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Israel’s government and their Zionist ideology has been present in African politics since the late 1800s. It all began with the British government who wanted to dominate East Africa to advance their commercial interests and to secure trading routes to India before other Western Imperial powers such as Germany and France. In 1888, the British established the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA). This is where the British government had a problem and an idea to solve it and proposed several places that could become a new homeland for the Jewish minority in Europe.

Theodore Herzl’s Search for a Jewish Homeland in Africa?

In 1897, the Zionist Organization (ZO) was founded by Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian citizen with Jewish roots was an accomplished journalist and a political activist who is considered the father of Zionism. Herzl established the Zionist Organization to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine with the idea that it will eventually become a Jewish state, so he saw it as a practical solution against antisemitism throughout Europe. In Herzl’s ‘A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question’ he said that

“The Argentine Republic would derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us. The present infiltration of Jews has certainly produced some friction, and it would be necessary to enlighten the Republic on the intrinsic difference of our new movement.” 

But he made it clear that

“Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name ‘ of Palestine would attract our people with a force of Marvelous I potency.” 

Herzl proclaimed that

“We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning them an extra-territorial status, such as is well known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these_ sanctuaries, answering for the fulfilment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.”

Herzl spoke of how institutions would assure Jewish Supremacy under the protection of international law:

Externally, the Society will attempt, as I explained before in the general part, to be acknowledged as a State- forming power. The free assent of many Jews will confer on it the requisite authority in its relations with Governments. Internally, that is to say, in its relations with the Jewish people, the Society will create all the first indispensable institutions; it ‘ will be the nucleus out of which the public organizations of the Jewish State will later on be developed. Our first object is, as I said before, supremacy, assured to us by international law, over a portion of the globe sufficiently large to satisfy our just requirements

Jewish Zionists in Europe led by Herzl already had a strong connection towards the Land of Israel as they saw themselves as the lineage of the ancient people of Israel who settled in Canaan (aka Palestine) more than 2000 years ago which was during the time of the Roman Empire.

Despite the claims that there was a Jewish connection to Palestine, the British Imperial government did propose more than one territory including Cyprus, El Arish in the North Sinai Peninsula of Egypt and even another place in Africa called the Guas Ngishu, a huge plateau located between Nairobi and Mau which is known today as Kenya and of course, Uganda which was proposed later, but the crisis for Jews living in Eastern Europe called for decisive action from the British government.

Theodor Herzl spoke at the Sixth Zionist Congress in August 1903 and mentioned the British proposal for a temporary place, but there was a sense of urgency for a Jewish homeland since Jews in Russia were facing a high-level of discrimination although Herzl had envisioned Palestine as a future homeland for the Jewish people. Herzl even wrote a novel based on the Jewish “return to Palestine” called ‘Altneuland.’

There were several important figures for establishing a Jewish homeland including Joseph Chamberlain, a statesman who had experience in managing colonies for the British empire as Secretary of State for the Colonies personally knew Theodor Herzl as both were introduced to each other by Rothschild family members.

However, Herzl’s proposal for Jewish settlements in Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula, or El Arish were not feasible to Chamberlain since they were not under British rule and in some cases, people had been living in these areas for a long time, but he did agree to discuss El-Arish Plan with Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne to gain Jewish support for Britain.  So, Chamberlain decided to tour South Africa, during his trip, he passed through Mombasa, a city in southeastern Kenya and was confronted by white British settlers who complained about the lack of workers to finish a railway. Along the way on a Ugandan railway, he saw a possible Jewish homeland in East Africa (Kenya) since it had a significant number of whites, so he mentioned the possibility to Herzl but did not push the idea any further since the plan was to eventually occupy Palestine.

But after the Kishnev Pogrom, an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev, the capital of the Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire in 1903, Herzl thought about East Africa as an option.  The British government was interested in establishing a Jewish homeland in East Africa under its control.  Reactions were mixed in the Sixth Zionist Congress so there was a split with 295 votes in favor and 178 against the East Africa proposal.

By December 1904, the Zionist Organization sent a special commission to Guas Ngishu to investigate and determine if the conditions were favorable for a Jewish homeland, but the Plan was ultimately rejected in 1905 because of the opposition by a former high commissioner of East Africa and the white settlers.  In ‘African Zion: The Attempt to Establish a Jewish Colony in the East Africa Protectorate’ describes why the plan was rejected:

On the whole, however, there was little for the scheme in British government circles, especially when opposition was encountered.  The white settlers in East Africa, led by Lord Delamere who had obtained a hundred thousand acres on lease, expressed their violent opposition in a campaign of vilification of Jews in general, and of the would-be Jewish settlers in particular.  Eliot, the commissioner of the protectorate, went along with the plan at first, but turned against it as opposition developed. The Indians were unfriendly, and the natives were not consulted

It seemed like the white settlers were acting just like the Palestinians.  The rejection of the plan allowed for the establishment of the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) to find a Jewish homeland even if it means that Palestine is out of the picture.  By 1925, the ITO was disbanded with most of its members throwing their support behind the Zionist movement.

Unfortunately, the British and shortly after, the Americans agreed on Palestine becoming a Jewish homeland called Israel in 1948. From there, Israel became a global player along with its Western partners, for example getting involved in Africa’s economy and having influence in its politics and that’s where the East African nation of Uganda comes in.

The Israelis in Uganda

It all began with a six-foot, four inches tall man by the name of Idi Amin Dada Oumee, known as General Idi Amin, an erratic dictator who lived like a ruling king who had several wives and children. During the start of his military career in the British led Ugandan military, he was promoted from a private to becoming one of two only black African officers. Serving in British led Uganda military, Amin fought against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army known as the Mau Mau who resisted British colonial rule.

Idi Amin first enlisted in the British King’s African Rifles (KAR) in 1946 and became an assistant cook since he lacked a formal education but received a comprehensive military training over the years and rose in the ranks, by 1959, he became the highest ranking black African officer (Effendi class 2) in the British led army. 

As a private, he was an impressive athlete who played in various sports including Rugby, swimming, and boxing. But it was boxing that made Amin stand out. As an amateur fighter, Amin had won the Uganda light heavyweight boxing championship in 1951 and remained a champion for nine more years. Some say that one of the greatest heavyweight champions of all-time, Muhammad Ali had refused to fight Idi Amin.

By 1962, Uganda gained its independence from British rule under a politician by the name of Milton Obote who became the country’s prime minister under King (Kabaka) Mutesa II in a coalition with the Kabaka Yekka movement.

By 1964, Obote had issues with King Mutesa II over a scandal in the 1964 Ugandan lost counties referendum and was also accused of smuggling gold, so Obote led a coup ousting Mutesa.  Obote became a civilian dictator which led him to the presidency in April 1966.

During Obote’s presidency, Amin had military training in the U.K and Israel. Amin was promoted several times eventually becoming the commander of all the Ugandan armed forces by 1970.

During that time, Obote had published ‘The Common Man’s Charter’ which was a guideline leading to socialist policies.  By 1970, the Obote government demanded more than 60% of share from private businesses and banks leading to massive corruption scandals.  Soon after, food shortages and inflation affected average Ugandans. Obote also persecuted the Indian population and their businesses which did not help the Uganda’s economy.  In other words, Obote was a corrupt socialist dictator that made life difficult for the Ugandan people.

During Obote’s reign, the Israeli government was entrenched in Ugandan society.  Israel even sent weapons through Uganda into southern Sudan, to support the Anyanya who were fighting the Arab-dominated Sudanese government for decades. They trained the police and military and supported the Anyanya, a Sudanese separatist group based in the South Sudan since the first Sudanese Civil War began in 1955.  The Anyanya were conducting a guerilla war with the Sudanese government.  Obote made a fatal decision to withdraw support for the Anyanya rebels which infuriated the Israelis since they were instrumental in fighting an Arab-influenced Sudanese government on the African continent.

However, during a short period of time, Obote managed to disappoint Western powers including the U.S., U.K., and of course, Israel. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Documents on Sub-Saharan Africa, 1969–1972 stated that “Amin is regarded as more moderate and pro-Western than Obote but his ability to organize and run an effective government is questionable.” So clearly, they knew Idi Amin would be more manageable than Obote who had socialist policies that would naturally lead to friendly relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea.  Idi Amin was the safer bet for Washington, London and Tel Aviv.

The West and Israel Supported Adi Amin’s Coup Against Obote

By January 1971, Idi Amin and his army overthrew President Obote with help from the Israelis and the CIA although Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth conference. In 1976, The New York Times interviewed a retired Israeli colonel who helped Idi Amin topple Obote in 1971, “Colonel Bar‐Lev was head of the Israeli mission to Kampala shortly after General Amin became chief of staff of armed forces. The Israeli became his confidant, and their families became close friends.” Bar-Lev supported General Amin because Obote was ready to expel the Israelis, “The colonel, In an Interview today, said he supported General Amin against President Milton Obote because the latter was hostile to Israel and was planning to expel Israeli forces from his country.”

Amin avoided a coup when his paratroopers killed Obote’s military officers who were planning to arrest him:

Colonel Bar‐Lev advised the general to station In Kampala a military force from his own tribe. The force would include paratroopers, armor, and jeeps. Its mobility and firepower would be such that 600 to 800 men could overcome 5,000, he said.  Trained by Israelis, this force thwarted an Obote effort to oust General Amin, the colonel said, and played a key role in defeating the President’s forces.

Colonel Bar‐Lev said that in January 1971, President Obote, who was attending a conference in Singapore, decided to remove General Amin, and sent orders to have him arrested. A battalion commander loyal to President Obote called a meeting in the officers’ club to make plans for the arrest.  Four Uganda paratrooper instructors loyal to General Amin learned of the plan and killed those at the meeting.  General Amin then telephoned Colonel Bar‐Lev announcing, “The revolution has started”

The breaking point between Israel and Uganda was when Tel Aviv decided to cancel a visit by President Amin in late 1971 who was going to attend a ceremony for 200 Ugandan soldiers who completed a training course, so Amin was offended.  Shortly after,Amin was interested in visiting Libya “Then, without mentioning what had happened, he asked “How many kilometers from here to Benghazi? If I can’t go to Israel, I’ll go to Benghazi.”  According to the New York Times, The Israeli colonel went back to Israel and Idi Amin became a critic of Israel:

Colonel Bar -Lev returned home and President Amin announced a rupture of relations between the countries and the expulsion of all Israelis. He became one of Israel’s bitterest critics in Africa and provided Arab terrorists with bases and training facilities.

The former colonel said he had never had illusions about President Amin. He said he told officials in Jerusalem years ago that the man was emotionally unstable. He was told he was exaggerating

Israel’s Hand in Uganda’s Politics

Since the 1950’s, Israel wanted strategic partnerships with several African states to counter Arab influenced governments who were seen as hostile to Israel, so Amin was seen as the puppet dictator to help Israel achieve its goals in Africa.  As a commander in the Ugandan army, Amin initially had a good relationship with top Israeli politicians and military officials, at one point he even enrolled in a paratrooper course in Israel which he never completed.

In 1972, there was an invasion of Uganda organized by Obote and supported by Tanzania in a mission to overthrow Amin with Ugandan rebels.  So, Amin needed arms to counter Obote’s forces, but Israel and the US refused military support because they wanted Amin’s government to pay upfront, so naturally, Amin turned to President Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and promptly ended his relationship with Israel and the U.S.  Amin went to Libya and met with Gaddafi.  Soon after, Amin denounced Zionism and received a $25 million loan and received other loans from the Libyan–Ugandan Development Bank.  Then Amin started to remove Israeli military advisers and technicians, and then ended full diplomatic relations with Israel.

Besides Amin’s policies towards Indians which was no different from Obote’s policies by shutting down their businesses and deporting them, he targeted the Israelis which was a major step for Amin’s foreign policies towards the state of Israel.

Amin’s new policies towards the Israelis were clear, he had completely changed.  But then rumors spread that Amin used national funds for his own personal expenses which may have been true since most Western and Israeli supported dictators were corrupt, but Israel took a chance with Amin anyway, and it eventually backfired.

On August 22, 1972, The New York Times published ‘Ugandan Expulsion Is a Setback for Israel’, on Israel establishing ties with non-Arab states but the big picture was to conduct covert operations to destabilize their Arab neighbors, “for Israel, Africa is a major diplomatic battleground. Premier Golda Meir has said that since Israel could not be friends with her Arab neighbors, she would try to “be friends with our neighbors’ neighbors.” 

Israeli influence was gaining some ground in Africa which was successful until President Idi Amin turned on them, maybe he was embarrassed to learn about what the Israelis were up to in the Middle East and in Africa thanks to Muammar Gaddafi, “for more than a decade the policy was an almost unqualified success. Israel established relations with 32 black states, or most of non‐Arab Africa” and that “Israeli diplomacy has now suffered a sharp setback in the East African nation of Uganda, which expelled the last of 470 Israeli diplomats, military advisers, technicians and dependents on April 9.” 

Israel blamed Libya since it offered Idi Amin the much-needed support but according to the NY Times, “Informed sources said that Uganda owed Israel $13 million to $18 million, most of it in the form of short‐term debts to Israeli contracting concerns constructing airfields, military barracks, housing projects and buildings, and that Uganda simply did not have the money to pay.”

An observer said that “When Amin began all this spending, Israeli contractors figured they might as well get their share.”  Amin defended his stance against Israeli accusations as he told Soviet journalists “That Israelis had been “milking Uganda dry” and that “if you ask them to build a fence, they will demand three quarters of the payment in advance.”  The NY Times suggested that Idi Amin was a dead beat, refusing to repay the Israelis, “In this view, General Amin’s action represents an indirect form of debt repudiation.”  They even went as far as to say that Ugandan civilian officials could not control Amin’s spending habits, so they conveniently blamed the Israelis:

Another factor was that some Ugandan civilian officials had been critical of the Israelis to General Amin. Unable to restrain the general’s spending themselves, they reportedly took the desperate course of suggesting that it was the Israelis and not Government orders that were causing the financial squeeze

It’s worth mentioning that Idi Amin was an Israeli favorite over Milton Obote who condemned their aggression against Egypt and moved to cut support to the Anyanyas:

Uganda’s President at the time, Milton Obote, was a Pan-Africanist who envisioned a united Africa that would challenge the legacy of division and colonialism. Like most African leaders, he condemned Israeli aggression against Egypt and wanted to cut off support to the Anyanyas. But Amin, the Ugandan Army’s commander at the time, was a great admirer of Israel. He had briefly enrolled in a paratrooper course there (uncompleted), and was friendly with Colonel Baruch Bar-Lev, Israel’s military attaché in Uganda; Amin’s numerous wives and children even socialized with Bar-Lev’s wife and children. Amin came from an area near the Sudanese border, so was well placed to insure that Israeli arms continued to flow to the Anyanya, against Obote’s wishes

Months later, Israel took Uganda to court for the money its President, Idi Amin owed to them.  On November 29^th, 1972, in a New York Times report ‘Israel‐Uganda Dispute Reaches into Court Here as Bank’s Assets Are Ordered Attached’ the Israelis claimed that the Ugandan government owed them $610,270.20:

An Israeli contracting company obtained in State Supreme Court in Manhattan an order directing sheriffs in the state to attach any assets of Grind lays Bank (Uganda) Ltd. to satisfy the company’s claim of $610,270.20.

Court papers filed for J. Zeevi & Sons, Ltd., which had done construction work in the East African country, said the company had made deposits in Uganda currency in Grindlays Bank last March against which letters of credit totaling $610,270.20 could be drawn here. The company charged that Grind lays, a British‐owned commercial bank, had canceled the letters of credit because of the Uganda Government’s “new policy of active anti‐Semitism.”

Libya was also mentioned in the lawsuit:

General Amin, who visited Israel three times in 1971, later broke with the Israelis, charging that they had encroached on Uganda’s military and economic affairs. He is also said to have felt that his status as an African leader was being compromised by his close ties with Israel. Israel believes Libya encouraged the break.

Another factor is reported to be that Uganda owed more than $13 million in short‐term debts to Israeli concerns constructing airfields, military bar racks and housing projects and that Uganda did not have the money to pay the debt

The Israelis said that Amin praised Hitler and that anti-Semitism was at the forefront of Uganda’s foreign policy towards Israel:

The Zeevi complaint contended that the cancellation of the letter of credit was “based upon a new Government‐inaugurated and directed policy on forfeiture of foreign assets and property and a new policy of active anti‐Semitism embarked upon by the Government of Uganda.”

Court papers included as exhibits were news articles quoting General Amin as praising Hitler “for the killing of Jews.” Both the seizure of foreign assets and the official anti‐ Semitism, the complaint said, “are against and repugnant to the public policy of the State of New York and not recognized by the Federal Government of the United States”

In 2016, The New Yorker published an interesting article called ‘Idi Amin’s Israeli Connection’ based on Amin’s ties to Israel:

Israel itself helped install Amin in power, creating a monster who turned on his former patrons.  Israel had had a special relationship with Uganda since the latter’s independence from Great Britain, in 1962. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, David Ben-Gurion, then Israel’s Prime Minister, sought strategic partnerships with states on the edge the Arab world, including Uganda, Kenya, Iran, and Turkey, to counter the hostile nations on Israel’s own borders. As part of what became known as the Peripheral Doctrine, Israel trained and equipped Uganda’s military and carried out construction, agriculture, and other development projects.

Just months after the Six-Day War, in 1967, Israel sold Uganda weapons worth seven million dollars. In 1969, Israel began funneling weapons through Uganda into southern Sudan, where a ragtag rebel group known as the Anyanya had been fighting the Arab-dominated Sudanese government since the nineteen-fifties

Idi Amin had expelled the Israelis; however, this does not ignore the fact that the ‘Butcher of Uganda’ was a dictator who reportedly ordered the murder of 100’s of thousands of Ugandans for ethnic, political, and financial reasons during his time in power.  Amin even purged his military officers and enlisted men from various ethnic groups including the Acholi and Lango people who technically opposed him and supported Obote.  That purge resulted in more than 5,000 military members killed and if you include the civilians who were killed in the process, the number is doubled.

In 1978, Amin wated to annex Tanzania’s  Kagera region, in response the Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere sent his troops to  invade Uganda and occupied Kampala  by 1979 and removed Idi Amin from power.  Amin went into exile in Libya, Iraq and ended up in Saudi Arabia for the rest of his life.

Idi Amin Dada was not one of the good guys, that’s for sure, but isn’t it ironic that even a dictator who was backed by the West and Israel, finally opened his eyes to the dangers of Zionism, he even called his former bosses ‘criminal’ for what they were doing to the Palestinians.

Here is a video with General Idi Amin in a candid interview explaining how the Israelis turned the Palestinians into refugees in their own country:

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Idi Amin at UN (United Nations, New York) (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians, the US President Joe Biden, and all the American allies repeated the same mantra on cue: ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’. Much later, the UN human rights expert pointed out that in this instance Israel does not enjoy that right, as the territory they are attacking is a territory they control and are responsible for.

As the millions of people across the globe took to the streets in support of the Palestinian cause of freedom, an end of occupation, and protesting the Israeli attacks on Gaza against unarmed civilians, the western leaders had to stop and re-think their old attitudes, which were proving to be far out of step with the world of today, especially the younger global population which demand justice.  Due to social media, people can see videos and commentary from the scene.  Western media is not inside Gaza and they report from safe distance locations in Israel; however, Arab media reporting in English from the ground in Gaza have brought the conflict close to people on the internet.

The European protests were huge and well organized. London had 350,000 people in the streets, even though the Home Secretary had called them ‘Hate Marchers’ and was fired for her contempt. Europe is closer to Gaza than the US, and while the US has been traditionally kept captive of the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, the European public has been supportive of the Palestinian quest for freedom. Many Europeans feel that the European Union has been blindly following US foreign policies which have proved disastrous in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. 

The US State Department employees, under Secretary of State Antony Blinken, called out the war crimes and violations of international law by the Israeli government. The staff are career professionals and diplomates who voiced concern at US double-standards by the Biden administration, which puts a hold on weapons transfers from US to any country which will likely use the weapons in human right violations. Instead of holding up weapons to Israel, they were fast-tracked immediately even though it was clear they were committing war crimes, human rights violations, and clearly operating against international laws. Josh Paul resigned from the State Department in an act of conscience.

At the White House, the staff have become younger and more diverse than in past generations.  These professionals complained to Biden about what Israel was doing in Gaza.  Biden and Blinken had to re-think their position of blind approval of Israeli military actions. 

Biden and Blinken started peppering their statements about Gaza with references to the decades old UN resolution for a two-state solution. As the moments progressed, we then heard the same phrases repeated by western leaders aligned with the US.  We heard the Arab leaders echo the call for the two-state solution, and China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa as well.

Experts are pointing to a generational change, or revolution in the minds of people who believe there is an alternative to occupation, and there should be no alternative to freedom and autonomy for the Palestinian people who have suffered since 1948 under a brutal military occupation of the West Bank, and Gaza the largest open-air prison on earth.

The Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the most extremist and racist in Israeli history. Some of the officials have called the Palestinians ‘animals’, others have called for mass deportations to ethnically cleanse the land, and some have claimed Jews are a superior race. 

Israel likes to claim they are the only democratic country in the Middle East, but their policies against the Palestinians are undemocratic.  Americans who are aged 70 and 80 might be content to hang on to outdated notions, but the younger Americans are questioning how can Israel be considered to share American values, while having a two-tiered justice system which the UN has deemed to be an Apartheid state.

Biden has sent a request to the Senate on October 20 to remove all restrictions on US weapons stockpiled in Israel itself.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Sunday he was open to placing conditions on any aid to Israel, with the aim of reducing civilian casualties in Gaza.

“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law. And, so, I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws,” Murphy said. 

Murphy said,

“Benjamin Netanyahu believed that you could ignore the Palestinians, that you could try to squash their desires for a state and, ultimately, that would bring peace to the region into Israel. That’s just not the case.”

He went on to call for a Palestinian state as the only way to long-term peace.

Senator Bernie Sanders listed out demands for the Israeli government in order to receive US aid.  Demanding “an end to the indiscriminate bombing,” a “right of displaced Gazans to return to their homes,” “a freeze on settlement expansion” in the West Bank and no long-term occupation of Gaza by Israeli forces, as well as a commitment to engage in peace talks “for a two-state solution in the wake of the war.”

The road towards a final solution to the Palestinian suffering will likely be long, but it looks like some road signs are being placed along the way pointing to a beginning of the journey. No one knows how many miles it will take, and what detours and roadblocks may spring up along the path, but the two-state solution is the plan. The only thing certain, is that this huge effort at peace in the Middle East will need the leadership and support of the White House and US Congress. With the 2024 election less than one year away, it will need the Biden administration, and any future President’s full support across all party lines.  Peace in the Middle East will have to be an American project with global coordination.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from MD

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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Dec. 8, 2021 – Watson, LA – 16 year old 6’2 230lb football player Grayson Lane Temple died suddenly on Dec. 8, 2021 – his death was blamed on a “genetic predisposition to a cardiac arrhythmia.”

He was the picture of health.  

He stood 6’2” and was 230 pounds. 16 year old Grayson could be found working on a motor of most any kind, welding, and hanging out with his friends. Grayson loved aggravating his older sisters Corinne and Sarah Peyton and his younger brother Jacob

Grayson never complained of feeling bad and was rarely sick. Six weeks prior to him going into cardiac arrest he was having symptoms that he had not shared with his parents. He had told his friends and the school nurse, but no one recognized the symptoms he was having as possible signs of a heart issue.

A week prior to his death, his mom noticed he was unusually tired and sleeping more than normal. Grayson had stayed home from school with what he called a stomach bug. After a couple of days home from school, his mom checked his blood pressure with an automated cuff and noted his pulse was too fast. She obtained her stethoscope and listened to his heart and found an arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat). The next day an appointment was made with a pediatric cardiologist.

Four days went by before Grayson would been seen and ended up being directly admitted to PICU with atrial flutter. The medical team attempted cardioversion and oral anti-arrhythmias unsuccessfully. The third day, they made the decision to attempt the cardioversion again but before the procedure could be performed Grayson went into cardiac arrest. Their attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. He passed away on December 8, 2021 at the age of 16.

Genetic testing was performed, and we learned that Grayson had a genetic predisposition to a cardiac arrhythmia such as Long QT syndrome (notice the story doesn’t say he had Long QT Syndrome)

His cause of death was listed as myocarditis which is the #3 leading cause of death in student athletes (Long QT syndrome has nothing to do with myocarditis)

Grayson’s parents have made it their purpose to educate their community about “sudden cardiac arrest.”

My Take on 16 year old Grayson Lane Temple’s Death 

This seems like a cover-up of what was most likely a COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Induced sudden cardiac death.

His cause of death was listed as myocarditis which has nothing to do with “genetic predisposition” such as “Long QT Syndrome”.

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Nov. 4, 2023 – Davie, FL – 14 year old Knox MacEwen is a Western High School Air Force Junior ROTC (Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) student. On Nov. 4 he was running at a Army Junior ROTC exercise when he suffered a cardiac arrest during a 5K run and died in the hospital. His mother is recovering from a hard fought battle with cancer this past year.

Nov. 8, 2023 – 14 year old dies after Running 5km; Is Congenital heart Disease to be blamed? (Someone paid for a fake story to be run on a fake website in India).

This story was so viral, that someone paid a fake site to run a fake story about Congenital heart disease.

The source is called “Times Now News” and appears to be a fake site out of India.

In fact, they consult an expert on US teenagers with congenital heart defects, Dr.Panjak Sugaonkar, Pediatric Cardiologist at Ruby Hall Clinic in Pune, India.

His clinic (in Pune, India) must be filled with mRNA Vaccinated US teenagers dropping dead from “Congenital heart disease”, for him to be an expert.

 

July 24, 2023 – Lebron James’ 18 year old son Bronny James suffered a cardiac arrest at 9:30am on July 24, 2023.

 

And here comes the Propaganda:

Look at how much focus they place on “those on social media who claimed that COVID-19 Vaccines were somehow involved despite the lack of that thing called evidence.”

Feb. 20, 2023 – 20 year old Ryan Keeler, UNLV football player, was found on Feb. 20 by UNLV defensive line coach Julio Garcia who was doing a welfare check on Keeler. He told police he kicked the apartment door open and found Keeler unconscious and cold to the touch. Coroner’s office said 20-year-old Ryan Keeler died of “cardiac dysrhythmia due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.” “…died of natural causes”, according to the Clark County Coroner’s Office.

Feb. 1, 2023 – New York, NY – 27 year old Sean Grogg died suddenly from an “unknown congenital heart condition.” He was mandated COVID-19 Vaccines at work.

Jan. 5, 2023 – Las Vegas, NV – 16 year old Ashari Hughes died suddenly while playing flag football. Coroner’s Office ruled a natural death due to “congenital coronary artery anomaly.”

The Coverup: “Las Vegas doctor addresses heart health concerns after sudden deaths of two high school students.”

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Following the recent news of the sudden deaths of two local high school students, who both suffered cardiac arrest, some parents are no doubt concerned about the heart health of young adults.

8 News Now’s Brian Loftus spoke to Dr. Alfred Danielian the director of Sports Cardiology at Las Vegas Heart Associates to address concerns on the topic.

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March 29, 2022 – Brazil – Helena Bilia Matarazzo was 6years old. Her mother had posted on social media about a congenital heart condition she had but that she was followed by a “specialized center”. She took the first dose of the Pfizer mRNA covid-19 vaccine on January 21, 2022 and the second dose in March of 2022. She died on March 29, 2022. Her mother did not blame Pfizer.

Sep. 28, 2021 – Inverness, FL – 16 year old Antonio Hicks collapsed during football practice and died suddenly on Sep. 28, 2021. Associate Medical Examiner Dr. Shanedelle Norford identified hypertrophic cardiomyopathy as the cause of the teenager’s death. Norford also cited ventricular hypertrophy in her Dec. 29, 2021, autopsy report.

My Take…

Sometimes there is a congenital heart condition and it is falsely blamed. Sometimes there isn’t a congenital heart condition at all. I have seen much use of the word “possible”.

Every autopsy report I have seen in these cases is fraudulent. Why? None of the pathologists stained for mRNA or spike protein in the heart tissue. When these pathologists issue the final report, they are committing fraud because they reach a conclusion they couldn’t possibly have reached because the proper staining for a key complicating factor, was not done.

Having an underlying congenital heart anomaly or genetic predisposition is not a death sentence. Why does a young person live 20 years of their life just fine with their congenital heart anomaly, but they take an mRNA vaccine, drop dead a month or two later and it’s called a “natural cause of death” due to the anomaly that didn’t cause any problems for 20 years?

It makes no sense but I’m seeing more and more of these fraudulent “natural causes of death”

But silence from most families is what allows doctors to get away with injuring or killing their patients.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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I have had cardiologists from time to time look perplexed and say they “never” see COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis. Two prospective cohort studies show the rate of COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis is ~2.5% per shot.

I am seeing cases nearly every day in the office as a practicing internist and cardiologist. How can other cardiologists be blind to this tidal wave of cases?

Here are a some simple explanations:

1. When a patient suddenly dies in the field, many times the physician is never notified. Distant family members may not know the treating doctors. In the case of young persons, there may be no doctor at all. So the medical examiner signs off on the death certificate, many times, with no autopsy.

2. Electronic medical records in clinics and hospitals are not well-linked to state or national death registries. So by looking in a chart by chance, it would be impossible to know if someone had died.

It seemed to me that these were not enough. Something else must explain the blindness among cardiologists particularly to nonfatal cases. So I undertook a Twitter (X) poll.

As you can see, once a patient suffers vaccine-myocarditis, they do not return to the same doctor who recommended the vaccine. Patients feel disappointed and burned in not receiving full, free informed consent. They go to another doctor who likely would have warned them not to take the shot from the very beginning.

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Kiev’s officials continue to spread baseless narratives about the conflict, predicting that hostilities tend to expand to other territories in Eurasia, as the fighting has supposedly become a “war of resources”. Although there is a real risk of the conflict spreading to other regions, the rhetoric is wrong and this narrative helps to spread anti-Russian paranoia.

Lt. Col. Sergey Naev, commander of the Ukrainian Joint Forces, revealed his thoughts during an interview with ABC News. For him, with Russian stability and decreasing military support for Kiev, Moscow could go beyond Ukraine in its military maneuvers, involving more countries in hostilities. Naev claims that Russia currently receives weapons from North Korea and Iran and that it is producing enough military equipment to remain active in the conflict.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is losing Western support, receiving fewer and fewer weapons and money. Naev is worried about this scenario, since, for him, only with a strong Ukraine facing Russia will it be possible to prevent Moscow’s alleged expansionist plans. In this sense, he makes it clear that, despite difficulties, the Ukrainian armed forces are already preparing for the future of the conflict, improving defense lines to prevent the Russian advance.

“We are preparing for this. We build defenses, lay mines and train our forces”, he emphasized.

There are some different points in Naev’s words that need to be analyzed. First, it is necessary to emphasize that he is right in his assessment of the critical Ukrainian situation. With the reduction of resources given to the country by the West, Ukraine has terrible expectations for the near future in the conflict. Since the start of the war in Palestine, the Western focus has been on supporting Israel in its campaign of ethnic cleansing against the people of Gaza, which is why the “endless” source of resources for Ukraine is “drying up”.

As we know, Kiev no longer has enough strength to maintain hostilities in the long term and at some point the regime will be forced to surrender, even if this does not please Western sponsors. Having received numerous military packages, the Ukrainians were at least able to continue fighting (even without any chance of victory), but without this continuous help, not even this prolongment will be possible.

However, Naev is wrong to claim that the conflict has become a mere “resource war”. He spreads rumors by claiming that Moscow is supplied with Iranian and North Korean weapons. There are several accusations of this type, but no official confirmation has been given so far. Furthermore, even if Russia eventually purchases weapons abroad, the country is evidently not dependent on this military cooperation to achieve its objectives on the battlefield, being self-sufficient in its defense industry. On the other hand, as far as Ukraine is concerned, this self-sufficiency obviously does not exist, as the country depends on weapons and money from the West to fight.

Another problem in Naev’s assessment is the unfounded belief that Ukrainian failure will motivate Russia to start conflicts in other countries. By saying so, he disseminates the narrative that Russia has expansionist interests and will continue to fight to gain new territories, which is a lie. The Russian-majority territories were only reintegrated into the Federation because Kiev did not give any guarantee that it would protect the rights of the local people.

The liberation of territories is a reactive measure by Russia to simultaneously protect its citizens and guarantee security on its borders. Hostilities could have ended last year without any territory being added to the Federation, but the Kiev regime opted for war, so the Russians have no other alternative than to fight and reintegrate the new regions.

Therefore, it is not correct to say that an expansion of the conflict will occur as a result of Russian acts. If hostilities begin in any other country, it will certainly not be on Russian initiative, but by NATO itself, which has repeatedly shown interest in internationalizing its aggression against Russia, involving new territories in the war.

For a long time, the Western alliance has been causing chaos and destabilization in regions around Russia’s strategic environment, such as the Caucasus, Moldova, Belarus and others. Faced with the impossibility of defeating Moscow in a symmetric confrontation, the West is betting on the creation of multiple fronts, thus enabling a strategy of prolonged attrition to “wear down Russia”. So, although the possibility of expanding the conflict zone is real, it is not Russia’s fault.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

The region between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan where 7 million, mainly immigrant European Jews, including two million Russians, whose families were given a national identity by courtesy of an American-led United Nations, in 1947, now face 7 million Palestinian Arabs, kept for 75 years without any national identity as a deliberate policy of racial superiority and ethnic cleansing by an extremist, Right-wing Likud government of a violent, illegal occupier that is, inexplicably, supported by both the US and the UK with billions of dollars of arms and aid each year.

