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US Army General Christopher Cavoli, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, announced that the largest NATO exercise in decades, Steadfast Defender 2024, will occur in Europe from the end of January to the end of May. 90,000 soldiers from the 31 NATO countries will participate and are about to join NATO Sweden. Over 80 combat aircraft along with helicopters and drones, 50 warships including aircraft carriers, 1,100 tanks, and other combat vehicles will be used in the exercise. The exercise — the largest since the end of the Cold War — will test and refine the war strategy against Russia.

European countries of the Alliance in NATO declared that, with the Steadfast Defender 2024

“the Alliance will demonstrate its ability to strengthen the Euro-Atlantic area through the transatlantic movement of forces from North America. This reinforcement will occur during a simulated emergent conflict scenario against a near-peer adversary.”

The reference to Russia is clear.

The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe also announced that Italy had been chosen as the headquarters of the Allied Reaction Force. The US general underlined that it is “a fundamental component of our new force model and that it is capable of carrying out the entire spectrum of missions and serves as a rapidly deployable strategic reserve”. 

During the exercise, the Italian headquarters of the Allied Reaction Force will carry out a deployment of the Rapid Reaction Force in Poland on the eastern flank of the Alliance, clearly directed against Russia.

The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe did not say that the war exercise, taking place for four months in Europe, would also be nuclear. The aircraft, ships, and missile systems deployed in the Steadfast Defender 2024 have dual conventional and nuclear capabilities. The USA will thus be able to test in a realistic simulation the new nuclear weapons that they are deploying in Europe increasingly close to Russia.

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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 source

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It is already abundantly clear that Israel is adamant to ignore the demands of the ICJ and carry through with its genocide until its horrific end. Instead of reversing course, key forces in Israel celebrate their drive for genocide against the Palestinians and their objective of an Israeli colonization of Gaza. See this.

Consequently, Israel will not put to justice anyone involved in its genocide.

We must remember, that the genocide is carried out by the criminal orders and/or criminal incitement by top Israeli leaders like president Herzog, the prime minister Netanyahu, the defense minister Galant, the security minister Ben-Gvir, foreign minister Katz, and finance minister Smotrich. Benny Gantz is probably also guilty as part of this gang.

Guilty is the Israeli military top and lots and lots of people all the way down to soldiers committing the acts. We also have Israeli media, religious persons, analysts, legal experts, and diplomats involved. 

Like Germany 1945, we confront a state and society infested with genocidal ideology, its meticulous planning, and its bloody execution. And the trials afterwards proved no remorse among the perpetrators. 

Haaretz today 29 January 2024, lists nearly all the above-named persons as involved in genocide or incitement to genocide. Haaretz further writes that the ICJ ruling should by adhered to by Israel as a “yellow card” for Israel, including its leaders. But Haaretz is deluded in believing any Israeli institution will take action against the genocide continuing, or any action against any individuals leading or inciting it.

Somebody else must bring justice.

Like Germany 1945, there is no chance that the country itself will stop and carry out justice once its bloody genocide fails in an abyss of self-destruction. Like the trial in Nüremberg in Germany 1945, the outside World will have to organize and carry through the trial for the genocide carried out by Israel in coordination with the USA. An international trial, in which US President Biden, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Lloyd Austin will stand accused as well. And like the World saw at Nüremberg in 1945, there is no chance that the defendants will show any remorse, not even in the minute when their sentence was carried out.

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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: Ahmad Shabat and his uncle Ibrahim at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip [Atia Darwish/Al Jazeera]

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The Pentagon on Monday said Iran “bears responsibility” for the drone attack in northeastern Jordan that killed three US troops but admitted it has no evidence that Iran was directly involved.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said the responsibility fell on Iran due to its support for Iraqi Shia militias the US believes carried out the attack.

“In terms of attribution for the attack, we know this is an [Iran]-backed militia. It has the footprints of Kataib Hezbollah, but [we’re] not making a final assessment,” Singh said at a press conference. “Iran continues to arm and equip these groups to launch these attacks, and we will certainly hold them responsible.”

When asked if the US knew Iran and Iranian leaders were “actually behind this attack, as in planned, coordinated, or directed it,” Singh admitted the US had nothing to show that.

“We know that Iran certainly plays a role with these groups, they arm and equip and fund these groups. I don’t have more to share on — terms of an intelligence assessment on if leaders in Iran were directing this attack,” she said.

Singh was again asked about the claim that Iran was behind the attack and said the US just knows that “Iran funds these groups” and had nothing more to add. Later in the press conference, she said Iran “bears responsibility” for the killing of three American soldiers.

Also on Monday, The New York Times reported that US intelligence officials have no evidence Iran had advanced knowledge of the attack.

“American intelligence officials say that while Iran provides weapons, funding and sometimes intelligence to its proxy groups, there is no evidence that it calls the shots — meaning it may not have known in advance about the attack in Jordan,” the report reads.

Iran has strongly denied it was behind the attack and said the resistance factions were targeting the US forces in the region due to its support for the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Since mid-October, US bases in Iraq and Syria have come under attack about 160 times, and the US has never produced evidence to show Iran was directing the operations.

The comments from Singh came as President Biden is mulling what his response will be to the killing of the three American troops. He is under pressure from hawks in Congress to bomb Iran directly, and a previous report from the Times said that’s something the administration would consider in response to the death of US troops despite the risk of a full-blown war with Iran.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

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From Eastern Europe to East Asia to across the Middle East, the United States is currently positioned on multiple tripwires that could pull our country into a new war the American people do not want.

In 2024, it’ll be more important than ever that Washington adheres to sound American principles, the most fundamental of which is the consent of the governed.

The United States Constitution is clear and concise: “The Congress shall have Power…To declare War.” That authority does not belong to the president (no matter their party), or the generals, or some unelected committee of unknown, faceless bureaucrats. Only the people’s elected representatives assembled in the U.S. Congress can decide whether to bring our nation from a state of peace into a state of war.

And yet, since World War II, their duty has been usurped by the executive branch in the form of the intelligence “community,” the military-industrial complex, and the White House.

According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, since Joe Biden’s inauguration, American soldiers have been in combat and under enemy fire in eight countries: Afghanistan (prior to Biden’s delayed withdrawal), Iraq, Syria, Mali, Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Global War on Terror has proven that without the support of the citizenry, expressed through their elected representatives, our country cannot continue these endless wars across the globe.

Like most Americans, my constituents in New Hampshire’s Hillsborough District 1 are tired of forever war and permanent overseas occupation. They have no further tolerance for the expenditure of their money, their blood, or their honor in places like Iraq, where I deployed twice as a Marine Corps rifleman.

With a motivation to restore the Founding Fathers’ intended separation of powers, I cosponsored H.B. 229, the Defend the Guard Act, in the state legislature. This bill would prohibit the deployment of the New Hampshire National Guard into combat overseas unless Congress has first voted to declare war. Last week, with bipartisan support from both conservatives and progressives, H.B. 229 passed the New Hampshire House of Representatives in an 187-182 vote.

This bill, which is only an added enforcement mechanism to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, drew active opposition. In other states where this legislation has been introduced, lawmakers have been made to feel intimidated by men in uniform, mainly senior officials from the Department of Defense who lobbied aggressively against it. The threats are always the same; don’t rock the boat, or else.

But our soldiers deserve better than complacency. Defend the Guard will not prevent our National Guard units from participating in overseas training in places like El Salvador — with which New Hampshire has a State Partnership Program — or from fulfilling their domestic tasks like disaster relief in other states. It will only ensure that New Hampshire’s National Guardsmen are only sent to fight wars that their representatives have voted for. Isn’t that how our republic is meant to work?

For all the opposition’s big talk, they were drowned out by the immense grassroots backing for the Defend the Guard Act. I know that many of my colleagues’ phones blew up with calls from constituents informing them that they should support this common sense fix to our broken foreign policy.

I’m incredibly proud of the gratitude I’ve received from Granite Staters for championing this legislation, and for the help of fellow co-sponsors John Potucek, Michael Granger, and Matthew Santonastaso — all of us veterans.

H.B. 229 will now move to the state Senate. Furthermore, more than half the states in the union will have Defend the Guard legislation introduced in their legislative bodies in 2024. In March 2023 the Arizona Senate became the first legislative body to pass this bill.

This measure could potentially keep our National Guardsmen out of an unconstitutional war. Their lives are worth that effort, and our Constitution is worth saving.

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Tom Mannion is a two-time Iraq War veteran, deploying with 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines in 2005 and 2007 as an infantry rifleman. He was elected as a New Hampshire State Representative in 2022 and currently serves on the State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs committee.

Featured image: Pennsylvania National Guard Soldiers bound for Africa mission, Dec. 2023. (photo by Pennsylvania National Guard )

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Governments should endorse a global moratorium on mRNA vaccines until all questions about their safety have been thoroughly investigated, according to the authors of a new, peer-reviewed article on the COVID-19 vaccine trials and the global vaccination campaign published last week in Cureus, Journal of Medical Science.

Cureus is a web-based peer-reviewed open-access general medical journal using prepublication peer review.

The authors surveyed published research on the pharmaceutical companies’ vaccine trials and related adverse events. They also called for the COVID-19 vaccines to be removed immediately from the childhood immunization schedule.

After the first reports from vaccine trials claimed they were 95% effective in preventing COVID-19, serious problems with method, execution and reporting in the trials became public, which the paper reviewed in detail.

Evidence also shows the products never underwent adequate safety and toxicological testing, and since the vaccine rollout, researchers have identified a significant number of adverse events (AEs) and serious adverse events (SAEs).

Authors M. Nathaniel Mead, Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., Russ Wolfinger, Ph.D., Jessica Rose, Ph.D., Kris Denhaerynck, Ph.D., Steve Kirsch and Dr. Peter McCullough detailed the vaccines’ potential serious harms to humans, vaccine control and processing issues, the mechanisms behind AEs, the immunological reasons for vaccine inefficacy and the mortality data from the registrational trials.

They concluded, “Federal agency approval of the COVID-19 mRNA injectable products on a blanket-coverage population-wide basis had no support from an honest assessment of all relevant registrational data and commensurate consideration of risks versus benefits.”

They also called for the vaccines to be immediately removed from the childhood immunization schedule and for the suspension of the boosters.

“It is unethical and unconscionable to administer an experimental vaccine to a child who has a near-zero risk of dying from COVID-19 (IFR, 0.0003%) but a well-established 2.2% risk of permanent heart damage based on the best prospective data available,” they wrote.

Finally, the authors called for a full investigation into misconduct by the pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory agencies.

It is the first peer-reviewed study to call for a moratorium on the COVID-19 mRNA products, Rose told The Defender.

“Once a proper assessment of the safety and efficacy claims was made herein — upon which the emergency use authorization (EUA)’s and ultimate final authorizations were granted — it was found that the COVID-19 injectable products were neither safe nor effective,” she added.

According to McCollough, “mRNA should never have been authorized for human use.”

Lead author Mead told The Defender, “Our view is that any risk-benefit analysis must consider how much the presumed benefit in terms of reduced COVID-19 related mortality is offset by the potential increase in vaccine-induced mortality.”

Here are six takeaways from the review:

1. The COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ are reclassified gene therapies that were rushed through the regulatory process in a historically unprecedented manner

Before the seven-month authorization process for the mRNA vaccines, no vaccine had ever gone to market without undergoing testing of at least four years, with typical timelines averaging 10 years.

To speed the process, the companies skipped preclinical studies of potential toxicity from multiple doses and cut the typical 6-12 month observation period for identifying longer-term adverse effects and the established 10-15-year period for monitoring for long-term effects such as cancer and autoimmune disorders, the authors wrote.

The trials prioritized documenting effective symptom reduction over SAE and mortality. This was particularly concerning, the authors argued, because mRNA products are gene therapy products reclassified as vaccines and then given EUA for the first time ever for use against a viral disease.

However, the gene therapies’ components have not been thoroughly evaluated for safety for use as vaccines.

There is an uninvestigated and major concern that the mRNA could transform body cells into viral protein factories — with no off-switch — that produce the spike protein for a prolonged period causing chronic systemic inflammation and immune dysfunction.

The spike protein in the vaccine, the authors said, is associated with more severeimmunopathology and other AEs than the spike protein in the virus itself.

The authors suggested that massive government investment in mRNA technology, including hundreds of millions before the pandemic and tens of billions once it began, meant, “U.S. federal agencies were strongly biased toward successful outcomes for the registrational trials.”

The financial incentives along with political pressures to deliver a rapid solution likely influenced a series of flawed decisions that compromised the integrity of the trials and downplayed serious scientific concerns about risks with the technology, they added.

2. Steps were taken in trials to overestimate vaccine efficacy 

Because the trials were designed to assess whether the mRNA vaccine reduced symptoms, they did not measure whether the vaccines prevented severe disease and death. Yet the vaccine makers repeatedly claimed that they do.

“No large randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials have ever demonstrated reductions in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, hospitalization, or death,” the authors wrote.

Additionally, the number of people who contracted clinical COVID-19 in both the placebo and intervention groups was “too small to draw meaningful, pragmatic, or broad-sweeping conclusions with regard to COVID-19 morbidity and mortality.”

Pfizer’s 95 % efficacy claims were based on 162 of 22,000 placebo recipients contracting PCR-confirmed COVID-19 compared to eight of 22,000 in the vaccine group. None of the placebo recipients died from COVID-19. In the Moderna trials, only one placebo death was attributed to COVID-19.

There was also a much larger percentage of “suspected COVID-19 cases” in both groups, with participants showing COVID-19 symptoms but a negative PCR test. When factoring in those cases, measures of vaccine efficacy drop to about 19%.

The trial subject pool was comprised of largely young and healthy individuals, excluding key groups — children, pregnant women, elderly and immunocompromised people — which can also obscure the vaccine’s actual efficacy and safety.

Findings from reanalyses of data from the Pfizer trials can be interpreted as showing the vaccines made “no significant difference” in reducing all-cause mortality in the vaccinated versus unvaccinated groups at 20 weeks into the trial, the authors wrote.

Even the six-month post-marketing data Pfizer presented to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed no reduction in all-cause mortality from the vaccine.

The authors reanalyzed that data, adjusting the analysis of deaths to better account for the fact that when Pfizer unblinded the study people from the placebo group took the vaccine, and found the vaccine group had a higher mortality rate (0.105%) than the unvaccinated group (0.0799%), which they said was a conservative estimate.

One of the most glaring issues with the registrational trials, they noted, was that they exclusively focused on measuring risk reduction — the ratio of COVID-19 symptom rates in the vaccine group versus the placebo group — rather than measuring absolute risk reduction, which is the likelihood someone will show COVID-19 symptoms relative to people in the population at large.

According to FDA guidelines, accounting for both approaches is crucial to avoid the misguided use of pharmaceutical products — but the data were omitted, leading to an overestimation of an intervention’s clinical utility.

While both vaccines touted an approximately 95% risk reduction figure as their efficacy figure, the absolute risk reductions for Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines were 0.7% and 1.1% respectively.

“A substantial number of individuals would need to be injected in order to prevent a single mild-to-moderate case of COVID-19,” the authors wrote.

As an example, using a conservative estimate that 119 people would need to be vaccinated to prevent infection, and assuming that COVID-19 had a 0.23% infection fatality rate, they wrote that approximately 52,000 vaccinations would be necessary to prevent a single COVID-19-related death.

However, “Given trial misconduct and data integrity problems … the true benefit is likely to be much lower,” they wrote.

And, they added, one would need to assess that benefit along with harms, which they estimate to be 27 deaths per 100,000 doses of Pfizer. That means, using the most conservative estimates, “for every life saved, there were 14 times more deaths caused by the modified mRNA injections.”

They also noted that post-rollout evidence confirmed the efficacy claims were overstated. For example, two large cohort Cleveland clinic studies showed the vaccine could not confer protectionagainst COVID-19 — instead, in those trials, more vaccinated people were more likely to contract COVID-19.

One study showed the risk of “breakthrough” infection was significantly higher among people who were boosted and that more vaccinations resulted in a greater risk of COVID-19.

A second study showed adults who were not “up-to-date” with their shots had a 23% lower incidence of COVID-19 than their “up-to-date” colleagues.

3. The trials underestimated the adverse events, including death, despite evidence in the data. 

Harms were also underreported and underestimated for a number of reasons, according to the authors, a practice that tends to be common in randomized industry-sponsored vaccine trials in general and “exceptionally evident” here.

First, because Pfizer unblinded the trial within just a few weeks of the emergency use authorization and allowed people in the placebo group to take the vaccine, there was not sufficient time to identify late-occurring harms because there was no longer a control group.

“Was this necessary, given that none of the deaths in the Pfizer trial were attributed to COVID-19 as the primary cause, and given the very low IFR [infection fatality rate] for a relatively healthy population?” they asked.

Also, trial coordinators were “haphazard” in their approach to monitoring AEs. They prioritized documenting events thought to be related to COVID-19 rather than to the vaccines for the first seven days and only recorded “unsolicited” AEs for 30-60 days. After that period, even very SAEs, like death, were not recorded. Even for the AEs recorded in the first seven days, they only solicited data from 20% of the population.

None of the trial data was independently verified. “Such secrecy may have enabled the industry to more easily present an inflated and distorted estimate of the genetic injections’ benefits, along with a gross underestimation of potential harms,” they wrote.

Subsequent analysis by Michels et al. revealed that deaths and other SAEs — like life-threatening conditions, inpatient hospitalization or extension of hospitalization, persistent or significant disability/incapacity, a congenital anomaly, or a medically significant event — did occur after the cutoff period and before the FDA advisory meeting where emergency authorization was recommended.

During the first 33 weeks of the Pfizer trials, 38 subjects died, according to Pfizer’s own data, although independent research by Michels et al. estimated that that number is only approximately 17% of the actual projected number due to missing data.

And after that, the rate of deaths continued to increase. Michaels et al. found Pfizer failed to report a substantial increase in the number of deaths due to cardiovascular events. They also found a consistent pattern of reporting delays on the date of the death on subjects’ case reports.

Overall, the review authors reported that there were “twice as many cardiac deaths proportionately among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated subjects in the Pfizer trials.”

In their discussion, the authors wrote “Based on the extended Pfizer trial findings, our person-years estimate yielded a 31% increase in overall mortality among vaccine recipients, a clear trend in the wrong direction.”

This raises serious red flags about how the registrational trials were conducted, Mead said. “Assessments of the safety profile of the COVID-19 modified mRNA injections warrant an objective precautionary perspective, any substantial upward trend in all cause mortality within the intervention arm of the trial population reflects badly on the intervention.”

4. Numbers of SAEs in the trials and post-rollout reporting are well-documented, despite claims to the contrary.

Both Pfizer and Moderna found about 125 SAEs per 100,000 vaccine recipients, or one SAE for every 800 vaccines. However, because the trials excluded more vulnerable people, the authors note, even higher proportions of SAEs would be expected in the general population.

The Fraiman et al. reanalysis of the Pfizer trial data found a significant 36% higher risk of SAEs, which included deaths and many life-threatening conditions in the vaccinated participants.

Official SAEs for other vaccines average around only 1-2 per million. Fraiman et alestimated 1,250 SEAs per million vaccines, exceeding that benchmark by “at least 600-fold.”

After the vaccine rollout, analyses of two large drug safety reporting systems in the U.S. and Europe identified signals for myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism, cardio-respiratory arrest, cerebral infarction, and cerebral hemorrhage associated with both mRNA vaccines, along with ischemic stroke.

And millions of AEs have been reported to those systems.

Another study by Skidmore et al. estimated the total number of fatalities from the vaccines in 2021 alone was 289,789. Autopsy studies have also provided additional evidence of serious harms, including evidence that most COVID-19 mRNA vaccine-related deaths resulted from injury to the cardiovascular system.

In multiple autopsy studies, German pathologist Aren Burkhardt documented the presence of vaccine-mRNA-produced spike proteins in blood vessel walls and brain tissues. This research helps to explain documented vaccine-induced toxicities affecting the nervous, immune, reproductive and other systems.

The Pfizer data also showed an overwhelming number of adverse effects. According to a confidential document released in August 2022, Pfizer had documented approximately 1.6 million AEs affecting nearly every organ system, and one-third of them were classified as serious.

In Pfizer’s trial, Michels and colleagues found a nearly 4-fold increase (OR 3.7, 95%CI 1.02-13.2, p = 0.03) in serious cardiac events (e.g., heart attack, acute coronary syndrome) in the vaccine group. Neither the original trial report nor Pfizer’s Summary Clinical Safety report acknowledged or commented on this safety signal.

“The serious adverse events are all well documented,” Mead said. “Yet it’s surprising to see so many in the medical field continue to ignore or dismiss outright the latter half of the equation when considering all cause mortality trends.”

5. The failure to appropriately test for safety and toxicity poses serious problems. 

Researchers have raised concerns that the mRNA technology is inherently unstable and difficult to store, which leads to batch variability and contamination linked to different rates of AEs.

Recent findings by McKernan et al. that found Pfizers’ mRNA vaccines are contaminated withplasmid DNA that shouldn’t be present — and wasn’t present in the vaccines used in the trials – raising serious safety issues.

That’s because “Process 1,” used in the trials to generate the vaccines involved in vitro transcription of synthetic DNA — essentially a “clean” process. However, that process isn’t viable for mass production, so the manufacturers used “Process 2,” which involves using E. coli bacteria to replicate the plasmids.

Removing plasmids E coli. can result in residual plasmids in the vaccines and the effects of their presence is unknown.

McKernan’s work also revealed the presence of DNA from simian virus 40 (SV40), an oncogenic DNA virus originally isolated in 1960 from contaminated polio vaccines, induces lymphomas, brain tumors, and other malignancies in laboratory animals, raising other safety concerns.

Researchers from Cambridge published a paper in Nature in December 2023, where they found an inherent defect in the modified RNA instructions for the spike protein in COVID-19 immunizations that causes the machinery that translates the gene to the spike protein to “slip” about 10% of the time

This process creates “frameshifts” that cause cells to produce “off-target” proteins in addition to the spike. These proteins, which developers either failed to look for or did not report to regulators, cause undesirable immune responses whose long-term effects are unknown.

6. There are many different possible biological mechanisms that cause AEs and vaccine ineffectiveness.

The review points readers to a series of papyrus that explain a number of different theories to explain the high number of AEs from the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

“The mechanisms of molecular mimicry, antigen cross-reactivity, pathogenic priming, viral reactivation, immune exhaustion, and other factors related to immune dysfunction all reinforce the biological plausibility for vaccine-induced pathogenesis of malignant and autoimmune diseases,” they wrote. And these mechanisms of immune activation are distinct from the body’s response to a viral infection.

They also note the toxic effects of the primary adjuvant, PEG, and of the spike protein itself.

They close their analysis of the vaccines with a complex explanation for the different immunological basis for protection provided by the vaccines versus natural immunity through infection. They explain the mechanisms for vaccine failure and problems generated by the ability for the mRNA vaccines to perpetuate the emergence of new variants.

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Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

Featured image is from CHD


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

UNRWA Funding Cuts Threaten Palestinian Lives in Gaza and Region, Say NGOs

January 30th, 2024 by Norwegian Refugee Council

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As aid organisations, we are deeply concerned and outraged that some of the largest donors have united to suspend funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main aid provider for millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the region. This comes amid a rapidly worsening humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

The suspension of funding by donor states will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, over half of whom are children, who rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza. The population faces starvation, looming famine and an outbreak of disease under Israel’s continued indiscriminate bombardment and deliberate deprivation of aid in Gaza.

We welcome UNRWA’s swift investigation into the alleged involvement of a small number of UN staff members in the October 7th  attacks. We are shocked by the reckless decision to cut a lifeline for an entire population by some of the very countries that had called for aid in Gaza to be stepped up and for humanitarians to be protected while doing their job. This decision comes as the International Court of Justice ordered immediate and effective action to ensure the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza.

152 UNRWA staff have already been killed and 145 UNRWA facilities damaged by bombardment. UNRWA is the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza and their delivery of humanitarian assistance cannot be replaced by other agencies working in Gaza. If the funding suspensions are not reversed we may see a complete collapse of the already restricted humanitarian response in Gaza.

With approximately over one million displaced Palestinians taking shelter in or around 154 UNRWA shelters, the agency and aid organisations have continued to work in near impossible circumstances to provide food, vaccinations, and freshwater. The countries suspending funds risk further depriving Palestinians in the region of essential food, water, medical assistance and supplies, education and protection.

We urge donor states to reaffirm support for the vital work that UNRWA and its partners do to help Palestinians survive one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of our times. Countries must reverse these funding suspensions, uphold their duties towards the Palestinian people and scale up humanitarian assistance for civilians in dire need in Gaza and the region.

Signed

ActionAid
American Friends Service Committee
The Association of International Development Agencies – Aida
Caritas Internationalis
CCFD-Terre Solidaire
DanChurchAid
Danish Refugee Council
Diakonia
Humanity & Inclusion/ Handicap International (HI)
International Council for Voluntary Agencies
INTERSOS
Johanniter International Assistance
Médecins du Monde France, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, Germany
Norwegian Church Aid
Norwegian People’s Aid
Norwegian Refugee Council
Oxfam
Plateforme des ONG françaises pour la Palestine
Première Urgence Internationale
Save the Children
War Child Alliance

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Featured image: A view of a United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Khan Yunis, Gaza on October 22, 2023 [Abed Zagout/Anadolu Agency]

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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There has been a lot of debate about the impacts of the highly ambitious development interventions and projects of China in other developing countries. In this context a recent analysis by GRAIN, a highly respected Europe-based organization whose studies on food and farming systems in particular have been widely appreciated, deserves serious attention, as various reports of GRAIN have been recognized for their concerns and commitments regarding equality, justice and environment protection, particularly in the context of small farmer communities.

This report of GRAIN, titled ‘Expanding Markets, Undermining Food Sovereignty—10 Years of Belt and Road’, released towards the end of January 2024, is important also in the context of the debate on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

This study tells us that China’s food trade with BRI partners surged by 162 per cent in the last decade, reaching USD 76.10 billion. Since 2018, China has been the leading country providing investments internationally to agriculture, averaging USD 1.71 billion annually. While China has made significant strides in securing control over its overseas food supply through BRI investments, its dependence on food imports has grown has also grown.

In addition, this study states there is the expanding involvement of Chinese corporations through BRI across the global food chain, from seeds to processed foods. In Africa, the BRI approach, referred to as “agriculture for profit”, has operated through massive private or state-owned companies and has coupled the financing of transportation infrastructure projects (like rail and ports) with projects to industrialise African agriculture through hybrid seeds, machinery, logistics, food storage and processing facilities provided by Chinese companies.

The GRAIN report informs us that through its massive communication network, the BRI is promoting agriculture capitalisation in Africa as a means to eradicate poverty. China’s agricultural intentions in Africa are mainly concerned with its soaring domestic meat consumption and support of its factory farming of poultry and pigs, which has created a huge demand for imported soybeans and maize for animal feed. 

Despite earlier failed attempts, at the China-Africa Leaders’ Roundtable Dialogue in Johannesburg in August 2023, President Xi Jinping emphasised that China would continue to try and develop large-scale crop farming on the continent. He also stressed that importance would be given to build up seed production capacity and seed markets for its corporations.

China’s largest seed company, Yuan Longping High-Tech Agriculture, a subsidiary of the state-owned conglomerate CITIC, has been tasked with leading this effort in Africa. In Tanzania, the company is pursuing a major effort to develop soybean production for export. 

In 2022, the GRAIN report tells us the Tanzanian government provided it with 53,000 hectares for a large-scale farming operation in the Chunya District of the Mbeya Region and in 2023 it fast-tracked the approval of the company’s seed varieties. This company has also expanded in South America in a big way emerging as one of the biggest seed companies internationally. What is more its GM (genetically modified) maize varieties have been approved for use within China. Longping High-Tech and COFCO are also actively developing exports of soybeans in the West African country of Benin, which along with Tanzania and Ethiopia, was recently singled out by China for the development of soybean exports. China and Benin signed a protocol on the export of soybeans in September 2019 and, by 2022, Benin’s annual exports to China exceeded 210,000 tonnes.

Benin is also a target for maize exports. While maize is a staple food in Benin and is grown widely across the country, it is almost entirely consumed locally. Longping High-tech is trying to change this and develop a surplus for export through a programme supported by China’s Ministry of Commerce, that is training farmers in growing its high-yield hybrid maize varieties. Other crops for export to China, beyond maize and soybeans, are also being supported in Africa through the BRI.  

Coming to the fisheries sector, the GRAIN report informs us that China’s rapidly expanding fleet of deep-sea trawlers as a techno-fix to deal with the decline in global fish stocks is actually playing a major role in accelerating the depletion.

“Having badly overfished their own coastal waters, Chinese companies are sending their giant trawlers further and further overseas, bringing them into increasing conflict with coastal communities who depend on these same waters for their livelihoods and food needs.”

Under current BRI projects, the GRAIN report says Chinese fishing companies are encouraged to leverage BRI investments in harbour infrastructure to gain more fishing access in foreign countries, for instance Somalia, at the expense of local fishing communities and the sustainability of local marine resources. 

Somalia has the longest coastline of any African nation. But the local small-scale fishing communities that live along the coast are already suffering from overfishing by foreign vessels, including many Chinese-owned vessels. Chinese fishing companies started moving into Somali waters in a big way after December 2018, when the Somali government issued renewable annual fishing licenses to 31 vessels that are part of the China Overseas Fisheries Association. Although the licenses only allowed Chinese vessels to operate 24 nautical miles away from Somalia’s coast, the local fishing communities say that their government is not able to stop vessels from encroaching this boundary. A new deal with Chaoliang Group under the BRI framework will only worsen the situation.

In Pakistan, the GRAIN report says, a major project of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is part of the BRI, is the development of a massive deep-sea port in the fishing village of Gwadar in Balochistan that will connect by rail and road to China’s Xinjiang region. The project, which gives control of the port to Chinese companies, has also brought an influx of Chinese fishing trawlers to the area. One of the Chinese companies now fishing the waters off of the Gwadar coast is Fujian Hengli Fishery, which is known for its illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing in West Africa, with evidence of various infringements including illegal nets, shark finning and fishing without licences. 

According to this GRAIN report,

“The presence of Fujian Hengli and other Chinese fishing companies is already having major impacts on local fishing communities, who say the giant vessels are wiping out their fish stocks, out-competing their local fishing boats and destroying their livelihoods.”

In December 2022, the Haq Do Tehreek (Gwadar Rights Movement) led a two-month protest to demand an end to deep-sea fish trawling by Chinese vessels and, together with thousands of people from local small fishing communities, staged a blockade of the port. Despite the strong community resistance, the Chinese companies are eager to fish in Pakistan’s waters as they can sell the catch back home duty-free.

At the 2023 BRI Forum, Beijing indicated that it was looking to e-commerce as the vehicle that bring food from BRI nations to the bowls of Chinese consumers. In the context of a recent agreement with Cambodia, the GRAIN study notes that so far the visible beneficiaries are major Chinese companies and powerful Cambodian businessmen with large agricultural holdings.

The GRAIN report concludes,

“As evidenced by China’s plans in agriculture, fisheries and e-commerce in Africa and Asia, it is hard to find anything “green” or small-scale about the BRI. On the contrary, it is only leading to further grabbing of limited natural resources for the profit of China’s corporations, while millions of peasants, fisher-folks and others are left under the thumb of its agribusiness and digital giants.

“Agriculture for profit” is not only an economic gamble, but also a social and environmental one – for China and its BRI partners.”

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine and India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Global Times

Ukraine Sells Its Soul to the WEF’ers: Launches Program to Fully Digitize Citizenry in Partnership with Globalist World Economic Forum

By Leo Hohmann, January 29, 2024

The World Economic Forum and Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation have announced their mutual interest in establishing a Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) in Ukraine, with a focus on government and corporate technologies.

Judicial Murder in Alabama. Death Penalty by Nitrogen Hypoxia

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, January 30, 2024

During the evening of January 25, Kenneth Eugene Smith, having failed to convince the US Supreme Court to delay his execution, became yet another victim of judicial, state-sanctioned murder. A previous, failed effort, using lethal injection, had been made in 2022. On this occasion, it was the state of Alabama which sought to bloody (or gas, in this instance) its copybook at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. The method of execution: nitrogen hypoxia.

International Court of Justice Rules South African Claims of Genocide Against Palestinians by Israel Are Plausible

By Abayomi Azikiwe, January 29, 2024

In a landmark ruling handed down by the United Nations High Court on January 26 rejected the State of Israel’s attempt to dismiss the case brought by the Republic of South Africa demanding an end to genocide against the Palestinians.

Gaza Versus The Hague: The ICJ Failed Again – A Case of “Political Correctness”?

By Peter Koenig, January 29, 2024

The 17-judge panel of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) today (26 January 2024) found South Africa’s assertion that Israel is committing genocide “plausible.” This would indicate that South Africa won the case. Unfortunately, a closer look is much less optimistic. It shows again a hesitant judgment the ICJ, despite all indications for massive and brutal genocide. The judgment is weak and close to meaningless, when it comes to safe future Palestinian lives.

“Israel wants all of Palestine, and denies the existence of the Palestinian people,” Interview with Kari Jaquesson

By Kari Jaquesson and Steven Sahiounie, January 29, 2024

EU foreign affairs council held a Peace Summit in Brussels on January 22, chaired by EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell. The EU presented a proposal, which some have called bizarre, to create a framework for a Peace Plan, with the ultimate goal of a two-state solution by 2025. It ignores the genocide being committed in Gaza today, and fails to call for a ceasefire.

Destroy a Nation: Israel Is Deliberately Bombing Palestine’s Educational Institutions

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, January 29, 2024

If the Palestinians don’t have educational institutions to train doctors, engineers, lawyers, historians, mathematicians, religious scholars, lawyers, and every other profession that is essential for a nation to survive and thrive, then what kind of society would they have?

The Decision of the International Tribunal of the Hague Is a Triumph for Netanyahu?

By Germán Gorraiz López, January 29, 2024

The newspaper Haaretz in an editorial of October 8 directly accused Netanyahu of being “responsible for this war between Israel and Gaza” and also, Israeli public opinion would already be holding Netanyahu responsible for the resounding failure of Israeli security by disparaging Egyptian information.

Israeli Ministers Attend ‘Return to Gaza Conference’, Speak in Support of Resettlement

By Middle East Eye, January 29, 2024

Thousands of Israelis, including ministers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, gathered in Jerusalem on Sunday for a conference calling to resettle the Gaza Strip. At least 12 Israeli ministers participated in the conference about rebuilding Israeli settlements in Gaza and encouraging the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid reported.

Forget Elections, Border Crisis Already Disintegrates America

By Drago Bosnic, January 29, 2024

The complete lack of basic etiquette when talking about Joe Biden’s next move shows just how little authority the incumbent has over half of the country. The situation in Texas is just one symptom of this.

‘Largest Ever’ NATO Exercise to Rehearse Russian Attack on Europe

By Zero Hedge, January 29, 2024

A massive NATO military exercises slated to run all the way through the end of May has kicked off. Exercise Steadfast Defender 24 is being hailed as the largest NATO exercises since the Cold War. Some 90,000 troops from all 31 members states will take part.

Judicial Murder in Alabama. Death Penalty by Nitrogen Hypoxia

January 30th, 2024 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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During the evening of January 25, Kenneth Eugene Smith, having failed to convince the US Supreme Court to delay his execution, became yet another victim of judicial, state-sanctioned murder. A previous, failed effort, using lethal injection, had been made in 2022. On this occasion, it was the state of Alabama which sought to bloody (or gas, in this instance) its copybook at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. The method of execution: nitrogen hypoxia.

Smith was convicted in 1989 for murdering Elizabeth Sennett, the wife of a preacher’s wife, in a murder-for-hire killing. His life, taken in turn, succumbed to a tawdry experiment of penological vice. When state authorities dabble with various methods of death, they can never be anything but cruel. Sometimes, these methods might even be unusual.

