When the Occupier Plays the Victim: The Mysteries of October 7 as the Trigger for the Gaza Massacre

December 18th, 2023 by Prof. Anthony J. Hall

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An Open Letter to Israelis from Israelis: We Deserve the Truth About October 7 

“Make no mistake, what Israel is doing in Gaza now will haunt Israelis for decades. Now is the time to make sure all Israelis understand this. And this understanding should start with full disclosure about the events of October 7, 2023……

The question of who killed some Israeli civilians haunts us. It emerges from several reports that some were killed by the Israeli military. Whether they were caught in the crossfire, or deliberately shot at with tanks or helicopters in order to eliminate Hamas fighters or prevent Hamas from taking more captives, we deserve an answer. 

We demand answers because a genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza in the name of Israeli victims, even though bereaved families are strongly opposed to this vengeful atrocity. We demand answers and so should you.

See this.

Genocide: Nakba 2023

It is becoming increasingly clear that the events on and around the Israel-Gaza border on 10/7, October 7, 2023, were designed to create the pretext for “finishing off” the Nakba initiated in 1948. The “Nakba” describes from the Arabic perspective the catastrophic project to kill and uproot indigenous Palestinians in order to make way for the ascent of a replacement population composed primarily of European Jews claiming divine sanction for their genocidal project.

This lethal project has pushed on the Palestinians an unbroken trajectory of genocide since 1948 when UN General Assembly of the United Nations instituted a new Convention to prohibit and punish the previously unnamed crime of Genocide. Many scholars and public official have emphasized that the current Zionist assault unleashed on Gaza and the West Bank accurately fulfills the UN’s legal definition of genocide. By majority vote in 1948, the UN General Assembly declared,

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

(a) Killing members of the group;

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

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

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

Thus the 75 years of the Genocide Convention, as well as, for that matter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, corresponds with the 75 years of the genocidal Nakba now culminating in Operation Swords of Iron. This current high-tech assault on a mostly unarmed civilian population is being speciously presented as if it constitutes a spontaneous response to the supposedly surprise events of 10/7.

Day by day the claim is coming to appear increasingly ludicrous that this very dramatic sequence of cause and effect was conjured up instantly out of the clear blue sky. The events of 10/7, it seems, emerged from much elaborate planning and preparation most likely involving the crossing of many lines of demarcation among a broad array of intertwined interests, institutions, and influential individuals.

The evidence is growing that an elaborate conspiracy, rather than a random convergence of instantaneous events, lies behind the current military campaign. This Swords of Iron campaign kicked into high gear during the 75th year of a sustained effort to depopulate the indigenous Palestinian population throughout the expanding region controlled by Israel.

This depopulation campaign is being led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a politician who since 1979 has built a formidable career in government by advancing his favoured agendas through cunning manipulation of expertly engineered deceptions concerning Islamic terrorism. Everything about his current conduct in Office announces that Netanyahu’s current schtick as the would-be slayer of Hamas has finally cast the widely distrusted politicians in an especially weird role in the theatre of the absurd.

The decision to initiate the Swords of Iron military operation, the world was told, was to lash back at Hamas fighters for succeeding in a surprise prison break followed by what was initially described as a savage and vengeful killing spree of Israelis. On October 7 Hamas fighters famously broke through the heavily-monitored and defended walls of the Israeli-policed Gaza enclosure. After moving through all the sophisticated devices, miraculously left open and unguarded by the Occupation Forces, the Hamas escapees then proceeded on courses of action whose nature is currently the subject of much contention.

To the government and most of its harnessed media collaborators, the Hamas fighters engaged in an orgy of unbridled atrocities slashing, killing and raping Israelis, including 40 beheaded babies that, we now know, never were. The other view is that the Hamas fighters, also known as the Qassem Brigades, engaged, possibly with some few exceptions, in a disciplined operation aimed primarily at taking Israeli captives, but especially military personnel.

Once Israelis were captured, the main imperative of the Hamas operation was to keep the hostages alive and well as they were transported back to Gaza to become bargaining chips in negotiations. The early stages of this objective have already been transacted in the exchange of hostages that took place during the ceasefire of late November.

Another area of contention concerns revelations about the large numbers of Israeli citizens that were killed by members of the IDF equipped with highly sophisticated weaponry including missiles launched from US-Israeli Apache Helicopters. As explained by Max Blumenthal and others, the imperative of the IDF was to eliminate whole groups of people including Israeli citizens and soldiers to prevent soldiers from becoming captives of Hamas.

The mounting disclosures from whistle blowers, concerned insiders, and credible researchers are already sufficient to reveal that the government rationale for the Israeli military response to the events of October 7, cannot stand up to close scrutiny. No honest and credible court could accept the position of the Israel government that the events of October 7 came out of the blue as a total surprise. No honest and credible court could accept the all-purpose explanation currently on offer that the events of 10/7 transpired as they did because of “intelligence failures.”

No credible court could overlook that many people had various forms of prior knowledge concerning what would take place on October 7, 10/7. As in 9/11, this prior knowledge was reflected in much short selling of certain vulnerable stocks on the stock market. Similar to 9/11, there is clear evidence of prior knowledge as reflected in the content of intelligence reports originating inside and outside Israel.

Especially volatile are the strident allegations and denials that journalists had prior knowledge so that they could be in the right place at the right time to capture photographs, videos and eye-witness stories on 10/7. Rather than ignore or downplay these stories, government officials have implicated themselves and their colleagues by basically making threats that media officials with prior knowledge of 10/7 will face dire consequences if they do not shut up and join the cover-up. This fix is already in, so it seems. See this and this.

Israeli citizens are feeling the need to petition the government for full disclosure on the events of 10/7. In an open letter from Israelis to other Israelis, some of them wrote,

Make no mistake, what Israel is doing in Gaza now will haunt Israelis for decades. Now is the time to make sure all Israelis understand this. And this understanding should start with full disclosure about the events of October 7, 2023.

It is possible that at the heart of the matter concerning how 10/7 came to happen, there was some kind of secret interactions between factions of Hamas with Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s intimate and “symbiotic relations” with the the Israeli-funded Hamas has been frequently observed by many including Israeli historian, Adam Raz. Raz has commented that “in the last 10 years, Netanyahu worked to block any attempt at demolishing Hamas in Gaza.” See this and this.

Netanyahu needs this so-called ‘war” for a number of reasons including his ongoing struggle to stay out of jail for corruption charges. He has many enemies that Netanyahu can only fend off by staying in the Office of Israeli Prime Minister. Netanyahu is currently representing an extremist constituency that shares and even exceeds his longstanding obsession with de-Palestinianizing both the land as well as the legal and cultural identity of Israel.

The Palestinians as a Symbol of Dignity and Hope for Oppressed People Worldwide

Hamas has never renounced its embrace of armed struggle as a legitimate means of self-defence. Indeed, since Hamas represents the occupied people where the Israeli government represents the occupying group, the former’s right of self-defence trumps that of the latter in international law.

In upholding this principle against great odds, Hamas and its allies are injecting added vitality into a growing global movement seeking long overdue justice for the abused Palestinians. Lara Elborno, a Palestinian lawyer living in “forced exile” in Paris, is emerging as a compelling voice for many principles. These include the inherent nature of the right of return for her fellow “forcibly displaced” Palestinians. In her person and with her words, Elborno makes a compelling case that the intergenerational resistance of the Palestinian people has become “a symbol of the dignity and hope for all oppressed people worldwide.”

This Zionist inheritors of the Anglo-American Empire’s most deleterious legacies are meeting an increasingly well-organized resistance that share many of Elborno’s conceptions about the symbolic importance of the Palestinians struggle. The plight of the Palestinians embody an iconic representation of the dilemmas facing the largest part of the global population. More and more the incursions of disentitlement, disempowerment and dispossession are becoming common themes in the relationship of most human beings on the planet with their irresponsible and unaccountable governors.

The current manifestations of the Palestine-Israel conflict are becoming the world’s most dangerous flash point in the intensifying conflict between the fast-declining West and a growing “resistance” aligning the core polities of China, Russia, and Iran and with the growing array of countries lining up to join the BRICS. The high stakes in this clash exceed anything we have seen so far in history. Global society has become so interdependent that the global population is vulnerable to domino effects of collapses in life support systems in ways never before seen.

The schemers on high prominently include the Rothschild dynasty. Some of its most influential Zionist members financed and stick handling the founding, consolidation and expansion of Israel. The primary money making-technique of the Zionist banking cabal lies in funding both sides in warfare, an old practice that represents the origins of today’s ubiquitous hedge funds.

Accordingly, there are wheels within wheels, together with untold ironies spinning throughout the scheme to depopulate Israel of the indigenous Palestinians. Many of those at the top tiers of authority on the Israeli side of the equation are not accustomed to taking orders from anyone. They are certainly not subject to the operations of their puppet institutions like the much discredited United Nations and the related systems of international courts in an era when the cat is out of the bag that might makes right. Money is often the measuring stick for might… for the exercise of coercive power.

The institutions of law enforcement, including the legal profession and its judicial branches, have become little more than very expensive ornaments and make-work-projects. For the most part, law enforcement agencies are mostly staffed by corrupted servants of ill-gotten wealth and power.

The primary purpose the system of so-called law enforcement is to present a very elaborate veil of deception to cover over the bloody realities of how the world actually works. The core dynamic of this system is to reward the most ruthless psychopaths in the contest for control and then to protect them from their victims, their critics, and their most strident accusers.

The failure of the international system to intervene on the ground as the Gaza Massacre grinds deeper into the realm of genocidal atrocities, is presenting humanity with a vivid illustration that the very concept of some kind of international rule of law is nothing but a sad hoax.

Making Gaza Uninhabitable to Help Along the Forced Deportation of Palestinian Survivors to Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Yemen

Since October 7 the extermination policies developed by the US and Israeli governments have been pushed into overdrive through forced starvation, forced dehydration, the creation of conditions conducive to plagues of contagious disease, and the cutting off of power sources including electricity, cooking fuel, and gasoline.

High-tech bombardment from the air, land and sea is targeted to destroy housing to the point that almost the entire population of Gaza has become homeless. The bombardment of other infrastructure is designed to destroy sewage systems, roads, businesses, telecommunications, mosques, churches, schools, heritage sites, libraries, key government buildings, and hospitals.

The IDF is even resorting to face-to-face mass executions of Palestinian civilians. Among the victims are dozens of children and women shot in cold blood, execution-style. Such a fate was visited on Palestinian family units seeking refuge at the Shadia Abu Ghazala School— a United Nations School in Northern Gaza. The building where the family executions took has not been hit with any major projectile.

See this.

As in earlier bombardments of Gaza, there is evidence to indicate the Israeli Armed Forces are hitting the population with enriched uranium devices that are neutron bombs designed for “genetic destruction warfare against the Palestinians.” See this.

On December 13 the Wall Street Journal reported that US officials briefed reporters that the IDF is beginning to flood the Gaza tunnels with seawater. The elaborate tunnel network dug beneath Gaza has provided the main means for Hamas to resist succumbing to the massive force deployed in the Israeli invasion. This tactic is arousing huge added anxieties in Israel from those that fear more Israeli hostages will be killed by drowning as well as by the often indiscriminate Israeli bombardment.

Source

Already on 5 November Hamas indicated that 60 Israeli hostages had been killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Hamas added that 23 of the 60 bodies lie under the rubble and cannot be retrieved at this point. See this.

The purpose of this many-faceted invasion is clear. It is to make Gaza uninhabitable and thereby reduce the options available for survivors who intend to continue their lives as well as those of their remaining family members.

The fate being prepared for the survivors of the holocaust of Zionist fury, is that they will flee the Gaza morgue and leave behind the kleptocratic replacement population. This replacement population will thereby be left free to bask in the irredeemable infamy of their genocidal monument to the ruthlessness of Jewish supremacy.

Various disclosures are removing any doubt that planning has been underway for sometime to “finish off the job” that began with the Nakba of 1948. Already in early November, Israeli Agricultural Minister Avi Dichter announced, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” See this.

The Zionist regime that dominates government in both Israel and the United States has long been engaged in preparing the apparatus for the factory-like operation of the industrialized genocide currently underway. This initiative extends the trajectory of Zionist audacity displayed in pulling off the international coup d’état initiated on 11 September, 2001.

The aim of both 9/11 and 10/7 was to open up new frontiers in the manipulation of mass murder to further centralize the control of financial structures integrated with Israel-based instruments of Zionist command and control. This fascistic vision is very much in line with the historic role of the Rothschild dynasty in the creation, elaboration, and expansion of Israel. This trajectory of expansionism helps explain much about many of the working parts in the current campaign to eliminate all life support systems in Gaza.

The goal is to eliminate choices for the Palestinian survivors of the carpet bombing, chemical contamination, mass famine and the proliferating plagues currently underway. Plans are advancing in the US Congress to enlist Zionist politicians to participate in the project of greasing the wheels to complete the genocide by deporting survivors of the Gaza extermination. According to the present plans, the survivors are to be deported into Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and Yemen.

Of course the US branch of the network planning this operation is expected to pay for it. As Marc Vandepitte reports in Global Research.ca,

“The plan has been submitted to key figures in the US House of Representatives and Congress and has the support of both Democrats and Republicans. The planned large-scale ethnic cleansing is cynically presented as a “moral and humanitarian” aid plan.”

Vandepetitte goes on to cite as follows the document submitted to Congress:

“It is now clear that in order to free the Gazan population from the tyrannical oppression of Hamas and to allow them to live free of war and bloodshed, Israel must encourage the international community to find the correct, moral and humane avenues for the relocation of the Gazan population.”

More Fog or More Illumination? Will Al Jazeera Step Up to the Plate of Genuine Investigative Journalism? 

The need to investigate the background and the duration of the events of 10/7 is pressing. This imperative described by the Israeli authors of the letter to Israelis makes this point very succinctly. To my way of thinking the need for an understanding of what is at stake in the interpreting 10/7 involves everyone, not just Israelis. We all have an enormous stake in how the Gaza Massacre unfolds and ends.

We cannot sustain the imposition of yet another onslaught of nonsensical outcomes on average people based on the unsubstantiated claims put forward by the world’s most powerful groups. These powerful groups, but most notoriously Jews, often assert victimhood status in order to justify the most audacious grabs for many forms of financial enhancement and augmented centralized authority by agencies they control.

There is a modern-day holocaust underway and answers to the question of how the events of 10/7 came to be, would do a lot to clarify who are the protagonists and who are the victims in the present conflagration.

In this spirit I am calling attention to the need for genuine investigative reporting in the public domain into the events leading up to October 7. The investigation would also explore exactly what happened during that fateful day. The fact that the big media venues are themselves suspects in the matter, has all sorts of major implications. When do the big media venues ever investigate themselves?

The abandonment of genuine investigative reporting by mainstream media venues forms a huge cause of the lawless murder and mayhem that presently permeates the human condition. So many aspects of life these days are classified as aspects of “national security” to be hidden from public view.

The result is that the public is inundated with false cover stories disseminated by the media to explain away what is really going on to create the human condition through which we all must navigate. The resulting tsunami of 24/7 disinformation amounts cumulatively to a particularly heinous crime against humanity.

The legacy media’s role in sabotaging even the possibility of a decent public role in rational decision making, runs very deep. The public is not equipped to perform its democratic functions if the relevant information about the most crucial facets of our society are held back, replaced with disinformation, or altered to serve the interests of power.

Before us now is what appears to be a massive deception that is pointing humanity very fast towards a worldwide Nakba of monumental proportions. As I see it, the Al Jazeera television network based in Qatar, the country whose officials mediated the ceasefire of late November, could and should play a decisive role in getting to the bottom of the possible psyop of 10/7.

One might think that Al Jazeera was created with the goal of playing a significant role in bringing about some kind of resolution to the Palestine-Israel antagonism. The fact that Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, told a Jewish audience he had tried to intervene politically in an effort to “rein in” Gaza coverage, speaks pointedly to the possibility that the Qatar-based broadcaster is breaking new ground. Its a good sign that journalists are doing their job when establishment figures feel threatened.

In my view, the leadership of Al Jazeera might consider assigning investigative journalists to look deeply into the unfolding 10/7 controversy and report on their findings regularly in an ongoing series.

The alternative is to leave the subject alone and simply trust officialdom’s pronouncements.

This choice runs against the imperatives of sound journalism especially given the nature of this particular story. Right now, the unfolding of the Gaza Massacre is by far the biggest story in the world. If Al Jazeera was to leave unaddressed the the unresolved controversy over the content of 10/7 at this crucial moment, then the Qatar-based broadcaster would answer an important question. Is Al Jazeera really breaking new ground or is the broadcaster simply another variation of a limited hangout creating more fog rather than illumination?

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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Looking out at the World from Canada.

Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

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

Featured image: Abandoned and damaged cars parked at the festival (12 October) (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Israel Attacks Hospitals in Gaza’s North and South

December 18th, 2023 by Maureen Clare Murphy

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

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Israel continues to pound Gaza by air, land and sea, killing scores of people from individual families in what has become a horrific daily occurrence in the long-suffering territory.

Areas in southern Gaza are being hit after hundreds of thousands fled from the north to those areas, with human rights groups affirming that “there is no safe place” in the entirety of the territory.

In recent days, Israeli forces have attacked a Catholic church complex in Gaza City, executed three captives who were seeking safety, and stormed hospitals in both the north and south of the territory.

Israeli forces shot and killed two women – a mother and daughter – inside the Holy Family Parish complex in Gaza City, “where the majority of Christian families [have] taken refuge since the start of the war,” the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said on Saturday.

The women, identified as Nahida and Samar Anton, “were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish, where there are no belligerents,” the patriarchate added.

An Israeli tank crew also fired at a convent in the church compound, the patriarchate said, destroying its generator and fuel resources and causing an “explosion and massive fire.”

The attack displaced 54 people with disabilities who are now “without access to the respirators that some of them need to survive.”

During his weekly blessing, Pope Francis condemned the attack as “terrorism”:

Also on Saturday, Israeli forces hit the YMCA building in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood, “reportedly killing six Palestinians and injuring many others,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

Around 250 internally displaced people were sheltering at the facility at the time.

The most intense airstrikes on Saturday were reported in Khan Younis, in the southern half of the territory, as well as in the Shujaiya, al-Tuffah and al-Daraj areas of Gaza City, according to OCHA.

The UN office added that “intense ground operations and fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups continued on 16 December, especially in Khan Younis and Rafah, in southern Gaza,” while Palestinian fighters continued to fire rockets towards Israel.

Gaza was subjected to its fifth and longest blackout of telecommunications and internet services yet, beginning on Thursday. Communication services were partially restored on Sunday.

18,800 Killed, 8,000 Missing

The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said on Thursday – the last day that casualty figures were updated — that nearly 18,800 Palestinians had been killed in the territory since 7 October, around 70 percent of them women and children. More than 50,000 people have been reported injured.

The Palestinian Civil Defense said last week that 8,000 people were missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings.

Around 120 Israeli soldiers have been killed during the ground invasion of Gaza.

On Friday, the Israeli military killed three captives held in Gaza since 7 October. The three young men, who had either escaped from or had been released or abandoned by their captors, were shirtless and waving white flags before they were executed by troops in Shujaiya, east of Gaza City.

They had also hung up an SOS message on a white sheet reading “Save 3 abductees” in Hebrew at the building where they were killed:

At least one other captive was killed during a failed rescue attempt and others reported dead by the military may have lost their lives in similar circumstances.

The fate of the captives killed by Israeli troops on Friday highlighted the military’s lax open fire regulations in Gaza.

Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of the Washington-based human rights watchdog DAWN, said that it was hardly the first time that the military has gunned down civilians in Gaza waving white flags.

“Literally every single Israeli policy we have criticized for [the] past 20 years as a violation of international humanitarian law is many magnitudes worse today,” she added. “This is what impunity begets.”

Israel Under Pressure to Negotiate

Some family members of the captives and those who were released during a temporary truce have called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet to secure their release by returning to negotiations for a prisoner swap with Hamas.

Israel insists that only military pressure will free the captives while the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, says that the captives will only be released on their terms.

The head of the Mossad, Israel’s domestic spy agency, met with Qatar’s prime minister over the weekend to renew prisoner swap negotiations. The Gulf monarchy along with Egypt mediated a deal that saw the handover of dozens of captives in November in exchange for the release of Palestinian women and children held by Israel.

Egyptian security sources told Reuters on Sunday that “Israel and Hamas are both open to a renewed ceasefire and hostage release, although disagreements remain on how it would be implemented.”

Hamas insists on drawing up the list of captives to be released unilaterally “and demanding that Israeli forces withdraw behind pre-determined lines,” Reuters reported.

Israel is demanding a timeline and to see Hamas’ list “before setting the time and duration of the ceasefire,” according to the agency. “Israel refuses to withdraw, the sources added.”

Both the Qassam Brigades in a psychological warfare video published on Telegram and the family members of captives and those who were released say that time is running out for the some 130 captives who remain in Gaza.

The execution of three captives by the Israeli military will only increase domestic and international pressure to resume negotiations to secure their release, with Hamas requiring a ceasefire as a precondition.

UN Security Council Considers New Resolution

While Israel’s campaign is increasingly losing international support, the Biden administration has bought Netanyahu and his war cabinet time by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution on 8 December calling for an immediate ceasefire.

The Security Council is expected to vote as soon as Monday on a resolution demanding that Israel and Hamas allow the delivery of aid to Gaza by air, land and sea, as well as an “urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities.”

Citing diplomats, Reuters reported on Sunday that the fate of the proposal “hinges on final negotiations between Israel ally and council veto power, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, which has drafted the text.”

The US is seeking to “tone down language on a cessation of hostilities,” Reuters added, with the draft text currently calling for “an urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access.”

Meanwhile, Yemeni rebel group Ansar Allah has imposed an effective naval blockade in the Red Sea, with major freight firms saying that they would avoid the Suez Canal.

Ansar Allah – also known as the Houthis – have attacked and intercepted cargo ships and fired drones and missiles towards Israel in recent weeks.

The rebel group said in a statement published on Telegram that it will continue to prevent ships destined for Israeli ports from voyaging until food and medicines are brought to “our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip.”

With unprecedented famine and disease borne from Israel’s siege causing a secondary wave of mortality, the military has ramped up its attacks on hospitals in multiple areas in Gaza.

For weeks, independent human rights experts have warned of “a genocide in the making” against the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza.

In mid-November, those rights experts said that Israel’s destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including tens of thousands of housing units, in addition to “hospitals, schools, mosques, bakeries, water pipes, sewage and electricity networks … threatens to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.”

Those experts said that “intentional starvation amounts to a war crime.”

Under US pressure, Israel reopened the Kerem Shalom (Karem Abu Salem) commercial crossing in southern Gaza on Sunday, which would allow for the transfer of additional humanitarian aid stockpiling in Egypt.

Aid agencies say, however, that Israeli airstrikes make it impossible to deliver aid.

Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, recently told the BBC that “you can’t deliver aid under a sky full of airstrikes.”

Meanwhile, crowds have stopped trucks entering Gaza via Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border and offloaded aid – an indication of the severe desperation that has set in after more than 70 days of intensive bombardment and siege.

Israeli Forces Hindering Medical Aid, Preventing Burials

The humanitarian situation is particularly dire for Palestinians “stranded in areas where the Israeli occupying forces are deployed,” three prominent human rights groups said on Sunday.

The Israeli military is denying the Palestine Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross access to those areas, threreby “hindering the crucial delivery of medical aid” and preventing the evacuation of casualties.

Nearly three dozen Palestinian Civil Defense workers have been killed and over 100 injured since 7 October.

On Friday, Israeli forces targeted and killed three civil defense workers, along with Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa, while attempting to evacuate a family in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, even after the military gave permission for them to enter the area.

Abu Daqqa bled out for hours as Israeli forces obstructed paramedics from reaching him and rendering assistance. Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh was injured in the drone strike that killed Abu Daqqa.

Elsewhere in Gaza, another journalist – al-Mashhad correspondent Mohammed Balousha – was shot in both of his legs shortly after Abu Daqqa was fatally injured. He had to wait hours before rescuers were able to reach and evacuate him. He is reportedly in stable condition.

Weeks earlier, Balousha documented the grim discovery of the decomposing bodies of several babies who died in their hospital beds, still attached to medical devices, 17 days after Israel forced the evacuation of al-Nasr pediatric hospital at gunpoint.

Three Palestinian human rights organizations – Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – say they have documented incidents in which Palestinians died from their injuries after Israeli ground forces blocked ambulances from reaching them.

“In these dire circumstances, civilians find themselves unable to access any medical treatment for their injuries,” the three groups said.

Rescue teams are unable to reach those in need or “retrieve the bodies of those killed,” the rights groups added.

“In certain areas, thousands of Palestinian bodies remain under the rubble and on the streets, inaccessible and unretrieved,” the groups said.

“This not only leaves their families in anguish, unable to ascertain their whereabouts and grieve properly but also presents a significant risk of the spread of serious diseases among the population.”

Bodies that are recovered are being buried in the nearest available sites, according to the groups, including “gardens, marketplaces and roadway medians.”

Israeli Forces Attack Hospitals

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said late Sunday that Israeli artillery fire had hit the maternity ward of the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, “leading to several casualties.”

The health ministry in Gaza, Al Jazeera and Palestinian outlets reported that 13-year-old Dunya Abu Muhsen, who was being treated for an amputated foot, was killed in the strike:

Video recorded inside the hospital showing a chaotic scene in a smoke-filled room as men carry away an evidently killed person:

Photos of the site of the strike show holes blown into the walls and a pillow stained with blood:

Also on Sunday evening, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza stated that Israeli forces had stormed Al-Awda Hospital, which has been under siege for several days.

Medical staff, as well as patients and their companions, have been shot by Israeli military snipers at the hospital, killing a nurse and a pregnant woman’s sister-in-law as they arrived at the facility for medical services.

The ministry said on Sunday that medical staff had been stripped, detained and interrogated for four hours before being released. The hospital’s director, Ahmad Muhanna, was detained and taken to an unknown destination.

On Thursday, the ministry said that Israel was holding 38 health workers from Gaza, including Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the director of al-Shifa hospital.

Kamal Adwan Hospital Stormed

In northern Gaza, Israeli occupation forces withdrew from the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya on Saturday after storming it on Tuesday and detaining its director and medical staff.

Medical staff came under fire while delivering a press conference in the hospital’s courtyard on Sunday. Video shows the staff ducking for safety as shots ring out while one of them was reading out a statement about an Israeli attack the previous day:

On Saturday, the Israeli military reportedly used a bulldozer to raze tents belonging to displaced people sheltering in the hospital courtyard.

Al Jazeera interviewed witnesses who said “civilians were deliberately targeted” in the bulldozer attack and “buried alive.”

Videos shared on social media show body parts sticking out of the rubble in front of the hospital and tire tracks from heavy machinery in the sand.

The Palestinian groups Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that Israeli forces had “carried out extensive excavations inside the hospital courtyard” on Saturday. They exhumed “a mass grave in which the bodies of 26 people” were buried.

The rights groups called for an independent international investigation into the “serious violations” at Kamal Adwan hospital and Israel’s targeting of health facilities across Gaza.

Israeli shelling destroyed the hospital’s pharmacy, doctors at Kamal Adwan told Al Jazeera, and some patients died during Israel’s siege due to a lack of medical supplies and a lack of clean water.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said that during the attack on Kamal Adwan, “many patients had to self-evacuate at great risk to their health and safety, with ambulances unable to reach the facility.”

Of the at least eight patients who perished during the siege, “several died due to lack of adequate health care, including a 9-year-old child.”

Ghebreyesus said that WHO is “extremely concerned” for the displaced people who are sheltering at the hospital but did not comment on the reported bulldozer attack in the facility’s courtyard.

“Gaza’s health system was already on its knees, and the loss of another even minimally functioning hospital is a severe blow,” he added.

The Israeli military published a crude propaganda video purporting to show weapons that were hidden incubators in Kamal Adwan’s neonatal intensive care unit, claiming that the hospital “was used by Hamas as a command center.”

The military released similarly unconvincing staged propaganda videos following its attack on al-Shifa hospital during November.

“Bloodbath” at al-Shifa Hospital

The World Health Organization said on Saturday that it delivered supplies and medicines to the now “minimally functional” al-Shifa hospital.

Al-Shifa was “once the most important and largest referral hospital in Gaza,” WHO stated. Today, only a “handful of doctors and a few nurses” are present, along with 70 volunteers, working in dire conditions.

“The hospital is only able to provide basic trauma stabilization, has no blood for transfusion, and hardly any staff to care for the constant flow of patients,” WHO said.

The health workers at the site say that the emergency department is a “bloodbath, with hundreds of patients inside and new patients arriving every minute.”

WHO said that a “multi-pronged humanitarian response is needed” to provide “tens of thousands of displaced people” sheltering at the hospital grounds with “food, water and shelter.”

Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City is the sole hospital out of 24 in northern Gaza that remains partially functional after more than two months of Israeli strikes and siege. Three other hospitals remain only minimally functional, according to WHO.

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Featured image: Dr Suleiman Qaoud surveys the damage at the Rantisi Specialist Hospital, part of the Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza City, following Israeli missile attacks on November 6, 2023 [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Towards a Broader Middle East War? The Iran-Israel “Non Official War”, Escalating at the Red Sea and Beyond with Global Consequences

December 18th, 2023 by Uriel Araujo

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***

An agent of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad was executed in Iran on December 16, according to IRNA news agency. In addition, an Israeli hacker group has claimed to have paralyzed gas stations across Iran in a cyber attack.

So much has been written on the Israeli campaign on Gaza and the West Bank, the humanitarian disaster, and its consequences. However, there is yet another angle to it, namely the escalation of the long going fuel war and of the so-called shadow war between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Jewish state, with even farther-reaching potential impacts globally way beyond the Red Sea and North Africa or the Middle East. One example of that is the fact that two of the largest shipping companies on the planet (Mærsk, and Hapag-Lloydhave) have just announced they are temporarily suspending their Red Sea routes after strikes carried out by the Iran-backed Houthis. This is no small matter: we are talking about one of the world’s main routes for fuel and oil shipments.

Speaking to the BBC on December 16, Mærsk stated that:

“following the near-miss incident involving Maersk Gibraltar yesterday and yet another attack on a container vessel today, we have instructed all Maersk vessels in the area bound to pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait to pause their journey until further notice.”

The Bab al-Mandab strait, also known as the Gate of Tears, is located between Yemen (on the Arabian peninsula) and both Djibouti and Eritrea on the coast of Africa. It is through this route that ships reach the Suez Canal from south – all ships coming from the Indian Ocean, for example, have to pass through it. To avoid it means taking considerably larger routes, such as navigating around southern Africa – with larger costs.

The Houthi rebels control a large part of Yemen, and have been launching attacks on waterways almost daily as part of their campaign against Israel, which in turn has responded by deploying missile boats. Warships from the US, UK, and France have also shot down various missiles launched by the rebels. On December 15, a member of Houthi’s Ansarullah politburo, Ali al-Qahoum stated Yemen is “ready” to respond to any military actions made by Israel or the US, adding that the operations will go on. Commenting on Maersk halting Red Sea journeys, Marco Forgione, director general at the Institute of Export & International Trade, said:

“This impacts every link in the supply chain… and will only increase the chances of critical products not making their destinations in time for Christmas.”

As I wrote before, Israel has high stakes in Africa, way beyond its “spyware” diplomatic endeavors (often described as “buying friends by selling weapons”), the Red Sea particularly being its “back door” to coastal states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen etc. The 2020 US-brokered Abraham Accords and subsequent normalization agreements with Israel signed by countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UEA) paved the way for security and military cooperation, which materialized itself in the Israel-UAE joint naval drill in November 2021, for instance, thus increasing Red Sea tensions.

There has been an energy and fuel crisis in the Levant (made worse by US Treasury sanctions and the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019), affecting Lebanon particularly, and this context has empowered Iranian oil diplomacy, as well as Iranian-supported Hezbollah, with Tehran supplying fuel to allies abroad such as Syria, Lebanon, and even Venezuela.

As part of such economic warfare, long before the bold ongoing Houthi campaign, several clandestine attacks on vessels had been taking place, with Syria accusing Israel of being behind them – this is the context of today’s Red Sea crisis. The Houthis seem to be willing to take this maritime proxy fuel war (and the proxy “shadow war”) to a whole new level, though.

For years now, a non-official war has been going on between Israel and Iran, two dominant powers in the Middle East. In July 2022, I asked whether such a local cold war could escalate into a major regional conflict, potentially even spiraling into a global confrontation. The current situation has arguably taken us a bit closer to such a catastrophic scenario.

It would be ill-informed to think of the Houthis in Yemen (or Hezbollah in Lebanon, for that matter) as mere Iranian pawns. Such groups obviously have their own popular base, agenda and agency as political and social actors. In any case, Iran does lend its support to them in a number of ways, and a larger Iranian-Israeli proxy war is indeed one of the angles to it.

The level of alignment between the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah (also a Shiite organization) cannot possibly be compared to that between Iran and Hamas (a Palestinian Sunni group). However, Tehran’s cooperation with Hamas has been on the rise, with the latter’s leader Ismail Haniyeh having met with Iran’s foreign minister in Qatar last month. How far this cooperation goes still remains to be seen. Tehran cannot “control” its “proxies” – much the same way Washington cannot do so with its Israeli ally.  In this complex equation, there is a large degree of unpredictability and ample room for backfiring.

It should be noted that the Persian nation is an emerging power and should not be underestimated. Due to its strategic location, for thousands of years, it played a key role as a route along the Silk Road for transporting goods from west to east. In the last decades, due to conflicts, sanctions and all kinds of infrastructures problems, such a potential has not been exploited.

Current conditions are changing, though. The aftermath of Washington’s failed neocolonial nation-building in Iraq for one thing has been an empowered Tehran. There is also the promising North-South Transit Corridor (NSTC), which does have the potential not only to counter US endeavors to isolate Iran and Russia economically, but actually to create a new promising route and an alternative to the Suez Canal.

In any case, the West does not want full escalation: top US military leaders have traveled to Tel Aviv to pressure Israel into avoiding major combat and a wider regional war by restraining itself and maintaining a more limited campaign. It remains to be seen whether a radicalized and emboldened Jewish state will refrain from crossing yet another redline – and whether the other actors involved will do the same: managing tensions from fully exploding is no simple task.

The Israel-Palestine conflict has always been a polarizing issue in Africa and the Middle East, particularly, and now it is also dividing the West, with European authorities crushing pro-Palestine demonstrations. The intensification of it plus the escalation of the Israel-Iranian “shadow war” will offer the Western and pro-Israel political elites an opportunity to further push its demands for “alignmentism” (while eroding the Western narrative on “human rights”, as Tel Aviv’s campaign is facing unprecedent criticism), much the same way it will pose a diplomatic challenge to nations worldwide. There is just too much at stake, in humanitarian, ethical, religious, ideological, geoeconomic and geopolitical terms.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Israel-Palestine War: Why Is the Media Ignoring Evidence of Israel’s Own Actions on 7 October?

December 18th, 2023 by Jonathan Cook

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***

Barely a day has passed since the 7 October attack by Hamas when the western media has not revisited those events, often to reveal what it claims are new details of astonishing atrocities carried out by the Palestinian group.

These disclosures have served to sustain public indignation in the West, and kept Palestinian solidarity activists on the back foot.

In turn, the outrage has smoothed Israel’s path as it has levelled vast swaths of Gaza; killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, most of them women and children; and denied the enclave’s population of 2.3 million access to food, water and fuel.

Critically, it has also made it far easier for western governments to throw their weight behind Israel – and arm it – even as Israeli leaders have repeatedly engaged in genocidal talk and carried out ethnic cleansing operations.

Israel’s intense bombing campaigns have herded nearly two million Palestinians into a small section of Gaza, pressed up against its short border with Egypt, while starvation and fatal disease start to take their toll.

Many of the claims about 7 October have been shocking beyond belief, such as stories that Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even described in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family:

“The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”

Little Evidence

Atrocities were undoubtedly committed that day by Hamas and other gunmen in Israel, as groups like Human Rights Watch have been documenting.

They have continued to occur in Gaza every day since, not least through Israel’s continuing and relentless bombing of civilians, and through Hamas’ refusal to free the remaining Israeli hostages without an exchange of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

But in respect of the more shocking allegations against Hamas promoted by the western media – which have bolstered the case for Israel’s two-month rampage in Gaza – often little or no evidence has been forthcoming beyond claims made by Israeli officials and highly partisan and unreliable first responders.

Last week the BBC and others led again with stories of systematic Hamas mass rapes on 7 October. Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims are being obstructed by Israel.

Nonetheless, once more, coverage of the growing devastation in Gaza was sidelined.

Media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place has operated within strict limits, however. Only claims that support Israel’s narrative about what happened that day are being aired.

A growing body of evidence suggesting a far more complex reality, one that paints Israel’s own actions in a far more troubling light, is being ignored or suppressed.

This deeply dishonest approach from the western media indicates that they are not, as they declare, fearlessly pursuing the truth. Rather, they are regurgitating talking points being fed to them by Israel.

That is not only unconscionable – particularly given Israel’s long track record of promoting lies, both small and large – but it violates all basic journalistic codes.

And, worse still, the media’s credulous amplification of Israel’s version of 7 October continues to breathe life into the Israeli case that wrecking Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.

Active Cheerleaders

Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in at least some of the killings attributed to Hamas.

This week the Israeli military finally conceded that it had killed its own civilians on October 7 “in immense and complex quantity”. Given the large numbers, it added with transparent non-logic: “It would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents.”

How is it possible, given their continuing interest in scrutinising the events of 7 October, that none of the western media has picked up on any of this distressing evidence, let alone investigated it?

It is hard not to conclude that the western media are only interested in stories – and largely indifferent to whether they are true or false – that portray Hamas, but not Israel, as the bad guys. That would mean the media are not dispassionate reporters, but have been recruited by Israel as its active cheerleaders.

Israel’s official story, echoed by the western media, is that Hamas had long planned a crazed, barbaric rampage through communities in Israel – driven by a mix of primitive, religious bloodlust and Jew hatred.

The group’s chance to realise this goal came on 7 October, according to the Israeli narrative, when Israel let down its guard momentarily and Hamas broke through the hi-tech fence meant to keep it and Gaza’s other 2.3 million inhabitants permanently imprisoned.

During the breakout, Hamas focused on the slaughter of civilians, killing babies by beheading them and using rape as a weapon of war and defilement. They fired into the homes of neighbouring Israeli communities, often leaving them in ruins and burning their victims alive.

Admittedly, the claim about 40 beheaded babies has been quietly shelved, because there is precisely zero evidence for it. According to Israel’s own published figures, only two infants died that day.

Nonetheless, the media rarely challenge Israeli spokespeople, or western politicians, when they make this long-discredited allegation.

But many of these other allegations are no less evidence-free and need scrutiny too.

Although they are rarely given a voice, Palestinians have their own, alternative narrative of what happened that day – and parts of it are being bolstered by accounts from Israeli sources.

Challenge to Official Story

In this telling, Hamas long trained for its breakout, and with a strategic aim in mind. The goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages.

The aim, according to this narrative, was to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges.

To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.

Hamas stormed military bases and the Israeli communities of Be’eri and Kfar Azza. That is why about a third of the 1,200 Israelis killed that day were soldiers, police or armed guards – and why many of the 240 hostages were serving in the Israeli military too.

According to most accounts, even Israeli ones, Hamas accidentally stumbled on to the Nova music festival, which had been relocated to an area close to the fence with Gaza. There were unexpected clashes with security guards, while the attack on festivalgoers turned especially chaotic and gruesome.

So why did Hamas depart from its plan by killing so many civilians? And why did it do so in such a savage, gratuitous and time-consuming fashion that involved burning Israelis alive, using its firepower to blast their homes into ruins, and setting fire to hundreds of cars on the highway near the music festival?

What did Hamas have to gain from expending so much energy and ammunition on horror-show theatrics rather than its plan to seize hostages?

For many western leaders and journalists, it appears no rational answer is needed. Hamas – and possibly all Palestinians – are simply barbarians for whom murdering Israelis, Jews or maybe all non-Muslims comes as second nature.

But for those whose minds are less bent by racist assumptions, an alternative picture of events has been steadily cohering, prompted by the testimonies of Israeli survivors and officials, as well as reporting from the Israeli media.

Because they contradict Israel’s official story, these testimonies have been studiously ignored by the western media.

Burned Alive

Surprisingly, the person whose statements have most confounded the official narrative is Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an interview on MSNBC on 16 November, Regev noted that Israel had reduced the official death toll by 200 after its investigations had shown that the charred remains it had counted included not just Israelis but Hamas fighters too. The fighters, burned alive, had been too disfigured to easily identify.

Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan:

“There were actually bodies that were so badly burned we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas terrorists.”

There was an obvious problem with Regev’s disclosure that went unchallenged by the MSNBC interviewer, and has been ignored by the media since. How did so many Hamas fighters end up burned – and in exactly the same locations as Israelis, meaning their remains could not be identified separately for many weeks?

Did Hamas fighters carry out some strange ritual, self-immolating in cars and homes alongside their hostages? And if so, why?

There is a likely explanation, confirmed by an Israeli survivor of the 7 October events, as well as by a security guard, and a variety of military personnel. But these accounts starkly undermine the official narrative.

Shelled by Israel

Yasmin Porat, who fled the Nova festival and ended up hiding in Be’eri, was one of the few to survive that day. Her partner, Tal Katz, was killed. 

She has repeatedly explained to the Israeli media what happened. 

According to Porat’s account to Kan radio on 15 November, the Hamas fighters in Be’eri barricaded themselves into a house with a group of a dozen or so Israeli hostages – either planning to use them as human shields or as bargaining chips for an exit.

The Israeli military, however, was in no mood for bargaining. Porat escaped only because one of the Hamas fighters vacated the house early on, using her as a human shield, before giving himself up. 

Porat describes Israeli soldiers engaging in a four-hour firefight with the Hamas gunmen, despite the presence of Israeli civilians. But not all of the hostages were killed in the crossfire. Israel ended the clash with an Israeli tank firing two shells into the house. 

In Porat’s account, when she asked why this had been done,

“they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house”.

The only other survivor, Hadas Dagan, who was lying face down on the lawn in front of the house during the firefight, reported to Porat what happened after the two shells hit the house. Dagan saw both of their partners lying near her, killed by shrapnel from the explosions. 

A 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who had been screaming inside the house throughout the firefight, also fell silent. 

Hatsroni and her aunt, Ayalan, were both incinerated. It took weeks to identify their bodies.

Notably, Liel Hatsroni’s charred remains have been one of the emotive pieces of evidence cited by Israel for accusing Hamas of killing and burning Israelis.

In reporting the deaths of Liel, her aunt, her twin brother and her grandfather, the Israeli news website Ynet stated that Hamas fighters “murdered them all. Afterwards, they set the house alight”.

Confused Pilots

Porat’s testimony is far from the only source showing that Israel is likely to have been responsible for a significant proportion of the civilian deaths that day – and for the burned bodies. 

The security coordinator at Be’eri, Tuval Escapa, effectively confirmed Porat’s account to the Haaretz newspaper. He said:

“Commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

The burnt-out cars at the Nova festival and their occupants appear to have suffered a similar fate. Worried that Hamas gunmen were fleeing the area with hostages in cars, it seems, helicopter pilots were told to open fire, incinerating the cars and all the occupants.

There is a likely explanation for this. The Israeli army has long had a secret protocol – known as the Hannibal directive – in which soldiers are instructed to kill any captured comrades to avoid their being taken hostage. It is less clear how this directive applies to Israeli civilians, though it appears to have been used in the past. 

The goal is to prevent Israel from facing demands to release prisoners.

In at least one case, an Israeli military official, Col Nof Erez, has stated that “the Hannibal directive was apparently applied”. He called the Israeli air strikes on 7 October “a mass Hannibal”.

Haaretz has reported that police investigators concluded that “an IDF combat helicopter that arrived at the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants”.

In a video released by the Israeli military, Apache helicopters are shown randomly firing missiles at cars leaving the area, presumably on the assumption that they contained Hamas fighters trying to smuggle hostages back into Gaza.

The Ynet news website cited an Israeli air force assessment of its two dozen attack helicopters in the skies above the Nova festival:

“It was very difficult to distinguish between terrorists and [Israeli] soldiers or civilians.” Nonetheless, pilots were instructed “to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence” with Gaza.

“Only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets,” the outlet reported.

Another Israeli publication, Mako, noted that

“there was almost no intelligence to assist in making fateful decisions”, adding that the pilots “emptied the ‘belly of the helicopter’ in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again”.

In another Mako report, the commander of an Apache unit is quoted stating:

“Shooting at people in our territory – this is something I never thought I would do.” Another pilot recalled of the attack: “I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at.” 

Secrets to the Grave

Quite extraordinarily, in reporting the devastation of ravaged houses and burnt and crumpled cars, reporters have completely ignored the visual evidence staring them in the face and simply amplified the official Israeli narrative.

There are plenty of more-than-obvious questions no one is asking – and for which no answers are ever likely to be forthcoming.

How did Hamas wreak such widescale and intense devastation when its fighters’ own videos show them mostly bearing light arms? 

Were those carrying basic RPGs capable of accurately tracking and hitting hundreds of fast-moving vehicles fleeing the festival – and doing so from ground level? 

Video footage from Hamas body-cams shows cars leaving the Nova festival with both gunmen and hostages inside. Why would Hamas risk incinerating its own people?

Given Hamas’ keenness to film its triumphs, why is there no footage of such actions? And why would Hamas waste its most prized ammunition on random attacks on cars rather than save it for the far more difficult task of attacking Israeli military bases?

Israel appears not to be interested in investigating the burnt-out cars and wrecked homes, possibly because it already knows the answers and fears that others may one day find out the truth too.

With religious organisations demanding that the cars be hurriedly buried to preserve the sanctity of the dead, the metal skeletons will take their secrets to the grave.

Grotesque Fables

What seems certain from this growing body of evidence – and from the trail of visual clues – is that on 7 October many Israeli civilians were killed either in the crossfire of gun battles between Israel and Hamas or by Israeli military directives to stop Hamas fighters returning to Gaza and taking hostages with them. 

This week, an Israeli commentator in the Haaretz newspaper called the testimonies “earth-shattering”, and added: “Was the Hannibal directive applied to civilians? An investigation and public debate need to happen now, no matter how difficult they are.” 

But as the army has made clear, it has no intention to investigate when its whole genocidal campaign against Gaza is premised on lurid claims that appear to bear a limited relationship to reality. 

None of that justifies Hamas’ atrocities, especially the killing and taking hostage of civilians. But it does paint a very different picture of that day’s events.

Remember, Israel and its supporters have sought to compare the Hamas attack on 7 October with the Nazi Holocaust. They have concocted grotesque fables to present Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages deserving of any fate that befalls them. 

And those fables have served as the basis for western indulgence and sympathy for Israel as it has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. 

The truth is it would have been much harder for western governments to sell Israel’s rampage in Gaza to their publics had Hamas’ crimes been seen, sadly, as all too typical of modern militarised confrontations in which civilians become collateral damage. 

What western governments and institutions should have done is demand an independent investigation to clarify the extent of Hamas atrocities that day rather than echo Israeli officials who wanted an excuse to trash Gaza and drive its inhabitants into neighbouring Sinai.

The western media’s performance has been even more dismal – and dangerous. It professes to be a watchdog on power. But it has repeatedly amplified the Israeli occupier’s evidence-free claims, peddled libels against Palestinians with little or no scrutiny, and actively suppressed evidence challenging Israel’s official narrative.

For that reason alone, western journalists are entirely complicit in the crimes against humanity currently being perpetrated in Gaza – crimes being committed right now, not two months ago.

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Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

Featured image: An Israeli man whose cousin was taken hostage during the 7 October attack visits family house in Kibbutz Nir Oz on 5 December, 2023 (Source: MEE)

Ukraine War Disaster. Zelensky Replacement Imminent? U.K. Will Extradite Ukrainian Refugees. Rodney Atkinson

December 18th, 2023 by Rodney Atkinson

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***

In Ukraine, Russia is advancing on nearly all fronts, the West’s armament deliveries have fallen 87% in 2023 compared to 2022, with a fall in the supply of artillery shells of 30% as the USA diverted supplies to Israel. In Congress, Biden’s Democrat party cannot get a $61bn package for Ukraine passed since the Republicans demand, as part of the total, sums for the existential crisis on the USA’s southern border (where some 2m migrants are crossing yearly) and because Biden cannot say what the war aim in Ukraine is.

The Ukrainian losses now amount to about 400,000 troops killed or missing while some independent estimates put Russian losses at up to 50,000. The Ukrainian “counteroffensive” has been a disaster with Russia gaining more ground than Ukraine since it began.   

The extent of the sudden realisation that the West has foolishly believed its own propaganda but must now recognise impending defeat is clear from the hopelessly naive Daniel Hannan in the Sunday Telegraph: On 15th July 2023 he wrote: 

“Take away Russia’s nuclear weapons – for  Putin is finished and his country may soon collapse.”

But on 9th December 2023 he was forced to admit: 

“Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe’s foundations are trembling”

Even where (in the Kherson area and around Rabotino) Ukraine has made ground their troops are either being decimated in Krynki on the East bank of the Dniepr or retreating again around Rabotino. 

The Odessa publication “Dumskaya” writes that: 

The operation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to maintain a bridgehead on the left bank of the Dniepr is meaningless and only leads to large losses. Marines cross the river and most are killed as they approach the shore. Those who survived and crossed over will be ironed with everything that is in the Russian arsenal. People are just constantly being thrown across the river – wave after wave. There is no talk of any further breakthrough; now the forces are being wasted simply on staying there. For what?

In this regard, the ongoing attempts to throw the Marines onto the left bank are something beyond good and evil,”

Following the pattern of hopeless resistance in other battles (Mariupol, Bakhmut) Zelensky refuses the advice of his generals to retreat and consolidate and instead throws decreasingly effective troops to their deaths for the sake of “heroic” media headlines.

No wonder so many have died and Zelensky is at loggerheads with the Chief of the Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi with whom he no longer communicates directly. Increasingly other Ukrainian leaders like former President Poroshenko and the Mayor of Kiev, Klitschko are taking Zaluzhnyi’s side and the massive losses at the front have led to demonstrations in Kiev and elsewhere by the relatives of the dead and missing. 

Zelensky Replacement

Following Zelensky’s failed trip to Washington and the frosty reception he got, he is now threatened both by insurrection at home and lack of both military and political support from his western allies.

The former CIA Intelligence Officer Larry Johnson, still with evident contacts within the Agency, says Zelensky  has asked for security guarantees for his escape from Ukraine. The Italian publication Antidiplomatico writes that the Ukrainian leader was found a “safe” successor in the person of his head of administration Andrey Yermak.

