The accomplishments of human technology are genuinely astounding. However, anthropogenic ingenuity’s limits – and potential harms – are abundantly evident. These dangerous realities do not daunt Elon Musk and NASA, who promise to use technology to solve worldly ills of energy and pollution (by burning energy, and polluting).
The practice of “embedding,” which requires correspondents to report in war and conflict zones as part of a given military unit, struck me as a repellent compromise with power as soon as American media began accepting this unacceptable practice. It is an undisguised effort to control what correspondents see and hear, and so what they write or broadcast, and so what their readers, listeners and viewers think.
The events in Gaza and Israel have captured the world’s attention. With so many factors and moving parts to the situation, it is necessary to take a step back and look at the whole scene.
An escalation in military engagements have been occurring in the Gulf of Aden as several vessels connected with the State of Israel and its supporters are being targeted by the Yemen resistance force of the Ansar Allah. See this.
On Tuesday, November 28, 2023, the National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) released the final report of its months-long investigation into Canada’s response to COVID-19. This report follows the September 14 release of an interim report focused on the regulatory approval process and safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
For months, the Neo-Nazi junta has been preparing to receive US-made F-16 fighter jets from its NATO overlords, including by repurposing civilian airfields and infrastructure for military use. The Kiev regime’s air arm has suffered major losses since the start of the special military operation (SMO), with its airbases either destroyed or damaged beyond repair by Russian long-range precision strikes.
The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong. Don’t believe it. It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Social media influencer Samara Maloney died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm on Nov. 7, 2023. There are many fake obituaries regarding her death, claiming car accident.
A New York Appellate Court has just upheld Governor Kathy Hochul and the State’s appeal that the government should have the authority to isolate and / or quarantine anyone with a highly contagious disease.
Data from Bankrate indicates that interest rates for new auto loans with a 60-month term have reached their highest point since the Dot Com bust era. Additionally, the soaring prices of new electric vehicles pose a significant affordability challenge for the average working-class American.
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The accomplishments of human technology are genuinely astounding. However, anthropogenic ingenuity’s limits – and potential harms – are abundantly evident. These dangerous realities do not daunt Elon Musk and NASA, who promise to use technology to solve worldly ills of energy and pollution (by burning energy, and polluting). Musk, a prominent priest of this new science fiction age, recently asserted that 10,000 square miles of solar panels could power the entire US. This far-sighted vision’s scientific realities and potential harms evaporate in the near-mystical assumptions implicit in such claims. Perhaps Elon will one day require absolution for his visions-become-nightmares.
Icarus and the Sun
In truly Icarian fashion, the higher mankind has climbed toward the technological sun, the more arrogant and reckless the race has become.
Almost every scientific advance has carried hidden and profound costs unpredicted by the prophets of science. Consider that the EPA has only this year determined what exposures of “forever chemical” PFAS are acceptable: the stuff has tainted millions of Americans’ drinking water since its introduction in the 1940s. There are thousands of PFAS: how could the Teflon frying pan be anything but good?
This example extends to technological “marvels” such as lobotomies, transgender surgeries (and synthetic hormones) for minors, thalidomide, Agent Orange, DDT, PCBs, phthalates, BPA, neonicotinoids, glyphosate, hydrofluorocarbons, and a dizzying myriad of other manmade contributions to the environment that ultimately delivered evils to compliment the promised good. Medicines saved lives but increased overpopulation; cars and refrigerators are essential gadgets that damage the environment. Over and over, man’s vision outstrips reality; repeatedly, the promised gifts of technology obscure the Trojan horse results after the supposed gift is unleashed within the city gates.
Musk Is Genius
Mr. Musk is undoubtedly brilliant, and his accomplishments are superhuman. But he has also proved his capacity for error, especially in his space exploration ventures: his rockets keep exploding, spewing pollution and space debris widely. But Elon is hardly alone in his guru promises: Steven Hawking famously claimed humanity had a mere 1000 years to escape the surly bonds of earth and populate a new world or perish. A few months later, he reduced his escape timeline to a single century: Which Hawking is correct?
If it is true humanity is destroying Earth with technology and must use technology to flee its masochistic destruction, is humankind simply a chubby virus that flits from planet to planet, destroying the universe? Which science fiction character is America in this scenario – the savior of Earth in Armageddon, or the Death Star of Star Wars?
Elon Musk is more sober than many prophets of techno-rescue, allowing his 100×100-mile solar panel array suffers from a battery problem. But he is still intoxicated by his vain imaginings: where is the power grid to deliver this energy?
What of the profound problems of intermittency?
How much pollution and energy would be generated while Musk and Co are paid stellar sums to manufacture 10,000 square miles of solar panels, and where and how will those toxic panels be “renewed” when their useful life inevitably expires? Perhaps the entire pile of solar panel refuse can be jettisoned into space, to drift around with the growing pile of Musk-launched flotsam and jetsom.
Hawking’s vision of interplanetary rescue is alive and well in Musk and NASA, which are now partners in flying a BIPOC American to the moon. The potential conflict of interest appears large: Musk and SpaceX are to supply NASA with its future spacecraft for its Artemis missions; Tesla manufactures residential and commercial solar panels. That profit motive might taint the visionary’s vision, but does not hinder the rose-colored receptiveness of fellow profiteers or the technologically faithful.
Exploding Rockets
Image: SpaceX Starship SN9 prototype (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Musk’s SpaceX rocketships keep exploding shortly following blast-off, but he has more readied for launch. The environmental cost of detonating rockets in the Earth’s atmosphere to populate space takes stock of the damage it wreaks much the same as Kim Jong Un’s military missile launches.
It is indisputable that these space missions (and the manufacture of rockets and fuels) spew massive quantities of toxins and greenhouse gases in their profit-driven execution.
Any logical risk-benefit analysis of the environmental costs of space exploration is simply side-stepped by NASA, much like the monumental externalized pollution costs of solar panel manufacture and disposal: the “see no evil, hear no evil” of the biggest polluters of all. Instead, NASA amplifies the Hawking-Musk promise of stellar deliverance:
Setting Humanity on a Sustainable Course to the Moon The Artemis program builds on a half-century of experience and preparation to establish a robust human-robotic presence on and around the Moon. ….America will lead the monumental shift that frees humanity from our innate bonds to Earth. This is the decade in which the Artemis Generation will teach us how to live on other worlds. … Under the Artemis program, humanity will explore regions of the Moon never visited before, uniting people around the unknown, the never seen, and the once impossible. We will return to the Moon robotically beginning next year, send astronauts to the surface within four years, and build a longterm presence on the Moon by the end of the decade. … The sooner we get to the Moon, the sooner we get American astronauts to Mars.
NASA gushes of its grand visions and sticks the trigger word “sustainable” as a title on its predictions without ever explaining what on earth is sustainable about landing a person “of color” on the sterile moon, or how the massive amounts of rocket fuel are being minimized with Musk catalytic converters on his Starship rocket’s 33 booster engines (they aren’t).
The ships’ “flight termination system” explodes the rockets in midflight if they veer off course. In his most recent launch, that technology effectively blew up the rocket in mid-flight so it would not plummet to earth and do harm. It failed on the previous launch. But where is all this pollution being sequestered? SpaceX has lost a series of prototypes that have “collapsed, exploded, or crashed and then exploded,” but claims that “success comes from what we learn … And this flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.”
As bizarre science strives to make men into women and transhumans immortal, the proposal of infecting the universe with human folly and toxic consumption in the name of “what we learn” demonstrates how little we ultimately have learned. Elon Musk may have saved free speech by purchasing X, but he will not save humanity by selling America 100×100 square miles of solar panels or ten spaceships for colored human explorers. George Lucas told a great story, but he and his air-conditioned audiences could still differentiate between reality and science fiction.
Space Religiosity 2023
The techno-colonization of foreign worlds will prove an elusive Holy Grail, but Elon Musk will enlarge his empire by billions in the trying. His fortunes may exceed those of fellow fantasy-visionary Bill Gates. Most Americans, though, are strangers in an ever-stranger land, being lorded over by space-fantasy prosperity prophets for profit. Tithing is economically and environmentally compulsory in the Musk megachurch of the Space Cadet age. A small step for Elon; a giant step background for mankind.
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The practice of “embedding,” which requires correspondents to report in war and conflict zones as part of a given military unit, struck me as a repellent compromise with power as soon as American media began accepting this unacceptable practice. It is an undisguised effort to control what correspondents see and hear, and so what they write or broadcast, and so what their readers, listeners and viewers think.
It is a trick, in short. The ruling or governing power’s military pretends it respects the rightful freedom of an independent press, while correspondents and editors get to pretend they serve as brave correspondents and principled editors.
There is no respect, bravery or principle in any of it. Embedding is a charade, an offense on the part of everyone who participates in it.
It is an act of deprivation in that it gives those reading or viewing the work of embedded correspondents the illusion they are informed while they are, most of the time, kept ignorant of the war or conflict they are eager to understand.
As in various other ways, Israel’s real-time barbarity in Gaza has worsened the relationship between media — Western media, I mean — and the powers they are supposed to report upon. As to audiences, they — we — are left utterly confused to the extent the common language with which people can communicate begins to fail them.
The result is not silence. It is a senseless cacophony that echoes through a weird no-man’s land in which nothing can be said without the risk of retribution or condemnation or banishment. Civil discourse is more or less out of the question.
We are now a dreadful step on from embedding, it seems. It is no longer enough to tether correspondents to the perspective of the military from whose side they report. We appear to be on the way to having wars fought — huge, bloody, consequential wars — without any witnesses.
I'm speechless.
Biden folks feared that a pause in the fighting would enable more journalists to get into Gaza and cover the carnage…
"And there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access…
Last week Politico published a lengthy piece on the Biden regime’s argument that the current “pause” in Israel’s merciless murder spree in Gaza and the exchange of hostages proves the policy cliques in Washington have done the right thing. It does not take much for these dangerously unqualified people to fool themselves.
But the White House remains “‘deeply, deeply worried’ about Israel’s longer-term strategy and what the next phase of the war may look like,” Politico reported. Then this:
“And there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”
In plain English, Biden’s people fret about what the slaughter of Palestinians will look like once it resumes — appearances being not quite all but nearly. But if there was no one there to see and report the savagery, there would be no appearances to worry about.
Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute brought this quotation to my attention, and I cannot do better than his comment on it: “I’m speechless.”
It is interesting that at least some people in the Biden regime seem to consider relations between power and the media to be adversarial in the old-fashioned way. And how fine it would be were the corporate press and broadcasters to get their correspondents into Gaza on their own and report what they see as they see it.
This seems to me perfectly possible. The BBC, Al Jazeera, and various wire services — Reuters, The Associated Press, Agence France–Presse — are among the news organizations with bureaus in Gaza City.
Since Vietnam
Aug. 10, 1968, protest against the Vietnam War as Chicago was preparing to host the Democratic National Convention. (David Wilson, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
But the record to date indicates that cowardice and supine compliance will prevail over the aforementioned bravery and principle. This is how embedding journalists got started in the post–1975 years. The defeat in Vietnam spooked the Pentagon and the political leadership, which blamed the media for turning Americans against the war. By the Gulf War, August 1990 to February 1991, embeddedness was s.o.p. among American media.
A reporter named Brett Wilkins published a well-reported piece in Common Dreams a month into the Israel Defense Forces’ war crimes in Gaza. In “U.S. Corporate Media Outlets Allow IDF to Vet ‘All Materials’ from Embedded Reporters in Gaza,” Wilkins laid out the whole disgusting nine. His lead:
“U.S. corporate media outlets have granted Israeli military commanders pre-publication review rights for ‘all materials and footage’ recorded by their correspondents embedded with the Israel Defense Forces during the invasion of Gaza, a precondition condemned by press freedom advocates.”
Wilkins goes on to name a few of the names — among them CNN and NBC — who indulge their spinelessness in this manner. And he quotes the feckless Fareed Zakaria offering the boilerplate excuse for this gross breach of professional ethics. “CNN has agreed to these terms in order to provide a limited window into Israel’s operations in Gaza,” Zakaria deadpans.
Speechless a second time.
A photojournalist named Zach D. Roberts gets my award for the pithiest summation of this daily travesty.
“What CNN is doing here is creating ad b-roll [supplementary video footage] for the IDF,” Roberts said. “It’s nothing resembling news and the CNNemployees that participated in it aren’t anything resembling journalists.”
What CNN is doing here is creating ad b-roll for the IDF. It's nothing resembling news and the CNN employees that participated in it aren't anything resembling journalists. https://t.co/MuRpyLEbK9
— Zach D Roberts – Photojournalist (@zdroberts) November 5, 2023
So far as I can make out there are few-to-no exceptions to this condemnable practice. The New York Times sent two correspondents and a photographer into Al–Shifa Hospital earlier this month and had the integrity to acknowledge they were escorted by the IDF and to report that a hole in the ground the diameter of a manhole cover did not look much like a Hamas command center.
But “limited windows,” in Zakaria’s slithery phrase, are nonsense, and the Times should have declined the tour on any terms but its own. This seems to me the only way the press and broadcasters can reclaim the professional sovereignty they gave up in the post–Vietnam years.
Devastated Credibility
Since then we have witnessed a succession of what I count as fatal compromises. This kind of conduct is part of what has devastated Western media’s credibility and left the reading and viewing public abandoned in the dark. Now we are down to embedding as bog standard procedure and the hinted possibility that correspondents may not be able to bear witness to conflicts and wars under any circumstances.
Journalists were once considered among the guardians of language. Writing and editing with rigorous attention to clarity and correct usage was how language as a vessel of meaning was preserved and protected.
Look at the circus all around us now. Anti–Semitism can mean anything you want it to mean. Ditto anti–Zionism. Anti–Israel can mean anti–Semitic, Hamas can be cast as a terrorist organization, a real-time genocide can be marked down as self-defense. The Times invites us, in Sunday’s editions, to wring our hands as we search for “a moral center in this era of war.”
It is an invitation to drown in blur and induced confusion. I put this down in part — in large part — to the derelictions of those reporting what is called — incorrectly, a case in point — the Israel–Gaza war.
I have watched recently a goodly number of videos recorded in Gaza and seen many photographs taken on the ground there. Here is a video of Gazans fleeing for their lives, published two weeks into the bombing by Al Jazeera. Here are some photographs shot by Mohammed Zaanoun, a Palestinian photographer, and published on Nov. 23 by The New Humanitarian, which was founded at the U.N. in the mid–1990s.
This kind of material, produced by professional journalists, various kinds of nongovernmental organizations, relief agencies and the like, is readily available. How differently would people think, how much clearer would their understanding and conclusions be, were our major media to make it available.
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Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
Featured image: Israeli soldiers around Gaza Strip on Oct. 7. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The events in Gaza and Israel have captured the world’s attention. With so many factors and moving parts to the situation, it is necessary to take a step back and look at the whole scene.
Dr. Ahmad Alderzi, the noted microbiologist and activist, has been interviewed by Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse, and his sweeping assessment is enlightening and thought provoking.
Steven Sahiounie (SS): Many people have wondered if Hezbollah will open a war front against Israel in response to the situation in Gaza since October 7. In your opinion, will the war expand, or will it remain contained?
Ahmad Alderzi (AA): Hezbollah looks at the issue of expanding the war from multiple concerns and it has prepared itself for such a situation since the end of July 2006 war. There are various factors in Hezbollah’s view of expanding the war, which make it measure the extent of its intervention in the war with a golden scale.
A. The Palestinian factor: There is great concern for the achievement to be completely Palestinian, which makes its cause return to the centrality of global issues, which in turn puts the resistance forces in the strongest position to achieve their conditions.
B. The Lebanese factor: This factor has played a fundamental role before the martyrdom of Abbas Raad, the son of the head of the largest parliamentary bloc in Parliament, due to the chronic political division between the Lebanese forces, and the fear of the section of the Lebanese environment incubating the resistance of the consequences of the war, which would be disastrous for the Lebanese and the “Israeli” interior. This factor may have changed after the martyrdom and after the anti-war forces realized that the war in Gaza and the West Bank is leading to defeat for the Israelis.
C. The regional factor: This factor is mainly related to the exhausted Syrian front, which is the weak point of the resistance axis. There is a real fear that Israeli and American aviation will intervene to open military roads for the expansion of military groups in the north, south and east, towards central Syria and the Syrian capital.
D. The Iranian factor: There is a perception among Iranians that the expansion of the war may get out of control, which pushes things towards more than regional war, and the widespread destruction of infrastructure that accompanies this war, in light of the harsh sanctions imposed on it, and the internal political division. With a mainstream that views the relationship with the West as an only option for a comfortable life.
E. The fifth factor is the American and Western position in general: which seeks to prevent the expansion of the war and control it within the Palestinian interior to give the Israeli army the opportunity to eliminate Hamas movement, and this is what did not happen.
Therefore, Hezbollah continued to raise the level of its military resistance against Israel, in a way that serves the Palestinian cause within the two conditions that Nasrallah have set ; namely the survival of Hamas movement and a ceasefire. However, this is what we began to notice with the last developments in the war and the truce that everyone agreed to extend
SS: Hamas and Israel have been exchanging Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. How do you view this development?
AA: This deal, which was concluded, represents the first step in announcing the reality on the ground for both Israel and Hamas movement, and this comes after Israel set high goals which are eradicating the Hamas movement and displacing the people of Gaza to Sinai. But, it failed to achieve both matters, that’s what puts Israel in a position of defeat, and it must acknowledge this; acknowledge the victory of the Hamas movement, and go towards accepting the requests of the victorious party, by starting the process of releasing prisoners and those kidnapped by both parties.
SS: The pause has lasted days, was extended, and is now coming to a possible end unless an extension is agreed upon. Will the battles resume afterwards?
AA: The truce has begun in practice, and has expanded in time. Because all parties have reached a complete conviction that the Israeli army has not been able to achieve an actual achievement in the field war, and also has suffered enormous losses in a way that the Israeli society cannot bear.
Despite the Israeli army’s efforts to continue the war to restore its shattered image, in addition to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence on the war continuation, to prevent himself from paying heavy prices as a result of his exit from political life after this war. But, the military and field reality, the continued losses of the Israeli army, and the resuming of the Israeli massacres against the Palestinians, all of these will make every day of the continuation of the war mean more accumulation of defeat, not only for Israel, but also for the entire dominant Western regime, and will help accelerate the emergence of a new international order of forces that oppose the policy of the United States.
SS: Resistance fighters in the far eastern desert region of Syria have attacked the American military bases that they had illegally occupied. In your opinion, can this tactic succeed in expelling the occupiers?
AA: This tactic, in its current state, does not fall short of the level of messages directed to the United States to intervene with its force to bring about a ceasefire in Palestine, considering that it is primarily responsible for this war in actual terms. And such operations, despite their intensity, did not lead to a significant harm to the Americans. The second thing here is to ensure that there is the least amount of bloodshed between the Americans, relying on patience by putting pressure on them and let them make the decision to leave Syria and Iraq, but I do not believe that this level of action will push the Americans to end their occupation and presence in these two countries, and more committed to staying , in order to prevent stability in the region, which does not prevent the success of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, the Eurasian project, and the West Asia Axis project, which is led by Tehran.
SS: Israel is waging a war on civilians in Gaza. How do you see the Syrian position on this conflict?
AA: Despite of the silence of Syrians at the official level, the official media outlets express the general official Syrian position, although there is a cold relationship with Hamas movement after the reconciliation between the two parties, and anticipation prevails in general, with the realization that this war will lead to a new reality for maps of the region. Because there is a real break in the static that has prevailed in the region for decades, especially since the start of the so-called “Arab Spring”. And this will naturally put Damascus in a position of waiting to pick the fruits of the Palestinian victory, which It will be a victory for the entire West Asian axis.
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An escalation in military engagements have been occurring in the Gulf of Aden as several vessels connected with the State of Israel and its supporters are being targeted by the Yemen resistance force of the Ansar Allah. See this.
On November 26, the United States Department of Defense issued a statement saying it had thwarted an attempted seizure of the Central Park, a commercial tanker operating in these waters.
However, several hours later, Mohammad al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Ansar Allah Political Bureau, denied any involvement in the incident. The resistance movement accused the Pentagon of concocting the story to provide a rationale for the ongoing military support to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in their genocidal war against the Palestinian people and others throughout the region.
Map of Somalia
After the statements by the Yemeni resistance, the Pentagon shifted its position and blamed pirates of Somalian nationality for the bordering and attempted hijacking of the Central Park. This is the first time in many years that Somalians have been accused of seizing commercial vessels. See this.
The Ansar Allah movement is routinely described by the U.S. administration and the Pentagon as being an Iranian-backed militia. This allegation on the part of Washington is designed to deny the legitimacy of the movement which has been the victims of a seven-year war engineered by several successive White House administrations both Democratic and Republican.
“The United States ‘invented a story of rescuing a commercial ship from militants in the Gulf of Aden,’ Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of Ansar Allah’s Political Bureau, posted on X. The official stressed that the location where the act was allegedly carried out is not a suitable spot for a capture operation. Al-Bukhaiti went on to debunk other details of the American narration of the events, in which the Pentagon claimed that two ballistic missiles were fired at the USS Mason, which responded to Central Park’s distress call.”
Yemen Has Long Been a Focus of the U.S. and NATO
Due to the anti-imperialist character of the Yemen revolutionaries, they have been targeted by the U.S. for destruction. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) beginning in 2015 waged an air war against the advances being made by the Ansar Allah.
It was the U.S. administrations of former President Barack Obama and his successor, President Donald Trump, which authorized the bombing of Yemen and the logistical support for a rival government in Yemen which was allied with imperialism. The ground campaign against Yemen was largely dependent upon the targeted bombing utilizing Pentagon aircraft and coordinates which struck infrastructural sites, residential neighborhoods and ports.
Mediation efforts by the Oman government coupled with improved relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, did lead to a lessening of tensions. Since 2022, there has been a substantial decrease in the fighting in Yemen, where during the course of U.S.-backed bombing and ground offensive against the Ansar Allah, the country considered the most impoverished in the West Asia region, became the center of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
1.2 million cases of cholera were reported largely among children. The capacity to address the crisis was hampered by the bombing of hospitals and clinics, a strategy employed by the U.S.-backed Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) military units which are being replicated in the current war in Gaza. See this.
Since the launching of Operation Al-Aqsa Storm on October 7 in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (POT), Yemen under the leadership of the resistance forces have pledged maximum solidarity with the fighters in Gaza. Demonstrations involving millions of Yemenis have been bolstered by military actions against the Israeli interests in the Gulf of Aden.
Al-Bukhaiti in the Al Mayadeen interview challenged other talking points by the White House related to the situation in the Gulf of Aden:
“Al-Bukhaiti went on to debunk other details of the American narration of the events, in which the Pentagon claimed that two ballistic missiles were fired at the USS Mason, which responded to Central Park’s distress call. The official exposed American lies, after the latter asserted that the two missiles fell 10 miles of their intended target, the USS Mason. Al-Bukhaiti explained that Yemeni ballistic missiles intended to target moving naval targets are equipped with active guidance systems and are capable of altering their trajectories accordingly. He also stressed that Yemen possesses precision-guided munitions, saying it is impossible for such weapons to have a margin of error of 10 miles. The official reiterated that the Yemeni Armed Forces ‘only target ships owned by the Zionist entity,’ warning other nations not to interfere in the operations of the Yemeni Armed Forces, aimed at supporting Palestine and its people who are faced with fierce Israeli aggression.”
Over the previous decade, the U.S. has deployed troops and intelligence operatives in Yemen aimed at controlling the internal political dynamic of the country. With the resistance forces operating as an integral part of the Axis of Resistance bringing together Iran, Syria, southern Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, the Biden administration will continue to escalate its military presence around Yemen and throughout the entire Gulf of Aden and Persian Gulf waterways.
U.S. Maintains Neo-Colonial Designs on Somalia and the Horn of Africa
For many decades various U.S. administrations have carried out direct and indirect military interventions in Somalia. In December 1992, former U.S. President George W. Bush Sr. deployed thousands of marines into the Horn of Africa state under the guise of providing humanitarian assistance during a famine in the aftermath of a civil war.
Within a matter of months, the Pentagon troops were embroiled in major battles with resistance forces in Somalia.
The U.S. ordered massacres of leading Somalian political groupings prompting anger and hostility towards their troops. By October 1993, the number of casualties inflicted upon the Pentagon troops led to the eventual withdrawal by the administration of then President Bill Clinton.
Somalians take down US helicopters chanting anti-American slogans during October 1993
Later in 2007, the administration of President George W. Bush Jr. launched a proxy war against the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia by encouraging the intervention of Ethiopian and Kenyan military forces.
The events in Somalia remain unsettled since 2007 as the U.S.-backed deployment of Ethiopian and Kenyan troops was reinforced by Pentagon aerial bombardments against Islamist organizations and civilians.
At present the U.S. and United Nations-sponsored African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) has been transformed into a transitional project (ATMIS) which aims to draw down the AU forces while placing more emphasis on strengthening the Somalian National Army.
Therefore, this cursory historical review of U.S. involvement in Somalia indicates that people inside the country and the Gulf of Aden-Horn of Africa region should not take any solace in the Pentagon apportioning blame to pirates for the attempted seizure of the Central Park.
What is never asked by the corporate and government-controlled media in the U.S. and other imperialist states is why does Washington still have military forces stationed throughout various areas spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to Gulf of Aden.
After the escalation of the war in Palestine, the Biden administration immediately dispatched two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean. The U.S. is the largest contributor to the military structures of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the occupation apparatus as a whole.
As the temporary truce during the closing days of November brought about the release of some of the prisoners of war and detainees among the Palestinians, settler population and foreign nationals, the IDF and other security forces continued to arrest and kill people living in the West Bank. On November 29, it was announced that two more Palestinian children, 8 and 15 years old, were killed by the IDF in what they described as an “counter-terrorism operation.”
Shamefully, the Biden administration has attempted to take political credit for the pause in the IDF bombing of Gaza, while millions in the U.S. are calling for a permanent ceasefire and the withholding of aid to the settler-colonial state of Israel. There is no long-term policy being articulated by the Biden administration other than additional attempts to maintain the status-quo which does not create an independent Palestinian state nor the abolition of the apartheid construct.
People in the antiwar, anti-imperialist and Palestine solidarity movements should pay very close attention to the increasing U.S. military presence in the Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa. The Biden administration like its predecessors is willing to risk a regional war in the failed attempts to reinforce its hegemony on a global scale.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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On Tuesday, November 28, 2023, the National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) released the final report of its months-long investigation into Canada’s response to COVID-19. This report follows the September 14 release of an interim report focused on the regulatory approval process and safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
The Report was written by NCI’s four independent Commissioners: Chairperson Mr. Ken Drysdale, Ms. Heather DiGregorio, Ms. Janice Kaikkonen and Dr. Bernard Massie. The Report is the culmination of their efforts to:
listen to the testimony of over 300 witnesses who told the Commissioners and all Canadians what happened to them during the COVID-19 crisis, or shared their expertise on subjects ranging from the economy and education, to mental health and medical science, to media and institutional censorship, to social harms and civic losses—to name just a few.
learn how Canadians were affected by the policies enacted by governments and other organizations in response to COVID-19.
recommend ways health and other crises can be better managed in future, to reduce and avoid the many harms that Canadians experienced since COVID-19 began in early 2020.
The Commissioners expressed deep appreciation for the individuals and organizations who courageously came forward to share their experiences, expertise and perspectives, and which led to the report and recommendations now available here.
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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
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With each passing month since the U.S./NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the catastrophic impacts of the United States’ hegemonic grip over West and Central Asia, or the so-called “Middle East,” continue to be evident. At the same moment U.S. officials are facilitating an ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine, they’re subjecting the people of Afghanistan to collective punishment.
In October, a series of powerful earthquakes killed and injured thousands in Herat. One month later, the U.S.-backed interim government of Pakistan initiated racist deportations of all Afghan nationals from the country. Despite the need for immediate humanitarian relief, the United States continues to levy sanctions and freeze Afghanistan’s sovereign assets. Despite the need for an immediate normalization of relations, Thomas West, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan, maintains that this is “not going to be possible.” The United States intends to continue targeting the Afghan people with impunity.
The mission of the United States Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan is “to advance U.S. interests related to Afghanistan.”
The United States was built on indigenous genocide, colonial conquest and violent repression, and the destructive humanitarian impact and economic devastation wrought by U.S. interests is plain to see–from Afghanistan, Palestine and Sudan to Haiti, Niger and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
As the conditions in Afghanistan worsen before what is expected to be another harsh winter–with nearly all Afghans unable to attain basic necessities like food, water and fuel due to the U.S.-led sanctions and asset freeze–it is imperative to connect what is unfolding in Afghanistan as a result of U.S.-led war and imperialism to the wider region and world.
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Let us implement peace!
There must be two independent states, Palestine and Israel in pre-1967 borders.
Each of about 7 million citizens with independent legislatures.
Freedom of movement for all citizens of both nations.
All political prisoners to be immediately released, without charge.
Each state to have its own international airport plus international seaports and fishing rights on the eastern Mediterranean.
River Jordan to be controlled by a joint authority and access to water supplies apportioned equally. Electricity to be generated independently.
National defence exercises to be held jointly every 2 years.
No Labour permits required for each others’ nationals. Tax regimes to be separate.
No restrictions on intermarriage. All holy sites to be under binational joint jurisdiction.
There must be freedom of worship. Nuclear weapons and all WMD to be banned.
Israeli nuclear armed submarine fleet and all NBC weapons at Dimona Nuclear site, Tel Nof Air Force Base 8, and elsewhere, to be destroyed under supervision of the UN’s IAEA. There must be an immediate ban on the importation of offensive arms and weapons from the US, U.K. or any other party or state without joint approval by both legislatures.
Natural mineral deposits including fossil fuels to be split equally between two states.
In all other respects each state is entirely independent, politically and economically but must act in concert on all matters that jointly affect the security or economy of both states.
Both Palestine and Israel must respect and adhere to all resolutions of the UN General Assembly and/or Security Council within the times specified therein.
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Hans Stehling is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The White House has requested the removal of restrictions on all categories of weapons and ammunition Israel is allowed to access from U.S. weapons stockpiles stored in Israel itself.
The move to lift restrictions was included in the White House’s supplemental budget request, sent to the Senate on October 20.
“This request would,” the proposed budget says, “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles.”
The request pertains to little-known weapons stockpiles in Israel that the Pentagon established for use in regional conflicts, but which Israel has been permitted to access in limited circumstances — the very limits President Joe Biden is seeking to remove.
“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel,” said John Ramming Chappell, a legal fellow with the Center for Civilians in Conflict.
Created in the 1980s to supply the U.S. in case of a regional war, the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I, is the largest node in a network of what are effectively foreign U.S. weapons caches. Highly regulated for security, the stockpiles are governed by a set of strict requirements. Under circumstances laid out in these requirements, Israel has been able to draw on the stockpile, purchasing the weapons at little cost if it uses the effective subsidy of U.S. military aid.
With the WRSA-I, Biden is looking to lift virtually all the meaningful restrictions on the stockpile and the transfer of its arms to Israel, with plans to remove limitations to obsolete or surplus weapons, waive an annual spending cap on replenishing the stockpile, remove weapon-specific restrictions, and curtail congressional oversight. All of the changes in the Biden budget plan would be permanent, except for lifting the spending cap, which is limited to the 2024 fiscal year.
The changes would come in an arms-trade relationship that is already shrouded in secrecy, as The Intercept recently reported. Whereas the administration has provided pages of detailed lists of weapons provided to Ukraine, for instance, its disclosure about arms provided to Israel could fit in a single, short sentence. Last week, Bloomberg obtained a leaked list of weapons provided to Israel, revealing that they include thousands of Hellfire missiles — the same kind being used extensively by Israel in Gaza.
The effect of lifting the restrictions on transfers to Israel — such as eliminating the requirement that the weapons be part of a surplus — could harm U.S. interests by diminishing American preparedness for its own conflicts in the region, said Josh Paul, a former official who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.
“By dropping the requirement that such articles be declared excess, it would also increase the existing strain on U.S. military readiness in order to provide more arms to Israel.”
“Undermine Oversight and Accountability”
The U.S. government is only supposed to spend $200 million per fiscal year restocking the WRSA-I — about half the total cap for all U.S. stockpiles round the globe. The White House request, however, would waive the limit on U.S. contributions to the stockpile in Israel. That would allow the stockpile to be continuously replenished.
“The President’s emergency supplemental funding request,” Paul said, “would essentially create a free-flowing pipeline to provide any defense articles to Israel by the simple act of placing them in the WRSA-I stockpile, or other stockpiles intended for Israel.”
The U.S. currently requires that Israel grant certain concessions in exchange for certain types of arms assistance from the Pentagon, but the White House request would remove this condition as well.
Finally, the White House request would also reduce congressional oversight of U.S. arms transfers by reducing the length of advance notice made to Congress before a weapons transfers. Under current law, there must be 30 days prior notice, but the Biden budget request would allow this to be shortened in “extraordinary” circumstances.
“The Biden administration’s supplemental budget request would further undermine oversight and accountability even as U.S. support enables an Israeli campaign that has killed thousands of children,” said Chappell, of Center for Civilians in Conflict.
The House has already passed legislation reflecting the White House’s request last month, and it now stands before the Senate.
“Taken as a package,” said William Hartung, an arms expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it is extraordinary, and it will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel, even as the Israeli government has engaged in massive attacks on civilians, some of which constitute war crimes.”
