Il Summit Usa-Russia, il 16 giugno a Ginevra, è stato definito dal presidente Biden «buono, positivo» e dal presidente Putin «abbastanza costruttivo». Dovremmo quindi sentirci un po’ rassicurati in una situazione in cui l’Europa è in prima linea in quello che la Nato definisce «il punto più basso della nostra relazione con la Russia dalla fine della guerra fredda»? I fatti ci dicono il contrario. Nel momento stesso in cui in Svizzera era in corso il Summit Usa-Russia, nel Baltico era in corso la Baltops 50, una delle 20 grandi esercitazioni militari Usa-Nato in Europa nel 2021.
La Baltops 50 è stata organizzata e diretta dal comandante delle Forze navali Usa-Africa con quartier generale a Napoli-Capodichino, l’Ammiraglio Robert Burke, che allo stesso tempo è a capo del Comando Nato di Lago Patria (JFC-Naples). Dal 6 al 18 giugno, oltre 4.000 militari con 40 navi e 60 aerei – appartenenti a 18 paesi membri e partner della Nato, tra cui l’Italia – si sono esercitati alla guerra aeronavale nel Baltico e nelle regioni circostanti», a ridosso del territorio russo. Hanno preso parte alla manovra navi da guerra e bombardieri anche a capacità nucleare, e, per la prima volta, è stato integrato nell’esercitazione il nuovo Centro Spaziale Nato.
Mentre era in corso questa grande esercitazione di guerra chiaramente diretta contro la Russia, nella conferenza stampa dopo il Summit il presidente Putin dichiarava: «Noi conduciamo le esercitazioni militari all’interno del nostro territorio, non portiamo i nostri equipaggiamenti e il nostro personale vicino ai confini degli Stati Uniti d’America, come invece stanno facendo ora vicino ai nostri confini gli Usa e i loro partner». La dislocazione geografica delle forze, soprattutto di quelle nucleari, è di primaria importanza: un missile tattico dislocato a 10.000 km di distanza non può colpire l’obiettivo ma, se dislocato a 1.000 km, ha lo stesso effetto distruttivo di un missile intercontinentale.
La Dichiarazione dei due presidenti sulla «stabilità strategica», che include l’estensione del Nuovo Trattato Start per il controllo delle armi nucleari, sarà vanificata se gli Usa, come hanno in programma, installeranno in Europa nuove armi nucleari «tattiche». Questa e altre questioni chiave sono state ignorate dai media che, secondo la regia di Washington, hanno usato il Summit quale una sorta di processo, con Putin sul banco degli imputati.
Pubblico ministero il Presidente degli Stati uniti che, dopo aver rifiutato di tenere la tradizionale conferenza stampa congiunta, non ha come Putin solo risposto alle domande, ma ha presentato una sua relazione sul Summit. Secondo quanto riferisce, Biden ha detto a Putin come reagisce quando vede violare i diritti umani in Russia e altrove: «Come potrei essere il presidente degli Stati Uniti d’America e non parlare contro la violazione dei diritti umani? Difendere le libertà fondamentali fa parte del DNA del nostro paese». Lo dichiara solennemente l’attuale Presidente degli Stati Uniti, il democratico Joseph Biden che nel 2001 sostenne la guerra del presidente repubblicano Bush in Afghanistan e, nel 2002, promosse una risoluzione bipartisan che autorizzava il presidente Bush a invadere l’Iraq con l’accusa (poi dimostratasi falsa) che esso possedeva armi di distruzione di massa.
Lo dichiara solennemente Joseph Biden che, quale vicepresidente dell’amministrazione Obama, è stato uno degli artefici delle guerre Usa-Nato contro la Libia e la Siria, del sostegno ai gruppi fondamentalisti islamici per scardinare questi paesi dall’interno, dell’impiego dei neonazisti in Ucraina per il putsch che ha aperto il nuovo confronto con la Russia, della «kill list» comprendente persone di tutto il mondo che, giudicate nocive per gli Stati uniti, erano segretamente uccise (The New York Times, President Obama’s Kill List, 29 maggio 2012), Guerre e operazioni segrete che hanno provocato, direttamente e indirettamente, milioni di morti e le peggiori violazioni dei diritti umani. Non mancano però i buoni sentimenti: in un lungo necrologio ufficiale su Twitter (riportato per intero dall’Ansa), il presidente Biden annuncia: «I nostri cuori sono pesanti oggi mentre vi facciamo sapere che il nostro amato pastore tedesco, Champ, è morto in pace a casa».
June 22nd, 2021 by Center For Biological Diversity
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A coalition of wildlife advocacy groups, represented by the non-profit environmental law firm Earthjustice, today asked the U.S. Forest Service to issue new protections for wolves in designated wilderness areas following Idaho and Montana’s enactment of a rash of aggressive anti-wolf laws.
The groups’ petition, submitted to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and top Forest Service officials, asks the agency to enact measures to protect wolves in National Forest wilderness areas from new Idaho and Montana laws authorizing use of professional contractors and private reimbursement programs resembling 19th-Century wolf bounties to dramatically reduce wolf populations in the two states.
During their 2021 sessions, the legislatures of Idaho and Montana both enacted harsh anti-wolf laws that target up to 1,800 wolves across the two states. One goal of the laws is to artificially inflate elk populations to levels last seen in the mid-1990s, before wolves were reintroduced to their historic range in the Northern Rockies.
“A wilderness is supposed to be a wild place governed by natural conditions, not an elk farm,” said Earthjustice attorney Timothy Preso. “We are calling on the Forest Service to prevent Montana and Idaho from taking the wild out of wilderness through their aggressive wolf-removal campaigns.”
The groups’ petition focuses on a guarantee in the 1964 Wilderness Act that the Forest Service must manage designated wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, … retaining its primeval character and influence, … which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.” New laws that authorize professional contractors and subsidized trappers to drive down wolf populations threaten to degrade wilderness conditions by upsetting the balance of predator and prey and eliminating a keystone wildlife species that is an icon of the wilderness landscape.
The petition asks the Forest Service to issue new regulations and closure orders to prevent wolf killing by professional and subsidized hunters and trappers across nearly 8 million acres of designated wilderness in Idaho and Montana, including such flagship areas as the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwest Montana and the Frank Church-River of No Return and Selway-Bitterroot Wildernesses in central Idaho.
“Wolves need wildernesses to serve as a refuge where they can be safe from the slaughter they face across Idaho and Montana,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Protecting wilderness requires the Forest Service to also protect wolves, which are so ecologically important to our national forests.”
“The state-sanctioned killing of wolves in Idaho and Montana threatens to needlessly damage the natural balance within our wilderness areas in these states for years to come,” said McCrystie Adams, managing attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. “We urge the U.S. Forest Service to abide by its duty and take immediate action to safeguard the unique character of our wilderness areas against these states’ wolf-killing measures.”
“The wild Clearwater region is the northern half of the largest relatively intact ecosystem in the lower 48 states,” said Gary Macfarlane, ecosystem defense director for Friends of the Clearwater. “Wolves and other species make places like the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness truly wild. This petition seeks to keep it that way.”
“Dispatching trappers and private contractors to cruelly and ruthlessly kill wolves on public lands threatens both the survival of the species and the character of the wilderness areas where they range,” said Nicholas Arrivo, managing attorney for the Humane Society of the United States. “The Forest Service must take action to mitigate the damage that Idaho and Montana’s reckless wolf-killing legislation will cause.”
“The Forest Service has long recognized that the presence of the Northern Rockies’ treasured wolves on the landscape enhances and preserves congressionally designated wilderness areas,” said Keisha Sedlacek, director of regulatory affairs for the Humane Society Legislative Fund. “The agency must carry out Congress’ intent to protect wolves from commercially driven slaughter.”
“The Montana Wildlife Federation supports ethical, fair chase hunting of wolves, but this is anything but ethical or fair chase,” said Nick Gevock, conservation director of Montana Wildlife Federation. “Paying contractors to go into wilderness areas and kill wolves amounts to an all-out eradication effort that harkens back to the 19th Century. These are wild areas that offer some of the best hunting in the country for all species, and these moves degrade that. It’s disgraceful and it needs to be stopped.”
“Wolves are essential to the overall health of ecosystems, but Montana and Idaho’s new laws aim to decimate their populations in the Northern Rockies. We cannot allow the modern equivalent of a bounty system for wolf killing to operate in wilderness areas— the very places meant to provide refuge for wildlife to thrive,” said Dan Ritzman, director of lands, water and wildlife at the Sierra Club. “With the extinction crisis bearing down, we need wilderness areas to remain intact and in support of life-sustaining biodiversity more than ever.”
“Wilderness is a place where natural processes should prevail, and the howl of the wolf should echo from peak to vale,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “Healthy populations should be allowed to thrive throughout the range of the gray wolf, and their ability to flourish should not be impeded by commercially-driven killing, especially in Wilderness.”
“Montana and Idaho have declared a despicable war on wolves and on the very idea of Wilderness itself,” said George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch. “The Forest Service has the authority and mandate to protect these special places and their wildlife. It needs to put a stop to this ugly slaughter.”
“Americans need to know that wolves can exist unmolested by man in our few remaining wildernesses,” said Marc Cooke, representative of Wolves of the Rockies.
The petitioner groups include the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the Clearwater, Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society Legislative Fund, International Wildlife Coexistence Network, Sierra Club, Western Watersheds Project, Wilderness Watch, and Wolves of the Rockies.
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Featured image: Photo courtesy of Jacob W. Frank, National Park Service.
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The foreign ministers of Turkey and Ukraine, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Dmytro Kuleba, met during the weekend’s three-day Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey to discuss yet further strengthening bilateral military cooperation.
“Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu assured that Turkey would continue to support Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration in all possible ways. The ministers discussed the possibilities of enhanced cooperation between the Ukrainian and Turkish navies which will help implement NATO standards in the Ukrainian Navy, increase their defense capabilities and interoperability with NATO member states, and generally strengthen cooperation between the countries for security in the Black Sea.”
Foreign Minister Kuleba expressed gratitude to Turkey for its steadfast support for its admission to NATO leading up to and during the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels. Ankara’s backing for Ukraine’s NATO accession is second to none in the 30-nation military bloc.
Kuleba told reporters at the conference that his nation is purchasing Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones “because Turkish drones are very good,” and very good precisely in this context:
“Drones are needed to deter Russia so that Russia thinks twice, before planning, any escalation or any large-scale attack on Ukraine.”
The foreign minister added that Turkey and Ukraine are collaborating “very closely” on exploiting the issue of Crimean Tatars to give Moscow an additional headache. Turkey, fresh from supporting the 44-day Azerbaijani war against Nagorno-Karabakh, would surely not object to replicating the model of “liberating” a Turkic/Muslim brother people from Russian occupation. Ukraine’s designation of Crimea, one which Turkey faithfully echoes, is that of temporarily-occupied territory: the same way Turkey views that portion of Nagorno-Karabakh not yet “liberated,” and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which its Georgian ally also proclaims occupied territories.
Turkey is accommodating Ukraine’s military buildup, assisting its war in the Donbass, facilitating its entrance into NATO and preparing it to confront Russia in the Black Sea as it incites Tatar separatism in Crimea.
The Turkish and Ukrainian foreign ministers also discussed plans for the impending 10th meeting of the High-Level Strategic Council chaired by presidents Volodymyr Zelensky and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the next meeting of the two nations’ Quadriga format consisting of the defense and foreign ministers of both countries.
After the April 10 meeting, the web page of the Ukrainian president confirmed that “all aspects of the strategic partnership between the two countries were considered at today’s meeting.” Zelensky was cited emphasizing commitments to joint work in the energy sphere and in weapons manufacturing. The energy factor involves among other matters the prospect of Ukraine connecting with the 1,100-mile Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline running from the Caspian Sea region to Turkey.
“National coordinators discussed ways to deepen cooperation between Ukraine and Turkey in the field of security and defense to restore stability and security in the Black Sea region, and to further develop cooperation in the defense industry. A separate topic of the consultations was the current situation on the Crimean peninsula temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation and the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions….The participants in the consultations exchanged views on the prospects for resolving conflicts in the regions of the Middle East, North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus.”
“[My] greatest fear is on a regional level. It is no secret that Ukraine is preparing for war or at least triggering an armed conflict in Russian-controlled Donbass with Turkish and Western blessings. It has been two weeks since I began monitoring the Ukrainian and Russian army’s supply routes and deployment of heavy weapons near Donbass. Kyiv, motivated by the Turkish and Azerbaijani victory in Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh], tried to establish military relations with Turkey and bought Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones. Russia, aware that it may engage in a two-front war and knowing well that Armenia cannot defend itself against another Turkish-Azerbaijani invasion, is consolidating its presence in southern Armenia by building military posts and reopening the abandoned airfield of Sisian in Syunik.”
“We have made our position in regards to attempts to pull Ukraine into NATO very unambiguous. I have no doubts that serious, responsible states understand very clearly, what we mean. We plan another contact within our regular dialogue with the Turkish colleagues. I believe we will discuss this topic as well, of course.”
A couple of days earlier, when asked about Turkey considering opening a military base in conquered Nagorno-Karabakh – the statement was made by the Turkish president himself and published in the Turkish press – Lavrov shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t respond to rumors.”
“Turkey and Turkey’s commitment to its independent course of development, which is quite firm, are generally the subject for heightened attention and, perhaps, concern at NATO. And, of course, this is a subject of US concern and the way the United States is trying to raise its voice at Ankara…obviously indicate that Washington does not like how [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is confidently leading Turkey forward and that they would prefer a more compliant Turkey.”
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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On June 23, the United Nations General Assembly will vote to condemn the six-decade-long United States embargo of Cuba. Again.
The world has been doing this since 1992. In 2019, 187 countries supported the motion, with only three (the US, Israel and Brazil) opposing.
What makes this year’s vote more pressing, and more distressing, is that US President Joe Biden—who vowed during last year’s presidential campaign he’d reverse 240 Trump administration measures that “inflicted harm on the Cuban people and [did] nothing to advance democracy and human rights”—is now making life worse instead of better for the Cuban people.
In May, Biden renewed Trump’s determination that Cuba is not “cooperating fully” in US anti-terrorism efforts. It’s a bogus claim that has everything to do with winning favour with South Florida voters and nothing to do with anti-terrorism or reality.
But it inflicts harm on the Cuban people by penalizing companies and countries that dare trade with the socialist island state.
The original intent of what is now the longest lasting trade embargo in modern history was to force regime change in Cuba. In 2018, the United Nations calculated the embargo had cost Cuba over $130 billion.
The US has not achieved its regime change ambition. But it has succeeded in making life ever harder for the Cuban people.
Cuba is facing especially difficult times. Tourism has dried up. COVID continues. The embargo exacerbates every hardship.
Consider just a few examples.
Because of the embargo, Cuba has to source supplies from around the world instead of its more convenient (and cheap) next-door neighbour. But global suppliers, nervous about US extra-territorial laws, often refuse to trade with Cuba. If they do, they tack on a large markup to cover their risk. The US government has also slapped sanctions on dozens of companies and financial institutions simply for doing business with Havana.
But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the escalating embargo is its escalating impact on the health of Cubans.
In 1997, the American Association for World Health issued a detailed 300-page report, subtitled “Denial of Food and Medicine” which condemned the “de facto embargo on medical supplies” that “has wreaked havoc” on the Cuban medical system.
It’s worse now.
When two traditional European suppliers of ventilators for Cuban hospitals—IMT Medical AG and Acutronic—were purchased by an American company recently, for example, they immediately announced they would no longer sell to Cuba.
Last year, when the Cuban government sought to update contracts with US-based drug companies, pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly refused to have further commercial dealings with the island. Elsewhere, Bayer claimed its licence no longer permitted it to deal with Cuba, and Pfizer and Merck Sharp didn’t even bother to respond to requests to purchase badly needed medicines.
Last March, as COVID spread across the world, a Chinese company, Alibaba, tried to donate badly needed ventilators, diagnostic kits and masks to Cuba. But the major shareholder in the airline it hired to deliver those medical supplies was American. Fearing US retaliation, it refused to fly them to Cuba.
In April, several Swiss banks (UBS, Banque Cler and Basler Kantonalbank) also fearing sanctions, refused to transfer funds so local organizations there could purchase testing equipment and personal protective equipment for Cuba.
In January, Congressman James McGovern—who described US efforts to block humanitarian assistance to Cuba as an “outrage”—urged Biden to “act early, quickly and comprehensively” to reverse all Trump-imposed anti-Cuba measures and “immediately end the application of any sanctions against food, medicine and other humanitarian assistance to Cuba.”
He hasn’t.
Nor has Biden responded to a March letter signed by 80 House Democrats calling for an immediate end to restrictions on travel and travel remittances. “With the stroke of a pen, you can assist struggling Cuban families and promote a more constructive approach,” they wrote.
When Biden was vice president, his boss, Barack Obama, recognized the obvious and, in 2014, declared US efforts to isolate Cuba a failure. “It’s time for a new approach,” he said.
That is even more true today. The question is, will Joe Biden finally listen to the united voice of the world?
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Stephen Kimber is a professor of journalism at the University of King’s College and the author of 11 books, including the award-winning What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five.
John Kirk, a professor emeritus of Latin American studies at Dalhousie University, is the author or co-editor of 18 books on Latin America.
Featured image: Plaza de la Revolución, Havana. Photo by Gilbert Sopakuwa/Flickr.
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Peter McCullough, MD, MPH appears on the Ingraham Angle on June 21, 2021 to explain why we don’t need to panic about the “Delta variant” and what younger individuals should know about the mRNA vaccines.
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The media focus on the Summit meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has to a certain extent crowded out news about the new government in Israel, headed by hardline nationalist Naftali Bennett. In those media outlets that are actually discussing the change there is an odd sort of perception that Israel’s new government will have to adjust to the new regime in Washington. That would imply that the Israelis will have to mitigate some of their more outrageous behavior to accommodate themselves to Biden’s intention to take actions that will be disapproved of in Jerusalem, to include a possible rapprochement with Iran over its nuclear program and a White House reengagement with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015.
The New York Times has an interesting article written by its Washington bureau diplomatic correspondent Michael Crowley with contributions from its new correspondent in Jerusalem Patrick Kingsley. The article is entitled “Shift in Israel Provides Biden a Chance for Better Ties” with a sub-heading that reads “The departure of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister is a relief for Democrats, but Iran and the Palestinians could test Mr. Biden’s relations with a fragile new Israeli government.”
The article argues that the fact that Biden did not call Netanyahu for three months after his own inauguration but called Bennett within three hours is significant. In the phone call Bennett reportedly blamed Netanyahu for “poisoning” the relationship with the United States, which should surprise no one as that was one of the issues hammered at repeatedly by Bennett during his own electoral campaign.
But one has to look beyond that and ask where is the evidence that Netanyahu’s admittedly acidic personality and arrogance led to any retribution by the White House, either under Barack Obama, Donald Trump or Joe Biden? It was generally reported and probably quite correct that Obama deeply disliked Netanyahu, even once being caught on an open mike speaking to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and regretting the fact that he had to interact with the petulant Israeli Prime Minister every week. Yet Obama then turned around and did something that no American President had ever done, arranging to give the Israeli’s a guaranteed $38 billion in military assistance over the course of ten years. The money was not conditional on Israeli behavior, did not reflect actual US interests, and was then sweetened by another half billion per year to support the Jewish state’s Iron Dome air defense system.
In 2015 the Obama Administration did indeed enter into the JCPOA, a multilateral agreement to monitor and limit Iran’s existing nuclear program, a move that was strongly opposed by Israel, but the only time the White House actually demonstrated any annoyance with Israel was when it abstained on a United Nations vote critical of the Jewish state’s settlements shortly before Obama left office. And it should be observed that Obama was duly punished by Israel for his bad attitude, with Netanyahu showing up at a joint session of Congress to denounce the impending Iran pact in March 2015. Bibi received twenty-nine standing ovations from a completely brainwashed gathering of the “peoples’ representatives.”
And then there is Donald Trump, who was probably the most pro-Israeli president in US history. Trump promoted Israeli interests repeatedly, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, de facto approving eventual incorporation of the Palestinian West Bank into Israel, and assassinating a senior Iranian general while also turning a blind eye to illegal settlement expansion and bombing attacks on both Syria and Lebanon. The US also repeatedly used its United Nations veto to prevent any criticism of Israel and its policies. Trump’s Ambassador to Israel David Friedman was notorious for his pander to Israeli interests, approving harsh measures against Palestinians and war crimes directed against its neighbors, so much so that he was perceived as a spokesman-apologist for Israel rather than the US.
Not much “poison” in the relationship as reflected by facts on the ground, is there? The money kept flowing, the political support hardly wavered, and the United States government at all levels could hardly stop gushing about how the Jewish state was a “democracy” and a “close ally,” both of which assertions were and are not true.
So now we come to Biden and talk about a reset. The Times oddly concedes that “The change in government in Israel will hardly wipe away deep differences with the Biden administration: The right-wing Mr. Bennett is ideologically closer to Mr. Netanyahu than to Mr. Biden. And it did not make the longstanding issues in the Middle East any less intractable. But the early interactions suggest a shift in tone and an opportunity, analysts said, to establish a less contentious relationship, with potential implications for dealing with Iran, the Palestinians and the wider region.”
Excuse me, but Bennett ran on a very hard line. He opposes any nuclear agreement with Iran and will not permit anything like a Palestinian state. He has been in office only a short time and has already approved airstrikes against targets in Syria and Gaza as well as a march by thousands of settlers through Palestinian East Jerusalem calling for “Death to Arabs.” A change in tone might be welcome, but as the United States already supinely agrees to support everything claimed by Israel, what will it mean on the ground? Nothing. And the “contentious relationship” is likewise hard to find. The thunder heard along the Potomac several weeks ago consisted of Congress and the White House’s synchronized chanting of “Israel has a right to defend itself!” And then there is the Iranian nuclear deal, which seems to be slipping away as Secretary of State Tony Blinken seemingly adds “conditions” to US reentry. So what are, in reality, the deep differences between Jerusalem and Washington that will be more manageable with “better tone?”
The Times argues perhaps more credibly that the damage has been done re the Israeli government relationship with the Democratic Party itself. It says “Mr. Biden has long considered Mr. Netanyahu a friend, albeit one with whom he often disagrees. But many administration officials and Congressional Democrats viscerally disdain the ousted Israeli leader, whom they came to see as a corrosive force and a de factopolitical ally of Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump.”
Excuse me yet again, but such thinking is pie in the sky. To be sure a handful of Democratic Party progressives have come down hard on Israel’s recent slaughter of Gazans, but those who have any real power in the party have not voiced a single criticism of the war crimes committed. Biden might have been able to intervene to shorten the conflict, but he did nothing in reality to put pressure on Israel. His view of the Palestine problem is to give them a state though he is inevitably fuzzy on the details and will put no pressure on the Israelis to take any peace initiatives. In short, he and the Israelis will likely work behind the scenes to reduce the tension so there is no more mass killing and therefore no more negative media. If they are successful, that will make the Palestinians go away.
Joe Biden has called himself a “Zionist” and is proud of it and his first move after Israel was through killing Arabs was to send them $735 million on top of what they already receive from the US taxpayer. And, most important to him is all those Jewish donors whose hands are clutching their checkbooks while their hearts are in Israel, contributing something like two-thirds of all the money going to the Democratic Party. They are led by Hollywood producer Israeli-American Haim Saban who has said unambiguously that he is a “one issue guy and that issue is Israel.” In a sense, Washington is also run by a duopoly that has “one issue” in foreign policy and that issue is also Israel.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
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The following commentary looks at the QUAD alliance in great detail to understand India’s position within this alliance and the more significant geopolitical relevance and significance. This article also examines the complex politics of the Asia-Pacific and the role the US partnership has to play in this complex setup.
Quad – is there anything in the name? There are many talks; some would call it to hype about the “Quad” these days. The Quad is a semi-formalized grouping organized by the USA involving Japan, Australia – and India. Without the USA to organize it, there would be no Quad.
Geostrategy is an excellent old tool for evaluating the Quad. To start, let us look at the map. Does India have common borders for shared army operations with Japan or Australia, or the USA? No – far from. Do these countries share “common waters” for India’s navy to operate in with them? Not at all – except, of course, if one thinks that all waters in the world are territorial waters of the USA. Do these countries share a common air space? Not that either.
What about a mutual logistics chain? No, not even that. Any Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC) between India and Japan would, in case of conflict, be cut off in the South China Sea, which China controls. Is India reliant on US-Japanese-Australian armament producers? No – fortunately not.
Does India need the US F-35 aircraft or the US Patriot / THAAD missile systems? No – they are nearly worthless. Is the Quad a kind of alliance where Japan will guarantee to come to India’s aid? No. Is that about to change? No. Is there a grand strategy, cultural heritage or big vision tying India to Japan, Australia, and the USA? Far from. Very far from. The US has decided to strive for US global primacy for the indefinite future. India is and always will be against the US’ agenda of unipolar primacy. China is rising, and that is the problem of the USA. It is all about size.
Shortly after the Soviet Union disappeared, on 8 March 1992, the US Department of Defence in the Pentagon developed a new global objective for the USA:
“… the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asiaor the territory of the former Soviet Union.” (emphasis added)
Evidently, the U.S. objective was to continue US primacy indefinitely by ensuring that no other power would ever emerge or be able to emerge to rival the USA.
The US strategy of thwarting any new rival power from emerging is consistent with all US foreign policy and political actions since then. Moreover, it covers the whole world, including all of Europe, China—and even India.
What China does or does not do is evidently only an excuse for the USA. Since 1992, the USA has accepted no power to rival or surpass it. The real problem for the US is simply that China is rising and will soon surpass the USA. They can always invent further arguments in each case. China is, of course, a concern for India, too, especially due to the old wounds about an unsettled border. But we must remember that India is rising too. One day in this century, India will surpass the USA.
This is India’s vision, and the USA will be against it. There is no shared strategic vision. The Quad has no material content. When something is devoid of material content, what remains is pure imagination.
This is why I call the Quad a thing from Disneyland. Despite being devoid of material content, the Quad has been sold to the global media as something “new”. The Quad is a PR operation for influence. India already has options to work together with the USA in naval exercises, special forces methods, intelligence, etc. One of the objectives of the American Quad hype about “shared values” is to sell more US weapons like the F-35, which are decidedly not what India needs (or can afford). You are always invited to spend your money. There is no need for a “Quad”. India should, of course, be open to security cooperation with all relevant countries — the USA, Japan, and Australia. And not only with them but also with Russia and NATO. Even with Pakistan, one day, when you find peace together in your shared South Asian family.
Is the USA a Valuable Partner?
The USA has a lot of military expertise, technology, experience, practice, and intelligence. India should learn everything there is to learn from US “expertise”. However, it is worth noting that the US has not won a major war since 1945. There must be a reason for that. The Korean war ended in 1953 with a tie. The USA could not even win in Korea.
Vietnam was a significant defeat for the USA in 1975. The only winner after two US wars against Iraq was Iran. And now, the USA has lost its longest war ever in Afghanistan.
What is wrong with the US military? India needs to ask this question.
One thing is that the USA is obviously fighting the wrong wars – wars of (bad) “choice”. The USA also has unconditional and unattainable aims. The US also lacks a sense of equal partnership with other peoples and cultures globally, especially non-European cultures. It is also worth noting that the USA since 1945—except for minor actions like Grenada—has had nothing but bad military outcomes despite the American use of overwhelming military force. Enormous or oversized efforts and adverse US outcomes must indicate that the USA has an ineffective and deficient military. The most effective army in Europe was Germany until 1945.
In his book “Fighting Power”, Martin van Creveld compares the performances of the German and US armies during WW II. Measured on several parameters, Martin van Creveld consistently found that the German Army during WW II was widely superior to the US Army in fighting power. Japan learned from Germany already in the late 19th century. Did the USA make a comprehensive effort to learn and adopt the German military’s methods, thinking, traditions, and doctrines?
No. The USA in World War I copied French methods, a static programmed thinking with amassed use of artillery (today bombardment from the air) and less movement, which led to defeat for France in two world wars. The USA back then also had a lack of competent officers and soldiers. Therefore, the USA developed enormous oversized military staff, detailed planning for how those in contact with the adversary should act in minor detail.
Precisely the opposite of the “Auftragstaktik” which Gerhard von Scharnhorst instituted in Prussia, Germany, building on well-educated officers and soldiers, who were given a mission (Auftrag), had high education, trust from above, and leeway to act optimally in the ever-changing circumstances of conflict, as long as they pursued the “commander’s intent”. Carl von Clausewitz was a pupil of Scharnhorst.
It is a well-known phenomenon that Generals often prepare to fight the last war over again. I will assert that the USA is mentally still fighting wars of the past. The US Pacific War of 1941-45 was won with massive strategic bombing (the B-29) and big aircraft carriers. Since 1950, the B-29 were upgraded to the B-52, which has been a backbone of US air strategy ever since. The US aircraft carriers are also more significant than they were in 1945. But basically, the structure of the US strategic setup is the same till today, 76 years later.
The USA now (with Biden) is also re-fighting the Cold War over again. The re-fighting of a new Cold War is also evident in the title and content of the “Longer Telegram” published in the Atlantic Council by a US government-related source called “Anonymous”. The “Longer Telegram” in the title, aim, and general approach overtly references George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram” about containment of the Soviet Union, which kicked off the first Cold War on 22 February 1946.
This time, however, the USA will not prevail victorious in a Cold War. Biden is making a fatal mistake of trying to repeat it. As Kishore Mahbubani rightly points out, China is better prepared internally and better integrated with the world economy than the USA.
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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 Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden. At the time of appointment, he was the youngest and the first non-German in that top position within Mercedes-Benz’ worldwide sales organization. He writes regularly for the Russian International Affairs Council.
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Stanley Milgram conducted a psychological experiment in 1961 that was truly mind-numbing in terms of revealing the depths of evils people are able to commit in order to comply with authority. Referred to as the Milgram experiments, the aim of the study was to see how far participants were willing to go when they were given orders that were appalling and unconscionable. The experiment involved one authority figure who donned a lab coat, participants who were instructed to electrocute someone each time that person got an answer wrong and an actor who pretended to writhe in pain and scream each time he or she received shocks.
Participants were shown the electric chair the person they thought they were shocking was strapped into; they even went as far as giving participants mild shocks to convince them that the exercise was real. Once the participants were manipulated to believe that the shocks they were about to give to the recipient were authentic, they were separated by a partition to ensure that the participants could only hear the agonizing pleas for mercy not see the whole thing was staged. Each time the actor who was supposedly sitting in an electric chair answered a question incorrectly, the authority figure instructed participants to press a button that supposedly delivered a shock to the person who got the answer wrong.
Astonishingly, every participant administered at least 300-volts to the person they thought they were shocking—a level so high that it has the potential of inducing severe harm or even death. What was even more shocking, excuse the pun, is that 65% of participants complied with the lab coat wearing overseers and delivered a lethal 450-volts, depending on the Amps, to the poor soul they believed was being electrocuted. Each time participants resisted and wanted to stop upon hearing the person they thought was getting shocking scream out in anguish and banging the wall in agonizing pain, the authority figure leveraged his status and ordered them to keep torturing the out of sight subject.
Milgram conducted these experiments because he wanted to see if the sheer number of Germans who complied and followed orders during the era of Hitler was an outlier or a universal human trait. What was discovered through his experiments, as unethical as they were, is that regular people have an innate ability to commit mass-atrocities not out of wonton desire but because they are being compelled to do so by people in a positions of power. Milgram used a scientific method to arrive at a conclusion that anyone who studies genocides understands very well; opinion leaders are able to condition society to commit unspeakable acts of terror against their fellow citizens through division, fear and indoctrination.
Human beings are able to commit unspeakable acts of terror against their fellow humans when they are given orders by depraved leaders
Milgram’s illuminating results are very germane to what is taking place at this precise moment. Authority figures—from heads of state like Biden to unelected technocrats like Fauci and beyond—weaponized their status and clout to condition billions of people around the world to be paralyzed by fear, give up their freedoms and eventually turn themselves into lab animals by receiving experimental “vaccines” into their arms. The unethical treatments that Milgram subjected participants in his study to is nothing compared to the criminal ways that the ruling class have conducted a psychological operation against the global population over the past 18 months.
Instrumental in this malicious biotech driven scheme were medical professionals who were convinced to take part either out of greed or out of fear of repercussion. There is a reason why Milgram had the authority figures in his experiments wear lab coats; doctors have a nearly unparalleled ability to convince people to follow their advice even if they feel unsure about the instructions they are being given. This almost God-like power to oblige society to act without questioning is the reason that doctors were enlisted from the outset in order to effectuate this insane mass-“vaccination” campaign. Such is the case with Dr. Leana Wen—who is intimately associated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—who is outrageously recommending that children get “vaccinated” even though Covid-19, outside of outlier cases, has not impacted the young. Nuremberg Trials 2.0 cannot come fast enough!
There's a pervasive narrative that kids aren't at risk from #covid19, and that with declining infection rates, authorizing vaccines for younger children is no longer a priority.
Realizing that society has lost trust in politicians and mainstream media, biotech corporations along with Bill and Melinda Gates funded and paraded a litany of doctors to impel us to socially isolate, mask up and ultimately get jabbed. They turned to the very tactics used by Stanley Milgram 50 years ago; they made sure that the authority figures who were leading this “vaccine” crusade were doctors with white coats. They then tormented us with “breaking news” as mainstream media took their turn by channeling images of death and carnage on a 24 by 7 basis. This is a type of social conditioning that Nazis perfected and incorporated by the United States government thanks to Operation Paperclip.
We stood no chance! The same way participants in Milgram’s studies submitted to the demands of authority figures even as they resisted, we too buckled when the pressure was applied. If you see people driving in their cars with masks on, don’t judge them too harshly, they are victims of a psychological war that has been conducted on us for a year and a half. What is being done to us is a carbon copy of the propaganda techniques perfected by Joseph Goebbels mixed with the good cop/bad cop technique used by the police to break a suspect they are interrogation. By alternating between “benevolence” as they reopen businesses and “allowing” us enjoy the freedoms we once took for granted only to announce a new outbreak and go back to lockdowns, the establishment are crushing our will to fight and gaslighting us into total submission.
After a year and a half of unending fears and anxieties that have been imbued in our minds, we have allowed our rights to be stripped away for the sake of security that will never come
It’s not an accident that about one-third of the participants in Milgram’s gruesome experiments opted out once the orders crossed the boundary and strayed into the realm of barbarity. The same phenomenon is evident now; most polls show that about 33% of Americans are either hesitant or outright hostile against the idea of getting jabbed. Over the coming months, the government-media-corporate complex are going to really turn up the heat to persuade at least 70% of the population to get “vaccinated”; the closer they get to that number, the easier it is for them to coerce the holdouts to get jabbed. They will do so by demonizing the unvaccinated, taking away their rights and potentially using force to arrive at their preferred outcome.
I pray we wake up from this collective psychosis that we are in and challenge people in positions of authority. Having a PhD doesn’t make anyone infallible, especially when these doctors have conflicts of interests they are not telling us about. Billions of people around the world have become like the actors in Milgram’s experiments who were pretending to be tortured; except this time around the electrocutions we are getting are very real. If we do not push back and defend our rights, a 450-volt shock will come for us by the time autumn arrives.
The ruling class are already setting the pretext for the abuses they have in store as they sow fear about the Delta variant. They will let us enjoy summer and get a taste of freedom before lowering the hammer. A potential first wave of “vaccine” deaths will be attributed to the Delta variant; the “unvaccinated” will get blamed even though people who are “vaccinated” continue to contract and transmit Covid-19. Facts will matter little when they enact draconian measures to address a crisis they created in a lab. Winter is coming; the only question is will people defy and rise up or will they do like the Germans did last century and follow orders.