So desperate is the Biden administration to finance and arm Ukraine for the further slaughter of its citizens that the Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin actually threatened congressmen in a closed committee session that if they did not authorise more funds for Ukraine “we will send your uncles cousins and sons to fight in Ukraine”. Needless to say this disgraceful threat further turned Congressmen and women against the government.

In Ukraine there are already 62,000 women in the Ukraine Armed Forces and women are now working down mines, replacing the men conscripted into the army!

The desperation of the Kiev Government can be seen not just in the recruitment of men up to the age of 70 and the vicious pressgangs dragging men off the streets but in this Ministerial Order which states that

“In order to avoid suicide attempts in combat positions, new arrivals do not issue ammunition to mobilised (ie conscripts) military personnel”

Zelensky’s former spokesman Arestovich has admitted that there are some 100 deserters per day by troops in the field.

“Our problem is that, let me give you some figures – 100 people who have arbitrarily left military units per day in Ukraine. 100 people per day – that’s a brigade per month.”

UK Will Return Ukrainian Refugees to Fight

There are 650 thousand Ukrainians of conscription age living in the European Union who fled from mobilisation after Russian troops entered Ukraine, with 190,000 in Germany and also thousands in the UK.

Following my correspondence with my MP and the UK Home Office it is now clear that the UK Government is prepared to extradite Ukrainian refugees to fight. In the text of the letter from the Security Minister to my MP about extradition;

“A requested person will not be extradited if doing so would breach their human rights, if the request issued politically motivated or if they would be at risk of facing the death penalty. The dual criminality test also applies meaning that the criminal offence for which an individual is ought must be an offence in both the requesting State and the UK”

What is clear from this letter and in particular the above paragraph, is:

1. there is no policy not to extradite.

2. since all Ukrainian refugees would not be subject to the death penalty, extradition to a country the UK is aiding in war would not breach their human rights and draft dodging is a common misdemeanour to both the UK and Ukraine therefore they would be extradited.

We know that Kiev is sending to the front lines new recruits with only a few weeks training and we know from Ukrainian commanders that this is not sufficient. But the almost hysterical Ukraine supporting British government is prepared to extradite Ukrainians whom it has granted refugee status to fight on the murderous font lines in Eastern Ukraine.

USA Begins to Recognise a Futile War

The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential organization in the US when it comes to US foreign policy and its president until June 2023, Richard Haas, has pointed to the futility of Ukraine’s sacrifices in this war:

“Even if we give everything we need to give to Ukraine it still won’t lead to success… Therefore the U.S. needs to have some very direct conversations with Ukraine and talk about reducing their emphasis on liberating land, increasingly put their emphasis on holding onto what they’ve got… The idea that 1 or 2 or 3 more years of this is going to result in success, I simply don’t see it… Anytime in life there’s a big gap between what you’re trying to do and your ability to do it, you either need to increase your means or lower your goals: here the only realistic option is to lower our goals.”

Were it not for the USA’s perceived threats from Iran, Hezbollah, Yemen, Gaza and China the Biden administration would blindly ignore this advice but times are a changing and the weakness of Biden in an election year, the precarious state of Zelensky in Kiev, the massive Ukrainian losses and growing opposition to the war in Europe mean that Washington will soon be forcing Kiev to negotiate with Russia. Since Zelensky has legislated against any such negotiations he will have to be replaced. Russia will not agree to pause the war during any such negotiations.

I remind our readers of this post on the most credible of the peace proposals.

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Cardinal Crimes: Absolute Rule and Fleecing the Holy See

December 18th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Like a bank with branches everywhere, the Catholic Church will go after its own when circumstances permit, wherever they are. In other instances, it will take the opposite tack, shielding the detractors or deviants from local scrutiny, and concealing them from the burden of accountability.

Italian Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, former adviser to Pope Francis and the second ranking official in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, could not count on the latter, though his prosecution had a pungent whiff of scapegoating to it. After some two-and-a-half years of tense church drama and institutional intrigue, a Vatican court sentenced the Pope’s former chief of staff to five-and-a-half years in jail for financial crimes, permanent disqualification from holding public office and a fine approximating to $8000 euros.

In 2020, a displeased Pope Francis accused Becciu of appropriating the equivalent of US$100,000 in Vatican funds via a non-profit outfit run by the cardinal’s brother. This, as things transpired, was merely the beginning. Proceedings against Becciu commenced in 2021, with the prosecution’s brief heaving with charges of embezzlement, abuse of office, conspiracy and witness tampering. The punishment sought was not inconsiderable: a prison term of seven years and three months, a fine of 10,329 euros, and a ban from holding office.

An important focus of the case centred on the development of a London investment property costing the Vatican Secretariat of State an eye-popping total of 350 million euros between 2014 and 2018.  A former Harrods warehouse, the property was intended as a site for luxury apartments. Instead, much fleecing took place, with very financially minded brokers pocketing tens of millions of euros in fees and commissions, topped by a bill of 15 million euros for ceding control of the building.

The property, subsequently sold at considerable loss, was seen as nothing less than a mechanism for fraud. The court was convinced that the crime of embezzlement had been proven, with the amount coming “to about one-third of the availability at the time of the Secretariat of State because it violated the provisions of the administration of ecclesiastical property.”

Showing himself to be very a much a brotherly sort, Becciu was also found guilty of embezzlement for transferring 125,000 euros to a charity run by his brother Antonio in the cardinal’s home diocese of Sardinia and using Vatican money to pay a Sardinian security consultant (one dare not call her an intelligence analyst), Cecilia Marogna.

The number of defendants involved in this enterprise suggest scope, scale and complexity. They include former Vatican employee Fabrizio Tirabassi, convicted of extortion and money-laundering, and Enrico Crasso, who earned his crust offering financial advice to the Vatican, found guilty on a number of charges including embezzlement. Both defendants received sentences of seven-and-a-half years and seven years respectively.

This crowded cosmos of heady corruption also featured the exploits of Raffaele Mincione, an investment manager closely connected to the London investment, and businessman Gianluigi Torzi, the glue in brokering the final stage regarding the purchase of that property. Torzi was found guilty of extortion and sentenced to a six-year prison sentence iced with a six-thousand-euro penalty; Mincione, convicted on embezzlement and money laundering charges, received five years and six months.

Marogna also found herself with a sentence of three years and nine months, with her company receiving a penalty worth 40,000 euros. Her case proved to be a particularly salty one, given her receipt of 575,000 euros via her Slovenian-based front company from the Vatican’s Swiss bank account, ostensibly to provide Becciu advice on securing the release of Sister Gloria Celia Narvaez, who had been kidnapped by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. But the amount in question was a double payment; Becciu and Marogna had already been furnished a separate amount of 1 million euros to facilitate the release of the Colombian nun using the services of the British security firm Inkerman. (Narvaez was released in October 2021.)

With some extra cash to stroke and burn, Marogna proceeded to, according to Slovenian bank records linked with her front company Logsic Humanitarne Dejavnosti, purchase luxury goods and enjoy well pampered resort vacations.

Other defendants, albeit of the less colourful variety, also featured. Fines of less than US$2000 were handed out to Tommaso Di Ruzza and René Brülhart for failing to report what amounted to a suspicious transaction, while lawyer Nicola Squillace received a slap on the wrist with a suspended one year and ten months sentence.

Throughout these lurid proceedings, lawyers for the defence expressed agitation at what they saw as a lack of due process and a conspicuous absence of respect for human rights on the part of the prosecutors. In one notable example, the prosecutors, defying an order by tribunal president Giuseppe Pignatone, refused to make available the taped video testimony of their star witness and supergrass Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, the individual whose hands most dirtied the London real estate investment.

Some of these concerns stand to reason: the long shadow of absolutist power in the form of Pope Francis, whose office fuses executive, legislative and judicial authority, was ever cast throughout. The Holy See, mindful of such power, has also been assiduous in avoiding subscribing to human rights conventions that would provide an avenue of review to the European Court of Human Rights. As Becciu’s attorney, Fabio Viglione, declared in October 2021, “These are harmful to the right of the defence that affect the right to a fair trial.”

Marogna’s own legal team also noted that the prosecution’s refusal to produce court ordered documentation would be intolerable in the formal Italian court system. As a defence memorandum authored by international law specialist Riccardo Sindoca remarked, “In a normal situation, in all countries having a judicial system that could be considered autonomous and impartial and structured in a way to safeguard a fair trial, the refusal would have been immediately sanctioned.”

All exercises of calculated scapegoating or selected sacrifice suggest a cleansing of the collective social and political body. The body, duly purified, can ignore the corrupting ailments it was afflicted with. In the past lay disease; now, glorious pink health awaits.  But institutions such as the Catholic Church, and any large corporate entity spanning the globe, use such instruments less as matters of purification than distraction. The rot often goes deeper. In the meantime, the ledger of distractions will likely bulk; expect further appeals, a rapidly scribbled film script or a Becciu Netflix special.

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

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Video: Covid-19 “Vaccine: Florida Nurse Testimony on What She Witnessed. Crisis and Corruption within the Health Care System

December 18th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis

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Click here to watch the video.

Transcript

0:00

Can you tell us your name?

0:02

My name is Nicole King and I’m a registered nurse in the Central Florida area.

0:06

And so this, we’re going to talk about what happened to you as a nurse during COVID.

0:11

So talk us through where you were and what you did.

0:13

So for starters, everything I say is of my own accord.

0:16

It does not represent any other hospitals that I’ve worked for.

0:19

These are all my comments.

0:22

In 2020 we were told probably around March, April that a virus was coming from China and that there was a lot of individuals that were becoming extremely ill and were passing away and that we were to get geared up as a hospital system to be aware that this is coming and that we need to kind of brace ourselves that people that are getting this are dying at rapid rates and so to prepare

0:47

We had a lot of protocols and different things that were coming from China and Italy to kind of guide us what they were doing to try to help the situation with these patients that were getting sick.

0:58

And then by the summer, you know, a couple months into it, we really didn’t have a lot of patients that were coming to the hospital.

1:05

It became kind of eerily slow.

1:07

because I think the fear that was pumped out into the communities was to not come to the hospital because this is where you could have or contract this virus and so we came to a point where a lot of nurses were pulled from non-essential areas and furloughed and then or used in different in a different capacity so by probably August or September we started to see the waves of patients coming in with this respiratory illness and even then because I think the hospitals were trying to avoid overcrowding the system

1:37

that we were not admitting patients like we should have and so I think that was kind of the first look into how we could have done things differently because these patients still had respiratory symptoms but they were not severe enough so they were being sent home and told to come back

1:53

when symptoms got worse or they were unable to breathe.

1:57

And then within the next, you know, so many days of patients being sent back home, they were coming back to the hospital system in such bad shape.

2:06

And by that point, we had had a lot of nurses and people in healthcare leave the profession.

2:11

A lot of them got let go.

2:12

Some of them went to go travel to different states that were having more of a crisis.

2:17

And so our staffing, which was already low, became even worse.

2:21

And so these patients were coming in to us.

2:23

And by the time they came back to us, they were so badly, you know, decompensated that a lot of them were not making it.

2:31

And so the ones that were coming through the door were immediately, you know, put on a ventilator.

2:36

You know, different protocols are being utilized and we started to notice very quickly that the success rate of these patients getting better was next to zero.

2:44

And so we also had quite a few protocols that involved medications like remdesivir and limiting the exposure that nurses had with their patients because we were so short staffed.

2:56

They didn’t want us to

2:57

really be in with the patients as much as we could have been or usually are to decrease exposure and so from that point on we continue to have patients just kind of coming in and you know the vaccine was being discussed and we were told you know if we did not get vaccinated that we were going to be let go and so as a nurse you know who’s been in the field almost two decades and has always been told that we can question science and discuss what’s going on in our communities and how we can make things better for our patients

3:26

We were immediately met with resistance.

3:28

You know, we were segregated.

3:31

We were told that we could not have these conversations and they kept discussing how we had to get vaccinated.

3:36

So a lot of people were so scared because people had already lost their jobs and you know, the country was essentially shut down.

3:44

People had to put food on the table.

3:46

So a lot of individuals felt that they had to get this vaccine.

3:49

And so a lot of them were being kind of co-horsed if you will.

3:53

because we were going to lose everything.

3:54

We were going to have to walk away from our professions.

3:57

And so as this continued, we had more and more people getting vaccinated, I guess, in the Christmas time of that year, people were becoming

4:07

sick after they got vaccinated.

4:08

They were coming down with flu like symptoms.

4:11

And so we started to see this trend where it appeared people that had had the vaccine were actually coming in sick.

4:20

They were the ones that were also coming in with the flu like symptoms and immune systems that really could not keep up with what was going on.

4:26

So at that point I had decided I was not going to get the vaccine.

4:30

I didn’t like the way it was being handled.

4:32

We were getting emails.

4:33

We were told that if you’re unvaccinated that we were the reason why people were dying.

4:37

You know, in the hospital setting with our empathetic and, you know, caring communities with our profession, you know, we were told that we could not participate in meetings.

4:44

We had to be in zoom.

4:45

If we weren’t vaccinated, we couldn’t eat in the same, you know, uh, break room as other people that weren’t vaccinated or were vaccinated.

4:51

And so we were just really treated on a day-to-day basis, completely like we were lepers and just lacked empathy all around.

5:00

And I started to see that kind of infiltrate and how we cared for our patients.

5:04

People that were not vaccinated did receive different care, whether it was even more lack of empathy or just in general, being told that, you know, they shouldn’t be allowed to take up a bed.

5:16

You know, they shouldn’t be allowed to come to the hospital and waste our resources.

5:21

And when I started to see people that I’ve trusted my life with and, and, you know, professions, professionals that are extremely intelligent, just become so vile towards people that we took an oath to do no harm to.

5:33

It really just kind of solidified my fact that I was not on board with what was happening.

5:37

I did not agree with how we were addressing these things.

5:40

And so I became the minority because a lot of nurses at that point did get vaccinated.

5:45

And so we were made to feel that we were not welcomed.

5:47

We were not part of the team and they did everything, meaning the hospital systems, did everything they could to get us to want to quit or get vaccinated.

5:56

So it really kind of pushed this culture

6:00

that created a very hostile work environment.

6:04

It was very, very toxic.

6:05

And so I remember being told by December 4th of 2020, you know, and a little bit past that, that if we didn’t get vaccinated, you know, when they were starting to talk about the vaccines, if we didn’t get vaccinated, then we were going to be let go.

6:18

And so I talked to my husband and I said, are you okay with this?

6:21

And he says that I trust you.

6:22

And I said, because I don’t feel right.

6:24

It doesn’t, it’s not the right thing to do.

6:26

We shouldn’t be forced to do things that we don’t feel comfortable with.

6:29

Nobody was given informed consent.

6:31

I had pages of packets that we would print out to give to patients for the vaccine that we used to give in the hospital system.

6:40

We do not COVID vaccinate in the hospital system anymore.

6:43

So that should tell you something.

6:44

A 15 page packet that basically said we don’t know what this vaccine can do.

6:49

We’re not sure what it can cause.

6:50

These are some of the adverse side effects.

6:52

If you have them, report it to VAERS.

6:55

and sign here and your second dose has to be given on the outside of the hospital and there was nothing else the inserts of the vaccines were blank 110 pharmacy would have to draw them up they were time sensitive they would have to send them to us and they could get probably five or six vaccines out of one vial

7:14

so the controlled method method of this was very kind of still not really hashed out and of course signing something that you don’t know what you’re getting was really unfortunate because people were so fear-mongered that we would have other health issues going on that under normal circumstances would not allow you to vaccinate somebody

7:34

and doctors were just waving that did not matter give them the vaccine this is what we’re doing and as some of us we would question it you know these patients are not well could we not defer this and we were told vaccinate so it became just kind of this method of it didn’t matter what else was going on and again people that had a different opinion they did not want us there it was very apparent and we were told

7:58

You know, indirectly, directly that, you know, we were people that were who are unvaxxed, that were going to infiltrate the system and skew people to feel that we needed to be anti-science, anti-vax.

8:11

And a lot of the things that we do in the health freedom movements in Florida now,

8:16

with Health Freedom Florida and Florida Freedom Keepers, you know, and many other grassroots organizations.

8:21

We try to explain to people that where there is risk, there must be choice.

8:25

And a lot of times informed consent is non-existent.

8:28

Though we are not an anti-vax, anti-science organizations, we are trying to offer people and make them understand you should have pro-choice.

8:38

You know, you have to be given the opportunity to make those best decisions for your health.

8:43

and a lot of people that we were seeing come in that had been vaccinated were having issues with autoimmune they had autoimmune issues that were exacerbated just like you know Britt Galvin we had people that were coming in with myocarditis pericarditis you know young individuals in their 20s and 30s that had no other health history but had recently been vaccinated with blood clots and pericarditis myocarditis

9:06

You know, tremors, you know, issues with their heart rate, just things that you can’t even fathom.

9:11

And people would not talk about it.

9:13

And if we did, we were immediately told that that was insane.

9:16

That’s not happening.

9:17

These are safe and effective.

9:19

And part of why I come forward is because I am still a nurse that works in the hospital system that time and time again has been declined to work in certain facilities because I would not get vaccinated.

9:30

Someone who has ample experience and has never had any

9:34

bad you know judgment against them was being offered jobs and then told I could not work because I would not vaccinate and again when your patients have more rights than your health care workers and first responders people should really question that and to to assume that we are part of the problem because people will come and say well if you’re still working in the hospital system and you knew what was going on you should have left well if every person who cares and is empathetic leaves you don’t want those people

10:03

taking care of you that are left.

10:04

And I and I don’t say that everyone is like this and to group all of us would be foolish.

10:09

But there was a culture change.

10:11

There were things that happened in healthcare that I had never seen before in my entire life.

10:15

And I want people to understand that we cannot undo what happened.

10:19

And I am deeply sorry that our profession failed many, many people.

10:24

But hopefully, you know, moving forward, we can try to work together to have our communities trust us again, and that we could have done things a lot better.

10:33

And hopefully we can grow from this, but there are a lot of vaccine injured patients that we are seeing.

10:39

We are seeing people that have had two, three, four plus vaccines, boosters, whatever you want to call them, that are coming in with heart attacks, strokes, neurological issues.

10:49

And now the link that never made sense as a cardiac nurse, I would always take patients that were coming in

10:56

that had heart issues because that’s my specialty and probably a year and a half ago we started to see patients require oncology consults.

11:06

I had no idea why and now we’re seeing that there is a derivative component whatever you want to call it and some of these batches of COVID-19 vaccines called SV40 that has now been linked to mutate cells and cause patients to be more apt to

11:22

how their cells attack it and turn into some sort of you know cancer that we’re now seeing exploding and so again it’s always pushing informed consent and letting people know what are your rights you know what can you agree to you know the fact that we’ve passed SB 252 with the governor it needs work but it’s a medical freedom bill

11:45

but to let people know that you can decline and that you still should be able to be a valued member of society.

11:51

And so part of why I feel like I’m a little, little unique in this aspect is because I still work in the hospital system after many, many times of them not wanting us to be there.

12:01

I think there’s a misconception in Florida that we are a free state that is debatable and we are still struggle.

12:08

You know, I, now this year,

12:11

had a job offered to me.

12:12

I was the most outstanding candidate.

12:14

I was the one that they wanted.

12:16

I was not, it was not disclosed to me during the, um, hiring process or anything up until I accepted it, that I was required to get a flu vaccine.

12:25

I’ve always exempted from the flu vaccine.

12:27

I have never taken it.

12:28

Um, past probably eight years ago, I stopped taking it.

12:31

I’ve always just declined it.

12:33

And that was always offered to me.

12:35

And now we have nurses across the country,

12:38

that are being denied work because of our flu vaccine status or lack thereof.

12:43

We are told that it’s okay if we don’t have the COVID-19 vaccine.

12:47

We are told that that’s not relevant at this point.

12:49

They’re not worried about it.

12:50

And now they’re saying that it’s due to the flu vaccine that we may not be able to get hired.

12:55

And in the state of Florida a month ago, when I was offered the job for the first time ever in 18 years as a nurse, I was declined a religious exemption.

13:05

for a flu vaccine and was told the only thing I could do was a medical exemption.

13:09

So they’re finding loopholes in the bills, they’re finding ways to work around the law and allowing these companies and organizations to further drive our workforce shortages and everything is a trickle-down effect and so if you don’t have people in the workforce and you’re creating unnecessary barriers

13:28

Because at the end of the day, if you were to stop breathing, you’re not going to ask me what my vaccine status is.

13:33

You want people there to help you.

13:36

They are creating it so that we don’t, we’re not allowed to work in these systems and driving the nursing shortage through the roof.

13:44

And we need the governor to understand that yes, SB 252 was a great start, but there are thousands and thousands of people that rely on work, going to school, etc.

13:58

that it goes beyond COVID-19 vaccines.

14:01

Now they’re coming after other vaccines to hold us accountable to work and go to school and be members of society.

14:08

And that that just can’t be, you know, mRNA technology has changed.

14:11

It is proven to cause issues in people.

14:15

and they’re changing the the mechanism of how these vaccines work and so without informed consent most individuals do not know that when you’re being offered these other vaccines that the technology has been changed the CDC will tell you when they change them what they’re putting in them but you do not get that when you go

14:33

to Publix or to your doctor’s office.

14:35

They don’t explain these things to you.

14:37

And that’s why nurses like me have come forward because I’ve seen the girls that you just interviewed, you know, I’ve seen what it’s like to have patients be gaslit.

14:46

I’ve seen what it’s like to have healthcare workers that you should trust turn their back on you and go against their oath and, you know, talk badly about you.

14:55

I’ve seen all of that.

14:56

And to be able to not speak up is just, to me, really unfortunate.

15:03

really wish more people would come forward but what the communities don’t understand is when we get hired by hospital systems and other private companies they have you sign forms to say it’s almost like an NDA if you will that if we’re caught on camera talking about it etc that you are immediately terminated you know you can’t even be seen with a shirt on you can’t even be seen at a governor’s rally nothing so people really feel like we’re part of the issue because we’re not coming forward but people who do

15:31

have lost everything, you know, doctors, nurses, healthcare workers.

15:35

They have lost everything trying to come forward and help their patients.

15:39

And, you know, doctors are still terrified to write, you know, medical exemptions because they’ve lost their licenses, they’ve had their privileges revoked, you know, just multiple things.

15:48

So it’s just really important that

15:51

You know, the public knows that we are out here and there are thousands of us that are trying to fight for not only your rights, but your children’s rights.

16:00

And to know that even those same people that wished me harm, wished for my life to end, wished that I would never be allowed to take care of patients and that I should be removed from the profession altogether, that despite all of that, I’m still out here fighting for you to have those rights to say that you want something or you don’t.

16:19

That bodily autonomy

16:21

and sovereignty, you can’t lose that, you know, and we’re trying our best to advocate so that that right is not taken away from you.

16:29

So, you know, how important it is to show face or at least be supportive.

16:35

We don’t always have to agree.

16:36

We don’t always have to, you know, see eye to eye on everything, but to know that without it, they will not stop.

16:44

They’re going to keep going, you know, as we see now, they’re changing vaccines that we’ve had for 50 plus years and

16:51

You know, everything has a consequence.

16:53

So, you know, that’s really the message is trying to make sure that people understand that we’re out here and that, you know, we’re trying to change the laws to accommodate everybody.

17:03

And that just because you choose differently does not mean that your life is less valued.

17:08

Thank you for all of that information.

17:10

Does anyone have any questions?

17:13

I think she’s covered everything.

17:17

You know, the flu shots… Do you want to come and sit here so we can see?

17:36

So the flu shots have been grandfathered in every year so they’re not tested the way any other shots, the COVID excluded, are and I wonder if the rules and regulations that were issued by the FDA to make that possible

17:51

DR. WILLIAM MAKIS speaking

18:13

for the COVID vaccines there’s no body of evidence and I’m just wondering if the whole process itself it’s only used it was only ever used for the flu shots and now it’s been applied to the COVID shots and you know maybe there’s some legal avenue to stop it

18:32

I do know that it’s very possible.

18:35

I know that I reached out to a local law firm to just kind of understand how I could be denied a religious exemption for the flu vaccine.

18:44

And what I was told was that because there’s no

18:50

You know, fetal aborted cells in that particular vaccine that it would be very difficult to prove.

18:58

And that a lot of times that’s not a case they’re willing to take.

19:02

So it becomes again, a very muted kind of gray area where they don’t want to discuss it.

19:09

A lot of these lawyers and law firms don’t want to go up against these organizations.

19:14

And so it poses a problem where we’re left alone.

19:17

and we don’t have that support.

19:19

I just know that prior to 2022 I was able to exempt from the flu vaccine with no problem.

19:27

Never an issue because yes it is true that nurses are required to be vaccinated for certain things prior to working in hospital systems and the flu was one of them.

19:50

that they wouldn’t offer it to me because they knew where I was going with this that the medical exemption was all I could have and that’s when I started hearing other nurses in other states say all of a sudden now they don’t care if we have the COVID vaccine or not which last year we were crucified for people lost everything

20:08

If they didn’t have it and now they don’t even bat an eye but the flu vaccine they’re coming at us and saying you will not be hireable.

20:15

So what’s next year?

20:17

Like we just have to set some sort of precedent to say when is enough enough and and to make sure that we all have the options to work and go to school.

20:27

So thank you so much, Nicole.

20:29

I really appreciate all that you’ve said.

20:31

I’m just talking about it from a legal perspective.

20:35

The reason they didn’t want to put that in writing is presumably because they knew that that was unlawful.

20:40

If Florida has religious exemptions, which to the best of my knowledge it does, then you have to be given that opportunity.

20:49

Now whether a law firm takes that or they don’t want to go up against the hospital, that’s a totally different issue.

20:55

But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that relates to fairness in employment has made it very clear that there are valid religious exemptions to the flu vaccine.

21:05

And you absolutely do not have to have as your only basis for a religious exemption, the existence of fetal cell lines in the shot.

21:13

That is for many people, particularly Catholics, often a reason, but that surely is not the only valid reason.

21:20

And I think you were being gaslit

21:23

about the unavailability of a religious exemption and I would encourage you to reach out to others in the legal community to submit that religious exemption and put them in that position where they actually have to do something unlawful and have it be in the record so that it can be challenged and I can help you with that if you want.

21:42

Well let me repeat, you need to submit it.

21:45

So what they’ve done is gaslight you and say you can’t even submit it, we’re not going to accept it.

22:14

And the EEOC changed that at the start of the COVID shots.

22:20

They issued an opinion and said, you know, we’re going to push everybody into COVID shots basically.

22:26

But they, as far as I know, they didn’t issue that opinion for flu shots and they have a considerable amount of case law existing where they have given nurses

22:37

the right to refuse flu shots on a religious basis.

22:40

And just to say, our colleagues at Informed Consent Action Network are challenging in all of the states that have denied religious exemptions, they’re challenging the lack of existence of religious exemptions.

22:52

There’s also other lawyers who are challenging that in Connecticut.

22:56

We have the right to freedom of, you know, we have, we have First Amendment rights to freedom of religion, to freedom of conscience.

23:04

And I believe, as many people do, that

23:07

course that entails your right to make your own decisions.

23:12

Like you, I also believe as a matter of bodily integrity and as basic freedom of bodily sovereignty, you do not have to have a religious exemption.

23:22

You can have any reason you want not to take an injection that can kill you.

23:26

but the pushback is absolutely there and I would encourage you and others to submit religious exemptions and to make this a point rather than simply let them sort of say oh we’re not going to write it down but you can’t have a religious exemption that’s nonsense.

23:42

So the other thing I’d like people to know too and it may be for other professions as well but

23:48

uh if we do not fill out an exemption and the company allows which i don’t think you should be required to fill out an exemption anyways if you don’t want something that’s it period amen um but for the ones that offer the exemptions uh they will increase your premiums on your insurance they can also um you know kind of during COVID we had things withheld from us if we

24:11

did not get the vaccine because we were considered more high risk and more of a cost issue to them.

24:16

So a lot of things happened also outside of that.

24:20

The unique situation about what I was faced with, not only was I not offered the religious exemption and I tried very, very hard to get everything so that I could prove it.

24:29

The interesting part is it only applies to new employees.

24:32

You were only allowed a medical exemption for a new employee.

24:35

However, if you’ve been employed, you were offered a religious, a medical, or a right to refuse, knowing that the right to refuse would increase your premiums for insurance, and that the other two were also required every year.

24:48

So again, it’s just all of these things that I don’t think people understand is going on.

24:53

and creating a lot of problems and so people are being coerced into making these decisions um and unfortunately you know adding to the thing where they say that we’re a minority you know they say well it’s not enough of you that are declining for it really to make a difference but that’s false and health care it takes we can’t even have one call in for us to be short so again it’s just so important that the public knows what is going on

25:16

and that this is not acceptable and it is a trickle-down effect in our communities.

25:21

Anything that happens in law or anything that happens in our communities will eventually come to us in the hospital setting.

25:27

You know, we see these patients that, you know, can’t afford to put food on the table, can’t afford their medications, you know, have lost their jobs and now there’s domestic violence in the home.

25:35

Like, we see these people.

25:36

So, I think people are always saying to themselves, well, this doesn’t really apply to me.

25:41

or this doesn’t really affect me because I’m not somebody that works in the hospital but when it’s you and your family that gets brought to us and you don’t have that person there to care for you it will it will affect you you know so again it’s just trying to let people understand this is much much bigger it’s still happening and yes in the great state of Florida

26:00

And let me say that the mandates start first with the health care workers and then expand the rest of the population.

26:08

So and nobody is willing to fight for that in the sense that some of us who have declined it have asked, you know, what form can you give to me that says that you are liable if something was to happen to me?

26:21

You know, again, it was rhetorical, but and a lot of times they just look at you like you’re crazy, but it truly is.

26:28

You know, we are not protected in that aspect.

26:32

So, you know, I just want to say that

26:36

Particularly in New York, we’ve been fighting the health care mandates.

26:39

And New York, the health care mandate was found to be unconstitutional in New York and violated law.

26:46

And that decision that the mandate was null and void, because the shots, the COVID shots didn’t stop transmission or infection, that still stands, even though the appeals court dismissed the case because they said it was moot.

27:00

But we totally understand that these mandates are

27:04

affecting the frontline people health care workers firefighters teachers and we have been working for the last four years on behalf of those groups because they’re so important to the the whole society as you point out we appreciate it we just want to make sure people know too that it’s not it’s not just stopping at COVID every every turnaround you know year it’s becoming another type of vaccine and and so we just want to make sure that everyone has the same rights so that we can all be protected so thank you for your hard work well thank you that was wonderful yes ma’am

*

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

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Study Proves that COVID Shots Can Cause Off-Target Immune Responses. “mRNA Nobel Prize Tech Inventor is Clueless”

December 18th, 2023 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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In early 2021, Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., warned that the replacing of uracil with synthetic methylpseudouridine in the COVID shots — a process known as codon optimization — could cause severe health problems

Recent research confirms this, showing that the use of methylpseudouridine can cause a glitch in the decoding, thereby triggering the production of off-target aberrant proteins. The antibodies that develop as a result may, in turn, trigger off-target immune reactions

According to the authors, off-target cellular immune responses occur in 25% to 30% of people who have received the COVID shot

According to an anonymous source, there’s evidence suggesting Pfizer and BioNTech fabricated data to hide this “glitch” from regulators

Previous research has demonstrated that codon optimization can result in misshaped and misfolded proteins that don’t match the natural protein being emulated, and that these misshapen proteins can trigger immunogenicity that in some cases may not become apparent until years later

*

Yet again, warnings from the earliest days of the COVID jab rollout prove prescient. In May 2021, I interviewed Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT for over five decades, about the likely hazards of replacing the uracil1 in the RNA used in the COVID shots with synthetic methylpseudouridine.2 This process of substituting letters in the genetic code is known as codon optimization, which is known to be problematic.

At the time, she predicted the shots would cause a rise in prion diseases, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases at younger ages, blood disorders and heart failure, and one of the primary reasons for this is because they genetically manipulated the RNA in the shots with synthetic methylpseudouridine, which enhances RNA stability by inhibiting its breakdown.3

Scientists have now demonstrated that about half of those who have received a COVID shot are still producing the genetically modified spike protein six months post-jab, but according to health authorities, and even the inventors of the COVID shots themselves, this was not supposed to happen.

Is mRNA Tech Inventor Really This Clueless?

In October 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their nucleoside base modification discoveries that enabled the development of the mRNA COVID shots.4 In the 2021 video above, Weissman had the following to say about this technology:

“The mRNA in the vaccine is identical to the RNA in your cells. The RNA in your cells isn’t causing long-term adverse events so the RNA in the vaccine won’t either. The RNA is degraded, probably within a week it’s completely gone … Nothing of the vaccine is left after days two to a week or so … The only really serious adverse event is this anaphylaxis-like reaction.”

None of that was true, and it’s hard to believe Weissman didn’t know it, considering several independent scientists who had looked at the research were able to point out the flaws from the get-go.

Now, researchers at Cambridge University and the Universities of Kent, Oxford and Liverpool, have discovered5,6,7 that the use of methylpseudouridine results in a high rate of ribosomal “frameshifting,” which causes your cells to produce off-target proteins with unknown effects.

mRNA Tech Turns Out to be Error-Prone

The findings of Mulroney et. al. were published in the December 6, 2023, issue of the journal Nature. As explained in that paper:8

“A key feature of therapeutic IVT [in vitro-transcribed] mRNAs is that they contain modified ribonucleotides, which have been shown to decrease innate immunogenicity and can additionally increase mRNA stability, both of which are favorable characteristics for mRNA therapies …

Pseudouridine (Ψ) is known to increase misreading of mRNA stop codons in eukaryotes, and can affect misreading during prokaryotic mRNA translation. 1-methylΨ does not seem to affect codon misreading, but has been shown to affect protein synthesis rates and ribosome density on mRNAs, suggesting a direct effect on mRNA translation …

Here we demonstrate that incorporation of N1-methylpseudouridine into mRNA results in +1 ribosomal frameshifting in vitro and that cellular immunity in mice and humans to +1 frameshifted products from BNT162b2 vaccine mRNA translation occurs after vaccination.

The +1 ribosome frameshifting observed is probably a consequence of N1-methylpseudouridine-induced ribosome stalling during IVT mRNA translation, with frameshifting occurring at ribosome slippery sequences …

[T]hese data highlight potential off-target effects for future mRNA-based therapeutics and demonstrate the requirement for sequence optimization.”

In layman English, the inclusion of synthetic methylpseudouridine causes the ribosomes (which are responsible for reading the code) to misread the RNA’s instructions. RNA code consists of groups of three bases (codons) that must be read in the correct order for a desired protein to be created.

Because the methylpseudouridine is not a perfect fit, it causes the decoding process to stall and shift (hence the term “+1 ribosomal frameshifting”). There’s basically a stutter in the decoding process, as your cells don’t understand what’s being asked for, and this stuttering causes the decoding to skip a letter, thereby garbling the entire code.

As a result, unintended “nonsensical” proteins are produced instead of the desired SARS-CoV-2 spike. That, in turn, means that your immune system will not produce antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, but rather against these aberrant proteins.

Up to One-Third of COVID Jab Recipients May be Affected

According to the authors, off-target cellular immune responses occur in 25% to 30% of people who have received the COVID shot. And, while they claim these garbled proteins are “harmless,” they admit that they can cause unintended immune reactions. And, as noted by molecular virologist David Speicher Ph.D., told Trial Site News reporter Sonia Elijah:9

“Whenever our cells create an abundance of unintended proteins or prevent production of appropriate proteins it could lead to an unintended immune response with a huge potential to cause harm.”

Did Pfizer/BioNTech Fabricate Data to Hide This ‘Glitch’?

While these findings are disturbing enough, Elijah, an investigative reporter for Trial Site News and former BBC researcher, claims there’s evidence suggesting Pfizer and BioNTech fabricated data to hide this “glitch” from regulators.10 She writes:11

“Early this year, the ‘Blotgate’ scandal erupted … My in-depth investigative report for Trial Site News (part 1 and part 2), revealed evidence strongly suggesting that BioNTech fabricated their Western Blot tests, which were used to prove the fidelity of their product to the regulators.

A Western Blot is used to identify certain proteins, in this case it was the vaccinal spike protein expressed by the modified mRNA in the Pfizer/BioNTech shots.

An anonymous source provided evidence revealing how BioNTech’s automated (computerized) Western Blots had appeared to be ‘copied and pasted’ across four different batches of the vaccine, transfected at six different concentrations.

pfizer biontech western blots quantified

This expert was able to quantify the bands using an image analysis software, the NIH-sponsored, open-source ImageJ and plotted them in graphs shown above.

The vertical axis measures the darkness of the band, in a scale from 0 (black) – 255 (white) and the horizontal axis plots the position. The bands are color-coded and identified by a letter. Where the same letter and colored band is seen repeated, demonstrates how these bands have been copied and pasted, either as a group or individually.

A possible reason for the researchers at BioNTech to fabricate their results could be to hide the fact that other unintended proteins were being produced- as proven by the recent Mulroney et al. paper.

A group of leading researchers and scientists published12 a detailed response to the Mulroney et al. paper. An extract from their response reads:

‘The premise for the study reveals a developmental and regulatory failure to ask fundamental questions that could affect the safety and effectiveness of these products. This is no better exemplified by Pfizer’s retired head of vaccine R&D who was quoted in Nature as saying: ‘We flew the aeroplane while we were still building it.’

The package insert for COMIRNATY states (3): ‘Each 0.3 mL dose of COMIRNATY (2023-2024 Formula) is formulated to contain 30 mcg of a nucleoside modified messenger RNA (modRNA) encoding the viral spike (S) glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant lineage XBB.1.5 (Omicron XBB.1.5).

There is no mention of any other kind of protein. The finding that unintended proteins may be produced as a result of vaccination is sufficient cause for regulators to conduct full risk assessments of past or future harms that may have ensued.’”

Codon Optimization Known to be Problematic

What’s so frustrating about all this is that it was entirely predictable. Previous research has demonstrated that codon optimization can result in off-target proteins, as well as misshaped and misfolded proteins that don’t match the natural protein being emulated, and that these misshapen proteins can trigger immunogenicity that in some cases may not become apparent until years later.13,14

Even a principal investigator at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Chava Kimchi Sarfaty, Ph.D., in 2011 stated:15

“We do not believe that you can optimize codons and have the protein behave as it did in its native form. The changed form could cause immunogenicity, for example, which wouldn’t be seen until late-stage clinical trials or even after approval.”

If the FDA knew all of this back in 2011, why did they not raise objections against codon optimization being used in the making of the COVID jabs?

Decoding Errors Can Have Serious Repercussions

As for Mulroney et.al. claiming the aberrant proteins created in one-quarter to one-third of all COVID jab recipients is “harmless,” I would not take that at face value. Two of the researchers on the team have a pending patent application for mRNA technology,16 so they certainly have reason to downplay the problem and propose all we need to do is a bit of tweaking and all will be well moving forward.

I don’t think it’s that easy. Codon optimization with pseudouridine has been hailed as a key factor that makes the COVID shots “work”17 (even though we now also have ample evidence they don’t work, even with codon optimization), and Mulroney et. al.’s primary suggestion is to identify a better code substitute.

But what’s to say that won’t cause the decoding to stutter as well? What’s more, ANY code substitution can trigger protein misfolding and splicing anomalies, which have been linked to a variety of serious pathologies, including heart failure and the neurodegeneration seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.18 As noted in a March 2021 paper:19

“BNT162b2 vaccine against COVID-19 is composed of an RNA having 4284 nucleotides, divided into six sections, which bring the information to create a factory of S spike proteins, the ones used by SARS-CoV-2 … to infect the host. After that, these proteins are directed outside the cell, triggering the immune reaction and antibody production.

The problem is the heavy alteration of the mRNA: Uracil is replaced to fool the immune system with pseudouridine; the letters of all codon triplets are replaced by a C or a G, to extremely increase the speed of protein synthesis; replacement of some amino acids with proline; addition of a sequence (3’-UTR) with unknown alteration …

An eventual mistranslation has consequences on the pathophysiology of a variety of diseases. In addition, the mRNA injected is pre-mRNA, which can lead to the multiple mature mRNA’s; these are alternative splicing anomalies, direct source of serious long-term harm on the human health.

In essence, what will be created may not be identical with protein S spike; just an error in translational decoding, codons misreading, production of different amino acids, then proteins, to cause serious long-term damage to human health, despite the DNA is not modified, being instead in the cell nucleus and not in the cytoplasm, where the modified mRNA arrives.”

Add to this the fact that synthetic mRNA may be able to integrate into the human genome,20 and we could be looking at serious intergenerational problems. The whole mRNA push is reckless beyond belief.

Resources for Those Injured by the COVID Jab

Data from across the world testify to a singular fact; that the COVID shots are the most dangerous drugs ever deployed. If you already got one or more COVID jabs and are now reconsidering, you’d be wise to avoid all vaccines from here on, as you need to end the assault on your body. Even if you haven’t experienced any obvious side effects, your health may still be impacted long-term, so don’t take any more shots.

If you’re suffering from side effects, your first order of business is to eliminate the spike protein — and/or any aberrant off-target protein — that your body is producing. Two remedies shown to bind to and facilitate the removal of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. I don’t know if these drugs will work on off-target proteins as well, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to try.

The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) has developed a post-vaccine treatment protocol called I-RECOVER. Since the protocol is continuously updated as more data become available, your best bet is to download the latest version straight from the FLCCC website at covid19criticalcare.com.21

For additional suggestions, check out the World Health Council’s spike protein detox guide,22 which focuses on natural substances like herbs, supplements and teas. Sauna therapy can also help eliminate toxic and misfolded proteins by stimulating autophagy.

*

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Notes

1 WikiDiff, Uracil vs Uridine

2 International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research May 10, 2021; 2(1): 402-444

3, 17 Front. Cell Dev. Biol. November 4, 2021; 9

4 Nobel Prize Press Release October 2, 2023

5, 8 Nature December 6, 2023

6, 9, 11, 16 Trial Site News December 7, 2023

7 The Telegraph December 6, 2023

10 Twitter Sonia Elijah December 8, 2023

12 OSF Preprints December 12, 2023

13, 15 Ehden Substack August 20, 2021

14 Nature Medicine December 6, 2011; 17: 1536-1538

18 Autophagy August 2008; 4(6): 821-823

19 Authorea March 25, 2021 DOI: 10.22541/au.161668243.35142344/v1

20 Medical Hypotheses February 2023; 171: 111015

21 Covid19criticalcare.com

22 World Council for Health Spike Protein Detox Guide November 30, 2021 

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jewish State in the Midst of Trying to Eradicate Palestinians”. Moral Principle: Denounce Bigotry of In-Group Members Before Criticizing Bigotry of Out-Group Members

December 18th, 2023 by Kim Petersen

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

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Contempt for the Arab population is deeply rooted in Zionist thought. — Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, 2015.

This is the holiday season for various groups of people. Some people will celebrate Xmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, etc during the winter season. Others will celebrate just because celebrating is fun.

Noting that it is Hanukkah, Sportsnet published an article titled “Oilers’ Zach Hyman: We must ‘eradicate antisemitism’.”

The article is extremely one-sided and insensitive because the Jewish State is in the midst of trying to eradicate Palestinians.

Obviously, antisemitism must be eradicated from any moral universe. But what does Hyman’s statement imply? It is not “We must ‘eradicate every form of bigotry’.” It is explicit to one group: Jews. Do Jews face bigotry targeted at them? Undoubtedly they do. But is the biotry faced by Jews the worst form of bigotry, so heinous that subordinating other forms of bigotry is acceptable? And is it the case that Jews do not engage in bigotry against Gentiles?

Hyman is a prideful, skillful forward for the Edmonton Oilers of the National Hockey League.

Mark Spector of Sportsnet writes of Hyman:

“I’m very proud of who I am. I’m proud of being Jewish. I’m proud of growing up in the Jewish community … and I’m proud of where we come from,” began Hyman, a 31-year-old product of Toronto’s Jewish community. The Oilers forward is the grandson of Holocaust survivors, schooled in Judaism from kindergarten all the way through Grade 12.

Why has he chosen to speak out during the eight days of Hanukkah?

To shed light on what he is seeing at home. To shine a candle on a growing sense of antisemitism right here….

“It’s very clear that antisemitism as a result of what’s going on has been on the rise. Jewish people … don’t feel safe. There are attacks on synagogues. My high school [in Toronto] has had two bomb threats. This is just for being Jewish. It’s just because you’re Jewish. There’s no other reason.

“There’s no other reason”? Apparently, Spector and Hyman are seemingly unaware that people in their self-declared Jewish State are engaged in a genocide against Palestinians and that the genocide has been in progress since 1948.

Jewish anti-Arabism has been on prominent display over the decades unabated to the present day. Recently, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant denigrated the Palestinians as “human animals.” Jerusalem deputy mayor Arieh King protested that Palestinians are not “human animals”; they are not “human beings”; they are “subhuman.”

It is a commonly held tenet that one should clean up one’s own backyard before complaining about the backyard of others.

At its most basic level, backyard ethics would include mutual respect between neighbors and non-violence (definitely no spilling of blood; especially of civilians, whether they be elderly, children, women, or men). What does mutual respect require? Observing the golden rule: treat others as you wish to be treated.

To prioritize concern about anti-semitism at a time when Israeli Jews, supported by Jews in the diaspora, are committing genocide against Palestinians speaks absurdly to a person’s moral basis. In essence, what Spector, Hyman, and Sporstnet are promoting is Jewish people first even when Jews are knocking down hospitals, blowing up schools, and destroying another people.

As Chomsky wrote in his book The Fateful Triangle: “Anti-Arab racism is, however, so widespread as to be unnoticeable; it is perhaps the only remaining form of racism to be regarded as legitimate.”

Bigotry must be opposed in all its forms. To stand on morally sound ground, one must especially denounce the odious acts committed in the name of one’s group and criticize the bigotry held by members of one’s own group.

*

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image source

False Transitions and Global Stocktakes: The Failure of COP28

December 18th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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

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The time has come to treat the sequence of UN Climate Change Conferences, the latest concluding in Dubai, as a series of the failed and the abysmally rotten. It shows how a worthless activity, caked (oiled?) with appropriately chosen words, can actually provide assurance that something worthwhile was done. Along the way, there are always the same beneficiaries: fossil fuel magnates and satirists.

COP28, which featured 97,000 participants, including the weighty presence of 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists, was even more of a shambles than its predecessor. Its location – in an oil rich state – was head scratching. Its chairman Sultan Al Jaber, taking advantage of the various parties who would attend, had sought to cultivate some side business for the United Arab Emirates, notably for the state oil company ADNOC.

This did not deter UN climate change bureaucrats and negotiators, who seemed to equate climate change policy with an account of goods held by a business. Consider the wording of the COP Agreement released on December 13:

“The global stocktake is considered the central outcome of COP28 – as it contains every element that was under negotiation and can now be used by countries to develop stronger climate action plans due by 2025.” 

It was a “global stocktake” supposedly signalling the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, to be facilitated by “laying the ground for a swift, just and equitable transition, underpinned by deep emission cuts and scaled-up finance.”

These words have been treated as sacerdotal by many of its participants, the be all and end all, the event’s great culmination.  But long hours of deliberation can confuse effort with achievement, and this proved to be no exception. Tinkering with meaning can be taken as a triumph. Recognising words such as “fossil fuels” and “science” can make delegates weak at the knees. Promises to set targets for a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) make others swoon.

It was such tinkering that led to the call for a “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable way with developed countries continuing to take the lead.” The emphasis here is on a “transition away” from their use, not their “phase out”, which is what 130 of the 198 participating parties were willing to accept.

The term “phase-down” was used regarding “unabated coal power” while “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” would be phased out, presumably leaving the question open as to what, exactly, efficient subsidies might look like. Parties were also “encouraged to come forward with ambitious, economy-wide emission reduction targets, covering all greenhouse gases, sectors and categories and aligned with the 1.5°C in their next round of climate action plans (known as nationally determined contributions) by 2025.”

Jaber was in a gleeful mood at the outcome. The naysayers’ warning that the summit would be an unmitigated failure had been disproved. “Together, we have confronted realities and we have set the world in the right direction. We have given it a robust action plan to keep 1.5°C within reach. It is a plan that is led by the science.”

US climate change envoy John Kerry thought the document convincing: it sent “very strong messages to the world” providing a much firmer statement on preventing global warming from exceeding the 1.5°C limit. Danish Climate Minister Dan Jørgensen seemed to angle for praise in noting that his country, being “an oil rich country surrounded by oil countries that are now signing a piece of paper saying we need to move away from oil” was “historic”.

The agreement had an eager audience desperate to identify signs of progress. Prof. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization called the COP28 agreement “historic in that – for the first time – it recognizes the need to transition away from fossil fuels for the first time.” Even the Scientific American made the observation that none of the previous 27 climate change conferences had even mentioned fossil fuels and its link to a rise in global temperatures.

A good gaggle of climatologists and geophysicists were less enthused. “The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels,” opined Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, “was devastating.” To use such an expression as “‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”

An editorial in Nature was also steely in rejecting the way science had been manipulated at the summit, noting Jaber’s own declaration on November 21 that there was no scientific basis that would necessitate phasing out fossil fuels to restrict global warming to the agreed limit. While the editorial had gone to press before the release of the final agreement, the journal was correct in assuming that it “would not include language on phasing out fossil fuels. That is more than a missed opportunity. It is dangerous.”

The dangers are considerable, given the number of transitioning states. They include, for instance, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who seeks the expansion of renewable energy while building coal-burning power plants, and the current US administration, whose Bureau of Land Management approved more oil and gas leases on federal lands in the first two years and seven months than the previous Trump administration did over the equivalent period. In the usual doublespeak of the Biden administration, such a policy could comfortably exist alongside its overall green strategy.

As weak tea as the document is, it’s not even binding. Countries can still pursue fossil fuel projects, at the behest of strong coal, gas and oil lobbies, even as they claim to be pursuing abating technologies that supposedly minimise emissions. In Australia, opposition spokesman for climate change and energy Ted O’Brien provided something of an exemplar of this.

“While the final communique names fossil fuels, it also promotes carbon, capture and storage as abating technology for such fuels along with nuclear energy which can be a zero-emission substitute.”

The record of actions taken to such agreements is not promising. For one, COP28 seemed riddled with pledges and gestures, a matter of theatre.The heralded “loss and damage fund” received commitments to the total of US$700 million, but this is wretchedly meagre when compared to the annual US$200 to US$400 billion required by Africa alone, let alone the US$400 billion a year for climate change adaptation.

Debates of herculean obstinacy over word changes in a text can spell the doom of its object. In future experiments in hot air summitry of the sort witnessed at Dubai, the powerful and wealthy will have room to stretch and delay meaningful change, adopting that famous plea by St. Augustine: “Please God, make me good, but not just yet.”