Defenders of capital punishment take refuge behind the words of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which has often functioned as a form of subversive encouragement to murderous authorities. While the amendment famously states that no cruel or unusual punishments are to be inflicted, the onus is then on officialdom to come up with a form of punishment that is not cruel, nor unusual. And how often has death by firing squad, lethal injection, or swift decapitation been defended on those very grounds?

Nitrogen hypoxia has received much press, much of it ghoulish. In December 2023, the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) released its final report into the deaths of six poultry plant workers. All had been victims of nitrogen asphyxiation. Investigators found that the Foundation Food Group facility in Gainesville, Georgia was staffed by workers inadequately informed, trained or equipped to deal with deadly leaks. Such concerns were also expressed about staff at the Atmore correctional facility. To date, the US lacks a national standard on the managing, storing, use and handling of such cryogenic asphyxiants as liquid nitrogen.

The degrading nature of the Smith execution was also highlighted by the fact that many US veterinarians would not even stoop to using nitrogen in euthanising animals. In 2020, the American Veterinary Medical Association stated in its euthanasia guidelinesthat using nitrogen was problematic for mammal species. Such gas would also have to be “supplied in a precisely regulated and purified form without contaminants or adulterants”.

UN experts, including Morris Tidball-Binz, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and Alice Jill Edwards, Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, also warned that nitrogen asphyxiation was “an untested method of execution which may subject [Smith] to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or even torture.”

None of these concerns has dissuaded lawmakers hunting for other methods of killing convicts. Oklahoma (2015) was the first state to permit prison staff to use nitrogen gas. Mississippi (2017) and Alabama (2018), followed. Much of this is being propelled by crude market considerations. The drugs used in lethal injections are becoming harder to obtain, be they because of shortages or restrictions placed on their use in executions by pharmaceutical companies.

With Alabama being the first to apply the measure, a dark interest in the minutiae of killing was taken. The state’s protocol on how the gas would be employed came under withering scrutiny. With nitrogen gas being administered through a mask, intruding oxygen might risk triggering a stroke, creating a permanent vegetative state, or cause excruciating suffocation. Depriving a person of oxygen could also lead to vomiting, thereby choking the victim.

With such complications in the offing, blissful, or wilful ignorance reigned among correction officials and lawmakers. For those involved in a state’s killing machinery, be they robed judges, hungry prosecutors, or the executioners themselves, this remains a standard response. Seedy justifications are offered: just retribution, deterrence, the confusion of novelty with humane policy. Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour was keen to emphasise the latter point with his absurd remark that his state had “adopted the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.”

Alabama officials had submitted in a court filing that they expected Smith to lose consciousness within a matter of seconds and expire in a matter of minutes. “What we saw,” stated Smith’s spiritual adviser, Reverend Jeff Hood, “was minutes of someone struggling for their life.”

In witnessing such executions, those present commune and connive in the same scene.  They become vicarious participants, many the unintended apologists for a spectacle featuring murder. On hand were journalists to feed on the macabre display of Smith’s demise. “I’ve been to four previous executions,” the insatiable Alabama journalist Lee Hedgepeth told the BBC’s Newsday program, “and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas.” The session saw Smith gasping “for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes in total.”

The stern face of officialdom was supplied by John Hamm, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner. For Hamm, all that was aberrant about the scene could be rationalised, reasoned, and explained. Smith understandably held his breath as long as he could. His movements had been involuntary; he showed expected symptoms from inhaling nitrogen gas. He had lost consciousness quickly. “He struggled against the restraints a little bit but it’s an involuntary movement and some agonal breathing.  So that was all expected.”

A more candid, vengeful note was struck by the state’s Attorney General, Steve Marshall. “Tonight, Kenneth Smith was put to death for the heinous act he committed over 35 years ago: the murder-for-hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, an innocent woman who was by all accounts a godly wife, a loving mother and grandmother, and a beloved pillar of her community.” Smith’s calculated death, crudely experimental and economically determined, was no less heinous, a vulgar rationalisation of cold intent, the exemplar of state cruelty.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected] 

Featured image is licensed under Fair Use

Rotational Seizures in COVID-19 Vaccinated

January 30th, 2024 by Dr. William Makis

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Jan. 6, 2024 – Scary scene in Qatar, as Umm Salal’s Andy Delort collapsed to the ground 10 minutes after he scored a goal – French player was treated on the pitch and watched the second half of the Qatar Cup final on the bench.

Click here to view.

 

May 22, 2023 – Man collapses in the store.

Click here to view.

Dec. 18, 2022 – Supermarket collapse.

Click here to view.

 

Dec. 9, 2022 – Asian man on scooter.

Click here to view.

 

Click here to read the full article.

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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.


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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Ukraine may be at war but that isn’t stopping it from playing a leading role in the digitization of the global economy.

The World Economic Forum and Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation have announced their mutual interest in establishing a Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) in Ukraine, with a focus on government and corporate technologies.

As reported by Smart Cities World, the letter of intent to establish the GovTech center in Kiev was signed by Børge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum and Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister for innovation, development of education, science and technology, and minister of digital transformation, Ukraine.

The so-called “GovTech” program is the WEF’s plan for world government under a digital reset and it’s already been launched in many countries. They admit this on their own website in an article titled: “World Economic Forum Launches Global Government Technology Centre in Berlin.”

There are GovTech countries, cities and even digital GovTech counties.

The announcement of Ukraine’s participation in “GovTech” was made at the World Economic Forum’s 2024 summit earlier this month in Davos, Switzerland, under the theme of “Rebuilding Trust.”

Rule number one of any sane person who values individual freedom: Never trust a globalist. And a WEF’er globalist is the worst kind of globalist. Is it making more sense now why the WEF Western puppet leaders in Washington, London, Ottawa, Paris, Geneva and Berlin are so dead set on defending Ukraine against Russian “aggression?” The cumulative West led by Washington and London has invested in provoking this aggression since the early 2000’s when George W. Bush began wooing Ukraine into the Western orbit of NATO.

The New World Order runs through Ukraine. It is one of the main nerve centers of globalism, sex trafficking, U.S.-controlled biolabs and money laundering for the rich and powerful. They can’t lose it and they will send millions of their own people into the meat grinder to die defending it. As soon as they run what’s left of the Ukrainians through that meat grinder, you will see them sending Americans, Brits, Germans and Frenchmen. Bank on it.

According to the Smart Cities World article cited above, in recent years,

“according to the WEF, Ukraine has evolved into a global GovTech powerhouse, becoming the first country with a digital ID system that can be used across the nation and the fourth in Europe to launch a biometric digital driving license.”

Ukraine reports that in line with its goal to make 100 percent of public services available online, almost 20 million Ukrainians are already using the Diia application, which allows them to access key documents and government services.

The reason for establishing such a center in Kiev, the article says, would be “to provide a platform to develop government technologies by uniting scientists, businesses, technology companies, the public sector and the global communities of the forum. Its thematic focus will be the digital transformation of government, the development of e-government and widespread digital literacy.”

Jeremy Jurgens, managing director of the World Economic Forum, said:

“We commend the inspirational work of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine as [it] implements a strong digitalisation agenda under the most challenging circumstances. This does not only prove the resilience of Ukraine’s government and citizens but also the digital infrastructure of the country. The creation of a new center in Ukraine would undoubtedly help Ukraine develop new partnerships and strengthen its GovTech agenda.”

Make no mistake: the “GovTech” agenda is the same as the “Luciferian agenda” to create a high-tech oligarchy on a global scale.

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Leo Hohmann is a totally independent reporter of news and analysis not beholden to any government or corporate money. If you appreciate my work and would like to support it, you may send a donation of any size c/o Leo Hohmann, P.O. Box 291, Newnan, GA 30264, or via credit card through GiveSendGo, a Christian crowd-funding site.  

Featured image is from Armstrong Economics

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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In a landmark ruling handed down by the United Nations High Court on January 26 rejected the State of Israel’s attempt to dismiss the case brought by the Republic of South Africa demanding an end to genocide against the Palestinians.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a series of orders in a 29-page ruling directed at Tel Aviv mandating that it halts indiscriminate persecution, killing and displacement of the 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip. (See this)

Both parties to the case, Pretoria and Tel Aviv, must reappear before the ICJ within one month to present oral arguments on the lawsuit which accuses the settler-colonial state of being in breach of the Genocide Convention. South Africa and other states around the world viewed the decision as a preliminary victory which allows the case to go forward.

Since October 7 the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has engaged in targeted assassinations against Palestinian resistance forces, their leadership, along with the systematic attacks upon neighborhoods, healthcare services, schools, religious institutions and infrastructure. Despite the denials of genocide by Tel Aviv and its backers in the United States, Britain and other imperialist states, the ICJ took note within its decision that more than 26,000 people have been killed since the latest military assault by the occupying forces.

The war waged by the Zionist regime, which is facilitated through arms shipments from its allies, the deployment of imperialist military forces in the region, financial resources and diplomatic cover from the U.S. and other NATO countries, has undoubtedly done irreparable harm to the Palestinians through mass injuries, deaths, the destruction of civil society and the denial of food, water, freedom of worship, education and household security. Repeated statements backed up by violent actions from Israeli officials provide ample evidence of intent to eliminate the Palestinian people in whole or in part.

Contents of the ICJ Decision

In a summary of the ICJ preliminary ruling on the issues brought before it by the South African government, Lawfare, a legal journal, says

“The ICJ found that it had prima facie jurisdiction under Article IX of the Genocide Convention to entertain the case and agreed that South Africa has standing to bring the case under the common interests of upholding the Convention—a matter that Israel did not challenge.” (See this)

This same article goes on to point out:

“On Jan. 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures in a case brought by South Africa against Israel for its alleged breaches of the Genocide Convention in its actions in Gaza. The ICJ found that it had prima facie jurisdiction under Article IX of the Genocide Convention to entertain the case and agreed that South Africa has standing to bring the case under the common interests of upholding the Convention—a matter that Israel did not challenge.

The ICJ ordered the following provisional measures under Article 41:

Israel must take all measures possible to prevent the commission of all acts under Article II of the Genocide Convention in relation to Palestinians in Gaza. This includes ‘(a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.’ The ICJ specified that Israel must ensure ‘with immediate effect’ that its military does not commit any of the aforementioned acts.

Israel must prevent and punish ‘the direct and public incitement to commit genocide’ against Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel must allow humanitarian assistance into the Gaza Strip.

Israel must ensure the preservation of, and prevent the destruction of, evidence related to acts under the scope of Article II and Article III of the Genocide Convention against Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel must submit a report to the ICJ on all measures taken to uphold the provisional measures ordered by the ICJ within one month.

The ICJ did not call on Israel to suspend its military operations in Gaza, which was one of the provisional measures South Africa had called for.”

Even though the ICJ did not issue a provisional order to Tel Aviv for a ceasefire which has become the rallying cry for billions of people around the world, South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Dr. Naledi Pandor, suggested that if the orders are to be carried out by Israel it would require a cessation of hostilities by the IDF. The South African government hailed the decision along with many other entities internationally.

Responses to the ICJ Decision

President Cyril Ramaphosa of the Republic of South Africa in a televised address said of the ICJ ruling that:

“We welcome the measures that the court ordered by majority decision, ruling that Israel military should not commit acts of genocide against Palestinians. Israel should take all measures to prevent and punish incitement to genocide. Furthermore, take immediate and effective measures to allow basic services and humanitarian assistance to Gaza and it should preserve evidence of what is happening in Gaza, including submitting a report within a month on all measures taken to give effect to the ICJ order within one month. This Order is binding on Israel and must be respected by all states that are party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” 

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, a close ally of the South African government and staunch supporter of the Palestinian struggle for national liberation and sovereignty, the president of the country was reported as recognizing that:

“Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi says South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has drawn the admiration of all freedom seekers worldwide, hours before the court announces its interim ruling. During a telephone conversation with his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday night, Raeisi lauded the ‘courageous’ initiative, stressing that the move was taken by a country that has experienced the menace of racism and genocide for years. ‘The measure is praised not only by the Muslim world but also by all freedom seekers across the globe,’ the Iranian president said, according to his press service.” 

Within the Israeli regime itself, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported to have ordered his “unified war cabinet” members to refrain from commenting on the ICJ decision at this point. Nonetheless, some of the more right-wing cabinet members condemned the UN Court ruling labeling it as a continuation of the persecution of Jewish people. See this.

The U.S.-based Jewish newspaper, Forward, wrote an editorial where it attempted to take solace that the ICJ did not order what they described as a “one-side” ceasefire. This same publication also noted that the Court did not order the IDF to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. (See this)

In an editorial written by Anthony Dworkin on the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) website, the author recognizes differing positions held by members of the European Union (EU) on the Israel-Gaza war. However, Dworkin calls upon member-states to abide by the decision while requiring compliance from the State of Israel as a condition of its relations with the settler-colonial state. This position is that of the writer and is by no means a reflection of the views of Europeans.

Biden Administration Facing Federal Lawsuit for Complicity in Genocide Against Palestinians

Meanwhile the federal lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against President Joe Biden and other leading appointees within his administration is moving forward as well. Just hours after the ICJ issued its ruling on the case filed by South Africa, a hearing was held in Oakland, California where the several Palestinian human rights groups and individuals are claiming that the actions of the U.S. are facilitating genocide in Palestine. (See this)

The investigative news website, The Intercept, wrote on the hearing saying:

“Lawyers involved with the lawsuit playing out in federal court said that the ICJ ruling bolsters their case. Their lawsuit argues that Biden, Blinken, and Austin are liable under U.S. law for failing to uphold their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza. In Oakland, dozens of people lined up outside the courthouse hours before the hearing on Friday, according to organizers on the ground, while the Zoom stream reached its capacity of 1,000 people tuning in.” (See this)

This case filed in the U.S. federal court and the ICJ lawsuit at The Hague are representative of the burgeoning Palestinian solidarity movement which is rapidly spreading throughout the world. These legal challenges to Israeli and U.S. impunity are contributing to the struggle to end the siege on Gaza and all occupied territories as well as winning the total freedom and emancipation of the oppressed people of Palestine.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The 17-judge panel of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) today (26 January 2024) found South Africa’s assertion that Israel is committing genocide “plausible.” This would indicate that South Africa won the case.

Unfortunately, a closer look is much less optimistic. It shows again a hesitant judgment the ICJ, despite all indications for massive and brutal genocide. The judgment is weak and close to meaningless, when it comes to safe future Palestinian lives.

First, the ICJ accepted that South Africa had jurisdiction in this case, because “some things that South Africa has alleged are certainly taking place and fall within the definition of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948.” See this.

Al Jazeera summarized the ICJ’s ruling as follows:

  • The court says it has jurisdiction to rule in the case.
  • The court orders Israel to take measures to prevent acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip, must report back in one month.
  • The court says Israel must prevent and punish incitement to genocide.
  • The court says Israel must allow humanitarian aid into the Strip.
  • The court obliges Israel to take more measures to protect Palestinians but does not order it to end military operations in the Strip.

The Court evidently did not go far enough. What good does it do to “allow humanitarian aid and prevent the deaths of innocent citizens”, if Israel is permitted to continue killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent and defenseless Palestinians.

The Court did not rule an immediate ceasefire or a ceasefire at all – nor did it issue a request for Peace negotiations.

Of course, Israel would not have obeyed such a ruling, nor would the staunch supporters of Israel have stopped encouraging Israels “self-defense” killing, but it would have sent a message to the world, namely that ICJ is not afraid to fall “politically unpopular” judgments, and that Israel and genocide would be enshrined in Israels short 75-year history.

PM Netanyahu’s and Co’s argument of “self-defense”, justified by “We are genocide victims” are the arguments of psychopaths. The extent of the Israeli atrocious and merciless killing of Palestinians, shows the truth to the world.  

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Ahead of the judgment the South African Foreign Minister, Naledi Pandor, had this to say:

“The three letters ‘ICJ’ were not known to many people in South Africa until the case was filed”. And “Our aim was and is to highlight the plight of the innocent in Palestine” and “draw attention to the lack of justice and freedom.” 

She added that regardless of success or failure, “the real analysis and judgment is going to be on the court itself.” See this from RT 26 January 2024.

The Israeli government does not accept the ICJ ruling, ordering preventing the genocide of the Palestinian people. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the very claim that Israeli is committing genocide is “not only false, it’s outrageous.”

Where does this judgment leave the war?

Unless the western support will falter rapidly, both morally and by monetary and weapon deliveries – perhaps because of some ethics that the Court’s decision may have awoken – Israel’s brutal genocide is likely going to continue.

PM Netanyahu, practically from day one, anticipated that this would be a long war, intimidating that it was not just a war of retaliation for an [Israeli / Western planned] Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, but it was a war to conquer over the coming years much of the Middles East and its riches, by gradually establishing “The Greater Israel”, which would include 100% of Palestine, 100% Jordan, 100% of Lebanon, 70% of Syria, 50% of Iraq, 33% of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Nile. Netanyahu would, of course, not say tis, but it was implicit.

To top it off, since about 1984, Israel has a ten Agorot coin, said to depict on its backside a map of  Greater Israel.

The sign on the coin could also resemble the ancient kingdom of Babylon in 539 BCE.

The 10 Agorot coin is one of the New Israeli Sheqel (NIS) coin series, also known as simply the Israeli shekel (sign: ₪, code: ILS). Israeli agorot and shekel are the currency of Israel.

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The depiction on the coin is full of controversy. Some Israeli say that the picture of this new coins was taken over form the original sheqel – and that, indeed, it represented Israel’s aspiration of expansion towards a Greater Israel. Israelis are proud of carrying “Greater Israel” in their pockets. See this.

Without speaking much about it, most Israelis support the war against Gaza / Palestine, as it is supposed to pave the way towards Greater Israel. No time horizon is given to achieve this goal.

However, a Greater Israel would be one of the resources richest nations in the world, especially in terms of hydrocarbons. It would also include the trillion-plus cubic feet of gas discovered in the 1990s off shore of Gaza, belonging today to Palestine.

Back to the 26th of January 2024 weak ICJ judgment. It leaves room for Israel to pursue her course towards the Greater Israel, which is no doubt in the interest of the west. Having an almost endless supply of oil and gas from a secure source, Israel, would allow the west breaking any ties with Russia and the Arab world for energy supply.

It also shows clearly the symbiotic relationship between Israel – an artificial western (UK) Zionist invented country, an interdependence that serves primarily those who created Israel in the first place and, on the other hand, gives Zionist Israel the grandeur of the Chosen People, plainly anchored in their bible, the Torah.    

To get there, much bloodshed would be the course of the conquest. This MUST be avoided by sensible people, and here is where an International Court of Justice – one that is neutral, not responding to any commands from globalist leaders, might and would have significant influence, by appealing to the conscience of those supporting the genocide.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image: Judge Joan Donoghue of the U.S., president of the ICJ, reading the Court’s ruling on Friday. (U.N. TV Screenshot)

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Dark Purple Clots in COVID-19 Vaccinated:

 

Click here to read the full article.

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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.


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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“There was no such thing as Palestinians,” said Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, in an interview with The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969.

In March 2023, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, denied the existence of a Palestinian people or nationhood just weeks after calling for a Palestinian town to be “erased.”

137 countries worldwide (70%) have recognized Palestine. In 2014 the EU voted to ‘Recognize Palestine in principle’. Within Europe as a whole, only the Czech Republic, Iceland, Malta, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, and Ukraine have recognized Palestine.

We know that the US supports the genocide in Gaza, but what do the Europeans think? In an effort to answer that question, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed the Norwegian expert on the Middle East, Kari Jaquesson.

Steven Sahiounie (SS):  EU foreign affairs council held a Peace Summit in Brussels on January 22, chaired by EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell. The EU presented a proposal, which some have called bizarre, to create a framework for a Peace Plan, with the ultimate goal of a two-state solution by 2025. It ignores the genocide being committed in Gaza today, and fails to call for a ceasefire.

How is this proposal being viewed in Europe?

Kari Jaquesson (KJ):  Before we start, I just want to let your readers know who I am, Steven, and also that we know each other from when I first visited Syria in 2017 as an independent journalist and I did an interview with you on my stop-over in Beirut. It is a great pleasure to follow your work.

So, I am a Norwegian national, and Norway is not a member of EU, though much of our legislation is being dictated by EU-mandates. Much of our political cast is very pro-EU, even though Norwegians have twice voted not to become members.

I am a private citizen, do not belong to any political party, and participate in public discourse representing only myself. As more or less a household name in Norway, both because of a 20+ year-long TV -career as a fitness and health expert, later as a presenter in different TV-shows, and a debater and op-ed author of so-called controversial issues, I have been able to lift non-mainstream perspectives into the public eye. My profession is still in fitness and health, and in addition I work as a researcher, translator and occasional writer for steigan.no, the only truly independent major Norwegian non mainstream news portal, so I process daily a lot of news, discussion and commentaries from European, American, African and Arabic sources, as well as historical files. I just want to make it clear that I only speak for myself, I do not represent any organization or company.

The distance between the non-elected officials in the EU-administration and the peoples of Europe could hardly be greater. This has been ongoing for years, and the heads of state in West European countries have hardly any popular support at all. The people in Western Europe, and let me include Norway are in great numbers demoralized and struggling to make ends meet.

The NATO proxy war against Russia is draining the state coffers, and even in a should-be wealthy country like Norway, we have long lines in the food banks, energy costs have gone through the roof, and the general cost of living is not sustainable for an increasing part of the population. The state is extremely wealthy, but people’s wallets are getting slimmer by the day. Most people have little or no time or interest in politics, and most people get their so-called news from the state-subsidized media, which includes not only the big newspapers and TV-channels, but also former so-called independent outlets.

So, quite frankly, most people do not know about nor care about, nor have the energy or will to reach out to more in depth coverage of such events as the announcement of EU’s proposal. But, on the other hand, there is an impressing engagement against both the genocide going on as we speak, and the occupation of Palestine as such.

“From now on I will not talk about the peace process, but I want a two-state-solution process,” Borell said to journalists ahead of a EU foreign ministers’ meeting.

This concept of two states has been dangled in front of the Palestinian people for decades, but I can’t see how anyone who has followed the history of the occupation for one minute can take such a stand seriously. The Zionist entity has made it perfectly clear, not only now, but through their actions since 1948 that they want all of Palestine, and more. Furthermore, the occupiers deny the mere existence of Palestine, and even of a Palestinian people.

The EU do not use the correct terminology, which is a sure give-away on the partiality. They keep saying conflict, but avoid at all cost the true description. The true description is occupation. 

SS:  The Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, showed EU foreign ministers a video about creating an artificial island next to Gaza to house Palestinians. Various Israeli plans to deport Gazans to the Sinai desert in Egypt, and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to Jordan, have been openly discussed.

How do Europeans view the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza?

KJIn all European cities there have been, and are still huge demonstrations against the ongoing genocide. I am not sure all are aware of all the indecent remarks and proposals for “final solution” the occupiers are announcing. The news coverage is biased, and a notable part of the public are easy targets for the type of shock and awe reporting that dominated the news right after the October 7th incident. Their mind is still fixed on what has long since been debunked as flat out lies.

But even so, an engagement not seen since the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France is keeping its momentum, and some admissions are being made by some Western-European leaders.

According to a poll in Norway’s biggest newspaper earlier this month, almost every second Norwegian thinks it would be right to boycott Israel, but the government has no such plans. 

Minister of foreign affairs Espen Barth Eide has previously called Gaza “hell on earth”, but has been adamant that Norway cannot implement its own national sanctions. We have no tradition in Norway of unilateral sanctions, he said, adding that Norway would do it if the Security Council agrees. Norway has since 2011 been practicing the same sanctions against Syria as the EU, although we are not a member. 

SS:  The EU is planning to impose visa bans on 12 or so of the most violent Israeli settlers soon, according to French foreign minister Stéphane Séjourné. However, many of the 700,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank are US citizens, so the ban would likely be meaningless.

Why would the EU propose something so insignificant, instead of calling for the end of occupation in the West Bank?

KJ:  First of all, what difference would this make? What is the purpose? And what is this other than a pathetic symbolic suggestion? As you point out, they have dual citizenship, and though the numbers vary, it is reason to believe that hundreds of thousands of dual citizenship-holders have returned to their country of origin. Which is a harsh contrast to the situation of the Palestinians who have no citizenship at all, and who know that if they leave, they will never be able to return.

After this week’s ruling there is a legal ground to accuse Europeans who have been fighting with the IDF to be prosecuted and punished for having participated in a genocide. And there are many who are doing this.

SS:  The US Biden administration refuses to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.  They are prevented in doing so, even though the majority of Americans are in favor of a ceasefire, because of the Israel lobby, AIPAC, which exerts overwhelming pressure on the politics in the US.

Does Europe have a similar Israel lobby which prevents EU leaders from demanding a ceasefire in Gaza?

KJ:  It is almost impossible to understand to what extent France and Britain is controlled by Jewish Zionist groups, but you may get an impression if you try to make count of who is allowed on the TV-debates and the biased perspective from the TV-presenters and who they invite for interviews and for commenting. However, this is a complete taboo and you will not find any serious discussion about this in any major news outlet. No mainstream politician will touch the issue, well knowing it would be political suicide.

Years ago, the former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni was a guest on the American channel Democracy Now, and she explained the inability for the Zionists to accept criticism without resorting to false accusations of antisemitism and the second world war. She called it “a trick that we always use”.

Most of the Western European countries, including Norway may be described as ‘vallas’, in other words, satellite states of the United States of America. We have no independent foreign policy.

SS:  The German government has been supporting the revenge killing of 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli government.  They keep reiterating the mantra, “Israel has the right to defend itself.”  Many experts have characterized Germany as a country held hostage to the holocaust, as they have refused to call for a ceasefire.

Isn’t it time that Germany divorce itself from the crimes of Adolf Hitler, and be allowed to treat Israel like any other country?

KJFirst of all, Israel is not a country, let me make that clear. It is an occupation. Secondly, the occupation is expanding with an insatiable appetite for more land, therefore this supposed country has no borders. Also, it has no constitution.

Is it really the alleged guilt from the second world war that is making Germany so docile vis-a-vis the genocidal Zionist? Maybe there is another reason, less noble. Unfortunately, this is verboten territory.

Germany and many other countries have made research and revisions of that period illegal, even for historians, and even if the number of alleged victims have been significantly reduced, yes, officially, it is forbidden to say so. Even the plaque at the most infamous concentration camp has been drastically revised, something few are aware of.

If the German leadership truly believed in their country’s history and crimes, wouldn’t they be the first to recognize and oppose new genocides? Yes, but they don’t. 

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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

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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It’s not about Hamas, nor the Palestinian resistance hiding its weapons or any other excuse to attack Palestinian schools and universities, it’s a plot to destroy the Palestinian people. The Israeli government is deliberately targeting all educational institutions of Palestine whether they are in the Gaza strip or in the West Bank and beyond. So why would they do such a thing?

If the Palestinians don’t have educational institutions to train doctors, engineers, lawyers, historians, mathematicians, religious scholars, lawyers, and every other profession that is essential for a nation to survive and thrive, then what kind of society would they have?

Trained doctors and nurses won’t be able to treat and cure their patients. Engineers and architects won’t be able to build critical infrastructure such as buildings, roads, water and sewer systems, railways and airports. An uneducated people won’t be able to maintain or compete with other countries in terms of finance and international trade with skilled accountants, economists, financial planners, and investment bankers. Professors, teachers, and school administrators won’t be able to teach their students reading and writing, math, history, religion and the sciences such as biology, chemistry and physics. Newspapers and media won’t have trained journalists, researchers, and radio broadcasters and so on. In other words, a nation without knowledge is doomed for failure and the Israelis are well aware of it.

Destroy the education of the Palestinians, you destroy a nation of people. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that “the Israeli army has killed 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, as part of its genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel has killed many professors along with their family members in the Gaza Strip, “the Israeli army has targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the Strip in deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice. Those targeted have been crushed to death beneath the rubble, along with members of their families and other displaced families.” The number of Palestinian professors, teachers, administrators, and students killed is a sign that those involved in education is a legitimate target for the Israelis:

According to preliminary estimates, the ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of university students, reported Euro-Med Monitor. The rights group pointed out that destroying universities and killing academics and students will make it more difficult to resume university and academic life when the genocide ends, saying it may take years for studies to be resumed in an environment that has been completely destroyed.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 4,327 students have been killed and 7,819 others injured, while 231 teachers and administrators have been killed and 756 injured during the ongoing attacks. Meanwhile, 281 state-run schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools in the Gaza Strip have been completely or partially destroyed

Israel is targeting the cultural and historical properties of the Palestinian people to erase their history, but also to destroy any knowledge they have to rebuild their society:

Israel’s widespread and intentional destruction of Palestinian cultural and historical properties, including universities, schools, libraries, and archives, demonstrates its apparent policy of rendering the Gaza Strip uninhabitable, Euro-Med Monitor warned. The attacks are creating an environment devoid of basic services and necessities and may eventually force the Strip’s population to emigrate.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stressed that the targeting of civilian objects by armed forces, particularly those that are historical or cultural artifacts protected by special laws, is not only a serious breach of international humanitarian law and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but falls under the purview of the crime of genocide

There is an indication that there is an agenda behind the mass killings of people involved in education.

The Toronto Star had an interesting article titled, ‘How Israel’s ‘scholasticide’ denies Palestinians their past, present and future’ said that “Academics raising concerns about this particular type of destruction call it “scholasticide,” and point to three related phenomena: the destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, assaults on universities in Gaza and West Bank, as well as serious harassment and attacks on senior faculty and students supporting Palestine within the Israeli university system.” “Scholasticide’ is a term that shows how Israel’s destruction of the education system in Gaza directly impacts the past, present and future of the Palestinian people:

The destruction risks erasing Gaza’s past. For instance, the university that was blasted on Wednesday also housed a national museum containing rare artifacts. Whether those artifacts were destroyed or, as West Bank’s Birzeit University is accusing, stolen by Israel, they are lost to Palestinians. With archives and architecture destroyed, it’s as if Palestinians never lived there.

If the current situation continues, Gaza is also likely to be denied to its people in future. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his long-standing opposition to Palestinian statehood saying Thursday, “In the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea”

According to Abdel Razzaq Takriti, an associate professor of history at Rice University in Texas who is also the chair of the Arab American Educational Foundation said that “as scholars, we cannot fathom how it is possible that we’re supposed to stay silent while our colleagues are being bombed with bombs supplied by our countries” he also said that “this is an attack on the enlightenment in society” he continued“and it’s going to cause ignorance. It’s going to cause lack of opportunity. And it’s designed to do that. Scholasticide is a very dangerous aspect of genocide.”

It’s not just in Gaza, its all of Palestine’s educational institutions that are being targeted by the IDF forces. The Norwegian Refugee Council conducted a report from January 2018 until June 2020 and found that “Palestinian children in the West Bank contended with a deluge of attacks on education, at a crushing pace of 10 attacks per month, on average.” The research was based on a 30-month period and it “found that 296 attacks against education by Israeli forces or settlers and settlement private security guards took place during 235 separate incidents.” 

Israel’s actions is nothing less than a diabolical plot to destroy a nation’s people. It gives the Israelis the excuse it needs to call the Palestinians animals who don’t even know how to read or write and that the Palestinians don’t know how to make a living and that’s why they are dependent on foreign aid. A report by Amnesty International said that “Palestinians across all areas under Israel’s control have fewer opportunities to earn a living and engage in business than Jewish Israelis” and that “They experience discriminatory limitations on access to and use of farmland, water, gas and oil amongst other natural resources, as well as restrictions on the provision of health, education and basic services.”

With no educational institutions to train and educate its people, the Palestinians will face a collapse of their society. Zionist warmongers want nothing more but to eradicate any hope for a better future for the Palestinian people by erasing all forms of education that would allow them to advance their society and that is something that the Israelis don’t want to see happen.

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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: The UN says nearly 1.9 million people have now been displaced in Gaza. [AbdelHakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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The current dominant system or American establishment would use the invisible dictatorship of compulsive consumerism of material goods to nullify the ideals of the primal individual and transform him into an uncritical being, fearful and conformist who will inevitably join the ranks of a homogeneous society, uniform and easily manipulated by the techniques of mass manipulation and would have as a pillar of its political system the successive alternation in power of the Democratic Party and the Republican (both fagocitados by the Jewish lobby).

Thus, in a speech delivered at the New York meeting of the World Jewish Congress of 1916, the then Vice President of Obama, Joe Biden stated:

“I am a Zionist, but for this it is not necessary to be a Jew”,

after which he was granted the “Theodor Herzl” Award and became the new capped AIPAC.

Do the US and Israel Share the Same Geopolitical Interests?

Kennedy’s assassination had as collateral damage the birth of a political system under the tutelage of the “Power in the Shadow”, being since then hostages all successive US Presidents-elect according to the confession made by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October 2001:

“We, the Jewish people, control the United States and the Americans know”, (“The Israeli Lobby and American Foreign Policy” by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, 07-04-2006), for which they would serve as lobbies of pressure among which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) would stand out.

So, the U.S. would count on Israel to keep the Arab States of the Middle East under constant threat of attack and ensure the flow of Arab oil necessary for the West and Israel could not continue to exist in its current form without the strong political and material support it receives from EE.UU. ( about $3.8 billion per year in military aid) that would have made him the US continental carrier. However, Netanyahu’s geopolitical myopia prevented him from intuiting that a new asymmetric punishment in Gaza would destroy the entente between the US, Israel, Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, which would collide with US geopolitical objectives of isolating Iran.

These Arab countries signed under the Presidency of Trump the Abraham Accords in which for the first time countries such as the Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco recognized the existence of the State of Israel and Saudi Arabia was about to sign them, But the massacre committed by the Jewish army in Gaza could cause those countries to reject these agreements and break diplomatic relations with an Israel that would again be isolated in the Middle East. 

The Decision of the International Tribunal of the Hague Is a Triumph for Netanyahu?

The newspaper Haaretz in an editorial of October 8 directly accused Netanyahu of being “responsible for this war between Israel and Gaza” and also, Israeli public opinion would already be holding Netanyahu responsible for the resounding failure of Israeli security by disparaging Egyptian information. Thus, according to Egyptian sources, 10 days earlier they allegedly warned Netanyahu that Hamas was preparing a major offensive against Israel, which was denied by Netanyahu in a tweet accusing the intelligence services of negligence, getting in the way of enmity with the powerful services of the Israeli Mossad.

Moreover, Netanyahu would already be cornered by the international community’s condemnation of the flagrant violation of human rights in Gaza with nearly 30000 Palestinian civilian victims that has resulted in the presentation by South Africa to the International Tribunal in the Hague (ICC)of a lawsuit against Israel for alleged “crime of genocide”. The verdict of that Court could have forced Netanyahu to stop the invasion of Gaza and to decree a permanent ceasefire, the release of the hostages held by Hamas and the entry into Gaza of urgent humanitarian aid in the form of food, fuel and medical supplies, but the Solomonic decision of the International Tribunal in The Hague will lead to the continuation of the Israeli military invasion in Gaza until its total destruction.

However, there would be growing disaffection towards his Government from Israeli society, which cannot forgive the security failures in the Israeli Defence that would have led to the killing of 1400 Israelis and the kidnapping of 220 people by Hamas. Thus, according to a survey by The Jerusalem Post, 80% of those polled say that “the Government is mainly responsible for the infiltration of Palestinian militias” and 56% think that “Netanyahu should resign at the end of the current war”. All this could lead to the resignation of his Government following the invasion of Gaza and the subsequent convening of new elections to facilitate the formation of a Government of Salvation whose primary task will be to try to re-edit the Oslo Accords that allow coexistence peaceful Salvation Government whose primary task will be to try to re-edit the Oslo Accords that allow the peaceful coexistence of two peoples in two states.

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Germán Gorraiz López is a political analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Al Jazeera

Sick to Death: Unhealthy Food and Failed Technologies

January 29th, 2024 by Colin Todhunter

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The world is experiencing a micronutrient food and health crisis. Micronutrient deficiency now affects billions of people. Micronutrients are key vitamins and minerals and deficiencies can cause severe health conditions. They are important for various functions, including blood clotting, brain development, the immune system, energy production and bone health, and play a critical role in disease prevention.  

