zionist deception and a spectacular public relations campaign worldwide using a Jewish narrative and Jewish influence wherever it could be applied. Thus the conflation we see today between Zionism and Judaism.
The confusion is difficult to erase even as Jews worldwide are increasingly speaking against Israel’s apartheid and violence in Gaza — See my blog post titled “Jews” vs. “Jewish People” — which not to use and why. Consider a news item in the Independent today about a letter by Google Jewish employees known as ‘Jewish Diaspora in Tech’ urging Google not to conflate Israel with Jewish people, adding that ‘anti-Zionism is not antisemitism’. In Gaza Israel has so far killed over 200 and injured more than 1,400 people. The letter says in part:
We ask Google leadership to make a company-wide statement recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel, which must include direct recognition of the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence,” the employees wrote in a version of the letter that has been made public.
While both Israelis and Palestinians have been harmed and killed in the ongoing conflict, the Jewish employees said that ignoring the deadly attacks faced by Palestinians erased the company’s Palestinian coworkers.
I am happy about this statement, of course, although I don’t understand what the identity ‘Jewish Diaspora in Tech’ is meant to signify. Are they religious and is this a spiritual/mythical designation or a nationalist one? The very name of the group, in my opinion, adds to the confusion of the terrible situation in Palestine since the Nakba.
The following quotation by Menachem Ussishkin, a Russian-born Zionist leader and head of the Jewish National Fund, in a speech at the 7th World Zionist Congress, Petrograd, May 1917, sums up how Zionism has weaponized the spiritual concept of “Diaspora Jews” against Palestinians:
Zionism is the solution of the Jewish question. None of us is thinking that all Jewish people must relocate to Palestine, at least in the foreseeable future. This is absolutely unnecessary. What IS necessary, and what our goal is — is creation of a national-territorial center for all Jewish people in the world, a national mother country for our national colonies worldwide.
Such center is being founded and keeps being strengthened by the forces of Diaspora. Diaspora is very important to us. On the other hand, the scattered bits and pieces of Jewry only then can be said to lead a healthy life, when they are nourished by the life juices of the Mother Country. Only through the unbreakable bond between the Mother Country and its colonies, through its organic symbiosis, we envision the healing of the Jewish nation, the solution for the Jewish people. Thus the work in Palestine and the work in Diaspora organically intertwine and complement one another.
Similarly, Vincent Fean, Chair of trustees, Balfour Project asks a very good question of Israeli leaders in an article in Arab Digest titled: Israel-Palestine: in search of the rule of law, May 18, 2021, but goes on elsewhere to refer to Israel’s “right” to the “Holy land.”
His question is: “Is your vision peace with equality, or is ‘peace’ for you the absence of Palestinian resistance to permanent Israeli control, amounting to oppression?”
Unfortunately, in his statement for the Balfour Project’s upcoming Conference on Jerusalem, Fean speaks of how “the Jewish people exercised their right to self-determination in the Holy Land more than 70 years ago with British help.”
Well, the “Jewish people” have no “right” to Palestine, which he euphemistically calls the Holy Land; Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants do, whatever religion they may follow. This language/idea that claims “both sides have rights in Palestine” is the Zionist narrative that we are trying to debunk.
The second persistent hasbara claim is that Palestinians, an occupied people, do not have a right to armed resistance.
But as Stanley Cohen says in Palestinians Have a Legal Right to Armed Struggle:
Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force is not just recognised under international law but specifically endorsed… Though Israel has tried, time and time again, to recast the unambiguous intent of this precise resolution — and thus place its now half-century-long occupation in the West Bank and Gaza beyond its application — it is an effort worn thin to the point of palpable illusion by the exacting language of the declaration itself. In relevant part, section 21 of the resolution strongly condemned “the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East and the continual bombing of Palestinian civilians, which constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people” … Never ones to hesitate in rewriting history, long before the establishment of the United Nations, European Zionists deemed themselves to be an occupied people as they emigrated to Palestine — a land to which any historical connection they had had long since passed through a largely voluntary transit.
Indeed, a full 50 years before the UN spoke of the right of armed struggle as a vehicle of indigenous liberation, European Zionists illegally co-opted the concept as the Irgun, Lehi and other terrorist groups undertook a decade’s long reign of deadly mayhem. … Self-determination is a difficult, costly march for the occupied. In Palestine, no matter what the weapon of choice — whether voice, pen or gun — there is a steep price to be paid for its use.
Today, “speaking truth to power” has become very much a popular mantra of resistance in neoliberal circles and societies. In Palestine, however, for the occupied and oppressed, it is an all-but-certain path to prison or death. Yet, for generations of Palestinians stripped of the very breath that resonates with the feeling of freedom, history teaches there is simply no other choice.
Silence is surrender. To be silent is to betray all those who have come before and all those yet to follow.
And as Stanley Cohen also says: “It’s time for Israel to accept that as an occupied people, Palestinians have a right to resist — in every way possible.”
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Head band of figure in the poster says “Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades” (Source: Rima Najjar)
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The Biden administration said stopping Nord Stream 2 is a long shot now that the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany is more than 90% complete, a shift in tone that came as the U.S. held off on sanctioning the company overseeing its construction.
In a report to Congress on Wednesday, the State Department said that Nord Stream 2 AG and its chief executive Matthias Warnig are engaged in sanctionable activity under U.S. law but that the administration will waive penalties for national security reasons.
Nord Stream 2 Q&A
Q: What is Nord Stream 2?
A: A natural gas pipeline between Russia and the EU. It will bypass a Ukraine bottleneck and instead go under the Baltic Sea.
The pipeline was 90% complete with Trump objecting every step of the way while placing huge obstacles.
The irony is that instead of EU contractors building the pipeline, Russian contractors built it and got paid for it.
National Security Nonsense
Trump placed the sanctions on Russia over the pipeline citing national security.
In reality, his primary focus was to get the EU to buy US liquid natural gas at a much higher price than the EU can get from Russia.
Biden reversed Trump’s national security lie with a lie of his own, also based on national security concerns.
Curiously we placed and removed the same sanctions out of national security concerns.
Opposition Unwavering? Security Threat?
“Our opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is unwavering,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Wednesday.
“Completion of this pipeline poses a threat to U.S. security interests and the stability of our partners in the region,” Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire said in a statement. “The administration should uphold its commitment to Congress. Every option available to prevent its completion should be utilized.”
Israel’s PM Netanyahu is a war criminal and should be held accountable for war crimes throughout his PM-ship of Israel, according to the 1945 / 1946 Nuremberg trials criteria. His crimes against humanity, against a defenseless Palestine are comparable to the Holocaust.
The crisis of 2020 has created the greatest wealth gap in history. The middle class, capitalism and democracy are all under threat. What went wrong and what can be done?
A German scientist has discovered why the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccines” made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) are causing some recipients to develop deadly blood clots. According to Prof. Andreas Greinacher, a blood expert from the University of Greifswald, the two viral vector vaccines contain genetically modified (GMO) cold viruses that, upon injection, trigger an autoimmune response.
In April, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.
America’s Frontline Doctors has published a video of a presentation by Dr. Jessica Rose, PhD, MSc, BSc, who has analyzed the data in the VAERS database related to the COVID shots. The presentation was for “Vaccine Choice Canada.”
Twenty-two years ago today the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was subjected to the 55th straight day of bombardment from the then 19-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with 23 days more to go. Many families in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš daily fled to bomb shelters during the aerial onslaught.
A bill allowing hunters and private contractors to kill up to 90 percent of the state’s wolves passed the Idaho House on Tuesday. The measure also passed the Idaho Senate last week, which means that the fate of around 1,000 wolves now lies with Republican Gov. Brad Little.
The safety, well-being, and lives of millions of Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories are endangered by US/Western support for Israeli state terror. On day nine of preemptive Netanyahu regime war on Gaza, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Jens Laerke said conditions in the Strip are dire.
The current crisis of Palestine-Israel deepens and widens: casualties mount, smoke from destroyed buildings blacken the sky over Gaza, there’s rioting on the streets of many Israeli and West Bank towns; Israeli police disrupt worshippers in Al-Aqsa mosque while protecting extremist Jewish settlers shouting genocidal slogans – “death to the Arabs” – in inflammatory marches through Palestinian neighbourhoods.
The numerous incidents of killing entire families in Israeli bombings in Gaza – Parents and children, babies, grandparents, siblings – attest that these were not mistakes. The bombings follow a decision from higher up, backed by the approval of military jurists.
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Israeli terror-bombing and shelling of besieged Gazans continues in its 11th day with no letup so far.
Unindicted war criminal Netanyahu says he’s “determined” to keep massacring Gazans and terrorizing Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories until his diabolical aims are achieved.
A readout of Wednesday’s conversation between him and Biden’s impersonator was more head-fake deception than a White House call for “significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire (sic).”
For 73 years, the US aided, abetted, and financed the worst of Israeli high crimes of war, against humanity, slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, and preemptive wars against neighboring states.
In the past week, the Biden regime blocked three Security Council (SC) joint statements that called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas — showing its dominant hardliners support war, not resolution.
On Wednesday in response to a French draft SC statement, jointly supported by Egypt and Jordan — that states “(t)he shooting must stop.”
“The time has come for a ceasefire and the UN Security Council must take up the issue,” the Orwellian response of the Biden regime’s UN mission was as follows:
“(W)e will not support (what furthers deescalation and ceasefire) actions that we believe undermine efforts to de-escalate (sic).”
According to an unnamed French source, Wednesday discussions on the above joint proposal at the UN were “very intense.”
Separately from Beirut, Lebanon,Islamic Jihad official Ziad Nakhaleh said neither nuclear weapons, warplanes or peace agreements between Israel and some Arab states achieved regional peace and security, adding:
Gazan resistance against Israeli state terror “made miracles that you can see with your own eyes and you live them every moment when you run to shelters.”
He referred to Strip responses to longstanding Israeli state terror against millions of long-suffering Palestinians under militarized occupation.
Because of increased dispossession of Palestinians from their homes on their own land, “we had two choices, to surrender and to give them everything or fight them over everything,” he explained.
One-sided US-dominated Western support for the highest of high Israeli high crimes permits its ruling regimes to do whatever they damn please with impunity — no matter how egregiously in breach of international law.
As for long-suffering Palestinians, rhetorical Western concern for their rights and welfare is hollow.
It’s virtually never followed by actions with teeth on their behalf.
Support for apartheid Israel has always been and remains entirely one-sided.
In January 2006, Hamas democratically won a Palestinian legislative majority over pro-Israeli puppet rule under Fatah.
Yet in October 1997 at the behest of Israel, the Clinton co-presidency false designated Hamas a “foreign terrorist organization” — what it never was and isn’t now.
At the time in response to what Israel urged, Hezbollah was falsely given the same designation.
Its officials are part of Lebanon’s elected government.
In May 2018 general elections, its candidates and allies won a 67-seat majority of parliament’s 128 seats – equally divided between Muslims and Christians.
At the time, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah called parliamentary results a “political and moral victory” for the resistance — giving the group and its allies power to veto legislation they consider unacceptable.
For self-defense against threatened Israeli aggression, its ruling authorities maintain a military wing.
Much stronger today than during Israel’s 2006 aggression against Lebanon, embarrassing IDF ground forces at the time, it’s a force to be reckoned with if the Jewish state again preemptively attacks the Lebanese people.
In April 2019, the Trump regime falsely designated Iran’s military — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)— a terrorist organization even though the Islamic Republic never attacked another nation preemptively or threatened one except in self-defense if attacked, the UN Charter right of all nations.
In stark contrast, aggression is what the US, NATO and Israel are guilty of time and again.
The world community of nations for peace, stability and compliance with the rule of law should designate them terrorist organizations.
Overnight Wednesday, Israel continued to terror-bomb and shell Gazan residential areas.
According to the Strip’s health ministry, at least 64 children and 38 women was massacred so far, the overall death toll around 230 — numbers that keep rising by the hour.
Interviewed on French television Wednesday, South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa said the following:
“Palestinians want their own self-determination rights.”
“They want their own state. They want to be able to run their own affairs and have freedom, and not have to be restricted to move around.”
Israel denies them “their rights” as affirmed under international law.
It’s an “apartheid” state. “I have no other reference point to describe what the Israelis are doing against the Palestinians.”
According to political analyst Omar Baddar, “Israeli leadership understands that…they are completely free to carry on with their massive assault against Gaza’s civilian population.”
No US/Western actions against the Jewish state will follow.
For 73 years, Israel has been free to commit the most egregious high crimes with impunity.
The US-dominated West and world community never did anything to hold its ruling authorities accountable for Nuremberg-level high crimes.
Nothing punitive will follow its ongoing rape and destruction of Gaza — for the fourth time since December 2008.
Nor will anything be done to halt its state terror against Palestinian civilians throughout the Occupied Territories.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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A very informative discussion with Beirut-based journalist and political analyst Marwa Osman, on the litany of Israeli crimes against Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s horrifying bombardment of the besieged and densely inhabited Gaza Strip.
Marwa also speaks of the unity not only among Palestinian resistance groups, but also Resistance movements throughout the region.
“Myself as a Shia Muslim, I believe that when there are people who are oppressed, it’s not only my duty, but if I don’t help that people, then I’m complicit. This ideology has surpassed the Shi’ism ideology and has passed to a pan-Arabism ideology, the same ideology Gamal Abdel Nasser used to reiterate and emphasize when he was president of Egypt. That pan-Arabism is now being mirrored at the different factions, the different resistance, the allied forces of the resistance across west Asia, from Sana’a to Maghreb, up to Baghdad to Mosul, to the border between Iraq and Syria, to Damascus, Aleppo, to Daraa, down to Quneitra, down to south Lebanon, not forgetting the Islamic republic of Iran. This is very important, and historic. What we are seeing is the same people that the Imperial powers, starting from WW2 to today, tried to dismantle, disintegrate, and break apart, they are coming all together to stand in the face of this cancer that was prepared for us in the late 1800s….”
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Any sort of holiday or otherwise partial cessation of hostilities in the Middle East, and namely Syria, provides civilians with a rare chance of focusing on other issues.
In the north and toward the central regions of Syria people took to the streets after a hike in fuel prices, attributed to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Two people were reportedly killed when SDF members opened fire on a protest, trying to disperse it.
Along with the protests in Hasaka, demonstrations happened in Deir Ezzor, Amuda, Rmelan, Al-Maabadah, Qamishli and Dayrik districts. They were all against the increases in the prices for energy resources such as natural gas, diesel oil and gasoline.
Two civilians were killed when the SDF stormed into As-Sawa village in Deir Ezzor western countryside.
Just two days earlier, SDF members stormed into a number of villages in al-Shaddadi area in Hasaka southern countryside and kidnapped many of the villagers, Syrian state media reported.
In total, the US-backed Kurdish group kidnapped 25 civilians and took them to one of the places which was turned into a prison within the city center.
The SDF cut off fuel provisions to President Bashar Al-Assad’s government nearly a month before, citing accumulating debt.
In nearby Aleppo, tensions between the Kurdish factions and the Turkish forces, and Turkish-backed militants continue.
Two members of the factions that Ankara backs were killed in an explosion in the vicinity of one of their armed headquarters in Rajo district in Afrin city.
The Damascus government blames Turkey and the militants it backs for stealing electricity, wheat and oil from northern Syria, while Ankara in its turn blames the SDF for that.
Meanwhile, both Ankara and Washington are actually smuggling resources away from northern Syria, causing their lack and the hikes in prices.
Civilian suffering is something that currently is taking place in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
A convoy of international aid trucks that started rolling into Gaza through Karem Abu Salem was stopped.
Israel briefly opened the crossing, then, closed it again, because alleged Hamas shelling lightly injured a soldier of the Israel Defense Forces. This warranted the stopping of any and all humanitarian aid.
At least 218 Palestinians, including 63 children, have been killed in Gaza since the attacks began. About 1,500 Palestinians have been wounded. Twelve people in Israel have died, including two children, while at least 300 have been wounded.
The situation in Gaza appears to be nowhere near resolved, with none of the collective West willing to undertake any tangible action or even sternly demand an end to violence. All that’s present are light calls for a ceasefire that fall on deaf ears.
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For the past year, I’ve been offering compelling evidence that: no one has proven SARS-CoV-2 exists. [1]
I’ve explained that the virus was never isolated. In fact, researchers use the word “isolated” to mean its very opposite: “We ASSUME we have the virus surrounded by, and embedded in, a great deal of other material, and we never extract it or purify it.”
No isolation=no discovery of a virus.
I’ve explained that it’s impossible to put together the genetic sequence of a virus that has never been found. Unless, of course, you’re lying.
I’ve published an article in which Dr. Andrew Kaufman [2] took apart, step by step, a typical published study in which the authors described how they isolated SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Kaufman tore this description to pieces and revealed how absurd it is. [3]
When confronted with a mountain of so-called science plus sheer propaganda, most people find it impossible to accept the fact that, at the core of the mountain, there is…
NOTHING.
Absolutely nothing.
“Oh, that couldn’t be. There has to be SOMETHING, and the something must be a virus.”
This is on the order of a child saying, “There has to be a ghost in the closet every night when I go to sleep.”
All that fear, and there is nothing? No, no.
But in the medical universe, there are actually several huge institutions that are based on nothing.
Here is one: PSYCHIATRY.
The official bible of the psychiatric profession, the DSM, lists, describes, and labels some 300 separate and distinct mental disorders.
If you plow through the bible, you will notice that NONE of these mental disorders has a defining laboratory test. No saliva, blood, hair, urine test. No brain scan. No genetic assay. NOTHING.
Yes, people have problems, troubles. People experience suffering and pain. But that is quite, quite different from arbitrarily carving up all that suffering into 300 academic and clinical categories called “mental disorders.”
And on top of the astonishing scientific con, the patients who are diagnosed are given toxic drugs, some of which push them over the edge into committing suicide and murder.
All based on a scientific nothing.
(A warning: Suddenly withdrawing from psychiatric drugs can be very dangerous, even life-threatening. Withdrawal should be done gradually, supervised by a caring professional who knows what he’s doing. See breggin.com.) [4]
In a PBS Frontline episode, Does ADHD Exist? [5], Dr. Russell Barkley, an eminent professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, unintentionally spelled out the fraud.
PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.
BARKLEY: That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid.
Oh, indeed, that does make them invalid. Utterly and completely. All 300 mental disorders. Because there are no defining tests of any kind to back up the diagnosis.
We are looking at a science that isn’t a science. That’s called fraud. Rank fraud.
Here is one more newsflash: The so-called “chemical-imbalance” theory of mental illness is dead.
Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid the theory to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times with this staggering admission:
“In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend — never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” [6]
Boom.
Dead.
However…urban legend? No. For decades the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been: “we’re correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain.”
The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance. So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn’t.
In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to protect his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:
“In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it…the ‘chemical imbalance’ image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding.”
Absurd. First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.
And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud…
…then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients…
…since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct a chemical imbalance?
The chemical-imbalance theory is a fake.
The entire branch of medicine called psychiatry is based on NOTHING.
But again, people find that difficult, if not impossible, to accept. They prefer to believe there must be SOMETHING. That’s what they want to believe. That’s what they’ve been trained to believe.
“Well, you see, every effect has a cause, and that cause is actually the effect of an earlier cause, and you can go back farther and farther in the chain…”
And this idea is somehow the basis for assuming that, if a pandemic is announced, there must be a virus.
“I’ve got to have a virus. I NEED a virus.”
“I fear the virus. I want the virus. I love the virus.”
There are all sorts of variations on the theme.
“The pandemic? There must be something at the core of it. There must be.”
THERE IS NOTHING.
And if someone responds with the familiar battle cry, “Then why are all these people dying?”, I’ve covered that issue from stem to stern in a dozen articles or so. [7]
The entirety of illness and death attributed to the “pandemic” can be explained by multiple factors (not one), and none of those factors involves a virus.
“People dying equals a virus” is about as convincing as “all-cause mortality rising is the result of plane crashes.”
As sure as I’m writing this sentence, someone somewhere will think, “Hmm, plane crashes. I should look into that…”
And he will. He’ll look into planes flying through underground caves, carrying passengers intent on exploring the center of the Earth, where doctors are producing a longevity drug that extends life for 500 years. But the planes are having accidents.
That level of fantasy is on the same bookshelf as “the virus is causing the pandemic.”
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The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
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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***
The numerous incidents of killing entire families in Israeli bombings in Gaza – Parents and children, babies, grandparents, siblings – attest that these were not mistakes. The bombings follow a decision from higher up, backed by the approval of military jurists.
Fifteen Palestinian nuclear and extended families lost at least three, and in general more, of their members, in the Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip during the week from May 10 through to Monday afternoon. Parents and children, babies, grandparents, siblings and nephews and nieces died together when Israel bombed their homes, which collapsed over them. Insofar as is known, no advance warning was given so that they could evacuate the targeted houses.
On Saturday, a representative of the Palestinian Health Ministry brought listed the names of 12 families who were killed, each one at its home, each one in a single bombing. Since then, in one air raid before dawn on Sunday, which lasted 70 minutes and was directed at three houses on Al Wehda Street in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza, three families numbering 38 people in total were killed. Some of the bodies were found on Sunday morning. Palestinian rescue forces only managed to find the rest of the bodies and pull them out from the rubble only on Sunday evening.
Wiping out entire families in Israeli bombings was one of the characteristics of the war in 2014. In the roughly 50 days of the war then, UN figures say that 142 Palestinian families were erased (742 people in total). The numerous incidents then and today attest that these were not mistakes: and that the bombing of a house while all its residents are in it follows a decision from higher up, backed by the examination and approval of military jurists.
An investigation by the human rights group B’Tselem that focused on some 70 of the families who were eradicated in 2014, provided three explanations for the numerous nuclear and extended families that were killed, all at once, in one Israeli bombing on the home of each such family. One explanation was that the Israeli army didn’t provide advance warning to the homeowners or to their tenants; or that the warning didn’t reach the correct address, at all or on time.
In any case, what stands out is the difference between the fate of the buildings that were bombed with their residents inside, and the “towers” – the high-rise buildings that were shelled as of the second day of this latest conflict, during the daytime or early evening.
Reportedly, the owners or the concierge in the towers got prior warning of an hour at most that they must evacuate, usually via phone call from the army or Shin Bet security service, then “warning missiles” fired by drones. These owners/concierges were supposed to warn the other residents in the short time remaining.
Not only highrises were involved. On Thursday evening Omar Shurabji’s home west of Khan Yunis was shelled. A crater formed in the road and one room in the two־story building was destroyed. Two families, with seven people altogether, live in that building.
About 20 minutes before the explosion, the army called Khaled Shurabji and told him to tell his uncle Omar to leave the house, per a report by the Palestinian center for human rights. It is not known whether Omar was there, but the residents of the house all hastened to get out, so there were no casualties.
This very fact that the Israeli army and Shin Bet trouble to call and order the evacuation of the homes shows that the Israeli authorities have current phone numbers for people in each structure slated for destruction. They have the phone numbers for relatives of the people suspected or known to be activists for Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
The Palestinian population registry, including that of Gaza, is in the hands of the Israeli Interior Ministry. It includes details such as names, ages, relatives and addresses.
As the Oslo Accords require, the Palestinian interior ministry, through the civil affairs ministry, transfers current information regularly to the Israeli side, especially concerning births and newborns: The registry data must receive Israeli approval, because without that, Palestinians cannot receive an identity card when the time comes, or in the case of minors – they can’t travel alone or with their parents through border crossings controlled by Israel.
It is clear, then, that the army knows the number and names of children, women and elderly who live in every residential building it bombs for any reason.
B’Tselem’s second explanation for why whole families were erased in 2014 is that the army’s definition of an attackable “military target” was very broad, and it included the homes of Hamas and Islamic Jihad people. These houses were described as operational infrastructure, or command and control infrastructure of the organization or terror infrastructure – even if all it had was a telephone, or just hosted a meeting.
The third explanation in the B’Tselem analysis from 2014 was that the army’s interpretation of “collateral damage” is very flexible and broad. The army claimed and claims that it acts according to the principle of “proportionality” between harm to uninvolved civilians and achieving the legitimate military goal, in other words, that in every case the “collateral damage” caused to Palestinians is measured and considered.
But once the “importance” of a Hamas member is considered high and its residence is defined as a legitimate target for bombing – the “allowable” collateral damage, in other words the number of uninvolved people killed, including children and babies – is very broad.
In the intensive bombing of three residential buildings on Al Wehda Street in Gaza, before dawn on Sunday, the Abu al Ouf, Al- Qolaq and Ashkontana families were killed. In real time, when the number of dead from one family is so great – it is hard to find and encourage a survivor to tell about each family member, and their last days.
So one must make do with their names and ages, as listed in the daily reports of the human rights organizations that collect the information and even note, when they know, if any family member belonged to any military organization. So far, it is not know whether and who among the residents of the Al Wehda buildings was considered such an important target, that “permitted” the obliteration of entire families.
The members of the abu al Ouf family who were killed are: The father Ayman, an internal medicine doctor in Shifa Hospital, and his two children: Tawfiq, 17, and Tala, 13. Another two female relatives were also killed – Reem, 41, and Rawan, 19. These five bodies were found shortly after the bombing. The bodies of another eight members of the Abu al Ouf family were removed from the ruins only in the evening, and they are: Subhiya, 73, Amin, 90, Tawfiq, 80, and his wife Majdiya, 82, and their relative Raja (married to a man from the Afranji family) and her three children: Mira, 12, Yazen, 13, and Mir, 9.
During the air raid on those buildings, Abir Ashkontana was also killed, 30, and her three children: Yahya, 5, Dana, 9, and Zin, 2. In the evening, the bodies of two more girls were found: Rula, 6, and Lana, 10. The Palestinian center’s report does not mention whether these two children are Abir’s daughters.
In the two neighboring buildings 19 members of the Al-Qolaq family were killed: Fuaz, 63 and his four children; Abd al Hamid, 23, Riham, 33, Bahaa, 49 and Sameh, 28, and his wife Iyat, 19. Their baby Qusay, six months old, was also killed. Another female member of the extended family, Amal Al-Qolaq, 42, was also killed and three of her children were killed: Taher, 23, Ahmad, 16, and Hana’a – 15. The brothers Mohammed Al-Qolaq, 42, and Izzat, 44, were also killed, and Izzat’s children: Ziad, 8, and three-year-old Adam. The women Doa’a Al-Qolaq, 39, and Sa’adia Al-Qolaq, 83, were also killed. In the evening, the bodies of Hala Al-Qolaq, 13, and her sister Yara, 10, were rescued from under the rubble. Palestinian center’s report does not mention who their parents were and whether they were also killed in the bombing.
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***
The high hopes that many had for a radical improvement of the situation in the Horn of Africa just a few short years ago have been shattered by a combination of internal and international conflicts centered on Ethiopia, but it might be premature to predict that the region won’t ever recover since Prime Minister Abiy could drastically turn everything around once more should he have the political will to do so.
What Went Wrong?
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed‘s ascent to power in Africa’s second most populous country a few years back inspired high hopes for a radical improvement of the situation in the Horn of Africa. His rhetoric was regarded as an almost revolutionary departure from his predecessors’ and he quickly set out to patch up his country’s years-long conflict with neighboring Eritrea, for which he later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This makes it all the more surprising to many observers that the region is once again beset by a slew of internal and international conflicts centered on his country, making them wonder whether something had went wrong or if they hadn’t properly assessed the situation to begin with. The answer to this question is complex, but the present analysis will attempt to address it in a relatively simple way for the sake of everyone’s understanding.
Background Briefing
To bring unaware readers up to speed, they’re encouraged to read the author’s prior works on this topic:
The rest of the analysis will reference and build upon the insight above.
Ethiopia’s Glasnost & Perestroika Experiment
The problems that have popped up in recent years weren’t exactly unexpected. For instance, Ethiopia’s federal system was always considered to be imperfect though nevertheless manageable under its prior leaders after the end of the civil war. Some internal borders didn’t match up with the ethnic demographics on the ground, thereby planting the seeds for future conflict but delaying their growth until a time that the central government became comparatively weaker than it used to be. That moment arrived with Abiy after he preached his political gospel of changing the state of political affairs in his country, particularly by loosening the reins of power that the ruling coalition held over practically all matters. This combination of Ethiopian-style glasnost and perestroika was well-intended but risked spiraling out of control exactly as its Soviet forerunner did.
Trouble With The TPLF
Instead of sitting back and letting centrifugal forces tear his cosmopolitan nation apart as he feared would inevitably happen, Abiy reacted by reversing his liberal vision and reviving some of the centralization tendencies of his predecessors. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), formerly the most powerful member of the ruling coalition, broke with Abiy and threatened an insurgency in their eponymous region that was powerfully crushed by the central government over the past half-year to much international criticism. The ongoing conflict continues to rage at a lower intensity than before and has caused much concern among observers about its humanitarian consequences which currently remain unclear due to a lack of access by independent observers.
“Balkanization” Fears
The alternative to war was always to continue with the track that he’d previously set with his rhetoric of loosening the reins up to the point of redefining the nature of Ethiopia’s federal system, but Abiy believed that this might “Balkanize” his country, hence why he reacted the way that he did. There’s no turning back the clock and doing things differently so that decision will go down in history as a pivotal moment for better or for worse. Critics claim that he returned Ethiopia to its dictatorial ways while supporters praise him for decisively safeguarding national unity and therefore setting an example to the other separatist groups that are active all across the country. In any case, considering the fact that the conflict remains unresolved and continues to reverberate throughout society, it can be said that the short-term consequences were destabilizing.
Eritrea’s Speculative Influence Over Ethiopia
It’s important to point out that neighboring Eritrea with whom Ethiopia had only recently entered into a rapid rapprochement dispatched troops to the rebellious Tigray region where they reportedly remain despite having promised to officially withdraw. This development internationalized Ethiopia’s internal conflict and therefore raised the stakes of its outcome. It also fueled speculation that long-ruling President Afwerki is secretly puling Abiy’s strings and might have even succeeded in imposing his desired vision upon the region as expressed by Al Jazeera contributor Goitom Gebreluel in his op-ed about “The Tripartite Alliance Destabilizing The Horn Of Africa”. The expert drew attention to other destabilizing trends such as the de facto changes to some of Ethiopia’s internal borders following the Amhara Region’s military occupation of parts of Tigray.
Geopolitical Competition Between China & The GCC
Gebreluel is also against what he described as the widespread disregard for international humanitarian law and the sharp decline in multilateral diplomacy. These are pertinent points and his concerns should be taken seriously. Missing from his detailed analysis, however, is reference to how the Horn of Africa has recently become an object of competition between rising powers. Chinese investments are now challenged by those from the GCC, particularly Saudi Arabia and especially the UAE. Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) ambitions risk being dealt a massive blow by the latest round of multi-sided destabilization in the region, which can create strategic opportunities for the GCC. It also deserves mention that the US is no longer exerting is post-Old Cold War leadership over the region. It’s unclear what the impact of this is though since it hasn’t been studied much.
The GERD Dispute
The heated dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) continues to afflict the region and provoke fears of a conventional military clash between Ethiopia on one side and GCC-backed Egypt and Sudan on the other. Observers should also remember that Ethiopia and Sudan have recently revived their old territorial dispute, potentially creating the pretext for another conflict that could actually serve as a smokescreen for either of them going to war over the GERD. As for Somalia, which is also mentioned in Gebreluel’s piece, its leader finally relented on his prior attempt to postpone elections that was responsible for provoking a brief round of bloodshed. He also repaired his country’s relations with Kenya too. Ironically, while Somalia is regarded as the least stable of the region’s countries, its recent actions were actually stabilizing.
The Role Of Leadership Over Regional Events
What can be learned from the Somali case is that a lot depends on the political decisions made by the region’s leaders. This is evidenced by everything going on in Ethiopia related to its internal and international conflicts. Abiy made the fateful decision to militarily intervene in Tigray, which created a humanitarian crisis that continues to this day even if national unity was preserved, albeit in a more centralized fashion than the decentralized one that his supporters had earlier expected. The GERD dispute is also largely due to the relevant leaders being unable to reach a pragmatic compromise. To be fair, there are serious ecological, economic, geopolitical, and strategic issues at play which take precedence over the personal opinions of any given leader, but these heads of state are ultimately responsible for it remaining unresolved.
Ethiopia’s Strategic Centrality
Ethiopia’s regional centrality leads one to conclude that “as Ethiopia goes, so goes the region”, which is proven by empirical evidence. The country’s recent round of multi-sided destabilization (regardless of whomever or whatever one attributes this to) has powerfully reverberated all throughout the Horn of Africa. The centralization trend that Abiy nowadays obviously supports sends the signal that decentralization trends, especially those advanced through the use of arms like Tigray’s was, will be militantly opposed by the region’s other leaders. At the same time, however, there’s no denying that decentralization is an objectively observable global trend and one that does indeed have some merits in the Horn of Africa. Alas, it won’t see any success in the immediate future considering the fear that Abiy has of it inadvertently provoking “Balkanization”.
Redrawing Internal Administrative Borders
Going forward, however, responsibly managed decentralization should be seriously considered by him and others as a compromise solution for resolving myriad internal issues, especially those of an ethnic nature. Ethiopia’s internal borders remain imperfect, but they shouldn’t be de facto redrawn through one region’s partial military occupation of another like the Amhara Region is presently doing to Tigray. This leads to the large-scale exodus of local people which can arguably be described as ethnic cleansing even if that wasn’t the intent. Replicating this model deeper in the Ethiopian heartland around the Oromo periphery for example could be disastrous for the country and potentially spell its doom in the worst-case scenario. From the opposite view, however, the peaceful resolution of such heated disputes could set an excellent example for the region.
The Most Powerful Man In Africa
What everything ultimately comes down to is the influence of leadership, especially in the Horn of Africa. For better or for worse depending on one’s perspective, Abiy is the most powerful man in the region, which thus makes him among Africa’s most powerful leaders today. His decisions set the trend that all neighboring countries follow. With this in mind, there’s still hope for the Horn of Africa, but it all depends on what Abiy decides to do. As seen from the example set by the neighboring Somali leader, backtracking on a controversial decision might improve the situation in one’s country, but Somalia is of course very different than Ethiopia so the comparison is admittedly imperfect. Nevertheless, this still shows that the region’s leaders exert powerful influence over national affairs, once again for better or for worse. Abiy could for example eventually take steps to restore the de facto collective leadership model that he inherited from the TPLF, though only if he cares to.
From A Party To A Person Being “The First Among Equals”
To explain, the post-civil war ruling coalition was largely modeled off of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Despite its faults, it succeeded in retaining stability in this very diverse country and controlling its centrifugal tendencies, albeit through heavy handed measures. Abiy retained that strict style of leadership but attempted to reform the dynamics of the ruling coalition, which in turn inadvertently destabilized the country since it was so unprecedented in the post-civil war period. Instead of the TPLF being “the first among equals”, it became him personally who fulfilled that role. His outsized influence over all matter of governing affairs has been felt by everyone, again for better or for worse. In a sense, it’s a return to history, but his evolving leadership model must continue adjusting to contemporary realities, especially the dynamics that he’s responsible for unleashing.
Ethiopia’s Most Immediate Priorities
Preserving superficial decentralization while in practice increasing centralization trends risks worsening domestic dissent, especially among the majority-minority Oromo and smaller groups around the country’s periphery. Abiy is unlikely to ever follow the Somali model of much broader decentralization for each region but some substantive movement in that direction with time might help placate some of those who’ve been provoked by his leadership style. The most immediate priority though is stopping the growing inter-ethnic violence of the past year which is driven to a large extent by various groups trying to redraw internal borders to more closely align with demographic realities on the ground. Only once this is brought under control can the state seriously start discussing the adjustment of those contentious frontiers.
