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In the blink of an eye, my cherished home is no more. Israel deemed my small residence a threat to its existence and its security.
Last Friday, at 6:30am, Wejdan, my husband’s niece, called us from Khan Younis in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. The apartment towers in Zahra town were bombed.
Unable to comprehend the news, I asked “Which one?” A moment of silence passed. Then Wejdan said, “All of them.” I passed the phone to my son and wept.
Everything is gone. All I held dear now lies under the rubble. Precious photo albums filled with memories of my school days, the faces of dear friends, the smiles from the early days of my marriage. Moments we captured of my children’s first steps, early play, and pictures from school. All gone.
Gone, too, are the photographs of my parents and grandparents. The records of my journeys. My extensive library. Some hard-earned certificates. My graduation photos. Torn asunder is my daughters’ artwork as well as an enormous painting created, and gifted, by my brother-in-law, Mohammed, on our wedding day.
All of this, and so much more, has vanished. It feels like a bomb was dropped onto the very substance of my memories.
Zahra is situated to the south of Gaza City, in the eastern part of the Strip. The air strike obliterated 24 residential buildings. Each tower comprised five floors. Each floor housed four apartments. All of them now exist only in the past tense.
These apartments were home to around 500 families. They include my friends like Dr Abu Adam Safi and his Russian wife. Engineer Obaid’s family. Abeer Allaham’s family. Um Shatha’s family. Abu Manhal’s family. Al-Daba’s family. Fora’s family. Al Tamimi family. Abu Ali family. Many families, including real children.
I believe in the words of the writer James Baldwin, that “not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” So, it is crucial to highlight the names of these families so the world cannot claim ignorance.
One of the oldest pictures in the family album where the author’s grandmother, a survivor of the Nakba, poses with all her uncles (Supplied)
President Joe Biden, alongside his British and EU allies, has relied on the talking points of the most hardline far-right government of Israel (not a low bar to pass). Biden said he could never imagine the images he had seen of beheaded Israeli children. But his spokespeople walked back these comments about beheadings.
Yet, we hear nothing about the children – real children – whose homes have been destroyed and whose lives have been lost. Because they are Palestinian.
What is uncertain is how many of these families were also providing shelter to families who had fled the northern part of Gaza in response to Israel’s warning to clear the area.
In our case, we offered our apartment to our friend Shaima Al Shawa. Her home in Gaza was bombarded. She survived, and then sought refuge in Al Quds Hospital with her father, mother and brother. When the news broke about the Al Ahli hospital bombardment that left 500 dead, mostly women and children, we urged Shaima to take shelter in our home in Zahra.
Thankfully, they did not need to accept the offer. If she had, we could not urge her any more.
My neighbours and friends are mostly refugees whose original homes were destroyed by Israel in 1948. With the destruction of Zahra, Israel has now wiped out nearly a quarter of the Gaza Strip’s homes. Now, my friends are in the streets, with nowhere to go.
In 2016, I wrote (in Apartheid in Palestine) about my great-grandfather in the 1970s, who refused an opportunity to revisit his old home inside what is today called Israel. My grandmother asked him why he refused the opportunity to revisit his old memories. He told her that he would prefer to die rather than walk on the ruins of his old home.
My house, he said in a choked voice, “is my flesh, my sweat, my blood and my bone. It’s me, the broken human being you see now. How do you expect to walk on your body?” He then turned his back on my grandmother to hide the tears.
My grandfather believed that there is nothing in life harder than walking on the rubble of one’s own home. Perhaps, however, there is something worse than walking on the rubble of one’s own home: not being allowed to walk on it.
Today, I share the pain of my grandfather through space and through time.
‘Leave this Land’
The destruction of a home is an echo of the destruction of a homeland. Israel’s colonial project is designed to wipe Palestine, Palestinians and Palestinian homes from the map. This project started with the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophe that destroyed Palestinian society, then manifested in years of military occupation and relentless violence against Palestinians and their civilian infrastructure.
This violence has included brutal attacks on schools, hospitals, clinics, factories, mosques, churches, bridges, orphanages, power stations, bakeries, water wells and even sports facilities throughout the repeated and relentless assaults on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2022.
The message is stark: “Leave this land.”
But in the face of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, the Palestinians have always responded with steadfastness and a dedication to justice that no bomb can wipe out.
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Dr Ghada Ageel is a visiting professor at the University of Alberta Political Science Department (Edmonton, Canada), an independent scholar, and active in the Faculty4Palestine-Alberta.
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***
As Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza entered its third week, leaving over 5000 dead and at least one million residents displaced, a Tel Aviv-based think tank published a blueprint for self-proclaimed Jewish state’s final solution.
In a white paper released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged costal enclave provided.
Published in Hebrew on the organization’s website, the paper was authored by Amir Weitman, “an investment manager and visiting researcher” at the Institute who also leads the libertarian caucus of Israel’s ruling Likud Party. The document began by noting that there are 10 million vacant housing units in neighboring Egypt that could be “immediately” filled with Palestinians. Weitman then assured readers that the “sustainable plan…aligns well with the economic and geopolitical interests of the State of Israel, Egypt, the USA and Saudi Arabia.”
Weitman’s ethnic cleansing proposal echoes forced transfer plans advanced in recent days by former Israeli officials while capitalizing on evacuation orders delivered to the entire civilian population of northern Gaza by the Israeli military.
Weitman’s sinister blueprint imagined Israel purchasing these properties at a cost of $5 – 8 billion dollars, a whopping price-tag that reflects just 1 – 1.5 percent of Israel’s GDP.
“These sums of money [required to cleanse Gaza] in relation to the Israeli economy, are minimal,” Weitman posits. “Investing individual billions of dollars to solve this difficult issue is an innovative, cheap and sustainable solution.”
Weitman acknowledged that his plan virtually amounts to Israel “buying the Gaza Strip,” arguing the move would be “a very worthwhile investment” for Zionists because it would “add a lot of value over time.” He asserted local “land conditions” in the area would provide “many” Israeli settlers a high standard of living, therefore allowing for an expansion of settlements in Gush Dan near the Egyptian border, giving “a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev.”
In December 2021, Tel Aviv approved plans to establish four settlements in the Negev to house 3,000 settler families.
A Genocidal War to End All Wars
Though Egypt has so far rejected Israeli pressure for a mass exodus of Gaza residents through the southern Rafah crossing, Weitman argued Cairo will welcome the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees as “an immediate stimulus” that will “provide a tremendous and immediate benefit to al-Sisi’s regime.”
Weitman claimed that Cairo’s major creditors — including France, Germany and Saudi Arabia — are likely to welcome a revitalized Egyptian economy, courtesy of “Israeli investment” in the Palestinians’ permanent removal. He surmizes that Western Europe will welcome “the transfer of the entire Gaza population to Egypt,” because it will significantly “reduce the risk of illegal immigration…a tremendous advantage.” Meanwhile, he expects Riyadh to embrace the move because the “evacuation of the Gaza Strip means the elimination of a significant ally of Iran.”
The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would mean an end to “ceaseless, repeated rounds of fighting, which inflame the fires of hatred against Israel.” Moreover, “closing the Gaza issue will ensure a stable and increased supply of Israeli gas to Egypt and its liquefaction,” from the vast reserves seized by Israel near Gaza’s shores.
Palestinians in turn are expected to jump at the chance to be forcibly transferred from their homes rather than “living in poverty under the rule of Hamas.” It is therefore necessary for Israel to “create the right conditions” for them to “immigrate” from Gaza to Cairo. Weitman noted that Gaza’s two million inhabitants “constitute less than 2% of the total Egyptian population, which today already includes 9 million refugees. A drop in the ocean.”
The paper ominously concluded: “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.”
“If We Want to Remain Alive, We Will Have to Kill and Kill and Kill”
As barbarous as these proposals might seem, they reflect what many Israeli officials appear to be murmuring in private, and what at least one former government spinmeister has openly pushed as an altruistic solution to the Palestinian “problem.”
“There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai Desert, just on the other side of Gaza,” former Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, Danny Ayalon, echoed the genocidal Zionist logic behind Weitman’s proposal in an interview with Al Jazeera’s Marc Lamont Hill. “The idea is—and this is not the first time it will be done—for them to leave over to the open areas where we and the international community will prepare the infrastructure — you know, 10 cities with food and water — just like for the refugees of Syria.”
"There is almost endless space in the Sinai Desert…this is not the first time it has been done…we & the international community will prepare tent cities…"
Israeli politician Danny Ayalon describes the their vision for another Nakba today in Gaza.
In 2004, Zionist demographer Arnon Sofer of Haifa University laid out detailed plans for the isolation of Gaza directly to Ariel Sharon’s government. This entailed withdrawing Israeli forces from the area entirely and constructing a stringent system of surveillance and security to ensure nothing and no one went in or out without Zionist proviso. He predicted a perpetual bloodbath:
“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today…The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”
The Institute has put forward a clean and easy fantasy of achieving the same goal put forward by Sofer. For it to succeed, all Palestinians have to do is put down their weapons and head toward the desert of permanent exile.
Arnon Sofer is an academic who helped devise Israel's siege of Gaza to engineer a one-way peace
Sofer said, "If we want to remain alive, we have to kill and kill and kill, all day, every day. If we don't kill, we will cease to exist."