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For months, the Neo-Nazi junta has been preparing to receive US-made F-16 fighter jets from its NATO overlords, including by repurposing civilian airfields and infrastructure for military use. The Kiev regime’s air arm has suffered major losses since the start of the special military operation (SMO), with its airbases either destroyed or damaged beyond repair by Russian long-range precision strikes. This has effectively made it impossible to launch anything but occasional airstrikes on Russian positions, an occurrence that is slowly coming to an end as Moscow is finding ways to make its second-to-none long-range air defenses deadlier than ever before. To say nothing of the Eurasian giant’s top-of-the-line interceptors and air superiority fighter jets.
Since the first day of the SMO, the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) dispatched jets such as the MiG-31BM “Foxhound” and Su-35S “Flanker-E”, destroying most of the Neo-Nazi junta’s air assets on the ground and leaving only a handful of operational jets. As these had little to no chance of shooting down vastly superior Russian equivalents, the Kiev regime forces had no choice but to disperse their units and use them for occasional air support, primarily by flying extremely low. The remaining aircraft were forced to operate from ad hoc bases, further limiting their usability and battlefield impact, although NATO made them somewhat more useful by investing in the rearmament of the remaining jets. This includes the integration of various Western weapons with the Soviet-built aircraft.
And indeed, according to their own admission, the Neo-Nazi junta needs over a hundred heavily modernized F-16s in order to have any sort of a fighting chance. However, the much bigger problem is how would NATO deliver these fighter jets and where exactly would they be based. Neighboring Poland and Romania both operate F-16s and already have the necessary infrastructure to accommodate them, making them the likeliest candidates for stopgap basing. In addition, Slovakia and Bulgaria are in the process of acquiring them and are rapidly building similar infrastructure, meaning they too are able to do the same or at least they will be soon. However, will Russia really tolerate this, considering that F-16s using NATO airbases would make them a party to the conflict?
There are also “lesser” problems connected to such developments, including the economic and financial damage to host countries, as they would need to disrupt their civil aviation, making it impossible to conduct normal economic (or any other regular) activities. This would inevitably exacerbate the already ongoing crisis in the European Union, as the well-being of its citizens would further deteriorate. Not to mention that the areas where these airbases are would become legitimate targets for the Russian military. Obviously, NATO would also attempt attacks on Russian bases in Crimea and elsewhere in the Black Sea region, which would certainly spark a wider war. Moscow would then respond by launching long-range missiles and/or dispatching advanced strike fighters.
That’s over four times more jets, plus the modernization which would take even longer to accomplish and would further delay the already overdue delivery. In other words, the risk is too high, while the reward is extremely low, meaning that NATO is doing all this for optics. While this may reignite the interest in the Ukrainian conflict for a short while, in the long term, the so-called “Ukraine fatigue” will only get worse. The obvious question arises, is the belligerent thalassocracy so desperate to keep its neocolonialist power that it’s willing to risk what would inevitably be a world-ending thermonuclear conflict?
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.” — William O. Douglas, dissenting in Osborn v. United States (1966)
The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
For instance, it was recently revealed that the White House, relying on a set of privacy loopholes, has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.
This goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection program.
Operated during the Obama, Trump and now the Biden presidencies, this secret dragnet surveillance program (formerly known as Hemisphere and now dubbed Data Analytical Services) uses its association with the White House to sidestep a vast array of privacy and transparency laws.
According to Senator Ron Wyden, Hemisphere has been operating without any oversight for more than a decade under the guise of cracking down on drug traffickers.
This is how the government routinely breaks the law and gets away with it: in the so-called name of national security.
It’s a program ripe for abuse, and you can bet it’s getting abused.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—haven’t made America any safer, and they certainly aren’t helping to preserve our freedoms.
Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.
The Fourth Amendment was intended to serve as a protective forcefield around our persons, our property, our activities, our communications and our movements. It keeps the government out of our private business except in certain, extenuating circumstances.
Those extenuating circumstances are spelled out clearly: government officials must have probable cause that criminal activity is afoot (a higher legal standard than “reasonable suspicion”), which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.
Unfortunately, all three branches of government—the legislatures, courts and executive offices—have given the police state all kinds of leeway when it comes to sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.
As a result, on a daily basis, Americans are already being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.
Warrantless, dragnet surveillance is the manifestation of a lawless government that has gone rogue in its determination to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, the Constitution be damned.
Dragnet surveillance. Geofencing. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted every second of every day—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, electronic eavesdroppers, robotic snoops and digital Peeping Toms.
The government has a veritable arsenal of surveillance tools to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Rounding out the list of ways in which the Techno-Corporate State and the U.S. government are colluding to nullify the privacy rights of the individual is the Biden Administration’s latest drive to harness the power of artificial intelligence technologies while claiming to protect the citizenry from harm.
In his executive order on artificial intelligence, President Biden is calling for guidelines on how the government will use AI while simultaneously insisting that corporations protect consumer privacy.
Talk about ironic that the very government that has been covertly invading our privacy rights wants to appoint itself the guardian of those rights.
Tell me this: how do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.
A government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.
At a minimum, you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, property or freedoms.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests.
Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.
Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.
Indeed, the government has a history of shamelessly exploiting national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes.
Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, civil unrest, economic instability, pandemics, natural disasters: the government has been taking advantage of such crises for years now in order to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.
That’s exactly where we find ourselves now: caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state.
All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
This is the grim reality of life in the American police state: our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.
While surveillance may span a broad spectrum of methods and scenarios, the common denominator remains the same: a complete disregard for the rights of the citizenry.
With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which the Constitution means nothing.
Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked, monitored and singled out must be met with extreme caution.
Dragnet surveillance in an age of pre-crime policing and overcriminalization is basically a fishing expedition carried out without a warrant, a blatant attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
What we need is a digital “No Trespassing” sign that protects our privacy rights and affirms our right to be left alone.
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The Baltic countries show a lack of geopolitical knowledge as well as a real strategic irrationality. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are criticizing the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and condemning the Russian Federation’s participation in an event of the bloc. For them, it is impossible for Moscow to be part of an OSCE meeting, even though it is a member country of the organization, which shows a great inability on the part of the Baltic states to deal with the geopolitical reality of Europe.
The foreign ministers of the three countries issued a joint statement saying that they will not attend the next OSCE conference due to the presence of the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergey Lavrov. For the Baltic states, Lavrov’s participation is “legitimizing the Russian aggression”, which is why, as supporters of Ukraine, these countries cannot be at the event.
“Lavrov’s attendance at the OSCE Ministerial also risks legitimizing aggressor Russia as a rightful member of our community of free nations, trivializing the atrocious crimes Russia has been committing, and putting up with Russia’s blatant violation and contempt of the OSCE fundamental principles and commitments (…) We, the Ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, will not be part of this and will not share responsibility for [the] consequences it will create”, the ministers said in the joint statement on November 29.
As can be seen, the Baltic states’ representatives were disrespectful towards the OSCE, openly attacking the organization for the mere fact of not banning Russia’s Lavrov from the event. By accusing the OSCE of “trivializing atrocious crimes”, these states are not only accusing Moscow, but truly defaming the organization and publicly demoralizing it.
Also, as expected, Ukraine took the same stance as the Baltic countries and decided not to participate in the meeting, claiming that the OSCE is experiencing an “existential crisis” and that the bloc is being held “hostage” by Moscow. For the Kiev regime, the OSCE needs to be “saved” from Russia – in other words, it needs to banish Moscow, otherwise there should be no normality in the group’s activities, stopping all cooperation projects.
“[Russia is creating an] existential crisis within the OSCE [and turning the group] into a hostage of its whims and aggression (…) We should focus our common efforts on how to save the OSCE from Russia, and not send messages about the possibility of returning to the forms of cooperation that existed before February 2022”, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine said in a statement about the case.
In fact, Lavrov’s participation has not even been confirmed yet. The Russian government is still awaiting official authorization from Bulgaria in order to confirm the Russian minister’s participation. The event will take place in the first week of December, in Skopjie, North Macedonia. To reach the location, Lavrov would have to pass through a neighboring country, Bulgaria, which is why official authorization is being awaited – as Bulgaria has adhered to the irrational sanctions imposed by the West on Moscow.
It is nothing really new that Ukraine and the Baltic countries are taking a firm stance against Russia, to the point of even boycotting the OSCE event. Kiev and the Baltics are controlled by fanatically anti-Russian and pro-NATO political elites, willing to take any action with the aim of harming Moscow. In practice, they do not act rationally and put the entire continental European security at risk by fomenting rivalries and hostilities against Russia.
The main problem is that, by boycotting the event, these countries are harming themselves. The OSCE is not a political or ideological organization, but a group focused on multilateral discussions about security and cooperation. The bloc’s members do not need to be allies or friends, just strategic partners in quest of the common goal of making Europe a safer place.
Russia is part of the European geographical reality, and peaceful coexistence is an absolute necessity. Even if other European countries criticize Russia, impose sanctions and maintain hostile relations of enmity, it is necessary to maintain dialogue with Moscow on strategic issues so that the minimum conditions of coexistence are created.
By trying to prevent Russian participation in the OSCE, the Baltics are simply ignoring elementary principles of European security. These states are acting very irresponsibly and risking the entire continental security architecture. As analysts say, dialogue needs to happen, regardless of the political situation. At some point, the Baltic countries will have to understand this, otherwise there will be a serious and irreversible escalation of tensions.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meets in Lodz, Poland, on December 1, 2022. Photo credit: OSCE
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Nov. 7, 2023 – Social media influencer Samara Maloney died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm on Nov. 7, 2023. There are many fake obituaries regarding her death, claiming car accident.
Fake Obituary #1: Vietnamese Website: “Samara Maloney Accident Details: Trinidad and Tobago mourns the loss of Samara Maloney, a beloved resident whose vibrant presence was tragically extinguished in a car accident.”
Fake Obituary #2: Website called “Wealthy Peeps”: “Samara’s life was tragically cut short due to a fatal car crash on a fateful day.”
Fake Obituary #3: Website called Holly Bolly – “On November 7, 2023, the nation of Trinidad and Tobago was deeply shaken by the news of the untimely demise of Samara Maloney, resulting from a tragic car crash.”
Nov. 28, 2023 – 22 year old Reed Ryan, football player for University of Minnesota Duluth Football Program, had a cardiac arrest during practice on Nov. 21 and died a week later on Nov. 28, 2023.
“he accepted a full scholarship to play football at North Dakota State University (NDSU) for four seasons. In 2023, he was welcomed as a Bulldog at the University of Minnesota-Duluth with #99”
Real Obituary: Waunakee – “Reed Ryan our much loved son, brother, uncle, teammate, and friend was welcomed by the angels into Heaven on November 28, 2023. Reed, age 22, was born on December 27, 2000. Reed went into cardiac arrest on November 21st following a football team workout in the weight-room doing what he loved. This was the result of an undetected genetic heart condition and a large, loving heart. The athletic training team was tremendous in their efforts to immediately initiate CPR and regain his pulse.”
While he was still in the hospital, alive, someone commissioned two fake obituaries for him claiming he died in a “car accident.” These fake obituaries were released on Nov. 26. He died on Nov. 28.
Fake Obituary #1: (Vietnamese website) “In a devastating car accident, the world lost a remarkable individual – Ryan Reed, a talented football player at NDSU. His untimely passing.”
Fake Obituary #2: (India Website with senior writer Rishabh Raikwar) RajasDentalCollege: “Ryan Reed, a talented football player at NDSU, lost his life in a tragic car accident. The news has left his family and friends in profound grief”
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Nov. 9, 2023 – US DOCTOR DEAD – Fredericksburg, VA Dr. Jayson Tappan, 53 year old emergency doctor and US Navy Veteran died suddenly on Nov. 9, 2023.
Fake Obituary #1: (Vietnamese website): “Tragedy strikes as Jason Tappan, a renowned emergency medical specialist in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, loses his life in a devastating crash. The collision, which occurred on Route 3 near Gordon Road, involved Tappan’s Toyota Camry and a Ford F-150 pickup truck traveling in the wrong direction. Both vehicles caught fire, resulting in the deaths of both drivers. While the cause of the crash is still under investigation, authorities suspect that speed and weather conditions may have been contributing factors.”
Fake Obituary #2: GeniusCelebs By: Sashank Paudel “He was involved in a fatal car crash that occurred around 8 a.m. on Route 3 near Gordon Road, according to the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Office. Tappan was driving a Toyota Camry when a Ford F-150 pickup truck that was traveling in the opposite direction collided with him.
Fake Obituary #1: Vietnamese Website: “Elizabeth Lynch Passes Away In a Tragic Accident – The incident occurred in the early hours of Thursday on I-264 near Bardstown Road. Elizabeth, a long-time resident of Louisville, was driving her SUV when she lost control and collided with the ramp barrier. The impact was catastrophic, resulting in a fiery crash that claimed her life.
Fake Obituary #2: Rajas Dental College – The fatal incident unfolded around 1 a.m. when Louisville Metro police officers were called to I-264 near Bardstown Road. Elizabeth Lynch, driving east in an SUV, tragically lost control of her vehicle, colliding with the ramp barrier. The aftermath was devastating, with the SUV catching fire immediately after the collision. Despite the efforts of emergency responders, Elizabeth Lynch was pronounced dead at the scene.
Fake Obituary #3: NewsUnzip – “Elizabeth Lynch…died in a horrific car crash on November 8, 2023 (wrong date). She was 21 years old and a student at the University of Louisville.” (wrong age)
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Nov. 6, 2023 – UK – Nurse Sarah Healey died suddenly on Nov. 6, 2023. She was an “aesthetic nurse prescriber.”
Fake Obituary #1: (EmlakSatan.com) “Sarah Jayne Healey Accident: Died in a Car Crash on Her Way to Work”
Oct. 27, 2023 – Lakeland, FL – 16 year old Julia Black, volleyball player at Harrison School for the Arts (Orchestra program) suffered cardiac arrest 8:20pm & died suddenly from “cardiac arrest caused by pericardial infection.”
Real Obituary: “Julia Christine Black was born on January 22, 2007, in Lakeland, Florida. She left us much too soon on Friday, October 27, 2023, after sudden cardiac arrest caused by a pericardial infection.”
Fake Obituary #1: By Subhikshya Khadka: Julia Black Lakeland FL Car accident and her untimely demise…
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June 7, 2023 – Prince George, BC – 35 year old Dr.Vincent Budac, optometrist at True North Optometry, died suddenly on June 7, 2023. His death was unexpected and he leaves behind two small children.
Fake Obituary #1: By Umesh Gautam: “Vincent Budac, a renowned optometrist…passed away on June 9th, 2023 (wrong date of death) at the age of 52 (wrong age, he is 35). He was involved in a fatal car accident while driving home from his clinic.”
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Jan. 8, 2023 – 48 year old Heather L Frederick, Algonquin middle school teacher, died in her home.
Local News Story #2: Coroner Clarifies Rumors Regarding Local Middle School Teacher’s Death. On Thursday, McHenry County Coroner Michael Rein said Heather Frederick, 48, did not die in a car crash.
Fake Obituary #1: by Rajasdentalcollege.com – ”Heather Frederick tragically lost her life in a car accident. Reports indicate that the critical injuries she sustained rendered her unable to recover, and despite her best efforts and four days of battling at the hospital, she sadly passed away. Heather had so much more life to live, but it was cut short by a cruel twist of fate.”
Fake Obituary #2: wepublishnews.com – “Heather Frederick car accident”
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Nov. 24, 2022 – 21 year old Canadian University student (mandated COVID-19 vaccines at Western University in Ontario) Megha Thakur died in the early morning hours at her home.
Fake Obituary #1: by AmericanKahani.com “However, a website called Social Telecast reported that the young woman died in a road accident. These claims haven’t been verified by any other publication.”
Fake Obituary #2: by Anupal Sraban Neog: “there have been reports circulating online about her reportedly passing away in a car accident.”
Fake Obituary #3: OxGaps
Fake Obituary #4: Indian website GeniusCelebs by Sashank Paudel: “Megha Thakur Death: TikTok Star And Western University Student Died In An Accident. According to reports, the TikTok influencer and celebrity perished on November 24, 2022, in Ontario, Canada. The accident claimed the life of the beloved TikToker and Western University student while also gravely injuring another person.”
June 18, 2022 – 34 year old Danielle Hampson died in early morning on her wedding day. One year later her X-Factor star Husband Tom Mann still has no answers. But the fake obituaries claim car crash.
Fake Obituary #1: Latest in Bollywood by Kajal Hundlani – “Danielle Hampson Cause of Death:- Danielle Hampson (Born: 15 March 1987; Death: 18 June 2022) was a popular dancer and model who died in a car accident.”
Fake Obituary #2: Freshers Live by V.Sruthi – “Danielle Hampson Car Accident: Danielle Hampson was a famous dancer and model who died in a car accident. Danielle Hampson Car Accident is widely searched on the internet by most people”
My Take…
Why would someone pay to create a fake obituary on an obscure website in India or Vietnam, claiming a person in the US who “died suddenly” (usually at home or in a hospital), died from a car accident?
Interestingly, these fake websites (most of them originating in India or Vietnam) are being used by mRNA pushing doctors, to attack those who are trying to shed light on the dramatic increase in sudden deaths.
Even though doctors who forced COVID-19 mRNA vaccines on their patients (knowing the jabs would most likely injure, disable or kill them) are some of the most evil people in the world today, I don’t believe they’re creating these fake obituaries themselves.
This has the look and feel of a governmental agency operation, or a big pharma sponsored operation to “poison the well” of sudden death reporting.
Many people have extremely short attention spans and a 30 second google search that yields “car accident” as an explanation for a tragic sudden death, is more than enough to put the minds of the 6x-vaccinated at ease.
Never underestimate the lengths that big pharma and their bribed doctors, bureaucrats, politicians and media will go to, to keep the mRNA Vaccine fraud going a little longer.
And yes, that includes commissioning and paying for fake obituaries on prominent sudden deaths where there was a high probability of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine involvement, and labeling them all as “car accidents”, to discourage their reporting.
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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 NaturalNews.com
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
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The geopolitical position of Serbia is highly contested and one of the most volatile in Europe. The vast majority of the Serbian people have undivided support for Russia, being the only nation in Europe to overwhelmingly hail the Kremlin and its resurgence. However, Belgrade’s political establishment is another story. While the current government has to take into account the opinions of the people, it would seem that its actual priorities lie in Brussels.
The NATO bombing of 1999. has made it almost impossible for the Serbian people to support the accession to the alliance, so local politicians found ways to circumvent that by claiming that Serbia is only joining the European Union, not NATO. However, with the recent blurring of the lines between the military alliance and what’s supposed to be an economic bloc, most Serbs have become disillusioned with the idea of joining the EU.
And yet, to the dismay of the general populace, the political establishment is not only insisting on this but is also becoming increasingly obedient to NATO demands, such as the official support for Ukraine. Having good relations with the West is one thing, but going against Russia and the national interests of the Russian people is a whole other issue that could cost the current government its political power.
A particularly controversial situation was sparked by Tamara Vucic, wife of Serbian President Alexander Vucic, as well as some of his closest associates. Tamara, known for her lavish lifestyle that includes attending expensive fashion weeks and shopping in Europe, particularly Paris, is also a strong supporter of the LGBT community in Serbia. Needless to say, the local populace is extremely critical of this.
Although the media in the country generally underreport Tamara’s activities, all in order to hide her highly unpopular behavior, the news travels through the grapevine, prompting protests and angry rebukes from patriotic organizations and political parties. Perhaps the most contentious issue was her recent attendance at the Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen organized by the First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska.
Needless to say, this was an extremely unpleasant surprise for the Serbian people, but only after the event was reported by alternative media, forcing the more mainstream platforms to admit that Tamara Vucic attended the controversial event. However, if this was a slap in the face of most Serbs, what she did next is considered nothing less than a stab in the back. Namely, Tamara Vucic also visited the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.
Now, why would visiting an Orthodox monastery be considered bad or even controversial? Well, it certainly wouldn’t have been an issue if the Ukrainian government hadn’t forcefully taken the Lavra from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), officially turned it into a museum, and then also given it to the unrecognized “Orthodox Church of Ukraine”, practically a NATO-backed NGO posing as an Orthodox Church.
To add insult to injury, the aforementioned support for the LGBT community is also very unpopular among the Serbian populace, but Tamara Vucic continues this practice. Her husband, Serbian President Alexander Vucic, despite his superficially conservative views, is also connected to the LGBT community through his support for Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, who is a lesbian and is openly flaunting her sexual orientation.
Naturally, this is extremely frustrating to the Serbian people, but still, Vucic has been keeping her as the Prime Minister since 2017, despite the fact that she was never elected for this position. It’s possible that he’s simply trying to appease the West by having a high-ranking official with such a background, which is understandable from a geopolitical standpoint. However, this still doesn’t justify his wife’s support for the LGBT community.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it. Other people from Vucic’s cabinet are also making highly controversial moves and giving statements that could ruin Serbia’s long-standing friendship with Russia. Namely, on November 17, the Minister of Construction, Transportation, and Infrastructure of Serbia, Goran Vesic, took part in the Serbian-Ukrainian Business Forum in Belgrade, where he openly supported the Ukrainian government.
Vesic said that he was convinced that Ukraine and its people were looking at days of recovery and prosperity, but also noted that Serbia was there to help. During the meeting at the Chamber of Commerce of Serbia (CCIS), Vesic reminded that, not long before, in cooperation with partners from the USA, the initiative for the potential participation of Serbian construction companies in the projects of rebuilding Ukraine had been launched.
During his speech, Vesic also condemned what he called “Russian aggression in Ukraine”, causing an uproar of angry reactions from countless patriotic organizations and political parties. This imprudent statement, to say the least, goes against Belgrade’s self-proclaimed neutrality in the Ukrainian conflict, as well as against its own foreign policy that relies on multiple global partners, including the Russian Federation.
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Desanka Handson is a Serbian-American freelance journalist.
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***
In his opening essay in the newly released anthology, Canary in a Covid World, Colin McAdam writes:
“I had watched everyone learn to hate each other in the name of caring, everyone denying life in the name of living, compassionate artists wagging their fingers or screaming at people who didn’t do as they did, and no one shouting at the people who deserved it most: the ones who created this disease, the motherf**kers who told us we should hate each other but continue to buy what they sold.”
McAdam is an internationally acclaimed novelist — and one of the few Canadian authors to speak up about the epic injustice of the COVID era. This despite the fact that McAdam initially went along with the mandates. His family even took both the prescribed clot shots.
But when the trucker convoy converged on Ottawa, he saw history unfold firsthand and realized which side of it he would be standing on:
“I shook hands with all kinds of people,” McAdam writes, “hugged a big drunk in Carhartt overalls, wandered around and chatted. Met a mother whose son couldn’t play hockey on his team without being vaccinated, who died the morning after inoculation. The gym owner who lost his business, his house, his income, deemed inessential by people who still enjoyed the novelty of working at home in their pyjamas. These people who should be heard, the mute and inglorious — they weren’t there just out of bitterness, they were there to feel connection. They were protesting, they had complaints, but they were there to overcome. To be brave.”
Quickly, McAdam realized that the liberal arts community had completely neglected to deride the very type of oppression they so pride themselves on opposing.
“One of the things I learned over these years is how class conscious, how insecure and unempathetic, so much of my cohort truly is. We in the Arts community are meant to be the ones who look in the dark corners, the ones who care about the oppressed and sing the sorrows of those who have no time or strength to sing. We are meant to think critically, to challenge authority and champion the individual under the thumb of the man.”
It also explains why, after reading McAdam’s essay, I immediately ordered his latest novel, Black Dove — a story about “genetic editing and the adventures of a grieving father and son.” I have a feeling I’m going to love it.
“Stories can warn us, scare us, light up the darkness, chase away boredom,” writes McAdam. “And they can also make us brave.”
And so can essays…. Canary in a Covid World includes 34 essays by thought leaders ranging from a novelist like Colin McAdams, to journalists, lawyers, judges, scientists, doctors, academics, politicians, researchers, vaccine-injured and data experts. They’ve bravely put their reputations (and possibly even their lives) before the firing squad of public opinion — to expose what happened and stop history from repeating itself. You can order copies of Canary in a Covid World for yourself, your family and friends here.
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John C. A. Manley is the author of the full-length novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. He is currently working on the sequel, Brave New Normal. John lives in Stratford, Ontario, with his son Jonah, and the ever-present spirit of his late wife, Nicole. You can subscribe to his email newsletter, read his full bio or find out more about his novel. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
Want to understand why the media we consume is either owned by billionaires or under the thumb of government?
The latest developments in the reporting of who was behind the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe provide the answer.
Although largely forgotten now, the blasts in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 had huge and lasting repercussions. The explosion was an act both of unprecedented industrial sabotage and of unparalleled environmental terrorism, releasing untold quantities of the most potent of the greenhouse gases, methane, into the atmosphere.
The blowing up of the pipelines plunged Europe into a prolonged energy crisis, tipping its economies deeper into a recession from which they are yet to recover. Europe was forced to turn to the United States and buy much more expensive liquified gas. And one of the long-term effects will be to accelerate the de-industrialisation of Europe, especially Germany.
There can be almost no one in Europe who did not suffer personal financial harm, in most cases significant harm, from the explosions.
The question that needed urgently answering at the time of the blasts was one no media organisation was in a hurry to investigate: Who did it?
In unison, the media simply recited the White House’s extraordinary claim that Russia had sabotaged its own pipelines.
That required an unprecedented suspension of disbelief. It meant that Moscow had chosen to strip itself both of the lucrative income stream the gas pipelines generated, and of the political and diplomatic leverage it enjoyed over European states from its control of their energy supplies. This was at a time, remember, when the Kremlin, embattled in its war in Ukraine, needed all the diplomatic influence it could muster.
The Main Culprit
The need to breathe credibility into the laughably improbable “Russia did it” story was so urgent at the time because there was only one other serious culprit in the frame. No media outlet, of course, mentioned it.
The United States had both the motive and the means.
My latest: If, as seems likely, the US was behind the pipeline blasts, it shows it's ready to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield – and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has treated the Global South https://t.co/cIN1INfiOQ
US officials from Biden down had repeatedly threatened that Washington would intervene to make sure the Nord Stream pipelines could not operate. The administration was expressly against European energy dependency on Russia. Another gain from the pipelines’ destruction was that a more economically vulnerable Europe would be forced to lean even more heavily on the US as a guarantor of its security, a useful chokehold on Europe when Washington was preparing for prolonged confrontations with both Russia and China.
As for the means, only a handful of states had the divers and technical resources enabling them to pull off the extremely difficult feat of successfully planting and detonating explosives on the sea floor undetected.
Had we known then what is gradually becoming clear now, even from establishment media reporting – that the US was, at the very least, intimately involved – there would have been uproar.
It would have been clear that the US was a rogue, terrorist state, willing to burn its allies for geostrategic gain. It would been clear that there was no limit to the crimes it was prepared to commit.
Every time Europeans had to pay substantially more for their heating bills, or filling up their car, or paying for the weekly shop, they would have known that the cause was gangster-like criminality by the Biden administration.
Evidence Ignored
Which is precisely why the establishment media were so very careful after the explosions not to implicate the Biden administration in any way, even if it meant ignoring the mass of evidence staring them in the face.
It is why they ignored the incendiary report by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – who has broken some of the most important stories of the last half century – detailing exactly how the US carried out the operation. When his account was occasionally referenced by the media, it was solely to ridicule it.
The story no one wanted told. Seymour Hersh reveals how the US blew up the Nordstream gas pipelines, one of the great environmental disasters of our time. I'm guessing Hersh published on Substack because no establishment media outlet dared touch his expose https://t.co/B2IxQj5kuh
It is why, when it became obvious that the “Russia did it” claim was unsupportable, the media literally jumped ship: credulously reporting that a small group of “maverick” Ukrainians – unknown to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course – had rented a yacht and carried off one of the most daring and difficult deep-sea stunts ever recorded.
It is why, later, the media treated it as entirely unremarkable – and certainly not worthy of comment – that new evidence suggested the Biden administration was warned of this maverick Ukrainian operation against Europe’s energy security. It apparently knew what was about to happen but did precisely nothing to stop it.
My latest: First, journalists lapped up Russian culpability for the Nord Stream blasts. Now they peddle a preposterous James Bond-style story.
Anything to ignore the US role in an act of unrivalled industrial and environmental terrorism https://t.co/LIwuiIdW21
And it is why the Washington Post’s latest report changes the earlier, impossible-to-believe claim that “maverick” Ukrainians carried out the operation to destroy the pipelines into one that implicates the very top of the Ukrainian military. Yet, once again, the paper and the rest of the media steadfastly refuse to join the dots and follow the implications contained in their own reporting.
The central character in the new drama, Roman Chervinsky, belongs to Ukraine’s special operations forces. He supposedly oversaw the small, six-man team that rented a yacht and then carried out the James Bond-style attack.
The ingenuous Washington Post claims that his training and operational experience meant he was “well suited to help carry out a covert mission meant to obscure Ukraine’s responsibility”. It lists his resistance activities against Russia. None indicate that he had any experience masterminding a highly challenging, extremely dangerous, technically complex attack deep in the waters of the Baltic Sea.
Prior Knowledge
If the Ukrainian military really was behind the explosions – rather than the US – all the indications are that the Biden administration and the Pentagon must have been intimately involved in the planning, execution and subsequent cover-up.
Not least, it is extremely unlikely that the Ukrainian military had the technical capability to carry out by itself such an operation successfully and covertly.
And given that, even before the war, the Ukrainian military had fallen almost completely under US military operational control, the idea that Ukraine’s senior command would have been able to, or dared, execute this complex and risky venture without involving the US beggars belief.
Politically, it would have been quite extraordinary for Ukrainian leaders to imagine they could unilaterally decide to shut down energy supplies to Europe without consulting first with the US, especially when Ukraine’s entire war effort was being paid for and overseen by Washington and Europe.
And of course, Ukrainian leaders would have been only too aware that the US was bound to quickly work out who was behind the attack.
In such circumstances, why would the Biden administration choose to reward Ukraine with more money and arms for its act of industrial sabotage against Europe rather than punish it in some way?
Equally, the three states supposedly investigating the attack – Germany, Sweden and Denmark – would also have soon figured out that Ukraine was culpable. Why would they decide to cover up Ukraine’s attack on Europe’s economy rather than expose it – unless they were worried about upsetting the US?
And of course, there is the elephant in the room: the Washington Post’s earlier reporting indicated that the US had prior knowledge Ukraine was planning the attack. That is even more likely if the pipeline blast was signed off by Ukrainian military commanders rather than a group of Ukrainian “mavericks”.
The Post’s new story repeats the line that the Biden administration was forewarned of the attack. Now, however, the Post casually reports that, after expressing opposition, “US officials believed the attack had been called off. But it turned out only to have been postponed to three months later, using a different point of departure than originally planned”.
The Washington Post simply accepts the word of US officials that the most powerful country on the planet fell asleep at the wheel. The CIA and the Biden administration apparently knew the Ukrainian military was keen to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines and plunge Europe into an energy crisis and economic recession. But US officials were blindsided when the same small Ukrainian operational team changed locations and timings.
On this account, US intelligence fell for the simplest of bait and switches when the stakes were about as high as could be imagined. And the Washington Post and other media outlets report all of this with a faux-seriousness.
Ukrainian Fall Guy
Either way, the US is deeply implicated in the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure and the undermining of its economy.
Even if the establishment media reporting is right and Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, the Biden administration must have given the green light, overseen the operational planning and assisted in the implementation and subsequent cover-up.
Then again, if as seems far more likely, Hersh is right, then there was no middle man – the US carried out the attack on its own. It needed a fall guy. When Russia no longer fitted the bill, Ukraine became the sacrificial offering.
A year on, these muffled implications from the media’s own reporting barely raise an eyebrow.
The establishment media has played precisely the role expected of it: neutering public outrage. Its regimented acceptance of the initial, preposterous claim of Russian responsibility. Its drip-feed, uncritical reporting of other, equally improbable possibilities. Its studious refusal to join the all-too-visible dots. Its continuing incuriousness about its own story and what Ukraine’s involvement would entail.
The media has failed by every yardstick of what journalism is supposed to be there for, what it is supposed to do. And that is because the establishment media is not there to dig out the truth, it is not there to hold power to account. Ultimately, when the stakes are high – and they get no higher than the Nord Stream attack – it is there to spin narratives convenient to those in power, because the media itself is embedded in those networks of power.
Why do billionaires rush to own media corporations, even when the outlets are loss-making? Why are governments so keen to let billionaires take charge of the chief means by which we gain information and communicate with each other. Because the power to tell stories, the power over our minds, is the greatest power there is.
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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
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***
What has happened to New York?
A New York Appellate Court has just upheld Governor Kathy Hochul and the State’s appeal that the government should have the authority to isolate and / or quarantine anyone with a highly contagious disease.
Regulation 10 NYCRR 2.13 established “isolation and quarantine procedures for people that were suspected of having communicable disease.”
The original regulation wasn’t even made DURING Covid – it was enacted under the state’s emergency authorization powers on Feb. 22, 2022. It has since been renewed in 90-day intervals with the state pushing for permanent adoption. A legal challenge ensued with a New York Supreme Justice upholding the plaintiff’s argument saying that it’s unconstitutional.