The Tigrayan Tinderbox Risks Spreading Throughout Ethiopia
It mustn’t be driven by inertia into letting events unfold “naturally” and creating fait accomplis lest the resultant violence worsen the country’s already tragic humanitarian situation. Although Abiy is trying to regain control of these centrifugal dynamics, critics allege that he might secretly be turning a blind eye to some of the violence out of speculative favoritism for one or another group. This risks deepening the country’s ethnic divisions as well as the growing gap between the central government and some of the governed. What’s happening right now in Tigray might therefore spread throughout the rest of the country as Ethiopia flirts with its own so-called “Great Reset”, albeit related to redrawing internal borders and continuing Abiy’s centralization trends instead of the socio-economic outcomes generally associated with that concept (i.e. “Fourth Industrial Revolution”).
An Outsider’s Proposed Solutions
From an outsider’s perspective, Ethiopia must immediately regain control over the security situation in all parts of the country without exception, though being careful not to overreact to certain conflicts. Then Abiy must compellingly articulate his envisioned governance model to the masses. Ideally, credible representatives from each region will either support him or offer constructive critiques to whatever he proposes with an aim to improve perceived shortcomings. Only after that happens can the country then consider redrawing some of its internal borders, though that process will of course be controversial and not everyone will be satisfied with the outcome. Amid all of this, Abiy must balance between the competing external forces shaping his decision making, particularly Eritrea and the GCC, while retaining Ethiopia’s traditionally excellent relations with China.
Concluding Thoughts
For as dramatic of a comparison as it may be, Abiy’s Ethiopia has many parallels with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Both visionary leaders sought to revolutionize their systems of governance but inadvertently opened up a Pandora’s Box of domestic crises. Unlike the USSR, however, Ethiopia still has a chance of surviving as a unified state, though it must eventually make meaningful reforms in the direction of substantive decentralization after stabilizing the security situation throughout the country. Abiy might also do well to consider returning to more of a collective leadership model than the one that he presently rules over where he personally wields the most power as the so-called ‘first among equals”. In any case, it all comes down to leadership, and everyone’s hopes are resting on his shoulders to see what he’ll do next.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The current crisis of Palestine-Israel deepens and widens: casualties mount, smoke from destroyed buildings blacken the sky over Gaza, there’s rioting on the streets of many Israeli and West Bank towns; Israeli police disrupt worshippers in Al-Aqsa mosque while protecting extremist Jewish settlers shouting genocidal slogans – “death to the Arabs” – in inflammatory marches through Palestinian neighbourhoods.
Underlying this entire eruption of tensions between the oppressor and the oppressed were the flimsy legalised evictions of six Palestinian families long resident in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem. These evictions epitomised the long Palestinian ordeal of persecution and banishment in whatremains their homeland.
While this mayhem continues, the lights have remained scandalously dim at the UN. Western leaders pathetically call for calm on both sides as if both sides shared equal blame, while perversely affirming the one-sidedness of “Israel’s right to defend itself”, which supposes that Israel had been attacked out of the blue.
Is this but one more cycle of violence exhibiting the unresolvable clash between a native people overwhelmed by a colonial intruder emboldened by a unique religiously grounded settler sense of entitlement?
Or are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the century-long struggle by the Palestinian people to defend their homeland against the unfolding Zionist project that stole their land, trampled on their dignity, and made Palestinians victimised strangers in what had been their national home for centuries?
Only the future can fully unravel this haunting uncertainty. In the meantime, we can expect more bloodshed, death, outrage, grief, injustice, and continuing geopolitical interference.
The spirit of resistance
Last week’s events have made clear that the Palestinians are withstanding prolonged oppression with their spirit of resistance intact, and refuse to be pacified regardless of the severity of the imposed hardships.
We also are made to appreciate that the Israeli leadership and most of its public is no longer in the mood even to pretend receptivity to a peaceful alternative to the completion of their settler-colonial undertaking despite its dependence on a weaponised version of apartheid governance.
For Israelis and much of the West, the core narrative continues to be the violence of a “terrorist” organisation, Hamas, challenging the peaceful state of Israel with destructive intent, making the Israeli response seem reasonable. It is thus framed as not only a response to Hamas’ rockets but also as a harsh punitive lesson for the people of Gaza, designed to deter future attacks.
The Israeli missiles and drones are deemed “defensive” while the rockets are acts of “terrorism”, even though Israeli human targets are seldom hit, and despite the fact that it is Israeli weaponry that causes 95 percent of the widespread death and destruction among the over two million civilian Palestinians in Gaza. They have been victims of an unlawful and crippling blockade that since 2007 has brought severe suffering to the impoverished, crowded and traumatised enclave, with unemployment levels above 50 percent.
In the current confrontation, Israel’s control of the international discourse has succeeded in de-contextualising the timeline of violence, thus leading those with little knowledge of what induced the flurry of Hamas rockets to believe falsely that the destruction in Gaza was a retaliatory Israeli reaction to hundreds of rockets launched by Hamas and Gaza armed groups.
With abuses of language that might even surprise Orwell, Israel’s state terrorism is airbrushed by the world along with the rebuff of Hamas’ peace diplomacy over the past 15 years that has repeatedly sought a permanent ceasefire and peaceful coexistence.
Symbolic victories
For Palestinians and those in solidarity with their struggle, Israel knowingly allowed the subjugated population of occupied East Jerusalem to experience a series of anguishing humiliations to occur during the holy period of Muslim religious observances in Ramadan, rubbing salt in the wounds recently opened by the Sheikh Jarrar evictions. This had the inevitable effect of refreshing Palestinian memories of their defining experiences of ethnic cleansing days before the annual observance of the Nakba on 15 May.
This amounted to a metaphoric reenactment of that massive crime of expulsion accompanying the establishment of Israel in 1948, which culminated in the bulldozing of several hundred Palestinian villages that signalled a firm Israeli intention to make the banishment permanent.
Unlike South Africa, which never claimed to be a democracy, Israel legitimated itself by presenting itself as a constitutional democracy. This resolve to be a democracy came with a high price tag of deception and self-deception, necessitating to this day a continuing struggle to make apartheid work to secure Jewish supremacy while hiding Palestinian subjugation.
For decades, Israel was successful in hiding these apartheid features from the world because the legacy of the Holocaust lent uncritical credence to the Zionist narrative of providing sanctuary for the survivors of the worst genocide known to humanity.
Additionally, the Jewish presence “was making the desert bloom“, while at the same time virtually erasing Palestine grievances, further discounted by hasbara visions of Palestinian backwardness as contrasting with Israeli modernising prowess, and later on by juxtaposing a political caricature of the two peoples, portraying Jewish adherence to Western values as opposed to the Palestinian embrace of terrorism.
Recent developments in the symbolic domains of politics that control the outcome of “Legitimacy Wars” have scored several victories for the Palestinian struggle. The International Criminal Court has authorised the investigation of Israeli criminality in Occupied Palestine since 2015 despite vigorous opposition from the leadership of the Israeli government, fully supported by the United States. The investigation in The Hague, although proceeding with diligent respect for the legalities involved, was not openly engaged by Israel, but rather immediately denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “pure antisemitism”.
Beyond this, allegations of Israeli apartheid were unequivocally confirmed in an academic report commissioned by the UN, concluding that Israeli policies and practices were designed to ensure Palestinian subjugation and Jewish domination. This too was similarly denounced by Israeli leaders.
A citizen of Gaza: “Today I did the strangest thing; I gave 2 of my kids to my brother and took 2 of his. This way if (the Israelis) kill an entire one of our families something will still remain of all of us.”#GazaUnderAttackغزةhttps://t.co/X11oCIUv4J
In the past few months both B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights NGO, and Human Rights Watch, have issued carefully documented studies that reach the same startling conclusion that Israel indeed administers an apartheid regime within the whole of historic Palestine, that is, the Occupied Palestinian Territories plus Israel itself.
While these two developments do not alleviate Palestinian suffering or the behavioural effects of enduring denial of basic rights, they are significant symbolic victories that stiffen the morale of Palestinian resistance and strengthen the bonds of global solidarity. The record of struggles against colonialism since 1945 support reaching the conclusion that the side that wins a legitimacy war will eventually control the political outcome, despite being weaker militarily and diplomatically.
‘Then you win’
The endgame of South African apartheid reinforces this reassessment of the changing balance of forces in the Palestinian struggle. Despite having what appeared to be effective and stable control of the African majority population through the implementation of brutal apartheid structures, the racist regime collapsed from within under the combined weight of internal resistance and international pressure.
Outside pressures included a widely endorsed BDS campaign enjoying UN backing and military setbacks in Angola against Cuban and liberation forces. Israel is not South Africa in a number of key aspects, but the combination of resistance and solidarity was dramatically ramped upwards in the past week.
Israel has already long lost the main legal and moral arguments, almost acknowledging this interpretation by their defiant way of changing the subject with reckless accusations of antisemitism, and is in the process of losing the political argument.
Israel’s own sense of vulnerability to a South African scenario has been exposed by this growing tendency to brand supporters of BDS and harsh critics as “antisemites” which seems in the context of present development best described as “a geopolitical panic attack”.
I find it appropriate to recall Gandhi’s famous observation along these lines: “First, they ignore you, then they insult you, then they fight you, then you win.”
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Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. In 2008 he was also appointed by the UN to serve a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
Featured image: Palestinian take cover as Israeli forces fire at protesters at the Gaza border on 14 December 2018 [Mohammed Asad/Middle East Monitor]
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With the conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin in the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, many had hoped that this rare legal occurrence represented a turning point in holding law-enforcement agents accountable for their use of lethal force involving interactions with Black and Brown peoples.
Nonetheless, on the same day as the guilty verdict was announced in Minneapolis, a 16-year-old youth, Ma’Khia Bryant, was gunned down in Columbus, Ohio by cops.
Corporate news reports on the killing of Bryant brought a plethora of so-called experts on police services and culture to express their opinions that the gunman was once again justified in using deadly weapons. Many of these talking heads said that each case of police use of firearms against civilians should be viewed individually, that most officers are trained to respond in such situations and there is no pattern of racial bias.
Chauvin’s defense lawyers in their appeal were expected to suggest that the jury was tainted due to the presence of one person at a March on Washington during August 2020, which commemorated the 57th anniversary of the 1963 gathering addressed by leading African Americans such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Mahalia Jackson, Odetta, Josephine Baker, Daisy Bates, Bayard Rustin, among others.
Could the presence of one African American at the rally in 2020 be considered by the defense to be enough to disqualify participation on a jury which decided the fate of Chauvin? A commemoration of the March on Washington was conveniently categorized as a “Black Lives Matter” activity, evoking the right-wing demonization of the Movement as a threat to policing across the United States.
Yet BLM and all antiracist campaigns since 2020 have been of a mass character. People have participated through a myriad of expressions which includes marches, rallies, letter writing, car caravans, bicycle rides, leafleting, social media posts, public debates and cultural work. The murder of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Hakim Littleton and a long list of victims of police brutality were covered by media outlets locally, nationally and internationally.
It is almost impossible that anyone living in or outside the U.S. would not be aware of these killings, the demonstrations which arose in response to the unjustified murders of African Americans and the prosecutorial investigations into the legality of these acts of state sponsored repression and violence. The fact that Chauvin’s defense lawyer would consider raising such issues illustrates the desperation of racist cops to ensure that their conduct on the job is not subjected to any scrutiny.
However, the actual efforts aimed at winning a new trial for Chauvin are based on a number of issues such as pretrial publicity, the alleged unfairness of the proceedings to the former police officer and the failure to grant a change of venue in the case since the defense is arguing that their client could not receive a fair trial in Minneapolis.
According to an article published by the Associated Press on May 5 it outlines some of the issues raised by Chauvin’s defense lawyer Eric Nelson. The article says:
“Nelson also took issue with Cahill’s refusal to sequester the jury for the trial or warn them to avoid all media, and with his refusal to allow a man who was with Floyd at the time of his arrest to testify. Nelson said Cahill also abused his discretion when he submitted jury instructions that Nelson said failed to accurately reflect the law on the murder charges and use of force, permitted the state to present cumulative evidence on use of force, and ordered the state to lead witnesses on direct examination, among other things.” (See this)
In an even more outrageous claim filed by Chauvin’s attorney, this same reports notes that:
“Nelson also asked the judge for a hearing to impeach the verdict on the grounds that the jury committed misconduct, felt race-based pressure, felt intimidated or threatened, and/or failed to adhere to jury instructions, though the filing did not include details about that assertion. To impeach a verdict is to question its validity. The brief did not mention recent reports that one of the jurors participated in an Aug. 28 march in Washington, D.C., to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Some legal analysts believe that the likelihood of Chauvin having the verdicts impeached or being granted a new trial is almost nil. Nevertheless, objectively it was the strength of the antiracist movement in the U.S. and worldwide which created the political atmosphere for the indictments of Chauvin and three other former police officers.
Absent of the mass demonstrations, rebellions and other forms of protests, it is highly unlikely that the Chauvin trial, his convictions on three counts of murder and the subsequent federal indictments by the Justice Department, would have ever taken place. People are routinely killed by the police in the U.S., and it is extremely rare that the perpetrating officers are charged with any crimes.
Andrew Brown, Jr. Killing Deemed Justified by North Carolina Authorities
In another high-profile police killing of an African American, Andrew Brown, Jr, 42, on April 21, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the family and lawyers for the victim have been attempting to obtain the release of all police body cam footage of the incident. Brown, who was unarmed, was shot several times in the back, including the head, while he was driving away from his home.
The Pasquotank County District Attorney Andrew Womble said on May 18 that the officers’ behavior was justified since they were attempting to apprehend what he described as a violent felon who was utilizing his vehicle as a dangerous weapon. Such language is typical in prosecutorial investigations of police misconduct particularly when African Americans and other people of color are involved as victims.
A lawyer for the family of Brown, Atty. Wayne Kendall, told the media in response to the DA’s decision not to prosecute the police that a local judge:
“[D]id not allow all of the defense team to see the videos. He only allowed one representative who was a North Carolina-licensed attorney to view that 19-minute segment of the four or five bodycam videos. And what our representative who saw those videos stated to us was that Andrew Brown had his hands visible on the wheel of the vehicle when the videos began and his hands were clearly visible at all times. The deputies shouted commands to him. He backed his car up and drove across a vacant lot, which is next door to his home, and they were shooting into the vehicle. According to our representative, the shots started before he ever put the vehicle in reverse to try to flee that particular scene. So there is a discrepancy between what our representative said he saw and what the district attorney indicated yesterday in his press conference that was on the videos. So we don’t know until we see all of the videos in their entirety as to what those videos actually show.” (See this)
On May 19, another lawyer for the Brown family, Atty. Chance D. Lynch, announced that a civil lawsuit was being filed for the wrongful death of the victim. Lynch said that he had already filed a petition demanding the release of all related police videos of the entire encounter between the officers and Brown.
Police Reform Must Be Comprehensive Nationally
More people in the U.S. are advocating the defunding and even dismantling of police forces as they currently exist. Some reforms such as de-escalation tactics and the curtailing of traffic stops have been instituted in some cities.
In Newark, New Jersey, city officials working under Mayor Ras Baraka, say that due to changes in policing practices, officers did not fire their weapons at all during 2020. Baraka also stated in a recent “60 Minutes” CBS News program that crime has been reduced by 50% due to changes in the conduct of police.
Despite this seemingly improvement in police-community relations in Newark, in other regions of the U.S. the overall conditions are worsening. The Justice Department has been raised by the attorneys for the family of Andrew Brown, Jr. seeking their intervention to investigate whether federal civil rights laws were violated. The Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in April that consent judgments were being leveled against several municipalities including Minneapolis where Floyd was killed and Louisville, the home of Breonna Taylor, shot to death in her apartment in an apparent case of mistaken identity.
The origins of policing in the U.S. are to be found within the war against Indigenous, African and working class people. Consequently, it will take far more than policy reforms to end police brutality. The entire system of oppression and exploitation as a whole must be eliminated.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Elizabeth City protests demanding justice for Andrew Brown, Jr. (All images in this article are from the author)
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The crisis of 2020 has created the greatest wealth gap in history. The middle class, capitalism and democracy are all under threat. What went wrong and what can be done?
In a matter of decades, the United States has gone from a largely benign form of capitalism to a neo-feudal form that has created an ever-widening gap in wealth and power. In his 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, French economist Thomas Piketty declared that “the level of inequality in the US is probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past anywhere in the world.” In a 2014 podcast about the book, Bill Moyers commented:
Here’s one of its extraordinary insights: We are now really all headed into a future dominated by inherited wealth, as capital is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, giving the very rich ever greater power over politics, government and society. Patrimonial capitalism is the name for it, and it has potentially terrifying consequences for democracy.
Paul Krugman maintained in the same podcast that the United States is becoming an oligarchy, a society of inherited wealth, “the very system our founders revolted against.” While things have only gotten worse since then thanks to the economic crisis of 2020, it’s worth retracing the history that brought us to this volatile moment.
Not the Vision of Our Founders
The sort of capitalism on which the United States was originally built has been called mom-and-pop capitalism. Families owned their own farms and small shops and competed with each other on a more or less level playing field. It was a form of capitalism that broke free of the feudalistic model and reflected the groundbreaking values set forth in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights: that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including the rights to free speech, a free press, to worship and assemble; and the right not to be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process.
It was good in theory, but there were glaring, inhumane exceptions to this idealized template, including the confiscation of the lands of indigenous populations and the slavery that then prevailed. The slaves were emancipated by the US Civil War; but while they were freed in their persons, they were not economically free. They remained entrapped in economic serfdom. Although Black and Indigenous communities have been disproportionately oppressed, poor people were all trapped in “indentured servitude” of sorts — the obligation to serve in order to pay off debts, e.g. the debts of Irish workers to pay for passage to the United States, and the debts of “sharecroppers” (two-thirds of whom were white), who had to borrow from landlords at interest for land and equipment. Today’s U.S. prison system has also been called a form of slavery, in which free or cheap labor is extracted from poor people of color.
To the creditors, economic captivity actually had certain advantages over “chattel” slavery (ownership of humans as a property right). According to an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War:
Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.
Slaves had to be housed, fed and cared for. “Free” men housed and fed themselves. Free men could be kept enslaved by debt by paying them wages that were insufficient to meet their costs of living.