That money and those arms are used to supply guns, guided missiles, F-16 / F-35 US strike aircraft, helicopter gunships, nuclear-armed German-built, Dolphin-class submarines, ICMBs, SLBMs, artillery, ammunition, cluster bombs, bunker busting bombs, electronic defence and espionage systems, all of which have built the tiny Israeli state into the most heavily-armed, nuclear-weaponised power, on a per capita basis, in the world. That state is now under the control of a government run by a Prime Minister currently on trial charged with corruption.

That same government and Prime Minister have, in the past weeks, ordered their military to commit the mass murder of over 14,000 civilians in Gaza, mainly unarmed women and children, in revenge for a terrorist attack committed by Hamas on 7th October against Israeli kibbutzim in southern Israel in which over 1200 Israelis were killed and 200 hostages taken.

In a blatant violation of international law, the Israeli state has in the past days, killed thousands of innocent men, women and children, in an extraordinary, criminal, revenge atrocity against an unarmed civilian population, that has been under a blockade of essential goods, medicines and electricity for now 16 years.

Those killed in this mass murder were indigenous Muslim Arabs (as well as Christians), living in Gaza, in their traditional homeland of Palestine. They comprised the majority demographic of Palestine for well over a millennium, until 1948 when their land was forcibly partitioned by an American dominated, then newly constituted, United Nations, in New York.

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Hans Stehling is a regular contributor to Global Research.

The History of US-NATO Led Wars: “Exporting Democracy” Through Acts of Subversion and Infiltration

By Shane Quinn, November 28, 2023

The American-led NATO attacked Serbia and Montenegro with military aircraft between March to June 1999. The often indiscriminate manner of the NATO bombing resulted in more than 1,200 civilian deaths according to the Yugoslav Committee for Cooperation with UNICEF; but in fact the real number of civilian fatalities was significantly higher, and could have amounted to between 5,000 to 5,700 civilian lives lost as a result of less than three months (11 weeks) of NATO air raids.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC): The Weaponization of Money? WHO’s Health Tyranny: Towards a Totalitarian World Government? No Way!

By Peter Koenig, November 28, 2023

Two kinds of absolute controls are being prepared to implement The Great Reset, alias UN Agenda 2030. A potentially straitjacket and total control by programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and an all-oppressive health tyranny by WHO, overriding national Constitutional rights and national sovereignty as far as health measures are concerned.

Women’s Rights in Afghanistan: “Before” and “After” America’s Destructive Wars

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 27, 2023

This short article focusses on Women’s Rights in Afghanistan “Before” and “After” the conduct of Washington’s “Humanitarian War” against Afghanistan, which commenced at the height of the Cold War in 1979. It was a carefully planned  intelligence operation. The CIA was directly involved from the outset in recruiting and supporting the “Islamic brigades”.

Germany’s ‘Military Schengen’ Proposal: To Ease the Movement of NATO Troops across the European Union”

By Drago Bosnic, November 28, 2023

On November 23, Alexander Sollfrank, a Lieutenant General in the German Bundeswehr and effectively the chief of logistics in NATO, proposed the urgent creation of what he called a “military Schengen” to ease the movement of NATO troops across the European Union.

UNESCO’s Insidious Plan to “Regulate Social Media” and “Control Speech Online”

By Alex Newman, November 28, 2023

A powerful United Nations agency has unveiled a plan to regulate social media and online communication while cracking down on what it describes as “false information” and “conspiracy theories,” sparking alarm among free-speech advocates and top U.S. lawmakers.

America’s Military Deployment in the Asia-Pacific Region. “Deter China from Invading Taiwan”

By Hasan Erel, November 27, 2023

USA’s Asia-Pacific policies undoubtedly underwent a tactical change with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that broke out in Gaza and has a tendency to spread to the region. However, it is not possible to talk about a change of direction strategically or geopolitically.

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) After COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination — A Disabling Illness

By Dr. William Makis, November 27, 2023

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome can be one of the most painful health conditions known to man. The Frikha paper suggests that this COVID-19 Vaccine Injury is not a local traumatic injury of the arm that was injected, but rather an auto-immune attack on the body, since it attacked the knee.

“Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy”

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, November 28, 2023

Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history. Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time.

The Myth that Putin Was Bent on Conquering Ukraine and Creating a Greater Russia

By John J. Mearsheimer, November 28, 2023

There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022 (see below). These talks were facilitated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and featured detailed and candid discussions on the terms of a possible settlement.

Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners

By Jeremy Scahill, November 28, 2023

The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected.

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The combat capacity of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, has been seriously weakened by the shortage caused by the continuous supplies of material and ammunition to Kiev, said Johann Wadephul, German deputy of the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. His comments come as it was discovered nearly half of Germans want to see the coalition government dissolved.

“Crucial [German] troop units can only last a maximum of two days in a battle [due to these shortages]. And that is a catastrophic finding overall,” Wadephul said. “Anyone who even talks about being ready for war, but expects the Bundeswehr to be at least ready to defend itself, should have ensured that such a bad situation does not occur. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case.”

Wadephul argued that the process of improving the combat capacity of the country’s armed forces was slow and blamed the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, for the current state of things. He added that he sees high-sounding statements but little real action to change the current situation.

According to the politician, “the turning point” for the Bundeswehr has not yet arrived. 

“Even when it comes to replacement procurement, the Bundeswehr is actually making a loss. As correct as the donations to Ukraine are in terms of material and ammunition, in the current security situation, it is unacceptable that there is no compensation,” Wadephul said. “We need much more [weapons] than we have had.”

Wadephul’s warnings about the weakened state of the Bundeswehr come after the CEO of German steel giant Salzgitter Steel, Gunnar Groebler, warned that Germany will face deindustrialisation if companies continue to move production out of the country. In his words, the German government’s refusal to import Russian energy resources has worsened the industrial economic climate.

According to the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 32% of the companies surveyed are inclined to invest abroad amid “concern over a future without cheap Russian gas,” highlights the Financial Times.

The CEO of Germany’s second-largest steel company warned that large energy users must commit to the country as a basis to avoid the progressive deindustrialisation of Europe’s largest economy.

“If I were to follow that lead, then we are going to deindustrialise this country,” Groebler told the Financial Times.

The CEO stressed that if suppliers of raw materials for industry, such as steel and chemicals, leave Germany due to high energy prices, there is a risk of losing the entire value chain.

According to several economists cited in mid-October, Germany’s GDP declined 0.2% in the second quarter and will likely fall another 0.1% before the end of 2023. Recently, the German Constitutional Court prohibited the government from taking out new loans, so the country faces a freeze in public spending.

Almost half of Germans are in favour of dissolving the current government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and about a third blame him for the suspended budget, according to a survey carried out on November 24 by the sociological institute Civey for the German magazine Focus.

According to the survey, 49% of respondents want to see the “traffic light coalition” government, formed by Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens, dissolved. Respondents believe it would be better for the SPD to join the alliance of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) to form a new government.

Another 48% said the coalition’s plight could be due to a billion-euro hole in the German budget, which was created when a court ruled that redistributing money from unclaimed loans from previous years was illegal. As a result, the cabinet has lost the confidence of 64% of the population, according to the survey.

Respondents were almost evenly divided when asked who should be held responsible for the budget debacle: 28% blamed Scholz, 27% blamed Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens, and 25% blamed the Minister of the Treasury, Christian Lindner, of the FDP.

With the Bundeswehr in its weakest state in decades, companies threatening to leave the country due to crippling energy prices caused by the sanctions on Russian energy, and the current budget debacles, it is easy to see why Germans are frustrated with this government. These issues will unlikely be alleviated until Berlin returns to normalcy with Moscow.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

On November 23, Alexander Sollfrank, a Lieutenant General in the German Bundeswehr and effectively the chief of logistics in NATO, proposed the urgent creation of what he called a “military Schengen” to ease the movement of NATO troops across the European Union. Sollfrank complained that the current bureaucratic rules are a major obstacle to operations in Europe and that they’re supposedly “jeopardizing everyone” due to the mythical “Russian threat“. It should be noted that this isn’t the first time a German high-ranking official or military officer has suggested that Europe should prepare for war with Russia. Since the start of the special military operation (SMO), Berlin has been extremely hostile to Moscow, evoking its genocidal policies of the first half of the 20th century policies.

Germany’s ideas of racial superiority and desire for global dominance led to both world wars that killed up to 100 million people, the majority of whom were Russians (nearly 30 million in WWII only). Just like Berlin feels responsible for committing the Holocaust against Jews, it should be no different in regards to other peoples it killed en masse, including Russians/Soviets, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, etc. However, for some reason, Germany doesn’t feel the same responsibility toward any of these nations, particularly the Russians. Worse yet, German weapons have been killing the people of Donbass for nearly a decade now, while its unadulterated support for the Neo-Nazi junta is more than disturbing enough, as it’s yet another proof that Berlin has never actually renounced its Drang nach Osten ambitions.

Since last year, there have been several instances where Germany showed that its hatred for Russia hasn’t subsided in the least, as its Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock effectively declared war on Moscow, while the Bundeswehr even leaked plans for war against the Eurasian giant. The only difference is that this time, the conflict would be disguised as a “pan-European/Euro-Atlantic collective defense effort”. In this regard, Berlin’s actions are perfectly in line with the strategic goals of the United States and its other allies, vassals and satellite states. Namely, as Washington DC is shifting its attention to the Asia-Pacific region in an attempt to prevent Beijing’s rise to the world’s most dominant economy, it’s effectively delegating the so-called “containment of Russia strategy” to the EU.

Interestingly, this has led to some crawling tensions between Poland and Germany, as the former isn’t exactly thrilled to see Berlin “take the driver’s seat”, which is perfectly understandable given the murderous history of German militarism, with Poles usually being its first target for approximately a thousand years. In fact, despite the virtually endemic Russophobia in Poland, the Germans have been a far greater threat to Polish survival, which is something many Poles still remember vividly. However, for the time being, Warsaw will certainly continue playing along as it perceives Moscow as “the bigger threat”. At the same time, despite numerous divisions and power play games, NATO is still fairly united in the idea of using Ukraine as a source of cannon fodder to be thrown at the Russian military.

On the other hand, the EU has definitely exposed its role long before the SMO. Officially an economic alliance, the loose bureaucratic superstate demonstrated that it’s nothing more than a geopolitical pendant of NATO, and by extension, of the US. The EU “broke the ice” last year by officially sending weapons to the Kiev regime and hasn’t stopped doing so ever since. Its de facto unification with NATO structures is effectively over and the belligerent alliance is now simply looking for ways to make it de jure, which would give its forces free rein over the entire continent. The process of militarization of Europe is perhaps best seen in the speedy NATO accession of Finland and soon Sweden (de facto it’s already done). Normally, it takes years or even decades for any given country to join the belligerent alliance.

For its part, Russia will surely not leave this escalation unanswered. The Eurasian giant certainly anticipated such moves, so it’s making adequate preparations. In such a hostile environment, the return to the path of a virtually unrivaled military superpower is the only way for Moscow, despite its initial reluctance. For decades, Russia has been trying to create a comprehensive, mutually beneficial partnership with Europe. During the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, Moscow went through an unprecedented demilitarization process that is unheard of in the entire history of mankind. Never has a global power willingly renounced such military dominance over its mortal enemies. And yet, the Eurasian giant’s rivals saw it as a “victory” and an opportunity to escalate their all-out aggression against the entire world.

Thus, it can only be expected that Russia’s recovery and resurgence to superpower status is an unpleasant surprise for the self-styled “victors”. However, despite the expectations of the political West, Moscow will not be fighting a WWII-style war in case of yet another Western aggression. This time, its unrivaled strategic arsenal will make sure any such invasion force is obliterated from afar.

Russia could easily reactivate officially dormant projects such as the RS-26 “Rubezh” that would give it complete control over the entire European continent and ensure that no sizeable invasion force could be mustered with impunity. The missile is perfectly capable of carrying not just (MIRV multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) warheads, but also HGVs (hypersonic glide vehicles) that would ensure the near-instantaneous destruction of any enemy.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

The New York Times reported on Saturday that “experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.” 

ScheerPost publisher Robert Scheer commented on the importance of the piece, stating,

“The so-called paper of record finally acknowledges the unprecedented degree of violence visited upon civilians in Gaza by the Israeli government.”

Using U.S.-made bombs that weigh 2,000 pounds “that can flatten [apartment towers],” Israel has killed “roughly 10,000 women and children” according to the Times. Women and children make up almost 70 percent of all deaths reported in Gaza.

According to Rick Brennan, the regional emergency director for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean office, the opposite is typically expected. “In past clashes between Israel and Hamas, for example, about 60 percent of the reported deaths in Gaza were men,” according to the Times. 

Further, “U.S. military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb — a 500-pound weapon — was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria,” according to the Times. As the Times reported:

“‘It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,’ said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may ‘have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.’”

The paper also reported that

“People are being killed in Gaza more quickly…than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.”

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the Israeli military spokesperson, claims that civilian casualties are inevitable because of Hamas’s alleged strategy of deliberately embedding itself within the civilian population of Gaza. Gaza is, however, one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, standing 25 miles long and 5 miles wide. 

The Israeli military claims that the numbers of dead Palestinians reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry cannot be trusted because the Ministry operates under Hamas. Conricus claims

“We do a lot in order to prevent and, where possible, minimize the killing or wounding of civilians.” 

As the Times reported, international experts do not share the same skepticism of the Palestinian Health Ministry’s numbers that the Israeli government does:

“[Brian Castner, a weapons investigator for Amnesty International and a former explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Air Force,] said Israel appeared to be moving too quickly to reduce harm to civilians…”

“After initially questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration now concedes that the true figures for civilian casualties may be even worse.

Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told a House committee this month that American officials thought the civilian casualties were ‘very high, frankly, and it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited.’”

“While the experts urged caution around public statements about the specific number of people killed in a particular strike — especially in the immediate aftermath of a blast — they said the aggregate death tolls reported by the Gaza Health Ministry have typically proved to be accurate.”

The Intercept previously uncovered evidence that the Gaza Health Ministry numbers were accurate, and possibly underreported. 

Further, since Israel began its bombardment of hospitals in Gaza, recording the death toll has become increasingly challenging since the Gaza Health Ministry, according to international experts the Times spoke to, “gathers death figures from hospitals and morgues across the enclave, which tally the dead and report the names, ID numbers and other details of people killed.” The majority of Gaza’s hospitals have been shut down by Israel, which has necessitated “other government officials [to begin] updating the number of killed instead of the ministry,” according to the Times. 

The numbers will likely rise in the coming weeks.  After Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Israel launched a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off food, water, electricity, and fuel. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “this will be a long war.”

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Max Jones is a staff writer and video producer for ScheerPost. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Southern California, where he studied communications and screenwriting, he is following his post-USC plans to be an independent filmmaker and screenwriter, and a journalist at ScheerPost. He has covered various topics in both his web show Journalists for Sale and writing, focusing most heavily on issues of free speech, information warfare, and foreign policy.

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***

When this Whistleblower Exposed the Crimes of Obama’s Golf Partner and 12th Largest Campaign Contributor, the U.S. Justice Department Did the Honorable Thing—It Jailed the Whistleblower and Let Obama’s Golf Partner Walk Away Free

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Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history.

Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time.

The egregious double standard by which whistleblowers go to prison and those on whom they blow the whistle go free is all too typical in today’s two-tiered U.S. justice system.

In April, Apple whistleblower Ashley Gjovik wrote an article in CovertAction Magazine aptly entitled “Whistleblowers Are the Conscience of Society, Yet Suffer Gravely For Trying to Hold the Rich and Powerful Accountable For Their Sins.”

It detailed the backlash and abuse that whistleblowers often face and the impunity of those holding positions of power.

In Birkenfeld’s case, at least he was able to get the last laugh: After he applied for whistleblower status following his release from prison, the IRS awarded him a settlement of $104 million through their Whistleblower Office.

Source: twitter.com

Lucifer’s Banker

Birkenfeld told his incredible story in his memoir, Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy (Austin, TX: Greenleaf Press, 2016), which is being made into a movie. See Birkenfeld’s website for more information. See also his updated second edition: Lucifer’s Banker Uncensored: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy (Alexandria, VA: Republic Book Publishers, 2020).

Birkenfeld writes that he has “lived the life of an Ian Fleming character, which was all about thrill and that’s a hunger that can get you buried.”^[1]

Growing up in an upper middle-class home in Hingham, Massachusetts (his father was a neurosurgeon), Birkenfeld graduated from Norwich Military Academy in Vermont and then experienced his first taste of the corruption of the banking world working for State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston, where he first became a whistleblower.

The father of the bank’s CEO, Marshall N. Carter, perhaps not coincidentally, had been Deputy Director of the CIA.

After getting an MBA degree, Birkenfeld started working for Credit Suisse, then Barclays and then the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), the largest Swiss banking institution and private bank in the world.

Serving as a director and head of business development for the American desk, Birkenfeld became UBS’s highest paid employee when he signed a multi-billionaire Russian émigré to the U.S., Igor Olenicoff, with the promise of helping him to evade paying taxes on much of his fortune.

Birkenfeld’s boss, Christian Bovay, conceived the scam that Birkenfeld participated in by which UBS would charge a three percent management fee to its wealthy clients in exchange for helping them to evade paying taxes by placing it securely in one of the bank’s secret off-shore accounts.

Birkenfeld would make clients more money by investing, often in weapons manufacturers. Then when the clients needed their money, UBS would lend it back at a reasonable interest rate.

Birkenfeld wrote in Lucifer’s Banker that “UBS was making a fee for holding the guy’s cash in the first place, then making another fee for loaning him his own damn money! And guess what? That guy’s happy! He’s getting his deal done, and he’s still doing it with tax-free cash! I couldn’t believe it, and you know what? It worked, over and over again.”^[2]

Birkenfeld’s job was to travel to the U.S. frequently, to attend charity events and upscale social functions, and to woo wealthy new clients to the UBS Bank with an offer they couldn’t refuse.

UBS headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. [Source: wikipedia.org]

When asked by a prospective client what he could do for them, Birkenfeld’s stock answer was “three zeros: Zero income tax, zero capital gains tax; and zero inheritance tax.”

And he told them that, if the feds came nosing around, they were protected by Swiss laws.

Birkenfeld did very well with the arrangement by taking a cut of the investment, enabling him to purchase a $250,000 Ferrari Maranello and to live the high life.

Birkenfeld estimated that the total assets in the secret U.S. accounts acquired and invested by UBS in Switzerland totaled a whopping $20 billion.^[3]

With time, Birkenfeld wrote that his conscience began to bother him as he recognized that he was helping rich people to “not pay their share, while the tax man’s axe fell on those who couldn’t afford it.”^[4]

Birkenfeld decided to become a whistleblower on November 24, 2004, after his boss Christian Bovay issued a three-page internal memorandum, “Cross-Border Banking,” that specified that private wealth management employees should not do precisely what Birkenfeld and others had been doing—traveling to the U.S. seeking out clients by proposing to help them evade taxes in violation of U.S. laws.

Birkenfeld considered the memo to be a “cover-your-ass document,” whose purpose was for company management to wash its hands of activities carried out by company employees and, if they were investigated by police authorities, to create the false illusion that they did not support such practices.

Birkenfeld wrote: “Christian Bovay. That fucking slimy, rotten-toothed, dandruff-flinging scumbag. This was all him, all the way…We are all making a fucking fortune for the firm. Would they throw their best moneymakers under not merely a bus, but a bullet train? Yes they would…In a fucking heartbeat. That bastard Bovay was like Satan. And what did that make me? A trusting naïve dupe. Nothing more then Lucifer’s fucking banker.”^[5]

On October 5, 2005, Birkenfeld resigned from UBS and became an internal whistleblower. After a company review of its malpractice turned into a whitewash, Birkenfeld sued UBS and was given a payout of 575,000 Swiss francs.

He then decided to provide the information that he had to the U.S. Justice Department, telling his lawyers that his job had been to help wealthy American citizens “hide their money, avoid paying taxes, deceive spouses and business partners, and in effect defraud the U.S. government.”^[6]

According to Birkenfeld, UBS “not only encouraged these practices [but] trained us all on the methods of secret solicitation, as well as on how to dupe American federal authorities.”^[7]

In July 2008, Birkenfeld testified on the malfeasance of his and other Swiss banks before the U.S. Senate.^[8]

He thought that he would be welcomed by the Department of Justice lawyers as “an American patriot, a virtual Paul Revere”; instead, he was treated with hostility by them.

A key reason is that UBS was very well connected politically. President Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, for example, had been a partner at the well-connected law firm of Covington & Burling, one of whose biggest clients was UBS.

The chairman of UBS’s America Division, Robert Wolf, was also a golfing partner and the 12^th largest donor to President Obama who may have lobbied to help ensure that no UBS executives were prosecuted by the Department of Justice—only the whistleblower Birkenfeld.^[9]

Image: Obama shakes hands with Robert Wolf, the chairman of UBS’s America Division. [Source: voiceofdetroit.net]

According to The New York Times, Wolf raised over $500,000 for Obama’s election in 2012 and he served as an informal adviser to Obama after being appointed to the Economic Recovery Advisory Board from 2009-2011, the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness from 2011-2013, the Export Council from 2014-2016, and the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s Border Infrastructure Task Force in 2012. In 2017, Wolf was named to the board of directors for the Obama Foundation and chairs the foundation’s audit and risk committee.

When Birkenfeld learned that the Department of Justice would be prosecuting him and not his bosses, he said it was “like being thunderstruck by the revelation that your entire family had banded together, taken out a $5 million insurance policy on your life, and hired a hit man to put a bullet in the back of your skull.”^[10]

Later on, Birkenfeld learned of a secret deal cut by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey to resettle some Uyghur terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in Switzerland in exchange for protecting the 19,000 American account holders in UBS, some of whom were big-time donors to the Clinton Foundation.^[11]

Soon after this deal was struck, Bill Clinton was paid $1.52 million by UBS for a series of fireside chats with the bank’s Wealth Management Chief Executive, Bob McCann—Clinton’s biggest payday since leaving the presidency.

Most of Birkenfeld’s clients ultimately admitted to their guilt, signed on to amnesty programs, paid their fines and back taxes, and remained safe from any public revelations.

Igor Olenikoff pled guilty to a single felony count of filing a false tax return for 2002 and got off with a $52 million fine, which for him was small change.

But the Feds threw the book at Birkenfeld, who believed that DoJ lawyer Kevin Downing had a “psychotic obsession” with him.^[12]

During sentencing after his conviction, Birkenfeld was given more than three years in prison despite the judge receiving a supporting letter from Senator Carl Levin who said that the information he provided to the Senate subcommittee on banking that he headed was accurate, and enabled the subcommittee to initiate its investigation into the practices of UBS.

He received another letter of support from Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who said that Birkenfeld’s whistleblowing and cooperation with the SEC had resulted in a successful civil suit against UBS that brought $200 million in penalties to the SEC, while preventing UBS from further violating federal securities laws.^[13]

Two-Tiered Justice System

According to Birkenfeld, the U.S. Treasury loses $100 billion each year in tax revenues from off-shore tax abuses.^[14]

These are not victimless crimes, as this money could be put to good use in funding education, health care, public transportation and environmental clean-up in the U.S., which is urgently needed.

Birkenfeld’s story exposes at once both the corruption and venality of global bankers and the blithe disregard for the common good among America’s one percent of earners.

It also shows the two-tiered nature of the U.S. justice system, which goes after whistleblowers while granting impunity to those against whom they blow the whistle.

An even more tragic case then Birkenfeld is that of Daniel Hale, who faced 45 months in jail for leaking documents exposing the criminality of the U.S. drone war, and Julian Assange, who faces the prospect of life in prison for exposing war crimes by leaders who will probably never see the inside of a jail cell that they so richly deserve.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Bradley Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy (Austin, TX: Greenleaf Press, 2016), 4. 

2. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 71. 
3. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 174. 
4. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 86. 
5. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 103, 104, 106. Above Bovay was his superior in Zurich, Martin Liechti, and Raoul Weil, managing director of the entire UBS operation worldwide. 
6. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 134, 135. 
7. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 134, 135. 
8. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 173. 
9. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 257. 
10. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 164. 
11. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 231. 
12. More recently Downing was Paul Manafort’s attorney. 
13. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 241. 

14. Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 211. 

Featured image is from lucifersbanker.com

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***

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that military commanders and the political arena are not in the same space, demonstrating that his power is under threat, and not by Moscow, but from within his own ranks. This issue is only amplified by the fact that Zelensky’s Western partners have slowly begun abandoning him, especially since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.

Ukraine’s commander-in-chief of the General Staff, Valeriy Zaluzhny, has no war plan for 2024 and, therefore, must resign, said Verkhovna Rada deputy Maryana Bezuglaya, deputy head of the National Security Committee of the Verkhovna Rada. According to her, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces could not provide a plan for 2024, stating only that the army should be replenished with at least 20,000 recruits per month, an impossible number.

“The current situation is that if the military leadership fails to present any ideas for 2024, and all its mobilisation proposals boil down to the fact that it is more people without the slightest proposal for change in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, then such leadership must leave,” Bezuglaya said.

Her comments were preceded by statements Zelensky gave British tabloid The Sun on November 20, warning for Zaluzhny to stay out of politics.

“If a military man decided to do politics, it is his right, then he should enter politics and then he can’t deal with war. If you manage war keeping in mind that tomorrow you will do politics or elections, then in your words and on the front line you behave as a politician and not as a military man, and I think that is a huge mistake,” the Ukrainian president told the outlet.

According to The Sun, there are rumours that Zaluzhny will be a potential rival to Zelensky if he decides to pursue a political career.

“With all the respect to General Zaluzhny and to all the commanders who are on the battlefield, there is an absolute understanding of the hierarchy and that is it, and there can’t be two, three, four, five. It is one, in accordance with the law and in times of war this can’t even be discussed. That does not lead to the unity of the nation,” said the Ukrainian president.

Still, in Zelensky’s view, military personnel entering politics has been taking place in the country since 2014:

“Various political forces are pushing the military into politics. It was after 2014 when each political party wanted some military personnel and war stars, and I believe this was a big mistake.”

General Zaluzhny stated earlier this month that the conflict with Russia was at an impasse and that a breakthrough was unlikely.

He wrote in the Economist on November 1 that “the war is now moving to a new stage” and that “what we in the military call ‘positional’ warfare or static and attritional fighting, as in the First World War, in contrast to the ‘maneuver’ warfare of movement and speed” is now the norm and admitted that “There will most likely be no breakthrough.”

Zelensky, in the Sun, responded to Zaluzhny by saying,

“In the morale, there is no stalemate. We are at our home. Russians are on our land. Therefore there is no stalemate.”

The general enjoys widespread popularity in Ukraine – his supporters even stencilled his portrait in cities that the Ukrainian military recaptured from Russia last year. His words have influence. For this reason, Zelensky fears the repercussions of Zaluzhny revealing the actual situation in the conflict and, even more dangerously, pursuing a political career and taking complete state power.

Zelensky has recently sacked one of Zaluzhny’s deputies in charge of special forces, showing that the Ukrainian president is slowly trying to weaken the general’s power and influence.

Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SZRU) announced on November 17 the sacking of Oleksandr Tarasovsky as deputy head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. The reasons for his dismissal were not specified in Decree No. 757/2023. It cannot be overlooked that Tarasovsky’s sacking came only one day after Zelensky told journalists that several intelligence agencies had informed him about campaigns to destabilise his government.

In recent weeks, the Ukrainian president’s clashes with other authorities in Kiev have become public. It was reported that Zelensky fears a civil uprising against his government along the lines of the Maidan protests that ousted one of his predecessors, Viktor Yanukovych. 

Effectively, Zelensky is battling to stay in power in the face of internal and external pressure to end the war with Russia, which will mean acknowledging the loss of territory. Zelensky even cancelled the 2024 presidential elections despite protests from Washington, which sees the democratic process as a condition to continue selling its financial support for Ukraine to the American public.

It is recalled that the Biden administration’s latest request to send $61.4 billion in aid to Ukraine has not yet been approved. An NBC poll released on November 19 showed that US President Joe Biden’s approval rating has declined to 40%, the lowest level of his presidency, with most voters disapproving of his handling of foreign policy. These US domestic concerns will naturally have an impact on support for Ukraine, which is already being seen through the 30% drop in US artillery shell deliveries to Ukraine since October 7, the day Hamas unleashed its brutal attack on Israel, as revealed by a Ukrainian official to ABC News on November 21.

The Ukrainian president is desperately trying to maintain power in the face of threats and pressures domestically and abroad. With US support for Ukraine slowly diminishing in favour of Israel and mounting domestic backlash, it will only naturally reverberate badly on Zelensky’s ability to continue a costly and futile war against Russia. Although diminished US support weakens Ukraine’s ability to wage war, it will strengthen Zelensky’s potential detractors, including Zaluzhny.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers an address in Kiev, Ukraine, April 15, 2022. (Credit: Ukrainian Presidency)

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***

There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022 (see below). These talks were facilitated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and featured detailed and candid discussions on the terms of a possible settlement.

By all accounts, these negotiations, which took place in March-April 2022, were making real progress when Britain and the US told Ukrainian President Zelensky to abandon them, which he did.

Coverage of these events has focused on how foolish and irresponsible it was for President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to put an end to these negotiations, given all the death and destruction that Ukraine has suffered since then – in a war that Kyiv is likely to lose.

Yet an especially important aspect of this story regarding the causes of the Ukraine war has received little attention. The well-entrenched conventional wisdom in the West is that President Putin invaded Ukraine to conquer that country and make it part of a Greater Russia. Then, he would move on and conquer other countries in eastern Europe. The counter-argument, which enjoys little support in the West, is that Putin was mainly motivated to invade by the threat of Ukraine joining NATO and becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. For him and other Russian elites, Ukraine in NATO was an existential threat.

The negotiations in March-April 2022 make it clear that the conventional wisdom on the war’s causes is wrong, and the counter-argument is right, for two main reasons. First, the talks were directly focused on satisfying Russia’s demand that Ukraine not become part of NATO and instead become a neutral state. Everyone involved in the negotiations understood that Ukraine’s relationship with NATO was Russia’s core concern. Second, if Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine, he would not have agreed to these talks, as their very essence contradicted any possibility of Russia conquering all of Ukraine. One might argue that he participated in these negotiations and talked a lot about neutrality to mask his larger ambitions. There is no evidence, however, to support this line of argument, not to mention that: 1) Russia’s small invasion force was not capable of conquering and occupying all of Ukraine; and 2) it would have made no sense to delay a larger offensive, as it would afford Ukraine time to build up its defenses.

In short, Putin launched a limited attack into Ukraine for the purpose of coercing Zelensky into abandoning Kyiv’s policy of aligning with the West and eventually bringing Ukraine into NATO. Had Britain and the West not intervened to scotch the negotiations, there is good reason to think Putin would have achieved this limited objective and agreed to end the war.

It is also worth remembering that Russia did not annex the Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia until September 2022, well after the talks had ended. Had a deal been reached, Ukraine would almost certainly control a far greater share of its original territory than it does now.

It is becoming increasingly clear that in the case of Ukraine, the level of foolishness and dishonesty among Western elites and the mainstream Western media is stunning. See this.

See this and this.

See this, this and this.

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Featured image is from The Unz Review

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***

A powerful United Nations agency has unveiled a plan to regulate social media and online communication while cracking down on what it describes as “false information” and “conspiracy theories,” sparking alarm among free-speech advocates and top U.S. lawmakers.

This approach includes the imposition of global policies, through institutions such as governments and businesses, designed to stop the spread of various forms of speech while promoting objectives such as “cultural diversity” and “gender equality.”

In particular, the U.N. agency aims to create an “Internet of Trust” by targeting what it calls “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and “conspiracy theories.”

Examples of expression flagged to be stopped or restricted include concerns about elections, public health measures, and advocacy that could constitute “incitement to discrimination.”

Critics are warning that allegations of “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” have increasingly been used by powerful forces in government and Big Tech to silence true information and even core political speech.

Just this month, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released a report blasting the “pseudoscience of disinformation.”

Among other concerns, the committee found this “pseudoscience” has been “weaponized” by what lawmakers refer to as the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

The goal: silence constitutionally-protected political speech, mostly by conservatives.

Indeed, many of the policies called for by UNESCO have already been implemented by U.S.-based digital platforms, often at the behest of the Biden administration, the latest congressional report makes clear.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers nevertheless expressed alarm about the new UNESCO plan.

Image: Congressman McCaul addressing cybersecurity at Rice University (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5)

“I have repeatedly and publicly criticized the Biden administration’s misguided decision to rejoin UNESCO, putting U.S. taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times regarding the social-media plan.

Calling UNESCO a “deeply flawed entity,” Mr. McCaul said he is especially concerned that the organization “promotes the interests of authoritarian regimes—including the Chinese Communist Party.”

The CCP has repeatedly made clear that even while working in international organizations, CCP members are expected to follow communist party orders.

Lawmakers on the House Appropriations Subcommittee dealing with international organizations are currently working to cut or reduce funding to various U.N. agencies that lawmakers say are using U.S. taxpayer money improperly.

Already, the U.S. government has twice exited UNESCO—under the Reagan and the Trump administrations—due to concerns about what the administrations described as extremism, hostility to American values, and other problems.

The Biden administration rejoined earlier this year over the objections of lawmakers, The Epoch Times reported.

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The American-led NATO attacked Serbia and Montenegro with military aircraft between March to June 1999. The often indiscriminate manner of the NATO bombing resulted in more than 1,200 civilian deaths according to the Yugoslav Committee for Cooperation with UNICEF; but in fact the real number of civilian fatalities was significantly higher, and could have amounted to between 5,000 to 5,700 civilian lives lost as a result of less than three months (11 weeks) of NATO air raids.

Western interference in Serbia had been taking place for years prior to 1999.