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

Featured image is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The Genocide in Gaza: Statement by Sweden’s Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research

December 18th, 2023 by Transnational Foundation

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As the brutal slaughtering in Gaza unfolds in increasingly horrific proportions, we, as an experienced research foundation for peaceful conflict resolution and peace-making since 1986, feel the urge to contribute our analytical points, sentiments and constructive conflict-resolution ideas.

TFF also wants to be on record with this Statement so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see who stood with whom and who advocated peace instead of ongoing genocide.

The killing has to stop, and we call, together with the UN and so many others, for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

The horrific attack of Hamas on October 7, 2023, with the death of over 1100 people, is indefensible. There is no excuse for the killing of absolutely innocent people. While there is a painful history of 75 years of brutal occupation and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people, there is no justification for such an act of senseless violence.

However, Israel’s response can by no means be seen as practising the right to self-defence. It is an utterly out-of-proportion massacre of civilians, mainly women and children, executed by the military of the most totalitarian and racist government Israel ever had since it was established. It is an unprecedented murderous revenge. It is genocide.

Despite the strongest condemnation by the UN, despite the unprecedented calls of its Secretary General, Israel continues with its systematic high-tech slaughter, and the Western governments are standing silent or, like Germany, declare their ”unwavering support for Israel.“ EU leaders declared immediately that ’Europe’ is ”standing with Israel.” The US voted against a ceasefire.

It is heartbreaking and painful beyond words to helplessly watch the unfolding of this massacre.

After two months, these are the facts:

But while much of Israel and many of the Western governments seem to be blinded by the idea of eternal victimhood of Jews and Israel, that can’t be used as an equally eternal excuse for just every atrocity. Fortunately, hundreds of thousands of Jews in and outside Israel show in unequivocal terms, that this is not happening in their name.

Hundreds of Jews with kippas packed New York Central Station as early as three weeks after the beginning of the forced exodus of 1 million Palestinians and the following slaughtering and blocked the whole station for hours, all of them in black t-shirts with huge letters ”This Jew is for immediate ceasefire“. And they keep protesting.

35 Jewish-Palestinian organisations in Israel are calling for an unconditional ceasefire, and the International Jewish Voice for Peace is raising its voices everywhere around the globe.

Hundreds of Rabbis all around the world, including in Israel, have been condemning the unparalleled killing and are calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Little do you read in the Western mainstream media about this, nor about the millions of other people around the world who manifest their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Amnesty International condemned Israel in non-mistakable terms, and the Security Council nearly unanimously called for an immediate ceasefire – vetoed shamefully by the United States alone.

The WHO called out Israel and urged for an immediate ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu repeatedly states that he will not be moved: the ”war on Hamas” (the Western media’s deceptive narrative for the genocide) will continue. Palestine did not exist on the map of the New Middle East he showed at the UN.

By all means available, this Israeli government should be isolated until it stops the genocide. Its political and military leaders must be held accountable for the horrible crimes against humanity and be brought to justice. What is at stake is the strength of international law, several conventions and UN Charter norms.

Every country that has delivered and continues to deliver the military means enabling this immoral, illegal and barbaric policy must be seen as complicit and likewise be held accountable. Without the ongoing military and political support of the US and Western States, Germany in particular – that 10-folded its weapon deliveries since October 23 – this horrible war and the unlawful occupation would be over soon.

There is no doubt that this will backfire on Israel and the West.

The whole world is watching the slaughtering and the collaboration of the Western states with horror and disgust. The arrogance of the ”leading nations” and their claim to act in the name of democracy, freedom, and human rights – as well as their ’rules-based international order’ – is fast falling apart. 

How Can We Move Towards Long-term Peace?

  • We still believe that Jews and Palestinians can live together – and so do many of them themselves. Even under shocking conditions, people and organisations on both sides still insist that their lives are inextricably linked and that peaceful coexistence is possible.

It will be a long and painful path to make this happen – and it will only be possible with equal rights for all.

And it will need tremendous pressure from the outside and a non-violent revolution from the inside to change Israel into a just, human rights and law- respecting true democracy.

  • We need to look at the entire Middle East as a region – we need its dense network of economic, cultural, and political ties to set up an all-regional conflict-resolution mechanism á la the OSCE. This way, over several years, all parties can dialogue their way through to something they can live with in the long term.

There are many possible elements – tie peace into economic and political mechanisms and relations; think of cantons and autonomies; think of mutually beneficial/cooperative uses of territories; think of the relations of it all with the Rest of the World, including the Global South. Tie it in with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, BRI.

Warfare requires no intellect or creativity; peace-making requires both.

  • The violence must die down to move towards such a civilised process. We need an immediate ceasefire.

Ideally, we need a huge UN mission to disarm Israel and Hamas to such a level that neither can re-start a war. And then all the good offices around the world, governmental but certainly more so non-governmental, to help mediate, consult, dialogue every detail: What do the many parties fear and what do they want?

And then – at the end, after years of such a peace-building process – the parties would come to a final negotiation table and then sign an agreement of peaceful coexistence with all its civilian and military modalities.

  • Conflict resolution means solving problems that stand between the parties. It cannot succeed by violence, looking to the past, or tit-for-tat for what was done yesterday.

It is, instead, one big, complex and long peace workshop where better futures/visions/ scenarios are brought up, evaluated, and sorted out – ending in combining the best elements into a comprehensive future arrangement.

You can’t change the past, but you can change the future. And – no! – everybody will not be happy, but all can be happy with something – and see a better future for their children.

And this is also where truth and reconciliation commissions come in – the healing and forgiveness that is found in all religions.

Peace is still possible.

Signed by TFF Associates:

Christina Spännar – PhD in sociology, founder, Sweden.

Jan Oberg – PhD in sociology, founder and director, Sweden.

Annette Schiffmann – Veteran peace activist & organiser of numerous international conferences on alternatives to war and violence: Iraq, Death Penalty, Israel/Palestine, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Heidelberg, Germany.

David Swanson – Co-Founder, Executive Director, and a Board Member of World Beyond War, author, activist, journalist, and radio host, the United States.

Liu Jian – Co-founder of Ichi Foundation, Beijing, China.

Erni Friholt – Secretary, the Orust Peace Movement, Orust, Sweden.

Claus Kold – PhD, senior researcher, director of TurningPoints, Denmark.

Biljana Vanskovska – Professor, Head of the Global Changes Center, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia.

Farhang Jahanpour – Retired professor and Editor for Middle East and North Africa at BBC Monitoring, England.

Radmila Nakarada – Professor, Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, Distinguished Fellow, New South Institute, Johannesburg, Belgrade, Serbia.

Ola Friholt – Chairman, the Orust Peace Movement, Orust, Sweden.

Richard Falk – Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, public intellectual and former UN Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, US/Turkey.

Elaheh Pooyandeh – MA in peace studies, peace educator and mediator, Tehran, Iran.

Ina Curic – Sociologist, M.A. in Gender Studies as well as Peace and Conflict Studies; former TFF project coordinator in Burundi, creator of Imagine Creatively story-telling for peace, Romania.

David Loy – Retired professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Zen tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism.

Chantal Mutamuriza – Former TFF project coordinator in Burundi, human rights advocate and humanitarian worker, Switzerland and Ethiopia.

Chaiwat Satha-Anand – Professor emeritus, Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University and prolific writer on Islam and nonviolence, Bangkok, Thailand.

Brajna Greenhalgh – PhD Researcher; MSc in psychology, licensed counsellor, Bangor University, Wales.

Mairead Maguire – Nobel peace laureate, co-founder of Peace People, Northern Ireland, Kilcief County Down.

Gareth Porter – historian, independent investigative journalist, author and policy analyst specializing in U.S. national security issues, the United States.

Shastri Ramachandaran – Independent Journalist, editor, writer, publication & media consultant, New Delhi, India.

Peter Peverelli – Retired professor, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and lifelong expert on China, The Netherlands.

Neelakanta Radhakrishnan – Dr., The Gandhi Peace Mission, India; former Director of Gandhi Darshan and International Centre of Gandhian Studies in New Delhi, India.

Jorgen Johansen – Editor at Irene Publishing, independent peace researcher and writer, Sweden.

Majken Sorensen – Associate Professor of Social Science at Østfold University College and Karlstad University, Sweden.

Jake Lynch – Associate Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He also writes, reports and broadcasts regularly as a journalist working in peace journalism, as well as making documentary films.

Fredrik S. Heffermehl – Lawyer (Oslo and NYU) and author, world expert on the Nobel Peace Prize. Just published The Real Nobel Peace Prize, a study of Alfred Nobel´s vision of peace by disarmament that also presents the 115 persons who should have won the Prize had Nobe’s intention been respected, Norway.

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Appendix: Why we use the word ”genocide.”

The use of the word ’genocide’ is controversial in many circles and may evoke emotional reactions. We are also aware that it has been used by some for political purposes to denigrate some other country or people.

But we do not use the term lightly or for political purposes. Given the links we provide below to trustworthy sites and organisations, legal documents such as the Genocide Convention, as well as expert opinion, we believe this is the term that best summarises what has unfolded in Gaza and subjected the Palestinians to unspeakable, unprecedented suffering as a people.  

One central criterion is intentionality – that there is a deliberate intention to harm, eradicate, humiliate, displace or make life impossible for a nation – in part or, over time, in whole.

Most of the links provided by professor John Mearsheimer here, in which various Israeli leaders are on record, make it abundantly clear that the suffering cannot be explained merely by ’collateral damage,’ i.e. civilian casualties caused by unintended consequences of bombings and other warfare activities.

Furthermore, according to the Genocide Convention of 1948 – “Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as … “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

  1. Killing members of the group;
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

All these criteria do not have to be present – as the word ”any” indicates. In the case of Gaza, it should be abundantly clear that the Israeli government’s activity falls within criteria a, b and c.

To that can be added a multi-decade occupation (since 1967), apartheid, humiliation and other elements that, in and of themselves, do not constitute genocide.

Finally, it is extraordinarily important to note that – as pointed out by UN experts:

“The international community has an obligation to prevent atrocity crimes, including genocide, and should immediately consider all diplomatic, political and economic measures to that end.”

We believe that this obligation does place the West’s complicity in the genocide – thanks to arms and ammunition export and political side-taking statements – in a particularly tragical light.

Darkness in Bethlehem as Christmas 2023 Is Cancelled. Palestinian Christians Under Attack

December 18th, 2023 by Steven Sahiounie

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This Christmas, the rooms of all the hotels in Bethlehem are empty, and local businesses are suffering because no Christian pilgrims wanted to travel to what is increasingly looking like a war-zone.

Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, has cancelled Christmas this year. For the first time since modern celebrations began, the birthplace of Jesus will not decorate the Manger Square tree.

In the original first Christmas story, Joseph and Mary were turned away from the inns, as all the rooms were full. This Christmas, the rooms of all the hotels in Bethlehem are empty, and local businesses are suffering because no Christian pilgrims, usually from America and Europe, wanted to travel to what is increasingly looking like a war-zone, as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) constantly raid the Occupied West Bank territory like Jenin.

“In our homes we can celebrate, but in our hearts we are suffering,” said Ibrahim Dabbour, a Greek Orthodox priest. “How can we decorate a Christmas tree?”

The Israeli government has a plan to transform Christian sites at the Mount of Olives into a national park. The future of ancient churches and Biblical sites is uncertain because Israel wants to ultimately turn them all into tourist attractions for profit after they have gotten rid of the Christians.

The War in Gaza and West Bank Raids

The IDF raids and attacks in the Occupied West Bank, with subsequent arrests, have been going on well before, but have intensified after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas which killed over 1,000 Israelis.

Heads of various churches in Jerusalem, the Occupied West Bank, and Jordan have made a collective decision to make this Christmas a somber one, in solidarity with the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, and the death toll now above 17,000 and rising daily in the Israeli war on Gaza.

Christmas is a public holiday in the Muslim-majority Jordan, with many city squares and shopping malls feted with seasonal decorations. But congregations throughout the country will now forgo the traditional festivities of public tree lighting, Christmas markets, scout parades, and distribution of gifts to children.

American Evangelical Zionists

“We have a role to speak to our friends in the West,” said David Rihani, president and general superintendent of the Assemblies of God Church of Jordan. “Jesus did not teach us to blindly side with anyone against another.”

He referred to a viral video of Tennessee-based pastor Greg Locke calling on Israel to turn Gaza into a “parking lot” and to blow up the Dome of the Rock to make room for the Third Temple and usher in the return of Jesus. Local evangelicals of the Holy Lands, Rihani said, refuse to be associated with such Christian Zionism.

John Munayer, a Jerusalemite Palestinian who belongs to the small Palestinian Evangelical Church, said that the harassment of Christians, which has increased especially over the past six months, has international ramifications.

“In the international Christian world there are those who passionately support Israel, those who identify with the Palestinian struggle against the occupation, and a great many who are somewhere in between,” Munayer said. “I go around international conferences and communities. The violent events move the needle and make many people question what the right attitude is toward Israel, and toward Jews.”

Palestinian Christians Under Attack by Israelis

From April 2 to May 10, 2002, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the West Bank was besieged by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). On April 7, 2002 Vatican City warned Israel to respect religious sites in line with its international obligations. On April 20, 2002 the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem called upon Christians worldwide to make the upcoming Sunday a “solidarity day” for the people in the church and the church itself, and called for immediate intervention to stop what it referred to as the “inhuman measures against the people and the stone of the church”.

Ahead of Christmas 2018, Israel banned the Christian minority who live in the Gaza Strip from visiting Christian holy sites and churches in the West Bank and Jerusalem to celebrate Christmas.

Around 5,000 Christians, most of whom are Greek Orthodox, lived in the Gaza Strip before Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed Oslo peace accords in 1994. However, their number dramatically declined because of the continuing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Christians in the Gaza Strip, home to 2 million Palestinians, used to travel every year to the West Bank city of Bethlehem and Jerusalem to join Palestinian Christians there to celebrate Christmas and the New Year.

Ahead of Easter 2017, Christian Palestinians looking to enter Jerusalem required the approval of the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of the Government’s Activities in the Territories.

On January 26, 2023, Miran Krikorian, the Armenian owner of Taboon and Wine Bar in the Old City of Jerusalem, received a call that a mob of Israeli settlers was attacking his bar in the Christian Quarter and shouting “Death to Arabs … Death to Christians.”

When he went to the police, the officer scolded him for bothering to report the crime.

A few days later, Armenians leaving a memorial service in the Armenian Quarter were attacked by Israeli settlers carrying sticks. An Armenian was pepper-sprayed as settlers scaled the walls of the Armenian convent, trying to take down its flag, which had a cross on it. When Armenians chased them away, the settlers began shouting: “Terrorist attack,” prompting the police to draw their guns on the Armenians, beating and arresting one of victims.

Hostility by Jews towards Jerusalem’s Christian community is persistent and covers all denominations. Since 2005, Christian celebrations around Holy Week, particularly Holy Fire Saturday, have brought military barricades and harsh treatment from soldiers and Jewish settlers alike, with the number of worshippers allowed inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre drastically limited, from as many as 11,000 historically during the Holy Fire ceremony to just 1,800 since last year.

Since Israel’s current Jewish extremist government came to power, incidents against Christians in Jerusalem have reportedly become more violent and common. At the beginning of the year, 30 Christian graves at the Protestant Mount Zion Cemetery were desecrated.

At the Church of the Flagellation, a Jewish settler attacked a statue of Jesus with a hammer, and an Israeli came to the Church of Gethsemane during Sunday religious services and tried to attack the priest with an iron bar. Being spat upon and shouted at by Israelis has become, for Christians, “a daily occurrence”. Victims of these incidents report little is done by police to catch or punish attackers.

“My fear is that these perpetrators are known, but they enjoy impunity,” said Munib Younan, bishop emeritus of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. “That’s the reason they are doing this.”

The Franciscans have set up cameras in all corners of their holy sites, which are becoming more closed off from the public due to the persistent attacks.

Ideologically, the primary source for this targeting of Christians and their holy sites comes from extremist Jewish groups, according to community and church leaders.

“Their mind is obsessed with the ‘Messianic syndrome’. They want to take over the whole land,” said Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem.

Jews know they are above the law, and they can harass Christians, even with guns and get away with it. They call Christians “pagans” and “idol worshippers”.

“The minister of national security is a lawyer who used to defend extremist Jews attacking Christian and other sites,” said one Armenian youth who was attacked in January, referring to Itamar Ben-Gvir. “What do you expect when the highest-ranking official in the equation is the most extremist?”

The Jews Are Spitting on Christians

On October 5, Israel’s minister in charge of crime and policing, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said it’s not a crime for Israeli Jews to spit on Christians.  Spitting on people of a minority religion would be considered a hate crime in most countries, but for the Israeli government it is simply ‘an old Jewish tradition’.

In July 2023, during the Catholic Pentecost ceremony, about 20 ultra-Orthodox Jews blew trumpets and cursed loudly to sabotage the ceremony. “We are very concerned about the religious freedom of Christians in Jerusalem,” said a representative of the U.S. State Department who was present at the ceremony.

The Upper Room, in which the Last Supper was said to have taken place, was the scene of a mass in June, but Jews blasted noise outside speakers to mar the event, and two weeks later a Jewish man smashed the windows of the Upper Room.

Since the beginning of 2023, a large number of cases of vandalism have been recorded in Jerusalem’s Old City including 20 hate crimes against Christians, such as the graffiti that reads “Jesus son of Mary the whore”.

In June, a conference under the title “Why are Jews spitting on non-Jews?” was held in the Old City, but was boycotted by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Robby Berman, an Israeli Jewish tour guide, said he was witness to two incidents of spitting, and that he is disturbed by the lack of enforcement in cases of harassment against Christians. After witnessing two boys spitting at Greek Orthodox priests at Jaffa Gate one Saturday morning, he flagged two Israeli police officers standing by them, but they refused to take action.

Berman was himself the victim of a spitting attack while chatting with a Palestinian security guard on the Via Dolorosa. As they were speaking, Berman said, “a modern ultra-Orthodox family walked passed — a father, a mother, a young couple, and many children. The young man spat at my legs,” as he was mistaken for a non-Jew.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

Featured image is from MD

Selected Articles: Same War Strategy from Ukraine to Palestine

December 18th, 2023 by Global Research News

Same War Strategy from Ukraine to Palestine

By Manlio Dinucci, December 16, 2023

The United States continues to support Israel in the war in Gaza while it continues to fuel the war in Ukraine directly and through NATO. The plan of the leaders of Israel involves the deportation of the population of Gaza to the Sinai desert and the cancellation of Gaza as a Palestinian territory, then doing the same thing with the West Bank.

From Colonialism to “Neoliberal Capitalism”: Low Wage “Special Economic Zones”. Integrating Developing Countries into Global Supply Chains: The Case of Jamaica

By Tina Renier, December 16, 2023

There are many challenges that have subverted Jamaica’s economic and social development since its political independence in 1962, including but not limited to low levels of growth, the struggle to industrialize, higher unemployment rates, particularly among young people and women and high debt. The first regime of free zones was introduced in 1976 to solve the problems of industrialization, curbing high unemployment, growing debt and creating benefits for the local industry.

Ukraine Is Bankrupt: Spanish Proposal to “Help Kiev” with Russian EU Frozen Assets. €211 Billion Owned by Russia’s Central Bank

By Ahmed Adel, December 16, 2023

The Spanish proposal to give Kiev the benefits of Russian assets frozen in the EU generates confusion about their amount and creates doubt about its legality and presumed risks to financial stability. In addition, the EU will ruin its image as a destination for foreign assets if it continues this pursuit to finance Kiev with Russian assets.

5G Danger: 13 Reasons 5G Wireless Technology Will be a Catastrophe for Humanity

By Makia Freeman, December 16, 2023

The 5G network uses and broadcasts frequencies which affect our sweat ducts, which act as antennae. In other words, our largest organ, the skin, can be influenced and manipulated by 5G.

Dr. Google Will See You Now

By Maryam Henein, December 15, 2023

Google no longer helps you find what you are truly looking for. Instead, they now customize results to satisfy their wants and needs. Individual results might vary. Google’s audacious tyranny, which includes censorship, surveillance, and mind control, is accelerating at a wicked clip. It’s hard to keep up.

Gaza: “I Can See the Children Haunted by Chaos, The Silent Cries of Injuries and Fear.” “There Is No Morality in U.S. Governance“

By Jim Miles, December 15, 2023

I can see the photos:  the faces of children haunted by chaos beyond their control; their faces of pain, the silent cries and screams of injuries and fear; parents’ faces, torn with grief and more silent cries of pain and injustice; blood washed across staircases and floors in hospitals, blood caked on faces of innocent people – clotted with the powder and grit of demolished concrete and plaster from homes, hospitals, and schools.

The Four Most Repeated Pieces of Likud Political Zionist Propaganda for Over 50 Years

By Hans Stehling, December 15, 2023

‘Israel came into existence in the most legitimate way possible — through a vote of the UN.’ In fact, UNGA Resolution 181 of 1947, was passed by just 33 votes, out of a current membership of 193 UN member states (17%). Hardly a unanimous decision by the global community of nations, then or now!

What Hamas Said: “Any bets on arrangements in Gaza without Hamas and the resistance factions are illusions and mirages.”

By Rima Najjar, December 15, 2023

You may be surprised to learn that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the organization with whom Israel negotiated the Oslo Accords in 1993, was designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” by the U.S. in 1997 and still holds that designation.

Election Fraud, Impeachment Inquiries, Prosecution of Political Opponents… Can American Politics Get Any Worse?

By Drago Bosnic, December 15, 2023

The mainstream propaganda machine’s (ab)use of the term “conspiracy theory” (coined by the likes of the CIA in an attempt to stifle and discredit any information that could hurt their interests) has made it virtually impossible to talk about election fraud in the United States.

The COVID-19 Vaccine: Why Data Lacks Persuasive Force. COVID Consciousness and Perceptions Determined by “Partisanship”

By John Leake, December 15, 2023

A recent KFF poll on perceptions an attitudes about the COVID-19 and other vaccines says it all in the byline: “Partisanship Remains Key Predictor of Views Of COVID-19, Including Plans To Get Latest COVID-19 Vaccine.”

Video: American Armies Are the Greatest Impediment to Peace in the Korean Peninsula

December 18th, 2023 by James Corbett

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[This was first published by GR on August 12, 2013.]

***

The Korean war never really ended, of course. It was just put on hold. The war itself lasted three years from 1950 to 1953, with both sides — the ROK in the south backed primarily by the US, and the DPRK in the North with significant military support from communist China — storming across the 38th parallel dividing north and south, only to be beaten back after vicious fighting.

The armistice bringing an end to open hostilities between the combatants was signed on July 27, 1953 by US Army Lieutenant General William Harrison, Jr. and North Korean General Nam Il. It established the 38th parallel, originally created as the demarcation line between the US-occupied South and the Soviet-occupied North during the post-war US military command of Korea, as the official border between the North and South. It established a 2.5 mile wide buffer zone, known as the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ, which to this day remains the most heavily defended border in the world. And it committed both sides to pursuing negotiations in expectation of a peace treaty to formally end the war.

And yet even now, 60 years after the war concluded, no such peace treaty has been signed. Over 28,000 US troops are still deployed in South Korea, ready to resume combat with North Korea. And the Korean nation remains divided along an arbitrary line on a map, splitting families from their ancestral homelands and creating yet another rift in a nation that has been conquered, ruled, occupied and divided throughout much of its history.

On the surface, the casual observer of Korea could be forgiven for forgetting that the nation is still at war. The South has been utterly transformed since the days of the fighting, with the impressive skyline of modern-day Seoul reflecting the country’s modern, high-tech economy. Even the DMZ has been tamed and gentrified, with souvenir shops and tourist attractions mingling seamlessly with military personnel whose presence at times seems more ceremonial than operational.

But beneath that surface remains the deep, lingering scars of a nation divided against itself, and the memories of a bitter, brutal war. Now, 60 years after the signing of the armistice, Korean peace activists are working harder than ever to confront the myths that have propped up and maintained this state of war, spearheading an effort to finally bring real peace to the Korean peninsula.

One such initiative was a recent international symposium which brought together peace activists, scholars, journalists and concerned citizens to events in Seoul, Pyongyang and Tokyo, all with the aim of confronting the enabling myths of the Korean war and working toward a peace treaty. The symposium took place around the 60th anniversary of the armistice and included the participation of Unified Progressive Party leader Jung Hee Lee and the Korean Alliance for Progressive Movements, as well as scholars like Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Professor Kiyul Chung of Tsinghua University in Beijing, journalist Xiong Lei of CCTV in China, activist Brian Becker of the ANSWER Coalition in Washington, and former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

Some of the myths that this symposium worked to deconstruct included the fundamental myth of the legitimacy of the war itself. The war effort in the South has long been characterized as a UN-led effort taking place under a United Nations Command that was authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 83. The legitimacy of this resolution has been challenged on several levels. In direct violation of Article 32 of the UN Charter, North Korea was not invited to participate in the Security Council deliberations on the dispute. The conflict was beyond the scope of UN action, as the North-South border skirmishes that drew UN attention was a civil war, and thus an internal matter beyond the mandate of UN intervention. And the Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council resolution, invalidating the action in the eyes of many legal scholars.

Even more fundamentally, the UN never in fact established a formal United Nations Command for the fighting. Security Council resolution 83 merely called on member states to provide assistance to the South Koreans, but the so-called UN Command was always primarily a US military effort, a point conceded by former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

The nuclear threat to the Korean peninsula was also a topic of discussion. Completely counter to the western narrative, however, which posits North Korea’s estimated six to eight nuclear devices and lack of intercontinental delivery system as some sort of existential threat to the United States, attendees stressed that the real nuclear threat is and always has come from Washington.

Given these facts, and given its history of scuttling attempts at serious peace negotiations, consensus at the symposium emerged around the notion that Washington and its 28,000 in country troops is the single greatest impediment to peace on the Korean peninsula.

As part of the events marking the 60th anniversary of the armistice, the symposium mounted a protest at the doorstep of the Demilitarized Zone, including speeches from a range of international speakers, and a march and rally outside the Yongsan US Army Garrison in central Seoul. The days events culminated in a candlelight vigil that drew 20,000 people out to Seoul Plaza for an overwhelming display of solidarity amongst Koreans truly interested in peace and reunification.

As this anniversary passes and another year without peace in Korea is added to the calendar, the Korean people increasingly take up the mantle of beginning the process of healing by themselves. It will be a long and difficult road, complicated by interference from all of the outside parties with a stake in using the Korean war as an excuse to militarize the region, but for this very reason it is important that peace is not delayed any longer. The people of Korea, the people of the Asia-Pacific, and indeed the people of the world, can’t wait any longer.

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Carta ao Presidente LULA e aos cidadãos brasileiros alertando sobre os perigos das injeções de Covid-19 em crianças

December 16th, 2023 by Dr. Nicole Delépine

Prezado Sr. Presidente

Ficamos chocados e muito tristes ao saber que o senhor pretende impor a injeção experimental de Covid em crianças de um a cinco anos de idade a partir de 2024.

Portanto, parece muito provável que o senhor tenha sido mal informado, pois, independentemente de suas convicções políticas, não se pode injetar injeções em crianças para nada (a Covid as expõe a menos complicações do que a gripe) e, assim, colocá-las em risco de doenças cardíacas, câncer ou outras patologias, ou até mesmo a morte.

Portanto, gostaríamos de lhe fornecer alguns detalhes que provavelmente foram ocultados e que esperamos que lhe permitam reverter essa decisão desastrosa.

1) A infecção por Covid-19 não é perigosa para crianças. Isso tem sido regularmente demonstrado em todos os artigos médicos publicados em revistas especializadas, reiterado pela imprensa internacional e pela OMS, e ilustrado por este gráfico da Santé Publique France:

Portanto, a criança não pode esperar nenhum benefício pessoal dessa injeção anticovid.

2) As injeções anticovid são ineficazes: elas não protegem contra doenças, transmissão ou morte.

Os dados globais da OMS sobre esse assunto são demonstrativos, uma vez que o uso generalizado de pseudovacinas foi seguido por um aumento de 6 vezes na taxa mensal de infecção.

No Brasil, a falha das vacinas em evitar a contaminação é óbvia se compararmos a evolução da epidemia no Brasil com as da Argélia, Madagascar e África, onde o tratamento precoce com antimaláricos foi utilizado e as injeções foram muito pouco usadas.

A política de “todas as vacinas” e a incapacidade das vacinas de proteger contra as formas graves da doença levaram o Brasil à 12ª maior taxa de mortalidade por milhão de pessoas no mundo (3.260 por milhão em 13/12/2023), no mesmo nível da Itália (3.267 por milhão) e do Reino Unido (3.438 por milhão), e de 20 a 100 vezes mais alta do que as taxas observadas na Argélia (153 por milhão), Costa do Marfim (29 por milhão) e Madagascar (48 por milhão), onde os níveis de vacinação são muito baixos.

As pseudovacinas contra a covid-19 se mostraram dramaticamente ineficazes contra a transmissão e a mortalidade da covid-19. A injeção em crianças não pode, portanto, reduzir a contaminação na população nem proteger as pessoas vulneráveis.

3) As injeções experimentais são prejudiciais a muitas crianças que não corriam o risco de contrair a covid-19.

Em 2021, o VAERS informou que, entre 3 de novembro e 19 de dezembro, foram recebidas 4.249 notificações de eventos adversos após a vacina da Pfizer em crianças com idade entre 5 e 11 anos.

Até 24 de junho de 2022, quando as injeções não foram autorizadas para crianças menores de 5 anos, o VAERS já havia registrado quase 60.000 efeitos colaterais das injeções da Pfizer em crianças menores de 17 anos, incluindo mais de 1.500 reações alérgicas graves, quase 4.000 internações hospitalares, 1.335 infartos do miocárdio e 125 mortes:

Em 6 de maio de 2021, perante o Senado do Texas, a Dra. Angelina Farella declarou sob juramento:

“Nunca vimos esse nível de efeitos colaterais em uma vacina sem que a FDA tomasse providências”…” A vacina contra o rotavírus foi retirada por 15 casos de efeitos colaterais não letais e a vacina contra a gripe suína foi retirada por 25 mortes.

Mas agora, de acordo com os próprios dados do CDC, estamos vendo um aumento de 12.000% nas mortes com essas vacinas e eles ainda estão falando em administrá-las a nossos filhos… Devemos interromper sua administração imediatamente para salvar nossos filhos”.

Em 28 de novembro de 2023, durante um debate sobre o fornecimento de medicamentos na Primeira Comissão do Senado, o novo Ministro da Saúde e Proteção Social da Colômbia, Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo, disse.

“Todos os colombianos vacinados [contra a covid-19] foram usados no maior experimento já realizado na história da humanidade. “Não podemos continuar a fazer experimentos com a comunidade colombiana.”

No Brasil, após o uso generalizado de vacinas anti-Covid, houve um aumento significativo na mortalidade por todas as causas, cronologicamente ligado às vacinas de reforço, suspeito de refletir sua toxicidade tardia.

Com praticamente nenhum risco de crianças morrerem de COVID-19 e um aumento significativo de mortes após essas vacinas, não há justificativa para essas injeções em crianças e muito menos para impô-las.

Ficamos à sua disposição, Senhor Presidente e caros cidadãos brasileiros, caso necessite de mais informações.

Dra. Nicole Delépine, oncologista

Dr. Gérard Delépine, oncologista

Artigo em francês : Lettre au Président LULA et aux citoyens brésiliens pour les alerter sur des dangers de l’injection Covid-19 pour l’enfant, Mondialisation.ca, 15 de dezembro de 2023.

Tradução : Mondialisation.ca 

A Rússia não é inimiga da Eslováquia – político de relevância.

December 16th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

A hostilidade com a Rússia está a começando a enfraquecer em alguns países da UE. Numa declaração recente, um importante político eslovaco deixou claro que o seu país não é inimigo de Moscou e que procura manter relações amistosas com os russos. Embora o bloco europeu continue a ser hostil em relação à Rússia, acredita-se que opiniões como estas começarão a crescer entre os países membros, à medida que a rivalidade com Moscou se revelar inviável.

A afirmação foi feita por Lubos Blaha, vice-líder do parlamento eslovaco. Segundo ele, a Eslováquia e a Rússia não são nações inimigas e devem procurar relações fraternas e mutuamente benéficas. Blaha também comentou o sentimento de gratidão por parte do povo eslovaco para com a Rússia pelo fato de o exército vermelho ter libertado a Eslováquia do controle nazista durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

O legislador também se comprometeu publicamente, a nível pessoal, a lutar para que as relações russo-eslovacas fossem normalizadas o mais rapidamente possível. Ele acredita que a normalização é apoiada pela maioria da população do país, dada a memória da guerra contra os nazistas e a herança eslava comum de ambos os povos.

“A Eslováquia quer ter boas relações com países de todos os lados do mundo (…) Sempre considerei a Rússia uma nação amiga (…) Estou certo de que a maioria dos eslovacos pensa o mesmo (…) A Rússia não é nosso inimigo. Pessoalmente, farei tudo para que as relações entre a Eslováquia e a Rússia voltem à normalidade. É isso que os eslovacos comuns querem”, escreveu ele nas suas redes sociais depois de participar numa importante reunião com o embaixador russo, Igor Bratchikov.

Sobre as conversas que teve com o diplomata russo, Blaha descreveu-as como “cordiais” e disse que Bratchikov o alertou sobre os planos da OTAN de fornecer caças F-16 ao regime de Kiev. Blaha deixou claro que não concorda com a medida e que o seu país é a favor das negociações de paz, opondo-se a qualquer política que leve à escalada do conflito.

“Para a Federação Russa, esta é uma linha vermelha e eles alertam que haveria um conflito aberto (…) a escalada poderia levar à terceira guerra mundial (…) A Eslováquia deve permanecer do lado da paz (.. .) Alguém quer mesmo uma guerra nuclear?!”, acrescentou.

Com isto, a Eslováquia junta-se à Hungria de Viktor Orban como um país que tende à neutralidade e à diplomacia, apesar de ser membro da UE e da OTAN. Esta mudança na política nacional é resultado de alguns acontecimentos recentes no país, como a eleição de Robert Fico como Primeiro-Ministro. Acusado de ser “pró-russo” e “agente do Kremlin” pela propaganda ocidental, Fico foi enfático em sua campanha eleitoral ao dizer que não enviaria “uma única bala” a Kiev.

Obviamente, os meios de comunicação ocidentais descrevem esta postura como uma espécie de “aliança com a Rússia”, mas na verdade é apenas uma política estratégica que traz benefícios para a Eslováquia. Apoiar o regime ucraniano não faz qualquer sentido para o país, pois coloca a Eslováquia numa crise diplomática com a Rússia, além de obrigar o governo a gastar em ajuda militar ao lado perdedor do conflito.

Os dois governos anteriores da Eslováquia colocaram o país numa situação delicada devido ao seu apoio sistemático à Ucrânia. A Eslováquia não só aderiu às sanções suicidas impostas pela UE, mas também enviou treze pacotes de ajuda militar a Kiev. No total, o apoio foi avaliado em mais de 700 milhões de euros, sendo exportadas armas de elevado valor estratégico, como veículos blindados, sistemas de defesa aérea e caças MiG-29, para o regime neonazista. A Eslováquia nunca teve nada a ganhar com este tipo de política, apenas obedecendo passivamente aos planos de guerra da OTAN, o que mostra como as atitudes de Fico restauraram a soberania eslovaca.

Neste sentido, recentemente, o governo eslovaco também deixou clara a sua oposição absoluta à entrada da Ucrânia na UE. Aderindo à posição húngara, o governo Fico afirmou que nenhum “procedimento especial” para Kiev pode ser tolerado. Segundo o Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros eslovaco, a Ucrânia deve realmente passar por todas as reformas necessárias para se adaptar ao bloco europeu, se quiser realmente avançar com o seu processo de adesão. O mesmo foi dito em relação à Moldávia, um país que foi encorajado pelo Ocidente a envolver-se em hostilidades contra a Rússia na região da Transcarpátia.

Na verdade, a emergência de uma alternativa política ao lobby pró-Kiev dentro da UE mostra um caminho de esperança para os pacifistas europeus. A política de segurança do continente depende obviamente de relações amistosas e estáveis ​​com a Rússia, uma vez que a geografia coloca a Rússia e a Europa Ocidental como parceiros naturais em desafios comuns. Ao ser hostil à Rússia, a UE está simplesmente a prejudicar os seus próprios interesses e a lutar inútilmente contra a sua própria condição geográfica enquanto vizinha da Rússia. Por outras palavras, a UE está apenas a obedecer irracionalmente aos planos de guerra dos EUA, sem ter em conta as suas próprias circunstâncias locais.

Com o fortalecimento de governos anti-guerra e neutros dentro do bloco, a tendência é que cada vez mais políticos como Fico e Orban ganhem popularidade nos processos eleitorais europeus, dando uma nova esperança para o futuro das relações Rússia-UE.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

Artigo em inglês :

https://infobrics.org/post/40069/

Imagem : InfoBrics

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

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

From Colonialism to “Neoliberal Capitalism”: Low Wage “Special Economic Zones”. Integrating Developing Countries into Global Supply Chains: The Case of Jamaica

December 16th, 2023 by Tina Renier

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In one of his video lectures for the course, “Decent Work in Global Supply Chains” offered by Global Labour University, Professor Praveen Jha discussed the extent to which developing and emerging economies have been integrated into the global supply chains or whether integration has this integrated perpetuated the condition of dependency.

Before delving into my analysis, I would like to share an overview or background of how free zones, as valuable mechanisms in the global supply chains (GScs), have evolved over time or the background on how they were introduced.

Professor Jha’s discussion is quite relevant and applicable to the Jamaican context as it is a small island developing state in the Caribbean region that has a unique labour, a political and economic history that is inextricably linked with indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery among peoples of African descent, colonialism, indentured and other forms of unfree labour and accumulation of capital and profits by former Empires, private interests and corporations.

There are many challenges that have subverted Jamaica’s economic and social development since its political independence in 1962, including but not limited to low levels of growth, the struggle to industrialize, higher unemployment rates, particularly among young people and women and high debt. The first regime of free zones was introduced in 1976 to solve the problems of industrialization, curbing high unemployment, growing debt and creating benefits for the local industry.

The success of this regime was that there was a broad-based participation of labour unions and legislation passed to protect workers’ interests and the majority of disenfranchised Jamaicans. In terms of establishing backwards and forward linkages, this was unsuccessful under the import substitution industrialization (ISI) model because there were restrictions on capital inflows that stifled growth and heavy government spending on social services, and vulnerability to external shocks such as stagflation from the OPEC oil crisis led to high debt with the balance of debt payment problems. 

The first regime of zones continued under the export-oriented industrialization (EOI) model and the neoliberal phase of capitalism (the 1980s to early 2000s) amidst the attempt to meet balance of debt payment obligations by the IMF and World Bank, attract foreign direct investment and create jobs to solve the ongoing labour problems. The first regime of zones failed due to a combination of domestic and external reasons. In terms of domestic reasons, the first regime of zones was unsuccessful because they heavily depended on sectors or industries (garment assembly, manufacturing and informatics in the 1990s) that were predicated on the use of cheap labour, low and semi-skilled labour and because they were low-valued added, there was little to no benefits for the local economy.

From a public policy perspective, the first regime zones failed at the domestic level because there was little or no strong policy coordination among government ministries, agencies and bodies with respect to the promotions, marketing, and policies to attract and retain investment, creating a robust regulatory framework for zone establishment and investing significantly in social and physical infrastructure (physical space for zone occupancy), investment in research and development and higher-value-added economic activities and industries that would benefit the local economy and quality education, skills development and training of the working age population and labour force in areas that would prepare them for higher value-added and decent jobs and sectors that are globally competitive. Externally, the old regime of zones were unsuccessful in significant changes in the international trade environment, with investors relocating to other countries where there is cheaper labour, lower labour standards and fewer red tapes or bureaucratic procedures involved in establishing zones, greater competition in sectors and industries and the as a small island developing state, the old regime of zones in Jamaica are even more vulnerable to external shocks such as economic crises (stagflation).

It is against this background, the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were introduced under the Andrew Holness-led government administration (2016- present) to replace the old free zone regime. Special Economic Zones have been introduced in accordance with World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations concerning international competitiveness and to promote foreign direct investment and economic growth through job creation. It has been reported that there are over 200 Special Economic Zones in Jamaica, and they have provided jobs for over 50,000 Jamaicans and have been hailed by government officials, including the Prime Minister, The Most Honourable Andrew Holness, as a vital component of integration in global supply chains (Jamaica Gleaner, June 14, 2022).

Some of the significant strengths of the new regime of zones are greater policy coordination among government ministries, bodies and agencies and more transparent and stronger guidelines in national legislation regarding prohibiting economic activities within zones that violate environmental protection, heritage and labour laws. Greater policy coordination among ministries, bodies and agencies is evident in the fact that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade promotes the wide array of international trade agreements and developments in transport and information communication technologies that makes Jamaica an attractive location for foreign investment while JAMPRO promotes and markets Jamaica as an ideal place in the Caribbean region for foreign direct investment because of its highly adaptable and productive labour force, close geographic proximity and affinity to North America, stable parliamentary democracy and attractive benefits for investors.

The Jamaica Special Economic Zone Authority (JSEZA) regulates and provides guidelines to developers, occupants and users in zones. It also recognizes that under the old regime of zones, there was little record keeping among zone occupants or companies in the zones and as a result, this hindered aspects of development and thus, recently, stipulates occupants to provide information on how their proposed economic activity will contribute to the local economy and other vital data upon their application for approval to be a developer or occupant or zone user under the Special Economic Zone Regulation, 2017. Despite the fact that there has been a surge in foreign direct investment towards SEZs as part of the global supply chains in the Caribbean (up by 39% or USD$3.8 billion), according to the 2022 World Investment Report, SEZs as a strategy of development have perpetuated problems of dependency, hindering the social components of development that are not captured in dominant econometric data such as GDP and FDI (decent work deficits, people’s sense of well-being and dignity, quality of life associated with the work they do and or non-productive activities).

Additionally, foreign investors and multi-national companies can still wield considerable leverage over domestic, regulatory and investment policy framework that suits their interests. The Developers and zone occupants are entitled to several benefits, including custom duty exemptions, 12.5% income tax for developers or zone occupants, promotional tax credit, exempted from paying income taxes derived from rentals or properties in the zone and for an occupant, one of their legal rights under the SEZ Regulations, 2017 (Section 39 1 h) is to transfer funds freely in and out of Jamaica in accordance with the Act and applicable law. This confirms Italian Marxist, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and is in congruence with the assertion posed by Dr. Michael Fichter in one of the video lectures for this course about corporations and private interests aligned to corporations who use hegemony through both coercion and consensus.

One of the most prominent sectors or industries in Jamaica’s Special Economic Zones is business product outsourcing (BPO) which offers a wide range of services from low value-added services such as call centres (outbound and inbound calls from clients from across the world) and higher value-added services such as information technology, technical support services, administrative services, legal services and health services but the sector is still plagued by chronic decent work deficits.

There are varying subjective experiences of workers in the call centres or BPO sector, which is highly dependent on the sector size, company size and policies for workers’ labour, trade union representation and human resource management policies.

However, the overarching picture is that these jobs have decent work deficits, including low wages, long and inflexible working hours, deplorable working conditions, limited or no social protection measures for workers, limited or no occupational health and safety, discrimination and different forms of abuse and harassment, and prohibition of workers’ rights to engage in social dialogue, collective bargaining, right to strike and for trade union representation- according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) Reports in 2011 and 2021. Numerous local newspaper articles (Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Jamaica Star and Nationwide News) have shared testimonials from workers in call centres or the BPO sector explaining that their working conditions are akin to slavery, gruelling working hours, they face verbal abuse from supervisors when their daily productivity targets are not met, discriminatory attitudes and comments from clients based in North America, no sick leave policy and have to be rushed to a hospital in near-death conditions and where health policies or insurance or promised, they have been denied, and with respect to their rights to social dialogue, there is a testimony that expressed that no one is on the side of call centre workers.

In the current pandemic context, local newspaper articles have highlighted that before lockdown protocols, many call centres had to be closed because their workers contracted COVID-19, and there are other workers who reported under anonymity explaining that their call centre had not put in adequate health and safety protocols to keep their employees safe and other testimonies that highlight the fear of speaking about breaches in their rights and an account of a female worker who was sexually assaulted and had to migrate out of fear of the repercussions for reporting the issue.

Representatives from trade unions, academia, think tanks and civil society organizations have proposed progressive recommendations that would better protect workers while ensuring economic growth. These recommendations include but are not limited to more flexible working hours and arrangements for workers in the BPO sector, changes in contractual arrangements to ensure enhanced job security and social protection, greater measures to ensure that workers are healthy and safe and sound investment climate, the focus of the Jamaican government still remain economic growth through job creation and not necessarily the types of jobs that are created. This case example is ideal for illustrating the paradoxes of integrating into the Global Supply Chains and that when the meaning of development is equated with economic growth and FDI injection, it comes with severe social costs, especially deficits in decent work.

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Ukraine is Bankrupt: Spanish Proposal to “Help Kiev” with Russian EU Frozen Assets. €211 Billion owned by Russia’s Central Bank

December 16th, 2023 by Ahmed Adel

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The Spanish proposal to give Kiev the benefits of Russian assets frozen in the EU generates confusion about their amount and creates doubt about its legality and presumed risks to financial stability. In addition, the EU will ruin its image as a destination for foreign assets if it continues this pursuit to finance Kiev with Russian assets.

At the end of October, Ursula von der Leyen said that the European Commission is still working on a proposal to seize the profits derived from Russian state assets frozen in the EU and transfer them to Ukraine for its post-war reconstruction. According to her, the value of frozen Russian sovereign assets amounts to €211 billion, whilst according to estimates by authorities in Belgium, the country where most of them are deposited, the Russian assets frozen there could yield around €3 billion in annual benefits.

Spain, the country that assumes the rotating presidency of the EU for this semester, has continued to advance Leyen’s plan. Madrid estimates that the benefits of Russian Central Bank reserves frozen in EU countries could generate between €15 billion and €17 billion for Kiev by 2027.

However, the idea generated great scepticism in some member states, such as France and Germany. The timeliness of the push is doubted, and there is a risk to the commitment to help Ukraine. The European Central Bank also fears that the initiative could affect the stability and reputation of the euro.

According to diplomatic sources from Politico magazine, the reluctance of several countries regarding the Spanish proposal lies in the conviction that it may take years before the money reaches Kiev. The calculation applied by Spain to conclude the amount of benefits has also generated confusion.

The idea of ​​reinvesting tied-up Russian assets and using the profits to support Ukraine is not new and was first proposed by the European Commission in late November 2022. The Commission estimated then that rebuilding Ukraine would require at least €600 billion, but the cost has likely skyrocketed since then.

Under international law, state assets enjoy immunity from execution. Regardless of the changes that are introduced in legislation, the EU cannot confiscate these reserves, which are distributed throughout the bloc and other G7 countries. In fact, the European Commission considers them immobilised since the ECB cannot use them.

Russian entities, for instance, could claim that they are entitled to some of the profits generated from the investment of the frozen assets and challenge the decision in both the General Court of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, Francis Bond, a leading practitioner on international financial sanctions matters from the Macfarlanes law firm told Euronews. 

In addition, Russia will have the right to go to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, which is the arbitration court of the World Bank, where these types of disputes are settled. This would not bode well for Spain, which has a long history of losing these types of cases.

The European Commission intends to provide Kiev with €17 billion in subsidies and another €33 billion in low-interest loans until 2027 to avoid Ukraine’s bankruptcy. Amid the EU’s economic recession, the confiscation and sale of frozen Russian assets emerges as a possible way to raise funds for Ukraine at a time when they are scarce for community policies.

But given the complication, Spain’s proposal has been received with astonishment by several foreign ministries, where, according to Politico, they also doubt that Madrid understands the thinking of the rest of the EU. Whether Madrid’s real objective is to divert extra contributions from the Ukraine crisis towards other budgetary areas, such as migration and EU competitiveness, is questioned.

A source in Brussels assumes that the Spanish government would be willing to use the funds promised to Ukraine for other expenses, such as migration. In any case, the content of the proposals will only be discussed in depth on December 14 and 15 during the EU leaders’ summit.

Most of Russia’s frozen foreign exchange reserves are in the EU, specifically at Euroclear, a financial security clearing and settlement house based in Brussels that acts as a depository. It is estimated that it holds around €180 billion in Russian securities. Luxembourg also hosts another clearinghouse with frozen Russian assets, Clearstream. But both Belgium and Luxembourg want guarantees that they will not be forced to assume all the legal and financial risks of an unprecedented measure.

Russian assets frozen under EU sanctions are divided into private assets and public assets. The private assets owned by individuals and companies are worth around €18.9 billion, including yachts, boats, helicopters, real estate, paintings, and other works of art. Of the 35 assets located in Spain, only 11 are listed in the name of people sanctioned by the EU. On the other side are public assets owned by state entities, specifically the €211 billion of international reserves owned by the Central Bank of Russia.

When they reach maturity, intermediaries reinvest them and generate a profit. But they can also generate losses. And, as Francis Bond explains, if the investments lose money, the European Commission would have to guarantee the Russian assets with public money or risk an avalanche of legal action from the asset owners. Given these conditions, attempts to redirect Russian assets and profits to Kiev is nothing more than a pipedream that will not eventuate unless the entire European Union wants to ruin its reputation and trustworthiness across the world.

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

Featured image is from febris / Adobe Stock

Stessa strategia di guerra dall’ucraina alla palestina

December 16th, 2023 by Manlio Dinucci

Zelensky, invitato a Washington da Biden, preme sul Congresso USA perché approvi la legge di spesa che include altri 50 miliardi di dollari di aiuti militari per l’Ucraina. Scrive il New York Times:

“La controffensiva ucraina lanciata sei mesi fa è fallita. Kiev deve fare i conti con il calo del personale militare,  delle riserve di munizioni e del sostegno Occidentale. Mosca sta dimostrando la capacità di sostenere una guerra prolungata.”

In tale situazione, scrive sempre il New York Times,  “Stati Uniti e Ucraina sono alla ricerca di una nuova strategia dopo il fallimento della controffensiva: il Pentagono invia il generale Aguto, che comanda il sostegno all’Ucraina da una base in Germania, a trascorrere lunghi periodi di tempo a Kiev. Il generale Aguto lavorerà più direttamente con la leadership militare del Paese”.

Mentre continuano ad alimentare direttamente e tramite la NATO la guerra in Ucraina, gli Stati Uniti  continuano a sostenere Israele nella guerra a Gaza. Il piano dei capi di Israele prevede la deportazione della popolazione di Gaza nel deserto del Sinai e la cancellazione di Gaza quale territorio palestinese, facendo poi la stessa cosa con la Cisgiordania.