At New York Attorney General Letitia James’s behalf, the Appellate Court has now overturned the ruling and it is downright frightening the consequences that this could have on American’s liberty.
The regulation, 10 NYCRR 2.13, established isolation and quarantine procedures for those who are “under suspected” of having a… pic.twitter.com/I9tlZfySCP
The State will now be able to instruct the the Department of Health to “pick and choose which New Yorkers they can lock up or lockdown without any proof they are sick and without any proof that you’ve been exposed to a communicable disease,” according to Attorney Debbie Anne Cox.
It gets worse.
“There is no time limit, so they can lock you up or lock you down for days, weeks… there is no location restrictions. They can put you in any facility they want; they can either lock you down in their house, or they can remove you from their house with the force of police and put you in a facility, detention center that they choose, you would have no say.”
Oh, and if that wasn’t enough…
There’s no procedure in how you actually get out of quarantine once you get there. Which is why the original New York Justice Ploetz ruled that the “involuntary detention is a severe deprivation of individual liberty, far more egregious than other health and safety measures,” and was a violation of constitutional due process. Instead of fighting for the people, Attorney General Letitia James argued that the plaintiff’s lacked standing.
Happening Now: The New York Appellate Division has ruled in favor of Governor Kathy Hochul in a landmark case for government overreach.
Rule 2.13: “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” will give the state of New York the ability to come in your home and take you away to… pic.twitter.com/wpWHrjU7x8
If we’ve learned anything throughout the past couple of years, it’s that our elected leaders, government and bureaucratic agencies and more don’t always have our best intentions in their hearts. Never forget what they did to small businesses and how they forced out those that put their lives on the line such as firefighters and first responders who refused, or weren’t medically able to receive the vaccine. President Biden, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Governor Hochul and others threw them under the bus and took their jobs away.
We sure as hell know that Big Pharma and Big Tech don’t have our best interests in their mind – many times caring more about their profits than actual individuals. (The Moderna CEO made $400 million last year)
The Patriot Act began as a noble concept in the wake of September 11th. It has now gone far and beyond its original purpose and has helped turn the country into a surveillance state at times.
Too much power entrusted via Executive fiat is a dangerous precedent, that is why we have Separation of Powers.
People Are Leaving New York in Droves
The medical profession is at a major PR struggle right now – many people simply do not trust their doctors as much as they used to, or at the very least have very little faith in the World Health Organization or Department of Health. I mean hell, California is bringing back mask mandates in some areas!
This latest New York power grab by Governor Hochul’s administration has only put more of your liberty at risk.
But don’t worry – because if you try to say anything, they might think it’s hate speech, which is why they are openly monitoring New Yorkers social media accounts.
And yet, Governor Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams and other Democratic leaders are ‘shocked!’ that so many New Yorkers – including millionaires and billionaires that help fund the state’s tax revenue – are getting the hell out of New York.
Hopefully New Yorkers smarten up and realize what their leaders are doing to them.
Kathy Hochul says the “social media analysis unit” will contact people who commit “hate speech” online
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Mike “Gunz” Gunzelman has been involved in the sports and media industry for over a decade. He’s also a risk taker – the first time he ever had sushi was from a Duane Reade in Penn Station in NYC.
Featured image: Gov. Kathy Hochul (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
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Data from Bankrate indicates that interest rates for new auto loans with a 60-month term have reached their highest point since the Dot Com bust era. Additionally, the soaring prices of new electric vehicles pose a significant affordability challenge for the average working-class American. Beyond affordability issues, consumer interest in EVs is also waning. This sentiment is echoed by 3,900 auto dealers who have written to President Biden, urging his administration to reconsider the pace of EV mandates, citing a severe decline in demand for these vehicles.
“Currently, there are many excellent battery electric vehicles available for consumers to purchase. These vehicles are ideal for many people, and we believe their appeal will grow over time. The reality, however, is that electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of BEVs arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. BEVs are stacking up on our lots,” the dealers said.
They said 2022 was a year of “hope and hype about EVs” but has morphed into a bust cycle as “supply of unsold BEVs is surging, as they are not selling nearly as fast as they are arriving at our dealerships — even with deep price cuts, manufacturer incentives, and generous government incentives.”
They warned:
“Already, electric vehicles are stacking up on our lots which is our best indicator of customer demand in the marketplace.”
According to Bankrate data, this may be because new auto loans with 60-month terms have soared from around 3.5% to 7.78% in a very short period – we call this an interest rate shock. Current rates are at levels not seen since the second half of 2001.
The dealers said most customers are not ready for EVs, citing unaffordability issues. No fiscally conservative American trying to survive the failure of Bidenomics wants a +$1,000 EV car payment.
They explained most customers don’t have “garages for home charging or easy access to public charging stations” and were concerned about “loss of driving range in cold or hot weather.”
With that being said, the dealers asked Biden:
Mr. President, it is time to tap the brakes on the unrealistic government electric vehicle mandate. Allow time for the battery technology to advance. Allow time to make BEVs more affordable. Allow time to develop domestic sources for the minerals to make batteries. Allow time for the charging infrastructure to be built and prove reliable. And most of all, allow time for the American consumer to get comfortable with the technology and make the choice to buy an electric vehicle.
None of this should be surprising to readers. We have well-documented the EV bust this year, pointing out in late summer that dealers struggled to sell EVs with inventories piling up.
The letter to the president also comes as the clean energy industry is plunging into turmoil, with shares of solar, wind, and hydrogen stocks crashing this year.
President Biden’s green revolution stands no chance in a high interest rate environment.
And we wonder if the EV price war sparked by Elon Musk earlier this year with major automakers means Tesla is soaking up market share – or if they, too, are experiencing demand troubles.
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The recent horrific events in Dublin left many in shock as a stabbing incident developed into an anti-immigration rally, which in turn developed into a riot as a tram, busses and Garda cars were set on fire. In the early afternoon a man stabbed three children and a care assistant. He was stopped by a 43-year-old Deliveroo driver who intervened and hit him with his helmet.
NATO makes it clear that the Kiev regime is not really a priority. In a recent statement, the head of the alliance emphasized the position of not advancing the accession process while there is a conflict with Russia.
One could earn a tidy sum the number of times the word “sovereignty” has been uttered or mentioned in public statements and briefings by the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. But such sovereignty has shown itself to be counterfeit.
On Nov. 1, the U.S. Air Force was forced to explosively “terminate” the flight test of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This meant blowing it up in the air after it exhibited unspecified in-flight anomalies to engineers monitoring its progress.
With it soon emerging that the suspect was an immigrant who had previously been served a deportation order in 2003, tensions that had been building across the country over the past year in response to the immigration policy of Leinster House, which has seen large amounts of male migrants placed into wildly unsuitable locations such as an inner city office block and a children’s school, would come to a head.
We are writing to exercise our First Amendment to petition Congress for redress of grievances. We are urging Congress to end the United States’ unconditional, close, and continual military and intelligence support of Israel in its ongoing physical destruction of 2.3 million Palestinians residing in Gaza. The United States is responsible for genocide under any plain reading of the Genocide Convention.
While Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been frantically shuttling around the Middle East trying to stop the Israeli coflict in Gaza from exploding into a regional war, the United States has also sent two aircraft carrier strike groups, a Marine Expeditionary Unit and 1,200 extra troops to the Middle East as a “deterrent.”
The event opened with Dr. Jennifer Hibberd, a dental surgeon, describing Canada as the “playground for the World Economic Forum.” But they play dirty, as she learned firsthand. She told how her clinic was raided under the suspected direction of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service the day after she posted an online video from the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. Here she is speaking on stage…
In mid-October 2019, the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project (MFBRP), in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the State of Hawai’i, The Nature Conservancy, the American Bird Conservancy, Pacific Bird Conservation, and San Diego Zoo Global, attached VHF radio transmitters to the legs of 10 kiwikiu before releasing them into the Nakula Natural Area Reserve, on the southern slope of Haleakalā volcano.
Regarding a woman in her 50s in the prefecture who died the day after receiving the new coronavirus vaccine – awarded 44 million yen (approx 300K USD). Nationally, over 2000+ vaccine deaths applications still in process.
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First published on October 15, 2023
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According to the official version, the Hamas attack “caught Israel by surprise”. However, a series of inexplicable facts do not make the official version credible.
How is it possible that the Gaza barrier was breached with bulldozers without anyone noticing?
The 64-kilometre barrier surrounding Gaza is made of an underground wall equipped with sensors to prevent tunnelling, and a 6-metre high fence with sensors, radars, cameras and automatic weapons systems connected to a command, and is manned by soldiers.
How is it possible that on that very day, a music festival was taking place involving thousands of young people, and located in the desert a few kilometres from Gaza, in an area already considered dangerous because it was within range of Hamas rockets, and moreover left without any security force?
How is it possible when Hamas militants attacked over 20 Israeli population centres, killing (according to official figures) 1300 people, the Israeli special forces, considered among the best in the world, did not immediately intervene with helicopters and only intervened with police force?
How is it possible that Mossad, considered one of the most efficient Secret Services in the world, did not realize that Hamas was preparing its attack?
The essential answers come from an article, published on October 8 by the Israeli newspaper The Times of Israel:
“For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu have adopted a policy that has divided the Gaza Strip and the West Bank between two different powers, bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees and favouring Hamas.
Hamas was treated as a partner to the detriment of the Palestinian Authority to prevent Abbas from moving towards creating a Palestinian State. Hamas was promoted from a terrorist group to an organization with which Israel conducted negotiations through Egypt, and which was allowed to receive suitcases containing millions of dollars from Qatar through the Gaza crossings.”
All these facts outline a scenario similar to the terrorist attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, when the entire US intelligence and Defence System was “caught by surprise” by an alleged Al-Qaeda attack.
Irrefutable evidence (officially ignored or dismissed as “conspiracy”) demonstrates that 9/11 was not carried out by Al Qaeda, as a means to trigger the “global war on terrorism” with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequent wars.
Something similar is happening today in Israel, whose entire Intelligence and Defence system was apparently “caught by surprise” by the Hamas attack.
The strategic aim of the operation is, on the one hand, to “put an end” to the Palestinians (so far there have been over 1,500 dead, including 500 children, and over 7000 injured) and to take over their territories.
The Israeli command has ordered the evacuation of over one million inhabitants, over half of the entire population, from the northern half of Gaza. On the other hand, the strategic aim of the operation is to trigger a chain reaction of wars in the Middle East, targeting Iran, where the United States, Israel and the European powers are losing ground.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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Last Thursday afternoon, news would spread throughout Ireland of a horrific knife attack on three young schoolchildren and their teacher outside a Gaelscoil (Irish-language school) in Dublin city centre. At the time of writing, the youngest of the victims, a five year old girl, remains gravely ill in hospital.
With it soon emerging that the suspect was an immigrant who had previously been served a deportation order in 2003, tensions that had been building across the country over the past year in response to the immigration policy of Leinster House, which has seen large amounts of male migrants placed into wildly unsuitable locations such as an inner city office block and a children’s school, would come to a head. Calls for a protest in Dublin later that night would rapidly spread throughout social media.
Such protests have become a mainstay across Ireland over the past year, with the government of WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Leo Varadkar labelling protesters as ‘’far-right’’ and carrying out surveillance of organisers in response, a strategy that has served only to exacerbate tensions even further.
Last year in Canada, under the rule of fellow WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Justin Trudeau, a similar response would take place to the Freedom Convoy, a protest movement launched by Canadian truckers following the decision to mandate jab passports for drivers returning from the US, the largest land-border in the world and a key component of the Canadian economy.
Just as open borders policies serve the interests of the global elites that the WEF represents, via the undermining of national sovereignty and the devaluing of labour, jab passports served their interests by acting as conditioning for the introduction of an eventual mandatory digital ID, which in line with the Great Reset initiative would allow the government-corporate alliance to have an unprecedented level of control over its citizens’ finances in a cashless society.
The fraught tensions that had spurred on Thursday’s planned protest however, would seemingly attract an opportunistic element, one that had engaged in looting and the burning of vehicles in Dublin on the night.
Unsavoury scenes, though it cannot be understated that, in terms of magnitude, they are a universe apart from the stabbing of children.
The establishment media however, did not hold the same view; with the unrest that swept Dublin dominating newspaper headlines alongside accusations that it had been ‘’organised by the far-right’’, the brutal attack on the children and their teacher being consigned to a mere afterthought.
Security Minister for the southern Irish state, Helen McEntee announced that legislation would be fast tracked to introduce Facial Recognition Technology – another key component of the Great Reset – in response to the riots, and it was announced that MMA star Conor McGregor was being investigated for ‘’inciting hate’’ over a post on X that he had sent the night BEFORE the stabbings.
A lockstep response of condemnation, though one that lies in stark contrast to the response towards the riots that swept the United States following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, for which a minutes silence was held in the southern Irish Parliament, something that has so far not occurred for the victims of last Thursday’s mass-stabbing.
To understand why, one must look at the wider political context at the time of George Floyd’s death.
Four days prior to the footage of Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck going viral, Joe Biden, the then-Democrat candidate for that years US Presidential election, infamously declared that whoever voted for the incumbent Donald Trump over him ‘’Ain’t black’’ in an attempt to garner support amongst the black community of the United States for his Presidential campaign. A PR disaster, and one that confirmed he was in need of the black vote in order to guarantee an electoral victory.
Thus, the death of George Floyd was weaponised to guarantee such a result, with violent riots sweeping the United States in the aftermath. In contrast to the one night of looting and arson that took place in Dublin however, the mainstream media would provide cover for the months-long unrest in the US, with corporate outlet CNN notoriously describing it as ‘’fiery but mostly peaceful’’ at one stage.
Key to this was the involvement of George Soros, a significant donor to both the Democratic Party and the Black Lives Matter organisation via his Open Society Foundations, a globalist support-network that has sponsored colour revolutions from as far afield as Ukraine and China.
It is also why last week’s night of unrest in Dublin, carried out amidst a wider political context of opposition to globalist policies in Ireland, came in for far more media condemnation than the months of BLM-led riots that took place in the United States in 2020.
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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism. Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Support him on Patreon.
Featured image: Dubliners watch as a Dublin Bus is engulfed in flames during the 2023 Dublin riot. Photograph taken from O’Connell Bridge, facing northwards towards O’Connell Street. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
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NATO makes it clear that the Kiev regime is not really a priority. In a recent statement, the head of the alliance emphasized the position of not advancing the accession process while there is a conflict with Russia. In practice, NATO is simply stating that it will not allow Ukrainian access, as the organization itself does everything possible to ensure that the conflict does not end.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenbergstated in an interview on November 28 that Ukraine’s entry will only happen when the necessary “conditions” for it materialize. In other words, he emphasized again that without the end of the war with Russia there can be no progress in the accession process.
According to Stoltenberg, Ukraine “is closer to NATO than ever,” however completion of entry is only expected to happen after the country’s main problems are resolved. It is necessary to end the war and implement some reforms to adapt Kiev to the bloc’s requirements. Although Ukraine has been exempted from entirely fulfilling the Membership Action Plan (MAP) obligations, some countries remain reluctant to accept Kiev without certain reforms being carried out. Therefore, an adapted program of reforms is expected to be required, which makes the Ukrainian situation difficult.
The reforms established in this special program are expected to be fulfilled by Ukraine only after the end of the conflict, which reduces expectations of real access, as it is unlikely that Ukraine will have the necessary conditions to advance major national projects in a post-war scenario. In practice, by establishing these new conditions, NATO may simply be making Ukrainian access unfeasible.
In fact, such obstacles will continue to be in Ukraine’s path to NATO. The bloc made the promise to its proxy but evidently does not want to and cannot fulfill it. Ukraine does not meet the basic conditions required by the alliance, in addition to the fact that it is in a conflict situation, which prevents it from being admitted. Being a collective security treaty, NATO cannot admit a new member that is at war, as this would automatically mean placing all other members in the same conflict scenario.
In practice, the promise made by NATO to Ukraine appears to have simply been a bluff. To react to Russian military initiatives and encourage pro-Ukrainian propaganda around the world, the alliance promised to admit Kiev, but did not move forward with the process, hoping that all sides would “forget” the promise over time. But such “forgetfulness” did not happen. Kiev continues to insist on its accession and hopes to receive solid guarantees that admission will happen – even if only after the conflict.
The problem is that, as far as it depends on NATO, the conflict will not end anytime soon. As well known, the bloc’s intention is to maintain hostilities against Russia for as long as possible. Not by chance, in the same interview, Stoltenberg assured that NATO will support Ukraine “as long as it takes”, guaranteeing that new military and financial aid packages will be provided to the regime in the future. This means that NATO does not want the war to end, keeping active the plan to fight “to the last Ukrainian.” Consequently, Kiev’s chances of gaining access to NATO in a post-conflict scenario decrease significantly.
Post-war Ukraine will be in a catastrophic situation of social crisis and military weakness. The country will not have the necessary conditions to enter the alliance or any other international bloc as it will be demilitarized and in debt, without being able to contribute anything to NATO’s “collective security”. So, by postponing the decision to “admit or not” Kiev, Stoltenberg is simply saying that accession will never happen.
For any analyst, the impossibility of this access has always seemed obvious. Ukraine is a NATO proxy, so it cannot be a member. The alliance mobilizes Ukraine against Russia precisely because it is not a member, as this frees the bloc from the obligation of intervening in favor of the regime. Ukrainian membership would prevent Kiev from fulfilling its role in NATO’s war plans, which is why the promise of membership was always a mere bluff.
The best Ukraine can do in this scenario is to “change sides” and stop its fruitless partnership with NATO. Upon realizing that it was used in a war plan and that it will receive nothing for it, the Ukrainian government should agree to negotiate under Moscow’s peace terms.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Members of the US Congress fear that if a military and financial aid package for Ukraine cannot be agreed before Christmas, it could be delayed until after the 2024 presidential elections, which take place in the distant November. The Economist notes that due to this funding uncertainty, “now America has become one of Ukraine’s greatest worries” since Washington has been “Ukraine’s greatest saviour as it marshalled arms, money and more to help” to fight Russian forces.
According to the London-based outlet, “the longer the delay, the more the Republican and Democratic parties will “become consumed by election fever.”
“If there is no deal before Christmas, some in Congress worry, a fresh allocation of aid may be delayed until after the elections in November 2024,” the Economist reported, citing a source in the US Senate, who added that if Donald Trump was to be elected president, funding could stop completely.
Ukrainian officials fear that without American support, Kiev’s allies in Europe could lose heart, with the magazine highlighting that Ukraine is trying to boost its defence industry, which was famous during the Soviet era but has been badly neglected since.
“No matter how much we grow local production, we would be hugely dependent on Western partnerships,” admitted a senior official in Kiev.
Another Ukrainian source cited by the Economist said,
“In the spring the flow of military supplies was a broad river. In the summer it was a stream. Now it is a few drops of tears.”
Without US and Western funding, Ukraine’s collapse would be imminent since this was the decisive factor in why the eastern European country’s military has survived for as long as it has. The situation is so dire that the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy and the National Bank believe that Ukraine’s GDP is expected to reach pre-crisis 2021 levels only in 2030.
Ukraine’s GDP dropped 29.1% last year, falling from 5.5 trillion hryvnia to 3.8 trillion hryvnia at constant prices, considering 2021 as the base year. With an average annual growth rate of 4.8%, the Ukrainian economy will reach pre-crisis levels only in 2030, when GDP will reach 5.6 trillion hryvnia at 2021 prices.
In comparison, the International Monetary Fund expects an average growth of 4.3% per year for the Ukrainian economy from 2025 to 2028.
Meanwhile, the Russian economy, which contracted 2.1% last year to 132.5 trillion rubles in 2021 prices, is forecast to grow 2.45% this year, reaching a GDP of 135.7 trillion rubles. Despite the sanctions, this value represents approximately 445 billion rubles more than recorded before the crisis.
Evidently, the sanctions against Russia have failed whilst Ukraine continues to struggle. Yet, despite this reality, the Biden administration is adamant about maintaining sanctions and financing Ukraine and is only blocked from doing so because of the strong opposition in Congress.
Biden’s unrelenting yet failed Ukraine policy will likely be his undoing since his popularity continues to plummet in the polls.
The latest Morning Consult poll, updated on November 27, had Biden’s approval rating at 38% and his disapproval rating at 55%. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of all polls, Biden’s approval rating sat at 39%, with 54.7% disapproving.
The New York Times/Siena College polls at the beginning of November showed Trump ahead of Biden in four of the six swing states. Still, more indicators of the president’s electoral peril soon followed. Biden’s popularity in head-to-head matchups with Trump is dwindling, as seen in the fact that among the latest surveys this month from 13 separate pollsters, Biden’s position is worse than their previous polls in all but two.
“And while polls suggest most of the movement comes from voters abandoning Biden — who might become undecided but not swing to supporting Trump — the Republican has also started to gain steam. Trump’s vote share in the national polling average is higher now than at any point in the past year.”
A massive reason for the swing in popularity between Biden and Trump is their respective positions on the Ukraine war.
Trump has claimed he can end the conflict in 24 hours, and even though this is doubtful, it points to the fact that he wants to wrap up this war quickly.
Biden, on the other hand, not only instigated the start of the war but is attempting to continue it for as long as possible, even at the expense of the American taxpayers who are already struggling with the cost of living.
If funding of Ukraine is discontinued until at least November 2024, Moscow will likely have ended the war by then after achieving their goals and will be ready to start engaging in slow normalisation efforts with Washington – if Trump were to be elected.
And even if Congress eventually approves a new aid package for Ukraine, it will only merely delay for a short duration Russia’s final victory.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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We are writing to exercise our First Amendment to petition Congress for redress of grievances. We are urging Congress to end the United States’ unconditional, close, and continual military and intelligence support of Israel in its ongoing physical destruction of 2.3 million Palestinians residing in Gaza. The United States is responsible for genocide under any plain reading of the Genocide Convention.
Congress commands plenary power over the foreign policy of the United States. It employed the power of the purse to end United States combat in Indochina on August 16, 1973. It prohibited the CIA from intermeddling in Angola with the Clark Amendment in 1975. And by statute, Congress has insisted that Israel receive weapons that ensure a Qualitative Military Edge over its neighbors.
Words only diminish our revulsion at the congressional dereliction in enabling President Joe Biden to transfer weapons and share real-time intelligence with Israel to destroy Palestinian civilians in Gaza in violation of multiple laws: the Genocide Convention, the federal prohibition of genocide,18 U.S.C. 1091, the Leahy Amendments, the Declare War Clause of the Constitution, and the statutory restriction on the use of American arms for defensive purposes only.
Why has Congress neglected public hearings to expose and redress these offenses to the rule of law?
Congress should enact a Joint Resolution endorsing a two-state solution featuring a Palestinian state initially administered by a United Nations caretaker mission to organize free and fair elections.
The United States’ current unlawful foreign policy is indistinguishable from “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” voiced by Thucydides in History ofthe Peloponnesian War.
Section 2 of the Genocide Convention defines the crime as including “intentionally creating conditions of life calculated to physically destroy a racial, religious, ethnic, or national group in whole or in part.” Evidence in the public domain authoritatively establishes that Israel is intentionally creating conditions of life in Gaza intended to physically destroy the 2.3 million Palestinian occupants. Israeli officials, without dissent, announced a siege of Gaza including the genocidal refrain, “no food, no water, no power, no electricity, no medicine, no shelter, no anything.” See e.g., “‘Erase Gaza’: Conflict Unleashes Inflammatory Rhetoric From Israeli Leaders,” New York Times, A7, November 16, 2023. Palestinians are even prohibited from collecting or storing rainwater which is considered the property of the Israeli government.
The siege of Gaza’s population has been fortified by a land invasion and bombings of hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bread bakeries, water mains, schools, apartment buildings, marketplaces, fleeing refugee families to nowhere, journalists, mosques, churches, and clearly marked United Nations schools and relief sites. Death certificates are prepared before the ink on birth certificates dries. Fires cannot be extinguished. Diseases are spreading. Deaths are at least 20,000 and probably twice or three times that number increasing by the hour, from lack of water, food, and urgent medical treatment, for those homeless battered families being driven south under Israeli bombardment and communications blackouts. There are no safe sanctuaries whether in North or South Gaza – even in hospitals they blockaded. Gaza is a free fire zone for the IDF.
Israel has turned its brutal war machine on the entire Palestinian population in Gaza. Israel’s President declaimed, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” An Israeli Knesset member echoed, “The Children of Gaza brought it upon themselves.” The Defense Minister insisted, “We are fighting human animals and will treat them accordingly.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu added that the Gaza conflict is between 21st century progress and “the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages” and a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness.” He reminded Israeli Jews of the Lord’s ordering the destruction of Amalek in the Book of Samuel, “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
The Nazis in World War II attempted to conceal the Holocaust fearing legal accountability. Israel’s genocide is unfolding in plain view confidant of impunity, including unconditional callous congressional support and gross misdirection of taxpayer dollars for violence, in lieu of satisfying the critical needs of the American people.
Congress is poised, without even public hearings and witnesses, to spend an additional $14.3 billion of taxpayer dollars to compensate for a staggering blunder of Israeli intelligence.Why?
Israel has taken an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth standard of justice of Leviticus to a criminal, genocidal level: 10,000 eyes for an eye, 10,000 teeth for a tooth. It is turning Gaza into a vast sick and dying huddle of civilian families exposed to American bombs and missiles. As the Washington Post reported, “hunger, thirst and disease are quickly spreading.” Babies are dying alone having lost their parents.
Had the touted Israeli defenses and intelligence not been colossally AWOL, the October 7th attack could never have occurred. As one elderly Holocaust survivor told The New York Times, “It should never have happened…”
President Biden has made the United States a belligerent and co-belligerent with Israel against Hamas without a constitutionally required declaration of war by Congress. Systematically providing the IDF with massive weapons made us a co-belligerent and sharing real-time battlefield intelligence made us a belligerent.
Such presidential wars are impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors as Mr. Biden himself vigorously underscored in his presidential campaign for the 2008 Democratic nomination in an interview with Chris Matthews on Hardball on December 4, 2007.
Listen further to the fundamental, historical provocation of the war as elaborated by David Ben-Gurion, founder and first Prime Minister of Israel:
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true, God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” Printed in “The Jewish Paradox,” (p. 121) by Nahum Goldmann.
Ben Gurion’s recognition was echoed by Israel’s acclaimed war hero Moshe Dayan. Standing close to the Gaza border in 1956 eulogizing a 21-year-old Israeli security officer who had been slain by Palestinian and Egyptian assailants, Dayan reflected,
“Let us not today cast blame on his murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in refugee camps of Gaza and watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.”
Also often forgotten by most Members of Congress is P.M. Netanyahu’s widely quoted strategy of supporting and funding Hamas over the years to thwart a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority. Roger Cohen of the New York Times wrote on October 22, 2023,
“All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: ‘Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.’”
The “From the river to the sea” expression originated with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party pressing for a “Greater Israel” in all of Palestine, not with Hamas. Further, the idea is also consistent with peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Jews, by people advocating a one-state solution.
Dante observed, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” The Congressional positions against Palestinian civilians, three-quarters of whom are children and women, are far beyond neutrality. Read the front-page article of the New York Times (November 26, 2023) headlined: “Israel Has Killed More Women and Children Than Have Been Killed in Ukraine.”
Congress should follow the example of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 who interceded in the Suez crisis to stop the attacks by Israel, France, and the United Kingdom, on Egypt. He also initiated the United Nations peacekeeping force in the Sinai.
Congress should conduct public hearings in the House and Senate featuring prominent and longtime Israeli peace advocates, holding past high-level government positions, along with Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups. Their voices have been excluded from Capitol Hill since 1948. You know why? Shame!
Congress cannot escape the judgment of history which will endure for the ages over its defining role in the annihilation of innocent Palestinian families – mostly children and women – inside Gaza – long described as Israel’s illegally blockaded open-air prison.
We look forward to a congressional response, from U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives respectful of citizen petitions.
Sincerely,
Bruce Fein, Esq.
Ralph Nader, Esq.
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On Nov. 1, the U.S. Air Force was forced to explosively “terminate” the flight test of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This meant blowing it up in the air after it exhibited unspecified in-flight anomalies to engineers monitoring its progress.
The test launch, carried out by the U.S. Air Force’s Global Strike Command, is, according to the Air Force, “part of routine and periodic activities intended to demonstrate that the United States’ nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, reliable, and effective to deter 21st century threats and reassure our allies.”
The U.S. Air Force maintains some 400 Minuteman III, stored in silos and ostensibly on 24-hour alert to respond to any potential strategic threat targeting the United States and/or its allies. The Minuteman III has been the land-based component of the “nuclear triad” of U.S. strategic deterrence (the other two being the sea component of Trident missiles onboard Ohio-class submarines and the air component of specially designated B-52 and B-2 manned bombers).
The Minuteman III was developed in 1968, an improvement on the original Minuteman I missile design from 1958. It entered operational service in 1970. Originally conceived to carry three independently targeted warheads, the Minuteman III was retrofitted with a single warhead as part of the now defunct START II treaty, ratified by both the U.S. and Russia, but never entered into force.
Image: Presidents George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign START II on Jan. 3, 1993, at the tail end of Bush’s term in office, in Moscow. (Kremlin, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
While the New START treaty that remains in effect today does not limit the number of warheads the Minuteman III can carry, the warhead limitations of the previous treaty means that the Minuteman III continues to be fitted out with a single warhead, although the U.S. Air Force routinely carries out flight tests of Minuteman III missiles retrofitted with three warheads.
The Minuteman III is scheduled to be replaced starting in 2029 with a new generation of U.S. land-based ICBM known as the Sentinel. Some Minuteman III missiles will remain on duty until the Sentinel is fully deployed sometime in the mid-to-late 2030s.
Sometime last year a British Vanguard submarine, carrying 16 nuclear-armed Trident II missiles, suffered a mechanical failure during dive operations which, if left unrectified, could have resulted in a catastrophe for the 140 crewmembers aboard at the time.
The Vanguard-class submarines (four were built) entered service in 1993, and are currently scheduled to be replaced with the new Dreadnaught-class missile submarine sometime in the 2030s. The Vanguard represents the totality of the British nuclear deterrence force. In 2017 a Vanguard-class submarine carried out a failed test launch of a Trident II missile which was kept secret from British Parliament during heated debates about the future of the British independent nuclear deterrent.
Royal Navy Vanguard Class submarine HMS Vigilant in 2014. (Thomas McDonald/MOD, Wikimedia Commons, OGL v1.0)
The failures of the aging U.S. and British strategic nuclear deterrence force contrasts sharply with a series of successful tests carried out by the Russian counterparts, including the recent launches of a modern Bulava missile from a new Borei-class submarine, a Yars ICBM equipped with an advanced Avangard hypersonic warhead, and the successful test launch of a new nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile (the Russians are not immune to test failures, either, as demonstrated by the failure of a Sarmat heavy ICBM earlier this year.)
The fielding of a new generation of Russian strategic nuclear missiles places additional pressure on both the U.S. and U.K. to push forward with expensive modernization programs at a time when competition for funding has created domestic political challenges in both nations.
Missing Arms Control Framework
Complicating things further is the lack of any viable arms control framework to keep the rush to deploy new strategic systems by all three nations from exploding into an arms race that could destabilize the strategic balance of power that has existed for decades. Citing the incompatibility of strategic arms control with the U.S. at a time when Washington’s official policy is to strategically defeat Russia, Moscow has suspended its participation in the New START treaty.
Image: U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and after signing the New START treaty in Prague, April 2010. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The New START treaty expires in February 2026. While both Russia and the U.S. had indicated an interest in pursuing a follow-on treaty that would maintain the strategic equilibrium that existed under New START, the lack of any ongoing contact between arms control negotiators from the U.S. and Russia makes any chance of having a new treaty vehicle ready in time to replace New START highly unlikely.
But the fact is that Russia appears unlikely to pursue such an option even if it were doable. Based upon a series of discussions with senior Russian officials who are knowledgeable about strategic nuclear policy, Russian officials are no longer interested in trying to patch up an arms control relationship with the U.S. that is founded in the legacy of the Cold War. The prevailing mood in Russia is that the U.S. has, over the years, negotiated in bad faith, seeking to use arms control as a vehicle to sustain U.S. strategic dominance as opposed to nuclear parity and stability.
When treaties are negotiated that achieve a modicum of reciprocal benefit, such as the anti-ballistic missile treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, the U.S. withdraws once the treaty is deemed to be inconvenient to U.S. strategic objectives, such as missile defense or responding to developments outside the framework of the treaty (such as Chinese missile systems not covered under the INF treaty.)
Russians believe that the strategic arms reduction treaties, individually and collectively, were never designed to produce nuclear parity, but rather to sustain U.S. nuclear superiority. The New START treaty has been singled out as an example of U.S. duplicity, where the Obama administration kept issues pertaining to missile reductions separate from missile defense, promising to address each separately, only to walk away from missile defense once the missile reduction treaty (New START) was ratified.
When New START expires in 2026, Russia is positioning itself to pursue its current nuclear modernization programs free of any treaty constraints. This will complicate the nuclear modernization efforts of both the U.S. and U.K., whose follow-on capabilities, being developed at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, will be inferior to the systems Russia is in the process of deploying.
Russia will not entertain any negotiating process which seeks to nullify its strategic advantage, especially so long as the U.S. and its Western allies embrace policies which paint Russia as a strategic enemy and seek the strategic defeat of Russia.