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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Featured image: A tent city in Khan Younis, Gaza for Palestinians forced to flee the northern areas of the besieged strip (Source: TG)
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***
At a private Manhattan fundraiser one year ago this month, President Joe Biden shared an assessment that he had not told the public. From his vantage point, Biden told the room of Democratic Party donors, the world faces “the prospect of Armageddon” for the first time “since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
At the time, Biden was referring to the conflict in Ukraine, which had just intensified with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and Russia’s declared annexations of four Ukrainian regions. Despite noting the dangers of a proxy war against Russia, the world’s other top nuclear power, Biden has nonetheless pursued the higher priority of enforcing US hegemony by attempting to “weaken” it. Accordingly, Biden has continued the proxy war with a signature policy of flooding Ukraine with weapons, encouraging a failed counter-offensive, and blocking diplomatic off-ramps.
One year later, Biden is not only doubling down on his apocalyptic approach in Ukraine, but adding a second front in the Middle East. The White House has asked Congress for a new spending package that would provide over $14 billion for Israel’s assault on Gaza and more than $61 billion for Ukraine – the largest such request since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Concurrently, the US is directly assisting Israeli atrocities and standing virtually alone to block global calls for a ceasefire – all while risking a wider regional confrontation.
In an Oval Office address last week, Biden dusted off George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” playbook to draw a direct tie between the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to annihilate a neighboring democracy,” he said.
In another nod to neoconservative dogma, Biden appropriated Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s pitch to voters on funding the war in Ukraine. The weapons sent to Ukraine and now Israel, Biden explained, are “made in America” – including, he stressed, the election swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. “You know, just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” According to Biden’s budget office, nearly half of his $106 billion request, $50 billion, will be spent on “the American defense industrial base.”
Beyond hegemony and war profiteering, Biden’s mention of states vital to his 2024 re-election chances underscores another reason for his record spending request. In bundling the two conflicts together, Biden is hoping to entice pro-Israel Republicans skeptical of more funding for the Ukraine war – thereby giving him $61 billion to prolong the fight against Russia until after the November 2024 election.
As it has done in Ukraine, the Biden administration is declining to use its significant leverage over Israel to end the carnage. If it wanted to, the White House could call on Israel to accept a ceasefire and pursue a negotiated release of Hamas’ captives, on top of the four that have already been freed. But according to the Washington Post, one US official “said it was clear that Netanyahu was not going to wait until the hostage crisis was resolved to initiate a ground offensive and that there was little Washington could do to change that calculus.”
A major factor, the Post adds, is that Biden “officials are loath to create a public spat as Republicans on Capitol Hill search for any sign of the president being insufficiently pro-Israel.” To avoid looking “insufficiently pro-Israel,” therefore, Biden must be sufficiently pro-mass murder – even at the expense of endangering the hostages that he insists are his top priority.
As for the argument that there is “little” Biden could do to impact Israel’s behavior, even top Israeli officials admit that to be false. At a recent meeting with Israeli lawmakers, Defense Minister Yaov Gallant acknowledged that his government agreed to allow some humanitarian aid into Gaza after US pressure. “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them,” Gallant said. “We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”
Luckily for Israeli leaders, they will not have to tell Biden “no” on an immediate end to the bombardment of Gaza, and a negotiated return of Hamas’ captives there. After Gaza’s health ministry reported the deadliest night of Israeli airstrikes so far – over 700 Palestinians killed – Secretary of State Antony Blinken allowed himself to declare at the United Nations that “humanitarian pauses must be considered.” In other words, the mass killing of Palestinians with US weaponry may proceed, so long as a pause to the slaughter is “considered.”
Having previously deemed ceasefire proposals “repugnant”, the Biden administration is openly embracing more Palestinian civilian deaths.
“This is war, it is combat, it is bloody, it is ugly, and it’s going to be messy,” spokesperson John Kirby said at the White House, just as Blinken appeared at the United Nations. “And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward.”
Kirby’s callous indifference to the deaths of more Palestinian civilians contrasts with his response to Hamas’ killings of Israeli civilians on October 7th, which led him to weep on live television.
“These are human beings.” White House spokesperson John Kirby breaks down on live TV while discussing the depravity of Hamas attacks. (Video: CNN) pic.twitter.com/aMfVDSEDIi
Israel will thus have free rein to bombard Gaza with no concern for the civilian population or the Hamas captives.
“Hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas,” ABC News reports of the prevailing Israeli government view. Economy Minister Nir Barakat explained the strategy further: “We shall do all efforts to bring our hostages, to bring our hostages [back] alive,” but destroying Hamas is the “first and last priority.”
A non-existent priority is the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, who are facing what Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top humanitarian official, describes as a crisis that “has reached catastrophic levels.”
When it comes to the meager amounts of aid that the US and Israel have allowed into Gaza, even that is subject to constraints. The first delivery of 20 trucks did not include any fuel, which powers hospital, water pumps, and everything else needed for survival – including the incubators for premature babies.
“Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and bakeries,” the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees warns. “Without fuel, aid will not reach those in desperate need.”
But Israeli needs negate such concerns. “The move to exclude fuel from the first delivery was an apparent concession to Israel, which worries that Hamas and other armed groups could divert it for military purposes,” the Washington Post notes. This follows the previous “concession” to Israel that created the need for these trucks in the first place: the Biden administration’s green light for Israel to shut off Gaza’s water and electricity supplies.
As Dr. Michael Ryan of the UN’s Health Emergencies Programme notes, the small fleet of trucks allowed so far “is a drop in the ocean of need right now in Gaza,” where over 1.4 million people – more than 60% of the population – have been displaced. Before Israel’s current assault, Gaza was already in such need that “several hundred trucks had been arriving in the enclave daily,” Reuters notes.
The Biden administration also acknowledges that its touted aid packages do not meet the bare minimum for Gazans’ survival. In an interview touting the first deliveries, the newly appointed US special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, said that the White House goal is to “build that flow up to the levels necessary to begin to meet Gaza’s needs.” Left unstated is that many Palestinians will die due to a lack of medical equipment and other vital supplies before the US-approved aid deliveries can “begin to meet” their life-saving needs.
The US is also actively involved in Israel’s military operation against Gaza. The White House has sent a Marine three-star general, Lt. Gen. James Glynn, and several other military officers to advise the Israeli military, including for its planned ground invasion. According to the New York Times,
US officials “have become increasingly concerned that a ground invasion in Gaza could lead to a huge loss of civilian lives,” but nonetheless insist that they have “not told Israel what to do and still supported the ground invasion.”
Biden’s commitment to protecting Israel’s carnage in Gaza and broader regional hegemony creates dangers far beyond the besieged territory. Since the assault began, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire along the south Lebanon border. In preparation for a potential regional conflict, the US has deployed air defense missiles and two aircraft carriers to deal “with threats to American troops throughout the Middle East,” the Wall Street Journal notes. According to the Pentagon, US forces in Iraq and Syria have come under fire at least 13 times in the past week, leaving at least 24 soldiers wounded. Meanwhile, Israel continues its routine airstrikes on Syrian territory, including the country’s two major airports.
The attacks on US forces from Iranian-backed groups are understood to be a direct result of the Gaza slaughter.
“For more than six months,” the Journal reports, “Iranian-backed militia groups refrained from launching drones or rockets against American troops in Iraq and Syria, as part of what appeared to be an undeclared truce between Tehran and Washington.”
Just as the lives of Palestinian civilians and US-Israeli hostages are subordinate to the imperatives of US-Israeli hegemony, so are US forces’. In Iraq, the US has retained its military contingent despite a 2020 vote from the Iraqi parliament calling for a full withdrawal. In Syria, the US remains all while ignoring government demands for both a withdrawal and compensation for looted oil reserves.
Although the US claims that its “sole purpose” in Syria is fighting ISIS, the US military has in fact barely done any fighting against the militant group. In 2019, now-senior Biden official Dana Stroul explained that occupying the “resource-rich”, “economic powerhouse” region in Syria’s northeast — which contains the country’s “hydrocarbons” and is its “agricultural powerhouse” — gives the U.S. government “broader leverage” to influence “a political outcome in Syria” in line with US dictates. Jennifer Cafarella of the Institute for the Study of War, a neoconservative Washington think tank, has likewise explained that the US military occupation gives it “direct influence over the vast majority of Syria’s most productive oil fields,” thereby controlling “Syrian national treasures that, when added up amount to brute geopolitical power for the US.”
As of this writing, more than 5,000 Palestinian civilians have become the latest casualties of the United States and Israel’s brute geopolitical power. This includes more than 2,300 children, a calamity that UNICEF calls a “growing stain on our collective conscience.” Not that of the Biden White House, content to sacrifice countless more civilian lives from Gaza to Ukraine in its dogged embrace of Armageddon.
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***
Brugada syndrome is a rare but potentially life-threatening inherited disease that predisposes patients to fatal cardiac arrhythmias. The syndrome is characterized by the ECG findings of a right bundle branch block and ST-segment elevations in the right precordial leads (V1-V3). More than 400 mutations in the cardiac SCN5A gene have been identified in people with Brugada syndrome, which is characterized by risk of cardiac arrest, particularly in the setting of fever.
Altermanini et al describe a clear-cut case of syncope with cardiac arrest triggered by fever after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. They were able to catch the post-arrest ECG and demonstrate the classic Brugada changes.
Altermanini M, Habib M, Hamamyh T, et al. SYNCOPE FOLLOWING PFIZER-BIONTECH (BNT162B2) VACCINATION UNMASKING BRUGADA SYNDROME. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2022 Mar, 79 (9_Supplement) 3340.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0735-1097(22)04331-5
Ittiwut et al described 5 cases of vaccine sudden death that tested positive for mutations in the SCN5A gene. Thus it appears that at least some of the early deaths after vaccination may be related to CN5A mutations in those who may not know they have Brugada syndromes.