The US and the European Union funnelled tens of millions of dollars into anti-government activities targeted at Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose defiance was unacceptable to Western politicians, mainly the Bill Clinton administration in Washington. Milosevic was pursuing independent foreign and domestic policies, the latter of which included his refusal to implement the neoliberal programs so heavily supported by the Americans and their European allies.

The Yugoslav city of Novi Sad on fire in 1999 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

In the 18 months before Milosevic’s presidency ended in October 2000, the US and the EU spent about $80 million on such areas as the opposition media in Serbia. Western funding stretched further back, to the mid-1990s, when large sums of US and EU money started to enter Serbia. Washington pursued this policy mostly through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which are closely linked to the White House.

American and European funds assisted anti-government political groups like Otpor, which was based in the Serbian capital Belgrade and wanted to overthrow president Milosevic. Paul McCarthy, a senior program officer for the NED in central and eastern Europe, revealed that after the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 the NED was granting aid to anti-government organisations in Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, including to Otpor. In 1999 Otpor also received almost $2 million from another Washington-funded group, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

Image is from TruePublica

The NED was undertaking subversive activities alongside the Soros Open Society Foundations, established three decades ago by wealthy businessman George Soros, who is a notorious meddler, supporter of liberalism and Western imperialist expansion. Soros’ actions are often compatible with US government policy.

The NED and the Soros foundations infiltrated media organisations, think tanks, trade unions, etc. After 1990 Soros spent over $100 million on supporting anti-Milosevic groups with Otpor among the beneficiaries. Soros invested $50 million in an effort to purchase the Trepca mines and factories, located mostly in Kosovo.

The US promoted its “export of democracy” through organisations like the NED, USAID, the CIA, Freedom House and the Soros foundations. They would serve as a front for regime change in countries independent of Western policy. The method was not very different from the 1953 British and American-backed ousting of Mohammad Mosaddegh’s government in Iran, after the Iranian prime minister had nationalised the British oil firms in the country.

The CIA and MI6 funded anti-government demonstrations in Tehran, with the goals of forcing Mosaddegh from power and bringing Iran back under Western domination. More recently, Soros has regularly made use of “activists” by placing them on his payroll and they then stoke unrest in a particular nation designated for regime change.

Tanks in the streets of Tehran, 1953. Coup supporters celebrate victory in Tehran (Licensed under the Public Domain)

US government supported groups also propped up the “colour revolutions” such as occurred 20 years ago in Georgia, which shares a more than 500-mile border with Russia and is a former Soviet republic. Historian Moniz Bandeira wrote,

“After the Clinton administration left office, the Pentagon’s leadership began drafting policies to use Georgia as a key player in the neo-containment policy. The goal was to prevent Russia from dominating the Caucasus region once again”.

Between 2002 and 2004 the administration of George W. Bush engineered a project called the Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP), which involved US military training of Georgian troops; and from 2005, the Georgia Sustainment and Stability Operations Program (GSSOP), entailing the dispatchment of US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and Marine Corps troops for the further training of Georgian military personnel. Georgian soldiers were involved in the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and they had participated in military activities in Kosovo.

As mentioned, in November 2003 in Georgia anti-government protests were taking place, dubbed in the West as the Rose revolution. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged that partaking in the demonstrations were “non-governmental organizations… supported by American and other Western foundations”.

Among those interfering in Georgia were Washington-funded groups such as USAID, the NED, Freedom House and the International Republican Institute. The Soros foundations, inevitably, were involved in instigating unrest in Georgia, and from August to October 2003 Soros spent $42 million in encouraging anti-government activities there.

The Soros foundations funded the Kmara opposition group in Georgia, as it had done with Otpor in Serbia. Kmara was supported too by the above-mentioned US government funded organisations. Moreover, the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, had a considerable role in planning and organising the “Rose revolution” through Washington. The Americans feared should events take an unwanted turn for them in Georgia, that the country would seek closer ties with its neighbour Russia.

Georgia was believed to be a strategically important state by the West, partly because of its location in the South Caucasus beside Russia and partly because it was a fossil fuel corridor. The US National Security Strategy for a New Century stated in December 1999,

“A stable and prosperous Caucasus and Central Asia will facilitate rapid development and transport to international markets of large Caspian oil and gas resources with substantial US commercial participations. Resolution of regional conflicts such as Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia is important for creating the stability necessary for development and transport of Caspian resources”.

Also in 1999 the US Congress sanctioned the Silk Road Strategy Act, to advance American interests and economic influence in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and to oppose the ambitions of Russia, Iran and China in the regions. The Silk Road Strategy Act outlined that the Caucasus/Central Asia could provide major quantities of oil and natural gas to America, while reducing the nation’s dependence on Middle East resources.

In the elapsing time America’s reliance on oil, already monumental, has further increased. In 2012 there were 248 million vehicles in the US. By 2022 there was almost a vehicle for every person in the US (291 million vehicles for 335 million people), whereas in China at the end of 2022 there were around 415 million vehicles in the country for 1.41 billion people.

There are clearly more vehicles in China by comparison to America, but per capita they remain well behind the Americans. In 2020 most households in China still did not possess a car, though that will certainly have changed by 2030 in both Chinese urban and rural areas. In America, 91.7% of all households possessed at least one car by 2021, with about 60% of American households having two cars or more.

Per capita the US continues to be the nation that is easily the biggest consumer of fossil fuels in the world, which has been the case for decades. The US military on its own burns through more fossil fuels each year than entire countries like Denmark or Portugal, which are not poor states either.

A year after the protests in Georgia, another “colour revolution” took place this time in Ukraine in November 2004, which was titled the Orange revolution by the Western media. Bandeira noted “just as in Georgia the movement [in Ukraine] was triggered by activists, militants of the organization PORA (It’s time) and of other American and European NGOs, including Vidrodzhenya (Revival), once again sponsored by George Soros, Freedom House, the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which sustained the campaign of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko“.

Orange-clad demonstrators gather in the Independence Square in Kyiv on 22 November 2004. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Since 1991, the US has spent many billions of dollars in an attempt to align former Soviet republics with the West, like Ukraine. This has usually involved funding the media to enable psychological warfare operations. The Pentagon pursued such a policy through the United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC), the State Department and groups like Freedom House and the NED.

Bandeira wrote, “The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the conflict in Ukraine had been triggered through outside pressure, in order to force Kiev to make a decision in favor of the West”. Ukraine gained an increased significance for the West this century as NATO continued with its reckless and provocative enlargement eastwards. Over the course of two years, 2003 and 2004, Bush’s government spent over $65 million in support of subversive political groups in Ukraine, including on a tour led by presidential hopeful Yushchenko, in order for him to meet authorities in Washington to convince them he would win the 2004 election against Viktor Yanukovych.

The International Republican Institute, overseen by US Senator John McCain, was also sponsoring Yushchenko’s campaign. The wife of Yushchenko, Kateryna Yushchenko, is an American citizen and she had worked in the White House in the Public Liaison Office during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. Yushchenko himself had worked in a far-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, while his wife was a director with the neoconservative think tank, the New Atlantic Initiative.

McCain and Soros had business dealings together and were friends. Upon McCain’s death in 2018, Soros wrote that he was “a brave warrior for human rights who stood up against repression and torture.” Soros forgot somehow that McCain had supported a number of unprovoked US wars including against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

After the Soviet Union’s 1991 disintegration, Soros’ Open Society Foundations poured tens of millions of dollars into Ukraine and invested money in other ex-Soviet republics, so as to make them “open” and “democratic”, in other words open to Western exploitation. From 1991 to 2011 the Soros foundations dispensed with $976 million in eastern European states and former Warsaw Pact countries. Some of the biggest recipients of this cash were publishers along with academic and cultural groups.

During an interview with CNN in 2014, Soros said that in 1989 he provided funds to dissidents in nations such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, when they were still part of the Warsaw Pact. Soros admitted that prior to Ukraine separating from the Soviet Union, he had created a foundation in Ukraine that was completely operational. Bandeira wrote that later on this Soros foundation “played an important role in the protests that erupted in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) after November 2013 and prompted the overthrow of President Yanukovych”.

Relating to Syria, president Bush, by way of an authorisation or finding in May 2007, permitted the CIA to implement covert actions to undermine and topple Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus. The desire to remove president Assad continued from 2009 into the administration of Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, as the latter attempted to sow disharmony in Syria while he repeatedly called for Assad to resign.

Obama was supported in his remarks by European leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel. She had previously provided strong backing for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, in spite of misgivings from most of the German public and from within her own party, the Christian Democratic Union.

One key reason for Washington’s desire to oust Assad was that he had rejected their proposal for a gas pipeline running through Syrian land, that was to eventually join up with the planned Nabucco gas pipeline, which was designated to transport gas from the Caspian Sea to the Middle East and Europe. Assad was pursuing policies independent of the Western liberal order and, partly because of this, the Syrian leader was demonised by American and European politicians who wanted regime change in Syria.

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This article was originally published on Geopolitica.RU.

Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree and he writes primarily on foreign affairs and historical subjects. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA (Springer; 1st edition, 23 June 2017)

“China registers 415 million motor vehicles, 500 million drivers”, Xinhua, 8 December 2022

Elizabeth Rivelli, “What is average mileage per year?”, Caranddriver, 24 February 2023

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st edition, 4 February 2019)

Charlotte Potts, “Merkel speaks; DW checks the facts”, Deutsche Welle, 30 July 2016

Jacob Grandstaff, “George Soros, John McCain, and Immigration”, Capital Research Center, 10 July 2017 

Featured image is from Geopolitica.RU

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First published on November 1, 2023

***

The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.

The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.

The existence of the document does not necessarily indicate that its recommendations are being considered by Israel’s defense establishment. Despite its name, the Intelligence Ministry is not directly responsible for any intelligence body, but rather independently prepares studies and policy papers that are distributed to the Israeli government and security agencies for review, but are not binding. The ministry’s annual budget is NIS 25 million and its influence is considered relatively small. It is currently headed by Gila Gamliel, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party.

However, the fact that an Israeli government ministry has prepared such a detailed proposal amid a large-scale military offensive on the Gaza Strip, following Hamas’ deadly assault and massacres in southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, reflects how the idea of forced population transfer is being raised to the level of official policy discussions. Fears of such plans — which would constitute a serious war crime under international law — have grown in recent weeks, especially after the Israeli army ordered about 1 million Palestinians to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip ahead of escalating bombardment and incremental ground incursions.

The document recommends that Israel act to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” during the war; establish tent cities and later more permanent cities in the northern Sinai that will absorb the expelled population; and then create “a sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt, and [prevent] the return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel.” At the same time, governments around the world, led by the United States, must be mobilized to implement the move.

A source in the Intelligence Ministry confirmed to Local Call/+972 that the document was authentic, that it was distributed to the defense establishment by the ministry’s policy division, and “was not supposed to reach the media.”

‘Make It Clear There Is No Hope of Returning’

The document unequivocally and explicitly recommends transferring Palestinian civilians from Gaza as the desired outcome of the war. The existence of the plan was first reported last week in the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, and the full text of the document is published and translated here [see Annex below for the full document].

The transfer plan is divided into several stages.

In the first stage, action must be taken so that the population of Gaza “evacuates south,” while the air strikes focus on the northern Gaza Strip.

In the second stage, a ground incursion into Gaza will begin, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip from north to south, and the “cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.”

Concurrently with the re-occupation of Gaza, Palestinian civilians will be moved into Egyptian territory, and not be allowed to return. “It is important to leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,” the document states.

According to an official in the Intelligence Ministry, the ministry’s personnel stand behind these recommendations. The source stressed that the ministry’s research is “not based on military intelligence” and serves only as a basis for discussions within the government.

The document proposes promoting a campaign targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza that will “motivate them to accept this plan” and lead them to give up their land. “The messages should revolve around the loss of land, making it clear that there is no hope of returning to the territories Israel will soon occupy, whether or not that is true. The image needs to be, ‘Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership — there is no choice but to move to another place with the assistance of your Muslim brothers,’” the document reads.

In addition, the document encourages the government to lead a public campaign in the Western world to promote the transfer plan “in a way that does not incite or vilify Israel.” This would be done by presenting the expulsion of Gaza’s population as a humanitarian necessity to win over international support, by arguing that relocation will lead to “fewer casualties among the civilian population compared to the expected casualties if the population remains.”

The document also says that the United States should be enlisted in the process to exert pressure on Egypt to absorb the Palestinian residents of Gaza, and that other European countries — particularly Greece and Spain — as well as Canada should help absorb and settle the Palestinian refugees. The Ministry of Intelligence said the document was not yet formally distributed to U.S. officials, but only to the Israeli government and security agencies.

A Wider Policy Discussion

Last week, the Misgav Institute, a right-wing think tank headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, a close associate of Prime Minister Netanyahu and a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, published a position paper that similarly called for the forced transfer of Gaza’s population to the Sinai. The institute recently deleted the post from Twitter and from its website after drawing strong international censure.

The deleted study was written by Amir Weitmann, a Likud activist and, according to sources familiar with him, a close associate of Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel. Last week, on a Facebook page named “The Plan to Rehabilitate Gaza in Egypt,” Weitmann interviewed Likud MK Ariel Kallner, who told him that “the solution you propose, to move the population to Egypt, is a logical and necessary solution.”

This is not the only connection between the Likud, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the right-wing think tank. About a month ago, the Ministry of Intelligence pledged to transfer about NIS 1 million from its budget to the Misgav Institute to conduct research on Arab countries. If the Misgav Institute was somehow involved in drafting the ministry’s Gaza transfer recommendations, its logo, at least, does not appear on the document.

Sources in the Ministry of Intelligence said that the Gaza report was an independent study conducted by the ministry’s policy division, without the cooperation of an external party, but they did confirm that the ministry had recently begun working with the Misgav Institute, stressing that the government body works with various research groups with diverse political agendas. The Misgav Institute has not yet responded to queries for this article.

In addition, the Intelligence Ministry’s document was first leaked in a small internal WhatsApp group of right-wing activists who, together with Likud advocate Whiteman, promote the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and the transfer of Palestinians living there.

According to one of these activists, the Intelligence Ministry document reached them through the mediation of a “Likud source,” and its public distribution is related to an attempt to find out whether “the Israeli public is ready to accept ideas of transfer from Gaza.”

The Preferred Option

The chances of fully implementing such a plan, which would amount to the total ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, are negligible in many respects.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has declared that he strongly opposes opening the Rafah Crossing to absorb the Palestinian population from Gaza.

He argued that the displacement of Palestinians to the Sinai would threaten Israeli peace with Egypt, and warned that it would lead to Palestinians using Egyptian territory as a base to continue armed confrontations with Israel. A similar plan has been presented in the past by Israeli officials, and until now, it too had not matured into a serious policy discussion.

Moreover, after weeks of reports that the United States was attempting to raise the possibility of moving Palestinians to Egypt as part of a “humanitarian corridor,” U.S. President Joe Biden asserted yesterday that he and Sisi were committed to “ensuring that Palestinians in Gaza are not displaced to Egypt or any other nation.”

I also spoke with President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to share my appreciation for Egypt facilitating the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

We reaffirmed our commitment to work together and discussed the importance of protecting civilian lives, respect for international…

— President Biden (@POTUS) October 29, 2023

The Intelligence Ministry document states that Egypt will have an “obligation under international law to allow the passage of the population,” and that the United States can contribute to the process by “exerting pressure on Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to contribute to the initiative, either with resources or with the absorption of displaced persons.” It also proposes conducting a dedicated public campaign aimed at the Arab world, with a “focus on the message of assisting the Palestinian brothers and rehabilitating them, even at the price of a tone that rebukes or even harms Israel.”

Finally, the document notes that the “large-scale migration” of non-combatants from combat zones is a “natural and sought-after outcome” that has also occurred in Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, concluding that only the expulsion of the Palestinian population will constitute “an appropriate response [that] will enable the creation of significant deterrence in the entire region.”

The document presents two other options regarding what to do with the residents of Gaza the day after the war. The first is to allow the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by the Fatah party in the occupied West Bank, to rule Gaza under Israeli auspices. The second is to cultivate another “local Arab authority” as an alternative to Hamas. Both options, the document claims, are undesirable for Israel from a strategic and security perspective, and will not provide a sufficient message of deterrence, especially to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The authors of the study also noted that bringing the PA into Gaza was the most dangerous option of the three, because it could lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“The division between the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria and Gaza is one of the main obstacles today preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. It is inconceivable that the outcome of this attack [Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacres] will be an unprecedented victory for the Palestinian national movement and a path to the creation of a Palestinian state,” the document said.

The document further argues that a model of Israeli military rule and PA civilian rule, as exists in the West Bank, is likely to fail in Gaza.

“There is no way to maintain an effective military occupation in Gaza only on the basis of military presence without [Israeli] settlements, and within a short time there will be internal Israeli and international pressure for withdrawal.”

The authors added that in such a situation, the State of Israel “will be considered a colonial power with an occupying army — similar to the current situation in Judea and Samaria, but even worse.” They noted that the PA has low legitimacy among the Palestinian public, and that based on Israel’s previous experience of handing over control of Gaza to the PA and Hamas’ eventual takeover, Israel should not “repeat the same mistake that led to the current situation.”

The other option, the formation of a local Arab leadership to replace Hamas, is undesirable according to the document, because there are no local opposition movements to Hamas and a new leadership is liable to be more radical. “The most plausible scenario is … not an ideological shift but rather the emergence of new, possibly even more extreme, Islamist movements,” it said. The authors mention the necessity of “creating ideological change” in the Palestinian population through a process of what it likens to “de-Nazification,” requiring Israel to “dictate the school curricula and enforce its use for an entire generation.”

Finally, the document argued that if Gaza’s population remained in the strip, there would be “many Arab casualties” during the anticipated re-occupation of the territory, which would damage Israel’s international image even more than expelling the population. For all these reasons, the Ministry of Intelligence’s recommendation is to promote the permanent transfer of all Palestinian civilians from Gaza to the Sinai.

The Defense Ministry, the army spokesperson’s office, and the Misgav Institute did not yet respond to +972’s requests for comment by the time of this article’s publication. Any responses received will be added here.

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Yuval Abraham is a journalist and activist based in Jerusalem.

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Annex: Israeli Intelligence Ministry Policy Paper on Gaza’s Civilian Population, October 2023

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***

 

 

 

“To the generals who have accompanied me in recent weeks, it seems we will part ways tomorrow, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your extraordinary humanity shown towards my daughter, Emilia.

You were like parents to her, inviting her into your rooms whenever she desired. She acknowledges feeling like all of you are her friends, not just friends, but truly beloved and good.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for the many hours you spent as caregivers.

Thank you for being patient with her and showering her with sweets, fruits, and everything available even when it was not.

Children should not be in captivity, but thanks to you and other kind people we met along the way, my daughter felt like a queen in Gaza…

In general, she acknowledges feeling like the center of the world. She hasn’t met anyone on our long journey, from the rank and file to the leadership, who didn’t treat her with gentleness, affection, and love.

I will forever be a prisoner of gratitude because she did not leave here with a lifelong psychological trauma. I will remember your kind behavior, granted here despite the difficult situation you were dealing with yourselves and the severe losses you suffered here in Gaza. I wish in this world we could truly be good friends.

I wish you all health and well-being… Health and love to you and your families’ children.

Many thanks.

Danyal and Emilia”

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***

The Israeli government narrative surrounding the Palestinian prisoners being released during this temporary ceasefire is both insidious and dishonest. Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has banned Palestinians from celebrating their release. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” He told Israeli police to deploy an “iron fist” to enforce his edict.

The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected. Israel released a list of the names with alleged crimes they committed. And who is making these allegations? A military that acts as a brutal occupation force against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The vast majority of the 300 Palestinian prisoners proposed for release by Israel are teenage boys. According to the list, 124 of the prisoners are under the age of 18, including a 15-year-old girl, and many of the 146 who are 18 years old turned so in Israeli prisons. According to the definitions laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel. 

Of the 300 names Israel proposed for potential release, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes; they are categorized simply as “under arrest.” Police and prosecutors all over the world make allegations later proven false during a fair trial. The Israeli narrative promotes the fiction that these Palestinians are in the middle of some sort of fair judicial proceeding in which they will eventually be tried in a fair and impartial process. This is a complete, verifiable farce. Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts. They often are denied access to lawyers and to purported evidence against them, and are regularly held in isolation for extreme periods and subjected to other forms of abuse. Israel is the only “developed” country in the world that routinely tries children in military courts, and its system has been repeatedly criticized and denounced by major international human rights organizations and institutions.

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As the truce between Hamas and Israel takes effect on Friday, Palestinians inspecting their neighbourhoods find their city in ruins and wounded civilians sheltering at al-Shifa hospital are still waiting for a way out

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First published on November 14, 2023

***

As the Israeli military enters the second month of its operation in Gaza, questions continue to swirl around the exact nature of U.S. support for the war, with major potential implications for American interests in the Middle East.

The Pentagon has been fairly transparent about its actions outside of Israel, including the decision to move two aircraft carrier strike groups into the Middle East, among other naval assets and missile defense systems. But two more sensitive issues remain shrouded in mystery: What exactly are American special forces doing in Israel? And what weapons is the U.S. now giving to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)?

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***

First published on November 1, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

I am not a practitioner, in the usual sense of the word, of a religion or an esoteric current.

On the other hand, I have read a lot, studied, reflected, curious about everything, open to everything.

I don’t exclude anything, I go everywhere, especially if an authority tells me, without any other argument than his “authority”, not to go there.

Thanks to this quality (considered a danger by some), I continue to learn, tirelessly.

As an “orthodox” doctor from a Belgian university and a classical curriculum, I have long followed the marked path, walked in the right direction and crossed when the light turns green, almost always.

Curiosity, an incurable flaw in me, has led me on the side roads, where you meet people, tread on soil, unearth treasures qualified by those who mark the roads and crosswalks, corrupt sources (modern expression: “fake news”), untrustworthy teachers.

I am not a guru, nor is Alexander De Croo, Young Global Leader 2015, Alexander De Croo becomes Young Global Leader | Focus on Belgium, nor are Edouard Philippe and President Macron, Young Global Leaders respectively in 2011 and 2012, or Olivier Véran in 2019, Emmanuel Macron and Edouard Philippe, these “young leaders” who govern us – Gala.

Check for yourself, all the heads or deputy heads of the governments that applied the roadmap in 2020, the plan established by the cartel of true gurus, have been Young Global Leaders of the “Great Reset World Economic Forum Cult”.

No, I am not a guru, no more or less than Bill Gates or Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (head of the World Health Organization) who, however, without being a healer or a doctor, are dragging the world into their health terrorist ideology.

On the other hand, yes, I have been a doctor for 25 years, an anesthesiologist for 17 years (someone who puts people to sleep and wakes them up, puts them to sleep to avoid suffering and wakes them up to give them back their autonomy).

With my curiosity, my learning and my openness to everything that can help humanity, without taboos or censorship, I say to all humanity to stop this race to death.

Get off the crazy train.

I know, it is scary, it can hurt, and at the same time, as long as you feel the pain, you are alive.

Take back your physical and intellectual autonomy and protect your children.

These Young Global leaders who have become “Leaders” (gurus) do not want to do you any good.

Under the cover of these lethal injections (immediately or remotely by sterilization), so many Trojan horses of death in your body, in your mind and in your soul, they make you believe that they want to save you.

They don’t. It’s convincing, well presented, but it’s not true.

If they wanted to save you, they would have told you a long time ago to move more, to eat better (really, not diet products that poison you as much as “heavy” products, Reassessing the risks of aspartame. New experimental and epidemiological data), to manage your stress on a daily basis, to take care of your microbiota, to take food supplements, some of them all year round in a country like Belgium (vitamin D).

This is only possible, unfortunately, thanks to the complicity of certain people who run the institutions that are supposed to protect us and the main media that are supposed to inform us.

As Professor Nagarra says to the prosecutor Henry Volney (Yves Montand) in Henri Verneuil‘s film I Comme Icare:

“A tyrant needs above all a tyrant-state, so he will use a million little civil servant tyrants who each have a trivial task to perform, and each will perform that task competently, and without remorse, and no one will realize that he is the millionth link in the final act.

Some will arrest the victims, they will have committed only simple arrests, others will lead these victims to camps. They will have only done their job as locomotive engineers, and the prison director opening his doors will have only done his duty as a prison director. Of course the bosses use the cruelest individuals in the final violence, but at every link in the chain, obedience has been made comfortable.” © Henri Verneuil, I comme Icare, 1979.  (emphasis added)

Does this remind you of anything?

Encouraged denunciation, violence on defenseless citizens trivialized, even justified, citizens excluded from hospitals for the only “crime” of not “yet” being injected with an experimental product, that salesman in a household appliance store who orders you to put on your mask properly, the bar owner transformed into both a policeman and a doctor since you must now show him your health condition.

Where do you think this is going?

Trailer of  I Come Icare (2’56”)

Saying it now, which is considered shocking by the same people who tell you that everything is fine, is the only chance to avoid crossing the threshold beyond which all hope of avoiding the repetition of history will be definitively lost.

Who is Pfizer to be so “powerful” in the end?

Despite the total number of deaths due to vaccination, even this official figure of 15,937 deaths from the United States’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)-period from December 14, 2020 to September 24, 2021)-which is known to be greatly underestimated, Pfizer, with its heavily loaded criminal record, continues, remains in the running (Pfizer’s criminal record and its killer “vaccine” (reseauinternational.net)

The “vaccine poison” imposed at the level of the entire planet is produced by a pharmaceutical company which was indicted by the US Department of Justice (2009) on charges of “fraudulent marketing”. 

 

Pfizer is now attacking pregnant women throughout their pregnancy, women who have given birth despite 1444 declared miscarriages (in reality much more) or premature, malformed births.

Some women put pressure on themselves to resist, to call for help or to alert (“The hand on the cradle”, Big Pharma extends its injections to pregnant women and children – Les Maîtres du Monde – Sott.net) but it is Pfizer’s pressure that systematically wins.

So, logically, since we let them do it, Pfizer is attacking children from 5 to 11 years old, with an emergency request for authorization for their toxic product, while 21 young people from 12 to 17 years old have recently died in the United States.

The only thing new in their lives? Having accepted Pfizer’s toxic product.

Seriously, do we need to do autopsies to convince you?

When almost no one under the age of 30, unless they had a prior debilitating illness, died from COVID-19 or had any serious form.

Who is Pfizer?

Who is Big Pharma?

Behind these companies are people, names, authorized officials.

From now on, let’s mention these names that serve the System, called Sauron in the Lord of the Rings.

We could call the current System, the Lord of the ‘vaccines’, with Sauron at its head, Balrogs at its service, zealous servants, useful ‘idiots’ (cf. I for Icarus), traitors (Saruman), people who watch and others who wait.

Do not laugh.

The analogy is realistic.

Words are important!

They unknowingly activate concepts deeply embedded in our individual and collective unconscious: the archetypes dear to Carl Jung.

Despite the evidence, the increasingly solid proofs and the increasingly convincing testimonies, the ‘vaccines’, even before Covid, are not the benefactors of humanity (Enquête Choc – Les vaccins ont-ils vraiment sauvé l’humanité ? – Health and Wellness – Sott.net), but it takes time to pull an archetype from its golden pedestal.

Today, the concept of ‘vaccine’ used as a Trojan horse, allows a firm with a criminal record, hit with the biggest federal fine in the history of the United States, associated with BioNTech, and other equally disreputable firms to drag part of humanity that bothers them (you and me) towards an extinction that will owe nothing to chance, with the complicity of swindlers with white teeth, dressed in design suits.

Some go happily, singing, following the Pied Piper.

Others go because they feel guilty for being alive: criminal gurus have succeeded in making them believe that they are the ones responsible for climate change, racism against people of color (white is a color), terrorism, inequalities, crises and today, pandemics.

Yes, for “Sauron the system”, we will never wash our hands enough, we will never put our mask on well enough and we will never accept enough of their products (falsely called vaccines) in our bruised body.

Some, the worst, go there knowingly, either to scratch some advantage or to shine like a light of Udûn*.

Be careful with words. Do not use the words of the Enemy.

Ban the word that starts with v and ends with ne! And words like ‘mandatory’, ‘containment’, ‘mask’, ‘hand washing’, ‘social distancing’… their words, their expressions used on purpose to wrap their poisons in a powerful and saving archetypal concept (perceived as such by the majority of humanity), to better make them accepted by a population more and more “hypnotized” through fear, repetition, confusion and pattern breaks (tools used to unknowingly put a person in hypnosis, a state of consciousness characterized by hypersuggestibility, an exaggerated sensitivity to influence).

Use the actual words for what these things really are:

• V…ne = transgenic injection
• Mask = respiratory barrier
• Hand washing = compulsive hygiene disorder
• Social distancing = social isolation

These are propositions.

The most important thing is to have understood why these semantic considerations are crucial in our fight against the current transgenic ideology.

I am specifically addressing all those who have understood, who have opened their eyes to all this today.

In this particularly dark passage of the first part of the Lord of the Rings (“The Fellowship of the Ring”), in the Moria, the cellars of Khazad-dûm, the spectator-reader sees two fires confronting each other.

Gandalf against the Balrog. Anor [the Sun] against Udûn [Hell]. The Flame can serve the Good, it can serve the Evil. The Flame can warm you, as it can burn you.

What a fabulous message of hope to all the planet still free and alive.

Udûn will not pass, thanks to each of you, small and big flames of Anor.

***

Que veut dire Gandalf par « Feu secret », « Flamme d’Anor » et « Flamme d’Udûn » ? (askfrance.me) Anor is a name for the Sun in Middle-earth, while Udûn (which translates as Hell) is the name of one of the first lairs of Morgoth, the Master of Sauron. “I have the power of good on my side, you have the power of evil’.

Dr. Pascal Sacré received his medical degree in Belgium in 1995. He started a specialty in anesthesia and resuscitation in 1997, completed in 2002 and completed a specialty in critical care in 2003.

He has been working in hospitals since then, in intensive care, with a 2.5 year stint in a burn center (Queen Astrid Military Hospital HMRA in Brussels) between 2009 and 2011. Since 2011, he works in a medical-surgical intensive care center in Charleroi, Belgium. He is trained in hypnotherapy in medical settings since 2014 and as such, he is responsible for stress management trainings for his hospital staff.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Translation by Global Research

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[This article was first published on November 20, 2018.]

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“Grieved by the loss of their lands, dissatisfied with reservation (aka, concentration camp)life, and ultimately brought to a condition of near starvation, the Dakota people appealed to US Indian agencies (involving ex-Minnesota governors Sibley and Ramsey) without success. The murder of five whites by four young Dakota Indians ignited a bloody uprising in which more than 300 whites and an unknown number of Indians were killed. In the aftermath, 38 Dakota captives were hanged in Mankato (the day after Christmas Day 1862) for ‘voluntary participation in murders and massacres,’ and the Dakota remaining in Minnesota were removed to reservations in Nebraska. Meanwhile, the Ojibwa were relegated to reservations on remnants of their former lands.

“What happened to the Dakota in 1862 and afterward was a grievous crime against humanity. If it had occurred in this present day and age the United Nations and the international community would condemn it and declare it to be ethnocide and genocide. A United Nations world court indictment would be issued and the perpetrators of this ethnocide and genocide would be rounded up, tried, convicted and punished for crimes against humanity.” — Thomas Dahlheimer from his long essay, entitled, A History Of The Dakota People In The Mille Lacs Area

“Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To them, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture. Participants in a National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.” — Text of a plaque on Cole’s Hill, overlooking Plymouth Rock

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There is no historical evidence that the First Thanksgiving actually occurred in the year 1621, as most of us Americans have been carefully taught, but there is also no historical documentation that any Native Americans were invited to attend any of the fall harvest celebrations that any Pilgrims ever hosted. Some accounts suggest that about 90 Wampanoag heard the settlers firing guns and came to see the cause of the stir or even ready to enter battle.

The story about how the aboriginals traded with the invading Pilgrims and taught them how to hunt and cultivate crops is usually exaggerated.

The Pilgrims found good land to establish as their new home in Plymouth was due to the fact that a smallpox epidemic had wiped out a Wampanoag village there before they arrived. Squanto, the aboriginal who aided the Pilgrims, was later sold into slavery in Spain. He actually learned English in order to escape his enslavement, but when he returned home, his entire tribe was dead.

The alleged “celebration” in 1621 did not mark a turning point in native vs. foreigner relationships and, whatever actually happened, did not become an annual event. In fact, relations between the native peoples and the Pilgrims deteriorated, and actually led to many wars. In fact, in 1637, following the death of a single Pilgrim (that they believed had been caused by an Indian), the Pilgrims burned their village and massacred at least 400 men, women and children.

Following that massacre, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for “the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” Typical puritanical Christianity!

Over the decades I have been re-learning many of the myths that my teachers taught me over my lifetime – including the lies about the First Thanksgiving. The patriotic stories about how Minnesota conquered the aboriginals that once occupied the territory are at least as distorted.

The quotes and text that follows represent my attempt to correct the record. Some quotes are important to note.

“The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” – Alexander Ramsey, Minnesota’s second Governor

Gov. Ramsey’s Thanksgiving Proclamation – November 3, 1862

“WHEREAS, 

“I, Alexander Ramsey, Governor of the State of Minnesota, do hereby set apart the twenty-seventh day of the present month of November, as a Day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God for his wonderful mercy towards us–for all the good gifts of His providence–for health and restored domestic peace–and the measure of general prosperity which we enjoy.

“Especially let us recognize His mercy in that He has delivered our borders from the savage enemies who rose up against us, and cast them into the pit they had privily dug for us; that our friends have been rescued from the horrors of captivity, and that our homes and household treasures are now safe from the violence of Indian robbers and assassins.