La strategia statunitense, sostenuta da Israele, mira ad allargare la guerra nella regione mediorientale, dove  gli USA stanno perdendo la loro posizione predominante di fronte all’avanzare dei progetti politico-economici di Russia e Cina, tra cui il prossimo allargamento dei BRICS ad Iran e Arabia Saudita.

Per sostenere questa strategia di guerra gli Stati Uniti continuano ad accrescere la loro già enorme spesa militare. Il Senato ha approvato una legge sulla Difesa da 886 miliardi di dollari, cui si aggiungono altre spese di carattere militare  portando il totale a oltre 1.200 miliardi di dollari, circa la metà della spesa militare mondiale.

Manlio Dinucci

 

VIDEO :

YOUTUBE :

BYOBLU.COM :

https://www.byoblu.com/2023/12/15/stessa-strategia-di-guerra-dallucraina-alla-palestina/

The Worldwide “Pandemic Treaty” and the Covid-19 Vaccine: Countering Propaganda with Truth. William Makis and Naomi Wolf

December 16th, 2023 by Michael Welch

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“I believe the reason why these autopsies are not being allowed is because I believe most of them would show the vaccine as the cause of death. I believe the spike protein would be found in damaged tissues like the heart, like the brain, or it would be found in tumors. That would mean that the vaccines would immediately have to be taken off the market, and you have got a multi hundred billion dollar industry that would come to a crashing halt immediately.”

– Dr. William Makis (From this week’s interview)

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“Imagine Disease X is as infectious as measles with the fatality rate of Ebola [67%]. Somewhere in the world, it’s replicating, and sooner or later, somebody will start feeling sick” [1]

This is the type of messaging that has been circulating in mainstream media in recent months. It is also a warning consistent with Bill Gates, the guru of all things immunological.

“We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time.” [2]

As past episodes of the Global Research News Hour, and articles all over Global Research have indicated, the ‘vaccine’ seems not to be quite as safe and effective as the major health organizations and mainstream media have broadcast. And awareness of this comes from people and their loved ones and their experiences with getting the jab. (See for example the experiences relayed by the National Citizens Inquiry: Canada’s Response to COVID-19.)

In spite of these experiences, the guardians of the major Health Care authorities now seemingly bought and paid for by Big Pharma continue the standard verse that the COVID-19 Vaccines are safe and effective and that anyone who says otherwise is passing on “dis-information.” [3][4]

People the second time around may not be as anxious as the first to take the vaccine.

Could the next pandemic, if and when it comes, have another trick up it’s sleeve to cause even the most hesitant to get the jab? This is just one of many other factors we share this week on the Global Research News Hour.

In our first half hour, we touch base with Dr. William Makis. The physician who has dedicated significant tabulating the sudden deaths of physicians, athletes, mothers and so on as being possibly related to the COVID vaccination tabulates his conclusions about the “Big One” that is being promoted in mainstream media today. He also talks about how we can separate a real pandemic from a “Pharma-profit” motivated fake one.

In our second half hour, we cross paths with renowned author Naomi Wolf. She talks about new information from the confidential Pfizer report revealed through a Freedom of Information Report. She also speaks about her latest book, Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age, which reveals the price she appears to have paid for digging too deep into the forbidden COVID vaccine story.

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

Dr. Naomi Wolf is a former political consultant and Co-Founder of the DailyClout, a platform that empowers democracy-building. She is the author of the best-selling The Beauty Myth, which launched her reputation as a leading voice within Third Wave feminism, and she authored the 2023 book Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age (Chelsea Green Publishing.)

(Global Research News Hour episode 413)

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Transcript of Dr. William Makis, December 11, 2023

Global Research: You blame COVID for a lot of the deaths due to turbo cancer, heart attacks of youth and dying suddenly. How did you first become convinced that these deaths, though tragic, were positively linked to the shot?

William Makis: So, I started looking into excess mortality figures for all the highly COVID vaccinated countries. You’re looking at excess mortality in Canada, for example, since the vaccines were rolled out. The excess mortality in 2022 is on the level of about 1 in 1,000. So, we have excess deaths of about 30-35,000 in Canada.

Here in Alberta, the province where I live, it was in the mainstream media that in 2021, the number one cause of death was “Cause unknown.” And I can tell you I’ve spoken to many doctors and, you know, they all tell me that doctors are not allowed to conduct autopsies. They are not allowed to conduct proper autopsies. And if they do, they are not allowed to do the proper staining of the tissues or the spike proteins, for example, for the vaccine spike protein. Or even for the other viral proteins. So, doctors are not allowed to search for a cause of death that may be due to long COVID or that may be due to vaccine. They are not allowed to do it.

And that’s the fascinating phenomenon about this, is you see similar excess mortality figures in the United States, on the order of 1 in a 1,000, so yeah, last year that would be about 300,000 excess deaths. There’s a number of publications that talk about that. United Kingdom excess deaths, Australia, Japan, Germany, these are all highly COVID vaccinated countries with a high excess mortality that no one is able to explain. And when you see it in the mainstream media, when they ask the health authorities, they have no answer for it.

You know, they’ll speculate, they’ll say, ‘Well, maybe it’s long COVID, or maybe it’s the stress of the lockdowns. Maybe it’s missed appointments, missed doctor appointments,’ because a lot of doctor appointments were cancelled. That’s the way they’re trying to explain away the excess cancer deaths, for example. But no one really seems to have an explanation.

But the smoking gun there is that, you know, if you want to have an explanation, all you have to do is conduct the proper autopsies on all these sudden and unexplained deaths.

And I wanted to clarify just, you know, with your introductory statement is that I do not claim that these deaths are due to the vaccine, because we don’t know. It is the number one suspicion that I have on my differential diagnosis. So, as a physician, whenever you’re faced with a medical issue you take all the available information you have and you put together a differential diagnosis of the potential things that might be causing that issue, and then you conduct the investigations to prove what is causing the problem. And the proof that is required here are the autopsies and they’re not being done.

And so, I have my suspicions. And as a medical professional, you know, I put all the information together and I’m allowed to have my differential diagnosis. And you know what? Long COVID is on my differential diagnosis as a possibility. But we need to then conduct the proper investigations and those are not being done, and I can tell you, no one is doing them. The autopsies are not being done in Canada, they are not being done in the United States, they are not being done in UK, they are not being done in Australia, New Zealand. And the publications that have come out in the literature on autopsies where they did conduct such staining, there are a few reports from South Korea, from Japan, from Germany, and you know, a couple of research places in the United States. But in terms of the general public having access to that kind of autopsy being done, it is not allowed.

And that is a huge red flag and a huge smoking gun for me, in that I believe the reason why these autopsies are not being allowed is because, I believe, most of them would show the vaccine as the cause of death. I believe the spike protein would be found in damaged tissues like the heart, like the brain. Or it would be found in tumours. That would mean that the vaccines would immediately have to be taken off the market and you’ve got a multi-hundred billion dollar industry that would come to a crashing halt immediately and I think that’s why the autopsies are simply not being done. There is too much money in this technology and in these pharmaceutical products.

GR: Yeah. Okay, well getting back to your article, you listed a number of possible culprits: Nipah, Marburg and Ebola, Disease X, or a combination between one of those and influenza or RSV. Are you seeing more recent signs hinting at the particular form that the next pandemic is going to take? I mean, is it visible yet?

WM: No, I don’t believe that it is visible. I listed these possibilities for several reasons: I believe that the next variant, whether – like, the next COVID variant is not scaring anybody. You know, you will have – let’s look at the vaccine updates right now. We’ve got a new variant, now it’s JN.1. We’ve had recent variants like the Kraken variant, XDB.1.5. And these were actually what the latest booster shots were designed for. The booster shots that just came out in the past month or two. The vaccine update, right now, of the latest booster – and we’re being told that, you know, the original vaccines are off the market, you know, they’re not available anymore and now you have to take the tailored booster which is specifically tailored to the recent variants. The uptake is 10 percent. It’s —

GR: Yeah.

WM: — plateaued at about 10 percent, give or take a percent, right?

GR: Yeah.

WM: And that is true for Canada, which you would expect the uptake to be much higher given the propaganda that the health authorities have engaged in. They’re expecting uptake of 70, 80, 85 percent, the same uptake that we had with the initial vaccines, and the uptake is about 10 percent. The same uptake – you know, you have the same uptake in the United States, in the UK, Australia. You know, there is only a very small group of people who are terrified enough to continue taking these vaccines. They’re on their sixth shot or they’re on their seventh shot. That number is only down to 10 percent, which means 90 percent of people have no interest in taking these vaccines anymore even if the health authorities are recommending them. For all age groups, down to six months old in Canada. And I believe the United States as well for pregnant women, and so on.

So, well you have a problem here is that – the problem for the authorities is that no one is afraid of the new COVID variants anymore. And no one wants the COVID vaccines anymore. You got only 10 percent is not enough to sustain, you know, this multi-hundred billion dollar industry that has grown up around this mRNA lipid nanoparticle technology. Certainly not enough to sustain all the factories that are being built around the world that will be producing mRNA vaccines, each factory producing hundreds of millions of shots. There is no demand for it. And so, you’re not going to scare people with the new Covid variant.

What you need, if you’re going to scare people – and this comes out of, you know, various literature around vaccine hesitancy and so on, is you’re going to have to scare people with a virus that has a 30, 40, 50, 60 percent fatality rate. And there’s very few viruses that can actually do that. And they’re the ones that, you know, you’ve just mentioned: Ebola, Marburg, Nipah virus. All of those can get up to 50, 60 percent fatality. There is also influenza H5N1. And there may be a couple of other really exotic viruses like Lassa virus. There’s Zika, there’s some really, you know, exotic ones. But there’s very few viruses that will give you that kind of a fatality rate and usually, you know, they are viruses that don’t spread easily.

So, you know, you’ve got your Ebola outbreaks in certain locations in Africa. They are usually very contained to a small geographical area, they are self-limiting, you know, they don’t spread. And so, if they want, if the pharmaceutical industry, for example, and all the people that they’ve bribed, all the politicians that they’ve bribed, the media that they’ve bribed to scare people into taking vaccines, if they want people to come back and start taking mRNA vaccines again, they are going to need to scare people to such a degree that those people who said, ‘I don’t want anymore COVID booster shots,’ are going to say, ‘No, I need to get this new mRNA vaccine.’ And the only thing that can do that is something with a very high case fatality rate.

GR: What if an actual thing, an actual pandemic came out that was not influenced by big pharmaceuticals and the pandemic? Wouldn’t that end up taking a very different direction than the direction we’re seeing right now?

WM: Well, you know what, I mean it is always possible that, you know, there will be an outbreak of some novel pathogen with, you know, with new mutations and so on. Obviously, you know, we haven’t seen it to date. Where the interesting situation arises is that, there is gain of function research being done on a lot of these pathogens to actually make them more virulent and to be able to spread more easily among humans.

And so, for example, for Nipah virus there is gain of function being researched – now there was Senate, US Senate, testimony last year about this, that there is evidence that, in the Wuhan lab – in the same lab that we suspect there may have been a leak of the COVID-19 virus, that had gain of function research on it – that they were working on gain of function research to enhance the transmissibility and fatality rate of the Nipah virus, for example. And I believe the Canadian Winnipeg lab was involved in sending some samples to Wuhan again with the Nipah virus.

GR: That’s the Winnipeg lab, right?

WM: That’s the Winnipeg lab. So unfortunately, there is ongoing gain of function research going on in labs around the world. And so, we might be facing a situation again where, you know, there is an outbreak of a novel pathogen and we’re again stuck wondering, well, is it something that’s arisen naturally out of a – sort of a natural evolution among, you know, animals and then it makes the jump to humans? Or is it again something that has been released accidentally or intentionally that was a gain of function experiment that scientists had been working on for years? And we might be faced, you know, with the same conundrum all over again.

But again, I think it is important for people to understand that you have to be – you have to question these things. And you have to question every official narrative, because when it came to COVID-19, we were lied to about everything that was part of the official narrative, we were lied to from the very beginning. And then, of course, once the vaccines were rolled out, we were lied to about the vaccines: about the safety, about the efficacy, and so on.

So, my point is that, question – don’t approach, you know, any new pandemic with fear. Approach it with an inquisitive nature, ask the hard questions, and sort of peer back beyond the propaganda to see what’s really hiding behind what the mainstream media wants us to believe.

GR: So, are you saying you have like a pandemic protocol as such? A way to, you know, how are you going to address it and then how do you address it for yourself and for your loved ones?

WM: Yes. It’s basically almost like a logical exercise. You know, I sort of call it sort of a three-step guide to Dr. Makis’s guide to new pandemics. But it really is just a mental exercise. And the mental exercise is as follows: you look at whatever pathogen is being talked about as – let’s say there’s an outbreak of a new pathogen and they tell us. It’s Nipah virus, it started in this local village. Several hundred people are sick, WHO is flying people out there and so on. Well, learn about the Nipah virus, what is it, and so on. But more importantly, has there been any gain of function research done about that particular virus and I think that’s very important. And you know, you can find that information.

So number 1) Has there been gain of function research done recently? Number 2) Have there been simulation exercises already done on this virus? And interestingly, for example, there was a big tabletop exercise done by John Hopkins, I believe it was 2018, on the Nipah virus. And it was supposed to be like a hybrid between a Nipah virus and like an influenza, so that it was more easily transmissible through, you know, as an airborne pathogen because the Nipah virus, you have to get exposed to it with physical contact of contaminated, you know, fruit or saliva from the bats or what have you. But if it’s been modified in some ways that it’s much more easily transmissible through the air, that can only been done through gain of function research, for example.

And they actually did this tabletop exercise, it was done for a whole day hosted by John Hopkins. It was called Disease X. And you know, now we here about Disease X in the media, but a lot of people will not go back and find out that, well, there was a tabletop exercise, a simulation. And that simulation, you know, I think over 20 months they simulated a 150,000,000 deaths. They simulated shutting down travel. They simulated shutting down even travel state-to-state within the United States, so people were not allowed to go from one state to the other. Of course, there were new vaccines that they simulated and there was, you know, the vaccines – well, there was a limited number of vaccines, so you know, you have to give it to health care workers and you have to decide who to give it to and so on. Obviously, economic chaos and turmoil, political turmoil. And I believe in that particular simulation, what came out of it was that they had to nationalize the US health care system. So, bring it completely under the government – under government control.

Now these are interesting things to know about and there have been other simulations on other pathogens in the last five years. I think that’s important to look at.

And the last one which I think is really important, which is where a lot – you know, the smoking gun is going to be is: is there an mRNA vaccine that is already in trials for this pathogen or infrastructure has been put in place to quickly roll out an mRNA vaccine for this new outbreak? And we’ve been told by the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna that they have put infrastructure into place to be able to roll out any new mRNA vaccine for any new outbreak in less than six months. And they have distribution infrastructure in place as well in collaboration with Gavi or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be able to roll out hundreds of millions of doses of a new mRNA vaccine to the broader population. People have to be aware of this. And to me, these are red flags and warning signs.

And seeing as to the injuries and deaths that we’ve seen from the COVID vaccines, you know, I personally would not trust any mRNA vaccine no matter what the pathogen is when they roll it out.

GR: Okay. I’ve only got about 30 seconds left, but I just wanted to get your take on the National Citizens Inquiry which you participated in, as did I. I mean, are you comfortable with the process and all of the recommendations they put forward?

WM: Absolutely. Now the National Citizens Inquiry, what’s incredible about it is the testimonies. The testimonies are key. There was over 300 testimonies, you had doctors, most of the freedom fighting doctors testified, including myself. I gave a three-hour testimony. Scientists who have been, you know, very honest about their work. There were people who were harmed by the vaccine mandates. There were military, there were lawyers. I encourage people to look at some of those testimonies, you know, pick some of the testimonies that interest you, look at them. The recommendations are very extensive and it’s basically an overhaul of our court systems, an overhaul of the way we approach health care. You know, the colleges that block doctors from being able to treat patients and so on. Like, there is a tremendous amount in terms of the recommendations which will obviously be extremely difficult to implement and I think a lot of politicians will be scared to – one important thing to note that I want to note, is that 63 politicians were invited to give testimony on behalf of the federal government and the provincial government and they refused. They did not give testimonies to justify the measures that they took during the pandemic, to justify the roll out of the vaccines and so on. So, that is a key thing to note is that government officials refused to participate in this.

GR: Well, we’ll be snapping on our safety belts this winter. Dr. Makis, it’s indeed been a great pleasure speaking with you and thanks for appearing on the show.

WM: Thank you very much for having me.

Transcript of Naomi Wolf, December 7, 2023

Global Research: So, you spoke to us about the report findings back in May. Is there more information you’ve gotten in the last six months that you would feel obliged to share with our listeners?

Naomi Wolf: Oh, gosh, so much more. Right now, probably when I last spoke with you, we had about 50 reports. And for viewers who are not sure about the details of that, I oversee a project called the War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Research Analysts and it’s 3,250 doctors and scientists who have joined forces as volunteers to read through the 450,000 pages of Pfizer internal documents released under a court order by a successful lawsuit against the FDA. And of course, the FDA had asked the court to keep these hidden for 75 years; now we know why.

So, probably when I last spoke with you, I was already reporting that they – these volunteers have found in these documents evidence – overwhelming evidence – of the greatest crime against humanity in recorded history. And I don’t say that lightly as the granddaughter of someone who lost nine siblings to the Holocaust. But in terms of scale, this is bigger.

We found, at that point, 1,225 deaths in three months. Thousands of neurological damage cases. Strokes, heart attacks, blood clots, lung clots, thrombotic thrombocytopenia, dementia, Alzheimer’s, cancers, turbo cancers. And many of these reports showed that the adverse events including deaths took place within 48 hours of the injection. The liver damage, the kidney damage report, the stroke report, the adverse events were temporally located shortly after the injection.

But the most concerning, to me, finding I may not have – well, I have new news for you since then: six months ago, we were starting to be aware that there is a focus, an intense focus, in the Pfizer documents on destroying human reproduction – quite intentionally. Whether it is their knowledge revealed in the documents that the lipid nanoparticles biodistributes, these are industrial fats coated in polyethylene glycol which is a petroleum product. You know, spokes- people said the material stays in your deltoid, in the injection site. They knew that was not true. These materials bio-distribute throughout the body. They traverse every membrane in the human body, but they also accumulate in the brain causing – or contributing to some of the cognitive changes people are seeing in their loved ones. They also accumulate in the liver, the adrenals, the spleen, and if you’re a woman, in your ovaries.

So, what is happening now, I got de-platformed in 2021 and globally attacked, because I correctly reported that women were having menstrual problems upon getting this injection. And it’s not surprising that if women are having menstrual problems in 2021, there will be fertility problems in 2023. And that’s what we’re seeing, a 13-20 percent drop in live births.

So, these industrial fats are accumulating in the ovaries. There is no way our volunteers have seen that they leave the body. So, the first injection some accumulate. The second injection, more accumulate. First booster, more accumulate. So now, nurses are reporting that women having abdominal surgery, even if it’s not focused on their ovaries, that their ovaries are blocked, right? Depressing fertility. Also, messing with their hormones, but that’s another story.

We know now that the lipid nanoparticles also traverse the placenta and Pfizer knew this. So, midwives and maternal fetal medicine specialist James Thorp, they’ve sent me pictures and descriptions of compromised placentas that vaccinated women are having. De-calcifications caused by the lipid nanoparticles are keeping nutrients and oxygen from reaching the baby, and the placentas are flat and thin and shrunken. Unlike – I mean, not to be gross – but, you know, the cushy, comfy bed of placenta is supposed to be for a growing baby. And they’re also – they’re like two inches too small in diameter. So, babies are being delivered prematurely.

Or, think about when was the last time you saw since 2021 a truly, heavily pregnant woman, right? I mean, most of us, if we consider, we haven’t – remember the way women used to look eight months, you know, almost at their due date, really there was a baby there basically. You only see very small baby bumps now, because these placentas are not big enough to hold a fully grown baby.

So, women are also dying in childbirth now. Forty percent rise in maternal deaths, because these placentas fall apart, and women have hemorrhages and infections just like in the 19th century in childbirth. Pfizer knew that there’s something in the semen of vaccinated men that is dangerous to women of childbearing age. Pfizer confirms that you can transmit, or that exposure to the vaccine, can happen through skin contact or inhalation, or sexual intercourse with vaccinated men. And they warned the vaccinated men in their study to use two reliable forms of contraception or to abstain from sex with childbearing age women. So, something they still haven’t told us is dangerous or damaging either to women or to the zygote – the implanted egg —

GR: Mm-hmm.

NW: — of the baby. Pfizer knew that the lipid nanoparticles degrade the testes of baby boys in utero. Remember, every membrane that the casing of the testes are a membrane. So, this is causing damage to sertoli cells and leydig cells in baby boys testes in utero. Those are the factories of masculinity that switch on in adolescence, causing things that we think of as masculine like, you know, facial hair or deep voices or broad shoulders or the ability to father a child. So, we don’t know if these poor baby boys, who aren’t even vaccinated, right – they’re just in the their mom’s stomach and their moms are vaccinated – whether those will be fertile men or even look like men when they grow up.

GR: Ah.

NW: Right – right? It’s a war on – it’s a war on gender, among other things, but it’s certainly a war on babies.

There’s horrific documents called “Pregnancy and Lactation Report,” it’s eight pages long. And it was produced in April of 2021 and it shows that Pfizer knew they – two babies died in utero. And Pfizer concluded that the deaths were due to maternal exposure to the vaccine. So, they knew they were killing babies. And instead of stopping, they kept going. And they also have this – they knew that they were causing babies to suffer and get really sick from nursing vaccinated moms because the mRNA and the spike protein in the lipid nanoparticles were getting into mom’s breast milk through the lymphatic system. So, they’ve got this chart showing these many thousands of babies are vomiting, these many thousands of babies have chills, you know, or fever. These many thousands have – their flesh is swelling, adema. You know, these babies have convulsions. One poor baby had multi-organ system failure and died in the ER from nursing his vaccinated mom – or her vaccinated mom. So, this set of nightmare outcomes for babies and moms got sent on April 20th to the White House and the CDC.

Three days later, Rochelle Walensky at the CDC gave a press conference, a White House press conference, stating to women that the vaccine was safe and effective for pregnancy. That there was no bad time to get vaccinated: before you’re pregnant, during your pregnancy, or after you have your baby. And she had this document showing how deadly it was.

There is another section of Pfizer documents that shows an 80 percent miscarriage or spontaneous abortion rate in vaccinated women. And there are now a million missing babies in Western Europe and in Western countries generally. Government databases show a dramatic drop in live birth.

GR: Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know if you have maybe one more, like, breaking story, because I want to move on before our deadline. But is there anything else before I just —

NW: Gosh, there’s so much. I mean I guess the other —

GR: Maybe give —

NW: — the other big – one more, sure. The other huge headline of the last few weeks is that – and it’s not in the Pfizer documents – Kevin McKernan of Medicinal Genomics broke this story. And so did someone named Josh Guetzkow who is in Israel. So, the injections turn out, so those Pfizer-Moderna, to have undisclosed plasmids and fragments of DNA in them. And that wasn’t disclosed to Health Canada. They have confirmed it wasn’t disclosed to the FDA. And it’s a result of mRNA is hard to grow at scale, for the giant amounts that they needed to inject everyone in the world. So, they cut corners by growing it in E. Coli, essentially using E. Coli to grow it, and this is a result. You know, this contamination is a result.

So, people are being injected with contaminated injections. And the way fragments of DNA and these plasmids react to your body is they can basically enter your cells and cause your body not to recognize or clear out invaders, and what that does is create turbo cancers according to Dr. Ryan Cole and other oncologists. So, I’m sure you’ve heard or people’s loved ones have heard or experienced healthy people being diagnosed with cancer in April, dead by November. These super fast-growing cancers. So, yeah, the whole roll out was contaminated.

GR: I’m just going to play a clip because I actually interviewed Peter Hotez who is said to be a successor of Fauci. I’ll just play a clip and, you know, as you to respond as you will:

GR: Pretty significant effects on pregnant women, the spontaneous abortions, miscarriages, and so on —

Peter Hotez: No. Again – again —

GR: Some fetal —

PH: No, no, this —

GR: — this was Pfizer.

PH: No, it’s not the case. This was carefully reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, again, which has an extraordinary track record of monitoring for safety and efficacy. They lifted the clinical trial data from, I think it was – I forget which one was 44 – I think it was 44 – 60,000 patients in the Pfizer study which is a pretty large study. Did not find those adverse effects. And in fact, now it’s been well documented. There was no link between mRNA vaccines and infertility or miscarriages. But I’ll tell you what there is a big link for: COVID-19 and pregnant women. We’ve lost many, many pregnant women to COVID-19 who did not get vaccinated, again, because of some of this weaponized communication that you are citing.

GR: So, yeah, basically – yeah, he’s saying that the FDA study didn’t and they didn’t see any problems with it. And then, he switched over to, ‘You got to get vaccinated,’ because Covid-19 could interrupt their pregnancies. Your response?

NW: I mean, Michael, that man is going straight to Hell! I mean, he is – no, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say! Like, that’s evil of such immense proportions, because he is lying, he knows he’s lying! And he’s lying in a way that’s going to kill babies! And he doesn’t stop! I mean, what he said is just a lie!

First of all, no one knows the denominator in the Pfizer clinical trials. It’s not in the records. We know the adverse events, and there are over 42,000 adverse events in just three months. Second of all, there are two distinct places and we’ve issued multiple reports about this that have gotten tons of media that enumerate the dead babies and show – and Pfizer concluded that the babies died due to vaccine. So, how can – how can Hotez not know that?

And the last thing is: you know, our team has taken two years to issue 92 reports. The FDA gave themselves one week to go through the documentation, it’s 450,000 pages. So, they ensured that they would not see what they did not look for.

But, it’s just – it’s a lie, and it’s not only a lie from our data sets, it’s a lie from the VAERS database which is a government database, that is the FDA’s and his job and the CDC director’s job to monitor this signals more babies have been lost to the various databases in all for this vaccine, than all of the other vaccines combined, last I – last I was informed. There is a dramatic safety signal for pregnancy and childbirth. And also, look at government databases on who is being born. Something is killing babies in utero and it coincides with the roll out of the injection.

This man is just such a liar! The last thing I will say about his disgusting, horrible lies is: when he says – Oh, they always do this, it’s a talking point – Oh, whatever you may say about whatever side effects you may mention, that same side effect happens to be caused much worse by COVID. Well, among the most important findings in the Pfizer documents is that one month after roll out, in November of 2020, Pfizer concluded that the vaccines did not work to stop COVID! Pfizer’s language is, “Vaccine failure and failure of efficacy.” And in fact, in the Pfizer documents, the third most common side effect of getting vaccinated is COVID.

And in fact, if they didn’t use funny math to claim 95% effective, if they – they got to that math by removing 200 vaccinated infected people. If they had done the math honestly, Hotez would have to acknowledge that more people who were vaccinated got COVID than the unvaccinated arm of the trials.

So, it’s meaningless for him to claim that, you know, women could save themselves by getting vaccinated because Pfizer concluded the vaccines did not work to stop COVID.

GR: Yeah. Well, you are an established journalist and I’m wondering, were you surprised by the way your report was treated, you know, not just by Hotez but by the establishment of the health services, by mainstream press, and by government? And by the way, you yourself were treated?

NW: Well, I’m certainly surprised at how I myself was treated because it’s pretty shocking – and this is the subject of my new book Facing the Beast – it’s, among other subjects, it’s pretty shocking to be a journalist for 35 years, my beat being women’s sexual and reproductive health primarily, and among other things, civil liberties.

And to have the same news outlets that had employed me for 35 years to be a commentator turn on me overnight with the same language, you know: “Conspiracy theorist,” “crazy,” et cetera. Like, that beggar’s belief and seeing how my bio changed around the world overnight when I was de-platformed, that was hard to understand. Now we understand AI is deployed to, you know, smear people globally all at once. But, I can —

GR: If you step out of line on COVID, then they’ll put, you know, ‘He’s a conspiracy theorist,’ or ‘She’s a conspiracy theorist,’ —

NW: Totally.

GR: — in the first line.

NW: Totally. And now other issues like Ukraine or, you know, climate or, you know, whatever is sacred, designated sacred. Now we know that it was the White House that was directing that smear campaign.

But what happened to me is not nearly as important as what happened to women and human beings around the world as a result of these discussions being silenced, right? You know, in response to the other part of your question, while I’ve been attacked and dumped out of my previous life – and I actually found a much better life which I go into detail about it in Facing the Beast – you know, in the rest of America, right, outside the liberal media bubble, it is silence, right? Like, this is the biggest story whether you like what I’m saying or not, whether you think I’m right or not. Issues of the New York Times, the Washington Post, they should be engaging with this, right? Debunk it, right? Try to debunk it. I mean, you can’t, because all of the primary citations are right there embedded in the digital report, but like… that would be journalism, you know? Because this is the biggest story of our time. But it’s been silenced.

To my knowledge, I don’t know who brought up the miscarriages clip, they didn’t attribute it to us but, you know, they dealt with the massive amount of legacy media, governments, you know, some very rare exceptions have dealt with the massive amount of evidence we have found, that we presented, you know, in beautifully documented reports with silence.

GR: Yeah. I noticed in your book Facing the Beast, which I read very quickly, but you seem to – it’s a collection of essays, essentially relating how the last three years altered the way you perceive people around you. And I think the way you present it is it’s like these three years were painful as Hell. But at the same time, it sort of transformed your way of perceiving things and people. I mean, maybe I could ask you, like, you know, as a collection, how – what’s the most important remark on all of these changes in the single book?

NW: Most important remark? I guess the most important is that I concluded that we’re in a non-human, non-normal period of history. I mean, it’s not normal human history, is a better way to say it.

Starting in 2020, something happened on the planet that I can’t explain using my normal, rigorous, highly educated analytical tools. It doesn’t look like history as long as it’s been recorded by human beings. And what I mean is: usually, always, when there is a tyrant, would-be tyrant, there are factions, there is dissent, there is backstabbing, there are people who don’t go along with it. Things fall apart. The Nazis didn’t figure, you know, think well in advanced about how cold the Russian winter was. Like, there is some human error. But what we saw since 2020 was no – like almost complete lockstep of evil, all over the same sound bites around the world. So, for me, I’m not asking anyone to believe this, I’m not proselytizing, but for me personally, I had to conclude that there is something spiritual going on, and that the political landscape, the material landscape is a symptom of what is really a battle between good and evil. Really a battle for the human soul and for humanity and this is kind of a time of a test, testing, you know, for human beings.

GR: Wow. Naomi, much of my recent reporting is focused on the possibility of a second pandemic, you know, potentially even worse than the first. Do you think that, well, between your book and speaking quietly now on the independent media margins will do enough to fend off yet another round of health, you know, enforcers and legacy media pounding into people’s skulls to get vaccinated and, you know, distance and lockdowns and all the rest of it?

NW: No. I mean, I, you know, I do everything I can, but I’m still gigantically cancelled and continually more cancelled. Like, Naomi Klein wrote a whole book trying to cancel me and then I found out that Pharma was sending millions of dollars in the direction of her husband and his extended family.

No, but I do think that there is a resistance, you know, in the United States, in Canada, in the West. And a lot of people are determined not to be fooled again. And you know, look at the studies, people don’t trust legacy media anymore. So, for sure they’re going to try it, you know, they’re already trying it. You know, the fear messaging about the white lung disease, which the dissident doctors I’ve interviewed think it’s due to the vaccines and the masking or made worse by it. And kids having not had normal immune exposure because of all the isolation and lockdowns. They’re going to try it. I hope and pray that people won’t go for it, but it just literally is country-by-country, state-by-state.

For instance, I’m in New York state. Our governor keeps trying to establish quarantine camps and she succeeded in defeating an appeal against quarantine camps. In Australia, people live in fear, you know. Their democracy is crushed. Canada is a catastrophe as you probably know. You know, people can have their bank accounts switched off. The truckers had their bank accounts switched off. You know, Central Bank Digital Currency is coming, the digital ID is coming. So, these people are not done with us by a long shot.

But I do think if enough people resist, it’ll be very difficult to implement.

GR: Naomi, thank you very much. I have appreciated speaking to you again and best wishes to you in the future.

NW: Thank you so much. I appreciate it as well. Take care. Bye.

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

  1. Alan Johnson (September 23, 2023), ‘Disease X on the way and experts fear it will kill more people than Covid pandemic’, The Mirror; https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/disease-x-way-experts-fear-31009551
  2. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/18/bill-gates-covid-risks-have-reduced-but-another-pandemic-will-come.html
  3. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/safety-of-vaccines.html
  4. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/addressing-vaccine-misinformation.html

Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age Paperback – November 9, 2023

by Naomi Wolf (Author)
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chelsea Green Publishing (November 9, 2023)
  • a
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1645022366
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1645022367

Reviews:

“When Western leaders abandoned reason and embraced the ideology of force several years ago, Naomi Wolf was one of few who understood instantly what was happening. She decided to tell the full truth about it all the time, no matter what. The result has been a thrilling inspiration to those of us who’ve followed it, and for the first time is collected here in one place. Read Facing the Beast to understand what bravery looks like.”―Tucker Carlson

“In the crisis of our lives and of everything we call civilization, Naomi Wolf has been a prescient observer, a keen analyst, and brave fighter for truth and freedom. Everything in her life and career prepared her for this moment. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for what she has done and continues to do for the great cause. Like her last book, Facing the Beast stands as a testament to truth in times gone mad.”―Jeffrey Tucker, president, Brownstone Institute

“Today’s world has been constructed to divide us. Naomi Wolf has seen through the lies and deception. In her personal journey, described in Facing the Beast, she unequivocally came to understand the universal principle―that all of humanity is connected. Dr. Wolf fights for our God-given rights and freedoms. I am honored to call her friend.”―Edward Dowd, author of Cause Unknown

Click here to order

 

The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test: How to Mislead All Humanity. Using a “Test” To Lock Down Society

December 16th, 2023 by Dr. Pascal Sacré

First published by Global Research on November 5, 2020

Introduction: using a technique to lock down society

All current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned:

Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID. This assumption is misleading.

Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works.

RT-PCR means Real Time-Polymerase Chain Reaction.

In French, it means: Réaction de Polymérisation en Chaîne en Temps Réel.

In medicine, we use this tool mainly to diagnose a viral infection.

Starting from a clinical situation with the presence or absence of particular symptoms in a patient, we consider different diagnoses based on tests.

In the case of certain infections, particularly viral infections, we use the RT-PCR technique to confirm a diagnostic hypothesis suggested by a clinical picture.

We do not routinely perform RT-PCR on any patient who is overheated, coughing or has an inflammatory syndrome!

It is a laboratory, molecular biology technique of gene amplification because it looks for gene traces (DNA or RNA) by amplifying them.

In addition to medicine, other fields of application are genetics, research, industry and forensics.

The technique is carried out in a specialized laboratory, it cannot be done in any laboratory, even a hospital. This entails a certain cost, and a delay sometimes of several days between the sample and the result.

Today, since the emergence of the new disease called COVID-19 (COrona VIrus Disease-2019), the RT-PCR diagnostic technique is used to define positive cases, confirmed as SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus responsible for the new acute respiratory distress syndrome called COVID-19).

These positive cases are assimilated to COVID-19 cases, some of whom are hospitalized or even admitted to intensive care units.

Official postulate of our managers: positive RT-PCR cases = COVID-19 patients. [1]

This is the starting postulate, the premise of all official propaganda, which justifies all restrictive government measures: isolation, confinement, quarantine, mandatory masks, color codes by country and travel bans, tracking, social distances in companies, stores and even, even more importantly, in schools [2].

This misuse of RT-PCR technique is used as a relentless and intentional strategy by some governments, supported by scientific safety councils and by the dominant media, to justify excessive measures such as the violation of a large number of constitutional rights, the destruction of the economy with the bankruptcy of entire active sectors of society, the degradation of living conditions for a large number of ordinary citizens, under the pretext of a pandemic based on a number of positive RT-PCR tests, and not on a real number of patients.

Technical aspects: to better understand and not be manipulated

The PCR technique was developed by chemist Kary B. Mullis in 1986. Kary Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

Although this is disputed [3], Kary Mullis himself is said to have criticized the interest of PCR as a diagnostic tool for an infection, especially a viral one.

He stated that if PCR was a good tool for research, it was a very bad tool in medicine, in the clinic [4].

Mullis was referring to the AIDS virus (HIV retrovirus or HIV) [5], before the COVID-19 pandemic, but this opinion on the limitation of the technique in viral infections [6], by its creator, cannot be dismissed out of hand; it must be taken into account!

PCR was perfected in 1992.

As the analysis can be performed in real time, continuously, it becomes RT (Real-Time) – PCR, even more efficient.

It can be done from any molecule, including those of the living, the nucleic acids that make up the genes:

  • DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)
  • RNA (Ribonucleic Acid)

Viruses are not considered as “living” beings, they are packets of information (DNA or RNA) forming a genome.

It is by an amplification technique (multiplication) that the molecule sought is highlighted and this point is very important.

RT-PCR is an amplification technique [7].

If there is DNA or RNA of the desired element in a sample, it is not identifiable as such.

This DNA or RNA must be amplified (multiplied) a certain number of times, sometimes a very large number of times, before it can be detected. From a minute trace, up to billions of copies of a specific sample can be obtained, but this does not mean that there is all that amount in the organism being tested.

In the case of COVID-19, the element sought by RT-PCR is SARS-CoV-2, an RNA virus [8].

There are DNA viruses such as Herpes and Varicella viruses.

The most well known RNA viruses, in addition to coronaviruses, are Influenza, Measles, EBOLA, ZIKA viruses.

In the case of SARS-CoV-2, RNA virus, an additional specific step is required, a transcription of RNA into DNA by means of an enzyme, Reverse Transcriptase.

This step precedes the amplification phase.

It is not the whole virus that is identified, but sequences of its viral genome.

This does not mean that this gene sequence, a fragment of the virus, is not specific to the virus being sought, but it is an important nuance nonetheless:

RT-PCR does not reveal any virus, but only parts, specific gene sequences of the virus.

At the beginning of the year, the SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced.

It consists of about 30,000 base pairs. The nucleic acid (DNA-RNA), the component of the genes, is a sequence of bases. In comparison, the human genome has more than 3 billion base pairs.

Teams are continuously monitoring the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome as it evolves [9-10-11], through the mutations it undergoes. Today, there are many variants [12].

By taking a few specific genes from the SARS-CoV-2 genome, it is possible to initiate RT-PCR on a sample from the respiratory tract.

For COVID-19 disease, which has a nasopharyngeal (nose) and oropharyngeal (mouth) entry point, the sample should be taken from the upper respiratory tract as deeply as possible in order to avoid contamination by saliva in particular.

ll the people tested said that it is very painful [13].

The Gold Standard (preferred site for sampling) is the nasopharyngeal (nasal) approach, the most painful route.

If there is a contraindication to the nasal approach, or preferably to the individual being tested, depending on the official organs, the oropharyngeal approach (through the mouth) is also acceptable. The test may trigger a nausea/vomiting reflex in the individual being tested.

Normally, for the result of an RT-PCR test to be considered reliable, amplification from 3 different genes (primers) of the virus under investigation is required.

“The primers are single-stranded DNA sequences specific to the virus. They guarantee the specificity of the amplification reaction. » [14]

“The first test developed at La Charité in Berlin by Dr. Victor Corman and his associates in January 2020 allows to highlight the RNA sequences present in 3 genes of the virus called E, RdRp and N. To know if the sequences of these genes are present in the RNA samples collected, it is necessary to amplify the sequences of these 3 genes in order to obtain a signal sufficient for their detection and quantification. »[15].

The essential notion of Cycle Time or Cycle Threshold or Ct positivity threshold [16].

An RT-PCR test is negative (no traces of the desired element) or positive (presence of traces of the desired element).

However, even if the desired element is present in a minute, negligible quantity, the principle of RT-PCR is to be able to finally highlight it by continuing the amplification cycles as much as necessary.

RT-PCR can push up to 60 amplification cycles, or even more!

Here is how it works:

Cycle 1: target x 2 (2 copies)

Cycle 2: target x 4 (4 copies)

Cycle 3: target x 8 (8 copies)

Cycle 4: target x 16 (16 copies)

Cycle 5; target x 32 (32 copies)

Etc exponentially up to 40 to 60 cycles!

When we say that the Ct (Cycle Time or Cycle Threshold or RT-PCR positivity threshold) is equal to 40, it means that the laboratory has used 40 amplification cycles, i.e. obtained 240 copies.

This is what underlies the sensitivity of the RT-PCR assay.

While it is true that in medicine we like to have high specificity and sensitivity of the tests to avoid false positives and false negatives, in the case of COVID-19 disease, this hypersensitivity of the RT-PCR test caused by the number of amplification cycles used has backfired.

This over-sensitivity of the RT-PCR test is deleterious and misleading!

It detaches us from the medical reality which must remain based on the real clinical state of the person: is the person ill, does he or she have symptoms?

That is the most important thing!

As I said at the beginning of the article, in medicine we always start from the person: we examine him/her, we collect his/her symptoms (complaints-anamnesis) and objective clinical signs (examination) and on the basis of a clinical reflection in which scientific knowledge and experience intervene, we make diagnostic hypotheses.

Only then do we prescribe the most appropriate tests, based on this clinical reflection.

We constantly compare the test results with the patient’s clinical condition (symptoms and signs), which takes precedence over everything else when it comes to our decisions and treatments.

Today, our governments, supported by their scientific safety advice, are making us do the opposite and put the test first, followed by a clinical reflection necessarily influenced by this prior test, whose weaknesses we have just seen, particularly its hypersensitivity.

None of my clinical colleagues can contradict me.

Apart from very special cases such as genetic screening for certain categories of populations (age groups, sex) and certain cancers or family genetic diseases, we always work in this direction: from the person (symptoms, signs) to the appropriate tests, never the other way around.

This is the conclusion of an article in the Swiss Medical Journal (RMS) published in 2007, written by doctors Katia Jaton and Gilbert Greub microbiologists from the University of Lausanne :

PCR in microbiology: from DNA amplification to result interpretation:

“To interpret the result of a PCR, it is essential that clinicians and microbiologists share their experiences, so that the analytical and clinical levels of interpretation can be combined.”

It would be indefensible to give everyone an electrocardiogram to screen everyone who might have a heart attack one day.

On the other hand, in certain clinical contexts or on the basis of specific evocative symptoms, there, yes, an electrocardiogram can be beneficial.

Back to RT-PCR and Ct (Cycle Time or Cycle Threshold).

In the case of an infectious disease, especially a viral one, the notion of contagiousness is another important element.

Since some scientific circles consider that an asymptomatic person can transmit the virus, they believe it is important to test for the presence of virus, even if the person is asymptomatic, thus extending the indication of RT-PCR to everyone.

Are RT-PCR tests good tests for contagiousness? [17]

This question brings us back to the notion of viral load and therefore Ct.

The relationship between contagiousness and viral load is disputed by some people [18] and no formal proof, to date, allows us to make a decision.

However, common sense gives obvious credence to the notion that the more virus a person has inside him or her, especially in the upper airways (oropharynx and nasopharynx), with symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, the higher the risk of contagiousness, proportional to the viral load and the importance of the person’s symptoms.

This is called common sense, and although modern medicine has benefited greatly from the contribution of science through statistics and Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), it is still based primarily on common sense, experience and empiricism.

Medicine is the art of healing.

No test measures the amount of virus in the sample!

RT-PCR is qualitative: positive (presence of the virus) or negative (absence of the virus).

This notion of quantity, therefore of viral load, can be estimated indirectly by the number of amplification cycles (Ct) used to highlight the virus sought.

The lower the Ct used to detect the virus fragment, the higher the viral load is considered to be (high).

The higher the Ct used to detect the virus fragment, the lower the viral load is considered to be (low).

Thus, the French National Reference Centre (CNR), in the acute phase of the pandemic, estimated that the peak of viral shedding occurred at the onset of symptoms, with an amount of virus corresponding to approximately 108 (100 million) copies of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA on average (French COVID-19 cohort data) with a variable duration of shedding in the upper airways (from 5 days to more than 5 weeks) [19].

This number of 108 (100 million) copies/μl corresponds to a very low Ct.

A Ct of 32 corresponds to 10-15 copies/μl.

A Ct of 35 corresponds to about 1 copy/μl.

Above Ct 35, it becomes impossible to isolate a complete virus sequence and culture it!

In France and in most countries, Ct levels above 35, even 40, are still used even today!

The French Society of Microbiology (SFM) issued an opinion on September 25, 2020 in which it does not recommend quantitative results, and it recommends to make positive up to a Ct of 37 for a single gene [20]!

With 1 copy/μl of a sample (Ct 35), without cough, without symptoms, one can understand why all these doctors and scientists say that a positive RT-PCR test means nothing, nothing at all in terms of medicine and clinic!

Positive RT-PCR tests, without any mention of Ct or its relation to the presence or absence of symptoms, are used as is by our governments as the exclusive argument to apply and justify their policy of severity, austerity, isolation and aggression of our freedoms, with the impossibility to travel, to meet, to live normally!

There is no medical justification for these decisions, for these governmental choices!

In an article published on the website of the New York Times (NYT) on Saturday, August 29, American experts from Harvard University are surprised that RT-PCR tests as practiced can serve as tests of contagiousness, even more so as evidence of pandemic progression in the case of SARS-CoV-2 infection [21].

According to them, the threshold (Ct) considered results in positive diagnoses in people who do not represent any risk of transmitting the virus!

The binary “yes/no” answer is not enough, according to this epidemiologist from the Harvard University School of Public Health.

“It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the course of action for each patient tested. »

The amount of virus (viral load); but also and above all the clinical state, symptomatic or not of the person!

This calls into question the use of the binary result of this RT-PCR test to determine whether a person is contagious and must follow strict isolation measures.

These questions are being raised by many physicians around the world, not only in the United States but also in France, Belgium (Belgium Health Experts Demand Investigation Of WHO For Faking Coronavirus Pandemic), France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Kingdom. in Germany, Spain…

According to them: “We are going to put tens of thousands of people in confinement, in isolation, for nothing. » [22]. 22] And inflict suffering, anguish, economic and psychological dramas by the thousands!

Most RT-PCR tests set the Ct at 40, according to the NYT. Some set it at 37.

“Tests with such high thresholds (Ct) may not only detect live virus but also gene fragments, remnants of an old infection that do not represent any particular danger,” the experts said.

A virologist at the University of California admits that an RT-PCR test with a Ct greater than 35 is too sensitive. “A more reasonable threshold would be between 30 and 35,” she adds.

Almost no laboratory specifies the Ct (number of amplification cycles performed) or the number of copies of viral RNA per sample μl.

Here is an example of a laboratory result (approved by Sciensano, the Belgian national reference center) in an RT-PCR negative patient:

No mention of Ct.

In the NYT, experts compiled three datasets with officials from the states of Massachusetts, New York and Nevada that mention them.

Conclusion?

“Up to 90% of the people who tested positive did not carry a virus. »

The Wadworth Center, a New York State laboratory, analyzed the results of its July tests at the request of the NYT: 794 positive tests with a Ct of 40.

“With a Ct threshold of 35, approximately half of these PCR tests would no longer be considered positive,” said the NYT.

“And about 70% would no longer be considered positive with a Ct of 30! “

In Massachusetts, between 85 and 90% of people who tested positive in July with a Ct of 40 would have been considered negative with a Ct of 30, adds the NYT. And yet, all these people had to isolate themselves, with all the dramatic psychological and economic consequences, while they were not sick and probably not contagious at all.

In France, the Centre National de Référence (CNR), the French Society of Microbiology (SFM) continue to push Ct to 37 and recommend to laboratories to use only one gene of the virus as a primer.

I remind you that from Ct 32 onwards, it becomes very difficult to culture the virus or to extract a complete sequence, which shows the completely artificial nature of this positivity of the test, with such high Ct levels, above 30.

Similar results were reported by researchers from the UK Public Health Agency in an article published on August 13 in Eurosurveillance: “The probability of culturing the virus drops to 8% in samples with Ct levels above 35.” [23]

In addition, currently, the National Reference Center in France only evaluates the sensitivity of commercially available reagent kits, not their specificity: serious doubts persist about the possibility of cross-reactivity with viruses other than SARS-CoV-2, such as other benign cold coronaviruses. [20]

It is potentially the same situation in other countries, including Belgium.

Similarly, mutations in the virus may have invalidated certain primers (genes) used to detect SARS-CoV-2: the manufacturers give no guarantees on this, and if the AFP fast-checking journalists tell you otherwise, test their good faith by asking for these guarantees, these proofs.

If they have nothing to hide and if what I say is false, this guarantee will be provided to you and will prove their good faith.

  1. We must demand that the RT-PCR results be returned mentioning the Ct used because beyond Ct 30, a positive RT-PCR test means nothing.
  2. We must listen to the scientists and doctors, specialists, virologists who recommend the use of adapted Ct, lower, at 30. An alternative is to obtain the number of copies of viral RNA/μl or /ml sample. [23]
  3. We need to go back to the patient, to the person, to his or her clinical condition (presence or absence of symptoms) and from there to judge the appropriateness of testing and the best way to interpret the result.

Until there is a better rationale for PCR screening, with a known and appropriate Ct threshold, an asymptomatic person should not be tested in any way.

Even a symptomatic person should not automatically be tested, as long as they can place themselves in isolation for 7 days.

Let’s stop this debauchery of RT-PCR testing at too high Ct levels and return to clinical, quality medicine.

Once we understand how RT-PCR testing works, it becomes impossible to let the current government routine screening strategy, inexplicably supported by the virologists in the safety councils, continue.

My hope is that, finally, properly informed, more and more people will demand that this strategy be stopped, because it is all of us, enlightened, guided by real benevolence and common sense, who must decide our collective and individual destinies.

No one else should do it for us, especially when we realize that those who decide are no longer reasonable or rational.

Summary of important points :

  • The RT-PCR test is a laboratory diagnostic technique that is not well suited to clinical medicine.
  • It is a binary, qualitative diagnostic technique that confirms (positive test) or not (negative test) the presence of an element in the medium being analyzed. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the element is a fragment of the viral genome, not the virus itself.
  • In medicine, even in an epidemic or pandemic situation, it is dangerous to place tests, examinations, techniques above clinical evaluation (symptoms, signs). It is the opposite that guarantees quality medicine.
  • The main limitation (weakness) of the RT-PCR test, in the current pandemic situation, is its extreme sensitivity (false positive) if a suitable threshold of positivity (Ct) is not chosen. Today, experts recommend using a maximum Ct threshold of 30.
  • This Ct threshold must be informed with the positive RT-PCR result so that the physician knows how to interpret this positive result, especially in an asymptomatic person, in order to avoid unnecessary isolation, quarantine, psychological trauma.
  • In addition to mentioning the Ct used, laboratories must continue to ensure the specificity of their detection kits for SARS-CoV-2, taking into account its most recent mutations, and must continue to use three genes from the viral genome being studied as primers or, if not, mention it.