Ittiwut C, Mahasirimongkol S, Srisont S, Ittiwut R, Chockjamsai M, Durongkadech P, Sawaengdee W, Khunphon A, Larpadisorn K, Wattanapokayakit S, Wetchaphanphesat S, Arunotong S, Srimahachota S, Pittayawonganon C, Thammawijaya P, Sutdan D, Doungngern P, Khongphatthanayothin A, Kerr SJ, Shotelersuk V. Genetic basis of sudden death after COVID-19 vaccination in Thailand. Heart Rhythm. 2022 Nov;19(11):1874-1879. doi: 10.1016/j.hrthm.2022.07.019. Epub 2022 Aug 5. PMID: 35934244; PMCID: PMC9352648.
Teaching points:
In patients with known Brugada pattern on ECG, COVID-19 and probably all other vaccines are contra-indicated
In patients who survive COVID-19 cardiac arrest, they should undergo genetic testing for SCN5A and other channelopathies
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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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***
The relevance given to a UN Secretary-General is often judged by the degree of controversy caused. In history, the most relevant are usually targeted. Dag Hammarskjöld, refusing to remain a mere bauble of international office, was almost certainly murdered over his intervention in the Congo civil war in 1961. The least relevant (who was that sweet little fella, Ban Ki-Moon?) have barely registered a note of dissent. The big powers like to know they can render such figures impotent, if not insignificant.
It was, for that reason, refreshing to see the current occupant of that post make the less than startling remark that the atrocious attacks of October 7 staged by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Israeli soil could not be seen as standalone acts of individual, unprovoked outrage. António Guterres was careful to also note that there was “nothing” that could “justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians, or the launching of rockets against civilian targets”.
Guterres also noted that it was “important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.” The Palestinians had “been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”
While the attacks by Hamas could not be justified to address such grievances, they also could not be used as a pretext to “justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” Even war, he explained to his colleagues, had rules.
The Secretary-General also reiterated the principle of protecting civilians during armed conflict. This precluded using them as human shields and ordering “more than one million people to evacuate the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the south itself.”
Such comments did not go down well with the Israeli Foreign Minister. Bullies of international relations are always easily slighted. And so it was that Eli Cohen would gasp and wonder which world the secretary-general was living in. “Definitely, this is not our world.”
The foreign minister made it fairly clear what sort of world that was. “I will not meet the UN Secretary-General. After the October 7th massacre, there is no place for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased off the face of the planet.”
Gilad Erdan, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, spoke in the voice of complacency outraged, going so far as to demand the resignation of Guterres.
It is a disgrace to the @UN that the Secretary-General did not retract his words and is not even able to apologize for what he said yesterday❗️❗️
The Secretary-General, once again, distorts and twists reality. He clearly said yesterday that the massacre by Hamas ‘did not happen…
— Ambassador Gilad Erdan גלעד ארדן (@giladerdan1) October 25, 2023
“A Secretary-General who does not understand that the murder of innocents can never be understood by any ‘background’ cannot be Secretary-General.”
With a callow splutter, he suggested that the UN chief had “expressed an understanding for terrorism and murder.”
On army radio, Erdan also announced that Israel would be refusing “to issue visas to UN representatives. We have already refused a visa for the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths. The time has come to teach them a lesson.”
As ever, Erdan’s reasoning confused explication with justification, but in that world, the nuanced explanation huffs and puffs in tired resignation, leaving the murderous justification to take the front position.
The comments from Guterres also come in light of the perilous operational state of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). The humanitarian agency has been starved of resources and will be forced to cease the provision of hospital care, largely occasioned by Israel’s blockade on fuel. “Current stocks are almost completely exhausted,” the agency states in its October 26 situation report, “forcing life-saving services to come to a halt. This includes the supply of piped water as well as fuel for the health sector, bakeries, and generators.” Staff have also suffered a horrendous: 39 have been killed since October 7.
“I am shocked by the misrepresentations by some of my statement … as if I was justifying acts of terror by Hamas. This is false. It was the opposite.”
The brainstorming session in the Netanyahu-IDF meetings must have been straightforward: de-historicise conflict, first and foremost; relegate Hamas to some equivalent monstrous organisation, in this case, ISIS; and then, just to make sure, use Nazism and the Holocaust as recyclable motifs.
Along the way, massive Palestinian casualties, many children (2,360 deaths over three weeks), can be excused by pointing the finger at Hamas, because it is not Israeli jets and weapons doing the killing but the policy of a terrorist organisation. And besides, Israel is, as Cohen insists, doing it for “the civilised world”.
The Israeli strategy here is to excuse the inexcusable: the collective, mass laceration of a people. In this, they simply perpetuate the tragic crimes that have been visited, not only upon the Jews, but upon any ethnicity or group in history. The Whig statesman Edmund Burke spoke about not knowing “the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.” Unfortunately, in this conflict, that indictment was drawn up some time ago, and is being prosecuted with relentless ruthlessness.
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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]
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It would be a gross understatement that the Divided States of America has never been so fractured in its modern history. Select any subject that touches upon and personally impacts people’s lives, fragile sentiments and cherished beliefs, and one uncovers a variety of quarrelsome tribes, each with belligerent leaders and voices, pushing and shoving to reach the stage’s microphone. It may not be too far-fetched that if our early forebears were to visit 21st century America, they might think we were some strange and new mutated species. For example, civility in the Commons is no longer in our postmodern American vocabulary. For the majority of Earth’s citizens, climate change and global warming are acknowledged as a very real existential threat. Yet somehow that message never reached our shores except in drabs and dribbles. Certainly, lip service ad nauseam has been sounded about climate change for the past five decades; but anyone can look around to see these words are empty and will never solve the irrefutable challenges ahead.
Today there are roughly 3 distinct ideological groups in conflict with each other over the threats of climate change and the desecration of the environment.
Group Number One
On the one hand there are those who fully embrace scientific research and analysis. Largely these are the climate experts, those conducting the actual research, undertaking expeditions to the poles and across oceans and analyzing atmospheric samples in order to make very valuable predictions.
Besides the many institutions and university departments, this group is perhaps best represented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and their cousins in other nations. Undoubtedly, their findings provide much to worry about for humanity’s long-term future. Ocean temperatures are now the warmest on record. Atmospheric CO2 is the most concentrated in millions of years. We are witnessing wildfires increasing exponentially. Recently, climate scientists observed that the rise in forest fires is destroying the ozone layer, which will only increase warming trends. The US megadrought in 2022 was the worst in 1,200 years. The Antarctic ice shelves continue to collapse and coastal cities and shorelines are already sinking. Warming trends are on a winning streak as monthly records are being broken more frequently.
On the surface, we might expect the scientific faction to be the authoritative voice for accurate climate change analyses. However there is a fundamental problem. Although the scientific climate community has an excellent track record when observing, identifying and measuring phenomena and trends underway, their predictions rarely come to pass. Very often they are flatly wrong. Their leading spokespeople who become the public face of this research, such as Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Gates, King Charles and Greta Thunberg have a terrible track record as soothsayers.
King Charles warns us that we have seven years to save the planet; however, that was stated in 2009. That same year Britain’s then Prime Minister Gordon Brown was more dire. Brown gave humanity 50 days to get its act together. For over two decades Al Gore has been annually proselytizing that the Arctic will be ice free; neither has this prediction come to pass. Perhaps one of the chief doomsayers is Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the popular doom and gloom epistle The Population Bomb published in 1968.
At that time, Ehrlich predicted that by 1990, 4 billion of earth’s residents would be wiped out by global famine, social upheaval and wars. Over the decades, Ehrlich oddly has continued to revise his apocalyptic forecasts. Why anybody continues to listen to him is more baffling. Of course, over a half century ago, nobody anticipated the forthcoming Green Revolution. Despite this agricultural revolution’s many shortcomings and often dire failures, including the widespread introduction of chemical agriculture, it did succeed in increasing food yields remarkably. In all fairness, it may have been a major contributor to preventing potential famines.
One of the climate change science faction’s major shortcomings is the incapability of relying upon current complex algorithmic modeling analytics to accurately make reliable predictions of climate and warming trends projected into the future.
It is not as much a problem of poor modeling; instead, it is institutionalized blind faith in the false promises these modeling methods represent and a professional failure to acknowledge these methods’ limitations. This is true for medicine as well. For example, every year the World Health Organization and its affiliate virology research centers employ fanciful modeling methodologies to predict the likely annual flu strains in order to begin influenza vaccine production. However, for decades, year after year, these predictors bat below fifty percent accuracy. It is not uncommon for their predictions to be off 70 percent or more. Therefore, if these computational modeling methods are unable to predict the spread of virus, how much more complex is making accurate predictions about future weather and global warming trends and atmospheric conditions? Given approximately one hundred in sundry negative (cooling) and positive (warming) feedback loops that interfere with the climate on a global scale, there are likely numerous unknown, and perhaps even intangible, factors that such computations must exclude out of necessity.
Group Number Two
The second climate and environmental contingent is more radical.
They tend to emote fear rather than reason out the hard evidence on hand. At the grassroots activist level, many of these voices may be regarded as the archetypal useful idiots who are unable to look at the larger picture outside of the futurist dystopian imagery in their sci-fi novels. This group cherry picks the scientific headlines that best support their agendas, which is more often than not politically and socially driven rather than research-based. This is the group that believes with absolute certainty that all global warming is anthropogenic.
By whatever means possible, including government-private partnerships for green programs, whatever humanity has achieved through the industrial age during the past two centuries, needs to be ultimately dismantled.
These are the prophets of doom and gloom, and many private interest groups are delighted they exist and perhaps blindly act on their behalf. This pseudo-stakeholder agenda is represented by the World Economic Forum and its international bloc of corporate elites, government leaders beholden to globalization and its faux Western democratic pageantry, and large compromised non-profit environmental do-gooders funded by private corporations. Grassroots activist groups are their naive, idealistic shock troops.