“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.” ~ Thomas Paine
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Teodrose Fikremariam is the co-founder and editor of the Ghion Journal. Prior to launching the Ghion Journal, he was a political organizer who once wrote a speech idea in 2008 that was incorporated into Barack Obama’s South Carolina primary victory speech. He is originally from Ethiopia and a direct descendent, seven generations removed, of one of Ethiopia’s greatest Emperors Tewodros II.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Dr. Robert Malone invented the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology. He has grave concerns about the lack of transparency of side effects, censoring of discussion and the lack of informed consent that these bring
Free SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is biologically active — contrary to initial assumptions — and causes severe problems. It is responsible for the most severe effects seen in COVID-19, such as bleeding disorders, blood clots throughout the body and heart problems. These are the same problems we now see in a staggering number of people who have received the COVID-19 “vaccine”
The spike protein also has reproductive toxicity, and Pfizer’s biodistribution data show it accumulates in women’s ovaries. Data suggests the miscarriage rate among women who get the COVID “vaccine” within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy is 82%
Israeli data show boys and men between the ages of 16 and 24 who have been vaccinated have 25 times the rate of myocarditis (heart inflammation) than normal
The COVID-19 injections have emergency use authorization only, which can only be granted if there are no safe and effective remedies available. Such remedies do exist, but have been actively censored and suppressed
In the video above, DarkHorse podcast host Bret Weinstein, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist, interviews Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology,1 and Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur who has been researching adverse reactions to COVID-19 gene therapies.
I realize that this is an absolutely epic three-hour interview but if you ever valued what I have been teaching, you must at a bare minimum very carefully read this entire article.
Malone is the scientist that actually invented the technology that makes the COVID jab possible and he spills the beans on just how this introduction has been ethically compromised to make informed consent absolutely impossible for the average person. Watch the interview if your schedule allows, but carefully read this article for sure.
Kirsch recently published the article, “Should You Get Vaccinated?” in which he reviews how and why he has changed his mind about the COVID-19 “vaccines.” This after he got both doses of the Moderna shot, as have his three daughters.
If you or someone you know is equivocal about the COVID jab, then please, you simply MUST read Kirsh’s article as it is clearly one of the best pieces written on the topic and provides the other side of the story that is NEVER given in the mainstream media. Remember, without full disclosure of the vaccine’s risk, it is impossible to have informed consent.2 If you read Kirsch’s article, you will get, in great detail, the other side that the conventional media refuses to share. He writes:
“I recently learned that these vaccines have likely killed over 25,800 Americans (which I confirmed 3 different ways) and disabled at least 1,000,000 more. And we’re only halfway to the finish line. We need to PAUSE these vaccines NOW before more people are killed.
Based on what I now know about the miniscule vaccine benefits (approximately a 0.3% reduction in absolute risk), side effects (including death), current COVID rates, and the success rate of early treatment protocols, the answer I would give today to anyone asking me for advice as to whether to take any of the current vaccines would be, ‘Just say NO.’
The current vaccines are particularly contraindicated if you have already been infected with COVID or are under age 20. For these people, I would say ‘NO! NO! NO!’
In this article, I will explain what I have learned since I was vaccinated that totally changed my mind. You will learn how these vaccines work and the shortcuts that led to the mistakes that were made.
You will understand why there are so many side effects and why these are so varied and why they usually happen within 30 days of vaccination. You will understand why kids are having heart issues (for which there is no treatment), and temporarily losing their sight, and ability to talk. You will understand why as many as 3% may be severely disabled by the vaccine.”
The Spike Protein Is a Bioactive Cytotoxin
As explained by Malone, many months ago he warned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that the spike protein — which the COVID-19 “vaccines” instruct your cells to make — could be dangerous. The FDA dismissed his concerns, saying they did not believe the spike protein was biologically active. Besides, the vaccine makers specifically designed the injections so that the spike protein would stick and not float about freely.
Well, they were wrong on both accounts. It’s since been well-established that, indeed, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein gets free, and that it is biologically active and causes severe problems. It is responsible for the most severe effects seen in COVID-19, such as bleeding disorders, blood clots throughout the body and heart problems.
These are the same problems we now see in a staggering number of people having received one or two shots of COVID-19 “vaccine.” For more in-depth information about how the spike protein causes these problems, please see my interview with Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and Judy Mikovits, Ph.D.
Using the word vaccine isn’t really appropriate here, and I don’t want to contribute to the misuse of that word. These injections are clearly not vaccines. They don’t work like any previous conventional vaccines. As the actual inventor of the mRNA vaccines clearly says in the interview, they are gene therapy. So, please understand that when I say vaccine or vaccination, I’m really talking about gene therapy.
Spike Protein Disseminates Throughout Your Body
In a recent interview3 with Alex Pierson, Canadian immunologist and vaccine researcher Byram Bridle, Ph.D., discussed previously unseen research obtained from the Japanese regulatory agency through a freedom of information act request.
The study was a biodistribution study done by Pfizer, which showed that the mRNA in the vaccine does not stay in and around the vaccination site but is widely distributed in the body, as is the spike protein.4
This is a serious problem, as the spike protein is a toxin shown to cause cardiovascular and neurological damage. Once in your blood circulation, the spike protein binds to platelet receptors and the cells that line your blood vessels. When that happens, it can cause platelets to clump together, resulting in blood clots, and/or cause abnormal bleeding. I detailed these and other findings in “Researcher: ‘We Made a Big Mistake’ on COVID-19 Vaccine.”
Dangerous Corners Were Cut
The spike protein also has reproductive toxicity, and Pfizer’s biodistribution data show it accumulates in women’s ovaries. Kirsch cites data suggesting the miscarriage rate among women who get the COVID “vaccine” within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy is 82%.5 The normal rate is 10%, so this is no minor uptick. Kirsch writes:6
“It is baffling that the CDC says the vaccine is safe for pregnant women when it is so clear that this is not the case. For example, one our family friends is a victim of this. She miscarried at 25 weeks … She had her first shot 7 weeks ago, and her second shot 4 weeks ago.
The baby had severe bleeding of the brain and other disfigurements. Her gynecologist had never seen anything like that before in her life. They called in a specialist who said it was probably a genetic defect (because everyone buys into the narrative that the vaccine is safe it is always ruled out as a possible cause).
No VAERS report. No CDC report. Yet the doctors I’ve talked to say that it is over 99% certain it was the vaccine. The family doesn’t want an autopsy for fear that their daughter will find out it was the vaccine. This is a perfect example of how these horrible side effects just never get reported anywhere.”
Disturbingly, the Pfizer biodistribution data package reveals that corners were cut in the interest of speed, and one of the research facets that were skipped was reproductive toxicology. Yet, despite the lack of an initial reproductive toxicology investigation and a rapidly growing number of reports of miscarriages (which is likely to be a significant undercount), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still urging pregnant women to get vaccinated. Why is that?
Is There Purposeful Suppression of VAERS Data?
What’s more, as discussed in the interview, there’s evidence that data in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is being manipulated as reports that were filed are now missing. Why were they removed? And without the filers’ consent?
Even with that manipulation, the number of deaths reported post-vaccination against COVID-19 is beyond anything we’ve ever seen. According to Kirsch, the rate of death from COVID-19 shots exceeds that of more than 70 vaccines combined over the past 30 years, and it’s about 500 times deadlier than the seasonal flu vaccine,7 which historically has been the most hazardous.
Other serious effects are also off the charts. For example, Israeli data show boys and men between the ages of 16 and 24 who have been vaccinated have 25 times the rate of myocarditis (heart inflammation) than normal.8 Additionally, many young people are actually dying as a result of this myocarditis.9
Malone points out that, in re-reading the most current version of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that governs these COVID shots, he discovered that the FDA opted not to require stringent post-vaccination data collection and evaluation, even though they had the latitude to do so.
As noted by Weinstein, this is yet another anomaly that needs an answer. Why did they opt for such lax data capture, because without it, there’s no way of evaluating the safety of these products. You cannot identify the danger signals if you don’t have a process for capturing effects data and evaluating all of it.
“The whole logic of EUA is you’re basically substituting real-time capture of key information for prospective capture of key information,” Malone explains. “But to do that, you’ve got to get the information and it has to be rigorous.”
Other Anomalies
Furthermore, as noted by Weinstein, if you release a vaccine under emergency use — because you say there’s an unprecedented health emergency and there are no other options, therefore it’s worth taking a larger than normal risk — then you still would not give it to people who are at no or low risk of the disease in question.
This would include children, teens and healthy individuals under the age of 40, at bare minimum. Children appear naturally immune against COVID-1910 and have been shown to not be disease vectors,11 and people under 40 have an infection fatality ratio of just 0.01%.12 That means their chances of survival is 99.99%, which is about as good as it gets.
Pregnant women would also be excluded as they are a high-risk category for any experimentation, and anyone who has recovered from COVID would be excluded as they now have natural immunity and have no need for a vaccine whatsoever. In fact, a recent Cleveland Clinic study13,14 found people who had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at least 42 days prior to vaccination reaped no additional benefit from the jabs.
Yet all of these incredibly low-risk groups are urged and even inappropriately incentivized to get vaccinated, and this too is anomalous behavior. Part of the risk-benefit analysis is not only the risk of serious outcomes and death from the disease, but also the availability of alternative treatments, and here we have the third massive anomaly.
We’ve seen a clear suppression of information showing that there are not just one but several effective remedies that could reduce the risk of COVID-19 to a number of cohorts down to virtually zero. Examples include hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, both of which have been safely used for decades in many millions of people around the world.
The precautionary principle dictates that as long as a drug or treatment strategy doesn’t do harm, even if the positive effect may be small, it should be used until better data or better treatments becomes available. This is the logic they used with masks (even though the data overwhelmingly showed no statistical benefit and there are a number of potential harms).
But when it comes to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, they suppressed the use of these drugs even though they are extremely safe when used in the appropriate doses and have been shown to work really well in many dozens of studies. As noted by Kirsch in his article:15
“Repurposed drugs [such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin] are safer and more effective than the current vaccines. In general, early treatment with an effective protocol reduces your risk of dying by more than 100X so instead of 600,000 deaths, we’d have fewer than 6,000 deaths. NOTE: The vaccine has already killed over 6,000 people and that’s from the vaccine alone (and doesn’t count any breakthrough deaths).”
Doctors are also being muzzled and their warnings suppressed and censored. Dr. Charles Hoffe has administered Moderna’s COVID-19 “vaccine” to 900 of his patients. Three are now permanently disabled and one has died. After writing an open letter to Dr. Bonnie Henry, the provincial health officer for British Columbia, in which he stated that he’s “been quite alarmed at the high rate of serious side-effects from this novel treatment,”16 his hospital privileges were yanked.
Bioethics Laws Are Clearly Being Broken
In a May 30, 2021, essay,17 Malone reviewed the importance of informed consent, rightly concluding that censorship makes it so that informed consent simply cannot be given. Informed consent isn’t just a nice idea or an ideal. It is the law, both nationally and internationally. The current vaccine push also violates bioethical principles in general.
“By way of background, please understand that I am a vaccine specialist and advocate, as well as the original inventor of the mRNA vaccine (and DNA vaccine) core platform technology. But I also have extensive training in bioethics from the University of Maryland, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and Harvard Medical School, and advanced clinical development and regulatory affairs are core competencies for me,” Malone writes.
“Why is it necessary to suppress discussion and full disclosure of information concerning mRNA reactogenicity and safety risks? Let’s analyze the vaccine-related adverse event data rigorously. Is there information or patterns that can be found, such as the recent finding of the cardiomyopathy signals, or the latent virus reactivation signals?
We should be enlisting the best biostatistics and machine learning experts to examine these data, and the results should — no must — be made available to the public promptly. Please follow along and take a moment to examine the underlying bioethics of this situation with me …
The suppression of information, discussion, and outright censorship concerning these current COVID vaccines which are based on gene therapy technologies cast a bad light on the entire vaccine enterprise. It is my opinion that the adult public can handle information and open discussion. Furthermore, we must fully disclose any and all risks associated with these experimental research products.
In this context, the adult public are basically research subjects that are not being required to sign informed consent due to EUA waiver. But that does not mean that they do not deserve the full disclosure of risks that one would normally require in an informed consent document for a clinical trial.
And now some national authorities are calling on the deployment of EUA vaccines to adolescents and the young, which by definition are not able to directly provide informed consent to participate in clinical research — written or otherwise.
The key point here is that what is being done by suppressing open disclosure and debate concerning the profile of adverse events associated with these vaccines violates fundamental bioethical principles for clinical research. This goes back to the Geneva convention and the Helsinki declaration.18 There must be informed consent for experimentation on human subjects.”
Experimentation without proper informed consent also violates the Nuremberg Code,19 which spells out a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation. This set of principles were developed to ensure the medical horrors discovered during the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II would never take place again.
Lines Have Been Crossed That Must Never Be Crossed
In the U.S., we also have the Belmont report,20 cited in Malone’s essay, which spells out the ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research, covered under the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations 45 CFR 46 (subpart A). The Belmont report describes informed consent as follows:
“Respect for persons requires that subjects, to the degree that they are capable, be given the opportunity to choose what shall or shall not happen to them. This opportunity is provided when adequate standards for informed consent are satisfied.
While the importance of informed consent is unquestioned, controversy prevails over the nature and possibility of an informed consent. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that the consent process can be analyzed as containing three elements: information, comprehension and voluntariness.”
Americans, indeed the people of the whole earth, are being prevented from freely accessing and sharing information about these gene therapies. Worse, we are misled by fact checkers and Big Tech platforms that ban or put misinformation labels on anyone and anything discussing them in a critical or questioning way. The same censorship also prevents comprehension of risk.
Lastly, government and any number of vaccine stakeholders are encouraging companies and schools to make these experimental injections mandatory, which violates the rule of voluntariness. Government and private businesses are also creating massive incentives to participate in this experiment, including million-dollar lotteries and full college scholarships. None of this is ethical or even legal. As noted by Malone:21
“… as these vaccines are not yet market authorized (licensed), coercion of human subjects to participate in medical experimentation is specifically forbidden. Therefore, public health policies which meet generally accepted criteria for coercion to participate in clinical research are forbidden.
For example, if I were to propose a clinical trial involving children and entice participation by giving out ice cream to those willing to participate, any institutional human subjects safety board (IRB) in the United States would reject that protocol.
If I were to propose a clinical research protocol wherein the population of a geographic region would lose personal liberties unless 70% of the population participated in my study, once again, that protocol would be rejected by any US IRB based on coercion of subject participation. No coercion to participate in the study is allowed.
In human subject clinical research, in most countries of the world this is considered a bright line that cannot be crossed. So, now we are told to waive that requirement without even so much as open public discussion being allowed? In conclusion, I hope that you will join me; stop to take a moment and consider for yourself what is going on. The logic seems clear to me.
1) An unlicensed medical product deployed under emergency use authorization (EUA) remains an experimental product under clinical research development.
2) EUA authorized by national authorities basically grants a short-term right to administer the research product to human subjects without written informed consent.
3) The Geneva Convention, the Helsinki declaration, and the entire structure which supports ethical human subjects research requires that research subjects be fully informed of risks and must consent to participation without coercion.”
Again, if your schedule allows, I sincerely hope you take the time to listen to Weinstein’s interview with Malone and Kirsch. Yes, it is very long — about 3 ½ hours — but they are all astute in their observations, which makes for an enlightening conversation. And remember to read and widely share Kirsch’s article, “Should You Get Vaccinated?”22
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.
The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.
In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.
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“You (the Jews) will never be able to live here in peace, because you left here black and came back white.” – Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt (1952)
There is an unknown empire that is barely mentioned in western history books, education institutions, in the media or in Hollywood. The name is not mentioned anywhere especially in the West, and that is why most people never heard about it. It was called Khazaria, it was an empire that still remains relatively unknown today.
So what was Khazaria? Its origins date back to the middle ages (c.650-950), its inhabitants were mostly semi-nomadic Turkic people made up of multiple ethno-linguistic groups that came from Eastern, Western, Northern and Central Asia as well as from parts of Europe and North Africa. Many languages that were spoken belonged to the “Turkic Language family” as they shared many cultural traits and similar histories that shared common ancestries. Today, Turkic ethnicities include Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz people, Uyghurs, Uzbeks and several other groups. However, during the eighth and ninth centuries, the Khazars, a warlike Turkic people converted to Judaism who had dominated a vast area in Southern Russia and the Ukraine in what was known as Khazaria until they were destroyed by Russia.
What happened to the Khazarian empire and its people since their destruction has been debated, in fact it is a conundrum, a mystery in a sense on what happened to the Khazars. Some historians have speculated that the Khazars are the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews. It was well-known that Jews were persecuted throughout Christian Europe which allowed some to migrate to the Middle East while others went to the Kingdom of Khazaria which was considered a “beacon of hope” for Jews who were able to live in peace since the ruling Khazars were considered tolerant of the Jews. Khazar rulers had allowed Jewish refugees from Byzantine and Persia to call Khazaria their home.
It was those actions of the Khazar rulers who discovered Judaism and soon adopted the religion. In an interesting article from 2014 by Jim Wald from The Times of Israel ‘Leaked report: Israel acknowledges Jews in fact Khazars; Secret plan for reverse migration to Ukraine’ argues that “it is well known that, sometime in the eighth to ninth centuries, the Khazars, a warlike Turkic people, converted to Judaism and ruled over a vast domain in what became southern Russia and Ukraine” he continued “what happened to them after the Russians destroyed that empire around the eleventh century has been a mystery” a mystery indeed. Wald says that the Khazar hypothesis is an attempt by the Arabs to deny Jewish claims to the land of Palestine:
Arabs have long cited the Khazar hypothesis in attempts to deny a Jewish historical claim to the land of Israel. During the UN debate over Palestine Partition, Chaim Weizmann responded, sarcastically: “lt is very strange. All my life I have been a Jew, felt like a Jew, and I now learn that I am a Khazar.” In a more folksy vein, Prime Minister Golda Meir famously said: “Khazar, Schmazar. There is no Khazar people. I knew no Khazars In Kiev. Or Milwaukee. Show me these Khazars of whom you speak”
Jim Wald claims that prominent researchers have come forward with their observations on the gene pool from today’s Jews that led them to the Khazars:
Contrarian Hungarian ex-communist and scientist Arthur Koestler brought the Khazar hypothesis to a wider audience with The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), in the hope that disproving a common Jewish “racial” identity would end antisemitism. Clearly, that hope has not been fulfilled. Most recently, left-wing Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People took Koestler’s thesis in a direction he had not intended, arguing that because Jews were a religious community descended from converts they do not constitute a nation or need a state of their own. Scientists, however, dismissed the Khazar hypothesis because the genetic evidence did not add up. Until now. In 2012, Israeli researcher Eran Elhaik published a study claiming to prove that Khazar ancestry is the single largest element in the Ashkenazi gene pool. Sand declared himself vindicated, and progressive organs such as Haaretz and The Forward trumpeted the results
Let’s begin with one of the books mentioned by Wald, Arthur Koestler’s ‘The Thirteenth Tribe’ which claims that “what is in dispute is the fate of the Jewish Khazars after the destruction of their empire, in the twelfth or thirteenth century” and that’s where the problem begins because its “various late mediaeval Khazar settlements are mentioned in the Crimea, in the Ukraine, in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.” This is where Koestler’s observation on the issue of where the Khazars settled over the years following their empire’s destruction by the Russians:
The general picture that emerges from these fragmentary pieces of information is that of a migration of Khazar tribes and communities into those regions of Eastern Europe – mainly Russia and Poland – where, at the dawn of the Modern Age, the greatest concentrations of Jews were found
So Khazar tribes ended up in parts of Eastern Europe, southern Russia and Poland:
This has led several historians to conjecture that a substantial part, and perhaps the majority of eastern Jews – and hence of world Jewry – might be of Khazar, and not of Semitic Origin. The far-reaching implications of this hypothesis may explain the great caution exercised by historians in approaching this subject – if they do not avoid it altogether
What was interesting about Koestler’s analysis points to the fact that the Khazars have bloodlines in Crimea, Poland and southern areas of Russia:
Thus in the 1973 edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica the article “Khazars” is signed by Dunlop, but there is a separate section dealing with “Khazar Jews after the Fall of the Kingdom”, signed by the editors, and written with the obvious intent to avoid upsetting believers in the dogma of the Chosen Race: The Turkish-speaking Karaites [a fundamentalist Jewish sect] of the Crimea, Poland, and elsewhere have affirmed a connection with the Khazars, which is perhaps confirmed by evidence from folklore and anthropology as well as language. There seems to be a considerable amount of evidence attesting to the continued presence in Europe of descendants of the Khazars
Historian and Emeritus Professor of history at Tel Aviv University, Shlomo Sand published ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’, a controversial book that pinched a nerve among Israeli society. In a 2014 article written by Sand in The Guardian,‘Shlomo Sand: ‘I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew’ describes his thoughts on being a Jew in Israel which was a bold move by the historian. Here is his opening statement on the matter:
During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to rabbis. At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world. Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman – who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected minority. In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.
Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew
It can be said that Sand’s statement upset the Zionist community:
Although the state of Israel is not disposed to transform my official nationality from “Jew” to “Israeli”, I dare to hope that kindly philosemites, committed Zionists and exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will respect my desire and cease to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they think matters little to me, and still less what the remaining anti-Semitic idiots think. In the light of the historic tragedies of the 20th century, I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.
By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of disappearing. I know that by insisting that only my historical past was Jewish, while my everyday present (for better or worse) is Israeli, and finally that my future and that of my children (at least the future I wish for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I run counter to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism
Sand’s controversial book ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ which was published in 2009 explores how genetics research involved what he calls Zionist mythology corrupting the true outcome of the common biological origin of what is a “real” Jew is by adopting genetic anthropology and linking it to stories found in the Holy Bible:
Zionist pedagogy produced generations of students who believed whole-heartedly in the ethnic uniqueness of their nation. But in the age of scientificpositivism, nationalist ideology needed more substantial reification thanthe “soft” materials produced in the humanities. The biological laboratorieswere called upon to provide it, and at first they did so in fairly subduedmanner.Nurit Kirsh, who in recent years completed her doctoral dissertation atTel Aviv University, has investigated the early stages of genetics research inIsrael.^”* Her conclusion is unambiguous: genetics, just like archaeology atthe time, was a tendentious science subordinated to the national historicalconcept, which sought at all costs to discover a biological homogeneity amongthe Jews in the world. The geneticists internalized the Zionist myth and,consciously or not, attempted to adapt their findings to it. As she sees it, themain difference between the Zionist anthropologists in the pre-State periodand the new scientists in Israel was that genetics became less prominent inthe public arena in Israel. Research findings that, despite their ideological bias,were published in international scientific journals were hardly noticed in theHebrew-language media. This meant that their pedagogical function in thegeneral education system was marginal
Sand gives another example of a British scholar by the name of Arthur E. Mourant who was influenced by a mentor who literally believed that the British people were the descendants of the “Ten Lost Tribes”, so you know where this is going:
In 1978 Oxford University Press published The Genetics of the Jews, by ateam of researchers headed by Arthur E. Mourant.’ This British scholar wasinfluenced by a much-loved mentor who belonged to a sect that believed theBritish people were descendants of the “Ten Lost Tribes,” hence his interest inthe Jews. For much of his life, the enthusiastic Mourant believed that he and allthe people around him were authentic Jews. When the British forces capturedPalestine, he was convinced that this signaled the beginning of salvation. Yearslater, he set out to discover the common biological origin of the “real” Jews,and adapted his genetic anthropology to the biblical story. As the Israeli genet-icist Raphael FaUc described it, the British scientist “first fired his arrows, thendrew the target around them”^^ To Mourant and his colleagues, the markeddifferences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews notwithstanding, they allhad to have a single common origin. By examining the frequency of A and Balleles in separate communities, he strove to show that the genes of Jews fromdifferent regions displayed a higher degree of uniformity than could be foundwhen those same subjects’ genes were compared to those of their non- Jewishneighbors. But if the genetic findings did not exactly support the ideologicalpurpose, it would be necessary to search for other results.
Although Mourant’s theory was weak and unfounded — the application of genetics to such diffuse categories as “Ashkenazi” and “Sephardic”was senseless, as they represent varieties of religious rituals — it legitimizedand invigorated the search for the Jewish gene in the life sciences at Israeluniversities
The New York Times came out with a scathing article criticizing Sand’s book shortly after its release which claims that Jews from Central and Eastern Europe including American Jews can be traced to the Khazars in ‘Book Calls Jewish People an Invention’:
History of the Turkic peoples (Public Domain)
Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine. He resurrects a theory first raised by 19th-century historians, that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, to whom 90 percent of American Jews trace their roots, are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who apparently converted to Judaism and created an empire in the Caucasus in the eighth century. This idea has long intrigued writers and historians. In 1976, Arthur Koestler wrote “The Thirteenth Tribe” in the hopes it would combat anti-Semitism; if contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus’ Crucifixion.
By now, experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory, concluding that the shards of evidence are inconclusive or misleading, said Michael Terry, the chief librarian of the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. Dr. Ostrer said the genetics also did not support the Khazar theory
While the New York Times continued its attack on professor Sand, it does admit that the Jews of Khazaria where converts:
That does not negate that conversion played a critical role in Jewish history — a proposition that many find surprising given that today’s Jews tend to discourage conversion and make it a difficult process. Lawrence H. Schiffman, chairman of the Skirball department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, said most historians agree that over a period of centuries, Middle Eastern Jews — merchants, slaves and captives, religious and economic refugees — spread around the world. Many intermarried with people from local populations, who then converted.
There is also evidence that in antiquity and the first millennium Judaism was a proselytizing religion that even used force on occasion. From the genetic research so far, Dr. Ostrer said, “It’s pretty clear that most Jewish groups have Semitic ancestry, that they originated in the Middle East, and that they’re more closely related to each other than to non-Jewish groups.” But he added that it was also clear that many Jews are of mixed descent.
“The ancient admixed ancestry explains the blond hair and blue eyes of Ashkenazi Jews whose grandparents and great-grandparents all lived in shtetls two and three generations ago,” Dr. Ostrer said. They brought the genes for coloration with them to Eastern Europe. These genes were probably not contributed by their Cossack neighbors”
The conclusion from the article emphasizes that Professor Sand’s take on Jewish history is “A mingling of myth, memory, truth and aspiration similarly envelopes Jewish history, which is, to begin with,based on scarce and confusing archaeological and archival records” continued “Experts dismiss the popular notion that the Jews were expelled from Palestine in one fell swoop in A.D. 70. Yet while the destruction of Jerusalem and Second Temple by the Romans did not create the Diaspora, it caused a momentous change in the Jews’ sense of themselves and their position in the world.” They accuse Sand of generating an old myth by using the same tactics as the Zionists in how they manipulate history to justify their narrative so that they are recognized as the indigenous people of Palestine which is now known as Israel:
Professor Sand accuses Zionist historians from the 19th century onward the very same scholars on whose work he bases his case of hiding the truth and creating a myth of shared roots to strengthen their nationalist agenda. He explains that he has uncovered no new information, but has “organized the knowledge differently.” In other words, he is doing precisely what he accuses the Zionists of shaping the material to fit a narrative.
In that sense, Professor Sand is operating within a long established tradition. As “The Illustrated History of the Jewish People,” edited by Nicholas Lange (Harcourt, 1997), notes, “Every generation of Jewish historians has faced the same task: to retell and adapt the story to meet the needs of its own situation.” The same could be said of all nations and religions. Perhaps that is why on both sides of the argument some myths stubbornly persist no matter how often they are debunked while other indubitable facts continually fail to gain traction
Review31based in the UK interviewed Sand and asked him how he became interested in Israel’s historical background and the myths within the bible “What was it that made you go looking for that information?”his response was the following:
In the framework of the Masters Studies programme at Tel Aviv University I invited a very famous researcher on the Bible. This is the first time that something started to move inside me. This very, very careful guy gave a lecture and he said that the exodus from Egypt never happened. He said that the kingdoms of David and Solomon are myths. I decided to write a book about this discovery, to compose the Bible as a historical book, because Shlomo Sand and all the children in Israel are studying the Bible as a historical book, not as a theological book. Now, after Simon Schama accused me, and he wasn’t the only one, I understood also that the insistence of Zionism, of Zionist historiography, Zionist politics about the concept of a people, has to do with the fact that people have territories. And then I understood that I have to move into understanding what is a homeland, what is a national territory; and that is the second book.
I went back to the ancient times like always, and I could find the political concept of modern homeland only in two cases in the past in western civilization: the Greek one, and the Roman one before the empire, in the republic. In Judaism there isn’t any traditional patriotism, any tradition of homeland. Palestine, Judea, it wasn’t the homeland of the Jews. And I discovered that the Christians were much more attached physically to the land. And very quickly I discovered that the first Zionists were not Jews; they were your [British] ancestors
The Rhineland Hypothesis has been the favoured explanation for the origins of present-day European Jews, until now. In this scenario Jews descended from Israelite-Canaanite tribes left the Holy Land for Europe in the 7th century, following the Muslim conquest of Palestine. Then, in the beginning of the 15th century, a group of approximately 50,000 left Germany, the Rhineland, for the east. There they maintained high endogamy, and despite wars, persecution, disease, plagues, and economic hardships, their population expanded rapidly to around 8 million in the 20th century. Due to the implausibility of such an event, this rapid expansion was explained by Prof Harry Ostrer, Dr Gil Atzmon, and colleagues as a miracle. Under the Rhineland Hypothesis, European Jews would be very similar to each other and would have a predominant Middle Eastern ancestry.
The rival explanation, the Khazarian Hypothesis, states that the Jewish-convert Khazars — a confederation of Turkic, Iranian, and Mongol tribes who lived in what is now Southern Russia, north of Georgia and east of Ukraine, and who converted to Judaism between the 7th and 9th centuries — along with groups of Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman Jews, formed the basis of eastern Europe’s Jewish population when they fled eastward, following the collapse of their empire in the 13th century. European Jews are thus expected to exhibit heterogeneity between different communities. While there is no doubt that the Judeo-Khazars fled into Eastern Europe and contributed to the establishment of Eastern European Jewry, argument has revolved around the magnitude of that contribution
Elhaik defined his hypothesis by focusing on the origins of the Khazars that included various tribes:
The competing “Khazarian hypothesis” considers Eastern European Jews to be the descendants of Khazars. The Khazars were a confederation of Slavic, Scythian, Hunnic–Bulgar, Iranian, Alans, and Turkish tribes who formed in the central–northern Caucasus one of most powerful empires during the late Iron Age and converted to Judaism in the 8th century CE. The Khazarian, Armenian, and Georgian populations forged from this amalgamation of tribes were followed by relative isolation, differentiation, and genetic drift in situ. Biblical and archeological records allude to active trade relationships between Proto-Judeans and Armenians in the late centuries BCE, that likely resulted in a small scale admixture between these populations and a Judean presence in the Caucasus. After their conversion to Judaism, the population structure of the Judeo–Khazars was further reshaped by multiple migrations of Jews from the Byzantine Empire and Caliphate to the Khazarian Empire
Elhaik declared that the Jews are an “assortment of Tribes who accepted Judaism” in other words, converts:
Although both the Rhineland and Khazarian hypotheses depict a Judean ancestry and are not mutually exclusive, they are well distinguished, as Caucasus and Semitic populations are considered ethnically and linguistically distinct. Jews, according to either hypothesis, are an assortment of tribes who accepted Judaism, migrated elsewhere, and maintained their religion up to this date and are, therefore, expected to exhibit certain differences from their neighboring populations. Because both hypotheses posit that Eastern European Jews arrived at Eastern Europe roughly at the same time (13th and 15th centuries), we assumed that they experienced similar low and fixed admixture rates with the neighboring populations, estimated at 0.5% per generation over the past 50 generations. These relatively recent admixtures have likely reshaped the population structure of all European Jews and increased the genetic distances from the Caucasus or Middle Eastern populations. Therefore, we do not expect to achieve perfect matching with the surrogate Khazarian and Judean populations but rather to estimate their relatedness
Elhaik concluded in his hypothesis that European Jews have genes that trace back to the Khazarian empire:
We compared two genetic models for European Jewish ancestry depicting a mixed Khazarian–European–Middle Eastern and sole Middle Eastern origins. Contemporary populations were used as surrogates to the ancient Khazars and Judeans, and their relatedness to European Jews was compared over a comprehensive set of genetic analyses. Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis depicting a large Near Eastern–Caucasus ancestry along with Southern European, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European ancestries, in agreement with recent studies and oral and written traditions. We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaized Khazars, Greco–Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews, and Judeans and that their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan
After World War II, there was a vision, an idea for a Jewish homeland by mainly European Jews whose genes can be traced to several ancient populations including “Judaized Khazars, Greco–Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews, and Judeans” in a place called Palestine and the rest is history.
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Timothy Alexander Guzman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Alongside its trade war, the US government is also engaged in a digital war against China. A central target of this US war is microchips, the heart of all information technology devices and development.
In September 2020, the US imposed a draconian ban on export of crucial materials needed by China’s leading chip manufacturer Semiconductor Manufacturing International Company (SMIC). The ban was instigated at the behest of the US Department of Defense on the alleged grounds that Chinese chips posed a threat to the US. This move also came in the wake of an earlier ban on export of chips for use by leading Chinese telecommunication company Huawei.
On June 3, US President Joe Biden issued a revised and expanded list that forbids owning or trading any stocks or securities related to 59 Chinese companies, on the supposed ground of threat from “Chinese surveillance technology.” Major Chinese companies listed include SMIC, China Mobile, China Unicom, China National Offshore Oil Corp, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co and Huawei.
On June 8, the US Senate passed a legislation containing a whole range of anti-China provisions, including a $52 billion “Chips for America Fund” intended to deprive China of access to high-end chips by subsidizing manufactures who locate either factories in the US. This legislation is expected to go to the US House of Representatives and become law. Grounds for this legislation also include claims that microchips in Chinese hands somehow constitute a security threat to the US.
Finally on June 9, Biden issued an order for foreign-based apps to be examined for “unacceptable national security risks they pose to US interests.” The Executive Order on Protecting American Sensitive Data from Foreign Adversaries explicitly points to Chinese apps as among ones that are antithetic to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the US.
The US seeks to justify its digital war with spurious, unsubstantiated claims that Chinese companies and technologies constitute a military or “security threat” to the US. The real objective, however, is to halt Chinese development of high-tech industries that the US regards as threatening its drive to exert economic and military dominance in Asia and around the world.
To understand just why Chinese high-tech is deemed a threat to US dominance, we need to look at the current path of technology development. Social, economic, political, military, educational, scientific, and personal life already increasingly rely on the internet. With the advent of the internet of things (IoT), the internet will rapidly become the fundamental infrastructure for all human life on earth.
It’s crucial to understand that – important as human-to-human interaction is – the internet is no longer primarily about human communication and information sharing. The internet is jumping down from our computer and phone screens into the entire world around us including the bodies, minds, and selves of human beings.
The IoT includes billions of networked entities of all kinds. Each of these entities interacts simultaneously with the real world around it and with one another via the online world. These networked entities typically include sensors to monitor the world around them, which allows them to act based on their information.
The IoT currently includes six million connected human beings and 50 billion other entities, which is projected to climb in the next few years to 500 billion. As artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics merge with the IOT, the world will soon consist of innumerable connected entities and increasing numbers of intelligent connected entities.
IoTs do not stand alone. They talk to one another online generally with little or no human intervention. They can be of almost any type, including bridges, buildings, cities, human bodies, cows, refrigerators and cars; government functions and military aircraft and missiles; factory machines, logistics and product distribution; science labs and education.
IoT technology is currently converging with artificial intelligence (AI), big data and robotics. IoT entities are typically equipped with a “controller,” which includes a set of sensors to monitor their immediate environment and an actuator, which can initiate action based on input from the sensors and online input and interactions with other online entities
These entities frequently generate “big data” – huge amounts of data – which human beings alone cannot effectively interpret. AI is then needed to manage and make decisions based on the big data. Robotics, previously a separate discipline, is also converging with the IoT as connected robots.
In the face of these world-changing developments, the US and China have opposite approaches.
The US’ approach is to exercise control of digital technology to ensure that it can be used to maintain its dominance of the planet. That approach is telegraphed in the phrase now used by Biden and other US politicians that “the US must win the 21st century.” The idea that one country must win – i.e. own – a century is disturbing to say the least.
China’s approach, on the other hand, is quite different. It is to develop and share the technology for the benefit of the Chinese people and to share it with the world for “building a community with a shared future for mankind.”
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This article was originally published on Global Times.