“And let us praise Him for the continued preservation of the Government of our Fathers, from the assaults of traitors and rebels; for the sublime spirit of patriotism, and courage, and constancy with which He has filled the hearts of its defenders; for the victories won by the valor of our troops; for the glorious share of Minnesota in the struggles and triumphs of the Union cause; for the safety of her sons who have passed through the fire of battle unscathed, and the honorable fame of the gallant dead; for the alacrity and devotion with which our citizens have rushed from their unharvested fields to the standard of the nation; and, above all, and proclaim FREEDOM as the condition and the law of a restored and regenerated Union.

“Given under my hand and the Great Seal of the State, at the City of St. Paul, this third day of November, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two”.

We sports-addicted, shop-until-you-drop, historically-illiterate, couch potato Americans have been the unwitting beneficiaries of 500 years of genocide against Native Americans who owned and occupied the continent that we falsely call our own. The lies our teachers taught us in our history classes have been happily perpetrated by historical figures such as Minnesota’s first two governors (Henry Hastings Sibley and Alexander Ramsey) and many others like them.

The original occupants of South, Central and North America (especially Canada and what now constitutes the United States) were over-powered by wealth, numbers and advanced technology that made mass murder of fingered enemies more efficient. The uncountable numbers of crimes against humanity have been waged against the aboriginal tribes that had occupied the two continents for thousands of years before Columbus accidentally bumped into the east coast. (Most of the actual killing was done not by the ruling elites, but by the ruthless soldiers who were mindlessly obedient to their political and economic superiors.)

The genocide began in 1492 when the gold-hungry white supremacist Christopher Columbus and his well-armed, sex-starved sailors disembarked from their stinking ships thinking that they had landed in India. Calling the inhabitants “Indians”, they set about pillaging the land, raping the female inhabitants while their priests converted the “heathens” to their brand of punitive, pro-homicide Christianity.

Columbus and his men eventually demanded, under the threat of cutting the native’s  hands off, that the non-white “sub-humans” produce allotments of gold from precious metal-less mines. All of this satanic cruelty was accomplished with the blessings of the priests.

Native Americans, whose hunting weapons were inferior to those war-making weapons of the foreign invaders, preferred self-exile or even death to the dishonor of submitting to slavery and so they refused to become slaves – nor would their tribal cohorts collaborate with their enslavement. And when they were forced from their ancestral lands by so-called Christian presidents like the acknowledged murderer Andrew Jackson, they tried to re-establish their tribal cultures further west.

Those of us modern-day Minnesotans who have Caucasian ancestors have benefitted from both the American and Minnesotan massacres of Native American tribes, the occupations and the theft of their land, the exploitation of their natural resources and the destruction of their way of life.

We pink-skinned progeny of our predatory ancestors were then carefully taught to believe the Big Lies about the First Thanksgiving that were carefully embedded in our history books and Sunday School lessons. And so we gullible non-native Minnesotans have been led to believe the sweet-sounding invented stories about the “nice” Pilgrims that landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 who then proceeded to gratefully share a post-harvest feast with their new neighbors.

Our illegal, undocumented immigrant ancestors from Europe were obviously not averse to homicidal violence. Sadly, they were soon followed by a large variety of other decidedly un-Christ-like religious fanatics that perpetuated the genocide that resulted in a 90% de-population of the Native Americans over just the few centuries following the invasion of Christopher Columbus.

The 2015 Ken Burns Documentary

The disinformation process that fooled so many Americans about the first Thanksgiving was explored in the 2015 Ken Burns documentary that was broadcast on PBS-TV during the Thanksgiving season three years ago.

That documentary refuted many of the myths about the First Thanksgiving that most of us had learned in school.

The myths about the “New Testament” values of welcoming the stranger and being merciful to the oppressed has been frequently disproven by many of those who have sought refuge from brutality, oppression and/or dictatorial rule in their homelands and expected that they would be welcomed here. The truth of the matter has often come hard.

The myth of the” merciful Puritans” of the First Thanksgiving was designed to absolve our ancestors from the guilt of the cruel bloodbaths that they either perpetrated or approved of when invading American soldiers repeatedly massacred the militarily weaker native populations all over the world and even in their own land.

The following quotes from a few of our so-called military or governing “heroes” need to be recited in the context of the true history of the American military genocide of the First Nations people.

Those military “heroes” include Henry H. Sibley and Alexander Ramsey, Minnesota’s first and second governors, both later to become army officers in the war against the oppressed and starving Sioux Indians. (Sibley- a Democrat – was governor from 1858 – 1860. He was succeeded by Alexander Ramsey – a Republican – from 1860 to 1863.)

Following are a series of quotes from historical figures of the era. The spark that set off the 6 week-long Sioux Uprising in the fall of 1862 (right in the middle of the American Civil War) was the impending starvation of the Native Americans who had been made dependent on food commodities, gold coins and credit after they had deceitfully ceded most of their hunting grounds and water resources to the deceptive US government:

“We have waited a long time. The money is ours but we cannot get it. We have no food but here these stores are filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement so we can get food from the stores, or else we may take it to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry, they help themselves.” —Chief Little Crow (Taoyateduta), Mdewakanton Dakota, to Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith in 1862

“For what reason we have commenced this war I will tell you. It is on account of Major Galbraith.”– Chief Little Crow in a letter to Henry Sibley, 1862 (For much more on the Galbraith issue, click here.)

“So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” — Indian trader Andrew J. Myrick to Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith. A few weeks later (on August 18, 1862), on the first day of the Sioux Uprising, Myrick was killed and his mouth was stuffed with grass.

“I shall probably approve them (the executions of the 303 Dakota warriors)and hang the villains” – Ex-governor and then US Army Colonel Henry H. Sibley, who had led the troops that defeated Chief Little Crow in the Battle of Wood Lake on August 23, 1862. Sibley had appointed the five-member military tribunal that tried, convicted and sentenced to death by hanging (in a “kangaroo court” proceeding, with no legal defense provided), the 303 Dakota warriors that had been captured in the battle that ended the 6 week-long US-Dakota War of 1862. Sibley was commenting on the fate of the convicted warriors, all but 38 of whom had their death sentences commuted by President Lincoln. Many warriors were imprisoned at Camp McClellan, near Davenport, Iowa and more than 1,600 non-combatant Native Americans were imprisoned at a concentration camp at Fort Snelling over the winter of 1862 – 63. Those that survived the cold, the starvation diets and the diseases were then deported to concentration camps in Nebraska and South Dakota (including Pine Ridge; see this)

“The Sioux (aka Dakota)Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” – Minnesota’s second governor Alexander Ramsey in a statement made on Sept. 9, 1862. Ramsey had made a fortune in real estate because of his dealings selling “stolen” Native American land to white settlers and businessmen after he himself had negotiated the treaties that cheated the tribes out of the land.Ramsey, incidentally, served as Secretary of War under Rutherford B. Hayes 25 years later.

“Destroy everything belonging to them and force them out to the plains, unless, as I suggest, you can capture them.  They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.” – Civil war Major General John Pope, in a letter to Colonel Sibley – dated September 28, 1862.

“As Europeans settled the East coast, they displaced eastern tribes who then migrated to get away from the White civilization, and they, in their turn, displaced weaker local tribes they encountered, and pushed many of those tribes farther from their homelands, as they took over their homelands.

“Westward moving Europeans would give the displaced eastern tribes … guns and gun powder and they would then instigate fights between the newly arrived tribes and the long established tribes in order to force the long established tribes from their homelands; and in doing so, extinguish the long established tribes’ ancestral ties that they had with the land, their ancestors and the spirit world. Evidence of this practice has shown itself time and time again throughout the Americas.

“Around 1750, a displaced East coast band of Ojibwe were pushed into the Dakota’s homeland and they then used French guns and gun powder to force the Dakota from theirMille Lacs Lake homeland.

“This was the strategy the European colonists used to greatly diminish the number of Dakota in their Mille Lacs homeland, which encouraged and made it possible for a French weapons armed, alcohol manipulated band of Ojibwe to violently force the Dakota from their Mille Lacs homeland.” — Thomas Dahlheimer from his long essay, entitled, A History Of The Dakota People In The Mille Lacs Area

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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas, as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of all life on earth. Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

Featured image: The statue of Little Crow overlooking Minnehaha Falls (MinnPost photo by Iric Nathanson)

Depois de insistir que não negociaria com o Hamas, Israel finalmente anunciou que concordou em participar numa troca de prisioneiros e na interrupção temporária dos combates. Os termos do acordo foram publicados por representantes do Qatar, sendo Doha o local das negociações. A notícia expõe algumas das fraquezas de Israel e mostra como o estado sionista está a ter dificuldades em levar a cabo a luta contra as guerrilhas palestinas.

O acordo foi anunciado em 23 de novembro, estabelecendo um cessar-fogo temporário de quatro dias a partir das 7h do dia 27. Israel concordou em libertar 150 reféns palestinos, em troca de 50 israelenses mantidos prisioneiros pelo Hamas. Os porta-vozes de Tel Aviv chegaram a anunciar que a trégua poderia ser prorrogada se o Hamas concordasse em libertar mais cidadãos israelitas, mas não há nenhuma atualização sobre esta possibilidade até agora.

Anteriormente, alguns rumores sobre um possível acordo já haviam sido divulgados nas redes sociais. Autoridades de ambos os lados disseram nos últimos dias que poderia ocorrer uma pausa militar, mas os termos ainda não estavam claros. O acordo atualmente em vigor foi mediado por diplomatas qatarianos, egípcios e americanos e parece ter finalmente conseguido encontrar um consenso mutuamente benéfico para ambos os lados do conflito.

Enquanto os combates estão em pausa, a ajuda humanitária chega a Gaza, com vários camiões a entrar no enclave palestino sem serem alvo da artilharia e da aviação israelitas. Ainda não se sabe ao certo se o combate foi realmente interrompido por completo. É possível que ocorram combates terrestres em algumas regiões, mas correspondentes locais disseram à mídia que neste momento a situação está “calma”.

“Estamos testemunhando uma relativa calma, que está gradualmente se tornando cada vez mais visível à medida que há uma parada completa dos caças sobrevoando a Faixa de Gaza”, disse um jornalista da Al Jazeera.

As IDF emitiram um aviso aos residentes de Gaza para não regressarem às suas casas durante o cessar-fogo, deixando claro que a trégua terminará em breve e a violência dos combates continuará. Avichay Adree, porta-voz militar de Tel Aviv, disse: “a guerra ainda não acabou. A pausa humanitária é temporária. O norte da Faixa de Gaza é uma zona de guerra perigosa e é proibido mover-se para norte”.

Embora ambos os lados se beneficiem do acordo, é inegável que a medida denota uma fraqueza por parte de Israel. Tel Aviv está a ser forçada a mudar a sua retórica sobre o conflito. Anteriormente, o estado isralita alegou que não havia possibilidade de negociação com o Hamas, pois o grupo é considerado “terrorista” pelas autoridades sionistas. A promessa de Netanyahu era levar a guerra às últimas consequências, sem qualquer preocupação humanitária, fazendo tudo o que fosse necessário para alcançar o objetivo de aniquilar completamente o Hamas.

Mas obviamente as coisas não correram como esperado. As FDI utilizaram uma estratégia fraca para combater em Gaza, optando por bombardear massivamente a Faixa, resultando na destruição de edifícios e instalações civis. Quando finalmente iniciaram a incursão terrestre, os soldados israelenses se depararam com um terreno hostil, onde as ruínas dos prédios bombardeados impedem a passagem de tanques e veículos militares, além de servirem de abrigo e barricada para os guerrilheiros palestinos.

Como resultado, os veículos israelitas tornaram-se um alvo fácil para o Hamas. Vários vídeos circulam nas redes sociais mostrando soldados do Hamas destruindo tanques israelenses a uma distância pequena– e depois se escondendo entre os escombros de edifícios. Israel sofreu baixas, com vários dos seus soldados mortos durante os confrontos intensos. Claramente, as forças sionistas não estavam preparadas para continuar a luta sem uma pausa estratégica para reabastecer as suas tropas e repensar a estratégia a ser utilizada na guerra.

Outra prova de que Israel precisava da ruptura é o fato de ter concordado em libertar 150 palestinos em troca de apenas 50 israelitas. Os termos da troca de prisioneiros não foram favoráveis ​​a Israel, que terá de devolver três palestinianos por cada israelita libertado pelo Hamas. Claramente, o acordo favoreceu mais os palestinos do que Tel Aviv, com Israel a concordar em participar porque realmente precisava de uma pausa o mais rapidamente possível para resolver a sua situação militar.

Além disso, o acordo representa uma derrota moral e psicológica para o governo de Netanyahu, que foi forçado a negociar com um grupo que Israel chama de “terroristas”. Isto certamente fortalecerá a oposição interna de Israel e aumentará as críticas ao governo, com Netanyahu sendo mais uma vez prejudicado pelas suas próprias medidas.

Porém, é inegável que, apesar destes fatos, o acordo foi um ponto favorável para todos. Os prisioneiros estão a ser libertados, a ajuda humanitária está a chegar a Gaza e a população palestina está a ver o seu sofrimento aliviado durante alguns dias. Para as IDF e as Brigadas Al-Qassam, é hora de se prepararem melhor para o combate no futuro próximo.

Resta saber se os termos serão realmente cumpridos ao longo de quatro dias.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

 

Artigo em inglês : Deal with Hamas reveals Israel’s difficulties, InfoBrics, 24 de Novembro de 2023

Imagem : InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas

 

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First published on November 26, 2023

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For those who missed it or chose to ignore it, there was a large demonstration in Washington on Tuesday the 14^th dubbed the “March for Israel” with many posters and signs featuring “Israel We Stand With You.” I have no big problem with Americans “standing with Israel” as long as they go over to Israel to do it and in some cases at least put their own lives at risk in so doing, but that is not the way they operate. What I do have a problem with is the cause they are supporting, namely the ethic cleansing of an entire nation or even, if required to do that, a military style genocide of the inhabitants of an area that was entirely populated by an ethnic group called Palestinians before Israel’s mostly European immigrants entered the scene and used foreign provided force majeur to steal the land and property. While so doing they were also killing thousands of locals and forcing three quarters of a million more to abandon their homes and spend their lives in refugee camps, a process of ethnic cleansing that has continued and been expanded through the creation of illegal settlements since the founding of the Jewish state 75 years ago.

The rally was organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Federations of North America in solidarity with Israel’s response to the October 7^th Hamas attack. Apart from backing the Israeli government in its devastating counterattack on Gaza, the stated goals of the rally were to support Israel in general, to call for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas, and to combat antisemitism. “Rising antisemitism” allegedly followed the October 7^th Hamas attack and the Israel reaction that marked the start of the war.

The usually cited source the Anti-Defamation League has stated that antisemitism has increased 388% in the US since October 6, 2023. Now one must observe that the ADL is not a reliable source when it comes to antisemitism as its agenda is clearly to send the message that Jews as a group are threatened, which is just not true to anything near the extent that is being implied. The reason why antisemitism and holocaust denial are used so often against critics is to discredit them without having to provide any evidence.

For ADL, a Jewish college student walking on campus and passing a pro-Palestinian poster and being upset by it is an antisemitic incident. What I am saying is that this is an entirely faked exercise to convince the audience that Israel and Jews are the victims in spite of the fact that many more Palestinians have been killed and dispossessed since the founding of Israel in 1948. If there is any real increase in actual antisemitism it is in response to the highly visible bestiality that the Jewish state has exhibited against the original occupants of what was once Palestine. Israel wants the Pals gone and these are the first steps in what might be termed a final solution, aided and abetted by American monsters like Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have made the United States complicit in war crimes.

Many participants in the Israel rally came by charter buses organized by Jewish houses of worship and schools. Most of the crowd appeared to be Jews but there was also a strong Christian Zionist component. Groups came from New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Boston, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia and Miami plus other domestic and even international locations. US college students were given $250 in travel and expenses money to attend as an incentive.

The crowd was considerable though there is some confusion about how many were actually in attendance. The organizers predicted 60,000 which was the number initially accepted, but other estimates of the crowd were as low as 10,00 or 25,000. The numbers quickly grew in some news stories to uncorroborated estimates of 270,000 to 300,000. There is, of course, certain bragging rights in large numbers and the March was in competition with a Palestinian rally that attracted 300,000 the week before, so let’s just accept that there was a large group present on the Mall.

Joe Biden did not personally attend the rally but he said on the following day “[that] Israel’s military operation in Gaza would stop when Hamas no longer maintains the capacity to murder, abuse, and do horrific things to the Israelis.” He left out the part of continuous abuse of Palestinians, going back 75 years and clearly is not paying attention to senior Israeli government officials who are making comments that indicate that the grand objective is to remove the Palestinians from what will soon be Eretz or Greater Israel.

Speakers at the three-hour long rally included Israel’s self-described protector in Congress Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Joni Ernst, Pastor John Hagee, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog (via video from Jerusalem), who praised US President Joe Biden for his “moral clarity and bold actions….” Johnson predictably declared that “The calls for a ceasefire are outrageous!” while the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt also delivered on demand a plea “Do not cower, allow no one to make you afraid.”

Meanwhile Donald Trump’s US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who served mostly as an apologist for the Jewish state while in office, roamed the Mall expressing his joy at developments. Other notable speakers included Natan Sharansky and actress Debra Messing. Speeches followed the predictable narrative, with descriptions of how Israel had been attacked by terrorists who sought to destroy the Jewish state, that Israel is America’s best friend and closest ally, and how Israel is only defending itself from attack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who did not speak, stated in an interview in Israel that if his country does not succeed in crushing Hamas, the next terrorist attacks would be directed against America, an evidence free claim to strengthen US resolve, but as Netanyahu hardly ever tells the truth it should be taken for what it’s worth.

Thousands of demonstrators showed up in support of Israel on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Nov. 14, 2023. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

And, of course, everyone’s openly stated or subliminal message was that the United States must stand by and do whatever it takes to help defend its good friend and ally, including rejecting a cease fire or negotiations and letting the slaughter of Gazan women and children continue. The discredited tales of torture and mass rapes of Israeli women and the killing by beheading of Jewish babies, which are still being replayed by President Joe Biden, were also part of the rally agenda and appeared as the messages on signs and posters.

What was not mentioned however was the systematic Israeli bombing of hospitals, schools, churches, and infrastructure, all of which are war crimes, as are the attacks on high density civilian targets which have produced more than 11,000 deaths as of this writing, mostly consisting of women and children. Targeting civilians in that fashion in those numbers can and should be construed as genocide. Israel’s war on hospitals can also be regarded as part of a systematic campaign of genocide. The deliberate targeting of civilian populations, children, medical and aid workers has been elevated to an Israeli government policy to drive the Palestinians from what was once Palestine.

Official Washington was on parade and in lockstep to demonstrate its unshakable loyalty to Israel even as opinion polls suggest that the American public is tired of the charade. A couple of brave peaceniks dared to move on the fringes of the crowd with signs calling for a ceasefire to end the carnage, but they were openly derided and threatened so they kept their distance. One truly shocking attendee at the rally was former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who was present and spouting the straight Israel line about how it was the victim of terrorists. Tulsi said

“It is inspiring to see how many people are flooding into Washington – understanding the seriousness of this moment, coming from all over the country. Many Jewish people [and] many people who are not Jewish . . . are coming and saying that we must stand up against antisemitism. We must stand up for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and we must take a strong stand against the Islamist terrorists who seek to not only exterminate the Jewish people but also to exterminate and kill anyone who does not adhere to their radical interpretation of Islam.”

She sounded something like the State Department’s despicable number two Victoria Nuland looking for another country to attack. Now that RFK Jr has also obligingly rolled over for the Jewish state there is no genuine peace candidate anywhere on the horizon with the exception of the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the beat of the war drums will continue to sound.

More out of sync perhaps was the presence as an ally of convenience evangelical Pastor John Hagee of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) group which was well represented both at the rally and as the key largest Christian Zionist component of the Israel Lobby in the US.

Hagee has said that Hitler was a “half-breed Jew,” created and sent by God as a “hunter” to drive European Jews on a divine mission to fulfill prophecy by creating the state of Israel to bring about the End Time and the Second Coming of Christ followed by the Rapture of all true believers into heaven. Jews will have to convert to participate.

One brings someone as controversial as Hagee out of the woodwork only to send a message that this is not about making sure that Jews are safe. It’s about showing solidarity with Israel, no matter what it does. And what kind of rally against antisemitism includes racist signs calling for more war, more bombings, and the destruction of not just Hamas but also the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians? Or as one sign held by a masked protester read, “From the river to the sea, Israel is all you will see.”

The so-called holocaust was evoked a number of times by speakers, particularly when it came time to describe Gaza on November 7^th as the biggest killing of Jews since the Second World War. Nor did anyone mention the fundamental dysfunction in the US-Israeli relationship, which is that Israel calls nearly all the shots, including the killing of 34 sailors on the USS Liberty in 1967 and the more recent shooting of American citizen journalists covering Palestinian protests by Israeli Army sharpshooters.

Israelis who kill Americans are never punished unlike the demands or retribution being made by speakers in Washington at the rally to kill not only all of Hamas but also the Gazan voters who elected Hamas in the first place. Though it is somewhat repetitive to say so, lest there be any confusion, that is referred to as genocide which is regarded as the most serious crime against humanity. And no one spoke up at the rally against the involvement of the US military in the operation against Gaza, which Biden is lying about and which is opposed by a majority of the public. Nor did anyone cite recent comments by US General Richard Clark that American soldiers must be “prepared to die for the Jewish state.”

Perhaps the politicians in Washington should ask US soldiers whether they are “prepared to die for the Jewish state.” Or maybe there should be called a national referendum asking the public whether it wants to continue arming and sending billions of dollars to Israel and to Ukraine as well. Evidence suggests that a clear majority would oppose both policies, which have hardly been debated at all in any serious way. Americans who want to “stand with Israel” should be allowed to go there with a one-way ticket in exchange for which they have to turn in their US passports as another major issue is “Who are they actually loyal to?” I’ll bet I know the answer to that one!

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

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First published on November 23, 2023

***

Israel is intentionally assassinating journalists in Gaza. As it wages its genocidal onslaught on the enclave, having murdered at least 13,000 Palestinians so far, Israel is simultaneously killing media workers in order to prevent the world from seeing the unspeakable atrocities it carries out.

The situation at hand is as dire as it is unprecedented. Since October 7, the Israeli military has killed 60 media workers, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. The Committee to Protect Journalists has stated this is the deadliest month for attacks on journalists since it started keeping record in 1992. Additionally, many other Palestinian reporters outside of Gaza face intimidation and harassment by Israeli forces.

“We have never experienced anything like this and we are overwhelmed,” admitted Nasser Abu Bakr, head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, a Ramallah-based trade union representing Palestinian media workers. “We are losing colleagues and friends every day as a result of the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people and the policy of targeted killing against journalists.”

“We can’t keep up with the number of attacks against our journalists,” Abu Bakr continued. “We are receiving more calls and information about … incidents than we can process. Our journalists have always been a target for the Israeli military, but Israel moved from killing [an average of] one Palestinian journalist a year before October 7 to killing [over] one a day.”

And it’s not just Palestinian reporters the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)  is attacking—any journalist who may potentially disseminate information critical of Israel is a potential target.

Among the long list of reporter casualties is Reuters photojournalist Issam Abdallah, who was killed by an October 13 Israeli strike on the Lebanese border while covering clashes between Hezbollah and the IDF. According to an independent investigation by Reporters Without Borders (RWB), Abdallah was explicitly targeted by Israeli forces—he was clearly identified as a journalist through his press helmet and vest, and he was standing next to a vehicle marked “press” on its roof. Immediately before the attack, other journalists in the area had witnessed an Israeli helicopter flying overhead, so the military was able to clearly see that Abdallah was a non-combatant. According to ballistic analysis done by RWB, the missiles were launched from the side of the Israeli border and “two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting.”

Not even the families of journalists are safe from Israeli retaliation. After learning on air that an Israeli air raid had killed his wife, son, daughter, and grandson, Gaza Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh rushed to the hospital, followed by press cameras. Upon finding his son there, he knelt over his lifeless body and lamented, “They take revenge on us with our children.”

This is the devastating reaction of Al Jazeera’s Wael Al-Dahdouh after learning his wife and two children were killed in Gaza. Israel says it was targeting terrorist infrastructure in the area. @pressfreedom says at least 24 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7. pic.twitter.com/5xcy9E1Yz4

— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) October 26, 2023

On November 7, Mohammad Abu Hasira, a correspondent for Palestinian news agency Wafa, was killed by an Israeli air raid, along with 42 members of his family. And just days before that, an Israeli strike killed Palestine TV reporter Mohammad Abu Hattab and 11 members of his family in south Gaza, including his wife, son, and brother.

Israel Invents Lies to Justify War Crimes

Just as it has claimed that Hamas was hiding in Gaza hospitals, near schools, and in ambulance convoys in order to justify its bombing and killing of civilians, Israel has peddled the same predictable excuses for these targeted assassinations of journalists. In a chilling November 2 article that effectively doubles as a hit list, the Jerusalem Post spotlighted several independent Palestinian journalists who had been reporting from Gaza and smeared them as part of “Hamas’s propaganda team.”

Then, pro-Israel media watchdog group HonestReporting released a report on November 8 claiming—with little evidence—that the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters freelance photographers in Gaza knew in advance of the October 7 Palestinian Resistance counter-offensive and even collaborated with Hamas in order be on location to get their shots during the operation.

Israeli officials quickly jumped on the story to vindicate their assassination campaign against Palestinian reporters.

In response to the report, former Minister of Defense and current member of Israel’s war cabinet Benny Gantz said,

“Journalists found to have known about the massacre, and [who] still chose to stand as idle bystanders while children were slaughtered, are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such.”

Danny Danon, Israel’s representative to the United Nations, went so far as to declare that these reporters would be put on a hit list, stating on X, “Israel’s internal security agency announced that they will eliminate all participants of the October 7 massacre. The ‘photojournalists’ who took part in recording the assault will be added to that list.”

Israel's internal security agency announced that they will eliminate all participants of the October 7 massacre.

The "photojournalists" who took part in recording the assault will be added to that list.

— Danny Danon 🇮🇱 דני דנון (@dannydanon) November 9, 2023

Gil Hoffman, executive director of HonestReporting, later admitted that he had no evidence to substantiate the claims made, but was just “raising questions.” According to Hoffman, he and HonestReporting “don’t claim to be a news organization.”

Accusations that Palestinian reporters are embedded within and acting in coordination with Hamas lay the propaganda groundwork to depict journalists as legitimate military targets.

Israel Restricting Information Coming Out of Gaza

Not only is the IDF killing Palestinian journalists on the ground, but the Israeli government is actively denying access to foreign press into Gaza. The only reporters allowed into the strip are those embedded within the IDF, and media outlets such as NBC and CNN have confirmed that in exchange for access, they must submit all materials to the Israeli military prior to broadcast for review and approval.

Additionally, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate reported that as many as 50 media outlets in Gaza have been partially or entirely destroyed by Israeli air strikes since October 7. If Israel is not outright bombing news outlets, then they are actively trying to repress the flow of information coming out. In late October, the Israeli government approved regulations that would allow it to shut down any foreign news channel if it believed the outlet posed a threat to national security. This regulation was then used to block the programming and website of Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen, because of its “wartime efforts to harm [Israel’s] security interests and to serve the enemy’s goals,” according to a statement released by the Israeli security cabinet.

In the absence of foreign press bearing witness to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Palestinian civilians have taken to documenting the horrors themselves and sharing them on social media sites such as X and TikTok for the outside world to see.

The Israeli government has responded by repeatedly shutting down internet and communications systems across Gaza, even further restricting the flow of information coming out.

History of Israel Targeting Journalists

Even before its current war on Gaza began on October 7, Israel had a long history of targeting reporters and news networks. During its 2021 military incursion on Gaza, Israel was accused of “silencing” journalists by press freedom advocates after it bombed the offices of Al Jazeera and the Associated Press. This occurred just days after it had bombed another building that housed a number of other news outlets, including Al Araby TV, Al Kofiya TV, and Watania News Agency, among others.

According to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, Israel killed 55 journalists from 2000 to 2022, either by live fire or bombardment. This figure includes Shireen Abu Akleh, the beloved Palestinian-American journalist and longtime Al Jazeera correspondent who was shot by Israeli forces while reporting on IDF raids in Jenin, as well as Yaser Murtaja, a cameraman for Palestinian network Ain Media, who was shot and killed by the IDF while covering the 2018 Great March of Return.

Like so many other Palestinian journalists Israel murdered on the job, Abu Akleh and Murtaja were both wearing their press vests at the time of their killings. Immediately after his death, Israel predictably—with no evidence—rushed to accuse Murtaja of being a Hamas fighter in order to cover its tracks.

The day after Murtaja’s killing, Israel’s then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman bluntly stated, “In the march of terror, there were no innocent civilians. They were all Hamas.”

Israel Is Losing the Information War

Israel relies on its advanced military weaponry and billions of dollars in funding from the U.S. to carry out its genocidal violence against the Palestinian people across Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Its Hasbara and “Brand Israel” campaigns work around the clock to justify its war crimes through outright lies and disinformation.

However, Israel has suffered significant losses in the information war as reports and images of the atrocities have reached millions across the world, many of whom have joined the mass mobilizations in support of the Palestinian cause. On the international stage, Israel is further politically isolated, with more and more countries cutting ties or recalling their diplomatic staff.

This battle of ideas cannot be won through sheer force and U.S.-backed military superiority. Israel cannot prevent information about its atrocities from leaking out, especially in an age of social media in which ordinary Palestinians are emboldened to act as citizen journalists, documenting what they are living through in Gaza for the world to see. As Israel escalates its assassination campaign against media workers, support for the Palestinian Resistance continues to grow.

Grim as the current situation may seem, it speaks to the reality at hand: The people of the world are waking up to the atrocities carried out by the Zionist state and refusing to allow it to continue.

And that speaks to another reality: Israel is living on borrowed time, and that time is running out.

*

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Amanda Yee is a journalist and organizer based out of Brooklyn. She is the managing editor of Liberation News, and her writing has appeared in Monthly Review Online, The Real News Network, CounterPunch, and Peoples Dispatch. Follow her on X @catcontentonly.

Featured image: Funeral for Palestine TV journalist Mohammad Abu Hattab. Credit: X/@MuhammadSmiry

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***

USA’s Asia-Pacific policies undoubtedly underwent a tactical change with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that broke out in Gaza and has a tendency to spread to the region. However, it is not possible to talk about a change of direction strategically or geopolitically.

The change in the US’s strategy to surround Russia first through Ukraine and then China through the Taiwan tension can only be described as a change in calendar.

The US occupation of Gaza and the necessity of deploying warships around the Middle East necessitated a new initiative against China in the diplomatic field. We saw this during the visits of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Chinese President Xi Jinping to the United States. It should also not be overlooked that these visits started with the Beijing visit of Henry Kissinger, the architect of the Chinese initiative in the 1970s (against the USSR).

However, neither America nor China are aware that the real struggle is the struggle for leadership on a global scale and they continue their preparations accordingly.

The Pentagon is in the process of deploying new medium-range missile systems to the Asia-Pacific region. The deployment is officially scheduled for next year and is intended to “deter China from invading Taiwan,” according to General Charles A. Flynn, Commander of U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC). Flynn also announced that the US Army will deploy a launch platform for land-based versions of medium-range “Tomahawk” missiles.

“We tested them and we have one or two batteries today,” General Flynn said. “We plan to deploy this system in 2024. I won’t say where or when. But I will just say that we will deploy them.”

Land-based missiles were banned under the 1987 US-USSR “Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.” The agreement banned land-based missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 km. However, the USA unilaterally withdrew from this agreement in 2019.

The calculation behind this withdrawal was a possible war against China rather than Russia. The missile that the USA continued to develop, even though it was banned for this purpose, was the GLCM (Ground Launched Cruise Missile) called BGM-109G “Gryphon”. Gryphon is a subsonic cruise missile with a range of 2780 km and a single W84 thermonuclear warhead (capacity up to 150 kilotons).

Their ability to carry W80 thermonuclear warheads means that the old “Gryphon” has effectively been resurrected; the only difference is that its target is not Russia, but China and most likely North Korea. It is estimated that the missiles will be deployed in Japan, Philippines and Guam.

This includes the deployment of similar “Tomahawk” launchers by the US Marine Corps (USMC), while the US Navy already has multiple sea-based “Tomahawk” launch platforms. All of this clearly indicates a concerted effort to surround China with hostile military bases and infrastructure, forcing it to respond accordingly. Although Beijing prioritizes peace talks and détente, it continues to prepare for war and calculate superiority. Asia-Pacific and its busy sea routes are vital to the Asian giant’s predominantly export-oriented economy. In addition to being a nuclear power, China is also a country with hypersonic missile capability, along with Russia. It will not tolerate or leave unanswered any US-based deployment that could endanger its interests.

The USA’s strategy to surround China is based on the seas. However, the number of active US warships has decreased significantly since the end of the Cold War. Still, the USA relied on its underwater superiority with its advanced submarines.

The USA may now be losing this superiority. China is making advances in submarine technology and undersea detection capabilities.

US spy satellite images showed China earlier this year launching a nuclear-powered attack submarine with a pump-jet propulsion system instead of propellers. The noise reduction technology used in US submarines was seen for the first time in a Chinese submarine. Carlson, a former U.S. Navy officer, predicts the new Chinese submarines will be as quiet as the Russian Akula I-class attack submarines commissioned in the 1990s. The bulk of China’s current submarine technology comes from reverse-engineered diesel-electric submarines purchased from Russia. The ever-strengthening military ties between Moscow and Beijing suggest that Russia may be willing to share some of its advanced submarine technologies with China. The Western Pacific is becoming increasingly dangerous for US submarines.