If there is to be any hope for a revival of nuclear arms control between the U.S. and Russia, it will not be through a vehicle which sustains the legacy of the Cold War.
Instead, a new strategic relationship will have to emerge based upon modern realities, where the U.S. either must spend huge amounts of money to reach nuclear parity with Russia or negotiate from a position of strategic inferiority.
The day and age of unquestioned American nuclear superiority has passed.
Whether U.S. policy makers can adjust to this new circumstance remains to be seen. But any failure to do so will only trigger an inevitable arms race which the U.S. cannot win, and for which the consequences of failure could be fatal to the entire world.
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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
Featured image: Crewmen perform an electrical check on an LGM-30F Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in its silo in 1980. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
This article was first published by Global Research in July 2014
The Al Qaeda legend and the threat of the “Outside Enemy” is sustained through extensive media and government propaganda.
In the post 9/11 era, the terrorist threat from Al Qaeda constitutes the building block of US-NATO military doctrine. It justifies –under a humanitarian mandate– the conduct of “counter-terrorism operations” Worldwide.
Known and documented, Al Qaeda affiliated entities have been used by US-NATO in numerous conflicts as “intelligence assets” since the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war. In Syria, the Al Nusrah and ISIS rebels are the foot-soldiers of the Western military alliance, which in turn oversees and controls the recruitment and training of paramilitary forces.
While the US State Department is accusing several countries of “harboring terrorists”, America is the Number One“State Sponsor of Terrorism”: The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) –which operates in both Syria and Iraq– is covertly supported and financed by the US and its allies including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Moreover, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’s Sunni caliphate project coincides with a longstanding US agenda to carve up both Iraq and Syria into separate territories: A Sunni Islamist Caliphate, an Arab Shia Republic, a Republic of Kurdistan, among others.
The US-led Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) constitutes the cornerstone of US military doctrine. “Going after Islamic terrorists” is part and parcel of non-conventional warfare. The underlying objective is to justify the conduct of counter-terrorism operations Worldwide, which enables the US and its allies to intervene in the affairs of sovereign countries.
Many progressive writers, including alternative media, while focusing on recent developments in Iraq, fail to understand the logic behind the “Global War on Terrorism.” The Islamic State of Iraq and Al Cham (ISIS) is often considered as an “independent entity” rather than an instrument of the Western military alliance. Moreover, many committed anti-war activists –who oppose the tenets of the US-NATO military agenda– will nonetheless endorse Washington’s counter-terrorism agenda directed against Al Qaeda:. The Worldwide terrorist threat is considered to be “real”: “We are against the war, but we support the Global War on Terrorism”.
The Caliphate Project and The US National Intelligence Council Report
A new gush of propaganda has been set in motion. The leader of the now defunct Islamic State of Iraq and Al Cham (ISIS) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced on June 29, 2014 the creation of an Islamic State:
Fighters loyal to the group’s proclaimed “Caliph Ibrahim ibn Awwad”, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as he was known until Sunday’s July 1st announcement, are inspired by the Rashidun caliphate, which succeeded the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, and is revered by most Muslims.” (Daily Telegraph, June 30, 2014)
In a bitter irony, the caliphate project as an instrument of propaganda has been on the drawing board of US intelligence for more than ten years. In December 2004, under the Bush Administration, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) predicted that in the year 2020 a New Caliphate extending from the Western Mediterranean to Central Asia and South East Asia would emerge, threatening Western democracy and Western values.
The “findings” of the National Intelligence Council were published in a 123 page unclassified report entitled “Mapping the Global Future”.
“A New Caliphate provides an example of how a global movement fueled by radical religious identity politics could constitute a challenge to Western norms and values as the foundation of the global system” (emphasis added)
The NIC 2004 report borders on ridicule; it is devoid of intelligence, let alone historical and geopolitical analysis. Its fake narrative pertaining to the caliphate, nonetheless, bears a canny resemblance to the June 29, 2014 highly publicized PR announcement of the creation of the Caliphate by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The NIC report presents a so-called “fictional scenario of a letter from a fictional grandson of Bin Ladin to a family relative in 2020.” It is on this basis that it makes predictions for the year 2020. Based on an invented bin Laden grandson letter narrative rather than on intelligence and empirical analysis, the US intelligence community concludes that the caliphate constitutes a real danger for the Western World and Western civilization.
From a propaganda standpoint, the objective underlying the Caliphate project –as described by the NIC– is to demonize Muslims with a view to justifying a military crusade:
“The fictional scenario portrayed below provides an example of how a global movement fueled by radical religious identity could emerge.
Under this scenario, a new Caliphate is proclaimed and manages to advance a powerful counter ideology that has widespread appeal.
It is depicted in the form of a hypothetical letter from a fictional grandson of Bin Ladin to a family relative in 2020.
He recounts the struggles of the Caliph in trying to wrest control from traditional regimes and the conflict and confusion which ensue both within the Muslim world and outside between Muslims and the United States, Europe, Russia and China. While the Caliph’s success in mobilizing support varies, places far outside the Muslim core in the Middle East—in Africa and Asia—are convulsed as a result of his appeals.
The scenario ends before the Caliph is able to establish both spiritual and temporal authority over a territory— which historically has been the case for previous Caliphates. At the end of the scenario, we identify lessons to be drawn.”(“Mapping the Global Future”. p. 83)
page 90 of the report
This “authoritative” NIC “Mapping the Global Future” report was not only presented to the White House, the Congress and the Pentagon, it was also dispatched to America’s allies. The “threat emanating from the Muslim World” referred to in the NIC report (including the section on the caliphate project) is firmly entrenched in US-NATO military doctrine.
The NIC document was intended to be read by top officials. Broadly speaking it was part of the “Top official” (TOPOFF) propaganda campaign which targets senior foreign policy and military decision-makers, not to mention scholars, researchers and NGO “activists”. The objective is to ensure that “top officials” continue to believe that Islamic terrorists are threatening the security of the Western World.
The underpinnings of the caliphate scenario is the “Clash of Civilizations”, which provides a justification in the eyes of public opinion for America to intervene Worldwide as part of a global counter- terrorism agenda.
From a geopolitical and geographic standpoint, the caliphate constitutes a broad area in which the US is seeking to extend its economic and strategic influence. In the words of Dick Cheney pertaining to the 2004 NIC’s report:
“They talk about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the Seventh Century Caliphate. This was the world as it was organized 1,200, 1,300 years, in effect, when Islam or Islamic people controlled everything from Portugal and Spain in the West; all through the Mediterranean to North Africa; all of North Africa; the Middle East; up into the Balkans; the Central Asian republics; the southern tip of Russia; a good swath of India; and on around to modern day Indonesia. In one sense from Bali and Jakarta on one end, to Madrid on the other.” Dick Cheney (emphasis added)
Screenshot, p. 92 of NIC Report
What Cheney was describing in today’s context is a broad strategic region extending from the Mediterranean to Central Asia and South East Asia in which the US and its allies are directly involved in a variety of military and intelligence operations, including covert US support to ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliated entities in the so-called “countries and territories where radical Islamists have aided violent groups…” (see map above)
The stated aim of the NIC report was “to prepare the next Bush administration for challenges that lie ahead by projecting current trends that may pose a threat to US interests”.
The NIC intelligence document was based, lest we forget, on “a hypothetical letter from a fictional grandson of Bin Ladin to a [fictional] family relative in [the year] 2020”. “The Lessons Learnt” as outlined in this “authoritative’ NIC intelligence document are as follows:
the caliphate project “constitutes a serious challenge to the international order”.
“The IT revolution is likely to amplify the clash between Western and Muslim worlds…”
The document refers to the appeal of the caliphate to Muslims and concludes that:
“the proclamation of the Caliphate would not lessen the likelihood of terrorism and in fomenting more conflict”. [sic]
The NIC’s analysis suggests that the proclamation of a caliphate will generate a new wave of terrorism emanating from Muslim countries thereby justifying an escalation in America’s Global War on Terrorism (GWOT):
the proclamation of the caliphate … could fuel a new generation of terrorists intent on attacking those opposed to the caliphate, whether inside or outside the Muslim World.” (emphasis added)
What the NIC report fails to mention is that US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad are covertly involved in supporting both the terrorists and the caliphate project.
In turn, the media has embarked on a new wave of lies and fabrications, focusing on “a new terrorist threat” emanating not only from the Muslim World, but from “home grown Islamist terrorists” in Europe and North America.
The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.
While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.
America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.
This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.
It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.
The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.
Mais uma vez, a OTAN deixa claro que o regime de Kiev não é realmente uma prioridade. Numa declaração recente, o chefe da aliança enfatizou a posição de não avançar no processo de adesão enquanto houver conflito com a Rússia. Na prática, a OTAN está simplesmente afirmando que não permitirá o acesso ucraniano, pois a própria organização faz todo o possível para garantir que o conflito não termine.
O secretário-geral, Jens Stoltenberg, afirmou numa entrevista no dia 28 de novembro que a entrada da Ucrânia só acontecerá quando se concretizarem as “condições” necessárias. Por outras palavras, voltou a sublinhar que sem o fim da guerra com a Rússia não poderá haver progresso no processo de adesão.
Segundo Stoltenberg, a Ucrânia “está mais próxima do que nunca da OTAN”, mas a conclusão da adesão só deverá acontecer depois de os principais problemas do país estarem resolvidos. É necessário acabar com a guerra e implementar algumas reformas para adaptar Kiev às exigências do bloco. Embora a Ucrânia tenha sido liberada do cumprimento integral das obrigações do Plano de Ação para a Adesão (MAP, em inglês), alguns países continuam relutantes em aceitar Kiev sem que sejam realizadas certas reformas. Portanto, espera-se que seja necessário um programa de reformas adaptado, o que torna a situação ucraniana difícil.
As reformas estabelecidas neste programa especial deverão ser cumpridas pela Ucrânia apenas após o fim do conflito, o que reduz as expectativas de acesso real, pois é pouco provável que a Ucrânia tenha as condições necessárias para avançar em grandes projetos nacionais num cenário pós-guerra. Na prática, ao estabelecer estas novas condições, a OTAN pode simplesmente estar a inviabilizar o acesso da Ucrânia.
Na verdade, tais obstáculos continuarão a ser colocados no caminho da Ucrânia para a OTAN. O bloco fez a promessa ao seu representante, mas evidentemente não quer e não pode cumpri-la. A Ucrânia não reúne as condições básicas exigidas pela aliança, além de se encontrar em situação de conflito, o que impede a sua admissão. Sendo um tratado de segurança coletiva, a OTAN não pode admitir um novo membro que esteja em guerra, pois isso significaria automaticamente colocar todos os outros membros no mesmo cenário de conflito.
Na prática, a promessa feita pela OTAN à Ucrânia parece ter sido simplesmente um blefe. Para reagir às iniciativas militares russas e encorajar a propaganda pró-ucraniana em todo o mundo, a aliança prometeu admitir Kiev, mas não avançou com o processo, esperando que todos os lados “esquecessem” a promessa ao longo do tempo. Mas tal “esquecimento” não aconteceu. Kiev continua a insistir na sua adesão e espera receber garantias sólidas de que a admissão acontecerá – mesmo que apenas após o conflito.
O problema é que, no que depender da OTAN, o conflito não terminará tão cedo. Como é sabido, a intenção do bloco é manter as hostilidades contra a Rússia durante o maior tempo possível. Não por acaso, na mesma entrevista, Stoltenberg garantiu que a OTAN apoiará a Ucrânia “enquanto for necessário”, garantindo que novos pacotes de ajuda militar e financeira serão fornecidos ao regime no futuro. Consequentemente, as possibilidades de Kiev obter acesso à OTAN diminuem significativamente.
A Ucrânia do pós-guerra estará numa situação catastrófica de crise social e fraqueza militar. O país não terá as condições necessárias para entrar na aliança ou em qualquer outro bloco internacional, pois estará desmilitarizado e endividado, sem poder contribuir em nada para a “segurança coletiva” da OTAN. Assim, ao adiar a decisão de “admitir ou não” Kiev, Stoltenberg está simplesmente a dizer que a adesão nunca acontecerá.
Para qualquer analista, a impossibilidade deste acesso sempre pareceu óbvia. A Ucrânia é um proxy da OTAN, por isso não pode ser membro. A aliança mobiliza a Ucrânia contra a Rússia precisamente porque não é membro, pois isso libera o bloco da obrigação de intervir a favor do regime. A adesão da Ucrânia impediria Kiev de cumprir o seu papel nos planos de guerra da OTAN, razão pela qual a promessa de adesão foi sempre um mero blefe.
O melhor que a Ucrânia pode fazer neste cenário é “mudar de lado” e pôr fim à sua parceria infrutífera com a OTAN. Ao perceber que foi usado num plano de guerra e que não receberá nada por isso, o governo ucraniano deveria cortar laços com o Ocidente e concordar em negociar sob os termos de paz de Moscou. Esta é a melhor forma de evitar que a situação se agrave ainda mais.
As autoridades de Kiev continuam a espalhar narrativas infundadas sobre o conflito, prevendo que as hostilidades tendem a expandir-se para outros territórios na Eurásia, uma vez que o conflito se tornou supostamente numa “guerra de recursos”. Embora exista um risco real de o conflito se espalhar para outras regiões, a retórica está errada e esta narrativa ajuda a espalhar a paranóia anti-russa.
O tenente-coronel Sergey Naev, comandante das forças conjuntas ucranianas, revelou seus pensamentos durante uma entrevista à ABC News. Para ele, com a estabilidade russa e a diminuição do apoio militar a Kiev, Moscou poderia ir além da Ucrânia nas suas manobras militares, envolvendo mais países nas hostilidades. Naev afirma que a Rússia recebe atualmente armas da Coreia do Norte e do Irã e que está a produzir equipamento militar suficiente para permanecer ativa no conflito.
Entretanto, a Ucrânia está a perder o apoio ocidental, recebendo cada vez menos armas e dinheiro. Naev está preocupado com este cenário, pois, para ele, só com uma Ucrânia forte frente à Rússia será possível impedir os alegados planos expansionistas de Moscou. Neste sentido, deixa claro que, apesar das dificuldades, as forças armadas ucranianas já se preparam para o futuro do conflito, melhorando as linhas de defesa para impedir o avanço russo.
“Estamos a preparar-nos para isso. Construímos defesas, colocamos minas e treinamos as nossas forças”, enfatizou.
Existem alguns pontos diferentes nas palavras de Naev que precisam ser analisados. Em primeiro lugar, é necessário sublinhar que ele tem razão na sua avaliação da crítica situação ucraniana. Com a redução dos recursos dados ao país pelo Ocidente, a Ucrânia tem expectativas terríveis para o futuro próximo do conflito. Desde o início da guerra na Palestina, o foco ocidental tem sido o apoio a Israel na sua campanha de limpeza étnica contra o povo de Gaza, razão pela qual a fonte “infinita” de recursos para a Ucrânia está a secar.
Como sabemos, Kiev já não tem força suficiente para manter as hostilidades a longo prazo e em algum momento o regime será forçado a render-se, mesmo que isso não agrade aos patrocinadores ocidentais. Tendo recebido numerosos pacotes militares, os ucranianos conseguiram pelo menos continuar a lutar (mesmo sem qualquer possibilidade de vitória), mas sem esta ajuda contínua, nem mesmo este prolongamento será possível.
No entanto, Naev está errado ao afirmar que o conflito se tornou uma mera “guerra de recursos”. Ele espalha rumores alegando que Moscou é abastecida com armas iranianas e norte-coreanas. Existem diversas acusações deste tipo, mas nenhuma confirmação oficial foi dada até o momento. Além disso, mesmo que a Rússia acabe por adquirir armas no estrangeiro, o país evidentemente não depende desta cooperação militar para atingir os seus objetivos no campo de batalha, sendo auto-suficiente na sua indústria de defesa. Por outro lado, no que diz respeito à Ucrânia, esta auto-suficiência obviamente não existe, pois o país depende de armas e dinheiro do Ocidente para lutar.
Outro problema na avaliação de Naev é a crença infundada de que o fracasso ucraniano motivará a Rússia a iniciar conflitos noutros países. Ao dizer isso, dissemina a narrativa de que a Rússia tem interesses expansionistas e continuará a lutar para conquistar novos territórios, o que é mentira. Os territórios de maioria russa só foram reintegrados na Federação porque Kiev não deu qualquer garantia de que protegeria os direitos da população local.
A libertação de territórios é uma medida reativa da Rússia para simultaneamente proteger os seus cidadãos e garantir a segurança nas suas fronteiras. As hostilidades poderiam ter terminado no ano passado sem que nenhum território fosse adicionado à Federação, mas o regime de Kiev optou pela guerra, pelo que os russos não têm outra alternativa senão lutar e reintegrar as novas regiões.
Portanto, não é correto dizer que uma expansão do conflito ocorrerá como resultado dos atos russos. Se as hostilidades começarem em qualquer outro país, certamente não será por iniciativa russa, mas pela própria OTAN, que tem demonstrado repetidamente interesse em internacionalizar a sua agressão contra a Rússia, envolvendo novos territórios na guerra.
Durante muito tempo, a aliança ocidental tem causado o caos e a desestabilização em regiões em torno do ambiente estratégico da Rússia, como o Cáucaso, a Moldávia, a Bielorrússia e outras. Perante a impossibilidade de derrotar Moscou num confronto simétrico, o Ocidente aposta na criação de múltiplas frentes, permitindo assim uma estratégia de desgaste prolongado para “desgastar a Rússia”. Assim, embora a possibilidade de expansão da zona de conflito seja real, não é culpa da Rússia.
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The recent horrific events in Dublin left many in shock as a stabbing incident developed into an anti-immigration rally, which in turn developed into a riot as a tram, busses and Garda cars were set on fire.
In the early afternoon a man stabbed three children and a care assistant. He was stopped by a 43-year-old Deliveroo driver who intervened and hit him with his helmet.
Then, “after the stabbing incident, rumours spread that the alleged perpetrator was an illegal North African immigrant ‘fresh off the boat’, along with false rumours that the children had died. Agitators fostered anti-immigrant sentiment online, urging people to assemble at the crime scene and protest.”
However, it turned out that the perpetrator was originally from Algeria, who had lived in Ireland for 20 years and was naturalised as an Irish citizen in 2014. The Deliveroo cyclist is from Brazil and the school is an Irish-medium primary school, of which there are many in Ireland, and these schools attract many children of Irish and non-Irish people living in Ireland who are interested in Irish traditional culture and the Irish language.
On social media the far-right urged people to go to the scene and “make your feelings known”, using the hashtag #Irelandisfull.
O’Connell Street, Dublin (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, 24 November 2023)
However, the rioters themselves seem to have been mainly young men from the ages of 18-25 who were not particularly ideological and in some cases had already been in trouble with the Gardai. Thus, the rioters seized the opportunity to cause trouble egged on by a small number of people who were reported to be shouting anti-immigration slogans at gardaí, some holding Irish flags and signs reading “Irish lives matter”.
Since then two of the victims have been released from hospital and the Justice Minister has confirmed that 48 people have now been arrested.
O’Connell Street, Dublin (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, 24 November 2023)
The Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonaldsaid “everyone saw this coming,” as “the reality is that Dublin city centre hasn’t been safe for some time,” due to a lack of Gardai in the city centre.
The current Taoiseach of Ireland and leader of the Fine Gael party, Leo Varadkar,stated:
“I really would ask people to try and avoid connecting crime with migration. It’s not right. Yes, of course, people who are migrants might commit crimes, just as people who aren’t might commit crimes. In a country of 5.3 million people, if you have hundreds of thousands of migrants, there are going to be a few of them who commit terrible crimes. Just as there are people born and bred in Ireland who commit terrible crimes every day, including murders. When I see what happened in Parnell Square, what I see is a suspect was a migrant, although a citizen and somebody here for over 20 years.”
“I’m sorry to say there are high profile individuals in this country, and there are people in this House and Seanad, who have used language about immigration that has undoubtedly contributed to the spread of that disinformation.”
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) called on workers to gather at 1pm outside the GPO on O’Connell Street today (28/11/2023). At the rally the General Secretary Owen Reidysaid:
“It’s a symbolic gesture and it’s an opportunity to do just that. We have to challenge this far-right xenophobic thinking that tries to make Ireland a place that’s unwelcome for migrants […] We want Ireland to be diverse and pluralistic and we want migrants to feel safe and welcome in our communities and our workplaces in our society […] Our bottom line is that all workers, whoever they are, have the right to go to work and come home safe.”
Phil Ní Sheaghdha, the general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Association (INMO), outlined the importance of the migrant workers for healthcare delivery but stated that
“there are instances where people will take advantage and try and have a go at somebody from a different country with a different colour of skin and we reject that totally, and we want to make sure that they feel safe, which is the very least that they should feel.”
O’Connell Street, Dublin (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, 24 November 2023)
On mainstream media Joe Brolly, a podcaster and barrister, was a witness to the aftermath and stated in an interview on Newstalk radio station that:
“‘No one hates Ireland more than the Irish far right. No one hates Ireland, and I mean no one hates Ireland more than the Irish far right. They hate bus drivers, librarians, Luas drivers, teachers, they hate teachers, women, gays trans, they loathe trans people, politicians, they can’t stand politicians. They hate working people. Muslims and jews, the Jewish replacement theory, we see them standing on O’Connell Street making these outrageous speeches, outrageous anti-Semitic speeches. The GAA, nurses, doctors, the homeless, sportspeople. You. They hate you, they hate me, and they’ll happily smash up their own city and loot shops because hate is transferable. It’s got nothing to do with politics. It’s psychologically occuring in the mind of the hater.”
As yet there is no real far right organisation in Ireland but it is hard not to speculate that there are very conservative forces in Ireland who are getting very worried about the rise in popularity of Sinn Féin and the huge support for the Palestinian cause. They need to create an indignant, pro-police, pro law and order climate that will help them sway opinion away from any ‘Leftist’ move in Irish society.
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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáinis an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. Hisartworkconsists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by countryhere. Caoimhghin has just published his new book – Against Romanticism: From Enlightenment to Enfrightenment and the Culture of Slavery, which looks at philosophy, politics and the history of 10 different art forms arguing that Romanticism is dominating modern culture to the detriment of Enlightenment ideals. It is available on Amazon (amazon.co.uk) and the info page ishere.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image: Parnell Square East, Dublin. Site of Gaelscoil Cholaiste Mhuire closed off as a crime scene. (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, 24 November 2023)
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While Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been frantically shuttling around the Middle East trying to stop the Israeli coflict in Gaza from exploding into a regional war, the United States has also sent two aircraft carrier strike groups, a Marine Expeditionary Unit and 1,200 extra troops to the Middle East as a “deterrent.” In plain language, the United States is threatening to attack any forces that come to the defense of the Palestinians from other countries in the region, reassuring Israel that it can keep killing with impunity in Gaza.
But if Israel persists in this genocidal war, U.S. threats may be impotent to prevent others from intervening. From Lebanon to Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, the possibilities of the conflict spreading are enormous. Even Algeria says it is ready to fight for a free Palestine, based on a unanimous vote in its parliament on November 1st.
Middle Eastern governments and their people already see the United States as a party to Israel’s massacre in Gaza. So any direct U.S. military action will be seen as an escalation on the side of Israel and is more likely to provoke further escalation than to deter it.
The United States already faces this predicament in Iraq. Despite years of Iraqi demands for the removal of U.S. forces, at least 2,500 U.S. troops remain at Al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar province, Al-Harir Airbase, north of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, and another small base at the airport in Erbil. There are also “several hundred” NATO troops, including Americans, advising Iraqi forces in NATO Mission Iraq (NMI), based near Baghdad.
For many years, U.S. forces in Iraq have been mired in a low-grade war against the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that Iraq formed to fight ISIS, mainly from Shia militias. Despite their links to Iran, the armed groups Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and other PMFs have often ignored Iranian calls to de-escalate attacks on U.S. forces. These Iraqi groups do not respect Iran Quds Force leader General Esmail Qaani as highly as they did General Soleimani, so Soleimani’s assassination by the United States in 2020 has further reduced Iran’s ability to restrain the militias in Iraq.
After a year-long truce between U.S. and Iraqi forces, the Israeli war on Gaza has triggered a new escalation of this conflict in both Iraq and Syria. Some militias rebranded themselves as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and began attacking U.S. bases on October 17. After 32 attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, 34 more in Syria and 3 U.S. airstrikes in Syria, U.S. forces conducted airstrikes against two Kata’ib Hezbollah bases in Iraq, one in Anbar province and one in Jurf Al-Nasr, south of Baghdad, on November 21, killing at least nine militiamen.
The U.S. airstrikes prompted a furious response from the Iraqi government spokesman Bassam al-Awadi.
“We vehemently condemn the attack on Jurf Al-Nasr, executed without the knowledge of government agencies,” al-Awadi said. “This action is a blatant violation of sovereignty and an attempt to destabilize the security situation… The recent incident represents a clear violation of the coalition’s mission to combat Daesh (ISIS) on Iraqi soil. We call on all parties to avoid unilateral actions and to respect Iraq’s sovereignty…”
As the Iraqi government feared, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq responded to the U.S. airstrikes with two attacks on Al-Harir airbase on November 22 and several more on November 23rd. They attacked Al-Asad airbase with several drones, launched another drone attack on the U.S. base at Erbil airport, and their allies in Syria attacked two U.S. bases across the border in northeastern Syria.
Short of a ceasefire in Gaza or a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Syria, there is no decisive action the U.S. can take that would put a stop to these attacks. So the level of violence in Iraq and Syria is likely to keep rising as long as the war on Gaza continues.
Another formidable and experienced military force opposing Israel and the United States is the Houthi army in Yemen. On November 14, Abdul-Malek al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi government in Yemen, asked neighboring countries to open a corridor through their territory for his army to go and fight Israel in Gaza.
The Houthi Deputy Information Secretary Nasreddin Amer told Newsweek that if they had a way to enter Palestine, they would not hesitate to join the fight against Israel,
”We have fighters numbering hundreds of thousands who are brave, tough, trained and experienced in fighting,” Amer said. “They have a very strong belief, and their dream in life is to fight the Zionists and the Americans.”
Transporting hundreds of thousands of Yemeni soldiers to fight in Gaza would be nearly impossible unless Saudi Arabia opened the way. That seems highly unlikely, but Iran or another ally could help to transport a smaller number by air or sea to join the fight.
The Houthis have been waging an asymmetric war against Saudi-led invaders for many years, and they have developed weapons and tactics that they could bring to bear against Israel. Soon after al-Houthi’s statement, Yemeni forces in the Red Sea boarded a ship owned, via shell companies, by Israeli billionaire Abraham Ungar. The ship, which was on its way from Istanbul to India, was detained in a Yemeni port.
The Houthis have also launched a series of drones and missiles towards Israel. While many members of Congress try to portray the Houthis as simply puppets of Iran, the Houthis are actually an independent, unpredictable force that other actors in the region cannot control.
Even NATO ally Türkiye is finding it difficult to remain a bystander, given the widespread public support for Palestine. President Erdogan of Türkiye was among the first international leaders to speak out strongly against the Israeli war on Gaza, explicitly calling it a massacre and saying that it amounted to genocide.
Turkish civil society groups are spearheading a campaign to send humanitarian aid to Gaza on cargo ships, braving a possible confrontation like the one that occurred in 2010 when the Israelis attacked the Freedom Flotilla, killing 10 people aboard the Mavi Marmara.
On the Lebanese border, Israel and Hezbollah have conducted daily exchanges of fire since October 7, killing 97 combatants and 15 civilians in Lebanon and 9 soldiers and 3 civilians in Israel. Some 46,000 Lebanese civilians and 65,000 Israelis have been displaced from the border area. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallantwarned on November 11,
“What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.”
How will Hezbollah react if Israel resumes its brutal massacre in Gaza after the brief pause is over or if Israel expands the massacre to the West Bank, where it has already killed at least 237 more Palestinians since October 7?
In a speech on November 3, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah held back from declaring a new war on Israel, but warned that “all options are on the table” if Israel does not end its war on Gaza.
As Israel prepared to pause its bombing on November 23, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian held meetings in Qatar, first with Nasrallah and Lebanese officials, and then with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
“the continuation of the ceasefire can prevent further expansion of the scope of the war. In the meeting with the leaders of the resistance, I found out that if Israel’s war crimes and genocide continue, a tougher and more complicated scenario of the resistance will be implemented.”
Amirabdollahian already warned on October 16 that,
“The leaders of the resistance will not allow the Zionist regime to do whatever it wants in Gaza and then go to other fronts of the resistance.”
In other words, if Iran and its allies believe that Israel really intends to continue its war on Gaza until it has removed Hamas from power, and then to turn its war machine loose on Lebanon or its other neighbors, they would prefer to fight a wider war now, forcing Israel to fight the Palestinians, Hezbollah and their allies at the same time, rather than waiting for Israel to attack them one by one.
Tragically, the White House is not listening. The next day, President Biden continued to back Israel’s vow to resume the destruction of Gaza after its “humanitarian pause,” saying that attempting to eliminate Hamas is “a legitimate objective.”
America’s unconditional support for Israel and endless supply of weapons have succeeded only in turning Israel into an out-of-control, genocidal, destabilizing force at the heart of a fragile region already shattered and traumatized by decades of U.S. warmaking. The result is a country that refuses to recognize its own borders or those of its neighbors, and rejects any and all limits on its territorial ambitions and war crimes.
If Israel’s actions lead to a wider war, the U.S. will find itself with few allies ready to jump into the fray. Even if a regional conflict is avoided, the U.S. support for Israel has already created tremendous damage to the U.S. reputation in the region and beyond, and direct U.S. involvement in the war would leave it more isolated and impotent than its previous misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The United States can still avoid this fate by insisting on an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. If Israel will not agree to that, the U.S. must back up this position with an immediate suspension of arms deliveries, military aid, Israeli access to U.S. weapons stockpiles in Israel and diplomatic support for Israel’s war on Palestine.
The priority of U.S. officials must be to stop Israel’s massacre, avoid a regional war, and get out of the way so that other nations can help negotiate a real solution to the occupation of Palestine.
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Featured image: U.S. Air Force airmen hand off cargo to the Israeli military at Nevatim Air Base, Israel, on Oct. 15, 2023. Photo: Edgar Grimaldo/U.S. Air Force
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VIDEO #1 (ABOVE): Oct.27, 2023 – Chubu-Nippon Broadcasting – Kyoto City Demonstrations by 230 families of COVID-19 Vaccine victims (8:33 min).
VIDEO #2: (Oct.28, 2023) Professor Emeritus Yasufumi Murakami of Tokyo University of Science discusses DNA Contamination of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines and TURBO CANCER (6:34 min)
“We know that vaccine nanoparticles circulate in the bloodstream for several months. In rats, the half-life is 1 week; in humans, it is 10 weeks. Even though they think it hits the muscle, 99% of the time it hits beyond the muscle. It goes into whole body around in about an hour.
This happens to patients at the vaccination site, and patient goes into anaphylactic shock. So it usually happens on the day of the injection, and the nanoparticles that keep circulating in the blood for a long time are the production of nanoparticles(spike).
The messenger (RNA) and spike proteins were detected in the blood of vaccinated people a few months later There’s even a paper that says they were able to detect it, which means that it circulates and enters the cells of all organs.
The liver and spleen are the most common, but the third is bone marrow. The cell division that creates blood cells is extremely intense. The fourth one gathers in the ovaries, and the fifth and sixth ones have testicular conditions. The vaccine is concentrated in the organs that create the next generation in both women and men.”
VIDEO 04 – (Nov.16, 2023) Clinic Director from Ginza, Tokyo shares his observation on his vaccinated patients (Turbo Cancer):
When we started administering the vaccine, some patients, for example, had been able to control their cancer like pancreatic cancer, for a long time, and after the second or third vaccine, it suddenly became serious, and this May, When the highest number of deaths occurred around June, there were times when around 5 people died per month. Around May and June, we saw the highest number of these cases, with roughly five patients per month succumbing to their illnesses.
Then, we are seeing patients with conditions like giant cell diabetes or light cell leukemia — diseases that are very rare and not often encountered in clinical practice. The cardiovascular specialist told them that they had never seen such diseases before though he read about them in books. I’m still wondering why there are so many people like this.”
VIDEO 05 – (Nov.12, 2023) Announcement from Japanese obstetricians and gynecologists to pregnant women and those who want to become pregnant about the coronavirus vaccine
“Major illnesses and abnormalities that have never been seen before are being found in pregnant women who received the new coronavirus vaccine during or before pregnancy. Pregnant women have a stronger blood clotting effect than usual to protect themselves from bleeding during childbirth. Then, administering the new coronavirus vaccine will make thrombosis much more likely to occur, putting you at greater risk of thrombosis than necessary. Blood clots can occur not only in the pregnant woman but also in the baby, making it difficult for blood to flow to the baby, causing blood clots to get stuck in the placenta, and other dangerous situations. The coronavirus vaccine is currently under research and its safety is not guaranteed. Please make your decisions carefully!”
VIDEO 06 – (Nov. 6, 2023) Japan’s largest national news broadcaster NHK just mentioned COVID-19 vaccine deaths!
Regarding a woman in her 50s in the prefecture who died the day after receiving the new coronavirus vaccine – awarded 44 million yen (approx 300K USD). Nationally, over 2000+ vaccine deaths applications still in process.