From ‘Industrial Capitalism’ to ‘Finance Capitalism‘
The economy crashed in the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government revived it and rebuilt the country through a public financial institution called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. After World War II, the US middle class thrived. Small businesses competed on a relatively level playing field similar to the mom-and-pop capitalism of the early pioneers. MMeanwhile, larger corporations engaged in “industrial capitalism,” in which the goal was to produce real goods and services.
But the middle class, considered the backbone of the economy, has been progressively eroded since the 1970s. The one-two punch of the Great Recession and what the IMF has called the “Great Lockdown” has again reduced much of the population to indentured servitude; while industrial capitalism has largely been displaced by “finance capitalism,” in which money makes money for those who have it, “in their sleep.” As economist Michael Hudson explains, unearned income, not productivity, is the goal. Corporations take out cheap 1% loans, not to invest in machinery and production, but to buy their own stock earning 8% or 9%; or to buy out smaller corporations, eliminating competition and creating monopolies. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis explains that “capital” has been decoupled from productivity: businesses can make money without making profits on their products. As Kevin Cahill described the plight of people today in a book titled Who Owns the World?:
These latter day pharaohs, the planet owners, the richest 5% – allow the rest of us to pay day after day for the right to live on their planet. And as we make them richer, they buy yet more of the planet for themselves, and use their wealth and power to fight amongst themselves over what each possesses – though of course it’s actually us who have to fight and die in their wars.
The 2020 Knockout Punch
The final blow to the middle class came in 2020. Nick Hudson, co-founder of a data analytics firm called PANDA (Pandemics, Data and Analysis), argued in an interview following his keynote address at a March 2021 investment conference:
Lockdowns are the most regressive strategy that has ever been invented. The wealthy have become much wealthier. Trillions of dollars of wealth have been transferred to wealthy people. … Not a single country did a cost/benefit analysis before imposing these measures.
Policymakers followed the recommendations of the World Health Organization, based on predictive modeling by the Imperial College London that subsequently proved to be wildly inaccurate. Later studies have now been done, at least some of which have concluded that lockdowns have no significant effects on case numbers and that the costs of lockdowns substantially outweigh the benefits, in terms not just of economic costs but of lives.
On the economic front, global lockdowns eliminated competition from small and medium-sized businesses, allowing monopolies and oligopolies to grow. “The biggest loser from all this is the middle class,” wrote Logan Kane on Seeking Alpha. By May 2020, about one in four Americans had filed for unemployment, with over 40 million Americans filing jobless claims; and 200,000 more businesses closed in 2020 than the historical annual average. Meanwhile, US billionaires collectively increased their total net worth by $1.1 trillion during the last 10 months of 2020; and 46 people joined the billionaire class.
The number of “centi-billionaires”– individuals with a net worth of $100 billion or more – also grew. In the US they included:
Jeff Bezos, soon-to-be former CEO of Amazon, whose net worth increased from $113 billion in March 2020 to $182 billion in March 2021, up by $70 billion for the year;
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, whose net worth increased from $25 billion in March 2020 to $164 billion in March 2021, up by $139 billion for the year; and
Bill Gates, formerly CEO of Microsoft and currently considered the “global vaccine czar,” whose net worth increased to $124 billion in March 2021, up by $26 billion for the year.
Two others are almost centi-billionaires:
The net worth of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, grew from $55 billion in March 2020 to $95 billion in March 2021, up by $40 billion for the year; and
The net worth of Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway grew from $68 billion in March 2020 to $95 billion in March 2021, up by $27.6 billion for the year.
These five individuals collectively added $300 billion to their net worth just in 2020. For perspective, that’s enough to create 300,000 millionaires, or to give $100,000 to 3 million people.
Philanthro-capitalism
The need to shield the multibillionaire class from taxes and to change their predatory corporate image has given rise to another form of capitalism, called philanthrocapitalism. Wealth is transferred to foundations or limited liability corporations that are designated as having charitable purposes but remain under the ownership and control of the donors, who can invest the funds in ways that serve their corporate interests. As noted inThe Reporter Magazine of the Rochester Institute of Technology:
Essentially, what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class. In the CEO society, the exercise of social responsibilities is no longer debated in terms of whether corporations should or shouldn’t be responsible for more than their own business interests. Instead, it is about how philanthropy can be used to reinforce a politico-economic system that enables such a small number of people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth.
With $100 billion, nearly anything can be bought – not just land and resources but media and journalists, political influence and legislation, regulators, university research departments and laboratories. Jeff Bezos now owns The Washington Post. Bill Gates is not only the largest funder of the World Health Organizationand the Imperial College London but the largest owner of agricultural land in the US. And Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturer SpaceX has effectively privatized the sky. Astronomers and stargazers complain that the thousands of satellites it has already launched, with many more in the works, are blocking their ability to see the stars. Astronomy professor Samantha Lawler writes in a piece for The Conversation:
SpaceX has already received approval for 12,000 Starlink satellites and is seeking approval for 30,000 more. Other companies are not far behind […] The point of the Starlink mega-constellation is to provide global internet access. It is often stated by Starlink supporters that this will provide internet access to places on the globe not currently served by other communication technologies. But currently available information shows the cost of access will be too high in nearly every location that needs internet access. Thus, Starlink will likely only provide an alternate for residents of wealthy countries who already have other ways of accessing the internet […] With tens of thousands of new satellites approved for launch, and no laws about orbit crowding, right-of-way or space cleanup, the stage is set for the disastrous possibility of Kessler Syndrome, a runaway cascade of debris that could destroy most satellites in orbit and prevent launches for decades…. Large corporations like SpaceX and Amazon will only respond to legislation — which is slow, especially for international legislation — and consumer pressure […] Our species has been stargazing for thousands of years, do we really want to lose access now for the profit of a few large corporations?
Public advocacy groups, such as the Cellular Phone Task Force, have also objected due to health concerns over increased electromagnetic radiation. But the people have little say over public policy these days. So concluded a study summarized in a January 2021 article in Foreign Affairs. Princeton professor and study co-author Martin Gilens wrote:
[O]rdinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. … Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences … of economic elites and of organized interests.
Varoufakis calls our current economic scheme “postcapitalism” and “techno-feudalism.” As in the medieval feudal model, assets are owned by the few. He notes that the stock market and the businesses in it are essentially owned by three companies – the giant exchange-traded funds BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Under the highly controversial “Great Reset” envisioned by the World Economic Forum, “you will own nothing and be happy.” By implication, everything will be owned by the techno-feudal lords.
Getting Back on Track
The capitalist model has clearly gone off the rails. How to get it back on track? One obvious option is to tax the uber-rich. As Chuck Collins, author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions (2021), writes in a March 2021 article:
A wealth tax would reverse more than a half-century of tax cuts for the wealthiest households. Billionaires have seen their taxes decline roughly 79 percent as a percentage of their wealth since 1980. The “effective rate” on the billionaire class—the actual percentage paid—was 23 percent in 2018, lower than for most middle-income taxpayers.
He notes that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and co-authors recently introduced legislation to levy a 2 percent annual tax on wealth starting at $50 million, rising to 3 percent on fortunes of more than $1 billion:
The tax, which would apply to fewer than 100,000 U.S. residents, would raise an estimated $3 trillion over the next decade. It would be paid entirely by multi-millionaires and billionaires who have reaped the lion’s share of wealth gains over the last four decades, including during the pandemic.
Varoufakis contends, however, that taxing wealth won’t be enough. The corporate model itself needs an overhaul. To create a “humanist” capitalism, he says, democracy needs to be brought to the marketplace.
Politically, one adult gets one vote. But in corporate elections, votes are weighted according to financial investment: the largest investors hold the largest number of voting shares. Varoufakis argues that the proper principle for reconfiguring the ownership of corporations for a market-based society would be one employee, one share (not tradeable), one vote. On that basis, he says, we can imagine as an alternative to our post-capitalist model a market-based democratic society without capitalism.
There is one Achilles heel in the globalists’ strategy, an option that remains open to governments. This option is a tax on the rental income – the “unearned income” – of land, natural resources and monopoly takings.
Reforming the banking system is another critical tool. Banks operated as a public utility could allocate credit for productive purposes serving the public interest. Other possibilities include enforcement of anti-monopoly legislation and patent law reform. Perhaps, however, the flaw is in the competitive capitalist model itself. The winners will inevitably capture and exploit the losers, creating an ever-growing gap in wealth and power. Studies of natural systems have shown that cooperative models are more efficient than competitive schemes. That does not mean the sort of “cooperation” coerced through iron-fisted totalitarian control at the top. We need a set of rules that actually levels the playing field, rewards productivity, and maximizes benefit to society as a whole, while preserving the individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
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In April, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.
Based on press reports and government statements, Microsoft would help farmers with post- harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices. In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.
CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profile of land held (cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions), production details (crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession) and financial details (input costs, average return, credit history).
The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution.
It seems that the blueprint for AgriStack is in an advanced stage despite the lack of consultation with or involvement of farmers themselves. Technology could certainly improve the sector but handing control over to powerful private concerns will merely facilitate what they require in terms of market capture and farmer dependency.
Such ‘data-driven agriculture’ is integral to the recent farm legislation which includes a proposal to create a digital profile of cultivators, their farm holdings, climatic conditions in an area, what is grown and average output.
Of course, many concerns have been raised about this, ranging from farmer displacement, the further exploitation of farmers through microfinance and the misuse of farmer’s data and increased algorithmic decision-making without accountability.
The displacement of farmers is not lost on the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) which, in a three-part series of articles, explains how neoliberal capitalism has removed peasant farmers from their land to facilitate an active land market for corporate interests. The Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away.
Taking Mexico as an example, RUPE says:
“Unlike Mexico, India never underwent significant land reform. Nevertheless, its current programme of ‘conclusive titling’ of land bears clear resemblances to Mexico’s post-1992 drive to hand over property rights… The Indian rulers are closely following the script followed by Mexico, written in Washington.”
The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory institutional investors and large agribusinesses will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture – which has already helped fuel wide-scale financial distress among farmers and a deep-rooted agrarian and environmental crisis.
By harvesting (pirating) information – under the benign-sounding policy of data-driven agriculture – private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends: they will know more about their incomes and businesses than individual farmers themselves.
Open letter
Some 55 civil society groups and organisations have written to the government expressing these and various other concerns, not least the perceived policy vacuum with respect to the data privacy of farmers and the exclusion of farmers themselves in current policy initiatives.
They add that any proposal which seeks to tackle the issues that plague Indian agriculture must address the fundamental causes of these issues. The current model relies on ‘tech-solutionism’ which emphasises using technology to solve structural issues.
There is also the issue of reduced transparency on the part of the government through algorithm-based decision-making.
The 55 signatories request the government holds consultations with all stakeholders, especially farmers’ organisations, on the direction of its digital push as well as the basis of partnerships, and put out a policy document in this regard after giving due consideration to feedback from farmers and farmer organisations. As agriculture is a state subject, the central government should consult the state governments also.
They state that all initiatives that the government has begun with private entities to integrate and/or share multiple databases with private/personal information about individual farmers or their farms be put on hold till an inclusive policy framework is put in place and a data protection law is passed.
It is also advocated that the development of AgriStack, both as a policy framework and its execution, should take the concerns and experiences of farmers as the prime starting point.
The letter states that if the new farm laws are closely examined, it will be evident that unregulated digitalisation is an important aspect of them.
There is the strong possibility that monopolistic corporate owned e-commerce ‘platforms’ will eventually control much of India’s economy given the current policy trajectory. From retail and logistics to cultivation, data certainly will be the ‘new oil’, giving power to platforms to dictate what needs to be manufactured and in what quantities.
Those farmers who remain in the system will be tied to contracts and told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what type of inputs are required and when the produce needs to be ready – and how much money they will receive.
Handing over all information about the sector to Microsoft and others places power in their hands – the power to shape the sector in their own image.
The data giants and e-commerce companies will not only control data about consumption but also hold data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved.
Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and traditional agribusiness will work with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless farms and e-commerce retail dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the economy, peddling toxic industrial food and the devastating health impacts associated with it.
And elected representatives? Their role will be highly limited to technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
As for farmers, many if not most will be forced to leave the sector. Tens of millions unemployed and underemployed ‘collateral damage’ stripped of their means of production.
Centuries’ old knowledge of cultivation and cultural practices passed on down the generations – gone. The links between humans and the land reduced to an AI-driven technocratic dystopia in compliance with the tenets of neoliberal capitalism.
As it currently stands, AgriStack will help facilitate this end game.
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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.
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Giving a heart-breaking appeal to the world to take note of the “Israeli brutality”, a grieving Palestinian father while holding his little son killed in Gaza bombing posed some chilling questions to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu and the Minister of Defense, is this child your target?” the bereaved father asked, holding his dead son, Ibrahim Al-Rantisi, who has been killed in Israeli airstrike in Rafah.
“Will you show your power over our children and women?” he further asked in Arabic.
As many as 137 Palestinians, including 36 children, have been killed in #Israeli bombardment over #Gaza in the last five days. Holding the body of his dead son, a Palestinian father asks the world for how long will it remain a mute spectator to this barbarism. #Gaza_Under_Attackpic.twitter.com/pS3hiWOc32
“What did my child do to bomb our house over our heads without even warning us? Why are you violently bombing our homes and destroying them completely?” he asked in the video shared by Safa – Palestinian press agency.
“Iron Dome”
Israel is pounding Gaza with bombs, allegedly having deadly chemicals, since last five days in response to what it called “Hamas barrage of rockets” and to “save its citizens.”
However, according to Israel Defense Forces (IDF), most of over 1,750 rockets so far fired by Hamas into Israeli territory have been either intercepted by “Iron Dome” – the much talked about Israeli defense system or fallen in open grounds without causing any major damage.
Yet as many as 10 Israelis have been killed as a result of the rockets fired by Hamas which rules Gaza, as per Israeli media reports.
Along with aerial attacks, Israel has also moved its ground troops near Gaza. Witnesses and Palestinian security sources told Xinhua that Israeli army artillery on Friday struck the eastern area of Gaza city with tanks, killing at least two.
Tanks hit the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, killing a mother and her four children, according to medical sources.
“Our message to the whole world”
The bereaved Palestinian father asked the world to wake-up and take note of the brutal and continued bombing over Gaza that has so far killed over 137 Palestinians including 36 children and at least 20 women.
“This innocent child killed in Israeli bombing is our message to the whole world”, he said in the video.
“What sin has this infant committed to be killed with such brutality?” he asked.
“Israel is an oppressive, unjust and a killer country founded on injustice, persecution”, he said.
“How long will you remain silent”
The bereaved father also questioned the silence of the world over what he called Israeli “brutality”, “oppression” and “injustice”.
“O world! O free people all over the world, why is this injustice? I am just asking the world how long will you keep silent about our pain, oppression, and injustice?” he asked.
The fighting between Israel and Hamas was triggered by days of escalating clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at Al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem. The site is revered by both Muslims, who call it the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), and Jews, for whom it is known as the Temple Mount.
Hamas demanded Israel remove police from there and the nearby predominantly Arab district of Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families face eviction by Jewish settlers. Hamas launched rockets when its ultimatum went unheeded.
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Children as young as six are being referred to a mental health project run by counter-terrorism police as part of the UK government’s controversial Prevent strategy, according to a report by medical human rights researchers published on Wednesday.
Researchers said the project, in which health workers “monitored” thousands of people identified through Prevent referrals, raised “serious ethical concerns” and blasted it for “gross Islamophobic disproportionality”.
Drawing on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, the report argues that “pre-crime” security concerns are influencing medical treatment.
Case studies show that medical professionals have been encouraged to monitor patients based on concerns related to them being a “convert to Islam”.
The documents also appear to show potentially coercive practices, including mental health assessments conducted in the presence of police.
The report by Medact, a medical human rights organisation, comes as what are known as Vulnerability Support Hubs are rolled out nationwide.
REPORT: We expose major ethics concerns with "Vulnerability Support Hubs" – a secretive project run by UK counter-terrorism police – showing that Prevent’s often spurious and racist pre-crime security concerns are influencing treatment.
Medact has called for the hubs to be scrapped along with the entire Prevent programme in healthcare.
Police vetting
Established in 2016, Vulnerability Support Hubs embedded National Health Service (NHS) mental health professionals within counter-terrorism units to assess people referred to Prevent who police suspect may have mental health conditions.
Psychiatrists, psychologists and mental-health nurses working in the units are required to undergo rigorous police vetting to obtain the security clearance necessary to access highly sensitive intelligence.
Over a five-year period, more than 3,000 people, many of them teenagers, have been referred to the hubs, which were piloted in regional counter-terrorism police units in England’s three biggest urban areas: London, Birmingham and Manchester.
Common diagnoses include psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, personality disorders, mood disorders and autistic spectrum disorders, as well as learning difficulties.
The hubs were introduced a year after the British government in 2015 imposed a duty on all public-sector workers requiring them to report to Prevent anyone they deemed to be “vulnerable to radicalisation”.
While the government regards Prevent as the flagship programme of its counter-terrorism strategy, it has attracted controversy over the years. Critics say its emphasis on detecting “signs” of so-called extremism has criminalised Muslims for perfectly legitimate behaviour, silencing dissent and stigmatising religious practice.
As individuals are referred to Prevent on the basis of suspicion, rather than for committing any crime, the duty has also been accused of opening the door to racial bias and Islamophobia on the part of public-sector workers.
Drawing on case studies contained in hub evaluation documents, the authors of “Racism, Mental Health and Pre-crime Policing: The Ethics of Vulnerability Support Hubs” say that such nebulous indicators of “extremism” as used in Prevent are unduly influencing mental-health interventions.
With the overwhelming majority of Prevent referrals turning out to be false, the report’s authors say the hubs are acting to ensnare people in a vast dragnet before funnelling them into the mental-health sector.
One document describes a situation where “Mr X was referred… following concerns that he had converted to Islam”.
In another example, the case of a 58-year-old man is escalated because of “extreme right-wing” comments that were deemed to be “out of character because the subject was a convert to Islam”.