A Chinese destroyer used sonar pulses to target and injure Australian navy divers a few months ago, Australia claims. Although a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Defense denies it, the encounter suggests Western governments are taking a more active stance against foreign militaries that conduct maritime surveillance and other activities near China’s borders.

China is also making significant progress in submarine surveillance. China has nearly completed several underwater sensor networks, known as the “Underwater Great Wall,” in the South China Sea and other areas off its coast. According to Chinese military and academic texts, the networks provide a much better ability to detect enemy submarines. In August, China conducted a more than 40-hour submarine-hunting exercise in the South China Sea involving dozens of Y-8 anti-submarine patrol aircraft. In October, the Chinese and Russian navies held a joint anti-submarine warfare exercise in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska.

All these developments mean that the final US-China showdown is still on the agenda and the era of the US’s undisputed dominance in the seas around China is coming to an end.

*

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This article was originally published on ATASAM.

Hasan Erel is a Turkish journalist-writer. He worked as a diplomacy and foreign news reporter and editor in TRT and other media for 30 years. He is a frequent commentator of Sputnik News radio and CRI Turk in Turkiye.    

Featured image is from ATASAM

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***

Collagen accounts for about 30% of the total protein in your body; 28% of collagen, in turn, is made up of the amino acid glycine

Glycine is the amino acid with the highest concentration in connective tissue. Its benefits go far beyond connective tissue health as glycine has anti-inflammatory effects, acts as a neurotransmitter, and plays an important role in the epigenetic regulation that drives the aging process

Glycine helps protect against viruses by reinforcing the extracellular matrix, which acts as a physical barrier to infectious agents such as bacteria, fungi and viruses

Most people need 8.5 to 10 grams more glycine than what their bodies can synthesize in a day

To boost your glycine intake, either eat more collagen or gelatin-rich foods and take a high-quality collagen or gelatin supplement, or supplement with pure glycine, which is available in powder form and tends to be very affordable

*

Collagen accounts for about 30% of the total protein in your body; 28% of collagen, in turn, is made up of glycine, and it is the amino acid with the highest concentration in collagen.¹ It is a mildly sweet amino acid that can also be used as a sugar substitute.

Glycine, proline and hydroxyproline² are the raw materials for connective tissue, but the benefits of glycine go far beyond connective tissue health. For example, glycine:

Glycine Protects Against Viral Infections

Interestingly, glycine also helps protect against viruses by reinforcing your extracellular matrix, as evidenced in a 2021 study.⁹ Collagen, which is high in glycine, is the primary protein of the extracellular matrix, which acts as a physical barrier against infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses and fungi.

When you’re deficient in glycine, your extracellular matrix is weakened, thereby raising the risk of viruses being able to proliferate through your tissues. Many infectious agents secrete proteases that destroy collagen to facilitate their proliferation.

Some viruses are also known to inhibit collagen synthesis, which has the same effect.¹⁰ Making sure you have enough glycine in your system at all times can help prevent viruses from destroying enough collagen to get inside your cells.

Another Mechanism to Explain Glycine’s Infection Protection

A 2020 study¹¹ showed an antiviral mechanism for glycine in that it prevents for formation of capsids. You probably didn’t know this, but viruses carry around an outer shell of proteins called a capsid. This capsid acts like a lockpick in that it attaches to and pries open the cell’s membrane it is seeking to infect.

The virus then hijacks the cell’s inner workings, forcing it to mass produce the virus’s genetic material and construct many viral replicas. These capsids are like popcorn kernels pushing away the lid of an overfilled pot: The new viruses explode through the cell wall, and the cycle continues with more virus lockpicks on the loose.

Since glycine prevents the viruses from forming a capsid, they become unstable and unable to infect other cells as they simply disintegrate without their capsid “shell.”

Glycine Supplementation Is a Necessity

While your body does synthesize glycine, there’s a limit to how much your body can make, and more than likely it falls far short of your requirements to perform all of its essential functions. As explained by the authors:¹²

“Glycine produced by human metabolism is much lower than the cell’s needs, giving a general glycine deficiency of 10 g/day in humans. This effect was tested for three years in 127 volunteers who had virus infections usually once or more times every year.

85 of them took glycine 10 g/day; 42 did not take glycine. Among those who took glycine, only 16 (12 of whom had infections two or more times each year) had the flu just in the first year — but much reduced in severity and duration — while those who did not take glycine, were infected as often and as severely as before.

Glycine intake at the afore-mentioned dose prevents the spread of viruses by strengthening the extracellular matrix barriers against their advance …

[G]lycine must be considered to be an essential or indispensable amino acid because, although it can be synthesized by human metabolism, the body’s capacity for its synthesis does not satisfy the needs of the cells, especially for collagen synthesis. Neither can glycine be considered ‘conditionally essential’ as its need is a general requisite, independent of any particular circumstances.”

According to previous calculations¹³ that considered glycine’s role in metabolism and the synthesis of metabolites, collagen and other proteins, most people need 8.5 to 10 grams more glycine than what their bodies can make in a day.

As a result, the authors of the 2021 paper recommend daily supplementation at a dose of 10 grams a day “to prevent and solve health problems of the body’s mechanical system such as osteoarthritis and osteoporosis,” and “the entire connective system of the extracellular matrix that is found in all tissues.”¹⁴

“The close relationship we have shown here between the consistency and strength of the extracellular matrix, based on healthy collagen, and resistance to viruses highlights the need to maintain this structure in good condition, for which dietary glycine supplementation is necessary,” they note.

The authors also stress that glycine supplementation may be more important than vaccines, because:

“… vaccines are specific for a particular antigen, and continuous mutations of viruses … can alter their antigenic protein rapidly, rendering the vaccine ineffective in a short time. The enhancement of collagen in the extracellular matrix, however, will always be effective and steadfast against any invasive agent.”

The Vitamin C Link

On a side note, the extracellular matrix’s role in blocking infection helps explain why vitamin C is so effective against infections. In short, vitamin C plays a key role in collagen synthesis, so one of the ways in which it prevents and treats infection is by strengthening the extracellular matrix, just like glycine does.

That said, vitamin C alone will not be as effective as when taken in conjunction with glycine. As explained by the authors:¹⁵

“Ascorbate contributes to precise collagen synthesis by avoiding or eliminating collateral reactions in proline and lysine hydroxylation, but it cannot cover the need for glycine, which must be ingested additionally to make possible the synthesis and renewal of collagen necessary to maintain firm extracellular matrix.”

Glycine With NAC Supports Mitochondrial Health

Another nutrient that has important synergistic effects with glycine is N-acetylcysteine (NAC). Like glycine, NAC is a precursor to glutathione, and when taken together, they can go a long way toward protecting your mitochondrial health.

For example, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have shown¹⁶ that glycine and NAC supplementation not only improves glutathione deficiency but also mitochondrial impairment, oxidative stress and insulin resistance in older mice.

Similar results have also been found in seniors (by the same team). Importantly, in the elderly, supplementation with glycine and NAC improved four of nine hallmarks of aging associated with most age-related disorders, namely mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammation, insulin resistance and genomic damage.

Glycine Protects Against Chronic Disease and Disability

Glycine supplementation makes loads of sense when you consider its role in mitigating chronic disease and disability. As reported in a 2023 scientific review, glycine has been shown to:¹⁷

• Suppress tumor growth in mice with melanoma¹⁸
• Decrease fasting glucose, insulin, triglyceride and IGF-1 in male rats¹⁹
• Preserve muscle mass and reduce inflammatory markers in mice with cancer cachexia²⁰
• Improve endothelial function in older rats²¹
• Reduce weight gain and improve bone mineral density in a mouse model designed to mimic postmenopausal bone loss²²
• Protect against cardiac hypertrophy²³
• Alleviate neuroinflammation and protect against cognitive deficits in mice with neurodegeneration²⁴

Researchers have also noted that supplemental glycine may be useful for the “prevention and control of atherosclerosis, heart failure, angiogenesis associated with cancer or retinal disorders and a range of inflammation-driven syndromes, including metabolic syndrome.”²⁵

In his article “Gelatin, Stress, Longevity,”²⁶ the late Ray Peat, a biologist and pioneer of bioenergetic medicine,²⁷ also reviewed a long list of health conditions that can be prevented or alleviated by glycine supplementation and/or increased consumption of collagen or gelatin, including:²⁸

• Fibrosis
• Most bleeding problems, including nosebleeds, excessive menstrual bleeding, bleeding ulcers, hemorrhoids and stroke. According to Peat, glycine, taken shortly after a stroke, limits the damage and accelerates recovery
• Epilepsy, by stabilizing nerves and raising the amount of stimulation required to activate nerves
• Multiple sclerosis (MS), thanks to its antispastic effects
• Any condition involving excess prolactin, serotonin and/or cortisol, including autism, postpartum and premenstrual problems, Cushing’s disease, diabetes, and impotence
• Muscular dystrophy and myasthenia gravis
• Metabolic disorders²⁹
• Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)³⁰
• Depression and schizophrenia³¹

Other health benefits of glycine include:

• Improved sleep³²
• Reduced stress³³
• Improved wound healing³⁴
• Improved gut health³⁵

How to Optimize Your Glycine Intake

Considering its many benefits, making sure you get enough glycine in your diet can go a long way toward improving your health and life span, and there are several ways you can do that:

1. Eat more collagen or gelatin-rich foods, as glycine makes up nearly one-third of collagen and gelatin. Examples include homemade bone broth made with bones and connective tissue from grass fed, organically raised animals, and chicken broth made from organic chicken feet. The claws are particularly rich in collagen.³⁶
2. Take a high-quality collagen or gelatin supplement.
3. Take a glycine supplement. Pure glycine is available in powder form and tends to be very affordable and easy to take, as it has a mildly sweet flavor.

Indirectly, animal foods such as seafood, red meat, poultry and dairy products will also raise your glycine level, as these foods contain taurine, which increases glycine.³⁷ That said, don’t rely on red meat for your glycine. As you can see from the chart below, beef contains only a fraction of the glycine you get from gelatin and collagen. You simply cannot get enough glycine from beef alone.

Dosing Suggestions

While there’s no established daily requirement or upper limit of glycine, as previously noted, most people tend to be about 10 grams short of what their bodies need for their daily metabolic processes,³⁸ so that’s probably a good goalpost.

Another study looking at people with metabolic syndrome found 15 grams of glycine a day for three months reduced oxidative stress and improved systolic blood pressure.³⁹

You can’t overdose on glycine, so a daily dose of 10 to 20 grams would probably be an ideal range for most people. If you have any of the chronic health problems reviewed above, or are elderly or frail, you’d probably want to lean toward the higher dosages.

*

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Notes

¹ Molecular Cell Biology, 4th Edition, Section 22.3. 2000

² Amino Acids 2018 Jan;50(1):29-38

³ Ageing Research Reviews March 31, 2023, Table 1

⁴ Scientific Reports 2015; 5 Article number 10434

⁵ Ageing Research Reviews March 31, 2023, Intro

⁶ Medical News Today April 4, 2023

^7, 24 Journal of Neuroinflammation October 15, 2020; 17, Article number 303

⁸ Medical Hypotheses January 15, 2019; 123(1)

^{9, 10, 12, 14, 15} Journal of Functional Foods January 2021; 76: 104318

¹¹ Changes in Membrane Dielectric Properties of Porcine Kidney Cells Provide Insight into the Antiviral […], Langmuir. 2020 Jul 28;36(29):8344-8356

¹³ Journal of Biosciences 2009; 34: 853-872

¹⁶ Clinical and Translational Medicine March 27, 2021

¹⁷ Ageing Research Reviews March 31, 2023

¹⁸ Carcinogenesis, Volume 20, Issue 5, May 1999, Pages 793–798

¹⁹ The FASEB Journal April 1, 2011

²⁰ Clinical Nutrition June 2014, Volume 33, Issue 3, Pages 448-458

²¹ Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology March 4, 2015; 93(6)

²² Amino Acids 2016; 48: 791–800

²³ Biochemical Pharmacology January 1, 2017; 123: 40-51

²⁵ Medical Hypotheses February 2019; 123: 125-129

^{26, 28, 33, 34} RayPeat.com Gelatin Stress and Longevity

²⁷ Umzu. Who Is Ray Peat?

^29, 30 Nutrients June 2019, 11(6): 1356

³¹ Examine Glycine

³² J Pharmacol Sci 2012; 118: 145 – 148 (PDF)

³⁵ Am J Physiol 1982 February;242(2):G85-8

³⁶ TheHealthBenefitsOf.com 10 Chicken Feet Health Benefits

³⁷ Anxiety Medication, Taurine

³⁸ Supplements Self Decode Glycine

³⁹ Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology June 17, 2013

Featured image is from Mercola

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***

July 4, 2023 – I took two COVID jabs while studying to be a Catholic priest. Now I’m in a wheelchair.

Julian Young was enrolled as a seminarian in the northeastern United States, that he received two doses of a COVID “vaccine,” and that he is now under medical care for autoimmune disease. 

“An autoimmune disease led to me leaving the seminary, and I believe my two COVID jabs are to blame.”

Happy in my studies, I decided to do the ‘safe’ thing and get the jab 

It was 2020 when I began my studies and, of course, at this time there was still widespread fear about COVID-19. The “vaccines” were about to be rolled out, and there was a lot of disagreement about whether or not the shots were safe. By the end of my spring semester 2021, like so many others, I unfortunately allowed fear to dictate my decision and decided to do the “safe” thing for my family and get the jab.

The ill effects of this poor decision weren’t immediate, so at first it did not occur to me that there was any correlation, but over the course of the next several months I began to experience inflammation in my lower body that caused pain in my back, especially, making it hard to sit. I figured that I just needed to go to the chiropractor, which helped a little, but the inflammation persisted.

That winter I made the unfortunate decision to get “boosted,” and that is when things really took a turn for the worse. Around that same time, I had injured my foot while running down some steps, and I began to feel inflammation around the site of the injury. To my bafflement, I began experiencing soon after a mirror phenomenon of pain and inflammation in my other foot as well, although I had done nothing to injure it.

I figured that I just needed to see a doctor, and that my feet would heal soon, so I went to a podiatrist who put me in a boot for six weeks and told me I would get better. However, he could not explain why my other foot was experiencing the same pattern of pain. By the end of the six weeks, not only was I not better, but the pain in both of my feet had elevated to an extreme burning and tingling.

At this time I was in still at the seminary, and although I managed to finish the semester, it was very difficult to get around and also to focus on my studies while trying to figure out what was going on with my health.

By the summer of 2022, my health continued to get worse. The inflammation and burning spread up my body, leading me to be relegated to a wheelchair. I didn’t have much success during the summer with doctors, so eventually I was forced to take a medical leave from my studies. It wasn’t until some friends pointed out to me that I had been “vaccinated” soon before the decline of my health that I began to realize the likely connection.

Mercury toxicity, complex regional pain syndrome, POTS 

It has been a year now since I first took my medical leave, and I have had to surrender my status as a seminarian on an indefinite basis. During the course of the past year, it was found that I have mercury toxicity, which of course is a rare thing to have, but — not surprisingly — mercury has since been demonstrated to be in the COVID jabs along with other toxic heavy metals.

I was also diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), a rare autoimmune disease rooted in dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, which usually begins with a minor trauma (in my case the foot injury) to which the nervous system, being in a compromised state, has an over-reactive response. This causes the trauma to exacerbate into a full blown inflammatory disease, in many cases spreading to the entire body. This is what has already happened to me. People with CRPS say it feels like they are being burned alive, and I attest that this has unfortunately been my experience, especially during really bad flare-ups.

Additionally, although I am still being tested, one of my doctors strongly believes that I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), another debilitating autoimmune disease rooted in autonomic nervous system dysfunction. It affects one’s heart and blood pressure.  NBC News recently did a story on the spike of people being diagnosed with POTS after getting COVID. I have never had COVID, but I wouldn’t put it past the jabs to have the same effect.

I have been to the ER so many times in the past year that I have lost count.  I have seen so many specialists, and yet my life still consists of sitting in my house day after day in crippling pain praying that our Lord would restore me so that I can return to my studies and become His priest. Although I know God can bring good out of my suffering, it is a very heavy burden to me and my family. I have tried a lot of the detox protocols put out by  doctors and researchers trying to help vaccine injured people, and although I have seen some improvements, my development has not been linear, for other aspects of my health have continued to decline, leaving me with a daily struggle to survive.

It is for this reason that I am seeking the help of the LifeSiteNews community so that I may receive the proper treatment to regain my health and resume my vocation. To this end I reached out to LifeSite for help in raising awareness of my story. I was happy when they agreed to help me promote a LifeFunder for my cause as well – it was truly an answer to prayer.

For both of the autoimmune conditions that I suffer with, the allopathic (that is, mainstream) medicine world says there is no cure. Removing the mercury from my body is a step towards health, but my doctor says there is no guarantee that my autonomic nervous system would return to normal function afterwards: my body would still have to be “reset” somehow.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I hope you will prayerfully consider lending your support so that I may continue my journey to priesthood.

May God bless you.

In Christ through Mary,

Julian Young

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Complex Regional Pain Syndrome after COVID-19 Vaccine. Papers Reviewed

• 2023 May (Hamada et al) – Complex regional pain syndrome type II following severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 vaccination: a case report
• 2023 Jan (Horisawa et al) – Complex regional pain syndrome after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination
• 2023 Mar (Frikha et al) – Complex regional pain syndrome of the knee after COVID-19 vaccine in an adult patient
• 2022 Oct (Cho et al) – Post-COVID-19 vaccination arm pain diagnosed as complex regional pain syndrome: A case report

2023 May (Hamada et al) – Complex regional pain syndrome type II following severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 vaccination: a case report

• 17F year old Japanese girl had COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine
• Next day she developed difficulty raising the left upper limb and hand edema on the side of the injection
• 2 days after, she developed pain and edema of left hand
• 12 days later she presented at hospital due to pain, and she could not move her left thumb. She was treated with ultrasound guided brachial plexus nerve block
• she was diagnosed with CRPS Type II.
• She had a total of 3 nerve blocks done.
• 35 days after, she developed cold allodynia of the left hand (pain when touching something cold)
• 50 days after her pain resolved but pain would return whenever she touched something cold
• 111 days later she had worsening pain and a stellate ganglion block was performed. She was not followed after.

2023 Jan (Horisawa et al) – Complex regional pain syndrome after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination

• 17F Japanese girl had 2nd Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine on her left upper arm
• 2 days later, a bruise appeared on the back of her hand and spread to the entire left hand, which became swollen and caused severe pain
• 5 days later the bruise moved to the upper arm and even slightest touch caused severe pain.
• 2 weeks later, bruise began to disappear but pain and swelling persisted.
• 6 weeks later, the patient visited a pain clinic, where CRPS was diagnosed, and a stellate ganglion block was performed.
• 2 months after 2nd jab, numbness and involuntary flexion of the right hand and fingers began to appear.
• 3 months: Though pain and swelling in the left hand decreased three months later, and the patient was able to move the hand, the distal interphalangeal of the left hand remained in a flexed position.
• 4 months: four months later, involuntary movements with pain in the index finger of the right hand appeared
• 7 months: She was referred to our department for surgical treatment of this movement disorder seven months after the second inoculation. On examination, there was no swelling of the left hand, and the patient had difficulty extending the distal interphalangeal joints of the fingers, but the range of motion at other joints was restricted
• Conclusion: highly likely that CRPS was caused by injection trauma in our case.

2023 Mar (Frikha et al) – Complex regional pain syndrome of the knee after COVID-19 vaccine in an adult patient

• 28M Tunisian man had 2nd Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine
• 2 weeks later he started having painful swelling of his right knee which persisted for the following 12 months.
• the pain and disability were so bad, they affected his daily activities and his work was badly compromised
• he reported a pain of 9 out of 10.
• On exam, he had mild non-pitting edema with tactile allodynia, extreme restriction of knee joint on active and passive movement and major atrophy of the right muscles
• Diagnosis: CRPS of the right knee
• No treatments worked for the pain, and he was treated with extensive and regular physiotherapy, including muscle strengthening and functional training.
• He had slow partial improvement
• Theory: causative mechanism of CRPS may be immune hyperactivity to a vaccine constituent supporting an immune-mediated mechanism as the CRPS affected the lower extremity.

2022 Oct (Cho et al) – Post-COVID-19 vaccination arm pain diagnosed as complex regional pain syndrome: A case report

• The patient presented with acute-onset severe arm pain and swelling following vaccine administration
• Based on the clinical, electrodiagnostic, and radionuclide three-phase bone scan findings, the patient was diagnosed with postvaccination CRPS.
• COVID-19 vaccine possibly elicited an immune-mediated inflammatory response to the injected antigen in the patient, who was predisposed to CRPS due to inflammatory immunity.
• The COVID-19 vaccine elicited an immune-mediated inflammatory response to the injected antigen, resulting in CRPS following COVID-19 vaccination.

My Take… 

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome can be one of the most painful health conditions known to man.

The Frikha paper suggests that this COVID-19 Vaccine Injury is not a local traumatic injury of the arm that was injected, but rather an auto-immune attack on the body, since it attacked the knee.

There are currently 336 cases reported to WHO VigiAccess, so it’s not that rare. Multiply by an under-reporting factor of 100x and consider that many of these people are permanently disabled.

This is another COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Injury of the Immune System to be aware of, and there seems to be no satisfactory cure or treatment.

It affects young people some of whom are permanently disabled after mRNA vaccination.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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“’You’ll own nothing and be happy’? David Webb has gone through the 50-year history of all the legal constructs that have been put in place to technically enable that to happen.”

The derivatives bubble is often estimated to exceed one quadrillion dollars (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillion). The entire GDP of the world is estimated at $105 trillion, or 10% of one quadrillion; and the collective wealth of the world is an estimated $360 trillion.

Clearly, there is not enough collateral anywhere to satisfy all the derivative claims. The majority of derivatives now involve interest rate swaps, and interest rates have shot up. The bubble looks ready to pop.

[Oct 2 interview titled “The Great Taking: Who Really Owns Your Assets?”]

 

Who were the intrepid counterparties signing up to take the other side of these risky derivative bets? Initially, it seems, they were banks – led by four mega-banks, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. But according to a 2023 book called The Great Taking by veteran hedge fund manager David Rogers Webb, counterparty risk on all of these bets is ultimately assumed by an entity called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), through its nominee Cede & Co. (See also Greg Morse, “Who Owns America? Cede & DTCC,” and A. Freed, “Who Really Owns Your Money? Part I, The DTCC”).  Cede & Co. is now the owner of record of all of our stocks, bonds, digitized securities, mortgages, and more; and it is seriously under-capitalized, holding capital of only $3.5 billion, clearly not enough to satisfy all the potential derivative claims. Webb thinks this is intentional.

What happens if the DTCC goes bankrupt? Under The  Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005, derivatives have “super-priority” in bankruptcy. (The BAPCPA actually protects the banks and derivative claimants rather than consumers; it was the same act that eliminated bankruptcy protection for students.) Derivative claimants don’t even need to go through the bankruptcy court but can simply nab the collateral from the bankrupt estate, leaving nothing for the other secured creditors (including state and local governments) or the banks’ unsecured creditors (including us, the depositors). And in this case the “bankrupt estate” – the holdings of the DTCC/Cede & Co. – includes all of our stocks, bonds, digitized securities, mortgages, and more.

It sounds like conspiracy theory, but it’s all laid out in the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), tested in precedent, and validated by court rulings. The UCC is a privately-established set of standardized rules for transacting business, which has been ratified by all 50 states and includes key provisions that have been “harmonized” with the laws of other countries in the Western orbit. The UCC makes boring reading and is anything but clear, but Webb has diligently picked through the obscure legalese and demonstrates that the amorphous “they” have it all locked up. They can take everything in one fell swoop, without even going to court. Ideally, we need to get Congress to modify some laws, beginning with the super-priority provisions of the Bankruptcy Law of 2005. Even billionaires, notes Webb, are at risk of losing their holdings; and they have the clout to take action.

About The Great Taking and Its Author

As detailed in the introduction, “David Rogers Webb has deep experience with investigation and analysis within challenging and deceptive environments, including the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 80’s, venture investing, and the public financial markets. He managed hedge funds through the period spanning the extremes of the dot-com bubble and bust, producing a gross return of more than 320% while the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ indices had losses. His clients included some of the largest international institutional investors.”

A lengthy personal preface to the book not only establishes these bona fides but tells an interesting story concerning his family history and the rise and fall of his home city of Cleveland in the Great Depression.

As for what the book is about, Webb summarizes in the introduction:

It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.

You might have to read the book to be convinced, but it is not long, is available free on the Net, and is heavily referenced and footnoted. I will try to summarize his main points, but first a look at the derivatives problem and how it got out of hand.

The Derivative Mushroom Cloud

A “financial derivative” is defined as “a security whose value depends on, or is derived from, an underlying asset or assets. The derivative represents a contract between two or more parties and its price fluctuates according to the value of the asset from which it is derived.”

Warren Buffett famously described derivatives as “weapons of financial mass destruction,” but they did not start out that way. Initially they were a form of insurance for farmers to guarantee the price of their forthcoming crops. In a typical futures contract, the miller would pay a fixed price for wheat not yet harvested. The miller assumed the risk that the crops would fail or market prices would fall, while the farmer assumed the risk that prices would rise, limiting his potential profit.

In either case, the farmer actually delivered the product, or so much of it as he produced. The derivatives market exploded when speculators were allowed to bet on the rise or fall of prices, exchange rates, interest rates and other “underlying assets” without actually owning or delivering the “underlying.” Like at a race track, bets could be placed without owning the horse, so there was no limit to the potential number of bets. Speculators could “hedge their bets” by selling short — borrowing and selling stock or other assets they did not actually own. It was a form of counterfeiting that not only diluted the value of the “real” stock but drove down the stock’s price, in many cases driving the company into bankruptcy, so that the short sellers did not have to cover or “deliver” at all (called “naked shorting”). This form of gambling was allowed and encouraged due to a number of regulatory changes, including the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA), repealing key portions of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking; the Bankruptcy Law of 2005, guaranteeing recovery for derivative speculators; and the lifting of the uptick rule, which had allowed short selling only when a stock was going up.

Enter the DTC, the DTCC and Cede & Co.

In exchange-traded derivatives, a third party, called a clearinghouse, ensures that the bets are paid, a role played initially by the bank. And here’s where the UCC and the DTCC come in. The bank takes title in “street name” and pools it with other “fungible” shares. Under the UCC, the purchaser of the stock does not hold title; he has only a “security entitlement”, making him an unsecured creditor. He has a contractual claim to a portion of a pool of shares held in street name, assuming there are any shares left after the secured creditors have swept in. Webb writes:

In the late 1960’s, something called the Banking and Securities Industry Committee (BASIC) had been formed to find a solution to the “paperwork crisis.” It seemed the burdens of handling physical stock certificates had suddenly become too great, so much so, that the New York Stock exchange had suspended trading some days. “Lawmakers” then urged the government to step into the process. The BASIC report recommended changing from processing physical stock certificates to “book-entry” transfers of ownership via computerized entries in a trust company that would hold the underlying certificates “immobilized.”

Thus was established the Depository Trust Company (DTC), which began operations in 1973, after President Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold internationally. The DTC decoupled stock ownership from paper stock certificates. The purchasers who had put up the money became only “beneficial owners” entitled to interest, dividends and voting rights, leaving title of record in the DTC. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation(DTCC) was established in 1999 to combine the functions of the DTC and the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC). The DTCC settles most securities transactions in the U.S. Title of record is with DTC’s nominee Cede & Co. Per Wikipedia:

Cede and Company (also known as Cede and Co. or Cede & Co.), shorthand for “certificate depository”, is a specialist United States financial institution that processes transfers of stock certificates on behalf of Depository Trust Company, the central securities depository used by the United States National Market System, which includes the New York Stock Exchange, and Nasdaq.

Cede technically owns most of the publicly issued stock in the United States. Thus, most investors do not themselves hold direct property rights in stock, but rather have contractual rights that are part of a chain of contractual rights involving Cede. Securities held at Depository Trust Company are registered in its nominee name, Cede & Co., and recorded on its books in the name of the brokerage firm through which they were purchased; on the brokerage firm’s books they are assigned to the accounts of their beneficial owners. [Emphasis added.]

Greg Morse notes that the dictionary definition of “cede” is to “relinquish title.” For more on “beneficial ownership,” see the DTCC website here.

“Harmonizing” the Rules

The next step in the decoupling process was to establish “legal certainty” that the “anointed” creditors could take all, by amending the UCC in all 50 states. This was done quietly over many years, without an act of Congress. The key facts, notes Webb, are these:

• Ownership of securities as property has been replaced with a new legal concept of a “security entitlement”, which is a contractual claim assuring a very weak position if the account provider [bank/clearing agent] becomes insolvent.
• All securities are held in un-segregated pooled form. Securities used as collateral, and those restricted from such use, are held in the same pool.
• All account holders, including those who have prohibited use of their securities as collateral, must, by law, receive only a pro-rata share of residual assets.
• “Re-vindication,” i.e. the taking back of one’s own securities in the event of insolvency, is absolutely prohibited.
• Account providers may legally borrow pooled securities to collateralize proprietary trading and financing.
• “Safe Harbor” assures secured creditors priority claim to pooled securities ahead of account holders.
• The absolute priority claim of secured creditors to pooled client securities has been upheld by the courts.

The next step was to “harmonize” the laws internationally so that there would be no escape, at least in the Western orbit. Webb learned this by personal experience, having moved to Sweden to escape, only to have Swedish law subsequently “harmonized” with the “legal certainty” provisions of the UCC.

“Safe Harbor” in the Bankruptcy Code

The last step was to establish “safe harbor” in the 2005 Bankruptcy Code revisions – meaning “’safe harbor’ for secured creditors against the demands of customers to their own assets.” Webb quotes from law professor Stephen Lubben’s book The Bankruptcy Code Without Safe Harbors: 

Following the 2005 amendments to the Code, it is hard to envision a derivative that is not subject to special treatment. The safe harbors cover a wide range of contracts that might be considered derivatives, including securities contracts, commodities contracts, forward contracts, repurchase agreements, and, most importantly, swap agreements. …

The safe harbors as currently enacted were promoted by the derivatives industry as necessary measures . . . The systemic risk argument for the safe harbors is based on the belief that the inability to close out a derivative position because of the automatic stay would cause a daisy chain of failure amongst financial institutions. The problem with this argument is that it fails to consider the risks created by the rush to close out positions and demand collateral from distressed firms. Not only does this contribute to the failure of an already weakened financial firm, by fostering a run on the firm, but it also has consequent effects on the markets generally . . . the Code will have to guard against attempts to grab massive amounts of collateral on the eve of a bankruptcy, in a way that is unrelated to the underlying value of the trades being collateralized.

A number of researchers have found that super-priority in bankruptcy for derivatives actually increases rather than decreases risk. See e.g. a National Bureau of Economic Research paper called “Should Derivatives be Privileged in Bankruptcy?” Among other hazards, super-priority has contributed to the explosion in speculative derivatives, threatening the stability of national and global markets. For more on this issue, see my earlier articles here and here.

What to Do?

Webb does not say much about solutions; his goal seems to be to sound the alarm. What can we do to protect our assets? “Probably nothing,” he quoted a knowledgeable expert in a recent webinar. “We just have to stop them.” But he did point out that even the assets of the wealthy are threatened. If the issue can be brought to the attention of Congress, hopefully they can be motivated to revise the laws. Congressional action could include modifying the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 and the UCC, taxing windfall profits, imposing a financial transaction tax, and enforcing the antitrust laws and Constitutional property rights. As for timing, Webb says just the movement in interest rates, from 0.25% to 5.5%, should have collapsed the market already. He thinks it is being held up artificially, while “they” get the necessary systems in place.

Where to save your personal monies? Big derivative banks are risky, and Webb thinks credit unions and smaller banks will go down with the market if there is a general collapse, as happened in the Great Depression. Gold and silver are good but hard to spend on groceries. Keeping some emergency cash on hand is important, and so is growing your own food if you have space for a garden. Short-term Treasuries bought directly from the government at Treasury Direct might be the safest savings option, assuming the government doesn’t wind up in bankruptcy itself.

Meanwhile, we need to design an alternative financial system that is equitable and sustainable. Promising components might include publicly-owned banks, product-backed community cryptocurrencies, a land value tax, and a financial transaction tax.

A neoliberal, financialized economy of the sort we have today produces little and leaves the workers in debt. Goods and services are produced by the “real” economy; finance is just superstructure. Derivatives do not now produce even the security for which they were originally intended. A healthy, enduring economy must produce real things and exchange them fairly for the wages earned by labor.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Web of Debt Blog.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. 

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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According to the Zionist propaganda Hamas is a collection of evil beasts. How do we reconcile this propaganda with the “excellent condition” of the Israeli women and children hostages released by Hamas?  

Despite the Israeli devastation of Gaza and murder of Palestinian women and children, Hamas has obtained a victory of sorts.

Netanyahu’s vicious attack on civilians has exposed the underbelly of the Apartheid Zionist State. It is no longer possible for Israel’s apologists to maintain that “Israel can do no wrong.”

For decades Israel has been slowly but surely squeezing Palestinians out of Palestine. 

The world has tolerated it, in part because the Zionist violence was limited in time and extent and the impossible situation papered over with talk about the “two-state solution.” But this time, the violence is unlimited and has the declared aim of emptying Palestine of Palestinians with Gazans driven into tent cities in Eqypt’s Sinai Desert. It is not another case of emptying one specific village in the West Bank or a limited incursion into Gaza. This time the world is faced with a declared Zionist agenda of genocide.

This makes a problem for the Western governments that pretend to support human rights and to deplore war crimes. It also makes a problem for American evangelicals known as “Christian Zionists.” Genocide is not something that can be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus. The evangelicals will have to decide between worshipping Israel and worshipping Jesus.