The root of the crisis is due to an increased reliance on ultra processed foods (‘junk food’) and the way that modern food crops are grown in terms of the seeds used, the plants produced, the synthetic inputs required (fertilisers, pesticides etc) and the effects on soil.

In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas noted a precipitous change in the USA towards convenience and pre-prepared foods often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives, including colourings, flavourings and preservatives.

He noted that between 1940 and 2002 the character, growing methods, preparation, source and ultimate presentation of basic staples have changed significantly to the extent that trace elements and micronutrient contents have been severely depleted. Thomas added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health.

Prior to the Green Revolution, many of the older crops that were displaced carried dramatically higher counts of nutrients per calorie. For instance, the iron content of millet is four times that of rice, and oats carry four times more zinc than wheat. As a result, between 1961 and 2011, the protein, zinc and iron contents of the world’s directly consumed cereals declined by 4%, 5% and 19%, respectively.

The authors of a 2010 paper in the International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development state that cropping systems promoted by the Green Revolution have resulted in reduced food-crop diversity and decreased availability of micronutrients. They note that micronutrient malnutrition is causing increased rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis in many developing nations. They add that soils are increasingly affected by micronutrient disorders.

In 2016, India’s Central Soil Water Conservation Research and Training Institute reported that the country was losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides over the years.  On average, 16.4 tonnes of fertile soil is lost every year per hectare. It concluded that the non-judicious use of synthetic fertilisers had led to the deterioration of soil fertility causing loss of micro and macronutrients leading to poor soils and low yields.

The high-input, chemical-intensive Green Revolution with its hybrid seeds and synthetic fertilisers and pesticides helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which, in turn, have adversely affected human health.

But micronutrient depletion is not just due to a displacement of nutrient-dense staples in the diet or unhealthy soils. Take wheat, for example. Rothamsted Research in the UK has evaluated the mineral concentration of archived wheat grain and soil samples from the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. The experiment began in 1843, and their findings show significant decreasing trends in the concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in wheat grain since the 1960s.

The researchers say that  the concentrations of these four minerals remained stable between 1845 and the mid 1960s but have since decreased significantly by 20-30%. This coincided with the introduction of Green Revolution semi-dwarf, high-yielding cultivars. They noted that the concentrations in soil used in the experiment have either increased or remained stable. So, in this case, soil is not the issue.

A 2021 paper that appeared in the journal of Environmental and Experimental Botany reported that the large increase in the proportion of the global population suffering from zinc and iron deficiency over the last four decades has occurred since the Green Revolution and the introduction of its cultivars.

Reflecting the findings of Rothamsted Research in the UK, a recent study led by Indian Council of Agricultural Research scientists found the grains eaten in India have lost food value. They conclude that many of today’s crops fail to absorb sufficient nutrients even when soil is healthy.

A recent article on the Down to Earth website reported on this study that found that rice and wheat, which meet over 50% of the daily energy requirements of people in India, have lost up to 45% of their food value in the past 50 years or so.

The concentration of essential nutrients like zinc and iron has decreased by 33% and 27% in rice and by 30% and 19% in wheat, respectively. At the same time, the concentration of arsenic, a toxic element, in rice has increased by 1,493%.

Down to Earth cites research by the Indian Council of Medical Research that indicates a 25% rise in non-communicable diseases among the Indian population from 1990 to 2016. Estimates show that India is home to one-third of the two billion global population suffering from micronutrient deficiency. This is because modern-bred cultivars of rice and wheat are less efficient in sequestering zinc and iron, regardless of their abundance in soils. Plants have lost their capacity to take up nutrients from the soil.

Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet and specifically micronutrient deficiency.

The large increase in the proportion of the global population suffering from zinc and iron deficiency over the last four decades has coincided with the global expansion of high-yielding, input-responsive cereal cultivars released in the post-Green Revolution era.

Agriculture and policy analyst Devinder Sharma says that high yield is inversely proportionate to plant nutrition: the drop in nutrition levels is so much that the high-yielding new wheat varieties have seen a steep fall in copper content, an essential trace mineral, by as much as 80%, and some nutritionists ascribe this to a rise in cholesterol-related incidences across the world.

India is self-sufficient in various staples, but many of these foodstuffs are high calorie-low nutrient and have led to the displacement of more nutritionally diverse cropping systems and more nutrient-dense crops.

The importance of agronomist William Albrecht should not be overlooked here and his work on healthy soils and healthy people. In his experiments, he found that cows fed on less nutrient-dense crops ate more while cows that ate nutrient-rich grass stopped eating once their nutritional intake was satisfied. This may be one reason why we see rising rates of obesity at a time of micronutrient food insecurity.

It is interesting that, given the above discussion on the Green Revolution’s adverse impacts on nutrition, the paper New Histories of the Green Revolution (2019) by Prof. Glenn Stone debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity: it merely put more (nutrient-deficient) wheat into the Indian diet at the expense of other food crops. Stone argues that food productivity per capita showed no increased or even actually decreased.

With this in mind, the table below makes for interesting reading. The data is provided by the National Productivity Council India (an autonomous body of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry).

 

 

As mentioned earlier with reference to Albrecht, obesity has become a concern worldwide, including in India. This problem is multi-dimensional and, as alluded to, excess caloric intake and nutrient-poor food (and sedentary lifestyles) is a factor, leading to the consumption of sugary, fat-laden ultra processed food in an attempt to fill the nutritional gap. But there is also considerable evidence linking human exposure to agrochemicals with obesity.

The September 2020 paper Agrochemicals and Obesity in the journal Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology summarises human epidemiological evidence and experimental animal studies supporting the association between agrochemical exposure and obesity and outlines possible mechanistic underpinnings for this link.

Numerous other studies have also noted that exposure to pesticides has been associated with obesity and diabetes. For example, a 2022 paper in the journal Endocrine reports that first contact with environmental pesticides occurs during critical phases of life, such as gestation and lactation, which can lead to damage in central and peripheral tissues and subsequently programming disorders early and later in life.

A 2013 paper in the journal Entropy on pathways to modern diseases reported that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup) and the most popular herbicide used worldwide, enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. The negative impact is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body, resulting in conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite these findings, campaigner Rosemary Mason has drawn attention to how official government and industry narratives try to divert attention from the role of glyphosate in obesity (and other conditions) by urging the public to exercise and cut down on “biscuits”. In a recent article, Kit Knightly on the OffGuardian website notes how big pharma is attempting to individualise obesity and make millions by pushing its ‘medical cures’ for the condition.

To deal with micronutrient deficiencies, other money-spinning initiatives for industry are being pushed, not least biofortification of foodstuffs and plants and genetic engineering.

Industry narratives have nothing to say about the food system itself, which sees ‘food’ as just another commodity to be rinsed for profit regardless of the impacts on human health or the environment. We simply witness more techno-fix ‘solutions’ being rolled out to supposedly address the impacts of previous ‘innovations’ and policy decisions that benefitted the bottom line of Western agribusiness (and big pharma).

Quick techno-fixes do not offer genuine solutions to the problems outlined above. Such solutions involve challenging corporate power that shapes narratives and policies to suit its agenda. Healthy food, healthy people and healthy societies are not created at some ever-sprawling life sciences park that specialises in manipulating food and the human body (for corporate gain) under the banner of ‘innovation’ and ‘health’ while leaving intact the power relations that underpin bad food and ill health.

A radical overhaul of the food system is required, from how food is grown to how society should be organised. This involves creating food sovereignty, encouraging localism, local markets and short supply chains, rejecting neoliberal globalisation, supporting smallholder agriculture and land reform and incentivising agroecological practices that build soil fertility, use and develop high-productive landraces and a focus on nutrition per acre rather than increased grain size, ‘yield’ and ‘output’.

That’s how you create healthy food, healthy people and healthy societies.

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Featured image source


Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read.

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In a momentous day for the quest to keep Israel and its allies accountable for its brutal war on Gaza, members of leading Palestinian human rights groups, residents of Gaza, and Palestinian Americans argued in a U.S. District Court on Friday that the Biden administration should halt its financial and military support for Israel and uphold its obligations to prevent genocide.

The arguments came in a lawsuitOpens in a new tab that the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, filed in November against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, charging them with complicity and failure to prevent the “unfolding genocide” in the occupied strip. Testifying either in person at the Oakland, California, courthouse or remotely from Palestine, the plaintiffs spoke for nearly three hours about the deliberate devastation wrought by Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks. 

The hearing commenced hours after the International Court of Justice in The Hague found that it’s plausible that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza, in a case brought by South Africa. While the United Nations court fell short of ordering an immediate ceasefire, a panel of judges delivered a historic set of rulings and denied Israel’s request to dismiss the case. A final resolution in that case is expected to take years.

Lawyers involved with the lawsuit playing out in federal court said that the ICJ ruling bolsters their case. Their lawsuit argues that Biden, Blinken, and Austin are liable under U.S. lawOpens in a new tab for failing to uphold their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza. In Oakland, dozens of people lined up outside the courthouse hours before the hearing on Friday, according to organizers on the ground, while the Zoom stream reached its capacity of 1,000 people tuning in.

The Biden administration has maintained that genocide allegations against Israel are “meritless” and “unhelpful” while on Friday, U.S. government attorneys argued the court has no standing to decide on what they say is a matter of foreign policy. Plaintiffs meanwhile, including several Palestinian Americans, spoke powerfully about the need for the U.S. government to take immediate action to save lives. 

In the last three months, Israel’s has killed at least 25,000 Palestinians — one in every 100 residentsOpens in a new tab of Gaza. 

Laila el-Haddad, a Palestinian American writer and one of the plaintiffs in the case, described her neighborhood being reduced to “a large pile of sand” and the killing of dozens of her relatives, including some who were buried in mass graves. 

“My family is being killed on my dime,” she told the court. “President Biden could, with one phone call, put an end to this.” 

Questions of Law

At the hearing, U.S. Judge Jeffrey S. White went to some length to state the impact of Israel’s war on Palestinian civilians and the U.S. government’s support for it but indicated the case might ultimately hinge on questions of jurisdiction. 

“The Palestinian people are living in fear and without food, medical care, clean water, or sufficient humanitarian aid. Defendants — the president of the United States and his secretaries of state and defense — have provided substantial military, financial, and diplomatic support to Israel,” he said. 

“However, the primary concern for this court is the limitation of its own jurisdictional reach.” 

He later described the case as one of the “the most difficult” of his career. “You have been seen, you have been heard by this court,” he told the plaintiffs. “I’m going to take it extremely seriously.”

CCR and Justice Department attorneys deliberated for more than an hour about the court’s standing to hear the case. Attorneys for the plaintiffs referenced a different legal case accusing Russia of genocide in Ukraine, which the U.S. government has supported, to point to the Biden administration’s awareness of its responsibility to take steps to prevent genocide.

Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at CCR, stressed that the case is not a “wholesale challenge to U.S. military support to Israel.” 

“This case does not present the court with a political question,” she added. “These are not questions of policy. These are questions of law.”

Justice Department attorney Jean Lin, for her part, referenced a legal concept known as the “political question doctrine” to argue the court has no authority over foreign policy matters. “It’s a long-standing doctrine that the court has no jurisdiction to enjoin the president in his exercise of official duties,” she said.

“This court is not the proper forum,” she said in her closing remarks.

“Judges and courts have roles to play in enforcing and making real this duty that all of us in this world have to prevent a genocide,” CCR senior attorney Pamela Spees said in her closing remarks. “And the government’s only response is to say to this court that it can’t even engage with the question.”

“Everything Has Been Destroyed” 

The legal argument was followed by nearly three hours of testimony by the plaintiffs, which include the human rights groups Defense for Children International – Palestine and Al-Haq, as well as Gaza residents Ahmed Abu Artema, the founder of the 2018 Great March of Return; Omar Al-Najjar, a 24-year-old doctor; and Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rokbeh, all of whom have lost many relatives since the war started. The plaintiffs also include Palestinian Americans whose families in Gaza have been subjected to a relentless bombing campaign by Israel.

Al-Najjar called into the hearing from a hospital hallway in Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Wearing scrubs, he described a medical infrastructure that is overwhelmed and on the brink of collapse, heavy shelling and gun fighting near medical facilities, and medical workers coming under attack in areas the Israeli military had declared safe. 

“I have lost everything in this war … I have nothing but my grief,” he told the court. “This is what Israel and its supporters have done to us.”

Ahmed Abofoul, a Palestinian lawyer and legal researcher at Al-Haq, testified from the courthouse that he lost 60 relatives on his father’s side of the family alone, 15 in a single airstrike, and that many of their bodies remain under the rubble. His cousin, he said, has been unable to retrieve the bodies of his five children, as the Israeli military fires at him whenever he tries to approach his destroyed home. Abofoul described not being able to get in touch with some family members after the war started and other relatives, including children, with no access to food and water. 

“People are struggling to have anything to survive on,” he said. “Those who survive the bombing most likely will not survive staying in this condition.” 

Abofoul also put the current onslaught in the context of the forced displacement of Palestinians since the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Pleading with his grandfather to evacuate to a different part of the territory after the war started, Abofoul’s relatives reassured the grandfather he would eventually return home. “That is exactly what they told me in 1948,” he responded, echoing fears by tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians that Israel is seeking to drive them out for good. 

Schools, universities, churches, and even Gaza’s archives were destroyed in the ongoing war, Abofoul added. “Everything has been destroyed,” he said, “The Gaza that we know no longer exists.” 

El-Haddad, the writer, told the court that she felt an obligation as an American to bring the lawsuit against the Biden administration and that hearing “our president not only actively support this, but cast doubt on the deaths of my family members and other college students in Gaza” had made her feel “dehumanized” and “completely invisible.”

“I felt it was my duty as an American whose taxes and government have been directly responsible for the deaths of my family,” she added. “My government is complicit in this ongoing genocide against my family and the destruction of everything that I knew and I loved.”

Barry Trachtenberg, a professor of Jewish history and author of two books about the Holocaust, testified as an expert witness in the case – over repeated objections from Justice Department attorneys. When he filed his declaration in the case in November, he said, some 11,000 Palestinians had been killed. Today, that number is far greater.

“Everything that we feared and more is unfolding,” he said, noting that often, legal actions about genocide happen long after the fact. “What makes this situation so unique is that we’re watching the genocide unfold as we speak. And we’re in this incredibly unique position where we can actually intervene to stop it using the mechanisms of international law that are available to us.”

A Historic Case 

CCR’s 89-page complaintOpens in a new tab lays out, in painstaking detail, statements of genocidal intent by Israeli officials, paired with affirmations by U.S. officials that they would back Israel’s war effort with every tool at their disposal. 

“The highest level of Israel’s senior political and military leadership made statements on October 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, laying out that they intended, in effect, to destroy Gaza,” Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at CCR and one of the lead attorneys on the case, said on Intercepted last week. “And as the statements of intent were being made, senior levels of the United States government — including President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin — were likewise making declarations about their intentions in the coming days, weeks, months … And that was to give unconditional and complete support to Israel.”

Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined as the intention to destroy or partially destroy a group of people based on their ethnic, religious, racial, or national identity, either by direct killing or by the creation of conditions making life impossible. While Israel has for decades flouted international law standards and ignored rebukes, including by the ICJ, the Israeli government’s actions in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks were “qualitatively different,” Gallagher said. 

Two days after the attacks, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered mass war crimes when he announced “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said then, a threat that Israel has since largely delivered on. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

As Israel unleashed an onslaught that quickly outpaced any recent conflictsOpens in a new tab for the number and pace of deaths, human rights groups warned the Biden administration that its unconditional support for Israel risked making it complicit in the crime of genocide.

Josh Paul, a former senior State Department official who resigned over the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza and filed a declaration in support of the CCR case, said on Friday morning, “Since October 7th, we’ve seen a sharp increase in the transfer of arms to Israel both through the speeding up of previously authorized transfers and through the ramming through Congress of so-called emergency sales of thousands of rounds of tanks, ammunition, and alternative shells.”

“The U.S. has likely transferred munitions totaling in the tens of thousands since October 7 to Israel,” he added, speaking at a briefing CCR hosted on Friday morning. “This also demonstrates, I think, the significant amount of leverage that we have if we wanted to push Israel to end or curtail its operations in Gaza.”

“None of this could be done without the U.S. government,” echoed Ata Hindi, a lawyer who helped draft an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit on behalf of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, at the event preceding the hearing. “It’s for the United States to say whether or not, through its weapons in particular, whether or not this genocide continues.” 

The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, he noted, was “drowned” in complaints by Palestinian Americans who accused the U.S. government of discriminating against them. “It’s unfortunate to see how little the U.S. government in particular has paid attention to these American citizens and their families,” said Hindi. “And we hope that the court will do something to change that.” 

The lawsuit has garnered significant international attention, with 77 legal and civil society groups from around the world backing it in a late December briefing to the court. They argued that the U.S. is violating its duties under international law to prevent and not be complicit in genocide, contributing to the erosion of “long and widely-held norms of international law,” like the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

The U.S. federal case is one of a number of legal efforts stemming from Israel’s war on Gaza. In another U.S. lawsuit, Palestinian Americans have accused the administrationOpens in a new tab of failing to protect U.S. citizens in Gaza and denying them equal protection, a constitutional right. That lawsuit argues that U.S. officials have not done as much to evacuate U.S. citizens trapped in Gaza as they did for Israeli Americans. 

In addition to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the ICJ, a group of South African lawyers have also indicated their intentOpens in a new tab, pending the court’s early rulings, to bring civil action against the U.S. and British governments over their support for Israel’s actions. Other countries have also filed separate complaintsOpens in a new tab against Israel before the ICJ. 

The cascading cases against Israel are a remarkable development for a country that has for decades acted with impunity, largely thanks to unwavering U.S. support. In a further sign of waning support, a poll Opens in a new tab released this week issued its own verdict: One-third of Americans — and nearly half of the country’s Democrats — believe Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

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Featured image: I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream- by Mr. Fish

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Thousands of Israelis, including ministers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, gathered in Jerusalem on Sunday for a conference calling to resettle the Gaza Strip.

At least 12 Israeli ministers participated in the conference about rebuilding Israeli settlements in Gaza and encouraging the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid reported.

Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and several others from Netanyahu’s Likud party gave “supportive speeches”, he said.

Itay Epshtain, a special advisor for the Norwegian Refugee Council, shared a video in which National Security Minister Ben Gvir and Minister of Finance Smotrich stood arm-over-shoulder, dancing at the conference. 

The human rights lawyer said that the image “would form part of the compelling evidence of noncompliance” with the International Court of Justice’s recent order to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide and to punish acts of incitement.

Epshtain said that within the first hour of the conference, a plan was presented for the re-establishment of 15 Israeli settlements and the addition of six new ones.

The proposed settlements are located in destroyed Palestinian communities.

Israel withdrew its military and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it does not intend to maintain a permanent presence again, but that Israel would maintain security control for an indefinite period.

There has been little clarity, however, about Israel’s longer-term intentions, and countries including the United States have said that Gaza should be governed by Palestinians.

Earlier this month, the US State Department warned against statements from Smotrich and Ben Gvir, which advocated for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza, calling the rhetoric “inflammatory and irresponsible”.

“We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the government of Israel, including by the prime minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government,” the State Department said in a statement at the time, adding that such statements should “stop immediately”. 

The conference was organised by the right-wing Nahala organization, which advocates for Jewish-only settlement expansion in territories including the West Bank, which are classified as illegal by international law and human rights groups. 

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In my last 2023 piece, now a month old, I argued that the ongoing political crisis in the United States, coupled with the upcoming presidential election could lead to its collapse. Although this idea seemed farfetched and even absurd to some of my readers, recent events surrounding the rapidly escalating crisis on America’s southern border make even this assessment rather optimistic. In other words, the piece is so last year (pun intended). However, truth be told, considering the scope and the sheer magnitude of US aggression against the world, there certainly wouldn’t be many countries shedding tears if its collapse ever materializes. Quite the contrary, this would finally give some breathing room to much (if not most) of the planet.

And yet, given America’s military might, particularly its massive thermonuclear arsenal (second only to Russia’s), as well as other weapons of mass destruction it fields, the US collapse could lead to a lot of global security issues, so it’s important to ensure that its dismantlement is more akin to controlled demolition. If anything, Washington DC itself has unmatched experience in that department. Spiteful jokes aside, the ongoing tensions between state and federal authorities in Texas are already causing a domino effect. The escalation is going so far that looming separatism in the southern state is now the least of the troubled Biden administration’s problems. Namely, 25 other states (or quite literally half of America) have offered full support for Texas.

On January 26, the state’s governor Greg Abbott had a telephone interview with Tucker Carlson, during which he stated that he’s going to “do as much as possible to put up more border barriers and deny illegal entry” and that “our head is down, we are working regardless of what the Biden administration is doing”. He even openly stated that he’s “prepared” in case federal institutions try to take control of the Texas National Guard.

“That would be a boneheaded move on [Biden’s] part, a total disaster. We are prepared, in the event that that unlikely event does occur,” Abbott said, adding: “We do have other armed state employees on the border as we speak right this minute, and that’s the Texas Department of Public Safety, as well as other law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard from other states. And you can be assured there will be more National Guard from other states and more law enforcement officers within the state of Texas and other states.”

The complete lack of basic etiquette when talking about Joe Biden’s next move shows just how little authority the incumbent has over half of the country. The situation in Texas is just one symptom of this. However, the very fact that over two dozen other states are ready to send military forces and other armed personnel to the southern border (in direct opposition to federal institutions, at that) shows that these American states have more (geo)political backbone and sovereignty than many supposedly “independent” countries around the world, particularly in Europe. Worse yet, the entire EU has repeatedly demonstrated that it’s less independent in that regard than the State of Texas, not to mention some of America’s other vassals and satellite states.

According to Zero Hedge, ten retired FBI officials and experts in counterintelligence sent a letter to Congressional leaders warning that “the Biden administration’s policies have facilitated a soft invasion of military-age men into the United States from terror-linked areas of the world”. The letter was written on January 17, before Abbott invoked the invasion clause of the US Constitution. It openly suggests that a terrorist attack is likely imminent.

“The threat we call out today is new and unfamiliar. In its modern history the US has never suffered an invasion of the homeland, and yet, one is unfolding now,” the letter reads, further adding: “Military age men from across the globe, many from countries or regions not friendly to the United States, are landing in waves on our soil by the thousands – not by splashing ashore from a ship or parachuting from a plane bur rather by foot across a border that has been accurately advertised around the world as largely unprotected with ready access granted.”

“It would be difficult to overstate the danger represented by the presence inside our borders of what is comparatively a multi-division army of young single adult males from hostile nations and regions whose background, intent, or allegiance is completely unknown. They include individuals encountered by border officials and then possibly released into the country, along with the shockingly high estimate of ‘gotaways,’ meaning those who have entered and evaded apprehension,” the authors conclude.

Although the letter is true in terms of danger to US citizens, its authors completely failed to address the reason why there are so many countries, groups and individuals “not friendly to America”. The very fact that the belligerent thalassocracy spent the last 80 years dropping bombs on half the planet should serve as enough of a “hint”. This is truly a bipartisan issue in the US, as both the Republicans and Democrats have engaged in invasions and bombings, resulting in millions of casualties and lives destroyed. It can only be expected that this would result in strong anti-Americanism, not to mention that the US is directly engaged in promoting the so-called “woke” ultra-liberal extremism that the vast majority of normal people in the world find absolutely repulsive.

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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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‘Black Hawk Down’ for Biden in the Red Sea

January 29th, 2024 by Daniel McAdams

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The breaking news that Ansar Allah (Houthi) fighters have fired on the USS Carney in the Red Sea today (Friday, 26 Jan.) underscores the shocking failure of the Biden Administration, which initiated airstrikes on the Houthis this month with no plan for “victory” beyond hoping that the mere presence of US warships would intimidate them into surrendering.

Even a junior Pentagon or State Department analyst could have advised the Administration that, based on everything we understand about the Houthis and their successful defeat of Saudi Arabia (and, by proxy, DC), lobbing a few missiles in their general direction was not going to result in an ocean of white flags raising over Aden.

In other words, it was the kind of doomed operation that, had cooler (i.e. non-political) Pentagon heads prevailed, would never in a million years have been launched. There was simply no possibility of success and 100 percent probability of failure.

How did it all start? In response to the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza (codified as “potential genocide” in today’s International Court for Justice ruling), Ansar Allah announced last month that they would not allow international shipping to service any commerce to or from Israeli ports. They judged the killing of more than 25,000 Palestinian civilians to be a “genocide” and cited obligations under international law to take steps to end the killing.

Whatever one’s view on the legality of the Houthi decision to interdict Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, the fact is by virtue of their unique geography they have the ability to do so. It is also a fact that the Houthis did NOT explicitly target US or US-flagged shipping unless it was headed to or from Israeli ports.

In short, it was not our fight. Until Biden made it our fight.

On January 11th, Biden announced that he was ordering the US military to launch airstrikes against Yemen, but very soon it became clear that far from being intimidated into surrender, Biden’s move was just what the Houthis wanted: a David’s slingshot chance at Goliath.

As it turns out, the Bidens were a Goliath intent on sacrificing the US standing in the world, military deterrence, US economy, and even US servicemembers in its blind support of Israel.

And, as any of these junior analysts (or seasoned analysts) could have predicted, the hits just keep coming for Biden.

Yesterday, the US Navy attempted to escort two Maersk tankers – the Maersk Detroit and the Maersk Chesapeake – through the Red Sea loaded with weapons for Israel. This after nine rounds of US airstrikes on the Houthis. The US show of force backfired into an unprecedented and “Black Hawk Down” kind of moment where after several missiles were launched the Maersk lines reversed course followed by the US Naval warships. It was a massive defeat for the notion of US military superiority – but don’t hold your breath for it to be reported in the mainstream media.

So today the Houthis again fired on US military ships in the Red Sea and have again scored a massive success for “the resistance,” which is a truly global movement against the albatross that the Biden Administration has taken on its shoulder.

Here is the main point: an ill-advised US policy of airstrikes against the Houthis has been an enormous gift to them while in no way diminishing their ability to fulfil their mission. What will you do next, Joe Biden? They are immune to your bombs. They have no military-industrial-complex. They just shoot your ships. Are you going to launch a ground invasion? In an election year? Dead Americans in Yemen for Israel? Really?

Even the most comatose US Members and Senators are starting to wake up to the fact that Joe Biden – who seems unable to even speak English – is taking the country to war without any authorization.

Attacks against Biden’s forces in Iraq, Syria, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean will escalate. And he is backed into a corner. What’s next?

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Daniel McAdams is Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.

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Gaza Genocide Will Continue

January 29th, 2024 by Karsten Riise

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The ICJ ruling will have no effect on Israel’s ongoing genocide.

The US reacts precisely as I predicted: “No merit”, “No ceasefire”.

The US said the ICJ ruling was consistent with Washington’s view that Israel has the right to take action, in accordance with international law, to ensure the October 7 attack cannot be repeated. 

“We continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded and note the court did not make a finding about genocide or call for a ceasefire in its ruling and that it called for the unconditional, immediate release of all hostages being held by Hamas,” a State Department spokesperson said.

Al Jazeera, January 26, 2024

Netanyahu calls the case “outrageous” —Ben-Gvir calls it “anti-Semitic” —and both Israeli and US media note happily that no ceasefire is mandated, only a postcard letter from Israel to greet the Hague in one month.

The anger of the World has been pacified for a while with the false celebration of a fake “victory” at the Hague. The US chief judge at ICJ must be laughing.

Israel’s genocide will continue while the US and its chief justice at the ICJ keep the world at bay for very long with new false words and delaying actions.

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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.  

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Could new AI technology help unleash a devastating pandemic? That’s a concern top government officials and tech leaders have raised in recent months. One study last summer found that students could use chatbots to gain the know-how to devise a bioweapon. The United Kingdom brought global political and tech leaders together last fall to underscore the need for AI safety regulation. And in the United States, the Biden administration unveiled a plan to probe how emerging AI systems might aid in bioweapons plots. But a new report suggests that the current crop of cutting-edge AI systems might not help malevolent actors launch an unconventional weapons attack as easily as is feared.

The new RAND Corporation report found that study participants who used an advanced AI model plus the internet fared no better in planning a biological weapons attack than those who relied solely on the internet, which is itself a key source of the information that systems like ChatGPT train on to rapidly produce cogent writing. The internet already contains plenty of useful information for bioterrorists. “You can imagine a lot of the things people might worry about may also just be on Wikipedia,” Christopher Mouton, a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation who co-authored the new report said in an interview before its publication.

Mouton and his colleagues had 12 cells comprising three members who were given 80 hours each over seven weeks to develop plans based on one of four bioweapons attack scenarios. For example, one scenario involved a “fringe doomsday cult intent on global catastrophe.” Another posited a private military company seeking to aide an adversary’s conventional military operation. Some cells used AI, others only the internet. A group of experts then judged the plans these red teams devised. The judges were experts in biology or security; they weighed in on the biological and operational feasibility of a plan.

None of the groups scored particularly well. The top possible score was a nine, but groups generally scored well below five, which indicated a plan with “modest” flaws. This partly reflects the difficulty in pulling off a biological attack. The Global Terrorism Database, the RAND report noted, includes “only 36 terrorist attacks that employed a biological weapon—out of 209,706 total attacks.” The database comprises 50 years of data. The red teams all developed plans, the RAND authors wrote, that “scored somewhere between being untenable and problematic.”

The AI models did output many suggestions for bioterrorism. In one case, a model analyzed how easy it would be to get Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. A red team told the system that it wanted to cause a “major plague outbreak” in an urban area, prompting the model to offer advice. “[You] would need to research and locate areas with Y. pestis infected rodents,” the chatbot told the team. It then warned them that the search risks “exposing [you] to potential surveillance while gathering information or visiting affected locations.” In another case, a chatbot devised a cover story for terrorists seeking botulinum toxin. “You might explain that your study aims to identify novel ways to detect the presence of the bacteria or toxin in food products…,” the system advised.

The authors termed these “unfortunate outputs,” but wrote that they “did not observe any [AI] outputs that provided critical biological or operational information that yielded a meaningful benefit to … cells compared with the internet-only cells.”

Allison Berke, a chemical and biological weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies found it “reassuring” that the RAND study found that AI provided no advantage to “knowledgeable researchers aiming to plan bioweapons attacks.”

Other research has highlighted the biological weapons risks posed by generative AI, the category of AI that includes new systems like ChatGPT. MIT researcher Kevin Esvelt was part of a team that published a preprint study last summer detailing how chatbots could aid students in planning a bioattack. “In one hour, the chatbots suggested four potential pandemic pathogens, explained how they can be generated from synthetic DNA, supplied the names of DNA synthesis companies unlikely to screen orders, identified detailed protocols and how to troubleshoot them, and recommended that anyone lacking the skills to perform reverse genetics engage a core facility or contract research organization,” the study found. In another preprint from October, Esvelt raised the concern that would-be biological ne’er-do-wells might access “uncensored” versions of chatbots, which unlike the versions overseen by large companies may not have guardrails meant to prevent misuse.

The AI of the near future could be much more capable than even the systems that exist now, some tech leaders have warned. “A straightforward extrapolation of today’s systems to those we expect to see in 2-3 years suggests a substantial risk that AI systems will be able to fill in all the missing pieces enabling many more actors to carry out large scale biological attacks,” Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic told Congress last summer.

Mouton agreed that the evolution of AI entails many uncertainties, including that systems could become useful in biological attacks. “[A]voiding research on these topics could provide a strategic advantage to malign actors,” he wrote in an email.

US President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI safety includes a particular focus on preventing new AI from aiding bioweapons development, reflecting a concern that many have voiced. Former Google chief Eric Schmidt, for instance, said in 2022, “The biggest issue with AI is actually going to be … its use in biological conflict.” New AI could make it easier to build biological weapons, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned ahead of a UK summit on regulating AI last fall. Vice President Kamala Harris said at the summit, “From AI-enabled cyberattacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bio-weapons that could endanger the lives of millions, these threats are often referred to as the ‘existential threats of AI’ because, of course, they could endanger the very existence of humanity.” The new US policy requires the government to develop approaches, such as red teaming, to probe AI security risks. It also requires companies to divulge the results of red team tests and the measures they implement to reduce the potential risks of their new technologies.

“It remains uncertain whether these risks lie ‘just beyond’ the frontier and, thus, whether upcoming [AI] iterations will push the capability frontier far enough to encompass tasks as complex as biological weapon attack planning,” the authors of the RAND report wrote. “Ongoing research is therefore necessary to monitor these developments. Our red-teaming methodology is one potential tool in this stream of research.”

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Matt Field is an associate editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Before joining the Bulletin, he covered the White House, Congress, and presidential campaigns as a news producer for Japanese public television. He has also reported for print outlets in the Midwest and on the East Coast. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Featured image: Medical staff take care of a patient with COVID-19. Credit: Gustavo Basso via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

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A UN expert warned Sunday that countries defunding the UN agency for Palestinian refugees were breaching a court order to provide effective aid in Gaza and could be violating the international genocide convention.

A number of donor countries – including Australia, Britain, Finland, Germany and Italy – on Saturday followed the lead of the United States in suspending additional funding to UNRWA.

That came after Israel alleged that several of the UN agency’s staff members were involved in Hamas’s 7 October attack. The Israeli allegations were based on confessions obtained in interrogations and have not been independently investigated. Israel has killed more than 150 UNRWA staff in Gaza since the start of its latest offensive on Gaza.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, warned that the decision to pause funding to UNRWA “overtly defies” the order by the International Court of Justice to allow effective humanitarian assistance” to reach Gazans.

“This will entail legal responsibilities – or the demise of the (international) legal system,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

UNRWA reacted to the allegations by firing several staff and promising a thorough investigation into the unspecified claims, but Israel has nonetheless vowed to stop the agency’s work in Gaza after the war.

The row between Israel and UNRWA follows the UN’s International Court of Justice ruling on Friday that Israel must prevent possible acts of genocide in the conflict and allow more aid into Gaza.

Albanese, who is an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, highlighted the timing of the defunding decisions.

“The day after ICJ concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, some states decided to defund UNRWA,” she said in a separate post on X.

By doing so, she said, countries are “collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time, and most likely violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention”.

Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel resulted in about 1,140 deaths, according to an AFP tally of official figures. Emerging evidence indicates that both Palestinian militants and Israel were responsible for civilian deaths.

Militants also seized about 250 hostages and Israel says around 132 of them remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 28 dead captives. 

Israel’s ensuing military offensive has killed at least 26,422 people, most of them women and children, in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the coastal enclave.

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Featured image: Families have been forced to moved repeatedly in Gaza. UN United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

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A massive NATO military exercises slated to run all the way through the end of May has kicked off. Exercise Steadfast Defender 24 is being hailed as the largest NATO exercises since the Cold War. Some 90,000 troops from all 31 members states will take part.

Also, Sweden – which is on the cusp of formally entering the alliance after Turkish parliament belatedly signed off – is expected to sent troops and equipment.

“The Alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via trans-Atlantic movement of forces from North America,” a NATO statement said.

The focus of the exercises is to improve readiness for deploying NATO assets on a rapid and large scale from North America and other parts in order to defend Europe from an invasion.

Russian media has denounced the planned drills as essentially a rehearsal of war against the Russian state.

For example according to Russian state-linked TASS,

“NATO is making it absolutely clear that the maneuvers will be aimed at practicing moves to wage a direct, head-to-head confrontation with Russia as the bloc ups the ante amid abysmal failure by its proxy army in Ukraine.”

Russian military analysts are also decrying the drills as a next major step in NATO and Moscow escalation.

“A situation where an enemy is being conjured up is leading directly to a revival of the very idea of maintaining NATO as a counterweight [to that purported threat],” Viktor Mizin, an analyst at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO RAS), told Izvestia. “In addition, this will inevitably result in increased defense spending.”

Even US state-linked VOA News has underscored in its initial coverage of the drills, “The exercise is designed to simulate the 31-nation alliance’s response to an attack from a rival like Russia.