Eric Sommer is a Canadian scholar and a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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At the top of the medical hierarchy is the neurosurgeon. Neurosurgeons are surrounded by a mystique of omniscience and omnipotence. Imagine my surprise, therefore, as a lowly medical student, to discover that the senior neurosurgeon in our institution, Robert Hughes, was being sued for malpractice. In fact, Robert Hughes, to his chagrin, went on to make Canadian medical and legal history on the issue of informed consent.
In 1970 Hughes performed a carotid endarterectomy (cleaning out of the carotid artery to the brain) on a 44-year-old man, John Reibl, who then went on to suffer a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side and unable to continue working. Reibl sued Hughes, claiming that he was not informed that he might suffer a stroke from this elective surgery, and that had he known this he would have delayed the surgery until he’d become eligible for a Ford Motor Company pension less than two years later.
Here is Reibl’s testimony to the Court:
Q. Did he talk to you about what would happen if you didn’t have the operation?
A. Yes, he said, “It is up to you if you want to have it or not. You can live a few years. You can live about 7 or 10 years or longer. One of these days you are going to fall on your nose, and that’s it. If you are going to do it now in the beginning you are not going to have any problem later.”
Q. Did Dr. Hughes say anything else about any risks of the operation?
A. He didn’t mention anything.
Reibl v Hughes went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and in 1980 the Court articulated the current standard for informed consent, specifically that the physician (or other health care provider) “must give the patient sufficient information so that an objective, reasonable person in the patient’s position would be able to make an informed choice about a medical procedure”. The court defined failure to disclose the attendant risks as negligence.
Thus, in Canada, to receive a treatment or procedure, the subject must not just verbally agree and sign a consent form, but must give informed consent after having the risks explained to them.
Forty-one years after the Supreme Court decision our federal and provincial governments are engaged in a program of administering to the entire Canadian population above the age of 12, a completely new, untried, experimental, non-FDA approved, gene therapy treatment. This therapy, according to US and European government adverse vaccine reaction databases, is reasonably suspected of having killed thousands of people, and created serious injury in tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the long-term consequences of the therapy are simply unknown.
Are Canadians who are receiving this treatment getting this information? Are they being told what they need to know to give informed consent? A friend of mine recently got the injection. I asked him if he was informed of the possibility of side effects. He said none were mentioned!
As far as I can determine, Canadians are not being informed that there are risks. When they show up at the injection site it appears that they are told to sign a form and hold out their arm. Those giving the treatment are not discussing with them the pros and cons, the risks and benefits of the injection prior to “vaccine” administration. Most Canadians taking the shot have no idea that there is a risk of blood clotting disorders, such as pulmonary embolism and stroke, of life-threatening immune processes such as vaccine-induced thrombocytopenia, or that young people taking the shot are at risk of the potentially fatal complication of myocarditis (nor are they informed that the risk of Covid itself is almost negligible for the young and healthy). Such lack of information is a violation of the Supreme Court decision on consent. If you are injured by the vaccine and did not provide informed consent, you have grounds to sue your health authorities for negligence and damages.
Note: The onus is not on patients to do their own research. The onus is on the health care provider to inform patients of the risks so that an objective, reasonable person in the patient’s position would be able to make an informed choice. Does anyone really believe that a 12 to 15-year-old child is able to sufficiently understand the complex issues involved in experimental gene therapy to give informed consent? Does enticing children with ice cream (Toronto), or adults with a lottery (Alberta), constitute informed consent?
If Reibl v Hughes sets the standard for approved treatments, what then should be the standard for unapproved treatments, for experimentation on humans with new and untried technologies? As a consequence of experiments performed by Nazi doctors on concentration camp prisoners and the subsequent Nuremberg trials, that Court articulated ten research ethics principles to guide medical experimentation in humans. The first principle is that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential”. Although the Nuremberg Code, created more than 70 years ago, did not use the word “informed”, it did use the word “consent,” and it is hardly a stretch to conclude that the consent they spoke of was “informed consent”. Most Canadians taking these novel gene therapy injections have no idea that these “vaccines” are not an approved therapy, like a flu shot, and they are unaware that they are in fact being enrolled in clinical trials which are still ongoing.
Our federal and provincial governments, premiers, public health administrators and personnel are negligent in administering the Covid vaccines to tens of millions of Canadians without clearly informing them that this is an experimental therapy, one which could result in serious adverse events, including life-altering injuries or death, and that the long-term side effects, for example potential auto-immune diseases, are as yet unknown.
When governments use all the means in their power, including control of the media and widespread censorship of dissenting voices, to induce people to get a medical treatment without adequately informing them of the risks, they are violating the fundamental trust between the people and their government.
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John Cunnington is a former McMaster University associate professor. After a 38-year career as a respirologist and internal medicine physician, he retired in 2018.
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Als ich mir heute zum wiederholten Male ein Video von Rechtsanwalt Dr. Reiner Füllmich von der deutschen Stiftung Corona-Ausschuss ansah – dieses Mal ein Video von „Report 24 News“ vom 9. Mai 2021 mit dem Titel „Rechtsanwalt fragt: ‚Warum ordnete Regierung wissentlich tödliche Maßnahmen an?‘“ –, empfand ich, dass es jetzt reicht. Obwohl ich seit Anfang 2020 regelmäßig Kommentare, Artikel und Offene Briefe zur Corona-Thematik schreibe, die in den unabhängigen alternativen Medien wie „Global Research“, „Neue Rheinische Zeitung NRhZ“ oder „RUBIKON“ und einmal auch in „Epochtimes“ veröffentlicht wurden, habe ich Sie und Ihre Rolle in dem ganzen Wahnsinn bisher ausgespart.
Wie Sie sich sicher erinnern werden, hatte ich vor vielen Jahren bereits zweimal die Gelegenheit, Sie als damalige Familienministerin in Sachen „Verein zur Förderung der psychologischen Menschenkenntnis VPM“ zusammen mit Kollegen in Bonn und Berlin persönlich zu sprechen. Entschuldigen Sie meine Offenheit: Aber damals war ich sehr erstaunt darüber, dass Sie spontan nie zur Sache Stellung nehmen konnten, sondern stets darum baten, erst Ihre Berater befragen zu dürfen, um sich eine persönliche Meinung bilden zu können.
Heute bin ich davon überzeugt, dass Sie nach den vielen Jahren in einem sehr verantwortlichen Amt sehr wohl wissen, was Sie tun und voll und ganz hinter Ihren politischen Entscheidungen stehen. Angefangen bei Ihrer Entscheidung „Wir schaffen das!“, als Sie versuchten, die gewaltige Migrationskrise und den Bevölkerungsaustausch in ganz Europa klein zu reden bis heute, wo Sie – um nochmals Dr. Füllmich zu zitieren – zur vermeintlichen Bewältigung der ausgerufenen Pandemie zusammen mit den anderen Regierungsmitgliedern wissentlich tödliche Maßnahmen anordneten und weiterhin fordern.
Durch diese Maßnahmen wurde ein unermesslicher wirtschaftlicher, gesellschaftlicher und individuell-menschlicher Schaden angerichtet, dessen Ausmaß heute noch gar nicht abzusehen und der nicht wieder gut zu machen ist. Aber das ist von Ihnen und Ihresgleichen vermutlich gewollt, um die allseits bekannten diabolischen Pläne des „Great Reset“ und der „Neuen Weltordnung NWO“ durchzusetzen. Das eigene Volk dazu zu ermuntern, sich einem nur notfallmäßig zugelassenen Killer-„Impfstoff“ auszuliefern, ist nur die Spitze des Eisbergs eines gigantischen Betrugs und Verbrechens an der Menschheit.
Meine Dame!
Ich frage Sie deshalb: In wessen Auftrag handeln Sie? Ganz sicher nicht im Auftrag des deutschen Volkes, was ja bekanntermaßen Ihre Aufgabe wäre. Wie ist es möglich, dass Sie sich trotz Ihrer gegen die Interessen des deutschen Volkes gerichteten Handlungen so lange an der Spitze der deutschen Regierung halten konnten? Ich persönlich habe Ihre Politik nicht mehr ertragen und deshalb mein Vaterland verlassen.
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Diplom-Psychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.
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When I watched a video by lawyer Dr Reiner Füllmich of the German Corona Committee Foundation again today – this time a video from “Report 24 News” of 9 May 2021 entitled “Lawyer asks: ‘Why did government knowingly order lethal measures?'” –, I felt that enough was enough. Although I have been writing regular commentaries, articles and open letters on the Corona issue since early 2020, published in the independent alternative media such as “Global Research”, “Neue Rheinische Zeitung NRhZ” or “RUBIKON” and once also in “Epoch Times”, I have so far left you and your role in the whole madness out.
As you will surely remember, many years ago I already had the opportunity to speak to you personally twice as the then Minister for Family Affairs in matters concerning the “Verein zur Förderung der psychologischen Menschenkenntnis VPM” together with colleagues in Bonn and Berlin. Excuse my frankness: but at that time I was very surprised that you were never able to spontaneously comment on the matter, but always asked to be allowed to question your advisors first in order to be able to form a personal opinion.
Today I am convinced that after many years in a very responsible office, you know very well what you are doing and stand fully behind your political decisions. Starting with your decision “We can do it!”, when you tried to talk down the huge migration crisis and the population exchange throughout Europe, until today, when you – to quote Dr. Füllmich again – knowingly ordered and continue to demand lethal measures together with the other members of the government in order to supposedly cope with the declared pandemic.
These measures caused immeasurable economic, social and individual-human damage, the extent of which cannot even be foreseen today and which cannot be repaired. But this is probably what you and your kind want in order to push through the well-known diabolical plans of the “Great Reset” and the “New World Order NWO”. Encouraging your own people to turn themselves over to a killer “vaccine” approved only on an emergency basis is only the tip of the iceberg of a gigantic fraud and crime against humanity.
My Lady!
I therefore ask you: on whose behalf are you acting? Certainly not on behalf of the German people, which, as you know, would be your task. How is it possible that you have been able to stay at the head of the German government for so long despite your actions being against the interests of the German people? Personally, I could no longer stand your politics and therefore left my fatherland.
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a qualified psychologist and educationalist.
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As Brussels seeks a new supply contract with Pfizer from 2022, the US pharmaceutical giant has hiked its EU prices on future orders of its vaccine, potentially raising the cost by more than 60%, to some $23 per dose.
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The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.
China has slammed G-7 leaders for pushing an aggressive agenda against itself and Russia. The 47th G-7 Summit in Carbis Bay, United Kingdom, concluded on Sunday, June 13. It was attended by the leaders of the seven global north nations and European Union, who form the core membership of the group, and with India, South Africa, South Korea and Australia as invitees.
Dr. Mike Yeadon walks us through the effects of COVID-19 vaccines on adolescents particularly for school-age children and younger. “I’m genuinely pro-vaccine but I’m pro-safety and these COVID-19 vaccines are not safe. Gene-based design makes your body manufacture virus spike proteins and we know that virus spike proteins trigger blood clots.”
The World Health Organization is awaiting an independent review of an Italian study indicating that COVID-19 could have been in circulation in the country as early as September 2019. The findings will form part of its investigations into the origins of the outbreak.
As it typifies oligarchic rule in Latin America, whenever the elite faces a serious challenge to its dominance it resorts to authoritarian methods, including brutal repression and if need be, mass murder. This is what the Peruvian elite did when in the early 1990s it faced mass opposition to the imposition of neoliberal impoverishment; one of the most extreme manifestations of opposition was the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency.
Health care employees and many other Americans are experiencing pressure to accept vaccination or be fired. For example, a hospital in Texas has made vaccination a condition of employment. I can understand the reluctance of a nurse or doctor, who has witnessed severe injury and death to those who were vaccinated, being unwilling to subject themselves to the risk.
Joe Biden took part in several key international meetings over the last week covering a wide range of issues but with one key goal in mind: intensify the new Cold War with China and construct a global front towards this end. This is the most intensive series of diplomatic summits for the Biden administration yet, and provides key insights about how it plans to manage the affairs of U.S. empire.
A man claiming to be a friend with a British Airways pilot has stated that 3 pilots have just died within the past week shortly after receiving COVID-19 injections, and his recording has gone viral on social media. Here is the recording (let us know if Twitter takes it down as we have a copy.)
Head of the General Federation of Trade Unions Sami Al-Amasi has confirmed that 20 factories were destroyed during the last offensive on Gaza, and 5,000 workers had lost their jobs.
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With 100% of the votes counted, Castillo, candidate of left-wing coalition Peru Libre, won with 50.14 % of the votes, against Keiko Fujimori, daughter of infamous and disgraced corrupt dictator, Alberto Fujimori and right-wing candidate of Fuerza Popular, a coalition supported by the country’s oligarchic elite, obtained 49,86%.
To many, Castillo’s electoral robust performance in the first round with 18% of the vote was a surprise, since up to that point, the main contender for the left was Veronika Mendoza, candidate of the Juntos por el Perucoalition, who obtained slightly less than 8%. Below we examine the main events and developments that would culminate in this extraordinary victory for the Peruvian and Latin American Left.
The ongoing crisis of legitimacy
As it typifies oligarchic rule in Latin America, whenever the elite faces a serious challenge to its dominance it resorts to authoritarian methods, including brutal repression and if need be, mass murder. This is what the Peruvian elite did when in the early 1990s it faced mass opposition to the imposition of neoliberal impoverishment; one of the most extreme manifestations of opposition was the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency. State repression was substantially intensified with the election of Alberto Fujimori as president in 1990.
Fujimori’s dictatorial regime lasted a full decade (1990-2000) but it fell under the weight of its own corruption, engulfed in a constitutional crisis of legitimacy caused by his contempt for democratic procedure: he closed down congress, usurped judicial authority, promulgated a neo-liberal constitution and governed brutally and autocratically. He is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for his role in killings and kidnappings by death squads during his government’s military campaign against leftist guerrillas.
Fujimori’s successor, president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) fared no better, even though, unlike Fujimori, he did not resort to underhand and brutal methods during his presidency. Nevertheless, he is under house arrest in San Francisco, awaiting extradition on charges of receiving multimillionaire bribes.
Then it was the turn of Alan Garcia, leader of APRA, an originally progressive populist party, who succeeded Toledo for the period 2006-2011, and who committed suicide in 2020 as the police came to arrest him for personal graft and corruption during his administration.
Ollanta Humala, briefly depicted as a sort of Peruvian Chavez and even publicly supported by the Comandante himself, defeated Keiko Fujimori at the 2011 elections thereby becoming the country’s president for the 2011-2016 period. But as it seems to befit Peru’s presidents, in 2017 he and his wife were arrested on charges of corruption and money laundering. Both are banned from leaving Peru and are awaiting trial.
The 2017 election crowned Pedro Pablo Kuczynski as the country’s president for 2016-2021, but he was not to break with the ‘cultural tradition’ and was forced to resign in 2018 (to avoid impeachment procedures began in 2017) for lying to congress and for receiving bribes in exchange for government contracts. Kuczynski also claimed to suffer from heart problems (as Fujimori, Toledo and Humala have done) thus benefiting from house arrest. It is evident that being the tenant of the House of Pizarro (the popular name for Peru’s presidential palace) is a tough job full of so many exciting incentives that can gravely affect their cardiac system.
Kuczynski had to be replaced by his vice-president, Martin Vizcarra, who launched an offensive against corruption but was impeached by Congress in November 2020 for taking bribes on several occasions in 2014 in exchange for awarding public work contracts. It is widely believed his impeachment was prompted by his decision to close down congress for obstructing the investigations against corruption.1
Vizcarra (who has not as yet claimed heart problems) accepted the congress decision and was replaced by the Congress’s President, Manuel Merino, as caretaker leader with a cabinet dominated by the business elite. Merino’s brief 6-day government sent strong hints of ignoring popular demands for the reform of the political and judicial systems and even entertained postponing the scheduled 2021 elections justified by the problems brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The country exploded in huge mass demonstrations that were met by brutal police repression with two dead, dozens injured and many more arrested. Merino was forced to resign on 15 November 2020 and Congress then appointed Francisco Sagasti (who had voted against Vizcarra’s impeachment) as interim president, and was entrusted with the task of organising the presidential elections in April 2021.
Thus since Peru’s elite had for decades undermined the rule of law and the credibility of the nation’s institutions, the state key positions had been filled in by corrupt or corruptible members of the political class (involving all mainstream political parties), in a system overwhelmingly dominated by finance capital, mining concerns, raw materials exporters, one media monopoly, and multinational companies. These powerful groups pay almost no taxes whilst taking away the nation’s wealth, leaving the agricultural sector in a state of total neglect. Such was the context surrounding the election that elected Pedro Castillo as president of Peru.
The consequences of Peru’s neoliberal dictatorship
In the last two decades, the country’s economic performance has been impressive receiving praise from the IMF: “Peru continues to be one of the best-performing Latin American economies. With annual real GDP growth averaging 5.4 percent over the past fifteen years, Peru has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, which enabled it to make significant progress in reducing poverty.”2
However, a deeper look into it produces a different impression. In 1970 Peru’s level of poverty was 50%, and by 2000 had slightly increased to 54.1%;3 by 2006 poverty had barely declined to 49.1%, and though it went down to about 20% in 2019, with the pandemic it has gone right back up to 30%4. In short, half of the country’s population have remained in a state of poverty for almost two generations and about one third for the last decade. However, 30% is deceptive since the level of labour informality in the country’s economy is a staggering 70%, of people who live day to day as street vendors; they and their families have gone hungry during the lockdown.5
The two decades of macroeconomic economic success and social horror correlate to the coming to office of Alberto Fujimori who successfully defeated Mario Vargas Llosa’s comprehensive neoliberal privatisation plan, at the 1990 election. Fujimori’s government systematised the use of counterinsurgency state terror to purge society from rebellious constituencies, such as those in the Sierra (Peru’s highlands), inhabited predominantly by indigenous people. Already by the end of the 1980s the departments of Ayacucho, Apurimac and Huancavelica were under martial law.
The military campaign against the Left was aided by the combination of extreme sectarianism, intense dogmatism, and the insurrectionary and violent methods practised by the Shining Path, a splinter group from the Communist Party. They enjoyed strong support precisely in the highlands departments mentioned and by the early 1990s had made considerable inroads into Lima’s shanty towns not only challenging the state but also waging a vicious campaign against the rest of the country’s Left.
The government response was the Fujimorazo, a self-coup carried out on 5 April 1992, with the president dissolving Congress and dismantling the judiciary, assuming full executive and legislative powers. He also used these powers to decree stringent and repressive labour laws that destroyed the remnants of an already seriously weakened labour movement. Under Fujimori labour legislation was crafted so as to make Peru a paradise of labour flexibility, management’s right to fire, casualization of labour contracts and workers’ unionisation and collective bargaining action, difficult.6
By 1993 Fujimori had increased the provinces under a military state of emergency from 52 to 66 and by 1994, nearly half of the population lived in such zones, areas where the security forces repressed the whole of the Left not just the Shining Path. It is estimated that by 1995 “insurgents, state security forces, drug traffickers, death squads, and civilian paramilitaries had killed more than 27,000 Peruvians.” And according to Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission the number of fatal victims of internal strife between 1980 and 2000 was 69,000.7 Peru had become a killing field.
The brutal state counterinsurgency offensive launched in 1980 had not only halted but also reversed the development of a Left that was becoming politically and electorally stronger. In the 1980 election it had obtained a combined vote of about 12-15%, though divided between 5 candidates, but in the 1985 election, a united left candidate got an impressive 24%. However, in the 1990 election the Left went down to 12% split between two candidates; it had almost no presence in the elections in 1995, 2000, 2006, and 2011 and began to painfully recover only in 2016.
Fujimori’s 1993 neoliberal structural reforms (the ‘Fuji-shock’) included the elimination of price controls, total deregulation of markets, privatisation of state-owned companies and activities, and a tight monetary policy. The privatisation programme attracted foreign investment (particularly from the US) in natural resources, finances and consumer markets. This resulted in intense concentration of ownership by foreign concerns thereby shrinking the influence and leverage of national industrial capital.8
Over time the country’s income distribution drastically worsened thus by 2019 the top 1% and 10% of income earners got 29.6% and 56.6% of GDP, respectively; 40% of middle income earners got 35.8% of GDP, whilst 50% of low income earners only received 9.4% of GDP; one of the most unequal in the world.9No wonder Covid-19 has wreaked havoc among the poor, since one lockdown day at home for the 70% working in the informal sector (this is millions of people and their families), means one day without income. Decades of neoliberal privatisation and cuts in state expenditure (health, education and the like) having thrown millions into precariousness and hardship made them the unavoidable victims of Covid-19: by 4 June Peru had the highest mortality rate in the world per million people (188,000 with 1,998,056 confirmed cases).10
Castillo’s Long March
It was reported that when it was announced that a teacher had won the first round of elections, the staff at CCN scrambled to obtain information about, and get hold of a photo of Pedro Castillo because they did not have even a picture of him in their database. How did Pedro Castillo and Peru Libre, managed to win the presidency, even though by a whisker? Castillo’s manifesto makes it even more puzzling since the key tenets of his government programme include a frontal attack on neoliberalism, proposes the election of a Constituent Assembly to draft and promulgate a new constitution to substitute the dominant neoliberal economic model, land reform, the nationalisation of the nation’s natural resources ensuring most of the wealth they produce remains in Peru so as to eradicate poverty, increase state expenditure on social services (health and education), and implement income redistribution.11 Even worse (or better) Castillo declares himself a Marxist and a mariateguista (follower of Peruvian intellectual, Jose Carlos Mariátegui, perhaps one the most original and influential Latin American Marxist thinkers).12
The Partido Nacional Peru Libre (PNPL) places political emphasis on the specific demands of Peru’s peasantry: land reform, social rights, education and health, thus expressing the demands and aspirations of the deep, rural, indigenous Peru. Mariátegui, writing in the 1920s, posited there would not be bourgeois revolution in Peru because there was no social class interested in carrying it out, thus the only concrete possibility of society’s structural transformation would come from a socialist revolution, the precondition of which was bringing in the indigenous people as a fundamental agent of such change.
This framework is still basically correct in 2021 Peru. Keiko Fujimori got strong support in key cities (for example, Lima and Callao, with 65% and 67%, respectively), but Castillo got a landslide in the Andean (indigenous) provinces such as Puno (89%), Huancavelica (85%), Cusco (83%), Ayacucho (82%), Apurimac (81%), Moquegua (73%), Cajamarca (71%), Huánuco (68%), and Pasco (66%). It was an indigenous victory13 that is not identical to a victory of rural against urban Peru, as some in the media have portrayed Castillo’s victory. After all, 73% of the population live in cities whilst only 27% live in rural areas, that is, the Marxist teacher could not have won without substantial support in the urban centres. The validity of the PNPL central tenet of refounding the nation as a Plurinational State along the basic lines of Ecuador and Bolivia is therefore undeniable: in Peru there are 4 indigenous languages in the Andes (Quechua, Aymara, Cauqui and Jaqaru) and 43 more in the Amazon region, 500 years after the Spanish Conquest.
The implementation of brutal neoliberal policies coupled with the DEA-inspired ‘war on drugs’ principally in the Amazon region (La Selva) from the 1990s onwards, meant that communities in Amazonia suffered the brunt of the ‘dirty war’ against the Shining Path and the army-led fight against drug trafficking, whilst in the Andes, indigenous communities were further marginalised by aggressive mining from the operation of multinational companies. The racism that supplemented these twin aggressions led to organised resistance and, therefore, to the rise of popular, communitarian and indigenous leaderships.
Hence, for example the election of some of these emerging leaders to the governorships of Puno, Junín and Moquegua. Many more such leaders were elected to lead provinces and municipalities with teachers playing a protagonist role in them (Castillo himself had been mayor of his town, Anguía, in Cajamarca).14 Thus, resulting from a decades-long political development, PNPL is a well-organised, militant, political outfit with strong territorial support in key areas, and with solid association and collaboration with peasant and indigenous communities and organizations (such as the ronderos15), and trade unions, especially, but not exclusively, among teachers. Castillo himself led the 2017 teachers’ strike to defend wages and demand budget increases in education.
In short, the PNPL has had access to local resources, has enjoyed an institutional presence in local, provincial and regional governments, and, since 60% of Peruvians do not have access to internet, for its election campaign it has relied on community radios, personal visits to small towns, and cultural events. Thus, in the context of the 2021 election (first and second rounds) Castillo was not only the outsider, but a breath of fresh air who, in the midst of a criminally managed pandemic and the deep institutional crisis the nation faced, gave hope and voice to the rural and urban downtrodden.16
The tasks ahead
The election result was incredibly tight: 8,883,185 for Castillo against 8,783,765 for Keiko Fujimori. Furthermore, the PNPL got a minority of 37 seats that together with the 5 obtained by Juntos por el Peru, president Castillo will command 42 out of the 130 seats in Congress, whilst Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular and the other right wing electoral coalitions have a combined parliamentary strength of at least 80 seats. The latter, with the full complicity and support of the country’s media, ran an intoxicating electoral campaign of fear charging Castillo with being a Shinning Path sympathiser, a “terruco”, pejorative slang term that means ‘terrorist’ used by Peru’s establishment to stigmatize the Left.
Days before the second round, Keiko deployed arch-reactionary Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa and Venezuelan extreme right-winger and outlawed coup-monger, Leopoldo Lopez, to support her electoral campaign so as to defeat Castillo’s “communism”. Keiko, with no evidence whatsoever, has persisted in accusing the PNPL of election fraud demanding the annulment of the votes of more than 800 voting points in the country’s interior. Then she mobilised 22 right-wing ex-presidents of Latin America and Spain (with Aznar and Uribe being prominent) who issued a statement making similar allegations, demanding Castillo was not proclaimed the winner. In desperation then, she staged marches to military barracks and to the Ministry of Defence (9 June 2021) to request the military to act to prevent the “victory of communism.” However, barely hours after Castillo proclaimed himself the winner, the Defence Ministry issued a statement confirming the political neutrality of the armed forces and calling for respect for the election results.
Such threats have been met with large demonstrations in Lima and the rest of the country with the ronderospromising a march on Lima if through electoral fraud, Castillo’s electoral victory is stolen. On 22 May 2021 the National Coordination of Army, Navy, Air Force and Police Reservists (Retired) – CONAFAP – issued a strong statement warning against any possible election fraud in the second round and in support of Pedro Castillo. Though it is not clear how strong Castillo’s support may be within the armed forces, there is a historic left-wing nationalist influence in them that stems from the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975)17; many of PNPL’s proposals strongly resemble those of Velasco.
With his clean victory, Castillo and his programme of progressive structural change are now being noticed by millions of the poor in the main urban centres, particularly Lima (with 10 million out of a total population of 32). The more his government engages, mobilises and commits to the poor in supporting the implementation of his policies, the greater the chances of being adopted by them as their own political social objectives. This will allow him to prepare the ground for a referendum for a Constituent Assembly to draft an anti-neoliberal constitution as the basis for the creation of a Plurinational State, the premise for the carrying out of a mariateguista socio-economic transformation of Peru.
Contrary to media misrepresentation, the PNLP programme also includes, among many other interesting policies, the decriminalisation of abortion, a head-on attack on the traffic of persons – especially women, the elimination of patriarchy and machismo in state and society, the respect and promotion of women’s reproductive rights and the promotion of the self-organization of women at every level.18 This contrasts sharply with Keiko’s defence of her father’s legacy that among other stains, has his Eugenic plan that led to the forcible sterilization of about 350,000 mainly peasant and indigenous women carried out to deal with the nation’s ‘Indian problem’ (higher birth rates among indigenous people than Peruvians of European descent).19
Castillo’s immediate concern is to ensure a smooth transition of presidential power to guarantee the country’s governability, prevent a run on the currency, prevent financial panic, violent street demonstrations, destabilisation plans and such like that have characterised many electoral victories of presidential candidates of the Left in Latin America. A major cause for concern is the Biden administration’s ‘Trumpian inertia’, maintaining pretty much unchanged US’s aggression against governments of the left in the region of his predecessor, despite his promise to, for example, restore Obama’s constructive policies towards Cuba.
On the other hand, the coming Peru Libre administration does and will benefit from a changing relation of forces for the better in the region with robust left victories in neighbouring Argentina, Chile and especially Bolivia. Castillo has already received the open support of Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba and from the mass parties of the Latin American Left organised in the Sao Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group, with the latter two issuing strong statements of support calling to respect the will of the Peruvian people. Castillo has also in his favour, the visible deterioration of the US regional machinery of intervention with Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of the American States (OAS), suffering massive discredit after his disgraceful and criminal complicity in the coup d’état that ousted Evo Morales in 2019 and facing a criminal accusation from Bolivia in the International Criminal Court. He has been openly and publicly repudiated by the governments of Argentina and Mexico, and with the US-inspired Lima group (set up to overthrow the Bolivarian government of Venezuela and led by Almagro) just having lost Lima to a party whose programme includes Peru leaving the OAS and going back to UNASUR. To top it all, the PNLP programme includes strong support for Cuba and Venezuela.
Our job in the imperialist North is to tell the truth about Pedro Castillo’s progressive, anti-neoliberal programme aimed at reversing decades of neoliberal policies to support his beleaguered nation and people by counteracting the unavoidable mainstream media misrepresentations; to remain vigilant and denounce and reject any external or domestic attempt to undermine the victory of the people of Peru by foul means (violence, coup d’état, lawfare, economic blockade, extra-territorial legislation, sanctions, the usual European Union shenanigans, and such like); and to help construct the broadest solidarity movement in their support.
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1 Milan Sime Martinic, The curious case of Peru’s persistent president-to-prison politics, The Week, 17 November 2020.
2 Peru, IMF Country Report No. 20/3, 10th Jan 2020,
3 Carlos Parodi Trece, “Perú: Pobreza y políticas sociales de la década de los 90”, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Vol. VI, No.3, Sept-Dec. 2001, p.385.
4 Covid-19 and its impact on Poverty in Peru, Project Peru, 10th Jan 2021
5 Whitney Eulich, ‘We’re invisible’: Peru’s moment of reckoning on informal workers,The Christian Science Monitor, 30 June 2020
6 Bart-Jaap Verbeek, “Globalisation and Exploitation in Peru: Strategic Selectivities and the Defeat of Labour in the US-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement”, Global Labour Journal, Vol. 5, 31 May 2014,p.223-4.
7 Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009, pp. 236-245.
12 For an analysis of Mariátegui’s significance in Latin America see Francisco Dominguez, “Marxism and the Peculiarities of Indo-American Socialism”, in Mary Davis (ed.), MARX200 The Significance of Marxism in the 21st Century, Praxis Press 2019, pp.49-58.
14 The Aymara ecologist, Walter Aduviri Calisaya, was elected governor of Puno and current PNPL general secretary, Vladimir Cerrón, its key Marxist intellectual, was elected governor of Junín, but the élite resorting to lawfare, managed to imprison Aduviri, who served 8 years in prison, and Cerrón was suspended as a governor and was banned from being a presidential candidate.
15 Peasant, indigenous and communitarian self-defense organization present in the country that has exponentially grown in the last 10 years; it is claimed that it can mobilize two and half million people; Castillo was an active member.
17 See the insightful analyses in Carlos Aguirre & Paulo Drinot (eds.), The Peculiar Revolution, Rethinking The Peruvian Experiment Under Military Rule, University of Texas Press, 2017.
18 See (in Spanish) especially Chapter XVI, The Socialist Woman, https://perulibre.pe/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ideario-peru-libre.pdf; in interview Castillo said he personally was against abortion, but was prepared to bring the issue to the proposed Constituent Assembly to be discussed.
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A reported 3.9 magnitude earthquake off the Florida’s east coast Friday was actually an “experimental explosion,” the U.S. Navy confirmed.
A spokesperson with the Navy told Action News Jax that what was measured were a result of military “shock trials” and they are not unusual, nor is it unusual for them to register as earthquakes.
Shock trials test a ship to see how it holds up in an undersea explosion. This is to test strength of the ship’s hull, making sure it can perform in battle.
Action News Jax has reached out to the Coast Guard for more information.
3.9 Experimental Explosion (USGS)
BREAKING UPDATE: NS Mayport spokesman @AustinBill13 tells @ActionNewsJax it was the result of a Navy Shock Trial off Daytona Beach. Says it’s not usual for a shock trial to register as an earthquake & that it happened before in 2016. Interesting stuff. Let us know if you felt it! https://t.co/J0XY8iXrzS
— Tenikka Smith Hughes (@TenikkaANjax) June 18, 2021
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The Gaza Strip, measures only 25 miles long and five miles wide. It is one of the most densely populated places on the planet.
Since 2007, Israel has imposed a full blockade on Gaza from the air, land, and sea. The two million Palestinians living there (half of which are under the age of 18) are trapped in an open air prison where food, potable water, electricity, medicine, building materials, etc. are severely restricted by the Israeli authorities.
The latest Israeli military operation in Gaza was called “Guardian of the Walls,” a reference no doubt to the walls enclosing the Palestinian population of mostly refugees, victims of Zionist settler colonialism, forcibly prevented from returning home. Highlighting the unfairness of the fight, at the war’s onset reports described Israeli tanks and 80 aircraft, including F-35’s, being deployed against a people militarily conquered and occupied since 1967. The Gazans have no air force, no navy, and no control over their borders, airspace, or coasts.
Following 11 days of bombing, an Egypt brokered ceasefire was accepted after multiple offers were rejected by Tel Aviv.
Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem
Last month’s war on Gaza was largely precipitated by an ethnic cleansing campaign occurring in East Jerusalem, illegally occupied by Israel. The threatened evictions of dozens of families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood sparked protests among the Palestinians.
Writer and researcher Yanis Iqbal provides some background;
Beginning from May 2, 2021, Israel has begun its attempts to forcibly evict 26 Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. These families consist of refugees since the Nakba (the 1947-49 expulsion and forced exile of over two-thirds of the population by Zionist forces) and have been denied their United Nations (UN)-mandated right to return home. They were relocated in the neighborhood when it was under Jordanian control between 1948 and 1967.
Israeli propaganda attempts to present the idea that the homes being seized were once owned by Jews. This is a complete lie – the Jordanian authorities were the ones to finance the construction of the homes. Since the early 1970s, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been battling a series of Jewish settler organizations who filed lawsuits claiming the land belonged to them. Many Palestinians have been kicked out of the neighborhood and replaced by Israeli settlers. The current standoff and protests came about after an Israeli court ruled in favor of Nahalat Shimon International – an organization based in the US – and Ateret Cohanim, another settlement group that seeks to take over the properties.
In its bloody quest to eliminate Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah, the settler state has left no stone unturned. Combat-clad murderers have been sent in to terrorize Palestinian sit-ins with skunk water, tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and shock grenades. Protesters have been physically assaulted, kneeled on, choked, and shot at with live rounds. On May 7, 2021, the Israeli police forced its way into the neighborhood as Palestinians and solidarity activists gathered to break their Ramadan fasting in solidarity with 40 Palestinians, including 10 children.
Far right violence had already been ramping up in Jerusalem. In one illustrative example from late April, a Israeli brownshirt-like group named Lehava led marches with memorable choruses such as “your village will be burnt down,” “may your village burn,” “Arabs get out,” and “death to Arabs.” The demonstrations saw large groups of Jewish youths hurling rocks at Palestinians, including inside their homes and vehicles. Participants were encouraged to arm themselves and get violent. Haaretz reported on a social media group administered by far right Knesset member, Itamar Ben-Gvir, that included somebody enthusiastically promoting plans to burn Palestinians with Molotov cocktails. A video shared on social media showed an Israeli man driving through East Jerusalem firing his gun in the air to frighten the occupied Palestinian residents. The Lehava event was explicitly promoted to “restore Jewish dignity” to Jerusalem. Palestinian counter protests at Damascus Gate in the Old City were responded to by police using similar measures to those deployed against the sit ins described above by Iqbal: 105 people were injured, with 22 hospitalized.
During Israel’s crackdown on early May protests against the planned dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, settlers again chanted “death to Arabs” and the police used cannons to fire the aforementioned “skunk water” into people’s houses. The pervasive stink spray smells like sewage and remains for weeks. After drying, it is only made worse when it coming into contact with water making it especially arduous to clean.
In an interview with Scott Horton, journalist Alan Macleod discussed the corporate media’s cynical efforts to create a “both sides narrative” despite the huge power disparity painted by vivid scenes of occupied civilians armed with “stones and prayer rugs” standing off with the Israeli security forces sporting their “machine guns and stun grenades.”