 

Overall Conclusion

Is the obstinacy of governments to use the current disastrous strategy, systematic screening by RT-PCR, due to ignorance?

Is it due to stupidity?

To a kind of cognitive trap trapping their ego?

In any case, we should be able to question them, and if among the readers of this article there are still honest journalists, or naive politicians, or people who have the possibility to question our rulers, then do so, using these clear and scientific arguments.

It is all the more incomprehensible that our rulers have surrounded themselves with some of the most experienced specialists in these matters.

If I have been able to gather this information myself, shared, I remind you, by competent people above all suspicion of conspiracy, such as Hélène Banoun, Pierre Sonigo, Jean-François Toussaint, Christophe De Brouwer, whose intelligence, intellectual honesty and legitimacy cannot be questioned, then the Belgian, French and Quebec scientific advisors, etc., know all this as well.

So?

What’s going on?

Why continue in this distorted direction, obstinately making mistakes?

It is not insignificant to reimpose confinements, curfews, quarantines, reduced social bubbles, to shake up again our shaky economies, to plunge entire families into precariousness, to sow so much fear and anxiety generating a real state of post-traumatic stress worldwide, to reduce access to care for other pathologies that nevertheless reduce life expectancy much more than COVID-19! [24]

Is there intent to harm?

Is there an intention to use the alibi of a pandemic to move humanity towards an outcome it would otherwise never have accepted? In any case, not like that!

Would this hypothesis, which modern censors will hasten to label “conspiracy”, be the most valid explanation for all this?

Indeed, if we draw a straight line from the present events, if they are maintained, we could find ourselves once again confined with hundreds, thousands of human beings forced to remain inactive, which, for the professions of catering, entertainment, sales, fairgrounds, itinerants, canvassers, risks being catastrophic with bankruptcies, unemployment, depression, suicides by the hundreds of thousands. [25-26-27-28]

The impact on education, on our children, on teaching, on medicine with long planned care, operations, treatments to be cancelled, postponed, will be profound and destructive.

“We risk a looming food crisis if action is not taken quickly.”  [29].

It is time for everyone to come out of this negative trance, this collective hysteria, because famine, poverty, massive unemployment will kill, mow down many more people than SARS-CoV-2!

Does all this make sense in the face of a disease that is declining, over-diagnosed and misinterpreted by this misuse of overly sensitively calibrated PCR tests?

For many, the continuous wearing of the mask seems to have become a new norm.

Even if it is constantly downplayed by some health professionals and fact-checking journalists, other doctors warn of the harmful consequences, both medical and psychological, of this hygienic obsession which, maintained permanently, is in fact an abnormality!

What a hindrance to social relations, which are the true foundation of a physically and psychologically healthy humanity!

Some dare to find all this normal, or a lesser price to pay in the face of the pandemic of positive PCR tests.

Isolation, distancing, masking of the face, impoverishment of emotional communication, fear of touching and kissing even within families, communities, between relatives…

Spontaneous gestures of daily life hindered and replaced by mechanical and controlled gestures …

Terrified children, kept in permanent fear and guilt…

All this will have a deep, lasting and negative impact on human organisms, in their physical, mental, emotional and representation of the world and society.

This is not normal!

We cannot let our rulers, for whatever reason, organize our collective suicide any longer.

Translated from French by Global Research. Original source: Mondialisation.ca

Dr Pascal Sacré is a physician specialized in critical care, author and renowned public health analyst, Charleroi, Belgium. He is a Research Associate of the  entre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

****

Professionals whose references and comments are the basis of this article in its scientific aspect (especially and mainly on RT-PCR):

1) Hélène Banoun

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Helene_Banoun

PhD, Pharmacist biologist

Former INSERM Research Officer

Former intern at the Paris Hospitals

2) Pierre Sonigo

Virologist

Research Director INSERM, worked at the Pasteur Institute

Heads the Virus Genetics Laboratory in Cochin, Paris.

Participated in 1985 in the sequencing of the AIDS virus.

3) Christophe De Brouwer

PhD in Public Health Science

Honorary Professor at the School of Public Health at ULB, Belgium

4) Jean-François Toussaint

Doctor, Professor of Physiology at the University of Paris-Descartes

Director of IRMES, Institute for BioMedical Research and Sports Epidemiology

Former member of the High Council of Public Health

***

Notes (French)

[1] “Une nette augmentation du nombre de cas dans toutes les provinces et toutes les tranches d’âge”, 7sur7 ACTU Belgique, 5-10-2020

[2] Le gouvernement belge renforce des mesures anti-Covid, VRT.be ; 6 octobre 2020.

[3] Non, l’inventeur du test PCR n’a pas dit que sa méthode était inefficace pour détecter les virus, dans Le Monde, 7 octobre 2020

[4] Kary Mullis : « Le test PCR ne permet pas de savoir si vous êtes malade », vidéo accessible sur YouTube, 9 octobre 2020.

[5] https://www.weblyf.com/2020/05/coronavirus-the-truth-about-pcr-test-kit-from-the-inventor-and-other-experts/ 

[6] « The Truth about PCR Test Kit from the Inventor and Other Experts »

[7] PCR en microbiologie : de l’amplification de l’ADN à l’interprétation du résultat 

[8] COVID : La PCR nasale peut-elle mentir ?, Dr Pascal Sacré, AIMSIB, 30 août 2020.

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaAcSJI0oMs&feature=youtu.be, 8 octobre 2020. Évolution génomique des virus ARN à l’Institut Pasteur, environ la moitié des nucléotides sont susceptibles d’avoir muté sur les 30 000 nucléotides de l’ARN viral. « Pour l’instant aucune mutation ou délétion n’a été associée à une perte de sévérité de la maladie sur une grande échelle géographique mais de nombreuses publications devraient bientôt préciser ces points. »

[10] https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FD_Raoult_SARS-CoV-2_EID_Sep2020_vL2.pdf, Article IHU-Méditerranée, Professeur D. Raoult, Dramatic increase in the SARS-CoV-2 mutation rate and low mortality rate during the second epidemic in summer in Marseille, 7 septembre 2020

Conclusions :

Dans l’ensemble, comme l’ont récemment souligné Tomaszewski et al. (7) qui ont décrit pour les génomes viraux disponibles jusqu’en mai 2020 un déplacement mutationnel sur la spike et le complexe de réplication vers des gènes codant pour d’autres protéines non structurelles qui interagissent avec les voies de défense de l’hôte, il semble que le taux de mutation du SARS-CoV-2 s’accélère depuis mai, impliquant principalement des mutations C vers U. L’augmentation du taux de mutation du SRAS-CoV-2 génère des génotypes viraux plus éloignés de la souche Wuhan initiale que ceux observés de mars à avril. Cela semble entraîner des épidémies de durée limitée, du moins pour le premier nouveau génotype que nous avons identifié, et est associé à une gravité globalement moindre à ce stade du développement de cette nouvelle épidémie.

Mutations observed in these seven different viral genotypes are located in most SARS- CoV-2 genes including structural and non-structural genes among which nsp2, nsp3 (predicted phosphoesterase), nsp5 (membrane glycoprotein), nsp12 (RNA-dependent RNA polymerase), S (Spike glycoprotein), ORF3a, E (membrane glycoprotein), M (membrane glycoprotein), ORF8 and N (Nucleocapsid phosphoprotein).

[11] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Helene_Banoun Evolution of SARS-CoV-2: Review of mutations, role of the host immune system, octobre 2020, mise à jour par Hélène Banoun, 

PhD, Pharmacien biologiste, ancien Chargé de Recherches INSERM, ancien Interne des Hôpitaux de Paris.

[12] https://nextstrain.org/, We are incorporating SARS-CoV-2 genomes as soon as they are shared and providing analyses and situation reports. In addition we have developed a number of resources and tools, and are facilitating independent groups to run their own analysis. Please see the main SARS-CoV-2 page for more.

[13] Tutoriel prélèvement nasopharyngé : Un geste technique, essentiel à la fiabilité du test COVID-19 

[14] Covid-19 : comment fonctionnent les tests et quelles sont leurs utilités ?

[15] COMMENT FONCTIONNENT LES TESTS DE DÉPISTAGE DU COVID-19 ? 7 avril 2020, Laboratoire de biologie et pharmacologie appliquée (LBPA), Clémence Richetta, maître de conférences au département biologie de l’ENS Paris-Saclay et chercheuse en virologie au LBPA : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNVDHCf8bGA 

Independent researcher, PhD 9 

Former research fellow at INSERM (French Institute for Health and Medical Research) 

[16] Par Pierre Sonigo, virologiste (un des découvreurs du VIH), MD PhD, CSO at Sebia, clinical diagnostics

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/diagnostic-du-covid19-comprendre-les-tests-pcr-leur-et-pierre-sonigo/?trackingId=pTYxDkpvRzKHWZwCzxSIag%3D%3D

Diagnostic du COVID19 : comprendre les tests PCR, leur interprétation et leurs limites, publié le 16 septembre 2020

La PCR utilise un principe très particulier : la cible du test, un fragment d’ARN viral, est massivement amplifiée afin de permettre sa détection. Au cours de l’analyse, une réaction enzymatique associée à des « cycles » de variation de température permet une série de « réplications » successives de l’acide nucléique cible. Chaque cycle correspond à une multiplication théorique de la cible par 2. On multiplie donc par 2 en un cycle, par 4 en 2 cycles, par 8 en 3 cycles, par 16 en 4 cycles, et ainsi de suite de manière exponentielle. A l’heure actuelle, l’amplification est généralement pratiquée sur 40 cycles, soit une amplification théorique de 2^40, environ mille milliards de fois ! En réalité, la réplication n’est pas efficace à 100%, mais la cible est amplifiée environ un million de fois, ce qui permet de détecter moins d’une dizaine de fragments d’ARN dans le volume analysé.

Lorsque l’acide nucléique viral est détectable après un petit nombre de cycles, cela signifie que la quantité de virus dans l’échantillon de départ est grande. Au contraire, lorsqu’il faut un grand nombre de cycles de réplication pour détecter l’ARN viral, cela signifie que l’échantillon de départ contient une quantité de virus très faible. On parle alors en nombre de cycles, ou Ct, qui signifie « cycle time », pour définir, au moins de façon semi quantitative, la quantité d’ARN présent dans l’échantillon de départ. Ainsi, un petit Ct correspond à un grand nombre de copies, un grand Ct à un petit nombre de copies.

Cette spectaculaire sensibilité n’est pas sans inconvénient et nécessite des précautions particulières. En effet, un échantillon positif amplifié un million de fois contient une très haute concentration de cible et le risque qu’il contamine (carry over) d’autres échantillons est particulièrement élevé. La saturation des laboratoires peut encore accroître ce risque et générer des faux positifs accidentels. Dans ces conditions, il est important que les résultats positifs soient confirmés par un second test, à plus forte raison lorsqu’un test positif présente des conséquences significatives, qu’elles soient médicales, professionnelles ou liées à l’obligation d’isolement.

La deuxième question importante concernant la PCR, une fois encore conséquence de sa spectaculaire sensibilité, est celle de sa signification clinique. Un sujet parfaitement asymptomatique présentant une PCR positive ne peut être qualifié de « malade », comme on le lit dans les médias qui rapportent la progression de l’épidémie ! Peut-on même parler de « cas » ? C’est pourtant le terme utilisé dans les dénombrements officiels. Ne sommes-nous pas en train d’oublier le patient pour se focaliser sur la technologie ? Est-ce une épidémie d’ARN dans des tubes que nous surveillons ou une maladie grave et potentiellement mortelle ?

Des publications récentes soulignent que la dose détectable par PCR est inférieure à la dose infectieuse ou contagieuse : aucun virus infectieux n’a pu être retrouvé chez les patients asymptomatiques présentant des tests PCR positifs avec un Ct élevé. Suite à ces résultats, la question du seuil de Ct qui permet de déclarer un échantillon positif est débattue. Peut-on rendre un résultat négatif chez un sujet asymptomatique dont la positivité apparaît au-delà de 35 cycles ? A défaut, est-il utile de retester ces échantillons ? Comme souvent en matière de diagnostic médical, lorsqu’un seuil de positivité est déterminé, faut-il privilégier la sensibilité ou la spécificité du test ?

De plus, un échantillon confirmé positif d’un point de vue analytique reste un faux positif du point de vue de la clinique, si la personne testée est en parfaite santé, parfois même prêt à affronter une compétition de tennis ou de football professionnels ! La question devient uniquement celle de sa potentielle contagiosité. C’est la question de la transmission éventuelle par des sujets asymptomatiques, qui sans être eux-mêmes en danger, pourraient en représenter un pour les autres.

Par rapport à cette question, il est important de raisonner quantitativement. La virologie, ce n’est pas du tout ou rien. De manière générale, au cours des infections virales aiguës, le risque de contagion et la gravité de l’infection varient en fonction de la quantité de virus présents dans l’organisme et de leur excrétion dans le milieu extérieur. Quelques copies de virus tapis dans les sinus n’ont pas la dangerosité d’un million projetés par la toux. Un sujet asymptomatique produit moins de virus qu’un sujet symptomatique et les sécrète moins vers l’extérieur. La quantité de virus produite et donc le risque de contagion sont corrélés à la gravité des symptômes. Même si elle n’est pas de zéro, le risque de transmission est donc vraisemblablement faible pour un sujet asymptomatique. Malheureusement, répéter sans cesse que la contagion venant d’un sujet parfaitement asymptomatique est possible sans aucune précision sur le niveau de risque pousse à prendre des mesures disproportionnées avec le risque.

De même, la stratégie « dépister-isoler » n’est pas réaliste lorsque le dépistage n’est pas suffisamment fiable et surtout lorsque le virus est déjà largement répandu dans la population. Il est bien trop tard pour appliquer une méthode conçue pour bloquer une épidémie à sa naissance. Comme pour une invasion de coccinelles ou de frelons, on ne peut stopper un virus qui est déjà partout avec une passoire trouée à 25% et bouchée par endroits. L’échec de la stratégie actuelle est plutôt lié à sa conception naïve et inapplicable qu’aux mauvais comportements des citoyens. 

Si, comme on l’observe en ce moment, la diffusion virale reprend, faut-il dépister plus massivement ou revoir la stratégie de protection de la population ?

Cette question ne relève pas de la science. Elle dépend des risques acceptables par un individu ou par un groupe. Si on est dans la recherche du risque minimal, proche de zéro, parce que le risque n’a pas été quantifié, ou pour des raisons de responsabilité juridique, on doit prendre les précautions maximales. Si on accepte un risque même faible, on peut reprendre certaines libertés et protéger ceux qui en ont réellement besoin. 

Le scientifique doit mesurer la grandeur des risques et ne pas se contenter d’affirmer qu’un événement adverse est « possible ». Mais ce n’est pas son rôle de décider si ces risques peuvent être pris par autrui.

Les tests PCR permettent une détection extrêmement sensible de l’ARN viral. Ils sont indispensables mais ne sont pas la solution ultime et unique qui permettra de contrôler l’épidémie et de gérer efficacement les risques de contagion. Appliquée lorsque le virus est largement disséminé dans la population, la stratégie « dépister isoler » est vouée à l’échec. Du fait de la sensibilité très élevée et des limites de leur spécificité, les tests PCR doivent être pratiqués et interprétés avec précaution, et comme toujours en lien avec le contexte clinique et épidémiologique. N’oublions pas qu’un sujet asymptomatique doit plutôt être considéré comme immunisé que comme malade.

[17] Les tests RT-PCR du Covid-19 se révèlent être de très mauvais tests de contagiosité, Xavier Boisinet, mis à jour le 3/9/2020.

[18] De nombreuses publications partagées des milliers de fois sur les réseaux sociaux en quelques jours affirment que « 90% » des personnes déclarées positives au Covid-19 ont en fait des charges virales trop basses pour être « malades » ou « contagieuses ». C’est faux.

[19] Mise au point du CNR sur la réalisation des prélèvements et la sensibilité des tests RT-PCR pour la détection du SARS-CoV-2, 9 mai 2020

[20] Avis du 25 septembre 2020 de la Société Française de Microbiologie (SFM) relatif à l’interprétation de la valeur de Ct (estimation de la charge virale) obtenue en cas de RT-PCR SARS-CoV-2 positive sur les prélèvements cliniques réalisés à des fins diagnostiques ou de dépistage, 25 septembre 2020

[21] Coronavirus – Les tests PCR inadaptés contre l’épidémie? « Jusqu’à 90% de personnes testées ne seraient pas contagieuses », basé sur une étude d’une équipe de Harvard ( Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health) de Michael Mina, département d’épidémiologie, je vous mets en fichier joint le PDF correspondant, une étude, reprise par le NY Times :

« Pour eux, la limite du test PCR (prélèvement par voie nasale ou salivaire) réside dans la brutalité et la simplicité du résultat qu’il donne. La personne est soit positive, soit négative. Pas plus de renseignement, notamment sur la contagiosité du malade.

Or, les scientifiques d’Harvard soulèvent le problème de la quantité de virus que ce test PCR ne donne pas et qui pourrait, selon eux, permettre de donner des clés supplémentaires pour contrer l’épidémie. 

« Les tests standards diagnostiquent un grand nombre de personnes qui peuvent être porteuses de quantités relativement insignifiantes du virus », explique ainsi le Dr. Michael Mina, épidémiologiste à la Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. »

[22] « Au rythme actuel avec nos tests RT-PCR, nous allons confiner des dizaines de milliers de gens pour rien », alerte le Dr. Yvon Le Flohic, manuel Moragues, 3 septembre 2020.

[23] Tests de diagnostic ultra sensibles, les tests RT-PCR sortent positifs même pour des individus qui portent trop peu de virus pour être encore contagieux. Pour en faire de meilleurs tests de contagiosité, certains appellent à baisser leur seuil de détection. Est-ce une bonne idée ? Quelles sont les limites de cette solution ? Décryptage.Xavier Boinivet, 15 septembre 2020

[24] Jean-Luc Gala (UCL) estime que les futures mesures de la Celeval, tel le lockdown, vont tuer l’économie, provoquer des suicides et déstabiliser l’État. Le Celeval, ou Cellule d’évaluation, est le groupe d’experts qui conseillent le gouvernement belge dans la gestion du COVID.

[25] L’OMS plaide pour éviter à tout prix les confinements : ‘Cela ne rend que les pauvres plus pauvres’

[26] Voici comment la pandémie risque de faire exploser la pauvreté mondiale, une première en 22 ans

[27] ‘Le coronavirus menace 500 millions de personnes de pauvreté’, prévient l’Oxfam. Ce n’est pas le coronavirus, la menace, mais l’attitude de nos gouvernants face au coronavirus !

[28] Le chômage de masse est désormais mondial

[29] ‘Nous risquons une crise alimentaire imminente si des mesures ne sont pas prises rapidement’. Encore une fois, ce n’est pas à cause du coronavirus, mais à cause de notre attitude face à cette crise.

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Same War Strategy from Ukraine to Palestine

December 16th, 2023 by Manlio Dinucci

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.

Zelensky was invited to Washington by Biden and was pressing Congress to approve the spending bill which includes another 50 billion dollars in military aid for Ukraine.

The New York Times writes:

“The Ukrainian counteroffensive launched six months ago has failed. Kyiv has to deal with declining military personnel, ammunition reserves, and Western support. Moscow is demonstrating the ability to sustain a prolonged war.”

In this situation, the New York Times still writes,

“The United States and Ukraine are looking for a new strategy after the failure of the counteroffensive: the Pentagon sends General Aguto, support commander for Ukraine from a base in Germany, to spend long periods in Kyiv. General Aguto will work more directly with the country’s military leadership.”

The United States continues to support Israel in the war in Gaza while it continues to fuel the war in Ukraine directly and through NATO. The plan of the leaders of Israel involves the deportation of the population of Gaza to the Sinai desert and the cancellation of Gaza as a Palestinian territory, then doing the same thing with the West Bank.

The US strategy, supported by Israel, aims to widen the war in the Middle Eastern region, where the US is losing its predominant position in the face of the advancement of the political-economic projects of China and Russia, including the forthcoming enlargement of the BRICS to Iran and Saudi Arabia. To support this war strategy the United States continues to increase its already enormous military spending.

The Senate has approved a Defence Law worth 886 billion dollars, to which other military expenditure is added, bringing the total to around half of global military spending.

 

Don’t Get Jabbed: Powerful Video on “Killer Vaccine” that Needs to be Watched by Everyone

December 16th, 2023 by JRickey Productions

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We bring to the attention of  Global Research readers this powerful and carefully researched video JRickey Productions.

Let us be under no illusions, the evidence of mortality and morbidity resulting from vaccine inoculation is overwhelming. 

In the words of Dr. Gary G Kohls:

Here is a must-watch, totally-truthful, science-based, vaccinology-literate video for anyone who is considering getting a booster (or even an initial) dose of any of the still-experimental, still unproven for long-term safety or efficacy, mRNA Covid-19 inoculations.  and then quickly forwarded on to loved ones before one of the many powers-that-be finds a way to shut it down.

First published on July 29, 2021

**

Video, click lower righthand corner to enlarge screen

Source: JRickey Productions Studio

 

Almost 20,000 Covid vaccine deaths have been recorded in the European Union (July 17, 2021). In the, US the number of registered vaccine related deaths is of the order of 12,000 (July 9, 2021).

And those official numbers vastly underestimate the devastating impacts of the mRNA vaccine. Most of the vaccine deaths and injuries are not registered or recorded by the health authorities.

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Featured image is from Health Impact News

Dr. Google Will See You Now

December 15th, 2023 by Maryam Henein

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Google no longer helps you find what you are truly looking for. Instead, they now customize results to satisfy their wants and needs. Individual results might vary.

Google’s audacious tyranny, which includes censorship, surveillance, and mind control, is accelerating at a wicked clip. It’s hard to keep up.

The planet’s leading search engine has stealthily infiltrated areas/sectors of our society, including elections, news, finances, and health, not to mention your mind, all the while ‘vacuuming‘ and usurping data, to become a megalithic repository.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane back to 2019.

Dr Goggle

November 1st: Google’s parent company Alphabet acquired FitBit for a cool $2.1 billion, adding it to the other 200 companies it owns.

November 12th: The Wall Street Journal reports via an anonymous ‘source’ within Google that the company has been accessing millions of patients’ health data alongside Ascension, the largest Catholic health system in the world, without patient consent.
The deal between Google and Ascension authorizing the data transfer was formally signed hours after The Wall Street Journal broke the story.

The same day, Ascension put out a notification stating that there was no breach of data and that their collaboration is (somehow) entirely compliant with The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations of 1996 (more on this later).

November 14th: The Wall Street Journal reports that attorney generals representing 48 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, announced the opening of a sweeping antitrust investigation into Google.

The Guardian published an opinion piece titled “I’m the Google whistleblower. The medical data of millions of Americans is at risk.”

Mind Control, Surveillance, Wicked Genius

The amount of surveillance, manipulation, and mind control that Google is guilty of beckons the slogan: “Make George Orwell Fiction Again.”

Courtesy Zach Vorhies

© Courtesy Zach Vorhies

It sounds outlandish and sci-fi until you untangle the wicked genius.

To begin, one can review the evidence Google software engineer turned whistleblower handed over to the Department of Justice and Project Veritas in August 2019.

Although mainstream media coverage has been slow to catch on, the 950 pages Zach Vorhies provided, which includes two blacklists, confirms Google’s nefarious ways.

Three years prior, Dr. Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today had already identified at least nine different blacklists and written about them in a piece for US News and World Report titled “The New Censorship.”

It was 2016, and he was already calling the company ‘the world’s biggest censor.’

In October 2019 at the American Priority Conference in Miami, Vorhies’s astounding presentation further unpacked Google’s maniacal plan to allow machines to unfairly control our minds to serve their agenda under the guise of benevolence.

Google calls it “Machine Learning Fairness.” In this world that Vorhies exposes objective reality itself is biased.

“I think it’s just going to get harder [for the mainstream] to ignore because Zach walked off with 950 pages of documents and an internal video,” says Dr. Robert Epstein.

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Gaza: “I Can See the Children Haunted by Chaos, The Silent Cries of Injuries and Fear”. “There is no Morality in U.S. Governance

December 15th, 2023 by Jim Miles

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***

I can see the photos:  the faces of children haunted by chaos beyond their control; their faces of pain, the silent cries and screams of injuries and fear; parents’ faces, torn with grief and more silent cries of pain and injustice; blood washed across staircases and floors in hospitals, blood caked on faces of innocent people – clotted with the powder and grit of demolished concrete and plaster from homes, hospitals, and schools; 

 


I can see the photos: neighbourhoods crumpled and flattened by thousands of bombs; craters where buildings and streets used to be; people, small by comparison to the deluge of destruction, digging with bare hands through the tangled rubble of steel and mortar; people, frozen in time, calling for help, beseeching the world, damning the world, nowhere to turn, no escape from the whistle and rumble of bombs and missiles;

 

I cannot hear that:  nor the screams of the wounded, the cries of the injured, the cries for lost parents, lost children, lost lives; the cries of those trapped under the wreckage of their homes;

I cannot smell that: the sickly metallic sweet smell of blood; the acrid sulfurous smoke of explosions; the dustings of powder and chemicals drifting around the ruins; the heart and gut-wrenching smells of bodies decomposing under the rubble; the smoke of a small fire somehow scavenged to boil water for a meager meal of…some unknown provenance; 

 

I cannot touch that: the heat, the cold, the grit, the twist of iron bars under calloused and bloody hands searching for victims; the warm damp of bloodied clothing and bandages.  

…and I understand: this is not a war, but a genocide committed against an imprisoned people; a genocide that has endured slowly over many decades; an ethnic cleansing long understood by the perpetrators to be an underlying feature of their conquest; as long as the very origins of the concept of the settler state started over a century ago. 

There is no morality in U.S. governance

 

I listen to the politicians:  the members of the U.S. congress and their fawning obsequiousness towards Israel; the same coming from the EU, Britain, Canada and other members of the ‘western’ (and diminishing) world. 

I listen to news commentaries:  knowing that “balance” and “fairness” do not apply in a situation where one side has vastly superior military power (although not the touted prowess of such), controls most of the media, and has its mystique inculcated into its own population:  exceptionalism, freedom, indispensability ring hollow in a world of violence they themselves have created.    

The United States, as the largest purveyor of violence in the world, could easily put a stop to all this. 

The feeble words and excuses of the U.S. government only emphasize how the politicians, the military-industrial-financial complex, and the corporate “persons” – all of whom reap large financial rewards for this carnage – do not want the savagery to end. 

The military corporations – Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northop Grumman, an almost endless list – and those supplying them, are providing as per President Biden a financial boost for the U.S. economy. 

Lives and deaths are not important; the dollar reigns supreme, both for profits and global hegemony.

A big if, a gigantic if:  if the U.S. simply stopped sending military support to Israel, the bombs and missiles and tanks would soon become silent.  So simple; so not going to happen. 

The U.S. is the least moral country in the world today.  It has created and facilitated more wars, more deaths, more damages, more humanitarian disasters than any other country.  The U.S. sees everything as a win or lose situation, a zero sum game in which only they can be the winners, at all costs – the costs of millions of lives around the world.  Now it is the costs of tens of thousands of lives in Gaza/Palestine, the costs of all civic functions, of hospitals, doctors, schools, teachers, bakeries, electrical and sewage systems, all to support the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.   

The future is unknown, but obviously major changes of some kind are in process, violently so.  There are solutions, none of which the U.S. or Israel will even consider for a moment, until and unless some unforeseen event forces them to.  As both are nuclear armed violent societies, the world needs to hope above all hopes for a peaceful resolution to current events, beyond a pause, beyond a ceasefire, well into the creation of a democratic state for all citizens, well into the creation of a global democracy where politicians and their militaries do not rule.   

In the meantime sumud in the face of a genocidal threat has served along with the resistance to ethnic tyranny. 

May peace eventually prevail. 

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“The Worst Days in Gaza”

December 15th, 2023 by Peter Koenig

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“The Worst Days in Gaza” — these are the words of an extraordinary testimony by Lara Elborno, Palestinian journalist, talking directly from Gaza – with video illustrations – showing in a 4-minute video clip a reality that most of the west ignores, or wants to ignore.

Lara says:

“Everyday has been the worst day; Israel outdoes itself in brutality and destruction every day; so, every day is the worst day. The day Yoav Gallant (Israel’s Minister of Defense, alias War) announced that Palestinians would be denied food, water, and aid, was the worst day.”

“The day that Israeli Officials announced that they were rolling out the Gaza Nakba, was the worst day. (Nakba, means “catastrophe” in Arabic, and refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab / Palestine – Israeli war. A new Nakba is occurring now in Gaza).”

“The day that they sieged and surrounded the Al-Shifa Hospital, bombed the maternity ward, bombed the outside clinic, was the worst day.”

“The day that Israel dropped six 1-ton bombs on the Jabalia refugee camp, was the worst day.”

There is an endless chain of “Worst Days of Gaza”

illustrated by pictures and video clips – worse than what the world has witnessed in at least the last seven decades, maybe in the last 300 years.

See this full 4-minute heart-breaking video clip:

Those with a dystopian and criminal mind like the leaderships of the United States and the European Union go even farther – they encourage Israel to continue the slaughter.

The US with a lone vote blocked a Ceasefire Resolution proposed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at the UN Security Council (UNSC) last week.

On 12 December, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) voted overwhelmingly for a Ceasefire, with 153 YES-votes, ten votes against, and 23 abstentions. Many EU countries voted against the mandate of the European Commission, FOR a ceasefire, including France.

ian bremmer on X: "unga vote call for an end to war in ukraine, feb 2023: in favor: 141 against: 7 abstentions: 32 today's vote for ceasefire in gaza in favor: 153

Then there are those whose conscience rejects the abject injustice in principle, and who would say yes to a Ceasefire – to a halt to the genocide, but their “political correctness”, their cowardice vis-à-vis the powers that be, prevented them from a Yes-vote for a Ceasefire. Instead, they abstained.

Among the abstaining cowards are Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, Hungary, Bulgaria – and even Argentina and Uruguay – and many (15) more.

What do they expect from the self-declared Masters of the Universe in return for not voting against this horrifying democide?

See this.

At the UNGA, unlike at the UNSC, none of the 193 member states has a veto. Their votes are not binding, they carry no international legal power. However, they are a strong indication for where the world stands with their opinion about political conflicts.

What will happen next is an open question. As long as the West, notably the US and her EU lapdog, keep sending money and weapons to Israel, hence encouraging the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) to keep bombing and killing, the massacre is likely to continue.

The IDF are targeting especially women and children — the children are the next generation Palestinians, and the women are the reproductive force for Palestine.

The intention of the Zionists could not be any clearer – erase Palestine and Palestinians not only from the maps, but from the globe.

As long as the West, led by the United States, continues with this murderous drive with impunity, so long the Worst Days in Gaza keep coming.

People of the world, continue taking to the streets – as you do already in New York, Washington, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vienna, Rome, and many more cities around the globe. And invent other means of depriving your Governments of Deception from the capacity to continue governing and reigning over and against the solidarity power of We, the People.

*

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

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

The Four Most Repeated Pieces of Likud Political Zionist Propaganda for Over 50 Years

December 15th, 2023 by Hans Stehling

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1. ‘Israel came into existence in the most legitimate way possible — through a vote of the UN.’

In fact, UNGA Resolution 181 of 1947, was passed by just 33 votes, out of a current membership of 193 UN member states (17%). Hardly a unanimous decision by the global community of nations, then or now!

2. ‘The newly established Israeli entity was immediately opposed by Arab states that set out to destroy the nascent Jewish state.’

In fact, the overwhelming population of Muslim Arabs that dominated the land of Palestine for over a thousand years, had warned the UN that it would never accept the forced insertion of a Jewish state in its midst.  Consequently, the resistance and attack, to preserve their lands and heritage, were of no surprise to anyone.

3. ‘In 2000, Ehud Barak, then Israel’s prime minister, offered Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat a Palestinian state. Arafat rejected the offer and 23 years of tragedy have ensued.’

In fact, Barak’s offer of a state was a ridiculous, non-contiguous entity with Israeli-controlled roads, military, airspace and sea access. An independent state? Never!

4. More than 500,000 Jews were forcibly expelled from Morocco and other North African and Middle East states, to Israel, after 1948, which served to balance the 3/4 million dispossessed Palestinians in 1948.

In fact, the large Jewish population of Morocco was never expelled. They had excellent relations with the national Arab community,  although they eventually decided to leave voluntarily. Other Jewish communities in Africa/ Middle East, decided likewise.  However, some communities were offered money by the new Israeli state, to emigrate there. Only a very few were forced to leave their country of birth and that was only because there was then a Jewish state that claimed their loyalty, albeit a state rejected by the Muslim world.

*

The above 4 pieces of zionist propaganda are repeatedly offered as an explanation as to why 700,000 Palestinians were violently removed from their homes and lands, and illegally dispossessed by the Irgun Jewish terrorist militia and the European immigrants to the new state of Israel, in 1948 – all without any compensation, then or subsequently.  

Being propaganda, not truth, these spurious claims are rejected in favour of fact-checked, historical evidence. Propaganda being only for the gullible who are credulous enough to believe such political fabrications.

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The Connection Between Insulin Resistance, Salt and High Blood Pressure

December 15th, 2023 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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Over 95% of the country is metabolically inflexible, and insulin resistance is a causal driver, with hypertension a frequent co-morbidity

According to conventional thought, salt induces high blood pressure by making your body absorb more water. Excess sodium in your blood absorbs water, thereby increasing the amount of blood filling up your vessels. As a result, your heart must work harder, hence your blood pressure goes up. However, the increase in blood volume is not really an excess sodium problem per se. The problem is that too much sodium is being retained due to excess insulin (insulin resistance)

Lowering your sodium intake isn’t the answer. In the long run, that may result in higher blood pressure, because your body has a built-in rescue mechanism that responds to low sodium in ways that results in vasoconstriction and increased stress, both of which ratchets up blood pressure

Oftentimes, a deficiency in the other electrolytes (calcium, potassium, and magnesium) are part of the problem. Your sodium-to-potassium ratio is particularly important for healthy blood pressure

Estrogen dominance is also pervasive and frequently contributes to high blood pressure by interfering with carbon dioxide production, thereby lowering blood oxygen levels. Estrogen can also interfere with your body’s production of progesterone, a hormone that helps maintain normal blood pressure by regulating your blood sugar level and reducing inflammation

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Over 95% of the country is metabolically inflexible, and insulin resistance is a causal driver, with hypertension a frequent comorbidity. In July 2022, a study1 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology from Tufts showed that 14 out 15 Americans, over 93% of the population, are metabolically inflexible, and insulin resistance and blood pressure are two of the key parameters of metabolic fitness.

Current statistics are likely even worse. The study used data from 2018, prior to the pandemic, which radically worsened metabolic health. So, in all likelihood, well over 95%, or 19 out of 20 people, are metabolically unfit. Excessive salt intake has long been accused of causing high blood pressure, and reducing salt intake typically does result in an initial reduction in blood pressure.

In one November 2023 study,2,3 reducing salt intake by 1 teaspoon a day (which equates to 2.3 grams of sodium) reduced systolic blood pressure by an average of 6 to 8 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) in 75% of participants in a single week — a result comparable to taking blood pressure medication. But is that all there is to it? Hardly.

Is Salt Intake Really the Problem?

According to conventional thought, salt induces high blood pressure by making your body absorb more water.4 Excess sodium in your blood absorbs water, thereby increasing the amount of blood filling up your vessels. As a result, your heart must work harder, hence your blood pressure goes up.

However, lowering your sodium intake isn’t the answer here. As detailed in “Trashing the Eight Glasses of Water a Day Recommendation,” while reducing salt intake may initially lower your blood pressure, it comes at a cost. In the long run, it worsens dehydration and ultimately results in higher blood pressure.

This occurs because when your salt intake is very low, your body responds to the decrease in blood volume by preventing your kidneys from excreting sodium. By retaining sodium, it helps increase your blood volume. It also increases vasoconstriction (narrowing of the blood vessels) to bring the blood pressure back up.

And, by forcing your kidneys to retain sodium, they will excrete potassium and magnesium instead. These are the primary intracellular electrolytes required for cellular hydration. Low magnesium and potassium also leads to further vasoconstriction and increased sympathetic nervous system activity.

Your sympathetic nervous system is the gas pedal that speeds up the systems involved in the fight-or-flight response, so it causes stress. Norepinephrine is also released when sodium levels are low, which also fuels the stress response. The stress response, in turn, ratchets up blood pressure. So, in the long run, too little salt can promote high blood pressure.

Electrolyte Imbalance Can Affect Your Blood Pressure

Oftentimes, a deficiency in the other electrolytes (calcium, potassium and magnesium) are part of the problem. Your sodium-to-potassium ratio is particularly important for healthy blood pressure.

Potassium helps lower your blood pressure by relaxing the walls of your arteries, and according to Harvard Health,5 many people with high systolic blood pressure can successfully lower it simply by increasing their potassium intake.

Prior to 2019, the adequate intake (AI) for potassium was 4,700 mg per day, based on the median intakes in healthy people. In 2019, the daily recommended intake was reduced to 2,600 mg a day for women aged 19 and older, and 3,400 mg a day for men, 19 and older.6

It is likely the higher 4,700 mg a day recommendation is the wiser one, and it’s generally recommended that you eat five times more potassium than sodium. If you’re unsure of your sodium and potassium intake, use cronometer.com/mercola. This nutrient tracker allows you to enter foods and then calculates the ratios automatically.

In my view the best way to increase your potassium is by eating ripe fruit. I typically get around 3,000 mg from watermelon, orange juice, apples and tangerines, and another 2,000 mg from other sources.

For a more complete list of potassium-rich foods, see DietaryGuidelines.gov’s “Food Sources of Potassium” page.7 Taking potassium supplements is not a good strategy and simply will not provide you with the benefits you seek. Magnesium also plays a significant role in the modulation of blood pressure, so you do not want to be deficient in that either.

Estrogen — A Wholly Overlooked Factor in High Blood Pressure

According to the late Ray Peat, a biologist and physiologist who specialized in the bioenergetic theory of health,8 estrogen is a major factor in the development of hypertension.

He believed there is a strong relationship between estrogen, nitric oxide (NO) and carbon dioxide (CO2). He explained that while estrogen promotes the production of NO, a gas that can help lower blood pressure by relaxing your blood vessels. NO also binds to complex IV and impairs mitochondrial energy production and increased insulin resistance.

Estrogen also interferes with your body’s ability to produce CO2, another gas that is essential for oxygen transport. As a result, high estrogen can result in low blood oxygen levels, which can contribute to high blood pressure.

Estrogen can also interfere with your body’s production of progesterone, a hormone that helps maintain normal blood pressure by regulating your blood sugar level and reducing inflammation. Progesterone is also an estrogen antagonist, which is important because estrogen, like linoleic acid (LA), draws water inside the cell, which increases blood pressure.

So, salt is hardly the only thing that causes water retention and swelling. Both estrogen and LA, which most processed foods are loaded with, do this as well.

If your blood pressure is high, and especially if your salt intake is already within reasonable limits, you’d be wise to assess whether your estrogen level might be too high (especially if you’re on estrogen therapy, which I do not recommend), and/or if you’re consuming too much LA.

Anything over 10 grams of LA a day can cause severe problems. I recommend keeping your LA intake below 5 grams a day. Cronometer.com/mercola is a helpful tool here as well.

Normalizing Your Blood Pressure with CO2

Peat advised treating high blood pressure with exogenous (supplemental) CO2, as it’s your body’s primary vasodilator. NO is a secondary “emergency” vasodilator. A simple way to do this is to take one-half to three-quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda in water a few times per day.

You can also boost your CO2 level by breathing into a paper lunch bag for a minute or two. The bag should not be too small or too large (an ideal size is 6 inches by 15 inches, or 15 centimeters by 38 centimeters). Breathe into the bag with your mouth and nose covered. Other exogenous delivery strategies include:

  • Drinking carbonated water and other carbonated beverages
  • Improving dysfunctional breathing habits
  • Nasal cannula administration
  • Rectal insufflation — This was the preferred administration method in the 1800s and 1900s. A 1-liter bag or 1-quart bag filled with CO2 gas, attached to a rectal catheter is used here; and it’s something that is relatively easy to do at home, provided you have the right equipment

If you are going to use CO2 therapeutically, make sure you’re getting beverage grade CO2. Beverage grade is 10 times cleaner and purer than food grade, and it’s the kind used in restaurants. You do not want industrial grade, which is used for cryo chambers, welding and a variety of other typically commercial applications.

Commercially, beverage grade CO2 is typically sold or rented in 20-pound cylinders. There’s enough CO2 gas in one cylinder that if you’re using 1 liter a day therapeutically, it will last you 250 years.

There are smaller units, like SodaStream, that can provide CO2 gas. The problem is that you need to use those CO2 cylinders with SodaStream equipment, and there is no easy way to put the gas into a container or bag, so you can’t use those cylinders for insufflation. A SodaStream is the ideal choice if you’re making carbonated beverages, however.

How Insulin Influences Your Blood Pressure

Insulin resistance is also a major contributor to high blood pressure, and one of its main causes is excess LA in your tissues. Additionally, your kidneys produce hormones that regulate arterial and venous constriction and your circulating blood volume. These two functions work together to maintain your blood pressure within normal limits.

Within your kidneys are special cells responsible for sensing the amount of sodium in the filtrate, and others that sense your blood pressure. As your blood pressure drops, the amount of filtered sodium also drops. In response to this drop in sodium, these specialized kidney cells release an enzyme called renin.

Renin, in turn, is converted into angiotensin I, and then to angiotensin II, a peptide hormone that causes vasoconstriction and an increase in blood pressure. At the same time, angiotensin II stimulates the adrenal gland to secrete aldosterone, an adrenal hormone that controls the amount of water your kidneys retain.

It does this by stimulating reabsorption of sodium, which pulls more water with it. The increase in sodium and water reabsorption then reduces your urine output and increases your circulating blood volume. Both of these functions affect your blood pressure measurements.

However, aldosterone is also activated by elevated insulin. So the increase in blood volume is not really an excess sodium problem per se. The problem is that too much sodium is being retained due to excess insulin.

Indeed, the class of blood pressure medications known as ACE inhibitors lower blood pressure by blocking the conversion of angiotensin. As a result, less aldosterone is produced, less sodium is reabsorbed, and less water is retained. Angiotensin II blockers also block this hormone directly.

So, to summarize, insulin resistance — which results from eating a diet too high in LA — is a major contributor to high blood pressure because elevated insulin leads to sodium retention, which draws in water and increases your blood volume, thereby raising your blood pressure. The graph below, posted on Twitter/X by the Mind Muscle Project,9 illustrates this sequence.

mind muscle project insulin resistance

Key Strategies to Normalize Your Blood Pressure

In closing, here is a list of some of the key lifestyle strategies to help normalize your insulin sensitivity and blood pressure:

  • Limit your LA consumption to 5 grams a day or less — Excessive omega-6/LA consumption contributes to high blood pressure by increasing mitochondrial dysfunction by several mechanisms that we will not review here.

The easiest way to do this is to ditch all processed foods (as they all are likely loaded with LA), and focus on a diet of whole foods, ideally organic. It would be helpful to also eliminate seeds and nuts unless you have been on a low LA diet for at least three years.

Sources of healthy fats to add to your diet include: grass fed butter, raw organic dairy, organic pastured egg yolks, coconuts, coconut oil and macadamia nuts, grass fed meats and pasture-raised poultry.

The best carbs to add would be ripe fruit that you tolerate well. Just make sure your fat intake is below 30%, which you can determine with Cronometer. If you fail to do this the carbs can convert to fat and change your cholesterol profile unfavorably.

  • Optimize your vitamin D, as vitamin D deficiency appears to be associated with both arterial stiffness and hypertension.10 
  • Optimize your sodium-to-potassium ratio, and make sure you’re getting enough magnesium and calcium as well.
  • Exercise regularly — Exercise is well-known for its ability to normalize blood pressure, but all forms of exercise are not the same in this regard. A recent investigation revealed that isometric exercise, where your muscles are in static contraction, is the most effective for lowering blood pressure, while aerobic exercise is next to last in terms of effectiveness.11
  • Avoid estrogen therapy, and never take estrogen without progesterone.
  • Consider using some form of exogenous CO2 supplement.

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Notes

1 J Am Coll Cardiol. July 12, 2022;80(2):138-151. doi: 10.1016/j.jacc.2022.04.046

2 JAMA November 11, 2023 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2023.23651

3 The Washington Post December 4, 2023

4 NPR November 17, 2023

5 Harvard Health Publishing, January 23, 2017

6 Food Insight Potassium

7 DietaryGuidelines.gov Food Sources of Potassium

8 Umzu. Who Is Ray Peat?

9 Twitter Mind Muscle Project November 26, 2023

10 Vitamin D Council, Hypertension

11 British Journal of Sports Medicine July 25, 2023 DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2022-106503

Featured image is from Mercola

Israel-Palestine War: Meet the Palestinian Teens Held and Abused in Israeli Prisons

December 15th, 2023 by Angelo Calianno

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***

In late November, a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas paused the bombing in the Gaza Strip. It also served as a window for the two sides to exchange Israelis taken captive during the 7 October Palestinian attack on Israel for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

Every year, Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank arrest between 500 and 700 people under the age of 18.

If charged, they are most often accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Otherwise, the teens, children and many other Palestinian prisoners are held in “administrative detention” – incarcerated without being charged of any crime. Palestinians in administrative detention can be imprisoned for six months without trial, though Israeli authorities can renew this period without any time limit as they see fit.

Around 7,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons, according to Palestinian NGO Addameer.

During the 24 November-1 December truce, Israel released 240 prisoners. Of those Palestinians, 169 were minors. In return, more than 100 Israelis and others holding foreign citizenship were freed by Hamas. Seventy-eight of them were women and children.

After their release, Middle East Eye met with five of the Palestinian teens to hear about their experience.

The Israeli prison service did not respond to a request for comment on the allegations of torture and abuse.

Mohamed Bahaa Ayyash, 17

‘The guards kept punching me in the eyes’

Image: Mohamed Bahaa Ayyash, 17, from the Jalazone refugee camp (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Mohamed Bahaa Ayyash, 17, from the Jalazone refugee camp (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Mohamed is from Jalazone refugee camp, north of Ramallah. He was placed in administrative detention for six months and released on 1 December from Ktziot prison in southern Israel’s Negev desert, known in Arabic as the Naqab.

The prison was brutal from the start. From the very first days, they made us walk around naked, spitting on us and beating us. After 7 October onwards, everything got worse. They gave us little to eat; they threw raw chicken and turkey on the ground. To this day, I still have stomach problems because of infections contracted in the cell. 

I can’t see properly anymore. The guards kept punching me in the eyes. Even today, after a week of being free, they hurt a lot. It was freezing in the Naqab. We only had shorts and T-shirts. At night, we had to share a blanket between three of us. I remember everything that was done to me every single day. Not only do I remember it, but I also see it. It is always before my eyes. When I eat, I think of my friends still inside who are going hungry. When I am in bed, I think of how cold my companions still are.

Abdul Rahman al-Zarim, 18

‘Boys were fainting from lack of food, illness, fever and beatings’

Image: Abdul Rahman al-Zarim, 18, was held in Ktziot prison in the Negev desert (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Abdul Rahman al-Zarim, 18, was held in Ktziot prison in the Negev desert (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Abdul Rahman was detained for a year and three months and released on 1 December from Ktziot prison. He was accused of hitting a settler, which he denies. He is from Kafr Aqab between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

I was moved between prisons several times, but my worst time was in the Naqab. The cold was intolerable. They used to throw food on us: raw meat and raw potatoes. They used to tell us: “Eat dogs.” The worst moment was when they brought in detainees who had arrived from Gaza: they beat them extremely hard, they suffered horrible torture. After 7 October, we were no longer even entitled to medical examinations. The boys were sick: they were fainting from lack of food, illness, fever and beatings. Sometimes from the window we would see the doctor passing by. We would shout at him to help us, but he pretended not to hear. 

Today, I feel better, although I can still only eat a little bit of food at a time because of the severe pain. I am trying not to look at my phone, social media, and TV. Every time I do and hear the news from Gaza, my mind goes back to what I went through in prison.

Abdelkarim Abu Mustafa, 17

‘I was so hungry that I constantly dreamed of eating sweets’

Image: Abdelkarim Abu Mustafa, 17, was previously wounded by Israeli sniper fire (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Abdelkarim Abu Mustafa, 17, was previously wounded by Israeli sniper fire (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Abdelkarim was released on 30 November, two days before the truce broke down. He served four months in administrative detention, but has been told his case remains open and has been threatened with re-arrest. Abdelkarim was previously wounded by sniper fire during an Israeli raid on Balata refugee camp, where he lives. In detention, he lost 20kg.

They beat us all the time. There was always little to eat. After the first few days, they moved me to a prison in Israel so my relatives could not visit me. The humiliations were continuous. They did not allow us to wash or change our clothes, even for a month. I saw everything: kids lost their minds and repeatedly banged their heads against the wall.

When I got out, I hugged my family again and bought lots of sweets. I was so hungry in the cell that I constantly dreamed of eating sweets. Now that I am home, I want to continue my studies to become an important person. For now, I am still very confused. I am talking to you, but my mind is still in that prison.

Mohammed Sawalmeh, 17

‘If we asked to go to the doctor, they would punish us severely’

Image: Mohammed Sawalmeh, 17, says he was forbidden from praying while in Israeli prison (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Mohammed Sawalmeh, 17, says he was forbidden from praying while in Israeli prison (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Mohammed was seized by Israeli forces from his uncle’s house in Balata refugee camp. His uncle was a prisoner during the Second Intifada, and Mohammed suspects this is why he was arrested. He was kept in administrative detention without charge.

At first, they gave me six months, and then, once in front of the judge, they renewed the sentence. I was released a fortnight ago, but prison broke me. I lost so much weight that my family hardly recognised me. Besides the physical aspect, there was a lot of psychological torture. They were small actions aimed at demoralising us.

One of the worst moments was when they would let the settlers, the most extremist ones, into our cells. They would force us to watch them while they prayed. We, on the other hand, were forbidden to pray, and if they found us doing so, they would beat us even harder. If we asked to go to the doctor, they would punish us severely. During the torture, they often screamed at us: “You are Hamas puppies.” I didn’t think they would ever release me. The night they did, they put me in a van and told me they had to transfer me for interrogation. I could not believe it when they told me I would be released.

Wael Mesheh, 17

‘I protected the younger ones by shielding them with my body’

Image: Wael Mesheh, 17, spent 14 months in Israeli prison. He holds up a photo of him looking much larger before his arrest (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Wael Mesheh, 17, spent 14 months in Israeli prison. He holds up a photo of him looking much larger before his arrest (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

Wael was released on 25 November after a 14-month detention. He was accused of throwing a rock at a jeep, an allegation he denies. When he was detained in his home in Balata, Israeli forces stormed his house at 4am, hit his mother and detained his 15-year-old brother.