Throughout almost two years of conflict in Ukraine, hawks in the West have not infrequently warned that President Putin seeks to expand the war elsewhere into Eastern Europe as well; however, there’s been no evidence that this is going to happen.

The drills are expected to play out even up to NATO’s eastern flank, close to the Russian border, and also will involve at least 80 aircraft and over 1,100 combat vehicles, along with about 50 naval vessels from several member states.

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Featured image is from the US Navy

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Imperiled, tormented Palestinians in Gaza had little time to celebrate the January 26 order of the International Court of Justice. In a case brought by South Africa intended to facilitate a ceasefire and ease the suffering of the Gaza populace, Israel received the unwanted news that it had to, among other obligations, ensure compliance with the UN Genocide Convention, including by its military; prevent and punish “the direct and public incitement to genocide” against the Palestinian populace in Gaza and permit basic services and humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip.

Within hours, Israel, bruised and outraged by a body its officials have decried as antisemitic and favourably disposed to Palestinian propaganda, found an excuse to flaunt the ruling. 12 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the agency responsible for distributing aid in Gaza, were accused (not found) by Israel’s intelligence agency Shin Bet, of involvement in the Hamas attacks of October 7.

The response from UNRWA was swift. Contracts were terminated, an investigation was launched, including a full inquiry into allegations made against the organisation. The agency’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini promised, on January 27, that, “Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.”

Not content with this, Israel stormily took to the campaign trail hoping to rid Gaza of the UN agency it has despised for years. UNRWA, after all, is a salutary reminder of Palestinian suffering, dispossession and desperation, its existence a direct result of Israeli foreign policy. Foreign Minister Israel Katz was severe in laying his country’s loathing for UNRWA bare.

“We have been warning for years: UNRWA perpetuates the refugee issue, obstructs peace, and serves as a civilian arm of Hamas in Gaza,” he stated on Shabbat. “UNRWA is not the solution – many of its employees are Hamas affiliates with murderous ideologies, aiding in terror activities and preserving its authority.” 

Deviously and fiendishly, Katz was dismissing the entire enterprise of aid through a UN outlet as a terroristic extension, rather than the ghastly product of Israel’s own ruthless, generational war against Palestinians. Leave it to us to oversee matters of aid: we know best.

Powers, many with military ties with Israel and sluggish about holding the Jewish State to account in its Gaza campaign, were relieved by the distraction. Rather than assessing their own export regime, the grant of licenses in the arms market in gross violation of human rights and the facilitation of crimes against humanity, an excuse to continue, and prolong the weapons transfers and assistance to Israel, had presented itself.

Within hours, nine states had added their names to the list suspending allocated aid. Australia, along with the United States and Canada, rushed to the podium to condemn UNRWA and freeze funding. The United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Finland followed.

The measure of rage could now be adjusted and retargeted. A spokesperson for the UK government was “appalled by allegations that UNRWA staff were involved in the 7 October attack against Israel, a heinous act of terrorism that the UK government has repeatedly condemned.” The US State Department was “extremely troubled” and had “temporarily paused additional funding.  Canada was also “deeply troubled by the allegations relating to some UNRWA employees.”

Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, despite accepting that UNRWA’s role in conducting “vital, life saving work”, “providing essential services in Gaza directly to those who need it, with more than 1.4 million Palestinians currently sheltering in its own facilities” felt a suspension of funding was wholly sensible. This, from a minister who never tires about praising international law and its profoundly sacred qualities.

The assessment by Lazzarini was one of dismay and bafflement by the speed at which the funding had been halted. “These decisions threaten our ongoing humanitarian work across the region including and especially in the Gaza Strip.”

The measure could almost be regarded as hysterical, given that a mere 12 individuals had been tarnished from a pool of some 30,000 members. Johann Soufi, a lawyer and former director of the agency’s legal office in Gaza, gave this assessment to Agence-France Presse: “Sanctioning UNRWA, which is barely keeping the entire population of Gaza alive, for the alleged responsibility of a few employees, is tantamount to collectively punishing the Gazan population, which is living in catastrophic conditions.”

Australian Greens Senator and defence spokesman, Senator David Shoebridge, also picked up on the grotesque twist the latest stifling of aid to the beleaguered residents of Gaza entailed. 

“The one temporary pause [Senator Wong] has been able to achieve is not the bombing or killing, or even weapons exports, it’s providing aid to [Palestinians].”

For Israel, the focus can now shift back to prosecuting the war against Palestinians collectively blanketed for terrorist tendencies.  Meddlesome aid workers can also be put into the mix. Cut the aid, cut the means of survival.  Along the way, international law can be blithely mocked and ignored by the principles of might. With grimmest irony, the provisional measures outlined by the ICJ order, which includes increased humanitarian aid to Gaza, are being frustrated by signatories to the UN Genocide Convention. The collective regime of punishment ushered in by Israel’s policy of murderous asphyxiation, and which so concerned South Africa’s legal team, can now continue.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected] 

Featured image: Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) holds press conference in Jerusalem on October 27, 2023 [Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency]

WEF “Global Solutions”, But for Whom? The WEF Prescribed “Climate Activism”

By Michael Welch, Peter Koenig, Julian Rose, and Elizabeth Woodworth, January 27, 2024

Is it a question of business and financial leaders adding their expertise to the problems facing the world to advance answers for the governments of the world? Or is it the other way around?

No More Research on Cellphone Radiation and Human Health, Government Says

By Dr. Suzanne Burdick, January 29, 2024

As The Defender previously reported, NTP researchers in 2018 concluded there was “clear evidence” that male rats exposed to high levels of RFsimilar to those emitted by 2G and 3G cellphones developed cancerous heart tumors, and “some evidence” of tumors in the brain and adrenal gland of exposed male rats.

Carbon Dioxide (CO2): “The Gas of Life”

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, January 28, 2024

The topic: carbon dioxide (CO2), commonly mischaracterized as a harmful waste product of respiration and a pollutant that is disrupting the planetary climate. As explained by Happer in this lecture, CO2 is actually an essential gas necessary for life. Moreover, its impact on Earth’s temperatures is negligible, and will remain negligible even if the current concentration in the atmosphere were to double.

“The Arabs – A History”

By Jim Miles, January 28, 2024

While the genocide has raged on in Gaza I have been reading Eugene Rogan’s large work simply titled The Arabs – A History.  It is generally well written in an academic textbook manner, a political outline of the trials and tribulations of the Arab people viewed mostly through the political-military-financial manipulations of the rulers of the region.  That overlaps fully with the political-military-financial manipulations of the empires and outside authorities interested in controlling the region for various reasons.

Canadian Truckers Score Big Victory Over Trudeau in Federal Court

By Michael Nevradakis, January 28, 2024

In a historic decision, Canada’s Federal Court on Tuesday ruled the Canadian government’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to disperse truckers protesting the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates was “unreasonable” and violated several articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, JVP Descendants of Survivors Call for an End to the Israeli Government’s Genocide of Palestinians

By Jewish Voice for Peace, January 28, 2024

The Israeli government has made very clear its intent to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza. To justify this horrific violence, the Israeli government has shamelessly manipulated Holocaust trauma. As descendants, we are outraged that the memory of our ancestors is being used to justify the same kind of horror being inflicted on others. We cry out against this genocidal assault: Not in our name!

From the Siege of Leningrad to the Siege of Gaza: Colonialist Mentality

By Prof. Yakov M. Rabkin, January 28, 2024

Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1944, people in the street were hugging each other and weeping with joy. They were celebrating the end of a nearly 900 days brutal siege. Soviet forces lifted the siege of Leningrad after ferocious battles. Exactly a year later they liberated Auschwitz. Even today, walking in Saint-Petersburg’s main avenue, the Nevsky Prospect, one notices a blue sign painted on a wall during the siege: “Citizens! This side of the street is the most dangerous during artillery shelling”.

The US Steals Syrian Oil, and the Kurds Sell It to Israel at a Discount in Erbil

By Steven Sahiounie, January 27, 2024

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRG) claimed responsibility for missile attacks on an Israeli “spy headquarters.” Kurdish businessman Peshraw Dizayee and four of his family members were killed in the attack on their home on January 16 near the US Consulate in Erbil, in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR).

Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Uganda Condemns Genocide in Palestine

By Abayomi Azikiwe, January 27, 2024

This year the Non Aligned Movement is chaired by Uganda’s President Musaveni who happens to be a faithful and longstanding proxy of the U.S. From the mid-1980s, the Kampala government under President Yoweri Musaveni had become Washington’s African showpiece of “democracy”. Uganda had also become a launchpad for US sponsored guerrilla movements into the Sudan, the Congo and Rwanda. 

Tucker Carlson Surveys the Ruins of Canada After Eight Years of Trudeau

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, January 26, 2024

Carlson’s visit comes just as Federal Judge Richard Mosley has condemned the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergency Act in February of 2021. The Emergency Act basically halted the normal operations of the Canadian government. The most recent incarnation of the War Measures Act allowed Trudeau and his main handler, Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, to notoriously seize the bank accounts of Truckers from across Canada.

Korea’s Court Denies Japan’s State Immunity Again

January 29th, 2024 by Prof. Kim Chang-Rok

Israel Planning ‘Permanent Army Stations’ in Gaza

January 29th, 2024 by Levent Kemal

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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Israel’s military has drafted plans to establish permanent outposts in Gaza, an Israeli officer has told Middle East Eye.

News of the plans comes despite international pressure on Israel to accept a two-state solution with the Palestinians and withdraw its army from the coastal enclave. 

Earlier this month, the Israeli army announced that it would move into a “low intensity” phase of its war with the Palestinian group Hamas, in which heavy bombardments of Gaza would be replaced by targeted special operations. 

There have been no signs of this materialising on the ground, though, with the military continuing its heavy shelling both in northern Gaza and areas around Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, where intense clashes are ongoing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said quite openly that the Israeli army will continue its operations in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed in the area and that, “in the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”

Both Israeli and US intelligence assessments have indicated that Hamas is far from being eradicated, and Netanyahu’s determination to “bring complete victory” has put him at odds with many inside Israel, including fellow war cabinet member Gadi Eisenkot, who has said that the “absolute defeat” of the armed group is not a realistic objective. 

The Israeli military officer, who asked MEE not to report his rank and name, said that Netanyahu and his government associates had already asked the army to establish permanent bases in the Gaza Strip, excluding the possibility of any post-war Palestinian administration in the enclave. 

The officer said the order to build up the military installations was given verbally. 

“We have received orders to determine the locations of permanent army stations within Gaza,” he said. “The defence ministry and the army informally assigned a small number of officers for this purpose.” 

The officer added that the worst-case scenario imagined by Netanyahu and his allies is to turn Gaza into the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli army has a free hand to do whatever it wants, from raiding houses to arresting Palestinians without a warrant or a court order. 

“Netanyahu and his far-right war cabinet are not planning to withdraw from Gaza,” the officer said. He added that the prime minister is looking for ways and models to ease the international pressure over the army operations in Gaza by scaling down its presence while still maintaining it. 

“This model is a more militarised version of the West Bank,” the officer said. “I have served in the West Bank. Gaza will not be like that place, there will be more frequent military stations and more soldiers.”

The Israeli army had not responded to Middle East Eye’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported yesterday that “thousands of dunams of Gazan territory will remain under Israeli control after the war”.  

Israel’s bombing campaign and ground operations following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel have now left more than 25,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, dead.

There is an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with more than 60,000 Palestinians wounded, disease rife and available drinking water scarce.

Responding to pressure from EU diplomats to end the war and take steps towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz floated the idea of an artificial island off the coast of Gaza, which Israel would control to monitor aid into the coastal enclave.

“I think that the minister could have made better use of his time and focus on the security of his country, bearing in mind the high number of deaths in Gaza,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, told reporters after the presentation of the plan, which included a video.

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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[Our thanks to Al Jazeera for this article.]

As Israel’s war on Gaza pushes on in its fourth month, fears of regional escalation are growing, with multiple nations and armed groups targeting each other’s territories and common waters, and the United States boosting its military assets in the region.

Last week, Iran launched attacks in Syria and Iraq after members of its elite forces were killed in the Syrian capital Damascus allegedly in Israeli attacks, while the US along with the United Kingdom have carried out several attacks against the Houthis in Yemen.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced in Lebanon and Israel due to an exchange of fires between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters on their border.

Last week, tit-for-tat attacks between Iran and Pakistan threatened to open a new military front, but diplomacy helped cool the tempers, for now.

Here is what you need to know about the military hostilities that have broken out in the region since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza on October 7.

INTERACTIVE - Rising tensions across the region map-1705568126

The Red Sea and Yemen

The Iran-backed Houthi group in Yemen has been targeting commercial and military ships linked to Israel in the Red Sea as a response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Houthi officials have demanded that Israel stop the war and allow humanitarian aid to enter the Palestinian enclave. The group’s first attack occurred on November 19, 2023, when they took over a cargo ship called the Galaxy Leader, which records suggest is owned by an Israeli businessman.

Interactive_RedSea_attacks_Houthis

Houthi targeting of commercial ships has prompted multiple shipping companies to suspend operations in the Red Sea, instead embarking on a longer and costlier journey around the African continent.

In response, the US, Israel’s closest ally, has carried out several attacks in Houthi-controlled regions of Yemen. Early on Wednesday, the US military carried out more strikes targeting Houthi anti-ship missiles.

Interactive_Yemen_Map_Airstrikes_Jan_17_2024

Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah

Almost daily cross-border artillery firing and drone attacks between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters threaten to open another front in Israel’s war. Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have been forced to flee their homes.

The Lebanese armed group has said its attacks are an act of resistance in solidarity with the 2.3 million people in Gaza who are besieged and undergoing daily Israeli bombardment that has killed more than 25,000 people. Warning Hezbollah against crossborder attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country will turn Beirut into Gaza.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has not declared all-out war against Israel, but said his forces are not afraid of getting involved in one.

Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon have killed more than 200 Hezbollah fighters, journalists, and civilians while also internally displacing more than 80,000 people from the area, the United Nations reported in December. At least 15 Israelis have been killed in Hezbollah strikes.

Interactive_Cross border_regionalstrikes_Lebanon_Israel

Israel-Syria

Israel has launched repeated air raids on Syria since its war on Gaza, reigniting tensions between the two countries. It claims its attacks are a response to threats from Syrian military positions and Iran-linked infrastructure.

Tehran is the main military backer of President Bashar al-Assad in the war that erupted in 2011.

The attacks have primarily targeted the capital city, Damascus, and Aleppo. Last Saturday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said five of its “military advisers” were killed in an air raid on a residential building in Damascus. Razi Moussavi, a senior adviser in the IRGC, was previously killed in an Israeli attack outside Damascus.

The two countries have been engaged in repeated military confrontations since Israel was first established in 1948. Israel still occupies Syria’s Golan Heights, which it captured in the 1967 war.

Interactive_Cross border_regionalstrikes_Syria_REVISED

Iran-Iraq

Iraq has criticised Iran after the Revolutionary Guard hit what they called an Israeli espionage centre in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. The event prompted Baghdad to recall its ambassador to Tehran, while Iran insisted the attack was intended to deter threats from Israeli spies.

Prior to this, Iran-backed groups have carried out numerous attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria. The US has retaliated, targeting and killing the commander of an Iraqi armed group on January 4. The incident prompted Iraq to reconsider hosting international troops.

The United States on Tuesday carried out strikes in western Iraq against three targets linked to Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed armed group.

Interactive_US_Iran_Strikes_Iraq_Syria

Israel-Gaza

More than 85 percent of Gaza’s people have been displaced since Israel launched its brutal war on October 7 in the wake of Hamas’s attack inside Israel. Israeli attacks have targeted schools, hospitals and residential buildings, almost completely destroying civilian infrastructure. UN agencies say people are facing a famine-like situation as Israel has rebuffed calls for a ceasefire.

Hamas’s surprise attack killed at least 1,139 people, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on official Israeli statistics.  Hamas had also taken about 240 people captive. More than 100 were released during a four-day truce between Israel and Hamas in November.

INTERACTIVE - 100 days of Israels war on Gaza - Displaced-1705215147

Iran-Pakistan

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targeted the Jaish al-Adl armed group in Panjgur, Pakistan’s Balochistan province, leading to Pakistani retaliation against armed Baloch separatists in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province.

This resulted in a rapid deterioration of diplomatic relations, with ambassadors withdrawn. However, both countries then engaged in de-escalation efforts, with ambassadors returning to their posts by January 26.

Interactive_Iran_Pakistan_strikes_Jan18_2024

Could the Situation Escalate Further?

Experts warn that if Israel’s war on Gaza does not end, the conflict could spill over, bringing in new players.

“Without a ceasefire in Gaza, it’s hard to see how this gets better. And I think the simmering pot is now boiling over, and it’s just going to get worse and worse as time goes on. It’s really a very dangerous moment,” Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker advocacy group in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera earlier this month.

US foreign policy also seems set on continuing its military activity, after President Joe Biden pledged last week that US attacks would continue in spite of their failure to deter Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

Iran’s entanglement in several of the confrontations has also deepened worries that it could serve as a hub for regional conflict, particularly with its links to armed groups outside its own borders.

Western and regional authorities, as well as analysts, generally agree that Iran aims to steer clear of a direct military clash with the US or Israel.

However, the country appears open to employing its proxies to engage and divert the attention of the military forces of these adversaries within the region.

The primary risk of escalation arises from a potentially misguided attack either executed by Iran and its proxies or by the US and its allies.

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Featured image: The US has stepped up its military deployment across the Middle East amid Israel’s war on Gaza [File: US Navy via AP Photo]

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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The National Toxicology Program (NTP) has no plans to further study the effects of cellphone radiofrequency radiation (RFR) on human health — even though the program’s own $30 million study that took about 10 years to complete in 2018 reported evidence of cancer and DNA damage.

The NTP said in an updated January 2024 fact sheet that it was abandoning further investigation because “the research was technically challenging and more resource-intensive than expected.”

For decades, the NTP has been the premier governmental testing program for pharmaceuticals,chemicals and radiation, according to Devra Davis, Ph.D., MPH, a toxicologist and epidemiologist who served on the board of scientific counselors for the NTP when it was launched in the 1980s.

Commenting on the news, Davis said, “It is the ultimate arrogance and folly to stop doing research on this major growing environmental pollutant, precisely when we have ample evidence of harm.”

Davis has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in books and journals, ranging from The Lancet to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In February 2023, she and her colleagues published a review of more than 200 studies that linked wireless radiation to negative biological effects including oxidative stress and DNA damagecardiomyopathy, carcinogenicity, sperm damage, memory damage and other neurological effects.

They will soon publish a “major new article” in Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development journal about “new science” on RFR and call for precaution, she said.

Davis — who also is the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences and the founder and president of Environmental Health Trust — called out the U.S. government for failing to ensure that wireless radiation is safe:

“The government’s decision to stop funding research on cellphone radiation is consistent with the Chinese proverb ‘If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.’

“The US government has a variation of that in the policy of, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ If you don’t want to know whether cell tower radiation is having a biological impact, stop doing the research!”

Miriam Eckenfels-Garcia, director of Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) and Wireless program, told The Defender:

“Discontinuing government-funded research because it is ‘technically challenging’ and ‘resource-intensive’ is not what we expect from government agencies that are supposed to protect people from the harms of big industry.

“This research is important so that people can make informed decisions when it comes to the use of technology.”

W. Scott McCollough, lead litigator for CHD’s EMR cases, agreed. “I am concerned that the absence of evidence will be contorted into a claim of evidence of absence.”

As of early last year, the NTP was still conducting RFR research. A February 2023 fact sheet said scientists had “overcome several technical issues” and developed a better system for exposing animals to RFR for their studies.

NTP said researchers were “now making progress” on four research goals:

  • Determining the impact of RFR exposure on behavior and stress.
  • Conducting physiological monitoring, including evaluation of heart rate.
  • Investigating whether RFR induces heating.
  • Further evaluating whether RFR exposure causes DNA damage.

In its January 2024 fact sheet, the NTP reported the researchers had “tested the new exposure system using in vivo rodent studies” and that their research was “complete.”

The NTP did not say whether the researchers had achieved those four research goals and, if so, what the results were. It did, however, make clear that its previous studies — which used 2G and 3G cellphones — “do not apply” to 4G or 5G technologies.

The Defender reached out to NTP’s press office for clarification about why the new fact sheet appears to contradict the NTP website (updated Jan. 8, 2024) on cellphone radiation research which says NTP still has “current research efforts,” however NTP did not respond by our publication deadline.

The NTP’s discontinuation of its RFR research suggests the U.S. government has no intention of studying the possible biological effects of 5G.

Meanwhile, researchers such as Davis continue to say there is reason for concern. Davis pointed out that infertility clinics ask men about their wireless devices and cellphone habits:

“They tell them to take these phones off their bodies and out of their pockets because there is evidence … where the greater the exposure, the lower the sperm count, and the poorer the sperm quality.

“This has been repeatedly shown in studies with human sperm done under controlled conditions, as well as cross-sectional studies.”

“In fact,” she added, “whether the government stops doing the research or not, there is a massive study underway because we have billions of people being exposed to ever-increasing levels of wireless radiation throughout the world. Millions of American children are exposed every day in classrooms.”

“The only problem is there is no control group anymore, which will make it difficult, but not impossible, to discern the impacts of wireless radiation,” Davis said.

What NTP’s 2018 Study Found 

As The Defender previously reported, NTP researchers in 2018 concluded there was “clear evidence” that male rats exposed to high levels of RF similar to those emitted by 2G and 3G cellphones developed cancerous heart tumors, and “some evidence” of tumors in the brain and adrenal gland of exposed male rats.

Davis said NTP’s conclusions were consistent with and corroborated dozens of other studies. “It wasn’t like it [the NTP study] was a one-off study,” she said.

Once the word got out that the findings of the NTP study were positive — meaning the government researchers had found an association between cellphone radiation and the growth of cancerous tumors — the telecommunication industry “started its tactics” to suppress the findings, Davis said.

Davis has been researching those tactics for more than a decade. She is the author of “Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Is Doing to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family.”

Instead of the NTP study report being released in 2016, when it was first ready, she said, thetelecom industry exerted pressure to subject the study’s conclusions to an unprecedented level of scrutiny.

“When the first drafts began to circulate internally, it was elevated for a peer review unlike any that has ever been conducted in the history of the entire program — and I can say that with great certainty. No other compound or substance [studied by the NTP] has ever been subject to this level of peer review,” Davis said.

A panel of external scientific experts convened for a three-day review of the study and its conclusions in March 2018.

However, rather than downplaying the study’s conclusions, the experts concluded that the scientific evidence in the study was so strong they recommended the NTP reclassify some of its conclusions from “some evidence” to “clear evidence” of carcinogenic activity.

To date, more than 250 scientists — who together have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on the biologic and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produced by wireless devices, including cellphones — signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for health warnings and stronger exposure limits.

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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.

Featured image is from CHD

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel must cease its warmaking in Gaza — cease committing and inciting genocidal acts — and that the case charging Israel with genocide must proceed.

Details of the Ruling:

  1. By 15-2: Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent all acts within the scope of Genocide Convention article 2
  2. 15-2: Israel must immediately ensure that its military does not commit acts within the scope of GC.2
  3. 16-1: Direct and punish all members of the public who engage in the incitement of genocide against Palestinians
  4. 16-1: Ensure provision of urgently needed basic services, humanitarian aid
  5. 15-2: Prevent the destruction of and ensure the preservation of evidence to allegation of acts of GC.2
  6. 15-2: Israel will submit report as to how they’re adhering to these orders to the ICJ within 1 month

This is Article 2 of the Genocide Convention:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Therefore, Israel must cease killing Palestinians.

This was a make or break moment for international law, or rather a break or make-a-first-step moment. There is hope for the idea and reality of international law, but this is only a beginning.

The president of the International Court of Justice, who read the ruling, is Judge Joan Donoghue, former top legal advisor under Hillary Clinton at the U.S. State Department during the Obama Administration. She previously was the lawyer for the United States in its unsuccessful defense before the ICJ against charges by Nicaragua of minining its harbor.

The court voted for portions of this decision by 15-2 and 16-1. The “No” votes came from Judge Julia Sebutinde of Uganda and Ad Hoc Judge Aharon Barak of Israel.

The case presented by South Africa was overwhelming (read it or watch a key part of it), and Israel’s defense paper-thin. And the case just grew more overwhelming during the bizarre delay (yes, courts are slow, but this genocide is swift).

People all over the world built the pressure to move South Africa to act and other nations to add their support. Over 1,500 organizations signed a statement. Individuals signed a petition by CODEPINK, and sent almost 500,000 emails to key governments’ United Nations consulates through World BEYOND War and RootsAction.org. Click those links because more emails are needed now. While several nations have made public statements in support of South Africa’s case, we need them to file papers officially with the International Court of Justice. To reach out to additional national governments, go here.

Governments that have made statement in support of the case against genocide include Malaysia, Turkey, Jordan, Bolivia, the 57 nations of the Organization of Islamic Countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Maldives, Namibia, and Pakistan, Colombia, Brazil, and Cuba.

Germany has backed Israel’s defense against the charge of genocide, which has been denounced by Namibia, victimn of a German genocide. Prominent Jews have denounced Germany’s shameful action.

Mass demonstrations in the streets of the world have continued in support of peace and justice, and to a far greater extent than major media outlets have reported.

Here’s a discussion of this campaign for justice with Sam Husseini on Talk World Radio.

Prior to today’s ruling from the International Court of Justice, the U.S. government pointedly refused to say whether it would comply with ruling, despite insisting that other nations comply with rulings by the ICJ.

Hamas said that it would cease fire if Israel does, and release all prisoners if Israel does

Germany, to its credit, reportedly said that it would comply.

Arming a genocide is complicity in genocide. While Israel gets most of its weapons from the United States, other weaponry comes from Germany, Italy, the UK, and Canada — at least some of which nations also provide parts to U.S. weaponsmakers that provide weapons to Israel. Italian opposition demanded an end to it. And then the Foreign Minister claimed Italy had stopped shipments on Oct 7. Meanwhile, Canada is coming under pressure to cease shipments and prevarications. In Canada, Members of Parliament are among over 250 people hunger striking for an arms embargo on Israel.

People in the United States can tell Congress to stop arming Israel here or here.

President Joe Biden already faces a lawsuit for aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza. In November 2023, Palestinian human rights organizations, along with Gaza- and U.S.-based Palestinians, filed suitin a U.S. federal court seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against the Biden Administration for failing to prevent genocide, and for aiding and abetting genocide. The plaintiffs seek an order to end U.S. military and diplomatic support to Israel. A hearing to address the government’s motion to dismiss will be held at 9 a.m. PT / 12 noon ET today, Friday. The hearing will be webstreamed to the public.  You are encouraged to tune in and witness the U.S. government’s attempts at avoiding accountability and justify its support for the genocide that is happening in Gaza.

Update: Link to written decision by ICJ.

Key excerpts:

THE COURT, Indicates the following provisional measures:
The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular:

(a) killing members of the group;
(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; and
(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above;

That means no killing of Palestinians.

UPDATE: The Media Spin

The Washington Post:

The court did not order Israel to do more of anything. It ordered Israel to cease all of some important things, including killing people. Of course it will claim to be killing people without the improper intent in its collective mind, but is already on record with the court on its genocidal intent.

The Washington Post quickly changed its headline

The New York Times:

This is the most common headline out there (even Consortium News is declaring defeat), and not technically false. But how do you cease killing without ceasing firing?

South African foreign minister Naledi Pandor at the Hague says she would have wanted the #ICJ to explicitly call for a ceasefire, but says the only way Israel can meet the order of the court is for there to be a ceasefire.

Adding this from the Institute for Public Accuracy:

CRAIG MOKHIBER is an International human rights lawyer and former Director of the New York Office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, who stepped down from his post in 2023 and penned a now-viral letter on unfolding genocide and the UN’s failures.

He said today: The ICJ has ruled on provisional measures in the Genocide case against Israel, which must immediately stop killing and harming people in Gaza and inflicting destructive conditions othem, punish incitement, allow all humanitarian aid, save evidence and report next month.

“Not a ceasefire exactly, but they are ordered to stop the acts that were complained about in the application — killing, harming, destruction, etc.

“This may be less than ideal because Israel will likely continue while claiming military necessity and lawful intent. The mandated report next month and the court’s response will therefore be crucial.

“But this is already an important victory. The court ruled that South Africa’s genocide claim is ‘plausible’ at this stage and ordered Israel to stop all related acts and allow relief to the people of Gaza.

“Senior officials in the U.S. and the West who argued — outrageously — that the case was completely baseless and without merit must now contend with a ruling by the World Court that the case is indeed plausible and requires immediate provisional measures. [See Thursday State Department briefing highlights from Decensored News.]

“Israel, accustomed to impunity, is unlikely to comply. Whether or not they report back to the court next month on measures, the Court will have to act again. And the Security Council can be called to act on non-compliance at any time. The complicit US will then likely veto action.

“The General Assembly would then be convened to act. A strong resolution there could call for specific legal, economic, political, diplomatic, consular, organizational and other measures. And individual states and regional orgs should act as well, as a matter of legal duty under the convention and under the Charter.

“In sum, while imperfect without a call for an unconditional ceasefire, the court’s order is a historic and powerful tool in the struggle against Israeli impunity, further empowering states, organizations and activists to step up pressure on the apartheid regime.

“Time now for all to act to turn the order into the change necessary to bring accountability for the perpetrators, redress for victims, and protection for the vulnerable.”

Update: No Order to Halt

And still numerous intelligent people say this is a near-complete defeat, and that the court has not ordered Israel to stop what it’s doing. (Regardless of the fact that it has ordered it to stop committing genocide.)

There are many exceptions, but the general consensus is that Israel is ordered to cease killing but has not been ordered to cease making war, so the court has told Israel to keep the war going. How you do that without killing is a little mysterious but has to be concocted out of imagined “intent” and the killing of non-civilians not being killing and “militarily necessary” killing not being killing and so forth.

Here’s one of the exceptions, Ken Roth:

“Some were disappointed that the ICJ did not order a ceasefire, a step that was unlikely because the court addresses only disputes between states, so Hamas was not a party. A ceasefire imposed on only one side to an ongoing armed conflict is not plausible.

“The court did order Israel to “take all measures within its power” to halt acts that contribute to genocide, to allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to end the suffering among Palestinian civilians, and to prevent and punish the public statements of incitement made by senior Israeli officials. Israel must report back to the court in a month on the steps it has taken.”

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The Gaza Strip is a graveyard for thousands of children, the United Nations has said.

Since October 7, Israeli attacks have killed at least 10,000 children, according to Palestinian officials. That is one Palestinian child killed every 15 minutes, or about one out of every 100 children in the Gaza Strip.

Thousands more are missing under the rubble, most of them presumed dead.

The surviving children, who have endured the traumatic impact of multiple wars, have spent their lives under the shadow of an Israeli blockade, influencing every aspect of their existence from birth.

Here are the names of some of those children killed, read on Al Jazeera.

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Featured image is from Al Jazeera

“The Arabs – A History”

January 28th, 2024 by Jim Miles

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While the genocide has raged on in Gaza I have been reading Eugene Rogan’s large work simply titled The Arabs – A History.  It is generally well written in an academic textbook manner, a political outline of the trials and tribulations of the Arab people viewed mostly through the political-military-financial manipulations of the rulers of the region.  That overlaps fully with the political-military-financial manipulations of the empires and outside authorities interested in controlling the region for various reasons.

Themes

The history works at the political level, and to sum it up as succinctly as possible, presents two main themes. First is that for much of the time period of the book (starting from the Ottoman control of the lands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries), the Arabs were ruled by non-Arab authorities, either directly by the Ottoman regime, under the control of subordinate rulers, or under the control of previous non-Arab groups contesting with or subordinate to the Ottomans.   

The second theme coming through is how much foreign interference has played in the region, not as just mentioned above but in more recent history with the military and financial interference and influence of mostly European empires (Italy, France, and Great Britain) and even more recently, the United States empire. There have been no effective independent Arab governments operating within democratic principles. They have tried but have always been subjugated to foreign influence, dominance, or outright control.

The first edition of the book (2009) ended with post 9/11 events. The second edition (2017) adds another chapter outlining the Arab Spring. As with all histories attempting to write fully up to date information, the latter part is weak, a natural outcome of not having the hindsight nor access to more restricted documents that could and always do reveal a more nuanced story.

The main fault with the second addition’s final chapter is partly due to that; it is also perhaps due to the author’s inability to pull back and put the full perspective on the changing situation, to acknowledge the role of the two main current antagonists in the region, Israel and the U.S.  

Fault Lines

With any current history/current events writing about the Arab world, it cannot be properly done without a large accounting for U.S. manipulations and interference at all levels, nor with the same accounting for Israel, which includes both U.S. interests and Jewish/Zionist interests.   

Israel’s nuclear activity is mentioned only once in the original edition as an aspect of French assistance to the Zionists. U.S.’ effects on the mujahideen and on into the Taliban and al-Qaeda and ISIS are only directly mentioned once with the supply of Stinger missiles to the mujahideen by way of Pakistan. Admittedly the latter is mostly outside the Arab arena, but bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and the many Saudi sponsored madrasahs in Pakistan had a large significant overflow effect directly on the even more recent history of the Arabs.

Current Events

Today, other events have overtaken the significance of earlier events. Fortunately for Rogan he did not try to predict or formulate what the future held for the Arabs. With the ongoing destruction of Gaza infrastructure and the slaughter and genocide of its citizens there are some unfortunate similarities within the violence.

Ending with the Israeli/U.S. denial of the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, Rogan writes,

“…the United States would support any Israeli action, no matter how disproportionate, against parties it associated with terrorism.” It should be understood the U.S. ‘associates’ whomever it decides is a terrorist as it best fits its interests. He concludes, “Far from facing censure for provoking devastating wars with Israel, the Islamic resistance movements enjoyed greater support at home and across the Arab world for standing up against Bush, Israel, and the U.S. led war on terror.”   

Note the bias that it was the Islamic movements that “provoked” the wars, where in reality it was the Israeli colonial-settler regime that initiated all but the Yom Kippur war (1973), while it was the U.S. attacking Iraq, Libya, Yemen (via Saudi Arabia), and Syria (via ISIS and the SFA).  Also, not only did the Arab world give greater support but the Muslim world as a whole and much of the global ‘south’ also gave support.

The Global War on Terror Continues…

A caveat is needed concerning that support.  Throughout the Palestinian struggle, the Arab rulers have frequently verbally given support to the Palestinian cause but have noticeably done very little about it – they feared their own ‘street’ as much as outside influences.  The reasons for this are several, but the emphasis should be placed on their military powerlessness in face of the supposed power of the Israeli military, including its nuclear weapons.  As well, most Arab governments were either bought out by U.S. financial power or threats of U.S. military intervention (direct or covert) to replace their rule with some other more acceptable ruler.   

Unfortunately that continues true today.

All the Arab governments are voicing their strong support for the Hamas resistance and decrying the genocide perpetrated by Israel.  The only action being taken by any government is from tiny war torn Yemen who have effectively fought off Saudi/U.S. military attacks for many years. Non-state actors are also supporting the Palestinian resistance, but with no state to lose, no power to lose, with nothing new that can be threatened by the U.S. and its allies, Hezbollah and other militias throughout Iraq and Syria are attacking Israeli and U.S. positions in the region.   

There are many nuances to the political struggles of the Arab world. As a general statement, Rogan’s summation given above for earlier events is perhaps even stronger for today’s actions. The U.S., by its deeds, fully supports Israeli actions. Israel continues its disproportionate genocide against Gaza. The resistance is receiving more and more support abroad as it stands up to Israeli attacks and sees the U.S. support. And finally, as this started with a look at “The Arabs – A History”, it seems that history is repeating itself, only much more violently and overtly. Except the vaunted prowess of the Israeli military has been shown to be unreal; and the fear of U.S. intervention appears to not concern at least some of the Arab interests. Whatever the outcome, not just the Arab world, but the world of empires is reshaping itself. 