After the police-led hub contacted mental-health services, monitoring to ensure the man took his medication was intensified.
And in another case, a man with schizophrenia who had previously refused to take part in the Channel programme, the “deradicalisation” scheme within Prevent, was sectioned under the Mental Health Act after suffering a schizophrenic episode in which he made racist remarks.
“While acting on police information is not necessarily a departure from normal psychiatric practice, the kinds of behaviours which prompted the police-led hubs to contact mental-health services, resulting in escalations of treatment plans, are concerning,” the report says.
“It is clear that counter-terrorism policing’s often spurious and racialised pre-crime concerns have influenced mental-health care,” the report says.
‘Pervasive racial bias’
Speaking to Middle East Eye, Amanda Williams, a professor of clinical health psychology at University College London (UCL), said there was no proven link between pre-radicalisation and mental health.
“This whole notion that you can identify a state of pre-radicalisation or vulnerability and associate that with mental-health problems is unproven,” she says.
“There are people with mental-health problems at a diagnosable level being referred to the hubs, whereas in other cases, the referral is just based on a stereotype.”
Like counter-terrorism, the report says that mental health is “inflected with pervasive racial bias”.
Race is an important factor at every stage – from access to mental-health care, through to diagnosis and treatment, the report says. Meanwhile, people of colour are more likely to be subjected to coercion and violence when experiencing mental distress.
Figures show that Black communities are three times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than average, while Muslims have recovery rates much lower than the national average for psychological therapies (three per cent versus eight per cent).
Yet despite the existence of racism in counter-terrorism and mental health, researchers said the hub documents were silent on the potency of combining these two areas.
“Such ‘colour blindness’ – the pretence that racial discrimination does not exist – serves to reproduce the egregious racism apparent in the hub statistics,” the report says.
This potency, the authors argue, has allowed for the over-representation of marginalised racial groups in the hubs. For instance, at a hub based within Greater Manchester Police’s counter-terrorism unit, the combined total of referrals from different ethnic groups (41.2 per cent) was almost equal to the number of white referrals (41.7 per cent).
At the same hub, some 48 per cent of referrals were people born outside of the UK.
The lack of acknowledgement of racial disproportionality has allowed hubs to use data on ethnicity to draw conclusions about the typical profile of referrals. One hub stated that “the most recurrent profile of person referred… is of Asian ethnicity”.
Hub data also shows evidence of “gross Islamophobic disproportionality”, the authors say.
More than half of those referred were categorised as presenting signs of “Islamist extremism”.
Remarkably, despite the exponential growth of far-right groups in recent years, the authors say that “a racialised Muslim is at least 23 times more likely to be referred to a mental-health hub for ‘Islamism’ than a white British individual is for ‘far-right extremism”.
Tarek Younis, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Middlesex and one of the report’s co-authors, said that the figures did not bode well for Black Muslims in particular, who were caught between the disproportionate focus of counter-terrorism policies on Muslim communities and a mental-health sector facing complaints of institutional racism.
“Racialised blackness and Muslimness together is something that is a huge blind spot that we’re really not considering,” he told MEE. “There is an intersectional dimension.”
Younis said Vulnerability Support Hubs were a symptom of an increasingly more “securitised state”.
“What the state is doing… is trying to have total access to all information. Prevent is another example of that and vulnerability mental health hubs is a further expansion of this.”
“It’s not just police structures entering the NHS, it’s a symbiotic relationship between police and the NHS. People might not know the NHS has been securitised when they attend it.”
Project Cicero
According to the report, counter-terrorism police have attended clinical assessments, questioning patients.
“The police presence is concerning because Prevent questioning and intelligence gathering can itself cause significant psychological stress and be experienced as stigmatising and traumatic,” it says.
“The explicit role of policing imbues the therapeutic encounter with a distinct element of coercion, rendering the veracity of consent deeply questionable.”
Guidance from the Royal College of Psychiatrists warns, “subtle pressures” such as “psychiatric examination in the presence of… security staff” may lead health professionals to “vary their normal medical practice to fit in with security considerations”.
The Royal College had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. The British Psychological Society, the representative body for psychologists, told MEE that they would raise the report’s findings within its ethics committee.
Both organisations made a commitment to tackling racial inequalities in the mental-health sector in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted last year.
Williams said:
“We should be really making our services far more accessible and responsive and sensitive to the needs of people from minority populations and, instead, we’re giving them every cause for being really suspicious about being referred or asking for help.”
The report draws on evaluations of Vulnerability Support Hubs piloted between 2016 and 2017. Its publication comes as counter-terrorism police begin to roll out the scheme nationwide under the name “Project Cicero”.
Chief Superintendent Nik Adams, counter-terrorism policing’s national Prevent coordinator, denied that the support hubs scheme was secretive and said all staff adhered to “existing ethical and clinical standards”.
“Through our partnership between policing and health specialists, we are getting better at identifying and understanding the complex individual needs that are driving harmful behaviour and vulnerability to radicalisation. This helps us intervene in the right way, at the right time, to stop those who are vulnerable from criminalising themselves, or suffering serious harm,” he said.
Counter-terrorism police on Tuesday tweeted a document highlighting the wider roll-out of the support hubs.
Learn more about our Prevent colleagues’ work with NHS mental health teams through the Vulnerability Support Service ⬇️
— Counter Terrorism Policing UK (@TerrorismPolice) May 18, 2021
“This partnership is designed to improve the health and criminal justice outcomes for individuals referred into Prevent and, by doing so, help mitigate the risk of terrorism to communities,” it says.
The document also includes a list of unethical practices which it says the hubs “will not do”, including having clinical staff undertake policing duties.
However, the Medact report’s authors say that “all of these practices do in fact appear to have taken place at the hubs” and that there was no evidence such “malpractice” had been rectified since the scheme was piloted.
Hilary Aked, one of the report’s co-authors and the research manager at Medact, said that the project combined “mental-health stigma with Islamophobia” while “co-opting health workers into activities beyond their remit, including surveillance and criminalisation”.
They added:
“Counter-terrorism police tried to keep the project secret because it’s so ethically dubious, but they’re now rolling it out nationwide despite a complete lack of independent evaluation. The health community must call for an end to the scheme, along with the whole Prevent programme in healthcare.”
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Israel’s demolition of a 12-storey tower block in Gaza, housing the US Associated Press (AP) news agency and Qatar’s Al Jazeera, forced the Biden administration to call for, at least some restraint in the aerial bombardment that has targeted other multi-storey buildings in the beleaguered Strip and killed dozens of Palestinian civilians. Israel’s tactic is to warn inhabitants of buildings to be taken down before missiles strike so they have time to get to safety while their possessions are blown to bits.
During a phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden reiterated his support for “Israel’s right to self-defence”, condemned Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israeli cities and towns, and expressed concern over the deaths of “Israeli and Palestinian civilians” and the safety of journalists. Later, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted that the Biden administration has “communicated to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility”. That is: Rather than the safety and security of Palestinian and international civilians living in Gaza.
Little wonder that after speaking to Biden, Netanyahu concluded he had a green light to proceed with its offensive and announced that Israel would carry on unhindered with its air, land and sea offensive against Gaza, eliciting Hamas’ response in flights of rockets from Gaza.
The AP, the main US global agency, had been based in the Jalaa tower for 15 turbulent years, including during Israel’s 2008-09 and 2014 all-out onslaughts on Gaza. Both the Associated Press and Al Jazeera chose this building because its height and location had given journalists an overall view of activity in the air and events on the ground during brief eruptions of violence and full-scale warfare.
AP chief Gary Pruitt pointed out, “The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened …We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organisations in Gaza.” He also argued that during the time AP was operating from the building, the agency did not believe, as Israel claimed as its pretext for the strikes, there were Hamas military or intelligence operatives based there.
Whether or not this is a false pretext, Israel is guilty of a war crime. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), targeting a purely “civilian object” is prohibited and “civilian objects must not be attacked unless they have become military objectives”.
Furthermore, the ICRC says when military objectives are targeted, civilians and civilian ”objects” must be spared collateral damage as far as possible and damage must not be excessive when assessing the military advantage gained by striking a specific target. “Such use of excessive force quite clearly violates the law of armed conflict and is a war crime,” states the ICRC. Indeed, it says carrying out mass disproportionate attacks — like those perpetrated in Israel’s earlier and latest campaigns against Gaza — is a war crime.
Several legal experts argue that targeting journalists is in itself a war crime while Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said this attack “raises the spectre that the Israel Defence Forces [IDF] is deliberately targeting media facilities in order to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza”.
Pruitt, who received a call from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the targeting of AP, should not have been shocked and horrified at the action of the Israeli military. The building was struck precisely because journalists there were reporting in real time what is happening in Gaza. Israel’s actions in this conflict do not polish Israel’s image and Israel cares a great deal about its image abroad, notably in the US and Europe. It has slavishly followed the US example by saying Israel has the right to defend itself but does not grant that right to Palestinians.
The other news organisations housed in the destroyed building included the photographer of Middle East Eye, a London-based website dealing with regional affairs. News organisations and journalists tend to clump together in front line areas like Gaza for safety and the need to cooperate in the event of power cuts, internet loss, or satellite outage.
Lone correspondents and independent stringers working for several outlets would have thought Israel would not bring down a block hosting AP, in particular, and would choose to its building for their offices. The loss of equipment could deprive them of the means to carry out their profession. Israel gave the residents of the tower one hour to evacuate and refused to grant journalists an extra 10 minutes to shift some of their remaining equipment. Nothing has been said about the equipment and records in the other offices in Al Jalaa tower or the household furnishings and possessions of residents. They do not count as they are,presumably, Palestinians.
Israel has never had any regard for journalists who expose its nefarious activities and brutal actions. Therefore, collapsing a tower block hosting journalists in Gaza is a good way to disrupt their reports and curb their opportunities to collect information.
The fact that an all too brief hullabaloo has been made over the destruction of Al Jalaa building on May 15th is only due to the presence of the AP offices there. Western double standards, nearly always applied to reporting events in this region, apply once again.
Israel’s demolition of two other high rises, Al Jawhara and Al Shorouk buildings, on May 11th and 12th, where journalists were also based, received little or no attention. Residents were told to evacuate Al Jawhara by text message and two warning shots were fired at Al Shorouk before Israel’s missiles were fired. The BBC reported that there had been “civilian deaths” in the former strike. Journalists housed in these two buildings reported for Arab outlets unfriendly to Israel. Its pretext was the same as for Al Jalaa tower.
On the demolition of these two buildings, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East and North Africa representative, Ignacio Miguel Delgado, declared,“It is utterly unacceptable for Israel to bomb and destroy the offices of media outlets and endanger the lives of journalists, especially since Israeli authorities know where those media outlets are housed… [The] Israeli authorities must ensure that journalists can do their jobs safely without fear of being injured or killed.”
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A German scientist has discovered why the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccines” made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) are causing some recipients to develop deadly blood clots.
According to Prof. Andreas Greinacher, a blood expert from the University of Greifswald, the two viral vector vaccines contain genetically modified (GMO) cold viruses that, upon injection, trigger an autoimmune response.
Stray proteins, Greinacher says, along with a preservative used specifically in the AstraZeneca jab known as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), are directly responsible for causing the blood clots, he says.
Greinacher and his team identified more than 1,000 human-derived cell proteins in the injections that they believe are getting into people’s bloodstreams and clamping onto a blood component known as platelet factor 4, or PF4, where they form complexes that activate the production of antibodies.
This then generates an inflammatory response throughout the body, as the immune system is tricked into believing that it has been infected with bacteria. The immune system then overreacts and goes nuts, essentially, causing deadly bleeding and clotting.
Greinacher compares the way the injections trigger this otherwise dormant immune response to “awakening a sleeping dragon.” And all for a virus with a 99.9-plus percent survival rate.
Covid vaccines kill, but the establishment still wants you injected
Prof. John Kelton from McMaster University in Canada says he and his team have replicated and confirmed Greinacher’s findings, though they are unsure if his causal theory is accurate.
Greinacher, meanwhile, is hoping the two respective vaccine makers will cooperate in nailing down whether or not his causal theory is correct.
“We strongly support raising awareness of the signs and symptoms of this very rare event, and we are currently exploring a potential collaboration with Dr. Greinacher,” a J&J spokesperson is quoted as saying.
Numerous other peer-reviewed studies have likewise confirmed Greinacher’s findings, reiterating that the type of blood clotting being observed from J&J and AstraZeneca injections is known as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, or VITT.
Most of the science hubs investigating the clotting issue, which was first identified back in March, focus on a similar condition known as heparin-induced thrombocytopenia, or HIT, which has near-identical symptoms and outcomes to VITT.
“With HIT,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “the blood-thinning drug heparin causes clots paired with an abnormal decrease in the blood’s natural clotting agents.”
Other scientists have speculated that the vaccine adenoviruses themselves may be directly triggering the blood clotting, while still others are blaming the “genetic predispositions” of recipients so as to shift the blame away from Big Pharma.
Prof. Eric van Gorp from Erasmus University in the Netherlands also says that the flu-like symptoms many recipients of the vaccines experience post-injection could also be the result of autoimmune-provoking inflammation.
The reason why none of this has ever been reported in the past is because viral vector vaccine technology has never before been administered at scale. In other words, these shots, just like their mRNA counterparts, are entirely experimental.
The only viral vector vaccine that even comes close is the Ebola injection developed by J&J, which was only given to about 60,000 people as of last July.
Meanwhile, the Journal and other mainstream media outlets are continuing to push the narrative that deadly blood clots are “rare,” and that people should still rush out and get injected as soon as possible to “save lives.”
“The symptoms are exactly the same as preclinical scurvy,” a commenter of ours wrote. “Vitamin C is essential to combat this.”
To keep up with the latest news about injuries and deaths caused by Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) injections, be sure to check out ChemicalViolence.com.
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America’s Frontline Doctors has published a video of a presentation by Dr. Jessica Rose, PhD, MSc, BSc, who has analyzed the data in the VAERS database related to the COVID shots. The presentation was for “Vaccine Choice Canada.”
Dr. Jessica Rose has a BSc in Applied Mathematics and completed her MSc in Immunology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. She completed her PhD in Computational Biology at Bar Ilan University and then did her first Post Doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Molecular Biology.
She is now doing a second Post Doctorate at the Technion where she will explore the structure and function of transport proteins in bacteria from both experimental and computational points of view. (Source.)
Dr. Rose challenges the “official” position of the political health authorities who keep telling the public that these thousands of reported deaths, and hundreds of thousands of adverse events reported to VAERS, have nothing to do with the COVID shots.
Her presentation of the statistics clearly shows that this cannot possibly be true, although she welcomes others to challenge her findings.
She concludes:
This work summarizes VAERS data to date and serves as information for the public and a reminder of the relevance of any adverse events, including deaths, that likely occurred as a direct result of vaccine administration.
Based on analysis of the VAERS numbers, it may appear that AEs are not currently imposing a significant burden on the fully vaccinated population; however, the weekly releases of VAERS data do not include all of their reports made to date — they are all the reports the CDC has processed to date — and the backlog is likely to be staggering.
Thus, due to both the problems of under-reporting and the lag in report processing, this analysis reveals a strong signal from the VAERS data that the risk of suffering an SAE following injection is significant and that the overall risk signal is high.
Analysis suggests that the vaccines are likely the cause of reported deaths, spontaneous abortions, and anaphylactic reactions in addition to cardiovascular, neurological and immunological AEs.
Based on the precautionary principle, since there is currently no precedent for predictability with regards to long-term effects from mRNA injections, extreme care should be taken when making a decision to participate in this experiment. mRNA platforms are new to humans with regard to mass injection programs in the context of viruses.
There is currently no way to predict potential detrimental outcomes with regards to SAE occurrences in the long-term.
Also, with regards to short-term analysis, this data is limited based on reporting that likely significantly underestimates actual events. (Source.)
I learned a few new things from Dr. Rose’s analysis.
She isolated the “breakthrough” cases of COVID recorded in VAERS. “Breakthrough” is the term they are using to describe people who come down with COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated.
According to Dr. Rose, 6% of all the breakthrough cases resulted in death.
This is significant, because one of the main reasons people are encouraged to get one of the experimental COVID shots is to prevent death. The drug companies have admitted that the injections are not proven to stop transmission of COVID, but supposedly the symptoms are supposed to be lessened among those getting the injections.
When 6% of those who get the shots end up dying with COVID, that challenges their claims. Dr. Rose did state that the statistics show that the majority of these deaths are among the elderly.
And there are statistically more breakthrough cases for the Pfizer shot, than the other two.
Of particular concern, were the “spontaneous abortions” immediately following the injections.
If we were to embed it into this article and drive a lot of traffic to it, most likely YouTube would remove it, so we also have it on our Rumble and Bitchute channels.
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This is a summary of a study by Dr. Jessica Rose, PhD, MSc. BSC, recently completed, submitted for publication, and accepted, entitled: A report on the U.S. Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) of the COVID-19 Messenger RNA (mRNA) biologicals.
The goal is make the public aware of the soaring Adverse Event reports in the context of the COVID-19 biologicals being administered en-masse prior to scientifically respectable safety and efficacy studies being completed.
The study concludes:
“This work summarizes VAERS data to date and serves as information for the public and a reminder of the relevance of any adverse events, including deaths, that likely occurred as a direct result of vaccine administration.
“Based on analysis of the VAERS numbers, it may appear that AEs are not currently imposing a significant burden on the fully vaccinated population; however, the weekly releases of VAERS data do not include all of there reports made to date — they are all the reports the CDC has processed to date — and the backlog is likely to be staggering.
“Thus, due to both the problems of under-reporting and the lag in report processing, this analysis reveals a strong signal from the VAERS data that the risk of suffering an SAE following injection is significant and that the overall risk signal is high.
“Analysis suggests that the vaccines are likely the cause of reported deaths, spontaneous abortions, and anaphylactic reactions in addition to cardiovascular, neurological and immunological AEs.