VIDEO 07 – Japanese people take to the streets to make the general public aware of the harms of covid vaccines (Oct. 30, 2023)
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
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On Saturday, I headed east to attend the Do No Harm Symposium in Hamilton (on the outskirts of Toronto).
The event opened with Dr. Jennifer Hibberd, a dental surgeon, describing Canada as the “playground for the World Economic Forum.” But they play dirty, as she learned firsthand. She told how her clinic was raided under the suspected direction of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service the day after she posted an online video from the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. Here she is speaking on stage…
Hibberd, like the other speakers, was speaking out against the “died suddenly/jabbed recently” phenomenon that’s been striking at the hearts, brains and major arteries of those who believed big government would never tell a big lie.
Up next was Michael Alexander…
Alaxander is the lawyer who has been representing Dr. Mark Trozzi. Trozzi has been deemed “incompetent” by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons for denouncing the entire COVID agenda, with his license under threat of suspension. How ironic, being that he’s one of the few competent doctors in Canada who is speaking out against the clot shot.
Alexander said he was quite confident that they would win against the Ontario College in court, despite failing before their corrupt tribunal. He is a true “Atticus Finch” of a lawyer (per Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird), though he’s such a jolly character, it’s as if he stepped out of a Dickens’ novel. You can see his cheerful demeanour pictured below with my son Jonah and me…
Up next was Alexander’s client, Dr. Mark Trozzi, who succinctly explained why he left the medical profession: “I did not sign up to be used to kill people.” However, he also pointed out that he has not really abandoned his job as an emergency room doctor, as the political situation he’s presently attending is “clearly an emergency.” Trozzi emphasized how the nanoparticles in the COVID shots are designed to penetrate and produce the toxic spike protein in every cell in the body.
I gifted him (and all the other speakers) signed copies of Much Ado About Corona — pointing out how I named one of the restaurants in the story after him (Trozzi’s Pizza). Here we are, with Trozzi wearing his “PROUD MEMBER [of the] FRINGE MINORITY” sweatshirt….
Dr. Chris Shoemaker, however, went even further in his claims of vaccine hazards than Trozzi — presenting evidence that the shots may be producing spiderweb protein in people’s bodies (along with the cancerous SV40 DNA sequence). Spiderwebs may explain the strange blood clots morgues around the world have been pulling out of corpses.
Prior to COVID, you’ve heard people say they have cobwebs in their brain, sadly, now it may no longer be a metaphor.
Here’s a mRNA-free shot of me with the honest doctor…
Derek Sloan concluded the series of talks with a strong call to turn the “lambs into lions.” Sloan has certainly proven himself a lion (albeit a vegetarian one), being the only member of parliament to expose and oppose the COVID scandal. He emphasized that it’s a matter of being unrelenting in waking up the sheeple, “because once the light switch is turned on they can’t go back to sleep.”
I had the honour of sharing a vendor table with Sloan (where I was selling copies of Much Ado About Corona, with the proceeds going towards Mark Trozzi’s legal fees). Sloan was selling copies of his semi-autobiographical game plan to make Canada “glorious and free” again — the book being of the same title. I was sure to purchase a signed copy of Glorious and Free as you can see here…
…and I encourage you to do the same (copies available here) unless you prefer Lamblike and Slaughtered.
And be sure to check out (and subscribe to) Dr. Mark Trozzi’s website. Consider also donating towards his legal fund (as, after all, it’s our battle he’s fighting).
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John C. A. Manley is the author of the full-length novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. He is currently working on the sequel, Brave New Normal. John lives in Stratford, Ontario, with his son Jonah, and the ever-present spirit of his late wife, Nicole. You can subscribe to his email newsletter, read his full bio or find out more about his novel.
All images in this article are from the author
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
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***
In less than two months, the soaring death rate in Gaza has now surpassed 15,000. The slaughter of Palestinians is recognized by UN experts as “genocidal incitement.” Israel nor the US never anticipated the global pushback against the Israeli carnage in Gaza. As of late, even the Mockingbird Mainstream Media outlets are turning against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime in its brutal assault on the Palestinian civilian population living in Gaza. With virtually the whole world watching via social media, the New York Times reported on November 25th that Israel’s bloodbath is killing innocent civilians at an unprecedented “historic pace” with over 10,000 women and children slaughtered so far.
The Jewish State’s appalling record violence is turning into a PR disaster for Netanyahu. A fast growing number of Israeli leaders, including ex-security chiefs, current opposition leader Yair Lapid and now two former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak are all calling for Bibi’s removal and formation of a new government to end this no-win war.
On Sunday November 26th, the Washington Post exposed Benjamin Netanyahu’s symbiotic relationship with Hamas. On the one hand, he’s often claimed to want to destroy the “terrorist” group Hamas over many years, yet has helped finance Hamas and used this Palestinian militant faction to divide and rule Palestinians as a politically disunited people. By breaking up Palestine and its token Palestinian authorities in the West Bank separate from East Jerusalem and the Hamas stronghold in Gaza, it ensures Israeli apartheid subjugation and control continues, all the while denying them their own sovereign nation-state. The WaPo exposé includes drawing on Israeli insiders. Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, stated:
With no unified [Palestinian] leadership, [Netanyahu] was able to say he couldn’t move forward with peace negotiations. It allowed him to say, ‘There is no one to talk to.’
Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer maintains:
Netanyahu always felt that the Palestinian conflict was a distraction being used as a wedge issue in Israel.
This really is all you need to know to understand why the leader about to be removed from power and in such deep disfavor with his own people, facing corruption charges while at war with Israel’s Supreme Court, offers the motivation and means necessary that allows Israel’s “invasion” by Hamas to unfold unimpeded for a full 7-hours before unleashing his Israeli Defense Forces on the scene to murder up to hundreds of their own fellow Israeli citizens, further driving up the death count to 1,200 on October 7th.
According to a Monday November 27thGrayzonearticle, more hard evidence reveals a female Israeli tank crew was ordered to indiscriminately fire at Israeli civilians at a kibbutz:
New disclosures add to the growing body of evidence indicating many Israelis who died on October 7 were killed by the Israeli military. Firsthand testimony by admittedly inexperienced Israeli tank operators reveals orders to open fire upon Israeli communities when Palestinian militants breached the fences encircling Gaza on October 7… Meanwhile, the Israeli government has muzzled captives freed from Gaza to prevent further damage to the official narrative.
Writing on X on November 14th, former Israel Prime Minister Naftali Bennett opportunistically uses victims killed by his own Israeli soldiers for false propaganda purposes justifying his nation’s genocide:
12 year old Liel Hetzroni of Kibbutz Beeri was murdered in her home by Hamas monsters on Oct 7th. Her body has now been identified. Look at her sweet smile. Liel harmed nobody. She was murdered just because she’s Jewish. We’re fighting the most just war: to ensure this can never happen again. Nobody should ask us to stop, nor will we, before we achieve that goal.
Then eleven days later on Saturday November 25th, another Grayzone article sets the record straight:
Eyewitnesses to the October 7 hostage standoff in Kibbutz Be’eri have exposed Israel for misleading the world about the killings of 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni, her family and her neighbors.
In the face of numerous falsely reported, now debunked incidents of Hamas “cutting heads off babies” and raping Israeli women still unsubstantiated, increasing evidence continues emerging daily that clearly proves that on the day of the so-called invasion, Israelis killed many fellow Israelis. It turns out Western MSM press’ jingoistic reporting of the Hamas “savage invasion” in southern Israel is pure propagandized fiction. Instantly, it gifted Bibi loads of sympathy and support from around the world, bought him more time in power as a wartime leader and granted him full license to exact genocidal revenge, ethnically purging Palestinians off the Gaza map through brutal war crime atrocities with the aim of forced evacuation migration of Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai Desert.
Then, with Gaza’s stolen land cleared of all Palestinians, Israel has been caught with a plan to take full advantage of two financial incentives for its genocide – building a hugely profitable canal across Gaza to surpass and replace Egypt’s Suez Canal as an international trade route shortcut while exploiting Gaza’s vast oil and gas reserves stealing not only Palestinians’ ancient homeland but their future source of wealth as well. As a Khazarian mafia chieftain, Zionist Netanyahu fits the profile archetype of the Luciferian mass murderer.
Per notable geopolitical analyst Scott Ritter in a Sputnik article on November 23rd, this week’s extended ceasefire in a number of ways is a win-win for both the people of Israel and Palestine, especially for their freed captives, along with humanitarian relief finally reaching the Palestinians in Gaza. But the broader picture also shows a breakthrough victory for the Palestinian cause and a big loss for Israel’s rightwing extremist government and its tyrant Bibi and its primary backer the Biden regime. After all, for the longest time Israel mimicked by US have steadfastly refused to a ceasefire under any conditions. This momentum shift will only place increasing pressure on the Netanyahu regime and accomplice to stop their genocide. Both Israel and the US have backed themselves up into a corner with another intractable loss, not unlike the Ukraine debacle. The world is recognizing both as neocolonialist rogue states 180 degrees out of step with today’s multipolar world.
Clearly the global tide of public opinion on the Israel-Gaza conflict has clearly shifted in Palestinians’ favor, despite the Hamas October 7th incursion in Israel. 46 years ago, the UN General Assembly called for the annual observance of an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29th. This year it takes on far more significance than ever before. The United Nations headquarters in New York is opening an exhibit called “Palestine – a Land with a People.” The world is now learning that as the longest Israeli leader in its 75-year history, war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions toward the people of Palestine proves him an enemy of the state opposing a free Palestine as a sovereign nation.
But now momentum toward justice can no longer be denied by continued lies and brutal oppression. The UN and even Western nations are increasingly demanding the two-state solution, never again placing it on the Israel apartheid backburner. The UN Resolution 242 in compliance with international law has called for a sovereign State of Palestine border to be returned to its 1967 pre-7-Day War status. The world of nations wants Israel and the US to finally begin complying with international law, and the people of Israel, Palestine, the US and entire world will be far better for it.
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Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.
The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point, the pandemic hoax and kill shot genocide. As an independent journalist for the last decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, including Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jamesfetzer.org/,Inteldrop.org and https://thegovernmentrag.com. As a published author of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, Joachim’s books and chapters are Amazon bestsellers in child advocacy and human rights categories. His A-Z sourcebook series fully document and expose the global pedophilia scourge and remain available free athttps://pedoempire.org/ contents/. Joachim also hosts the weekly Revolution Radio broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed” on Friday morning at 7AM EST
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Zelensky himself set this divisive process into motion by recently warning that Russian agents are supposedly plotting to carry out a “Maidan 3” against him.
Ukrainian National Security Council chief Alexey Danilov claimed that the Times of London misinterpreted his words when they quoted him as saying that the secret police (SBU) are still supposedly rife with Russian spies. It’s extremely unlikely that a newspaper of record such as this one would do that, however, especially about a subject as sensitive as this one. For that reason, it was probably the case that he was forced by the SBU to retract his statement under pressure from them.
It’s understandable why the SBU would be upset after they wrote that
“Oleksiy Danilov said in an interview with The Times that dormant Russian agents embedded in public institutions including the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic security service, were being ordered to undermine the country’s unity.”
To that end, he told them that this spy network was trying to widen political-military divisions and stir up protests, and he blamed the SBU’s continued infiltration on the legacy of former President Yanukovich.
It was arguably with a view towards preemptively discrediting genuinely grassroots protests against him, irrespective of whether his newfound military rival plays a role in orchestrating them, that the Ukrainian leader recently alleged that Russia is plotting a so-called “Maidan 3”.
Objectively speaking, it’s difficult to believe that Russia still retains the influence required to carry out such a regime change after the SBU’s 21-month-long nationwide counterintelligence operation, hence why it’s more likely that Zelensky just wanted to concoct a pretext for cracking down on state dissidents. Nevertheless, the signal that he unwittingly sent apparently made Danilov think that he should roll with this new information warfare narrative in solidarity with his boss, thus explaining his initial remarks.
By doing so, he actually ended up stoking the same internal divisions that he ironically claimed that Russia was trying to widen, which the SBU obviously realized and that’s the reason that they presumably pressured him to retract his statement right away. Extrapolating from this sequence of events, it seems that serious paranoia is once again beginning to take hold of security officials in Kiev, which was due in no small part to Zelensky himself warning about a “Maidan 3” for purely self-interested political reasons.
His desperation to save his own skin did what no “Russian agents” were hitherto able to accomplish, namely exacerbate domestic divisions at the most sensitive moment in the conflict thus far after the failure of this summer’s counteroffensive led to everything falling apart behind the Ukrainian frontlines. The economy, finances, foreign military aid, logistics, and morale have all plummeted at precisely the same time and served to widen preexisting civil-state and military-political fault lines.
Prior to Zelensky unveiling his conspiracy theory about Russian agents still supposedly operating inside Ukraine and continuing to pose a credible regime change threat in spite of the SBU’s protracted counterintelligence operation, Kiev played these problems off as being the result of natural processes. That was admittedly an accurate assessment, but now security officials are once again super paranoid after their head of state unexpectedly suggested that this is actually all the work of Russian agents.
The SBU felt offended after all they’d done to root out such networks over the past 21 months, while their institutional rivals began wondering whether the secret police might really still be infiltrated by the enemy, so much so that perhaps the Kremlin is now using them as cover for a “Maidan 3” scenario. Danilov then inadvertently extended credence to this divisive speculation that Zelensky himself was the first to introduce into the national discourse by explicitly claiming that the SBU is indeed still infiltrated.
From the secret police’s perspective, his rhetoric could serve to fuel their rivals’ efforts to sideline them at this sensitive moment in the conflict, which could potentially be exploited by Zaluzhny and his “fellow travelers” inside the state bureaucracy to carry out a power play against Zelensky. The SBU might also suspect that Danilov could be in on this speculative plot too and meant to discredit them this whole time but is only now retracting his statement because they put immense pressure upon him to do so.
It’s at moments like this that all states are supposed to remain united, yet it was none other than the head of state himself that set into motion the process that’s now tearing the state apart at the seams by pitting its security officials against once another out of paranoia that their rivals might be Russian agents. Nobody can confidently predict what comes next, but there’s no doubt that Zelensky dealt a powerful blow to “deep state” unity that’ll be very difficult for Ukraine to recover from anytime soon, if at all.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: APR-23-2022 Press conference of Volodymyr Zelenskyy the President of Ukraine during Russian Ukrainian war at Kyiv Metro station to protect against air strikes. Kyiv, Ukraine
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The announcement comes amid an enormous increase in the already massive American military presence in the Middle East, which includes everything from carrier strike groups (CSGs) to fighter jets and even strategic bombers. The tensions have escalated significantly in the context of the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict, prompting Iran to urgently modernize its aging fighter jet fleet.
Speculation about the acquisition has been ongoing since last year, specifically after Egypt withdrew from the deal to buy Russian jets. Cairo’s fear of getting on America’s bad side pushed it to stifle its sovereignty (and security), an opportunity that Tehran took to make a deal that would otherwise take years to finalize. Western sources have been speculating about the Su-35 deal with Iran even before the special military operation (SMO). Rumors about the acquisition continued throughout 2022, followed by speculation about the deal allegedly not going through. However, by September, it became clear that the military cooperation between Moscow and Tehran would include even more than Su-35 fighter jets, particularly after the Yak-130 light fighters/advanced trainers were spotted in Iran.
The Yak-130 can double as both attack jets and advanced trainer aircraft, but their primary role is the latter, meaning they were especially indicative of the deal going through. Namely, the Yak-130 is used as the stepping stone in flight training for pilots preparing to fly the Su-35. Getting advanced fighter jets for the Iranian Air Force (IRIAF) has been a point of contention for decades as the country was under a strict Western arms embargo that prevented any advanced weapons acquisitions. This had its perks, as it forced Tehran to develop a plethora of indigenous industries, including a very robust and highly cost-effective drone production, and now it’s clear that Tehran’s advanced military industry is perfectly capable of going toe to toe with the world’s most powerful countries in terms of developing and deploying unmanned systems.
However, despite these advances that also include a plethora of other weapons, such as surface combatants, transport aircraft and long-range SAM systems (mostly based on Russian designs), Iran is sorely lacking in the manned combat aviation compartment. This is hardly surprising, given that only a handful of countries in the world have fully indigenous aerospace industries. Even Asian giants such as China and India still rely heavily on Russia to acquire top-of-the-line aircraft, although their respective advances in this regard are certainly commendable. By getting the Su-35, Tehran is pushing the capabilities of the IRIAF well into the 21st century. Various reports indicate that at least 24 fighter jets have been ordered to replace the aging F-14 “Tomcats”, while there’s speculation that it would acquire over 60 in follow-up orders.
Almost the same could be said for the Mi-28 attack helicopter. The advanced Russian rotorcraft has very few equivalents abroad and would certainly revolutionize Iranian capabilities. Namely, Tehran currently relies on its ancient Vietnam War-era AH-1 “Super Cobra” attack helicopters which are decades behind technologically, even with the incremental upgrades and overhauls that the Iranian military has been applying. Reports indicate that Iranian forces operating in Syria were impressed by the performance of Iraqi and Russian Mi-28s in both Iraq and Syria, which was a major contributing factor to the decision to acquire them. The superb flight characteristics and armament of this Russian helicopter are rivaled only by the less conventional coaxial rotors-equipped Ka-52 “Alligator”.
It’s important to note that the ongoing procurement is of the utmost importance to the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) and BRICS+ frameworks. Namely, Iran is already a member of the former, while it’s poised to join the latter in just over a month. With the US escalating tensions in the region, the primary target of which is precisely Tehran, the belligerent thalassocracy is looking to disrupt multiple peace processes in the region. Attacking Iran seems to be a very tempting prospect for Washington DC, as it would effectively “kill two birds with one stone” by making both SCO and BRICS+ look “weak” and unable (or even unwilling) to defend their new members. The US very likely believes this could be a deadly blow to the rapidly emerging multipolar world that will inevitably dismantle the existing “rules-based world order“. By arming Iran, Russia is making sure that any such attack would be not only a costly endeavor, but also a failed one.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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It is a particularly quotidian breed in the modern, management-driven university. The desk clerk who pretends to be an academic and researcher but is neither. The desk clerk who admires rosters, work plans and “key performance indicators”, thinking that the process of knowledge is quantifiable by productivity targets and financial returns. The desk clerk who pilfers the work of undergraduates, sports a dubious doctoral thesis, and who rarely sets foot within the sacred surrounds of a library.
The rise of such a figure in the global university scene, one neither fish nor fowl, is no accident. As universities have declined, bureaucracy has bubbled with furious enthusiasm. The decline of teaching and its quality is complemented by the rise of the paranoid penpusher and spreadsheet artist. With a decline in substantive learning, the emergence of soft, watered-down syllabi, diminished reading lists (how dare one expect students to read one book a subject, let alone a few journal articles?), an increased focus on entertainment (flickering videos, please), the desk clerk has become sovereign, dominant, and terrifying. Shallow, weak, insipid, such beings occupy a particular space of decline, subsided by the toilers who put in the hours in often shoddy conditions. For the casual or sessional workforce, this is particularly acute.
Importantly, the desk clerk cadres perform the role of keeping actual academics with unhealthily industrious standards in check, acting as a sinister Varangian Guard for the broader management of the universities. They monitor staff emails without warning, undermine privacy with habitual criminality, conduct surveillance with pathological tendency. They straitjacket thought, curtail originality, quash dissent. To assist them in their mission is a vicious set of regulations known as the “Code of Conduct”, a document that would be neatly slotted into any KGB manual on thought control. Good to be on your best behaviour: the Desk Clerk is keeping an eye on you. Be a team member. Don’t question university policy, however criminal or moronic. If not, to the cooler, a disciplinary hearing devoid of natural justice precepts.
So, where do we find these crawling creatures so menacing to learning and murderous to thought? In the position of Deans, associate deans and their collaborating adjutants. Program managers on the make. Colourless gauleiters, humourless henchmen, women and those in between hoping to make a buck or two out of the neuroses of identity politics. (Fancy an aboriginal cause we can advance?) In the role of directors of learning and teaching. (Universities are in a bad way if they need such areas.) In sections with names resembling toilet cleaning products or carcinogenic chemicals.
These people are, in turn, given orders by nameless, unaccountable individuals in the upper echelons of the institution, crowned by that most unaccountable of officers, the Vice-chancellor. Usual corporate and commercial laws do not apply, be there in terms of remuneration or governance decisions. This is particularly the case in Australia’s universities, where the average salary for the VC hovers around A$1 million. Despite being treated as corporate institutions, such universities are not controlled by the same disclosure requirements that companies must follow. The results are predictable enough: the sloshing and moving of dark money, the prevalence of shady deals, and poor, even bankrupting decisions.
The desk clerk’s orders, often crafted on a ghastly template, are followed without question, delivered at meetings held with academics who should know better. (An academic who has time for meetings is obviously not pulling any weight.) It is one of the greatest conflicts of interest in the academy: the associate dean, having a chat with staff in a discipline meeting ostensibly to address a critical issue of merit. Given that the associate dean in question is not beholden to staff welfare but the unelected officialdom of a mini-police state, the spectacle is not merely farcical but scandalous.
Debate is supposedly held, discussion conducted. Academic staff babble, gossip and chat in convivial surroundings pretending to follow a serious agenda. But these meetings only ever serve to rubberstamp the bleak reality that is hatched in the University Chancellery, where thought is purposely killed in favour of middle-management speak, corrupt goals, and self-feathering. For desk clerks keen to rise up the greasy pole, it’s best to be obedient and steely in resolve, kick down against the opposition, and suppress the contrarians. Never mind that students are ignored, a toxic workplace rife with bullying neglected, or that the university is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
The favourite occasion of the year for the desk clerk is the announcement of the promotions round. Bootlickers and coprophagic devotees delight in the news that they have gained an associate professorship or even professorship, despite having not authored work of note – or any work for that matter. The time has surely come to strip such individuals of academic positions and admit them to the role of administrators, with salaries adjusted downwards. Because that is what a desk clerk, after all, is.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Israel’s government and their Zionist ideology has been present in African politics since the late 1800s. It all began with the British government who wanted to dominate East Africa to advance their commercial interests and to secure trading routes to India before other Western Imperial powers such as Germany and France.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians, the US President Joe Biden, and all the American allies repeated the same mantra on cue: ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’. Much later, the UN human rights expert pointed out that in this instance Israel does not enjoy that right, as the territory they are attacking is a territory they control and are responsible for.
I believe many cardiologists are covering up COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Induced cardiac injuries and deaths, mainly because they recommended these vaccines and even if their heart injured patient didn’t take the jab on their advice, they’re worried it will come back to haunt them via other patients they pushed the jabs on.
I have had cardiologists from time to time look perplexed and say they “never” see COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis. Two prospective cohort studies show the rate of COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis is ~2.5% per shot.
Kiev’s officials continue to spread baseless narratives about the conflict, predicting that hostilities tend to expand to other territories in Eurasia, as the fighting has supposedly become a “war of resources”. Although there is a real risk of the conflict spreading to other regions, the rhetoric is wrong and this narrative helps to spread anti-Russian paranoia.
Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history. Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time.
There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022 (see below). These talks were facilitated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and featured detailed and candid discussions on the terms of a possible settlement.
A powerful United Nations agency has unveiled a plan to regulate social media and online communication while cracking down on what it describes as “false information” and “conspiracy theories,” sparking alarm among free-speech advocates and top U.S. lawmakers.
Muslim migrants in Japan suffer from the lack of access to burial grounds when 99.9% of the nation is cremated. Muslims are usually met with opposition from the local community where cemetery construction is planned.
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Israel’s government and their Zionist ideology has been present in African politics since the late 1800s. It all began with the British government who wanted to dominate East Africa to advance their commercial interests and to secure trading routes to India before other Western Imperial powers such as Germany and France. In 1888, the British established the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA). This is where the British government had a problem and an idea to solve it and proposed several places that could become a new homeland for the Jewish minority in Europe.
Theodore Herzl’s Search for a Jewish Homeland in Africa?
In 1897, the Zionist Organization(ZO) was founded by Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian citizen with Jewish roots was an accomplished journalist and a political activist who is considered the father of Zionism. Herzl established the Zionist Organization to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine with the idea that it will eventually become a Jewish state, so he saw it as a practical solution against antisemitism throughout Europe. In Herzl’s ‘A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question’ he said that
“The Argentine Republic would derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us. The present infiltration of Jews has certainly produced some friction, and it would be necessary to enlighten the Republic on the intrinsic difference of our new movement.”
But he made it clear that
“Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name ‘ of Palestine would attract our people with a force of Marvelous I potency.”
Herzl proclaimed that
“We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning them an extra-territorial status, such as is well known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these_ sanctuaries, answering for the fulfilment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.”
Herzl spoke of how institutions would assure Jewish Supremacy under the protection of international law:
Externally, the Society will attempt, as I explained before in the general part, to be acknowledged as a State- forming power. The free assent of many Jews will confer on it the requisite authority in its relations with Governments. Internally, that is to say, in its relations with the Jewish people, the Society will create all the first indispensable institutions; it ‘ will be the nucleus out of which the public organizations of the Jewish State will later on be developed. Our first object is, as I said before, supremacy, assured to us by international law, over a portion of the globe sufficiently large to satisfy our just requirements
Jewish Zionists in Europe led by Herzl already had a strong connection towards the Land of Israel as they saw themselves as the lineage of the ancient people of Israel who settled in Canaan (aka Palestine) more than 2000 years ago which was during the time of the Roman Empire.
Despite the claims that there was a Jewish connection to Palestine, the British Imperial government did propose more than one territory including Cyprus, El Arish in the North Sinai Peninsula of Egypt and even another place in Africa called the Guas Ngishu, a huge plateau located between Nairobi and Mau which is known today as Kenya and of course, Uganda which was proposed later, but the crisis for Jews living in Eastern Europe called for decisive action from the British government.
Theodor Herzl spoke at the Sixth Zionist Congress in August 1903 and mentioned the British proposal for a temporary place, but there was a sense of urgency for a Jewish homeland since Jews in Russia were facing a high-level of discrimination although Herzl had envisioned Palestine as a future homeland for the Jewish people. Herzl even wrote a novel based on the Jewish “return to Palestine” called ‘Altneuland.’
There were several important figures for establishing a Jewish homeland including Joseph Chamberlain, a statesman who had experience in managing colonies for the British empire as Secretary of State for the Colonies personally knew Theodor Herzl as both were introduced to each other by Rothschild family members.
However, Herzl’s proposal for Jewish settlements in Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula, or El Arish were not feasible to Chamberlain since they were not under British rule and in some cases, people had been living in these areas for a long time, but he did agree to discuss El-Arish Plan with Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne to gain Jewish support for Britain. So, Chamberlain decided to tour South Africa, during his trip, he passed through Mombasa, a city in southeastern Kenya and was confronted by white British settlers who complained about the lack of workers to finish a railway. Along the way on a Ugandan railway, he saw a possible Jewish homeland in East Africa (Kenya) since it had a significant number of whites, so he mentioned the possibility to Herzl but did not push the idea any further since the plan was to eventually occupy Palestine.
But after the Kishnev Pogrom, an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev, the capital of the Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire in 1903, Herzl thought about East Africa as an option. The British government was interested in establishing a Jewish homeland in East Africa under its control. Reactions were mixed in the Sixth Zionist Congress so there was a split with 295 votes in favor and 178 against the East Africa proposal.
By December 1904, the Zionist Organization sent a special commission to Guas Ngishu to investigate and determine if the conditions were favorable for a Jewish homeland, but the Plan was ultimately rejected in 1905 because of the opposition by a former high commissioner of East Africa and the white settlers. In ‘African Zion: The Attempt to Establish a Jewish Colony in the East Africa Protectorate’ describes why the plan was rejected:
On the whole, however, there was little for the scheme in British government circles, especially when opposition was encountered. The white settlers in East Africa, led by Lord Delamere who had obtained a hundred thousand acres on lease, expressed their violent opposition in a campaign of vilification of Jews in general, and of the would-be Jewish settlers in particular. Eliot, the commissioner of the protectorate, went along with the plan at first, but turned against it as opposition developed. The Indians were unfriendly, and the natives were not consulted
It seemed like the white settlers were acting just like the Palestinians. The rejection of the plan allowed for the establishment of the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) to find a Jewish homeland even if it means that Palestine is out of the picture. By 1925, the ITO was disbanded with most of its members throwing their support behind the Zionist movement.
Unfortunately, the British and shortly after, the Americans agreed on Palestine becoming a Jewish homeland called Israel in 1948. From there, Israel became a global player along with its Western partners, for example getting involved in Africa’s economy and having influence in its politics and that’s where the East African nation of Uganda comes in.
The Israelis in Uganda
It all began with a six-foot, four inches tall man by the name of Idi Amin Dada Oumee, known as General Idi Amin, an erratic dictator who lived like a ruling king who had several wives and children. During the start of his military career in the British led Ugandan military, he was promoted from a private to becoming one of two only black African officers. Serving in British led Uganda military, Amin fought against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army known as the Mau Mau who resisted British colonial rule.
Idi Amin first enlisted in the British King’s African Rifles (KAR) in 1946 and became an assistant cook since he lacked a formal education but received a comprehensive military training over the years and rose in the ranks, by 1959, he became the highest ranking black African officer (Effendi class 2) in the British led army.
As a private, he was an impressive athlete who played in various sports including Rugby, swimming, and boxing. But it was boxing that made Amin stand out. As an amateur fighter, Amin had won the Uganda light heavyweight boxing championship in 1951 and remained a champion for nine more years. Some say that one of the greatest heavyweight champions of all-time, Muhammad Ali had refused to fight Idi Amin.
By 1962, Uganda gained its independence from British rule under a politician by the name of Milton Obote who became the country’s prime minister under King (Kabaka) Mutesa II in a coalition with the Kabaka Yekka movement.
By 1964, Obote had issues with King Mutesa II over a scandal in the 1964 Ugandan lost counties referendum and was also accused of smuggling gold, so Obote led a coup ousting Mutesa. Obote became a civilian dictator which led him to the presidency in April 1966.
During Obote’s presidency, Amin had military training in the U.K and Israel. Amin was promoted several times eventually becoming the commander of all the Ugandan armed forces by 1970.
During that time, Obote had published ‘The Common Man’s Charter’ which was a guideline leading to socialist policies. By 1970, the Obote government demanded more than 60% of share from private businesses and banks leading to massive corruption scandals. Soon after, food shortages and inflation affected average Ugandans. Obote also persecuted the Indian population and their businesses which did not help the Uganda’s economy. In other words, Obote was a corrupt socialist dictator that made life difficult for the Ugandan people.
During Obote’s reign, the Israeli government was entrenched in Ugandan society. Israel even sent weapons through Uganda into southern Sudan, to support the Anyanya who were fighting the Arab-dominated Sudanese government for decades.They trained the police and military and supported the Anyanya, a Sudanese separatist group based in the South Sudan since the first Sudanese Civil War began in 1955. The Anyanya were conducting a guerilla war with the Sudanese government. Obote made a fatal decision to withdraw support for the Anyanya rebels which infuriated the Israelis since they were instrumental in fighting an Arab-influenced Sudanese government on the African continent.
However, during a short period of time, Obote managed to disappoint Western powers including the U.S., U.K., and of course, Israel. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Documents on Sub-Saharan Africa, 1969–1972 stated that “Amin is regarded as more moderate and pro-Western than Obote but his ability to organize and run an effective government is questionable.” So clearly, they knew Idi Amin would be more manageable than Obote who had socialist policies that would naturally lead to friendly relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea. Idi Amin was the safer bet for Washington, London and Tel Aviv.
The West and Israel Supported Adi Amin’s Coup Against Obote
By January 1971, Idi Amin and his army overthrew President Obote with help from the Israelis and the CIA although Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth conference. In 1976,The New York Times interviewed a retired Israeli colonel who helped Idi Amin topple Obote in 1971, “Colonel Bar‐Lev was head of the Israeli mission to Kampala shortly after General Amin became chief of staff of armed forces. The Israeli became his confidant, and their families became close friends.” Bar-Lev supported General Amin because Obote was ready to expel the Israelis, “The colonel, In an Interview today, said he supported General Amin against President Milton Obote because the latter was hostile to Israel and was planning to expel Israeli forces from his country.”
Amin avoided a coup when his paratroopers killed Obote’s military officers who were planning to arrest him:
Colonel Bar‐Lev advised the general to station In Kampala a military force from his own tribe. The force would include paratroopers, armor, and jeeps. Its mobility and firepower would be such that 600 to 800 men could overcome 5,000, he said. Trained by Israelis, this force thwarted an Obote effort to oust General Amin, the colonel said, and played a key role in defeating the President’s forces.
Colonel Bar‐Lev said that in January 1971, President Obote, who was attending a conference in Singapore, decided to remove General Amin, and sent orders to have him arrested. A battalion commander loyal to President Obote called a meeting in the officers’ club to make plans for the arrest. Four Uganda paratrooper instructors loyal to General Amin learned of the plan and killed those at the meeting. General Amin then telephoned Colonel Bar‐Lev announcing, “The revolution has started”
The breaking point between Israel and Uganda was when Tel Aviv decided to cancel a visit by President Amin in late 1971 who was going to attend a ceremony for 200 Ugandan soldiers who completed a training course, so Amin was offended. Shortly after,Amin was interested in visiting Libya “Then, without mentioning what had happened, he asked“How many kilometers from here to Benghazi? If I can’t go to Israel, I’ll go to Benghazi.” According to the New York Times, The Israeli colonel went back to Israel and Idi Amin became a critic of Israel:
Colonel Bar -Lev returned home and President Amin announced a rupture of relations between the countries and the expulsion of all Israelis. He became one of Israel’s bitterest critics in Africa and provided Arab terrorists with bases and training facilities.