This is the agenda that demands the need for more solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, a reinvigorated nuclear power program, rapid deindustrialization and new species of engineered food produce. However, all of their solutions are directly tied to the preservation of perpetual economic growth. Its large investors, such as Blackrock and JP Morgan, would never have it otherwise. If solutions to global warming and environmental degradation cannot be monetized exponentially in order to replace humanity’s reliance upon fossil fuels, then it is rejected outright or tossed to the bottom of their to-do list.
This entire group, perhaps the most dangerous to humanity’s future, is plagued by a cognitive disconnect between advocating for technologies and solutions in of themselves that certainly reduce greenhouse gas emissions but equally have devastating consequences on the environment. It is a Green ideology where technology holds higher value than human life, except for those who commandeer its course. Electric vehicle batteries, as well as batteries necessary for other technologies including wind farms, have a catastrophic impact on the environment, which further contributes to ecological decay and global warming. The minerals and metals necessary for the so-called renewable energy technologies and nuclear power require astronomical large scale mining operations that may never meet humanity’s demands to transition away from fossil fuels. The irony is how much fossil fuels are necessary for mining operations and the high carbon footprint. People are living in a non-lucid dream if they believe otherwise. Researchers estimate that actual emissions necessary for manufacturing an electric vehicle can be 15 to 68 percent higher than a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle. Some batteries pack ten times as much power as an average household consumes in one day, and very often EVs are charged at home. Finally, 40 percent of the total climate impact of a battery comes from the mining of aluminum, cobalt, nickel and lithium, which are highly dirty and polluting industries.
The new Green Deal push for solar and wind energies are likewise fraught with contradictions. Solar power is unreliable, inefficient, weather dependent and similar to EVs requires rare materials, some highly toxic, such as arsenide, cadmium, cobalt gallium and lead. A Columbia University estimate predicts that by 2035 384 new mines for lithium, cobalt and nickel will be required to keep up with growing Green Deal demands. Solar energy is also water intensive; a single large solar farm can require over 600 gallons of water for every megawatt hour of power produced. Finally, the entire solar industry is heavily dependent upon government subsidies, which again makes this industry economically unsustainable.
Wind energy suffers from similar non-friendly environmental drawbacks as solar. It is unreliable, inefficient and requires large open spaces of land. Because the turbines rely on magnets, MIT engineers have warned that over-reliance on wind power, in addition to EVs, will strain the supply of scarce rare minerals such as neodymium, dysprosium and praseodymium. A Harvard review estimated that one ton of rare earth minerals produces 30 pounds of dust, up to 12,000 cubic meters of noxious gases such as hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide and 75 cubic meters of waste water, for a total of 2,000 tons of toxic sludge.
Likewise, industrial chemical agriculture, although extraordinarily profitable for large investors and mega-corporations, is no solution to the climate crisis. However, to support and invest in a Marshall Plan to revive small farms and regenerative organic agricultural practices, which are without question far more sustainable, is simply not profitable for the global parasitical class. Certainly other technologies such as geothermal, wave power, and a large investment to harness free energy from cold fusion are truly more renewable energy sources with a far smaller carbon footprint.
Both of these climate change groups are correct, and both are wrong. The radical side downplays the importance of jobs and the health of society at large. The current Green Party coalition ruling Germany now is a good example. Olaf Scholz’s government is arguably the most incompetent in Germany’s modern history. The coalition’s Green ideology has demolished the country’s vibrant industrial base, which once held the world’s admiration, and has shown itself to be empty handed and incapable of replacing this loss with anything viable. Today, Germany is becoming the basket case of Western Europe, and this is a direct consequence of inept radical Green ideologues.
Despite youthful activists such as Greta Thunberg and the many international young environmental voices marched through the halls of the World Economic Forum as the new generations’ exemplars of a Great Reset future, are any truly substantial changes being made that are reversing climate trends. Indeed, their message is authentic, however is it making any difference. Thunberg may be a hero in her generation; however, only for a small faction of teens and young adults who at least have their eyes partially open. But Greta pales in the shadow of media celebrities such as Kylie Jenner with her thousands of footwear and one of the largest private jets in California. And the delusional mainstream media knows it will get more attention and views by spotlighting Jenner’s obsessive-compulsive consumerism over Thunberg’s dirty overalls and cardboard signs. As long as we remain a consumerist culture, and reward hyperactive and emotionally fragile influencers, nothing will change to address climate and environmental threats at any crucial level.
Group Number Three
A third group simply denies outright anthropogenic climate change or at best believes human impact on global warming is minimal.
The US currently has the largest percent of any nation’s population that is not concerned about climate change. People like Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, Mike Adams, and others leaning towards the radical Right are among its leading voices. In their opinion, economic and social issues should take precedence, including protection and expansion of fossil fuel industries and preserving the neoliberal capitalist doctrine of infinite growth on a finite planet, which Marx warned about in the middle of the nineteenth century. This position is not without its reasons. They have no reason to trust a government that acts on its own behalf at the detriment of human liberty.
There is no reason to believe anything coming from the mouths of the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, Bill Gates and politicians serving private interests over the public good.
They lied about the Covid-19 pandemic.
They lied about America’s entry into Afghanistan and Iraq.
They’ve bailed out Wall Street and financial institutions rather than the citizens who suffered from these very same institutions’ irresponsible negligence and greed.
Why should these institutions’ threats and fear mongering about global warming, a pending collapse of human civilization and the urgency for a Green New Deal be given any legitimacy?
Therefore, this group rejects anthropogenic climate change outright and demands a return to the old normal: agro-industrial farming, fossil fuel extractions, economic growth over environmental responsibility, and widespread consumerism. In addition, there is of course the entire conservative-leaning Judeo-Christian theological base that embraces this view.
So what is to be done amidst the warring tribes either concerned or apathetic towards climate change?
Obviously any abrupt simpleminded and gullible systemic change, as in Germany, will have catastrophic economic, social and human consequences.
And no one should be so dewy eyed as to believe that Germany’s policies were not aligned with the World Economic Forum. Climate change and global warming are undoubtedly real threats despite all the failures to predict how and when future tipping points are reached.
Therefore, it is incumbent to act intelligently and take into account what is factual and remove that from everything that is economically and politically ideological.
At the popular level of societies, people must learn to gradually wean themselves away from buying so much stuff, and especially imports if possible. Regardless of how meaningless GDP has become as a metric to evaluate the economic and social health of a country, consumerism is nevertheless tied to GDP. The world’s three largest polluters—China, India and the US—will not curtail their economic growth nor will their corporations.
Therefore, even with a steady decline in consumerism, GDP will continue to be tweaked and distorted to maintain the fantasy of productivity and growth. We find ourselves in a Hobbesian choice: we care about the environment and its preservation but are simultaneously accelerating its denigration by exploiting the planet’s resources to sustain a standard of living contrary to environmental sanity. Bookended by corporate greed and profit on the one hand, and an insatiable appetite for detrimental selfish pursuits, we impulsively consume stuff that we don’t really need. Hence rises a collective toxic brew that the majority of people participate in.
Second, it is perfectly within nations’ means to reduce their reliance upon agro-chemical agriculture and adopt large regenerative farming practices that preserve the land and reduce greenhouse emissions. Third, become vegetarian or vegan. This will reduce the unnecessary wastage of land required for livestock of every kind, which has a terrible ratio between energy into the system and energy taken out. Moreover, the medical science now seems unwaveringly confirmed that plant based diets would dramatically reduce disease.
Finally, education about climate change, environmental preservation and human health and well-being needs to be completely overhauled and revised.
Sadly, ethics no longer holds any role in modern education; therefore, it is near impossible to instill in younger people any moral responsibility towards the environment. The younger generation increasingly gets it but only in a radicalized and uncritical manner; it is also fundamentally aligned with the globalist agenda that today steers much of our public education. We can no longer rely upon government and private interests to solve humanity’s problems. It now relies upon every individual at the local level to make the responsibility choices despite the odds. At least they will gain a personal satisfaction that they acted ethically out of a sense of compassion for others and the well-being of humanity that the polluters, influencers and their cheerleaders in government and media will never taste in their lives.
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Richard Galeis the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Nullis host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow.
Global WAR-NING! Geoengineering Is Wrecking Our Planet and Humanity
Edited by Prof. Claudia von Werlhof
After more than one year of “lockdowns” all over the world, the issue of “global warming” and “climate change” is back on the table of the international debate.
It seems that natural catastrophes have started to surround us everywhere – from the animal world next to us as well as from the sky above us. Is “nature” the enemy that has to be combatted today, be it by vaccinating humanity against the coronavirus that allegedly jumped out of the wilderness attacking us, be it by tearing down industrial production and consumption in order to avoid the alleged greenhouse gas CO2 emissions, being officially identified as the sole culprit of a so-called global warming? Or be it by applying methods of an alleged civil “geoengineering” against an ongoing climate change that seems to threaten the world?
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In political discourse – and perhaps this is an inexorable feature of human tribalistic psychology — there exists a dichotomy between what Noam Chomsky and others have described as “worthy” and “unworthy” victims of state violence and other forms of oppression.
Returning to the topic of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, the Palestinians, as can be seen in recent college protests, are very much in vogue as “worthy” victims.
This is not a treatise on the Palestine vs. Israel conflict. I bring up this example of a “worthy” victim because it is timely and apropos.
On the other hand, college students (along with everyone else in the population at large) who were forced to receive unnecessary and often extremely damaging experimental medical treatments with no public health benefit are very much placed in the latter category (“unworthy victims”) by the same ideological cohort that champions the Palestinian cause.
Accordingly, the victims of COVID tyranny get no sympathy from the mainstream academic institutions nor the students and faculty who outsource their critical thinking to them.