“Based on the precautionary principle, since there is currently no precedent for predictability with regards to long-term effects from mRNA injections, extreme care should be taken when making a decision to participate in this experiment. mRNA platforms are new to humans with regard to mass injection programs in the context of viruses. There is currently no way to predict potential detrimental outcomes with regards to SAE occurrences in the long-term. Also, with regards to short-term analysis, this data is limited based on reporting that likely significantly underestimates actual events.”
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Featured image is from America’s Frontline Doctors
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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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A bill allowing hunters and private contractors to kill up to 90 percent of the state’s wolves passed the Idaho House on Tuesday.
The measure also passed the Idaho Senate last week, which means that the fate of around 1,000 wolves now lies with Republican Gov. Brad Little.
“If this horrific bill passes, Idaho could nearly wipe out its wolf population,” Andrea Zaccardi, Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) senior attorney, said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “Unless we can stop this from becoming law, decades of progress towards wolf recovery will be lost.”
The bill, which is supported by the agricultural industry, expands wolf-killing methods, such as using night-vision equipment and hunting from snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, The AP reported. The bill also allows the state to hire private contractors to kill wolves and increases the amount of money provided from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control board from $110,000 to $300,000.
Ultimately, the bill allows the state to whittle down its wolf population to 150, the lower limit on state wolves earmarked by Idaho’s 2002 wolf conservation and management plan. However, Idaho’s wolf population has hovered around 1,500 for the past two years.
The bill’s proponents argue that wolves harm livestock and wildlife. Cattle and sheep ranchers claim wolves cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars because they either kill animals outright or scare them to the point of losing weight.
“We have areas of the state where the wolves are having a real detrimental impact on our wildlife,” House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, who co-sponsored the bill, told The AP. “They are hurting the herds, elk and deer. This allows the Wolf (Depredation) Control Board and others to control them, also, which we have not done in the past.”
However, environmentalists and animal-rights advocates challenge this view. About 12 conservation groups, including CBD, sent a statement to Gov. Little urging him to veto the bill. A study in Yellowstone National Park found that wolves improve the health of ecosystems, the groups said. They argued that wolves also benefit elk and deer herds by killing diseased animals as well as coyotes, who are bigger threats to livestock. Wolves kill less than one percent of the state’s livestock, and elk numbers are above the population target in most of the state, CBD pointed out.
“Governor Little has a duty to protect Idaho’s ecosystem and wildlife tourism economy — both of which desperately need wolves,” Amanda Wight, program manager of wildlife protection for the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “Science, ethics and the Governor’s own Fish and Game Commission’s position all indicate without a doubt that Gov. Little must veto this bill, which puts an estimated 83-90% of Idaho’s wolf population in the crosshairs of trophy hunters, trappers and private contractors using the cruelest methods imaginable. America’s wolf families do not deserve to be barbarically gunned down in their dens, shot from helicopters and airplanes, or strangled in snares — all methods this bill allows. We cannot allow hate to win.”
Gray wolves have a fraught history in the U.S. They were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the start of the 20th century. When they were finally granted Endangered Species Act protections in 1974, there were only hundreds left. Wolf populations have recovered somewhat since then, but are still missing from about 70 percent of their potential habitat.
Despite this, gray wolves lost their endangered species protection in Idaho, Montana and portions of Washington, Oregon and Utah in 2011 and in all lower 48 states in 2020. Since regaining control of wolf management, Idaho has allowed increasingly aggressive wolf-control measures. The state doesn’t place a yearly quota on the number of wolves that can be killed, and in March extended the hunting season to year round in most of the state. Approximately 500 wolves have been killed a year for the last two years, The AP reported.
Opponents of the new bill say it could return Idaho’s wolves to federal management if wolf numbers decline to 100.
“If the bill becomes law, there will be no margin for error,” environmental advocates said in their letter to Gov. Little. “Conservationists stand ready to compel an Endangered Species Act listing if viable wolf populations aren’t sustained in the face of these heavy-handed new methods.”
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Turkey has reduced the flow of the Euphrates River from 500 m3 per second to less than 200 m3 per second. This will have a major consequence on Syria – a threat of drought with summer only around the corner. Ankara is effectively weaponizing water to pressure Damascus and Kurdish-held cities.
Syrians have noticed a major drop in the river’s level, almost a total of five meters in some places. Osama Khalaf, spokesman for the Raqqa municipal council, explained that “fishery is affected and the health consequences are starting to be felt. Desertification is progressing. This is a deliberate strategy on Turkey’s part.”
The 2,780-kilometer-long Euphrates River, where some of the earliest city-states and civilizations emerged from in the early Bronze Age, has its source in Turkey’s Anatolian basin. As a result, the Turkish government has a formidable weapon to pressure and weaken the Syrian State, as well as the Kurdish-led and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The long-term strategy of Turkey is to establish another geopolitical lever, besides the military, to use against its neighbors. Turkey in July 2020 cut off the supply of drinking water to the Syrian city of al-Hasakeh and has previously reduced the flow of the Euphrates, depriving thousands of Syrians of electricity and preventing them from irrigating their crops. Human Rights Watch then alerted international authorities on the humanitarian consequences of water shortages in the region. Given the Kurdish presence in eastern Syria, this flow reduction is anything but trivial.
Turkish authorities want to prevent Kurdish insurgents from being able to establish a permanent autonomous unit in Syria as it will strengthen calls for an autonomous Kurdistan within Turkey’s own borders, or perhaps even independence. Fighting against the SDF, Turkey has launched three military operations since 2017. The “Euphrates Shield Operation” was launched in March 2017 and dislodged Kurdish forces from the border. The second, dubbed “Olive Branch Operation,” allowed Turkish forces to establish themselves militarily in Syria by seizing the strategic zone of Afrin in March 2018. The third, “Operation Peace Spring,” began in October 2019 and was an extension of the second operation.
Although Turkey has the military strength, especially with the utilisation of thousands of Syrian militants, water control is an additional tool of pressure that can be equally devastating without risking the lives of Turkish personnel. Another Turkish military operation, especially as global pressure and condemnation mounts, would attract too much attention, especially from Washington. Since the arrival of Joe Biden to the White House, Washington has been at odds with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Several advisers to the new American administration are ardent defenders of the Kurdish cause, like the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council, Brett McGurk, or the director for the Syria and Iraq file to the same National Security Council, Zehra Bell.
Turkey is therefore using water as an alternative means to project its power as it can play a role in negotiations with the Kurds and/or Damascus. The waters of the Euphrates have regularly been a source of tension between Syria and Turkey. In 1991, the two countries were on the verge of war after Ankara blocked water flows to fill the newly constructed Atatürk Dam. In retaliation, Damascus began supporting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to destabilize Turkey.
In the 1960s, Turkey embarked on the construction of several dams. Today, it aims to build 22. The GAP (Güneydogu Anadolu Projesi) project was to enhance irrigation, hydropower, education and forestry, thus turning Turkey into the “breadbasket” of the region. The project, which was to be completed by 2005, was postponed to 2029 due to a lack of funding for the $32 billion needed to complete it. Turkey’s idea of becoming a “breadbasket” was during the brief period that it was attempting to have amicable relations with all its neighbors – but this idea was quickly abandoned by neo-Ottomanism with the advent of the Syrian War in 2011.
88% of the Euphrates flow comes from Turkey, meaning that with ease, Ankara can hinder other riparian states of the watercourse, namely Syria and Iraq. Turkey would be able to use water as a lever of influence vis-à-vis its Syrian and Iraqi neighbors. However, if Turkey manufactures a drought crisis, which it is slowly heading towards, it can provoke a casus belli and force Iraq and Syria to confront Turkey which is already occupying large areas of both countries without approval from Damascus or Baghdad.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
May 15 marked Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) Day, Palestinians’ annual mourning of British withdrawal in 1948 leaving them helpless – having been disarmed by the British in the late 1930s – against a blitzkrieg of ethnic cleansing by Zionist terrorism with mass expulsions, property seizures and over 30 massacres.
Over the past two weeks, the world has looked on in ominous horror as the military might of Israel, fully supported by both the US and Britain, has waged a relentless onslaught on the citizens of the besieged Gaza Strip; with what had initially begun as protests against the eviction of six Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, and the subsequent storming of the al-Asqa Mosque by Israeli police the following day, soon escalating into a full-fledged military assault on Gaza, one which has already drawn comparisons with the 2014 war which resulted in the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians in the space of 7 weeks.
If any observer were to wonder, why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so certain that Tel Aviv’s pounding of the West Bank will continue, one of the reasons seems to have surfaced.
After rollout under emergency authorisation, manufacturers of COVID vaccines now have their sights on regulatory approval — but should we rush approval based on only six months’ worth of data from unblinded trials?
This one-minute video clip is a recording depicting a ten-year old Gaza girl, crying in desperation not knowing what to do – about the continuous destruction around her – the merciless killing and mass murder committed by the Israeli military, IDF – all directed by the already indicted criminal Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
For much of the past month national media has been replete with headlines decrying “vaccine hesitancy” as coronavirus infection rates continue on the decline. Amid dire “warnings” this may “hinder” herd immunity goals, local and federal health agencies are busy pouring vast resources into vaccine-promoting ad campaigns.
Captain Shapira who had resigned from the Israeli army in 2003 at the height of the Palestinian Second Intifada explained in an exclusive interview with Anadolu News Agency why he realized after joining the army that he was “part of a terrorist organisation”.
For over a week, Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip with bombs, claiming it is targeting Hamas “terrorists”. But residential buildings, book stores, hospitals and the main Covid-19 testing lab have also been flattened. Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the besieged enclave, which has now killed at least 213 people, including 61 children, likely constitutes a war crime, according to Amnesty International.
Independent Journalist Taylor Hudak interviews Prof. Michel Chossudovsky. The topic of discussion are the many different ways in which the people are being deceived regarding COVID-19. The interview largely focusses on the process of economic destabilization and how it affects people’s lives Worldwide.
Israeli Forces spokesman Zilberman announced the start of the bombing of Gaza, specifying that “80 fighters are taking part in the operation, including the advanced F-35s” (The Times of Israel, May 11, 2021). It is officially the baptism of fire for the US Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter, whose production Italy also participates in as a second-level partner.
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The safety, well-being, and lives of millions of Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories are endangered by US/Western support for Israeli state terror.
On day nine of preemptive Netanyahu regime war on Gaza, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Jens Laerke said conditions in the Strip are dire.
Tens of thousands of Gazans fled homes for safety not gotten anywhere in the world’s largest open-air prison where they’re trapped by Israel’s blockade.
Much of Gaza’s infrastructure was destroyed or badly damaged.
Scores of residential and commercial buildings were demolished or rendered unusable.
Thousands of families are homeless.
Many of their loved ones were killed or wounded from Israeli terror-bombing and shelling — countless numbers of children traumatized.
According to the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA), displaced Palestinians sought shelter in its schools despite no provisions to care for their needs.
They’re “in classrooms without mattresses or blankets and without the provision of essential services, such as sufficient drinking water, food and adequate toilets,” according to the Al Mezan human rights group, adding:
They’re “most(ly) liv(ing) on what little food they brought with them, or on food given them by neighboring residents or provided by charitable associations and popular committees for refugees.”
They’re “threatened by a health and humanitarian disaster” from Israeli aggression without mercy — multiple daily crimes of war, against humanity, and slow-motion genocide against Palestinians throughout the Territories.
They include willfully and maliciously blasting a crater into the main artery leading to Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility.
According to the Al-Haq human rights group, inflicting significant damage to the road adversely impacts the facility’s ability to provide vitally needed medical services to the sick and wounded.
Israel’s action is “a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”
The IDF also terror-bombed Gaza’s health ministry, damaging it and wounding medical staff inside, some critically.
According to the WHO, Israel terror-bombed or shelled 19 medical facilities in the Strip — limiting to what extent they’re able to treat wounded Gazans.
Strip power and water facilities were heavily damaged.
The Biden regime and its Western co-conspirators support Israeli crimes of war, against humanity, and slow-motion genocide against millions of Palestinians in harm’s way.
A joint statement by Columbia University Palestine Studies Centers members said the following:
“We are as committed as ever to to help the Palestinian people…in their just struggle for freedom and liberation.”
“We strongly condemn the Israeli ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and the brutal Israeli violation of the sacred Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa mosque, which are not just religious but also national symbols of the Palestinian struggle.”
“We ask the world to immediately intervene to stop the callous Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, which costs the lives of many civilians – among them children – and end the blockade immediately.”
“We ask the world to protect the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and inside Israel from the brutal force of the police and the violence of Israeli settlers and their supporters.”
“Only when Israel treats Palestinians inside Israel as equal citizens, recognizes the right of the Palestinian refugees to return and the right of the Palestinians to live free of colonization and occupation, will there be hope for peace and reconciliation in historic Palestine.”
As long as US/Western countries support the worst of Israeli crimes — rejecting accountability for Nuremberg-level ones — Palestinians will continue being oppressed, including by extremist armed settlers, free to commit violence in cahoots with security forces.
South African Reverend Allan Boesak earlier said the following about Israeli apartheid:
“It is worse (than what existed in his country), not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it…sharpened it.”
“(W)e had Bantustans, and we had the Group Areas Act. and we had the separate schools…but I don’t think it ever even entered the mind of any apartheid planner to design a town in such a way that there is a physical wall that separates people and that that wall denotes your freedom of movement, your freedom of economic gain, of employment, and at the same time is a tool of intimidation and dehumanization.”
“We carried passes as the Palestinians have their ID documents, but that did not mean that we could not go from one place in the city to another place in the city.”
“The judicial system was absolutely skewed of course.”
“All the judges in their judgements sought to protect white privilege and power and so forth, and we had a series of what they called ‘hanging judges’ in those days, but they did not go far as to openly, blatantly have two separate justice systems as they do for Palestinians — tried in Israeli military courts.”
“So in many ways the Israeli system is worse.”
“Another thing that makes it even worse is that when we fought our battles, even if it took us a long time, we could in the end muster and mobilize international solidarity on a scale that enabled us to be more successful in our struggle.”
“The Palestinians cannot do that. The whole international community almost conspires against them” because of US/Western pressure.
“The UN, which played a fairly positive role in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, takes the disastrous position of not wanting to offend its strong members like the US that protect Israel.”
“So even in the UN, where international law ought to be the framework wherein all these things are judged, where international solidarity is not an assumption but is supposed to be the very foundation upon which the UN builds its views on things and its judgements as to which way it goes, the Palestinians don’t even have that.”
“Palestinians are mocked in a way that South Africans were not.”
“In a sense, the UN tried in our case to follow up on its resolutions to isolate the apartheid regime.”
“Here, now, they make resolutions against Israel one after the other, and I don’t detect even a sense of shame that they know there is not going to be any follow up.”
What’s going on in Occupied Palestine is “scandalous.”
Israeli “apartheid is more (ruthless and terrifying than the worst of how South Africa’s version) ever was.”
Along with one-sided US-led Western support, Israeli barbarity remains the cross borne by one Palestinian generation after another with no relief in prospect — no end to the misery they endure.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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May 15 marked Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) Day, Palestinians’ annual mourning of British withdrawal in 1948 leaving them helpless – having been disarmed by the British in the late 1930s – against a blitzkrieg of ethnic cleansing by Zionist terrorism with mass expulsions, property seizures and over 30 massacres.
The 70-80% dispossessed and expelled population have never been allowed to return, with those remaining within Israel in 1948, and those later colonized in 1967, repressed under brutal and degrading occupations and denied basic civil and human rights in varying degrees to this day.
Israel has predictably used the occasion this year for yet another genocidal onslaught against Gaza while President Biden smiles and signs yet another U.S. Treasury check to the genocidaires involuntarily underwritten by American taxpayers. Israeli PM Netanyahu smiles beside him in a photo-op for the Israeli electorate demonstrating their highly effective, long-standing lobby power openly boasted in 2001 by then-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, “We, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.”
Fortunately, Sharon didn’t speak for all “Jewish people” as Jewish Voice for Peace and other anti-Zionist Jewish organizations are making clear. But they need to ramp up their opposition, since the anti-Zionist diaspora probably holds the key to any acceptable solution. The simplest and best solution, an integrated democratic state which I believe inevitable, and better sooner than later, was proposed over 30 years ago by a great Palestinian leader, Dr. Haider Abdul Shafi.
Good efforts by good people
I profoundly appreciate distinguished international attorneys such as Richard Falk, Marjorie Cohn and John Dugard who have repeatedly condemned Israel’s relentless “violations of international humanitarian law” and sought legal redress through UN channels that are invariably blocked by U.S. threats, financial leverage, UN Security Council vetoes, and manipulations of international institutional machinery.
But there are too many syllables (17) in that familiar phrase to capture or evoke what we psychologists call “appropriate affect,” aka gut feelings. Perhaps the most dedicated legal advocate for Palestine has been University of Illinois professor of international law Francis Boyle, who beyond articulate condemnation has painstakingly disentangled the elaborate strategies and deceptions used by Israel to evade international justice, and does not conceal his contempt for these devices and for American enablers who collude with Israel under guise of neutral mediation.
Even were it is actually practiced, the pretense of neutrality is disingenuous at its base. A murder, rape or armed robbery is not defined as a “conflict.” There are “two sides” to be sure, but criminal rather than civil law is the applicable remedy. In his agonizing account of Israel’s foundation following declassification of Israeli archives in the 1980s, titled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe unequivocally designated the Nakba “a crime against humanity” that must be named as such and treated as a crime.
Dr. Boyle’s book, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, continues this story of the ongoing Nakba, describing his legal consultation with the Palestinian delegation preceding Oslo and his deep respect for the delegation’s leader. This wise, principled and articulate Gaza physician, Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, offered Israel in his 1991 Madrid speech the peace it has always claimed it wanted, but to no avail since it also included the justice Israel has never wanted.
Before this moment, Palestinians had quite properly but futilely demanded that Israel return the land it stole, allow the refugees to return as specified by UN Resolution 194 under Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and pledged by Israel as a condition of its UN admission in 1949, and get out. But for the first time, a prominent Palestinian leader agreed to accept the invasive Jewish presence in Palestine however illegitimate in origin, share the land and establish a true democracy with equal citizenship and civil rights for all.