Even clinics were not spared. At Mondoweiss, Yumna Patel reported “[v]ideos from a clinic in East Jerusalem where injured Palestinians were being treated showed Israeli forces firing sound bombs into the clinic itself.”
As a result of consecutive days of Israeli violence and “clashes,” hundreds of Palestinians were injured and hospitalized. On May 10th, even before the rockets and bomb attacks, those at the Mosque and the surrounding neighborhood described the area as a “war zone.”
Hamas Retaliates on Behalf of The Palestinians
The armed brigades of Hamas, the militant group ruling the Gaza Strip, gave Israel an ultimatum that evening to withdraw from Sheikh Jarrah, the al Aqsa Mosque, and release Palestinian prisoners. The Israelis refused. Hamas retaliated on behalf of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. Those Palestinians have essentially no other armed force to deter or defend against Israeli aggression. The first of the crude rockets launched by Hamas into Jerusalem killed nobody and “lightly injured” one Israeli. Israel responded with airstrikes on Gaza that killed 20 people, nine of which were children.
Most of the children belonged to the same extended family. Two siblings, 11-year-old Ibrahim and seven-year-old Marwan, were the only children of Yousef al-Masri.
The children were playing outside their homes before the Ramadan iftar meal in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, before two explosions rocked the street.
Youssef al-Masri, the father of the siblings was quoted in the media as well, “My children were martyred. I cannot find any justification whatsoever for targeting someone passing through overcrowded civilian neighborhoods where dozens of children usually play.”
For nearly two weeks Israel then proceeded to pummel Gaza with high explosives.
Disgracing The American People
Along with the already massive but growing military and financial aid to Israel, the American government underwrote every bit of the massacre with diplomatic cover as it ensued. At the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. blocked three successive statements urging a ceasefire and cessation of attacks against Palestinians in just the first week of bombings. The third statement blocked was introduced by Norway, China, and Tunisia.
The French later introduced a draft Security Council Resolution demanding a ceasefire which the U.S. threatened to veto.
On the domestic scene, mainstream media sprang into action providing an abundance of hasbara to American audiences attempting to muddy the waters sufficiently to keep people from taking the obvious moral positionagainst the U.S. backed canned hunt.
Indeed, both the executive branch and much of the legislature are eager to provide “more for Israel” at the American people’s expense. In early June, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who in a video messageduring the war threatened “Gaza will burn,” visited Washington D.C. to request another billion dollars in military aid. Many in Congress are thrilled at the opportunity to fulfill his request and Biden has promised to “replenish” Israel’s U.S. funded Iron Dome missile defense system.
Once again, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a complete mockery of his post as America’s top diplomat. As Dave DeCamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, has written:
In a pathetic attempt to pretend that the Biden administration cares about the suffering Israel is causing… Blinken announced additional aid for the Palestinians after the truce was reached. The assistance includes about $5.5 million to rebuild Gaza, a pittance compared to what the US is poised to give Israel.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Blinken somehow claimed that Israel took “significant steps” to avoid killing civilians in Gaza. This ignores the deliberate targeting of civilian homes. In one Israeli air raid, bombs hit a residential building in the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza, killing 10 people; two women and eight children…
The violence was not limited to Gaza. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, at least 29 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli security forces.
Not to be outdone by the Democrats, in the neoconservative wing of the Senate, Marco Rubio used Israel’s slaughter in Gaza as a political opportunity to sabotage renewed talks with Tehran. Rubio led an effort, backed by more than forty other Republican lawmakers, to thwart all sanctions relief and end talks with Iran. Rubio was hoping to preclude any U.S. return to the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA constitutes the most intrusive international inspections regime in history over Iran’s civilian nuclear program. Iran is a long time signatory of the Non Proliferation Treaty unlike Israel, who has a clandestine but well known nuclear weapons arsenal.
On top of the annual $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel, five days before the war, Biden approved another $735 million weapons sale. The sale consists primarily of Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). The JDAMs are used to convert unguided bombs into precision guided munitions or “smart bombs.” JDAMs were a weapon of choice during the assault on Gaza.
In one instance, Israel dropped a “smart bomb” on a building that contained offices used by the Associated Press, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera.
The targeting and destruction of Al-Jalaa Tower have been condemned by a number of local and foreign media groups, including two of its occupants, The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, which launched its own investigation identifying the weapon that wrecked its offices as a GBU-31, one of several JDAM variants known to have been exported by the U.S. to Israel in past years.
Israel even bombed roads around hospitals impeding ambulances from helping victims reach healthcare centers. A week into the war, Gaza’s Ministry of Information was reporting $18 million worth of damage done to streets and other key infrastructure alone.
“Why Do They Hate Us?” 20 Years Later
In the wake of the events of September 11th, 2001, Americans often pondered “why do they hate us?” The best way to answer this question is to analyze the words of Osama Bin Laden, the words he used to convince others to follow him and join his cause.
Throughout the 1990s, he called for violence against the U.S. explicitly for the U.S. Army and Air Force bases occupying Muslim holy land on the Arabian Peninsula. He railed against America, under then President Bill Clinton, for making the Peninsula a “staging post” for the bombing and blockade of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims. He also pointed to U.S. support for myriad authoritarian Middle East dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He hoped to bait us into a protracted war that would bleed us dry. The plan is for us to eventually leave, but only after bankrupting ourselves and destabilizing the region, making al Qaeda’s long desired local revolutions more plausible. His plan is working better than expected.
In 1996, Bin Laden issued his first “fatwa” against the United States, he did not incite hate against Americans for their love of freedom and liberty. Contrarily, he specifically complained about U.S. support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
The youths hold you responsible for all the killings, evictions, and displacements of the Muslims and the violation of their sacred places which were carried out by your Jewish brothers in Palestine using moneys and arms you supplied them with. [emphasis added]
We declared jihad against the U.S. government because the U.S. government is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of [Palestine]… we believe the U.S. is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. [emphasis added]
Along with some of the other fellow lead hijackers, Mohammed Atta, the man who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was motivated to attack Americans over their government’s support for Israel. In the book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, Scott Horton details Atta’s trajectory,
…as Lawrence Wright reported in The Looming Tower, in April 1996, after Israel launched their Operation Grapes of Wrath campaign in Southern Lebanon,… Atta signed his last will and testament, a symbol of his willingness to die in the fight against those he blamed for the war. As journalist Terry McDermott explains in Perfect Soldiers, his book on Atta’s so-called “Hamburg cell” of September 11th plotters, they had all agreed it was the Americans who were responsible for what Israel was doing since the U.S. government gives Israel so many billions of dollars in military equipment and other financial aid.
During Operation Grapes of Wrath, in what is called the First Qana Massacre, the Israelis infamously bombed a U.N. compound killing more than one hundred civilians seeking shelter. Qana was referenced often by Bin Laden in the speeches and writings that influenced Atta and his associates to join up the jihad.
In reality, Israel is ruthlessly occupying about six million people in Palestine with virtually no rights while expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The so called “Two State Solution” is dead. Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, Israel’s top human rights organization, issued reports this year calling the situation in Israel/Palestine a one-state situation akin to apartheid. As Sheldon Richman says, one state “dedicated to Jewish supremacy or domination.” Lately, Israeli ultra-nationalism, with the accompanying street violence, has been on full display without the establishment media’s filters. During the war, evidence proliferated across social media with videos exposing, yet again, the dystopian reality that is the life of Palestinians not just in the occupied territories but, within the 1948 borders too, in what is called Israel proper. In cities like Bet Yam and Lod, Arabs were attacked in the streets by roving mobs of Israelis destroying Palestinian owned businesses and storefronts.
What Must Be Done
It’s been 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. On Memorial Day, neoconservative spokesman and Senator Lindsey Graham, with an ear to ear grin, stood next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and lied to the American people’s faces. He said “nobody does more to protect America from radical Islam than our friends in Israel.” He was lobbying his own country for another billion dollars in weaponry for the Israelis. Ironically, Tel Aviv has, for years, supported al Qaeda during the war in Syria against their common enemy in Damascus. So much for our ‘greatest ally’ in the Middle East.
From the beginning, the al Qaeda/terrorism issue was framed in a kind of unreality that shared little to no resemblance with the truth. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda was only a few hundred men, formally backed by Ronald Regan against the Soviets, tucked away in Nangarhar Province. It was the U.S. and its allies that started this fight when we supported Israel’s occupations, put troops on Saudi soil and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
And therefore, aside from dealing with those directly responsible for the attack, whom the Taliban offered to hand over anyway, there was no need to become further bogged down in the region. As it would only kill exponentially more innocent people, create more enemies, more war, more blowback, and destroy our economy.
But we were ceaselessly told by our government that September 11th, 2001 changed everything. Under the spell of the Cathedral, our society accordingly goosestepped into an era of totalitarianism at home to defeat the artificially inflated threat abroad. And what do we have to show for it? Record breaking “defense” budgets, unending mass surveillance, trillions of dollars in crushing debt, indefinite global wars against vaguely defined enemies, millions killed and displaced, torture prisons, assassinations of American citizens, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, a suicide epidemic among veterans, militarized police, hyper divisive fake corporate news, ongoing economic crises and moral decay. In the end, we sacrificed our character and our way of life. And none of it was necessary.
U.S. support for Israel is a travesty, a stain on our history and present. And because of our own corrupt, imperialist government, Americans are still in the line of fire as Tel Aviv continues to kill men, women, and children on our dime and in our name. We can no longer morally, financially, legally, or strategically afford to offer aid to a regional superpower violating international law. Israel, an internationally notorious apartheid state, killing civilians, perpetually at war, armed with nuclear weapons, and comfortably surrounded by friendly dictatorships, has received well over $200 billion in U.S. money, adjusted for inflation, since its founding. Netanyahu himself once remarked, it is “absurd.”
As Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar.com, points out, “Israel’s relationship to the US has long centered around intense lobbying and getting embarrassingly large amounts of military aid ($58 billion in 20 years, more than all other US aid recipients combined).”
Israel uses its American taxpayer-funded, state of the art military to subjugate Palestinians, stealing their property in East Jerusalem and the West Bank while bombing those held prisoner in the Gaza concentration camp. Israel is also constantly attacking its neighbors, such as Syria, whom the Israelis conduct airstrikes against on a weekly basis.
It is a supreme disservice to the victims of 9/11, their memory, and their survivors, to continue down this road, year after year, still funding Israel’s atrocities and fighting the endless Middle East wars. It is time for the American people to not only renounce Washington’s permanent war agenda but emphatically refuse to foot the bill for Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Or have we learned nothing?
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Connor Freeman is a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also been a guest on Conflicts of Interest. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96
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“The Peruvian people have raised their heads to say democratically that we are going to save this homeland,” farmer-turned-teacher, unionist organizer and socialist Pedro Castillo, 51, told supporters the evening of June 15, following the end of ten days of counting ballots.
“We are not Chavistas, we are not communists, no one has come to destabilize this country,” he said, a reference to a common refrain from Fujimori’s party and supporters comparing him to Venezuela’s late leftist President Hugo Chavez.
On June 15, Peru’s National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) concluded counting all votes cast in the June 6 elections. Free Peru candidate Pedro Castillo received 50.12% of the votes while Popular Force candidate Keiko Fujimori received 49.87%. (Details are shown here: ONPE)
In absolute terms, Castillo received 8,835,579 votes, 44,058 votes over the far-right politician charged with committing several crimes, Keiko Fujimori, 46, who garnered the support of 8,791,521 voters. This is her third time running for the presidency for the party she formed, Popular Force, following the 25-year sentence of her father, former President Alberto Fujimori. She was his First Lady and is charged with some of the same crimes that he was.
More than 18.8 million Peruvians cast their votes in the country and abroad. The electoral authorities counted 17.6 million valid votes, over one million invalid votes, and 121,477 blank votes.
This is a historic election for Peru, and an outstanding inspiration to workers like Castillo throughout Latin America and beyond. Non-politician Pedro Castillo is to take office on July 28.
Source: DPA
This historical moment for the poor, workers, indigenous could still be lost if it is up to right-wing militarists, former commanders, and pro-Fujimori judges.
As of June 20, still no final word of who actually is the next president. Keiko Fujimori appealed 200,000 votes at 943 polling stations for being “manipulated” with “fraudulent signatures,” and claimed that there were “impersonations of polling station members” in polling stations.
The Special Electoral Jury (JEE) completed its recount of those cases, on June 19, and found the claims all to be “inappropriate” and “unfounded.”
“[Sixty-three] retired generals and other high-ranking officers issued a communique demanding the resignation of the head of the election board, warning of the danger of a Castillo victory and calling for the ‘strengthening of confidence in the armed forces and the police.’ The Defense Ministry felt compelled to issue a statement in response deploring the use of official military symbols in the communique.”
Telesur followed this announcement up on June 15:
“Peru’s Armed Forces on Monday stated their respect for the constitutional order and disassociated themselves from versions of a coup d’état in this South American country, which is still awaiting the official declaration of Free Peru candidate Pedro Castillo as the winner of the June 6 presidential elections.”
“’We regret the political use of the Armed Forces because this not only undermines their institutionality, but also generates alarm, anxiety, and division at a time when the country requires unity and calm,’ the Defense Ministry said.
“The statement pointed out that the Armed Forces had ‘an exemplary role’ in the elections guaranteeing the free exercise of the right to vote and protecting electoral officials. ‘Their mission in this electoral process has been fulfilled.’” See Peru’s Armed Forces Disassociate Themselves From Coup Attempts.
By June 18, the daily La Republica reported that nothing substantial had yet occurred to ward off this threat. Its front page article was headlined: “Retired former military high-ranking officers instigate rebellion of armed institutes!”
The next day, Minister of Defense Nuria Esparch “sent the letter to the Attorney General (Fiscalía) asking for it to determine if the letter is evidence of a ‘crime of conspiracy.” She also stated that there were no signatures on the letter and that six of those named were dead.
Although Ecuador’s socialist presidential candidate Andrés Arauz lost to Ecuador’s former Coca Cola director, banker millionaire Guillermo Lasso, last April, the Latin American pink tide from the beginning of the 21st century appears to be reviving after other recent defeats.
Bolivia’s new socialist President Luis Arce, Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, Ecuador’s former President Rafael Correa, Brazil’s ex-Presidents Lula Da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, and Colombia’s ex-Senator Piedad Cordoba sent joyful messages.
In the April 11 general election, Castillo led the race of 18 candidates with 19% of the voters. He had never engaged in parliamentary politics. Keiko Fujimori, a congresswoman from 2011 to 2016, took second place with 13.36%. In 2011, she barely lost to liberal-leftist Ollanta Humala with 51.5%. In 2016, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski squeaked by with 50.12% of the voters.
The fact that the JNE has delayed announcing the official victor has encouraged turmoil and demonstrations in front of JNE and ONPE leaders’ houses.
“A group of supporters of the presidential candidate of The Popular Force, Keiko Fujimori, approached the exterior of the house of Magistrate Jorge Rodríguez Vélez, a member of the plenary session of the National Elections Jury (JNE), to hold a sit-in.” They shouted, “Respect my vote, JNE.”
“Another call is being made today, so I can say it’s a systematic thing … They are not going to scare us,” Rodríguez responded.
Keiko Fujimori backers claim ”election fraud” in front of JNE president’s house. [Source: larepublica.pe]
Peruvian voters were faced with two extremes unlike in previous elections, and many were unhappy that a moderate candidate did not make the run-off. Peruvians had the choice of taking a chance with a major change in the economy towards benefiting the poor and the working class, or bringing in the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori.
He is serving time for ordering the murder of 25 persons by a secret death squad whose killers were military men, in addition to massive corruption, receiving bribes and other crimes committed while his daughter was his adviser.
On October 10, 2018, Keiko Fujimori was arrested on charges of money laundering, illegally receiving money for her 2011 and 2016 presidential campaigns from the Brazilian Odebrecht real estate and construction company, for several other corruption cases, including leading a criminal organization.
She was sentenced to three years’ pre-trial detention as a “high escape risk.” The prosecution seeks 30 years’ imprisonment. Keiko Fujimori was released on bail under house arrest on May 5, 2020.
On June 10, Peru’s anti-corruption prosecutor José Domingo Pérez asked the judiciary to order a new pre-trial detention for Keiko Fujimori’s interference in the ongoing criminal investigations.
“It has been determined once again that the defendant Fujimori Higuchi does not comply with the restriction of not communicating with witnesses,” said the prosecutor.
Fujimori is still under investigation for the Odebrecht case, one of the most significant bribery and graft scandals in Latin America. The prosecutor told the court that she “is communicating with Miguel Torres Morales,” a witness to alleged illegal campaign financing for Fujimori’s 2011 and 2016 presidential bids.
For Keiko Fujimori, this election determines whether she goes to prison for a long time or takes the reigns as chief of state.
Keiko Fujimori in prison, and awaiting the conclusion of judicial investigations into crimes of corruption, accepting bribes, leading a criminal band. She is out on house arrest. [Source: peruactu.com]
Daniel Espinosa, a Peruvian journalist compared what Keiko Fujimori is doing—“attempting to compel the masses into the streets in a move that is as irresponsible as it is dangerous”—to what Donald Trump did by “inciting his fanatics to storm the U.S. Capitol.”
Keiko Fujimori originally filed a lawsuit of 802 cases of fraud against electoral authorities and requested a computer audit of the digitalized electoral records before the current 943 claims of fraud in the country and abroad.
The electoral juries rejected most of them, because they were presented after the legal deadline, and there was little or no evidence of fraud at the polling stations.
From the start of counting the votes following 12 hours of casting ballots on June 6, who led had been nip and tuck. One or the other candidate had led by from 0.1 to 0.5% of the votes. Following a short-held lead by Castillo, Fujimori led in urban areas.
She held the lead throughout Sunday evening and early Monday. Later in the day with more rural votes counted, the tide turned in Castillo’s favor. Fujimori immediately claimed that his party had “distort[ed] or delay[ed] results that reflect[ed] the will of the people.” How this was to have happened was not forthcoming, but she called upon her supporters to protest.
Peru’s currency (sol) “headed to its biggest drop in more than a decade and the S&P/BVL Peru General Index fell as much as 5.8%, the most since November, with mining companies and financial firms among the hardest hit.
Overseas bonds were steady in light trading while the cost to insure against a default edged higher … after investor favorite Keiko Fujimori saw her early lead over leftist opponent Pedro Castillo fade overnight and in the early morning.”
With almost 93% of votes counted [morning of June 7], Fujimori had 50.1% support to 49.9% for Castillo, a former farmer and then school teacher and union organizer from the Peruvian highlands. Castillo traded places once 94% were counted: 50.7% to Fujimori’s 49.92%.
Vote counting slowed. One day, only 451 votes were counted. In one example of alleged “fraud,” a village where 197 people voted, only one favored Fujimori. Vote counters, election observers and ONPE found no fraud. Even the pro-U.S. Organization of American States leadership stated that there had been no fraud.
While Fujimori won every district in Lima’s capital region, the unionist teacher, who had led an important teacher strike in 2017, and whose parents are illiterate peasants, is overwhelmingly supported in the countryside.
Castillo stands for reforming the economy with greater state control over markets and natural resources; curtailing mining; increasing public works and social welfare spending with a 30% cut from corporate profits gained from the use of fossil fuels; and increasing pensions and wages. Fujimori wants more of the same “free market economy,” and spreads fear of “communism” taking over the country internally.
The corporate and White House favorite is also supported by Peruvian middle and upper class urban women simply because she is a woman. Fujimori is supported by celebrities, wealthy players on the national soccer team, and the nation’s most famous author, Mario Vargas Llosa.
The former communist sympathizer turned extreme conservative was the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. He even campaigned for Fujimori without regret. According to Vargas Llosa, she is the best of the “lesser of evils”; he said that her conduct is “very decent.”
Fear Tactics
Upon completion of voting, National Elections Board (JNE) chairman Jorge Luis Salas stated that there were 166 international observers and 1,400 Transparency Civil Association observers monitoring the voting process.
Furthermore, tens of thousands of police and soldiers were on patrol on election day. They reported no instances of chaos or violence. There were, however, a few hundred reports of bringing candidate propaganda into voting areas.
Many people fear that the military, or parts of it, will align with Fujimori to prevent the worker socialist from leading the country.
Three days before the final count, Daniel Espinosa wrote:
Fujimori and her rich backers are endeavoring to destabilize the country, to prevent Castillo from assuming the presidency, or lay the basis for his overthrow once in office—a strategy she may have learned from the CIA and her years in the United States.
Waya, another Peruvian paper, wrote that this election will be remembered for “citizen polarization, the psycho-socials, the false news and the fear campaigns that have been deployed at the national level to direct the vote towards the presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori.”
For the business elite, its media, the police and military leaderships, the only real danger to “democracy,” as they see it, is Pedro Castillo. All the endemic pro-capitalist political corruption, bribes, swindles and murders are apparently of no consequence when confronting socialism, which aims to equalize rights and benefits, end military “solutions” to struggles resisting poverty, injustices, and wars for profit.
The hundreds of U.S. businesses in Peru include scores of chemical companies. Peru is the world’s second largest copper producer. It is also a large source for silver, gold and zinc.
Conclusion
In the last days of the campaign, both candidates concentrated on promising total battle against the coronavirus, which, as of June 17, had taken 189,522 Peruvian lives and infected 2,015,190. Peru leads the world in percentage of deaths per capita: 572.3 per 100,000. Of its 33.3 million population, more than two million have been infected. Peru’s per capita death rate is nearly double that of Hungary, the country with the second highest rate of deaths per 100,000 population at 305.
At the end of the ballot tally, the state announced a curfew in Lima and Callao from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., in an effort to curtail the spread of Covid-19 infections and deaths.
Peru’s ethnic makeup (self-identified) is 60% mestizo; 27% indigenous (85% are Quechuas, the remainder are Aymaras and Amazonians); 5% white, ca. 2% black/mulatto, and 6.7% others.
Voting is mandatory in Peru for all persons aged 18 to 70. Turnout in this election, at 74%, was lower than the 82% in 2016 but still high.
Latin America’s poor and Indigenous peoples will be watching with hope to see what this feisty farmer-teacher-unionist will attempt to accomplish as a socialist president. Peru’s rich, its military and police leaderships, and Wall Street/Pentagon/CIA will be watching too.
Just in the last generation, the U.S. has backed at least nine coups or coup attempts against progressive or socialist presidents.
In 2002 against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (unsuccessful); in 2004 against Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide (successful); in 2009 against Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya (successful); in 2010 against Ecuador’s Rafael Correa (unsuccessful); in 2018 against Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega—the former revolutionary and progressive (unsuccessful); and in 2019 against Bolivia’s Evo Morales (successful).
The U.S. has also blessed right-wing parliamentary coups—in 2012 against Honduras’s Supreme Court; in 2012 against Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo; and in 2016 against Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff.
Records show, in the last century, at least 87 coups in South America and the Caribbean, all either conducted directly by the self-proclaimed “greatest democracy,” the United States of America, or by its wealthy Latin American and military proxies.
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Ron Ridenour is a U.S.-born author and journalist, anti-war and civil rights activist since 1961. After joining the U.S. Air Force at 17, he saw the inner workings of U.S. imperialism first hand and resigned. In the 1980s and 1990’s he worked with the Nicaraguan government and on Cuban national media. Ron can be reached at [email protected].
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How many Americans are as brave as Buffalo Bills wide receiver Cole Beasley, who announced he would give up playing football before he submits to the NFL’s vaccine protocols? See this.
Health care employees and many other Americans are experiencing pressure to accept vaccination or be fired. For example, a hospital in Texas has made vaccination a condition of employment. I can understand the reluctance of a nurse or doctor, who has witnessed severe injury and death to those who were vaccinated, being unwilling to subject themselves to the risk. They have exposed themselves for 16 months to risk of infection by treating those who are infected. Now they are declared to be a risk to patients because they are not vaccinated and are pressured to accept the high risk of injury from the vaccine.
David Ramsey offers advice to one nurse:
Notice how quickly American corporations have taken to the idea that they have the right to make deeply personal decisions for employees.
It is no longer just US presidents, such as Bush and Obama, who claim authority to set aside our constitutional protections and throw us in prison and execute us without due process, private profit-making corporations are now asserting the right to make our personal decisions.
What does this tell us about the belief in freedom in America? It tells us that it is the last thing public and private leaders think about. Freedom? What is that? The right to disagree with the government, the boss, the media? That’s terrorism. That’s conspiracy theory. That’s being uncooperative. Take off the tinfoil hat and do as you are told.
This is what everyone who works for a US corporation experiences. Take the vaccine. Don’t use these pronouns. Go to sensitivity training. Submit! Submit! Submit!
That is America today. Notice how quickly it came on us. Compare today with 16 months ago and observe the rapid erosion of freedom.
During the 20th century Cold War, Americans heard about “captive nations.” Today America is a captive nation.
Employers’ demands that employees submit to vaccination are not merely assertions of authority over personal decisions and violations of freedom. A lot of evidence indicates that vaccination mandates endanger people’s lives. Much evidence indicates a high incidence of death and serious injury associated with Covid vaccination and that the vaccine itself is causing the variants. See below for one such warning.
The scientific evidence should be publicly debated. Instead, the evidence is suppressed. If the evidence is mistaken, it should be easy to show that to be the case. So why is it suppressed instead of examined and debated? How can it be that corporate executives and boards can be ignorant of the dangers to which they demand employees subject themselves?
Is this a plot against life as people increasingly believe, or is it just stupidity and incompetence on the part of those in leadership positions. Neither answer is reassuring.
Dr. Peter McCullough provides one of the many unambiguous warnings issued by highly qualified experts, people far more knowledgeable than Tony Fauci, a medical bureaucrat whose lifetime work has been to maximize the profits of the pharmaceutical industry: see this.
Dr. Peter McCullough – COVID Vaccines Have Already Killed 50,000 Americans. Is the United States gearing up to force people to submit to vaccination?
Dr. McCullough is Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University, editor of Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, senior editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, editor of the textbook Cardiorenal Medicine, and president of the Cardiorenal Society.
“The first wave of the bioterrorism was a respiratory virus that spread across the world, and affected relatively few people—about one percent of many populations—but generated great fear,” McCullough explained during the Oval Media webinar with other doctors. He noted that the virus targeted “mostly the frail and the elderly, but for otherwise well people, it was much like having the common cold.”
Dr. McCullough has treated many patients with the disease, written papers on it, had the disease himself, and has also seen a death in his own family due to COVID.
He believes that fear of the virus was used very quickly to generate policies that would hugely impact human life, such as the draconian lockdowns.
“Every single thing that was done in public health in response to the pandemic made it worse,” he pointed out.
McCullough explained that early on, as a doctor treating COVID patients, he came up with an early treatment regimen for those struck with the virus, which reduced hospital stays by about 85 percent, and said he began publishing papers on what he had learned. The doctor noted that he was “met with resistance at all levels” in terms of actually treating patients and publishing his papers.
“Fortunately I had enough publication strength to publish the only two papers in the entire medical literature that teaches doctors how to treat COVID-19 patients at home to prevent hospitalization,” he said.
“What we have discovered is that the suppression of early treatment was tightly linked to the development of a vaccine, and the entire program—and in a sense, bioterrorism phase one— was rolled out, and was really about keeping the population in fear, and in isolation preparing them to accept the vaccine, which appears to be phase two of a bioterrorism operation.”
McCullough explained that both the coronavirus and the vaccines deliver “to the human body, the spike protein, which is the gain of function target of this bioterrorism research.”
He acknowledged that he couldn’t come out and say this on national television because the medical establishment has done such a thorough job of propagandizing the issue.
“What we have learned over time is that we could no longer communicate with government agencies. We actually couldn’t communicate with our propagandized colleagues in major medical centers, all of which appear to be under a spell, almost as if they’ve been hypnotized.”
“Good doctors are doing unthinkable things like injecting biologically active messenger RNA that produces this pathogenic spike protein into pregnant women. I think when these doctors wake up from their trance, they’re going to be shocked to think what they’ve done to people,” he said, echoing what he, and Dr. Harvey Risch, professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham during an interview last month.
Last summer McCullolugh started an early treatment initiative to keep COVID patients out of the hospital, which involved organizing multiple groups of medical doctors in the United States and abroad. The doctor noted that some governments tried to block these doctors from providing the treatments, but with the help of the Association of Physicians and Surgeons, they were able to put out a home patient guide, and in the U.S., organized four different tele-medical services, and fifteen regional tele-medical services.
This way, people who were stricken with COVID-19, were able to call in to these services and get the medications they needed prescribed to local pharmacies, or mail order distribution pharmacies, he explained.
“Without the government really even understanding what was going on, we crushed the epidemic curve of the United States,” McCullough claimed. “Toward the end of December and January, we basically took care of the pandemic with about 500 doctors and telemedicine services, and to this day, we treat about 25 percent of the U.S. COVID-19 population that are actually at high risk, over age 50 with medical problems that present with severe symptoms.”
“We know that this is phase two of bioterrorism, we don’t know who’s behind it, but we know that they want a needle in every arm to inject messenger RNA, or adenoviral DNA into every human being,” he said. “They want every human being.” The doctor later warned that the experimental vaccines could ultimately lead to cancers, and sterilize young women.
Dr. McCullough said his goal is to set apart a large group of people that the system cannot get to, which would include those who have already had the virus, those with immunity, children, pregnant women, and child-bearing women.
The cardiologist went on to say that because there is no clinical benefit in young people whatsoever to get the vaccine, even one case of myocarditis or pericarditis following the shots “is too many,” yet even though the CDC is aware of hundreds of alarming reports of cases of heart swelling in teenagers and young adults, they’re only going to reevaluate the matter later on in June. He accused the medical establishment of neglecting to to do anything to reduce the risks of the vaccines.
As someone who has chaired over two dozen vaccine safety monitoring boards for the FDA, and National Institute for Health, McCullough had room to criticize how the vaccines have been rolled out.
“With this program, there is no critical event committee, there is no data-safety monitoring board, and there’s no human ethics committee. Those structures are mandatory for all large clinical investigations, and so the word that’s really used for what’s going on is malfeasance, that’s wrongdoing of people in authority,” the doctor explained.
“Without any safety measures in place, you can see what’s going on,” he continued.
“Basically it’s the largest application of a biological product with the greatest amount of morbidity and mortality in the history of our country.”
“We are at over 5,000 deaths so far, as you know, and I think about 15,000 hospitalizations. In the EU it’s over 10,000 deaths. We are working with the Center for Medicaid (CMS) data, and we have a pretty good lead that the real number is tenfold.”
McCullough explained that because the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database only amounts to about 10 percent of the bad reactions to the vaccines, his team has had to go to other sources for information.
“We have now a whistleblower inside the CMS, and we have two whistleblowers in the CDC,” the doctor revealed. “We think we have 50,000 dead Americans. Fifty thousand deaths. So we actually have more deaths due to the vaccine per day than certainly the viral illness by far. It’s basically propagandized bioterrorism by injection.”
Dr. McCullough said he’s seen people in his office with cases of portal vein thrombosis, myocarditis, and serious memory problems post-vaccination. “It’s so disconcerting,” he said.
“If you said this is all a Gates Foundation program to reduce the population, it’s fitting very well with that hypothesis, right? The first wave was to kill the old people by the respiratory infection, the second wave is to take the survivors and target the young people and sterilize them,” he said.
“If you notice the messaging in the country, in the United States, they’re not even interested in old people now. They want the kids. They want the kids, kids, kids, kids kids! They’re such a focus on the kids,” he said, noting that in Toronto, Canada, last month, they lured the children with promises of ice-cream to get the jab. According to one report, the government of Ontario—-which doesn’t require parental consent for children to get vaccinated—-encouraged the kids to get the Pfizer vaccine at a pop-up vaccine event.
“They held the parents back, and they were vaccinating the kids,” the doctor reported. He said his Canadian wife’s mother was forcibly vaccinated against her will.
McCullough predicted that the United States is gearing up to force people into getting the injections.
“We have to stop it, and we have to see what’s behind it,” he concluded.
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We have uploaded a copy of the film Cancer: The Forbidden Cures, to our Rumble and Bitchute channels.
This film was produced years ago, but it still stands as one of the best documentaries explaining how the FDA and Big Pharma have gone out of their way to suppress effective therapies that have been proven to treat cancer, to protect their monopoly on the Cancer Drug industry.
Here is the 3 and half minute trailer:
Since the roll out of the COVID-19 Plandemic at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 bioweapon shots have become the new cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry, and in order to get the FDA to issue emergency use authorizations to use the public as lab rats to complete their Phase 3 trials, they had to pull out a very familiar and often-used page from their playbook in the past: suppress natural and effective treatments so that consumers have only one source, creating a monopoly on a disease that only the FDA can approve “cures” to be sold to the public.
To understand their strategy, one only needs to review their monopoly on the cancer industry, and this documentary is an excellent source to understand it.
Here is a review on the documentary that we published back in 2013.
REVIEW BY DAVID BONELLO – INTERNATIONAL WELLNESS DIRECTORY
Not what it seems. When I popped in the DVD, I went to the chapters to see what they were. I felt, no, not again…the same old stuff.
What a pleasant surprise. I’ve researched and written about these “forbidden” cures for years. What a delight to actually see an interview with Rene Caisse. We even see a party thrown for Rene a year before she died filled with people whom she had helped with their cancers.
Harry Hoxsey shows up, and you get to see scenes from a rare movie that Hoxsey himself made in 1957 called You Don’t Have to Die. It is so rare, you can’t even find a mention of it at the Internet Movie Database.
I loved the research they did on this film. It must have taken years to compile all the archived photos, audio, and films.
They even got Morris Fishbein on film. This is the creep who ran medicine for nearly 50 years. He destroyed many people, many companies, and the damage he did to the health care system of the time killed untold numbers of suffering humans. However, the Hoxsey affair was his downfall. He was forced to resign after libeling Hoxsey and eventually had to admit that Hoxsey was curing cancer.
The section on Max Gerson was interesting, especially the deja vue section: they borrowed scenes from Dying to have Known. The scenes they used were the most powerful, the contraposed scenes of so-called medical experts proclaiming that no one has ever been cured of cancer at the Gerson clinic, juxtaposed with patients telling their story.
Finally, you’ll see some of the latest advances in alternative therapies, including a physician who is curing cancer with baking soda even after he’s lost his license to practice medicine. For you history buffs, this is a must have. For you people looking for options outside of conventional medicine, this could save your life. It is very well done and well worth a watch.
– David Bonello, International Wellness Directory
Here is the full length film.
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With Joe Biden in the White House you can expect to hear the name “Blackrock” in the headlines connected to a variety of issues from real estate purchasing to green energy projects with massive domestic and international investments.
BlackRock, Inc. (together with its subsidiaries) is a massive publicly traded multinational investment firm with over $8.68 trillion in assets under management [December 31, 2020 financial statement] in more than 100 countries across the globe. To say that Blackrock is invested in globalism, climate change and leftist politics, would be a severe understatement {See Here}. Larry Fink is the CEO and people like Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s attorney of record, are on the board.
Inside BlackRock there is a division called the BlackRock Investment Institute (BII) {See Here}.
Essentially the role of the BII is to tell BlackRock what is going to happen around the globe, and be the tip-of-the-spear in directing BlackRock where to invest money by predicting political events.
The Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute is Tom Donilon, President Obama’s former National Security Advisor (before Susan Rice), and a key advisor to Joe Biden throughout his career in politics.
You cannot get more deeply connected in the swamp financial schemes than Tom Donilon.
Donilon has been in/around government for 35+ years, deeply connected. Before joining the Obama administration Donilon was a registered lobbyist from 1999 through 2005 for O’Melvney & Myers. {Bio Here} Tom’s sole client was Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae is a government-backed private corporation that sells mortgages to investors.
Donilon took the lobbying gig because he was previously Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae where he was responsible for Fannie Mae’s legal, regulatory, government affairs, and public policy issues. Tom Donilon’s BlackRock Biography reads like a who’s-who of connections to the swamp {READ HERE}
Here’s where it really gets interesting.
Tom Donilon’s brother, Mike Donilon is a Senior Advisor to Joe Biden {link} providing guidance on what policies should be implemented within the administration. Mike Donilon guides the focus of spending, budgets, regulation and white house policy from his position of Senior Advisor to the President.