Instead, anyone who asks questions about vaccine mandates – and even anyone injured by the shots – is subject to ridicule by the mainstream media and the mainstream culture it fosters.
On the hypocrisy of bodily autonomy, which is tangentially related to this topic, I will only note in passing, although it could constitute an entire article, the “my body, my choice” hypocrisy of pro-choice activists who suddenly have nothing to say about needle rape with an experimental drug as a requirement to attend school.
When a woman is denied access to an abortion by the state, she is a “worthy” victim of coercion. When that same woman is required to submit to an injection with a product she doesn’t want, she is an “unworthy” victim.
Perception influenced by media and academic bubbles and the resulting ideological possession inform the level of outrage of activists over any given issue, and who constitutes a “worthy” victim and who does not.
Such ideologues have no reservoir of sympathy for, or solidarity with, their own peers who have been forced to suffer for many years at this point for the sake of pharmaceutical profiteering and technocratic social control.
Please do not misunderstand: this is not to equate the explosive latent war in the Middle East and COVID-19 vaxx mandates. One is obviously geopolitical and millennia-old and highly ripe for sensationalism in the media. The other is a domestic policy matter and relatively new and slow-burning.
The caveat of unfair comparisons aside, allow me to briefly make the case that the COVID crimes of the past few years dwarf, by any metric, what is currently unfolding in the Middle East – the main difference between the two, in terms of media presentation, and hence public perception, being that the COVID crimes do not convey scenes of bombings and bloodied children and therefore do not have the same visceral impact on the viewer or reader.
This might engender criticism as hyperbole, but I believe that history will regard the COVID-19 crimes by the Public Health™ authorities and the pharmaceutical industry –
first, the [alleged] creation of SARS-CoV-2 in in a Wuhan lab using money funneled to it by Anthony Fauci’s NIAID through EcoHealth Alliance;
The final tally of dead victims may exceed a billion when the totality of the truth emerges, as it will one day, about the vaxxes’ adverse side effects, the mass starvation induced by global lockdowns and demolished supply lines, the wrecked mental health induced by the same, etc.
We need justice. We need an end to brutal vaxx and masking mandates on college campuses and throughout civil society. After the immediate injustices are remedied, we need Nuremberg 2.0 to ensure nothing like the crimes of the past three years are ever permitted to occur again.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Armageddon Prose.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Students rally for Palestine at Harvard University on October 14th, 2023. (Source: Rick Friedman / Alamy Stock Photo)
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In a pointed riposte to U.S. President Joe Biden—who said he has “no confidence” in Gaza casualty figures provided by Hamas, Palestinian health officials on Thursday released a 212-page list identifying 6,747 people killed by Israeli air and artillery attacks on the besieged enclave since October 7.
The Gaza Health Ministry published the names, ages, genders, and civil identification numbers of 6,747 Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks, including 2,665 children. The list is in Arabic, with an English version said to be forthcoming.
Another 281 people, 248 of them children, could not be identified. In order to improve chances of identification should their children be dismembered by Israeli bombardment, some Gaza parents and guardians have taken to writing children’s names on their hands and legs.
All told, 7,028 Palestinians—including 2,913 children—have been killed in Gaza since Israel declared war in the wake of the Hamas-led infiltration attacks that left more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers dead on and after October 7.
The Ministry of Health released a report on those killed in Gaza, by Israeli airstrikes. Here is the name, ID number & age of those who’ve been identified. Where you see words vs a number – kids under 1.
More than 17,000 Palestinians have been injured in Israeli attacks, nearly half the homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and over 1.4 million people have been displaced.
Israeli soldiers and settlers have also killed more than 100 Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, while nearly 2,000 others have been wounded there.
The Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement that it was releasing the list “so that the world knows that behind every number is the story of a person whose name and identity are known.”
“Our people are not nobodies who can be ignored,” the agency stressed.
“At a time when our people are waiting for urgent international intervention to stop the genocidal war being carried out by the Israeli occupier against all civilian components including health and media personnel… more than 2 million people living in the Gaza Strip are exposed to the ugliest types of systematic killing and brutal massacres,” the statement continued.
Every American should know that your government did this too. This isn't just Israel. This is also the responsibility of the country that funds and arms Israel and shields it from accountability.
The ministry accused the Biden administration of accepting all of the Israeli government’s claims “without any verification or scrutiny” and “devoid of all… morals and basic human rights values that it sings about.”
On Wednesday, Biden—who earlier this month declared his “rock-solid and unwavering” commitment to Israel—said during a White House press conference that he was “sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
“But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” the president added.
Some critics condemned Biden’s stance as “genocide denial.”
However, the administration doubled down on its claim as White House Spokesperson John Kirby said during a Thursday press briefing that “the Gaza Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas.”
“We can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health, at face value,” Kirby added.
The White House spokesman says that Gaza's 'so-called' Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas and that their numbers are not reliable. They've gone with doubling down on genocide denial. pic.twitter.com/nTciOSiluX
Some observers noted that the Biden administration cited Gaza Ministry of Health casualty figures as recently as last year in a State Department human rights report.
IfNotNow, a Jewish-led U.S. peace group, called the Gaza victims list “catastrophic” and “devastating.”
“President Biden publicly undermining the Gaza death toll is dangerous and wrong,” the group said. “Questioning death tolls directly dehumanizes Palestinians. It’s a key part of genocide denial. Israel is murdering Palestinians. By minimizing this, the U.S. is laying the groundwork for more death.”
Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, toldThe New York Times that the arguing over the number of dead in Gaza is akin to not seeing the forest for the trees.
“As the debate focuses on death tolls, the bodies continue to pile up,” Shakir said. “Our focus should be on how to prevent further mass atrocities, instead of debating whether or not the number is exactly accurate or not.”
“We know that Palestinians are being killed in unprecedentedly high numbers,” he said, “and that needs to end.”
[From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.]
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Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
Featured image: Dr. Ashraf al-Qidra speaks during an October 26, 2023 press conference as he holds a list of 6,747 people killed by Israeli air and artillery strikes on the besieged Palestinian enclave since October 7. (Photo: Gaza Health Ministry/Facebook)
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House Speaker Mike Johnson, confirmed Wednesday after three failed previous Republican choices and weeks of inner party turmoil, is an evangelical Christian whose connections to Israel reflect the movement’s deep ties to the Israeli right, which has become increasingly mainstream over the years.
Johnson’s confirmation brought to an end weeks of Republican Party turmoil after three previous choices failed to win enough votes to replace Kevin McCarthy.
But it is also the most significant victory to date for evangelical Christians’ pro-Israel movement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies – including former Israel ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer – have publicly and privately stressed the importance of evangelical support as U.S. Jews have grown increasingly critical of Israel’s rightward shift.
This dynamic has largely fueled Israel becoming an increasingly partisan issue where Republicans have adopted increasingly pro-Israel sentiments – both within international geopolitics and local domestic politics.
Since the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent response in Gaza, pro-Israel evangelicals have only become more vocally pro-Israel, while the rest of the GOP adopts increasingly anti-Palestinian rhetoric.
Louisiana Rep. Johnson traveled to Israel in February 2020 with an under-the-radar group called the 12Tribe Films Foundation. The organization’s CEO is a social media activist named Avi Abelow, who emigrated from New York more than 30 years ago at age 18 and lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.
Abelow switched his vote from right-wing Likud to far-right Religious Zionism in last November’s general election, helping elevate Bezalel Smotrich to a position where he could demand a key role in Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition. He told Haaretz following the election that his decision was motivated by his deep distrust of the Arabs serving in the Israeli parliament and genuine fears for his own safety living in the occupied territories.
Johnson’s first stop on his Abelow-organized visit was to the Kohelet Policy Forum – the conservative think tank that has been an essential partner to the government’s efforts to weaken the judiciary.
The fourth-term congressman also visited the Temple Mount compound alongside Yehudah Glick, a former Likud lawmaker who has led the fight to change the status quo and permit Jewish prayer at the flash point Jerusalem holy site – in opposition to both official Israeli government policy as well as that of the international community, particularly the Biden administration and Jordan.
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Featured image: Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Mike Johnson delivers remarks following his election to the position, October 25, 2023. (Licensed under the Public Domain)
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On October 12, Veterans For Peace issued this statement about the conflict between Hamas and Israel, in which we condemned the horrific violence on both sides, particularly the killing of civilians. We added our voice to the many calls for a ceasefire and negotiations toward a political solution because there is no military one.
Since then, conditions have worsened – terribly. If a ceasefire isn’t declared, the killing and wounding in Gaza will increase dramatically, given announced plans to intensify bombing and conduct what is likely to be a months-long ground invasion.
Marjorie Cohn, VFP Advisory Board member and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, joined many others in defining what’s happening in Gaza as “genocide,” and the U.S. role as “complicity in genocide.”
We take those terms very seriously.
On October 20, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that 4,127 people, including 1,661 children have been killed and 13,162 people have been injured. Since then, 400 people were killed in 24 hours on October 22.
“Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
Members of Veterans For Peace know what happens when those are the “rules of engagement” and what a “free fire zone” is.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, warned of a new instance of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and called for an immediate ceasefire.” She added, Palestinians have no safe zone anywhere in Gaza, with Israel having imposed a “complete siege” on the tiny enclave, with water, food, fuel and electricity unlawfully cut off.
How could anyone, at the very least, not support a ceasefire…Mr. President?
Biden ordered our UN ambassador to veto the UN resolution calling for a ‘humanitarian pause,’ so he can have more time to let American on-the-ground diplomacy “play out.” The tragedy and hypocrisy in that statement are monstrous, but surely delight the weapons makers who profit savagely from the billions of dollars our taxes buy for Israel year in and year out.