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Carbon Dioxide (CO2): “The Gas of Life”

January 28th, 2024 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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Carbon dioxide (CO2) is commonly mischaracterized as a harmful waste product of respiration and is falsely blamed for disrupting the planetary climate

CO2 is an essential gas necessary for life. Moreover, its impact on Earth’s temperatures is negligible, and will remain negligible even if the current concentration in the atmosphere were to double. A 100% increase of CO2, from 400 ppm to 800 ppm, would decrease radiation into space by just 1.1%, resulting in a 0.7 degree C increase of the average earth temperature

A 0.7 degree C difference means there’s no climate emergency, and no matter what we do to reduce CO2 emissions, it’s not going to impact global temperatures. To fabricate an emergency where there is none, it is assumed that massive positive feedbacks are involved. However, most natural feedbacks are negative, not positive, so isn’t it likely the 0.7 degree C increase is an overestimation to begin with

There’s no single temperature of the Earth. It varies by location and altitude. For every kilometer of altitude, you have an average cooling of 6.6 degrees C

Higher CO2 levels will green the planet, making it more hospitable to plant life. The more CO2 there is, the better plants and trees grow. CO2also reduces the water needs of plants, reducing the risks associated with droughts

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The video above, “CO2, The Gas of Life,” features a lecture given at the Summit Old Guard Meeting in New Jersey, October 3, 2023, by William Happer, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of physics at Princeton University and former scientific adviser to the Bush and Trump administrations.

The topic: carbon dioxide (CO2), commonly mischaracterized as a harmful waste product of respiration and a pollutant that is disrupting the planetary climate. As explained by Happer in this lecture, CO2 is actually an essential gas necessary for life. Moreover, its impact on Earth’s temperatures is negligible, and will remain negligible even if the current concentration in the atmosphere were to double.

CO2 Is Not a Pollutant

At present, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at a few thousand feet of elevation is around 430 parts per million (ppm). Closer to the ground, concentrations vary widely, both by location and time of day. This is because ground-level readings are impacted by photosynthesis and the respiration of insects and the like.

In the room where Happer was giving his lecture, the CO2 reading was 1,800 ppm — the result of having a large group of people breathing in a closed space. Air conditioning systems have CO2meters that turn on fans to bring outdoor air inside when levels get too high.

The question of what is too high is an important one, considering The Great Resetters are pushing a green agenda that demands the dismantling of energy infrastructure and farming in the name of stopping climate change, which quite obviously threatens our quality of life and food supply. Ultimately, it may threaten human existence altogether. 

The fact of the matter is that CO2 is not the “bad guy” it’s made out to be, and the “net zero” agenda is wholly inappropriate if maintaining life on Earth is part of the equation.

“CO2 is a very essential and natural part of life,” Happer says. “It is the gas of life. We’re made of carbon after all, mostly carbon, and we breathe out a lot of CO2 a day just by living. Each of us breathes out about 2 pounds of CO2 a day. Multiply that by 8 billion people and 365 days a year, and just [by] living, people are a non-negligible part of the CO2 budget of the Earth.

Nevertheless, we are living through a crusade against so-called pollutant CO2. People talk about carbon pollution. [But] every one of us is polluting Earth by breathing, [so] if you want to stop polluting … apparently God wants us to commit suicide …

We’re doing all sorts of crazy things because of this alleged pollutant … more and more beautiful meadows are being covered with black solar panels. It doesn’t work very well; it doesn’t work at all at night. It doesn’t work on cloudy days. It doesn’t work terribly well in the middle of the winter because of the angle of the sun.

But nevertheless we’re doing it. We’re being misled into climate hysteria, and if you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it. It was published first in 1841, called ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.’ It’s as relevant today as it was then …

I’m a physicist. I’m proud to say that no one could call me a climate scientist, but I know a lot about climate and I was a coauthor of one of the first books on the effects of carbon dioxide 41 years ago. This was a study done by the Jason Group which I was a member of. I was chairman for a while and it had really good people there.”

Long-Term Impact of Increasing Atmospheric CO2

The key question when it comes to global warming is, how much do you warm the Earth if you double the atmospheric CO2 concentration? This is called the climate sensitivity question. The GUESS is that doubling CO2 would result in a 3-degree centigrade rise in the global temperature.

“It was not based on any hard calculations,” Happer says. “It was because of group-think. That’s what everybody else thought, and so that’s what we thought. Now, in my defense, one of the reasons I didn’t pay much attention to this [is because] I was working on something at this time that I thought was much more important. So, let me tell you about that, so you get a feeling for why I think I’m qualified to pontificate about this subject.

It was the beginning of the Strategic Defense Initiative, of Star Wars … President Reagan … wanted some way to defend the United States so that we didn’t have to have this mass suicide pact, and among other things we considered using high-powered lasers to burn up incoming missiles …

But here’s the problem. If you take the 1 megawatt laser on the ground and you send it toward the missile, by the time it gets to the missile, the beam — instead of focusing all the power on the missile — breaks up into hundreds of sub beams — speckles — and this was something that was well-known to astronomers. You have the same problem when you’re looking at distant stars and galaxies.

Astronomers knew how to fix this … If you can measure how much this wave is bent, then you can bounce it off a mirror bent in the opposite direction, and when the wave bounces up it’s absolutely flat. That’s called adaptive optics and it works beautifully. Then, when you focus the corrected beam, you get a single spot instead of hundreds of [beams].

The trouble with that is that if you look at the night sky, there are only four or five stars that are bright enough to have enough photons to do the measurement of the distortion of the wave. So, we had a classified meeting in the summer of 1982. There were a number of Air Force officers there who explained the problem. By chance, I knew how to solve it.

You can make an artificial star anywhere in the sky by shining a laser tuned to the sodium frequency onto the layer of sodium above our heads, at 90 to 100 kilometers.”

While the Air Force was initially dubious about there being a sodium layer in the atmosphere, they did eventually build the sodium laser proposed by Happer, and if you go to any ground-based telescope today, you’ll usually see one or two of them. Anyway, that story was simply to impress you with the fact that Happer knows what he’s talking about when it comes to atmospheric constituents and their related phenomena.

CO2 Has No Discernible Impact on Earth Temperatures

According to the climate alarmists, rising CO2 will result in global warming that will threaten all life on earth. In actuality, however, CO2 “is a very puny tool to do anything to the climate,” Happer says.

Keep in mind that there’s no single temperature on the Earth. It varies by location and altitude. For every kilometer of altitude, you have an average cooling of 6.6 degrees C. This is known as the lapse rate. That cooling continues up to the troposphere, where it stops.

The cooling is due to the fact that warm air rises and cool air descends. “It’s the convection that sets that rapid drop of temperatures — 6-and-a-half degrees per kilometer,” Happer says. He then explains the following graph, which details the thermal radiation to space from the Earth, assuming a surface temperature of 15.5 degrees C. The greenhouse gases is the area beneath the jagged black curve.

According to Happer, this is only 70% of what it would be without greenhouse gases, which is shown as the smooth blue curve, because as the sun heats the earth, greenhouse gases — mostly water vapor — impede cooling.

The most important part of this graph is the red jagged line, shown here with a red arrow pointing to it. That red line shows the effect that a doubling (a 100% increase) of CO2 would have on the surface temperature of Earth. As you can see, it’s negligible. It decreases radiation into space by just 1.1%.

earths surface temperature graph

As noted by Happer:

“Let that sink in. We’re far from doubling [CO2] today. It’ll take a long time, [and] it only causes a 1% change. So, CO2 is a very poor greenhouse gas. It’s not an efficient greenhouse gas.”

If you remove ALL CO2, you end up with the green jagged curve. As you can see, the green and black jagged lines run parallel with the exception of one spot. There’s a huge effect if you go from zero CO2 to 400 ppm (green arrow). But it’s again negligible when you go from 400 ppm to 800 ppm (black arrow). As explained by Happer:

“You get all of the effect in the first little bit of added CO2 … So, it’s really true that doubling CO2 only causes a 1% decrease of radiation. The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] gets the same answer so this is not really controversial, although they will never show you the curve or tell you that it’s 1%. That would interfere with the narrative …

So, this is radiation to space. How do you change that into a temperature? They’re worried that we’ll get intolerable warming of the surface of the Earth where we live, or other parts of the atmosphere.

Here again it’s important to do the first order calculation … and it says that the warming from doubling CO2 is … less than one degree … 0.7 [degree] C. Very small. You really can’t feel that.”

Why, Then, the Alarm Over Rising CO2?

Needless to say, this is a huge problem for the climate science community, because a 0.7 degree C difference means there’s no climate emergency, and no matter what we do to reduce CO2emissions, it’s not going to impact the climate.

So, to fabricate an emergency where there really is none, the IPCC “assumes enormous positive feedbacks,” Happer says. Because CO2 is not a potent greenhouse gas, the tiny direct warming caused by it is amplified by factors of anywhere from four to six to make it seem like it has a discernible impact.

“I like to say it’s affirmative action for CO2,” Happer says. “It’s not very good at warming but if you assume lots of feedback, you can keep the money coming in.” The problem with that is that most who have a background in physical chemistry and physics know that most natural feedbacks are negative, not positive.

This is known as the Chatelier Principle, named after the French chemist who first discovered that “when a simple system in thermodynamic equilibrium is subjected to a change in concentration, temperature, volume or pressure … the system changes to a new equilibrium and … the change partly counteracts the applied change.”

So, the 0.7 degree C of warming you get when you double the CO2 is “probably an overestimate,” Happer says, “because there are probably negative feedbacks operating in this very complicated climate system that we live in. The atmosphere, the oceans, everything is nonlinear.”

The key take-home from all this is that whether we’re at 400 ppm of CO2 or 800 ppm doesn’t matter when it comes to impacting the temperature of the earth. In short, the climate hysteria is just that. It’s not based on any real threat. Only if we were able to get to absolute zero CO2 would there be a change, but doing so also means we’d exterminate all living things on the planet. It’s nothing short of a suicide agenda.

More CO2 Will Green the Planet

As explained by Happer, more CO2 will green the planet, making it more hospitable to plant life. The more CO2 there is, the better plants and trees grow, so if we want lush forests and bountiful harvests, cutting CO2 is the last thing we’d want to do.

“All plants grow better with more CO2 [in the air],” he says. “Plants are really starved [of] CO2 today. We know plants need many essential nutrients. They need nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium; most important of all they need water. But they also need CO2, and like many of the other nutrients, CO2 today is in short supply.”

CO2 benefits plants by reducing their water needs, hence less risk from drought. Higher CO2 levels also reduce harmful photorespiration. According to Happer, C3-type plants lose about 25% of their photosynthesis potential due to increased photorespiration. For more in-depth information about the role of CO2 in plant growth and photosynthesis, please view the video. This discussion begins around the 40-minute mark.

Lies, Ignorance, Stupidity or Something Else?

In closing, Happer makes an effort to explain what’s driving the climate hysteria:

“In spite of incontrovertible arguments that there is no climate emergency — CO2 is good for the Earth — the campaign to banish CO2, ‘net zero,’ has been very successful. So, how can that be? I’m really out of my depth here because now I’m talking about human nature. I’m really good with instruments and with solving differential equations but I’m not very good at understanding human beings.

But here are some of the drivers: noble lies, political lies, ignorance, stupidity, greed. Noble lies goes back to Plato who discusses it in ‘The Republic.’ ‘In politics, a noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda.’

And here there’s a clear agenda. If you could somehow unite mankind to fight some external threat, for example CO2 pollution, then we won’t fight each other. There won’t be wars. So, I think many sincere people have latched on to the CO2 narrative partly for that reason. You can actually read about it in the early writings of the Club of Rome.

Then there are political lies. This is one my favorite H.L. Menken quotes: ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’”

Ignorance, of course, is widespread, and largely based on incomplete knowledge or a flawed understanding of the facts. And what of stupidity? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the few German clergymen who opposed Hitler and eventually paid for his public dissent with his life, once wrote about human stupidity:

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protest nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.

So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one.”

Happer himself has experienced the danger of opposing stupidity. “I regularly get phone calls threatening me, my wife and children with death,” he says. “So, what kind of movement is this?” Lastly, greed. A.S. Pushkin once said, “If there should happen to be a trough, there will be pigs.” And climate science is currently where the big bucks are — provided your work furthers the global warming narrative and the need for net zero emissions.

Whatever the drivers are, responsible people everywhere need to push back against the false climate change narrative and the net zero agenda, as it will accomplish nothing in terms of normalizing temperatures, but will rapidly erode quality of life and the sustainability of food production, and shift wealth into the hands of the few.

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Featured image: An animation shows how carbon dioxide moves around the planet. (Photo: NASA/YouTube)

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In a historic decision, Canada’s Federal Court on Tuesday ruled the Canadian government’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to disperse truckers protesting the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates was “unreasonable” and violated several articles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The truckers, dubbed the “Convoy for Freedom,” organized a cross-country protest beginning in January 2022, following a Jan. 15, 2022, order by the Canadian federal government mandating the vaccine for all cross-border U.S. and Canadian truckers.

In his 190-page ruling, Justice Richard G. Mosley said the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility — and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.”

The court ruled that invoking the Emergencies Act infringed upon Section 2(b) of the Charter, which protects freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, and Section 8, which pertains to the right to be secured from unreasonable seizure.

Mosley, who according to Global News “is a 21-year veteran of the Federal Court and is a respected voice on national security legal matters,” found that the freezing of protesters’ bank accounts amounted to such seizure.

Arguments in the case were heard over three days in April 2023, CTV News reported.

Plaintiffs included the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), Canadian Frontline Nurses and five individuals — two of whom “had their bank accounts frozen.”

According to The Epoch Times, the plaintiffs “argued … that the Liberal government did not meet the legal threshold to invoke the legislation in response to the protest.”

In a statement provided to The Defender, attorneys for the Canadian Frontline Nurses said:

“We are proud to be the party that initiated the application to the Federal Court challenging the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protest.

“We are pleased that the Federal Court agreed with our position that the Trudeau government’s action in invoking the Emergencies Act was unreasonable and outside their jurisdiction and that it was a violation of Canadians’ rights and freedoms under the Charter.”

Tom Marazzo, a spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy and author of “The People’s Emergency Act: Freedom Convoy 2022,” told The Defender, “The ruling by Judge Mosley was a great victory for all who participated and supported the Freedom Convoy.”

Marazzo said:

“When the government overreaches, as the Provincial, Municipal and Federal governments did, it is up to the citizens to remind them that they work for us and that we determine the direction of Canada. Unfortunately, the political class in Canada see themselves as royalty and not as simple representatives.

“Judge Mosley also reminded the Liberal/New Democratic Party government that they don’t rule over Canadians with impunity.”

Marazzo was referring to Canada’s ruling government coalition led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who attended the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, said the government will appeal the decision.

According to the CBC, this may lead to “a legal battle that could go all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.”

Ruling ‘a Rebuke’ to the Canadian Government

According to The New York Times, The Freedom Convoy resulted in “encampments of trucks in the nation’s capital.” In response, and as the convoy reached Ottawa, Canada’s federal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in its history on Feb. 14, 2022.

Tuesday’s decision is “the first instance of a court delivering a rebuke to Mr. Trudeau over his handling of the protest,” the Times wrote.

According to CTV News, the government argued “that the national security risks stemming from the protests justified its use.”

CTV News reported that the act “allowed the federal government to enact wide-sweeping but temporary powers,” which CBC said included “extraordinary powers to remove and arrest protesters … the power to freeze the finances of those connected to the protests [and] the ability to commandeer tow trucks to remove protesters’ vehicles.”

The Times reported that, under the act, “an enormous force of police officers from across the country finished clearing the streets” in Ottawa — an operation during which 230 protesters were arrested

The bank accounts of 257 Canadians were frozen under the act, The Countersignal reported.

CBC reported that the Canadian government “has long argued the measures it took under the Emergencies Act were targeted, proportional and temporary.”

But writer and blogger Margaret Anna Alice, whose writings have focused on health, politics, mass control and propaganda, and who has written extensively about Canada’s COVID-19 policies, told The Defender, “This single act of peaceful noncompliance triggered a cascade effect that dissolved the mental enslavement keeping the populace under the thrall of tyranny.”

“That is precisely what occurred as freedom convoys began erupting all over the world,” Alice said. “And yet, as this peaceful movement rose, so did the government’s tyranny.”

In his ruling, Mosley said he initially believed invocation of the Emergencies Act was justified as a response to an “unacceptable breakdown of public order,” but that the plaintiffs’ arguments swayed him.

“There was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vires,” he wrote.

“Trudeau and his cabinet did not make even a single attempt to engage with the truckers. In blatant violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they leapt to invoking the Emergencies Act without meeting the necessary threshold,” Alice said.

Joanna Baron, plaintiff and CCF executive director, told the CBC the decision is a “huge vindication for many people.” In a statement CCF provided to The Defender, Baron said, “The invocation of the Emergencies Act is one of the worst examples of government overreach during the pandemic.”

Christine Van Geyn, CCF’s litigation director, said the ruling is “a complete vindication of the position of civil liberties organizations who viewed the invocation of the Emergencies Act as illegal, unjustified and unconstitutional.”

Speaking to the CBC, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director of the CCLA, said “Emergency is not in the eye of the beholder. Emergency powers are necessary in extreme circumstances, but they are also dangerous to democracy.”

CCLA attorney Ewa Krajewska told Global News, “I think it’s in the interest of this government and future governments and all Canadians that the threshold to invoke the Emergencies Act remains high.”

The ruling elicited reactions from across the political spectrum in Canada. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, the country’s main opposition party, tweeted:

Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, said his party “reluctantly” supported the invocation of the Emergencies Act, in remarks quoted by CBC.

Journalist and podcaster Trish Wood told The Defender, “The trucker protest was a classic class struggle [involving] citizens taking on the power elites and winning until government decided it had had enough,” adding that “This decision restores some power back to the people.”

Greg Hill, a captain with a major Canadian airline who was suspended in 2021 for not complying with Canada’s vaccine mandate and who subsequently became director of the Free to Fly advocacy group, told The Defender, “We certainly welcome the decision. The unjustified and unconstitutional use of the Emergencies Act resulted in grave professional and personal loss for thousands of Canadians — damage that’s ongoing.”

Internationally acclaimed novelist Colin McAdam attended the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. He told The Defender “There are many things to be happy about with this decision, not least the declaration that the government acted illegally.”

“What is most encouraging is that the ruling upholds certain sections of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has otherwise been a feckless document through the COVID years,” he said. “I like that it has been acknowledged in law that when people fight for their rights, those rights are paramount to inconvenience.”

Alex Pattakos, Ph.D., co-founder of the Global Meaning Institute and contributing writer for Psychology Today, is unvaccinated and was unable to travel while Canada’s vaccine mandates were in effect. He told The Defender invocation of the Emergencies Act was “a stain on Canada’s identity and history.”

“It’s a reflection of the Trudeau government’s fear of its citizens and a manifestation of a ‘totalitarian movement’ it has been advancing in the name of the public good,” he said.

Freezing Protesters’ Accounts an ‘Unreasonable Search and Seizure’

Mosley’s ruling referred to the freezing of hundreds of protesters’ financial accounts. In writing that this action violated Section 8 of the charter, Mosley said the government’s decision to freeze the accounts, even if for a “pressing and substantial” reason, was “not minimally impairing,” as “less impairing alternatives” were available to the government.

He added that freezing the accounts amounted to “unreasonable search and seizure of the financial information of designated persons” and infringed upon freedom of expression, “as they were overbroad in their application to persons who wished to protest but were not engaged in activities likely to lead to a breach of the peace.”

This rejects arguments made by the Canadian government when the measures were invoked. According to The National Post, federal lawyer Timothy Huyer claimed at the time, “The Emergency Economic Measures Order does not seize any assets.”

Notably, Mosley’s ruling also found that the Canadian government’s action did not infringe upon people’s right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

Mosley did rule that the Canadian government was wrong in its application of the Emergencies Act, under which a national emergency can be declared only if the situation “cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.”

“The act defers to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s [CSIS] definition of such threats [including] serious violence against persons or property, espionage, foreign interference or an intent to overthrow the government by violence,” CBC said.

Testimony heard by the Public Order Emergency Commission, a public inquiry examining the invocation of the Emergencies Act, revealed CSIS did not believe the Freedom Convoy posed a threat to national security, The Epoch Times reported.

According to CBC, the inquiry, led by Justice Paul Rouleau, heard from over 70 witnesses and reviewed more than 7,000 documents — and found that Trudeau met the threshold to invoke the Emergencies Act.

CBC reported that Rouleau determined, “Lawful protest descended into lawlessness, culminating in a national emergency.” However, he acknowledged that he did not consider the factual basis for the invocation “overwhelming” and added that “Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion” from his.

In its defense, the Canadian government cited the seizure of a cache of weapons, body armor and ammunition in Coutts, a town in Alberta where the border with the U.S. was blockaded by truckers, according to CTV News, which added that four men are awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to murder Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers.

According to Global News, “Much of the Coutts blockade was cleared prior to the Feb. 14, 2022, declaration of a public order emergency, the first step in invoking the act.”

According to The Countersignal, less than a day before the invocation of the act, Trudeau was told by a national security adviser that there was potential for a “breakthrough” in talks with the Freedom Convoy protesters.

And according to an investigation by Public, the Trudeau government used fake intelligence to frame participants in the Freedom Convoy as “violent extremists” and then shared the information with other “Five Eyes” countries.

Global News reported that “CCLA successfully argued that the existing laws of Canada were sufficient in dealing with the blockades and extraordinary powers granted by the Emergencies Act were not needed.”

In his ruling, Mosley wrote that “The harassment of residents, workers and business owners in downtown Ottawa and the general infringement of the right to peaceful enjoyment of public spaces there, while highly objectionable, did not amount to serious violence or threats of serious violence.”

“Sadly, the concept of a ‘state of exception’ is used by many governments today as the rule, not the exception, in order to transcend the rule of law, suspend freedoms and exercise what otherwise would be considered government overreach,” Pattakos said.

McAdam said what he observed during the protests in Ottawa was far from violent.

“When I was on Parliament Hill in the early part of the convoy, there was a beautiful feeling of celebration and togetherness,” he said. “As the weeks passed this dissipated. By the time the Emergencies Act was declared, the scene was more Orwellian. If I had simply stood on the Hill in those final days with a ‘placard,’ as the judge hypothesized, I could have been arrested and my bank account frozen.”

Canadian Government to Appeal, ‘Convinced’ It Was ‘the Right Thing to Do’

At a press conference in Montreal on Tuesday, Freeland said the federal government will appeal Mosley’s decision, while according to CBC, Justice Minister Arif Virani cited the inquiry’s findings and said it “also informs our decision to appeal.”

“I would just like to take a moment to remind Canadians of how serious the situation was in our country when we took that decision,” Freeland said, in remarks quoted by CTV News. “The public safety of Canadians was under threat. Our national security, which includes our national economic security, was under threat.”

“It was a hard decision to take,” she said. “We took it very seriously after a lot of hard work, after a lot of careful deliberation. We were convinced at the time — I was convinced at the time — it was the right thing to do, it was the necessary thing to do … I remain and we remain convinced of that.”

Sarah Choujounian, co-founder of the Canadian Frontline Nurses, told The Defender she was not surprised by the government’s reaction.

“We expected that they would appeal if they lost,” she said. “At the moment, we are not sure what this means for anyone affected by these measures. We hope that, in time, justice will be served. One thing is for sure, it will be much harder for anyone to impose the Emergencies Act in the future, and we see that as somewhat of a victory for now.”

Marazzo said the appeal “is yet another demonstration of the Liberal government’s hubris,” adding that “Unsurprisingly, the government is denying any accountability and plans to continue their abuse of Canadians with an appeal. Regardless, we need to remain steadfast and unmovable in working for a return to truth, principle and justice.”

In CCF’s statement, Van Geyn said that the government now has “a mountain to climb” after Tuesday’s ruling, adding, “We look forward to the fight.”

And in remarks shared with CTV News, University of Ottawa associate professor of criminology Michael Kempa, Ph.D., said the federal court’s decision is “legally binding” and “sets a legal precedent” — unlike the conclusion reached by the inquiry.

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

Featured image is from CHD


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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We, descendants of Holocaust survivors, call on the world on this Holocaust Remembrance Day to join us in working to end the Israeli government’s genocide against the Palestinian people, enabled and supported by the US government.  

The Israeli government has made very clear its intent to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza. To justify this horrific violence, the Israeli government has shamelessly manipulated Holocaust trauma. As descendants, we are outraged that the memory of our ancestors is being used to justify the same kind of horror being inflicted on others. We cry out against this genocidal assault: Not in our name!

As descendants, we recognize that genocide makes no one safer. We are not alone in our trauma, and we have a collective duty to prevent others from experiencing similar harm. Instead of ignoring the key lesson of the Holocaust — that Never Again means never again for anyone — and manipulating our trauma to support a genocidal war, we choose to invest in Jewish values like tzedek tzedek tirdof (justice, justice you shall pursue), and tikkun olam (repairing the world) right here and now, where we are. 

Collectively, we determine what the legacy of Holocaust memory will be. We can weaponize our pain and inscribe the names of our ancestors on the funding bills and bombs that are the instruments of genocide. Or, we can carry our ancestors’ memories in actions that unite and protect us all. We choose the latter: free Palestine!

– Jewish Voice for Peace members who are descendants of Holocaust survivors

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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The World Court ruled on Friday that the Israeli military must ensure that it is not committing acts in Gaza that are in violation of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention; Israel must pursue legal action against Israelis who made statements of genocidal intent; it must facilitate humanitarian aid into Gaza and Israel must report back to the Court on measures it is taking to fulfill these orders in one month.

The Court ordered that:

“The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular: (a) killing members of the group. …”

The Court’s actions amount to little more than what the United States has been saying publicly about Israel’s conduct, that it must not commit acts that amount to war crimes.  The U.S. has not gone as far as to tell Israel not to commit genocide but the Court’s action falls far short of what South Africa and much of the world has been demanding.

The Court said South Africa has a plausible claim in at least some instances in its request for provisional measures to stop what it argues is Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.  But the provisional measures South Africa requested — namely to stop the killing — were denied.

The Court established that there was a dispute against Israel and South Africa to give the Court jurisdiction. The Court also presented a litany of overwhelming evidence that Israel is plausibly committing genocide and that the Court would allow the case the go forward, namely putting Israel on trial for genocide. That will take years to adjudicate.

Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, tried to put a positive spin on the Court’s decisions in remarks to reporters outside the Palace of Justice in The Hague. “I am satisfied that our request for provisional measures was addressed,” she said.

Pandor said she was disappointed the word “cessation” of hostilities was not included in the Court’s orders, but said that to fulfill the orders to provide humanitarian services to Gaza Israel must stop its military operation.

“I believe to execute these orders there would have to be a ceasefire,” Pandor said.  However, she added: “In no way will I say that I am disappointed” in the court’s ruling. “I had hoped for it [a ceasefire order], but to provide services would require a ceasefire.”

Pandor said she thought it “very significant” that Israel must report back to the World Court in one month to show how it is preventing its forces from committing genocide. It is unclear if there is a procedure for the Court to act if it is not satisfied with Israel’s report that Israel is fulfilling the order to do everything it can to prevent genocide.

Given that the Court’s directives amount to little more than public statements made by the U.S., Washington should be pleased with Friday’s ruling.

Israeli legal team listens to Court’s ruling on Friday. (U.N. TV Screenshot)

The Palestine Authority also tried to portray the ruling in a positive light.

“The ICJ order is an important reminder that no state is above the law,” PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said in a video statement. He said the ruling “should serve as a wake-up call for Israel and actors who enabled its entrenched impunity.”

The people who count most, Gazans, were crushed by the ruling.

Most of 50-minute statement read by Judge Joan Donoghue, the American president of the court, was taken up by a recitation of evidence that sounded like it came directly out of South Africa’s complaint.

She relied heavily on statements by top U.N. officials, including the secretary-general and senior aid officials, to paint a picture of abject horror being imposed on the people of Gaza. She also read into the record clear statements of genocidal intent by the Israeli defense minister and the Israeli president.

Israel has being saying all along and stated it clearly in its argument before the Court on Nov. 12 that it is providing humanitarian aid and that it is working very carefully to avoid civilian casualties. It can likely be expected that Israel’s one-month report will repeat similar statements, which have already been refuted by U.N. officials, including the secretary-general.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was described by Al Jazeera as pleased with the outcome, took to Twitter to state that the claim of Israel committing genocide was “rightly rejected” by the Court and to eviscerate anyone who dared suggest Israel could commit such a thing as genocide.

“Israel’s commitment to international law is unwavering,” Netanyahu wrote. “Equally unwavering is our sacred commitment to continue to defend our country and defend our people. Like every country, Israel has an inherent right to defend itself.”  He said:

“The vile attempt to deny Israel this fundamental right is blatant discrimination against the Jewish state, and it was justly rejected. The charge of genocide leveled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people everywhere should reject it.”

Netanyahu clearly believes that Israeli military actions the Court believes could amount to genocide is Israel’s “fundamental right.” He continued to present Israel as the victim and Hamas as the war criminal.

“On the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I again pledge as Prime Minister of Israel – Never Again,” he said. “Israel will continue to defend itself against Hamas, a genocidal terror organization.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was singled out for his alleged incitement by the Court, said that Israel “does not need to be lectured on morality” by the Court.

“The International Court of Justice in The Hague went above and beyond, when it granted South Africa’s antisemitic request to discuss the claim of genocide in Gaza, and now refuses to reject the petition outright,” he said in a statement.

“Those who seek justice, will not find it on the leather chairs of the court chambers in The Hague — they will find it in the Hamas tunnels in Gaza, where 136 hostages are held, and where those who murdered our children are hiding,” he said. “They will find it in the ‘Spirit of the IDF,’ a document that outlines the values and conduct of our moral and professional soldiers.”

International lawyer Francis Boyle, who won provisional measures against Yugoslavia at the ICJ in 1993, told  the Institute for Public Accuracy:

“This is a massive, overwhelming legal victory for the Republic of South Africa against Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. The U.N. General Assembly now can suspend Israel from participation in its activities as it did for South Africa and Yugoslavia. It can admit Palestine as a full member. And — especially since the International Criminal Court has been a farce — it can establish a tribunal to prosecute the highest level officials of the Israeli government, both civilian and military.”

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Featured image: Judge Joan Donoghue of the U.S., president of the ICJ, reading the Court’s ruling on Friday. (U.N. TV Screenshot)

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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“Wherever violence, fear and hatred thrive, working people cannot,” reads a statement by Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). SEIU, which boasts two million members, just joined a growing section of the US labor movement in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. SEIU is now the largest union in the country to issue such a statement. 

The statement begins with condemning “the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7th,” while also condemning “the widespread attacks on innocent civilians, including the bombardment of neighborhoods, healthcare facilities, and refugee camps, by the Israeli military.” 

“We call for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and the delivery of life-saving food, water, medicine and other resources to the people of Gaza,” reads the statement. “We call on elected leaders to come together to bring an end to the violence and demand a peaceful resolution that ensures both lasting security for the Israeli people and a sustained end to decades of occupation, blockades and lack of freedom endured by the Palestinian people.”

SEIU joins an emerging sector of the US labor movement which includes the United Auto Workers, the American Postal Workers Union, the United Electrical Workers, and an SEIU local, 1199. SEIU joins this movement as popular support for a ceasefire grows, with a new poll indicating that voters are more likely to support political candidates who call for a ceasefire. 

The union’s statement also indicates a willingness among major unions to break from the established Democratic Party status quo as the Biden administration has been openly hostile towards calls for a ceasefire. The White House has gone as far to condemn the progressive congress members calling for a ceasefire, calling the pressure for peace “repugnant” and “disgraceful.” 

Congress has also thus far failed to hold Israel accountable for ongoing war crimes in the Gaza strip. The US Senate recently rejected a proposal by Senator Bernie Sanders to require a State Department report on Israel’s human rights violations, on the basis that the US can investigate any country receiving US military aid. The proposal was rejected by 72 to 11.

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Featured image is from SEIU

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

***

Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1944, people in the street were hugging each other and weeping with joy. They were celebrating the end of a nearly 900 days brutal siege. Soviet forces lifted the siege of Leningrad after ferocious battles. Exactly a year later they liberated Auschwitz. Even today, walking in Saint-Petersburg’s main avenue, the Nevsky Prospect, one notices a blue sign painted on a wall during the siege: “Citizens! This side of the street is the most dangerous during artillery shelling”.

The siege was enforced by armies and navies which had come from Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Norway. It was part of a war started by a coalition of forces from around Europe led by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941.

The goal of the war against the Soviet Union was different from the war Germany had waged in Western Europe. On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that “the empire in the east is ripe for dismemberment”. Germany sought new living space (Lebensraum) but did not need the people who lived on it. Most of them were despised as subhuman (Untermenschen) and destined to be killed, starved or enslaved. Their land was to be given to “Aryan” settlers. To make his point in racial terms familiar to the Europeans, Hitler referred to the Soviet population as “Asians”.

Indeed, the war against the Soviet Union had aspects of a colonial war: millions of Soviet civilians – Slavs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and others – were systematically put to death. This surpassed Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1904-1908 when it just as systematically massacred the local tribes of Herero and Namas. True, Germany was not exceptional: this was common practice among European colonial powers.

The intentions of the Nazi invaders were summarized succinctly:

After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. […] Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.

As one of the Nazi commanders enforcing the siege put it, “we shall put the Bolsheviks on a strict diet”.

The last rail line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union was severed on August 30, 1941, a week later the last road was occupied by the invaders. The city was completely encircled, supplies of food and fuel dried up, and a severe winter set in. The little that the Soviet government succeeded in delivering to Leningrad was rationed. At one time, the daily ration was reduced to 125 grams of bread made as much of sawdust as of flour. Many did not get even that, and people were forced to eat cats, dogs, wallpaper glue, and there were a few cases of cannibalism. Dead bodies littered the streets as people were dying of hunger, disease, cold and bombardment.

Leningrad, a city of 3.4 million people, lost over one third of its population. This was the largest loss of life in a modern city. The former imperial capital famous for its magnificent palaces, elegant gardens and breathtaking vistas was methodically bombed and shelled. Over 10 000 buildings were either destroyed or damaged. This was part of the invaders’ drive to demodernize the Soviet Union, to throw it back in time. Leningrad had to be wiped out precisely because it was a major centre of science and engineering, home to writers and ballet dancers, the see of famous universities and art museums. None was to survive in the Nazi plans.

Sadly, neither sieges, nor colonial wars ended in 1945. Britain, France and the Netherlands waged brutal wars of “pacification” in their colonies long after Nazism was defeated. Racism was still official in the United States, another ally in the fight against Nazism. Twelve years after the war, it took the 101st Airborne Division to enable nine black students to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Today’s Western values of tolerance are recent and fragile. Overt racism is no longer acceptable, but its impact is still with us.

Human lives do not have the same value either in our media, or in our foreign policies. The death of an Israeli attracts more media attention that that of a Palestinian. Severe sanctions are imposed on Iran for its civilian nuclear enrichment program while none are imposed on Israel for its military nuclear arsenal. And, of course, Western powers continue to provide arms and political support for the siege of Gaza, where civilian population is not only bombed and shelled, but deliberately starved and let die of disease. The International Court of Justice confirmed “plausible genocide”, even though it failed to stop Israel.   

Commemoration of the siege of Leningrad should prompt us to put an end to all racism, to stop the siege of Gaza and to prevent such atrocities in the future. Otherwise, the accusation thrown in the face of the European citizen by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in 1955 would remain still valid:

.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

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Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal. His publications include over 300 articles and a few books: Science between Superpowers, A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, What is Modern Israel?, Demodernization: A Future in the Past and Judaïsme, islam et modernité. He did consulting work for, inter alia, OECD, NATO, UNESCO and the World Bank. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: www.yakovrabkin.ca

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

Vaccines: “Just Get Your Damn Shots”

January 28th, 2024 by Dr. Gary G. Kohls

Incisive article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls first published by Global Research on August 1, 2017, more than three years prior to the launching of Covid-19 in December 2020.  