The former colonel said he had never had illusions about President Amin. He said he told officials in Jerusalem years ago that the man was emotionally unstable. He was told he was exaggerating
Israel’s Hand in Uganda’s Politics
Since the 1950’s, Israel wanted strategic partnerships with several African states to counter Arab influenced governments who were seen as hostile to Israel, so Amin was seen as the puppet dictator to help Israel achieve its goals in Africa. As a commander in the Ugandan army, Amin initially had a good relationship with top Israeli politicians and military officials, at one point he even enrolled in a paratrooper course in Israel which he never completed.
In 1972, there was an invasion of Uganda organized by Obote and supported by Tanzania in a mission to overthrow Amin with Ugandan rebels. So, Amin needed arms to counter Obote’s forces, but Israel and the US refused military support because they wanted Amin’s government to pay upfront, so naturally, Amin turned to President Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and promptly ended his relationship with Israel and the U.S. Amin went to Libya and met with Gaddafi. Soon after, Amin denounced Zionism and received a $25 million loan and received other loans from the Libyan–Ugandan Development Bank. Then Amin started to remove Israeli military advisers and technicians, and then ended full diplomatic relations with Israel.
Besides Amin’s policies towards Indians which was no different from Obote’s policies by shutting down their businesses and deporting them, he targeted the Israelis which was a major step for Amin’s foreign policies towards the state of Israel.
Amin’s new policies towards the Israelis were clear, he had completely changed. But then rumors spread that Amin used national funds for his own personal expenses which may have been true since most Western and Israeli supported dictators were corrupt, but Israel took a chance with Amin anyway, and it eventually backfired.
On August 22, 1972, The New York Times published‘Ugandan Expulsion Is a Setback for Israel’, on Israel establishing ties with non-Arab states but the big picture was to conduct covert operations to destabilize their Arab neighbors, “for Israel, Africa is a major diplomatic battleground. Premier Golda Meir has said that since Israel could not be friends with her Arab neighbors, she would try to “be friends with our neighbors’ neighbors.”
Israeli influence was gaining some ground in Africa which was successful until President Idi Amin turned on them, maybe he was embarrassed to learn about what the Israelis were up to in the Middle East and in Africa thanks to Muammar Gaddafi, “for more than a decade the policy was an almost unqualified success. Israel established relations with 32 black states, or most of non‐Arab Africa” and that “Israeli diplomacy has now suffered a sharp setback in the East African nation of Uganda, which expelled the last of 470 Israeli diplomats, military advisers, technicians and dependents on April 9.”
Israel blamed Libya since it offered Idi Amin the much-needed support but according to the NY Times, “Informed sources said that Uganda owed Israel $13 million to $18 million, most of it in the form of short‐term debts to Israeli contracting concerns constructing airfields, military barracks, housing projects and buildings, and that Uganda simply did not have the money to pay.”
An observer said that “When Amin began all this spending, Israeli contractors figured they might as well get their share.” Amin defended his stance against Israeli accusations as he told Soviet journalists “That Israelis had been “milking Uganda dry” and that “if you ask them to build a fence, they will demand three quarters of the payment in advance.” The NY Times suggested that Idi Amin was a dead beat, refusing to repay the Israelis, “In this view, General Amin’s action represents an indirect form of debt repudiation.” They even went as far as to say that Ugandan civilian officials could not control Amin’s spending habits, so they conveniently blamed the Israelis:
Another factor was that some Ugandan civilian officials had been critical of the Israelis to General Amin. Unable to restrain the general’s spending themselves, they reportedly took the desperate course of suggesting that it was the Israelis and not Government orders that were causing the financial squeeze
It’s worth mentioning that Idi Amin was an Israeli favorite over Milton Obote who condemned their aggression against Egypt and moved to cut support to the Anyanyas:
Uganda’s President at the time, Milton Obote, was a Pan-Africanist who envisioned a united Africa that would challenge the legacy of division and colonialism. Like most African leaders, he condemned Israeli aggression against Egypt and wanted to cut off support to the Anyanyas. But Amin, the Ugandan Army’s commander at the time, was a great admirer of Israel. He had briefly enrolled in a paratrooper course there (uncompleted), and was friendly with Colonel Baruch Bar-Lev, Israel’s military attaché in Uganda; Amin’s numerous wives and children even socialized with Bar-Lev’s wife and children. Amin came from an area near the Sudanese border, so was well placed to insure that Israeli arms continued to flow to the Anyanya, against Obote’s wishes
Months later, Israel took Uganda to court for the money its President, Idi Amin owed to them. On November 29th, 1972, in a New York Timesreport ‘Israel‐Uganda Dispute Reaches into Court Here as Bank’s Assets Are Ordered Attached’ the Israelis claimed that the Ugandan government owed them $610,270.20:
An Israeli contracting company obtained in State Supreme Court in Manhattan an order directing sheriffs in the state to attach any assets of Grind lays Bank (Uganda) Ltd. to satisfy the company’s claim of $610,270.20.
Court papers filed for J. Zeevi & Sons, Ltd., which had done construction work in the East African country, said the company had made deposits in Uganda currency in Grindlays Bank last March against which letters of credit totaling $610,270.20 could be drawn here. The company charged that Grind lays, a British‐owned commercial bank, had canceled the letters of credit because of the Uganda Government’s “new policy of active anti‐Semitism.”
Libya was also mentioned in the lawsuit:
General Amin, who visited Israel three times in 1971, later broke with the Israelis, charging that they had encroached on Uganda’s military and economic affairs. He is also said to have felt that his status as an African leader was being compromised by his close ties with Israel. Israel believes Libya encouraged the break.
Another factor is reported to be that Uganda owed more than $13 million in short‐term debts to Israeli concerns constructing airfields, military bar racks and housing projects and that Uganda did not have the money to pay the debt
The Israelis said that Amin praised Hitler and that anti-Semitism was at the forefront of Uganda’s foreign policy towards Israel:
The Zeevi complaint contended that the cancellation of the letter of credit was “based upon a new Government‐inaugurated and directed policy on forfeiture of foreign assets and property and a new policy of active anti‐Semitism embarked upon by the Government of Uganda.”
Court papers included as exhibits were news articles quoting General Amin as praising Hitler “for the killing of Jews.” Both the seizure of foreign assets and the official anti‐ Semitism, the complaint said, “are against and repugnant to the public policy of the State of New York and not recognized by the Federal Government of the United States”
In 2016, The New Yorkerpublished an interesting article called ‘Idi Amin’s Israeli Connection’ based on Amin’s ties to Israel:
Israel itself helped install Amin in power, creating a monster who turned on his former patrons. Israel had had a special relationship with Uganda since the latter’s independence from Great Britain, in 1962. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, David Ben-Gurion, then Israel’s Prime Minister, sought strategic partnerships with states on the edge the Arab world, including Uganda, Kenya, Iran, and Turkey, to counter the hostile nations on Israel’s own borders. As part of what became known as the Peripheral Doctrine, Israel trained and equipped Uganda’s military and carried out construction, agriculture, and other development projects.
Just months after the Six-Day War, in 1967, Israel sold Uganda weapons worth seven million dollars. In 1969, Israel began funneling weapons through Uganda into southern Sudan, where a ragtag rebel group known as the Anyanya had been fighting the Arab-dominated Sudanese government since the nineteen-fifties
Idi Amin had expelled the Israelis; however, this does not ignore the fact that the ‘Butcher of Uganda’ was a dictator who reportedly ordered the murder of 100’s of thousands of Ugandans for ethnic, political, and financial reasons during his time in power. Amin even purged his military officers and enlisted men from various ethnic groups including the Acholi and Lango people who technically opposed him and supported Obote. That purge resulted in more than 5,000 military members killed and if you include the civilians who were killed in the process, the number is doubled.
In 1978, Amin wated to annex Tanzania’s Kagera region, in response the Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere sent his troops to invade Uganda and occupied Kampala by 1979 and removed Idi Amin from power. Amin went into exile in Libya, Iraq and ended up in Saudi Arabia for the rest of his life.
Idi Amin Dada was not one of the good guys, that’s for sure, but isn’t it ironic that even a dictator who was backed by the West and Israel, finally opened his eyes to the dangers of Zionism, he even called his former bosses ‘criminal’ for what they were doing to the Palestinians.
Here is a video with General Idi Amin in a candid interview explaining how the Israelis turned the Palestinians into refugees in their own country:
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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Idi Amin at UN (United Nations, New York) (Licensed under the Public Domain)
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In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians, the US President Joe Biden, and all the American allies repeated the same mantra on cue: ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’. Much later, the UN human rights expert pointed out that in this instance Israel does not enjoy that right, as the territory they are attacking is a territory they control and are responsible for.
As the millions of people across the globe took to the streets in support of the Palestinian cause of freedom, an end of occupation, and protesting the Israeli attacks on Gaza against unarmed civilians, the western leaders had to stop and re-think their old attitudes, which were proving to be far out of step with the world of today, especially the younger global population which demand justice. Due to social media, people can see videos and commentary from the scene. Western media is not inside Gaza and they report from safe distance locations in Israel; however, Arab media reporting in English from the ground in Gaza have brought the conflict close to people on the internet.
The European protests were huge and well organized. London had 350,000 people in the streets, even though the Home Secretary had called them ‘Hate Marchers’ and was fired for her contempt. Europe is closer to Gaza than the US, and while the US has been traditionally kept captive of the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, the European public has been supportive of the Palestinian quest for freedom. Many Europeans feel that the European Union has been blindly following US foreign policies which have proved disastrous in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
The US State Department employees, under Secretary of State Antony Blinken, called out the war crimes and violations of international law by the Israeli government. The staff are career professionals and diplomates who voiced concern at US double-standards by the Biden administration, which puts a hold on weapons transfers from US to any country which will likely use the weapons in human right violations. Instead of holding up weapons to Israel, they were fast-tracked immediately even though it was clear they were committing war crimes, human rights violations, and clearly operating against international laws. Josh Paul resigned from the State Department in an act of conscience.
At the White House, the staff have become younger and more diverse than in past generations. These professionals complained to Biden about what Israel was doing in Gaza. Biden and Blinken had to re-think their position of blind approval of Israeli military actions.
Biden and Blinken started peppering their statements about Gaza with references to the decades old UN resolution for a two-state solution. As the moments progressed, we then heard the same phrases repeated by western leaders aligned with the US. We heard the Arab leaders echo the call for the two-state solution, and China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa as well.
Experts are pointing to a generational change, or revolution in the minds of people who believe there is an alternative to occupation, and there should be no alternative to freedom and autonomy for the Palestinian people who have suffered since 1948 under a brutal military occupation of the West Bank, and Gaza the largest open-air prison on earth.
Israel likes to claim they are the only democratic country in the Middle East, but their policies against the Palestinians are undemocratic. Americans who are aged 70 and 80 might be content to hang on to outdated notions, but the younger Americans are questioning how can Israel be considered to share American values, while having a two-tiered justice system which the UN has deemed to be an Apartheid state.
Biden has sent a request to the Senate on October 20 to remove all restrictions on US weapons stockpiled in Israel itself.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Sunday he was open to placing conditions on any aid to Israel, with the aim of reducing civilian casualties in Gaza.
“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law. And, so, I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws,” Murphy said.
“Benjamin Netanyahu believed that you could ignore the Palestinians, that you could try to squash their desires for a state and, ultimately, that would bring peace to the region into Israel. That’s just not the case.”
He went on to call for a Palestinian state as the only way to long-term peace.
Senator Bernie Sanders listed out demands for the Israeli government in order to receive US aid. Demanding “an end to the indiscriminate bombing,” a “right of displaced Gazans to return to their homes,” “a freeze on settlement expansion” in the West Bank and no long-term occupation of Gaza by Israeli forces, as well as a commitment to engage in peace talks “for a two-state solution in the wake of the war.”
The road towards a final solution to the Palestinian suffering will likely be long, but it looks like some road signs are being placed along the way pointing to a beginning of the journey. No one knows how many miles it will take, and what detours and roadblocks may spring up along the path, but the two-state solution is the plan. The only thing certain, is that this huge effort at peace in the Middle East will need the leadership and support of the White House and US Congress. With the 2024 election less than one year away, it will need the Biden administration, and any future President’s full support across all party lines. Peace in the Middle East will have to be an American project with global coordination.
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Dec. 8, 2021 – Watson, LA – 16 year old 6’2 230lb football player Grayson Lane Temple died suddenly on Dec. 8, 2021 – his death was blamed on a “genetic predisposition to a cardiac arrhythmia.”
There have been many questionable young person deaths attributed to “congenital” or “genetic” heart issues, since COVID-19 Vaccines rolled out. I provide some detailed examples. Coroners and cardiologists are concluding “deaths of natural causes” but it seems they are just covering up vaccine deaths.
He stood 6’2” and was 230 pounds. 16 year old Grayson could be found working on a motor of most any kind, welding, and hanging out with his friends. Grayson loved aggravating his older sisters Corinne and Sarah Peyton and his younger brother Jacob
Grayson never complained of feeling bad and was rarely sick. Six weeks prior to him going into cardiac arrest he was having symptoms that he had not shared with his parents. He had told his friends and the school nurse, but no one recognized the symptoms he was having as possible signs of a heart issue.
A week prior to his death, his mom noticed he was unusually tired and sleeping more than normal. Grayson had stayed home from school with what he called a stomach bug. After a couple of days home from school, his mom checked his blood pressure with an automated cuff and noted his pulse was too fast. She obtained her stethoscope and listened to his heart and found an arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat). The next day an appointment was made with a pediatric cardiologist.
Four days went by before Grayson would been seen and ended up being directly admitted to PICU with atrial flutter. The medical team attempted cardioversion and oral anti-arrhythmias unsuccessfully. The third day, they made the decision to attempt the cardioversion again but before the procedure could be performed Grayson went into cardiac arrest. Their attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. He passed away on December 8, 2021 at the age of 16.
Genetic testing was performed, and we learned that Grayson had a genetic predisposition to a cardiac arrhythmiasuch as Long QT syndrome (notice the story doesn’t say he had Long QT Syndrome)
His cause of death was listed as myocarditis which is the #3 leading cause of death in student athletes (Long QT syndrome has nothing to do with myocarditis)
Grayson’s parents have made it their purpose to educate their community about “sudden cardiac arrest.”
My Take on 16 year old Grayson Lane Temple’s Death
This seems like a cover-up of what was most likely a COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Induced sudden cardiac death.
His cause of death was listed as myocarditis which has nothing to do with “genetic predisposition” such as “Long QT Syndrome”.
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Nov. 4, 2023 – Davie, FL – 14 year old Knox MacEwen is a Western High School Air Force Junior ROTC (Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) student. On Nov. 4 he was running at a Army Junior ROTC exercise when he suffered a cardiac arrest during a 5K run and died in the hospital. His mother is recovering from a hard fought battle with cancer this past year.
Nov. 8, 2023 – 14 year old dies after Running 5km; Is Congenital heart Disease to be blamed? (Someone paid for a fake story to be run on a fake website in India).
This story was so viral, that someone paid a fake site to run a fake story about Congenital heart disease.
The source is called “Times Now News” and appears to be a fake site out of India.
In fact, they consult an expert on US teenagers with congenital heart defects, Dr.Panjak Sugaonkar, Pediatric Cardiologist at Ruby Hall Clinic in Pune, India.
His clinic (in Pune, India) must be filled with mRNA Vaccinated US teenagers dropping dead from “Congenital heart disease”, for him to be an expert.
July 24, 2023 – Lebron James’ 18 year old son Bronny James suffered a cardiac arrest at 9:30am on July 24, 2023.
And here comes the Propaganda:
Look at how much focus they place on “those on social media who claimed that COVID-19 Vaccines were somehow involved despite the lack of that thing called evidence.”
Feb. 20, 2023 – 20 year old Ryan Keeler, UNLV football player, was found on Feb. 20 by UNLV defensive line coach Julio Garcia who was doing a welfare check on Keeler. He told police he kicked the apartment door open and found Keeler unconscious and cold to the touch. Coroner’s office said 20-year-old Ryan Keeler died of “cardiac dysrhythmia due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.” “…died of natural causes”, according to the Clark County Coroner’s Office.
Feb. 1, 2023 – New York, NY – 27 year old Sean Grogg died suddenly from an “unknown congenital heart condition.” He was mandated COVID-19 Vaccines at work.
Jan. 5, 2023 – Las Vegas, NV – 16 year old Ashari Hughes died suddenly while playing flag football. Coroner’s Office ruled a natural death due to “congenital coronary artery anomaly.”
The Coverup: “Las Vegas doctor addresses heart health concerns after sudden deaths of two high school students.”
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Following the recent news of the sudden deaths of two local high school students, who both suffered cardiac arrest, some parents are no doubt concerned about the heart health of young adults.
8 News Now’s Brian Loftus spoke to Dr. Alfred Danielian the director of Sports Cardiology at Las Vegas Heart Associates to address concerns on the topic.
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March 29, 2022 – Brazil – Helena Bilia Matarazzo was 6years old. Her mother had posted on social media about a congenital heart condition she had but that she was followed by a “specialized center”. She took the first dose of the Pfizer mRNA covid-19 vaccine on January 21, 2022 and the second dose in March of 2022. She died on March 29, 2022. Her mother did not blame Pfizer.
Sep. 28, 2021 – Inverness, FL – 16 year old Antonio Hicks collapsed during football practice and died suddenly on Sep. 28, 2021. Associate Medical Examiner Dr. Shanedelle Norford identified hypertrophic cardiomyopathy as the cause of the teenager’s death. Norford also cited ventricular hypertrophy in her Dec. 29, 2021, autopsy report.
My Take…
I believe many cardiologists are covering up COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Induced cardiac injuries and deaths, mainly because they recommended these vaccines and even if their heart injured patient didn’t take the jab on their advice, they’re worried it will come back to haunt them via other patients they pushed the jabs on.
Sometimes there is a congenital heart condition and it is falsely blamed. Sometimes there isn’t a congenital heart condition at all. I have seen much use of the word “possible”.
Every autopsy report I have seen in these cases is fraudulent. Why? None of the pathologists stained for mRNA or spike protein in the heart tissue. When these pathologists issue the final report, they are committing fraud because they reach a conclusion they couldn’t possibly have reached because the proper staining for a key complicating factor, was not done.
Having an underlying congenital heart anomaly or genetic predisposition is not a death sentence. Why does a young person live 20 years of their life just fine with their congenital heart anomaly, but they take an mRNA vaccine, drop dead a month or two later and it’s called a “natural cause of death” due to the anomaly that didn’t cause any problems for 20 years?
It makes no sense but I’m seeing more and more of these fraudulent “natural causes of death”
But silence from most families is what allows doctors to get away with injuring or killing their patients.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
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
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
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***
I have had cardiologists from time to time look perplexed and say they “never” see COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis. Two prospective cohort studies show the rate of COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis is ~2.5% per shot.
I am seeing cases nearly every day in the office as a practicing internist and cardiologist. How can other cardiologists be blind to this tidal wave of cases?
Here are a some simple explanations:
When a patient suddenly dies in the field, many times the physician is never notified. Distant family members may not know the treating doctors. In the case of young persons, there may be no doctor at all. So the medical examiner signs off on the death certificate, many times, with no autopsy.
Electronic medical records in clinics and hospitals are not well-linked to state or national death registries. So by looking in a chart by chance, it would be impossible to know if someone had died.
It seemed to me that these were not enough. Something else must explain the blindness among cardiologists particularly to nonfatal cases. So I undertook a Twitter (X) poll.
As you can see, once a patient suffers vaccine-myocarditis, they do not return to the same doctor who recommended the vaccine. Patients feel disappointed and burned in not receiving full, free informed consent. They go to another doctor who likely would have warned them not to take the shot from the very beginning.
*
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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
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Kiev’s officials continue to spread baseless narratives about the conflict, predicting that hostilities tend to expand to other territories in Eurasia, as the fighting has supposedly become a “war of resources”. Although there is a real risk of the conflict spreading to other regions, the rhetoric is wrong and this narrative helps to spread anti-Russian paranoia.
Lt. Col. Sergey Naev, commander of the Ukrainian Joint Forces, revealed his thoughts during an interview with ABC News. For him, with Russian stability and decreasing military support for Kiev, Moscow could go beyond Ukraine in its military maneuvers, involving more countries in hostilities. Naev claims that Russia currently receives weapons from North Korea and Iran and that it is producing enough military equipment to remain active in the conflict.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is losing Western support, receiving fewer and fewer weapons and money. Naev is worried about this scenario, since, for him, only with a strong Ukraine facing Russia will it be possible to prevent Moscow’s alleged expansionist plans. In this sense, he makes it clear that, despite difficulties, the Ukrainian armed forces are already preparing for the future of the conflict, improving defense lines to prevent the Russian advance.
“We are preparing for this. We build defenses, lay mines and train our forces”, he emphasized.
There are some different points in Naev’s words that need to be analyzed. First, it is necessary to emphasize that he is right in his assessment of the critical Ukrainian situation. With the reduction of resources given to the country by the West, Ukraine has terrible expectations for the near future in the conflict. Since the start of the war in Palestine, the Western focus has been on supporting Israel in its campaign of ethnic cleansing against the people of Gaza, which is why the “endless” source of resources for Ukraine is “drying up”.
As we know, Kiev no longer has enough strength to maintain hostilities in the long term and at some point the regime will be forced to surrender, even if this does not please Western sponsors. Having received numerous military packages, the Ukrainians were at least able to continue fighting (even without any chance of victory), but without this continuous help, not even this prolongment will be possible.
However, Naev is wrong to claim that the conflict has become a mere “resource war”. He spreads rumors by claiming that Moscow is supplied with Iranian and North Korean weapons. There are several accusations of this type, but no official confirmation has been given so far. Furthermore, even if Russia eventually purchases weapons abroad, the country is evidently not dependent on this military cooperation to achieve its objectives on the battlefield, being self-sufficient in its defense industry. On the other hand, as far as Ukraine is concerned, this self-sufficiency obviously does not exist, as the country depends on weapons and money from the West to fight.
Another problem in Naev’s assessment is the unfounded belief that Ukrainian failure will motivate Russia to start conflicts in other countries. By saying so, he disseminates the narrative that Russia has expansionist interests and will continue to fight to gain new territories, which is a lie. The Russian-majority territories were only reintegrated into the Federation because Kiev did not give any guarantee that it would protect the rights of the local people.
The liberation of territories is a reactive measure by Russia to simultaneously protect its citizens and guarantee security on its borders. Hostilities could have ended last year without any territory being added to the Federation, but the Kiev regime opted for war, so the Russians have no other alternative than to fight and reintegrate the new regions.
Therefore, it is not correct to say that an expansion of the conflict will occur as a result of Russian acts. If hostilities begin in any other country, it will certainly not be on Russian initiative, but by NATO itself, which has repeatedly shown interest in internationalizing its aggression against Russia, involving new territories in the war.
For a long time, the Western alliance has been causing chaos and destabilization in regions around Russia’s strategic environment, such as the Caucasus, Moldova, Belarus and others. Faced with the impossibility of defeating Moscow in a symmetric confrontation, the West is betting on the creation of multiple fronts, thus enabling a strategy of prolonged attrition to “wear down Russia”. So, although the possibility of expanding the conflict zone is real, it is not Russia’s fault.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
The region between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan where 7 million, mainly immigrant European Jews, including two million Russians, whose families were given a national identity by courtesy of an American-led United Nations, in 1947, now face 7 million Palestinian Arabs, kept for 75 years without any national identity as a deliberate policy of racial superiority and ethnic cleansing by an extremist, Right-wing Likud government of a violent, illegal occupier that is, inexplicably, supported by both the US and the UK with billions of dollars of arms and aid each year.
That money and those arms are used to supply guns, guided missiles, F-16 / F-35 US strike aircraft, helicopter gunships, nuclear-armed German-built, Dolphin-class submarines, ICMBs, SLBMs, artillery, ammunition, cluster bombs, bunker busting bombs, electronic defence and espionage systems, all of which have built the tiny Israeli state into the most heavily-armed, nuclear-weaponised power, on a per capita basis, in the world. That state is now under the control of a government run by a Prime Minister currently on trial charged with corruption.
That same government and Prime Minister have, in the past weeks, ordered their military to commit the mass murder of over 14,000 civilians in Gaza, mainly unarmed women and children, in revenge for a terrorist attack committed by Hamas on 7th October against Israeli kibbutzim in southern Israel in which over 1200 Israelis were killed and 200 hostages taken.
In a blatant violation of international law, the Israeli state has in the past days, killed thousands of innocent men, women and children, in an extraordinary, criminal, revenge atrocity against an unarmed civilian population, that has been under a blockade of essential goods, medicines and electricity for now 16 years.
Those killed in this mass murder were indigenous Muslim Arabs (as well as Christians), living in Gaza, in their traditional homeland of Palestine. They comprised the majority demographic of Palestine for well over a millennium, until 1948 when their land was forcibly partitioned by an American dominated, then newly constituted, United Nations, in New York.
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Hans Stehling is a regular contributor to Global Research.
The American-led NATO attacked Serbia and Montenegro with military aircraft between March to June 1999. The often indiscriminate manner of the NATO bombing resulted in more than 1,200 civilian deaths according to the Yugoslav Committee for Cooperation with UNICEF; but in fact the real number of civilian fatalities was significantly higher, and could have amounted to between 5,000 to 5,700 civilian lives lost as a result of less than three months (11 weeks) of NATO air raids.
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.
A powerful United Nations agency has unveiled a plan to regulate social media and online communication while cracking down on what it describes as “false information” and “conspiracy theories,” sparking alarm among free-speech advocates and top U.S. lawmakers.
USA’s Asia-Pacific policies undoubtedly underwent a tactical change with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that broke out in Gaza and has a tendency to spread to the region. However, it is not possible to talk about a change of direction strategically or geopolitically.
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome can be one of the most painful health conditions known to man. The Frikha paper suggests that this COVID-19 Vaccine Injury is not a local traumatic injury of the arm that was injected, but rather an auto-immune attack on the body, since it attacked the knee.
Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history. Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time.
There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022 (see below). These talks were facilitated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and featured detailed and candid discussions on the terms of a possible settlement.
The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected.
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***
The combat capacity of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, has been seriously weakened by the shortage caused by the continuous supplies of material and ammunition to Kiev, said Johann Wadephul, German deputy of the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. His comments come as it was discovered nearly half of Germans want to see the coalition government dissolved.
“Crucial [German] troop units can only last a maximum of two days in a battle [due to these shortages]. And that is a catastrophic finding overall,” Wadephul said. “Anyone who even talks about being ready for war, but expects the Bundeswehr to be at least ready to defend itself, should have ensured that such a bad situation does not occur. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case.”
Wadephul argued that the process of improving the combat capacity of the country’s armed forces was slow and blamed the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, for the current state of things. He added that he sees high-sounding statements but little real action to change the current situation.
According to the politician, “the turning point” for the Bundeswehr has not yet arrived.
“Even when it comes to replacement procurement, the Bundeswehr is actually making a loss. As correct as the donations to Ukraine are in terms of material and ammunition, in the current security situation, it is unacceptable that there is no compensation,” Wadephul said. “We need much more [weapons] than we have had.”
Wadephul’s warnings about the weakened state of the Bundeswehr come after the CEO of German steel giant Salzgitter Steel, Gunnar Groebler, warned that Germany will face deindustrialisation if companies continue to move production out of the country. In his words, the German government’s refusal to import Russian energy resources has worsened the industrial economic climate.
According to the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 32% of the companies surveyed are inclined to invest abroad amid “concern over a future without cheap Russian gas,” highlights the Financial Times.
The CEO of Germany’s second-largest steel company warned that large energy users must commit to the country as a basis to avoid the progressive deindustrialisation of Europe’s largest economy.
“If I were to follow that lead, then we are going to deindustrialise this country,” Groebler told the Financial Times.
The CEO stressed that if suppliers of raw materials for industry, such as steel and chemicals, leave Germany due to high energy prices, there is a risk of losing the entire value chain.
According to several economists cited in mid-October, Germany’s GDP declined 0.2% in the second quarter and will likely fall another 0.1% before the end of 2023. Recently, the German Constitutional Court prohibited the government from taking out new loans, so the country faces a freeze in public spending.
Almost half of Germans are in favour of dissolving the current government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and about a third blame him for the suspended budget, according to a survey carried out on November 24 by the sociological institute Civey for the German magazine Focus.
According to the survey, 49% of respondents want to see the “traffic light coalition” government, formed by Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens, dissolved. Respondents believe it would be better for the SPD to join the alliance of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) to form a new government.
Another 48% said the coalition’s plight could be due to a billion-euro hole in the German budget, which was created when a court ruled that redistributing money from unclaimed loans from previous years was illegal. As a result, the cabinet has lost the confidence of 64% of the population, according to the survey.
Respondents were almost evenly divided when asked who should be held responsible for the budget debacle: 28% blamed Scholz, 27% blamed Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens, and 25% blamed the Minister of the Treasury, Christian Lindner, of the FDP.
With the Bundeswehr in its weakest state in decades, companies threatening to leave the country due to crippling energy prices caused by the sanctions on Russian energy, and the current budget debacles, it is easy to see why Germans are frustrated with this government. These issues will unlikely be alleviated until Berlin returns to normalcy with Moscow.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
On November 23, Alexander Sollfrank, a Lieutenant General in the German Bundeswehr and effectively the chief of logistics in NATO, proposed the urgent creation of what he called a “military Schengen”to ease the movement of NATO troops across the European Union. Sollfrank complained that the current bureaucratic rules are a major obstacle to operations in Europe and that they’re supposedly “jeopardizing everyone” due to the mythical “Russian threat“. It should be noted that this isn’t the first time a German high-ranking official or military officer has suggested that Europe should prepare for war with Russia. Since the start of the special military operation (SMO), Berlin has been extremely hostile to Moscow, evoking its genocidal policies of the first half of the 20th century policies.
Germany’s ideas of racial superiority and desire for global dominance led to both world wars that killed up to 100 million people, the majority of whom were Russians (nearly 30 million in WWII only). Just like Berlin feels responsible for committing the Holocaust against Jews, it should be no different in regards to other peoples it killed en masse, including Russians/Soviets, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, etc. However, for some reason, Germany doesn’t feel the same responsibility toward any of these nations, particularly the Russians. Worse yet, German weapons have been killing the people of Donbass for nearly a decade now, while its unadulterated support for the Neo-Nazi junta is more than disturbing enough, as it’s yet another proof that Berlin has never actually renounced its Drang nach Osten ambitions.
Interestingly, this has led to some crawling tensions between Poland and Germany, as the former isn’t exactly thrilled to see Berlin “take the driver’s seat”, which is perfectly understandable given the murderous history of German militarism, with Poles usually being its first target for approximately a thousand years. In fact, despite the virtually endemic Russophobia in Poland, the Germans have been a far greater threat to Polish survival, which is something many Poles still remember vividly. However, for the time being, Warsaw will certainly continue playing along as it perceives Moscow as “the bigger threat”. At the same time, despite numerous divisions and power play games, NATO is still fairly united in the idea of using Ukraine as a source of cannon fodder to be thrown at the Russian military.
On the other hand, the EU has definitely exposed its role long before the SMO. Officially an economic alliance, the loose bureaucratic superstate demonstrated that it’s nothing more than a geopolitical pendant of NATO, and by extension, of the US. The EU “broke the ice” last year by officially sending weapons to the Kiev regime and hasn’t stopped doing so ever since. Its de facto unification with NATO structures is effectively over and the belligerent alliance is now simply looking for ways to make it de jure, which would give its forces free rein over the entire continent. The process of militarization of Europe is perhaps best seen in the speedy NATO accession of Finland and soon Sweden (de facto it’s already done). Normally, it takes years or even decades for any given country to join the belligerent alliance.
For its part, Russia will surely not leave this escalation unanswered. The Eurasian giant certainly anticipated such moves, so it’s making adequate preparations. In such a hostile environment, the return to the path of a virtually unrivaled military superpower is the only way for Moscow, despite its initial reluctance. For decades, Russia has been trying to create a comprehensive, mutually beneficial partnership with Europe. During the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, Moscow went through an unprecedented demilitarization process that is unheard of in the entire history of mankind. Never has a global power willingly renounced such military dominance over its mortal enemies. And yet, the Eurasian giant’s rivals saw it as a “victory” and an opportunity to escalate their all-out aggression against the entire world.
Russia could easily reactivate officially dormant projects such as the RS-26 “Rubezh” that would give it complete control over the entire European continent and ensure that no sizeable invasion force could be mustered with impunity. The missile is perfectly capable of carrying not just (MIRV multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) warheads, but also HGVs (hypersonic glide vehicles) that would ensure the near-instantaneous destruction of any enemy.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
The New York Times reported on Saturday that “experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.”
ScheerPost publisher Robert Scheer commented on the importance of the piece, stating,
“The so-called paper of record finally acknowledges the unprecedented degree of violence visited upon civilians in Gaza by the Israeli government.”
Using U.S.-made bombs that weigh 2,000 pounds “that can flatten [apartment towers],” Israel has killed “roughly 10,000 women and children” according to the Times. Women and children make up almost 70 percent of all deaths reported in Gaza.