A consequence of Washington’s wars for Israel in the Middle East is that Western countries are now the homes of millions of Muslim refugees who take umbrage to the West’s support of Palestinian genocide. This introduces into the Western countries  countervailing power at the street level to the Zionist lobby that focuses on controlling the governments. Western governments now have a new element of instability to manage, and the consequence could be a less one-sided stance toward Zionist Israel.

Not all of Israel is Zionist. Netanyahu has minority support. The outcome could be different for Israel than Netanyahu and his US neoconservative allies intended.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from AFP

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Click here to watch the video

Oct. 13, 2023 at 3:30am (above video) – Firefighter Terra White’s partner collapsed at the wheel while driving an ambulance and almost went off a cliff. 

In this article I present 26 such recent collapses behind the wheel due to a “medical emergency” suffered by the driver and how these stories ended:

Nov. 10, 2023 – Chicago – Jay Carroll played pickleball, walked to the car, opened the door and collapsed. He had a heart attack and died on the spot.

Nov. 9, 2023 – Reality TV Star 40 year old Brandi Mallory was found dead in her car on Nov. 9, 2023, in the parking lot of a strip mall after eating at Chipotle the previous day. 

Nov. 5, 2023 – Granbury, TX – Tony Monroe had a medical episode while driving. He simply pulled over and died.

Oct. 25, 2023 – 57 year old Carlton Campbell, Principal at Hallandale Beach K-8 had a medical emergency behind the wheel, crashed his car & died on Oct. 25, 2023.

Oct. 22, 2023 – Post Falls, ID – 36 year old Nicholas McDaniel, Post Falls Police Officer was found slumped over in his patrol car after he failed to reply to a “status check” and died suddenly on Oct. 22, 2023.

Oct. 18, 2023 – Dwight Allan Twilley was driving alone when he suffered a massive stroke, lost control of his car and crashed into a tree, dying of brain hemorrhage on Oct. 18, 2023. He mocked Ivermectin and posted: “time to quit whining & get vaccinated.”

Oct. 8, 2023 – Italy – 40 year old Francesco Forner had a cardiac arrest while driving. “His lifeless body and stationary car attracted attention of passing motorists.”

Sep. 17, 2023 – Palermo, Italy – 34 year old bricklayer had a “sudden illness” behind the wheel of his car, got out of his car, collapsed and died suddenly.

Click here to read the full article.

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On November 24, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) national board leadership made public the full text of a tentative contract agreement.

The union had been on strike for 118 days, since July 14, one of the longest such actions in many decades.

Preceding SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), had walked out on May 2 when extended negotiations failed to prevent a strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The joint labor action involved more than 171,000 union members impacting the economy and social life of millions throughout the United States.

WGA ended its strike on September 27 and opened the ratification process on October 2. Just one week later, October 9, the tentative agreement was approved overwhelmingly.

Nonetheless, they could not fully return to work with approximately 160,000 screen actors and other artists still on strike. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA joined hundreds of thousands of other organized workers in the United States during 2023 who either threatened to strike or did withhold their labor due to unacceptable conditions of employment.

Meridith Stiehm, the President West of the WGA, issued a statement saying:

“Through solidarity and determination, we have ratified a contract with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of our combined membership. Together we were able to accomplish what many said was impossible only six months ago.” 

Debate Over the Terms of the Proposed Contract

Even prior to the release of the entire 128-page document which constituted the tentative agreement between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP, disagreements had surfaced over key elements of the dispute between the union members and the studios. On top of the list is the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by the owners in the process of generating, producing and distributing of television and film content. WGA and SAF-AFTRA viewed the unrestricted utilization of AI as a means to further the exploitation of writers, actors and announcers, potentially replacing the need for thousands of jobs which previously went to union members.

In addition, there is the major issue of fair compensation from streaming services which were accused of not being forthright in reporting their statistics for the number of viewers. Under previous contracts, residuals were paid for reruns aired over the years.

WGA and SAG-AFTRA picketers (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Today with numerous streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, among others, the WGA in their negotiations, demanded a new system of calculating residuals. However, it appears that the public sharing of data related to viewership will not be implemented. The data available from the corporations will only be available for six people to peruse. Even if union members demand an audit of the figures, the examiners will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement. See this.

As it relates to the tentative agreement involving SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP there are two major differences which have surfaced within the leadership. The president and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA, Fran Drescher and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland respectively, have encouraged the membership to accept the agreement saying it provides substantial gains over conditions which were prevailing prior to the strike.

Crabtree-Ireland wrote in a cover letter sent out to members for the ratification process:

“These contracts achieve more than $1 billion in NEW compensation and benefit plan funding (including an additional $317.2 million to the benefit plans). The contracts establish lengthy and detailed AI guardrails that didn’t exist before and do protect you as we meet the challenge of this new technology, hair and makeup equity, significantly increased background coverage, outsized streaming residuals, a new streaming success fund, and so much more. These gains are only possible because of your sacrifice, solidarity and tenacity over the 118 days of the strike and are assured if you vote to ratify the agreement.” 

If approved, the Memorandum of Agreement will extend from November 9, the day after the negotiating team and national board accepted the offer of the owners, until June 30, 2026. Union members have up until December 5 to cast their votes.

Other voices have also been heard which do not approve of the proposed contract. Award-winning actor Matthew Modine, a national board member of SAG-AFTRA, publicly announced through an open letter that he would not be voting in favor of the contract.

Modine wrote in part that:

“Happy holiday season. There’s so much to be grateful for. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (SAG-AFTRA) can be thankful that the prolonged strike is over. We appreciate the negotiation committee and their attempt to arrive at a fair and equitable deal. While there are improvements and gains, I will not vote to ratify the contract. Members should vote their conscience. I cannot endorse a contract that compromises the independence and financial futures of the performers. As a National Board Member, it’s morally mandatory to stand beside and provide protection for fellow members. Especially those beginning their careers, those unable to defend themselves, and in this case, their identities, their voices, and their physicality, from being taken away by a technology that no one fully understands. It demands a warning to members that says do not consent to the terms of employment defined by the terms within this contract. Consenting to these terms is a pre-negotiation that will take control of the financial and creative future of every working member of SAG-AFTRA. Consent is surrender.” 

Modine argues that the federal government does not have a clear policy regulating the use of AI. Therefore, under these circumstances there needs to be definitive guidelines for people working in the entertainment industry.

Economic Impact of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes

With more than 171,000 writers and actors on strike between May and November, mainly in the state of California, there were huge financial losses. Although some analysts suggested that the lack of production for films and television saved cash for the studios, this cannot be viewed in light of the potential profits from ticket revenues and advertising which did not materialize.

When 171,000 people are not reporting to work other sectors of the economy will also lose jobs and profits. The timing of the strikes came as many businesses were attempting to recover from the downturn which occurred during the height of the pandemic in 2020-2021.

The Hollywood Reporter emphasized in the aftermath of the November 8 announcement that SAG-AFTRA had reached a tentative agreement:

“The strikes put more than 100,000 actors and writers out of work, but all the other workers that were sidelined may be even more consequential in what turned out to be a labor standoff costing billions. The list includes directors, editors, grips, makeup artists, props suppliers and location managers, among dozens of other professions that make a production go round.” 

Moreover, the end of the strikes by WGA and SAG-AFTRA does not mean that production will immediately resume. Shifts in scheduling for television programs and films will mean that there will be far less episodes and movies over the next several months until the summer of 2024.

What the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike confirmed was that the working class in the U.S. is ready to take industrial action in response to the burgeoning economic crises of the last two decades. The Great Recession of 2007-2009 wiped out millions of jobs while creating the conditions for huge concessions on the part of organized and unorganized labor.

Tens of millions of working families have lost their homes and rental units since the Great Recession and the later pandemic, illustrating the lack of guarantees for the masses regarding the necessities of modern life within capitalist society. Although military spending continues to skyrocket along with megaprofits for multi-national corporations and financial institutions, the proletariat and nationally oppressed are expected by the ruling class to accept austerity and even deeper impoverishment.

The militancy of the trade union movement must find a political expression where the working class and the oppressed can speak in their own names putting forward demands based solely upon their own interests. This imperative will become even more obvious in light of the 2024 national elections where both the Democratic and Republican parties will inevitably fail to address the important problems which can resolve the social aspirations of the majority of people in the U.S.

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Featured image is from Abayomi Azikiwe

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[We repost this article first published in December 2021.]

*** 

 

After decades of repression, the resistance movement today gives the Palestinian national struggle for liberation a new direction. But such resistance has never come from the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose reason for existing at all is to accommodate Israel’s priorities of security and trade.

The “peace process” the PA managed to sell to the young generation of Palestinians in the West Bank has proven to be the mirage it’s always been, a mirage that Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan were fully cognizant of. The latter, for example, is said to have mused at the signing of the Oslo agreement: “If Israel were serious about withdrawing from the West Bank, it would have returned it to me and not to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).”

In a 2017 piece in The Algemeiner titled “Israel Cannot Withdraw From the West Bank,” Gershon Hacohen emphasized the writing on the wall — true even before Israel built the wall:

The greatest threat to Israel’s existence is neither Shiite militias on the Golan border, nor the Iranian nuclear threat, which are both of physical and military nature.

Instead, it is the threat of a Palestinian state within the Clinton parameters — which would entail dividing Jerusalem and withdrawing to the 1967 lines — that most endangers Israel.

As countless political analysts have pointed out repeatedly, the PA is a security treasure for Israel. As long as it exists, it carries all the cost of Israel’s occupation. The PA’s security configurations in relation with its national, regional, and international security partners have always been highly problematic. The neoliberal politics and aid from the US and the EU continue to entrench the illusory promise of self-determination.

Only resistance in all its forms is likely to lead Palestinians out of the political maze into which the PA has boxed them. Since they walked into that maze, many are still blind-folded, but many others, especially among the young, are clear eyed with no illusions any more of liberal state-building or economic development in the occupied West Bank.

The maze is still dark, dank and foul. Consider, for example, yesterday’s report in Al Jazeera on “the financial crisis” in the occupied territories described as “the worst” since the PA’s establishment in 1993. It’s the same old story exacerbated by the pandemic and recent US politics: “Donor aid and Israel’s withholding of vital tax funds are squeezing the PA’s already decimated budget.” One public employee is quoted as saying: “Until now, nobody knows whether we will get paid or not, or if we’ll get our salaries in full or only 75 percent of it.”

Headlines such as the above in Al Jazeera yesterday were recurrent when I was in the West Bank in 2006 after Hamas took power and formed a Palestinian unity government and the Bush Administration, along with its Quartet partners and Israel, cut off contact with and halted assistance to the PA.

I used to marvel how the thousands of families dependent on public money managed to cope. Someone explained to me that almost every such family had members working abroad who helped their relatives. Some employees moonlighted. Women sold their gold jewelry, the traditional dowry Palestinian brides get upon marriage. The school and health systems faltered but continued to function.

At the time, Congress passed P.L. 109–446, the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006, to tighten existing restrictions on aid to the Palestinians. In 2007, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced H.R. 1856, which further restricted contact with and assistance to the PA.

You may recall that the Biden administration at first accepted the PA’s decision to hold elections in April, elections in which all Palestinian political parties were slated to take part. However, pressured by Israel, the Biden administration reversed its position and prevailed on Abbas to cancel the elections. The reason for the reversal on the part of the PA was economic: Hamas in a unitary Palestinian government would trigger US laws that would de-fund the Palestinian Authority.

Economist Anas Iqtait, in Chapter 11 of the recent book Political Economy of Palestine, makes the case that readily available funds, in the form of foreign aid and clearance revenue to the PA have “relieved it of constructing an authentic contract with its populace and widened the gap between its senior employees and rest of society.”

In the light of the above economic morass, it’s fair to wonder how the PA could possibly find the wherewithal to resist. The answer to this question necessitates a critical understanding of the political economy that “turns on the colonial question” and on the reality of the existence of a single apartheid Israeli state in Palestine from the river to the sea.

Through such understanding and organizing, I believe it is possible to replace the PA with a political system that embraces solidarity with popular struggles in Palestine and transforms itself into a force for social, economic, and political change. I believe that the PA, as a compromised and corrupt agent for the current horrific status quo in Palestine, is a huge stumbling block for any political or material progress. It is the reason why mountains of evidence as well as thousands of Palestinian prisoners and martyrs who sacrificed their lives so that other Palestinians may live have failed fundamentally to improve conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Palestinians have been collectively weakened by the complicity and cowardice of the PA and its reliance on the mediation of the US. The resistance movement has still not fully recovered. Only now are movements like Masar Badil beginning to organize how Palestinians could collectively resist Israel’s colonization and apartheid, mapping out an important corrective to the many defeatists who discuss Palestine today as though the existing status quo were the last word in the matter.

The need for a strong resistance movement that targets the PA and not just Israel is crucial for the liberation of Palestine. At the very least, activists must shame and pressure the PA for its sins as much or even more so than they are pressuring Israel for its crimes. Criticizing the PA and holding it accountable is not anti-Palestinian; it is patriotic and as much a tenet of the resistance movement as criticizing apartheid Israel is.

Palestinian resistance expresses itself in many forms, collective and individual. Although individual actions, such as the continuous and relentless exposure of Israel’s crimes on social media or the production of resistance art forms often goes unquantified, it is, nevertheless, very powerful and can be credited with debunking Israel’s “narrative.”

On Facebook, there exist no Groups or Pages I know of that are publicly critical of the PA or make popular demands of it. On the other hand, such Pages against Israel proliferate. That is why I have started a Page called “Sins of the Palestinian Authority” — not to equate the crimes of the PA with the crimes of the settler-colonial Jewish Zionist entity, but rather to highlight the problematic nature of a structure called “Authority” that uses whatever such authority it is permitted to have in order to impede liberation and worsen Israel’s ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people. About the Page:

This Group is committed to solidarity with the Palestinian resistance and with the liberation of the land and people of Palestine, to achieve victory from the river to the sea.

The Palestinian Authority today has the largest per-capita police force in the world. And yet, it uses this force to safeguard Israel’s security instead of safeguarding the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s apartheid and occupation. This group is meant to expose the failings of the Palestinian system of governance, which is built on the defunct “peace process,” as well as the Palestinian elite and the powers, Arab and Western, who continue to preach and implement the “road map” of “normalizing” this defunct system.

Palestinian resistance points to a hopeful future, whereas the PA continues to be nothing but bad news for Palestine’s liberation struggle and national aspirations.

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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: Only resistance in all its forms is likely to lead Palestinians out of the political maze into which the PA has boxed them. (Source: Rima Najjar)

Unspoken Objective: Israel Wants to Confiscate Gaza’s Offshore Gas Reserves Which Belong to Palestine

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Ben Samuels, and Amir Tibon, November 26, 2023

Netanyahu’s October 2023 declaration of war against 2.3 million people of the Gaza Strip is a continuation of its 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza under “Operation Cast Lead.”  The underlying objective is the outright military occupation of Gaza by Israel’s IDF forces and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. 

Long COVID Propaganda and Fraud: It’s Time to Push Back on Lies and Help Those Suffering from Spikeopathy

By Dr. William Makis, November 26, 2023

In the last few weeks, Twitter has tweaked its algorithm to push LONG COVID Propaganda. I now see 100s of posts from 3x-6x COVID-19 Vaccinated people who believe they’re suffering from “Long COVID”. Let’s address the bogus Propaganda and see how “Long COVID” sufferers can be helped. 

The WHO Pandemic Treaty and Amendments to the International Health Regulations: Enabling a Global Health Dictatorship

By Paul Anthony Taylor, November 26, 2023

Intended to form part of international law, preparations for the creation of a World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty began in 2001. Far from strengthening the prevention of, preparedness for, and response to future pandemics as the latest draft of the text claims, its implementation could severely undermine democracy by limiting the ability of national parliaments to make crucial healthcare decisions in the best interests of their citizens.

In this Truce, the Star of David Is Akin to a Swastika

By Rima Najjar, November 26, 2023

Even though the airwaves have long been agog with the voices of the Israeli government, the US and other so-called leaders of the free world about the war on Gaza, the leaders of Hamas and the rest of the Islamic resistance, dubbed “terrorists” in a preemptive Israeli-US propaganda campaign designed to legitimize their extraction by firepower, have managed to get their voices heard.

Israeli Ministry of Intelligence: Let’s Deport Palestinians to the Sinai Desert. “Erase the Palestinian Territories”

By Manlio Dinucci, November 26, 2023

The Israeli Intelligence Ministry-which oversees the operation of the Mossad and Shin Bet (the external and internal intelligence services) under the direction of the prime minister-recommends the forced and permanent relocation of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai desert peninsula.

Three Presidents Who Made Thanksgiving a National Holiday — And What They Were Thankful For

By Ellen Brown, November 26, 2023

On October 3, 1789, George Washington declared the first federal Thanksgiving holiday. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln made it an annual federal holiday. And in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill setting the date at the fourth Thursday of every November. 

How to Take Down the Billionaires. Form Independent Communities

By Emanuel Pastreich, November 26, 2023

Our front against corporate fascism cannot be a weekend hobby for the well-to-do. It must be a 24 hours a day effort that is supported at every step by our independent communities. At the core of this movement will stand a network of 100% economically independent, intellectually independent and self-sufficient communities.

Marching for Israel? American and Israeli War Criminals Celebrate Together

By Philip Giraldi, November 26, 2023

For those who missed it or chose to ignore it, there was a large demonstration in Washington on Tuesday the 14^th dubbed the “March for Israel” with many posters and signs featuring “Israel We Stand With You.” I have no big problem with Americans “standing with Israel” as long as they go over to Israel to do it and in some cases at least put their own lives at risk in so doing, but that is not the way they operate.

NATO’s Proposed “Military Schengen” Is a Thinly Disguised German Power Play Over Poland

By Andrew Korybko, November 26, 2023

As has traditionally been the case throughout history, Polish sovereignty is once again in the process of being sacrificed as part of the Great Powers’ games, but this time its borders will remain intact even though the country is poised to functionally become a German vassal in the coming future.

Israel Admits It Killed Its Own at Nova Music Festival

By The Cradle, November 26, 2023

An Israeli police investigation into the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival near the Gaza border on 7 October revealed that an Israeli attack helicopter killed some of the attendees, Haaretz reported on 18 November. 

A Ucrânia está a ter dificuldade em convencer os seus cidadãos a permanecer no país. De acordo com um relatório recente, os soldados do regime estão a concentrar os seus esforços em impedir que os cidadãos deixem o território ucraniano na fronteira Transcarpátia. O caso mostra claramente como os cidadãos ucranianos estão insatisfeitos com a situação do país e não apoiam a guerra com a Rússia, tentando fugir às obrigações militares.

Os funcionários do serviço de fronteira ucraniano estão localizados na região da Transcarpátia tentando controlar o grande fluxo de cidadãos ucranianos que tentam atravessar todos os dias para evitar o recrutamento. Muitos cidadãos ucranianos querem entrar nos países vizinhos, como a Hungria, a Polónia e a Romênia, pois acreditam que esta é a única forma de salvar as suas vidas das consequências devastadoras do conflito.

Incapazes de convencer os seus compatriotas a lutar na guerra, os soldados ucranianos estão a usar métodos ilegais e anti-humanitários para evitar fugas. Realizam-se verdadeiras operações militares na região e há até utilização de minas terrestres na fronteira, demonstrando a intenção de ferir ou matar quem tenta entrar nos países vizinhos. Os raptos de cidadãos locais para recrutamento forçado também se tornaram comuns.

É também importante lembrar que a região Transcarpátia é alvo repetido das práticas de limpeza étnica de Kiev. Sendo uma região de maioria de etnia húngara, a Transcarpátia tornou-se uma espécie de “Donbass Ocidental” na Ucrânia. Um processo de genocídio contra a população local tem sido implementado de forma cada vez mais aberta e pública nos últimos anos.

Este genocídio acontece tanto a nível cultural como físico. As escolas húngaras foram fechadas e a língua nativa banida dos documentos oficiais. Paralelamente, os húngaros étnicos são recrutados em massa e levados sem formação adequada e mal equipados para as linhas da frente, onde se tornam alvos fáceis para a artilharia russa e morrem em grande número. Kiev está a aproveitar a sua lei marcial para utilizar cidadãos étnicos não ucranianos como bucha de canhão na guerra de agressão da OTAN contra a Rússia, e atualmente parece haver claramente um foco na utilização da situação para acelerar a limpeza étnica na Transcarpátia

É possível compreender as práticas do regime neonazista lembrando sua principal inspiração política, que é a Alemanha de Hitler. Durante a guerra, a Alemanha nazista implementou a chamada “Volkssturm”, uma medida de recrutamento em massa com recrutamento forçado para formar uma grande milícia nacional. Na Ucrânia, é exatamente isso que está a ser feito, dando prioridade aos grupos étnicos que o governo Zelensky quer eliminar o mais rapidamente possível, como os húngaros.

Na Transcarpátia estão a ser criadas unidades de milícias denominadas “centros de resistência nacional”, onde, para além do recrutamento forçado de cidadãos locais, também são realizadas operações de sabotagem contra qualquer tipo de resistência do povo húngaro. Os protestos pacíficos são rapidamente reprimidos e os dados de ativistas anti-guerra locais são enviados para a inteligência ucraniana para sofrerem represálias. Existe um objetivo claro por parte do regime de eliminar qualquer tipo de “ameaça húngara” na Transcarpátia, razão pela qual estas práticas ilegais estão a tornar-se gradualmente frequentes.

Estes fatos mostram que os russos sempre tiveram razão nas suas alegações. O atual governo ucraniano é na verdade uma junta neonazista que odeia e persegue as minorias étnicas. Kiev não respeita o povo húngaro e o seu direito à autodeterminação, da mesma forma que nunca respeitou os russos do Donbass, tendo sempre promovido atos violentos contra a população local. O racismo, a xenofobia e o ultranacionalismo são uma parte vital da ideologia que se tornou hegemônica na Ucrânia em 2014, razão pela qual os crimes contra cidadãos ucranianos não étnicos são recorrentes.

No mesmo sentido, é evidente que os cidadãos locais estão cansados ​​de viver sob o terror da guerra e querem deixar o país o mais rapidamente possível. Não há nenhuma motivação patriótica que convença os ucranianos a permanecer no país, simplesmente porque parece cada vez mais claro que Kiev não está a lutar pelo seu próprio povo ou território, mas por interesses estrangeiros que de forma alguma beneficiam a população local. Esta consciência está a levar muitos jovens em idade militar a fugir do país através da fronteira na Transcarpátia. Kiev reage usando métodos violentos desnecessários, mas o caminho correto a se seguir deveria ser outro.

Em vez de forçar os seus cidadãos a lutar, a Ucrânia deveria mudar as suas políticas e adotar uma postura humanitária e soberana, deixando de servir como representante e deixando os seus cidadãos livres de escolher se querem ou não cumprir o serviço militar. O problema é que estas propostas de respeito pela humanidade e pela democracia são contraditórias com a ideologia hegemónica neonazista na Ucrânia de hoje..

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

Artigo em inglês :

Mass Migration, Depopulation. “Ukrainians are Fleeing Ukraine”. Kiev Regime Trying to “Prevent Escapes” on the Western Transcarpathian Border 

https://infobrics.org/post/39914

Artigo em francês :

Migration à grande échelle, dépeuplement. « Les Ukrainiens s’enfuient de l’Ukraine ». Le régime de Kiev tente « d’empêcher les évasions » à la frontière occidentale de la Transcarpathie

 

Imagem : InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas

 

 

 

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In the last few weeks, Twitter has tweaked its algorithm to push LONG COVID Propaganda. I now see 100s of posts from 3x-6x COVID-19 Vaccinated people who believe they’re suffering from “Long COVID”.

Let’s address the bogus Propaganda and see how “Long COVID” sufferers can be helped. 

Source of Long COVID Propaganda (CDC): 

• The graphic above comes from CDC Website, dated May 24, 2022 (source)
• CDC claims 20% of US Adults 18+ may be suffering from “Long COVID”
• “26 conditions often attributable to post-COVID”
• But what is the evidence for it?

Here is the CDC “Long COVID” Propaganda compared to real UK Government Disability Data:

Where’s the “Long COVID”? It’s in the 2020 Graphs When COVID-19 Was at Its Worst

• 2020 had the worst waves of SARS-CoV-2
• CDC defines “LONG COVID” as: “at least 4 weeks after infection is the start of when Long COVID could first be identified.”
• We should see “Long COVID” cases accumulate in large numbers throughout most of 2020, but we see no such thing.
• The most significant increase in disabilities in 2020 was in the “respiratory” category with a 24% increase.
• This makes sense for a respiratory virus with long term sequelae such as pulmonary fibrosis and scarring.
• There is also a modest but significant increase in hematological, kidney and cardiovascular disabilities in 2020 on the order of 17%, 18% and 13%.
• These increases in disability are real and significant.
• True Long COVID is a consequence of corrupt health officials and politicians blocking access to Early Treatments for COVID-19. For a small percentage of vulnerable individuals, this resulted in prolonged sequelae (spike protein damage to tissues and organs).

• Neurological +107% (2020 was +7%)
• Cardiovascular +121% (2020 was +13%)
• Respiratory +94% (2020 was +24%)
• Hematological +522% (2020 was +17%)
• Musculoskeletal +93% (2020 was 0%)
• Kidney +143% (2020 was +18%)

• COVID-19 Vaccines rolled out starting Dec. 8, 2020
• SARS-CoV-2 waves became progressively milder.
• All the evidence suggests that the increase in disabilities in 2021 and 2022 is almost entirely due to COVID-19 Vaccines

Treating Spikeopathy: New Research

• Spike protein from both SARS-CoV2 infection and COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine is TOXIC.
• Texas Cardiologist Dr.Peter McCullough is one of the few doctors in the world publishing research on helping those suffering from “Long COVID” or Spikeopathy
• Dr. McCullough’s Protocol is an elegant approach to “Spikeopathy” and giving your body a chance to break down some spike protein and start to get the tissue damage under control.
• Breaking down blood clots is a key benefit.

From Nov.21, 2023 (Hulscher et al):

Outlining a Broader Therapeutic Approach

1. Breaking down Spike Protein

• Nattokinase, Bromelain, (Serrapeptase, Lumbrokinase)

2. Blocking Spike Protein

• Ivermectin
• Quercetin, Olive Leaf, Curcumin, Nigella Sativa (Black Seed)
• Artemisia Annua, Dandelion Extract, Pomegranate peel (a more herbal approach)

3. Anti-oxidant

• NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine)
• Vitamin C

4. Immune Support

• Vitamin D
• Melatonin
• Zinc, Selenium
• Vitamin B Complex (Niacin)

5. Anti-Cancer protection

• Ivermectin, Melatonin, Quercetin, Olive Leaf, Curcumin

This is a very rough and broad outline and I will shape it further over time.

My Take… 

I believe that 90-95% of “Long COVID” sufferers (who have had COVID-19 Vaccines) have COVID-19 Vaccine Injury due to Spikeopathy.

Those who had some “Long COVID” symptoms and then took COVID-19 Vaccines, have had additional Spike protein injury to their body.

The distinction matters, because Long COVID sufferers are usually gaslit and lied to by their doctors and they don’t know where to even start when it comes to treating not only symptoms but the underlying cause (long term spike protein production).

Those, who for example discover Ivermectin or NAC, don’t realize that there is a much broader treatment approach that must be undertaken, as each of these Spikeopathy treatment modalities on their own, are rarely sufficient to address the injuries entirely or bring about major improvement.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from Mercola

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 Introduction

According to Haaretz (See Full Report by Ben Samuels and Amir Tibon below): 

Amos Hochstein, U.S. President Joe Biden’s energy security advisor, is currently visiting Israel to discuss preventing a second front from opening between Israel and Lebanon amid ongoing clashes with Hezbollah, as well as potential economic revitalization plans for Gaza centered around undeveloped offshore natural gas fields.

Biden’s Envoy Hochstein “was most recently in Bahrain, where he discussed the opportunity to develop offshore gas fields on behalf of the Palestinians as part of plans for post-war Gaza.”

“Israel gave preliminary approval for the development of a gas field off Gaza’s coast in June, stressing it would require security coordination with both the PA and Egypt. The Gaza Marine field, nearly 20 miles off Gaza’s coast, has remained undeveloped despite holding an estimated 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This total is hypothetically much more than needed to power the Palestinian territories, and some of it could be potentially exported.”  Haaretz)

There is More than Meets the Eye.

The Objective is “Not On Behalf of Palestinians” Quite the Opposite.

Israel Wants to Confiscate Gaza’s Offshore Gas Reserves Which Belong to Palestine

Netanyahu’s October 2023 declaration of war against 2.3 million people of the Gaza Strip is a continuation of its 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza under “Operation Cast Lead.”  The underlying objective is the outright military occupation of Gaza by Israel’s IDF forces and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. 

There are powerful financial interests which stand to benefit from Israel’s criminal undertaking (Genocide) directed against Gaza.  The ultimate objective is not only to exclude Palestinians from their homeland, it consists in confiscating the multi-billion dollar Gaza offshore Natural Gas reserves, namely those pertaining to the BG (BG Group) in 1999, as well the Levant discoveries of 2013. 

This is what is contemplated. Outright confiscation with the complicity of Egypt 

Egypt-Israel “Secret Bilateral Talks” 

In 2021-22, Egypt and Israel were involved in “secret bilateral talks” regarding “the extraction of natural gas off the coast of the Gaza Strip.

“Egypt succeeded in persuading Israel to start extracting natural gas off the coast of the Gaza Strip, after several months of secret bilateral talks.

This development … comes after years of Israeli objections to extract natural gas off the coast of Gaza on [alleged] security grounds, … 

British Gas (BG Group) has also been dealing with the Tel Aviv government.

What is significant is that the civilian arm of the Hamas Gaza government has been bypassed in regards to exploration and development rights over the gas fields:

The field, which lies about 30 kilometers (19 miles) west of the Gaza coast, was discovered in 2000 by British Gas (currently BG Group) and is estimated to contain more than 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The official in the Egyptian intelligence service told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “An Egyptian economic and security delegation discussed with the Israeli side for several months the issue of allowing the extraction of natural gas off the coast of Gaza. …Al-Monitor, October 22, 2022

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between Egypt and Israel, which had the rubber-stamp of the Palestinian National Authority (PA):

“The Egyptian official explained that Israel required the start of practical measures to extract gas from the Gaza fields at the beginning of 2024, to ensure its own security. (Al-Monitor, October 22, 2022

The occupation of Gaza is intent upon confiscating Palestine’s maritime gas reserves, starting in early 2024, as outlined in the Secret bilateral Agreement between Egypt and Israel. 

This initiative will NOT “Revitalize the Palestinian Economy” as outlined in the article below, 

Unless Palestinians take full control over offshore gas resources that belong to the State of Palestine, and which Israel wants to confiscate with the support of the Biden Administration.

Egypt is in on the game 

Cairo is complicit with total disregard for the rights of Palestinians.

It’s a criminal undertaking.

Egypt will establish refugee camps in the Sinai desert in coordination with Israel and the U.S., in exchange for a token participation in the exploitation of Gaza’s maritime, which are worth billions and billions of dollars.

For more analysis, see the following articles,

.

Video: “Wiping Gaza Off The Map”: Big Money Agenda. Confiscating Palestine’s Maritime Natural Gas Reserves

By Felicity Arbuthnot and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 26,

 

War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 21, 2023

 

 

Michel Chossudovsky, November 26, 2023

 

***

 

U.S. to Push Israel on Allowing Gaza Offshore Gas Reserves

to Revitalize Palestinian Economy

by Ben Samuels and Amir Tibon 

Haaretz, November 20, 2023

Amos Hochstein, U.S. President Joe Biden’s energy security advisor, is currently visiting Israel to discuss preventing a second front from opening between Israel and Lebanon amid ongoing clashes with Hezbollah, as well as potential economic revitalization plans for Gaza centered around undeveloped offshore natural gas fields. 

“While in Israel, Hochstein will emphasize that restoring calm along Israel’s northern border is of utmost importance to the United States and it should be a top priority for both Israel and Lebanon,” a U.S. official told Reuters.

He has been “backbriefing” Israeli officials on his meetings in Lebanon, according to U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

“We don’t want to see this war escalate or widen, we certainly don’t believe it’s in anybody’s interest – certainly not the Israeli people,” Kirby said. 

Hochstein was most recently in Bahrain, where he discussed the opportunity to develop offshore gas fields on behalf of the Palestinians as part of plans for post-war Gaza.

Israel gave preliminary approval for the development of a gas field off Gaza’s coast in June, stressing it would require security coordination with both the PA and Egypt. The Gaza Marine field, nearly 20 miles off Gaza’s coast, has remained undeveloped despite holding an estimated 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This total is hypothetically much more than needed to power the Palestinian territories, and some of it could be potentially exported.

“There is an opportunity here to develop the gas fields in offshore Gaza, on behalf of the Palestinians,” Hochstein told The National, adding “as soon as we get to the day after and this horrible war ends, there are companies willing to develop those fields”.

“We shouldn’t exaggerate its potential, but it can absolutely be a revenue stream for a Palestinian government, and to ensure there is an independent energy system for Palestine,” he continued, adding that there is “clear mechanism that we have developed, that would pose no threat and would maximize the effectiveness for the Palestinian people”. 

Hochstein noted that he is “100 percent” sure Israel would allow this, adding that

“I am very confident, there is no reason for them not to, it is not theirs [the Israelis], the gas belongs to the Palestinian people.”

Click here to read the full article on Haaretz.