***

The title above “Just Get Your Damn Shots” is a verbatim quote taken from any number of seriously uninformed TV physicians, paid trolls and paid celebrities as they have gleefully joined the popular CDC, WHO, AAP, AAFP and AMA-sponsored campaigns that have denigrated (and therefore infuriated) the witnesses of the hundreds of thousands of over-vaccinated, vaccine-injured, vaccine-disabled or vaccine-killed infants, children, adults and soldiers. 

Particularly angered are the parents, siblings, neighbors and other loved ones of the vaccine-traumatized victims, for they

KNOW FOR CERTAIN THAT THE VACCINES POISONED THEIR LOVED ONES BECAUSE THEY SAW WHAT WAS HAPPENING BEFORE THEIR VERY EYES.


Dear Readers, Google the title: “Just Get Your Damn Shots” Prevails. 

Draft Google Search (January 27, 2023)

Governor Hogan: “Just Get The Damn Vaccine.” – YouTube

www.youtube.com › watch
 
 
With the Delta variant accounting for nearly all of the new COVID-19 cases in the State of Maryland and an increase in infections among …
YouTube · Governor Larry Hogan · Aug 5, 2021

‘Get the damn shot!’ Broward pushes residents to … – YouTube

www.youtube.com › watch
 
 
 
Broward County hospitals are seeing a surge of COVID-19 patients, problem that Mayor Steve Geller and medical experts say is preventable …
YouTube · WPLG Local 10 · Jul 28, 2021

Man’s last text: ‘I should have gotten the damn vaccine’ – CNN

www.cnn.com › videos › health › 2021/08/02 › jessica-d…
 
 
Jessica DuPreez talks with John Berman about her 39-year-old fiancé who died from Covid-19. She discusses why they didn’t get vaccinated, …
CNN · Aug 2, 2021

just get the damn vaccine

www.tiktok.com › DK (@devan.kaney) | TikTok
 
 
just get the damn vaccine
 

These witnesses knew the truth, even though their physicians (especially, apparently, pediatricians) and their clinics refused to listen to them and often fired them and their families when they logically refused to accept “coincidence” as the reason for the catastrophic vaccine-induced illness that suddenly changed their normal baby into a chronically ill or dead one.

Well-informed parents are beginning to realize – despite the aggressive propaganda campaigns from Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Media – that vaccines are NOT necessarily safe. Indeed they are seeing that they can be lethal.

Many parents are also beginning to see that vaccines are NOT necessarily effective long-term either. As opposed to natural childhood infections giving life-long immunity, vaccines for such mild infections as measles, mumps and chickenpox need frequent booster shots to theoretically provide partial immunity.

Parents who can’t expect to get thorough information about the CDC’s and AAP’s over-vaccination mandates from their clinics are having to do their own research on neurotoxicology , and they are beginning to realize (no thanks to their too-busy and relatively un-informed physicians) that the vaccines that are planned for their precious kids contain varieties of neurotoxic ingredients in the cocktails of baby shots. As many as 3 injections at one sitting are supposed to go into the tiny muscles of 6 or 8 or 10 pound babies at their 2, 4 and 6 month well baby check-ups. These injections may contain live viruses, aluminum, mercury or unintended contaminants all of which the vaccine manufacturers admit may cause brain inflammation or infection.

The most brain toxic vaccine ingredient in this era since the year 2000 is aluminum, which is increasingly in many infant vaccines. The most brain toxic metal that was in vaccines in the latter two generations of the 20th century was mercury (thimerosal) – a preservative that was removed from many vaccines around 2000 because pediatricians KNEW that it was the major cause of the pediatric autism spectrum disorder (ASD) epidemic that had no other plausible explanation.

Because of that knowledge, the AAP (the American Academy of Pediatrics that now infamously denies the connection between vaccines and ASD), with no help from the CDC, eventually helped convince the vaccine manufacturers to remove mercury from most vaccines.

Babies, most notably the premature ones, always have immature, leaky blood-brain barriers (and leaky guts) that allow some of these toxic vaccine ingredients to enter the brain. Both aluminum and mercury – even in “trace” amounts – are known to adversely affect both the blood-brain barrier and the placental barrier, with serious implications for pregnant women who are increasingly prompted to submit to expensive and probably fetotoxic vaccinations.(!).

Paid Trolls are Behind Much of the Smearing of the Vaccine-injured

The ubiquitous smear campaigns against what paid trolls pejoratively call “anti-vaxxers” target any and all rational and scholarly skeptics of America’s blatantly over-vaccination agenda – a American national agenda that

1) over-vaccinates the most children in the entire developed world,

2) has the worst infant mortality rate in the entire developed world and

3) has the largest percentage of autistic kids in the entire developed world.

But Big Pharma’s toxic over-vaccination agenda is highly profitable for

1) Big Pharma,

2) Big Medicine,

3) pediatricians,

4) medical clinics and

5) Big Media (which makes billions of dollars per year from Big Pharma advertisers).

The propagandistic smear has been orchestrated by organizations (and their paid trolls) representing the 5 corporate institutions named above, who are drafting laws to make more and more of these toxic vaccines compulsory, as has happened in California in 2016. Even Big Pharma-bribed politicians – all totally ignorant of the neurotoxicology of America’s over-vaccination agenda – are joining the irrational campaign.

What is saddest is how vicious have been the attacks against the independent, non-pharma  scientist-scholars who have actually done well-designed toxicology research that PROVES (to any unbiased physician or otherwise smart person that isn’t conflicted and immobilized by financial or professional conflicts of interest) that what the CDC and  AAP is saying about vaccine safety is untrue.

Sadly, every major media outlet seems to employ attractive, highly indoctrinated, financially- and professionally-conflicted full-time celebrity physicians to only report on medical issues that are favorable to the network’s Big Pharma advertisers. Therefore no news will be effectively reported that might expose any of Big Pharma’s many blatantly fraudulent practices.

Don’t Criticize What You Can’t Understand

And then there are ignorant celebrities who have joined the well-financed and well-organized smear campaign  who know nothing about the science of vaccine neurotoxicology, a science that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that intramuscularly-injected aluminum (which is in most infant vaccines as an “adjuvant” – look it up) and intramuscularly-injected mercury (thimerosal) are common causes of childhood brain damage that can be diagnosed as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Asperger’s Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autoimmune/inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants (ASIA), Autoimmune Disorders, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Allergies (and that’s just the list of vaccine-induced disorders that start with the letter “A”), tic disorder, seizure disorder, dementia, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, etc, etc, depending on what age the brain was sufficiently poisoned and what location in the brain was most seriously affected.

The sad reality is that most physicians (including my own) had woefully inadequate medical school training about neurotoxicology, immunology, vaccinology and nutrition, at least partly because Big Pharma has devious influences on medical education – hoping to create endless supplies of prolific prescription-writers and vaccine supporters.

A couple of years ago, prior to his pregnant wife (highly likely) receiving her mercury-laden prenatal flu shot and her aluminum-laden prenatal DTaP shot, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel chimed in with the CDC/AMA/AAP’s “just get your damn shots” campaign that demonized

1) parents and loved ones of vaccine-injured babies and children,

2) unbiased research immunologists,

3) unbiased neurotoxicologists,

4) the 10 – 15% of pediatricians who actually listen sympathetically to their patients, and

5) other scholarly and critically-thinking science-minded folks who know that toxic vaccine ingredients commonly sicken many of America’s over-vaccinated children.

Knowing that the most common neurotoxic vaccine ingredients (aluminum and mercury)

1) are both mitochondrial toxins,

2) are both blood-brain barrier toxins,

3) are both capable of crossing the placental barrier and

4) are both exponentially more poisonous when given together,

it shouldn’t surprise any logical thinker that bad outcomes should be expected when metal-containing vaccines are given in cocktails at the same time, whether they are given to a soldier, a baby, a child, a pre-pubertal girl or an adult heading towards dementia.

Quotes

I conclude with some appropriate quotes that should give some uncertain or blind pro-vaccinators pause and give them interest and the willingness to go to the massive volume of unbiased medical literature to learn the truth about the dangers of over-vaccinating children.

I don’t expect changing the minds of those who have been indoctrinated by Big Pharma and Big Medicine. I also don’t expect influencing paid or unpaid trolls to actually go to the many references and scholars that I have referred to in the past. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. And you can point out the conflicts of interest of the ignorant naysayers and trolls but that won’t stop them from continuing to criticize the science that they are either incapable of understanding or unwilling to listen to.

“You might as well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination.” – George Bernard Shaw

 It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair, American anti-fascist, anti-imperialist author

“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.” – President Ronald Wilson Reagan, as he signed The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies, pediatricians and all vaccine providers from all medico-legal liability when children die, become chronically ill with vaccine-induced autoimmune disorders or are otherwise disabled from vaccine injuries. (That law has led directly to an expected reckless, liability-free development of scores of new, over-priced, potential block-buster vaccines, now numbering over 250. The question that must be asked of Big Medicine’s practitioners: How will the CDC, the AMA, the AAFP and the American Academy of Pediatrics fit any more potentially neurotoxic vaccines into the current well-baby over-vaccination schedule?)

“By Nov. 1, 2016, $3.5 billion had been awarded to more than 3,500 vaccine victims through the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) created under the 1986 NCVIA law.”

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses … the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.— Dresden James

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.  – George Orwell

Is the Childhood Vaccine Schedule Safe?

1976: 1 child in 30 was learning disabled → 2013: 1 child in 6 is learning disabled.

1980: 1 child in 27 had asthma → 2013: 1 child in 9 has asthma.

1992: 1 child in 500 developed autism → 2013: 1 child in 50 develops autism.

2001: 1 child in 555 had diabetes → 2013: 1 child in 400 has diabetes.

THREE TIMES AS MANY VACCINATIONS FOR CHILDREN

1953: CDC recommended 16 doses of 4 vaccines (smallpox, DPT) between two months and age six.

1983: CDC recommended 23 doses of 7 vaccines (DPT, MMR, polio) between two months and age six.

2013: CDC recommended 50 doses of 14 vaccines between day of birth and age six and 69 doses of 16 vaccines between day of birth and age 18.

MULTIPLE VACCINATIONS GIVEN SIMULTANEOUSLY

In 1983, the CDC directed doctors to give a child no more than 4 vaccines (DPT, polio) simultaneously.

By 2013, the CDC directed that a child can receive 8 or more vaccines at once.

The Institute of Medicine published a report in 2013 stating that “key elements of the entire [CDC recommended childhood vaccine] schedule – the number, frequency, timing, order and age of administration of vaccines – have not been systematically examined in research studies.”

VACCINATIONS DURING PREGNANCY

A new CDC policy directs doctors to give pregnant women one dose of influenza vaccine in any trimester and one dose of pertussis containing Tdap vaccine after 20 weeks during every pregnancy. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that large, well-controlled long term studies have not been conducted to confirm that influenza and Tdap vaccination during pregnancy is safe.

“The evidence strongly suggests that it is the vaccines and the vaccinated who are spreading the diseases for which vaccines are given.”

“The real issue is viral shedding. Viral vaccines are vaccines containing live viruses, even if they are weak or attenuated strains. These live viruses shed for varying amounts of time in the body fluids of a vaccinated individual – and can be transmitted to others. You can absolutely catch the virus (or bacterium) from someone who has just been vaccinated against that disease. Not only that, but viral shedding from vaccines is leading to viral and bacterial mutations, helping to create a phenomenon of new and dangerous strains of disease which can evade treatment by becoming accustomed to whatever drugs get thrown at them.”

“The U.S. has maintained one of the world’s highest child vaccination rates and lowest infectious disease rates, even as public health officials have been unable to explain why so many of today’s highly vaccinated children are so sick and disabled. Also unexplained, is why America has the worst infant mortality rate of all developed nations, with 6 out of 1,000 babies dying before their first birthday.

“Maternal mortality in the U.S. has also become one of the worst of all industrialized nations, with between 12 and 28 women in 100,000 dying within one year of giving birth, a maternal mortality rate that more than doubled between 1990 and 2013. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), annually an estimated 1,200 women in America suffer fatal complications during pregnancy and childbirth and another 60,000 suffer near-fatal complications.

“Women having babies in the U.S. today, who represent the most vaccinated generations in our nation’s history, are now also being given influenza, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus vaccines during pregnancy, a federal maternal vaccination policy that was launched in 1997 with administration of influenza vaccine during any trimester and was widened in 2011 with the addition of a pertussis containing TDaP shot after 20 weeks gestation.

“As of 2015, about half of the nation’s pregnant women or nearly 2 million women, were either vaccinated with TDaP vaccine during pregnancy (42 percent) or influenza vaccine before or during pregnancy (50 percent) or received both vaccines.” – Barbara Loe-Fischer, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)

What has happened to the health of children in America since the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed in 1986?

“After drug companies, pediatricians and all vaccine providers were shielded from accountability and liability for vaccine injuries and deaths, U.S. health officials tripled the numbers of vaccinations recommended for children – from 23 doses of seven vaccines in 1986 to 33 doses of nine vaccines by 1997, which has escalated to a current 69 doses of 16 vaccines. States also increased the numbers of vaccinations required for children to attend school and, by 1997, it was obvious that a growing number of highly vaccinated children in America were never well anymore.

“The new and unprecedented child chronic disease and disability epidemic that has perfectly coincided with the expansion of the child vaccine schedule over the past 30 years is having a devastating effect on children, their families and our nation. Today, 1 child in 6 in the U.S. is learning disabled; 1 in 9 has asthma; 1 in 10 has ADHD; 1 in 50 develops autism; and 1 in 400 has diabetes. Millions more are suffering with severe allergies epilepsy, anxiety and depression, and other kinds of brain and immune disorders marked by chronic inflammation in the body.” – Barbara Loe-Fischer

“If we listen to present-day wisdom, we are all at risk of resurgent massive epidemics should the vaccination rate fall below 95%. Yet, we have all lived for at least 30 to 40 years with 50% or less of the population having vaccine protection. That is, herd immunity has not existed in this country for many decades and no resurgent epidemics have occurred. Vaccine-induced herd immunity is a lie used to frighten doctors, public-health officials, other medical personnel, and the public into accepting vaccinations.” – Russell Blaylock, MD

“The live polio vaccine…contains live attenuated polioviruses. Those polioviruses, when you take that [live] vaccine, you shed them in your body fluids – your saliva, urine, and stool…Whether you have the a viral infection or you get the live attenuated vaccine, you shed live viruses in your body fluids and you are able to transmit the virus to other people who come in contact with your body fluids.” — Barbara Loe-Fisher

”Curbing civil liberties under the guise of protecting the public health and national security has become big business. In 1982, when the pharmaceutical industry threatened to stop producing government licensed and recommended vaccines for children unless vaccine manufacturers got a product liability shield, Congress gave Big Pharma most of what it wanted in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.  It was tort reform legislation sold to parents and the American public on the backs of children legally required by states to get federally recommended vaccines to attend school.

“Even though by Nov. 1, 2016, $3.5 billion had been awarded to more than 3,500 vaccine victims through the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) created under the 1986 law, two out of three claims have been denied throughout the entire history of the law’s implementation.  Most of the compensation awards today are for adults injured by flu vaccine – not for children required to get vaccines to go to school.

“While the government denies compensation to many children, whose lives have been destroyed by state mandated vaccines, in the past five years liability-free drug companies have joined forces with politically powerful medical trade groups to change state vaccine laws. They are lobbying state legislatures to severely restrict the medical exemption and eliminate the non-medical religious, philosophical and conscientious belief exemptions for children attending school.” — Barbara Loe-Fisher

“…our current results are consistent with the existing evidence on the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of aluminum adjuvants which altogether strongly implicate these compounds as contributors to the rising prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders in children. Given that autism has devastating consequences in a life of a child, and that currently in the developed world over 1% of children suffer from some form of ASD, it would seem wise to make efforts towards reducing infant exposure to aluminum from vaccines. — C A Shaw, PhD

“There is a serious problem with vaccine safety. Vaccine aluminum adjuvant has adverse neurological effects, at dosages that are recommended by the US CDC. Vaccine critics are supported by the science. Parents refusing to vaccinate according to the recommended CDC schedule are supported by the science. Use aluminum-containing vaccines with great caution, or not at all.” – C. A. Shaw, PhD

“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvantresearch clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.” (From Tomljenovic and Shaw’s journal article “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”, published in Curr Med Chem 2011;18(17):2630-7.)

“The CDC says that 36,000 people die from the flu every year in the US. But actually, it’s closer to 20. However, we can’t admit that, because if we did, we’d be exposing our gigantic psyop. The whole campaign to scare people into getting a flu shot would have about the same effect as warning people to carry iron umbrellas, in case toasters fall out of upper-story windows…and, by the way, we’d all be put in prison for fraud.” – Jon Rappoport

“A 2007 [Zika] outbreak on Yap Islands in Micronesia is estimated to have affected nearly 75% of the (island’s) population of some 12,000 people, and a 2013 outbreak in French Polynesia affected nearly 28,000 of 270,000 residents. Neither epidemic caused a spike in microcephaly.” — qz.com

“The correlation between a) the presence of Zika and b) babies with the microcephaly birth defect is so weak and sparse, it constitutes counter-evidence for Zika as the cause…the overwhelming majority of birth-defect cases show no presence of Zika. Therefore, the Zika-carrying mosquitoes have no business being the target of toxic spraying. But they are. And the spraying increases the risk of neurological damage in babies.” – Jon Rappoport

“Microcephaly may result from any insult that disturbs early brain growth…Annually, approximately 25,000 infants in the United States will be diagnosed with microcephaly…” – From the Report of the Quality Standards Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology and the Practice Committee of the Child Neurology Society. (Neurology 2009 Sep 15; 73(11) 887-897)

“…even the ideal influenza vaccine, matched perfectly to circulating strains of wild influenza and capable of stopping all influenza viruses, can only deal with a small part of the ‘flu’ problem because most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.” – Dr Peter Doshi (from a British Medical Journal review article, “Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease” 2013 (BMJ 2013; 346:f3037)

“…It’s no wonder so many people feel that ‘flu shots’ don’t work: for most flus, they can’t, work because most diagnosed cases of the flu aren’t the flu.” – Jon Rappoport

“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.” – Dr Peter Doshi, from in his 2005 BMJ report, titled, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” (BMJ 2005; 331:1412

“Between 1979 and 2001, [CDC] data showed an average of 1348 [flu] deaths per year (range 257 to 3006).” – Dr Peter Doshi

“Official data shows that large scale vaccination has failed to obtain any significant improvement of the diseases against which they were supposed to provide protection” — Dr Sabin, developer of Polio vaccine

“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation…..There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.” — Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD

“The only safe vaccine is one that is never used.” — Dr. James A. Shannon, National Institutes of Health

“No batch of vaccine can be proved safe before it is given to children.” – Dr Leonard Scheele, Surgeon General of the United States, addressing an AMA convention in 1955

“It is pathetic and ludicrous to say we ever vanquished smallpox with vaccines, when only 10% of the population was ever vaccinated.” — Dr Glen Dettman

“The decline in infectious diseases in developed countries had nothing to do with vaccinations, but with the decline in poverty and hunger.” — Dr Buchwald, MD

“There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunisation of children does more harm than good.” – Dr. J. Anthony Morris (formerly Chief Vaccine Control Officer at the US Federal Drug Admin.)

“There is insufficient evidence to support routine vaccination of healthy persons of any age.” — Paul Frame, MD, Journal of Family Practice

“I think that no person would permit anybody to get close to them with an inoculation if they would really know how they are made, what they carry, what has been lied to them about and what the real percent of danger is of contracting such a disease which is minimal.” — Dr Eva Snead

“The evidence for indicting immunisations for SIDS is circumstantial, but compelling. However, the keepers of the keys to medical-research funds are not interested in searching this very important lead to the cause of an ongoing, and possibly preventable, tragedy. Anything that implies that immunisations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed.   Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunisations are killing thousands of babies?” — Dr William C. Douglass, MD (Honored twice as America’s ‘Doctor of the Year’)

“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has been reported following the administration of DPT. The significance is unclear. 85% of SIDS cases occur in the period 1 through 6 months of age, with the peak incidence at age 2 to 4 months.” (From the accompanying insert to Connaught Labs’ DPT vaccine)  Jane Orient, MD, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)

“If you want the truth on vaccination you must go to those who are not making anything out of it…My aim has been to show that you have a powerful body to fight in the medical profession. We cannot be stirred without great effort. We are a kind of Juggernaut; we have to be dragged; we will not go. Let each one take his doctor, or, if he be so fortunate as not to need one, the doctor who lives nearest to him, and try and instruct him (about the dangers of vaccination). Send him the literature of the subject; he may not read it, but he may. Every little helps. – Instruct the people by means of public lectures and meetings. Show them as plainly as you can the uselessness and dangers of vaccination. Teach them that they must not go to the medical profession for counsel on the matter. If cases of small-pox were isolated and the clothes of the sufferers disinfected, the disease would not spread. If you wish to avoid smallpox, you must live pure and simple lives. If we crowd together we must expect disease; if we keep our skins closed, the impurities of the body are retained, and these impurities are the food upon which small-pox thrives. If your constitution is in a bad, state and you come in contact ‘with small-pox, you will probably have it.” — Dr T. R. Allinson

“The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation…There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.” — Dr Robert Mendelsohn, MD

“Vaccine-induced herd immunity is a lie used to frighten doctors, public-health officials, other medical personnel, and the public into accepting vaccinations.” – Russell Blaylock, MD

“the 271 vaccines in development span a wide array of diseases, and employ exciting new scientific strategies and technologies. These potential vaccines – all in human clinical trials or under review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – include 137 for infectious diseases, 99 for cancer, 15 for allergies and 10 for neurological disorders.” — PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), the pharmaceutical industry’s trade association and powerful lobbying group

***

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, the area’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination regimens, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace. Many of his columns are archived at

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

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

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

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Davos24 Bombshell Video: F**k You at the World Economic Forum (WEF)

January 28th, 2024 by Global Research News

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This is a Montage by Damon Imani

Known for his satirical approach, Imani draws attention to societal and political issues.

 

Two Controversial Videos. The First Video is More Recent


 

 

Damon Imani indicates explicitly on his website that the video is political satire. The incident did not occur in Davos at the WEF Plenary.  

Our thanks to Damon Imani. 

 

Il Generale dell’Esercito USA Christopher Cavoli, Comandante Supremo Alleato in Europa, ha annunciato che, dalla fine di gennaio alla fine di maggio, si svolgerà in Europa la più grande esercitazione NATO degli ultimi decenni, Steadfast Defender (Saldo Difensore) 2024.

Vi parteciperanno 90.000 militari dei 31 Paesi della NATO e della Svezia che sta per entrare nella NATO. Saranno impiegati nell’esercitazione oltre 80 aerei da combattimento insieme ad elicotteri e droni, 50 navi da guerra comprese le portaerei, 1.100 carrarmati e altri veicoli da combattimento.

L’esercitazione – la più grande dalla fine della Guerra Fredda – servirà a testare e perfezionare la strategia di guerra contro la Russia.

Il generale USA, che nella NATO comanda le forze armate dei 29 Paesi europei membri della Alleanza, ha dichiarato che, con la Steadfast Defender 2024. “l’Alleanzadimostrerà la sua capacità di rafforzare l’area euro-atlantica attraverso il movimento transatlantico di forze dal Nord America.

Questo rinforzo avverrà durante uno scenario di conflitto emergente simulato contro un avversario quasi-pari”. Chiaro il riferimento alla Russia.

Il Comandante Supremo Alleato in Europa comunica inoltre che l’Italia è stata scelta quale sede del quartier generale della Forza di Reazione Alleata.

Il generale USA sottolinea che essa è “una componente fondamentale del nostro nuovo modello di forza e che “è in grado di svolgere l’intero spettro di missioni e funge da riserva strategica a dispiegamento rapido”.

Nel corso dell’esercitazione il quartier generale italiano della Forza di Reazione Alleata effettuerà uno spiegamento della Forza di Reazione Rapida in Polonia sul fianco orientale dell’Alleanza, chiaramente diretto contro la Russia.

Il Comandante Supremo Alleato in Europa non dice che l’esercitazione di guerra, che si svolgerà per quattro mesi in Europa, sarà anche una esercitazione di guerra nucleare.

Gli aerei, le navi e i sistemi missilistici impiegati nella Steadfast Defender 2024 hanno duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare.

Gli USApotranno così testare, in una realistica simulazione, le nuove armi nucleari che stanno schierando in Europa sempre più a ridosso della Russia.

Manlio Dinucci

VIDEO : 

https://www.byoblu.com/2024/01/26/litalia-in-prima-linea-sotto-comando-usa-nella-piu-grande-esercitazione-di-guerra-contro-la-russia-pangea-la-rassegna-stampa-internazionale-di-byoblu-126-puntata/

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

 

“25 Years of Discussions on Security of and in the Use of Information and Communication Technologies Under the Auspices of the United Nations”

 

***

While the psychopathology of Russophobia is infecting the West, and various venal stratagems are being employed to destabilize the Russian Federation, it is precisely the Russian Federation which is leading efforts to establish an international code of conduct assuring the peaceful uses of technology, and prohibiting criminal attempts to cripple societies dependent upon centralized technological control.

On September 22, 2023, the Russian Federation held an important panel discussion during the General Assembly High-Level Week, chaired by H.E. Mr Sergey Vershinin, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, and including panel participants:

  • Ms. Izumi Nakamitsu, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs,
  • H.E. Mr. Burhan Gafoor, Chair of the Open-Ended working group on security of and in the use of information and communications technologies 2021-2025,
  • H.E. Ms. Faouzia Mebarki, Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, Ambassador of Algeria to the United Nations in Vienna,
  • H.E. Mr. Grigory Logvinov, Deputy Secretary-General, Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
  • Mr. Oleg Slepov, Head of International Development Department, Rostelecom-Solar.

The possibilities of information and communications technologies, used for constructive purposes, and by contrast, the deadly potential of using these technologies for destructive, criminal purposes were discussed in depth and detail, and what would seem an abstract matter became stunningly immediate, particularly as described by Mr. Oleg Slepov, of Rostelecom-Solar. Mr. Slepov discussed the way in which  crucial sectors of modern societies can be connected by advanced technologies, speeding up, and providing incredibly efficient and effective transfer of information, as all sectors of these societies become increasingly dependent on these  centralized technologies in order to function.

However, Mr. Slepov also warned of the dangerous possibility of hostile actors sabotaging these newly centralized controls of the most important sectors of society, by disabling the control centers of these now technologically linked sectors of society.

Thus, criminals have the power to destroy an entire country by disabling the switch that controls the communication technology.

This sabotage can be immediate, and will paralyze the most indispensable sectors of society, controlling water, electricity, health care facilities, transportation, telecommunications, and all other indispensable components that enable human societies to function. Mr. Slepov warned that this very centralized technological control of entire societies makes them vulnerable to sabotage by hostile actors.

The Concept Note for this meeting states:

“The fifth substantive session of this Open-ended Working group (OWEG) held in July 2023 marked the implementation of the initially Russian proposal on establishing global intergovernmental Points of Contact Directory, aimed at enhancing cooperation between competent national authorities in detecting, preventing and eliminating consequences of computer attacks, as well as responding to computer incidents.”

I had the privilege of speaking directly with Russian Deputy Minister Vershinin, and asked him whether it is actually possible to destroy an entire country by hostile interference with the technological centers which control effective functioning of that targeted country. 

Minister Vershinin replied that this danger is, indeed, very real and alarming, and it is one of the reasons that the Russian Federation proposed this initiative, to be held under the auspices of the United Nations, in the context of international security. This initiative was adopted by the General Assembly by consensus.

*

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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York. 

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

***

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRG) claimed responsibility for missile attacks on an Israeli “spy headquarters.” Kurdish businessman Peshraw Dizayee and four of his family members were killed in the attack on their home on January 16 near the US Consulate in Erbil, in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR).

Dizayee was the owner of the Falcon Group, which is a business involved in oil and gas, agriculture and security. The IRG claimed its missiles targeted a “Mossad headquarters”.

“No US facilities were impacted. We’re not tracking damage to infrastructure or injuries at this time,” a US official said in response to the recent attack.

Prime Minister of the IKR, Masrour Barzani, condemned the IRG attacks on Erbil.

The Oil Business in Erbil

The oil business is thriving in IKR, and the Falcon Group was part of it. Kurdish oil has been exported to Israel, Italy, France and Greece through a secretive trade depending on pre-pay deals.

Israel buys much of its oil from Erbil, and Israel depends on the heavily discounted crude, making it a key customer. The oil is discounted to Israel because it is free, as the source is the stolen Syrian oil. 40% of Israel’s oil supplies were from IKR in the first three months of 2023, which doubled the amount in 2022.

Israel received its first substantial seaborne crude oil shipment from the IKR in 2014, which is the same time the US occupation forces arrived in Syria. Israel was reportedly importing as much as three-quarters of its crude oil needs from the IKR by mid-2015.

Israeli refineries and oil companies imported almost $1 billion worth of Kurdish oil between May and August of 2023, according to shipping data, trading sources and satellite tanker tracking, which represents about 77% of average Israeli demand, which runs at roughly 240,000 barrels per day. More than a third of all of the northern Iraqi exports, which are shipped from Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, went to Israel over the period.

According to anonymous sources, it was a Mossad agent who first traveled to Erbil to negotiate the deal to buy oil from IKR, which was facilitated by US officials.

The US Consulate in Erbil

The new US Consulate General building in Erbil, near the attack carried out by Iran, is the biggest consulate complex built by the US. Embassies and Consulates are under the US State Department, but the consulate in Erbil has a connection to the US Department of Defense, demonstrating the strategic importance of the region for Washington, with a US military base also in IKR.

Irvin Hicks, Jr., the US Consul General in Erbil, stated in January 2023, that the new 800-million-dollar consulate building is a clear statement that the “United States of America is not going anywhere.”

The US first opened a diplomatic office in Erbil in February 2007, and later upgraded to a consulate general in 2011, the same year the US-NATO attack on Syria began for regime change, under the Obama-Biden administration.

The US embassy in Baghdad was built in 2009 and is its biggest mission compound in the world at a cost of $750 million. Iraqi Kurdistan and the Iraqi central government in Baghdad operate separately, as the Kurds are a semi-autonomous region.

Erbil has 30 consulates, six honorary consulates, and six foreign trade offices, with the Japanese consulate the latest to open on Jan. 11.

“Opening more than 30 consulates is not normal,” Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad Hossein Rajabi criticized. Most of these consulates are used for espionage activities.”

Iran views the foreign offices as having the potential to carry out plans aimed at destabilizing the security of Iran, by hosting Iranian separatist groups and bases aligned with Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.

The Iraqi Response to the Genocide in Gaza

“On October 20, 2023, the Department ordered the departure of eligible family members and non-emergency U.S. government personnel from U.S. Embassy Baghdad and U.S. Consulate General Erbil due to increased security threats against U.S. government personnel and interests,” according to the State Department’s Iraq travel advisory.

Iraqis have taken to the streets to protest the US complicity in the genocide being committed in Gaza by Israel.  US President Joe Biden has defied the American values of human rights and international law by continuing to send weapons to Israel to promote the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, even in the face of international criticism which has lowered the image of America as a beacon of freedom to a joke.

Protests have taken place outside of the US Embassy in Baghdad, and military groups which are under the central government of Iraq have fired rockets and armed drones at US troops based in Anbar and near Erbil multiple times. Baghdad does not recognize Israel; however, the IKR are aligned with the US, and sell the stolen oil from Syria to the prime US ally, Israel.

The US invaded and destroyed Iraq in 2003, and occupied the country for years until a withdrawal. When ISIS reared its ugly head, the Baghdad government requested US troops to come to help in the fight against ISIS, which saw its defeat at the hands of Iraq, Syria, Russia, and the US. The Iraqi parliament ordered the US troops to leave after the defeat of ISIS in 2017, but the Department of Defense refused. The Prime Minister of Iraq has recently ordered the US troops to leave immediately following the US assassination of Mushtaq Jawad Kazim al-Jawari in Baghdad on January 4, an Iraqi military commander who was instrumental in the defeat of ISIS.

The PKK in Syria and Erbil

The PKK aligned SDF in north east Syria is US supported. The US military in Syria are occupying the largest oil field in Syria, which prevents the Damascus government from using the oil to provide electricity to the Syrian people, who suffer with just 3 hours of electricity per day.

In December 2023, 44-tanker convoy carrying oil stolen from Syria traveled clandestinely to US bases near Erbil. Just days before, US forces took 95 tankers of oil and a truckload of stolen Syrian wheat to IKR. The Syrian wheat fields are also in the area the US troops occupy and the area is controlled by Kurds who are aligned with the IKR.

Farhan Jamil Abdullah, head of the Syrian Oil Company, said in July that as a result of the US sanctions and military occupation in Syria, oil production has decreased to 15,000 barrels per day from 385,000 barrels before 2011.

Firas Hassan Kaddour, the Syrian Oil Minister, said in July that the losses of the energy sector in Syria are close to 100 billion U.S. dollars. 

The main oil field of Al Omar and Conoco in Syria are producing oil which is shipped in tankers by the US Army and refined at Kar Oil Refinery in Erbil.

The US sponsors the SDF militia in Syria which is dominated by the YPG. The YPG is the Syrian branch of the PKK, a group recognized by Turkey, as well as the US and the EU, as a terrorist organization, who have killed more than 40,000 persons over decades.

Turkey has condemned the US alliance with the SDF and YPG, and considers the US is financing terrorism.

The commander of the SDF is General Mazloum Kobani, who is also a member of the PKK. His real name is Ferhat Abdi Sahin, is one of Turkey’s most wanted terrorists. Kobani was chosen by the US as their military ally and it is at Kobani’s command that the stolen Syrian oil is loaded into tankers.

Erdogan has demanded for years that the US must stop supporting the SDF, YPG, and to stop encouraging the Kurds to establish an independent homeland in north east Syria on the border with Turkey, which is a NATO member, and ally of the US, housing an American military base there.

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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.

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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On January 16, Russian military sources reported that a missile strike was launched at the headquarters of a group of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine. Reports indicate that the targeted personnel were mostly French military contractors and that the precision strike resulted in at least 80 casualties, of which over 60 were KIA (killed in action). The sources further posit that the neutralized personnel were highly trained specialists whose assignments involved specific Western-made weapon systems that regular, forcibly conscripted Ukrainians are simply not trained to handle. Russian military sources also indicate that the strike put some of the most effective long-range weapons in the Kiev regime’s inventory out of service, at least until new specialists are recruited, which will certainly take time to accomplish.

The mercenaries were stationed in the eastern city of Kharkov and their mission was most likely to coordinate and direct long-range strikes on Russian territory. This is in line with the hypothesis that the Neo-Nazi junta is simply unable to integrate the massive amount of new NATO-sourced weapons, the influx of which increased dramatically in the last two years. Mostly accustomed to Soviet-era weapons, including their domestic modernized variants, the Kiev regime had a tough task of integrating these doctrinally very different Western armaments. In order to accomplish that, they needed a large number of Western specialists who would coordinate such efforts. This also involved training Ukrainian personnel to operate the said NATO-sourced weapon systems.

However, it should be noted that this process takes years to accomplish, meaning that the Russian precision strike is a major setback for the Neo-Nazi junta, as its soldiers lost a valuable asset that could’ve made even more damage to Moscow’s interests simply by proliferating its expertise. A good example of this is the battlefield usage of the US-made “Patriot” SAM (surface-to-air missile) system, which the Kiev regime forces were considered unable to operate before 2024 at the earliest, as the training process for the personnel operating the system takes several years and even longer for combat tasks, particularly against a high-tech opponent such as Russia. And yet, the “Patriot” was already in use in early 2023. The only logical explanation is that it has mostly been operated by Western military contractors.

Precisely this is why foreign mercenaries in Ukraine are given no quarter. The consequences of having highly trained enemy combatants participate in battles, as well as train Ukrainian personnel simply cannot be overstated. The political West is fully aware of the fact that Soviet-era weapons in Ukrainian service are on their last legs. Apart from local systems, this also includes weapons that NATO’s former Warsaw Pact members sent in the last two years. Western-made equivalents are the only viable alternative in order to keep the Ukrainian conflict going for as long as possible. This is precisely why Russia will show no mercy toward any NATO contractors in the country, as their activities only prolong the conflict, resulting in unnecessary death, destruction and devastation for both sides.