According to Rick Brennan, the regional emergency director for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean office, the opposite is typically expected. “In past clashes between Israel and Hamas, for example, about 60 percent of the reported deaths in Gaza were men,” according to the Times.
Further, “U.S. military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb — a 500-pound weapon — was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria,” according to the Times. As the Times reported:
“‘It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,’ said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may ‘have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.’”
The paper also reported that
“People are being killed in Gaza more quickly…than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.”
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the Israeli military spokesperson, claims that civilian casualties are inevitable because of Hamas’s alleged strategy of deliberately embedding itself within the civilian population of Gaza. Gaza is, however, one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, standing 25 miles long and 5 miles wide.
The Israeli military claims that the numbers of dead Palestinians reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry cannot be trusted because the Ministry operates under Hamas. Conricus claims
“We do a lot in order to prevent and, where possible, minimize the killing or wounding of civilians.”
As the Times reported, international experts do not share the same skepticism of the Palestinian Health Ministry’s numbers that the Israeli government does:
“[Brian Castner, a weapons investigator for Amnesty International and a former explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Air Force,] said Israel appeared to be moving too quickly to reduce harm to civilians…”
“After initially questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration now concedes that the true figures for civilian casualties may be even worse.
Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told a House committee this month that American officials thought the civilian casualties were ‘very high, frankly, and it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited.’”
“While the experts urged caution around public statements about the specific number of people killed in a particular strike — especially in the immediate aftermath of a blast — they said the aggregate death tolls reported by the Gaza Health Ministry have typically proved to be accurate.”
The Intercept previously uncovered evidence that the Gaza Health Ministry numbers were accurate, and possibly underreported.
Further, since Israel began its bombardment of hospitals in Gaza, recording the death toll has become increasingly challenging since the Gaza Health Ministry, according to international experts the Times spoke to, “gathers death figures from hospitals and morgues across the enclave, which tally the dead and report the names, ID numbers and other details of people killed.” The majority of Gaza’s hospitals have been shut down by Israel, which has necessitated “other government officials [to begin] updating the number of killed instead of the ministry,” according to the Times.
The numbers will likely rise in the coming weeks. After Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Israel launched a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off food, water, electricity, and fuel. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahustated that “this will be a long war.”
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Max Jones is a staff writer and video producer for ScheerPost. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Southern California, where he studied communications and screenwriting, he is following his post-USC plans to be an independent filmmaker and screenwriter, and a journalist at ScheerPost. He has covered various topics in both his web show Journalists for Sale and writing, focusing most heavily on issues of free speech, information warfare, and foreign policy.
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***
When this Whistleblower Exposed the Crimes of Obama’s Golf Partner and 12th Largest Campaign Contributor, the U.S. Justice Department Did the Honorable Thing—It Jailed the Whistleblower and Let Obama’s Golf Partner Walk Away Free
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Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history.
Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time.
The egregious double standard by which whistleblowers go to prison and those on whom they blow the whistle go free is all too typical in today’s two-tiered U.S. justice system.
It detailed the backlash and abuse that whistleblowers often face and the impunity of those holding positions of power.
In Birkenfeld’s case, at least he was able to get the last laugh: After he applied for whistleblower status following his release from prison, the IRS awarded him a settlement of $104 million through their Whistleblower Office.
Birkenfeld writes that he has “lived the life of an Ian Fleming character, which was all about thrill and that’s a hunger that can get you buried.”[1]
Growing up in an upper middle-class home in Hingham, Massachusetts (his father was a neurosurgeon), Birkenfeld graduated from Norwich Military Academy in Vermont and then experienced his first taste of the corruption of the banking world working for State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston, where he first became a whistleblower.
The father of the bank’s CEO, Marshall N. Carter, perhaps not coincidentally, had been Deputy Director of the CIA.
After getting an MBA degree, Birkenfeld started working for Credit Suisse, then Barclays and then the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), the largest Swiss banking institution and private bank in the world.
Serving as a director and head of business development for the American desk, Birkenfeld became UBS’s highest paid employee when he signed a multi-billionaire Russian émigré to the U.S., Igor Olenicoff, with the promise of helping him to evade paying taxes on much of his fortune.
Birkenfeld’s boss, Christian Bovay, conceived the scam that Birkenfeld participated in by which UBS would charge a three percent management fee to its wealthy clients in exchange for helping them to evade paying taxes by placing it securely in one of the bank’s secret off-shore accounts.
Birkenfeld would make clients more money by investing, often in weapons manufacturers. Then when the clients needed their money, UBS would lend it back at a reasonable interest rate.
Birkenfeld wrote in Lucifer’s Banker that “UBS was making a fee for holding the guy’s cash in the first place, then making another fee for loaning him his own damn money! And guess what? That guy’s happy! He’s getting his deal done, and he’s still doing it with tax-free cash! I couldn’t believe it, and you know what? It worked, over and over again.”[2]
Birkenfeld’s job was to travel to the U.S. frequently, to attend charity events and upscale social functions, and to woo wealthy new clients to the UBS Bank with an offer they couldn’t refuse.
UBS headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. [Source: wikipedia.org]
When asked by a prospective client what he could do for them, Birkenfeld’s stock answer was “three zeros: Zero income tax, zero capital gains tax; and zero inheritance tax.”
And he told them that, if the feds came nosing around, they were protected by Swiss laws.
Birkenfeld did very well with the arrangement by taking a cut of the investment, enabling him to purchase a $250,000 Ferrari Maranello and to live the high life.
Birkenfeld estimated that the total assets in the secret U.S. accounts acquired and invested by UBS in Switzerland totaled a whopping $20 billion.[3]
With time, Birkenfeld wrote that his conscience began to bother him as he recognized that he was helping rich people to “not pay their share, while the tax man’s axe fell on those who couldn’t afford it.”[4]
Birkenfeld decided to become a whistleblower on November 24, 2004, after his boss Christian Bovay issued a three-page internal memorandum, “Cross-Border Banking,” that specified that private wealth management employees should not do precisely what Birkenfeld and others had been doing—traveling to the U.S. seeking out clients by proposing to help them evade taxes in violation of U.S. laws.
Birkenfeld considered the memo to be a “cover-your-ass document,” whose purpose was for company management to wash its hands of activities carried out by company employees and, if they were investigated by police authorities, to create the false illusion that they did not support such practices.
Birkenfeld wrote: “Christian Bovay. That fucking slimy, rotten-toothed, dandruff-flinging scumbag. This was all him, all the way…We are all making a fucking fortune for the firm. Would they throw their best moneymakers under not merely a bus, but a bullet train? Yes they would…In a fucking heartbeat. That bastard Bovay was like Satan. And what did that make me? A trusting naïve dupe. Nothing more then Lucifer’s fucking banker.”[5]
On October 5, 2005, Birkenfeld resigned from UBS and became an internal whistleblower. After a company review of its malpractice turned into a whitewash, Birkenfeld sued UBS and was given a payout of 575,000 Swiss francs.
He then decided to provide the information that he had to the U.S. Justice Department, telling his lawyers that his job had been to help wealthy American citizens “hide their money, avoid paying taxes, deceive spouses and business partners, and in effect defraud the U.S. government.”[6]
According to Birkenfeld, UBS “not only encouraged these practices [but] trained us all on the methods of secret solicitation, as well as on how to dupe American federal authorities.”[7]
In July 2008, Birkenfeld testified on the malfeasance of his and other Swiss banks before the U.S. Senate.[8]
He thought that he would be welcomed by the Department of Justice lawyers as “an American patriot, a virtual Paul Revere”; instead, he was treated with hostility by them.
A key reason is that UBS was very well connected politically. President Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, for example, had been a partner at the well-connected law firm of Covington & Burling, one of whose biggest clients was UBS.
The chairman of UBS’s America Division, Robert Wolf, was also a golfing partner and the 12th largest donor to President Obama who may have lobbied to help ensure that no UBS executives were prosecuted by the Department of Justice—only the whistleblower Birkenfeld.[9]
Image: Obama shakes hands with Robert Wolf, the chairman of UBS’s America Division. [Source: voiceofdetroit.net]
When Birkenfeld learned that the Department of Justice would be prosecuting him and not his bosses, he said it was “like being thunderstruck by the revelation that your entire family had banded together, taken out a $5 million insurance policy on your life, and hired a hit man to put a bullet in the back of your skull.”[10]
Later on, Birkenfeld learned of a secret deal cut by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey to resettle some Uyghur terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in Switzerland in exchange for protecting the 19,000 American account holders in UBS, some of whom were big-time donors to the Clinton Foundation.[11]
Soon after this deal was struck, Bill Clinton was paid $1.52 million by UBS for a series of fireside chats with the bank’s Wealth Management Chief Executive, Bob McCann—Clinton’s biggest payday since leaving the presidency.
Most of Birkenfeld’s clients ultimately admitted to their guilt, signed on to amnesty programs, paid their fines and back taxes, and remained safe from any public revelations.
Igor Olenikoff pled guilty to a single felony count of filing a false tax return for 2002 and got off with a $52 million fine, which for him was small change.
But the Feds threw the book at Birkenfeld, who believed that DoJ lawyer Kevin Downing had a “psychotic obsession” with him.[12]
During sentencing after his conviction, Birkenfeld was given more than three years in prison despite the judge receiving a supporting letter from Senator Carl Levin who said that the information he provided to the Senate subcommittee on banking that he headed was accurate, and enabled the subcommittee to initiate its investigation into the practices of UBS.
He received another letter of support from Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who said that Birkenfeld’s whistleblowing and cooperation with the SEC had resulted in a successful civil suit against UBS that brought $200 million in penalties to the SEC, while preventing UBS from further violating federal securities laws.[13]
Two-Tiered Justice System
According to Birkenfeld, the U.S. Treasury loses $100 billion each year in tax revenues from off-shore tax abuses.[14]
These are not victimless crimes, as this money could be put to good use in funding education, health care, public transportation and environmental clean-up in the U.S., which is urgently needed.
Birkenfeld’s story exposes at once both the corruption and venality of global bankers and the blithe disregard for the common good among America’s one percent of earners.
It also shows the two-tiered nature of the U.S. justice system, which goes after whistleblowers while granting impunity to those against whom they blow the whistle.
An even more tragic case then Birkenfeld is that of Daniel Hale, who faced 45 months in jail for leaking documents exposing the criminality of the U.S. drone war, and Julian Assange, who faces the prospect of life in prison for exposing war crimes by leaders who will probably never see the inside of a jail cell that they so richly deserve.
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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). He can be reached at: [email protected].
Notes
Bradley Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy (Austin, TX: Greenleaf Press, 2016), 4.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 71.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 174.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 86.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 103, 104, 106. Above Bovay was his superior in Zurich, Martin Liechti, and Raoul Weil, managing director of the entire UBS operation worldwide.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 134, 135.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 134, 135.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 173.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 257.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 164.
Birkenfeld, Lucifer’s Banker, 231.
More recently Downing was Paul Manafort’s attorney.
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***
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that military commanders and the political arena are not in the same space, demonstrating that his power is under threat, and not by Moscow, but from within his own ranks. This issue is only amplified by the fact that Zelensky’s Western partners have slowly begun abandoning him, especially since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief of the General Staff, Valeriy Zaluzhny, has no war plan for 2024 and, therefore, must resign, said Verkhovna Rada deputy Maryana Bezuglaya, deputy head of the National Security Committee of the Verkhovna Rada. According to her, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces could not provide a plan for 2024, stating only that the army should be replenished with at least 20,000 recruits per month, an impossible number.
“The current situation is that if the military leadership fails to present any ideas for 2024, and all its mobilisation proposals boil down to the fact that it is more people without the slightest proposal for change in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, then such leadership must leave,” Bezuglaya said.
Her comments were preceded by statements Zelensky gave British tabloid The Sun on November 20, warning for Zaluzhny to stay out of politics.
“If a military man decided to do politics, it is his right, then he should enter politics and then he can’t deal with war. If you manage war keeping in mind that tomorrow you will do politics or elections, then in your words and on the front line you behave as a politician and not as a military man, and I think that is a huge mistake,” the Ukrainian president told the outlet.
According to The Sun, there are rumours that Zaluzhny will be a potential rival to Zelensky if he decides to pursue a political career.
“With all the respect to General Zaluzhny and to all the commanders who are on the battlefield, there is an absolute understanding of the hierarchy and that is it, and there can’t be two, three, four, five. It is one, in accordance with the law and in times of war this can’t even be discussed. That does not lead to the unity of the nation,” said the Ukrainian president.
Still, in Zelensky’s view, military personnel entering politics has been taking place in the country since 2014:
“Various political forces are pushing the military into politics. It was after 2014 when each political party wanted some military personnel and war stars, and I believe this was a big mistake.”
General Zaluzhny stated earlier this month that the conflict with Russia was at an impasse and that a breakthrough was unlikely.
He wrote in the Economist on November 1 that “the war is now moving to a new stage” and that “what we in the military call ‘positional’ warfare or static and attritional fighting, as in the First World War, in contrast to the ‘maneuver’ warfare of movement and speed” is now the norm and admitted that “There will most likely be no breakthrough.”
Zelensky, in the Sun, responded to Zaluzhny by saying,
“In the morale, there is no stalemate. We are at our home. Russians are on our land. Therefore there is no stalemate.”
The general enjoys widespread popularity in Ukraine – his supporters even stencilled his portrait in cities that the Ukrainian military recaptured from Russia last year. His words have influence. For this reason, Zelensky fears the repercussions of Zaluzhny revealing the actual situation in the conflict and, even more dangerously, pursuing a political career and taking complete state power.
Zelensky has recently sacked one of Zaluzhny’s deputies in charge of special forces, showing that the Ukrainian president is slowly trying to weaken the general’s power and influence.
Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SZRU) announced on November 17 the sacking of Oleksandr Tarasovsky as deputy head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. The reasons for his dismissal were not specified in Decree No. 757/2023. It cannot be overlooked that Tarasovsky’s sacking came only one day after Zelensky told journalists that several intelligence agencies had informed him about campaigns to destabilise his government.
In recent weeks, the Ukrainian president’s clashes with other authorities in Kiev have become public. It was reported that Zelensky fears a civil uprising against his government along the lines of the Maidan protests that ousted one of his predecessors, Viktor Yanukovych.
Effectively, Zelensky is battling to stay in power in the face of internal and external pressure to end the war with Russia, which will mean acknowledging the loss of territory. Zelensky even cancelled the 2024 presidential elections despite protests from Washington, which sees the democratic process as a condition to continue selling its financial support for Ukraine to the American public.
It is recalled that the Biden administration’s latest request to send $61.4 billion in aid to Ukraine has not yet been approved. An NBC poll released on November 19 showed that US President Joe Biden’s approval rating has declined to 40%, the lowest level of his presidency, with most voters disapproving of his handling of foreign policy. These US domestic concerns will naturally have an impact on support for Ukraine, which is already being seen through the 30% drop in US artillery shell deliveries to Ukraine since October 7, the day Hamas unleashed its brutal attack on Israel, as revealed by a Ukrainian official to ABC News on November 21.
The Ukrainian president is desperately trying to maintain power in the face of threats and pressures domestically and abroad. With US support for Ukraine slowly diminishing in favour of Israel and mounting domestic backlash, it will only naturally reverberate badly on Zelensky’s ability to continue a costly and futile war against Russia. Although diminished US support weakens Ukraine’s ability to wage war, it will strengthen Zelensky’s potential detractors, including Zaluzhny.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers an address in Kiev, Ukraine, April 15, 2022. (Credit: Ukrainian Presidency)
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There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022 (see below). These talks were facilitated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and featured detailed and candid discussions on the terms of a possible settlement.
By all accounts, these negotiations, which took place in March-April 2022, were making real progress when Britain and the US told Ukrainian President Zelensky to abandon them, which he did.
Coverage of these events has focused on how foolish and irresponsible it was for President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to put an end to these negotiations, given all the death and destruction that Ukraine has suffered since then – in a war that Kyiv is likely to lose.
Yet an especially important aspect of this story regarding the causes of the Ukraine war has received little attention. The well-entrenched conventional wisdom in the West is that President Putin invaded Ukraine to conquer that country and make it part of a Greater Russia. Then, he would move on and conquer other countries in eastern Europe. The counter-argument, which enjoys little support in the West, is that Putin was mainly motivated to invade by the threat of Ukraine joining NATO and becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. For him and other Russian elites, Ukraine in NATO was an existential threat.
The negotiations in March-April 2022 make it clear that the conventional wisdom on the war’s causes is wrong, and the counter-argument is right, for two main reasons. First, the talks were directly focused on satisfying Russia’s demand that Ukraine not become part of NATO and instead become a neutral state. Everyone involved in the negotiations understood that Ukraine’s relationship with NATO was Russia’s core concern. Second, if Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine, he would not have agreed to these talks, as their very essence contradicted any possibility of Russia conquering all of Ukraine. One might argue that he participated in these negotiations and talked a lot about neutrality to mask his larger ambitions. There is no evidence, however, to support this line of argument, not to mention that: 1) Russia’s small invasion force was not capable of conquering and occupying all of Ukraine; and 2) it would have made no sense to delay a larger offensive, as it would afford Ukraine time to build up its defenses.
In short, Putin launched a limited attack into Ukraine for the purpose of coercing Zelensky into abandoning Kyiv’s policy of aligning with the West and eventually bringing Ukraine into NATO. Had Britain and the West not intervened to scotch the negotiations, there is good reason to think Putin would have achieved this limited objective and agreed to end the war.
It is also worth remembering that Russia did not annex the Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia until September 2022, well after the talks had ended. Had a deal been reached, Ukraine would almost certainly control a far greater share of its original territory than it does now.
It is becoming increasingly clear that in the case of Ukraine, the level of foolishness and dishonesty among Western elites and the mainstream Western media is stunning. See this.
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A powerful United Nations agency has unveiled a plan to regulate social media and online communication while cracking down on what it describes as “false information” and “conspiracy theories,” sparking alarm among free-speech advocates and top U.S. lawmakers.
In its 59-page report released this month, the U.N. Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) outlined a series of “concrete measures which must be implemented by all stakeholders: governments, regulatory authorities, civil society, and the platforms themselves.”
This approach includes the imposition of global policies, through institutions such as governments and businesses, designed to stop the spread of various forms of speech while promoting objectives such as “cultural diversity” and “gender equality.”
In particular, the U.N. agency aims to create an “Internet of Trust” by targeting what it calls “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and “conspiracy theories.”
Examples of expression flagged to be stopped or restricted include concerns about elections, public health measures, and advocacy that could constitute “incitement to discrimination.”
Critics are warning that allegations of “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” have increasingly been used by powerful forces in government and Big Tech to silence true information and even core political speech.
Just this month, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released a report blasting the “pseudoscience of disinformation.”
Among other concerns, the committee found this “pseudoscience” has been “weaponized” by what lawmakers refer to as the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”
The goal: silence constitutionally-protected political speech, mostly by conservatives.
“The pseudoscience of disinformation is now—and has always been—nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives,” states the congressional report, “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats.”
Indeed, many of the policies called for by UNESCO have already been implemented by U.S.-based digital platforms, often at the behest of the Biden administration, the latest congressional report makes clear.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers nevertheless expressed alarm about the new UNESCO plan.
Image: Congressman McCaul addressing cybersecurity at Rice University (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5)
“I have repeatedly and publicly criticized the Biden administration’s misguided decision to rejoin UNESCO, putting U.S. taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times regarding the social-media plan.
Calling UNESCO a “deeply flawed entity,” Mr. McCaul said he is especially concerned that the organization “promotes the interests of authoritarian regimes—including the Chinese Communist Party.”
Indeed, UNESCO, like many other U.N. agencies, includes multiple members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its leadership ranks, such as Deputy Director-General Xing Qu, The Epoch Times has reported.
The CCP has repeatedly made clear that even while working in international organizations, CCP members are expected to follow communist party orders.
Lawmakers on the House Appropriations Subcommittee dealing with international organizations are currently working to cut or reduce funding to various U.N. agencies that lawmakers say are using U.S. taxpayer money improperly.
Already, the U.S. government has twice exited UNESCO—under the Reagan and the Trump administrations—due to concerns about what the administrations described as extremism, hostility to American values, and other problems.
The Biden administration rejoined earlier this year over the objections of lawmakers, The Epoch Times reported.
The UNESCO Plan
While being marketed as a plan to uphold free expression, the new UNESCO regulatory regime calls for international censorship by “independent” regulators who are “shielded from political and economic interests.”
“National, regional, and global governance systems should be able to cooperate and share practices … in addressing content that could be permissibly restricted under international human rights law and standards,” the report explains.
Unlike the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting any governmental infringement on the right to free speech or free press, UNESCO points to various international “human rights” instruments that it says should determine what speech to infringe on.
These agreements include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which states that restricting freedom of expression must be provided for by law and must also serve a “legitimate aim.”
In a recent review of the United States, a U.N. human-rights committee called for changes to the U.S. Constitution and demanded that the U.S. government do more to stop and punish “hate speech” in order to comply with the ICCPR.
Another key U.N. instrument is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states explicitly in Article 29 that “rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
In short, the U.N. view of “freedom of expression” is radically different from that enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
The UNESCO report says that once content that should be restricted is found, social-media platforms must take measures, ranging from using algorithm suppression (shadow banning) and warning users about the content, to de-monetizing and even removing it.
Any digital platforms found to not be “dealing with content that could be permissibly restricted under international human rights law” should “be held accountable” with “enforcement measures,” the report states.
UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay, a former French culture minister with the Socialist Party, cited risks to society to justify the global plan.
“Digital technology has enabled immense progress on freedom of speech,” she said in a statement. “But social media platforms have also accelerated and amplified the spread of false information and hate speech, posing major risks to societal cohesion, peace, and stability.
“To protect access to information, we must regulate these platforms without delay, while at the same time protecting freedom of expression and human rights,” said Azoulay, who took over the U.N. agency from longtime Bulgarian Communist Party leader Irina Bokova.
In the forward to the new report, headlined “Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms,” Azoulay says that stopping certain forms of speech and at the same time preserving “freedom of expression” is “not a contradiction.”
Citing a survey commissioned by UNESCO itself, the U.N. agency also said most people around the world support its agenda.
According to UNESCO, the report and the guidelines were developed through a process of consultation including more than 1,500 submissions and over 10,000 comments from “stakeholders” such as governments, businesses, and non-profit organizations.
UNESCO said it will work with governments and companies to implement the regulatory regime around the world.
“UNESCO is by not (sic) proposing to regulate digital platforms,” a spokesman for UNESCO, who asked not to be named, told The Epoch Times in a statement.
“We are, however, conscious that dozens of governments around the world are already drafting legislation to do so, some of which is not in line with international human rights standards, and may even jeopardize freedom of expression.
“Similarly, the platforms themselves are already making millions of human and automated decisions a day with respect to the moderation and curation of content, based upon their own policies,” the spokesman said.
The European Union, which already places severe limitations on free expression online, has already provided funding for implementation worldwide, UNESCO added.
The Biden administration told The Epoch Times that it wasn’t involved in creating the plan.
“We will reserve comment until we finish carefully studying the plan,” the State Department said in an email.
Free Speech Concern Grows
Concerns over the implications for freedom of speech and free expression online are mounting as awareness of the UNESCO plan spreads.
Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), expressed alarm.
“FIRE appreciates that UNESCO’s new action plan for social media recognizes the value of transparency and the need for protecting freedom of expression, but remains deeply concerned about efforts to regulate online ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech,’” Ms. McLaughlin told The Epoch Times.
“As we’ve seen in recent weeks, enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act, for example, has created even more uncertainty about platforms’ content moderation policies and users’ ability to speak freely online,” she said. “Local legal restrictions and norms can ultimately influence how platforms operate on a global scale.
“As countries around the world ramp up regulation of speech on the internet, it becomes increasingly likely that platforms’ enforcement will affect users—including Americans—outside of the states enforcing such rules.”
Indeed, across Europe, “hate speech” rules have increasingly been used not just to silence speech on issues such as marriage, immigration, sexuality, and religion, but even to prosecute those who violate speech laws.
This month, Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish Parliament and the former interior minister, triumphed after a years-long “hate speech” prosecution over her online speech supporting the biblical understanding of homosexuality and marriage.
In Poland, several members of the European Parliament are facing charges of “hate speech” for sharing political advertisements warning about possible effects of mass Islamic immigration into Europe.
Even more troubling to critics is that the concept of “hate speech” itself was introduced into the U.N. system by the Soviet Union, which regularly described anti-communist speech as “hate speech,” explained Jacob Mchangama in a 2011 paper for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Patrick Wood, founder and chairman of Citizens for Free Speech, warned that the UNESCO plan will certainly be used to silence critics of its agenda.
“When UNESCO trots out statements like—’the result of extensive worldwide consultations and is backed by a global opinion survey’—the fix is in,” Mr. Wood told The Epoch Times.
“In this case it will lead to a deluge of global programs to censor speech deemed counter to its agenda.”
The George Soros-funded Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which styles itself “the leading nonprofit” defending free speech, said it didn’t have anyone available to comment on the UNESCO plan.
Concerns about the U.N. attitude toward free speech are not new and have been growing in recent years—especially as so many of its member states with agents in U.N. leadership are known for suppressing dissent.
The new UNESCO plan also comes after the agency unveiled a plan last year to combat what it described as “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation” through education, The Epoch Times reported at the time.
According to the organization, “conspiracy theories” can “reduce trust in public institutions” and cause problems, such as decreasing people’s desire to “reduce their carbon footprint.”
Examples of “conspiracy theories” cited in last year’s report include everything from widely held beliefs such as “climate change denial” and concerns about “manipulation of federal elections” in the United States, to more far-fetched and fringe notions such as the “earth is flat” or “Michelle Obama is actually a lizard.”
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming last year spoke at a World Economic Forum event and boasted that the global organization had “partnered” with Google to promote its materials and suppress those that contradict it in search results.
“We own the science,” she said. “We think the world should know it.”
“We own the science, and we think that the world should know it.”
Melissa Fleming, UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, speaking on a WEF panel.
The reason they want us to “follow the science” is because they “own the science”.pic.twitter.com/KQ5B5fgnua
In an October 2020 World Economic Forum podcast on “Seeking a cure for the infodemic,” Ms. Fleming bragged of having enlisted over 100,000 volunteers to amplify U.N. views while squelching competing narratives that she dubs “misinformation.”
The revelation came after years of U.N. and governmental efforts to suppress what the global organization describes as extremism, misinformation, and more on the internet.
In 2016, the U.N. Security Council launched a “framework” to fight “extremism” online on the heels of a program from the previous year that pledged to battle “ideologies” that it said might lead to violence. Communism was not one of the targeted ideologies.
UNESCO Defends the Plan
The UNESCO spokesman defended the new plan, framing it more as an effort to protect free expression rather than a plan to limit it.
“Protecting freedom of expression has been at the heart of all of UNESCO’s initiatives to promote best practices in communications for decades, and this principle underpinned our approach to the Guidelines from the start,” the spokesman said.
The statement also pointed to a section of the guidelines that calls for adhering to “legal due process” when dealing with “hate speech.”
“They put a particular focus on the need for transparency as well as systematic human rights due diligence and impact assessments, as well as accountability to users,” the spokesman said, adding that the plan calls for “equal distribution of moderation capacity.”
“It is also clearly stated that the Guidelines should be considered in their entirety, rather than picking and choosing—for example, a policy on content moderation implemented by regulators that do not meet the definition of independence set out in the Guidelines would not be in alignment, regardless of the specific nature of the policy,” said the UNESCO spokesman, claiming that the guidelines will actually “expand” freedom of expression.
The organization didn’t provide a timeline for implementation, but more meetings are scheduled in the lead-up to the September 2024 U.N. summit in New York City.
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The American-led NATO attacked Serbia and Montenegro with military aircraft between March to June 1999. The often indiscriminate manner of the NATO bombing resulted in more than 1,200 civilian deaths according to the Yugoslav Committee for Cooperation with UNICEF; but in fact the real number of civilian fatalities was significantly higher, and could have amounted to between 5,000 to 5,700 civilian lives lost as a result of less than three months (11 weeks) of NATO air raids.
Western interference in Serbia had been taking place for years prior to 1999.
The US and the European Union funnelled tens of millions of dollars into anti-government activities targeted at Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose defiance was unacceptable to Western politicians, mainly the Bill Clinton administration in Washington. Milosevic was pursuing independent foreign and domestic policies, the latter of which included his refusal to implement the neoliberal programs so heavily supported by the Americans and their European allies.
The Yugoslav city of Novi Sad on fire in 1999 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
In the 18 months before Milosevic’s presidency ended in October 2000, the US and the EU spent about $80 million on such areas as the opposition media in Serbia. Western funding stretched further back, to the mid-1990s, when large sums of US and EU money started to enter Serbia. Washington pursued this policy mostly through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which are closely linked to the White House.
American and European funds assisted anti-government political groups like Otpor, which was based in the Serbian capital Belgrade and wanted to overthrow president Milosevic. Paul McCarthy, a senior program officer for the NED in central and eastern Europe, revealed that after the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 the NED was granting aid to anti-government organisations in Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, including to Otpor. In 1999 Otpor also received almost $2 million from another Washington-funded group, the International Republican Institute (IRI).
Image is from TruePublica
The NED was undertaking subversive activities alongside the Soros Open Society Foundations, established three decades ago by wealthy businessman George Soros, who is a notorious meddler, supporter of liberalism and Western imperialist expansion. Soros’ actions are often compatible with US government policy.
The NED and the Soros foundations infiltrated media organisations, think tanks, trade unions, etc. After 1990 Soros spent over $100 million on supporting anti-Milosevic groups with Otpor among the beneficiaries. Soros invested $50 million in an effort to purchase the Trepca mines and factories, located mostly in Kosovo.
The US promoted its “export of democracy” through organisations like the NED, USAID, the CIA, Freedom House and the Soros foundations. They would serve as a front for regime change in countries independent of Western policy. The method was not very different from the 1953 British and American-backed ousting of Mohammad Mosaddegh’s government in Iran, after the Iranian prime minister had nationalised the British oil firms in the country.
The CIA and MI6 funded anti-government demonstrations in Tehran, with the goals of forcing Mosaddegh from power and bringing Iran back under Western domination. More recently, Soros has regularly made use of “activists” by placing them on his payroll and they then stoke unrest in a particular nation designated for regime change.
Tanks in the streets of Tehran, 1953. Coup supporters celebrate victory in Tehran (Licensed under the Public Domain)
US government supported groups also propped up the “colour revolutions” such as occurred 20 years ago in Georgia, which shares a more than 500-mile border with Russia and is a former Soviet republic. Historian Moniz Bandeira wrote,
“After the Clinton administration left office, the Pentagon’s leadership began drafting policies to use Georgia as a key player in the neo-containment policy. The goal was to prevent Russia from dominating the Caucasus region once again”.
Between 2002 and 2004 the administration of George W. Bush engineered a project called the Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP), which involved US military training of Georgian troops; and from 2005, the Georgia Sustainment and Stability Operations Program (GSSOP), entailing the dispatchment of US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and Marine Corps troops for the further training of Georgian military personnel. Georgian soldiers were involved in the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and they had participated in military activities in Kosovo.
As mentioned, in November 2003 in Georgia anti-government protests were taking place, dubbed in the West as the Rose revolution. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged that partaking in the demonstrations were “non-governmental organizations… supported by American and other Western foundations”.
Among those interfering in Georgia were Washington-funded groups such as USAID, the NED, Freedom House and the International Republican Institute. The Soros foundations, inevitably, were involved in instigating unrest in Georgia, and from August to October 2003 Soros spent $42 million in encouraging anti-government activities there.
The Soros foundations funded the Kmara opposition group in Georgia, as it had done with Otpor in Serbia. Kmara was supported too by the above-mentioned US government funded organisations. Moreover, the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, had a considerable role in planning and organising the “Rose revolution” through Washington. The Americans feared should events take an unwanted turn for them in Georgia, that the country would seek closer ties with its neighbour Russia.
Georgia was believed to be a strategically important state by the West, partly because of its location in the South Caucasus beside Russia and partly because it was a fossil fuel corridor. The US National Security Strategy for a New Century stated in December 1999,
“A stable and prosperous Caucasus and Central Asia will facilitate rapid development and transport to international markets of large Caspian oil and gas resources with substantial US commercial participations. Resolution of regional conflicts such as Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia is important for creating the stability necessary for development and transport of Caspian resources”.
Also in 1999 the US Congress sanctioned the Silk Road Strategy Act, to advance American interests and economic influence in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and to oppose the ambitions of Russia, Iran and China in the regions. The Silk Road Strategy Act outlined that the Caucasus/Central Asia could provide major quantities of oil and natural gas to America, while reducing the nation’s dependence on Middle East resources.
In the elapsing time America’s reliance on oil, already monumental, has further increased. In 2012 there were 248 million vehicles in the US. By 2022 there was almost a vehicle for every person in the US (291 million vehicles for 335 million people), whereas in China at the end of 2022 there were around 415 million vehicles in the country for 1.41 billion people.
There are clearly more vehicles in China by comparison to America, but per capita they remain well behind the Americans. In 2020 most households in China still did not possess a car, though that will certainly have changed by 2030 in both Chinese urban and rural areas. In America, 91.7% of all households possessed at least one car by 2021, with about 60% of American households having two cars or more.