Tom Donilon’s wife, Catherine Russell, is the White House Personnel Director {link}. In that position Donilon’s wife controls every hire in the Office of the Presidency.
Tom Donilon’s daughter, Sarah Donilon, who graduated college in 2019, now works on the White House National Security Council {link}
So let me just summarize this…. The Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the guy who tells the $8.7 trillion investment firm BlackRock where to put their money, has a brother who is the Senior Advisor to Joe Biden; has a wife who is the White House Personnel Director; and has a daughter who is now on the National Security Council.
Put another way… Tom Donilon’s literal job description for BlackRock is to: “leverage the firm’s expertise and generate proprietary research to provide insights on the global economy, markets, geopolitics and long-term asset allocation,” and his wife is in charge of White House personnel, his brother is Senior Advisor to the President, and his daughter is on the National Security Council.
You seeing this? Conflicts and insider information much?
The only thing missing is Hunter Biden being moved to the BlackRock board.
Now, I say again: Watch Where “BlackRock” and Biden Put Their Money…
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The World Health Organization is awaiting an independent review of an Italian study indicating that COVID-19 could have been in circulation in the country as early as September 2019.
The findings will form part of its investigations into the origins of the outbreak.
CGTN’s Hermione Kitson spoke with scientists in Tuscany at the forefront of the study.
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Dr. Mike Yeadon walks us through the effects of COVID-19 vaccines on adolescents particularly for school-age children and younger.
“I’m genuinely pro-vaccine but I’m pro-safety and these COVID-19 vaccines are not safe. Gene-based design makes your body manufacture virus spike proteins and we know that virus spike proteins trigger blood clots.”
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On the “Dark Horse Podcast,” Dr. Robert Malone, creator of mRNA vaccine technology, said the COVID vaccine lipid nanoparticles — which tell the body to produce the spike protein — leave the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues.
From 1950 through May 23, 2021, the mandate of the UN Security Council has been either violated or ignored, contributing to the gross destabilization of the world, and the Security Council has authorized four virtually genocidal wars through resolutions based upon fabricated justifications.
The idea of children, including preschoolers, walking around with bacteria traps on their breathing orifices all day so shocked the conscience that last summer, a bunch of internet parodies were produced illustrating such absurdity. Then, within weeks, most local governments mandated this cruel form of child abuse for an entire year without any study of the side effects.
Independent MP Derek Sloan holds a news conference on Parliament Hill to raise concerns about the alleged censorship of doctors and scientists as well as medical information related to vaccines.
Governments are using fear to control and manipulate their citizens. That has now been admitted by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K. And they should know, because they advocated for it, and now say it was a regrettable mistake.
On 3 June 1941 a meeting of the Soviet Supreme Military Council was chaired in Moscow. Its goal was to ratify instructions for the Red Army’s political workers, which would stress the need for vigilance and caution against the growing Nazi threat.
Good doctors are doing unthinkable things like injecting biologically active messenger RNA that produces this pathogenic spike protein into pregnant women. I think when these doctors wake up up from their trance, they’re going to be shocked to think what they’ve done to people.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. Think about it.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Brussels on Monday reminds us once again of what a hoax the United States had perpetrated on the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 by assuring him that the western alliance would expand “not one inch eastward” once Moscow allowed German Unification and disbanded the Warsaw Pact.
Residents of Sheikh Jarrah’s resistance to eviction by Israeli Jews evolved into a military confrontation so lopsided, the Israeli bombardments against Gaza so terrifying, it drew widespread condemnation (the US government excepted).
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A man claiming to be a friend with a British Airways pilot has stated that 3 pilots have just died within the past week shortly after receiving COVID-19 injections, and his recording has gone viral on social media. Here is the recording (let us know if Twitter takes it down as we have a copy.)
HUGE …. 3 British Airways pilots have DIED of the COxxVID vaxxine in the past 7-days, and BA are now in crisis talks with the UK Government about whether or not their vaxxinated pilots should be allowed to fly.
This brought out the usual corporate media “fact-checkers” to try and debunk the man’s claims.
Reuters responded with a “fact-check,” but in their own investigation and report they confirmed that not only did these three die, but a fourth one as well.
They gave the usual corporate media response by quoting some health “authorities” who categorically stated that their deaths had “nothing to do” with the shots, while not denying that they died, nor giving any other explanation for their deaths.
Shared in the form of a voice recording on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, an unidentified male says he has spoken to a “friend who’s a BA pilot” and explains “things are getting crazy” after three fellow pilots passed away (here , here and here).
“They’ve had the third BA pilot die in the last seven days, yeah? Third pilot dead in the last week,” says the man heard in the recording. “The first two guys were in their forties and fifties; this guy, mid-thirties, perfectly fit, no underlying conditions. He gets his second jab and he’s dead within days, exactly the same with the first two.
“Because of this, BA are now in crisis talks with the government about whether to allow vaccinated pilots to fly. The issue with that of course is that about 80%, according to my friend in BA, 80-85% have been injected.”
The man then goes on to say only “10% of pilots will be able to fly,” branding it a “serious issue”.
Reuters presented the claims to British Airways, which said they were unfounded and that no such talks were underway with the government.
The spokesperson, however, confirmed the authenticity of the four condolence books, as four company pilots had recently passed away.
“Our thoughts are with their family and friends,” they said, adding that none of the deaths was linked to vaccines.
In a statement to Reuters, the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) also denied any such crisis talks with Britain’s flagship air carrier.
“We have not been made aware of deaths of BA pilots after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine and have not had discussions with BA or other airlines, about preventing pilots from flying after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Dr. Sarah Branch, the director of vigilance and risk management of medicines for the MHRA. “There are currently no restrictions on aviation or other industries and activities post vaccination.” (Source -Emphasis added.)
Meanwhile, Sky News out of Australia is reporting that airline companies in Spain and Russia are warning COVID-19 “vaccinated” people not to travel because of the risk of blood clots.
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The Ethiopian government is committing massacres and other crimes against humanity in different regions of the country. At the recent G7 meeting in Britain over 1,000 protestors marched outside calling for urgent action to prevent more killings of civilians in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. The United States and its allies ignored this.
Instead, they repeated their claims that China is guilty of massive human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. This reveals their fear at the threat posed by China to American hegemony over the global economy.
The G7 discussed plans to contain China’s economic development through the “Build Back Better World’’ initiative. This infrastructure programme is designed to counter China’s Belt and Road project. This reveals their fear at the threat posed by China to American hegemony over the global economy.
Last November Ethiopia’s army launched an invasion a devastating war on the Tigray region that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands, mass ethnic cleansing and weaponized rapes of women.
Both the ineffectual UN and pro western human rights group Amnesty International have called for urgent investigations into the massive wave of violence directed against civilians in the Tigray region.
“Thousands have been killed, millions displaced, cities demolished and looted, and millions are starving and suffering from a lack of essential services. ”
Since then the central government’s bloody repression has triggered another civil war in the Oromia region which wants independence for its region.
Investigative journalist Rene Lefort has commented:
“While more than half of the country is under a de facto state of emergency managed by martial law (“Command Post”), basic order is still far from prevailing in these [non-war] zones. Barely a week passes without a massacre, or pogrom, with dozens of victims.’’
“The conditions for genocide against Tigrayans are ripe, and there really are intentions and deeds to destroy Tigray, and cleanse and exterminate Tigrayans. International intervention is needed to avoid a 21st century genocide of Rwandan proportions and a silent massacre of millions of Tigrayans by starvation.’’
The civil wars engulfing the country also encompasses the Oromia region where the Oromo Liberation Army has advanced to the Shewan part of Ormomia near the capital Addis Ababa. This is in response to civilian deaths caused by the violent repression of the Ethiopian army in the region.
The US and its Western allies claim that China is guilty of genocide in its Xinjiang region without producing any solid evidence to support these claims. Meanwhile, they ignore the atrocities being committed by the Ethiopian government on a daily basis. The hubris and hypocrisy of American imperialism and its allies knows no bounds as they step up their Cold War propaganda against China and Russia.
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Vaccine: Residents of Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces who refuse to take the covid-19 vaccine could have their cell phone signal blocked. The measure was one of the solutions found by local authorities to encourage the population to immunize, as reported by The New York Times on Tuesday (15).
With 216 million inhabitants currently, the Asian country began vaccination for covid-19 in February, with the expectation of serving between 45 and 65 million people by the end of this year. However, only 3 million had received the two doses in early June, according to official data.
The suspicions regarding the immunization against the new coronavirus are related to the fake news about the subject circulating in the country, according to the publication. One of the most talked about conspiracy theories among Pakistanis is that whoever receives the doses will die within a period of up to two years.
But misinformation about vaccines is old in Pakistan, mainly associated with polio, resulting in a large number of cases there. Believing that it is a formula produced by the United States for the purpose of sterilizing children, many parents prohibit their children from being vaccinated against the polio virus.
Pay cut
Cutting the cell phone signal for those who do not get vaccinated should be just one of the efforts of Pakistani authorities to encourage immunization. In Sindh, the government also plans to suspend pay for civil servants who refuse to be served.
Sanctions are expected to start in July, but there is not much information yet on how they will work. While the measures do not go into effect, many Pakistanis rush to get fake vaccination certificates, sold for the equivalent of US$12 each (just over R$60 in direct conversion, at the rate of the day).
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Royal Caribbean’s Odyssey of the Seas was scheduled to leave Port Everglades on July 3rd. The cruise was halted after eight crew members tested positive for COVID. Strange enough, all eight COVID-positive crew members were “vaccinated” for COVID, proving yet again that these spike protein bioweapons do not stop people from testing positive for COVID or transmitting infection. Royal Caribbean has discovered that the VACCINATED cause outbreaks, and vaccines are not magic elixirs that prevent infection at all times.
The good news is that only two of the positive COVID cases showed any kind of symptoms, and these symptoms were mild, like any other cold virus. Testing positive for COVID and not having any sign of sickness is a pattern that has occurred for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated populations for over a year. Even though NONE of these positive cases on the Odyssey of the Seas represent a viable public health concern, the CDC has quarantined hundreds of non-infected, vaccinated crew members and halted the ship’s operations! The ship’s inaugural sailing date is now July 31st. Under the current testing standards, the CDC will always find a “COVID CASE” no matter if a person is vaccinated or not. Under the current quarantine standards, ships will never sail again and people’s lives will be disrupted for no reason!
Cruise ship industry and basic human liberties are under attack
For over a year, Royal Caribbean and the rest of the cruise ship industry have begrudgingly acquiesced to the CDC’s unlawful medical edicts and false authority, hoping that the agency would give people their basic liberties back. But as the industry comes to rely on the CDC for basic economic and personal freedoms, more of those individual liberties are taken away. The cruise ship industry has not been allowed to operate at all under the CDC guidelines, as thousands of cruise ship employees are forced to take part in an experiment that alters their cells and distributes spike proteins into their blood. All this time, the CDC guidelines advertise “safety” while continuing to violate bodily autonomy and informed consent principles.
By targeting the cruise ship industry specifically, the CDC is contradicting their own guidance and discriminating against one industry over all other industries. The CDC no longer responds to infectious disease outbreaks in an evidence-based manner. This rogue agency of unelected officials has abused their authority, locking down an industry without giving individuals a choice to assume their own risks. Individuals have assumed risks with infectious viruses, bacteria and fungi for centuries, without having to take part in an experiment and passport system that further enslaves them and promotes future outbreaks.
There are many reasons someone might seek medical attention on a cruise ship, (including heart attacks, aneurysms, and blood clots caused by COVID vaccines) but in the case of Odyssey of the Seas, COVID is not one of the reasons. Nevertheless, the CDC has the power to shut down the entire cruise for another two months and isolate vaccinated people who did everything to their body that the CDC wanted.
Florida fighting back against CDC to ensure that unvaccinated people aren’t segregated
The CDC has kept the cruise ship industry locked down for over a year in order to implement Fourth Reich vaccine passports in the United States. The Florida state legislature has fought back against vaccine passports, and has passed a law to punish any rogue entity (such as the CDC) which threatens to violate the medical privacy of an individual or discriminate against a person based on their vaccination status. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is poised to enforce that law, putting the rogue CDC on notice. Consequentially, all cruise ships that sail out of Florida cannot legally require passengers to prove their vaccination status. Individuals in Florida will NOT be segregated or abused. They will be treated with dignity and can assume their own level of risk, as was always the case. As for the vaccinated: They will continue to test positive for COVID and spread spike proteins and other diseases; therefore, they SHOULD NEVER receive preferential treatment or be given special privileges.
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China has slammed G-7 leaders for pushing an aggressive agenda against itself and Russia. The 47th G-7 Summit in Carbis Bay, United Kingdom, concluded on Sunday, June 13. It was attended by the leaders of the seven global north nations and European Union, who form the core membership of the group, and with India, South Africa, South Korea and Australia as invitees.
In the three-day long summit, leaders led by United States president Joe Biden pushed for an aggressive stance against China and Russia, two of the emerging global powers. In the final joint communique that was released the seven governments and the EU pushed for “collective approaches” to counter policies of the Chinese government that allegedly “undermine the fair and transparent operation of the global economy.”
The communique also made sweeping statements on the situation in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, made unsubstantiated allegations of forced labor, called for an investigation into man-made origin theories of COVID-19, and called for a “free and open Indo Pacific” in the context of stained relations between mainland China and Taiwan.
The language in the communique and by Biden himself resurrected the same unsubstantiated allegations raised by the previous US administration under Donald Trump.
In response to the meeting, the Chinese embassy in the UK commented that the “days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone.” They added that any matter of global affairs needs to be decided in consultation with all nations as per the “basic norms of international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, not the so-called rules formulated by a small number of countries.”
The embassy also countered the statements on Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong and alleged that the leaders distorted the facts, exposing the “sinister intentions of a few countries such as the United States.”
The G-7 nations also pledged a long overdue spending commitment of USD 100 billion for poorer nations to transition to cut carbon emissions and mitigate global warming. In 2009, as part of the Copenhagen Accord, advanced economies had made a pledge to contribute USD 100 billion per year until 2020.
The target was never met, and the G-7 nations have often deliberately derailed the commitments, which led to the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This long overdue funding is now revived as part of measures to counter competition from China and its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.
The G7 meeting was followed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit on June 14, Monday, where again the same leaders continued to push an aggressive stand against China and Russia. In the final communique by the 30-member organization, the leaders of the summit called China’s “stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order.”
Sweeping statements on “lack of transparency and use of disinformation” and “coercive policies” were made in the communique, reiterating the same allegations made in the G7 communique.
Unlike the G7, which emerged as a platform for economic cooperation among some of the richest nations, NATO is a military bloc that emerged during the Cold War with an explicit purpose to contain the Soviet influence and growing communist movements around the world. This, along with a contentious NATO military exercise in South China Sea, indicates that the US and its allies wish to expand their aggression with China into a militaristic competition as well.
Campaign against cold war tactics grow
In the meanwhile social movements and peace movements are coming together to oppose these latest escalation of tensions by western powers. A public meeting scheduled to be held on June 16, Wednesday, will launch the No Cold War Britain campaign, to oppose the “increasingly aggressive statements and actions” towards China by the US.
The organizers of the meeting have described the newly-emerging Cold War with China as “an obstacle to humanity successfully dealing with extremely serious common issues which confront it such as climate change, control of pandemics, racist discrimination and economic development.”
Several prominent progressive public figures including Vijay Prashad from the Tricontinental Institute, Andrew Murray of the Stop the War Coalition UK, Fiona Edwards of the No Cold War, Jodie Evans of CODEPINK, and Ben Chacko (editor of the Morning Star) among others, will be speaking at the event.
“In the midst of a pandemic, the only way forward is for the states of the world to collaborate with each other rather than to intensify competition,” insisted Vijay Prashad, while speaking to Phoenix Media Co-op. “The conflict imposed on China is a distraction from the many compelling problems we face, at the heart of it all being the virus and the economic collapse that has come as a consequence. We need collaboration to deal with both.”
The plan to launch a unified campaign against cold war aggression in the UK, comes at a time when the British government has sent its largest warship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, along with other warships to South China Sea to participate in NATO naval exercises.
Pointing out how the decision to participate in the exercise is both “aggressive and a total waste of resources” Fiona Edwards stated that “instead of wasting billions of pounds on weapons of mass destruction and supporting the US’s military build-up against China, Britain should genuinely pursue dialogue and global cooperation with China to tackle the immense problems facing humanity.”
Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK questioned the anti-China push by Biden.
“Biden says at G7 press conference that the only way we will meet global threats, including ending the pandemic and combating climate change, is by working together. Then why all the trashing of Russia and China?,” she asked in a tweet.
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Featured image: Anti-NATO and anti-war protest in Brussels, on the day of the NATO summit in the city on June 14, 2021. Photo: PTB
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Before entering the Trump administration to serve as U.S. envoy to Venezuela and Iran, Elliott Abrams penned a revealing essay in May 2017, entitled “Why I’m Rooting for the Hardliner in Iran’s Elections: Two cheers for Ibrahim Raisi!”
Abrams was well aware of Raisi’s bloody track record as a judiciary official, where he was among the judges who oversaw the execution of thousands of political prisoners in the 1980s. Abrams was also well aware that a Raisi presidency could make him the apparent successor to the aging Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, which could have far-reaching consequences for decades to come.
However, Abrams’ support boiled down to his belief that Raisi represents “the true face of the Islamic Republic, while Rouhani is a façade.” According to Abrams, elevating a hardliner like Raisi would bring the Islamic Republic closer to collapse and provide a “clearer view” of the nature of the regime. Such an understanding would make it easier to advance the pressure policies that Abrams and his like-minded compatriots favored, regardless of their interlocutor in Iran and what could be achieved through diplomacy.
Abrams was far from alone in his belief. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the architect of Trump’s maximum pressure policies, published a memo for the Trump administration arguing that Iran was susceptible to “coerced democratization” and suggesting that the administration “work to prevent Rouhani’s reelection.” This dynamic was not new, either, as some U.S. hawks revealed their preference for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ahead of Iran’s notorious 2009 election.
Of course, Raisi was soundly defeated by the incumbent and relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani four years ago, 57 to 38 percent. Amid high turnout, that outcome signaled continued support for international compromise, the lifting of sanctions, and promises of domestic reforms at home.
But what a difference four years, and a damaging U.S. pressure campaign, makes.
While Rouhani entered his second term with a mandate to pursue broader sanctions relief, U.S. hardliners promptly scuttled his prospects. At the urging of hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo inside the Trump administration, and outside groups like FDD, Trump exited the nuclear deal that many Iranians had publicly celebrated just a few short years before. In the months that followed, sanctions increased to heights not even seen during the height of the Obama administration. Rouhani’s moderation had been met with pressure, vindicating Rouhani’s critics who had warned that the United States could never be trusted.
Now, Rouhani is set to leave office with little to show for his engagement, and people in Iran are desperate and disillusioned amid continuing repression, dramatic sanctions-induced inflation, and a devastating pandemic. Amid widespread voter apathy triggered in large part by the continuation of sanctions, Iran’s leaders have brazenly rigged the game to the benefit of the candidate that U.S. and Iranian hardliners have actively rooted for: Ibrahim Raisi.
Now that the project of installing a hardline Iranian president with minimal voter participation is near complete, U.S. hawks will undoubtedly urge President Biden to finish what Trump started. Even in the face of continual blowback — on the nuclear issue, across the region, and for the people of Iran — direct military confrontation and the removal of the regime in Iran is the only outcome that will satisfy U.S. hawks.
As Abrams’ essay shows, U.S. and Iranian opponents of diplomacy pursue mutually reinforcing policies. Raisi recovered from a decisive defeat in large part thanks to maximum pressure, vaulting to the top of powerful judiciary and, almost certainly, soon to the presidency while the people of Iran bore the brunt yet again of America’s powerful sanctions. And, as Iran tips in a reactionary direction, U.S. hawks will find further justification to push even more escalatory policies.
President Biden has signaled a desire for a new approach and rightly invested significant energy in reviving the nuclear deal with Iran. But he also moved slowly, failed to take significant steps to open up humanitarian trade amid the pandemic and kept his predecessor’s sanctions in place. Now, with Raisi’s elevation, Biden’s options narrow even further. He can continue his predecessor’s pressure-only approach that decimated moderates, empowered Raisi and his fellow hardliners, and closed the door on broader diplomacy. Or he can restore the agreement Trump worked so hard to kill, ease the pressure on the people of Iran and restore some semblance of faith that diplomacy can deliver for each country. Only the latter has delivered any success — for both the United States and the people of Iran.
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The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
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As the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday easily passed a bill by Rep. Barbara Lee to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, peace advocates called on Congress to enact similar legislation to end the 2001 AUMF upon which the open-ended so-called Global War on Terror has been waged for nearly 20 years.
Appearing on NBC‘s “Meet the Press Daily” on Thursday, Lee (D-Calif.), who was the only member of Congress to vote against the post-9/11 AUMF (pdf)—passed one week after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States—told host Chuck Todd that H.R. 256, her bill repealing the 2002 AUMF that passed by a bipartisan vote of 268-161, “is an important step toward repealing the 2001 authorization.”
“We must keep up our fight to repeal the 2001 AUMF so that no future president has the unilateral power to plunge us into endless wars,” Lee said separately ahead of Thursday’s House vote.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) also called to repeal the 2001 AUMF, tweeting Thursday that “the power to declare war belongs to Congress because we are the branch most accountable to the people.”
“Today, the House voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which has enabled endless war in Iraq,” Porter added. “Let’s do the 2001 AUMF next.”
The anti-war group Peaceful Tomorrows, founded by relatives of 9/11 victims, published a statement Thursday calling for a repeal of the 2001 authorization.
“It has been almost two decades since the deaths of our loved ones, and for the entirety of that time, the U.S. has been at war,” the group tweeted. “These wars have not brought justice for the crimes of 9/11. Instead, they have caused untold suffering and deaths among innocent civilians who bore no responsibility for 9/11. Rather than keeping Americans and other people throughout the world safer, these wars have inflamed and provoked violence.”
Now onto a Senate vote on S.J. Res. 10, then (hopefully) an effort to repeal the 2001 AUMF as well. See our full statement, backed by >250 family members of 9/11 victims, on the need to reject authorizations for endless war and bring the forever wars to a long overdue end. pic.twitter.com/MB9jJ3Wfno
— Peaceful Tomorrows (@PeacefulTomorro) June 17, 2021
Peaceful Tomorrows noted that while the 2001 AUMF gave then-President George W. Bush “the authority to use force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” the law “has been used by the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations to authorize the use of force in 19 countries, against groups that did not even exist in 2001, and have no connection to the attacks.”
“To end the forever wars and end this chapter in American history, Congress must sunset the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” the group said.
In 2001, Lee presciently warned that the AUMF would allow presidents to wage war “anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic, and national security interests, and without time limit.”
“That was a blank check; it was passed right after the horrific attacks of 9/11, it was 60 words, and it just authorized the use of force forever,” Lee told Todd of the 2001 authorization. “So it set the stage for perpetual war.”
As debates kick off on H.R.256, you can find some more historical background by reading our joint letter from earlier this year, where we joined 24 other orgs in calling on Congress to repeal the 2002 #AUMF (and sunset the 2001 AUMF!).https://t.co/hmY0I494sj
The U.S.-led anti-terror war—which includes the Afghanistan War, the longest in U.S. history—continues to this day. At least 800,000 Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, Pakistani, Somali, Syrian, and Yemeni people, as well as thousands of U.S. and allied troops, have died, at a cost exceeding $6.4 trillion, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, toldEsquire in an article published Wednesday that the 2001 AUMF is even more important than the 2002 authorization because it “grants the president broad authority to extend the war wherever and however he pleases.”
If the Senate Is Serious About Ending Endless Wars, It Should Focus on the 2001 AUMFhttps://t.co/lPtHE9fpHY
— Mass. Peace Action #FreePalestine (@masspeaceaction) June 17, 2021
Esquire politics editor Jack Holmes wrote:
The move to repeal the 2002 AUMF is welcome, particularly because, as the Trump administration demonstrated, it can also be exploited by the executive to justify unilateral decisions of war and peace. But if [Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York] is serious about reclaiming the war powers of Congress—and ending our endless wars—then the 2001 AUMF will have to go, too.
The Biden White House, like every administration, is fused to the extended military and intelligence apparatus… When the smoke clears, there are always new enemies. More bombs to drop, and give to our friends to drop. Eventually, this has to stop. It would help if the legislative branch, and its many individual members who have absolved themselves of responsibility for these endless conflicts by ensuring they never have to go on the record about them, would take some of that responsibility back.
On the House floor ahead of Thursday’s vote, Lee cited some of the “lies and misinformation” disseminated by the Bush administration in its attempt to sell the Iraq War to a largely skeptical American public. And while it was not based on as many outright lies as the Iraq War, the Bush administration nevertheless brushed off multiple opportunities to avoid a protracted war in Afghanistan.
In the weeks following 9/11, the Taliban—whose members were previously supported by the U.S. government and courted by American business interests despite their human rights crimes—offered first to try al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and then to turn him over to the United States as Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan.
We're grateful to our friends like @WinWithoutWar and champions like @RepBarbaraLee, who have worked tirelessly for peace. We look forward to working with our allies and partners to finally #StopEndlessWar.
— Indivisible Guide (@IndivisibleTeam) June 17, 2021
In April, President Joe Biden announced he plans to withdraw all regular American combat troops from Afghanistan by this year’s anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to the Costs of War Project, the nearly 20-year war has claimed an estimated 241,000 lives and cost the U.S. $2.26 trillion.
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Recently the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to the all-male draft. The plaintiffs in the case argued that excluding women from the draft was unconstitutional. Apparently the Court is simply letting Congress decide the issue.
I’ve got an idea — an idea grounded in freedom. How about abolishing the draft — and, of course, draft registration? In fact, better yet, how about enacting a constitutional amendment prohibiting the draft from ever being enacted again?
Young people might think the matter is irrelevant, given that there hasn’t been conscription since the Vietnam War. That is naive, wishful, and dangerous thinking. Every 18-year-old male is required, on pain of a felony conviction, to register for the draft. The reason? Because in the event of some major foreign war, make no mistake about it: The Pentagon will not hesitate to restore the draft because it will need soldiers to fight, kill, and die. Young men — and also most likely young women — will begin receiving draft notices ordering them to report to military facilities for training and “service” to “their country.”
The fact that the national-security establishment continues doing everything it can to gin up such a war — like with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea — makes the the possibility of a draft even more likely. And once it happens, there is little anyone will be able to do to stop it. In fact, in the event of another major foreign war, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started jailing people for just challenging the draft, as U.S. officials did in World War I.
There is no way to reconcile conscription with the principles of a genuinely free society. Either people are the masters of their own lives or the government is their master. It’s one or the other.
With conscription, the government wields the power to order a person to leave his family and his regular life and report to a government facility to serve the state. That is the opposite of freedom. In a genuinely free society, a person has the right to live his life the way he wants — free of governmental interference, so long as his conduct is peaceful and non-fraudulent.
In fact, there is actually no difference between slavery and conscription. Under slavery, a person is being force to serve his master. That’s what conscription is based on. It’s a system in which the individual is being forced to serve his master, with the master being the federal government, and specifically the Pentagon.
Under 19th-century slavery in America, the slave’s service usually consisted of work on a plantation. Under conscription, the work consists of military training on a Pentagon-run facility and then killing, maiming, or torturing people on orders in some faraway land. But that’s just a distinction without a difference. What matters is that under both systems, the individual is being forced to serve his master.
Proponents of the draft say that sometimes it is necessary to force people to fight for “freedom.” But that’s ridiculous because if you have a system where the government can conscript people, you no longer have a free society. Freedom has been destroyed in the name of protecting freedom.
Moreover, when you have a genuinely free society, you don’t need to force people to fight for their freedom. A free people will fight vociferously to protect their freedom. In fact, foreign regimes that attack and invade a genuinely free society soon find that they have swallowed a porcupine.
The problem is that the U.S. government wages foreign wars — that is, wars in faraway lands, where no foreign regime has attacked or invaded the United States. In those wars, many Americans aren’t interested in giving up their lives to fight the “enemy.” World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam come to mind.
In every one of those wars, Americans had to be forced to go fight, kill, and die. Oh, yes, they were all told that they were fighting for their “freedom,” but that was palpable nonsense.
If any of the enemies in those wars were really invading the United States, there would have been more than enough Americans ready and willing to defend their country, their lives, and their freedom. No one would have had to have been forced to fight.
Yes, I know, in World War II Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. But my hunch is that many Americans realized that President Roosevelt had manipulated Japan into attacking in order to circumvent widespread American opposition to entry into the war. Moreover, many Americans realized that Japan never intended to invade and take over the United States, Instead, it was simply trying to knock out the Pacific fleet to give Japan a free hand to secure oil in the Dutch East Indies, as a way to overcome FDR’s pre-war oil embargo on Japan. Moreover, if FDR had not been successful in maneuvering Japan into “firing the first shot,” Germany would not have declared war on the United States.
If you’ve never read the essay “Conscription” by Daniel Webster, I highly recommend it:
Today, the American people have a unique opportunity to lead the world to a genuinely free society. A great place to begin would be a constitutional amendment, modeled after the 13th Amendment, that prohibits conscription forever.
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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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Joe Biden took part in several key international meetings over the last week covering a wide range of issues but with one key goal in mind: intensify the new Cold War with China and construct a global front towards this end. This is the most intensive series of diplomatic summits for the Biden administration yet, and provides key insights about how it plans to manage the affairs of U.S. empire.
The first major event took place in the UK, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson hosted the other members of the “Group of 7” club of advanced imperialist economies from June 11 to 13. Biden took credit for pushing the other leaders to attack China by name for the first time in the closely-watched communique issued at the conclusion of the summit. The communique was designed to provocatively touch on the issues that China considers to be core to its sovereignty and the integrity of its national territory.
The G7 called on China “to respect … those rights, freedoms and high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law”. It also demanded that China “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially in relation to Xinjiang”. The communique expressed support for “peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues. We remain seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas and strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo and increase tensions.”
These words are dripping in hypocrisy. For 150 years Hong Kong was ruled in a completely dictatorial fashion by the British Empire with no guaranteed political rights for its residents, who were colonial subjects of the Queen of England. The city returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 after having been stolen in the infamous Opium Wars of the 19th century, a development the G7 leaders are effectively trying to undo by supporting the separatist protest movement. The manufacturing of the “Uighur genocide” issue by the United States and allied powers similarly seeks to slice off a major section of China’s northwestern territory and damage its reputation internationally. And far from promoting “peace and stability”, the United States and others routinely sail warships and fly military aircraft through the Taiwan Strait in deliberate provocations against China. Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China, was seized by the defeated forces of dictator Chiang Kai-shek at the conclusion of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 with U.S. backing and is rightfully claimed by China as part of its national territory.
The Biden administration along with the other G7 leaders fueled the baseless conspiracy theory that Coronavirus was unleashed onto the world accidentally or intentionally by a virology lab in China. This is clearly intended to compensate for the imperialist countries’ woefully poor performance containing the pandemic relative to China. A similar logic was at play with the pledge by the G7 to donate one billion COVID vaccine doses to poorer nations. Especially considering how wealthy the major western powers are compared to China, the Chinese government’s extensive efforts to aid 66 other countries’ vaccination efforts has put them to shame.
A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry strongly rejected the G7 communique, which it said sought to, “wantonly smear China and blatantly interfere in its internal affairs.” The ministry affirmed that, “Gone are the days when one country or a group of countries dictated the world.”
The United States and European powers made economic moves to deepen their aggressive posturing towards China. On June 15, a US-European Union Trade and Technology Council was established with the goal of coordinating policies to constrain China’s ability to trade with the rest of the world and pursue its economic development. The U.S. and European leaders pledged the “development and deployment of new technologies based on our shared democratic values”. It is ludicrous that the government that developed the monstrous NSA electronic surveillance state that spies on its own population along with much of the rest of the world feels the right to lecture China on democratic values in technology. To underscore their commitment to coordinating economic policy as part of a united front against China, U.S. and European officials brokered an end to their long-running dispute over subsidies for corporate giants Boeing and Airbus.
NATO Summit
On June 14, immediately after the conclusion of the G7 summit, the leaders of the NATO military alliance gathered in Brussels. There, the leaders declared for the first time that China constituted a “systemic challenge to the rules-based international order”. The “rules-based international order” is a euphemism frequently used to refer to the existing world order dominated by the U.S.-led bloc of imperialist powers.
This represents a historic shift in the mission of NATO. Founded in 1949, the goal of NATO was to prepare for a new world war with the Soviet Union, and ensure that all the major capitalist powers would be united in their global confrontation with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has served in large part as a mechanism to threaten Russia — now capitalist but still outside of the control of the traditional imperialist powers.
The elevation of China to the status of a “threat” of the same magnitude as Russia is a serious escalation. It also further disproves NATO’s assertion that it is a “collective defense” organization for the North Atlantic, considering that it has now taken up stoking war in East Asia as a core task.
Biden-Putin meeting
Biden capped his week of diplomacy with a highly-anticipated meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Biden has a long history of hostility towards Russia. He was effectively put in charge of Ukraine by the Obama administration following the 2014 coup that installed an anti-Russian government, is a proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, and shortly after taking office as president called Putin a “killer” — which led to the withdrawal of the Russian ambassador to the United States and subsequently the withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador to Russia.
Anti-Russia hardliners in the U.S. political elite were disappointed that Biden expressed something less than absolute, unmitigated hostility at the Putin summit. The tone of the meeting was in marked contrast to for instance the Alaska summit with top Chinese officials in March, where the U.S. side was senselessly belligerent and saw the meeting as little more than an opportunity to raise ideologically-charged criticisms of China’s system of government. But at the same time little was done in the way of concrete action to change the status quo of simmering tension.
Biden described his policy towards Russia as “strategic stability”. This essentially means the preservation of the status quo instead of a further deterioration in relations. Towards that end, Biden and Putin agreed to hold ongoing talks between their respective countries’ officials on the issues of cybersecurity and arms control. They also put Biden’s “killer” remark behind them and agreed to send their ambassadors back to their posts.
But the core issues that have put the United States and Russia on a collision course remain unchanged: the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, the conflict in Ukraine, efforts at regime change in Russia-aligned Belarus, the war in Syria, and others. “Strategic stability” suggests that Biden does not intend to make any major moves to resolve these conflicts.
Biden’s preference for “strategic stability” is likely motivated in large part by his desire to focus on the new Cold War with China. Russia and China have been developing progressively closer relations in the face of deepening hostility from the United States in recent years. Keeping China and Russia divided has long been a key goal of U.S. foreign policy, and its ability to achieve this was key to its success in the original Cold War. Momentarily softening pressure on Russia to foster suspicion in China (and vice versa) is a tried and true tactic in the toolkit of U.S. imperialism.
On the road to war
While Biden and his top officials were busy escalating global tensions with statements, press conferences and communiques; bombers, fighter jets and warships in East Asia were demonstrating the real-world consequences of these reckless moves.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Navy announced it had deployed the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier along with a guided-missile destroyer and a guided-missile cruiser to the South China Sea. The South China Sea is the site of numerous territorial disputes between neighboring countries including China, which the United States has long sought to inflame by sailing warships through contested waters.
Also on Tuesday, China’s air force flew 28 planes into an area around Taiwan’s airspace known as an Air Defense Identification Zone — the largest number of mainland aircraft yet to be sent into the ADIZ. This maneuver was carried out in retaliation to the G7 communique that raised the issue of Taiwan for the first time. China needed to demonstrate that it would not back down from its rightful claim to sovereignty over all of its territory.
Reports surfaced this week that the Pentagon was mulling the creation of a permanent naval task force to patrol the waters surrounding China. This task force would be led by the United States but also involve forces from U.S. allies. While it has yet to be confirmed, the task force is conceptualized along the lines of the Standing Naval Forces Atlantic that operated during the original Cold War. Should this come to pass, it would represent a major ratcheting up of military pressure on China.
The Biden administration is pursuing a foreign policy completely at odds with the interests of workers in the United States. If a war between the United States and China were to ever break out, the consequences for every person on the planet would be catastrophic. In the meantime, trillions of dollars that could otherwise be used to solve social problems will instead be wasted on instruments of destruction. And for what? The continued domination of U.S. banks and corporations over the whole world is not a cause worth dying for.