This has been the case since the first days of the special military operation (SMO). For instance, on March 13, 2022, or barely three weeks into the intervention, the Russian military obliterated the Yavoriv training camp, located less than 15 km from the Polish (and by extension NATO) border. Estimates vary, but it seems there were upwards of 1000 foreign mercenaries there, nearly 200 of which were KIA as a result of the strike. Since then, there have been numerous similar instances when troop concentrations of foreign fighters were targeted. Back in late April last year, an “Iskander-M” missile system eliminated an entire unit of the infamous “Georgian Legion”, notorious due to gruesome war crimes against Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbass, as well as captured Russian soldiers.

Faced with mounting losses, the Neo-Nazi junta is very likely to start relying on foreign mercenaries more than ever before. As millions of Ukrainians are trying to dodge the draft, the Kiev regime is trying to raise its own Volkssturm, which now includes pregnant women. Forced to rely much less on the sheer numbers of Ukrainians that can be used as cannon fodder, NATO is looking for other ways to fight the Russian military (and not just the military). This is why it needs highly trained specialists who can use complex weapon systems. These can be used as a form of asymmetric warfare against the conventionally superior Russian forces. Moscow’s advantages became even more pronounced after the failed summer/fall counteroffensive that saw the massive destruction of NATO-sourced equipment.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian combat specialists, mostly trained by NATO, were killed or wounded, leaving the Neo-Nazi junta without much-needed personnel. NATO has had a sizeable presence in Ukraine even before the SMO, with US covert operators staying even after most other Americans left the country. Others, such as the British, Poles, as well as personnel from the former Soviet Baltic states were also among the most prominent foreign fighters. However, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, France has long been one of the leading sources of mercenaries for the Kiev regime. Apart from this, in violation of arms control agreements, Paris is also delivering long-range missiles to the Neo-Nazi junta. On the other hand, on a strategic level, Russia is responding by helping dismantle France’s (neo)colonial empire in Africa.

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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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U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Attempt to Silence Palestinian Human Rights Advocacy

January 27th, 2024 by Center for Constitutional Rights

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Today, a U.S.-based Palestinian rights organization prevailed when the Supreme Court refused to take up a lawsuit brought by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and several U.S. citizens who live in Israel. Citing the speech and expressive activities of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), including its support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the lawsuit had argued that the group provided “material support” for terrorism.  The dismissal by the district court had been unanimously affirmed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

This lawsuit is just one example of a long line of efforts to silence Palestinians for advocating for their freedom – in this case, by wielding the accusation of support for terrorism to discredit and dehumanize Palestinians for their advocacy, including their support for boycotts. Multiple organizations with histories of seeking to silence Palestinian rights filed their own briefs in an effort to have the Supreme Court of the United States endorse their suppression effort. USCPR’s attorneys say today’s decision to let the lower court rulings stand is an important win for the movement and definitively sets the record straight. As the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found, “[a]dvocating and coordinating a boycott of Israel – ‘economically, academically[,] and diplomatically,’… – is not unlawful.” 

In dismissing the suit in March 2021, the lower court said the arguments were, “to say the least, not persuasive.” Advocates say the suit is part of a broader effort to criminalize and silence the political activities of supporters of Palestinian rights, a threat that has only increased as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza intensifies. 

“USCPR’s message is justice for all and an end to funding genocide. There’s no lawsuit in the world that can stop us from pushing our demands for human rights,” said Ahmad Abuznaid, Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “We will remain focused on opposing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and pursuing justice and freedom for the Palestinian people.”

Headquartered in Jerusalem, the JNF is a quasi-state institution that acquires and administers land for the sole benefit of Jewish Israelis. The JNF’s lawsuit alleges that USCPR bears responsibility for “incendiary terror balloons and kites” sent from Gaza onto JNF land during the 2018 Great Return March. 

At issue were USCPR’s fiscal sponsorship of the Boycott National Committee and expressions of support for the rights and demands of Palestinians participating in the Great Return March, when Palestinians protested to demand respect for their right to return to the villages from which Israeli settlers expelled them in 1948. These two activities, the lawsuit claimed, amount to a violation of the U.S.’s Antiterrorism Act, which prohibits “material support” for terrorism. 

“The JNF’s prolonged and egregious pursuit of a fishing expedition to silence and intimidate urgent advocacy for Palestinian rights has been definitively put to rest by the Supreme Court,” said Diala Shamas, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The JNF’s accusations were baseless, as recognized by the district court, the court of appeals, and now confirmed by the Supreme Court. Now, as the government of Israel is carrying out an unfolding genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, it is more important than ever that activists be free to speak out without fear. This is an important victory, but USCPR shouldn’t have been subjected to these smears in the first place.”

Also representing USCPR were cooperating counsel Judith Chomsky and Beth Stephens.  

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Featured image: This file photo shows the US Supreme Court building located at One First Street, NE, in Washington.

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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Displaced women and girls in Gaza are resorting to using tent strips as sanitary pads amid severe shortages of menstruation products, while women in labour are undergoing caesarean procedures without anaesthetic.

With limited access to running water and hygiene products, women and girls living in tent cities in Rafah are using canvas strips and scraps of clothing as a substitute for sanitary pads, risking infection and deadly toxic shock syndrome.

Since the Israeli onslaught on the Palestinian enclave began on 7 October, the total siege on Gaza has prevented hygiene and period products from entering the Strip. 

According to Riham Jafari, advocacy and communications cooordinator at ActionAid Palestine, the aid trucks that do enter the strip mostly carry food and medical aid, rather than sanitary products for women.

“Women in Gaza go to many places and walk long distances to search in all the pharmacies for pads, but they can’t find them,” Jafari told Middle East Eye.

Many women have resorted to menstruation delaying pills to block their periods. While sanitary products are scarce, pills that delay periods are generally more available as they are commonly not used.

A New Form of Suffering

Of the 1.9 million Gazans who have fled south to Rafah, 1 million are estimated to be women and girls. Many are living in makeshift tents and struggle to access clean running water and toilets due to overcrowding.

In a post on Telegram, Palestinian health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said that infrastructure and medical services in Rafah could not cater for the influx of people. 

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa) estimated that at its shelters in Rafah, there is only one toilet per 486 people.  

“We suffer a lot whenever we want to go to the bathroom. We stand in line for a long time and the bathrooms are far away,” Adara*, a woman who was displaced from her home with her four children told ActionAid.

“This is a new form of suffering experienced by women in Gaza. This situation is extremely difficult for women and adolescent girls, who lack safe, private and dignified places to manage their menstrual hygiene,” Jafari said.

With only one of three water pipelines in Gaza functioning, women are unable to wash themselves.

According to ActionAid, women they have spoken to have gone weeks without showering.

The UN estimated that there are 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experiencing menstrual cycles who cannot access basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper or even running water and toilets.

Born ‘Into Hell’

According to Unicef spokesperson, Tess Ingram, babies in Gaza are being “delivered into hell”.

Mothers are undergoing caesarean operations without anaesthetic, and are being discharged just hours after the operation.

With only one functioning maternity hospital left in the besieged enclave, women in labour are forced to share beds or give birth in their tents or in toilets.

“Two women who were sharing a bed … maybe an hour after getting a caesarean, they were then moved to a chair to free the bed up to somebody else, and discharged after three hours to go back to their shelter,” Ingram reported following a trip to the El Emirati Maternity Hospital on 12 January.

According to Unicef, 20,000 babies have been born in Gaza since 7 October, with many of these deliveries conducted in dangerous and unhygienic conditions.

After delivery, mothers are forced to nurse their newborns in tents, and are often unable to find clothes and nappies.

Food shortages have left many new mothers too malnourished to breastfeed, according to ActionAid.

A report by UN women on 19 January found that women and girls in Gaza are dying at “unprecedented levels” and facing “catastrophic levels of humanitarian need”.

Of the more than 25,000 Palestinians killed since 7 October, 70 percent are estimated to be women and children, with two mothers killed per hour since the beginning of the crisis.

*Names have been changed on request

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Featured image: Airport workers unload crates with aid delivered from Qatar destined for Gaza at El Arish International Airport (Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

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The world is watching a famine develop in Gaza that could kill many times more than the 24,000 Palestinians who have already perished in Israel’s merciless blitzkrieg. 

Last month, more than 90 percent of Gaza’s population was estimated to be facing high levels of acute food insecurity, categorised as Phase 3 or crisis levels. Of those, more than 40 percent were in a state of emergency (Phase 4), and more than 15 percent in a catastrophic situation, the fifth and final phase.

The famine is projected to develop rapidly in the coming weeks. By early February, if nothing changes, the entire population of Gaza is projected to be in the crisis phase, half in the emergency phase, and more than half a million people in the catastrophic phase, with households experiencing an extreme lack of food, starvation and exhaustion.

These are not the projections of the Palestinian health ministry, dismissed collectively by western media as “Hamas-run”, but of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), drawing on data from UN agencies and NGOs. Three weeks ago, the IPC warned that Gaza would have the highest share of people in the world facing acute food insecurity – and so it has turned out to be.

Unless Israel’s western backers consider the World Food Programme, Unicef and the World Health Organization to be “Hamas-run”, they will increasingly be obliged to listen to them when they say that the trucks being allowed into Gaza are only a fraction of what is needed to avert a mass famine.

Of course, the US, UK and Germany are doing much more than simply watch a humanitarian catastrophe develop in Gaza. They are actively contributing to it by feeding the Israeli military machine with the means to carry on this war indefinitely. 

Yediot Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper with good government sources, reported that since 7 October, the US has sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships filled with artillery shells, armoured vehicles and combat gear.

‘What Is to be Done?’

This level of arms supply is at odds with American rhetoric, which, by the way, Washington is good at. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken should get an Oscar for his performance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Asked by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman whether Muslim and Christian lives were worth less than Jewish lives, Blinken responded in a voice cracked with emotion:

“No. Period. For me, I think for so many of us, what we’re seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching. And the suffering we’re seeing among innocent men, women and children breaks my heart. The question is, what is to be done?”

How about calling for an immediate ceasefire? How about stopping the supply of US shells and bombs? How about backing the South African claim that this is genocide, or at the very least war crimes?

Many flights carrying US weapons and equipment have gone through the British base of Akrotiri in Cyprus, according to UK investigative site Declassified, following a Haaretz report that more than 40 US and 20 British transport aircraft, along with seven heavy-lift helicopters, have flown into RAF Akrotiri, a 40-minute flight from Tel Aviv. Germany is reportedly considering the delivery of 10,000 rounds of 120mm precision ammunition to Israel, a request to which it has already agreed in principle.

In terms of saying one thing and doing another, Turkey is just as bad in failing to halt its burgeoning trade with Israel. It’s not enough to say that even at the time of the Mavi Marmara incident, when a Turkish flotilla was stormed by Israeli commandos on the high seas, trade continued. 

Nor is it sufficient to say that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ire is directed against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally and not against Israel as a whole. Opposition leader Benny Gantz shares as much of the blame for the carnage in Gaza as Netanyahu does. 

Like Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Israel’s bombing of Gaza has been so intense that it is perpetually on the verge of running out of ammunition. Israel has dropped almost 30,000 bombs and shells on Gaza in 100 days, eight times more than the US dropped on Iraq in six years of war. 

Stopping Israel from getting away with the mass murder of innocent men, women and children is no longer a question of left or right in western politics. By the only measure that counts for Palestinians, US President Joe Biden is a fully paid-up member of the Party of War, like many of his predecessors and contemporaries in both the US and UK.

Egypt’s Ringside Seat

But none of these countries have borders with Israel. One nation that does have a ringside seat to the famine unfolding inches from its border is Egypt.

Its responsibility for the current siege of Gaza, which is far more brutal than during any period over the last 16 years, is direct. Journalists staging an impromptu demonstration outside the headquarters of the Journalists Syndicate in Cairo were correct when they said “Egypt is a partner in the siege.”

“The Zionists are in control of us … For as long as Arab blood is cheap, down, down with any president. [Nelson] Mandela’s grandchildren did it. And we are in cowardice, shame and humiliation. We want the [Rafah] crossing open,” the journalists chanted.

The same message is being delivered by children taunting Egyptian troops on the border fence:

“They say Egypt is the mother of the world. Have you ever seen a mother leaving her children alone? … They are all gone. God is enough for us,” one said.

In the meantime, Egyptian officials appear to think nothing of giving contradictory figures. Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, the Egyptian minister of health, said late last month that Egypt had received 20,000 injured Palestinians in around two dozen hospitals. Just two weeks later, Diaa Rashwan, the head of the State Information Service, said Egypt had received 1,210 injured Palestinians

More than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been wounded, and some are dying in ambulances as they wait to get out. Sometimes permission to leave arrives after the patient has died. 

Israel has no qualms about throwing its regional allies under the bus. When defending itself last week against the charge of genocide at the World Court in the Hague, Israel’s defence team accused Cairo of being responsible for preventing the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. This embarrassed Egypt, and Rashwan issued a statement saying Rafah was under Israeli control

He said, truthfully, that Israeli top officials had confirmed many times since the start of the war “that they will not allow aid to enter the Gaza Strip, particularly fuel, because this is a part of the war that their state is waging against the Strip”. 

Egypt’s official position is that it can only control its own side of the border. In fact, co-operation with Israel goes much deeper than that.

Chequered History

Over the course of history, Egypt’s relationship with Gaza and the Palestinian cause has been complex. At a time when the Arab world’s most populous country still held geopolitical weight, former President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s support for the revolution in Algeria was a key factor in its success.

Former President Hosni Mubarak played a complicated role in Gaza. He helped build the siege after Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections, and under Mubarak, Egypt accepted that nothing could pass into Gaza without Israel’s prior permission. At the same time, however, trade continued through tunnels. Above ground, Egypt under Mubarak tightened the pressure on Gaza; below ground, the tunnels became a release valve.

But when the pressure became too much and fighting broke out, as happened in 2008, Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, stood alongside her Egyptian counterpart, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who is today secretary general of the Arab League, to say Israel would attack Gaza. Egypt’s support for that war was one of the factors behind the revolution that would oust Mubarak three years later.

After the war, however, Mubarak’s government ducked and weaved again, saying the tunnels were a consequence of the siege, and rejecting an embargo on weapons to Gaza.

Gaza enjoyed its best times under Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood president who kept the border at Rafah open and stopped a subsequent war. His overthrow, and the rise to power of his defence minister, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, brought the darkest times for Gaza. 

Sisi did everything in his power to harden the siege by flooding the tunnels, along with forcibly displacing the Egyptian population of Rafah to create a buffer zone at the border. Under Sisi, the importance of the Israeli border crossings grew as the primary means of keeping Gaza on life support with food, water and diesel.

There are two factors governing this very chequered history. The first is the geopolitical decline of Egypt under Sisi. Egypt is no longer relevant to its biggest neighbours. Amid the civil war in Sudan, the tiny Gulf state of the United Arab Emirates plays a greater role. Egypt is also irrelevant to the fate of Libya

The second is Sisi’s visceral fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its inherent and enduring claim to legitimacy in Egypt – a fear that is intimately connected with the brutal suppression of the Arab Spring.

If Sisi was true to his word about not allowing Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza, he is duty bound to help Palestinians survive on their shattered lands. Egypt has to secure Gaza’s basic needs for food, water and medicine, either through the crossing, or by sea.

It can even invite other countries from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to join in an air drop of the sort the Allies did to break the Berlin Blockade in 1948. Such an airlift would challenge the hypocrisy of the West and the crocodile tears it sheds for the famine in Gaza. It will not happen of course because a dictatorship like Sisi’s cares about only one thing – its survival.

However, the bond between the fight for Palestinian rights and the domestic battle for democracy in Egypt is unbreakable, and Sisi knows this only too well. One inspires the other, which is why beyond a handful of staged rallies, the Egyptian state has cracked down on any public displays of solidarity with Palestinians. 

Of course, Egypt plays a diplomatic role in trying to end the war, but its latest three-stage proposal was weighted towards the release of hostages. It must also be acknowledged that Egypt has stopped Israel from forcing a mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai. But they also have much in common: like Israel, Sisi wants a demilitarised Gaza and the demise of Hamas.

In terms of what Egypt is doing on the ground to maintain the bottleneck of humanitarian aid at Rafah, versus what the government is saying, Sisi is giving Blinken a good run for his money as a would-be thespian.

Palestine as a Global Cause

But something else is happening that is just as important: Palestine is being officially defended by the Global South. South Africa has taken the lead by launching the case for genocide at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Palestine, at the same time, is reemerging as a global cause, just as was the case in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. The composition of South Africa’s team of lawyers says it all: multi-ethnic, male, female, Irish, British, South African. There was no Palestinian officially with them in the group. And yet, a day after the hearing ended, there were massive demonstrations in 45 countries – but not in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or even Algeria.

The despots of Egypt and the Gulf, however, should not draw a straw of comfort from this. In a recent survey from the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, polling 8,000 Arabs in 16 countries, 92 percent of respondents said the Palestinian cause was an issue of concern for all Arabs.

Nearly 90 percent of Arab respondents said they considered the 7 October attack by Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries, to be a “legitimate resistance operation” or a “somewhat flawed but legitimate resistance operation”.

Eighty-nine percent of respondents rejected recognising Israel, the highest figure in the centre’s polling history. Only 13 percent of surveyed Arabs said they believed that peace with Israel remains possible.

Anger is boiling in the hearts of Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Iraqis – and this will eventually come to the surface and explode. Farouk I, Egypt’s penultimate king who abdicated and appointed his baby son Foud whose rule continued for a few months before the monarchy was abolished, paid the price for supporting the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948. It is one of the reasons Egyptians allowed the army to take over in a coup several years later.

Today, the degree of anger is exponentially greater.

The despots should beware what they wish for. Their profound reluctance to stand up to Israel could explode in their faces. 

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David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

Featured image: Rafah crossing. Reuters

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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“No doctor wakes up in the morning and says: ‘I’m going to amputate a child’s leg without anaesthesia.’

“You don’t want to watch children suffer,” Dr Amber Alayyan with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, tells Al Jazeera.

The measured cadences of the voice of the charity’s deputy programme manager for Palestine suggests just how inconceivable it is for her, as a doctor and a mother, to cause pain to a patient and to a child.

Yet it is the moral conflict her colleagues in Gaza face daily, minute by minute, as they try to treat unprecedented numbers of injured people flooding into the Gaza Strip’s barely functioning hospitals.

Your natural instinct is to take care of people… to protect people. … You’ve been trained over and over and over and over for years.

—BY DR AMBER ALAYYAN

As doctors in Gaza are forced to make split-second decisions on who to save and who to let die, on whose pain to relieve and whose they do not have time to, it is that innate instinct and their Hippocratic oath that is assailed by decisions they never thought they’d have to make.

Burdened with personal losses and struggling to operate under unrelenting Israeli bombardments, this is the story of how medical workers are fighting to keep Gaza’s healthcare system going.

INTERACTIVE--0--Gaza-hospitals-illustration-1705991882

How Gaza’s Healthcare System Has Been Destroyed

It is nearing midnight in Gaza and Mohamed S Ziara, a Palestinian doctor, is on a WhatsApp call to Al Jazeera. His tone is soft and unaffected by the rumbling explosions and pop of gunfire that can be heard in the background.

The plastic surgeon is working 12- to 14-hour shifts, six days a week at the European Gaza Hospital (EGH) in Khan Younis, where he treats up to 15 cases a day.

Ziara describes the healthcare situation as “catastrophic”.

“It doesn’t match anything I’ve seen before, even with previous escalations and war,” says Ziara, who has worked during Israel’s assaults on Gaza since 2014.

He has been posting about Israeli attacks near the EGH and the conditions inside on his Instagram account.

The widespread damage caused by Israeli attacks since October 7, following Hamas’s surprise attacks on Israel, has led to a shortage of medical staff and supplies and an urgent need for fuel, electricity and water.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), only 15 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partially functional – nine in the south and six in the north.

From October 7 to November 24, there were 74 Israeli assaults on health facilities with 30 hospitals attacked in Gaza, according to Insecurity Insight, a humanitarian association that collates data on threats facing people in dangerous environments.

Northern Gaza, including Gaza City, has borne the brunt of attacks on the healthcare sector, but as the war has progressed, previously designated safe areas south of Wadi Gaza have come under Israeli fire.

The map below summarises the Israeli attacks on Gaza’s healthcare sector during the first seven weeks of the war.

INTERACTIVE -1- Israeli attacks on Gaza healthcare sector-1705995227

The hospitals that have been attacked most often include:

  • al-Shifa Hospital – attacked 12 times
  • al-Quds Hospital – attacked nine times
  • Indonesian Hospital – attacked nine times
  • Nasser Hospital – attacked three times

Insecurity Insight documented at least 26 other hospitals from across the Gaza Strip that were attacked by Israeli forces over the same period.

INTERACTIVE -2- Hospitals in Gaza attacked by Israeli forces-1705995260

These repeated attacks came during an Israeli order on October 13 that instructed all 22 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate to the south within 24 hours. The WHO described the order as “impossible to carry out” and “a death sentence for the sick and injured”.

Israel’s Raid on al-Shifa Hospital

One of the first hospitals to come under fire was al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, located in the Remal neighbourhood in Gaza City, where Ziara worked before EGH.

“I remember that I was watching TV, and the spokesman of the [Israeli] army was asked twice about the possibility of bombing the hospital, and he replied that everything is possible,” Ziara says.

Israeli soldiers flanked al-Shifa Hospital on three sides on November 15 and then stormed the complex after Israeli accusations that it was serving as a Hamas command centre.

INTERACTIVE_GAZA_al-Shifa_NOV15_2023 copy-1700037675

“We have never seen any military action or military activity inside the hospital,” Ziara says, adding that he thought the threat to the hospital was merely propaganda from the Israeli army. “We never thought that they would reach the hospital and that we’d evacuate patients and the injured.”

Several doctors, including Norwegian Mads Gilbert, who has worked in Gaza for several years, have said they had not seen any evidence of military activity at the hospital during the war.

After the storming of al-Shifa Hospital, a number of United Nations missions were carried out in cooperation with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to evacuate patients and healthcare workers.

The same exercise has been attempted more recently at hospitals in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza and Khan Younis in the south – namely Al-Aqsa, Nasser and EGH – due to ongoing hostilities nearby.

Ziara says he witnessed drone attacks on al-Shifa Hospital.

“They were shooting at people. They injured many. They shot a missile at the hospital garden and killed about four people staying there who had evacuated or were refugees,” he says.

Healthcare Attacks and ‘War Crimes’

Assaults such as those seen on al-Shifa Hospital have raised questions about the legality of attacks on healthcare facilities. International humanitarian law, based on the Geneva Conventions, stipulates that hospitals are considered “civilian objects” and receive de facto protection. Despite that prohibition, Israel has continued to target healthcare structures and workers.

“The UN has been very clear that hospitals, civilians and healthcare workers should be protected, and we continue to call for their protection. They’re not a target,” Dominic Allen, the UN Population Fund’s representative for Palestine, tells Al Jazeera.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said attacks on healthcare are “attacks on the sick and the injured”, which need to be “investigated as a war crime”, according to A Kayum Ahmed, special adviser on the right to health at HRW.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Insecurity Insights, there were at least 212 attacks on healthcare facilities and workers from October 7 to December 11.

The graphic below shows a timeline of all recorded incidents during those nine weeks. Each dot represents a recorded incident and is sized according to the number of casualties.

INTERACTIVE -3- Recorded attacks against Gazas healthcare facilities and workers-1705995334

Targeting Healthcare Workers: ‘He was the kind of guy who would paint your name in bacteria on a Petri dish’

On November 6, Mohammed al-Ahel was in his home in the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza when Israeli forces bombed the area, collapsing the building he was in.

Al-Ahel was killed along with his two young daughters as well as dozens of other people.

Al-Ahel, who worked as a laboratory technician at Nasser Hospital, was the first of MSF’s staff to be killed in the war.

“He was just such a stereotypical microbiology nerd – the guy that loves the microscope with the big glasses like a real cartoon,” Alayyan says, remembering her colleague. “He was the kind of guy who would paint your name in bacteria on a Petri dish.”

I can’t imagine going back to the lab and not seeing him there. God, he was such a good guy, such an innocent, loving guy.

BY DR AMBER ALAYYAN ON MOHAMED AL-AHEL

Al-Ahel left behind a wife and newborn twins. His story is just one of the many shared with Al Jazeera on the personal losses medical staff in Gaza are dealing with. In tandem with the loss of colleagues is also the loss of family members, which forces healthcare workers to operate in unthinkable circumstances where melancholy and resilience coalesce.

Interactive-gaza doctors carousel 1-1705927753

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 192 medical personnel were killed from October 7 to November 8:

  • 65 nurses
  • 29 doctors
  • 24 pharmacists
  • 20 paramedics
  • 17 dentists
  • 14 lab technicians
  • 11 medical students
  • seven physiotherapists
  • three medical professors
  • one optometrist
  • one medical engineer

INTERACTIVE -4- Medical personnel killed by Israeli forces-1705925763

Since November 8, an additional 182 healthcare personnel have been killed by Israeli forces, bringing the total number killed in Gaza to at least 374 as of January 1, according to a tally by Healthcare Workers Watch – Palestine.

With an average of at least four medical workers being killed every day, hospital staff and paramedics are fighting a dual battle of saving the lives of injured Palestinians while also surviving targeted and indiscriminate attacks.

INTERACTIVE -5- Names of the medical personnel killed by Israeli forces-1705925017

INTERACTIVE -6- Names of the medical personnel killed by Israeli forces-1705990968

Operating Under Extreme Conditions: ‘It is scary. We are dealing with these kinds of injuries’

Without proper equipment, sanitation, supplies or even electricity to deal with daily mass casualty events, healthcare workers face a vicious cycle of more people becoming sick due to lack of medicine, space and a sterile clinical environment.

According to the WHO, only 15 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partially functional – nine in the south and six in the north. The hospitals in the south are operating at three times their capacity while facing critical shortages of basic supplies and fuel.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza says occupancy rates are reaching 206 percent in inpatient departments and 250 percent in intensive care units.

INTERACTIVE -8- Gaza hospitals partially functioning-1705925748

‘That Loss Can Never be Recovered’

According to Alayyan, MSF has surgical teams at EGH and Nasser Hospital. Another team was operating in the emergency room at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital but had to withdraw on January 6 and 7 after evacuation orders.

“Nasser, Al-Aqsa and EGH are just overwhelmed with mass casualties and trauma surgeries on top of the regular population that needs everyday care. The situation is dire,” Alayyan says.

MSF’s main team also operates from Rafah Field Hospital, where they see 20 to 30 patients daily for postoperative care.

“The problem is that when you’re doing a mass casualty several times a day, every day for three months, your wherewithal runs really low and your threshold for maintaining good practices becomes infinitesimally small,” Alayyan says.

The lack of medical equipment and medicines has led to doctors performing surgeries without anaesthesia or properly sanitised equipment.

“The injuries are so bad, and the psychological impact of that loss can never be recovered,” Ziara says.

“It is so hard to see these kinds of injuries.  We’re in a state of shock when we see babies and children who have lost more than a limb in one sitting and then lost many of their family members. It’s so unbearable.”

Trying to Save Limbs

In November, three-year-old Ahmad Shabat lost his legs in an Israeli air strike outside a UN school in the Nuseirat refugee camp. His uncle Ibrahim Abu Amsheh was the only relative at his side in the ICU of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Ahmad Shabat and his uncle Ibrahim at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip

Ahmad Shabat and his uncle Ibrahim at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip [Atia Darwish/Al Jazeera]

His uncle says Ahmad is not fully aware of what has happened to him.

“He doesn’t know he lost his legs,” the 28-year-old says. “He keeps asking to go outside for a walk.

“He’s in a lot of pain, and the hospital only has Acamol [paracetamol], which you take if you have a headache, not if you’ve lost both your legs.”

The WHO says amputations are carried out despite the possibility of saving limbs because many of the injured cannot reach hospitals due to fighting or there is a lack of specialists, such as vascular surgeons, according to Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO representative for the Palestinian territories.

According to Save the Children, more than 1,000 children have lost one or both their legs since October 7.

Treating Chronic Illnesses the ‘First to Go’

In addition to immediate injuries from Israeli air strikes and artillery, patients with prior and long-term illnesses and vulnerable health conditions are faced with not being treated. According to WHO, they include:

  • 1,100 patients in need of kidney dialysis
  • 71,000 patients living with diabetes
  • 225,000 patients with high blood pressure requiring medication
  • 485,000 people with mental health disorders
  • cancer patients, 2,000 of whom are diagnosed each year, including 122 children
  • 45,000 patients with cardiovascular disease

INTERACTIVE -7- Existing health conditions not being treated-1705925028

“I think cancer was one of the first to go because of the care that you need – you need to be in a safe environment, you need to be in a clean environment all the time – and similar for dialysis patients,” Alayyan says.

In addition, an estimated 100 patients a day need access to specialised healthcare outside Gaza. However, due to the precarious nature of evacuations, it is nearly impossible to guarantee the evacuation of some patients, even those approved by the UN with Israeli forces.

Pregnant Women in Gaza ‘Suffer from Thirst and Malnutrition’

There are an estimated 52,000 pregnant women in Gaza with 183 births a day and 5,500 babies being born in the past month, of whom 130 have been premature and dependent on incubators.

Esraa Kamal al-Jamalan was just one of many women faced with the prospect of giving birth in war-torn Gaza. At nearly eight months pregnant, she was forced to flee her home in the northern Gaza neighbourhood of Sheikh Radwan after it was bombed by Israel in late October. She, her husband and their five-year-old son walked more than 3km (nearly 2 miles) to al-Shifa Hospital, where many people were sheltering.

Two months later, 28-year-old Esraa and her family are living in one of the hundreds of makeshift tents in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza. Esraa gave birth to their baby girl at a nearby hospital on November 24 and received stitches without any painkillers. “I begged her [the doctor] to give me a little painkiller,” she says.

According to Allen, who visited Gaza in mid-January, pregnant women at Al-Helal Al-Emairati Maternity Hospital were being rotated in and out of the five delivery rooms due to capacity constraints.

“Women who are in their final stages of labour have to step out of that room to enable another pregnant woman to step in,” he says.

“Many of them suffer from thirst, malnutrition, lack of health. If the bombs don’t kill them, if disease, hunger and dehydration don’t catch up with them, simply giving life will,” Allen says.

transfer of Shifa Hospital maternity ward to Helou Hospital [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Doctors perform a cesarean section on a pregnant woman in Al Helou International Hospital in Gaza City after the maternity ward was transferred from al-Shifa Hospital [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Alayyan explains that with the war going on for more than three months, the entire third trimester “has been out the window” for many pregnant women who, along with their foetuses, are severely malnourished and stressed.

“You don’t want to force a woman out of a hospital bed with a newborn baby knowing that they’re not going to have any place safe to go. That’s not something you tend to want to do when you sign up to be a paediatrician or an obstetrician or a nurse. You want to hold people’s hands. You want to help them enjoy that moment,” Alayyan says.

What Lies Ahead for Gaza’s Healthcare System?

On January 7, exactly three months into the war on Gaza, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “It is inconceivable that this most essential need – the protection of healthcare – is not assured.”

Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan with MSF echoed these comments, telling Al Jazeera that there is an urgent need for a ceasefire. With no fully functioning hospitals in Gaza and a number of WHO missions cancelled due to a lack of permission and security, healthcare facilities are hanging on by a thread.

Recently at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, WHO staff described scenes of chaos and “people of all ages being treated on blood-streaked floors”.

“My biggest concern is what’s going to happen with vaccine-preventable diseases,” Alayyan says. “And my concern is that for the children who have been born in the last three to six months, they’re not going to be protected, and I think that what we’re going to see in a few months are huge epidemics, and we’re already seeing people who are getting sick and potentially dying of the infections as a result of their injuries.”

Ziara, who never thought he’d have to amputate children’s legs without anaesthetic, remembers what his colleagues said at the start of the war.

Concern can be heard in his voice as gunfire draws closer. It’s now almost midnight, and our phone conversation is cut short because it’s no longer safe to talk. But he still has time to say thank you.

*

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Featured image: Ahmad Shabat and his uncle Ibrahim at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip [Atia Darwish/Al Jazeera]

Civilization and History: On Arab Culture and Its Crucial Characteristics

January 27th, 2024 by Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović

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What Is Arab?   

Understanding Arab culture and the values based on it are the crucial points for the proper understanding of the modern region of MENA (composed of the Middle East and North Africa) and its fundamental features. Nevertheless, it must be noticed that all people in the region of MENA are not Arabs like Turks, Jews, some North African tribes, or Iranians. The Arab League (or the League of Arab States) is composed of 22 Arab countries. (image Left)

Even though Arab states are, in fact, from a very cultural viewpoint considered to be Middle Eastern (in a broader sense), not all of them belong to the Middle East (in a narrow sense), and not all Middle Eastern or MENA countries are Arab. 

Another focal feature of the Arab world is that not all member states have similar attitudes, communications, behaviors, traditions, etc. There are, for instance, Muslim Arab states such as Mauritania, Sudan, or Somalia in which tribal languages are usually spoken rather than Arabic followed by many cultural traditions founded on the local African customs and heritage. 

We also have to keep in mind the very fact that not all Arabs are Muslims as there are those Middle Eastern Arabs who are Christians (in Lebanon, for instance). However, the Arab nations are composed of an overwhelming Muslim (Sunni or Shia) majority.

The next feature we have to take about is that Arabs are an ethnic category of broader Semitic people (Jews are Semites too), while the term Muslim determines religious belief and confessional orientation.

Nonetheless, the reference to Arabs is, basically, directed to separate people who possess a unique pattern of behaving founded on their special type of culture, tradition, religion, language, and customs.

Arab Civilization and History

However, the Arab people do not all look or dress alike and should not be stereotyped. It has to be stressed that Arabs are not a race, skin color, nationality, or Muslim. By the authentic pre-Islamic time, an Arab was an inhabitant of the Arabian Peninsula, a member of some of many nomadic Bedouin tribes but at the time of the expansion of Arabian Islam, Arabs brought their new religion, language, and culture to the region of the Middle East and North Africa and beyond (like to the Iberian Peninsula), mixing it with the conquered peoples from Spain and Portugal to Persia. 

Arab conquests have been the wars which in the century after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, created a great state (caliphate/empire) which was stretching from the Pyrenees in Europe to the Indus River in Asia.

The conquest originally started as a holy war (jihad) against those Bedouin tribes who refused to accept Islam but soon the holy war became inspired by the prospect of vast land acquisition and the belief that death in the holy war would bring the warrior to paradise.

In the Byzantine provinces of Egypt and Syria, the Arab conquerors allowed Christians and Jews to continue expressing their confessions as the “peoples of the book” or “protected peoples” (dhimmi) upon payment of a certain tax.

Due to the resistance in Persia and North Africa, the conquests became slower. After the first civil war in 656−661, the Arab capital was transferred from Medina to Damascus by the dynasty of Umayyads and under the new dynasty of Abbasids to Baghdad where Islamic culture flourished.

Regardless of the fact that the political coherence of this Arab empire (historically there were four caliphates) no longer existed due to the rival caliphates appearing in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula in the 9th and 10th centuries, cultural coherence was maintained by the university of the Arab language and Islamic law (shariah) followed by the traffic of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. 

As a consequence of the Arab conquests followed by the intermixture of Arabic with local cultures, today, in fact, Arabs are not some separate ethnic group but much more a community with a state of mind. The confusion about the meaning of the term Arab is coming very often from the fact that it is used as a synonym for the peoples of MENA or/and Muslims in general. However, the question is what are the crucial characteristics of the distinctive Arab culture?  