Per capita the US continues to be the nation that is easily the biggest consumer of fossil fuels in the world, which has been the case for decades. The US military on its own burns through more fossil fuels each year than entire countries like Denmark or Portugal, which are not poor states either.
A year after the protests in Georgia, another “colour revolution” took place this time in Ukraine in November 2004, which was titled the Orange revolution by the Western media. Bandeira noted “just as in Georgia the movement [in Ukraine] was triggered by activists, militants of the organization PORA (It’s time) and of other American and European NGOs, including Vidrodzhenya (Revival), once again sponsored by George Soros, Freedom House, the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which sustained the campaign of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko“.
Orange-clad demonstrators gather in the Independence Square in Kyiv on 22 November 2004. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
Since 1991, the US has spent many billions of dollars in an attempt to align former Soviet republics with the West, like Ukraine. This has usually involved funding the media to enable psychological warfare operations. The Pentagon pursued such a policy through the United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC), the State Department and groups like Freedom House and the NED.
Bandeira wrote, “The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the conflict in Ukraine had been triggered through outside pressure, in order to force Kiev to make a decision in favor of the West”. Ukraine gained an increased significance for the West this century as NATO continued with its reckless and provocative enlargement eastwards. Over the course of two years, 2003 and 2004, Bush’s government spent over $65 million in support of subversive political groups in Ukraine, including on a tour led by presidential hopeful Yushchenko, in order for him to meet authorities in Washington to convince them he would win the 2004 election against Viktor Yanukovych.
The International Republican Institute, overseen by US Senator John McCain, was also sponsoring Yushchenko’s campaign. The wife of Yushchenko, Kateryna Yushchenko, is an American citizen and she had worked in the White House in the Public Liaison Office during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. Yushchenko himself had worked in a far-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, while his wife was a director with the neoconservative think tank, the New Atlantic Initiative.
McCain and Soros had business dealings together and were friends. Upon McCain’s death in 2018, Soros wrote that he was “a brave warrior for human rights who stood up against repression and torture.” Soros forgot somehow that McCain had supported a number of unprovoked US wars including against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
After the Soviet Union’s 1991 disintegration, Soros’ Open Society Foundations poured tens of millions of dollars into Ukraine and invested money in other ex-Soviet republics, so as to make them “open” and “democratic”, in other words open to Western exploitation. From 1991 to 2011 the Soros foundations dispensed with $976 million in eastern European states and former Warsaw Pact countries. Some of the biggest recipients of this cash were publishers along with academic and cultural groups.
During an interview with CNN in 2014, Soros said that in 1989 he provided funds to dissidents in nations such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, when they were still part of the Warsaw Pact. Soros admitted that prior to Ukraine separating from the Soviet Union, he had created a foundation in Ukraine that was completely operational. Bandeira wrote that later on this Soros foundation “played an important role in the protests that erupted in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) after November 2013 and prompted the overthrow of President Yanukovych”.
Relating to Syria, president Bush, by way of an authorisation or finding in May 2007, permitted the CIA to implement covert actions to undermine and topple Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus. The desire to remove president Assad continued from 2009 into the administration of Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, as the latter attempted to sow disharmony in Syria while he repeatedly called for Assad to resign.
Obama was supported in his remarks by European leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel. She had previously provided strong backing for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, in spite of misgivings from most of the German public and from within her own party, the Christian Democratic Union.
One key reason for Washington’s desire to oust Assad was that he had rejected their proposal for a gas pipeline running through Syrian land, that was to eventually join up with the planned Nabucco gas pipeline, which was designated to transport gas from the Caspian Sea to the Middle East and Europe. Assad was pursuing policies independent of the Western liberal order and, partly because of this, the Syrian leader was demonised by American and European politicians who wanted regime change in Syria.
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This article was originally published on Geopolitica.RU.
Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree and he writes primarily on foreign affairs and historical subjects. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Sources
Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA (Springer; 1st edition, 23 June 2017)
“China registers 415 million motor vehicles, 500 million drivers”, Xinhua, 8 December 2022
Elizabeth Rivelli, “What is average mileage per year?”, Caranddriver, 24 February 2023
Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st edition, 4 February 2019)
Charlotte Potts, “Merkel speaks; DW checks the facts”, Deutsche Welle, 30 July 2016
Jacob Grandstaff, “George Soros, John McCain, and Immigration”, Capital Research Center, 10 July 2017
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“To the generals who have accompanied me in recent weeks, it seems we will part ways tomorrow, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your extraordinary humanity shown towards my daughter, Emilia.
You were like parents to her, inviting her into your rooms whenever she desired. She acknowledges feeling like all of you are her friends, not just friends, but truly beloved and good.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the many hours you spent as caregivers.
Thank you for being patient with her and showering her with sweets, fruits, and everything available even when it was not.
Children should not be in captivity, but thanks to you and other kind people we met along the way, my daughter felt like a queen in Gaza…
In general, she acknowledges feeling like the center of the world. She hasn’t met anyone on our long journey, from the rank and file to the leadership, who didn’t treat her with gentleness, affection, and love.
I will forever be a prisoner of gratitude because she did not leave here with a lifelong psychological trauma. I will remember your kind behavior, granted here despite the difficult situation you were dealing with yourselves and the severe losses you suffered here in Gaza. I wish in this world we could truly be good friends.
I wish you all health and well-being… Health and love to you and your families’ children.
Many thanks.
Danyal and Emilia”
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***
The Israeli government narrative surrounding the Palestinian prisoners being released during this temporary ceasefire is both insidious and dishonest. Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has banned Palestinians from celebrating their release. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” He told Israeli police to deploy an “iron fist” to enforce his edict.
The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected. Israel released a list of the names with alleged crimes they committed. And who is making these allegations? A military that acts as a brutal occupation force against Palestinians in the West Bank.
The vast majority of the 300 Palestinian prisoners proposed for release by Israel are teenage boys. According to the list, 124 of the prisoners are under the age of 18, including a 15-year-old girl, and many of the 146 who are 18 years old turned so in Israeli prisons. According to the definitions laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel.
Of the 300 names Israel proposed for potential release, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes; they are categorized simply as “under arrest.” Police and prosecutors all over the world make allegations later proven false during a fair trial. The Israeli narrative promotes the fiction that these Palestinians are in the middle of some sort of fair judicial proceeding in which they will eventually be tried in a fair and impartial process. This is a complete, verifiable farce. Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts. They often are denied access to lawyers and to purported evidence against them, and are regularly held in isolation for extreme periods and subjected to other forms of abuse. Israel is the only “developed” country in the world that routinely tries children in military courts, and its system has been repeatedly criticized and denounced by major international human rights organizations and institutions.
If, as Israel alleges, these people have committed violent crimes, particularly against civilians, then Israel should give them full rights to due process, to see the alleged evidence against them, and they should be tried in civilian courts with the same rights afforded Israeli defendants. That would also mean allowing Palestinians who do commit acts of political violence, particularly against the military forces of a violent occupation, to raise the context and legality of the Israeli occupation as part of their defense. Israel is asking the world to believe that these 300 people are all dangerous terrorists, yet it has built a kangaroo military court system for Palestinians that magically churns out a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. All of this from a country that constantly promotes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.
Palestinians on this list are from the occupied West Bank and have lived their entire lives under an apartheid regime. Palestinians taken by Israel, including some on the list of prisoners proposed for release, have certainly committed violent acts. But to pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust, given the appalling conditions Palestinians have lived under for decades. Contrast this to the widespread impunity that governs the actions of violent Israeli settlers who mercilessly target Palestinians in an effort to expel them from their homes.
All nations should be judged by how they treat the least powerful, not the most powerful or only those from a certain religion or ethnicity. This is why many leading civil liberties lawyers in the U.S. opposed the use of Guantánamo Bay prison and military tribunals and continue to oppose U.S. laws or rules that deny the accused a fundamental right to a proper defense.
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***
As the truce between Hamas and Israel takes effect on Friday, Palestinians inspecting their neighbourhoods find their city in ruins and wounded civilians sheltering at al-Shifa hospital are still waiting for a way out
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Palestinian families walk through destroyed neighbourhoods in Gaza City on 24 November 2023 as the temporary truce between Hamas and the Israeli army takes effect (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
The gate of the damaged headquarters of the Palestinian legislative council in Gaza pictured on 24 November 2023, following intensive Israeli air strikes on the northern Gaza Strip (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
People walk next to destroyed buildings in Gaza City on 24 November 2023 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
A man standing in the yard of a UN school that was used by Israeli soldiers during the fighting with Hamas, but is now vacated, 24 November 2023 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
A wounded Palestinian man sitting outside the emergency department of al-Shifa hospital on 24 November 20233 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
Wounded civilians on hospital beds at al-Shifa medical complex on 24 November 20233 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
Wounded children among dozens who are still at al-Shifa hospital as of 24 November 2023 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
A man carrying the coffin of a dead child in Gaza City, on 24 November 20233 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
A park in Gaza City destroyed after Israeli air strikes, as pictured on 24 November 20233 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
The destroyed front of a wedding dress shop in Gaza City, on 24 November 20233 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
A damaged mosque pictured in Gaza City as a result of Israeli air strikes, 24 November 2023 (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
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First published on November 14, 2023
***
As the Israeli military enters the second month of its operation in Gaza, questions continue to swirl around the exact nature of U.S. support for the war, with major potential implications for American interests in the Middle East.
The Pentagon has been fairly transparent about its actions outside of Israel, including the decision to move two aircraft carrier strike groups into the Middle East, among other naval assets and missile defense systems. But two more sensitive issues remain shrouded in mystery: What exactly are American special forces doing in Israel? And what weapons is the U.S. now giving to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)?
What Are American Soldiers Doing in Israel?
U.S. special operations forces are stationed in Israel and “actively helping the Israelis” in a number of areas, among them efforts to “identify hostages, including American hostages,” a Department of Defense official revealed last week.
The official did not share further details, but others told the New York Times that DoD “has dispatched several dozen commandos in recent weeks, in addition to a small team that was in Israel on Oct. 7 conducting previously scheduled training.” Other Western countries have also sent special operations forces “closer to Israel” in order to help with hostage recovery and potential civilian evacuations, according to the Times.
The Pentagon also dispatched a Marine Corps general with substantial special operations experience to advise Israel’s ground operations, but the general left the country prior to Tel Aviv’s ground incursion.
One official told journalist Spencer Ackerman that the U.S. is considering emergency “contingencies” in which U.S. special forces would directly assist with hostage recovery, but those plans remain hypothetical, according to the official. The only solid evidence of “direct” U.S. involvement has been a series of unarmed drone flights over southern Gaza that are helping to locate hostages.
Some eyewitnesses claim to have seen soldiers with American flag patches on the ground in Gaza, but no news outlets have substantiated this allegation. It’s also plausible that an Israeli-American soldier could have been wearing such a patch without permission from the U.S. or Israeli militaries.
#BREAKING| According to testimonies by Palestinians displaced from Al Naser neighborhood in western #Gaza, American soldiers were on the ground participating in #Israel's offensive on #Gaza. pic.twitter.com/fXSMFTRWxL
As for the identity of U.S. soldiers in Israel, a White House photo from President Joe Biden’s October 18 visit appeared to show the president meeting with several members of Delta Force, the Pentagon’s premier counterterror and hostage recovery unit.
It is unclear if any non-special operations U.S. military units are currently operating in Israel. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment from RS about its operations in Israel.
Increased Secrecy Around Weapons Transfers
The Biden administration has taken flak in Congress for his attempts to conceal details about American arms transfers to Israel amid the war, including a proposed measure to skip congressional notification requirements that would provide lawmakers with an opportunity to object to specific weapons sales.
“There is no reason we cannot both ensure needed U.S. assistance is provided to Israel in an expeditious manner and ensure Congress is able to fulfill its constitutional oversight duty,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) — the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — told the Washington Post last week.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), for his part, said Congress “should not make exceptions to this practice” and argued that it is the legislature’s responsibility to “review these funds and ensure their use is in the best interests of the American people.”
While lawmakers have reportedly received full briefings about what weapons are being sent to Israel, the White House has avoided publicly sharing information about its support, a sharp contrast with the detailed accounting of the Biden administration’s aid to Ukraine.
The administration has not explained this discrepancy, but it most likely stems from simple political logic. While Biden has been proud to boast his team’s support for Ukraine, he stands to face far more blowback for supporting Israel, whose actions in Gaza have drawn significant criticism both within the U.S. and abroad.
This logic played out recently when it came to light that the U.S. is planning to supply rifles to the Israeli national police, which is controlled by far-right Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has promised to give guns to settlers in the West Bank. Former State Department official Josh Paul also told RS last week that multiple units of the Israeli police had previously been flagged for alleged “gross violations of human rights,” which should legally preclude them from receiving American weapons.
The only other planned weapons transfer to Israel that has been publicly disclosed is a previously approved shipment of $320 million in precision bomb kits known as Spice Family Gliding Bomb Assemblies. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will reportedly fight this sale by filing a “resolution of disapproval” that would block the transfer if it received a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress. The kits are “the sort of capability Israel has been using for the last month to devastate Gaza,” according to Paul.
High Stakes for U.S. Interests in the Region
Another likely reason for the secrecy around U.S. involvement is the fear that American support for Israel will hurt Washington’s standing in the Middle East, especially given the region’s widespread opposition to Israel’s offensive, which numerous Arab commentators have called a “genocide.”
If people in the Middle East come to believe that U.S. troops are directly involved in hostilities, it could have dire consequences for perceptions of American actions in the region. As a recently leaked cable from the U.S. embassy in Oman noted, Israel’s campaign is already “losing us Arab publics for a generation.”
That impact could be felt far beyond the region, according to Stephen Wertheim, a historian and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The costs, in American prestige and power, have already proved substantial,” Wertheim wrote in the New York Times. “And they could get much worse.”
And the potential consequences of direct U.S. involvement would not be limited to public opprobrium, argued Ackerman, the journalist.
“If SOF should enter Gaza as combatants, how might Iran, whose regional strategy is predicated on leading an ‘axis of resistance’ to the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia, feel compelled to respond?” he asked. “What would it choose to do? What would the impact be on Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.?”
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Connor Echols is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously an associate editor at the Nonzero Foundation, where he co-wrote a weekly foreign policy newsletter. Echols received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, where he studied journalism and Middle East and North African Studies.
Featured image: U.S. Special Forces Green Beret Soldiers, assigned to 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) during training at TwentyNine Palms, Calif., 2016 (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech Sgt. Efren Lopez/Released)
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I am not a practitioner, in the usual sense of the word, of a religion or an esoteric current.
On the other hand, I have read a lot, studied, reflected, curious about everything, open to everything.
I don’t exclude anything, I go everywhere, especially if an authority tells me, without any other argument than his “authority”, not to go there.
Thanks to this quality (considered a danger by some), I continue to learn, tirelessly.
As an “orthodox” doctor from a Belgian university and a classical curriculum, I have long followed the marked path, walked in the right direction and crossed when the light turns green, almost always.
Curiosity, an incurable flaw in me, has led me on the side roads, where you meet people, tread on soil, unearth treasures qualified by those who mark the roads and crosswalks, corrupt sources (modern expression: “fake news”), untrustworthy teachers.
Check for yourself, all the heads or deputy heads of the governments that applied the roadmap in 2020, the plan established by the cartel of true gurus, have been Young Global Leaders of the “Great Reset World Economic Forum Cult”.
No, I am not a guru, no more or less than Bill Gates or Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (head of the World Health Organization) who, however, without being a healer or a doctor, are dragging the world into their health terrorist ideology.
On the other hand, yes, I have been a doctor for 25 years, an anesthesiologist for 17 years (someone who puts people to sleep and wakes them up, puts them to sleep to avoid suffering and wakes them up to give them back their autonomy).
With my curiosity, my learning and my openness to everything that can help humanity, without taboos or censorship, I say to all humanity to stop this race to death.
Get off the crazy train.
I know, it is scary, it can hurt, and at the same time, as long as you feel the pain, you are alive.
Take back your physical and intellectual autonomy and protect your children.
These Young Global leaders who have become “Leaders” (gurus) do not want to do you any good.
Under the cover of these lethal injections (immediately or remotely by sterilization), so many Trojan horses of death in your body, in your mind and in your soul, they make you believe that they want to save you.
They don’t. It’s convincing, well presented, but it’s not true.
If they wanted to save you, they would have told you a long time ago to move more, to eat better (really, not diet products that poison you as much as “heavy” products, Reassessing the risks of aspartame. New experimental and epidemiological data), to manage your stress on a daily basis, to take care of your microbiota, to take food supplements, some of them all year round in a country like Belgium (vitamin D).
This is only possible, unfortunately, thanks to the complicity of certain people who run the institutions that are supposed to protect us and the main media that are supposed to inform us.
As Professor Nagarra says to the prosecutor Henry Volney (Yves Montand) in Henri Verneuil‘s film I Comme Icare:
“A tyrant needs above all a tyrant-state, so he will use a million little civil servant tyrants who each have a trivial task to perform, and each will perform that task competently, and without remorse, and no one will realize that he is the millionth link in the final act.
Encouraged denunciation, violence on defenseless citizens trivialized, even justified, citizens excluded from hospitals for the only “crime” of not “yet” being injected with an experimental product, that salesman in a household appliance store who orders you to put on your mask properly, the bar owner transformed into both a policeman and a doctor since you must now show him your health condition.
Where do you think this is going?
Trailer of I Come Icare (2’56”)
Saying it now, which is considered shocking by the same people who tell you that everything is fine, is the only chance to avoid crossing the threshold beyond which all hope of avoiding the repetition of history will be definitively lost.
Who is Pfizer to be so “powerful” in the end?
Despite the total number of deaths due to vaccination, even this official figure of 15,937 deaths from the United States’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)-period from December 14, 2020 to September 24, 2021)-which is known to be greatly underestimated, Pfizer, with its heavily loaded criminal record, continues, remains in the running (Pfizer’s criminal record and its killer “vaccine” (reseauinternational.net)
The “vaccine poison” imposed at the level of the entire planet is produced by a pharmaceutical company which was indicted by the US Department of Justice (2009) on charges of “fraudulent marketing”.
Pfizer is now attacking pregnant women throughout their pregnancy, women who have given birth despite 1444 declared miscarriages (in reality much more) or premature, malformed births.
So, logically, since we let them do it, Pfizer is attacking children from 5 to 11 years old, with an emergency request for authorization for their toxic product, while 21 young people from 12 to 17 years old have recently died in the United States.
The only thing new in their lives? Having accepted Pfizer’s toxic product.
Seriously, do we need to do autopsies to convince you?
When almost no one under the age of 30, unless they had a prior debilitating illness, died from COVID-19 or had any serious form.
Who is Pfizer?
Who is Big Pharma?
Behind these companies are people, names, authorized officials.
From now on, let’s mention these names that serve the System, called Sauron in the Lord of the Rings.
We could call the current System, the Lord of the ‘vaccines’, with Sauron at its head, Balrogs at its service, zealous servants, useful ‘idiots’ (cf. I for Icarus), traitors (Saruman), people who watch and others who wait.
Do not laugh.
The analogy is realistic.
Words are important!
They unknowingly activate concepts deeply embedded in our individual and collective unconscious: the archetypes dear to Carl Jung.
Today, the concept of ‘vaccine’ used as a Trojan horse, allows a firm with a criminal record, hit with the biggest federal fine in the history of the United States, associated with BioNTech, and other equally disreputable firms to drag part of humanity that bothers them (you and me) towards an extinction that will owe nothing to chance, with the complicity of swindlers with white teeth, dressed in design suits.
Some go happily, singing, following the Pied Piper.
Others go because they feel guilty for being alive: criminal gurus have succeeded in making them believe that they are the ones responsible for climate change, racism against people of color (white is a color), terrorism, inequalities, crises and today, pandemics.
Yes, for “Sauron the system”, we will never wash our hands enough, we will never put our mask on well enough and we will never accept enough of their products (falsely called vaccines) in our bruised body.
Some, the worst, go there knowingly, either to scratch some advantage or to shine like a light of Udûn*.
Be careful with words. Do not use the words of the Enemy.
Ban the word that starts with v and ends with ne! And words like ‘mandatory’, ‘containment’, ‘mask’, ‘hand washing’, ‘social distancing’… their words, their expressions used on purpose to wrap their poisons in a powerful and saving archetypal concept (perceived as such by the majority of humanity), to better make them accepted by a population more and more “hypnotized” through fear, repetition, confusion and pattern breaks (tools used to unknowingly put a person in hypnosis, a state of consciousness characterized by hypersuggestibility, an exaggerated sensitivity to influence).
Use the actual words for what these things really are:
V…ne = transgenic injection
Mask = respiratory barrier
Hand washing = compulsive hygiene disorder
Social distancing = social isolation
These are propositions.
The most important thing is to have understood why these semantic considerations are crucial in our fight against the current transgenic ideology.
I am specifically addressing all those who have understood, who have opened their eyes to all this today.
In this particularly dark passage of the first part of the Lord of the Rings (“The Fellowship of the Ring”), in the Moria, the cellars of Khazad-dûm, the spectator-reader sees two fires confronting each other.
Gandalf against the Balrog. Anor [the Sun] against Udûn [Hell]. The Flame can serve the Good, it can serve the Evil. The Flame can warm you, as it can burn you.
What a fabulous message of hope to all the planet still free and alive.
Udûn will not pass, thanks to each of you, small and big flames of Anor.
Dr. Pascal Sacré received his medical degree in Belgium in 1995. He started a specialty in anesthesia and resuscitation in 1997, completed in 2002 and completed a specialty in critical care in 2003.
He has been working in hospitals since then, in intensive care, with a 2.5 year stint in a burn center (Queen Astrid Military Hospital HMRA in Brussels) between 2009 and 2011. Since 2011, he works in a medical-surgical intensive care center in Charleroi, Belgium. He is trained in hypnotherapy in medical settings since 2014 and as such, he is responsible for stress management trainings for his hospital staff.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Translation by Global Research
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Featured Image: Photo from the movie: Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
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[This article was first published on November 20, 2018.]
***
“Grieved by the loss of their lands, dissatisfied with reservation (aka, concentration camp)life, and ultimately brought to a condition of near starvation, the Dakota people appealed to US Indian agencies (involving ex-Minnesota governors Sibley and Ramsey) without success. The murder of five whites by four young Dakota Indians ignited a bloody uprising in which more than 300 whites and an unknown number of Indians were killed. In the aftermath, 38 Dakota captives were hanged in Mankato (the day after Christmas Day 1862) for ‘voluntary participation in murders and massacres,’ and the Dakota remaining in Minnesota were removed to reservations in Nebraska. Meanwhile, the Ojibwa were relegated to reservations on remnants of their former lands.
“What happened to the Dakota in 1862 and afterward was a grievous crime against humanity. If it had occurred in this present day and age the United Nations and the international community would condemn it and declare it to be ethnocide and genocide. A United Nations world court indictment would be issued and the perpetrators of this ethnocide and genocide would be rounded up, tried, convicted and punished for crimes against humanity.” — Thomas Dahlheimer from his long essay, entitled, A History Of The Dakota People In The Mille Lacs Area
“Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To them, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture. Participants in a National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.” —Text of a plaque on Cole’s Hill, overlooking Plymouth Rock
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There is no historical evidence that the First Thanksgiving actually occurred in the year 1621, as most of us Americans have been carefully taught, but there is also no historical documentation that any Native Americans were invited to attend any of the fall harvest celebrations that any Pilgrims ever hosted. Some accounts suggest that about 90 Wampanoag heard the settlers firing guns and came to see the cause of the stir or even ready to enter battle.
The story about how the aboriginals traded with the invading Pilgrims and taught them how to hunt and cultivate crops is usually exaggerated.
The Pilgrims found good land to establish as their new home in Plymouth was due to the fact that a smallpox epidemic had wiped out a Wampanoag village there before they arrived. Squanto, the aboriginal who aided the Pilgrims, was later sold into slavery in Spain. He actually learned English in order to escape his enslavement, but when he returned home, his entire tribe was dead.
The alleged “celebration” in 1621 did not mark a turning point in native vs. foreigner relationships and, whatever actually happened, did not become an annual event. In fact, relations between the native peoples and the Pilgrims deteriorated, and actually led to many wars. In fact, in 1637, following the death of a single Pilgrim (that they believed had been caused by an Indian), the Pilgrims burned their village and massacred at least 400 men, women and children.
Following that massacre, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for “the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” Typical puritanical Christianity!
Over the decades I have been re-learning many of the myths that my teachers taught me over my lifetime – including the lies about the First Thanksgiving. The patriotic stories about how Minnesota conquered the aboriginals that once occupied the territory are at least as distorted.
The quotes and text that follows represent my attempt to correct the record. Some quotes are important to note.
“The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” – Alexander Ramsey, Minnesota’s second Governor
Gov. Ramsey’s Thanksgiving Proclamation – November 3, 1862
“WHEREAS,
“I, Alexander Ramsey, Governor of the State of Minnesota, do hereby set apart the twenty-seventh day of the present month of November, as a Day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God for his wonderful mercy towards us–for all the good gifts of His providence–for health and restored domestic peace–and the measure of general prosperity which we enjoy.
“Especially let us recognize His mercy in that He has delivered our borders from the savage enemies who rose up against us, and cast them into the pit they had privily dug for us; that our friends have been rescued from the horrors of captivity, and that our homes and household treasures are now safe from the violence of Indian robbers and assassins.
“And let us praise Him for the continued preservation of the Government of our Fathers, from the assaults of traitors and rebels; for the sublime spirit of patriotism, and courage, and constancy with which He has filled the hearts of its defenders; for the victories won by the valor of our troops; for the glorious share of Minnesota in the struggles and triumphs of the Union cause; for the safety of her sons who have passed through the fire of battle unscathed, and the honorable fame of the gallant dead; for the alacrity and devotion with which our citizens have rushed from their unharvested fields to the standard of the nation; and, above all, and proclaim FREEDOM as the condition and the law of a restored and regenerated Union.
“Given under my hand and the Great Seal of the State, at the City of St. Paul, this third day of November, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two”.
We sports-addicted, shop-until-you-drop, historically-illiterate, couch potato Americans have been the unwitting beneficiaries of 500 years of genocide against Native Americans who owned and occupied the continent that we falsely call our own. The lies our teachers taught us in our history classes have been happily perpetrated by historical figures such as Minnesota’s first two governors (Henry Hastings Sibley and Alexander Ramsey) and many others like them.
The original occupants of South, Central and North America (especially Canada and what now constitutes the United States) were over-powered by wealth, numbers and advanced technology that made mass murder of fingered enemies more efficient. The uncountable numbers of crimes against humanity have been waged against the aboriginal tribes that had occupied the two continents for thousands of years before Columbus accidentally bumped into the east coast. (Most of the actual killing was done not by the ruling elites, but by the ruthless soldiers who were mindlessly obedient to their political and economic superiors.)
The genocide began in 1492 when the gold-hungry white supremacist Christopher Columbus and his well-armed, sex-starved sailors disembarked from their stinking ships thinking that they had landed in India. Calling the inhabitants “Indians”, they set about pillaging the land, raping the female inhabitants while their priests converted the “heathens” to their brand of punitive, pro-homicide Christianity.
Columbus and his men eventually demanded, under the threat of cutting the native’s hands off, that the non-white “sub-humans” produce allotments of gold from precious metal-less mines. All of this satanic cruelty was accomplished with the blessings of the priests.
Native Americans, whose hunting weapons were inferior to those war-making weapons of the foreign invaders, preferred self-exile or even death to the dishonor of submitting to slavery and so they refused to become slaves – nor would their tribal cohorts collaborate with their enslavement. And when they were forced from their ancestral lands by so-called Christian presidents like the acknowledged murderer Andrew Jackson, they tried to re-establish their tribal cultures further west.
Those of us modern-day Minnesotans who have Caucasian ancestors have benefitted from both the American and Minnesotan massacres of Native American tribes, the occupations and the theft of their land, the exploitation of their natural resources and the destruction of their way of life.
We pink-skinned progeny of our predatory ancestors were then carefully taught to believe the Big Lies about the First Thanksgiving that were carefully embedded in our history books and Sunday School lessons. And so we gullible non-native Minnesotans have been led to believe the sweet-sounding invented stories about the “nice” Pilgrims that landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 who then proceeded to gratefully share a post-harvest feast with their new neighbors.
Our illegal, undocumented immigrant ancestors from Europe were obviously not averse to homicidal violence. Sadly, they were soon followed by a large variety of other decidedly un-Christ-like religious fanatics that perpetuated the genocide that resulted in a 90% de-population of the Native Americans over just the few centuries following the invasion of Christopher Columbus.
The 2015 Ken Burns Documentary
The disinformation process that fooled so many Americans about the first Thanksgiving was explored in the 2015 Ken Burns documentary that was broadcast on PBS-TV during the Thanksgiving season three years ago.
That documentary refuted many of the myths about the First Thanksgiving that most of us had learned in school.
The myths about the “New Testament” values of welcoming the stranger and being merciful to the oppressed has been frequently disproven by many of those who have sought refuge from brutality, oppression and/or dictatorial rule in their homelands and expected that they would be welcomed here. The truth of the matter has often come hard.
The myth of the” merciful Puritans” of the First Thanksgiving was designed to absolve our ancestors from the guilt of the cruel bloodbaths that they either perpetrated or approved of when invading American soldiers repeatedly massacred the militarily weaker native populations all over the world and even in their own land.
The following quotes from a few of our so-called military or governing “heroes” need to be recited in the context of the true history of the American military genocide of the First Nations people.
Those military “heroes” include Henry H. Sibley and Alexander Ramsey, Minnesota’s first and second governors, both later to become army officers in the war against the oppressed and starving Sioux Indians. (Sibley- a Democrat – was governor from 1858 – 1860. He was succeeded by Alexander Ramsey – a Republican – from 1860 to 1863.)
Following are a series of quotes from historical figures of the era. The spark that set off the 6 week-long Sioux Uprising in the fall of 1862 (right in the middle of the American Civil War) was the impending starvation of the Native Americans who had been made dependent on food commodities, gold coins and credit after they had deceitfully ceded most of their hunting grounds and water resources to the deceptive US government:
“We have waited a long time. The money is ours but we cannot get it. We have no food but here these stores are filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement so we can get food from the stores, or else we may take it to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry, they help themselves.” —Chief Little Crow (Taoyateduta), Mdewakanton Dakota, to Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith in 1862
“For what reason we have commenced this war I will tell you. It is on account of Major Galbraith.”– Chief Little Crow in a letter to Henry Sibley, 1862 (For much more on the Galbraith issue, click here.)
“So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” — Indian trader Andrew J. Myrick to Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith. A few weeks later (on August 18, 1862), on the first day of the Sioux Uprising, Myrick was killed and his mouth was stuffed with grass.
“I shall probably approve them (the executions of the 303 Dakota warriors)and hang the villains” – Ex-governor and then US Army Colonel Henry H. Sibley, who had led the troops that defeated Chief Little Crow in the Battle of Wood Lake on August 23, 1862. Sibley had appointed the five-member military tribunal that tried, convicted and sentenced to death by hanging (in a “kangaroo court” proceeding, with no legal defense provided), the 303 Dakota warriors that had been captured in the battle that ended the 6 week-long US-Dakota War of 1862. Sibley was commenting on the fate of the convicted warriors, all but 38 of whom had their death sentences commuted by President Lincoln. Many warriors were imprisoned at Camp McClellan, near Davenport, Iowa and more than 1,600 non-combatant Native Americans were imprisoned at a concentration camp at Fort Snelling over the winter of 1862 – 63. Those that survived the cold, the starvation diets and the diseases were then deported to concentration camps in Nebraska and South Dakota (including Pine Ridge; see this)
“The Sioux (aka Dakota)Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” – Minnesota’s second governor Alexander Ramsey in a statement made on Sept. 9, 1862. Ramsey had made a fortune in real estate because of his dealings selling “stolen” Native American land to white settlers and businessmen after he himself had negotiated the treaties that cheated the tribes out of the land.Ramsey, incidentally, served as Secretary of War under Rutherford B. Hayes 25 years later.
“Destroy everything belonging to them and force them out to the plains, unless, as I suggest, you can capture them. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.” – Civil war Major General John Pope, in a letter to Colonel Sibley – dated September 28, 1862.
“As Europeans settled the East coast, they displaced eastern tribes who then migrated to get away from the White civilization, and they, in their turn, displaced weaker local tribes they encountered, and pushed many of those tribes farther from their homelands, as they took over their homelands.
“Westward moving Europeans would give the displaced eastern tribes … guns and gun powder and they would then instigate fights between the newly arrived tribes and the long established tribes in order to force the long established tribes from their homelands; and in doing so, extinguish the long established tribes’ ancestral ties that they had with the land, their ancestors and the spirit world. Evidence of this practice has shown itself time and time again throughout the Americas.
“Around 1750, a displaced East coast band of Ojibwe were pushed into the Dakota’s homeland and they then used French guns and gun powder to force the Dakota from theirMille Lacs Lake homeland.
“This was the strategy the European colonists used to greatly diminish the number of Dakota in their Mille Lacs homeland, which encouraged and made it possible for a French weapons armed, alcohol manipulated band of Ojibwe to violently force the Dakota from their Mille Lacs homeland.” — Thomas Dahlheimer from his long essay, entitled, A History Of The Dakota People In The Mille Lacs Area
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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas, as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of all life on earth. Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including
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