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Featured image: NATO heads of state at the alliance’s summit in Brussels (Source: Liberation News)
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Four years ago this weekend, I received a phone call. The panicked voice at the end of the line told me a terror attack had taken place.
Someone had rammed their van into worshippers as they left night prayers at Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, and one of the worshippers had been killed.
This was our mosque, our community hub, our space of solace, and my workplace. Now our sense of serenity had been shattered by an act of hate.
The days that followed saw a flurry of activity and chaos. The world’s media camped outside our mosque. Security was heightened, official visits took place, and promises of change were made.
Four years on, we are still waiting for those promises to be fulfilled.
The politicians and media may have moved on, but our community has not. Makram Ali, who was mowed down in the attack, is still dead.
His children are still without a father, and those who knew him and prayed beside him still live in fear that an attack like this could take place again and that their names will be the ones written in obituaries.
Our mosque has received endless calls from Muslim women in the area worried about being the victims of hate crimes and we have had to put on workshops and therapy sessions to help with the trauma people are experiencing.
Our lives as a community were changed forever on 19 June 2017, and we are still feeling the effect of that attack today.
Dark smog
It is why I was pained and horrified to see such a similar attack take place in Canada earlier this month where four members of the same family in London, Ontario, were killed because they were Muslim.
Reading about this incident gave me flashbacks to what took place outside our mosque and the unimaginable terror and horror unleashed that day.
Though these attacks took place hundreds of miles apart, the source of this hatred is the same: Islamophobia.
Islamophobia is the dark smog we have allowed to descend on our societies. What was once exclusively the rhetoric of the far right on the fringes of society has now infiltrated the mainstream and has become the acceptable face of racism.
The Islamophobic attacks that took place in Finsbury Park, Ontario, and Christchurch, to name a few, did not arise in a vacuum.
They are the culmination of decades of institutional Islamophobic discourse and racialised policies that have filtered down from the top to our streets.
Islamophobia is not simply surviving, it is thriving, and we put Muslims at risk when we fail to acknowledge the pattern of hate locally and across borders.
Here in the UK, we have a political class that still refuses to acknowledge Islamophobia and take it seriously, and a media that is complicit in spreading negative coverage of Muslims and demonising them.
Global inaction
From London to Jerusalem, from Christchurch to Oslo, the impact of Islamophobia is clear for everyone to see, yet the response to its rise globally has been met with inaction, silence, and in some cases, celebration.
Following the attacks in London, Ontario, the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that Islamophobia has no place in our communities. But despite this, Ontario’s government blocked a motion condemning Islamophobia.
Similarly, leaders of the Conservative Party here in the UK reneged on their promise to carry out a truly independent inquiry on Islamophobia in the party, and our prime minister still refuses to apologise for several Islamophobic comments he has made.
Let us be clear: Muslims will never be safe from another attack until the issue of Islamophobia is taken seriously and tackled head-on.
For us at Finsbury Park Mosque and for many Muslims across the world, another Islamophobic attack taking place is not a case of if, but when.
Though these attacks are intended to cause terror and fear, they also draw out the best in people.
From the courage of Imam Mohammed, who protected the attacker from the anger of those he had nearly just killed, to those who sent flowers and cards from across the world to our mosque and Makram’s family, to the hundreds from our local community and beyond that gathered outside our mosque the day after the attack to show their solidarity.
Christchurch and London, Ontario, have their heroes and well-wishers too, and what these acts of solidarity show are that those who tried to divide us have failed.
I hope other communities around the world do not have to experience what we did in order to come together to fight the scourge of Islamophobia and I hope that governments around the world reflect the actions of their citizens who are calling out in one voice against this evil.
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Mohamed Kozbar is a community leader and chairman of the Finsbury Park mosque in North London.
Featured image: Darren Osborne was jailed for life for the attack in 2017 that killed Makram Ali, who was walking home from night prayers (Supplied to Middle East Eye)
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Head of the General Federation of Trade Unions Sami Al-Amasi has confirmed that 20 factories were destroyed during the last offensive on Gaza, and 5,000 workers had lost their jobs.
In a statement, Al-Amasi disclosed that the latest Israeli offensive inflicted a massive blow to the economic sector in the Gaza Strip. He noted that it aggravated the already weak economy, which has been suffering for more than one and a half decades, with increased adversity due to COVID-19.
Al-Amasi indicated that the economy was the main target for the Israeli attacks, pointing to the demolition of the offices of big companies located in the high-rise buildings destroyed during the offensive.
Meanwhile, he stated that the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 affected more than 160,000 workers during the last year.
Al-Amasi called for Deputy Labour Minister Ihab Al-Ghussein to establish a fund to help workers affected by the Israeli offensive.
He also called for Arab, Islamic and international trade unions to support the Palestinians and their cause, as they are enduring harsh conditions under Israeli occupation.
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Featured image: Flames are seen after an Israeli air strike hit targets in Gaza City, Gaza on 15 June 2021 [Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency]
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Last week, the Venezuelan government announced that the Union Bank of Switzerland blocked its latest payments of 10 million USD towards the COVAX initiative for acquiring COVID-19 vaccines
The member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), on June 13, rejected the decision of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to block the payment made by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to acquire COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX initiative, a global access fund for anti-COVID-19 vaccines. The countries condemned the commercial, economic and financial blockade imposed by the US against Venezuela, which impeded the country from accessing vaccines, which are crucial in the global fight against the pandemic.
In an official statement, the member countries denounced that “the arbitrary blockade carried out by the financial institution” and said that “this illegal action is a consequence of the unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States government, whose effects on the financial sector threaten the well-being, health, security and right to life of the people.”
The bloc reminded that all this is aimed at “promoting regime change and overthrow of a constitutionally, legally and legitimately elected government by the will of the people and in the exercise of their self-determination.”
The organization emphasized on “the need to fully respect all human rights, especially the right to life and health,” and called to “immediately lift the unilateral coercive measures that prevent the affected countries from combating COVID-19 effectively.”
Los países miembros de @ALBATCP denuncian el bloqueo arbitrario realizado por parte de una institución financiera del pago de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela para la adquisición de vacunas contra el COVID-19, a través del mecanismo COVAX. pic.twitter.com/1wPJt5FuEi
Last week, on June 10, the government of President Nicolás Maduro denounced that the UBS blocked the last four installments of 10 million USD directed towards the COVAX mechanism to complete the payment of 120 million USD for COVID-19 vaccines.
Vice-president Delcy Rodriguez, during a press conference, reported that “we received a notification that the resources deposited for the acquisition of vaccines have been blocked and are under investigation.”
The representatives of the COVAX facility confirmed that Venezuela had transferred 110 million USD for over 11 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines and only 10 million USD remained to be paid. They also confirmed that the UBS bank blocked the last 4 payments and placed the money under investigation.
Como lo acaba de denunciar la Vicepresidenta @delcyrodriguezv, #Venezuela ha pagado LA TOTALIDAD de sus compromisos con el mecanismo #COVAX para adquirir las vacunas. Sin embargo, el Banco ha "bloqueado" arbitrariamente los últimos pagos y están bajo "investigación". ¡Un crimen! pic.twitter.com/L6n9xj41Mo
On June 11, during an event, President Maduro urged his US counterpart Joe Biden to “end the blockade of Venezuela’s financial resources” and allow the country to “purchase vaccines and accelerate the national immunization campaign.”
Venezuelan government is facing additional challenges in fighting the pandemic. The country’s capacity to purchase vaccines has been severely hindered by the commercial blockade and economic sanctions imposed by the US and the EU against it. The country is unable to use its foreign assets worth billions of dollars and resources frozen in foreign bank accounts due to these sanctions.
However, despite all the political maneuvers by the US and its allies, Venezuela has managed to secure Sputnik V and Sinopharm vaccines from Russia and China respectively. On June 5, the Bolivarian government and the Russian pharmaceutical company Geropharm signed an agreement to buy 10 million doses of EpiVacCorona vaccine. The government also plans to buy Soberana 02 and Abdala vaccines from Cuba, after the conclusion of their clinical trials.
Venezuela began inoculating its healthcare workers and other priority sectors against COVID-19 on February 18 with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. On June 1, it launched a mass vaccination campaign for the rest of the population. It hopes to vaccinate 70% of its population by the end of the year.
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Ex-Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich talks about his bombshell book, DIVISION OF LIGHT AND POWER, in which he describes being repeatedly thwarted by corrupt members of his city’s government while fighting against a relentless campaign to privatize Cleveland’s public electric power systems that included multiple attempts to assassinate him.
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First published on January 29, 2021
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A recent study in the journal Cancer Discovery found that inhalation of harmful microbes can contribute to advanced stage lung cancer in adults. Long-term use of face masks may help breed these dangerous pathogens.
Microbiologists agree that frequent mask wearing creates a moist environment in which microbes are allowed to grow and proliferate before entering the lungs. Those foreign microbes then travel down the trachea and into two tubes called the bronchi until they reach small air sacks covered in blood vessels called alveoli.
“The lungs were long thought to be sterile, but we now know that oral commensals–microbes normally found in the mouth–frequently enter the lungs due to unconscious aspirations.” – Leopoldo Segal, Study Author and Director of the Lung Microbiome Program and Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University Grossman School of Medicine
According to the study, after invading the lungs these microbes cause an inflammatory response in proteins known as cytokine IL-17.
“Given the known impact of IL-17 and inflammation on lung cancer, we were interested in determining if the enrichment of oral commensals in the lungs could drive an IL-17-type inflammation and influence lung cancer progression and prognosis,” said Segal.
While analyzing lung microbes of 83 untreated adults with lung cancer, the research team discovered that colonies of Veillonella, Prevotella, and Streptococcus bacteria, which may be cultivated through prolonged mask wearing, are all found in larger quantities in patients with advanced stage lung cancer than in earlier stages. The presence of these bacterial cultures is also associated with a lower chance of survival and increased tumor growth regardless of the stage.
Additionally, research into the cultivation of Veillonella bacteria in the lungs of mice found that the presence of such bacteria leads to the emergence of immune suppressing cells as well as inflammatory ones such as cytokine IL-17.
“Given the results of our study, it is possible that changes to the lung microbiome could be used as a biomarker to predict prognosis or to stratify patients for treatment.” – Leopoldo Segal
As more evidence emerges pertaining to the long-term effects of mask mandates and lock downs, doctors and scientists are beginning to reconsider whether these authoritarian measures really are doing more harm than good. One Canadian public health expert named Dr. Aji Joffe found in a related study that lock downs cause “at least ten times” more damage than benefit.
In a recent working paper by researchers at Harvard, Duke, and John Hopkins Universities, academics concluded that “for the overall population, the increase in the death rate following the COVID-19 pandemic implies a staggering 0.89 and 1.37 million excess deaths over the next 15 and 20 years, respectively.”
Since forced mask wearing began, dermatologists have coined the term ‘maskne’ to describe an onset of pimples near the mouth caused by masks clogging up pores with oil and bacteria. This can be caused by either disposable or cloth masks.
Dentists have also been warning about a phenomenon known as ‘mask mouth’ in which patients are arriving back to the dental office with an increase in gingivitis and tooth decay as high as 50% in a period of just a few months since mask mandates began.
This discovery sheds light on the growing evidence of harm caused by long-term mask wearing.
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Phillip Schneider is a staff writer for Blacklisted News. To see more of his work, you can follow his Facebook Page, become a subscriber on the free speech social network Minds, or support his efforts by becoming a contributor via Patreon.
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With nearly all votes counted from Friday’s presidential election, Ebrahim Raeisi triumphed by a 62% landslide as predicted by pre-election polls.
Rival aspirants Mohsen Rezaei achieved 11% support, Nasser Hemmati 8% and Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi 3% — according to near-final results.
Raeisi’s four-year term begins on on August 3. He’ll succeed two-term President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s head of state since August 2013.
In November 2019, the Trump regime sanctioned Raeisi and other Iranian officials for invented reasons.
No legitimate ones existed then or now.
Trump’s Treasury Department defied reality by falsely accusing targeted Iranian officials — including Raeisi — of “oppress(ing) the Iranian people (sic), export(ing) terrorism (sic), and advanc(ing) destabilizing policies around the world (sic).”
The above accusations apply to hegemon USA and its imperial partners, not nonbelligerent Iran.
In stark contrast to Washington’s war on humanity at home and abroad, the Islamic Republic prioritizes peace, stability, cooperative relations with other nations, and compliance with international law.
If US-dominated Western nations were governed like Iran, world peace would end preemptive wars against invented enemies.
Western societies would be fit to live in instead of the other way around, things worsening, not improving.
According to Iranian Interior Minister Rahmani Fazli, final results showed Raeisi getting 17.92 million votes.
Over 59.3 million Iranians were eligible to cast ballots — over 28.9 million participating for a turnout of 48.8%.
In response to Raeisi’s triumph, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the following:
“Dear Mr. Seyyed Ebrahim Raeisi, the president-elect of the Islamic Republic of Iran, accept my sincere congratulations on the election of Your Excellency as the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” adding:
“(O)ur countries are traditionally gifted with friendship and good neighborliness” — a relationship he looks forward to deepening ahead.
Along with electing a new president, Iranian voters also chose officials to fill vacant parliamentary and Expediency Council seats, as well as city and village council positions.
Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said
“(t)he great winner of (Friday) elections was the Iranian nation, which stood up once again in the face of the propaganda campaign waged by the enemy’s mercenary media and temptations of the ill-wishers and showed off its presence in the heart of the political field.”
Outgoing Iranian President Rouhani said anti-Iranian US/Western propaganda failed to prevent millions of voters from exercising their franchise on Friday.
He also praised national patience and fortitude in light of US/Western war on Iran by other means, and expressed best wishes to his successor.
Along with Vladimir Putin, other prominent officials congratulated Raeisi on his triumph.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad said the following:
“I wish for your country to move forward on the path of progress and bring about prosperity in all fields for the people, who have withstood all the conspiracies and pressures mean to break their will.”
“I take this opportunity to express my eagerness for closer cooperation in promoting bilateral relations between the Syrian Arab Republic and the Islamic Republic and pursuing common interests.”
Iraqi President Barham Salih and Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi sent congratulatory messages to Raeisi.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted the following:
“Congratulations to Excellency brother Ibrahim Raisi @raisi_com on his landmark victory in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s 13th Presidential elections.”
“Look forward to working with him for further strengthening of our fraternal ties and for regional peace, progress and prosperity.”
Raeisi was also congratulated by leaders and officials of Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Azerbaijan, the UAE, Armenia, Turkey, Lebanon, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
Western nations ignored his triumph — except to unjustifiably criticize him and the Islamic Republic.
On a sour note, Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned Britain’s envoy to Tehran to protest against Boris Johnson regime obstruction of the right of Iranian ex-pats in the country to vote on Friday.
He was sharply criticized for what Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh called “riotous and terrorist” conduct by UK “anti-Revolution terrorist elements and those opposing democracy.”
US/Western media press agents for power are militantly hostile toward Iran — for its sovereign independence from imperial control.
NYT propaganda falsely claimed that “many Iranians (viewed Friday elections) as rigged (sic),” adding:
President-elect Raeisi “has a record of grave human rights abuses, including accusations (of) mass executions of political opponents (sic).
The above is typical Times rubbish, based on falsified talking points supplied by US hardliners.
Other US/Western media report similar Big Lies against all nations free from US hegemonic control.
Ahead of Friday’s process, the selected — unelected — Biden regime criticized Iran’s electoral system while ignoring its own illegitimacy.
Raeisi has no friends in Washington.
Perhaps Biden regime hardliners will add new illegal sanctions to existing ones — to assure no softening in their war on the country and its people by other means.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Three days after 9/11/2001 — the mother of all state-sponsored false flags to that time — Congress near-unanimously declared war on humanity.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was passed by joint congressional resolution — signed into law by Bush/Cheney four days later.
The measure for endless wars on invented enemies authorized all “necessary and appropriate force (sic)” against parties responsible for “plann(ing), authoriz(ing), committ(ing)…aid(ing) (or) harbor(ing)” those involved in the 9/11 attacks (sic).
Falsely called “just wars,” US aggression on Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Somalia followed, along with deployment of US special forces death squads to around three-fourths of world community countries.
Guantanamo and dozens of other CIA torture prisons were established and continue operating extrajudicially.
Security Council member states alone may legally approve war by one nation against another — permitted only in self-defense, never preemptively.
UN Charter Article 51 allows the “right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member” state.
It’s permitted “until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”
Self-defense is legally permitted — never an unprovoked attack by one nation on another.
No foreign power attacked the US since Britain in 1812 — none on 9/11.
Nor was Osama bin Ladin or “crazed Arabs” involved in what happened on a day that will live in infamy.
On 9/11/2001, US dark forces were behind what the Nuremberg Charter calls “the supreme international crime against peace.”
Pre-9/11, Bush/Cheney regime officials planned to attack Afghanistan and Yemen in October 2001, then Iraq and other countries on their target list for regime change.
All that was needed was what the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC) called a “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a New Pearl Harbor” — to wage endless war on invented enemies when no real ones existed, nor any today.
Former CIA head of counterintelligence, Vincent Cannistraro, later acknowledged that US war planners “cooked intelligence” to justify what’s always unjustifiable.
At the time, CIA analyst Michael Scheuer said Langley knew in advance “that we were going to war” before 9/11.
By joint resolution in October 2002, Congress Authorized Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat of Iraq(i)” WMDs that did not exist.
Bush/Cheney regime deputy war secretary Paul Wolfowitz later admitted that (nonexistent) WMDs were used as a pretext for war on Iraq because it was the thing everyone agreed on to justify what’s always unjustifiable.
He also acknowledged that war on Iraq was part of a larger plan for controlling regional oil by establishing a large-scale US Middle East military presence.
On Thursday, House members voted to repeat AUMF by a 268 – 161 majority.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the following:
“I strongly and fully support repealing the 2002 authorization for the use of military force…”
“It is my intention as majority leader to bring this matter to a floor vote this year.”
On Monday, the Biden regime’s White House said the following:
It “supports the repeal of the…AUMF, as the United States has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on” its use, adding:
Its repeal “would likely have minimal impact on current military operations.”
They’re ongoing lawlessly in multiple theaters with no end of them in prospect — along with illegal sanctions wars on around three dozen nations.
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The three-day Antalya Diplomacy Forum started in southern Turkey on June 18. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, its participants include ten current and three former heads of state and government (presidents and prime ministers), 42 foreign ministers and over 50 representatives of international organizations.
Topics of discussion include the Balkans, the future of Europe, trans-Atlantic relations, refugees and migrants and terrorism (which with Turkey is usually a reference to the Kurdish Workers’ Party and affiliates). A session was scheduled on Turkey’s proposal for an Eastern Mediterranean conference as well.
The conference is another reflection of Ankara’s ambition to establish itself not only as a regional but a latent global power. Evidence of that policy has been seen from the military side in places ranging from Libya to the Caucasus and from Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan.
Speaking on the sidelines on the first day of the event, the foreign minister of Pakistan, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, called for joint Pakistani-Turkish cooperation in Afghanistan after all U.S. and other NATO forces (except Turkey’s) are withdrawn. Qureshi was quoted by a reporter from Daily Sabah as stating: “I will be meeting the Turkish foreign minister on June 20 and I have to hear him out about what is their proposal. I do not know the details yet.”
After meeting with the leaders of several other NATO countries at the June 14 NATO summit in Brussels, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he intended to invite Pakistan and Hungary to join Turkey in playing a security role in Afghanistan after the departure of U.S. and NATO military forces. Pakistan is an obvious choice for him, as the two nations are solidifying cooperation in several spheres, including the military, but Hungary is not so obvious a selection. One possibility is that the nation has hosted the multinational NATO-supported Strategic Airlift Capability since 2008 and would be best qualified to share control of the Hamid Karzai International Airport with NATO ally Turkey.
Erdoğan, with characteristic lack of timidity, said that his nation was the only one that could continue a foreign security function in Afghanistan after the general withdrawal.
On June 17 the Afghan Foreign Ministry said that Cihad Erginay, the Turkish ambassador to Afghanistan, met with Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar. Turkey advocated bringing Pakistan into the reconciliation process – by which it might be understood to mean negotiations between the government of President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban – and its envoy spoke both of continuing a NATO role in the nation and recruiting “the support of regional countries, especially Pakistan” in Afghanistan.
The population of Afghanistan is over 40% Pashtun and some 12% Turkic (Uzbek and Turkmen). The first gives Pakistan and the second Turkey the influence of ethnic and linguistic affinity. The largely autonomous warlord in the north, ethnic Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, has lived in Turkey and owns property there. He recently threatened Afghan President Ghani with the prospect of a South Turkestan (with Turkish backing) if Kabul doesn’t meet his demands.
Turkey dominates the Turkic Council, which also includes its de facto province Azerbaijan and three of Afghanistan’s neighbors in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Afghanistan has an estimated population of close to 40 million. Pakistan has a population of 225 million and Turkey of 85 million.
In what is a revealing indication of what may lie at the root of a Turkish-Pakistani alliance not only in Afghanistan but also much further afield, at the beginning of the month the speaker of the Turkish parliament, Mustafa Şentop, was in Pakistan where he met with Pakistani President Arif Alvi. The Turkish parliamentarian was quoted by the Daily Sabah as stating Turkey and Pakistan should lead the Islamic world together.
A Turkish-Pakistani axis, replete as it would be with nuclear weapons, would be a force – a military force – to contend with; a combination of NATO’s largest member state outside North America and the most populous of NATO’s forty partners.
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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VAERS data released today by the CDC showed a total of 358,379 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 5,993 deaths and 29,871 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 11, 2021.
This week’s number of reported adverse events among all age groups following COVID vaccines surpassed 350,000, according to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data comes directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed. Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date.
Data released today show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 11, 2021, a total of 358,379 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 5,993 deaths — an increase of 105 deaths over the previous week. There were 29,871 serious injury reports, up 1,430 compared with last week.
In the U.S., 306.5 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of June 11. This includes128 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 167 million doses of Pfizer and 11 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine.
This week’s data, from Dec. 14, 2020 to June 11, 2021, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
The most recent reported deaths include a 15-year-old male (VAERS I.D. 1383620) who reportedly died one day after receiving his second Pfizer dose, a 15-year-old male (VAERS I.D. 1382906) who received Pfizer and a 16-year-old male (VAERS I.D. 1386841) who reportedly suffered a hemorrhage and died four days after receiving a Pfizer vaccine. An autopsy is pending.
Other deaths include two 15-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1187918 and 1242573), a 16-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1225942) and one 17-year-old (VAERS I.D. 1199455).
974 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to17-year-olds with 98% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 1.4% to Moderna and 0.2% (or two cases) to J&J.
109 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation) with 108 attributed to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
Of the 3,516 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 54% were reported after Pfizer vaccinations, 42% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 267 cases, or 8%, of Bell’s Palsy cases were reported in conjunction with J&J.
CDC reschedules emergency meeting to discuss reports of young people developing serious heart issues after mRNA vaccines
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) planned to hold an emergency meeting today to discuss the benefit-risk of COVID mRNA vaccines in adolescents and young adults. The agency rescheduled the meeting late Thursday, after Congress officially established Juneteenth National Independence Day (observed today) as a federal holiday.
The meeting will now be held during a regularly scheduled ACIP meeting on June 23 – 25.
The emergency meeting was announced last week after the CDC acknowledged a higher-than-expected number of reports of heart inflammation in young people after they received a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
The CDC on June 10 said it was aware of a total of 475 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis in patients 30 and younger. The disclosure was made during a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hearing to consider what data the agency would need in order to extend Emergency Use Authorization of COVID vaccines for children under 12.
CDC data showed 196 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis among 18- to 24-year-olds through May 31, compared with an expected rate of between eight and 83 cases. Among 16- to 17-year-olds, 79 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis were reported through May 31. The expected rateamong people in this age group is between two and 19 cases.
A search of the latest available data in VAERS revealed 1,117 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, among all age groups reported in the U.S following COVID vaccination between Dec.14, 2020 and June 11, 2021. Of the 900 cases reported, 686 cases were attributed to Pfizer, 391 cases to Moderna and 36 cases to J&J’s COVID vaccine.
Parents share horror stories of death, illness after Moderna vaccine
This week, The Defender reported on two cases of young people who developed heart complications after being vaccinated with the Moderna COVID vaccine, including a 19-year-old college freshman who died, and a 21-year-old student who is recovering.
On June 15, The Defender reported that Simone Scott, a 19-year-old freshman at Northwestern University, died of complications from a heart transplant she underwent after developing what her doctors believe was myocarditis following her second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine.
Scott received the second dose on May 1, and on May 11, visited a doctor on campus because she wasn’t feeling well. On May 16, she texted her father complaining of dizziness and fatigue. He called campus police who, when they checked in on her, had to administer CPR.
After multiple interventions, including hooking Scott to an ECMO machine that mirrors the function of the heart so her own heart could rest, doctors determined she needed a heart replacement. She died June 11.
Scott’s mother told local media, “I still feel like she’s here, even though I know she’s not and it just feels like such a waste.”
Scott’s doctors have not fully confirmed the cause of her death, but they said it appears she suffered from myocarditis.
On June 15, The Defender reported that a 21-year-old New Jersey student suffered severe heart inflammation after receiving his second dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine. Justin Harrington, whose school required him to get the vaccine in order to attend classes in the fall, experienced flu-like symptoms followed by heart pain within eight to 12 hours of receiving the vaccine.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Justin’s father, Timothy Harrington, said his son felt different after the second shot. Every time his heart beat it hurt and he felt pressure,” Harrington said. “Then he developed heart pain down both arms.”
Harrington said his son, who has no underlying medical conditions, did not experience heart pain with his first dose of the vaccine. Although Justin has since been released from the hospital, he has to wear a heart monitor and take four different medications for six months, has to sleep propped up, can’t exert himself and he’s missing out on one of the most important times of his life, his father said.
As for Justin’s recovery, Harrington said, “He has minor scarring on his heart and doctors hope they caught it early enough that there will be no other issues — but it’s pure conjecture at this point.”
8 fully vaccinated die of COVID in Maine, as U.S. breakthrough cases rise
Initial data suggest breakthrough cases in Maine are more common in older individuals and people with underlying health conditions — the same populations that, among the unvaccinated, are most at risk of hospitalization or death from the virus. About half of the vaccinated people in Maine who tested positive for COVID had not experienced symptoms when contacted by case investigators, according to the Maine CDC.
On June 3, Napa County California announced a fully vaccinated woman, who was more than a month past her second Moderna shot, died after being hospitalized with COVID. The 65-year-old woman had underlying conditions and tested positive for the Alpha variant.
As of June 9, the California Department of Public Health had identified more than 5,723 breakthrough COVID cases. Of the 5,723 cases, at least 417 people were hospitalized and least 47 died. Approximately 48% of cases were missing hospitalization data. It is not known if the primary cause of hospitalization or death was COVID or if there were other causes.
Other states continue to report breakthrough cases, among them Texas, which recorded more than 768 breakthrough COVID cases through June 1, with 8% (61 cases) resulting in death.
In Washington, the state’s Department of Health reported 1,837 cases of breakthrough infection through June 9. Of those, 10% resulted in hospitalization and 31 people died from COVID-related illness. The majority of cases occurred in the 35 to 49 age group.
Health officials push vaccines, ignore natural immunity
The CDC conservatively estimates more than a third of Americans (at least 114.6 million) have been infected with SARS-CoV-2.
For example, a December 2020 study by Singapore researchers found neutralizing antibodies (one prong of the immune response) remained present in high concentrations for 17 years or more in individuals who recovered from the original SARS-CoV.
Yet health authorities are largely ignoring this fact as they continue to push for everyone to get the vaccine. As the American Institute of Economic Research reported, it appears in order to promote the COVID vaccine agenda, key organizations are not only “downplaying” natural immunity but may be seeking to “erase” it altogether.
New Cleveland Clinic study found people who had COVID were less likely to be reinfected than fully vaccinated individuals who never had virus—suggesting vaccine is of no benefit to people who already had COVID.#TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66EdwTnDhttps://t.co/zvQMuYwHaa
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 9, 2021
102 days and counting, CDC ignores The Defender’s inquiries
According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”
On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. After repeated attempts, by phone and email, to obtain a response to our questions, a health communications specialist from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force contacted us on March 29 — three weeks after our initial inquiry.
The individual received our request for information from VAERS, but said she had never received our list of questions, even though employees we talked to several times said CDC press officers were working through the questions and confirmed the representative had received them. We provided the list of questions again along with a new deadline, but never received a response.
On May 19, a CDC employee said our questions had been reviewed and our inquiry was pending in their system, but would not provide us with a copy of the response. We were told we would be contacted by phone or email with the response.
We’ve contacted the CDC numerous times since and there is no change in the status of our questions, to re-submit our questions or to callback later. It has been 102 days since we sent our first email inquiring into VAERS data and reports and we have yet to receive a response.
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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Only three days before the 80th anniversary of the German-led Operation Barbarossa invasion of Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941, NATO reports that fifteen German warplanes flew near Russia’s northwest border for four days this month, the 14th-17th.
Altogether over 40 military aircraft from NATO nations participated in Multinational Air Group Days, with the German planes providing the framework for other warplanes from fellow NATO member states Denmark, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S.
For the first time a Multinational Air Group Days deployment was integrated with the mammoth Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) war games in the indicated region, which are led by the U.S.
“The combination of the two training events offered synergies weaving multinational air operations into the maritime play facilitating modern warfighting operations. NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre at Uedem, Germany – an expert for Allied air operations in the region, controlled the aerial training activities….”
The NATO press release from which the preceding is excerpted also quotes Lieutenant Colonel Rüdiger Gerhart, German Multinational Air Group Days Project Officer at the German Air Operations Command in Kalkar, Germany:
“The way ahead is to achieve an initial operational capability in 2023 allowing Germany to lead an air task force and to further expand and solidify that capability to declare full operational capability in 2026.”
The German Air Force, which appeared in the sky over Yugoslavia in 1999 during NATO’s 78-day air war against the nation, after a 54-year hiatus following the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, is back in business and ready to bomb many of the same cities it did 80 years ago.
German multirole combat aircraft rotate to upgraded air bases in Latvia and Lithuania to participate in NATO’s so-called air policing operations with patrols near the Russian border, particularly near the territory of Kaliningrad, and that of Belarus. Latvia borders the main body of Russia; Lithuania abuts Kaliningrad. Both border Belarus.
NATO stations Enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, all of which border Russia. The battlegroup in Lithuania is commanded by the German military and also includes troops and equipment from fellow NATO member states Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway (which also borders Russia). It is located at Rukla, just a few kilometers from Russia.
Thirty German soldiers attached to the NATO battlegroup in Lithuania were sent home two days ago for alleged racist and anti-Semitic behavior and for, to make the anniversary complete, singing a birthday song for Adolph Hitler. Nostalgic for the glory days of their great-grandfathers, no doubt. Surely NATO has provided them with the opportunity to reflect on such matters.
Anyone in Russia or elsewhere who observes that the current configuration of multinational Western military forces along Russia’s entire western border resembles that of 80 years will of course be accused of paranoia. And of “amplifying GRU disinformation.” They will monitored and detected by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, which will report them to the government of their nation, and they may receive a knock on their door.
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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Biden set the trap by warning Putin that it would be disastrous for Russia if Navalny were to die in prison. See this.
With the trap set, ABC “presstitute” Rachel Scott sprang the trap in Putin’s open press conference following the summit. She dressed up an accusation as a question:
“The list of your political opponents who are dead, imprisoned, or jailed is long and you have now prevented anyone who supports [Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny] to run for office. So my question is, Mr. President, what are you so afraid of?”
Putin answered that Navalny had knowingly broken the terms of his parole. Rachel Scott hit Putin again:
“You didn’t answer my question, sir. If all your political opponents are dead, in prison, poisoned — doesn’t that send a message that you don’t want a fair political fight?”
CNN, which headlined Biden’s warning to Putin, made certain that ABC presstitute Rachel Scott’s propaganda coup reached a wide audience by repeating Scott’s confrontation with Putin: see this.
The world’s population was not privy to what was said in the Biden-Putin meeting. What people know of the meeting comes from the press conference afterward. What people took away from the press conference is that Putin is a tyrant who poisons and arrests the opposition.
In other words, Putin’s Russia is the Soviet Union redux.
Whatever Biden’s intentions and Putin’s hopes, there is no possibility of improved relations as long as Washington has hegemonic aspirations and as long as Washington needs the “Russian threat” to justify the annual $1,000 billion military/security complex budget and NATO which Washington uses to control the foreign policy of Europe.
Given the facts, what hope did the Kremlin see in the summit? Were the hopes worth another black eye for Putin?
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Israel’s recent military assault on the Gaza Strip of occupied Palestine intensifies questions of U.S. complicity in the conflict. While the bombs were falling, congressional Republicans demanded that President Biden “strongly condemn Hamas” for firing missiles at Israel. Conservative Democrats demanded that Biden become more “engaged” in the drama. So-called progressive Democrats voiced a desire to place limits on military aid to Israel. On both sides of the political aisle, demands grew for the United States to become more involved in the crises.
Representatives of both parties were mistaken. The U.S. was firmly engaged in the conflict on the side of Israel. President Biden allowed the brutal assault to continue for 11 days by repeatedly intoning that “Israel is allowed to defend itself.” Essentially, Biden gave Netanyahu a green light to destroy Hamas, condemning himself as an accessory to mass murder. The extended bombing campaign gave Israel an opportunity to pulverize the Gaza Strip slaughtering mostly civilians in a gruesome display of state sponsored terrorism. In the end, Israel’s pathological prime minister failed to degrade the fighting capability of Hamas.
Throughout the conflict, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken asked both sides to show “restraint,” as if this was a symmetrical war between countries rather than the 4th most powerful military force in the world bombing a besieged ghetto. Blinken also called for a two-state solution oblivious to the fact that there are now 622,670 Jewish settlers living in permanent settlements in the West Bank. Proposals for a two-state solution are a fiction used to posture for a non-existent peace process that allows Zionist colonization to proceed unimpeded.
On the diplomatic front, U.S. ambassadorLinda Thomas-Greenfield blocked UN Security Council resolutions that called for a cease fire and condemned Israel’s military response to the crisis after having delayed a meeting of the Council. A spokeswoman for the Chinese government eviscerated the double standard whereby the U.S. routinely condemns China for treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority while allowing Israel to massacre Muslims in Palestine.
The United States sent an envoy to the region to try to “de-escalate” tensions, to no purposeful avail. Secretary of State Blinken eventually visited Israel in late May. All the typical platitudes about Israel’s right to self-defense and the need for a two-state solution were repeated.
The U.S. offered “aid” to Gaza simultaneously offering to replenish Israel’s weapons and its “Iron Dome” defense batteries. The U.S. has approved $735 million in military aid as part of a yearly $3.8 billion gift to Israel that finances purchases of the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza. The advanced fighter aircraft are produced by U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Secretary Blinken offered $360 million to rebuild Gaza, but stipulated the money must not help Hamas whose leaders rejected the help. The aid will be funneled to the Palestinian authority in the West Bank to further divide the Palestinian resistance. The U.S. will also coordinate international assistance to Gaza.
There was no condemnation from the Biden administration of the genocidal assault on Gaza or the vigilante violence that took place against Palestinians living in Israeli cities.
Not a word was uttered to denounce the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem or repeated attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Biden claimed he talked to leaders of “both sides” during the conflict, speaking periodically with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas does not represent the Palestinian side in the struggle for self-determination, armed or political. Hamas does. But the U.S. will not talk with “terrorist organizations,” only “terrorist states,” such as Israel and its homicidal prime minister. President Abbas has not stood for elections in 16 years. There have been no Palestinian elections since January 2005 when Abbas was elected to a four-year term as president. He is a puppet of Israel and the United States. The Palestinian people have contempt for the PA government he leads prompting the autocrat to cancel elections scheduled for May and July.
During Blinken’s trip to Israel, he refused to meet with representatives of Hamas. This strategy mirrored U.S. policy in Vietnam, where the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations supported the puppet government in Saigon, refusing to speak with the Hanoi leadership of Ho Chi Minh until Johnson finally agreed to do so in 1968. Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 after leading the national liberation struggle against the French and Americans for 25 years. The Nixon regime was eventually compelled to negotiate with representatives of North Vietnam when it became clear the U.S. could not win the war.