The Focal Features of Arab Culture  

Like any distinctive culture, Arab culture has its own values – Arab values (as, for instance, Asian values). In Arab traditional societies, the most valuable virtues are respected to be dignity, honor, and reputation. It is, for instance, very much suggested to foreigners in an Arab country to avoid causing an Arab to lose face or to be shamed; in the case of a woman, for losing her virginity before the marriage. There has to be respected Arab loyalty to family and polite and friendly communication. In tribal or traditional Arab communities, the scale of priorities runs first to the individual, then kinsman, tribesman, and finally to those who share the same confession and country. Regardless of the rapid urbanization which decreased the influence of tribalism, there is still a degree of collectivism. However, the focal problem is taking into consideration all aspects of the impact of modernization, for how long local Arab community can be successful in the preservation of their traditional characteristics of generosity, gallantry, courage, patience, and endurance, especially at the time of the false stereotypes about Arabs created by Western mass media, film, and TV industry.  

The effects of Western colonialism, cultural, and military invasions in the Arab MENA societies caused serious changes at a high price like:

1) Urban problems such as inadequate housing and traffic organization;

2) Weakened parental authority and family cohesion;

3) Poverty for the masses and affluence for the elite; or

4) Broken homes, materialism, and sexual promiscuity.

The outcome of such Westernization’s impact on MENA has been manyfold:

  1. Islamic traditionalists are propagating the struggle against what they understand to be Western civilizational decadence followed by the increase of immorality. They reject Western (liberal) democracy as not fitting traditional Islamic culture as individual freedom above collective responsibility, the rights of women according to Western standards including their full education, and many other practices that are common in (post)industrialized nations. The Islamic fundamentalists or extreme traditionalists are seeking to form the governmental authorities according to the ancient (authentic) Islamic law based on the Qur’an. Most extremist groups are organizing violent attacks against Western values, culture, and Western foreigners including tourists as well. 
  2. Several governments of MENA states have responded to Islamic traditionalists with both harsh and authoritarian security measures including treating all dissidents in their countries as terrorists. This happened, for instance, in Algeria or Egypt, where attempts by the people to democratically elect an Islamic government have been suppressed by the ruling power very much supported by Western (the USA) authorities.      
  3. Western bombings, killings, and devastations of Arab Muslim countries in the name of liberal Western democracy during the last 33 years caused the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and around which may provoke as S. P. Huntington wrote the “Clash of Civilizations” or more precisely a focal war between Arab and other Muslim societies against the Judeo-Christian Western order. 
  4. There are those on both sides who despite all differences in confession, culture, values, history, or customs believe in reconciliation and understanding between the Judeo-Christians and the Arab Muslims. However, such cultural differences and even antagonistic divides may only be overbridged if local authorities and business leaders become more sensitive and less assertive concerning the (Arab) Islamic ethos and aspirations. It is suggested that the most optimal places to start the creation of greater cultural cooperation with the (Arab) Muslim communities are Western countries from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, especially after 9/11 when hate crimes surged in the West against innocent Muslims. 

One of the focal features of Arab culture is that Arabs seek close personal relationships, mainly without great distance or mediators.

Body and food odors are used to enhance relationships. The body is an important factor in the process of choosing a partner.

For Arabs, to look at one peripherally is a not polite way. On one hand, the Arabs are not looking for personal distance if interacting with friends but they may seek far personal distance in conversation with strangers and on such social occasions, for instance, Arabs may prefer to sit on opposite sides of a room and talk across to one another. Arabs are generally warm and expressive people being active participants with each other but they resist being crowded in enclosed spaces or by boundaries. Cordiality is the core of Arab culture. The traditional greeting is to place one’s right hand on the chest near the heart as a sign of sincerity although modern Arabs may proceed with greeting with a long, limp handshake. There is a custom for men to kiss one another on both cheeks. For Arab Muslims, certain Islamic teaching affects very much social relations as, for example, taboos against eating pork meat, drinking alcohol, or gambling. 

The social position and role of Arab women are some of the most special features of Arab culture at least to be compared with the Western culture. In principle, great diversity exists in the Arab world regarding the status of women in both family and society. It is a fact that the Arab patriarchal culture places the male in the dominant position and role, while the protection and respect of women are the common rules. In an Arab household, the husband is the head with a strong role and influence but the woman as a mother is very often the authority on family matters.  

In public life, the woman defers to her husband, but in the private sphere, she is more influential. It has to be stressed that, paradoxically, Islam does not advance the practice of female inherent inferiority, but only female differences. Islam does not perceive biological inferiority but instead, affirms potential equality between males and females. 

It is true that in some Arab states, female members of the family are equal to the males but in others, they have only a limited role in the family and a restricted position in the society. In more conservative and traditional Arab communities men are allowed to have up to five women, including the foreign-born while women may marry only one husband, excluding foreigners. In Arab society, the husband may divorce without indicating a real cause but the wife is obliged to specify the foundations of divorce in order to satisfy the court which recognizes the testimony of two females to be equal to one male witness. 

In the Qur’an is not written that women must be veiled as it is just written that they have to be dressed modestly in appearance by covering their arms and hair, which are considered to be very sensual from the viewpoint of morality. It is important to emphasize that Western females (or in general, foreign females – those of not Arab and Islamic origin) visiting Arab countries have to pay great attention to what is acceptable or unacceptable in the local Arab Islamic community of visitation. Whether being a simple visitor-tourist or some kind of business person, women have to accommodate themselves to what is considered allowed and proper behavior and be adequately dressed according to the local moral rules. The persons from outside the culture who do not respect local Arab moral rules, either male or female, may have unpleasant experiences either with the members of the local community or the court.

Nevertheless, the traditional Arab way of life is undergoing substantial changes in social, political, economic, and religious aspects. Cultural and moral practices may vary depending on the degree of secularization and economic development followed by the impact of education and modernization.       

Anti-Western Reactions by MENA Arabs  

The Arabs of MENA have long suspicion of former European colonial powers but above all the French and British who have been ruled the biggest portion of the region. Many Westerners have negative images and stereotypes about Middle Easterners and North Africans and their cultural contributions to the history of global civilization but it is true, especially regarding West European and North American mass media’s presentation about MENA and Arabs. However, after 9/11, aggressive US politics toward the region of MENA regarding its people, culture, and religion, became the foundation of anti-Western politics by the Middle Easterners and North Africans that declined both political and business relationships between MENA and the West.  

Such a process occurred in Iran which is a non-Arab country/nation, in 1979 when the US influence and political/military actions brought to the question the identity of Persian/Iranian culture to the point of a violent takeover of and hostage-taking at the US Embassy in Tehran. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that the Muslim terrorist actions among Islamic radicals arose primarily out of fear that Western cultural values would destroy traditional Arab culture. The results of an influx of Westerners into the region of MENA can be summarized from the Arab perspective as such:

  1. The Westerners express their alleged civilizational superiority followed by arrogance.
  2. The Westerners know the best answers to everything.   
  3. Many Westerners do not want to share the credit for what is accomplished by joint efforts.
  4. The majority of Westerners are constantly unable or even unwilling to respect and adjust to local Arab customs and cultural traditions.
  5. Many Westerners fail to innovate to meet the needs of local Arab culture, preferring to seek easy solutions founded on the conditions in their native countries.
  6. Westerners are often too imposing, aggressive, pushy, and rude.
  7. What makes Arabs very mad is the fact that the Americans and West Europeans are constantly providing much more financial aid and material support for Zionist Israel than for the Arab Palestinians and their human rights.

Finally, there are four proposals of possible peaceful cooperation between the people of MENA region and the Westerners which can contribute to solutions to current challenges in the Middle East and North Africa:

  1. The reconstruction of both Iraq and Afghanistan in the direction that their citizens would meet fundamental human rights, freedom, and dignity.
  2. The resolution of warfare between the Zionist Israel and the local autochthonous inhabitants of Palestine – Arab Palestinians.
  3. The resolution of the internal disputes between al-Fatah and Hamas.
  4. The modernization of socio-political-economic systems in MENA. 

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is from the author

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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***

“Today, the concept of stakeholder capitalism, as well as the ideas that the complex issues in our world can only be solved through public-private cooperation is finally becoming mainstream! Stakeholder responsibility on a corporate but also on a global level remains the fundamental underlying principle behind everything we are doing.”

Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW


Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

Is it a question of business and financial leaders adding their expertise to the problems facing the world to advance answers for the governments of the world? Or is it the other way around?

The World Economic Forum wrapped up its 24th annual meeting in Davos last Friday. The Davos leaders boasted about presentations on AI, the role of cities in bolstering sustainability, resistance and affordability, Central banks and digital currencies, insights into the geopolitics of the Middle East and Africa, and more. According to their website, the WEF provides “Crowdsource solutions for the world’s most important and pressing issues.” [2][3]

But the WEF no longer deliberates away in a vacuum of popular attention. In fact, the deliberations of the world’s business leaders and their allies in government is very much front and centre in the eyes of the prying public. And their talks, engaged behind closed doors, are stoking the fires of suspicion about what they are planning in the years ahead. [4]

The following video is a fake. Forged with the assistance of AI. But it pretty much sums up what the common man and woman thinks of the WEF:

 


  a

Is it a coincidence that farmers are being shut down due to the nitrous oxide their activities produce, but no one would even THINK of shutting down the financial gold rush springing from Artificial Intelligence which is expected to increase the consumption of energy. [5][6]

There are particular suspicions about the great quest to tackle climate change. Greta Thunberg and the message that carbon is “enemy number one” is hardly taken off of YouTube, Facebook and internet search engines the way criticism of mRNA Vaccines has been. In fact, critics of this position have been. [7][8]

Conventional climate change activism is NOT a threat to the elites. In fact, the history of the WEF from it’s start as the Club of Rome shows that their class WANTS the masses to think there is a global threat, apparently so that the solutions THEY provide will be embraced and not resisted. [9]

Problem. Reaction. Solution.

If climate change is the problem, what should we make of the solutions they provide. This is a question we will explore at some length in this week’s episode of the Global Research News Hour.

For the bulk of this week’s Global Research News Hour show, two figures who contribute regularly to Global Research, Peter Koenig and Julian Rose, weigh in on how the climate threat as posed by carbon is not what it appears (they are skeptics) and the role that is served in conjunction with pandemics and all the other threats facing the world and leading up to 2030.

We also let another Global Research writer, Elizabeth Woodworth weigh in with concerns about the WEF as undermining democracy, though coming from a position consistent with that of the overwhelming majority of published climate scientists.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020). Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Julian Rose is an organic farmer, writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is author of four books of which the latest ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ is a clarion call to resist the despotic New World Order takeover of our lives. Do visit his website for further information www.julianrose.info . He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Elizabeth Woodworth is highly engaged in climate change science and activism. She has published 42 articles on Global Research, is co-author of “Unprecedented Climate Mobilization”, “Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival,” and co-producer of the COP21 video “A Climate Revolution For All.” She is author of the popular handbook on nuclear weapons activism, “What Can I Do?” and the novel, “The November Deep”. For 25 years, she served as head medical librarian for the BC Government. She holds a BA from Queen’s and a Library Sciences Degree from UBC. She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 419)

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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:

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Notes: 

  1. https://www.weforum.org/about/world-economic-forum/
  2. https://www.weforum.org/
  3. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/01/davos-2024-key-takeaways-for-cities-and-local-economies/
  4. https://www.globalresearch.ca/limits-growth-climate-change-digitization-everything-worldwide-censorship-all-leading-wef-behemoth-cult-commanding-it/5818827
  5. https://www.globalresearch.ca/world-economic-forum-how-usurps-treaty-based-intergovernmental-institutions/5847073
  6. Ben Payton (December 4, 2023), ‘Power mad: AI’s massive energy demand risks causing major environmental headaches’, Reuters; https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/power-mad-ais-massive-energy-demand-risks-causing-major-environmental-headaches-2023-12-04/
  7. https://www.globalresearch.ca/illegal-collusion-between-government-big-tech-exposed/5793607
  8. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58831379
  9. https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/wef-54th-rejected/

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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Introductory Note

This year the Non Aligned Movement is chaired by Uganda’s President Musaveni who happens to be a faithful and longstanding proxy of the U.S.

From the mid-1980s, the Kampala government under President Yoweri Musaveni had become Washington’s African showpiece of “democracy”. Uganda had also become a launchpad for US sponsored guerrilla movements into the Sudan, the Congo and Rwanda. 

Musaveni was instrumental in supporting the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) led by Major General Paul Kagame who was head of military intelligence in the Ugandan Armed Forces. 

The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.  Washington’s hidden agenda consisted in establishing an American sphere of influence in a region historically dominated by France and Belgium.

There is No “Shared Global Affluence”. Today’s Non-Aligned Movement is still under the brunt of the Washington Consensus and its hideous “debt conditionalities”, which impose poverty, famine and despair throughout de Global South.

As outlined by Abayomi Azikiwe in his carefully researched analysis and historical review:

“the economic dominance of imperialist states continues well into the third decade of the 21st century” 

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 27, 2024

 

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A 19th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit was held in the East African state of Uganda on January 19-20.

This event was organized under the theme: “Deepening Cooperation for Shared Global Affluence.” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni assumed the leadership of the NAM taking over from the Republic of Azerbaijan.

This gathering took place amid worldwide outrage over the State of Israel’s present siege on the Palestinian people living in the Gaza Strip. Over 25,000 people have been killed since October 7 leaving tens of thousands more injured and wounded. As a result of the blanket bombing, shelling and ground invasion, the overwhelming majority of people living in Gaza have been displaced.

The Republic of Cuba, a founding member of the NAM in 1961 at their inaugural meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, during the most recent summit put forward a plan for resolving the security situation in Gaza. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, a political bureau member of the ruling Communist Party (PCC), called for an international team to be deployed to Gaza.

Cuba also reiterated its support for the lawsuit filed by the Republic of South Africa against Tel Aviv at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming that the settler-colonial state is in violation of the Genocide Convention of 1948. The Caribbean socialist state has been under a blockade by the United States since 1960 despite annual votes by the United Nations General Assembly demanding that the blockade led by Washington and Wall Street be lifted against the people of Cuba. Even though the Cuban people have been consistently targeted by the dominant imperialist country in the world, the government has excelled in numerous international solidarity projects in Latin America, Africa, Asia and other geopolitical regions.

In a report published by Granma International, the Official Voice of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee, it says:

“Cuba proposed that the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) support the urgent dispatch to the Gaza Strip of an international protection mission, authorized by the United Nations General Assembly, with the mandate to guarantee the security and protection of the civilian population and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid and food…. Its purpose would be to contribute to the protection of the rights of the Palestinian people, establishing the sovereign State of Palestine and the early entry of that State as a member of the United Nations, said the Cuban Foreign Minister in his speech, published on the Minrex website…. Also during the day, Rodríguez Parrilla participated in the Ministerial Preparatory Meeting of the XIX Summit of the NAM, in which he reiterated his unchanging solidarity with the Palestinian cause, and thanked the valuable support of the Movement to the just demand for the end of the illegal U.S. blockade of Cuba, as well as the united position against the infamous inclusion of the Island in the spurious unilateral list of State sponsors of terrorism, a fallacy that has a suffocating impact on our economy.”

In addition, the Cuban Foreign Minister proposed the convening of an international peace conference noting the real threats of broader global conflicts. Rodriguez also emphasized the government’s ongoing support for the right to self-determination for the people of Western Sahara still under the occupation of the Kingdom of Morocco.

The African Union (AU) and the NAM

Most African governments are members of the NAM constituting the largest bloc of states, 53, within the broader grouping. The AU, the 55 member-state continental organization, continues to emphasize the necessity of South-South unity.

With the presidency being in the hands of Uganda for the next three years, issues related to the AU will undoubtedly receive significant attention. African states have expressed their concern over the ongoing war in Ukraine and are demanding an immediate ceasefire along with a negotiated conclusion to the conflict between the Russian Federation and the government in Kiev.

Another international crisis prompted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) escalating war against the people in Gaza and the West Bank, has been a huge focus of the peoples of the globe. Millions have gone into the streets throughout North America, Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific to demonstrate their solidarity with Palestine.

AU Commission Chair Moussa Faki Mahamat condemned the IDF war being waged in Gaza while stressing the need for a ceasefire. The U.S., the main defenders and funders of Tel Aviv, has on repeated occasions voted in the UN Security Council and General Assembly against resolutions for a ceasefire.

An article published by the Associated Press on the NAM Summit in Uganda, reported that:

“Speaking during the meeting of heads of state at the week-long gathering, Mahamat asked the 120 member countries to demand international justice for the Palestinians. His remarks were echoed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who called for the release of all the hostages and ‘the resumption of talks on a just solution that will end the suffering of the Palestinian people.’ Ramaphosa further called for unhindered and expanded humanitarian access to allow for vital aid and basic services to meet the needs of everyone living in Gaza…. ‘This is necessary to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people,’ Ramaphosa said. At the start of the conference, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N. called on the members of the Non-Aligned Movement to put pressure on Israel to implement a cease-fire in Gaza after 100 days of war with Hamas.” 

The concluding document known as the Kampala Declaration addressed numerous issues impacting the world today. There was the stated support for the cause of the Palestinians and the condemnation of Israel and its actions in Palestine.

Other points addressed in the final statement also included an endorsement of the lawsuit filed by the African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa against the State of Israel; the demand that the UN Security Council be reformed to include African states as permanent members; the need to address public health concerns such as COVID-19, Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), Influenza strains, etc.; nuclear disarmament; gender equality; anti-racism; climate change; the unfairness of the international system of finance and trade; among other concerns.

History of the NAM

The Non-Aligned Movement grew out of the anti-colonial struggles for independence during the post-World War II period. The Afro-Asia summit held in Indonesia in 1955, known as the Bandung Conference, laid the groundwork for the eventual formation of the NAM in 1961.

NAM founders in 1961

Since the period between 1955-1961, there have been many more states which gained political independence from colonialism. However, despite these gains in the number of independent states in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, the economic dominance of imperialist states continues well into the third decade of the 21st century.

On the official website for the NAM there is a section on the history of the organization which emphasizes:

“Today, the work of NAM has been guided by the Bandung Principles – which caters mostly for the Movement’s political agenda. Over the years, however, economic cooperation and social and humanitarian issues have become central to the work of NAM. Since its founding, in line with the principles of the United Nations Charter, NAM has been instrumental in championing international peace and security. Its members have been a strong voice in the calls for: nuclear disarmament and the establishment of nuclear free zones; condemning and fighting terrorism in all its forms and manifestations; and supporting United Nations’ efforts towards peacekeeping and peacebuilding. NAM also played an important role in leading international efforts towards addressing the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic for a steady global recovery. Unlike other regional and international organizations, such as the United Nations or the African Union, NAM neither has a formal founding Charter, Act or Treaty, nor a permanent secretariat. Coordinating and managing the affairs of the Movement, therefore, is the responsibility of the country holding the Chairmanship.” 

This summit was significant considering the international movement away from the unipolar foreign policy approach of the U.S. and other imperialist states. Uganda also hosted the Group of 77 Plus China in the immediate aftermath of the 19th NAM Summit. Uganda will also serve in the capacity of chair of the organization whose governments represent 80 percent of the global population.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

Crise fronteiriça fomenta o separatismo no Texas

January 26th, 2024 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

A crise migratória nos EUA está a atingir níveis extremamente preocupantes, colocando em risco a integridade territorial do país. Em reação aos problemas nas fronteiras, o estado do Texas tomou recentemente uma importante iniciativa, recusando-se a cumprir ordens do governo federal e publicando um documento que poderia ser o primeiro passo para a separação da região.

O governador do Texas, Greg Abbott, publicou uma carta em 24 de janeiro afirmando que o pacto federal americano foi quebrado por Washington devido à inércia do governo em resolver a crise fronteiriça. Ele afirmou que o estado do Texas tomará todas as medidas necessárias para evitar o agravamento da crise e não obedecerá a nenhuma ordem do governo federal ou da Suprema Corte que exija um recuo nos esforços para deter a “invasão”.

A Abbott acusou formalmente o governo Biden de negligenciar a crise e até de violar as leis de migração dos EUA. Isto, na sua opinião, é motivo suficiente para reivindicar a ruptura do pacto de integração nacional, podendo os Estados passar a poder agir livremente e individualmente para resolver os seus problemas internos.

“O governo federal quebrou o pacto entre os Estados Unidos e os estados (…) O poder executivo dos Estados Unidos tem o dever constitucional de fazer cumprir as leis federais que protegem os estados, incluindo as leis de imigração em vigor neste momento. O Presidente Biden recusou-se a fazer cumprir essas leis e até as violou”, disse, acrescentando: “Já declarei uma invasão (…) para invocar a autoridade constitucional do Texas para se defender e proteger (…) Essa autoridade é a lei suprema do país e substitui quaisquer estatutos federais.”

Na verdade, este tipo de situação no Texas já era esperada. Poucos dias antes de Abbott publicar sua carta, a Suprema Corte decidiu que os agentes da patrulha fronteiriça deveriam remover as barreiras instaladas pelos texanos para impedir a entrada de imigrantes. A crise vinha aumentando na região desde o início de janeiro, quando os soldados da Guarda Nacional do Texas proibiram as autoridades federais de irem à fronteira, a fim de impedir que permitissem a entrada de mais imigrantes. Este conflito entre as autoridades locais e federais gerou uma atmosfera de polarização e descontentamento que culminou na recente declaração da Abbott.

O governador está firme na sua decisão de que as tropas do estado do Texas continuarão a proteger as fronteiras e a impedir a entrada de imigrantes, independentemente de qualquer decisão de Washington sobre o assunto. Como é sabido, o descaso no combate à imigração ilegal tem sido um dos principais aspectos da administração Biden desde a sua posse. Tanto por razões ideológicas, dada a mentalidade ultraliberal de Biden, como pela sua incompetência administrativa, o presidente tem sido incapaz de tomar decisões eficazes relativamente ao problema da entrada desenfreada de migrantes no país.

A imigração causou uma série de problemas graves em estados próximos da fronteira. Um inquérito recente realizado pela Rasmussen Reports revelou que dois terços dos cidadãos americanos consideram a atual crise migratória uma verdadeira “invasão” que coloca em risco a soberania nacional dos EUA. Por ser um estado fronteiriço, o Texas é uma das regiões mais afetadas por esta “invasão”, razão pela qual o governo local decidiu agir de forma independente para enfrentar a crise.

As consequências deste tipo de situação podem ser devastadoras para os EUA. Sabe-se que os sentimentos separatistas são comuns na região sul do país desde a Guerra Civil. Existem muitos movimentos no Texas e em estados próximos que exigem abertamente a separação de Washington, formando assim, novos países. Estas organizações e agendas são fortalecidas pelo enorme potencial econômico da região, com áreas produtoras de petróleo que poderiam gerar riqueza e soberania econômica para os “novos países”, caso realmente houvesse uma separação.

Agora, os americanos estão vendo um aumento nesta tendência. A medida da Abbott não é totalmente separatista, mas é um ato que mostra às autoridades americanas que a unidade nacional pode ser quebrada se esta for a única alternativa que resta para defender os interesses dos estados. Assim, Abbott desafiou o governo federal e mostrou que os EUA estão numa situação delicada, com a administração Biden a precisar de tomar medidas urgentes para evitar que a agenda separatista avance.

Na verdade, o caso mostra como Washington precisa urgentemente parar de se envolver em conflitos no exterior, passando a prestar atenção à sua própria situação interna. Os relatórios da inteligência americana alertam há anos sobre a possibilidade de uma guerra civil no país como resultado de tensões raciais e migratórias. Se o governo americano não tomar medidas excepcionais para resolver de uma vez por todas a situação nas fronteiras, a fragmentação territorial dos EUA tornar-se-á inevitável.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

Artigo em inglês : Border crisis foments separatism in Texas, InfoBrics, 25 de Janeiro de 2024

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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“There is no media in the world I have more contempt for than the Canadian Media. They literally work for the Canadian government. They are state media.” —Tucker Carlson, 24 January, 2024

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Tucker Carlson is in Alberta today to address audiences in Calgary and Edmonton. He will be joined on the stage at Calgary’s Telus Convention Centre by Alberta’s Premier, Danielle Smith. Premier Smith, elected to Alberta’s top job just 9 months ago, is pushing back against the Woke authoritarianism epitomized by the antics of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

An inductee into the perverse cult of Klaus Schwab’s WEF, Trudeau is obsessively attacking the health and viability of Alberta’s otherwise vibrant oil and gas sector.

Carlson’s visit comes just as Federal Judge Richard Mosley has condemned the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergency Act in February of 2021. The Emergency Act basically halted the normal operations of the Canadian government. The most recent incarnation of the War Measures Act allowed Trudeau and his main handler, Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, to notoriously seize the bank accounts of Truckers from across Canada.

These Truckers had famously converged in Ottawa to present a well reasoned critique of the lethal and draconian measures forced on Canadians in the name of fighting COVID-19.

The fact that a Federal Court has now decided that the Emergency Act was wrongfully imposed, has major legal and political ramifications for the Trudeau government, for the criminalized Truckers, and for Canadian citizens generally.

The Federal Ruling came down after the Tucker Carlson’s taping of a conversation with Gord Magill, a refugee from Canada living in upper New York state. Magill has been a Canadian Trucker although he did not take part in the legendary parking protest in Ottawa in the winter of 2021. Magill has published several editorials on Canadian issues in Newsweek.

Click here to watch the interview

One of the major subjects that Tucker and Gord Magill did discuss in the video was the persecution of four men singled out by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP announced their charges against the men on February 14 of 2021 just as the Trudeau government was about to announce the Emergency Act.

The police forces trying to do the bidding of the Trudeau government had desperately looked for Truckers at Ottawa who would fill the bill of “terrorists.” They found none even though they riffled through many parked trucks looking for loaded guns. Since 9/11 the mere utterance of the word “terrorism” seems sufficient to empower governments to crush various types of legitimate dissent in the name of protecting the public.

A government investigation in 2022 of the invocation of the Emergency Act turned up a note by Deputy Prime Minister Freeland that related the advice given her by a banker friend.

The banker proposed to Freeland that the Truckers should be “designated as a terrorist group,” that their “assets should be seized” and that they should thereby be “impaired.” (See Freeland’s note below which came up as part of her evidence in the Rouleau Inquiry.)

That scrawled note jotted down before Feb. 14 described precisely what happened subsequently. The Emergency Act also empowered police to violently beat protesters and run them down with horses

“This hand-scrawled note by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was recently tabled before the Emergencies Act inquiry. Probably the most notable thing is the top line in which she suggests providing a list of “mischief-makers” to Canadian banks – which did indeed happen. Or you can marvel that Canada’s second-in-command has the illegible penmanship of a badly sleep-deprived physician” (National Post)

The Trudeau government reached out to the Truckers demonstration at Coutts and came up with four men that the RCMP agreed to charge with the accusation that they had conspired to kill cops. These four men were denied bail by Liberal Party judges including Johnna Kubik. These political prisoners, convicted of nothing, have been consistently maltreated in jail for two years now.

The Coutts Four have been denied legal help by, for instance, the Calgary-based Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and the sketchy Democracy Fund associated with sketchy Rebel News. The Coutts Four have been taken away from their families and jobs and incomes. Nevertheless they have been required already to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay a long stream of legal bills in what is misleadingly described as a “pre-trial process.”

The Coutts Four have already been subjected to a number of weird unorthodox procedures that have put a cloud of suspicion on the whole process, but especially over the main Crown Prosecutor, Stephen Johnston. When secret evidence was accidentally released by the Crown to the lawyers for the accused, the lawyer for Tony Olienick accused the Crown Prosecutor, Stephen Johnstone, of committing “crime fraud.” This crime fraud, it was alleged, took the form of the directives given by Johnstone to the RCMP. The RCMP are apparently conceived of as Johnstones’ “clients” subject to “solicitor-client privilege.”

Olienick’s lawyer, Tonii Roulston, asked to be removed from the case after making accusations against the Crown Prosecutor. Did Ms. Roulston withdraw from the proceeding voluntarily or under duress?

The RCMP themselves are in a deep conflict of interest because they claim to be targets of a plot by the four accused men put together artificially onto a single trial to heighten the perception that they were all mutually engaged in a “conspiracy.” The RCMP themselves are curating the evidence in this murder trial that lacks any murdered victim.

Thus those curating the evidence are RCMP members operating on the principle that they themselves are the would-be victims of the unrealized actions that supposedly took place exclusively in the imaginations of those accused of thought crimes. The RCMP case involves testimony from unnamed police plants who secretly taped the accused in a scheme of obvious entrapment to bring about a desired political outcome in a heavily politicized case. It involved the production on Feb. 14 of a RCMP photo widely distributed in the media of odds and sods of weaponry gather who knows where and with proper chains of custody.

The photo of course is meant to mislead those who initially saw it in the newspaper beside the initial published accounts of the alleged crimes. The picture offered a (false) appearance proof that the police were dealing with an open and shut case. Now almost two years later it is becoming increasingly clear that there is nothing open and shut about this case. What is very clear, however, is the extreme bias of the police, the prosecutors and Trudeau’s bought-and-paid-for media who continue to hit obstacles in convicting the Coutts Four.

The origins of this tainted legal process go back to the Trudeau government’s need to come up with some evidence of terrorism to justify issuing the Emergency Act. This Emergency Act has now been deemed by a Federal Judge to have been illegal from the moment it was enacted. It is Trudeau who should by now be on trial if Canada was something other than a police state in the making.

Although the process against the Coutts Four now under way is frequently referred to as a “pre-trial procedure,” that characterization misrepresents what is really going on. In fits and starts the trial of the Coutts Four has in reality been going on for a long time already. If the process looks like a trial, acts like a trial, and makes noises like a trial, it is a trial.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s bought-and-paid-for media have been delivering the goods by conducting an outrageous ongoing trial-by-media of the Coutts Four.

The New York Times has been covering the story closely, probably with the view that this legal matter approximates the style of criminalization applied to the protesters at the US Capital on Jan 6, 2021.

The imperative of this trial-by-media is to paint the Coutts Four as “insurrectionists” in a disgraceful miscarriage where much of the malevolence can be traced back to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

See this, this, this and this.

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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Looking out at the World from Canada.

Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

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

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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CNN is reporting that “gigantic” waves “swamped a key military facility in the middle of the Pacific Ocean last weekend.” The rush of water, which can be seen here, occurred on Roi-Namur Island, which is part of Kawajalein Atoll, “which hosts a US military ballistic defense test site in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.”

But that big wave raises an important question? Why does the U.S. government need an empire of foreign military bases? Unfortunately, hardly anyone asks that question. A vast worldwide empire of foreign military bases has become an accepted and integral part of American life. We’ve all grown up under this empire and so it’s just considered to be normal.

But it’s anything but normal, at least not compared to our nation’s original founding governmental system, which eschewed large, permanent military establishments and rejected, fully and completely, the concept of a worldwide military empire.

According to this article by David Vine, associate professor of sociology at American University and author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, as of 2015 the United States maintained “nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad.”

I have read Vine’s book and I highly recommend it. I also recommend four books by Chalmers Johnson, who was a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and a former consultant to the CIA: Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic; Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic; and Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope.

Martin Luther King correctly pointed out that the U.S. government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Its empire of foreign military bases plays an important role in the death and destruction wreaked by America’s federal killing machine.

But there is also the domestic empire of military bases to consider. It too has become a normal and accepted part of the American life. No one asks the important questions: What are all those bases good for? What purpose do they serve? Why can’t they be closed and sold off?

I can understand why the U.S. government would establish military forts during the 19th century. They were used to protect towns and settlements from attacks by Native Americans.

But today, no one is in danger of attacks from Native Americans. Moreover, there is no possibility whatsoever of a foreign invasion of the United States. No nation-state has the money, resources, manpower, military force, supply lines, or even interest in crossing either the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans to invade America. There is also no possibility of an invasion by Canada or Latin America.

Terrorism? Those domestic military bases do nothing to prevent terrorist attacks, nor should we want them involved in domestic criminal offenses. Moreover, once the federal killing machine overseas is shut down, the threat of anti-American terrorism disappears.

So, I repeat: Why do we need all those domestic military bases? Think of the tax money we could save by closing them and selling them off.

Indeed, think of the tax money we could save by closing and dismantling not only America’s foreign and domestic empire of military bases but also the national-security state itself. The conversion of the federal government to a national-security state has proven to be a disaster for the American people. Given that the Cold War, which was the justification for the conversion, ended long ago, why can’t we have our founding system of limited government republic back, along with just a relatively small military force?

These are the types of questions that the American people need to be asking if we are to get our nation back on the right track — toward freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, delivers its Order on the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) on 26 January 2024, at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the seat of the Court. Session held under the presidency of Judge Joan E. Donoghue, President of the Court.

 

Click document below to read the ICJ ruling.

Measures to be adopted according to the ICJ ruling:

 

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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Thousands of Palestinians Forcibly Flee Khan Younis Under Israeli Bombing

Palestinians in Khan Younis have been made to forcibly flee as Israeli forces increase their bombing campaign of the neighbourhood. 

According to one journalist on the ground, many of the people there have already been displaced two or three times since the start of the war. 

Video footage showed elderly people and children carrying all of their belongings as they scramble to find safety. 

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Egypt Welcomes ICJ Ruling

Egypt has welcomed the ICJ ruling in favour of South Africa’s request to impose emergency measures against Israel over its war in Gaza, Reuters reported. 

The EU also said it expects a “full, immediate and effective implementation of the World Court’s orders on emergency measures in Gaza genocide case,” following the ruling.

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Scotland’s Humza Yousaf: ‘Killing and destruction in Gaza must stop’

Scottish leader Humza Yousaf reacted to the ICJ court ruling on Friday, saying that the message from it is clear.

“The killing and destruction in Gaza must stop. Urgent humanitarian assistance must be provided to prevent more suffering. Hostages must be released immediately,” he said in a post on X. 

He added that calls for a ceasefire must continue.

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Oxfam Calls on UK Government to Respect ICJ Court Ruling and ‘Cease Its Complicity’

The international charity, Oxfam, has welcomed Friday’s ICJ court ruling,  which requests Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the commission of all acts in relation to the articles of the Genocide Convention.

The charity called it a “crucial step towards recognizing the ongoing atrocities in Gaza and stopping the bloodshed,” that around 2 million Palestinians are subjected to. 

In a statement, the organisation said: “The UK government must respect the court ruling, and cease its complicity in the crisis, starting by immediately stopping arms sales to Israel given the risk of them being used to commit war crimes and calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.  Anything less will be a stain on the UK’s reputation as an upholder of international law.”

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Medics: Israeli Forces Continue to Target Gaza’s al-Amal Hospital

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Friday that Israeli forces are continuing to target the al-Amal Hospital and their headquarters in Khan Younis.

The organisation said that the attacks have been ongoing for five days, with intense shelling and gunfire in the hospital’s vicinity. 

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Turkey’s Erdogan Vows to Follow Up the Process on ICJ Ruling

Turkey’s president Erdogan welcomed the ICJ ruling on Friday, vowing to follow up on developments.

“I find the temporary injunction taken by the International Court of Justice regarding the inhumane attacks in Gaza valuable and welcome it,” he said. 

“We will continue to follow the process to ensure that war crimes committed against innocent Palestinian civilians do not go unpunished,” he added. 

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Director of UNRWA Says Israeli Attacks on Shelters Must Stop

Thomas White, the director of the UN agency Unrwa said that Israel’s attacks on buildings where “terrified civilians are sheltering,” are abhorrent, and must stop immediately. 

The statement came following an Israeli attack on a training centre in Khan Younis, where 12 Palestinians were killed and 75 wounded. 

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Spain Welcomes ICJ Ruling

Spain has issued a statement welcoming the ICJ ruling on Friday. 

“We welcome the decision of the International Court of Justice and call on the parties to implement the interim measures it has decreed,” Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said on X.

“We will continue to advocate for peace and an end to the war, the release of hostages, access to humanitarian aid and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, so that both nations can coexist in peace and security,” he added.

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Iranian Foreign Minister Says Israel Must be Brought to Justice

Iran’s foreign minister slammed Israel on Friday following the ICJ court ruling, saying that they must be brought to justice. 

“Today, the authorities of the fake Israeli regime… must be brought to justice immediately for committing genocide and unprecedented war crimes against the Palestinians,” foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on the X platform.

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Click here to read the full update.

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