Our government, with many billions of our tax dollars, has fanned the flames beneath the pressure cooker of occupation for decades. We cannot pretend ignorance. One of our members saw a tragic similarity between what he witnessed in Palestine and what he did as an occupier in Iraq.
VFP urges our members and supporters as emphatically as we can:
Take action NOW – no matter how large or small – but do it now.
We must do everything we can to prevent even greater disaster!
Join in a local protest or organize one yourself. Certainly picket, and think seriously about occupying local offices of Members of Congress who do not support HR 786 for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid. Tell your friends what’s happening. Write a letter to the editor.
But do it now!
Without a ceasefire, this war, like all wars, will dangerously escalate. The U.S. has sent aircraft carrier battle groups into the eastern Mediterranean and more troops into neighboring countries; Israel has bombed two airports in Syria; Shia militias have attacked U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.
To American troops deployed to the Middle East: follow your conscience. Remember that what you do as a member of the United States military will be with you for the rest of your life. We in Veterans For Peace have learned from our experiences with war and death to be life affirming.
Join us for peace.
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For many of us, it’s impossible to imagine the scale of death and destruction in Gaza.
In just two weeks, the Israeli military has killed over 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli warplanes have flattened entire neighborhoods. Shell-shocked children are left to search for their parents under the rubble. Millions of Palestinians have once again been made refugees, bombed as they tried to flee. Surgeons are operating by the light of their cellphones, increasingly without anesthesia.
Let us be clear: This is genocide.
This isn’t a war on Hamas. It’s a war on the Palestinian people.
As Aseel Al Bajeh writes, “All of Palestine is under attack.”
While international attention is focused on Gaza, the Israeli government and extremist settler groups are taking the opportunity to accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank.
On October 12, as the last villagers of Wadi al-Seeq left their homes, driven out by ongoing settler terror, a group of Israeli “soldiers-settlers” — some dressed in military uniform and some in civilian clothing — took three Palestinian men captive.
For hours, the men were tortured: They beat them, forced them to strip down to their underwear, handcuffed and blindfolded them, urinated on them, extinguished cigarettes on their bodies, and attempted to sexually assault one of them.
Settlers have carried out dozens of attacks, setting Palestinian homes on fire, destroying their property, and shooting at them with live ammunition.
Over 90 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 26 children, have been murdered by the Israeli military and settlers since October 7.
They include 16-year-old Mohammad Rafat Mohammad Edwan, who was throwing stones at Israeli soldiers when he was shot with live ammunition. The bullet lodged itself in his lung, and four days later, on October 14, he was dead.
On October 12, 62-year-old Ibrahim Wadi and his son, 24-year-old Ahmad Wadi, were killed when Israeli settlers opened fire on the funeral procession of four Palestinians who had been murdered the previous day — three by Israeli settlers and one by an Israeli soldier.
And on October 19, 11-year-old Yousef Mohammad Omar Zaghdad was killed when the Israeli military fired a missile at a group of civilians inside Noor Shams refugee camp. Three other children were killed in the attack.
Enabled by the Israeli military and empowered by a climate of impunity and lawlessness, Israeli settlers are taking advantage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza to steal more Palestinian land, thereby expanding Israeli control of the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinians from over a dozen different communities in the West Bank have been displaced as a result.
“They came into the village and destroyed houses and sheep pens, beat an 85-year-old man, scared our children. Slowly our lives became unlivable,” Sliman al-Zawahri, a resident of the now-depopulated village of Ein Rashash, told the Guardian.
Israel’s war on Gaza has also heightened the discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel and those with Jerusalem IDs, who are increasingly being arrested, harassed, doxxed, suspended from school, and fired from their jobs for expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
The expansion of Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy relies on the destruction of all Palestinian life. For Palestinians, there is no right way to protest their subjugation, and nowhere safe from Israeli violence.
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July 11, 2023 – Inverkip, UK – 25 year old NHS pediatric nurse Kristin Hamill was finishing her pediatric nursing studies (with COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine mandate). On June 28, 2022 she developed sepsis, her kidneys failed, she ended up on dialysis and needs a kidney transplant. In July 2023 she was diagnosed with heart failure – all COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine injuries & long term effects.
July 31, 2023 – Calvary, TX – Danny DeGrande was a Nursing Student at TCU and 5 years in the US Marine Corps. He had chest pain and died suddenly on Oct. 31, 2022.
June 22, 2023 – Marietta, GA – 18 year old Kylie Yeager died after being diagnosed with Leukemia in April 2023. She was interested in pediatric nursing and had attended a Wellstar Nursing Camp and volunteered at special needs camps in the summer. She is presumed COVID-19 mRNA Vaccinated.
June 22, 2023 – Provo, UT – 27 year old Keyon Snow, a nursing student at Joyce University, died suddenly in his sleep.
June 20, 2023 – Las Vegas, NV – Crystal Martinez is a nursing student at Nevada State College. She began having neurological deficits and was diagnosed with a strange epidural hematoma of her spinal cord.
June 14, 2023 – Metairie, LA – 20 year old Bryan Ibanez is a nursing student at Missouri State University. He was diagnosed with Stage 2 Testicular Cancer in Sep. 2022 which has metastasized to the lungs and is now Stage 4.
June 10, 2023 – Knoxville, TN – 18 year old Caileigh O’Donohue Duggan, a nursing student at University of Tennessee nursing program died suddenly on June 10, 2023. She died in her sleep.
June 2, 2023 – 19 year old Kate Kaufling, University of Kentucky dancer and nursing student with 4.0 GPA was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma. It started with swollen lymph nodes containing cancer.
May 22, 2023 – Chandler, AZ – 21 year old Valerie Calderone was a college student studying to become a nurse when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma.
May 21, 2023 – UK – Winifred Chioma George, a Nigerian Nursing Student who was only 16 weeks away from completing her nursing degree at the University of Hertfordshire died suddenly on May 21, 2023.
April 26, 2023 – Southport, UK – 31 year old nursing student Ashleigh De Andrade returned from holiday, felt unwell, had a brain bleed, several seizures & died suddenly.
April 20, 2023 – University of Missouri – 19 year old Nursing student Kennedy Grace Carter died suddenly on April 20, 2023. She was found dead in her dorm room bed.
April 16, 2023 – Mesa, AZ – Katherine Wilson is a nursing student who was diagnosed with a brain/orbital tumor in Feb. 2023 and had surgery in April.
My Take…
Nursing students in United States and Canada were mandated COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines to be able to continue their studies.
mRNA Vaccine mandates forced on University and College students were one of the greatest crimes perpetrated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
All University and College leaders who presided over COVID-19 Vaccine mandates must serve life in prison sentences without possibility of parole.
Now that COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine injuries are out in the mainstream and can no longer be covered-up, it is crucial for nursing students and their families to carefully evaluate any health problems that occurred after COVID-19 Vaccination.
Kristin Hamill’s immune system would have been damaged by COVID-19 Vaccines, putting her at high risk of sepsis, which is now a common condition among the COVID-19 Vaccinated. Her kidneys and heart may have also been damaged by spike protein.
Danny DeGrande would have had COVID-19 vaccine cardiac injury, and those who died in their sleep like Keyon Snow, Caileigh Duggan, Kennedy Grace Carter may also have had COVID-19 Vaccine cardiac injury.
Also important to note are blood clots, DVTs, pulmonary emboli, as well as blood vessel injuries such as aneurysms and hemorrhagic strokes.
Any Cancer diagnosis after COVID-19 Vaccination must be considered a Turbo Cancer until proven otherwise and carefully evaluated for unusual behavior.
The time for lawsuits against Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson is now.
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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 European Union’s sanctions envoy said on October 23 that the bloc’s sanctions regime on Russian oil will remain in place for the long term, perhaps five or ten years. Yet, despite the triumphant statement, the EU’s economy is facing a recession, and not the Russian, which is going from strength to strength even though it faces Western-imposed sanctions.
“Prepare for five to ten years,” said David O’Sullivan, special international envoy for the implementation of EU sanctions, at an Atlantic Council event. O’Sullivan added that he did not see any imminent lifting of these sanctions in any meaningful way, even if there were a cessation of hostilities, as other issues would need to be overcome.
Responding to O’Sullivan’s comments, Dmitry Peskov, Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation, said that Russia was prepared to face Western sanctions for the period said by the EU envoy.
“Russia has been living under a sanctions regime for quite a long time, for decades, and we have sufficiently adapted to it, so such time horizons as five to 10 years do not scare us,” Peskov said.
The worst effects of Western sanctions against Russia have already been felt, and the Eurasian country has already constructed mechanisms to overcome Western economic attacks. In fact, even with Western sanctions, Russia is increasingly close to surpassing the USA and the EU in GDP growth.
Moscow said sanctions have boosted its domestic economy and industrial production, and most observers acknowledge now that the sanctions have been circumvented and have failed to deter Russia from ending its military operation against Ukraine.
According to calculations based on the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, Russia’s external debt level relative to GDP at the end of the second quarter of this year fell below 15% for the first time. In fact, Russia’s external debt has not stopped decreasing in recent years.
At the end of 2020, it was 31%; in 2021, it was 26.2%; and, at the end of last year, it was only 16.6%. In the first quarter of 2023, it decreased slightly to 15.45%. In the second quarter of this year, the indicator also declined to 14.96%. In monetary terms, Russian external public and corporate debt at the end of June 2023 was $343.4 billion, about 29.9 trillion roubles.
The Central Bank also published data on the external debt per capita at the end of the second quarter: the figure fell 4% to $2.3 billion. This is the best level since 2006 when it was $2.2 billion. At the same time, Russia’s economy will grow by 2.3% in 2023 against all forecasts from Western analysts, something that is due to the rise in real wages.