In prison, everything changed from 7 October onwards. At first, I worked in the prison cafeteria, and the guards treated us more humanely. During interrogations, there was always an adult from the Palestinian Authority present because we were minors. Being in prison was hard, but you could survive. Then, everything was different. From 7 October, the first thing that was taken away from us was the presence of an adult: the first sign that made us worry. Every day, the guards came to our cells, punished us, and insulted us for no reason. When they came to beat us, I protected the younger ones by shielding them with my body.

Sometimes, they made us parade with the Israeli flag. One day, during time in the courtyard, I set it on fire. I was beaten a lot and thrown into solitary confinement. But that gesture gave us all a lot of courage. 

Now, I am OK because I am at home. The first thing I did as soon as I got back was to hug and kiss my mother, but still today, I cannot sleep at night. The officer who released me told me: “If they bring you back here alive, I will kill you with my own hands.” I want to give a message to boys my age in the West. They are certainly at a time when they think about having fun and living a teenager’s life. On the other hand, we live in the conditions you see, trying to defend a country, which is something none of them can imagine.

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Featured image: Abdelkarim Abu Mustafa, 17, in his home in Balata, occupied West Bank (MEE/Angelo Calianno)

What Hamas Said: “Any bets on arrangements in Gaza without Hamas and the resistance factions are illusions and mirages.”

December 15th, 2023 by Rima Najjar

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Ismail Haniyeh’s statement yesterday (Dec 13, 2023) was eloquent and powerful. Haniyeh is the senior Hamas leader and former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (2006–07) and of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip (2007–14). His statement was carried on many Arabic news channels.

I listened to the speech carefully as it was being broadcast live on Al Jazeera Arabic during its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, and then had a hard time finding it again on Al Jazeera’s website, likely because Israel and the U.S. continue to disfigure the reality of Hamas and Palestinian resistance generally (whether violent or non-violent) as terrorism, instead of what it is, which is a national movement of resistance to occupation and for liberation and self-determination.

You may be surprised to learn that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the organization with whom Israel negotiated the Oslo Accords in 1993, was designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” by the U.S. in 1997 and still holds that designation.

Bafflingly, rather than dropping the designation, the US uses a “presidential waiver” that allows US diplomatic engagement with the PLO (such as it is today), as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” to take place.

But Biden is not about to waive the US designation of Hamas as a “terrorist organization” to engage diplomatically with the Palestinian Islamic armed resistance.

On the contrary, it continues to hurl invective and dehumanizing language at this side of what it perversely describes as a defensive war by the occupier against “terrorists,” exhibiting callous, shocking and inhumane disregard to a humanitarian situation that practically the whole world now recognizes as a series of continuing massacres by Israel against civilians, mostly women and children, and a scorched-earth tactic on vast areas of a densely populated strip of Palestinian occupied land under blockade for 17 years (see “What was Hamas Thinking?”).  Moreover, as Jonathan Cook points out, the BBC and other media keep revisiting Hamas crimes that day, but fail to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens, often in grotesque fashion.

Biden continues to call for the eradication of Hamas, long after every rational and informed political analyst has declared that to be an impossible task.

What resonated most for me in Ismail Haniyeh’s speech is his reassurance that Palestinian sacrifice, blood and suffering shall not be in vain, God willing; Palestine will be free.

Ismail Haniyeh:

“Every life lost, whether of a boy or girl, man or woman, young or old, every tear shed by a mother, father, or child, is precious. Every home or dream destroyed by zionist attacks, and all suffering from hunger, thirst, lack of money, lives, and crops, will remain etched in our memory, never to be forgotten or forgiven. The enemy will pay the price for all of it, no matter how long it takes.”

Jabaliya refugee camp bombed in Gaza

That price is the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, the freedom and self-determination of the Palestinian people.

To my ears, Haniyeh was echoing the sentiments Abraham Lincoln described so eloquently in his Gettysburg address as he commemorated the dead on the battlefield by saying they gave their lives so that the nation could live.

Abraham Lincoln:

“… from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish on this earth.”

Palestinian government of the Palestinian people, by the Palestinian people, for the Palestinian people is not in Joe Biden’s calculations, let alone Netanyahu’s. But they most certainly are in the calculations of Hamas:

Ismail Haniyeh:

“Any bets on arrangements in Gaza without Hamas and the resistance factions are illusions and mirages, illusions and mirages, illusions and mirages… We are certain that the brutal aggression will end, and the resistance will remain a faithful guardian of the rights and legitimate aspirations of our people…”

Abraham Lincoln:

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Ismail Haniyeh:

“I affirm that we are steadfast, our resistance is capable, our people are patient and firmly struggling, and we are confident that the occupation will disappear, God willing.”

Palestinians everywhere are similarly steadfast and confident. A new poll conducted across the West Bank and Gaza shows skyrocketing support for Palestinian resistance and dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority.

The above comparison of rhetoric between Haniyeh and Lincoln is meant to juxtapose US virtuous national rhetoric against what it designates as terror and so highlight US hypocrisy. To Abraham Lincoln “the nation” was a settler-colonial entity that had massacred much of the indigenous population on the land. Haniyeh is a leader of a real liberation effort for indigenous freedom, currently defending against both genocide and ecocide.

And because you are unlikely to come across what Hamas has to say on the 36th anniversary of the movement, here is a translation of the Arabic text of that statement as provided by Resistance News Network on Telegram:

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

On the occasion of the 36th anniversary of the launch of the Hamas movement and amidst the blessed Al-Aqsa Flood battle, we renew our commitment to continue the resistance until the occupation is removed and to achieve our people’s aspirations for liberation, return, and the establishment of the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

O patient and steadfast masses of our Palestinian people, both in proud Palestine and abroad, today marks the 36th anniversary of the launch of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and we live in days of glory and pride, under the shadows of the glorious Al-Aqsa Flood battle.

This battle inaugurated a new phase in our struggle with the brutal zionist occupier, who indulges in the blood of our people, denies our national rights, steals our land, and Judaizes our Islamic and Christian sanctities, including Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Al-Aqsa Flood battle is a title of steadfastness and resistance on the path to freedom and liberation from occupation and the establishment of the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital, God willing.

Since its inception, the movement has kept the covenant of the righteous martyrs, carrying the banner of jihad and resistance to complete our people’s journey towards liberation and independence. It has offered its leaders and soldiers alongside the martyrs of our people to create a free and dignified future for our patient and steadfast people. Al-Aqsa Flood is a continuation of this approach, which we will not abandon until the zionist Nazi occupation is ended.

We live the pain and suffering with our people everywhere, especially in proud Gaza, which faces a savage zionist aggression and a genocidal war targeting its existence on its land by destroying all elements of life. Yet, we will never succumb to humiliation and defeat, and this brutal enemy will not succeed in its malicious schemes. Our great people and our valiant resistance in Gaza and the West Bank remain steadfast on the land, and we will not leave it except to return to Al-Quds as the capital of our independent Palestinian state.

We mourn the righteous martyrs of our people, pray for the speedy recovery of our wounded, and freedom for our heroic prisoners.

We affirm the following:

First: Our promise to our great Palestinian people is to remain faithful to their sacrifices, pains, and hopes. We will not abandon our duty to defend them, our land, and our sanctities. Hamas and its victorious Al-Qassam Brigades will continue to be the protective shield for the Palestinian national project and our people’s aspirations for liberation, return, and independence. The Al-Aqsa Flood battle is a page of glory and pride in the history of our people’s struggle against the zionist Nazi colonizer, and our resistance will continue to escalate until the occupation is gone and the Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital is established, God willing.

Second: The Hamas movement is an integral part of this great people, expressing their will for freedom and independence. The movement will remain a fortress defending our people’s national rights. We will accept no guardianship and will not allow the passing of any suspicious plans to circumvent our people’s right to self-determination and the establishment of their fully sovereign state.

Third: The zionist occupation and President Biden’s administration, with their obstinacy and arrogance, refusing all efforts and UN resolutions calling for an end to aggression, bear full responsibility for the ongoing massacres against our people and the destruction in Gaza. This historical responsibility will not expire with time, and the day will come when they will be held accountable.

Fourth: We are open to all efforts leading to stopping the aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, to the release of our prisoners in the occupation’s prisons, and to forming a national reference on the path to restoring our people’s national rights and establishing their independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

Fifth: We salute the steadfast and resistant Palestinian masses in proud Gaza, the West Bank, throughout Palestine, and the diaspora. We call on them to further steadfastness, solidarity, and escalation of resistance against the occupation everywhere. The occupation will be eradicated by the determination of the revolutionaries and the bravery of the heroic resistance fighters.

Sixth: We salute all the forces and parties that have stood in solidarity with our people, championed Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa, and committed to standing by the right, in the face of the occupation and the zionist project threatening Palestine and the region.

Seventh: We salute the nations of our Arab and Islamic nation and all the free people of the world who have come out in solidarity with the just cause of the Palestinian people, rejecting the massacres and aggression of the occupation in the Gaza Strip, and rejecting President Biden’s administration’s bias towards the new Nazis. We call on them to increase their escalating activism in support of the Palestinian people and their right to freedom and self-determination, like all peoples.

Eighth: We appreciate all Arab, Islamic, and international efforts that have sought and are seeking to stop the aggression, to aid our people in the Gaza Strip. We call on them and the international community for more political action to stop the double standards policy pursued by President Biden’s administration and some Western countries biased towards the occupation, to work to end the zionist occupation threatening international peace and security, and to enable our people to exercise their inalienable national rights, no matter how long it takes.

Indeed, it is a jihad of victory or martyrdom.

Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas

Thursday: 01 Jumada al-Akhirah 1445H

Corresponding to: December 14, 2023In short, as the commander-in-chief of the Martyr Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades (the armed branch of Hamas) Mohammad Deif said in his historic speech announcing Al-Aqsa Flood: “The era of bets has ended, and the occupation must be expelled.”

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This article was originally published on the author’s blogsite.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Ismail Haniyeh, senior Hamas leader and former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (2006–07) and of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip (2007–14). Screen shot is from Al Jazeera broadcast of his statement on Dec 13, 2023

Pakistan Court Indicts Jailed Ex-PM Imran Khan in State Secrets Case

December 15th, 2023 by Al Jazeera

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Jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan has pleaded not guilty to charges of leaking state secrets under an indictment that deals a new blow to his chances of contesting Pakistan’s general election in February.

The charges are related to a classified cable called a cypher sent to Islamabad by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington last year that Khan is accused of making public.

“The charges were read out loudly in the courtroom,” government prosecutor Shah Khawar said on Wednesday, adding that Khan and his co-accused, former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, both denied the charges.

Khan’s lawyer Gohar Khan contested the indictment, saying it would be valid only if signed by the accused. The former prime minister has previously said the contents of the cable appeared in the media from other sources.

A guilty verdict under the Official Secrets Act could bring up to 10 years in prison, lawyers said.

It is the second time Khan has been indicted on the same charges after a superior court struck down an earlier indictment on technical grounds, saying the correct procedure had not been followed.

Click here to read the full article on Al Jazeera.

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Pablo Escobar’s Son Reveals His Dad “Worked for the CIA Selling Cocaine” — Media Silent

December 15th, 2023 by Claire Bernish

This article was first published on the Free Thought Project, crossposted on Global Research on May 18,. 2018

Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of notorious Medellín cartel drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, now says his father “worked for the CIA.”

In a new book, “Pablo Escobar In Fraganti,” Escobar, who lives under the pseudonym, Juan Sebastián Marroquín, explains his “father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America.”

“The drug business is very different than what we dreamed,” he continues. “What the CIA was doing was buying the controls to get the drug into their country and getting a wonderful deal.”

“He did not make the money alone,” Marroquín elaborated in an interview, “but with US agencies that allowed him access to this money. He had direct relations with the CIA.”

Notably, Marroquín added, “the person who sold the most drugs to the CIA was Pablo Escobar.”

Where his first book primarily covered Escobar, the man as a father, Marroquín’s second — which has just been released in Argentina — delves into the kingpin’s “international ties of corruption in which my father had an active participation, among them with the American CIA,” he said in a recent interview.

Those government associates “were practically his partners,” which allowed Escobar to defy the law, and gave him nearly the same power as a government.

Predictably, this information is conveniently absent from media headlines in America.

If the CIA trafficking cocaine into the United States sounds like some tin foil conspiracy theory, think again. Their alleged role in the drug trade was exposed in 1996 in an explosive investigative series “Dark Alliance” by Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News. The investigation, headed up by Webb revealed ties between the CIA, Nicaraguan Contras and the crack cocaine trade ravaging African-American communities.

The investigation provoked massive protests and congressional hearings, as well as overt backlash from the mainstream media to discredit Webb’s reporting. However, decades later, officials would come forward to back Webb’s original investigation up.

Then-senator John Kerry even released a detailed report claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons — but that the U.S. government knew about it.

El Patron, as Escobar came to be known, amassed more wealth than almost any drug dealer in history — at one point raking in around $420 million a week in revenue — and reportedly supplied about 80 percent of the world’s cocaine. Escobar landed on Forbes’ list of international billionaires for seven straight years, and — though the nature of the business makes acquiring solid numbers impossible — his estimated worth was around $30 billion.

Escobar and the Medellín cartel smuggled 15 tons of cocaine into the U.S. — every day — and left a trail of thousands of dead bodies to do so.

“It was a nine-hundred-mile run from the north coast of Colombia and was simply wide-open,” journalist Ioan Grillo wrote in the book, “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency.” “The Colombians and their American counterparts would airdrop loads of blow out to sea, from where it would be rushed ashore in speedboats, or even fly it right onto the Florida mainland and let it crash down in the countryside.”

If what Marroquín reveals in the new book is, indeed, true, it would mean the CIA played a major role in ensuring Americans had access to boundless quantities of cocaine — while the U.S. government sanctimoniously railed against drugs to promote the drug war.

In fact, as Marroquín keenly observes, drug prohibition makes for the best pro-drug propaganda — the nature of something being illegal naturally gives it greater appeal.

That prohibition guaranteed Escobar’s bloody reign would be all the more violent. Marroquín now believes “his path of healing is reconciliation with the relatives of those whom his father ordered to kill.”

While Escobar certainly used violence, or ordered others to use violence, to effectively foment and maintain power, he wasn’t without a charitable bone in his body. As Business Insider notes, “He was nicknamed ‘Robin Hood’ after handing out cash to the poor, building housing for the homeless, constructing 70 community soccer fields, and building a zoo.”

El Patron met his fate in 1993 — by gunshot as he attempted to flee after his house was surrounded. However, the circumstances surrounding his death are still being debated today. Marroquín insists his father committed suicide rather than be shot or captured by police forces sent to hunt him down; while others believe Escobar was absolutely slain by police.

Either way, Escobar’s accumulation of wealth could be viewed as incidental to the role he played for the CIA and the war on drugs — a massive hypocrisy serving to keep people hooked on a substance deemed illegal by the State, so the State can then reap the profits generated by courts, prisons, and police work ‘necessary’ to ‘fight’ the ‘war on drugs.’

“My father was a cog in a big business of universal drug trafficking,” Marroquín explains, and when he no longer served a purpose for those using him that way, killers were sent to do away with the problem — the problem so many had a hand in creating.

Marroquín, who only revealed himself as Escobar’s son in 2009, says he’s had to forgive members of his family for their involvement in the drug business and betrayal of his father — but notes that forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened.

But he has measured perspective about the man who brutally ruled the cocaine industry.

“Pablo Escobar is by no means a role model,” he asserts.

“I admire Pablo, my father, who educated me. Not Escobar, the mafioso.”

Marroquín noted drug lords like his father might appear to have everything as their status and name garner attention, but these material gains, in actuality, take control in the end.

“The more power my father had, the poorer he lived.”

 

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Election Fraud, Impeachment Inquiries, Prosecution of Political Opponents… Can American Politics Get Any Worse?

December 15th, 2023 by Drago Bosnic

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The mainstream propaganda machine’s (ab)use of the term “conspiracy theory” (coined by the likes of the CIA in an attempt to stifle and discredit any information that could hurt their interests) has made it virtually impossible to talk about election fraud in the United States.

Anyone even remotely suggesting that this could be possible in the “lighthouse of global democracy” was considered a “conspiracy nut”. Former president Donald Trump was even threatened will legal action if he doesn’t drop the idea.

Worse yet, some Democrats even accused him of supposed “treachery”, as the claims of election fraud could further undermine the otherwise “impeccable” image and reputation of the US.

However, the latest poll, conducted jointly by Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports, based in Illinois and New Jersey, respectively, found that 20% of voters who cast mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election admit to participating in at least one kind of voter fraud.

Heartland and Rasmussen claim that when asked, “During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?”, 21% of respondents who said they voted by mail answered “yes”.

It should be noted that filling out a ballot on someone else’s behalf is illegal in all US states (although some allow people to assist others with voting).

In addition, 17% of mail-in voters said they voted “in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident”, while the same percentage also admitted to signing a “ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member”. Both actions are illegal and automatically invalidate votes. The report further points out that over 43% of voters cast ballots by mail, which is by far the highest percentage in US history. Another 10% of all respondents — not just those who said they voted by mail — claimed that they know “a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who has admitted … that he or she cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than his or her state of permanent residence”.

However, more disturbingly, 8% of all respondents said “a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party” offered them “pay” or a “reward” for agreeing to vote in the 2020 election.

The results of the poll show that election fraud was not only present during the 2020 election, but was actually quite common, particularly in the case of mail-in ballots.

It also shows that Trump’s claims were certainly not exaggerated, much less a “conspiracy theory”.

However, the troubled Biden administration will certainly keep insisting on this notion, for obvious reasons, of course. And yet, this isn’t where their troubles end, as President Joe Biden is faced with an impeachment inquiry.

Namely, on December 13, the House of Representatives approved the launch of a formal impeachment probe, just hours after Hunter Biden refused a Congressional testimony. According to the Wall Street Journal, formalizing the impeachment process will give Congress additional power by improving the likelihood that a court will authorize access to grand jury materials, as well as boosting the chances that the GOP will be able to overcome objections such as executive privilege. The White House has been trying to torpedo Congressional subpoenas and demands for transcribed interviews with Biden family members since they were launched back in September.

These refusals were based on the grounds that the existing impeachment probe was invalid because the House didn’t vote to authorize it. However, with a 221-212 vote in favor of the inquiry, the Biden administration can’t use this as an excuse anymore. House Speaker Mike Johnson even directly accused the White House of impeding the investigation, which has so far been two-pronged. Namely, the House Oversight Committee is focusing on the Biden family’s corruption, while the House Judiciary Committee is investigating the weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI, as both are being used by the DNC to prosecute political opponents, with a particular focus on Donald Trump.

The sheer number of cases launched against him is absolutely unprecedented.

No president has ever been indicted in the US, but Trump now has over half a dozen major cases and a plethora of smaller ones, including for alleged “election subversion”.

Trump’s business-minded approach to politics and geopolitics has made him quite a lot of enemies among the political elites in Washington DC, which he, ever so “endearingly” (but not without reason), likes to call “The Swamp”. His statements about Putin and Russia are effectively considered “heresy” among both Democrat neoliberals and his “fellow” Republican neocons. Trump’s aversion toward warmongering is his “gravest crime”.

While in office, he had tremendous problems with warhawks within his own administration, resulting in several high-profile sackings, such as the case of the infamous John Bolton, one of the leading members of the so-called “war party” in Washington DC.

Trump’s realpolitik approach stands in stark contrast to the warmongering elite’s overly ideological and completely impractical foreign policy framework that has not only created enemies everywhere, but has also effectively united them. He regularly criticizes his political opponents for underestimating Russia, a resurgent global superpower, rightfully calling it dangerous for US and global security.

However, Trump’s repeated warnings have not only been ignored, but simply rejected by the political establishment.

It seems that high-profile US political figures committing any crime can get away with it, including sexual misconduct with minors, as long as they support the official narrative, even when the said narrative leads to a world-ending thermonuclear exchange.

However, fighting the narrative in order to prevent such a conflict will almost certainly result in years of incessant and largely unfounded slandering (at best) or even land one in jail on trumped-up (no pun intended) charges. Either way, the current political situation completely dispels the illusion that the US is a democracy.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image is licensed under Creative Commons

The Covid-19 Vaccine: Why Data Lacks Persuasive Force. Covid Consciousness and Perceptions Determined by “Partisanship”

December 15th, 2023 by John Leake

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A recent KFF poll on perceptions an attitudes about the COVID-19 and other vaccines says it all in the byline: “Partisanship Remains Key Predictor of Views Of COVID-19, Including Plans To Get Latest COVID-19 Vaccine.”

The key takeaway:

Mirroring the partisan differences in views on vaccines, there is a persistent partisan divide on overall views of COVID-19, the current caseload in the U.S., whether they could be sick from COVID, and changes to behavior – including willingness to take a diagnostic test when sick. Democrats are more likely to report changing their behaviors because of recent news of increases in COVID-19. More than half of Democrats (58%) say they’ve recently modified their behavior to be more COVID-conscious compared to 16% of Republicans. Democrats (19%) are also more than twice as likely as both independents (8%) and Republicans (9%) to say that in the past three months they have had symptoms they thought could be COVID-19, and therefore took a COVID-19 diagnostic test. Most Democrats (77%) also say there is a new wave of COVID-19 infections hitting the U.S. now, while half of Republicans (51%) disagree.

The poll results are striking evidence of something that philosophers and anthropologists have long observed—namely, facts and data alone possess little persuasive force if they challenge long-held beliefs, emotional attachments, and social identities.

We humans are hyper-social and tribal. For most of pre-history and history, cohesion was essential for a tribe’s survival in a world of different tribes competing for scarce resources. Intellectual authority about the world—both the natural and the supernatural—resided in a small priestly class that made the decisions about the best course of action when the tribe was threatened.

Thus, opening one’s mind to a new way of looking at the world—a process that involves a willingness to consider emerging data—is always a difficult and painful experience. Doing so requires recognizing and acknowledging that we have been wrong about things, and accordingly made wrong decisions and invested our time and energy into wrong things. No one relishes doing that.

What prompts us to change our point of view is when we suffer pain as a direct and readily identifiable consequence of our false beliefs—that is, when the pain of holding fast to erroneous beliefs exceeds the pain of abandoning them.

I often think of this during my daily reading of Steve Kirsch’s Newsletter, which I highly recommend. By longstanding habit, Steve is deeply attached to data, the key determinant in shaping his view of reality.

Unfortunately, in his valiant effort to make factual reality triumphant, he often finds himself addressing institutions, groups, and individuals for whom data he presents has no persuasive force. Their attachments and allegiances preclude them from considering it.

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‘Groundbreaking’ Legal Action Demands EPA Finally Ban Glyphosate

December 15th, 2023 by Julia Conley

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Citing research from the U.S. government’s own National Institutes of Health, a coalition of environmental and farmworkers groups said Wednesday that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out of excuses for continuing to allow the use of the herbicide glyphosate, which has been linked to cancer in people who are exposed to it.

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a petition with the EPA on behalf of Beyond Pesticides and four farmworkers groups, including Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, saying glyphosate’s registration in the U.S. is illegal.

The petition was filed a week after cancer scientists at the NIH published a study in Environmental Health Perspectives, which found that male farmers had “markers of genotoxicity” when they reported high levels of glyphosate use.

The study is only the latest to link glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used weedkiller Roundup, with cancer and other health issues. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer warned in 2015 that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” and Roundup manufacturer Monsanto—now owned by Bayer—was ordered to pay more than $2.3 billion by juries in 2018 and 2019 for failing to warn the public about the product’s risks.

“Farmworker women and their families have experienced the damaging health effects of pesticides for far too long,” said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “EPA must protect the nation’s farmworkers and our environment by immediately suspending and canceling all glyphosate registrations.”

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit struck down the EPA’s claim that glyphosate is safe.

Despite the mounting evidence of the harmful effects of glyphosate, said CFS on Wednesday, “EPA has declined to act.”

“EPA lacks a legal human health assessment of glyphosate to support its current use,” the group said.

Pegga Mosavi, an attorney at CFS, said the petition provides the Biden administration with “a blueprint… to do what the law and science require and finally cancel glyphosate’s registration.”

“There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that glyphosate endangers public health, and poses cancer risks to farmers and other Roundup users,” said Mosavi. “Glyphosate formulations are also an environmental hazard and have driven an epidemic of resistant weeds that plague farmers. After last year’s court decision, EPA has no legal legs to stand on. EPA must take action now.”

Environmental Health Perspectives also published an opinion article by health researchers who found the NIH study should be considered in glyphosate safety evaluations.

“There is really compelling new science out there,” Bill Freese, science director at CFS, toldThe Guardian. “It’s becoming increasingly untenable for the agency to deny the cancer hazard.”

The group said the EPA should suspend the use of glyphosate—which is already banned for household use in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and for public use in Germany—until its registration can be canceled or the agency can prove the herbicide meets required safety standards under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).

“In accordance with FIFRA, EPA can register a pesticide only upon determining that it will cause no unreasonable adverse effects on the environment when used in accordance with widespread and commonly recognized practice,” reads the executive summary of the petition. “Glyphosate remains registered despite no demonstration by EPA that it can meet the required FIFRA safety standard for this herbicide’s currently approved uses. In other words, glyphosate as it’s currently used has no legal safety assessment on record.”

Freese noted that in the past, the EPA acknowledged glyphosate’s adverse effects on the liver, kidneys, reproductive system, and its link to cancer.

“But as Monsanto sought ever wider uses for its blockbuster herbicide,” said Freese, EPA consigned those incriminating studies to regulatory oblivion, thus facilitating greater use, even as independent scientists confirmed the harms EPA now denies.”

[From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.]

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Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Featured image is from The New Lede

US Admits: Russia Has the Upper Hand

December 15th, 2023 by Karsten Riise

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All the time, US media have tried to tweak and belie the situation in Ukraine to hide Russian progress and portray Russia as a loser. Now, they cannot hide Russia’s success anymore.

US media are today forced to admit that Russia is a success and has the upper hand in Ukraine. 

Mr. Putin spoke from a position of relative strength.

Russian forces fended off Ukraine’s counteroffensive this year and are now attacking in several areas along the front line, and military production in Russia is ramping up.

At the same time, Ukraine faces some of the steepest challenges of the war, deadlocked on the battlefield and urgently seeking to shore up Western support. 

New York Times, December 14  

Efforts from Biden, Sullivan, and US media to shoehorn new packages of money through Congress to Ukraine are a scam.

Nothing for Ukraine has worked for the US so far. On the contrary, the situation for America and the EU in Ukraine has only become worse and worse.

The US and NATO supplied Ukraine with everything they had in military, money, and diplomatic support. It didn’t help.

Ukraine is devastated, mired in coup-plots in Kiev, and running out of men to let die.

US and NATO military stocks are depleted.

Western populations don’t want to see Zelensky or hear about Ukraine no more.

The West has abused Ukraine in efforts to destroy Russia – instead, Russia has come out stronger than ever.

What a fiasco for the West.

This is the complete moral, military, and political defeat of the US and the West.

Next comes Israel.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.  

Regime Change? Military Coup? Kiev Regime Hyenas After Zelensky as He Loses Grip on Power. Western Funding is Running Out.

December 15th, 2023 by Drago Bosnic

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In the aftermath of the special military operation (SMO), the mainstream propaganda machine and the Kiev regime fought bitterly to ensure that the image of “united Ukraine standing in the face of Russian aggression” is spread across the world. The illusion held initially, but it was only a matter of time before this false unity faded away. And that’s precisely what’s happening as the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky is trying his best to retain power. Namely, Zelensky is trying to seize his “Churchill moment” by using the ongoing conflict as a way to legally stay in power and continue exploiting whatever’s left of Western funding, slated to soon dry out.

His supporters often quote the poll conducted back in February 2023, the results of which can be considered highly questionable, as it showed that “over 90% of Ukrainians were satisfied with his performance”, while 65% allegedly “wanted him to serve another term”. Even in the case these numbers were true at the time (once again, an extremely debatable claim), they certainly wouldn’t have stayed the same (or even close). Since February, the Kiev regime suffered a crushing defeat of its much-touted counteroffensive, losing nearly all of its initiative and resulting in Russia moving from active defense and defense-in-depth to incremental offensive operations.

As a result, factionalism and fault lines within the Neo-Nazi junta were exacerbated exponentially, amplifying its troubles both at home and abroad. The confidence in “victory over Moscow” plummeted, despite Zelensky’s declared “optimism”. His propagandists have tried to push the narrative that criticizing him is supposedly “unpatriotic”, stifling any chance to get accurate information about the situation on the frontlines and in the country itself. Alternative sources are the only way to get bits and pieces of the truth, but using them can be deadly nowadays, as the Kiev regime henchmen are ready to imprison (or worse) anyone they deem “disloyal” or “not loyal enough”.

However, despite all this, Zelensky is still afraid to allow elections even in such a climate. As he became accustomed to having no competitors or critics, Zelensky took his grip on power to the extreme and is actively using the state apparatus against his potential opponents. “Conspiracy theorists” would probably say he’s taking a lesson directly from Joe Biden’s playbook, to paraphrase the favorite propaganda trope used by American and other Western outlets when talking about Vladimir Putin. What’s more, Zelensky is turning on his own backers, as evidenced by Igor Kolomoisky’s arrest back in early September when he was accused of corruption and embezzlement.

When the pompously announced counteroffensive started, Zelensky pledged to “liberate the whole country (including Crimea) from the evil Russians”. Giving such grossly unrealistic promises might have secured short-term political points, but it also drew a wider wedge with the military, because top generals such as Zaluzhny certainly knew that such claims were nothing more than silly fantasies. Thus, Zelensky managed not only to antagonize the military, but also got another strong political opponent, as Zaluzhny’s presidential ambitions might be publicly revealed sooner than expected. In addition, Zelensky’s old rivals are still alive and kicking, ready to reactivate soon.

This includes former president Petro Poroshenko and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, both of whom are just waiting for the perfect opportunity to regain power. In addition, the mayor of Kiev, Vitaliy Klitschko, Zelensky’s former adviser, the notorious Oleksiy Arestovych, as well as the GUR chief Kyrylo Budanov all might join the political arena. Arestovych and Budanov can be considered very serious contenders, as both have been (or are still) close to the top echelons of power in Kiev and know all of Zelensky’s weaknesses. They’ll certainly use them against him when the time comes, as the political arena in the country has always been merciless.

Oligarchs, such as the aforementioned Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov are also very likely to try and seize power, if not directly, then through intermediaries. Akhmetov was particularly affected by the SMO, losing much of his wealth that was largely based in the southeast, precisely where the heaviest fighting has been ongoing. However, despite this wealth and power, military leaders are emerging as the richest and most influential figures. Showered with tens (if not hundreds) of billions in Western funding, top generals have accumulated enormous resources that could easily be translated into political power. Many have also built up their reputation as supposed “war heroes”.

This is particularly true for General Zaluzhny, who has been extremely critical of Zelensky and his closest associates. The “unexplained” death of Zaluzhny’s aide might be a message from the presidential cabinet, one that he certainly won’t ignore and that could very well serve as the driving force behind his potential power grab. Zelensky won’t be able to use the conflict to stay in power indefinitely, particularly if recent battlefield defeats are followed by even greater failures and Russian advances, either incremental or massive. The blame game between the politicians and the military might backfire on Zelensky, as Zaluzhny could easily argue that he was denied proper funding.

Given the staggering level of corruption of the Kiev regime, this could be embraced by the people who want someone to be held accountable for hundreds of thousands of casualties. Even before the SMO, Zelensky’s presidency was marred by corruption scandals, which only worsened in the last nearly two years. Either way, the political struggle in Kiev is bound to look more like a hyena fight, particularly when Western funding starts running dry. The situation on the frontlines will further exacerbate this, a fact that Zelensky’s opponents will (ab)use to the maximum. The military might even try to grab power directly, which Zaluzhny might use as a shortcut to take the presidency.

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

Featured image: Credit Image: © Ukraine Presidency/Ukraine Presi/Planet Pix via ZUMA Press Wire

A Week Like No Other. “America’s Love for Israel.” Dr. Philip Giraldi

December 15th, 2023 by Philip Giraldi

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The first week in December of this year was all about America’s apparent inextinguishable love for the state of Israel. After a short pause to exchange hostages for prisoners, the Israelis re-launched their drive to exterminate the Gazans and steal what remains of their land and property. President Joe Biden, ably assisted by his ever-present sidekick State Department honcho Antony Blinken, welcomed the Jewish state’s onslaught by pushing the pedal to the metal on aiding the loveable Bibi Netanyahu while at the same time suggesting that the twenty thousand dead Palestinians and counting just might be a tad too much.

Of course, the suggestion was limited to demonstrating what a great humanitarian, who is up for reelection, now sits in the Oval Office and was not supported by any real consequences for Israel should it ignore the advice, which it did.

Biden then demonstrated where his heart truly was by expediting through the State Department a new shipment of munitions, an apparent gesture that keeps on giving to help the war effort, with some reports suggesting that upwards of two hundred US military aircraft have already made deliveries of more than 15,000 bombs to help Bibi kill more Pals.

The decision to provide more weapons to Israel coincides with a recommendation from Jerusalem’s right wing deputy mayor that captured Palestinians, whom he described as subhuman, should be buried alive, which elicited no comment from the White House. The Administration explained the rush delivery of the tank cannon munitions circumventing established congressional review procedures by saying that Israel urgently required the materiel to defend itself and that complying with Israeli demands is “vital to US national interests.”

A State Department press release described the unusual procedure as having been “determined and provided [with] detailed justification to Congress that an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale to the Government of Israel of the above defense articles and services in the national security interests of the United States, thereby waiving the Congressional review requirements under Section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act, as amended. The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability. This proposed sale is consistent with those objectives. Israel will use the enhanced capability as a deterrent to regional threats and to strengthen its homeland defense.”

As Hamas has no heavy weapons and it is not occupying or penetrating into Israeli territory, the explanation would appear to be more in the nature of another government “big” lie, somewhat similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech before the UN in 2003 affirming that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was preparing to use them. And it also challenges those who believe the United States is making an honest effort to reduce casualties among civilians.

Josh Paul, the former State Department official who resigned to protest the provision of American weapons for use against the people of Gaza, reacted to the news with “…this expedited provision of lethal arms to Israel should cause some serious consideration of whether the secretary’s repeated assertions that the US seeks to minimize civilian casualties in Israel’s operation in Gaza are sincere.”

So, what made the first week in December different than any other in which the White House looks the other way and gives Netanyahu whatever he wants while Israel kills and kills and kills? Well, there was also more going on than just the provision of thirteen thousand nine hundred eighty-one (13,981) 120mm M830A1 High Explosive Anti-Tank Multi-Purpose with Tracer (MPAT) tank cartridges, worth a paltry $106.5 million.

There was also a bit of bother at the United Nations, where a motion came to a vote that would have demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to permit negotiations to end the genocide that Israel is pursuing to end the Palestinian problem forever.

The motion had been endorsed earlier in the week, by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who invoked a rarely used article of the UN Charter to urge the Security Council to “press to avert a humanitarian catastrophe” and pass a resolution for a “humanitarian cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militants.” Guterres warned that the civilian death toll was approaching what he described as an “apocalyptic” level due to the bombing of infrastructure, starvation and disease. He called for the UN Security Council to stop the killing in Gaza as a basic responsibility under the UN Charter. Each day, UN officials on the ground in Gaza heroically struggled to feed, shelter, and protect the population from Israeli bombs and more than 100 UN staff have been killed, a higher death toll than for any other operation ever.

The motion would have passed unanimously but for one little problem: the United States vetoed it, clearly acting under orders from Netanyahu, who later thanked Biden. The final vote was 13 to 1 with Britain abstaining and not voting. Blinken defended the move on the Sunday talk shows, saying that Israel’s effort to eliminate Hamas was a “legitimate goal.” He added that “When it comes to a cease-fire in this moment, with Hamas still alive, still intact, and again, with the stated intent of repeating October 7th again and again and again, that would simply perpetuate the problem.”

The US deputy representative to the UN Robert Wood, clearly acting under orders from the White House and State Department, explained his veto vote, saying that “…the resolution’s authors declined to condemn Hamas’ October 7th attack that killed 1,200 people, including women, children and elderly.” Wood added that the draft also “failed to acknowledge that Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism.” Israeli Ambassador to the US Gilad Erdan thanked the White House “for standing firmly by our side.”

Frustrated by the US veto in the Security Council, on December 12th the UN General Assembly voted on the same resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Gaza conflict. The result was an overwhelming Yes: 153; No: 10; Abstain: 23. The US was again a “no” vote, together with Israel and the usual “associated” south Pacific island territories and Austria, Papua New Guinea, the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Liberia and Paraguay . The vote took place at an “emergency special session” under a “Uniting for Peace” resolution introduced when the Security Council fails to act due to the veto of a permanent member, and there have been legal arguments made that such votes, like Security Council votes, can be construed as legally binding. Of course, that may be viewed as irrelevant, since Israel has rarely if ever complied with any UN resolution that it opposed, whether of the “binding” variety or not, and also since Israel’s effective control of the US government has guaranteed that its defiance will not produce any adverse consequences.

It was, reportedly, the forty-fifth time that Washington has used its veto to protect the state of Israel in the UN, which is why the Jewish state has never been held accountable for anything. Nor has the United States, which has started more wars against countries that did not actually threaten it than anyone else since the founding of the UN and, presumably, it could always use its veto to block such a motion against itself. The result is that the United Nations Security Council only exists to take action against countries that are not one of the permanent members of the Council or against Israel, which is protected by Washington.

One would think that all of the above would constitute a far above average week from hell, but there’s more, including yet another sustained attack on freedom of speech being mounted by politicians, the media and Jewish billionaires to block all and any criticism of Israel. The attacks started several months ago when students at a number of public and private universities began protesting over Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians, leading to a death toll that is almost certainly currently approaching or exceeding 20,000 when all the corpses are dug up from the rubble of bombed buildings. Some politically ambitious scumbags like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis immediately declared that pro-Palestinian student groups were “antisemites” and banned them from Florida state universities while also declaring that no Palestinian refugees should be admitted to the US because they too were “Jew haters.”

As the anti-Palestinian narrative took shape in political, media and Zionist circles, it adopted a familiar line, which goes something like this: Israel is the Jewish state. If you criticize the Jewish state and/or Zionism you are therefore by definition an antisemite. Antisemitism is a “hate crime.” If you advocate or argue for any Palestinian group like Hamas, which the US government has labeled “terrorist,” you are providing “material assistance to terrorism” which is a crime for which you can be fined or imprisoned. Even if you merely criticize Jewish groups supporting Israel you are likewise an antisemite and have committed a “hate crime.” Neat, isn’t it? and the end result is that Israel, which is immune from the consequences of its actions internationally, also increasingly cannot be criticized at all without serious consequences for the critic. In other words, freedom of speech in the United States only exists, insofar as it does, if you are not disparaging Israel or even its friends due to their demonstrable behavior.

Some of those consequences were experienced recently by three presidents of prominent American universities, responding to a congressional grilling that was set up by allegations that colleges are hotbeds of antisemitism and are responsible for major increases in incidents targeting Jews. There is a certain irony in the allegations since Jews in America are the wealthiest, best educated, most politically powerful, most prestigiously employed and most protected by Homeland Security of all ethno-religious groups. And there is not much real evidence that Jews are in any way increasingly “victims” in the United States or in Europe. The antisemitic incidents that are “surging” are frequently based on criticisms of what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians and often consist of a Jewish college student being offended or annoyed by a poster or a speaker criticizing Israeli behavior. Instances of actual physical confrontation are few and far between and are immediately reported in the accommodating mainstream media to heighten the sense that Jews in America and even worldwide are threatened. Certain groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are heavily into the promotion of the narrative of Jew hatred as it is in their bottom line to do so given their donor base which likes to hear exactly that. In other words, it is all largely a contrivance to obtain political and economic benefits as well as a free pass on bad behavior that might not otherwise be forthcoming.

The three university presidents, all of whom were women, represented Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT and all three were highly respected in their respective professions prior to their presidencies. They did not anticipate New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Jewish Harvard product, who was out to nail them and make the case that academia hates Jews and is encouraging antisemitism. Stefanik was backed up by Jewish oligarchs who have threatened to sharply cut donations to the respective universities that do not toe the line, doing what Jews are often accused of doing, i.e. using their money and the power that it buys to stop all discussion on subjects that they find troubling.

Stefanik and company were particularly incensed by student pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanting “Intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She interpreted both expressions being calls for the destruction of Israel, which they are not. Intifada is “shaking off” in Arabic and is a call for liberating the Palestinian people and their land from the Israeli tyranny. The “river to sea” is somewhat similar, a call for a Palestinian state with actual sovereignty and neither is an explicit call for killing Israelis or Jews. They are generic cries for freedom. Stefanik curiously, though not surprisingly, did not mention the concurrent actual demands by senior Israeli government officials to displace or kill all Palestinians, something that they actually have the power to do and which might be regarded as a threat.

The university presidents were pilloried by congress, the White House, the Israel Lobby and the media by refusing to label all criticisms of the Zionist project and Israeli behavior as unacceptable “free speech” and through their assertion that the meaning of political slogans often depends on the context. For something or someone to qualify as a source of harassment, which is forbidden at the colleges in question, there has to be a direct threat made to another person. When that is present, it is harassment. When it is not, it is protected speech on a university campus, even if it is critical of group behavior or even racist. That is as it should be.

And if you thought that the week’s nastiness ended there, you would be wrong. There was also some disgraceful action during the week from Congress which rejected a Senator Rand Paul motion to withdraw US troops from Syria by a vote of 13 votes in favor and 84 votes against. Ironically, on the same day December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day, US bombers committed a war crime in killing 36 Syrian villagers in retaliation for a series of attacks on US bases. American soldiers are in Syria illegally basically to bring down the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad, though they claim it is to confront ISIS terrorists. They are also sitting on Syria’s oil producing region and stealing the oil. Both Syria and neighboring Iraq would like to see the “Yankees go home” but the Pentagon alleges that the attacks on the bases have been carried out by groups affiliated with Iran, Washington and Israel’s prime enemy in the region, so the White House has decided that killing Syrian farmers is justifiable reciprocity. Meanwhile, Israel is bombing Syrian airports in Damascus and Aleppo on a regular basis, arguing that they are being used by the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guards.

During the week the Congress also passed a motion which partly explains why US foreign policy in the Middle East region is so incoherent. Congress declared by way of a GOP drafted and backed resolution that antizionism is to be considered antisemitism by a vote of 311 to 14, drawing the support of all but one Republican. Ninety-two Democrats voted “present” — not taking a position for or against the measure — while 95 supported it, paving the way for more hate crime persecutions and increasing legal liabilities for critics of Israel. Antizionism is, of course, not antisemitism as Zionism is a political movement and Judaism is a religion. In fact, many religious Jews reject the idea of a Jewish state and many secular Jews are currently active and even prominent in the humanitarian protests against Israel’s massacre of the Gazans.

Finally, the week also saw presentations by Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, both of whom explained their view of why Congress must pony up multiple billions of dollars for Ukraine. Biden warned explicitly and almost certainly incorrectly that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there. We’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops.” Austin doubled down on the warning, telling members of Congress that he will send “your uncles, cousins, and sons to fight Russia if aid to Ukraine is not approved.” Biden and Austin’s delusion centers on a presumption that Russia’s Vladimir Putin will move to reconstruct the Soviet Union by taking the Baltic states, which are NATO allies, after he gobbles up Ukraine. It is a scare tactic based on no evidence whatsoever and Russia does not even have the desire or ability to take all of Ukraine, let alone recreate the USSR, which its leadership clearly recognizes. Fortunately, few in Washington and Europe have been buying the bullshit and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who made a surprise visit to Biden a few days later to plead for money, went home basically empty handed.

There probably is still more from that action packed week if I dig a bit deeper, but I am sure that readers get the point. It was a disastrous week for genuine United States’ interests and I don’t see anything that benefits the average American, quite the contrary. But this has been the pattern for a whole series of US administrations that have unfortunately done their best to destroy the United States as it once was along the lines of George W. Bush’s pledge to be the new sheriff in town ready and willing to engage in warfare against the whole world. Who will rid us of these monsters or are they too deeply entrenched in the system to be removed? That is the real question.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Unmasking Media Complicity: The Urgent Call for Truth in Gaza

December 15th, 2023 by Nour Jaghama

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Bisan Owda, a 25-year-old journalist from Gaza, recently expressed a bleak outlook: ‘I no longer have any hope of survival…I am certain that I will die in the next few weeks or maybe days.’ Bisan’s harrowing sentiment reflects the dangerous reality journalists face, risking their lives to expose the brutal truths obscured by the fog of war.

Bisan and other Palestinian reporters, such as Motaz, another courageous photojournalist from the Deir al-Balah refugee camp, stand as unsung heroes amid a devastating genocide. Bisan, tearfully acknowledging the imminent danger she faces, and Motaz transitioning from documenting to surviving underscore the extraordinary courage of Palestinian journalists determined to unveil the truth.

In contrast, mainstream Western media, epitomized by The New York Times, presents a stark disparity. Instead of amplifying the voices of individuals like Bisan and Motaz, major publications propagate a narrative that perpetuates misinformation and greenlights the ongoing tragedy.

The toll in Gaza is staggering—over 20,000 lives lost, including nearly 10,000 innocent children. Amidst the ruins of homes and the echoes of airstrikes, it becomes clear that the valiant efforts of these journalists serve as our only window into the extent of this horror.

Regrettably, The New York Times is failing to report the situation accurately. Its persistence in publishing misleading information not only aids in spreading propaganda but also follows a historical pattern. The current reporting echoes the publication’s prior engagement in a misinformation campaign preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The New York Times is failing an open-notes test it has taken many times.

Notably, instead of reporting on the confirmed cases of genocide, the New York Times seems fixated on fake controversies sparked by controversial lawmakers such as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.) that feed into the false idea that supporting Palestinians and demanding an end to the genocide is antisemitic. This type of reporting creates a false sense of danger and weaponizes people into rejecting the Palestinian struggle as the human rights issue it is.

As the Israeli military intensifies its attack on Gaza, the urgency for accurate reporting becomes paramount. Netanyahu’s unwavering pursuit of genocidal goals, evidenced by the bombing of schools, hospitals, and UN buildings, demands unfiltered attention. Strikingly, Israeli leaders have laid bare their intentions for ethnic cleansing through genocide, yet U.S. media remains conspicuously silent.

The betrayal of journalists like Bisan, Motaz, and countless others who put their lives on the line becomes even more egregious when juxtaposed with The New York Times’ failure to uphold journalistic standards. It is no longer a matter of misguided reporting; it is the perpetuation of a historical pattern that prioritizes profit and imperialism over truth and justice.

Western media has the potential to be a catalyst for change. We have seen the impact of unfiltered reporting during the Vietnam War when journalists chose to reveal the truth, irrespective of government constraints. There are the equivalents of the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre currently being in Gaza by Israel. Any reporting by Western media that doesn’t center its context around that is a disservice to humanity.

News reporting, at its core, should be about saving lives. Instead, influential publications opt to provide manufactured consent for violence and oppression, holding the line for war criminals while the atrocities unfold in real-time. In doing so, this makes publications like the New York Times complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, mixing the blood of innocent Palestinians with that of those murdered in Iraq twenty years ago—shame on the New York Times and all.

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Nour Jaghama is CODEPINK’s Palestine and Iran Campaigner. 

Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She writes about the intersection of militarism and the human cost of war. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The West Agonises over an ‘Atrocity Upsurge’ while backing Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

December 15th, 2023 by Jonathan Cook

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The problem isn’t ‘global inaction’ to prevent mass atrocities, as the Guardian claims. It’s intense US and UK support for atrocities so long as they bolster their global power

Declassified UK – 11 December 2023

How do politicians, diplomats, the media and even the human rights community keep us politically ignorant, docile and passive – a collective mindset that prevents us from challenging their power as well as the status quo they benefit from?

The answer: By constantly misrepresenting reality to us and their own role in shaping it. And they do it so successfully because, at the same time, they gaslight us by flaunting the pretence that they crave to make the world a better place – a better place where, in truth, the unspoken danger is that, were those advances to be realised, their own power would be severely diminished.

A perfect illustration of how this grand deception works was provided in a report at the weekend in the supposedly progressive Guardian newspaper, headlined “World faces ‘heightened risk’ of mass atrocities due to global inaction”.

The opening paragraph reports that human rights activists fear the “international community has given up on intervention efforts to stop mass atrocities, leading to fears that such occurrences may become the norm around the world”.

In practice, this “failure”, according to the report, has manifested in an abandonment by western states of the principle of R2P – or “responsibility to protect”. This principle and related “humanitarian” pretexts were used to justify the US and its allies meddling since the 1990s variously in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, with disastrous consequences.

Millions were killed as a result of R2P-type interventions and tens of millions displaced, leading to mass movements of people that are seen today by western states in terms of an “illegal immigration threat”.

Sustained massacre

The context for the human rights community’s concerns, we are told, are growing abuses of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both were adopted in the immediate wake of the second world war to prevent a repeat of the Nazi holocaust and widespread atrocities committed against civilians on both sides of the fighting.

One might have assumed, at this point, that such fears have been heightened – resulting in their being raised at the United Nations – by the most egregious genocide of modern times: the sustained massacre over two months of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the wanton destruction of the vast majority of their homes to drive the survivors out of Gaza and into Egypt.

More than 18,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed by Israel so far, most of them women and children. More than 100,000 homes have been made uninhabitable. Some 2.3m Palestinians have been herded into a tiny, ever shrinking space, close to the border with Egypt, denied water, food, and fuel.

This combined act of genocide and ethnic cleansing is the most intense, visible and industrial – using the very latest and most powerful weaponry available – in living memory.

But extraordinarily, that does not appear to be the central concern of the “international community”. According to the Guardian, the following are the global crises primarily driving a steep rise in atrocities:

“The mass killing of civilians in Syria and Ukraine, and the internment of over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in China, have been followed by war crimes in Ethiopia, and a resumption of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur province, 20 years after the start of the genocide there.”

Notice anything significant about this list? It comprises only mass atrocities being committed by those not firmly within the US imperial sphere of subservience.

The mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, which has been in the headlines for many weeks, cannot be credibly overlooked. So it is mentioned – but notice how the spotlight is sharply directed away from the present, highly pertinent events in Israel and Palestine. The genocide in Gaza, which has driven many millions of protesters on to the streets across Europe and North America, becomes an afterthought:

“The 7 October Hamas killing of 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and the consequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, in which women and children have accounted for most of the estimated 16,000 dead, have added to the bloody chaos.”

Manifold deceptions

The deceptions here are manifold, and not just because Gaza ought to be top of the list of concerns, not at the bottom.