Opportunities squandered for greed and racism
But Israel ignored this entirely, met in Oslo with Arafat excluding Dr. Abdul Shafi, and engineered the Oslo Accords that included all the loopholes Boyle had advised the Palestinians to beware. The rest is history to date, as Israeli settlers under protection of IDF martial law and the ruse of conditionality pending “final settlement negotiations” have gobbled up more and more Palestinian land, dispossessed more and more Palestinian citizens, committed wholesale violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and entirely disregarded the Fourth Geneva Convention which specifies the duties and limitations of an occupying power.
In a great historic irony, the democratic one-state solution offered by Dr. Abdul Shafi had been the solution envisioned by the majority of members of UNSCOP (UN Special Committee on Palestine) established in 1947 in response to the problems anticipated upon the announced British withdrawal. However, elaborate manipulations by the Zionist lobby supported by U.S. financial extortion – described in detail by contemporary observer Alfred Lilienthal in his 1953 book, What Price Israel – resulted in recommendation to the UN General Assembly, adopted as UNGA 181 in November 1947, that two-thirds of Palestine be given to the 30% Jewish population who owned less than 7% of the land.
In the discarded plan, Jerusalem would have been reserved as an international corpus separatum sacred to the three Abrahamic faiths under UN administration, which would likely have avoided the ethnic cleansing inferno we see there today.
UNGA 181 was never ratified by the UN Security Council, which was instead developing a 5-year UN trusteeship plan when Zionist terrorist militias, recognizing that they would not get what they wanted from the UN, launched their long- and well-prepared “Plan Dalet” operation to take over by force. In a final deception as British troops shipped out for home, Zionist leaders declared themselves a new country and requested diplomatic recognition from President Truman by assuring him that Israel would be a secular state. But the document cabled to Truman self-identified as the “new Jewish state,” which Truman modified by hand to read the “state of Israel.”
Intransigence or maturation ahead?
No matter. Israel proceeded to do what it pleased irrespective of U.S. or international opinion and has done so ever since. But ultimately, the only outcome consistent with international law and human rights is the original plan envisioned by UNSCOP and later proposed by Dr. Abdul Shafi, a solution prevented by the U.S. roadblock and Israeli unwillingness to abandon its racist policies of Jewish supremacy and entitlement. Their obstinacy blinds perception that the transformation of Israel into a multi-ethnic democracy from internal apartheid with some 65 laws that discriminate against non-Jews, and a UN-designated “belligerent occupation” next door, would benefit both parties.
Despite the daunting obstacles inflicted by Israel, Palestinians are a well-educated and admirably resilient people. Together, Israel/Palestine could become a great country instead of a festering sore in the Middle East. As a secular, egalitarian unity, Israel would predictably repel its racist settlers and attract better, smarter, more open and tolerant Jewish and other citizens. Until then, from my viewpoint as an advocate for international law and justice, I see no historical basis to view Israel as anything but an illegal political interloper “on a lunatic course” headed for self-destruction as forecast by French Israeli Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book, “Toward an Open Tomb.” The entire land between the Mediterranean and Jordan River – not simply the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – remains 73-year occupied Palestine that urgently needs thorough de-occupation. But Israel persistently continues along its narcissistic path of self-isolation behind its own apartheid walls – both physical and psychological.
Neither Israel nor the U.S. has special entitlement to drive on the wrong side of the street, although both do so at will. The world at large seems to agree. International opinion polls consistently view the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace, and United Nations member states are nearly uniform in condemning Israel. We have vetoed 45 UN Security Council resolutions to censure or discipline Israel, in 44 of which we were joined by none of the other 14 member states. The UN General Assembly has passed dozens of resolutions against Israel by overwhelming margins, with Israel, the U.S. and three South Pacific island U.S. principalities the only reliable votes supporting Israel each time. Much of the world has suffered under settler and/or economic colonialism and wants no more of it.
For our non-profit al-Nakba Awareness Project, I produce an annual calendar each year. The cover image I found for our 2020 calendar seems Nakba-relevant this month. It evokes the layered beauty and vitality of historic Palestine (Jaffa) in the foreground, where it belongs. Palestine was the western arc of the fertile crescent sharing the origins of Eurasian civilization, hardly a “land without a people.” Jesus was a Palestinian. Gaza, Jaffa, Haifa and Acre were ancient Mediterranean ports. Tiberius and Jericho were ancient cities in the fertile Jordan Valley. Safad and Hebron anchored trade routes connecting Egypt, Persia and East Asia to each other and the Mediterranean. Palestinians have had various and successive cultures and cosmologies over some 4,000 years. In this calendar cover we see ordinary modern Tel Aviv, a grafted intrusion, in the background where it should humbly remain.
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Jack Dresser, Ph.D. is a retired psychologist and NIH-funded research scientist associated with Oregon Research Institute, where he served as Principal Investigator on projects developing and evaluating high-risk behavior prevention and early intervention programs. Before these studies he directed several projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education developing drug and alcohol abuse prevention and early intervention programs for school districts in northern and southern California and Oregon. He began his professional career as a U.S. Army psychologist during the Vietnam War, and is national vice-chair of the Veterans for Peace working group on Palestine and the Middle East. For several years he has co-hosted a weekly radio show titled “Racism, Empire and Survival” on www.kepw.org in Eugene, Oregon that focuses on the propaganda fueling and maintaining violent U.S./NATO/Israeli imperialism and the false histories packaged as education that provide the framing into which government and media propaganda is seamlessly fitted. For the past year he has focused intensively on the covid-19 debacle, which displays the characteristic earmarks of imperial psyops.
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Featured image: Olive tree (Source: Middle East Eye)
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The stone streets of Jerusalem’s Old City are silent. Shutters with peeling paint are firmly rolled down.
In Haifa, Jewish cafes are serving coffee. Beside them, Palestinian-run businesses have their lights turned off.
Across Israel, the clanking, sawing and drilling sounds from construction sites have disappeared. There are no Palestinian labourers manning the scaffolds now.
Millions of Palestinians have gone on strike.
In Israel, occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Palestinians have downed tools or stayed away from their desks in just the latest example of pan-Palestinian solidarity following days of Israeli crackdowns and ferocious bombing on Gaza.
“I cannot recall, for years, Palestinians of all backgrounds, factions, Muslims, Christians, atheists, being united under one goal,” Inas Abbad, a political science researcher and activist from East Jerusalem, told Middle East Eye.
“This is the first time since the Second intifada that Palestinian parties, together with all Palestinians of the occupied territories of 1948, have issued a joint statement and a unified call for a strike.”
Shutdown in Israel
Schools, businesses, shops and official institutions have heeded the call, first raised on Sunday by the Arab Follow-up Committee, which coordinates between political parties inside Israel.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, too, encouraged participation in the action, labelled the Karameh (Dignity) Strike.
Around 1.93 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel, a fifth of the country’s population. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem are some three million, some of whom travel over to Israel every day to work on construction.
Though the strike has shut down large parts of all of their economies, there is no quietude.
Israeli forces arrested scores of Palestinians as they took to the streets to peacefully express their opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza (MEE/Latifeh Abdellatif)
Thousands of Palestinians are protesting in cities and towns across historic Palestine, raging against Israeli raids in al-Aqsa Mosque, attempted expulsions in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah, deadly far-right violence in Israel and a punishing bombardment in Gaza that has killed 212, including 60 children.
In Haifa, a northern Israel city known for its mix of Jewish and Palestinian citizens, the Palestinian flag has been raised on several buildings, and residents have taken to the streets chanting in solidarity.
“My feeling is that this strike is important to each and every one of us, so that we can put a stop to this brutality and the constant assault on us in all walks of life,” Hazar Hijazi, a 45-year-old education therapist, said in Haifa.
“Enough attacks on people in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, Lod, everywhere. Enough attacks on our homes, our daily life and displacement. The displacement and erasure of our existence on our land needs to stop, we’ve experienced enough repression, arrests and threats to our homeland and our futures.”
Israeli forces have violently cracked down on Palestinian protests in Jerusalem, both inside the Old City and around the Damascus Gate.
Israeli police beat, pepper sprayed and removed the hijab of MEE correspondent Latifeh Abdellatif while she was filming the detention of a young boy.
Palestinians on the scene stepped in to protect Abdellatif, scuffling with the Israeli officers. A number of them were arrested as a result.
قوات الاحت.ـلال تعتدي على المصورة الصحفية المقدسية لطيفة عبد اللطيف وتنزع حجابها أثناء قيامها بعملها في باب العامود pic.twitter.com/380Sus3h1h
Fatima Khadir, an activist from Jerusalem at the Damascus Gate, underlined the feeling of unity across all Palestinian communities.
“We gave so many sacrifices during this past year, many of our children were killed in Jerusalem and Gaza, and we don’t want to return to the past. Our children and families are being destroyed and have no chance of living in dignity under occupation,” she said.
“Who will protect us from the settlers and the Israeli forces? Who will protect Sheikh Jarrah from eviction?” she asked.
“We have no one.. I really hope that the international community stands with us. Shame on the Arab countries that normalise with Israel and see the Palestinian women being beaten by the army. Biden is a Zionist, the arms that are used in Gaza are coming from the US.”
Nashwa Amir, a resident of Gaza city, said the strike could impact Israel’s economy as it grapples with fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, and force it into negotiations.
“The strike is aimed to expressing unity in the Palestinians cause and struggle, and show an absolute rejection of Israeli attempts to deal with central issues of the conflict separately,” she said.
Much of Jerusalem was quiet as Palestinians respected a strike held across historic Palestine (MEE/Latifeh Abdellatif)
Shabtai, a Jewish Israeli in his 60s in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Baqaa, has had to take the day off because none of the Palestinian labourers working on his construction site turned up for work.
“I hope this does not last. The longer the Arabs strike, the more money we will lose because the building projects will be frozen,” he told MEE.
“I’ve called them several times to try and convince them to come to work. Even the ones that want to work say they cannot because of the shame and popular pressure.”
West Bank solidarity
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, hundreds of Palestinians have gathered in the main streets and squares.
The crowd includes teachers, bank clerks and doctors, repeatedly chanting “we will return to Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle and Lydd”. Anger is palpable over the international community and Arab states’ inability to stop the bombing of Gaza, where today the health ministry said Israel is preventing the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from accessing certain health facilities.
“This is the start of a new era, one united aim for all Palestinians, wherever they may reside. Our demand is that we want to live freely and in peace,” said one protester.
Demonstrations have also begun in Bethlehem and the Bedouin village of Tulkum. They are expected to be followed this evening by ones in Jenin and Nablus.
Israel forces shot a Palestinian man dead in Hebron on Tuesday morning. The military said Fayyad Zahda, 31, was carrying weapons as he approached soldiers near a settlement.
At least one Palestinian was killed in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces used brute force to disperse a large demonstration against the bombardment of Gaza (MEE/Latifeh Abdellatif)
East of Ramallah in the town of Silwad, Shahla Hammad, 60, told Middle East Eye that the nine-day bombing campaign on Gaza has resurfaced traumatic memories.
“The air strikes bring back memories of the West Bank during the Intifada, when people were opposing the Israeli attacks,” she said.
“Today’s air strikes, just like the air strikes during the Intifada, unite us as Palestinians and brings us closer together and in cohesion.
“It helps us remember one another’s pain and the pain of parents in Gaza who face Israeli aggression, and the pain of people in Jerusalem who are under threat of displacement,” she added.
A group of experts with the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) urged the international community to unite in calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Israel on Monday, and to then work to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
The experts said that “the denial of collective and individual rights of the Palestinian people” was the “underlying source” of the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
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Featured image: Shuttered Palestinian businesses in Jerusalem (MEE/Latifeh Abdellatif)
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Over the past two weeks, the world has looked on in ominous horror as the military might of Israel, fully supported by both the US and Britain, has waged a relentless onslaught on the citizens of the besieged Gaza Strip; with what had initially begun as protests against the eviction of six Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, and the subsequent storming of the al-Asqa Mosque by Israeli police the following day, soon escalating into a full-fledged military assault on Gaza, one which has already drawn comparisons with the 2014 war which resulted in the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians in the space of 7 weeks.
Although the ongoing violence has garnered worldwide media attention, an unusual occurrence of events in the Middle East, one glaring double-standard remains so far in all mainstream media coverage; the lack of calls for sanctions, regime change and a ‘humanitarian intervention’ that would be trumpeted by every corporate media outlet had Israel been a country opposed to the aims of the US-NATO hegemony, cases in point being both Libya and Syria.
In Feburary 2011, following Muammar Gaddafi’s decision to pursue a ‘Gold Dinar’ currency, one which would have ended any reliance by Tripoli on the US Dollar, a regime change operation was quickly launched by then-US administration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden which saw the arming, funding and training of Salafist terrorists (linked to al Qaeda) seeking to overthrow the Libyan Arab Jamarihiya.
Lauded as ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘rebels’ by the Western corporate media, these groups soon overran the North African country; with a ‘humanitarian intervention’ and No-Fly Zone subsequently being launched by NATO in March 2011 in response to alleged ‘human rights abuses’ by Tripoli; ultimately resulting in the capture, brutalisation, and murder of Gaddafi by US-backed terrorist groups in October of that year, his once thriving nation left in ruins and still remaining in turmoil a decade later.
Similar to Libya, a regime change operation was also launched in Syria in March 2011, this time in response to Bashar al-Assad’s 2009 refusal to allow Western-allied Qatar to build a pipeline through his country, and which also seen the arming of Salafist terrorist groups, seeking to depose Assad’s secular leadership, by the Obama administration alongside David Cameron’s Tory government in Britain.
Unlike Tripoli however, Damascus has successfully withstood the onslaught of NATO-backed terrorists over the past decade, with an Iranian intervention in 2013 on behalf of the Arab Republic, and a further Russian intervention in 2015, again at the request of Damascus, both playing a key role in the defence of the Middle Eastern nation.
The ire of Washington’s neocons would soon be drawn however, both in 2017 and 2018, when two separate false-flag chemical attacks led to calls from the Western corporate media, in full compliance with the Military Industrial Complex, for a ‘humanitarian intervention’ against Damascus; calls which almost came to fruition on both occasions when the Trump administration launched cruise missile attacks and air strikes against Syrian government targets, just stopping short of a full-scale Libya-style intervention which could have easily sparked a wider conflict between the United States and Russia.
When it comes to the documented violence that Israel has inflicted on the Gaza Strip over the past fortnight however, no such calls have been made by the Western media for a No-Fly Zone to be imposed by NATO over the Palestinian held territory in a bid to protect its inhabitants, or for US Navy Destroyers to fire Cruise Missiles towards Tel Aviv.
With the United States being a key ally of Israel since its establishment in 1948, the Zionist lobby has long played a decisive role in guiding Washington’s foreign policy; with lobbying for the Iraq war being done by Benjamin Netanyahuhimself in the run-up the 2003 US-led invasion of the Arab country – Israeli involvement has also played a key role in the Syrian regime change project, with Damascus being a long-time opponent of the Zionist State.
Therefore, it is this long-time partnership between Tel Aviv and Washington that will see the current outrage by the Western media towards Israeli atrocities in Gaza amount to nothing more than empty rhetoric – a far different response to the calls for sanctions and military action that would currently be taking place had Israel been a nation refusing to kowtow to US-NATO Imperialist demands.
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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist based in Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the impacts of British and US Imperialism. He is Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News.
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The concept of “negative nationalism”, or basing one’s nationalism based on what they are not, is a potent means of political mobilization in Central & Eastern Europe as evidenced by countries such as Ukraine obsessing over their identity differences – whether real, imagined, or exaggerated – with Russia.
Is Ukraine Turning Into The “Anti-Russia”?
President Putin said late last week while speaking with members of his National Security Council that “Apparently – and regrettably – attempts are being made to slowly but surely turn Ukraine into some kind of Russia’s polar opposite, an anti-Russia, from where we are likely to be getting news requiring special attention in terms of national security.” This point has been touched upon by many experts in the past, most recently RT’s Glenn Diesen in his piece last month titled “Borsch & Bulgakov ours, Brezhnev & Bolsheviks theirs: American propaganda is driving Ukraine’s ridiculous cultural war with Russia”. The Norwegian academic’s point is that the differences between these two fraternal countries aren’t all that serious, but external forces like the US are artificially exacerbating them as part of a modern-day form of nation-building for anti-Russian geostrategic purposes.
Reviving The Spirit Of Nazism
This phenomenon isn’t new neither, but has been part of many Central & Eastern European (CEE) countries’ evolving post-communist nationalisms. I criticized this approach in a recent analysis about how “Russia Warned The West Against Reviving The Supremacist Spirit Of Nazism” where I pointed out how differing interpretations of historical events such as the Soviet Union’s interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia shouldn’t become the bases upon which anti-Russian nationalisms are built. It’s taken for granted that there are some domestic forces that sincerely believe that those events and some controversies over certain cultural issues like the ethnicities of artistic figures or the origin of certain cuisines set those people apart from Russia, but there’s a difference between expressing these views in a cordial or contentious manner. Regrettably, the latter approach has become fashionable as of late.
The Psychological Roots Of “Negative Nationalism”
Instead of being proud of what they are, some of these people are more proud of what they aren’t, in this case, Russian. Such “negative nationalist” sentiments are attractive because they’re based largely on emotions, mostly a painful historical memory in the CEE case, which is why their adherents cling so closely to them because it’s a way of coping with the presumed “inferiority complex” that such events provoked more widely in their cultures. It’s of course unfortunate that certain things have happened in the past to result in those feelings, but those who feel that way should move past them in order to become stronger, not obsess over how they make them feel and thus react by espousing extreme forms of negative nationalism directed against modern-day Russia which wasn’t responsible for their ancestors’ suffering. At the same time, these same “negative nationalists” deny Russians the right to hold any negative historical views about their countries.
Polish & Ukraine Examples
To explain, Poles usually gloss over the brief period when their Commonwealth occupied Moscow in order to perpetually portray their historical state as a victim of so-called “Russian aggression”. The reality is much more complex of course, though everything is much simpler when it comes to Ukrainian “negative nationalists” who thought it would be more effective to spin their Nazi-allied ancestors as so-called “true nationalists” than simply acknowledge their evil deeds.