Biden and Blinken could have communicated with leaders of Hamas at the inception of the crisis to bring about an immediate cease fire. The U. S. could have stopped the bombing of Gaza in one second despite Netanyahu’s intransigence by threatening to cut off aid and support U.N. Security Council resolutions condemnatory of Israel. There was precedent.
In 1956, an angry President Eisenhower ordered France, Britain and Israel to cease their attack on Egypt and withdraw their forces from the Sinai desert and Suez Canal. When Israel hesitated, he supported a U.N. General Assembly resolution that deplored Israeli occupation of the Sinai, went on national television to bring his case to the American people and privately threatened Prime Minister David Ben Gurion with sanctions that would have ended all public and private aid to the fledgling state. Israel promptly withdrew.
Biden is no Eisenhower. He fully supports Israel’s reign of terror, rendering persistent claims of U.S. advocacy for human rights a fraud. The U.S. endorses genocide in Gaza. Why?
U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East are tied to Israel. A symbiotic relationship exists between imperialism and Zionism. The interests of the U.S. have merged with the interests of Israel.
A key debate in foreign policy circles is whether Israel functions as a strategic asset or liability of the United States.
With the existence of the Soviet Union in a bipolar world, the U.S. relied on Israel as an attack dog in the Middle East principally aiding its efforts to fight Arab nationalism and counter Soviet influence in the region. In other parts of the world, Israel stood alone with the U.S. to support apartheid South Africa. Israel also provided weapons to right-wing dictatorships supported by the U.S. in Africa and Latin America.
Since the dissolution of the USSR, Israel has become a strategic liability of the U. S. generating fanatical hatred of America throughout the Arab and Muslim world for prosecuting a destructive “war on terrorism” whose architects were neoconservatives closely associated with the right-wing Likud party in Israel.
The neoconservatives advance policies that facilitate U.S. global domination while labeling enemies of Israel as foes of America in a ‘war of terror’ that serves as pretext for interventionism. By rationalizing aggressive designs of U.S. imperialism, the neoconservatives wish to use U.S. power to dominate the Middle East on behalf of Israel.
The evolution of the neoconservative movement that began in the Republican Party during the presidencies of Bush Senior and Bush Junior, has morphed into the Democrat party under Obama and Biden.
Neoconservatives now dominate the foreign policy establishment so thoroughly, that any aversion to U.S. hegemony is considered treason. Critics of the U.S. relationship with Russia or Syria are quickly targeted as apologists for Putin and Assad, respectively. Pragmatic alternatives to the exercise of assertive power are nonexistent in official circles. The Wolfowitz Doctrine failed to prevent the emergence of competitors to U.S. power, but animates the New Cold war against Russia, the Pivot to Asia, sequential wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and coups in Honduras and Ukraine.
The ascendancy of neoconservative political ideology that equates the interests of imperialism with those of Zionism in the corridors of power and prominence of an Israel Lobby that advances this perspective, explains America’s unconditional support for Israel despite the liabilities.
The Zionist power structure comprising the Israel Lobby led by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CoP) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI); pro-Israel think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Center for Security Policy (CSP), Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and the Saban Center at Brookings (SCB); political donors; supporters in government, media and myriad national organizations work tirelessly to equate U.S. interests with the interests of Israel. The power configuration also labels any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.
The Lobby can be defied on a particular issue such as Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran that was vehemently opposed by the organized Zionist movement in the U.S. and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu. But it cannot be defied on essential policies involving U.S. financial, military, diplomatic and political support for Israel. Obama, despite his intense dislike of Netanyahu, gave Israel $38 Billion to be distributed over a ten-year period.
Trump was fanatically pro-Israel in part because of his friendship with Netanyahu, business connections with the Kushner family in the real estate industry and massive campaign contributions by the late ultra-Zionist casino magnet Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and other pro-Zionist Republican mega-donors.
Trump named his personal bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel and appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner as point-man in the Middle East. Both Friedman and Kushner are donors to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Friedman also gave money to the Jerusalem Reclamation Project that buys property for Jews in Muslim East Jerusalem to Judaize the city. Kushner’s father is a lifelong friend of Netanyahu.
Trump’s rabidly pro-Israel agenda resulted in the U.S. embassy being moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, official recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” that failed to resolve conflict with Palestinians and the Abraham Accords of 2020 that normalized relations between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
Taken together, the Deal of the Century and Abraham Accords intended to subjugate the Palestinian struggle and eliminate isolation of Israel in the Muslim world.
Resistance continues with Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The strategic goal of the U.S. and Israel is to smash the “Arc of Resistance.” Obama launched a dirty war in Syria to topple the Assad government and break a link in the chain connecting Iran with Hezbollah and Hamas. The U.S. supported Islamic jihadists, including ISIS fighters, in the covert war. Trump tore up the nuclear agreement with Iran and imposed killer sanctions on the country, cheered on by U.S. media propagandists.
Biden, a consummate supporter of Israel, supports the hostile agenda.
Passage of the Jewish Nation-State Law in 2018 codified apartheid in Israel. In June 2021, Benjamin Netanyahu was forced out and Naftali Bennett, a right-wing ultra-nationalist more hawkish than his predecessor, was moved in as prime minister. Bennet is doctrinaire. No Palestinian statehood, no two-state solution, no removal of settlements, no ending the occupation, no right of return, no peace. For Bennet, Israel is a Jewish state not a state for all its citizens.
By providing unconditional support for racists in Israel, the U.S. openly promotes apartheid, nurtures barbarism and condones savagery. The U.S. is fully complicit in the crimes of the settler state. As Israel continues to consolidate what B’Tselem describes as a regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, an irresistible force continues to meet an immovable object. Israel cannot expel seven million Arabs living among seven million Jews in historic Palestine. Torture, abuse, oppress and kill, yes. Eliminate or exterminate, no.
The Zionist war on the Palestinian people is relentless. Zionist demands for a supremacist Jewish state and Palestinian demands for self-determination are irreconcilable. Occupied Palestine is the epicenter of resistance to settler colonization and the struggle in Jerusalem is its core. By fighting a ‘war of terror’ against the resistance, the U.S. and Israel have unleashed a torrent of anger, hatred and violence that breeds a whirlwind of incessant and ever worsening strife.
When rationalizing Israel’s “right to defend itself” from Hamas rockets, the racketeer and war criminal Hillary Clinton recently claimed the U.S. shares similar values with Israel. It does. It shares the values of a racist colonial settler state, not the values of democracy hypocrites like Clinton and the murderous Netanyahu pretend to extol.
Ending U.S. criminality in Occupied Palestine means ending the American empire. As long as the empire persists, it will support the apartheid state. Liberation in Jerusalem begins with liberation in Washington.
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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His recent book is titled, The Politics ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com
Featured image: The Israeli and American flags displayed on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem (Photo: Yonatan Sindel)
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“There are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all frighten them, and then demoralise them. An educated healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.” –Tony Benn
Biologists tell each other stories. These stories might involve lots of acronyms and use strange and wonderful verbs and nouns but, unlike say mathematics, the mechanism by which biologists convey their science is at heart through the use of language. But unlike works of creative writing, the language used by biologists needs to be precise because bad English can lead to bad science. Which is why it jarred so much when I first read the following statement:
A third of people with COVID-19 have no symptoms.
The more technically correct statement (assuming that “a third” is accurate) is:
A third of people infected with [more correctly, testing positive for] the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms.
So why did the first statement raise my biological hackles so much when at first glance these two statements might appear to be essentially very similar? It is because from a biological perspective they are profoundly different. The first statement asserts the existence of a disease with no symptoms i.e., a sickness that is indistinguishable from being healthy, while the second statement asserts that a viral infection does not necessarily result in a disease. It is not a question of semantics but accuracy and mixing these two concepts up is the sort of thing that would have resulted in an ‘F’ if I were to have submitted it in an essay to one of my professors. Yet, this is exactly the inaccurate language that has been used throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and not by students learning their discipline, but by experienced senior scientists who, one assumes, are well aware of what they are saying.
One could argue that this is unimportant as surely the point is to convey the idea that you could be infectious with coronavirus and be unaware of it and the first statement is an easy way to do this for the layman. Not only does this assumption treat the public as if they were children unable to understand the nuances of infection and disease, but I’d argue that the second statement is just as easy to understand as the first. No, the reason to create a disease with no symptoms is based on a profound decision, one that I believe was made with the intention of ensuring compliance but has, since its inception, grown to dominate our entire response to COVID-19.
First, let’s see why defining having a disease based purely on the presence of a pathogen is a flawed concept. This is best illustrated by reference to another virus, Epstein-Barr Virus or EBV. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of this virus, but it could be argued to be one of the most successful human pathogens because almost everyone is infected by it. Most people are infected early in life and if this happens then EBV takes up residence in your B-cells (the cells in your immune system responsible for making antibodies) where it quietly persists throughout your life. Every now and then the virus goes into active replication and makes copies of itself which get shed into your mouth, a process that you are blissfully unaware is happening. The problems with EBV generally occur if you don’t get infected early in life but avoid infection until you’re much older. Now when you get infected with EBV, you can develop a disease called infectious mononucleosis or, more commonly, glandular fever. This often happens in young adults when they become interested in close physical contact with members of the opposite (or same) sex… which is why glandular fever is sometimes referred to as “the kissing disease”.
Now let’s apply the new asymptomatic COVID-19 orthodoxy to EBV where we define having a disease purely through the presence of a viral genome. So, according to this definition, almost everyone in the U.K. (and the world) is suffering from a new disease, asymptomatic glandular fever, and if we were to do a large-scale mass screening campaign we’d discover that there were millions of ‘cases’ of asymptomatic glandular fever in the U.K. alone!
Of course, this is complete nonsense. We aren’t all ‘suffering’ from asymptomatic glandular fever. Glandular fever requires infection by EBV, but EBV infection does not necessarily lead to glandular fever. The same is true of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 and so the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19 as a disease is as ridiculous as that of asymptomatic glandular fever.
But as is the case with EBV, being infected with SARS-CoV-2 means that you can still pass it on even if you aren’t sick. However, it is a matter of degrees and the reason that people can be healthy carriers is simply because they have less viral replication and a lower viral load, which is why they aren’t sick. Of course, if the lower levels of SARS-CoV-2 in an asymptomatic individual were sufficient to mean such an individual was as infectious as someone with symptoms, then from an infectivity perspective the distinction between asymptomatic carriers and people with COVID-19 is unimportant and our statement would need to read:
A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.
However, this situation would mean that the R number for SARS-CoV-2 would likely be much greater than it is, and that coronavirus infection and COVID-19 would have crashed through the population in one huge tsunami at the start of last year. This wasn’t the case, and all the evidence is that healthy, asymptomatic carriers (and pre-symptomatic sufferers) are much less infectious than those with symptoms and a disease (see Will Jones’s summary of COVID-19 facts for links to supporting evidence).
Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.
The effect of the asymptomatic disease is to blur the lines between being healthy and being sick and means that people will consciously, or subconsciously, transfer some of their understanding of symptomatic COVID-19 and apply it to asymptomatic COVID-19. The implication being that the absence of symptoms is somehow not relevant and that just because you feel fine, you are in fact suffering from a deadly disease. This naturally creates fear, fear for oneself (what if I have it?) and fear of everyone else (they look O.K., but what if they have it?). This fear is useful if you now want to control the behaviour of people and drive compliance with policies designed to limit the spread of COVID-19, but the problem is that having created the asymptomatic monster as a mechanism to ensure compliance, it soon starts to consume everything because you now need to manage this disease with no symptoms.
The first thing asymptomatic disease needs is a way of identifying who has it. By definition, asymptomatic individuals have no symptoms and so in order to identify who is sick we need a test. Not only do we need a test, but because anyone who is healthy could be silently suffering from this illness, we will need a lot of tests. And because healthy people can become sick without any change in how they feel or look, then the testing needs to be endless. Also, because the disease is only defined by the presence of the virus, then positive screening results (real or false positives) naturally become ‘cases’, confirming the ongoing presence of the asymptomatic disease. Testing begets more testing.
The whole host of non-pharmaceutical interventions – including lockdowns – can also be seen as logical steps to take in fighting an asymptomatic disease. If sick people have no symptoms, then we need to employ strategies in everyday life to manage them. In effect, we have to treat the entire population as if it were ill and deploy measures across the whole of society with this in mind. This effectively leads to ‘reverse quarantine’ where we lock up the healthy to try and protect the few genuinely sick people.
Likewise, vaccine passports are also driven by the need to manage asymptomatic disease because it is only by proving that you’ve had a medical intervention that we can be sure that your lack of symptoms are not a cause of concern. But being immune doesn’t stop an individual from becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, it just means their immune system more rapidly and effectively recognises and deals with this infection and as a result they may never develop symptoms. In other words, vaccination is no protection from asymptomatic COVID-19 and suitably sensitive screening will continue to detect asymptomatic ‘cases’ amongst the immune population. Proponents of vaccine passports acknowledge this and argue (correctly) that if immune individuals are infected with coronavirus, they will carry a lower viral burden and so are less infectious. However, they then go on to demonise unvaccinated, naïve healthy individuals because they might be asymptomatic carriers. In reality, healthy people are healthy and even if they are carriers are unlikely to infect other people in normal social situations regardless of vaccination status. In fact, if you support the notion of asymptomatic COVID-19 ‘sufferers’ being a significant source of infection, it could be argued that we need vaccination certificates to protect the non-vaccinated from the vaccinated!
Finally, there is the whole question of variants. Clearly, a new, virulent more deadly strain of coronavirus that evades current immunity is a very concerning thing as it would essentially reset the clock back to the start of the pandemic: in effect it is a new disease. But because we have blurred the distinction between infection and disease and our focus is on the presence (and sequence) of viral genomes, every new variant is now treated as if it actually were a new disease. This in turn drives the need to continue to monitor (picking up more and more new variants) and manage ‘the spread of cases’ irrespective of the severity of disease they cause or the prior immunity within the population. Again, testing begets more testing in an endless cycle that will never stop unless we decide to stop it.
What all this means in practice is that the management of asymptomatic COVID-19 has become the the focus of the Government’s coronavirus policy, but if we go back to the original (mis)statement about asymptomatic COVID-19 and swap it around we get:
Two thirds of people with COVID-19 have symptoms.
Of course, this should read “three thirds (all!) of people with COVID-19 have symptoms” but the point I’m making is that hiding in plain sight is the fact that most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 get ill to varying degrees. We also know that people with symptoms account for the majority of onward transmission of the infection (again see Will’s summary for evidence). So, if we were designing an effective policy to manage COVID-19 we would focus our efforts on the sick as this is where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck.
What would this mean in practice? First, we would only need diagnostic testing capacity for the minority of the population with symptoms, rather than the industrial-scale screening that we have had to deploy to deal with asymptomatic COVID-19.
Second, restrictions would be focused on ill people, and this would be much easier, not only because these individuals are easier to find, but because sick people behave as if they were, well, sick and as such may not require much encouragement to prevent others getting ill. (“Don’t come too close, I’m not very well.”) They also probably wouldn’t want to go to work, or the gym, or the pub, or visit Granny. These restrictions would be time limited as they only apply to an individual while they are ill. We could use the billions of pounds saved on not destroying the economy in a futile attempt to quarantine the entire healthy population to ensure that these individuals were supported until they got better. We could invest in extra capacity in the healthcare system to manage any increase in hospitalisations and focus resources on improved treatments rather than testing and managing healthy people. The need for vaccination certification becomes irrelevant because healthy people are treated as healthy people and new variants only become of concern if they make individuals sicker. Essentially, we could stop treating COVID-19 as a special case with all the collateral damage this causes to non-COVID-19 related health and manage it as we would any other potentially serious infection. None of this is surprising as it is based on centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to manage infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the creation and focus on asymptomatic disease has drawn our eye away from the real illness and devoured huge amounts of time, effort, and money.
Being told that you are sick with a major illness can be a devastating piece of news, not just for the individual themselves but for those around them. Even if this news is couched in terms of positive treatment outcomes, it would be impossible to not be fearful and run hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios through one’s mind. Regardless of how you feel today, the worries are all about progression and how you will feel tomorrow. Normally, clinicians would have a duty of care to their patients and spend time in discussing a diagnosis and helping their patients come to terms with this news. But for COVID-19, people receive the results of their diagnosis with no support. Worse through track-and-trace they might even receive this news completely unsolicited; imagine if a complete stranger phoned you to tell you that you might have cancer? Then, rather than offer support and comfort, we demand that individuals cut themselves off from others (self-isolate); you’re ill but on your own.
All of this has consequences, especially for those who have bought into the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19, and so is it not surprising that some people want to cling to mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns. In the end, it turns out that – ironically – asymptomatic COVID-19 might not be asymptomatic after all because for any number of vulnerable people the very existence of this asymptomatic disease has the potential to make them sick – sick with fear, worry and anxiety.
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At the initiative of Paris, an international conference took place on June 17 with the focus of aiding the Lebanese army. Through this support, France and the U.S. want to prevent Lebanon from falling under Hezbollah domination and count on the commander-in-chief of the Lebanese armed forces for the next election. After Paris cooled its relations with Saad Hariri, leader of the anti-Hezbollah March 14 Alliance political coalition, it re-established contact with civil society and started to strongly support the Lebanese army.
French Defense Minister Florence Parly organized the June 17 meeting to bring together emergency aid for the Lebanese army as it is a “pillar institution which prevents the security situation in the country from deteriorating.” About twenty countries participated in the French conference, including the U.S., Germany, Italy, Russia, China and some Gulf countries. Paris and the international community are planning to send medical aid and spare parts for military equipment.
The Lebanese currency has plummeted to 15,000 to the dollar on the black market, the minimum wage has lost about 90% of its value and the country is experiencing a shortage of gasoline and electricity. Before the crisis, an officer in the Lebanese army earned about $4,000 a month, today it is only about $400. However, for the regular soldier, the situation is even more dramatic.
Last May, the U.S. increased its aid to the Lebanese army by 12% – about $120 million for 2021. This financial support is multisectoral and aims to improve the equipment of the army – from armoured vehicles to combat helicopters and night vision systems. In addition, since 2014, more than 6,000 Lebanese soldiers have been trained by the U.S. military. France is also very active and signed three conventions last February with Lebanon on defense and naval cooperation, the fight against terrorism, and mountain combat training. Since 2016, Paris has reportedly delivered €60 million of equipment to Lebanese military units.
Western powers hope that the Lebanese military will prevent Hezbollah from spreading its influence over the country, especially since the Shi’ite movement is less affected by the economic crisis due to direct support from Iran. While other political parties struggle to receive state support, Hezbollah in 2020 received at least $700 million from Iran.
The difficulty that the West faces is the fact that Hezbollah is undisputedly the most powerful military force in Lebanon. The Lebanese Army and Hezbollah do share some objectives, such as the fight against jihadist’s and opposing any potential invasion from Israel.
As France and the U.S. have a very specific agenda with the Lebanese army, it explains why they maintain a good relationship with the commander-in-chief, Joseph Khalil Aoun. The Lebanese general went to the Elysee Palace in Paris last May and was received by President Emmanuel Macron. They reviewed the economic, security and social challenges in Lebanon and Paris stressed that the Lebanese army was the “real pillar of stability in the country.”
Aoun’s visit was the first time in history that the head of the Lebanese army was received by the French President, a maneuver which could be explained in part by the presidential ambitions of the army commander. He also visited Washington in 2019 and plans to return this month.
Despite the economic problems, the pressure from the streets and the immobility of the political class, the army still enjoys certain sympathy across the country. In 2019, it was the only state body not to suffer the horrors of the Lebanese revolution. It is also the only true multi-faith institution and serves as an example in a country that is ravaged by religious communalism.
The head of the Lebanese army will now set himself up as a presidential candidate, especially since he has the support and backing of the West to oppose Hezbollah’s domination. In fact, since Lebanon’s independence in 1943, most former presidents have been from the military. France is therefore hedging its bet on next year’s Lebanese presidential elections – but will their support be enough to convince the Lebanese people to turn their back on Hezbollah after the group played a prominent role in expelling Israeli forces from the country in 2000 and was a key player in preventing ISIS from gaining a foothold near the Syrian-Lebanese border?
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
First published on July 10, 2020, this article reviews the biometric vaccine project sponsored by GAVI.
“A new biometric identity platform partnered with the Gates-funded GAVI vaccine alliance and Mastercard will launch in West Africa and combine COVID-19 vaccinations, cashless payments, and potential law enforcement applications.
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A biometric digital identity platform that “evolves just as you evolve” is set to be introduced in “low-income, remote communities” in West Africa thanks to a public-private partnership between the Bill Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance, Mastercard and the AI-powered “identity authentication” company, Trust Stamp.
The program, which was first launched in late 2018, will see Trust Stamp’s digital identity platform integrated into the GAVI-Mastercard “Wellness Pass,” a digital vaccination record and identity system that is also linked to Mastercard’s click-to-play system that powered by its AI and machine learning technology called NuData. Mastercard, in addition to professing its commitment to promoting “centralized record keeping of childhood immunization” also describes itself as a leader toward a “World Beyond Cash,” and its partnership with GAVI marks a novel approach towards linking a biometric digital identity system, vaccination records, and a payment system into a single cohesive platform. The effort, since its launch nearly two years ago, has been funded via $3.8 million in GAVI donor funds in addition to a matched donation of the same amount by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In early June, GAVI reported that Mastercard’s Wellness Pass program would be adapted in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Around a month later, Mastercard announced that Trust Stamp’s biometric identity platform would be integrated into Wellness Pass as Trust Stamp’s system is capable of providing biometric identity in areas of the world lacking internet access or cellular connectivity and also does not require knowledge of an individual’s legal name or identity to function. The Wellness Program involving GAVI, Mastercard, and Trust Stamp will soon be launched in West Africa and will be coupled with a Covid-19 vaccination program once a vaccine becomes available.
The push to implement biometrics as part of national ID registration systems has been ongoing for many years on the continent and has become a highly politicized issue in several African countries. Opposition to similar projects in Africa often revolves around the costs surrounding them, such as the biometric voter management system that the Electoral Commission of Ghana has been trying to implement ahead of their 2020 general election in December. Bright Simons, honorary VP of the IMANI policy think tank, has questioned the “budgetary allocation” for the new system, claiming that the “unnecessary registration of 17 million people all over again” represents millions of dollars “being blown for reasons that nobody can explain in this country.”
Masking ulterior motives
Trust Stamp’s biometric identity system, largely funded by Mastercard’s massive investment in the company in February, utilizes a technology it calls Evergreen Hash that creates an AI-generated “3D mask” based on a single photo of a person’s face, palm or fingerprint. Once this “mask” is created, much of the original data is discarded and encryption keys are created in place of a person’s name or other more traditional identifiers.
“Only a small percentage of the data that originally existed is in the hash,” Trust Stamp CEO Gareth Genner has stated. “What you have is something safer for storing because it can’t be used to directly identify you. No one would recognize you in this huge jumble of numbers.” The result, according to Genner, is an “irreversible non-personally identifiable information” system that “protects privacy, reduces potential for misuse and allows effective inclusion when there is no other form of legal record.”
Genner also explained in a recent press release that the unique “hash” is capable of “evolving” as a new hash with updated health information is created every time a child or individual gets a vaccine. Trust Stamp’s AI algorithms can accurately determine if different hashes belong to the same individual, meaning that “the hash evolves over time just as you evolve,” said Genner.
It is unclear how much the Wellness Pass initiative is motivated by public health concerns as opposed to free market considerations. Indeed, the GAVI alliance, largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as allied governments and the vaccine industry, is principally concerned with improving “the health of markets for vaccines and other immunization products,” rather than the health of individuals, according to its own website. Similarly, Mastercard’s GAVI partnership is directly linked to its “World Beyond Cash” effort, which mainly bolsters its business model that has long depended on a reduction in the use of physical cash.
Dual use tyranny
Trust Stamp also shares this market-focused vision for its digital identity system as the company has stated that it is looking for new commercialization options for its Evergreen Hash technology, specifically with prison systems. Talks with private and public prison systems have revealed an interest in their utilization of Trust Stamp’s technology to provide identification for individuals on parole “without making them pay for pricey ankle bracelets that monitor their every move,” as Trust Stamp’s platform would ostensibly provide that same function but in a “touchless” and less expensive manner.
Trust Stamp’s interest in providing its technology to both COVID-19 response and to law enforcement is part of a growing trend where numerous companies providing digital solutions to COVID-19 also offer the same solutions to prison systems and law enforcement for the purposes of surveillance and “predictive policing.”
For instance, contact tracing software originally introduced as part of the COVID-19 response has since been used by police departments across the U.S. to track protesters during the country’s recent bouts of protests and civil unrest. Similarly, a controversial Israeli tech firm currently being used in Rhode Island offers AI-powered predictive analytic to identify likely future COVID-19 hotspots and individuals likely to contract COVID-19 in the future, while also offering governments the ability to predict future locations of and participants in riots and civil unrest.
What is perhaps most alarming about this new “Wellness Pass” initiative, is that it links these “dual use” digital solutions to cashless payment solutions that could soon become mandated as anything over than touchless, cashless, methods of payment have been treated as potential modes for contagion by GAVI-aligned groups like the World Health Organization, among others, since the pandemic was first declared earlier this year.
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Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani negotiated the original Iran nuclear deal in 2015, but is due to leave office in August. On Saturday, Iran’s lead envoy in Vienna, Abbas Araghchi, said a new deal was unlikely before presidential elections in his country this Friday. World powers are trying to revive the 2015 agreement that the US abandoned three years ago. It restricted Tehran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and the Vienna talks are focused on how Washington can reverse Trump-era sanctions and return to the accord so that both sides can resume full compliance with its terms.
As the world waits eagerly to see a new agreement possibly signed soon, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Seyed Hamed Nematollahi, an independent journalist and political analyst based in Tehran. He has studied International Journalism and has been working for different media and think tanks since 1997. He been interviewed many times about political developments, especially in Iran, on different media such as TV5Monde, France24, ABC News, AlEtijah English, Globo Brazil, FranceInter, and RTS.
Steven Sahiounie (SS): Iran is set for a new presidential election, in your opinion will there be change in the foreign policy of Iran?
Seyad Hamed Nematollahi (SHN): Analyzing topics related to Iran without a good and clear understanding of the power structure of the Islamic Republic is impossible. According to Article 110 of the constitution determining the overall politics of the Islamic Republic system of Iran after consultation with the Expediency Council is one of the authorities and responsibilities of the leader. Because of this responsibility and some duties of the Supreme Council of National Security (Article 176), the ministers of Defense, Foreign Affairs and Interior are selected by the president with consultation with the Leader.
Therefore, we won’t see radical changes with a new president and only the techniques will be changed.
SS: The nuclear deal between Tehran and the west is very close to an end. Will the new Iranian leadership proceed with the deal?
SHN: The strategy toward the JCPOA is subject to a consensus across the Iranian political system that Iran has given enough concessions, and it’s time for the European signatories to stand up to the U.S. and take us back to the deal and to its commitments. The United States has quit the agreement so they should take the first step and till now they have shown no determination towards removing its sanctions and returning to compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, so I don’t predict any agreement in the current situation.
SS: The tension between Iran and the Israeli occupation is at the highest level. Do you think that this tension will take the Middle East to war?
SHN: The tension between the Israeli occupation and Iran has always been high. Sometimes these tensions have been directly influenced by the domestic situation of the occupied territories. Nowadays Netanyahu is trying absolutely anything to avoid giving up power and conceding defeat to the new coalition partners and the recent 11 days’ war can be understood in the same context. He is also trying to provoke retaliation by Iran with clandestine attacks but I believe Iran has no intention of taking that bait, for now. and nothing will happen.
SS: If the nuclear deal succeeds, in your opinion, will that have a positive effect on the Middle East hot-spots such as: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen?
SHN: According to Article 154 of the constitution “while it completely abstains from any kind of intervention in the internal affairs of other nations, it supports the struggles of the oppressed for their rights against the oppressors anywhere in the world.” So, this support -that is not limited to the Middle East and the Axis of Resistance- it’s for oppressed in “anywhere in the world’. During the latest years that Iran was under “Crippling Sanctions”, not only different forms of support has not stopped, but it has intensified.
I believe that the narrative promoted by mainstream media that the JCPOA will result rise of tensions in that hotspots, is false and an international agreement will help in its own to make the region safer. Also Biden’s foreign policy approach is on less presence in the region and the change of tone of Mohammad Bin Salman and the ongoing negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Iran is a sign of this change.
SS: If the nuclear deal is completed, what does this mean for Iranian business in general?
SHN: The JCPOA -in the current format- can’t resolve the problem of the Iranian economy in its own because USA has enforced their nuclear sanctions with others such as secondary ones that they won’t revise. Speaking in the United States’ Council of Foreign Relations on April 2016, Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Governor Valiollah Seif said, “Let me also give you a snapshot of what has happened over the last three months — the date of implementation of the JCPOA: almost nothing.” He reiterated the same words in another interview with Bloomberg.
Nothing has changed from then, so I don’t expect any big changes.
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The Western desire to keep open the Bab al-Hawa corridor for aid into the extremist-controlled Idlib region of Syria is a ploy to continue destabilizing the Assad government, by propping up a murderous al-Qaeda offshoot.
Among the matters under discussion by US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on Wednesday was Washington’s call to keep open the last United Nations aid crossing into Syria, in an opposition-held northwest part of the country at Bab al-Hawa on the Turkish border. It is set to be closed on July 10 under the terms of a UN Security Council Resolution.
MP Sarah Champion, chairwoman of the House of Commons International Development Committee, is urging British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to tow the US line in a similar manner.
Presenting the aid entry point as the last bastion of humanitarian rescue efforts in the war-ravaged country, Biden said in a follow-up press conference to the summit that the effort to keep aid flowing in the northwest is supposedly part of “the urgent need to preserve and reopen the humanitarian corridors in Syria.”
But Biden’s loose nomenclature is misleading, because the aid corridor in question is one that pipes in foreign aid money from abroad without passing it under the scrutiny of Bashar Assad’s government in Damascus, which as the territorially sovereign government of Syria has the right to coordinate all foreign aid inflows.
President Putin has underscored this point, as Assad has regained control over much of Syria formerly overrun by factious jihadists, helping shut down similar UN aid crossings into those areas as Damascus broadened its own reach in distributing aid. Shortly before his summit with Biden, the Russian leader said that “[Humanitarian] assistance should be given through the central government.”
In addition, the recipient of the foreign aid at issue is the breakaway region of Idlib, under the control of a terrorist faction lacking international recognition, which has stoned women to death and slaughtered religious minorities as part of its modus operandi.
What sounds at the outset like an issue of genuine humanitarian concern, then, is on closer inspection an iteration of a common Western regime-change ploy, to keep breakaway regions as vassals under the pretext of international assistance disbursed by Western entities.
Maintaining a foreign aid crossing into northwest Syria unregulated by Damascus would allow the band of butchers in Idlib to continue to influence that funding or even benefit directly from it, under the leadership of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.
This same Jolani, a terrorist theocrat, is the focus of a slick Western PR campaign that has kicked into high gear alongside the Western diplomatic offensive to keep Idlib tied to foreign NGOs – both with the aim of presenting Jolani as a viable Western “asset” merely because he coalesces a contingent of anti-Assad militants.
This rebranding effort is meant to distract attention from years-long US and British support that has funded the rise of Jolani and other extremists wreaking havoc on Syrian civilians, all in the name of anti-Assad opposition.
Since 2013, the CIA has been funneling large tranches of covert money to a group of Syrian oppositional elements dominated by Islamist extremist groups. Jolani was a member of that group who ascended in prominence, having crossed into Syria in 2012 as a member of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and helping establish Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State.
A feud with him led Jolani to set up Jabhat al-Nusra, the official Syrian offshoot of Al-Qaeda. With CIA backing, Nusra took control of Idlib Province and instituted a bloody regime of theocratic oppression. Encouraged by its foreign supporters to distance itself from Al-Qaeda while continuing its brutal methods, Nusra changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and then to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), by which it is currently known.
In reply to deliberately friendly overtures from HTS claiming to be a purely anti-Assad organization rather than a terrorist one, James Jeffrey, President Donald Trump’s Special Representative for Syrian Engagement, said, “I couldn’t agree more… Keep me informed as often as possible,” while reporting back to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a recent interview Jeffrey gave with PBS Frontline’s Martin Smith.
The Al-Qaeda run cabal in Idlib ramped up its charm offensive in 2020, rebranding itself as the “Syrian Salvation Government” and creating an office of media relations, helping Western journalists access the region and, via government-endorsed guides, showing them exactly what HTS wanted them to see.
During one such staged on-location interview in March 2021, also with Martin Smith of PBS, Jolani told Smith that Idlib “is not a staging ground for executing foreign jihad,” blithely ignoring the ongoing jihadist extremism carried out against Syrian citizens in the region, by his own government.
As ‘refugees’ from formerly extremist enclaves in Syria fled into Idlib after Assad’s forces brought those regions back under national control, Western pundits and politicians deliberately conflated the supposedly humanitarian needs of this population with real support for Syrian sovereignty.
In fact, though, the Idlib regime’s extremist enforcement of narrow religious doctrines repeatedly plays out in routine, prejudicial persecution of fellow Syrians, while essentially holding the burgeoning population of refugees as leverage to extract aid money from Western nations. They, in turn, are more focused on humanitarian plight than the brutal regime directing the inflows of aid.
In this dangerous nexus, US aid money earmarked for Idlib has been siphoned off by the ruling terrorists. In a report released in 2018, the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that USAID funds were implicated in “numerous instances of possible or confirmed diversions to armed groups in Idlib Governorate in northwestern Syria, including Ha’yat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.” NGO contractors willfully used their USAID disbursements to assist HTS, and in some instances HTS had already infiltrated the NGOs themselves.
Although USAID’s own investigation into this behavior led to a crackdown on such funding and the Trump administration’s official refusal to send aid to HTS-controlled Syrian areas in 2018, aid to Idlib is still a politicized weapon used by the West against the Assad regime. The Brussels-headquartered International Crisis Group, funded by the EU and other Western governments, ran a highly sympathetic interview with Jolani in 2020, quoting him as saying, “we pledge non-interference” in the work of NGOs delivering aid to Idlib.
Ken Roth, executive director of regime-change promoting Human Rights Watch (HRW), emphatically endorsed this interview at the time, while Gerry Simpson, an HRW associate director, claimed recently that shutting down the Bab al-Hawa corridor would “unleash a humanitarian calamity.”
These are partisan statements that take the words of a murderer at face value, even though his actions have repeatedly contradicted any promises of respect for all Syrians’ civil liberties. Falsely portraying Jolani’s Idlib as a bastion of workable democracy and sending aid to territory under its control automatically burnishes the image of the HTS elite, by implying they are victims rather than dangerous usurpers. Attention instead ought to be given to the fact that with Assad having regained control of much of Syria, his government is now far-better placed than foreign NGOs to coordinate the delivery of aid to all Syrian regions and has repeatedly expressed its willingness to do so.
Indications have already emerged that World Food Organization trucks have been used to smuggle terrorists and weapons into Syria in the past, and with Western furor over the potential closing of a UN aid corridor into Idlib rising while their rebranding of HTS kicks into full pitch, it would seem probable that the Bab al-Hawa aid corridor is the only avenue the regime-change activists have left in funding the illegitimate, extremist HTS regime.
If these activists were not engaged in propping up HTS under cover of an ostensibly humanitarian guise, they would have no problem with the corridor’s shutdown and would simply coordinate their aid through Damascus.
As Special Representative Jeffrey said in his PBS interview, “we were perfectly willing to go on in a questionably sustainable attrition situation” by opening indirect channels to HTS in Idlib “to keep the other side from winning in Syria.”
That “other side” is represented by President Assad, who has already won another presidential election as the sovereign ruler of Syria. Disturbingly, as Jeffrey has served in key diplomatic posts under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, his warped anti-Assad views on Syria appear to reflect bipartisan continuity proceeding apace under Biden, Obama’s former vice president.
Propping up HTS and its murderous Idlib tyranny as a jingoistic cat’s paw against the Damascus government and its Russian, Chinese, and Iranian allies – whether through diplomacy, aid, publicity, or weapons – only delegitimizes the terrorists and their Western apologists even further.