The formulaic framing in this paragraph is designed – as ever in western reporting – to create a false equivalence between Hamas’ actions and Israel’s, and engender a sense that Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians is caused, and excused, by Hamas’ preceding mass slaughter of Israelis.

It should hardly need restating that Hamas’ breakout of the prison that is Gaza – and its predictably dire consequences – was preceded by decades of Israeli military abuses of Palestinians under military occupation and an illegal 16-year siege of their territory depriving more than 2 million people of their freedom, basic rights and dignity.

There has been a constant, slow-motion atrocity in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem for decades – long before the human rights community, the UN and the Guardian raised their new concerns about “a heightened risk of atrocity crimes”.

There is, too, a clear difference between the exceptional, one-off violence Hamas was able to wreak on October 7 because of dramatic and unexpected failures in Israel’s surveillance and control of the Palestinian population in Gaza and Israel’s intensification of the structural violence of a decades-long occupation and siege.

These, all too obviously, are not the same things – and they do not pose even vaguely comparable threats to the status of the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

To suggest otherwise – as all western reporting does constantly – is to exaggerate the threat posed to international law by the atrocities committed by Hamas and dramatically underplay the significance of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Weapons testing lab

But there is a far deeper problem with the framing of these concerns. The critical problem is not “global inaction” over mass atrocities. It is the opposite: intense western – chiefly US – support for, and complicity in, such atrocities.

This problem is highlighted only too clearly by events in Gaza. Which is precisely why it is included reluctantly, and only as an afterthought, in the list of threats to international humanitarian law. The US is not helpless in the unfolding genocide. It is actively facilitating it. In fact, Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing would be impossible without not just US collusion but active participation.

The mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is occurring because the US has supplied many of the heavy-duty bombs razing Gaza’s high-rises and killing its children.

The slaughter is occurring because the US has sent warships to the region to intimidate neighbouring Arab states and militant groups into remaining quiet as Gaza’s civilians are murdered.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, for example, is quite capable of ending “global inaction”, by engaging Israel militarily and drawing Israeli firepower away from Gaza. But no one in the “international community” presumably wants that kind of “action”.

The mass slaughter in Gaza is occurring because the US used its veto at the UN Security Council last Friday to block a ceasefire.

It is occurring because the US has funded the Iron Dome missile interception system that stops Hamas being able to fire rockets on Israeli communities – mirroring on a tiny scale Israel’s destruction in Gaza – to raise the political pressure in Israel for a ceasefire.

The slaughter is occurring because Washington has for decades propped up Israel’s military with the bulk of the US overseas aid budget, and let Israel use the Palestinian territories as a profitable laboratory for testing new weapons systems, surveillance techniques and cyber technology.

Peace talks blocked

The problem here is most definitely not “inaction”. It is that the US picks and chooses when and how it wants to be active in creating, sustaining and ending conflicts around the globe.

Noticeably absent from the list of concerns about the spread of atrocities is the suffering of Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been waging a genocidal war for years. On average, four Yemeni children have been killed or maimed each day over the past eight years by Saudi atrocities.

Why is Yemen overlooked? Because factions there are seen as allies of Iran and therefore enemies of the West whose lives count for nothing. Because Riyadh is a critically important US ally and supplier of oil. And because the US and Britain have been arming the Saudis to the hilt to commit the genocide there.

Similarly, in Ukraine. The vast majority of the casualties on both sides of the fighting might have been avoided if peace talks had not been blocked by the US and Britain in the first weeks after Russia’s invasion.

It was that “action” and others – such as the threatening expansion of Nato to Russia’s borders and the West’s flooding of Ukraine with weapons on the false promise that Nato would have Kyiv’s back – that ensured nearly two years of war and its tragic death toll.

As with Gaza, the problem has not been inaction, it’s been far too much action from the US and its lapdogs in Europe of the very kind designed to assist in slaughter and genocides.

‘You must obey’

There is, however, a reason why the “international community” is raising concerns about “atrocity crimes” now, while downplaying or denying the worst possible atrocity crime – genocide – in Gaza.

And that is because Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7 signifies a dangerous moment for western domination of the so-called “global, rules-based order”. The concern is not really about a rise in mass atrocities. The West is just fine with atrocities when it commits them or it helps others carry them out.

It is about the West’s increasing difficulty of keeping the rest of the world weak, intimidated and subdued through the use of its own atrocities. US military failures in Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine – and the growing self-assurance of Russia and China – are marking out new limits to Washington’s supremacy.

The truth is that Hamas’ attack on Israel – horrific as its consequences were – served as a signpost to a different future for many of those who have lived for decades under the thumb, or more often the boot, of the US and its allies. They see that it is possible, even as an oppressed, weak, abused party, to give the bullying global hegemon and its sidekicks a bloody nose.

What is seen by privileged, complacent westerners purely in terms of senseless, barbaric violence is understood by others as a slave revolt – as an “I am Spartacus” moment.

Which is why, just as happened after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so much of the rest of the world is failing to join the West in its self-righteous chorus of outrage and condemnation. They view these professions of indignation as pure hypocrisy.

It is the reason, too, why the US is being so indulgent as Israel goes about its genocidal rampage in Gaza. The importance for Washington is not stopping Israel’s atrocities but making sure Israel reasserts its famed “deterrence” to provide a lesson to those who might be inspired to wage their own slave revolt.

In front of the cameras, the Biden administration is calling for restraint and urging Israel to minimise civilian casualties. But behind the scenes, it is carefully calibrating just how much savagery Israel needs to unleash to send the right message to the non-Western world: You cannot win. You must obey.

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Psychopaths of the World United. Rebuilding Trust at the World Economic Forum

December 15th, 2023 by Jacob Nordangard

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World Economic Forum recently announced the theme for their annual meeting in Davos in January 2024.[1] This time it is about “rebuilding trust”. This also happens to be the theme of the United Nations 78th General Assembly that opened September 5 2023.[2]

I say good luck with those ambitions! Klaus Schwab and his army of “change agents” have never scored high on the popularity charts, and his achievements of the recent years haven’t exactly improved that.

This is a project that will likely have about the same chances of success as Jack Skellingtons hijacking of Christmas in Tim Burton’s classic movie Nightmare Before Christmas.

The aim is to “restore collective agency, and reinforce the fundamental principles of transparency, consistency and accountability among leaders”.

This is the old worn out mantra of working together as a unit to solve the many crises that sweeps the world. A more fitting description would be:

Unite the psychopaths of the world to solve problems of their own making with the help of more centralised power and control.

The goal is “to help connect the dots in an increasingly complex environment and provide foresight by introducing the latest advances in science, industry and society”.

Foresight is the latest catch word among the world leaders. A futuristic concept about gaining knowledge about, and controlling the times ahead with an “Earth Macroscope”.

Earth Macroscope, Digital Citizenship, World Government Summit

That means no more hiding (or breathing)! Very much like Stings lyrics to the song “Every breath you take” by The Police:

Every breath you take and every move you make, Every bond you break, every step you take, I’ll be watching you – Every single day, every word you say, Every game you play, every night you stay, I’ll be watching you

The meeting in Davos with “over 100 governments, all major international organizations and the Forum’s 1000 partner companies as well as civil society leaders, foremost experts, young changemakers, social entrepreneurs and the media” will serve as an arena to further these megalomaniacal goals.

All is a part of the ongoing agenda to restructure the global governance system that started with The Great Reset in 2020, and is connected to simultaneous processes in the United Nations and the Group of Twenty (G20) that lead up to next years Summit of the Future and the signing of the “Pact for the Future”.

A pact with who?

I can hear the characteristic voice of Dan McCafferty in Nazareths “Sold my Soul”:

I prayed to God and Jesus but I guess they didn’t hear. My sacrifice was useless, my pleas fell on deaf ears. So I cried in desperation, bowed to evil sorcery…I sold my soul, sold my soul – I sold my soul to the Devil…

This will further the rolling out of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its futuristic management techniques.

The meeting in Davos will be organised around four subjects:

  1. Achieving Security and Cooperation in a Fractured World.
    How to effectively deal with security crises, such as in the Middle East.
  2. Creating Growth and Jobs for a New Era
    How government, business and civil society can come together around a new economic framework.
  3. Artificial Intelligence as a Driving Force for the Economy and Society
    How AI can be used for the benefit all.
  4. A Long-Term Strategy for Climate, Nature and Energy
    How to develop a long-term systemic approach to achieve a carbon-neutral world by 2050.

Psychopaths of the World United!

The last point on the WEF-agenda is a red hot topic as a new climate deal was signed at the Climate Summit (COP28) in Dubai, December 13. The negotiating parties have now “recognized” the need for:

Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.

A major topic will be how Artificial Intelligence can help to achieve this goal.

World Economic Forum recently started the AI Governance Alliance, including Microsoft, Google, IBM, Meta and the United Nations Envoy on Technology, with the mission to design global “responsible, transparent and inclusive” AI that is “harnessed for the betterment of society while upholding ethical considerations and inclusivity at every step”.

AI as a solution to climate related challenges was also recently discussed at COP28 as well as at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils in October.

Both these meetings were held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The global elites’ futuristic world capital in the Middle East, which serves as a playground for the transhumanist alchemists that summons their desired sci-fi future at the annual World Governments Summit every February.

The irony is that the fossil free future was discussed in a country built with revenues from oil and gas. It is like letting the pyromaniacs take charge of the fire brigade. It is safe to say that few of the 70 000 COP28 attendees arrived to the Persian Gulf with sailing ships.

As shown in my book Rockefeller – Controlling the Game, the climate agenda is largely constructed with the willing assistance of Big Oil “environmentalists” like The Rockefellers (Standard Oil), Robert O. Anderson (ARCO) and Maurice Strong (Petro Canada).

These culprits and their contemporary heirs know that this world would collapse without oil and gas and have other aims with the climate agenda and their “sustainable transformation”. They want an inventory of all the worlds carbon emissions (global stocktake) in order to efficiently manage them with the Earth Macroscope. All with a little help from their All-seeing Eye (AI).[3]

Global Energy Trends: Insights From The 2023 Statistical Review Of World Energy

At WEFs October-meeting the AI-expert Azeem Azhar (Chief Executive Officer of Exponential View), said that AI can be a force for good in the world but added that the outcome depends on who’s the controller.

If control of infrastructure is power and control of the interface is power. Those who control AI will be powerful.[4]

This closely resembles Klaus Schwab’s State of the World Adress from this year’s World Government Summit where he proclaimed: “who masters those technologies will in some way, be the masters of the world.”

Has the time come to externalize the trustees of the “material universe for future generations”? The Master(s) of Puppets:

Master of puppets, I’m pulling your strings
Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams
Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing
Just call my name, ’cause I’ll hear you scream
Master, master…

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Notes

[1] www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/12/davos-2024-what-to-expect-and-whos-coming/

[2] www.un.org/pga/77/wp-content/uploads/sites/105/2023/07/Letter-from-President-elect-of-the-78th-session-of-the-United-Nations-General-Assembly-Theme-for-the-78th-session-of-the-United-Nations-General-Assembly.pdf

[3] unfccc.int/topics/global-stocktake/information-portal

 

[4] www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/10/ai-force-for-good-amgfc-dubai-uae-gfc23/

 

State Department Goon Grilled on Prosecuting Netanyahu Over Material Support to Hamas Terrorists

December 15th, 2023 by Ben Bartee

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I have covered previously the well-documented strategy of the Israeli Netanyahu regime to provide material and political support for Hamas in the Gaza Strip going back many years.

The utility for the Israeli government, obviously, of propping up Hamas is that, by virtue of maintaining a designated terrorist organization as the de facto governing body of the Strip and creating political separation between the Strip and the West Bank, which is governed nominally by the Palestinian Authority (a puppet regime of the Israeli state), handing off political autonomy to a unified Palestinian state (the so-called “Two State Solution”) becomes a much harder sell.

What kind of a monster, after all, could advocate legitimizing a terrorist organization as a bona fide government of a sovereign state?

And, if Bibi could scare up an atrocity or two in the process, and thereby create a further pretext for endless war and negate any possibility of a long-term peace, all the better for a creature such as he whose entire political career has revolved around instigating war.

This is how the real world works. It’s ugly, Machiavellian, honorless stuff.

But why should anyone expect anything different from the regime that achieved the proud distinction of being “the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against COVID-19,” — having administered 18,199,232 “vaccine” doses to a country of 9.3 million — in the service of its multinational corporate state masters?

At any rate, a journalist at one of the recent State Department propaganda sessions pressed the U.S. government’s spokescreature on Bibi’s complicity in “bolstering” a terrorist organization’s and the government’s plans to sanction him for it.

(relevant exchange starts at 23:12)

As an aside, glimpse the shark-like psychopathy fully evident in the State Department propagandist’s eyes. There is something not fully human there.

It’s worth recalling that Jen Psaki, who has the same dead eyes, came up through the State Department ranks. They appear to be a job requirement — perhaps not least of which for the sake of coping with the death and destruction worldwide they enable through their lies. No human of conscience could get up on that horse every day and go to work lying on behalf of a murderous government for a measly paycheck and a 401(k). 

Returning to the matter at hand, 18 U.S.C. 2339B states unequivocally that “providing material support” (i.e., cash money) to designated terrorist organization is a violation of federal law.

Via Department of Justice:

“The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 gave the Secretary of State authority to designate foreign terrorist organizations whose terrorist activity threatens the security of United States nationals or the national defense, foreign relations or economic interests of the United States. See Pub. L. 104-132, § 302, 110 Stat. 1214, 1248. See also section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. §  1189). The Antiterrorism Act also created 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, which makes it unlawful, within the United States, or for any person who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States anywhere, to knowingly provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization that has been designated by the Secretary of State.” 

The U.S. government designates Hamas a terrorist organization.

  • The logic is clear and, actually, impeccable:
  • Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government
  • Providing material support to designated terrorist organizations is illegal under U.S. law 18 U.S.C. 2339B
  • Bibi Netanyahu is on record bragging about funneling cash to Hamas
  • Bibi Netanyahu broke U.S. law 18 U.S.C. 2339B
  • Bibi Netanyahu is a criminal enabler of terrorism and ought to be brought up on charges just as soon as he steps foot next on American soil to cajole the American taxpayer into sending him more money and weapons

Israeli propagandists salivate at the prospect of sanctioning the speech of individual college students — who have far less influence over the material conditions on the ground in Gaza than Netanyahu — opposed to Israel’s activities in Gaza under the pretext that they are providing “support for terrorists.”

How about starting with Bibi, the world’s biggest booster of Hamas?

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!” my Irish-Catholic grandmammy was wont to admonish me as she crocheted next to the fireplace on chilly wintry eves.

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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Armageddon Prose.

Ben Bartee is an author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

This Is Not a War Against Hamas. “Our War is Your War” Says Netanyahu. It is a Joint US-Israel Operation

December 15th, 2023 by Jeremy Scahill

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The events of the past week should obliterate any doubt that the war against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.–Israeli operation.

On Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among the nations of the world in vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy circumventing congressional review to ram through approval of an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. For weeks, Blinken has been zipping across the Middle East and appearing on scores of television networks in a PR tour aimed at selling the world the notion that the White House is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents.

“Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them,” Blinken declared on November 10.

A month later, with the death toll skyrocketing and calls for a ceasefire mounting, Blinken assured the world Israel was implementing new measures to protect civilians and that the U.S. was doing everything it could to encourage Israel to employ a tiny bit more moderation in its widespread killing campaign. Friday’s events decisively flushed those platitudes into a swirling pool of blood. 

Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has argued, including on U.S. news channels, “Our war is your war.” In retrospect, this wasn’t a plea to the White House. Netanyahu was stating a fact. From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his “great, great friend” Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.

The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times that even the Israeli military has suggested they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely claimed to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed that unverified allegation as fact — including over the objections of his advisers — and publicly questioned the death toll of Palestinian civilians. None of this is by accident, nor can it be attributed to the president’s propensity to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes. 

Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has. 

Israel’s Dystopian Game Show

The horrifying nature of the October 7 attacks led by Hamas do not in any way — morally or legally — justify what Israel has done to the civilian population of Gaza, more than 18,000 of whom have died in a 60-day period. Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to “self-defense.”

If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been “justified” in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in “self-defense” as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily. 

Despite all the airtime consumed by Blinken and other U.S. officials playing make-believe on the issue of protecting Palestinian civilians, what has unfolded on the ground is nothing less than a corralling of the population of Gaza into an ever-shrinking killing cage. On December 1, Israel released an interactive map of Gaza dividing it into hundreds of numbered zones. On the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic language website, it encouraged Gaza’s residents to scan a QR code to download the map and to monitor IDF channels to know when they need to evacuate to a different zone to avoid being murdered by Israeli bombs or ground operations. This is nothing short of a dystopian Netflix show produced by Israel in which its participants have no choice to opt out and a wrong guess will get you and your children maimed or killed. On a basic level, it is grotesque to tell an entrapped population that has limited access to food, water, health care, or housing — and whose internet connections have repeatedly been shut down — to go online to download a survival map from a military force that is terrorizing them.

Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had made clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has repeatedly struck areas of Gaza to which it had told residents to flee. In some cases, the IDF sent SMS messages to people just 10 minutes before attacking. One such message read: “The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas.” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.” Blinken attributed the continuously mounting pile of Palestinian corpses to “a gap” between Israel’s stated intent to lessen civilian deaths and its operations. “I think the intent is there,” he said. “But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby got visibly irritated when asked on December 6 about Israel’s widespread killing of civilians.

“It is not the Israeli Defense Forces strategy to kill innocent people. It’s happening. I admit that. Each one is a tragedy,” he said. “But it’s not like the Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying ‘Hey, how many more civilians can we kill today?’ ‘Let’s go bomb a school or a hospital or a residential building and just—and cause civilian casualties.’ They’re not doing that.”

One problem with Kirby’s rant is that attacks against civilians, schools, and hospitals are exactly what Israel is doing—repeatedly. It is irrelevant what Kirby believes the IDF’s intent to be. For two months, numerous Israeli officials and lawmakers have said that their intent is to collectively strangle the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, death, or flight. 

Dr Suleiman Qaoud surveys the damage at the Rantisi Specialist Hospital, part of the Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza City, following Israeli missile attacks on November 6, 2023 [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent investigative report by the Israeli media outlets 972 and Local Call. The story, based on interviews with seven Israeli military and intelligence sources, described in detail how Israel knows precisely the number of civilians present in buildings it strikes and at times has knowingly killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single top Hamas commander.

“Nothing happens by accident,” one Israeli source said. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

As Israel ratchets up its killing machine, giving lie to all of Blinken’s pronouncements, it continues to wage a propaganda war that is consistent with its overarching campaign of mass killing. No lie is too obscene to justify the wholesale slaughter of people that Israel’s defense minister has called “human animals.” According to this campaign, there are no Palestinian children, no Palestinian hospitals, no Palestinian schools. The U.N. is Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. The prime ministers of Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are Hamas. Everything and everyone who dissents in the slightest from the genocidal narrative is Hamas.

Israel has quite understandably grown accustomed to many Western media outlets accepting its lies — no matter how outrageous or vile — when they are told about Palestinians. But even news outlets with a long track record of promoting Israel’s narrative unchecked have inched toward incredulity. Not because they have had a change of conscience, but because the Israeli propaganda is so farcical that it would be embarrassing to pretend it is otherwise.

Israeli forces have distributed multiple images and videos in recent days of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear — sometimes wearing blindfolds — and claimed they are all Hamas terrorists surrendering. These claims, too, fell apart under the most minimal scrutiny: Some of the men have been identified as journalists, shop owners, U.N. employees. In one particularly ridiculous piece of propaganda, a video filmed by IDF soldiers and distributed online depicted naked Palestinian captives laying down their alleged rifles.

Government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the practice of stripping detainees.

“Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here. Especially during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt might not be pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev told Sky News. “We are looking for people who would have concealed weapons, especially suicide bombers with explosive vests.”

Regev was asked about this clear violation of the Geneva Conventions’s prohibition against publishing videos of prisoners of war.

“I’m not familiar with that level of international law,” he said, adding (as though it matters) that he did not believe the videos were distributed by official Israeli government channels. “These are military aged men who were arrested in a combat zone,” he said. 

Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz reported that “of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees photographed handcuffed in the Gaza Strip in recent days, about 10 to 15 percent are Hamas operatives or are identified with the organization,” according to Israeli security sources. Israel has produced no evidence to support its claim that even this alleged small pool of the stripped prisoners were Hamas guerrillas.

So what we have here is both a violation of the Geneva Conventions and an immoral production in which Palestinian civilians are forced at gunpoint to play Hamas fighters in an Israeli propaganda movie.

No Path of Resistance

It has become indisputably clear over these past two months that there are not actually two sides to this horror show. Without question, the perpetrators who meted out the horrors against Israeli civilians on October 7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing operation is about. And journalists should stop pretending it is.

Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7. An honest examination of the current situation must view October 7 in the context of Israel’s 75-year war against the Palestinians and the past two decades of transforming Gaza first into an open-air prison and now into a killing cage. Under threat of being labeled antisemitic, Israel and its defenders demand acceptance of Israel’s official rationale for its irrational actions as legitimate, even if they are demonstrably false or they seek to justify war crimes.

“You look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism,” the Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani recently told Intercepted. “It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition.”

Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed. That was the case in 2018-2019 when Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return, killing 223 and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. When Palestinians fight back against apartheid soldiers, they are killed or sent into military tribunals. Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead. Palestinians live their lives stripped of any context or any recourse to address the grave injustices imposed on them.

Image: Members of the Hamas al-Qassam Brigade (EPA-EFE/Mohammed Saber via Euractiv)

You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support. One aspect of this should certainly probe Netanyahu’s own role — extending back to at least 2012 — in propping up Hamas and facilitating the flow of money to the group.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud comrades in 2019. 

But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza. Israel’s president said as much on October 13.

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog declared. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” 

The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages.

“Look, this could be over tomorrow,” Blinken said December 10. “If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered.”

That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles. 

Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has consistently facilitated Israel’s “mowing the grass” in Gaza. This is not a series of periodic assaults on Hamas — it is a cyclical campaign of terror bombings largely aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Biden administration is not — and Biden personally has never been — an outside observer or a friend encouraging moderation during an otherwise righteous crusade. None of this slaughter would be occurring if Biden valued Palestinian lives over Israel’s false narratives and its bloody ethnonationalist wars of annihilation repackaged as self-defense. We should end the charade that this is an Israeli war against Hamas. We should call it what it is: a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza.

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“The Futile War against Russia”, Congress has Already Allocated $100+ Billion, Zelensky Recognises He Will be Forced to Cede Territories to Russia “Without US Help”

December 15th, 2023 by Ahmed Adel

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After failing to obtain more funding from the United States for additional military assistance in the conflict with Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted to Congressmen that he would have to cede territories to Russia without financial and military assistance. His comments come as Elon Musk contributed his opinion to the great risk Ukraine faces if it continues its futile war against Russia.

A Washington Post report published on December 13 states that Ukraine’s leader declared that without more help, the conflict will become even more brutal, and the Ukrainian military will “inevitably” cede “ground to its determined and well-armed adversary.”

Zelensky’s visit to the US Congress occurred during an impasse in the legislative house when Republicans demanded comprehensive changes to US immigration legislation in exchange for approval of the request for more than $60 billion from US President Joe Biden to keep Kiev supplied.

At a White House press conference, Zelensky characterised the meetings as “more than positive” but acknowledged that Ukrainians would have to “separate words from results.”

Biden and Zelensky did not detail Ukraine’s plans for next year, a major concern for Republicans. Biden also discussed when the US would urge Ukraine to negotiate with Russia to end the fighting.

This was the second time in three months that the Ukrainian leader visited the Capitol, and it is hugely contrasted with the visit in December 2022 when he was given a standing ovation at the legislative house and received an American flag that flew over the State Capitol during his visit.

To date, Congress has allocated more than $111 billion to support Ukraine and Biden’s call for more funds is part of a larger emergency spending package that would also provide security assistance to Israel and Taiwan and on the US-Mexico border. Ultimately, the bill failed to pass the vote in the US Senate as it needed support from 60 lawmakers. Only 49 voted in favour, with 51 voting against.

Due to this financing issue, policymakers in Kiev are trying to figure out how to fund their war against Russia if its allies fail to deliver on promised aid, and the options are fraught with risk. According to Bloomberg, the Ukrainian financial toolkit could include increasing tax revenues — an obvious challenge in a battered economy — or cutting expenses to an already beleaguered public and service sector.

“The support from the EU and US is crucial,” said Ukrainian Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko to the agency, adding that Kiev maintains active communication with EU and US representatives to inform them about their needs for the next budget year.

Ukraine’s financial salvation is at stake, especially after Kiev’s counteroffensive failed to make gains, and the arrival of winter brought new difficulties. If the shortage of foreign aid flows exceeds several billion US dollars, Ukrainian authorities will be left with very few choices, and all eventually result in the cessation of more territories to Russia.

Newly committed aid to Kiev fell to the lowest level since the start of the conflict in February 2022, down almost 90% between August and October compared to the same period the previous year, according to data monitored by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) and released on December 7.

“Our figures confirm the impression of a more hesitant donor attitude in recent months,” said Christoph Trebesch, head of the team responsible for the Ukraine Support Tracker and director of a research centre at the Kiel Institute.

In fact, Elon Musk even chipped in with his own opinion on December 12, concurring with the conclusions of David Sacks, a South African entrepreneur, that

“Ukraine has lost Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, most of Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia forever. If it doesn’t negotiate a peace deal now, it will also lose Kharkiv, Odesa, the rest of Kherson, and more. The flag wavers who think they’re helping Ukraine are just dismembering it.”

Musk responded on X (formerly Twitter),

“Your assessment is accurate [in my opinion].”

The endgame is nearing, and although no one will know exactly when this will be, Ukraine has reached a point where there is nothing they can do once Russia decides to go on the offensive, something the Eurasian Giant has not done in a serious manner for the entirety of 2023 as it instead secured its defensive lines and easily absorbed Ukraine’s attacks to devastating effect. No amount of finance and material support to Ukraine can help the country now, especially as it contends with a huge manpower shortage, and this is extremely evident to any observers of the war who do not see the Ukrainians as nothing more than an expendable force to pursue their Russophobic policies.

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

Featured image is from Al Mayadeen English

Unmasking Media Complicity: The Urgent Call for Truth in Gaza

December 15th, 2023 by Nour Jaghama

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Bisan Owda, a 25-year-old journalist from Gaza, recently expressed a bleak outlook: ‘I no longer have any hope of survival…I am certain that I will die in the next few weeks or maybe days.’ Bisan’s harrowing sentiment reflects the dangerous reality journalists face, risking their lives to expose the brutal truths obscured by the fog of war.

Bisan and other Palestinian reporters, such as Motaz, another courageous photojournalist from the Deir al-Balah refugee camp, stand as unsung heroes amid a devastating genocide. Bisan, tearfully acknowledging the imminent danger she faces, and Motaz transitioning from documenting to surviving underscore the extraordinary courage of Palestinian journalists determined to unveil the truth.

In contrast, mainstream Western media, epitomized by The New York Times, presents a stark disparity. Instead of amplifying the voices of individuals like Bisan and Motaz, major publications propagate a narrative that perpetuates misinformation and greenlights the ongoing tragedy. 

The toll in Gaza is staggering—over 20,000 lives lost, including nearly 10,000 innocent children. Amidst the ruins of homes and the echoes of airstrikes, it becomes clear that the valiant efforts of these journalists serve as our only window into the extent of this horror.

Regrettably, The New York Times is failing to report the situation accurately. Its persistence in publishing misleading information not only aids in spreading propaganda but also follows a historical pattern. The current reporting echoes the publication’s prior engagement in a misinformation campaign preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The New York Times is failing an open-notes test it has taken many times.

Notably, instead of reporting on the confirmed cases of genocide, the New York Times seems fixated on fake controversies sparked by controversial lawmakers such as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.) that feed into the false idea that supporting Palestinians and demanding an end to the genocide is antisemitic. This type of reporting creates a false sense of danger and weaponizes people into rejecting the Palestinian struggle as the human rights issue it is. 

As the Israeli military intensifies its attack on Gaza, the urgency for accurate reporting becomes paramount. Netanyahu’s unwavering pursuit of genocidal goals, evidenced by the bombing of schools, hospitals, and UN buildings, demands unfiltered attention. Strikingly, Israeli leaders have laid bare their intentions for ethnic cleansing through genocide, yet U.S. media remains conspicuously silent.

The betrayal of journalists like Bisan, Motaz, and countless others who put their lives on the line becomes even more egregious when juxtaposed with The New York Times’ failure to uphold journalistic standards. It is no longer a matter of misguided reporting; it is the perpetuation of a historical pattern that prioritizes profit and imperialism over truth and justice.

Western media has the potential to be a catalyst for change. We have seen the impact of unfiltered reporting during the Vietnam War when journalists chose to reveal the truth, irrespective of government constraints. There are the equivalents of the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre currently being in Gaza by Israel. Any reporting by Western media that doesn’t center its context around that is a disservice to humanity. 

News reporting, at its core, should be about saving lives. Instead, influential publications opt to provide manufactured consent for violence and oppression, holding the line for war criminals while the atrocities unfold in real-time. In doing so, this makes publications like the New York Times complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, mixing the blood of innocent Palestinians with that of those murdered in Iraq twenty years ago—shame on the New York Times and all. 

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Nour Jaghama is CODEPINK’s Palestine and Iran Campaigner. 

Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She writes about the intersection of militarism and the human cost of war.

Flirting with Nuclear Energy Down Under. Contentious Issue in Australia

December 15th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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It was a policy that was bound to send a shiver through the policymaking community. The issue of nuclear energy in Australia has always been a contentious one. Currently, the country hosts a modest nuclear industry, centred on the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), nuclear medicine and laboratory products. But even this has created headaches in terms of long-term storage of waste, plagued by successful legal challenges from communities and First Nation groups. The advent of AUKUS, with its inane yet provocative promise of nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy, adds yet another, complicating dimension to this fact. Without a clear idea of a site, a vital part of the nuclear dilemma remains unresolved.

Broadly speaking, the nuclear issue, in manifold manifestations, has never entirely disappeared from the periphery of Australian policy. The fact that Australia became a primary testing ground for Britain’s nuclear weapons program was hardly something that would have left Canberra uninterested in acquiring some nuclear option. Options were considered, be they in the realm of a future weapons capability, or energy generation.

In a June 29, 1961 letter from Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies to his counterpart in the UK, Harold Macmillan, concerns over the impediments imposed by a potential treaty that would impose limitations on countries the subject of nuclear testing were candidly expressed.  Were that treaty to go ahead, it “could prove a serious limitation on the range of decisions open to a future Australian Government in that it could effectively preclude or at least impose a very substantial handicap on Australia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.”

Menzies put forth a suggestion that was ultimately never pursued – at least officially. An arrangement deemed “more practical,” suggested the Australian PM, might involve “the supply of ready-made weapons” at the conclusion of such a treaty.

A sore point here were efforts by the Soviets to insist that countries such as Australia be banned from pursuing their own nuclear program. Menzies therefore wished Macmillan “to accord full recognition of the potentially serious security situation in which Australia could find herself placed as a result of having accommodated United Kingdom testing.”

Australia eventually abandoned its nuclear weapons ambitions with the ratification of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in February 1970, preferring, instead, the nuclear umbrella of extended deterrence offered by the United States. (The nature of that deterrence has always seemed spectacularly hollow.) Domestically, nuclear technology would be sparingly embraced. Nuclear power stations, however, were banned in every state and territory, a policy left unchallenged by a number of parliamentary inquiries.

The quest of meeting emissions reduction targets during the transition to the goal of net zero was bound to refocus interest on the nuclear power issue. The Liberal-National opposition is keen to put the issue of nuclear power back on the books. It is a dream that may never see the light of day, given, according to the chief government scientific body, the CSIRO, its uncompetitive nature and the absence of “the relevant frameworks in place for its consideration and operation within the timeframe required.”

Australian politicians have often faced, even when flirting with the proposition of adopting nuclear power, firm rebuke. South Australian Premier Malinauskas gave us one example in initially expressing the view late last year that “the ideological opposition that exists in some quarters to nuclear power is ill-founded.”  It did not take him long to tell the ABC’s 7.30 program that he did not wish “to suggest that nuclear should be part of the mix in our nation.” Australia had to “acknowledge that nuclear power would make energy more expensive in our nation & [we should] put it to one side, rather than having a culture war about nuclear power.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has been by far the boldest, pitching for a gentler exit from the fossil-fuel powered nirvana Australia has occupied for decades. Australia, he is adamant, should join “the international nuclear energy renaissance”. Of particular interest to him is the use of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which might be purposefully built on coal generator cites as part of the general energy package alongside renewables. SMRs, as Joanne Liou of the International Atomic Energy Agency explains, “are advanced nuclear reactors that have a power capacity of up to 300 Mw(e) per unit, which is about one-third of the generating capacity of traditional nuclear power reactors.”

The heralded advantages of such devices, at least as advertised by its misguided proponents, lie in their size – being small and modular, ease of manufacture, shipping and installation. They also offer, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “savings in cost and construction time, and they can be deployed incrementally to match increasing energy demand.”

For all these benefits, the cold reality of SMR designs is how far they have yet to go before becoming viable. Four SMRs are currently in operation, though these, according to Friends of the Earth Australia’s lead national nuclear campaigner, Jim Green, hardly meet the “modular definition” in terms of serial factory production of components relevant to such devices.

Russia and China, despite hosting such microreactors, have faced considerable problems with cost blowouts and delays, the very things that SMRs are meant to avoid. Oregon-based NuScale has tried to convince and gull potential patrons that its small reactor projects will take off, though the audience for its chief executive John Hopkins is primarily limited to the Coalition and NewsCorp stable. The company’s own cost estimates for energy generation, despite heavy government subsidies, have not made SMR adoption in the United States, let alone Australia, viable.

In his second budget reply speech in May, Dutton showed little sign of being briefed on these problems, stating that “any sensible government [in the 21st century] must consider small modular nuclear as part of the energy mix.” Labor’s policies on climate change had resulted in placing Australia “on the wrong energy path.”

Such views have not impressed the Albanese Government. Energy Minister Chris Bowen insists that counterfeit claims are being peddled on the issue of the role played by nuclear energy in Canada along with false distinctions between the costs of nuclear power and renewable energy.

“If they are serious about proposing a nuclear solution for Australia, the simplistic bumper stickers and populist echo chamber has to come to an end. Show the Australian people your verified nuclear costings and your detailed plans about where the nuclear power plants will go.”

Such verification will be a tall order indeed. As the CSIRO concedes,

“Without more real-world data for SMRs demonstrating that nuclear can be economically viable, the debate will likely continue to be dominated by opinion and conflicting social values rather than a discussion on the underlying assumptions.”

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

Families that Inject COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Together Have Heart Attacks, Blood Clots, Develop Turbo Cancer and Die Suddenly Together

December 15th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis

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***

 

Dec. 4, 2023 – 36 year old adult film star Sophie Anderson died suddenly on Dec. 4, 2023. Two weeks earlier, her husband Premier League professional soccer player Oliver Spedding died suddenly on Nov. 17, 2023.

Nov. 26, 2023 – CANADA, Montreal, QC – Two sisters diagnosed with same cancer – osteosarcoma. They have a genetic mutation of p53 – but does that place both of them at higher risk of developing COVID-19 Vaccine Induced Turbo cancer? Should people with these genetic susceptibilities have avoided mRNA Vaccines?

Nov. 18, 2023 – FIVE SIBLINGS DEAD – 48 year old Christine Chrissy Brandt died suddenly on Nov. 18, 2023. All 5 siblings are dead (sisters Pam, Yvonne, step-sister Renee, brother Teddy). Her sister Pam (Pamela Zieler) died Dec. 1, 2022.

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Oct. 18, 2023 – Paula Denton, Albert Johnson and Letha Knox are three family members all of whom died suddenly within the past few months.

Oct. 1, 2023 – 57 year old Red Sox baseball pitcher Tim Wakefield died this morning on Oct. 1, 2023. I reported he had aggressive brain cancer and his wife has aggressive pancreatic cancer!

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Sep. 15, 2023 – YOUNG COUPLE WITH TURBO CANCER – In Feb. 2023, Shane Gray developed testicular cancer that spread to lymph nodes. In June 2023, his wife Morgan was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.

Sep. 5, 2023 – Los Angeles, CA – Teacher Karyn Newbill Helmig was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the form of 5 malignant tumors in her abdomen. Her husband 53 year old Shawn Helmig died unexpectedly of a pulmonary embolism in Nov. 9, 2022.

Aug. 29, 2023 – Temple Hill, KY – Nurse Velvet Scott died suddenly on Aug. 29, 2023. She rushed to get her 1st COVID-19 Vaccine on Dec. 23, 2020. Her brother died a few moths prior and her other brother just had surgery for prostate cancer. Three siblings, two dead, one with cancer within a few months.

Aug. 19, 2023 – Halifax, MA – William Roche and his wife Tracy Roche have both come down with cancer. Tracy was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and this spring William was diagnosed with tonsil/neck/throat cancer.

Aug. 14, 2023 – Melbourne, Australia – Danny Norman and Stacey Singles lost their baby boy Cooper at 2 weeks old on May 23, 2023. Just 2 months later, on August 13, 2023, while on vacation in Bali, Stacey Singles collapsed and died suddenly. “My beautiful wife Stacey passed away and is now with our beautiful boy Cooper in heaven”

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

Featured image is from COVID Intel

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week’s Most Popular Articles

December 15th, 2023 by Global Research News

The WHO Confirms that the COVID-19 PCR Test Is Flawed: Estimates of “Positive Cases” Are Meaningless. Both the Lockdown and the “Vaccine” Have No Scientific Basis

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 12, 2023

“Is the Virus Fictitious”? Laboratories in US Can’t Find COVID-19 in One of 1,500 Positive Tests

Xander Nieuws, December 10, 2023

The Climate Scam Revealed by COP28

Peter Koenig, December 12, 2023

There Never Was a “New Corona Virus”, There Never Was a Pandemic

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 14, 2023

Video: “The design of the so called COVID-19 vaccines was intentionally to harm people.” Dr. Mike Yeadon

Patricia Harrity, December 11, 2023

The Gaza War, “Big Money” and the Insidious Role of the World Economic Forum

Ernst Wolff, December 8, 2023

Are National Governments All Following a Genocide Agenda?

Julian Rose, December 11, 2023

Israel and US Plan Complete Deportation from Gaza. Famine Is Looming. “A Child Is Killed Every Ten Minutes”

Marc Vandepitte, December 11, 2023

Yuval Noah Harari Discusses the Creation of a Massive Class of “Useless People” and What Should be Done with Them

Rhoda Wilson, December 11, 2023

The Criminalization of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Life and Legacy of Henry Kissinger

Michael Welch, December 10, 2023

Turbo Cancer: Leukemia Diagnosis to Death in Hours, Days or Weeks

Dr. William Makis, December 11, 2023

The War on Gaza: Debunking the Pro-Zionist Propaganda Machine

Amir Nour, December 11, 2023

Israel-Palestine War: The Big Picture. Peter Koenig

Peter Koenig, December 9, 2023

A Fateful Nobel Prize in Medicine to Convince “Reluctant People” to Get Vaccinated. For Making Possible the “Genetic Lobotomy” of a Large Part of the World’s Population

Dr. Michael Nehls, December 9, 2023

The ‘Greater Israel’ Scheme and Its Global Power Play: A Delusional Recipe for Armageddon

Matthew Ehret-Kump, December 7, 2023

Israel’s “Final Solution” for the Palestinians Did Not Start in 2023. “The Terror to Eliminate Palestinians from their Homeland” Started in the 1930s

Peter Koenig, December 11, 2023

Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?

Nauman Sadiq, December 9, 2023

The ‘Blue Shirts’ of October 7. The Wall of Jericho, “The Mysterious Case of the Men with the Light Blue Shirts”

Michael Ginsburg, December 11, 2023

Sabotage of the Kiev-Moscow March 2022 Peace Agreement in Istanbul. The End Game is the Destruction and Privatization of Ukraine

Nauman Sadiq, December 8, 2023

Seventeen Covid Pandemic Lies We’ve Been Told

Richard Gale, December 10, 2023

Selected Articles: “Digital Euro Is Now in Preparation Phase”. Can We Trust the Head of the ECB Christine Lagarde?

December 15th, 2023 by Global Research News

“Digital Euro Is Now in Preparation Phase”. Can We Trust the Head of the ECB Christine Lagarde?

By Global Research News, December 14, 2023

The Head of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde, has announced the implementation of the digital Euro, which will have devastating economic and social consequences.

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

By Peter Koenig, December 14, 2023

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

WHO Pandemic Treaty’s Global Power Grab in May 2024

By Global Health Project, December 14, 2023

W.H.O. Pandemic Treaty “Judgment Day” is May 24, 2024. Everything is on the line in this historic, unprecedented, global power grab. This 4 part video series is probably one of the most important things you will ever watch.

“Pogrom”: From Kishinev in Tsarist Russia (1903) to Gaza, Palestine (2023)

By Prof. Yakov M. Rabkin, December 14, 2023

Pogrom. This Russian term denotes a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring Jews and destroying their property. One of the deadliest pogroms (50 Jews were killed and nearly 600 wounded) took place in Kishinev [Chișinău, Moldava] a hundred and twenty years ago, in April 1903. But the trauma of Russian Zionists facing the oppression in Tsarist Russia over a century ago continues to inform Israel’s political culture. 

Ukraine War: Mainstream Media Narrative Doubles Down on “Russia Losing” Fantasies

By Drago Bosnic, December 14, 2023

Even before the start of the special military operation (SMO), the mainstream media had been running several propaganda narratives, almost simultaneously. Shortly before the SMO and in the first few days, there was the claim that Russia would take Kiev in three days and most of Ukraine in a week.

A Stunning Rebuke: U.N. Cease-fire Vote Humiliates U.S. Imperialism

By Sara Flounders, December 14, 2023

The United Nations Security Council vote on December 8, calling for an immediate cease-fire in Palestine, was a public humiliation of the United States. When explaining their vote, numerous countries denounced the U.S. — Israel’s number one supporter — as the accomplice, the enabler and the real force behind the Zionist destruction in Gaza.

“Four Died Trying”: John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy: A Powerful, Riveting, and Masterful Documentary Series Begins

By Edward Curtin, December 14, 2023

It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today. Many might assume that that was then and long before their time, so let’s move on to what we must deal with today. 

The Horrifying Secret Agenda of the UN and WHO: Total Enslavement of Humanity Through a “Global Health Dictatorship”

By Peter Koenig, Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger, and Mike Adams, December 14, 2023

Imagine where the world has gone? And where the full UN Agenda 2030 is planning to take us? With a corrupted UN system, with a World Health Organization that is no longer looking after the population’s health and disease, but is promoting death.

Video: The Pfizer “Killer Vaccine”: “Money vs. Mortality”. Michel Chossudovsky

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 14, 2023

“Killing is Good for Business”. What we are witnessing is a crime against humanity on an unprecedented scale, affecting the lives of the entire population of our  planet. The upward trend in excess mortality related to the Covid-19-19 Vaccine is amply documented. 

Death and Destruction in Gaza: “Have You No Decency?” Prof. John J. Mearsheimer

By John J. Mearsheimer, December 13, 2023

I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history.

“Digital Euro Is Now in Preparation Phase”. Can We Trust The Head of the ECB Christine Lagarde?

December 14th, 2023 by Global Research News

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The Head of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde, has announced the implementation of the digital Euro, which will have devastating economic and social consequences.

According to Peter Koenig:

“The universal drive towards central bank digital currencies, emanates most likely from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Central Bank of all central banks, controlling at least 90% of central banks around the globe, and the BIS, itself, being controlled by the Rothschild family.

As we see, all is in best-intended private hands, perfectly aligned with the fraudulently established 1913 Federal Reserve Act – that has allowed the US Federal Reserve –which is controlled by a handful of Wall Street Banks– to create a US dollar hegemony around the world”.

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Can We Trust Christine Lagarde? 

The Head of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde has a criminal record in France.

“International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde has been convicted [December 2016] over her role in a controversial €400m (£355m) payment to a businessman.

French judges found Ms Lagarde guilty of negligence for failing to challenge the state arbitration payout to the friend of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy [Bernard Tapie].

The 60-year-old, following a week-long trial in Paris, was not given any sentence and will not be punished.
 .
 The Court of Justice of the Republic, a special tribunal for ministers, could have given Ms Lagarde up to one-year in prison and a €13,000 fine. (The Independent, December 19, 2016, emphasis added)
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Screenshot: The Independent, December  2016 

Unusual in France? Lagarde was found “guilty” without the enforcement of a one year jail term ordered by the Court:  She was accused of “negligence” rather than “complicity”  in a multimillion euro fraud.

The French judges took the decision to withhold a one year prison sentence pertaining to the accused pursuant to a decision of the IMF Executive Board which is routinely chaired by the accused. 

 

Can We Trust Pfizer Which Also Has A Criminal Record?

Did the Media or Your Government Inform You? Had You Known Would You Have Accepted to Receive the Covid-19 mRNA Vaccine?

“The federal government announced the largest medical fraud settlement in U.S. history” directed against Pfizer: $2.3 Billion (2009)

See details below

Pfizer Has a Criminal Record

By US Department of Justice and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 13, 2023

Pfizer’s CEOs Were not Arrested.  They were Put on “Probation” by the U.S. DOJ  

Is there a relationship between the Covid “Vaccine” and the “Digital Euro”?

They are both “Big Money” operations controlled by the Financial Elites. The Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) project is to be implemented in coordination with the International ID system under the so-called WHO Pandemic Treaty, as well as the vaccine programs. 

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

See:

Video: The Pfizer “Killer Vaccine”: “Money vs. Mortality”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 14, 2023

Video. US Department of Justice. 2.3 Billion Medical Fraud Settlement

 

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Featured image is from the European Commission

A UE não financiará Kiev tanto quanto antes – Ministério de relações exteriores da Espanha.

December 14th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

Cada vez mais, os líderes ocidentais começam a adotar uma postura mais realista em relação à Ucrânia. Confrontados com a impossibilidade de manter o fornecimento irrestrito de armas a longo prazo, algumas autoridades ​​europeias expressam uma visão crítica do papel da UE no conflito, admitindo que o bloco não será capaz de manter a sua política atual.

É provável que a UE fique em breve sem fundos para ajudar Kiev. O alerta foi feito pelo ministro das eelações exteriores da Espanha, José Manuel Albares, durante entrevista ao jornal El Pais, no dia 10 de dezembro. Segundo o responsável, o bloco europeu terá que rever as suas prioridades estratégicas para fazer investimentos de forma adequada e racional, sem prejudicar as suas próprias reservas financeiras.

“Estamos na fase inicial da discussão deste quadro financeiro plurianual. A Ucrânia tem necessidades muito importantes que temos vindo a cobrir até agora. No entanto, os fundos são limitados e as prioridades devem ser analisadas (…) Mas não podemos permitir que princípios básicos como a soberania ou a integridade territorial sejam violados na Europa. Seria um retrocesso. Não vamos desistir”, diz o comunicado.

Ele enfatizou, no entanto, a “necessidade” de continuar a apoiar o regime de Kiev, apesar de todas as dificuldades. Segundo ele, se a Europa suspendesse a ajuda à Ucrânia, permitiria à Rússia violar importantes princípios internacionais, como a soberania e a integridade territorial – que considera inaceitáveis. No entanto, ele acredita que só é possível reduzir a ajuda financeira e continuar a apoiar Kiev impondo sanções contra Moscou.

Um tema interessante que ele comentou foi o conflito na Palestina. O ministro admite que o Ocidente está atualmente a ter a sua atenção desviada da Ucrânia para a Palestina devido aos últimos acontecimentos. Ele acredita que as hostilidades entre Israel e o Hamas “mudaram o foco” da OTAN, mas enfatiza a “importância” de apoiar a Ucrânia de todas as formas possíveis, desde que seja “necessário”.

Albares acrescentou ainda que a “solução” para o conflito depende da Rússia e da sua vontade de pôr fim às hostilidades, ignorando todas as circunstâncias paralelas graves, como o expansionismo ilimitado da OTAN. Repetindo as narrativas convencionais, afirmou que Moscou poderia simplesmente parar as suas actividades militares, “acabando” com a “guerra” e pacificando a região – o que mostra que, apesar do realismo relativamente ao apoio da UE a Kiev, o ministro espanhol continua a ser ingênuo quando se trata de para analisar o futuro do conflito.

Na verdade, o crescimento de uma opinião crítica relativamente ao apoio da UE à Ucrânia já parece ser um fenómeno inevitável. Os políticos do bloco estão a ser forçados a adotar este pensamento estratégico porque se nada for feito para mudar a política atual, a UE entrará certamente numa grave crise interna. Sem dinheiro e armas para continuar a apoiar o regime neonazista de forma ilimitada, a UE precisa urgentemente de rever as suas orientações relativas ao conflito, caso contrário as consequências poderão ser catastróficas.

Neste sentido, acabar com a prestação de ajuda militar e financeira e restringir o apoio à implementação de sanções anti-russas parece uma forma disfarçada de simplesmente deixar de ajudar Kiev. As sanções contra a Rússia já se revelam ineficientes, à medida que a economia de Moscou cresce cada vez mais e parece longe do isolamento e do colapso que os estrategistas ocidentais planejaram. Além disso, mesmo que as sanções prejudicassem de alguma forma a Rússia, não seriam suficientes para gerar qualquer efeito no campo de batalha, razão pela qual as medidas são essencialmente inúteis.

Além disso, mesmo que o apoio militar continue, o resultado final das hostilidades não mudará nada. Com um exército devastado pelos efeitos da “contra-ofensiva” falhada e dependente de recursos estrangeiros para continuar a lutar, a Ucrânia não parece ter quaisquer esperanças no conflito atual. Assim, para a UE, os argumentos para manter o apoio são ainda mais reduzidos, uma vez que, não vendo possibilidade de vitória, não há realmente razão para investir tanto dinheiro no exército ucraniano.

Na verdade, o que a UE deveria fazer é simplesmente admitir que foi errado começar a apoiar o regime e pôr termo à sua política anti-Rússia. Além de não ser eficiente, a onda anti-Rússia revelou-se verdadeiramente suicida para os europeus, sendo extremamente prejudicial aos interesses estratégicos da UE.

O bloco europeu deveria romper com os EUA e a OTAN e adotar uma política externa centrada no pragmatismo e no multilateralismo. Esta é a única forma de reverter os danos causados ​​por quase dois anos de sanções suicidas e de uma política militar irresponsável.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

Artigo em inglês :

https://infobrics.org/post/40060/

Imagem : InfoBrics

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

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

Holanda compra gás russo apesar de publicamente apoiar medidas coercivas.