Both “negative nationalists” in those examples are driven by a desire to separate themselves and their people’s histories from Russia in the most dramatic ways but also in pretty petty ones too such as the squabbles over certain cultural issues like culinary dishes or shared Slavic traditions. Meanwhile, the US has observed these organic dynamics and selfishly sought to exploit them for its own geostrategic gain against Russia, ergo its support of its regional partners’ narratives, especially via “NGOs”.
America’s Interest In The CEE Countries’ “Negative Nationalism”
Nationalism of any sort is a potent force for political mobilization, but “negative nationalism” is perhaps among its strongest variants since it seeks to remind its adherents of the perceived historical injustices that were committed against them which influenced those folks to hold the views that they presently do. It redirects grassroots anger, especially among the youth, away from their own governments and towards the so-called “other”, which in this case is conveniently Russia.
This enables the US to more easily manipulate their people and governments into sacrificing their own national interests through economic, military, political means (ex: lopsided trade deals, disproportionate military obligations like dispatching troops to fight America’s far-flung wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and openly allowing the US to meddle in their domestic political affairs) so long as they think this is somehow against Russia’s interests too.
“Negative Nationalism” As A Form Of Hybrid Warfare
In other words, America’s weaponized exploitation of “negative nationalism” in the CEE space is responsible for perpetuating its regional hegemony over all of their affairs since the manipulated people wrongly believe that their “sacrifices” (if they even regard them as such, which is unlikely among many) are worth it since this somehow or another goes against Russia’s grand strategic interests. The entire time, however, their own national interests continue to suffer as they remain under the US’ indirect influence. Some of them even go as far as proposing more radical forms of subservience to the US without even being prompted to do so since they sincerely believe that this perverse relationship that they’ve established with it is truly in their nation’s best interests. It can therefore be said that this dynamic is an important but understudied component of America’s HybridWarfare against its own “allies” (which in reality function as client states).
Is “Positive Nationalism” The Solution?
It’s not enough to simply critique “negative nationalism” since a solution should be proposed if one sincerely hopes to effect meaningful change. The opposite of this criticized concept is “positive nationalism”, which refers to pride in what one is without obsessing over what they aren’t in relation to others like Russia. There’s plenty that the Polish, Ukrainian, and other CEE people can be proud of that doesn’t have to do with Russia. It’s inevitable that part of their nationalisms will be based on some unfortunate experiences with that country, but they mustn’t comprise the majority of such sentiment. Instead, focusing more on their contemporary geopolitical and other interests as they objectively exist could help formulate more balanced nationalisms that in turn improve the formulation of policy. That’s not to say that it’s realistic to expect them to cut ties with the US, but just that they could at least negotiate with it better to get more in exchange for their “services”.
The “Success” Of The “Ukrainian Experiment”
That’s not happening right now though, nor is it likely to happen anytime soon. The US continue to exploit those two countries and others as part of its grand strategic ambitions to “contain” Russia and even subsequently encroach upon its domestic interests via provocative regional military deployments for instance.
Ukraine is poised to become the quintessentially anti-Russian state as a result of the active cultivation of its extreme form of “negative nationalism” against its neighbor despite it ironically being very similar to it in many respects, especially ethno-cultural and historical. The “success” of the “Ukrainian experiment” proves that other nations less close to Russia than the Ukrainians are can obviously be just as radically affected by this form of Hybrid War, if not even more like in the Polish case for example. This “nation-building” model is antithetical to their objective national interests and results in the formulation of counterproductive policies.
Wishful Thinking
In the unlikely event that some of the CEE nations realize that they’re being manipulated by a hegemon that’s many times more powerful than Russia ever was in the sense that the US was able to “successfully” shape their modern-day identities without barely any of their people even noticing, then it would be incumbent upon them to support so-called “pragmatic” political forces that don’t “scare” the US too much by openly calling for an outright revision of relations with it. Rather, genuinely nationalist forces should consider retaining strategic ties with America whenever they suit their actual national interests such as in the trade and investment domains while not shying away from being “hard negotiators” when it comes to other issues, up to and including the possibility of declining a deal if the terms aren’t acceptable to those same national interests. From the Russian perspective, this wouldn’t be the “ideal scenario”, but it’s the most realistic one if it ever happens.
Concluding Thoughts
To wrap it all up, “negative nationalism” is indeed a potent force for political mobilization, one that’s so effective that it’s easily exploited in the CEE space by external powers like the US for anti-Russian geostrategic purposes. Ukraine is the ignoble poster child of this model as recently noted by President Putin, but it’s not the only such example since Poland also figures very prominently on that list as well as the Baltic States among others. The latter are probably “irredeemable” in the sense of them ever embracing “positive nationalism”, but Ukraine and Poland aren’t lost causes, at least not yet. In fact, “positive nationalism” is so potent of a counteracting force in the former right now that Kiev is actively persecuting leading members of the increasingly popular opposition that embrace it, thereby attesting to its grassroots support. In any case, the battle between “negative” and “positive” nationalisms will continue to unfold in CEE for the foreseeable future.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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If any observer were to wonder, why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so certain that Tel Aviv’s pounding of the West Bank will continue, one of the reasons seems to have surfaced.
According to the Washington Post, on May 5th, 5 days before the bombardment of Israel began, and 2 days before the protests in Mount Temple went out of control, US Congress was notified of a $735 million sale of high-precision weapons to Israel.
The approval of the sale by US President Joe Biden became known on May 17.
Clearly, this serves as an impetus for Tel Aviv.
On May 17th, alongside the aerial and ground bombardment, the battle switched to the naval area.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly thwarted an underwater drone attack.
The Israeli military destroyed the autonomous submarine of Hamas before it left the coast and struck the car used by the operators who launched it.
Moreover, Israeli military planes targeted the main operative center of the Internal Security Force of the Hamas movement in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The Al-Quds Brigades also confirmed the death of Husam Abu Harbid, the commander of the Northern Brigade at Saraya al-Quds, who was killed “during the raid”.
Many other targets were also struck.
Israel maintains that these are only military targets, but many civilian casualties keep mounting.
So far, at least 212 Palestinians, including 61 children, have been killed in Gaza since the violence began.
Some 1,500 Palestinians have been wounded.
Israel has reported 10 dead, including two children.
On the morning of May 18th, explosions were heard and balls of fire and plumes of smoke were seen rising from several buildings in Gaza City, alongside the sunrise.
In support of Gaza, 6 rockets were fired from Lebanon towards Israeli territory, the IDF reported.
All 6 launches failed and landed within Lebanese territory.
Still, the Israeli military responded by shelling the purported locations from which the launches occurred.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II spoke to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and said it was Israel’s “recurrent provocative” actions against Palestinians that have led to the ongoing escalation.
It is unlikely that this support will turn into any more tangible assistance for the Palestinians.
A direction where actual support may come from is Syria.
On the day hostilities began in the West Bank, the IDF used a combat helicopter to strike a house in Syria’s al-Quneitra.
One of the soldiers who were wounded in the attack died in the morning of May 17th.
Israel’s regular raids on various targets throughout Syria are likely warranting of a response, which Damascus is yet to carry out.
Casualties are piling up, Israel is continuing its attacks, Hamas and others are responding as best they can.
So far, none of the Palestinians Arabic allies have undertaken any actions other than providing supportive rhetoric.
US President Joe Biden has held three phone calls with Netanyahu saying that he’s supportive of a “ceasefire” but a more than $700 million weapon sale shows that any course of action is permitted.
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After rollout under emergency authorisation, manufacturers of COVID vaccines now have their sights on regulatory approval — but should we rush approval based on only six months’ worth of data from unblinded trials?
In April 2021, Pfizer and Moderna announced efficacy results at the six-month mark from the phase 3 trials of their respective COVID-19 vaccines.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the company’s data “confirm the favourable efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine and position us to submit a Biologics License Application to the U.S. FDA [Food and Drug Administration].” And on May 7 it formally initiated that application which, if successful, will earn the Pfizer-BioNTech product, BNT162b2, the distinction of becoming the first COVID-19 vaccine approved by the FDA.
Because lest we forget, all COVID-19 vaccines currently in use in the U.S. are available under emergency access only.
The situation is similar in Europe, where four COVID-19 vaccines have been granted “conditional marketing authorisations,” a fast track mechanism that can be used in emergencies. These can be converted into standard “marketing authorisations” pending positive data after authorisation, but this has not yet happened for any COVID-19 vaccine being administered.
As hundreds of millions of people around the world get vaccinated, it may seem like wordsmithing to highlight the fact that none of the COVID-19 vaccines in use are actually “approved.” Through an emergency access mechanism known as Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), the products being rolled out still technically remain “investigational.” Factsheets distributed to vaccinees are clear: “There is no FDA approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19.”
The approval-authorisation distinction is often misunderstood by the media, even in the scientific press. But it was the focus of much discussion back in September 2020. With large phase III trials by Pfizer and Moderna well under way, and the November U.S. presidential election looming, many worried about political pressure resulting in the rollout of an unsafe or ineffective vaccine.
The FDA had already come under fire, accused of bending to the White House in granting EUAs for two COVID-19 treatments, hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma. But those fears largely dissipated when the FDA published a guidance document in early October outlining its expectations for the EUA. According to the document, at least half of a trial’s participants would need to be followed for at least two months. This alone made it all but certain no vaccine could cross the line before the election.
The FDA also said it would want a vaccine at least 50% effective (with a confidence interval reaching no lower than 30%) against a primary endpoint of preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 disease of any severity — parameters it had previously defined as necessary for approval. Even for non-clinical parameters, like manufacturing quality, the FDA characterised its expectations for the EUA as “very similar” to those for approval.
Six months: enough?
One key difference between EUA and approval (also called “licensure,” and which for vaccines is known as a BLA (Biologics License Application) was the expected length of follow-up of trial participants. Unlike its clear articulation of two months for an EUA, the FDA has not committed to a clear minimum for approval.
Cody Meissner, a professor of paediatrics at Tufts University and member of the FDA’s advisory committee, was curious. “Is it possible to predict or estimate when conditions of safety and efficacy might be satisfied for BLA?” Meissner asked at the agency’s December 10 meeting which had been convened to consider the FDA’s first emergency authorisation for the Pfizer vaccine.
The FDA’s Doran Fink responded: “I couldn’t predict, but I will say that we typically ask for at least six months of follow-up in a substantial number of clinical trial participants to constitute a safety database that would support licensure.”
An approval based on six months of data would represent one of the fastest for a novel vaccine in FDA history. Among the six “first in disease” vaccines approvedbythe FDA since 2006, pre-licensure pivotal trials were a median of 23 months in duration, according to a recent analysis.
Six months also seems substantially shorter than previously conceptualised expectations. A World Health Organization expert group on COVID-19 vaccines (which included FDA regulators) in August 2020 called for follow-up “until at least month 12, or until an effective vaccine is deployed locally.” Another group, composed of industry and academic authors, similarly wrote in October 2020: “we recommend longer term follow-up of all participants … for at least a year after randomisation.”
On paper, the phase III studies by Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen are all of two years’ duration. But the FDA’s official position on minimum follow-up before licensure is unclear at best.
In its formal guidance last June, the agency said that for licensure applications, it wanted participants followed for COVID-19 outcomes for “as long as feasible, ideally at least one to two years” after the first injection. But the same document states that safety assessments for “serious and other medically attended adverse events” should be studied “for at least six months after completion of all study vaccinations. Longer safety monitoring may be warranted for certain vaccine platforms.”
Asked to clarify whether its guidance is asking for follow-up of at least six months or one year, a spokesperson told The BMJ: “We do not have any further information beyond what is in the guidance document.”
Unblinded and without a control group — what about safety?
Duration of protection is not the only question that longer, placebo controlled trials can address. They also address vaccine safety.
“Very often, it’s the fact that we have that placebo controlled follow-up over time, that gives us the ability to say that the vaccine didn’t cause something at a longer period of time after vaccination,” the FDA’s Philip Krause explained last December.
Yet there is a gap — currently of unknown size but growing — between any expectation of blinded placebo controlled data, and the reality that within weeks of the vaccines receiving an EUA the unblinding of trials commenced as placebo recipients were offered the chance to get vaccinated.
Steven Goodman, associate dean of clinical and translational research at Stanford University, told the FDA in an invited presentation last December, “Once a vaccine is made widely available and encouraged, maintaining a double blinded control group for more than a nominal period is no longer in the investigator’s (or regulator’s) control and undue pressure to do so may undermine the entire vaccine testing enterprise.”
Goodman’s recommendation was to rapidly convert the trials into crossover studies, enabling those on placebo to get vaccinated (and vice versa), while maintaining the blind. The companies challenged the feasibility, calling it “onerous,” and a crossover never occurred.
The BMJ asked Moderna, Pfizer, and Janssen (Johnson and Johnson) what proportion of trial participants were now formally unblinded, and how many originally allocated to placebo have now received a vaccine. Pfizer declined to say, but Moderna announced that “as of April 13, all placebo participants have been offered the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and 98% of those have received the vaccine.” In other words, the trial is unblinded, and the placebo group no longer exists.
Janssen told The BMJ: “We do not have specific figures on how many of our study participants have received a vaccine at this time.” But the company confirmed it was implementing an amended protocol across all countries to unblind all participants in its two phase III trials, the earlier of which passed the median of two month follow-up mark in January.
How the FDA will weigh the loss of blinding and placebo controlled follow-up is unclear, but just months ago the agency said these trial properties were vital.
“Continuation of placebo controlled follow-up after EUA will be important and may actually be critical to ensure that additional safety and effectiveness data are accrued to support submission of a licensure application as soon as possible following an EUA. … Once a decision is made to unblind an ongoing placebo controlled trial, that decision cannot be walked back. And that controlled follow-up is lost forever,” the FDA said last October.
At its next advisory committee in December 2020, the FDA reiterated the importance of the placebo group: “Placebo controlled follow-up can be very important in showing that whatever happened in the vaccine group also happened in the placebo group. Because that’s our best way of knowing.
What’s the rush?
The U.S.’s “Operation Warp Speed” delivered on its promise to get a novel vaccine into arms in record time. Millions of doses of vaccines are being administered daily across the U.S., making clear that lack of FDA approval is no barrier to access. So just what benefit is there in seeking, and granting, a BLA?
The BMJ asked the manufacturers why they were seeking a BLA. Moderna did not respond and Janssen only confirmed it intended to apply for a BLA “later in 2021.” Pfizer likewise did not answer but instead quoted an FDA webpage on medical devices, which stated: “Sponsors of EUA products are encouraged to follow up the EUA with a pre-market submission so that it can remain on the market once the EUA is no longer in effect.” But EUAs have no built-in expiry date — in fact, 14 EUAs for Zika diagnostic tests remain active despite the publichealthemergency expiring in 2017.
Cody Meissner told The BMJ he saw some distinct advantages of a BLA over EUA. An approved vaccine, for one, would provide “an element of assurance,” increasing public trust in the vaccines, particularly for those currently sitting on the fence. It would also pave the way for claims of vaccineinjury to be routed through a more established compensation programme, and for adding the vaccine to government funded schemes to reach children in financial need.
Finally, it may affect the potential for vaccine mandates: “It is unlikely these vaccines will be mandated while an EUA is in place. Remember that currently these vaccines are still considered experimental.”
While still under EUA, an increasing number of educational and other institutions have already mandated vaccines, but debates over the legality of these actions has hinged on the distinction between authorisation and approval.
But approving a vaccine in order to legally support mandates or convince people of its safety arguably puts the cart before the horse. Meissner responded that a BLA would not be issued until the FDA is convinced of the short and long term safety of these vaccines.
No new biodistribution studies for COVID-19 vaccines
Officials have consistently emphasised that despite shaving years off traditional timelines for producing vaccines, no compromises in the process were taken. However one type of study, tracking the distribution of a vaccine once injected in the body, was not conducted using any of the three vaccines currently authorised in the U.S.
Such biodistribution studies are a standard element of drug safety testing but “are usually not required for vaccines,” according to European Medicines Agency policy, which adds, “However, such studies might be applicable when new delivery systems are employed or when the vaccine contains novel adjuvants or excipients.”
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, regulators accepted biodistributiondata from paststudies performed with related, mostly unapproved compounds that use the same platform technology.
Janssen told The BMJ its COVID-19 vaccine leverages the same technology as its Ebola vaccine, which received licensure last June. “Our confidence in our adenovirus vector Ad26 is based on our experience with this vector.”
Pfizer and Moderna did not respond to The BMJ’s questions regarding why no biodistribution studies were conducted on their novel mRNA products, and none of the companies, nor the FDA, would say whether new biodistribution studies will be required prior to licensure.
notes:
Competing interests PD gave a public statement at the October and December FDA advisory committee meetings mentioned in this article (transcripts here:
https://faculty.rx.umaryland.edu/pdoshi/#publications, and may continue to engage in public input towards regulatory decision making around COVID-19 vaccines.
PD is also employed by a university that has mandated COVID-19 vaccines for all faculty, staff, and students. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official policy or position of the University of Maryland.
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This one-minute video clip is a recording depicting a ten-year old Gaza girl, crying in desperation not knowing what to do – about the continuous destruction around her – the merciless killing and mass murder committed by the Israeli military, IDF – all directed by the already indicted criminal Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
The video clip says it all.
And the western world – the European Union, vassal of murderer-supporting USA – is still just watching – silently watching – witnessing Israeli genocide and saying nothing.
"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
And this is the story of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy – who has successively lost his entire family, two brothers and dad – and now his mom – to Israeli war criminals. He commits suicide in despair:
Fourteen-year-old Palestinian child in Gaza committed suicide!
Hamza threw himself from the 8th floor last night.
Hamza lost his entire family in the recent wars on Gaza.
In 2009, his little brother was killed by an Israeli missile while playing football.
In the 2012, his older brother was killed.
In 2014, his father was killed.
Due to this severe trauma, Hamza became very close to his mother, his last surviving family member, who was killed in an Israeli bombing this week.
Shortly after, he ended his life.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
In the US, “more than 30 million people, over 15% of the workforce, have applied for unemployment benefits… ” (