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***

So they’re lunatics. The protesters, rioters and looters who hit the streets of Dublin last night are ‘people who are severely mentally ill’, which is how my dictionary defines a lunatic. That’s according to Garda commissioner Drew Harris. The violent mob that rocked Dublin yesterday in response to the mass stabbing of four people, including three kids, are a: 

‘complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology’, Ireland’s top cop raged on TV. Stop your Googling, park your analysis, we now know why hundreds descended on central Dublin – because they’re madmen and fascists.

It is striking how swiftly this thin explanation for the worst street violence in Dublin in years was embraced as gospel by Ireland’s chattering class.

The kind of Trinity-educated know-alls who have no doubt had HR training on why words like lunatic are outdated and offensive nodded along as the chief of police damned a mostly poor crowd as lunatics. Dublin’s Sally Rooney-reading Gen Z radicals who probably agree with the writers who said the BLM looting in the US was a valiant stab at ‘the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police’ took to X to wail about the looting on their beloved O’Connell Street. It seems rioting in response to the police killing of an African-American is fine, but rioting in response to a knife attack on three Irish schoolkids is literal derangement.

Some of us, even as we feel deeply unsettled by the riotous scenes in Dublin, believe there has to be a better explanation than ‘They’re insane’ or ‘They’re Nazis in tracksuits’.

It started with the horrific knife attack outside a school near Parnell Square. A woman and three children were assaulted. The woman and a five-year-old girl remain in a critical condition. It was reported, but isn’t yet confirmed, that the knifeman is an Algerian national. This news spread like wildfire and before long the republic was in the grip of its worst civil unrest in a long time.

Buses, cars and trams were set ablaze. Huge crowds clashed with guards (police). Shopfronts were smashed and stuff was looted. Some chanted ‘Get ’em out’, clearly a reference to certain migrant communities. These were horrible scenes. Unlike leftists like Naomi Klein, who once described ‘spontaneous looting’ as a species of ‘resistance’, I do not believe it is acceptable to desecrate and steal from your own community, however pissed off you are. Protest by all means. Burn down public trams and violate private property? No.

And yet, we cannot write off this unrest as the antics of imbeciles. To me it looks more like the fury of the cancelled. The rage of the overlooked. For years now, there has been a simmering discomfort with Ireland’s immigration policy. Some in Ireland believe too many people have arrived, too quickly, and that we need a ‘mature debate’ about it. But whenever they say something, they’re branded bigots and scum. When hundreds of opponents of mass immigration marched in Dublin earlier this year, President Michael D Higgins accused them of ‘sowing hate’. Is it possible that the fire and violence of the kind we saw in Dublin last night is what happens when every other avenue of expression is shut down to people?

Ireland’s immigration trends are extraordinary. It seems to me that many outside Ireland do not appreciate what a staggering cultural shift has taken place. According to the 2022 census, 20 per cent of Ireland’s current population was born outside of Ireland. That’s one in every five people. Even Fintan O’Toole – no looter he – acknowledges ‘this is an extraordinary phenomenon’. He points out that in the US, between 1870 and 1930, the decades of the great American ‘melting pot’, between 12 and 15 per cent of the population was born outside America. So our immigrant population is ‘not as large as that in the great age of immigration in the US’, he says. ‘It is much larger.’

And yet, says O’Toole, immigration is ‘not talked about very much in official discourse’. He says there’s a fear that ‘drawing attention to the scale of inward migration’ would feed ‘nativist’ prejudices and whip up ‘far-right movements’. He’s exactly right. Among the aloof influencers in Dublin’s media and cultural elites, the great dread is that open discussion of immigration will inflame the bovine bigotries that they believe lurk in the hearts of the ill-educated and culchies. So they enforce a conspiracy of silence. ‘Nothing to see here’, they say about the largest influx of migrants in the republic’s history. ‘Only racists want to talk about this’, they say about a government policy which should surely be as open to democratic scrutiny as every other government policy.

Even to me – someone who favours liberal immigration policies – it’s clear there are legitimate questions about the Irish elites’ immigration drive. Ireland is not a rich country. Large numbers of arrivals have an impact. Consider the Ukraine crisis. Unlike most EU states, Ireland hosts Ukrainian refugees in hotels. In 2022, 37,535 hotel beds were reserved for Ukrainians. That cost the taxpayer €385million and caused a downturn in Ireland’s tourism industry, with knock-on effects for small businesses that rely on tourism for an annual economic kick. Growing Irish scepticism towards the Ukrainian intake is not down to racism but to far more practical matters.

Worse, people sense that immigration policy is done above their heads. News reports always emphasise Ireland’s ‘obligations’ to the EU – that is, the pressure it’s under from Brussels to accept migrants. Earlier this year, Ireland had to pay a fine of €1.5million – or a ‘financial contribution’, to use EU lingo – for failing to find suitable accommodation for 350 refugees. Some feel, not wrongly, that Ireland’s immigration policy is more about winning the flattery of faraway technocrats than serving the Irish people. More about demonstrating Ireland’s fealty to its new masters in Brussels than doing what’s right for the nation. That’s why they’re angry.

Across Europe, and in the US too, immigration is the issue through which many people most viscerally experience their own disenfranchisement. It is the issue that feels beyond their democratic reach. The issue they’re told not to talk about. The issue that is so often weaponised by their self-styled moral superiors to taunt and demean them. Witness Ireland’s well-educated upper-class youths who counter-protest marches against mass immigration with signs saying: ‘Everyone welcome – except racists.’ In short, why don’t you get out, lowlife bigot?

This exploitation of immigration to weaken national borders, fortify the technocratic elites and embolden the superiority complex of the rising woke establishment was always bound to backfire. It is sickening to see Irish elites who trounced democracy and demonised their own people now wring their hands over the street violence that is partly an ugly byproduct of their own behaviour. These people are meant to be clever and they don’t even know that when you cancel democracy, violence often takes its place.

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Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy 

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***

Intended to form part of international law, preparations for the creation of a World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty began in 2021. Far from strengthening the prevention of, preparedness for, and response to future pandemics as the latest draft of the text claims, its implementation could severely undermine democracy by limiting the ability of national parliaments to make crucial healthcare decisions in the best interests of their citizens. Aided by proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations of 2005, the treaty threatens to transform the WHO into a global health dictatorship.

The sweeping influence exerted by the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of revised International Health Regulations passed at a meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) in 2005. The decision-making body of the WHO, the WHA’s meetings are held annually in Geneva, Switzerland, and attended by delegations from the WHO’s 194 Member States.

Prior to 2005, the WHO had principally acted as a coordinator, assistant, or collaborator to the public health services and drug regulatory authorities of its Member States. But with the passing of the revised International Health Regulations, the WHO took on vast new powers that were unprecedented in the field of global health. These essentially enable it to decide when a public health emergency of international concern exists and to take key decisions regarding what measures should be implemented in response. Under the regulations, the WHO’s recommended actions can include vaccination, quarantine, isolation, drug treatment, and contact tracing, among others.

Now, however, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the road is being prepared for the WHO’s already considerable powers to be expanded still further. Particularly worryingly, the latest draft of the proposed amendments to the regulations shows that clauses that previously made their provisions non-binding are being reworded – effectively making them mandatory and giving the WHO real decision-making powers over its Member States. As such, claims that the planned pandemic treaty will not undermine national sovereignty are at best disingenuous, as its text has to be viewed in light of the increased authority that, if approved, will be given to the WHO under the amended International Health Regulations.

The WHO Thinks You Have “Too Much Information”

The growing concern over the WHO pandemic treaty isn’t simply that it could undermine democracy by preventing national parliaments from being able to make crucial healthcare decisions in the best interests of their citizens. Through introducing the term “infodemic,” the treaty seems to be attempting to prevent the spread of truthful information about science-based natural health approaches and dangerous experimental vaccines. Without citing any evidence, the text claims that having “too much information” available during a disease outbreak causes “confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health.” Suggesting who this wording is primarily intended to benefit – namely, the WHO itself – the text states that having too much information apparently “leads to mistrust in health authorities.” To counter this, “infodemic management, at local, national, regional and international levels,” is proposed.

The pandemic treaty also dramatically expands the WHO’s areas of interest. Through what it terms a “One Health approach,” the global body now intends to be able to take decisions in health matters related to animals, ecosystems, and the environment. The treaty specifically refers to “taking action on climate change,” for example. Several observers have suggested that with these extended powers, the WHO could potentially declare an environmental or climate emergency and enforce lockdowns.

Given the global body’s close links to Bill Gates and the pharma industry, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding it receives from them, there is a growing worldwide recognition that this looming power grab represents a fundamental threat to democracy. At the very least, the increasing transfer of powers to the WHO raises important questions regarding national sovereignty and personal liberty.

Ultimately, if its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the WHO has sold its soul to corporate interests and cannot be trusted to take important decisions on global health. It is surely in all of our interests to demand that our national lawmakers do not sign away the sovereignty that the WHO is seeking.

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This article was originally published on Dr. Rath Health Foundation.

Executive Director of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and one of the coauthors of our explosive book, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’”, Paul is also our expert on the Codex Alimentarius Commission and has had eye-witness experience, as an official observer delegate, at its meetings. You can find Paul on Twitter at @paulanthtaylor

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

As has traditionally been the case throughout history, Polish sovereignty is once again in the process of being sacrificed as part of the Great Powers’ games, but this time its borders will remain intact even though the country is poised to functionally become a German vassal in the coming future.

NATO logistics chief Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank suggested the creation of a so-called “military Schengen” for optimizing the movement of such equipment across the EU. At present, bureaucratic and logistical obstacles impede the free flow of arms throughout the bloc, which he believes could hamstring the West’s ability to respond to any unexpected conflict along its periphery. It’s not just this proposal’s substance that’s significant, however, but also its timing.  

“NATO’s Proxy War On Russia Through Ukraine Appears To Be Winding Down” for the reasons explained in the preceding hyperlinked analysis. Accordingly, Bloomberg’s report about the EU’s draft security guarantees to Ukraine conspicuously omits any mention of mutual defense obligations of the kind that Kiev has sought for years and which greatly contributed to the latest phase of this nearly decade-long conflict. Sollfrank’s suggestion therefore seems to contradict these emerging de-escalation trends.

Upon reflection, however, it’s actually revealed to be a thinly disguised Germany power play over Poland. The EU’s informal leader ramped up its regional competition with Poland in mid-August through its promised military patronage of Ukraine, which readers can learn more about in that hyperlinked analysis. In brief, Poland aspired to become the leader of Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) throughout the course of the NATO-Russian proxy war, but Germany rose to the occasion to challenge its ambitions.

The liberal-globalist opposition coalition’s victory in last month’s Polish elections, which its Foreign Minister earlier accused Germany of meddling in, will likely result in former Prime Minister and European Council President Donald Tusk’s return to the premiership. In that event, this German-aligned politician could voluntarily subordinate his country to Berlin, thus resulting in Poland ceding its envisaged regional sphere of influence to that country and becoming its largest-ever vassal indefinitely.

Tusk’s plans to improve ties with the de facto German-controlled EU are regarded by conservative-nationalists as a means to that end, particularly due to that body’s efforts to further erode Polish sovereignty. Although he claims to oppose changes to the EU Treaty, some doubt his sincerity and suspect that he slyly wants to prevent large-scale protests over this issue. If these two scenarios come to pass, then Poland’s sovereignty would be further reduced, including in the defense sphere.

Prior to last month’s elections, Germany and Poland were competing to build the EU’s largest military, but the aforesaid sequence of events could result in Warsaw throwing in the towel. Even though its next potential Defense Minister said that his country won’t cancel any of its military contracts, conservative-nationalists also suspect that he’s either being insincere or could be coerced by Berlin/Brussels into doing so. All things considered, these concerns are credible and should be taken seriously.  

Germany’s national interests as its incumbent policymakers conceive them to be rest in becoming the EU’s hegemon, which necessitates neutralizing Poland’s ambitions to lead the CEE space, ergo its alleged support of Tusk and speculative efforts to erode Polish sovereignty via the EU. These moves importantly preceded NATO’s proposed “military Schengen”, and that’s not by coincidence either. Rather, they’re meant to facilitate Germany’s unprecedented post-WWII power play over Poland.

If Tusk improves ties with the EU like he promised, complies with any EU Treaty changes despite unconvincingly claiming to oppose them, and the “military Schengen” is imposed upon his country, then German forces could return to Poland en masse on the pretext of defending the EU from Russia. This doesn’t contradict the de-escalation trends pertaining to the NATO-Russian proxy war, but complements them since it could be spun as compensating for the lack of Article 5-like guarantees to Ukraine.

On the one hand, the EU would wisely avoid laying any tripwires that Kiev could maliciously exploit to provoke a larger conflict with Russia upon the inevitable freezing of the present one (whenever that happens), while at the same time reassuring the public that they can still adequately respond if need be. The “military Schengen” would serve the purpose of enabling the bloc’s de facto German leader to swiftly dispatch its forces, which are planned to be the EU’s largest, to the eastern frontier in that event.

It goes without saying that they’d have to transit through Poland and could easily end up deployed there indefinitely, whether as a so-called “deterrent to Russian aggression” or as part of a preplanned response to an artificially manufactured (i.e. false flag) border incident. After having voluntarily subordinated itself to Berlin under Tusk as is soon expected for the reasons that were explained, the restoration of German hegemony over Poland would therefore be completed without firing a shot.

In that scenario, which Polish conservative-nationalists are powerless to prevent and can only be offset by unlikely variables beyond their control, Germany would essentially be tasked by the US with “containing” Russia in Europe as part of Washington’s “Lead From Behind” stratagem. Once that country’s continental hegemony is fully secured through the means that were described in this analysis, America can then more confidently “Pivot (back) to Asia” to focus on containing China.

Those two superpowers are currently in the midst of an incipient thaw as proven by the positive outcome of their leaders’ latest face-to-face meeting earlier this month on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in San Francisco, but it can’t be taken for granted that this trend will continue. It therefore makes sense for the US to outsource its anti-Russian containment operations in Europe to Germany in order to free up the resources required for more muscularly containing China in Asia if this thaw fails.

As has traditionally been the case throughout history, Polish sovereignty is once again in the process of being sacrificed as part of the Great Powers’ games, but this time its borders will remain intact even though the country is poised to functionally become a German vassal in the coming future. There are indeed some variables beyond Poland’s control that could offset this scenario, but they’re very unlikely, so it’s probably a fait accompli by this point that Poland will play second fiddle to Germany indefinitely.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

 

 

 

 

Even though the airwaves have long been agog with the voices of the Israeli government, the US and other so-called leaders of the free world about the war on Gaza, the leaders of Hamas and the rest of the Islamic resistance, dubbed “terrorists” in a preemptive Israeli-US propaganda campaign designed to legitimize their extraction by firepower, have managed to get their voices heard.

They’ve done so through a brilliant media campaign that has made a folk hero out of Abu ‘Obaidah, the spokesperson for Martyr Al Qassam’s Islamic Brigades, and put to shame Israel’s undeniably degenerate tactics of killing and maiming thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, displaced families sheltering in UNRWA schools, the wounded and sick in hospitals and news reporters and flattening large swatches of the Gaza Strip.

And just as Netanyahu is resolved to continue the war on Gaza after the announced truce between Hamas and Israel, the Palestinian resistance is resolved to continue its heroic and already legendary fight against Israel.

This war, as well as being a national war of liberation on the Palestinian side and a settler-colonial war aided by Western powers on the Israeli side, is a religious war on both sides. The optics, as commentators love to use the term in analyzing the tragedy, are telling. It is religious Jews in the Israeli cabinet, wearing their kippot and holding up the Star of David that they have managed to turn into something akin to a swastika who have voted against the truce and who are most virulent in their call for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

On Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Mayadeen, Palestinians standing in the rubble over the dead bodies of their children invoke God to deal a blow for justice against Jews. Islamic resistance fighters call out loudly “God is great; praise be to God” with each hit on enemy tanks or soldiers. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon celebrate their martyrs as having fallen “on the road to Jerusalem,” where the desecrated Al Aqsa Mosque lies. “Al Aqsa Flood” is not named so for nothing. In Yemen, a spokesperson explained to Al Mayadeen that Houthi forces feared God’s displeasure if they did not come to the aid of Palestine. Moreover, this cause has unified Shia and Sunni Muslims.

When Blinken first arrived in Israel after Oct 7, he embraced Netanyahu by saying,

“I am here as a Jew, not just as US State Secretary.”

Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Al Safadi, on the other hand, did not say in any of his statements,

“I am speaking here, not just as a Jordanian, but also as a Palestinian.”

I assume Safadi is of Palestinian origin because of his name. “Al Safadi” in Arabic means “from Safad.” Incidentally, Mahmoud Abbas is also from Safad: he was born there. Safad in the Galilee was predominantly Palestinian Arab before 1948. It was emptied from its Palestinian citizens by the Haganah Jewish force (the perpetrator of many massacres during the Nakba) when, according to the language of the Israeli narrative flooding Google, “the Arab population fled,” leaving Safad to its “rightful” owners, the Kabbalists of the mystical branch of Judaism.

More than half of the 6.3 million population of Jordan is of Palestinian origin, the vast majority, except for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, have Jordanian citizenship. Jordan’s refugee camps are full of Palestinians holding on to the keys of their homes and their right of return to occupied Palestine. Ayman Al Safadi, speaking for the Jordanian government and for King Abdullah, is certainly not about to increase their ranks.

As so many Jewish-American officials have done before him, Blinken flaunts his Jewish supremacist privilege. He and his American family can “return” to Israel any time they please. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, as well as all those in al-shatat, the diaspora, cannot.

What is to happen next? The best way to predict the future is to create it. Israel’s bombing of Gaza is to resume as soon as the truce is over. And so will the Palestinian resistance everywhere and in every form.

When the resistance is the entire body (as represented by Muslim, Christian and every free person of any persuasion holding up the Palestinian flag), you can’t have a “surgical operation,” as the US is now urging Israel to do as opposed to mayhem, without killing the patient.

“Even if you kill all the children, One Moses will survive” (Source: Rima Najjar)

Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, recently expressed this determination by the resistance by saying: “We refuse to be silenced, we continue to organize, we continue to take to the streets; we refuse to be silenced by political power, by state repression or by corporate complicity, and we stand for the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Biden, Blinken and Israel’s war criminals with their “Hannibal Procedure” will discover there isn’t enough anesthesia in the world to put down this body of resistance and perform their “surgical operation.” Let’s hope that the human-interest stories that will now flood the airwaves about the return of Israeli hostages to their families will also highlight the devastation that the Israeli colonial military judiciary and prison system have, for decades, imposed on Palestinian families.

Roni Sarig, a reader of my previous blog post titled, “Israel is a Rogue State,” made the following absurd comment there: “It is your right to have ‘righteous anger.’ But I would hope that you’ve also considered what end your righteous anger serves? Those of us who are pro-Israel but anti-Netanyahu and pro-Palestine but anti-Hamas could be allies with you. But too much righteous anger will get in the way of actually solving the issue — and probably will just lead to more suffering. We can be allies, but not if you’re advocating for the removal/killing of my people.”

“Palestinian and righteously angry” is the tagline of my blog on Medium. Sarig, apparently, wants me to modulate my outrage at what his government is doing to Palestinians and at the monumental suffering the creation of the Jewish entity on Palestinian territory in 1948 by violence and terror continues to engender — all in the guise of forging an alliance on his terms and in accordance with his own feelings. He presents himself as reasonable, and me as someone advocating the removal/killing of “his people,” disregarding the context of war I am discussing, and understanding decolonization to mean “killing Jews.” That Palestinian freedom means genocide for Jews is a ridiculous argument. I think it is also antisemitic, because it implies that Jews can only exist at the cost of others’ lives. As Lena Bloch says in a comment on this post, “This assumption is the basis for Jewish fascism. Kahane built his ideology on that and this is what ‘Never again’ that he introduced means: ‘If we kill and abuse, THEY will never dare to kill and abuse US.’”

In the name of “moderation,” Sarig pushes a false Israeli narrative we have heard ad infinitum over the years. As a friend said to me, “Sincere allies know not to center a struggle in their own ‘feelings.’”

No doubt, Sarig, like his government, would also wish to modulate my joy at the release of Palestinian prisoners. Netanyahu’s government has already issued a warning to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem not to exhibit any signs of joy at their release.

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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.

Featured image: At the pro-Palestine demonstration in Brussels on Oct 22, 2023: “Gaza, If You Die, I Die.” (Source: Rima Najjar)

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***

An Israeli police investigation into the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival near the Gaza border on 7 October revealed that an Israeli attack helicopter killed some of the attendees, Haaretz reported on 18 November. 

According to a police source, an investigation into the incident showed that an Israeli combat helicopter that arrived at the scene from the Ramat David base fired at Hamas fighters and other Palestinians who crossed through the border fence from Gaza into Israel, but also fired on some of the Israelis attending the music festival. According to the police, 364 people were killed there.

The Israeli military and rescue services previously claimed that 260 Israelis were killed at the festival, all by Hamas and Palestinians in a deliberate massacre. But this is the first acknowledgement that Israeli forces killed some of their own.

Previous reports in Israeli media revealed that Israeli forces killed Israeli civilians in Be’eri, a settlement also near the Gaza border. In that case, Hamas fighters were holding Israelis captive in homes. When the Israeli military arrived, it opened fire, including by firing tank shells, killing both Israeli captives and Hamas fighters.

Three of those killed in Be’eri by Israeli tank fire were 12-year-old Liel Hezroni, her brother Yanai, and their aunt Ayla. Israeli broadcaster Kan reported that Liel’s relatives held a farewell ceremony for her, rather than a burial ceremony, because her body could not be recovered from the house that collapsed on her and other Hamas captives after an Israeli tank fired two shells into it. 

הסיפור של ליאל חצרוני ז"ל ואירוע בני הערובה בבארי:
מאיפה מתחילים את הסיפור המורכב הזה? אפשר להתחיל אותו בסוף: בשעה זו נערך טקס פרידה לליאל חצרוני, שנרצחה בבארי ב7 באוקטובר. זו לא קבורה כי אין גופה. המשפחה החליטה על הטקס, כי עד עכשיו לא הודיע אף גורם רשמי למשפחה מה קרה לה לליאל > pic.twitter.com/7GLEUpPXjH

— kereneubach (@kereneubach) November 15, 2023

A similar instance occurred in Sderot, where Hamas fighters had taken over the local police station, and were holding Israeli police captive inside. Both the Hamas fighters and Israeli police were killed when the Israeli army fired tank shells at the police station, killing everyone. Israeli forces then bulldozed the station.

It is therefore unclear how many of the Israelis who died on 7 October were killed by Hamas, whose fighters were seeking to take as many Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, captive back to Gaza as possible, and how many were killed by Israeli forces refusing to negotiate for the captives’ release.

Israel initially claimed Hamas and Palestinians killed 1,400 Israelis on 7 October, including soldiers, police, and civilians, but later revised the count to 1,200. Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev acknowledged that 200 of the alleged victims were Hamas fighters or Palestinians whose bodies were burned so badly that Israeli authorities could not initially identify them and assumed them to be Israelis.

In an interview with MSNBC on 17 November, he stated,

“We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”

Regarding the Nova festival, Haaretz reported as well that,

“There is a growing assessment in the security establishment that the terrorists who carried out the massacre on October 7 did not know in advance about the Nova festival held near Kibbutz Re’im, and decided to come to the place after discovering that a mass event was taking place there.”

The Hamas fighters had initially intended to attack nearby settlements in what is known as the Gaza envelope.

According to Haaretz, senior security officials estimate that Hamas found out about the existence of the party using drones, and directed its fighters to the location using their communication system. In a video from a body camera of one Hamas fighter, “he is heard asking a captured Israeli for directions to reach the bad guys, even though he was in a different area.” One of the findings that strengthens the assessment, according to the police and other security officials, is that the first Hamas fighters arrived at the Nova festival from the direction of road 232 and not from the direction of the Gaza border fence.

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Featured image: Burnt cars are abandoned in a carpark near where a music festival was held before an attack by Hamas gunmen from Gaza, in southern Israel, October 10. (Photo credit: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)

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Three weeks after receiving a second dose of a covid vaccine, Robert Sullivan collapsed at home on his treadmill. An anaesthesiologist in Maryland, USA, he was a particularly fit 49 year old: the week before falling ill, he’d been happily skiing at altitude in Colorado.

Sullivan was given a diagnosis of sudden onset pulmonary hypertension, which is generally progressive, can be fatal, and in most cases can’t be cured. The condition is rare, especially in middle aged men. Sullivan decided to file a report in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals.

But the submission process was a glitchy race against the clock. “The format is cumbersome and it times you out,” he tells The BMJ. For his troubles, Sullivan received a confirmation by email and a temporary “e-report” number. He learnt from his doctor’s office that a VAERS representative had requested medical records. Then he didn’t hear back for a year.

VAERS is supposed to be user friendly, responsive, and transparent. However, investigations by The BMJ have uncovered that it’s not meeting its own standards. Not only have staffing levels failed to keep pace with the unprecedented number of reports since the rollout of covid vaccines but there are signs that the system is overwhelmed, reports aren’t being followed up, and signals are being missed.

The BMJ has spoken to more than a dozen people, including physicians and a state medical examiner, who have filed VAERS reports of a serious nature on behalf of themselves or patients and were never contacted by clinical reviewers or were contacted months later.

Our investigation has also found that, in stark contrast to the US government’s handling of adverse reaction reports on drugs and devices, the publicly accessible VAERS database on vaccines includes only initial reports, while case updates and corrections are kept on a separate, back end system. Officials told The BMJ that this was to protect patient confidentiality—but this means that patients, doctors, and other public users of the database have access only to an incomplete and uncorrected version.

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According to the [Israeli] Hebrew media, the Israeli police’s initial investigation proved that Israeli helicopters bombed the Israeli civilians who participated in the nature party on Oct. 7 [2023] (sic., refers to Nov. 18, 2023 Haaretz report that one Israeli army helicopter firing at Hamas terrorists may have accidentally also hit some Israeli civilians; the [Israeli] police have denied this report).

This means that Israeli military aircraft caused great destruction in the area and in some of the settlements (i.e., Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip), after the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’ was activated, which allows the occupation police and occupation army to kill everyone (sic., the directive calls to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers even at the risk of harming Israeli forces).

Therefore, the ministry thinks that the conclusions of the aforementioned investigation cast doubt on the Israeli versions regarding the destruction and killing that took place in that area, especially on everything concerning the images and videos showing the destruction and the fires that broke out in many houses as a result of this bombing.

The ministry demands that all media outlets, senior UN officials, and heads of state monitor this topic, show interest in the Hebrew media publications on the topic, and reexamine their positions in light of this.

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The text above was sourced from Palestinian Media Watch.

Featured image: Abandoned and damaged cars parked at the festival (12 October) (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The Israeli Intelligence Ministry-which oversees the operation of the Mossad and Shin Bet (the external and internal intelligence services) under the direction of the prime minister-recommends the forced and permanent relocation of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai desert peninsula. Tent camps and later permanent settlements should be established there. An inaccessible strip several kilometers wide should be established in Egyptian territory to prevent Palestinians from approaching the border with Israel.

The plan, which the Netanyahu government is working on through negotiations with Egypt, also involves the Palestinian population of the West Bank. Emblematic is the image of an Israeli bulldozer in the West Bank Palestinian Territory knocking down the monument to Palestine’s historic leader Yasser Arafat.

The Netanyahu government’s goal is clear: to erase the Palestinian Territories. This is confirmed by the fact that the Israeli attack is not only exterminating the Palestinian population, but is making the Gaza territory uninhabitable, so that the deportation of Palestinians to the Sinai or elsewhere, disguised as an “international humanitarian operation,” is inevitable.

From this situation emerges the need to focus action against the war on precise political objectives.

In Italy there can be basically three:

1) The repeal of Law 94/2005, which institutionalizes full-scale military cooperation between Italy and Israel.

2) The demand that the United Nations immediately send an international peacekeeping force to Gaza, the territory of the State of Palestine, which since 2012 has been part of the United Nations with all rights except voting rights.

3) The indictment of Israel’s leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: Girl holds improvised white flag, to tell Israel to respect Geneva Conventions and spare her fleeing family. Photo credit: Yasser Qudih 

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Insider reported:

The deployment of AI-controlled drones that can make autonomous decisions about whether to kill human targets is moving closer to reality, The New York Times reported.

Lethal autonomous weapons, that can select targets using AI, are being developed by countries including the U.S., China and Israel.

The use of the so-called “killer robots” would mark a disturbing development, say critics, handing life and death battlefield decisions to machines with no human input.

Several governments are lobbying the UN for a binding resolution restricting the use of AI killer drones, but the U.S. is among a group of nations — which also includes Russia, Australia and Israel — who are resisting any such move, favoring a non-binding resolution instead, The Times reported.

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Featured image is from Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Three U.S. presidents were instrumental in establishing Thanksgiving as a regular national event.

On October 3, 1789, George Washington declared the first federal Thanksgiving holiday. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln made it an annual federal holiday. And in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill setting the date at the fourth Thursday of every November. All three presidents were giving thanks for bringing the country through a major financial crisis related to war, and they all achieved this feat through what Sen. Henry Clay called the “American system” of banking and finance – sovereign or government-issued money and credit.

For Washington, the challenge was freeing the American colonies from the imperial rule of Britain, then the world’s leading military power, when the new government lacked a source of funding. Lincoln faced a similar challenge, leading the Northern states in a civil war while lacking a national bank or national currency to fund it. For Roosevelt, the challenge was bringing the country through the Great Depression and World War II, when 9,000 banks had gone bankrupt at the beginning of his first term and the country was again without a source of credit.

In 1796, after 20 years of public service, George Washington warned in his farewell address to “cherish public credit” and avoid “accumulation of debt,” and to “avoid foreign entanglements” (“steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world”). He would no doubt be alarmed to see where we are 227 years later. We have a federal debt of $33.7 trillion, bearing an interest tab of nearly $1 trillion annually — over one-third of personal tax receipts. And we have a military budget from “foreign entanglements” that is also approaching one trillion dollars, devouring more than half the annual discretionary budget. Meanwhile, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the country is in serious need of infrastructure funding, tallied at $3 trillion or more; but our debt-strapped Congress has no appetite or capacity for further infrastructure outlays.

However, Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt faced financial challenges that were equally daunting in their day; and the country came through them and continued to thrive, using a funding device that Benjamin Franklin described as “a mystery even to the politicians.”

Hamilton’s Revolutionary Fix: Debt-for-Equity Swaps

To fund the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress resorted to simply issuing the money as paper receipts for goods and services, as the colonial governments had done with their paper scrip. It was this that Franklin wrote was “a mystery even to the politicians, how we could pay with paper that had no previously fixed fund appropriated specifically to redeem it.” He said, “This currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine.” Thomas Paine called it a “cornerstone” of the Revolution.

But the Continental dollar was not a pure fiat currency. It was “a zero-interest bearer bond.” That means it was a debt, which had to be repaid. By the end of the Revolutionary War, the new government was $77 million in debt — $40 million in domestic debt, $12 million in foreign debt, and $25 million in state debt incurred in the Revolution — with no apparent means of repayment.

Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s Treasury Secretary, solved the problem with debt-for-equity swaps. State debt was accepted in partial payment for stock in the First Bank of the United States (BUS), paying a 6% dividend. The rest was to be paid in gold. The Bank leveraged this capital into credit, issued as the first U.S. currency.

BUS loans were based on the fractional reserve model. Hamilton wrote, “It is a well established fact, that Banks in good credit can circulate a far greater sum than the actual quantum of their capital in Gold & Silver.” That was the model of the Bank of England (BOE), the financial engine of the oppressors; but there were fundamental differences between the BUS and BOE models. The BOE was privately owned and was operated for private profit. It was chartered to be an instrument of government policy capitalized exclusively by public debt. The government would pay the private lenders, who controlled what policies could be funded. What early American economists called the “British System” was geared to exploiting the colonies through “free trade” and the government through usurious interest payments.

Hamilton’s BUS, by contrast, was to be a commercial bank, funding itself by generating credit for public works. Its primary purpose, following Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit, was to issue credit to the government and private interests for internal improvements and other economic development. Hamilton said a bank’s function was to generate active capital for agriculture and manufactures, increasing the quantity and quality of labor and industry. The BUS was intended to establish a sovereign currency, a banking system, and a source of credit to build the nation, creating productive wealth, not just financial profit.

It was thus a national development bank, and so was the Second BUS chartered after the First BUS charter expired. Infrastructure and productivity flourished during that period, including completion of the Erie Canal. But Pres. Andrew Jackson thought only silver or gold coins qualified as an acceptable medium of exchange. He declared war on the bank and shut it down, leaving the country without a national currency or source of national credit for nearly three decades.

Lincoln’s Greenbacks and the National Bank Act

When President Lincoln came into office, he was faced with the prospect of a crippling war debt to British-backed banks at 24% to 36% interest. To avoid that “re-conquest by debt,” his government returned to the practice of the American colonists: it issued U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks,” actually doubling the money supply. The National Bank Act was also passed, allowing banks in the national banking system to issue National Bank Notes backed by the U.S. Treasury. To join the system, banks had to capitalize their banknotes in part with government debt.

These new monies funded not only the war effort but rapid economic development. Most famous was completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, linking both sides of the nation by 1869 and returning a profit to the government. The telegraph system developed beside the railroad; railroad track expanded; and freight tonnage between New York and Chicago grew 75%. By the end of the war, 90 trains entered Chicago every day (vs. none in 1850). Factory output boomed, and mechanization allowed agriculture to flourish, despite one million men being under arms. The money supply was doubled but did not trigger price inflation after the war, because supply and demand rose together, keeping prices in balance.