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Kevin Karp, commentator, screenwriter, and former political adviser in the House of Commons and the European Parliament. As an EU adviser based in Brussels and Strasbourg, he specialized in international trade, European populism, and Brexit. Find his website at moon-vine-media.com.
“Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to destroying the Soviet Union, as well as weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, etc. and again those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers.” – Professor Michel Chossudovsky (from this week’s interview).
America was born out of a revolt against British imperial rule.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British Empire was “the hated enemy”. In 1812, the young republic declared war on Great Britain and tried unsuccessfully, to conquer the Canadian colonies.
Within less than a half century of its birth, the United States of America under President James Monroe, established a policy that came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted that the USA would oppose any further colonization in the Americas (Western Hemisphere) by European powers. By establishing a sphere of influence outside its borders, the new republic was arguably taking its first steps in the direction of becoming an imperial power. [1]
Subsequent decades saw the U.S. continue to grow in geographic size, economic power and geopolitical influence. By the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. had become a significant military and economic player, and after World War II, the U.S. was to overtake all the European powers as the dominant force on the world stage.
A popular conception is that the United States is a democratic country devoted to the principles of the Founding Fathers and tasked with the responsibility of bringing freedom and democracy to the world. A less naive viewpoint might hold that governments corrupted by greed and the influence of big money have redirected the country’s foreign policy away from these high ideals toward whatever might benefit entrenched wealthy interests.
The notion that America’s military expansion might be guided by imperial rivalries with European powers is not immediately evident. Certainly, while menacing gestures and indignant statements toward nations like China or Russia or the so-called rogue or failed states like North Korea and Iraq may be common-place, U.S. leadership over the last century has typically exhibited a congenial attitude toward its counterparts in Europe.
In a recent paper by Professor Michel Chossudovsky (presented at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)) focussing on documentary record of both world wars, the interwar period, the Cold War and the post Cold War period, America has continued to adopt an adversarial attitude toward Great Britain.
In fact, the paper, published in Spanish as La globalizacion de la guerra: Cronología de la “Guerra Larga” de EE.UU. contra la Humanidad, exposes, among other aspects, U.S. support for Nazi Germany, a 1920-39 approved plan to invade Canada, and plans to wage a nuclear war against 66 Soviet cities in the immediate wake of World War II at a time when the two countries were allies.
In a feature length interview, Professor Chossudovsky elaborates on his thesis, placing world events spanning the last century, including the recent Brexit drama in the United Kingdom, in that context.
Professor Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, and Editor of Global Research. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. His books include The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), and The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015). In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia.
Transcript- Interview with Professor Michel Chossudovsky, Dec. 19, 2019
The transcript has been edited by Prof Chossudovsky. Text boxes, maps added.
Part One
Global Research: You presented your paper in Nicaragua at the beginning of December 2019. Could you briefly introduce that paper to us?
Michel Chossudovsky: Well, the focus essentially was on the globalization of war and the chronology of U.S. hegemony.
The (“accepted scholarly”) history of the last hundred years is misleading because it presents Britain and the United States as allies, but in fact, they were never allies. They were competing Empires.
This confrontation between the United States and Britain has existed right from the onset of the founding of the United States in 1776. It became increasingly pervasive in the wake of the Civil War, 1865.
There were US military scenarios and war plans directed against the British Empire. These were not limited to the Western Hemisphere.
In essence, the objective of the United States was to weaken the British Empire and acquire a dominant position Worldwide.
There’s a lot of history, and I want to point to some important landmarks.
The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885, which was essentially a French and British initiative, the United States was excluded. They were there as observers, but they were never offered any role to play in “the carving up of Africa”, so that in effect, the European powers had already decided on the carving up of Africa without the United States.
1914 Map of Africa
Then you have the Spanish-American war of 1898, and then the First World War (1914-1918), and what we can say is that the United States consolidated its hegemony in relation to the British Empire specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean but also in Asia.
And although the Monroe Doctrine was not “officially” directed against the British Empire, it was nonetheless intent upon consolidating US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
GR: Professor Chossudovsky, could you remind us briefly what exactly is the Monroe Doctrine and when it came about?
MC: Well, the Monroe Doctrine was initiated in the early 19th century, and it went through several phases. But ultimately, the concept was that European powers should not intervene in the Western hemisphere. It was directed largely against Spain and France but also Britain. And as we know France was also involved in Mexico at one point in its history (1862)
In other words, the Monroe doctrine laid the groundwork for hemispheric consolidation by the United States.
Now, what’s very important, particularly for Canadians, – because we have a particular way of understanding our history from 1867 onwards – is the fact that the United States had a plan to annex Canada, that was formulated in 1866.
M.C: (Cont) Of course then we had Confederation (1867). But that war plan against Canada wasn’t dropped: After World War I, the United States formulated a plan to invade the British Empire (including Canada). It was called ‘War Plan Red.’
Now, the details of this plan to invade the British Empire might seem absurd. They were supposed to be allies.
What happened was that there were plans to invade Canada, there were war games right at the US-Canadian border – and there were plans to even use chemical weapons against Canadians.
Map: Invasion plan directed against Canada and British possessions in Caribbean
The bombing campaign underlying these War plans was formulated in the 1920s and 1930s. It consisted in a plan to bomb four major Canadian cities, namely Vancouver Montreal, Halifax, and Quebec City. This infamous project had been entrusted to none other than General Douglas MacArthur. Well he wasn’t General at the time. He became General during World War II.
But nonetheless, War Plan Red pointed to the fact that there was a certain continuity, and there were plans to invade Canada.
The United States never really dropped its intent to wage war on the British Empire. And in 1939, when World War II broke out, the United States remained neutral. It did not side with the Allies until much later. In early September 1939, the United States declared its neutrality. It did not take any action to prevent the invasion of France by Nazi Germany, nor the bombing raids directed against the U.K.
World War II commenced with the invasion of Poland and the Baltic States, which was followed by war on the Western Front, including the invasion and occupation of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the bombings of the U.K.
The war on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union started in June 1941.
Text Box. The Invasion of Canada
A detailed plan to invade Canada, entitled “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan — Red” was approved by the US War Department under the presidency of Herbert Hoover in 1930. It was updated in 1934 and 1935 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was “put on hold” in 1939 following the outbreak of the Second World War.
Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley was largely instrumental in the formulation and approval of Plan Red by the US administration.
In its day, War Plan RED was not meant to be funny. The 1928 draft stated that “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously”. The 1930 draft stated that “large parts of CRIMSON territory will become theaters of military operations with consequent suffering to the population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country…”
In October 1934, the Secretary of War and Secretary of Navy approved an amendment authorizing the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal and Quebec City by “immediate air operations on as large a scale as practicable.” A second amendment, also approved at the Cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army, in capital letters, “TO MAKE ALL NECESSARY PREPARATIONS FOR THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE FROM THE OUTBREAK OF WAR. THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE, INCLUDING THE USE OF TOXIC AGENTS, FROM THE INCEPTION OF HOSTILITIES, IS AUTHORIZED…”
The use of poison gas was conceived as an humanitarian action that would cause Canada to quickly surrender and thus save American lives. (Commander Carpender, A. S., & Colonel Krueger, W. (1934), memo to the Joint Board, Oct. 17, 1934, available in U.S. National Archive in documents appended to War Plan RED.)
In March 1935, General Douglas MacArthur proposed an amendment making Vancouver a priority target comparable to Halifax and Montreal. This was approved in May 1935, and in October 1935, his son Douglas MacArthur Jr. began his espionage career as vice-consul in Vancouver. In August 1935, the U.S.A. held its then largest ever peace time military maneuvers, with more than 50,000 troops practicing a motorized invasion of Canada, duly reported in the New York Times by its star military reporter, Hanson Baldwin. Floyd Rudmin, Plan Red, Counterpunch, 2006 (emphasis added)
US Support of Nazi Germany
M.C: Now, the United States, in the course of the 1930s, but even extending further into World War II, was collaborating quite actively with Nazi Germany in the areas of finance, technology but also in the areas of military production, and this included the participation of Ford, Rockefeller, and also the Bush family.
The granddad of President Bush Junior was Prescott Bush. In other words the granddad of George W Bush was the director of the Union Banking Corporation, Brown Brothers Harriman, which in turn were partners with Thyssen Stahl, a major German conglomerate involved in the weapons industry of the Third Reich. And this has been reasonably well documented.
The United States continued to collaborate with Nazi Germany after September 1939. And after December 1941, namely Pearl Harbor, the US joined the allies, declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy. And there was a formal shift with regard to Nazi Germany. The Roosevelt administration adopted “Trading With The Enemy” legislation, In other words Washington took an official stance in support of its allies against Nazi Germany. But unofficially they continued collaborating with Nazi Germany.
Text box. The Bush Family and Nazi Germany, “Sleeping with the Enemy”
Prescott Bush was a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co and director of Union Banking Corporation which had close relations with German corporate interests including Thyssen Steel, a major company involved in the Third Reich’s weapons industry.
“…[N]ew documents, declassified [in 2003], show that even after America had entered the war [December 8, 1941] and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he [Prescott Bush] worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty” (The Guardian, September 25, 2004)
In August 1934, American “Standard oil” in Germany acquired 730,000 acres of land and built large oil refineries that supplied the Nazis with oil. At the same time, Germany secretly took delivery of the most modern equipment for aircraft factories from the United States, which would begin the production of German planes.
Germany received a large number of military patents from American firms Pratt and Whitney”, “Douglas”, “Curtis Wright”, and American technology was building the “Junkers-87”. In 1941, when the Second world war was raging, American investments in the economy of Germany amounted to $475 million. “Standard oil” invested – 120 million, “General motors” – $35 million, ITT — $30 million, and “Ford” — $17.5 million. (emphasis added)
Standard Oil Was Selling Oil to the Third Reich
M.C: Invariably neglected by historian and journalists, there’s a something which is absolutely crucial to an understanding of WWII: Germany did not have any petrol, fuel – it had very limited supplies of petrol.
This is documented in the book by Jacques Pauwels, a prominent Canadian historian. Pauwels analyses the relationship between Standard Oil, which was owned by the Rockefeller family and the Nazi regime.
Standard Oil was the largest oil producer Worldwide. It controlled the oil industry, and Nazi Germany was dependent on oil.
And that oil was sold to Nazi Germany directly up until Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and subsequently it was sold via third countries indirectly, to bypass the “Trading With The Enemy Act” which was passed in the US Senate.
Well, in fact it was a previous legislation [1917] but nonetheless, it’s worth noting that the Bush family’s assets were confiscated under the “Trading with Enemy” legislation.
M.C.: (Cont) But as far as Standard Oil was concerned, they continued selling oil to Nazi Germany up until 1944-1945.
And the Roosevelt administration turned a blind eye.
And the main reason for this was that without the oil supplies from Standard Oil, Nazi Germany could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union, and in fact, even the Western Front would have been compromised.
So that the sale of US oil by Standard Oil to the Third Reich was crucial. The US was sleeping with the enemy. Unofficially the US was a de facto “ally” of Nazi Germany. There were no sanctions imposed on the Third Reich: After Pearl Harbor (December 1941) US oil was sold to the enemy through third countries, and then there was a large component of Standard Oil’s shipments which was sold out of Venezuela.
Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941 by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. It resulted in 26 million deaths.
It was understood that the Third Reich would be getting oil from the United States.
The Nazis were staunch military planners, and prior to launching Operation Barbarossa they ensured that they would have regular supplies of oil provided by Standard Oil.
Without US oil, they could not under any circumstances have waged war on the Soviet Union.
Text Box. The Unspoken Question. Where did Germany get its oil from?
Prior the December 1941, Texas oil was shipped on a regular basis to Nazi Germany.
While Germany was able to transform coal into fuel, this synthetic production was insufficient. Moreover, Romania’s Ploesti oil resources (under Nazi control until 1944) were minimal. Nazi Germany largely depended on oil shipments from US Standard Oil.
The Attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) occurred barely six months after the launching of Operation Barbarossa (July 1941). The United States enters World War II, declaring war on Japan and the axis countries.
Trading with the Enemy legislation (1917) officially implemented following America’s entry into World War II did not prevent Standard Oil of New Jersey from selling oil to Nazi Germany. This despite the Senate 1942 investigation of US Standard Oil.
While direct US oil shipments were curtailed, Standard Oil would sell US oil through third countries. US oil was shipped to occupied France through Switzerland, and from France it was shipped to Germany:
“… for the duration of the Second World War, Standard Oil, under deals Teagle had overseen, continued to supply Nazi Germany with oil. The shipments went through Spain, Vichy France’s colonies in the West Indies, and Switzerland.”
It should be noted that a large share of Nazi Germany’s oil requirements was met by shipments out of Venezuela which at the time was a de facto US colony.
Venezuela’s US sponsored (War-time) president GeneralIsaías Medina Angarita (May 1941 – October 1945) was there to protect US oil interests as well as “trade with the enemy” from the onset of America’s entry into World War II in December 1941:
John D. Rockefeller Jr. owned a controlling interest in the Standard Oil corporation, but the next largest stockholder was the German chemical company I. G. Farben, through which the firm sold $20 million worth of gasoline and lubricants to the Nazis. And the Venezuelan branch of that company sent 13,000 tons of crude oil to Germany each month, which the Third Reich’s robust chemical industry immediately converted into gasoline.
While Medina Angarita’s government pressured by Washington in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) remained officially neutral (de facto aligned with the US, while breaking its relations with Nazi Germany), oil shipments out of Venezuela to Germany were not discontinued. In a rather unusual twist (bordering on ridicule) Venezuela declared war on Germany in February 1945, when the war was almost over.
Without those oil shipments instrumented by Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, Nazi Germany would not have been able to implement its military agenda. Without fuel, the Third Reich’s eastern front under Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have taken place, saving millions of lives. The Western front including the military occupation of France, Belgium and The Netherlands would no doubt also have been affected.
M.C: The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration could have adopted severe sanctions against Standard Oil with a view to enforcing a blockade against Nazi Germany.
The US was not committed to peace: Washington’s unspoken objective was not only to destroy the Soviet Union, it also consisted in undermining Britain’s role as an imperial power.
Let us be under no illusions. Without the oil shipments instrumented by US Standard Oil and its subsidiaries, Nazi Germany’s imperial design could not have been undertaken.
It should be noted that the role of the US in supplying Nazi Germany with oil is casually ignored. Today’s Western “consensus” which was upheld by the European Parliament is to blame Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for WWII.
GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you said quite a bit there. Could you maybe just share with our listeners some of the key source documents that you used for your research that informed your analysis?
MC: Well, you know, from a historical standpoint, this US-Third Reich “alliance” was not clear in my mind, it was blurred. Moreover, with some exceptions it was not the object of (mainstream) scholarly research.
What I did was to indulge in what might be called common sense analysis. In this regard, I think that Jacques Pauwels book on World War II, is absolutely fundamental.
Common sense analysis tells us the following: you cannot wage a large scale military campaign without fuel.
Without the steady supply of fuel to Nazi Germany from Standard oil, the history of WWII would have been totally different. Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have occurred.
But then, there’s another element which I mentioned earlier with regard to the British Empire. War Plan Red against the British Empire was put on hold in 1939. But it was never abandoned.
From 1939 onwards, from a geopolitical standpoint, America’s unspoken hegemonic objective was to weaken all competing imperial powers including the British empire.
In other words, weaken Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Holland as well as Japan. All these countries had colonial possessions. And in the wake of World War II, Europe had been destroyed and the US economy was booming.
In the course of the post-war era, these colonial possessions (e.g. Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia) were taken over, integrated into America’s sphere of influence.
The two historic objectives of the United States in World War II were
1) to undermine the British Empire and competing imperial powers,
2) destroy the Soviet Union,
Secret Plan to Wage Nuclear War on the Soviet Union Formulated during WWII
There was a secret plan first formulated in 1942 confirmed by declassified September 15, 1945 documents, that the United States was intent upon waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
Two atomic bombs were dropped respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki under President Truman (6 and 9 August 1945), and we know that in the first few minutes of that bombing of Hiroshima, a hundred thousand people were killed, and the same thing occurred with regard to Nagasaki.
These cities were totally destroyed, leading also to extensive nuclear radiation.
But what most people don’t know, is that on the 15th of September 1945, declassified documents from the U.S. war department pointed unequivocally to a detailed US plan to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union – with over 200 atomic bombs.
Some historians might have concluded: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dress rehearsals for this devastating project directed against 66 Soviet cities. Now, I think this is significant because this project was formulated when the Soviet Union and the United States were allies theoretically against Nazi Germany.
But in fact 20th Century history, I think, has to be looked at very carefully.
US oil for Nazi Germany’s motorized convoys of tanks and armored cars, its Luftwaffe planes was part of America’s plan to destroy the Soviet Union. It resulted in the loss of 26 million lives.
Now, that project did not take place because the Soviet Union had information on this plan first formulated in 1942 and they were in the process of developing their own weapons system.
But what I’m saying is that the arms race did not start with the Cold War. The arms race started with the Manhattan Project (launched in 1939) which consisted in building nuclear weapons capabilities in the United States. And Canada, incidentally, was a partner in that project. And so was Britain.
Essentially what we’re looking at is a broader perspective of how the United States de facto supported Nazi Germany with a view to
a) destroying the Soviet Union,
b) weakening the British Empire and competing empires including of course France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, etc and so on, (Those countries virtually are no longer colonial powers).
Intermission
Part Two
GR: Another aspect of U.S. hegemony, as you put it, is also the economic dimension. We spoke with Michael Hudson a few months back and, you know, he mentioned the use of the U.S. dollar in maintaining their control and financing their war agenda.
So, could you speak to the point of the use of the U.S. dollar, and the way that’s been used to maintain America’s hegemonic role – the way they’ve been able to use the creation of these institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and just the U.S. dollar as the currency – the world’s petro-currency?
US Dollar Hegemony
MC: Well, you know, this goes back to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, where there was a decision which was virtually imposed in the post-war era, to establish the U.S. dollar as the international currency. And linked up to gold and then subsequently the gold standard was dropped.
This dollarization of the post World War II economy went through several stages. It eventually led to the World Bank and the IMF playing a pro-active role in countries which were former colonies of the Western European powers: Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and of course Latin America – in other words, these were so-called ‘developing countries.’
But again it’s the Washington Consensus, it’s the World Bank, the IMF which became instruments leading to the consolidation of U.S. hegemony, namely U.S. dollar hegemony.
And definitely that is really, in a sense, an outcome of World War II where all the competing imperial powers are ultimately destroyed. Well, they’re no longer competing powers and I’m talking about Italy, France, Britain, Belgium, Holland, and of course Germany.
That whole structure has been ultimately flattened, and many of the so-called developing countries – territories of these former colonial powers– are now within the U.S. sphere of influence.
And the dollar is their proxy currency.
So, it’s a structure of domination and hegemony using currency markets, economic policy conditionalities, control of wages, control of prices, and so on.
And then it’s also the whole process of relocation of industrial activity to cheap labour economies. And many of those cheap labour economies are the former colonies of the Western Powers.
GR: Now, there’s the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so the Soviet Union is no more.
And then we have entered into a new phase, but the United States and its NATO allies continue to advance towards the border of Russia.
we’re at the point where US-NATO is threatening Russia,
Moreover, since 2001 the US is waging a ‘Global War on Terrorism’. It’s the post 9/11 period.
So, does this signify an important course change, and how does that relate to this ongoing effort to supplant the British Empire?
MC: Well, I mean, in the wake of World War II NATO is established in 1949.
It’s the seventieth anniversary of NATO so to speak. And it’s the shift into the Cold War. Now NATO was actually established (April 1949) barely a few months before the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) on October 1st 1949. And consistently of course, NATO has been targeting the Soviet Union on behalf of the Pentagon.
The United States has been the main power in sustaining the Cold War up until its “official end” in 1989.
But in effect, the Cold War is not over. While the Soviet Union no longer exists, US-NATO is now directing its threats against the Russian Federation (which is bona fide capitalist country).
Again, it’s part of a hegemonic project, not by the NATO member states but of the United States which controls NATO via the Pentagon.
And I think that the whole process of militarization after World War II with the establishment of the geographic command structures – the U.S. Central Command, U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Pacific Command, etc – hundreds of military bases around the world.
US Geographic Commands
And largely, well, they’re not only there threatening Russia, they’re threatening China.
And these bases are also there as a means to enforcing america’s sphere of influence, i.e. colonize regions which were formerly colonies of European countries.
In Southeast Asia, of course, what is very important are the strategic waterways.
Indonesia is a de-facto within the U.S. zone of influence and various other countries as well.
And so, it’s a process of global militarization in each of the major regions of the world.
This new hegemony in the wake of the Cold War is also characterized by various modes of interference in the affairs of sovereign states through military dictatorships in Latin America, regime change, engineered protest movements, sanctions, meddling in national elections, and so on.
It’s the whole gamut of military might which of course supports U.S. economic and financial interests in different parts of the world.
And it’s not strictly in the context of Eastern Europe. It’s also in Central Asia, it’s in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait,
And in the present structure we now have a situation where the Russian Federation and China are allies under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which ultimately constitutes a powerful countervailing bloc in relation to U.S. hegemony, particularly in the Asian context.
GR: Most people understand there was a great deal of enmity between the United States and the British Empire in the late 18th century and early 19th century. But over the course of the last couple of centuries, one would think that, well, maybe they’ve changed their ways. I mean the United States is more of a partnership with the United Kingdom, as opposed to looking to supplant them as the dominant empire.
Could you maybe take on that idea, i.e. that there’s no interest in a partnership? Because there’s certainly been a lot of partnership in all of these military adventures we’ve seen since the second world war, but what indications are there that the objective of supplanting of the British Empire is still in effect?
MC: Well, you know, the world is characterized by what I would call cross-cutting coalitions. You can be friends in the area of diplomacy and politics, and then enemies in financial affairs. We can see the situation with regard to the relationship between, let’s say, the United States and Turkey, or Turkey and NATO. Turkey is an ally now of Russia, but it’s still part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
With regard to Britain and the United States – there are many cross-cutting relations. Britain is still Europe’s main financial market, and the City of London is considered one of the major financial centres in the world. And there are links between British and American firms. And there are links also with other European countries.
But, I think there’s something quite specific. Today, while the United Kingdon aligns itself with the United States, they are subordinate to the US.
And I don’t think British governments have any intention of restoring the British Empire, because, apart from the Commonwealth, it is more or less defunct – it doesn’t exist anymore.
But, on the other hand, it’s important to point out that in all recent wars, Britain has faithfully participated in an Anglo-American alliance, both with regard to Afghanistan, as well as, of course, with regard to Iraq during the Gulf War (1991) as well as in 2003. It was marked by The Bush-Tony Blair relationship.
In that regard, there is, of course, a very cohesive and corrupt alliance.
But when you look at the hegemonic objectives of the United States, you realize that what’s happening today in the United Kingdom is the appointment under PM Boris Johnson of a U.S. proxy regime.
GR: Could you explain that a little bit?
MC: It’s something which is not so straighforward to explain. I should mention there are other cases of proxy governments in Western Europe, particularly in France and Germany.
But what this means is that essentially the United States is intent upon taking over the European landscape.
And in one form or another it has done that since the end of World War II, simply by the fact that there are U.S. military bases in several European countries, and they have NATO and they control NATO.
But in the case of Britain, we must understand that the UK has never been part of the Eurozone. And there’s a reason for that, and it has to do with U.S.- U.K. relations in terms of financial institutions, markets, and so on.
But more recently, there have been UK-US negotiations pertaining to trade and investment, etc. the details of which haven’t really emerged. Negotiations between Boris Johnson and the Trump administration, let’s say, with regards to macro-economic policy, specifically the privatization of health services.
In other words, what the U.S. is pushing for is the neoliberal restructuring of Britain, extensive privatization, repeal of the welfare state, something which was built in the post World War II era, namely socio-democracy. And which has nothing to do with British colonialism.
It had to do with the fact that, at one point, the British people pushed towards the development of social programs, education and so on.
And I think that what is happening now is that we have a government which ultimately is not representative of the British people. It has become an instrument of dominant U.S. hegemonic interests, as well as a continuation of a fragile Anglo-American partnership dominated by Washington.
So that, I think that is the endgame. The destabilization of Britain as a nation state.
That destabilization is engineered by the Washington Consensus.
If we look at the evolution of the British Empire from Queen Victoria at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, US hegemony ultimately prevails, The endgame of Britain’s imperial ambitions is economic and political chaos under Brexit.
GR: Yeah…
MC: …It’s not that Brexit per se is the issue. It’s the fact that a proxy government has been installed. It’s a corrupt government. It’s manipulated by financial interests and it is ultimately leading Britain, the former British Empire into a total political impasse.
Intermission
Part Three
GR: Professor Chossudovsky, you brought up Brexit there just now, and I just want to get some clarification. Does Brexit ultimately serve U.S. goals or was it just a means by which a certain kind of proxy, as you say, would get elected?
MC: Well, I think the broader US objective is to create instability across the European landscape. It serves U.S. interests because it cuts Britain off from the European Union. But it also defines a whole series of trade agreements, and so on, which are to benefit the United States. (i.e. US financial interests).
The irony is that U.S. expansionism and hegemony feeds on creating and disrupting both national and local economies. The result is economic and social destabilization.
US sponsored neoliberal reforms destabilize the national economy and create social divisions. (For instance the divisions created in EU member states). the nation state becomes fragmented. (eg. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are broken up). You create divisions within national societies.
At the same time, the War on Terrorism is used, of course, to weaken the fabric of Western European countries: it triggers the refugee crisis. The latter is marked by people fleeing the war theatres in Syria, or Iraq, or elsewhere. The refugee crisis is the direct result of U.S. military aggression, whether it’s direct military action or whether it is the result of US sponsored terrorist insurgencies.
The whole European landscape now is in crisis politically, socially. And this is also the consequence of U.S. led wars in the Middle East.
But it is also the result of neoliberal policies which are now much more generalized, and which are now being applied in many Western countries.
And inevitably, when you start adopting neoliberal policy in a country like the United Kingdom, you destroy the whole fabric of the welfare state. That’s ultimately the objective.
GR: Professor Chossudovsky we’re going to have to bring the interview to a close shortly, but I wanted to ask one more question about the fact that when these plans – this hegemonic agenda – originated in the 19th century, the U.S. was ascendant, and now it would seem that today and for a couple of decades now, the U.S. has been on the decline with China apparently – appearing to be on the rise and forming partnerships with Russia and other countries. So, how do you see this – I mean, is this agenda of imperial dominance going to fall apart, given the immense debts that the U.S. has racked up, and the inability to sell U.S. Treasury bonds as they have in the past. How do you see this proceeding? Is the U.S. hegemon going to succeed or is it destined to fail?
MC: Well, you know, it has a lot to do with the sources of money wealth. And it’s the growth of speculative activities, the hedge funds, the deregulation of banking during the Clinton administration and the fact that now you can make money without necessarily producing anything.
And you can speculate.
And the various corrupt forms of wealth creation within the financial system are ultimately to the detriment of the real economy.
Then, there’s the whole issue of delocation. And, in effect, what we’ve seen now in the United States is that certain industries are simply being wiped out – and it’s true also in Canada and Western Europe.
And they’ve been delocated to Southeast Asia or even to China for that matter, to cheap labour havens in Southeast Asia.
But at the same time the implementation of these austerity measures, coupled with very large military budgets is leading to the collapse of America’s economic infrastructure.
So the real economy is in crisis. In the core of the US Empire, there’s a large share of the U.S. population which don’t even meet minimum food requirements.
It’s a situation of impoverishment of the richest country on the planet.
And that has a lot to do with the way the US imperial apparatus functions. You delocate everything with a view to paying $150 a month to workers in Southeast Asia, which then leads to people loosing their jobs on assembly lines in North America and so on, And ultimately then this leads to unemployment and the collapse in purchasing power and the downfall of economic activity, not to mention rising food prices. But also concurrently the whole infrastructure of the U.S. economy is in crisis.
And I suspect that this is going to backlash because the Empire is no longer in a position to assert its hegemony in relation to real economic activity.
And the levels of consumer demand have collapsed because of the process of off-shoring of jobs, which create unemployment.
We might make a comparison with the Roman Empire. At one point, in the history of the Roman Empire, the use of slave labor contributed to destroying the independent small scale handicraft economy as well as farming. With the extension of the slave labor economy, the levels of consumer demand simply collapsed, and the whole productive and trading structure went into crisis.
Well, we’re living that, in a sense. We delocate industrial activity to an overseas cheap labour economy with exceedingly low wages (from $100 and $300 a month), and then we close down our factories here.
And then we cut all social expenditures with a view to funding the military industrial complex with large scale investments now of the order of $1.3 trillion for an absolutely useless nuclear weapons program: the only use for that program is to blow up the planet.
Meanwhile, the media tell us that that “nuclear weapons make the World safer”.
This hegemonic project seeks to minimize wages at a global level. In the central core of the US Empire: America, has a declining standard of living, it has high levels of illiteracy, it has poverty, racism alongside a thriving luxury good economy for a small sector of the population.
And those social conditions in the heart of the Empire are exacerbated by the thrust of America’s hegemonic objectives in different parts of the world including the ‘profit driven” global cheap labor economy.
The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.
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This article by Jean-Marie Chauvier was first published on June 22, 2016
***
On 22nd June, 2021 it will have been 80 years since the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the Hitlerian invasion of the Soviet Union, the war of extermination, pillage and colonization which was to cost the lives of between 24 and 29 million human beings (according to recent estimates): Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and other Soviet peoples who spearheaded the resistance – finally victorious – to Nazi Germany and its allies. It is sometimes forgotten that this aggression was led not only by Germans but by the armies, SS divisions and various other legions of most European countries, under fascist, right-wing authoritarian, or occupation regimes, which were to a greater or lesser extent collaborators.
The fact – explicit in the principal Nazi documents – is also neglected that Hitler’s “European project”, the destruction of the USSR and the colonization (economic integration) of a vast “Lebensraum” in the East was the major project of this war. Berlin’s Generalplan Ost provided for deportation beyond the Urals of thirty to fifty million Slavs, of whom a good number were to die – estimates were in the vicinity of thirty millions deaths. In the course of the first year of the invasion around twelve million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately exterminated through starvation or shooting – a subject generally withheld from us – and 900,000 Jews, as implementation of the “final solution” got underway.
But the approach of the 75th anniversary is equally inspiring an indictment of the USSR and Russia. Make way for militant revisionism!
In the Baltic countries that are members of the European Union and NATO, and in Ukraine since the political overturn of February 2014, the accent is being placed on “Bolshevik barbarity” to which resistance was mounted by the local nationalisms allied with Germany. The death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war is imputed to Stalin “who had not signed the Geneva conventions” protecting prisoners. The war itself and its mass carnage are attributed to “the twin totalitarianisms” and certain historians and journalists (Russian oppositionists, Ukrainian nationalists) are putting into circulation the German theory according to which Hitler “was obliged” to attack the USSR given the imminence of a Soviet invasion of Europe.
The “revisionism” currently fashionable, including in Germany and Central Europe, focuses its attention on the acts of cruelty perpetrated by the Red Army and the anti-fascist resistance. In this new “inventory”, the work of often remarkable historians (notably in Germany) carries little weight with public opinion by comparison with the novels and fiction films, media “revelations” adapted to the political requirements and the new presumed expectation of the “the public”. Who would be so bold as to claim that “the past is unpredictable”?
Jean-Marie Chauvier is a researcher and specialist on Russia, Belarus and Ukraine
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.
***
First published on June 17, 2021
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Selected quotations from Transcript
Indian tribal girls were used as guinea pigs.
With 1.3 billion people, India is a good base for pharmaceutical companies to make a killing and also kill a lot of people in the process.
The manipulation of people by the media.
It is so terrifying what they are doing.
“We are taking things that are genetically modified organisms and injecting them into little kids arms…”, says Bill Gates
Over 490 000 children in India developed paralysis as a result of the Gates supported vaccine.
There was a parliamentary inquiry, and the Gates Foundation was excluded from India.
And Now they are back, doing their own tricks again.
**
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*
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A man claiming to be a friend with a British Airways pilot has stated that 3 pilots have just died within the past week shortly after receiving COVID-19 injections, and his recording has gone viral on social media.
Here is the recording (let us know if Twitter takes it down as we have a copy.)
…
This brought out the usual corporate media “fact-checkers” to try and debunk the man’s claims.
Reuters responded with a “fact-check,” but in their own investigation and report they confirmed that not only did these three die, but a fourth one as well.
They gave the usual corporate media response by quoting some health “authorities” who categorically stated that their deaths had “nothing to do” with the shots, while not denying that they died, nor giving any other explanation for their deaths.
Shared in the form of a voice recording on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, an unidentified male says he has spoken to a “friend who’s a BA pilot” and explains “things are getting crazy” after three fellow pilots passed away (here , here and here).
“They’ve had the third BA pilot die in the last seven days, yeah? Third pilot dead in the last week,” says the man heard in the recording. “The first two guys were in their forties and fifties; this guy, mid-thirties, perfectly fit, no underlying conditions. He gets his second jab and he’s dead within days, exactly the same with the first two.
“Because of this, BA are now in crisis talks with the government about whether to allow vaccinated pilots to fly. The issue with that of course is that about 80%, according to my friend in BA, 80-85% have been injected.”
The man then goes on to say only “10% of pilots will be able to fly,” branding it a “serious issue”.
Reuters presented the claims to British Airways, which said they were unfounded and that no such talks were underway with the government.
The spokesperson, however, confirmed the authenticity of the four condolence books, as four company pilots had recently passed away.
“Our thoughts are with their family and friends,” they said, adding that none of the deaths was linked to vaccines.
In a statement to Reuters, the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) also denied any such crisis talks with Britain’s flagship air carrier.
“We have not been made aware of deaths of BA pilots after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine and have not had discussions with BA or other airlines, about preventing pilots from flying after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Dr. Sarah Branch, the director of vigilance and risk management of medicines for the MHRA. “There are currently no restrictions on aviation or other industries and activities post vaccination.” (Source -Emphasis added.)
Meanwhile, Sky News out of Australia is reporting that airline companies in Spain and Russia are warning COVID-19 “vaccinated” people not to travel because of the risk of blood clots.
An Exclusive Interview of Three Frontline Canadian Physicians “Freedom of expression is enshrined in our Constitution, and is imperative in a free and democratic society, as it underpins other human rights, such as the freedoms of thought, conscience, association and assembly.
Free expression is vital to robust and open debate in order to formulate sound and reasoned public policy. This video reveals the disturbing, and dangerous, trend of how peaceful voices of frontline physicians who dissent, and disagree, with state policy regarding COVID directives, are being silenced.
Dr. Gill, Dr. Phillips and Dr. Lamba have all come under attack for their expression that public health directives and mandates are grossly flawed and misguided, and for calling attention to the incredible harms of the governments’ forced lockdowns.
Their desire to speak about the research they know, and the harms they witness, is driven by their conscience.
Their only purpose in doing so is to live up to their oath to “first, do no harm”.
Please subscribe to this YouTube channel and https://www.carenotcuts.ca to stay informed. Exclusive Interview by the Constitutional Rights Centre of Canada and Whole Hearted Media. Original Premiere was February 21, 2021.
Independent MP Derek Sloan holds a news conference on Parliament Hill to raise concerns about the alleged censorship of doctors and scientists as well as medical information related to vaccines.
The Ontario MP has been critical of lockdowns that have been in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also sponsored a petition questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
La Baltops 50 è stata organizzata e diretta dal comandante delle Forze navali Usa-Africa con quartier generale a Napoli-Capodichino, l’Ammiraglio Robert Burke, che allo stesso tempo è a capo del Comando Nato di Lago Patria (JFC-Naples). Dal 6 al 18 giugno, oltre 4.000 militari con 40 navi e 60 aerei – appartenenti a 18 paesi membri e partner della Nato, tra cui l’Italia – si sono esercitati alla guerra aeronavale nel Baltico e nelle regioni circostanti», a ridosso del territorio russo. Hanno preso parte alla manovra navi da guerra e bombardieri anche a capacità nucleare, e, per la prima volta, è stato integrato nell’esercitazione il nuovo Centro Spaziale Nato.
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