Meanwhile, the economic slowdown in the Eurozone worsened in October, according to preliminary data from a survey of purchasing managers conducted by S&P Global.
“The seasonally adjusted HCOB Flash Eurozone Composite PMI Output Index, based on approximately 85% of usual survey responses, fell from 47.2 in September to 46.5 in October, signalling a fifth consecutive month of falling business activity and the steepest decline since November 2020,” said the S&P press release on October 24.
Excluding the months of the pandemic, business activity in the eurozone recorded its largest contraction since March 2013.
For the chief economist of Hamburg Commercial Bank (HCOB), Dr. Cyrus de la Rubi:
“In the Eurozone, things are moving from bad to worse. Manufacturing has been in a slump for sixteen months, services for three, and both PMI headline indices just took another hit. In addition, all subindices point very consistently downwards, too, with only a few exceptions. Overall, this points to another lacklustre quarter. We wouldn’t be caught off guard to see a mild recession in the Eurozone in the second half of this year with two back to back quarters of negative growth.”
However, rather than seeking to remove sanctions, the EU will not only maintain them for many years to come but will introduce a new sanctions package, the 12th since Russia launched its special military operation against Ukraine in February 2022. This sanctions package could include a ban on Russian diamonds – a further crackdown on Moscow’s ability to get around sanctions and listing companies in third countries helping Moscow do so.
Just like the previous 11 sanctions packages, this will obviously fail to deter Russia from completing its mission against Ukraine. Rather, it will only have a greater impact on the EU as their own economies struggle while Russia continues to forge trade relations with non-Western partners, thus shielding the economy from Western attacks.
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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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***
Germany is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian community, with roughly 80,000 Palestinians living in the country. For years, German authorities have tried to stifle Palestinian activism in the country, viewing it as a nuisance to its explicit policy of “unconditional support for Israel.” Demonstrations, such as one earlier this year to mark the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, have been sporadically banned in recent years and organizations, like the Palestinian prisoner solidarity network Samidoun, have also come under increasing scrutiny.
Yet the criminalization of solidarity with Palestine on a national level has taken on entirely new dimensions since October 7. After a small demonstration on Berlin’s busy Sonnenallee street on the evening of October 7, the German media and body politic have been up in arms about Palestinians supposedly celebrating terrorism and antisemitism on German streets.
Talking points that were two weeks ago only uttered by far-right AfD politicians are now being openly expressed by politicians from all parliamentary parties in Germany. Playing off the idea of “imported antisemitism,” the social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz is now arguing that “we must finally deport on a large scale” residents who do not hold German citizenship and openly protest against Israel. The Christian Democrats (CDU) are even demanding that the recognition of Israel’s right to exist must become a precondition for German citizenship.
Samidoun has been made into public enemy number one, as the media presents the group as a bastion for “sympathizers of terror” that poses “a particular danger, because as a secular organization, they are building bridges between Islamists and radical leftists.” In a speech before parliament on October 12, Chancellor Scholz personally announced a ban on Samidoun along with a ban on the activities of Hamas in Germany.
In Berlin specifically, which is home to one of the largest Palestinian diaspora communities outside the Arab world, the authorities have been particularly hostile towards any signs of solidarity with Palestine. Since October 7, every demonstration explicitly or implicitly referring to Palestine has been banned, leaving the roughly 30,000 Palestinians living in Berlin with no means of expressing their anguish at the siege and bombardment of Gaza.
Solidarity groups have been trying to bypass this censorship by avoiding political statements and focusing on humanitarian campaigning, yet even demonstrations and slogans such as “Children in Gaza need help” and “Solidarity with the civilian population in the Gaza Strip” were banned. On October 13, the police went so far as to ban a demonstration registered by the group “Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East” entitled “Jewish Berliners against violence in the Middle East.”
Sonnenallee, a busy street in the district in which many Arab migrants live, has become a focal point of dissent against Israel’s attack on Gaza. The police patrol Sonnenallee every evening with tight controls on the public squares. Racial profiling and brutal arrests are commonplace and often recorded and posted to social media. One particular video shows police officers stomping out a candle-lit vigil with their boots.
In a letter to all Berlin schools, the city’s Department for Education, Youth and Family set out strict guidelines on how to discuss the situation in Palestine with students. “Any demonstrative action or expression of opinion that can be understood as advocating or approving of the attacks against Israel or support for the terrorist organizations carrying them out, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, constitutes a threat to school peace in the current situation and is prohibited.” According to the letter, these may include the following: “visibly wearing relevant clothing (for example, the kuffiyeh known as the Palestinian scarf), displaying stickers and patches with inscriptions such as ‘free Palestine’ or a map of Israel in the colors of Palestine (white, red, black, green), and shouting ‘free Palestine!’ and demonstrating verbal support for Hamas and its terrorism.”
At one high school on Sonnenallee, a 61-year-old teacher attempted to confiscate a Palestinian flag from a 14-year-old student and ended up in a physical altercation with a second 15-year-old student. The parents’ association of the school tried to organize a demonstration under the slogan “No place for racism, no place for violence” as a reaction to the incident, yet it was promptly banned by the police, ostensibly as a “a precautionary measure”. The Central Council of Palestinians in Germany has since sent a letter in response to Berlin’s Department for Education, expressing their “great concern about the psychological and educational development [of their children]” in Berlin schools.
As other European states are witnessing mass protests in solidarity with Palestine, the German state has been able to use force and violence to prevent such scenes on German streets. Yet it is unlikely that the government will be able to ban these sentiments of solidarity indefinitely, especially as the images of Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza continue to circulate around the world.
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Featured image: Demonstrators in Berlin take the streets in solidarity with Palestine (Photo: Montecruz Foto)
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Update on October 24, 2023
After this article was originally published, the Israeli outlet Calcalist reported on a separate plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza that is being circulated by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry headed by Gila Gamliel. The leaked document was reportedly created for an organization called “The Unit for Settlement – Gaza Strip” and was not meant for the public.
In the plan being proposed by the Intelligence Ministry, Palestinians in Gaza would be displaced from Gaza to the northern Egyptian Sinai peninsula. In the report, the ministry described different options for what comes after an invasion of Gaza and the option deemed as “liable to provide positive and long-lasting strategic results” was the transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai. The move entails three steps: the creation of tent cities southwest of the Gaza Strip; the construction of a humanitarian corridor to “assist the residents”; and finally, the building of cities in northern Sinai. In parallel, a “sterile zone”, several kilometers wide, would be established within Egypt, south of the Israeli border, “so that the evacuated residents would not be able to return”.
In addition, similar to the plan described in the original story below, the document calls for cooperation with other countries, in fact “as many as possible” so that they may “absorb” the Palestinians who have been uprooted from Gaza. Among the countries mentioned as possible sites for Palestinians from Gaza are Canada, European countries such as Greece and Spain, and North African countries.
Original article
The Hamas attack on Israeli towns surrounding Gaza on October 7 has provided a pretext for an unprecedented, genocidal revenge campaign by Israel involving the massacre of now nearly 5,000 Palestinians, including over 2,000 children – and that may only be the beginning. Now, an Israeli think tank with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promoting plans for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
On October 17, the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategypublished a position paper advocating for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.” The report advocates exploiting the current moment to accomplish a long-held Zionist goal of moving Palestinians off the land of historic Palestine. The report’s subtitle makes it clear: “There is at the moment a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in coordination with the Egyptian government.”
The Misgav Institute is headed by former Netanyahu National Security Advisor Meir Ben Shabbat, who remains influential in Israeli security circles. The Institute’s former chairpersons and founding associates includeYoaz Hendel(chair 2012-19), a right-centrist who was Minister of Communications intermittently in the years 2020-22; Moshe Yaalon, former Defense Minister (note that both Hendel and Yaalon have become opposed to Netanyahu in the recent years); Moshe Arens, also former Defense Minister — and other top political personas.
The main arguments of the report, which the Institute highlighted on social media upon the report’s release, are translated as follows:
There is a need for an immediate, viable plan for the resettlement and economic rehabilitation of the entire Arab population in the Gaza Strip, which sits well with the geopolitical interests of Israel, Egypt, U.S.A. and Saudi Arabia.
In 2017 it was reported that in Egypt there were 10 million available apartment units, of which half were built and half under construction. For example, in two of the biggest Cairo satellite cities, “October 6” and “Ramadan 10” there is an immense number of built and empty apartments under governmental and private ownership as well as empty lots for building that would in total suffice the housing of about 6 million residents.
The average cost of a three-room apartment of 95 square meters for an average Gaza family of 5.14 people in one of the two mentioned cities stands at $19,000. In calculating the total population that resides in the Gaza Strip, which stands between 1.4-2.2 million people, it is possible to assess that the amount that would need to be transferred to Egypt in order to finance would be around $5 to 8 billion.
An encouraging injection to the Egyptian economy at this magnitude would provide an enormous and immediate advantage to [Egyptian President] El-Sisi’s regime. Such money sums, compared to the Israeli economy, are miniscule. The investment of a mere few billions of dollars (even if it is $20 or 30 billion) in order to solve this difficult issue is an innovative, cheap and viable solution.
There is no doubt that in order for this plan to be enacted, many conditions need to exist in parallel. At the moment, these conditions exist, and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if at all.
It appears that this ethnic-cleansing plan is based on a similar logic to that of the “Abraham Accords,” involving the infusion of massive sums towards despotic regimes to write off the Palestinian issue. But this time, it is not just about slow annexation and bantustanization through “economic peace” — but advocating for the complete population transfer of Palestinians from Gaza.