The Federal Reserve and “Checkbook Money”

But Lincoln was assassinated, the Greenbacks were discontinued, silver was demonetized, and a deep depression followed. A major banking crisis in 1906 led to passage in 1913 of the Federal Reserve Act, modeled on the Bank of England. The twelve Federal Reserve Banks are all 100% owned by the private banks in their districts. The national currency is issued as “Federal Reserve Notes,” which are lent or sold to private banks and bond dealers. Rather than issuing dollars, the U.S. government issues debt (bonds, bills and notes), which it sells on the open market to the bond dealers at interest.

President Wilson signing the Federal Reserve Act 1923 painting by Wilburg G. Kurtz; photo courtesy of Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library)

Today private banks rather than the government issue most of the money supply by creating dollars on their books as loans. That practice dates back to the post-civil-war era. Before the 1860s, banks printed paper promissory notes called “banknotes” that were redeemable in gold or “real bills” (promises to deliver goods in the future). These notes were then lent to borrowers. Real bills could not be leveraged, since they were specific to particular goods; but gold could be and was, leading to bank runs when customers doubted their bank’s ability to repay all the claims against its gold. The National Bank Act stabilized that system by maintaining the value of National Bank Notes from state to state.

In an effort to get state-chartered banks to join the national banking system, the National Bank Act imposed a heavy tax on their banknotes. But many banks avoided the tax by replacing banknotes with checkbooks: the loan amount was just written into the borrower’s account as a “deposit,” and the borrower wrote his own promissory note in the form of “checkbook money.” These deposits are counted in the money supply, and that is how banks now “create money” – nearly all of it.

FDR and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation

The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent bank runs by providing reserves, but it obviously failed in that endeavor. The early 1930s saw the worst contagion of bank runs in history. Loose credit in the 1920s triggered speculative bubbles on leveraged borrowing; and when the bubble inevitably burst in the Crash of 1929, liquidation of assets was forced on the borrowers. Depositors rushed to withdraw funds, triggering runs; 9,000 banks failed; and $7 billion in deposits were frozen. The money supply shrank, yet the Fed did not intervene.

To stimulate the economy and restore jobs, FDR’s government therefore reverted to Hamilton’s “American System.” The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), set up by President Hoover to save the banks, was repurposed and greatly expanded to leverage credit for manufacturing and development. Begun with a modest $500 million in capitalization, the RFC lent or invested over $40 billion from 1932 to 1957. It funded the New Deal and World War II and returned a net profit to the government of $690 million.

The RFC was not a depository bank and did not take deposits. For liquidity it issued bonds, most of which were bought by the federal government. The RC then made loans to local governments and productive small businesses at below-market rates. To repay the loans, cities that were over their general obligation bond limits issued “revenue bonds,” repaid with the revenues generated by the works funded by the loans.

The RFC provided off-budget funding. According to James Butkiewicz, professor of economics at the University of Delaware:

The RFC was an executive agency with the ability to obtain funding through the Treasury outside of the normal legislative process. Thus, the RFC could be used to finance a variety of favored projects and programs without obtaining legislative approval. RFC lending did not count toward budgetary expenditures, so the expansion of the role and influence of the government through the RFC was not reflected in the federal budget.

The Chinese Economic Miracle

Today the stellar model for infrastructure development is China, which went from one of the poorest countries in the world to global economic powerhouse in four decades. Among other achievements, between 2008 and 2019 China built 18,000 miles of high-speed rail, along with the world’s largest dam and power station. How was all that funded?  The government owns 80% of Chinese banking assets, including three massive “policy banks” designed to carry out the policies of the government. Government-owned banks fund the projects with credit, and fees generated by the projects repay the loans.

China Development Bank headquarters (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Predominant among the policy banks is China Development Bank (CDB), the largest development bank in the world. It has a national network of local branches to coordinate policies and projects; but like the RFC, it does not take private savings. Rather, it issues bonds. CDB bonds make up 25% of the national bond market, second only to those of the Ministry of Finance (the Chinese Treasury). CDB bonds have a credit rating as high as the government’s and are in high demand.  

China’s publicly-owned banks issued so much credit for infrastructure and development that its money supply (M2) actually grew 2900% in the last 27 years, yet hyperinflation did not result. Why? China’s GDP shot up in tandem, keeping supply and demand in balance.           

Development Banks to the Rescue

China’s massive infrastructure development has been credited with pulling the world out of the Great Recession, and its current tack is to repeat that effort. In 2022, the Chinese government pledged the yuan equivalent of $120 billion to the policy banks for infrastructure funding to revive the economy.

We could do that too — revive the U.S. economy with a self-funding National Infrastructure Bank. H.R.4052, the National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2023, follows the Hamiltonian model. For capital, it proposes debt-for-equity swaps with federal bondholders, adding a 2% dividend on top of the bond payouts for enticement. The swap would be bonds for non-voting bank shares, which could be swapped back for the bonds after twenty years. Unlike the RFC, the NIB is proposed to be a depository bank, able to leverage its capital to create deposits as loans on its books. Cities could repay these low-interest loans with revenue bonds funded by the infrastructure they create, as in the 1930s.

Abundance is the hallmark of Thanksgiving, and affordable credit is the key to abundance. If we can duplicate the feats of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, we can turn debt into equity for an infrastructure bank that generates low-cost credit for development and create an abundant economy we can be thankful for!

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This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, co-chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.  

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Our front against corporate fascism cannot be a weekend hobby for the well-to-do. It must be a 24 hours a day effort that is supported at every step by our independent communities.

At the core of this movement will stand a network of 100% economically independent, intellectually independent and self-sufficient communities. The number of these cooperatives and communities may be small at first, but once we have a model that can be exported, they will increase rapidly.

Economically independent means that we can produce our own products (clothes, furniture, tools, housing) within the community, create our own currency and our own barter system that is 100% independent of the Federal financial system, and we can grow our own food to the best of our ability without relying on the monopoly of distribution and logistics, the wrapping of everything in plastic and paper, the taxes and charges on everything that we eat, and the pesticides, herbicides and petro-fertilizers and the GMOs that cost us and kill us. If we get these vampire middle men out of the way, our movement will be far more powerful and we will not have these parasites sucking our economic lifeblood.

Intellectually independent means that we avoid the commercial television broadcasts that are meant to dumb down the population, and we create our own independent journalism and run our own alternative schools for our children. We will engage in discussions among citizens concerning local, national and international issues that will allow for a rational and informed discussion without the fluff, the hype and the blatantly anti-intellectual agenda of the corporate media.

That means that we will avoid like the plague the thought leaders that corporations force-feed us and rather strive to increase the intellectual independence and capacity of all citizens; we will recognize the potential of all to rise to the intellectual level demanded of them as citizens.

A pledge of membership and of joint ownership of the village, the community, that we join is an extremely effective means of creating a clear awareness of our independence through cooperation. 

We will welcome to our growing communities those who were laid off in the COVID-19 firings, those who have been economically destroyed by lockdowns and other political attacks, and those persecuted for not taking vaccines. Moreover, the farmland that multinational corporations and billionaires like Bill Gates claim to possess belongs to our communities. In accord with the Constitution of the United States, we do not recognize the purchase of our precious farmland, critical to our survival, by billionaires and multinational corporations using fake money and other financial tricks. They own nothing.  

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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OpenAI is falling apart.

What remains will still be an extremely consequential AI developer with a big bunch of the best talent in global AI – but not genius.

Microsoft is now in full control – commerce including with the US power handlers is now on top and the founding principles are out.

There is no chance Ilya can realize his visions in OpenAI anymore. No way.

Everyone from tech industry insiders to average bystanders marveled over the past week at how some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley managed to briefly turn the world’s leading AI company into a laughing stock.

The drama that unfolded at OpenAI nearly a year to the day after the institute first captured people’s imagination with the release of ChatGPT is now over—or at least paused—with co-founder Sam Altman reinstated as CEO.

But experts now believe OpenAI crossed the Rubicon and there is no going back to the way things were, even if Altman’s in-house rivals, among them Ilya Sutskever, wish for nothing more. (Fortune, November 24, 2023)

The Dilemma for Ilya Sutskever Is Acute

The meaning, rationale, governance, principles, and power in OpenAI have changed completely. Even if Ilya stays, he will still no longer work for the company he helped create and led scientifically to its achievements. The new OpenAI will not give a damn about an “AI that loves humanity.” This is not only tough but impossible for Ilya.

If Ilya leaves with some of the best and most loyal talent, they will probably be a minority with less developers and bereft of some intellectual rights of their creation. But new talent and the right kind of individuals will love to go there. Tough, but possible.

Breaking things down and starting over sometimes even creates a breakthrough.

Ilya has to leave and realize his visions by starting his own.

There is no other way.

OpenAI will just be an ordinary big commercial AI company – a little better but fundamentally no different from Google. Not nearly the room like before for Ilya to work, and Ilya cannot change that. Ilya, on his side, does not need OpenAI or depend on Microsoft. Ilya will always attract the right talent, the right kind of people with that talent (crucial), and the right kind of capital partners with his conditions.

Ilya starting his own company will be even more successful than before.

Go, go, go!

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.  

Featured image: OpenAI headquarters, Pioneer Building, San Francisco (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Il Ministero dell’Intelligence israeliano – che supervisiona il funzionamento del Mossad e dello Shin Bet (i servizi segreti esterno e interno) sotto la direzione del Primo Ministro – raccomanda il trasferimento forzato e permanente dell’intera popolazione palestinese di Gaza nella penisola desertica del Sinai in Egitto. Qui dovrebbero essere create tendopoli e successivamente insediamenti permanenti.

Dovrebbe essere istituita una fascia inaccessibile larga diversi chilometri, in territorio egiziano, per impedire ai palestinesi di avvicinarsi al confine con Israele. Il piano, a cui il governo Netanyahu sta lavorando attraverso una trattativa con l’Egitto, coinvolge anche la popolazione palestinese della Cisgiordania.

Emblematica l’immagine di un bulldozer israeliano che, nel Territorio Palestinese della Cisgiordania, abbatte il monumento al leader storico della Palestina Yasser Arafat.

L’obiettivo del governo Netanyahu è chiaro: cancellare i Territori palestinesi. Lo conferma il fatto che l’attacco  israeliano non solo sta sterminando la popolazione palestinese, ma sta  rendendo il territorio di Gaza inabitabile, così da rendere inevitabile la  deportazione dei palestinesi nel Sinai o altrove, camuffata da “operazione umanitaria internazionale”.

Da tale situazione emerge la necessità di focalizzare l’azione contro la guerra su precisi obiettivi politici. In Italia possono essere  fondamentalmente tre:

1) L’abrogazione della Legge C. 5592 del 2005 che istituzionalizza la cooperazione militare a tutto campo tra Italia e Israele.

2) La richiesta che le Nazioni Unite inviino immediatamente una forza internazionale di peacekeeping a Gaza, territorio dello Stato di Palestina che dal 2012 fa parte delle Nazioni Unite con tutti i diritti, salvo quello di votare.

3) La messa in stato di accusa dei capi di Israele per crimini di guerra, crimini contro l’umanità e crimine di genocidio.

Manlio Dinucci

Video Byoblu.com :

https://www.byoblu.com/2023/11/24/il-ministero-dellintelligenge-israeliano-deportare-i-palestinesi-nel-deserto-del-sinai-grandangolo-pangea/

Video Youtube :

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***

“Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world–or to make it the last.”

–  President John F. Kennedy, September 20, 1963 speech to the UN, two months and two days before his death. [1]

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Sixty years ago…

According to the official story released by the Warren Commission Report, the murder of John F. Kennedy was an achievement of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone gunman. [2]

His actions just happened to coincide with the decision by Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker, two hours before the attack on Kennedy, to order all one hundred of his deputies, “to take no part whatsoever in the security of the presidential motorcade.” And  Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry also gave an order to keep officers out of Dealey Plaza during the time the president was travelling through it. As he later pointed out in his book, The JFK Assassination Files, Curry was following the orders of the Secret Service. [3]

Lee Harvey Oswald could only be shooting from behind Kennedy. And yet, several individuals testified that the bullet that killed Kennedy entered from the front and exited through the back of his head! Only ten minutes before Oswald shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) a secretary in the building who knew him saw him having lunch on the second floor! [4]

Oil billionaires expecting Kennedy to pass laws which would have them spending substantial amounts of taxes from their incomes held a party the night before the assassination. Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were apparently in attendance. Then a week later, a second big party was held at an oil billionaire’s mansion where attendees were served champagne and were laughing apparently all the way to the bank. [5]

With these and other coincidences and realities in full display, one can come to one of two conclusions.

1) Lee Harvey Oswald was quite an amazing guy!

2) The real culprit(s) succeeded in pinning the blame exclusively on him!

As the anniversary has passed us over, we decided to commemorate the domestic event living on in infamy by looking at one researcher and two sets of evidence seldom on display when casual observers choose to talk about the death of perhaps the last president enjoying his level of high popularity.

Jacob Hornberger is a lawyer, a JFK investigator and author of two JFK related books in the last decade: The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. Hornberger brings these two books to light during this feature interview on the Global Research News Hour.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 410)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

1. https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19630920
2. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-1
3. https://www.globalresearch.ca/kennedy-assassination-greatest-conspiracy-ever-conceived/5840890
4. ibid;
5. ibid;

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***

After over 20 months of talk about various “game-changing NATO weapons” that would “drive Russia behind the Urals”, particularly the much-touted F-16 fighter jets, the Kiev regime doesn’t seem to be so enthusiastic anymore. Namely, the Neo-Nazi junta is now whining that the F-16s they’re supposed to be getting simply won’t make the cut against advanced Russian fighter jets. Thus, they’re already complaining about the need to modernize the US-made aircraft so it could stand a chance against Moscow’s platforms. The Kiev regime is particularly unhappy with the radar systems these F-16s will come with and is demanding they be upgraded before delivery, because they can’t even match the existing MiG-29s they’re supposed to replace (to say nothing of the higher-end Su-27s).

According to Oleksandra Ustinova, a prominent lobbyist for NATO arms deliveries and a member of the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), discussions are ongoing regarding the modernization of F-16s that are slated for delivery to the Neo-Nazi junta. In an interview with the European Pravda, she emphasized the need for a better radar and more advanced missiles, as the ones that are supposed to be delivered are not up to the task. Ustinova confirmed that talks about applying the necessary upgrades are in progress, but refused to give more details. She complained about the acquisition process, calling it challenging due to communication issues with the Kiev regime’s NATO backers, particularly Washington DC, which, according to her, keeps 83% of the “aid” funds in the US.

“In addition, when we talk about the supply of weapons, 83% of the money allocated for weapons for Ukraine actually remains in America, because the state purchases these weapons from American manufacturers,” Ustinova said, later also adding: “After all, giving us aircraft with a radar range of 60 kilometers like a MiG does not make sense.”

While the exact type of F-16 fighter jets that the Neo-Nazi junta will get remains a secret, considering these claims, as well as the fact that one of the main donors is Norway which operated the F-16AM/BM Block 15 MLU (Mid-Life Upgrade), all of which were retired in 2022 in favor of the deeply troubled F-35, it’s safe to assume what sort of aircraft the Kiev regime will get. However, some of its over-enthusiastic military sources are claiming that the modernized aircraft would get the advanced AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR). This is an advanced AESA (active electronically scanned array) radar based on the F-22’s AN/APG-77 and the F-35’s AN/APG-81. They believe that this advanced AESA radar is capable of fulfilling their requirements to face Russian jets.

The Kiev regime is hoping that the AN/APG-83 can even be paired with old F-16s that some of their military sources erroneously labeled as the Block 20 MLU. Still, only the less advanced F-16 Block 15 were outfitted with the MLU upgrade. As for the AN/APG-83, the financial aspect of such an advanced (and expensive) upgrade should certainly be taken into account. The US Air Force (USAF) is currently undergoing a major modernization program for over 600 of its F-16C/D Block 40/42 and 50/52 variants. How likely is the Pentagon to give the go-ahead for transferring such advanced radars to the Kiev regime when its own jets are yet to get them? Not very, I’d argue. However, even if it does happen, the Neo-Nazi junta surely won’t be happy to learn that this would further delay the delivery of F-16s.

The process of training Ukrainian pilots for some of the most basic variants of the US-made jet is already taking too long.

Retraining them for a modernized version would take even longer and that’s without taking into account the time and resources needed to upgrade the existing F-16s slated for the Kiev regime forces. The acquisition process has been pushed back several times already and current estimates predict that the jets won’t be available before mid to late 2024. What’s more, there’s also the question of training the ground crews that are supposed to conduct maintenance, repairs and other logistics, further exacerbating the issue. However, the real pushback from the US might have the least to do with money, resources, deadlines or even having to undercut its own fleet for Kiev’s sake.

Namely, the real risk for the Pentagon comes from the possibility of Russia getting the chance to examine these advanced radars. With Russian jets such as the MiG-31BM, Su-35S and Su-57 in the skies over Ukraine and now even deadlier advanced SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems, the possibility of any other aircraft in the world surviving in such an environment is effectively zero. Moscow’s specialists could then locate any well-preserved wreckage and study its components, including the AN/APG-83. This would make it possible for Russia to design advanced countermeasures for its own jets and air defense systems, rendering these radars obsolete virtually overnight and making the USAF’s entire modernization effort a completely pointless waste of enormous resources.

This is without even considering the risk of a possible defection, as evidenced by a recent case with one Ukrainian pilot.

There’s also the ever-present reputational damage for the US, as massive combat losses could easily disrupt or even prevent foreign sales. And the danger is not only in the sky, but on the ground as well. Long-range precision strikes with air-launched cruise missiles launched by strategic bombers/missile carriers such as the Tu-95MS and Tu-160 or ground-based ones such as the now legendary “Iskander” could easily destroy entire squadrons parked on runways. Other platforms, such as the MiG-31K/I and even Su-34M strike fighters could fire the 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles and obliterate entire airbases with F-16s, their pilots and ground crews.

*

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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***

Examine the following diagram, reporting  Vaccine Adverse Events  in Florida following the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in mid-December 2020

Below is a report of the Florida Department of Health published in February 2023, which demonstrates unequivocally that the Covid-19 vaccine launched in mid-December 2020 was conducive to a major shift in the number of Adverse Events reported in 2021, in comparison with all previous years. 

Of significance, most governments Worldwide (and across the U.S. and Canada) have failed to inform people on the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine.

In contrast, The Florida Department of Health  acknowledges in this report the adverse events related to the COVID-19 vaccine including: 

coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries, Bell’s palsy, encephalitis. cardiac arrests, thromboembolic and thrombocytopenic events, cardiovascular disease, etc

Michel Chossudovsky,  Global Research November 23, 2023

 

Overall reports submitted to VAERS, Florida 2006–2022

In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period (Figure 1).

The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign. There is a need for additional unbiased research to better understand the COVID-19 vaccines’ short- and long-term effects.

The findings in Florida are consistent with various studies that continue to uncover such risks. To further evaluate this, the Surgeon General wrote a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) illustrating the risk factors associated with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and emphasizing the need for additional transparency.

According to a study, Fraiman J et al, Vaccine. 2022, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events, including coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries, Bell’s palsy, and encephalitis. This risk was 1 in 550 individuals, which is much higher than other vaccines.

A second study, Sun CLF et al, Sci Rep. 2022, found increased acute cardiac arrests and other acute cardiac events following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.

Additionally, Dag Berild J et al, JAMA Netw Open. 2022, assessed the risk of thromboembolic and thrombocytopenic events related to COVID-19 vaccines and found preliminary evidence of increased risk of both coronary disease and cardiovascular disease.

While the CDC has identified safety signals for stroke among individuals 65 and older following the bivalent booster administration, there is a need for additional assessments and research regarding safety of all mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

To support transparency, the State of Florida reminds health care providers to accurately communicate the risks and benefits of all clinical interventions to their patients, including those associated with the COVID-19 vaccine as additional risks continue to be identified and disclosed to the public.

The State of Florida remains dedicated to protecting communities from the risks of COVID-19 and other public health concerns, specifically by promoting the importance of treatment and promoting prevention through healthy habits. We encourage our health care partners and providers to do the same.

*

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***

It resembles a chronology of desperation, shifting narratives, and schoolboy howlers. From the outset, the mass lethality of Israeli strikes against Gaza and the collective punishment of its populace needed some justification, however tenuous. If it could be shown, convincingly, that Hamas and its allies had militarised such civilian infrastructure as hospitals, they would become fair game for vengeful air strikes and military assault. Thus, could Israel’s soldiers demonstrate, not merely the animal savagery of Hamas, one indifferent to humanity and suffering, but the virtue of Israel’s own military objectives.  The forces of pallid light would again prevail against swarthy evil.

Interest quickly shifted to Al-Shifa Hospital, where the carnage has been horrific. This was said to be the wicked heart of operations, one depicted with exaggerated relish in a video titled “Home to Hamas’ Headquarters, This is an IDF 3D Diagram of the Shifa Hospital”.  In an explanatory note, the Israeli Defence Forces state in the crude production that the hospital “is not only the largest hospital in Gaza but it also acts as the main headquarters for Hamas’ terrorist activity.” It goes on to note that, “Terrorism does not belong in a hospital and the IDF will operate to uncover any terrorist infrastructure.”

This bit of amateurish theatrics suitably complemented another effort which made its debut on November 11. In its official Arabic account affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israel posted a selfie video (now deleted) starring a Palestinian nurse indignant at Hamas’ commandeering of the Al-Shifa hospital. A close inspection of the production could only engender doubt: a well laundered lab coat, appropriate positioning of implicating logos, crude simulations of background bombing, the unconvincing accent. “The only thing missing was a degree hanging in the background saying Tel Aviv Upstairs Medical College,” a scornful Marc Owen Jones of The Daily Beast wrote.

So @israelarabic deleted the tweet of the fake Al Shifa nurse claiming Hamas was taking over the hospital #Gaza pic.twitter.com/dkrZhKeXud

— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) November 12, 2023

Despite these stumbling efforts, support followed from Israel’s staunch backers, the United States. In a press briefing held on November 14, NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, asserted that

“we have information that  Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages.”

The language used by Kirby, however, did not exactly suggest a thriving command and control centre at work, though he would go so far as to claim that the hospital served as a “command-and-control node”. “They have stored weapons there, and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli operation against that facility.”

When the IDF eventually made its way into the hospital, the initial evidence was not promising. In videos and photos posted by the Israeli forces none revealed tunnels and evidence of a vast command centre. As Aric Toler of the New York Times reported, a mere 10 guns were found at the first count. “The IDF has claimed that the ‘beating heart’ of Hamas’ operations is beneath Shifa.  Presumably they’ll release more photos/videos?” In another post, Toler identifies various “grab bags” with “guns and the body armor scattered around, and a laptop next to CD-Rs.”

In another round of public relations tripping, two new videos released by both the IDF and the Shin Bet security agency purported to document, as the Times of Israel describes it, a tunnel shaft with “a winding staircase from around three meters deep, continuing down for another seven meters until it reaches part of the tunnel network.  The tunnel continues for five meters, before turning to the right and continuing for another 50 meters.” At the end of the tunnel lies an obstructing blast door, equipped with a hole for shooters.

“The findings,” an IDF statement claimed with weak conviction, “prove beyond all doubt that buildings in the hospital complex are used as infrastructure for the Hamas terror organization, for terror activity. This is further proof of the cynical use that the Hamas terror organization makes of the residents of the Gaza Strip as a human shield for its murderous terror activities.”

Despite some strained satisfaction in the statement, the picture Israel offers is gnarled and tattered. The IDF production teams continue to struggle in reviving a cadaverous narrative, using their own soldiers as props (because that’s convincing) to describe their first impressions on seeing “a terrorist tunnel”. Just as its cream-of-the-crop elite failed to get wind of the October 7 attack, suggesting an expertise drugged by hubris, Israel’s information strategy seems increasingly suspect, slippery and ever subject to qualification. Rifles, a truck, and a hostage or two, do not a central military command centre make.

Watch IDF 1LT Masha describe the moment she saw a terrorist tunnel underneath Gaza's biggest hospital. pic.twitter.com/gGAnG8v7BE

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) November 23, 2023

It is also worth noting that physicians and doctors working at the hospital – the authentic ones, in any case – have also been perplexed by the allegations that Al-Shifa serves as a throbbing command and control hub for Hamas and its combat operations.  Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert, who has worked at the facility for 16 years, told Democracy Now! that there was “no evidence at all” that such claims were true. “If it was a military command centre, I would not work there.” At least we can be sure that Gilbert is not a stage extra.

In this bleak mess, it is worth stressing that even if the hospital proved to be a military facility, humanitarian protections would not mysteriously cease for those patients and staff within it. “Anything that the attacking force can do to allow the humanitarian functions of that hospital to continue,” reasons Adil Haq of Rutgers Law School, “they’re obligated to do, even if there’s some office somewhere in the building where there is a fighter holed up.” But the strategy against Al-Shifa was never humanitarian to begin with, starting with depriving Gaza access to fuel, food and water. The rest is Pallywood.

*

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected] 

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***

Ukraine is having difficulty in convincing its citizens to stay in the country.

According to a recent report, the regime’s soldiers are focusing their efforts on preventing citizens from leaving Ukrainian territory on the Transcarpathian border. The case clearly shows how Ukrainian citizens are dissatisfied with the situation in the country and do not support the war with Russia, trying to evade military obligations.

Ukrainian border service officials are located at the region of Transcarpathia trying to control the large flow of Ukrainian citizens who try to cross every day in order to avoid conscription. Many Ukrainian citizens want to enter neighboring nations, such as Hungary, Poland and Romania, as they believe this is the only way to save their lives from the devastating consequences of the conflict.

Unable to convince their compatriots to fight in the war, Ukrainian soldiers are using illegal and anti-humanitarian methods to prevent escapes. Real military operations are being conducted in the region and there is even the use of landmines on the border, showing the intention to injure or kill those who try to enter neighboring countries. Kidnappings of local citizens for forced recruitment have also become commonplace.

It is also important to remember that the Transcarpathian region is a repeated target of Kiev’s ethnic cleansing practices. Being a region of majority of Hungarian ethnicity, Transcarpathia has become a kind of “Western Donbass” in Ukraine. A process of genocide against the local people has been implemented in an increasingly open and public manner in recent years.

This genocide happens on both a cultural and physical level. Hungarian schools have been closed and the native language banned from official documents. In parallel, ethnic Hungarians are recruited en masse and taken without adequate training and poorly equipped to the front lines, where they become easy targets for Russian artillery and die in large numbers. Kiev is taking advantage of its martial law to use non-Ukrainian ethnic citizens as cannon fodder in NATO’s war of aggression against Russia, and there currently clearly appears to be a focus on using the situation to accelerate ethnic cleansing in Transcarpathia. 

It is possible to understand the practices of the neo-Nazi regime by remembering its main political inspiration, which is Hitler’s Germany. During the war, Nazi Germany implemented the so-called “Volkssturm”, a mass recruitment measure with forced conscription to form a large national militia. In Ukraine, this is exactly what is being done, giving priority to ethnic groups that the Zelensky government wants to eliminate as quickly as possible, such as the Hungarians.

Militia units are being created in Transcarpathia and called “centers of national resistance”, where, in addition to the forced recruitment of local citizens, sabotage operations are also carried out against any type of resistance from the Hungarian people. Peaceful protests are quickly repressed and data from local anti-war activists is sent to Ukrainian intelligence to enable attacks. There is a clear objective on the part of the regime to eliminate any type of “Hungarian threat” in Transcarpathia, which is why these illegal practices are becoming gradually frequent.

These facts show that the Russians have always been right in their allegations. The current Ukrainian government is really a neo-Nazi junta that hates and persecutes ethnic minorities. Kiev does not respect the Hungarian people and their right to self-determination, in the same way that it never respected the Russians of Donbass, having always promoted violent acts against the local population. Racism, xenophobia and ultranationalism are a vital part of the ideology that became hegemonic in Ukraine in 2014, which is why crimes against non-ethnic Ukrainian citizens are recurrent.

In the same sense, it is clear that local citizens are fatigued of living under the terror of war and want to leave the country as quickly as possible. There is no patriotic motivation that convinces Ukrainians to remain in the country, simply because it seems increasingly clear that Kiev is not fighting for its own people or territory, but for foreign interests that in no way benefit the local population. This awareness is leading many young men of military age to flee the country across the border in Transcarpathia. Kiev reacts using unnecessary violent methods, but the correct path to follow should be another.

Instead of forcing its citizens to fight, Ukraine should change its policies and adopt a humanitarian and sovereign stance, stopping serving as a proxy and leaving its citizens free to choose whether or not to undertake military service. The problem is that these proposals of respect for humanity and democracy are contradictory to the hegemonic neo-Nazi ideology in today’s Ukraine.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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***

Approximately two months after the unfortunate fall of Artsakh (better known as Nagorno-Karabakh), a historically Armenian land occupied by Azerbaijan, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 indigenous Armenians, the current government continues with its disastrous foreign policy. Run by the infamous Sorosite Nikol Pashinyan, the end of Armenia’s troubles is nowhere in sight.

Worse yet, one of the world’s oldest countries and civilizations, spanning millennia and starting with the ancient Kingdom of Urartu nearly 3000 years ago, Armenia is staring into the abyss as its NATO-backed “leader” keeps making one bad decision after another. The victims of this unwise (at best, although the more suitable term would be treacherous) “strategy” are the Armenian people, both in Artsakh and Armenia proper.

The former have lost virtually everything and are now living in refugee camps while their multi-millennial native homeland is being ravaged by Azeri invaders. On the other hand, the latter are running the risk of going through the same, as Azerbaijan and its Neo-Ottoman ally Turkey keep escalating pressure on Armenia. For his part, Pashinyan continues the suicidal pivot toward the political West that intends to use Yerevan to destabilize Moscow’s southern periphery. Back in early October, as the exodus of Artsakh Armenians was unfolding, Pashinyan met French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, who pledged “support” for the South Caucasus country, including with weapons shipments. Too little, too late, one would argue. However, as long as France can make some money for its Military Industrial Complex, it’s “perfectly fine and dandy”.

The continued suffering of the Armenian people is secondary, it would seem, as Yerevan continues to tilt toward Paris. According to Quest-France, Armenia received up to 24 French “Bastion” armored personnel carriers (APCs) that were originally intended for the Kiev regime. The latter claims to have discarded the armored vehicles on account of their inadequate protection, although some have suggested that the actual reason why the APCs were not delivered to the Neo-Nazi junta (despite the promised donation by the manufacturer) is because Yerevan was willing to pay for them. The price is yet to be disclosed, but various sources report it hovers around half a million euros apiece, an exorbitant sum for the increasingly cash-strapped Armenia that should have other priorities.

The superb performance of Russian drones during the special military operation (SMO) should’ve prompted a wise Armenian leader to acquire them from Moscow, a move which would not only reignite their centuries-old alliance, but would also provide a very real and combat-proven capability to deter and/or defeat further Turko-Azeri aggression. But alas, the Armenian people are unfortunate to have Pashinyan in power. To demonstrate just how spectacularly incompetent he is, we can compare the cost and the performance of a single Russian-made “Lancet” and the French-made “Bastion”. The former costs approximately $35,000, while the latter stands at over $400,000. This would mean that for the price of one “Bastion” APC, Yerevan could acquire at least 11 “Lancet” drones.

Considering the fact that an anti-tank variant of the “Lancet” was documented destroying German “Leopard 2” tanks (costing over $8 million apiece), one of the best in NATO, what chance could the “Bastion” APC possibly have? Thus, the combat performance of the “Lancet” far exceeds its price, making it one of the most cost-effective weapons of our age. Worse yet, Armenia bought up to 24 “Bastion” APCs, meaning that it wasted approximately $10 million that otherwise could’ve been used to acquire nearly 300 “Lancet” drones that would’ve provided a massive advantage over any potential Azeri invasion force. However, Yerevan’s strategic miscalculations don’t seem to be limited to disastrous military thinking only. Namely, there have been disturbing reports that the Pashinyan government will provide weapons to the Kiev regime.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), citing “a prominent Kremlin milblogger” (unspecified in the text, but obviously referring to the Militarist) and other Russian sources, claims that Armenia allegedly agreed to transfer its “Tochka-U” short-range ballistic missiles to the Neo-Nazi junta and that it’s supposedly even considering the possibility of leaving the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). On November 9, Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanyan denied this, while the Armenian Ministry of Defense rejected reports about the supposed shipment of missiles to the Kiev regime forces. However, other sources keep claiming that the supposed deal is not only going forward, but could also include air defense systems such as the older S-300 and short-range “Osa-AK”.

The allegations are yet to be substantiated and hopefully will soon be disproven, but Moscow’s distrust towards the Pashinyan regime can hardly be considered unreasonable. Namely, the Secretary of the Armenian Security Council Armen Grigoryan recently met the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, one of the most prominent Kiev regime officials. The participation of one of the highest-ranking Armenian officials at a conference dedicated to the Neo-Nazi junta certainly won’t reassure Russia that Armenia can be considered an ally. This explains why the allegations were even made in the first place, as Moscow cannot be sure what sort of behind-closed-doors agreements were made during the aforementioned conference. If the reports turn out to be true, the damage to Russian-Armenian ties could be irreparable.

Despite its age and obsolescence against the Russian military, the “Tochka-U” missile system can be used against civilian targets, as evidenced by the Kiev regime’s indiscriminate usage of all sorts of weapons against cities and towns across Ukraine and even some in Russia. What’s more, if Yerevan does have hundreds of “Tochka-U” missiles, the obvious question arises, why weren’t they used to protect Artsakh? Worse yet, if Armenia indeed sends “Osa-AK” and S-300 SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems to the Neo-Nazi junta, while importing the much more expensive French “Mistral” short-range air defense systems, this could end up being one of the most self-defeating moves ever made by any country in recent times. Since there certainly hasn’t been a shortage of such suicidal moves in Yerevan, who could possibly criticize Moscow’s suspicion?

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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