December 14th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

O fracasso das sanções contra a Federação Russa parece cada vez mais claro. Agora, os dados mostram que os Países Baixos continuam a importar gás russo, apesar de o país ter aderido publicamente às sanções lançadas pela UE. O caso é mais uma prova de que a política coercitiva anti-Rússia falhou e só é mantida devido à hipocrisia dos seus apoiantes.

Os dados foram revelados por um importante meio de comunicação russo. Segundo fontes, a Holanda não parou de comprar a commodity, tendo importado cerca de 211,5 milhões de metros cúbicos de gás natural liquefeito só em setembro de 2023. As transações atingiram valores de centenas de milhões de euros, tendo sido um negócio obviamente lucrativo para ambas as partes.

A informação indica que os Países Baixos apenas deixaram de importar gás russo por um curto período de três meses, tendo rapidamente retomado as negociações bilaterais. Dados sobre o assunto são impedidos de chegar à opinião pública para não gerar escândalo, já que o país está comprometido com as medidas que o bloco europeu impôs contra Moscou. Em vez de pôr fim às sanções e agir abertamente com o seu povo, o governo holandês optou pela hipocrisia e por acordos secretos, escondendo dos seus próprios cidadãos a realidade das relações com a Rússia.

Na verdade, não existe apenas o fator geopolítico, mas também as contradições do país relativamente à sua paranóia “ambiental”. Além de usarem a desculpa ucraniana, os políticos holandeses pressionam pelo fim das relações com a Rússia, dizendo que é necessário substituir completamente o uso de gás natural por fontes de “energia limpa”. Esta narrativa “verde” fortaleceu enormemente o crescimento da popularidade da mentalidade anti-russa. Mas, aparentemente, tais preocupações com a Ucrânia e o ambiente eram igualmente apenas hipocrisia.

Na prática, os estados continuam reféns das suas próprias necessidades e interesses. Mesmo que exista algum desejo genuíno de romper laços com a Rússia, os países europeus simplesmente não podem fazê-lo – pelo menos não de uma forma radical e absoluta. As condições geográficas forçam a Europa a cooperar, em certa medida, com a Rússia, para que as suas necessidades de segurança e de recursos sejam satisfeitas. Assim, por mais pró-Kiev que seja o discurso público, é muito improvável que a ruptura seja realmente implementada de forma integral.

Vale lembrar também que em abril o ministro holandês do clima e da energia, Rob Jetten, fez uma declaração enfatizando que a Holanda encerraria todos os acordos de fornecimento de gás com a Rússia – mas, aparentemente, isso não aconteceu. Acredita-se que Jetten tenha feito tais promessas motivado apenas pelo fato de a Europa atravessar então a época primavera-verão, quando a dependência do gás diminui, “encorajando” discursos radicais contra esta importante commodity. No entanto, com a chegada do inverno, o governo mudou rapidamente a sua estratégia, ignorou as promessas pró-ucranianas e começou a preparar-se através da compra de gás russo.

Com esta informação a chegar à opinião pública, é muito provável que haja uma crise de legitimidade nos Países Baixos – se não em toda a UE. A dada altura, os cidadãos comuns compreenderão que estão a ser enganados com tais narrativas sobre sanções e “defesa da Ucrânia” – o que conduzirá inevitavelmente a uma crescente impopularidade destas medidas e à pressão para o seu fim. Os protestos em massa e a diminuição da confiança das pessoas no governo são algumas coisas previsíveis para o futuro próximo na Europa.

Além disso, é necessário lembrar que a transparência na política estatal é um dos principais princípios democráticos. Ao afirmar-se como defensora da democracia e dos valores ocidentais, a Europa precisa de agir de acordo com estas orientações, caso contrário estará em contradição com a sua própria ideologia política. A UE critica frequentemente a Rússia e outros países rivais, acusando-os de não serem “democráticos” e de terem pouca “transparência política”, mas aparentemente é a própria Europa que depende de mentiras e hipocrisias na sua administração.

Na verdade, confrontados com a impossibilidade de implementar sanções de forma “satisfatória”, os países ocidentais deveriam simplesmente deixar de ser hipócritas e admitir que precisam da ajuda russa, procurando termos bilaterais mutuamente interessantes e negociando acordos estratégicos em conjunto. É necessário ignorar questões ideológicas e políticas ao negociar o fornecimento de produtos vitais como gás e alimentos, razão pela qual não há necessidade de continuar a “sancionar” Moscou – mesmo que ideologicamente a UE continue a apoiar a Ucrânia. Resta saber quando é que os tomadores de decisões europeus o admitirão.

Luca Leiroz de Almeida

Artigo em inglês :

https://infobrics.org/post/40049

Imagem : InfoBrics

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

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

Por que Israel não pode derrotar o Hamas

December 14th, 2023 by Eduardo Vasco

Benjamin Netanyahu, o Hitler judeu, declarou inúmeras vezes que o principal objetivo de Israel nestes últimos dois meses é erradicar a Faixa de Gaza do Hamas. O genocídio promovido por seu exército, que já deixou mais de 18.000 palestinos mortos, resultante de bombardeios e ataques quase ininterruptos contra qualquer coisa que se mova em Gaza, indica que o primeiro-ministro israelense está disposto a fazer qualquer coisa para destruir o movimento da resistência islâmica.
Contudo, a história e a realidade atual da Palestina mostram que o Hamas não será erradicado. E Israel e seus comparsas sabem disso. Emmanuel Macron teve um raro momento de razão ao declarar: “eu acho que nós chegamos a um momento no qual as autoridades israelenses terão de definir mais claramente qual é o seu objetivo final. A destruição total do Hamas

Alguém acha que isso é possível? Se for assim, a guerra vai durar dez anos.”

A jornalista Loveday Morris publicou no Washington Post de 5 de dezembro que as forças sionistas estimam em 5.000 o número de militantes do Hamas mortos por Israel em Gaza – uma cifra considerada incerta e mesmo duvidosa, pois a Israel (como sempre acontece nas guerras) interessa inflar o número de baixas do inimigo para justificar a carnificina de civis. Se esse índice estiver próximo à realidade, isso significa que, até aquela data, Israel teria assassinado uma criança e um civil adulto para cada militante do Hamas morto.

Segundo o Centro Nacional de Contraterrorismo do Diretório de Inteligência Nacional do Governo dos EUA, até setembro de 2022 o Hamas tinha entre 20.000 e 25.000 membros. Analistas consultados pela BBC acreditam que atualmente o número de combatentes seja de 30.000, enquanto que a mesma reportagem do Post o estima em até 40.000 e com recrutamento recorrente. Se tanto os dados do governo americano como os desses veículos de imprensa estiverem mais ou menos corretos, pode-se considerar que o número de militantes do Hamas aumentou consideravelmente no período de um ano.
Isso seria um fato essencial para a análise da correlação de forças na atual fase do conflito na Palestina. E vai ao encontro das revelações expostas por pesquisas de opinião realizadas recentemente. Reportagem de Dahlia Scheindlin publicada em 22 de novembro no Haaretz noticia que um estudo do grupo de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Mundo Árabe apontou que: 1) quase 60% dos palestinos de Gaza e da Cisjordânia apoiam totalmente e 16% apoiam moderadamente a operação liderada pelo Hamas em 7 de outubro; 2) somente 13% (21% em Gaza) se opõem àquela operação militar; 3) para 76%, o Hamas desempenha um papel positivo; 4) ao menos metade dos consultados acredita que o Hamas luta pela liberdade dos palestinos.

A mesma reportagem cita outra pesquisa de opinião, conduzida pelo Barômetro Árabe, que revela que antes de 7 de outubro a maioria dos palestinos criticava o Hamas por não fazer o suficiente contra a ocupação. Essa pesquisa teve o apoio do Fundo Nacional para a Democracia (NED, na sigla em inglês) dos EUA – logo, provavelmente é enviesada para diminuir o apoio real ao Hamas. O Washington Institute, insuspeito de apoiar os palestinos, também conduziu uma pesquisa em julho deste ano, que concluiu que 57% dos habitantes de Gaza expressam um sentimento positivo pelo Hamas, sendo um pouco menor na Cisjordânia (52%) e maior em Jerusalém Oriental (64%) – e três quartos do povo de Gaza apoiam a Jihad Islâmica Palestina e a Cova dos Leões, outra organização militante.

A maioria das análises dos números apresentados pelas pesquisas de opinião não interpreta corretamente o sentimento dos palestinos, incluindo a análise publicada em 25 de outubro na Foreign Affairs por Amaney A. Jamal e Michael Robbins, os dois principais investigadores do Barômetro Árabe. O que essas pesquisas comprovam é: 1) o Hamas tem um grande apoio popular e 2) o movimento foi compelido a realizar a operação de 7 de outubro pela pressão popular para que alguma medida fosse tomada em reação à opressão imposta pelos ocupantes sionistas. A operação do Hamas foi o resultado lógico do sentimento de indignação dos palestinos com a sua condição de oprimidos, sendo que uma parte significativa dos palestinos revoltados se incorporou às fileiras do Hamas no último ano para lutar de forma efetiva contra essa opressão.

No dia 13 de dezembro veio à luz uma nova pesquisa de opinião, do Centro Palestino de Política e Pesquisas de Opinião, publicada no site da Press TV. Ela é enfática: 57% dos habitantes de Gaza apoia a operação Tempestade de al-Aqsa. É fundamental destacar que o levantamento foi feito durante o cessar-fogo, quando Gaza já estava destruída e milhares de pessoas já estavam mortas (481 pessoas responderam o questionário em Gaza). Ou seja, mesmo sofrendo a retaliação criminosa de Israel, a maioria dos entrevistados defende a ação do Hamas. Não se arrependem da operação conduzida pela Resistência.

Os nazistas de Tel Aviv têm tratado os civis palestinos como membros ou cúmplices do Hamas. Ao assassiná-los, cometem crimes de guerra – ignorados pelas “sagradas” organizações internacionais, todas corrompidas pelos patrocinadores de Israel. Contudo, a concepção israelense não é de todo incorreta: o povo palestino como um todo está em guerra contra os ocupantes e, ao invés de ser uma guerra entre Israel e Hamas meramente, é uma guerra de todo o povo palestino conduzida pelo Hamas contra os agressores israelenses. Uma grande parte dos cidadãos comuns constitui uma rede de apoio logístico e material à Resistência Palestina. De fato, muitos dos atuais membros do Hamas eram crianças inocentes quando Israel devastou Gaza no início da década anterior e muitas crianças que sobreviverem ao atual genocídio seguirão o mesmo caminho, porque a tendência natural de um povo que vive esmagado e massacrado é a revolta radical e armada.
A Resistência Palestina é somente mais um dos inúmeros movimentos de libertação nacional que necessariamente brotam nos países oprimidos, tal como os vietcongues, os talibãs ou a resistência xiita no Iraque pós-2003. E, assim como aqueles, o Hamas tem grande apoio popular – em seu caso, um apoio urbano, dadas as características da Faixa de Gaza, que também fazem com que a tática da resistência seja de guerrilha urbana diante da atual invasão. O Centro Nacional de Contraterrorismo dos EUA admite o caráter popular do movimento ao informar que o Hamas utiliza “dispositivos explosivos improvisados”, “armas pequenas” e “sistemas de defesa aérea portáteis”, reconhecendo assim que a guerra de Israel é absolutamente assimétrica.

Tal como os seus antecessores vietnamitas, afegãos e iraquianos, o Hamas utiliza redes de milhares de túneis subterrâneos para transportar armas e combatentes e surpreender os ocupantes com emboscadas mortais. Mesmo que seja verdade que guerrilheiros se escondam sob instalações civis (o ex-primeiro-ministro Ehud Barak admitiu à CNN que foi Israel quem construiu bunkers sob o Hospital al-Shifa), isso não constituiu uma conduta indevida levando-se em conta que os esconderijos servem também aos civis, que são o grande sustentáculo do Hamas na guerra de todo o povo. Deste modo, é de total responsabilidade e culpa de Israel as mortes civis causadas por bombardeios a hospitais, escolas, prédios residenciais e campos de refugiados, mesmo que eles abriguem “terroristas”.

As características da militância de organizações como o Hamas e a Jihad Islâmica, assim como do Vietcongue e do Talibã, que significam o abandono desinteressado de todo o tipo de comodidade e a entrega ao martírio, são prova de que o movimento só será derrotado se todos os seus membros e apoiadores (atuais e futuros) forem mortos. Isto é, se toda a população palestina for exterminada. Caso contrário, os palestinos forçosamente continuarão a luta, até a vitória. O grupo de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Mundo Árabe revelou em seu levantamento que três quartos dos palestinos acreditam na vitória e, mesmo na Cisjordânia, onde o Hamas não governa, apenas 10% acham que o Movimento da Resistência Islâmica será derrotado. Isso significa que o moral dos palestinos está muito elevado e essa é uma condição essencial para a vitória em qualquer guerra, principalmente em uma guerra de libertação nacional de todo o povo contra um ocupante.
Essa disposição de luta também se comprova pelo fato de que, mesmo após dois meses de martírio em massa, os tradicionalmente inferiores armamentos do Hamas (em relação aos de um exército regular como o de Israel), muitos de produção doméstica, têm vencido o tão propagandeado Domo de Ferro e os israelenses reconhecem que seria muito difícil destruir completamente esses foguetes. O Haaretz revelou que não foram feridos somente 1.593 soldados israelenses (como divulgou Israel), mas sim 4.591. Até o dia 13 de dezembro também haviam morrido 115 militares de Israel em meio aos combates em Gaza. A Resistência Palestina continua revidando, e continuará revidando, mesmo que seja com paus e pedras (como fez tantas vezes), a agressão das forças de ocupação. Até a vitória.

O Hamas é fruto direto da opressão sionista e da natural insurgência contra os ocupantes. É fruto também dos erros, capitulações e traições da OLP. Assim como no Vietnã, no Afeganistão e no Iraque, a única maneira de os palestinos conseguirem sua independência é a rebelião armada. O abandono da luta radical contra os opressores foi a sentença de morte da OLP, assim como o é da esmagadora maioria dos regimes da Ásia Ocidental e do Norte da África. A pesquisa divulgada pela Press TV é prova da impopularidade da Autoridade Palestina: 92% dos moradores da Cisjordânia querem a renúncia de Mahmoud Abbas e 60% querem a dissolução da Autoridade Palestina – por outro lado, 82% apoiam a operação Tempestade de al-Aqsa, liderada pelo Hamas.

Os povos da região não suportam mais a opressão que sofrem de Israel e dos EUA e, enquanto essa opressão existir (ou seja, enquanto existir o Estado de Israel e a presença militar e econômica do imperialismo americano), eles nunca desistirão de lutar.

Eduardo Vasco

 

 

Eduardo Vasco é jornalista especializado em política internacional, correspondente de guerra e autor dos livros O povo esquecido: genocídio e resistência no Donbass e Bloqueio: a guerra silenciosa contra Cuba.

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

December 14th, 2023 by Peter Koenig

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[This article was first published on April 10, 2023.]

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

The former will be “managed”, coordinated and supervised for faultless implementation, by the so-called Central Bank of Central Banks, the Bank for International Settlement (BIS); the latter by the 1948 Rockefeller-created, falsely called UN-agency WHO. The emerging tyrant’s budget is to 80% pharma, Gates and otherwise privately funded. Both are criminal organizations.

These are plans, not yet implemented. But the world better be aware, so We, the People, may stop this terrifying assault on humanity in its tracks.

CBDC may be upon us, humanity, rather sooner than later. Programmable CBDC is a weapon of mass destruction. The weapon has been in the planning for decades – and it fits right into the Bigger Picture of the Great Reset / Agenda 2030.

Programmable – means the money can be programmed on how it is to be spent by an individual, or blocked, or made to expire, or made to be used for certain goods or services – or it can be totally withheld, wiped out, depending on how well you behave, according to the standards of the all-commandeering death cult elite.

CBDC is a master control element, a stranglehold on the population.

Simultaneously, an all controlling health tyranny is being prepared by WHO. The plan is that the new totalitarian rules – Biden Administration initiated revised International Health Regulations (IHR), including a new Pandemic Treaty – are to be ratified by the World Health Assembly, presumably by the end of May 2023. If approved, by a two-thirds majority, the new rules will become effective in 2024.

Health Tyranny and Control by WHO

The elite who pretends to rule over humanity acts most silently from the shadows. It includes the financial giants, the largest funders of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Davos Boys. The financial elite calls the shots on integrated and willing Klaus Schwab, WEF’s CEO.

In turn, Mr. Schwab passes on instructions to the World Health Organization (WHO), for example, to redesign and implement the revision of the IHR which now also includes a Pandemic Treaty.

First, Bill Gates, also one of the key sponsors of WHO, puts a shady Ethiopian politician, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at the helm of WHO. Tedros, a buddy of Bill Gates, is former DG of the GAVI Vaxx-Alliance, also created and funded by the Gates Foundation. – So much for WHO being a UN Agency.

If these new IHR / Pandemic Treaty are approved by the World Health Assembly at the end of May 2023, the world (currently 194 WHO members) will be living under a “health tyranny”.

WHO would have overreaching powers over otherwise autonomous countries, being able to overrule national Constitutions and decide whether a disease must be treated as a pandemic, i.e., with massive vaccination.

For example, WHO could decide that henceforth the common flue must be treated as a pandemic. Since “covid”, any “vaccination” will be the gene-modifying mRNA type. The same viral-technology that has, with covid inoculations, caused already tens of millions of deaths around the world. Of course, not openly recognized, but over-mortality statistics, especially in the western world, alias, Global North, speak for themselves. They are congruent with the countries’ vaxx-injection rates.

People have no clue that when they next take their kid for a polio, or measles vaccination, their child will be injected with a potentially deadly mRNA-type toxic solution, producing immune-averse spike proteins. See this by Dr. Mike Yeadon, former VP and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer.

Total Obedience

To assure utmost obedience of countries, Klaus Schwab has on several occasions boasted that the, the WEF was able infiltrating scholars of the WEF “Academy” for Young Global Leaders (YGL) into governments around the world. They often are placed in Prime Minister’s or President’s positions. To name just a few of the more prominent ones – Justin Trudeau, Canada; Emmanuel Macron, France; Mark Rutte, Netherlands; former German Chancellor Angela Merkel; as well as Olaf Scholz, current Chancellor of Germany.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – Welcome to the New Money Prison

The decision to introduce CBDC so-to-speak at warp speed was made at a Jackson Hole, WY, meeting in August 2019 by the Central Bankers of the G7 nations. They voted on a financial coup which was “Going Direct Reset”.

This was planned way ahead for at least the last 20 years, and now needed to be consolidated for the final stage of total and absolute financial control – the end game of the coming world tyranny. First applied by the Global North, where the impact will be greatest. 

It is weaponizing money into programmable and controllable CBDC – a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

The rest of the world will follow suit. That’s what they think. Destruction of the industrialized world is first. Germany is supposed to lead deindustrialization of Europe, prompted by artificially caused energy shortages. Then comes the absolute control of the world’s natural resources – so that reconstruction of the system, with a drastically reduced world population, may progress rather fast.

The US / NATO Ukraine proxy-war against Russia is a forerunner aiming at dominating Russia and her wealth of natural resources.

Governments and banksters are the people’s biggest, most nefarious, but least recognized enemies. How much longer does it take until a majority of people will wake up and stop this crime on humanity?

According to Katherine Austin Fitts, the introduction of CBDC, may put half a billion people out of work. That is just one part of the warfare. It is intimately connected to the plandemic. People did not die of covid, most perished from toxic vaxxes and from “covid” caused misery.

Dr. Michael Yeadon, former VP and Chief Scientist of Pfizer repeatedly said in his interviews and special addresses, the real, potentially massive dying, of the coerced vaxx-campaign – will take place after three and up to about ten years from the beginning of the vaxx-drive. Injections of mRNA material into people’s bodies began in December 2020. We are now entering year three. And hundreds of thousands, if not millions, around the world have already died due to the “vaxxes”, NOT covid.

Today, truth-seeking scientists and medical doctors warn – “don’t get vaxxed, it is dangerous for your health, the jabs may kill you.” If not, they may maim you for life, or reduce massively women’s and men’s fertility. The latter shows already up in statistics – in Europe from 20% to 40% reduced fertility in 2022. Yet, worldwide vaxx-drives go on – a bulldozer stopping from nothing.

How to weaponize money?

A threesome tyranny – a “trinity”, is at it.  The WEF and it’s behind the scene giant financiers; the Governments, and the banksters, through a network of national central banks, all controlled by the Bank for International Settlement (BIS), in Basel, Switzerland. The “health industry” – Big Pharma, health- and hospital facilities and insurances are following the line with digitized health records and digitized health services.

The 2019 G7 Jackson Hole decision on massive bank failures to bring about CBDC, started in early March 2023 on a relatively light note in the United States. The opening was the apparent collapse of California’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), California’s Silvergate Capital and NYC’s Signature Bank. None of them really needed to go into bankruptcy. They were “bailed out” by the Biden Administration, put in control of the “Regulator”, before rumors of failure could trigger a run on the bank.

We know how “rumors” can be fabricated or enhanced and how they may mobilize people.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Credit Suisse, second largest Swiss bank, had been plagued for the last two decades by scandals and “financial irregularities” one after the other, including drug money laundering, and helping Russian oligarch escape western sanctions by “disappearing “ documents linking them to their luxury yachts which were supposed to be confiscated.

Since earlier this year, the bank’s share value plummeted, first by the week, then by the day. For a complete list of financial scandals and more, see this.

Much of the loss of confidence was, again, based on rumors – and rumors can be spread – true or false.

There was never a need to put CS into receivership. The bank, according to many analysts, also FINMA (the Swiss banking “regulator”) was solvent, especially after CS supposedly received on Friday, 17 March, a 50 billion franc “bail-out” loan from the Swiss Central Bank.

According to insiders (CS analysts)- and outsiders, this amount of cash would have been enough to restructure the bank, including quietly getting rid of undesirable skeletons – regaining trust of people and shareholders – and be functional again within less than a year.

However, there may be another agenda for the sudden change in direction, during the weekend, 18/19 March. Janet Yellen, US Secretary of Treasury, UK and German senior Ministry of Finance officials were in “consultation” with the Swiss Minister of Finance.

Outside pressure again cut into Swiss sovereignty politically and in terms of Swiss reputed private banking services.

What happened then, is the complete opposite to what the 50 billion “bail-out” should have achieved. One may ask, was the CHF 50 billion government “bail-out” just a disguise?

In an apparent sudden change of direction, the Swiss Government, without any consultation of shareholders and holders of some CHF 16 billion worth of bonds, forced UBS, the largest Swiss bank, to take over its slightly smaller sister, CS. Even stranger, this happened by applying a shady emergency decree. CS was never in an emergency of insolvency.

CS shareholders had to accept a take-over price of CHF 3 billion, about CHF 0.76 / share, less than half its last quoted share value. The bank’s infrastructure alone is worth a multiple of the take-over price.

On Sunday, March 19, the Swiss regulator FINMA announced that the so-called additional tier-one bonds (AT1) of about CHF 16 billion will be written to zero as part of the deal. Neither the shareholders or the bondholders were warned.

This precipitous coerced deal has not gone down well in Europe. A famous law Professor at the Swiss Fribourg law-specialized university, called Switzerland a “Banana Republic”.

The conservative Swiss newspaper NZZ reported on 19 March 2023 that a few months ago nobody would have believed the downfall of CS was possible. In 2007, CS had a stock value of over CHF 100 billion. It was gradually reduced to CHF 7 billion, less than a week before the decreed take-over. The paper concludes that Switzerland got rid of a Zombie-bank, but acquired instead a Monster-bank. After the merger, UBS will have about 5 trillion worth of managed assets. Compare this with about 10 trillion of BlackRock.

Instead of a 50 billion bailout credit – which would have been paid back, the new deal costs Switzerland about 230 billion – a 200 billion Central Bank line of credit, of which hundred billion are fully guaranteed by the Swiss Government (taxpayers), plus a 9 billion guarantee (taxpayer) for UBS losses, plus other guarantees in case of defaults.

As a sideline, the Swiss Central Bank, on 5 March declared one of the biggest losses in its recent history, of CHF132.5 billion. You add to this a potential loss position of another some CHF 100 to 200 billion – that makes you think – what else is planned to wipe out this debt?

The major CS shareholders may launch a massive law suit against the Swiss Government. Saudi National Bank (10%), Saudi Olayan Group (5%), plus Qatar Holding (5%), hold together about 20%. For these oil-producing countries legal fees may not be an issue, but creating a precedent will be important. BlackRock with about 4.1% CS shares stays for now on the sidelines.

Looks and smells like all of this has been planned by a long hand. Remember the G7 Central Bankers meeting at Jackson Hole, Wy in 2019?

Financial Times and Forbes report that there are about 200 small-to medium size US banks “at the brink” of collapse. The Credit Suisse collapse, one of the world’s 30 systemically most important banks, also one of the “Too Big to Fail” banks, rescued by the Swiss Government, may just set the beginning of a massive domino of bank failures in the US and Europe. See this.

BlackRock’s Vice Chairman, responsible for Investments, Philipp Hildebrand, is the former President of the Swiss National Bank (forced out in 2016, because of a personal scandal), then joined BlackRock. He knows how the wheels turn in Switzerland.

The Biden Administration’s rule of order, ignores the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that eliminates government bail-outs and opened the door for bail-ins, allowing banks to confiscating creditors’ money and converting it into equity. If this government bail-out policy continues, a never-seen before government debt will accrue. The same may apply in Europe, amassing potentially hundreds of trillions of national debts, on both sides of the Atlantic.

This would be the ideal moment to introduce at once in the western world – US, UK, Canada, Europe, but also Japan and Australia – programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

These countries’ combined 2022 GDP amounts to about US$ 50 trillion equivalent, almost half of the 2022 world GDP (US$ 103.86 trillion). See this (World Bank data).

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Within the shortest period of time, the western US-dollar-based economy’s debt could be wiped out with one stroke – with a new kind of money, the CBDC. With another stroke, the entire ignorant western population could be doubly straitjacketed – by WHO’s Health Tyranny, as well as by programmable CBDC.

It is high time that We, the People, around the world gain consciousness and become aware of the dictatorial measures waiting just a short stretch down road to be implemented. Then, the bulk of The Great Reset / Agenda 2030 would have been achieved. Once that happens, it will be difficult to escape.

It is time that We the People, request our governments to exit WHO – in Switzerland a referendum to this effect has already been initiated – and that we are prepared for setting up parallel governments with local money, totally delinked from existing banking and central banks.

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

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

Featured image is from International Man

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WHO Pandemic Treaty’s Global Power Grab in May 2024

December 14th, 2023 by Global Health Project

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“Pogrom”: From Kishinev in Tsarist Russia (1903) to Gaza, Palestine (2023)

December 14th, 2023 by Prof. Yakov M. Rabkin

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Pogrom. This Russian term denotes a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring Jews and destroying their property. One of the deadliest pogroms (50 Jews were killed and nearly 600 wounded) took place in Kishinev [Chișinău, Moldava] a hundred and twenty years ago, in April 1903. But the trauma of Russian Zionists facing the oppression in Tsarist Russia over a century ago continues to inform Israel’s political culture. 

The Russian word has been widely used by Israelis to characterise the Hamas attack on Southern Israel in October 2023. It had also been used before. For example, an Israeli general employed it a few weeks earlier when armed Zionist settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Huwara on the occupied West Bank.

These attacks have intensified since. The term appears appropriate since gun-toting Israeli vigilantes were attacking unarmed civilians.

Kieff (Rusia).—La expulsión de los judíos eslavos: familias israelitas abandonando sus hogares. Public Domain, Link

However, the use of this term for the Hamas attack has provoked debate. Some argue that Hamas conducted the operation as an act of resistance against one of the best armed states in the world. They would not call the attack a pogrom because it was ultimately directed at a powerful state enforcing a system deemed oppressive and illegitimate by its victims.

Others put emphasis on the purely civilian targets of the attack such as the music festival which may justify the use of the Russian word. They attribute the Hamas attack to antisemitism, i.e., unmotivated hatred, rather than see in it a reaction to decades of suffering and misery inflicted by the Zionist state.

However, within the state of Israel, despite its formidable military might, including nuclear weapons, the term has caught on. It was claimed that the number of Jews killed on one day in the Hamas attack was the highest since the Nazi genocide. This drew a direct line with the Nazi genocide and created the impression that Jews were once again powerless in the face of “pure unadulterated evil”, as the U.S. President put it. 

When, two weeks into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the U.N. Secretary General reminded the world that the Hamas attack had not happened in a vacuum, Tel Aviv indignantly called for his resignation.

There is little tolerance for any mention of the Israeli blockade of Gaza since 2007, and, more generally, of Israeli responsibility for the dispossession, deportation, and murder of Palestinians since 1947.

These look like the manifest cause of the Palestinian resistance.

Most Israelis also prefer to ignore the fact that the millions of Palestinians trapped in Gaza are largely descendants of those that the Zionist militias and the Israeli military expelled from their homes in what is now the state of Israel. Israeli officials and its fans elsewhere usually deploy arrogance and self-righteousness to reject rational debate about the Hamas attack.

Besides the obvious political purposes of this PR strategy, one can notice a genuine embrace of the term “pogrom” in Israeli society at large.

Ideologically committed Zionists used to treat pogrom victims of over a century ago and survivors of the Nazi genocide with shame and disdain. They were blamed for lacking the courage to fight, for “going as sheep to the slaughter”.

Haim Nahman Bialik, who later became a cultural icon in Israel, in a poem written following the Kishinev pogrom, castigated the survivors, heaping shame upon their heads. Bialik lashed out at the men who hid in stinking holes, “crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks, “while their non-Jewish neighbors raped their wives and daughters. This poem, in the Russian translation by Vladimir Jabotinsky, remains one of the strongest literary depictions of the pogrom.

Brenner, another poet and like Bialik the son of a pious Russian Jewish family, radically transformed the best-known verse of the Jewish prayer book “Hear, O Israel, God is your Lord, God is one!” one of the first verses taught to children and the last to be spoken by a Jew before his death. Brenner’s revised verse proclaimed: “Hear, O Israel! Not an eye for an eye. Two eyes for one eye, all their teeth for every humiliation!”

This is how these and many other Zionist writers stoked the fires of revenge and violence. As the Diaspora Jew was a coward, so the Zionist Jew — the New Hebrew, the Israeli Jew — must be a warrior.

Later, recognized as the collective legatee of the victims of the Nazis, the state of Israel was awarded crucial financial resources from West Germany and other countries. At the same time, a transformation was taking place: while it was becoming militarily stronger, the state of Israel was claiming to be recognized not only as a legatee of past victims but as an actual collective and righteous victim in its own right.

The Eichmann trial in 1961 marked a watershed in this respect. From then on, the state of Israel has emphasised its continuity with the victims and introduced Holocaust studies into public education. Israeli officials argue that their country is unfairly treated as a harmless collective Jew. In the face of opprobrium for the mass bombing of Gaza in 2023 the Israeli delegates at the United Nations started wearing yellow six-pointed stars, like those imposed on the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The pretense of being a blameless victim justifies Israeli reliance on military force. “Ein brera!”, “we have no choice” is a common Israeli explanation of violence. Jabotinsky formulated the Zionist concept of the Iron Wall, of terrorising the Arabs into submission, and published it in Russian in 1923. His concept is being reconfirmed a century later. Moreover, political compromises with the Palestinians appear suspect and dangerous. Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin who tried to reach such a compromise was assassinated, effectively putting an end to the idea of a Palestinian state next to Israel.

The European Jewish memory of victimhood has been maintained, cultivated, and transmitted to future generations of Israelis.

The collective memory of the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement and the death camps in Poland has been inculcated in Israeli schools. All the students, whether or not their ancestors suffered at the hand of the Nazis, are led to make the same conclusion: Arabs attack us just because we are Jews. No wonder this is the way many Israelis view the Hamas attack, which enables them to support the massive violence being inflicted on the Palestinians.

Since October 2023, comparisons of Palestinian resistance with the Nazis have acquired a new life. One of the best-known precedents belongs to Menachem Begin who, during Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon, compared Arafat to Hitler.

This was meant to make the massive bombardment of Beirut in 1982 appear morally sound. Such comparisons are now used to justify a much deadlier bombardment of Gaza. The proportion of civilian casualties in these bombardments surpassed that of all the cases of warfare in the 20th century.

The state of Israel tends also to dehumanize the Palestinians to vindicate what many experts qualify as genocide. An Israeli high school history teacher was put in solitary confinement  for making Facebook posts showing the names and faces of a few of the 18,000 Palestinians killed during Israel’s assault on Gaza. The Zionist state apparently considers humanizing the Palestinians an existential threat.

The paradigm of the Kishinev pogrom is rallied to provide a moral carte blanche for the Israeli destruction of Gaza.

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Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal. His publications include over 300 articles and a few books: Science between Superpowers, A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, What is Modern Israel?, Demodernization: A Future in the Past and Judaïsme, islam et modernité. He did consulting work for, inter alia, OECD, NATO, UNESCO and the World Bank. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: www.yakovrabkin.ca 

Featured image is from Informed Comment

Ukraine War: Mainstream Media Narrative Doubles Down on “Russia Losing” Fantasies

December 14th, 2023 by Drago Bosnic

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Even before the start of the special military operation (SMO), the mainstream media had been running several propaganda narratives, almost simultaneously. Shortly before the SMO and in the first few days, there was the claim that Russia would take Kiev in three days and most of Ukraine in a week. However, as this didn’t happen (nor was it ever planned to unfold this way in the Kremlin), the mainstream propaganda machine went full afterburner in the opposite direction. Now, Moscow was suddenly losing, the Kiev regime forces are unbeatable, the Russians are suffering from extremely low morale due to massive losses, they’re running out of missiles, shells, fuel and so on, and so forth.

These ludicrous myths never stopped and continued until the failure of the much-touted counteroffensive. That was when many in the political West adopted a somewhat less propagandistic tone and tried mixing in some “realism”. However, this didn’t have the desired effect on the populace in Western Europe and North America. Thus, there’s a slow return to the most ridiculous propaganda one could possibly imagine. For instance, the Wall Street Journal claims that the Neo-Nazi junta will be “able to seize the initiative on the battlefield in 2025 if it can hold out against Russia until the end of next year”. This narrative is being pushed despite the fact that the United States, its primary backer, is about to stop the money flow.

The report initially doesn’t come off as propagandistic as one would expect, but towards the end, the authors still tried pushing debunked propaganda narratives. There are several instances of somewhat unexpected admissions, such as the obvious failure of the Kiev regime’s counteroffensive, as well as the dwindling financial support from the political West. The report also touched upon the growing divisions within the Neo-Nazi junta and the fact that its battered military will need time to recover. However, in a response to the WSJ, its Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba challenged this with a claim that “any pause in the fighting now would allow Russia to regroup and prepare for large-scale offensive operations”.

Kuleba even stated that the Kiev regime forces are preparing fresh brigades for “new counteroffensive and defensive operations”. The WSJ supported the idea and even went as far as to claim that “2024 will be the year of the recovery [for the Neo-Nazi junta troops]”. However, the authors admit that this comes with an important caveat, as the Kiev regime and its NATO overlords will need to “work through their current adversities and continue delivering supplies to troops, an emerging best-case scenario among Western strategists is that next year becomes a year of rebuilding for Kiev’s military“, adding that “the hope would be that a limited number of Ukrainian soldiers can hold Russian forces at bay”.

This would supposedly “allow NATO countries time to train fresh Ukrainian troops, expand armament production and restock Ukraine’s arsenals”. As indicated during a recent NATO meeting, the political West hopes that Russia’s incremental offensive operations will fail, “resulting in a depletion of its manpower and munitions, potentially offering Ukraine better prospects to retake the battlefield initiative in the spring of 2025, if it gets through next year”. However, the WSJ concluded the report with a not-so-optimistic remark of a Ukrainian infantry sergeant who said that when he talks to people at home he tells them that “everything is going well” and doesn’t describe what he sees or feels, which isn’t so upbeat.

“What is the point?”, the WSJ quoted the Ukrainian sergeant.

While the WSJ certainly is part of the mainstream, it’s still a bit more reputable than many other outlets of America’s massive propaganda machine. For instance, the infamous CNN is beating its own records in laughable claims by publishing that “Russia has lost a staggering 87% of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks”. Of course, this information came from “a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress”. The assessment was sent on December 11, as the Republican-dominated Congress was in the middle of effectively canceling the “Ukraine aid”.

The “intelligence” assessment supposedly found that “the war has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force”. Then came the numbers game, where CNN claims that “of the 360,000 troops that entered Ukraine, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, 2,200 of 3,500 tanks and 4,400 of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers have also been destroyed, a 32% loss rate”. CNN says it reached out to the Russian Embassy for comment, which is yet to respond. The most likely scenario is that His Excellency Ambassador Anatoly Antonov is still laughing uncontrollably after reading all this. And he certainly isn’t the only one.

“The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said on CNN’s State of the Union on December 10, adding: “So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?”

Even CNN had to admit that “Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable”, as its “highly anticipated counteroffensive stagnated through the fall”, and that “US officials believe that Kiev is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months”. As for the alleged “staggering losses” of the Russian military, the truth is that Moscow hasn’t been this strong militarily since at least the 1980s. In addition, the Kremlin is effectively returning to a Soviet superpower level with its latest military strategy shift. The very idea that Russia lost well over 300,000 soldiers is beyond ludicrous, as the country would be littered with new military cemeteries in virtually every major settlement. On the contrary, it’s precisely Ukraine that looks like that thanks to the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi junta.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image: Russian T-80 Tank in Ukraine (Source: mil.ru)

A Stunning Rebuke: U.N. Cease-fire Vote Humiliates U.S. Imperialism

December 14th, 2023 by Sara Flounders

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The United Nations Security Council vote on December 8, calling for an immediate cease-fire in Palestine, was a public humiliation of the United States. When explaining their vote, numerous countries denounced the U.S. — Israel’s number one supporter — as the accomplice, the enabler and the real force behind the Zionist destruction in Gaza.

The U.S. vetoed the resolution, making the resounding vote by every other member of the current Security Council unenforceable. Britain, the only remaining U.S. ally, acted like a loyal lap dog and abstained. Yet the vote was unprecedented; 100 member countries of the U.N. signed on to the resolution with less than 24 hours’ notice.

It is politically significant that the U.S. effort to amend the resolution, by inserting a condemnation of the Oct. 7 actions by the united Palestinian resistance, was refused. The vote was an assertion of the Palestinian right to resist occupation — a right that has long been recognized in international law but is usually ignored.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield attempted to label Hamas as a terrorist force. This also went down in public defeat, which was a global victory for the Palestinian resistance.

Of course, the U.N. has been a mere talk shop for decades. Its Secretariat and even its “humanitarian organizations” have been largely controlled through heavy-handed U.S. dictates. But the fact that more than 100 U.N. personnel have been killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza is fueling enormous anger at the U.S. within the body. The deaths of its workers are challenging toothless and usually complicit U.N. agencies to publicly denounce the killing of over 17,000 Palestinians.

Pressure on Guterres Led to Vote Being Called

Pressure from within the United Nations is what led the usually compliant U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to convene the emergency meeting. For the first time in his tenure as Secretary-General, Guterres invoked Article 99 of the U.N. Charter, under which he “may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”

On X, Guterres posted:

“Facing a severe risk of collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza, I urge the Council to help avert a humanitarian catastrophe and appeal for a humanitarian cease-fire to be declared.”

Growing U.S. isolation and its waning ability to enforce its domination through any political forum was confirmed in a stark new way. Only its military firepower remains. This overwhelming firepower is being challenged by a small armed resistance in a totally occupied Gaza.

The resistance in the West Bank is defending Palestinians from armed settler lynch mobs who operate with the Israeli Occupation Forces. In the past, these enforcers of apartheid acted with impunity. In addition to the armed resistance, a call for a Global General Strike has resonated in the West Bank and the surrounding countries, bringing about a total shutdown on Dec. 11.

Israel is being challenged by revolutionary forces in Yemen, who through several drone and missile attacks and then by daringly boarding Israeli-owned freighters, have forced all other Israeli chartered ships to avoid the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. They must navigate around Africa and into the Mediterranean Sea, causing the cost of supplies to skyrocket.

The U.N. vote is mirrored in hundreds of votes by unions and student assemblies, city council resolutions and actions by grassroots organizations globally. This can’t be shut down by U.S. demands.

The vote in the U.N. Security Council has now moved to the United Nations General Assembly. This vote, scheduled for Dec. 12, will lead to a further U.S. humiliation and a resounding defense of Palestine’s right to resist occupation.

Map depicts isolation of U.S, Israel in U.N. General Assembly vote in October 2023. (Map: Geopolitical Economy Report)

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Sara Flounders is an American political writer active in progressive and anti-war organizing since the 1960s. She is a Contributing Editor of the Marxist Workers World newspaper as well as a principal leader of the International Action Center. Sara also works actively with the SanctionsKill Campaign and United National Antiwar Coalition. Sara can be reached at [email protected].

She is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image: US Embassy in Jerusalem. Image: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs/ Flickr

“Four Died Trying”: John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy: A Powerful, Riveting, and Masterful Documentary Series Begins

December 14th, 2023 by Edward Curtin

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It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today. Many might assume that that was then and long before their time, so let’s move on to what we must deal with today. 

Let some old folks, the obsessive ones, live in the past. It is an understandable but mistaken attitude that this documentary will quickly shatter, visually and audibly.

The echoes of those guns that killed President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in rapid succession repeat and repeat and repeat down through the years, and their echoes bang off the walls of all today’s news that springs from the cells of all the little digital dinguses that provide a constant stream of distractions and fear porn meant to titillate but not illuminate the connections between then and now, nor those between the four subjects of this illuminating film.

Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country. Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you. We control the stories you are meant to hear. If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you. You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly. Bang. Bang. Bang.

But they lie, and this series, beginning with its first installment (see sneak peek here), will tell you why. It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present. It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down. It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.

Click Here to Access Trailer with Sound 

Click Here to access Trailer 

Four Died Trying, directed by John Kirby, the wonderful filmmaker who made The American Ruling Class with and about Lewis Lapham, and produced by Libby Handros, his partner in exposing the criminals that run the country, has just begun streaming.

As I watched the first twenty minutes of this opening episode, I was inwardly screaming, feeling deep in my soul how powerfully the film was capturing the essence of the dynamic, prophetic, and charismatic voices of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., and RFK. All shot down – we hear the gun shots – by deep state forces, even as the film artfully juxtaposes this brutality against video clips of new reports, images of advertisements for silly products, and television shows that kept most of the public entertained and distracted during the 1960s carnage. Doing the Hokey Pokey, as the soundtrack plays it, but not turning around in a profound sense, as did the four who died trying to radically change the country and the world for the better.  Simply as film art, this documentary is ingenious. And its use of music is great.

I was transported back to the time of my youth. I was startled again by the powerful courage, passion, and eloquent intelligence of those four compelling voices that once lifted my spirits to the heavens, and I felt the despair as well as each assassination followed the other and my spirits sank. It is not nostalgic, I am sure, to say that one is hard pressed to find those qualities in many leaders today.  Like others of my generation, I am still trying to grasp the depths of what their assassinations did to me. Bob Dylan, who came to prominence in the midst of it all, referring ironically to his own life and work, has said that his first girlfriend was named Echo. I think I know her, for she echoed down the canyons of my mind as I watched this prologue and continues as I now reflect upon it.

So it does get hard to be objective, if that is what you want. I don’t. This not-to-be-missed film is truthful, for it uses vintage footage of what these men said and what was said against them by a government/media intent of distorting their messages and their assassinations. Listen and then research if you have any doubts. See if the film is truthful or manipulative. As one who has deeply studied these matters, I can attest to the former.

And I can tell you that if you are young and never knew about these four guys and what men they were – not in any macho sense, but as true lovers of human beings, men with chests, as C.S. Lewis described those who were true and brave and undaunted by the then current vibes that sucked the soul out of you, not pseudo-men in the “pumping iron” sense, not men who tried to appeal to your grossest stereotypes – you are in for a great surprise. You will yearn to see them resurrected in others today. In yourselves.  As Malcolm X said hopefully, “The dead are arising.”

This 58 minute prologue touches on many of themes that will follow in the months ahead. Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war.

Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

One important aspect of this documentary series – never before done in film – is the way it shows the linkages between these four great leaders. Beside their own words, we hear from their families and associates throughout. Based on over 120 interviews conducted over many years, we hear from the four men’s children, Vince Salandria, James W. Douglass, Mort Sahl, Harry Belafonte, Khaleed Sayyed, Earl Caldwell, Clarence Jones, James Galbraith, John Hunt, Stephen Schlesinger, Andrew Young, Oliver Stone, David Talbot, Adam Walinsky, et al. It is an amazing list of thoughtful commentators who tell the story for the dead men whose living tongues have been silenced, although we are privileged for their fatidic cinematic ghosts to speak to us through archival footage.

In this opening Prologue, I was especially impressed with the words of Vince Salandria, one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission’s absurd claims, and Adam Walinsky, a former aide and speechwriter for RFK, who made it clear that we are free, no matter what the propagandists tell us. That freedom to think and act, to make connections between then and now, to see the linkages between the four men’s messages and today, is crucial to carry on their legacy. That message ends the Prologue. It is a message of hope in a dark time.

This opening prologue is divided into four parts, each devoted to what each man tried to accomplish.  That is followed by a section on how they died and the ways it was buried, ending with an Epilogue on why they died and why it matters today.

All four died fighting the international power structure, the CIA and FBI, the military-industrial complex, the racist ideology central to the capitalist elites’ economic injustice and warfare state – those deep structures of power that have come to be called the deep state.  They were brothers in arms, their only weapons being their linked arms in a spiritual war against evil forces.  They were men of compassionate conscience, warriors for peace and justice for all.  That is why they were killed.

Four Died Trying is a profound documentary. It is good that each episode will be a stand-alone short film – that gives the viewer time to absorb its lessons rather than binging on too much too soon.  Once you watch this prologue, with its overview of all to come, you will be hooked.  It is not just revelatory history, but is artistically made, and, dare I say, entertaining. Kirby and Handros are astute to realize that young people demand more than lectures, and it is to the next generations that these voices must be addressed.  For although the times have changed, in so many ways we are today faced with all the same problems. The deep wounds of the 1960s were never given careful treatment; they are now suppurating and the infection is spreading.

Then and now. There is a powerful clip in the film of Senator Robert Kennedy giving a speech in Chicago when he has decided to enter the race for the presidency right after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a massive breakout surprise to U.S. authorities who thought they could contain and defeat the Vietnamese struggle for independence; that they had them trapped. Kennedy has decided to enter the race for President and realizes that supporting a corrupt South Vietnamese government and their ruthless policies aimed at exterminating the Vietcong and North Vietnamese is morally wrong and runs counter to American attestations of the belief in democracy and justice for all. He says about such an impossible military victory:

. . . and that the effort to win such a victory will only result in the further slaughter of thousands of innocent and helpless people—a slaughter which will forever rest on all our consciences and the national conscience of the country.

His was a powerful moral voice. Who is standing with the innocent and helpless people today? And who is standing with the killers? As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And procrastination is still the thief of time and conscience whispers those pathetic words: Too Late.

Don’t miss Four Died Trying. I am sure it will affect you deeply and force you to think twice over about what is going on today.

Yes, then and now. To slightly alter the song, As Time Goes By:

It’s still the same old story.
A fight for love and glory.
A case of do and die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

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Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Selected Articles: From Dallas to Gaza: Was JFK’s Assassination Instrumental in Strengthening Zionist Israel?

December 14th, 2023 by Global Research News

From Dallas to Gaza: Was JFK’s Assassination Instrumental in Strengthening Zionist Israel?

By Rick Sterling, December 13, 2023

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 60 years ago. If he had  lived and won a second term, the Israeli Palestinian conflict would have evolved differently. Possibly the path toward Israeli apartheid and genocide in Gaza could have been avoided. 

A Wall and a Watchtower: Why Is Israel Failing? Ilan Pappe

By Ilan Pappe, December 14, 2023

These architects of Zionism were too racist and orientalist, like the rest of Europe, to realize how progressive Palestinian society was in relation to that period, with an educated and politicized urban elite and a rural community living at peace within a genuine system of co-existence and solidarity. 

Getting Serious About Halting Israeli Genocide

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, December 14, 2023

On Friday, December 8, the UN Security Council met under Article 99 for only the fourth time in the UN’s history. Article 99 is an emergency provision that allows the Secretary General to summon the Council to respond to a crisis that “threatens the maintenance of international peace and security.”

Is Free Speech a Relic in America?

By James Bovard, December 13, 2023

Is the First Amendment becoming a historic relic? On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”

The U.S. Is Complicit with Israel in the Genocide in Gaza

By Steven Sahiounie, December 13, 2023

A UN Security Council vote on December 8, demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war, failed because the U.S. used their veto power in the sole dissenting vote. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, did not cast the damning vote, she sent her assistant instead, shielding herself from the disgust of the international community.

Zelensky’s “Rose-tinted” Speeches No Longer Convince His Team or Military

By Ahmed Adel, December 13, 2023

Sources familiar with Zelensky’s communications strategy told the Financial Times that the purpose of these messages is to maintain optimism at home and abroad and that there is a communications policy applied at all levels of the state, including strict censorship of bad news, such as the number of Ukrainian casualties or the success of Russian troops.

Pfizer Has a Criminal Record

By US Department of Justice and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 13, 2023

In September 2009, the U.S Justice Department attorneys and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius held a news conference “dealing with a health care-related settlement”. Pfizer Inc which is currently involved in the Worldwide distribution of the mRNA vaccine, was accused in 2009 of “Fraudulent Marketing”.

Genocide and a Holocaust – Palestine, Gaza AD 2023. Open Letter to Lord Cameron, U.K. Foreign Secretary

By Dr. David Halpin, December 13, 2023

I will be ‘personal’ but the current and most terrible holocaust in Gaza requires this. About a quarter of my practice involved looking after dear children, often from infancy and with skeletal defects such as congenital dislocation of the hip, club foot etc. Included were those with cerebral palsy – often caused by injury during birth.

Women’s Rights and the Dominant Neoliberal Agenda: The Current Global Trajectory Is Far from Sustainable

By Tina Renier, December 13, 2023

In these perilous times of growing unpredictability, I also think of how public debt as new form of colonialism and imperialism has influenced the everyday lives of peoples in the Global South, which are former colonies of Empires.

Ret. Col. Ann Wright Unmasks the Truth in Arms Transfer Debate

By Melissa Garriga, December 13, 2023

In a heated session at the United Nations Security Council, diplomats engaged in a vigorous debate over the provision of arms to Ukraine amid the protracted war with Russia. The eleventh meeting on this pressing issue since Russia invaded in February of 2022 drew sharp criticisms from multiple speakers, who accused Moscow of deflecting attention from its own aggression.