Previous Calls for Ethnic Cleansing
It is not the first time that suggestions for a full ethnic cleansing have appeared from Israeli analysts or even politicians. In the midst of the 2014 Gaza onslaught, Moshe Feiglin, who was then part of Likud and deputy chair of the Knesset, sent Netanyahu a public, 7-point proposal for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. He repeated the genocidal advocacy in 2018. Feiglin is now a libertarian politician. In a recent interview on Channel 14, Feiglin called for a “Dresden” on Gaza (referring to the WW2 firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, killing some 25,000 people) — “a storm of fire on all of Gaza!” he proclaimed, demanding to “not leave stone on stone” and emphasizing “total fire!” and “the end of ends!”
The Misgav Institute’s thinking has also been reflected in the Israeli intelligentsia. In 2004, respected Israeli historian Benny Morris, who is a self-proclaimed leftist, shocked many by bemoaning the fact that Ben Gurion did not “finish the job” and carry out the full ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, saying it would have led to less conflict in the ensuing decades. But he also said that a “transfer and expulsion” policy is only a question of time, and timing. Morris argued that in “normal” times, such policies may be immoral — but in “apocalyptic circumstances,” they may be both moral, “reasonable,” and “even essential.” From his interview in Haaretz:
“If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions.”
Thus, the Misgav report would seem not only to be arguing that to forcibly displace the Palestinian population from Gaza but that, similar to the conditions that Morris laid out, this is a historic opportunity to do it.
Israeli Support
Since October 7, calls for flattening Gaza have been rampant among the Israeli leadership and widely espoused across the population. On October 12, Israeli Channel 12 published a report about how the desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza has taken hold in Israeli popular culture:
“People from the political left and center have called for the flattening of Gaza this week. A very short post fantasizing about a nature party that would take place on what was Gaza land received 100 thousand likes and 60 thousand shares”. The young Tel-Aviv woman who posted on Instagram had only 700 followers, but then the post “exploded”. She claims to be a centrist who “has always sanctified human rights, compassion is the first emotion that is activated in me”, she says. “I do not want to kill Gazan babies, I never hated Arabs and it’s not like I started hating them this week. But after what happened, I say to the Gaza residents – your babies are your problem”.
Meanwhile, while the world’s eyes are on Gaza, ethnic cleansing is also being realized in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and soldiers. The terrorizing of mostly rural Palestinian communities in the West Bank had resulted in the uprooting of several communities before October 7 but has accelerated greatly since, with some 545 Palestinians forcibly displaced from at least 13 communities since October 7, according to information from the West Bank Protection Consortium (WBPC) and Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din (cited by Al Jazeera). The murderous settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank have gotten relatively little attention, like the murder of four Palestinians in Qusra on October 11 and then the murder of a Palestinian father and his son at the funeral. The number of killed Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7 is nearing 100 — in two weeks — an unfathomable pace.
Thus, these times are exceptionally dangerous for Palestinians. The Hamas attack seems to have reignited long-standing Zionist wishes, and now some want to exploit this public mood in support of a massive ethnic cleansing campaign. It doesn’t mean that it will happen all at once, but as mentioned, in some places, it has already begun.
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Israel has dropped more than 12,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, the media office in the Palestinian enclave said on Tuesday.
“The explosive force of these explosives is equivalent to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in Japan” in 1945, the office said in a statement.
“An average of 33 tons of explosives were dropped per square kilometer on the Palestinian enclave since Israel started its aggression,” it added.
Home to 2.3 million people, the Gaza Strip has a total area of 365 square kilometers.
Israel launched a relentless bombardment campaign on the Palestinian territory following a cross-border attack by Hamas, putting the enclave’s residents under total siege and a blockade of food, fuel and medical supplies.
More than 7,100 people have been killed in the latest conflict, including at least 5,791 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis.
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The Egyptian parliament met on October 19 and gave President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi the power to declare war against Israel, if necessary. Egypt and Israel have a peace treaty dating from 1979, which has been a success, proving that a neighboring Arab and Muslim country can share long-lasting peaceful relations with the Jewish State of Israel.
Egyptians have watched in horror at the scenes of death and destruction in Gaza as the Israeli government exacts its revenge on Hamas after the October 7 attack on Israel. With the promised Israeli ground invasion of Gaza beginning at any moment, it is expected to be a bloodbath among unarmed civilians. Already the death toll is at least 5,087, including 2,055 children.
The Cairo Peace Summit, co-chaired by the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine, met on October 21.
Sisi said that the solution to the Palestinian issue is not the displacement of an entire people to other areas, but justice and obtaining their legitimate rights and the right to self-determination.
The US sent a low-level representative to the Cairo Peace Summit, and this was a message from US President Joe Biden, that the US is working against Egypt, and not with them.
The reason behind Egypt’s refusal to accept Palestinian refugees is never hinted at in the US media which parrots the US State Department talking points.
Israel has a long-standing law that prevents any Palestinian who leaves Gaza, or the Occupied West Bank, from ever returning home. The right of return is enshrined in international law; however, Israel does not comply with international law.
Sisi knows there is an Israeli plan, condoned and supported by Biden, to remove all Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt, where they will be supported by humanitarian aid, but can never repopulate Gaza again. They will be permanently homeless and stateless refugees.
The Israeli plan also includes the Occupied West Bank and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has warned of attempts to displace the Palestinian people and said:
“We will not leave, we will not leave, we will stay in our land.”
“The violent bombing campaign in Gaza is a collective punishment of a besieged and helpless population,” he said, calling it a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime.”
The US-Israeli plan is to move all the Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank into Jordan, which has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1994.
Both leaders have warned of a plan to de-populate the West Bank, which will then be the ultimate solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as there will be no more occupation and no need for the UN resolution calling for the two-state solution. Israel will get everything, and the Palestinians will get nothing.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said on October 18, that any attempts to displace Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan would be considered a declaration of “war.”
The US betrayal of Egypt runs deeper than the Gaza war. Biden set his sights on the record annual revenue of the Suez Canal, which totaled $9.4 billion in USD as of June 30, 2023. The major asset in Egypt handles roughly 10 percent of global maritime trade, and the US has a plan to declare economic war on Egypt by circumventing transit through the Suez Canal.
The Biden Plan Against Egypt
On September 8, at the G-20 summit in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which is a Biden plan to work behind the back of Egypt and undermine their economy. This plan will circumvent the Suez Canal.
The huge plan links India with Europe and includes the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
Not only does the IMEC work to the detriment of Egypt, but also Biden’s chief enemy, China, and their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which began in 2013.
The IMEC project connects cross-country railway lines and shipping corridors from India’s west coast with the UAE by sea, and a rail route crossing the Arabian Peninsula, with the Israeli port of Haifa as the endpoint.
From Haifa, goods are shipped to Piraeus, Greece which is the gateway to all European destinations. Included in the plan are pipelines for hydrogen produced in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, high-powered IT connections, and energy grids.
Biden wants India tied to the West, thus serving as a counter-balance to China. At the same time, the plan promotes the normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which has been the main goal of Netanyahu since taking office, and a priority of the US State Department under the Biden administration.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE regard hydrogen production as a green alternative to their fossil-based energy exports.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the IMEC plan was “much more than ‘just’ a railway or a cable” adding, “It is a green and digital bridge across continents and civilizations.”
The IMEC plan could potentially speed up trade between India and Europe by up to 40 percent. However, its critics point out that the cargo must be off-loaded, and re-loaded twice in the route, which will add costs that might not be cost-effective as opposed to the traditional Suez Canal route. But, the US support of the IMEC proves that their support is not about saving money, but is about betraying Egypt.
The Saudi Position
President Trump’s plan, the Abraham Accords of 2020, gained momentum when the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel.
The big prize to both Israel and the US would be signing with Saudi Arabia, and negotiations were progressing favorably until the current Gaza war began. Saudi Arabia halted any progress on normalization in favor of pro-Palestinian solidarity. The Kingdom’s stance will affect Israel’s participation in IMEC.
Previous US Betrayal of Egypt
Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was a staunch and loyal ally of the US, and yet they called for him to step down.
President Barack Obama and his Vice President Joe Biden engineered a US-rigged election in which the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was elected. The American official in Cairo who was sentenced to five years in prison by an Egyptian court for election fraud was whisked away from Cairo before serving time by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who used her diplomatic immunity to transport Lila Jaafar to Washington, DC where she now serves as an official with the Peace Corps.
This US betrayal of Egypt lasted less than a year, during which hundreds of unarmed civilians were massacred by the Morsi regime, and then the Egyptian people threw out the American puppet, and the current president Sisi came to power.
The US has no friends, only interests. America is the first to teach the lesson: “Treaties are made to be broken”.
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Amid rapid AI progress, the authors of this paper express a consensus on the large-scale risks from upcoming, powerful AI systems. They call for urgent governance measures and a major shift in AI R&D towards safety and ethical practices before these systems are developed.
Cancer during pregnancy is rare and before COVID-19 mRNA vaccines approximately 1:1000 pregnancies were complicated by maternal cancer. Of these, breast cancer is most common, corresponding to between 1:3000 to 1:10000 pregnancies, according to a 2022 Dutch study by Boere et al.
The room was quiet, bright, high-ceilinged, spacious and elegantly appointed. At the long burnished table were seated two baker’s dozen of the most immaculately dressed and manicured individuals — themselves virtually unknown to those outside their exclusive circle — who represented approximately sixty percent of the world’s wealth.
On October 24, the United States and other imperialist states for the third time voted against a resolution, this time sponsored by the Republic of Brazil, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, disguised as “the better good,” marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and carried out by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
Three years ago I was among the first – and certainly the first Bishop – to denounce pandemic and vaccination fraud. Expressed with arguments that today emerge as true and well-founded are the critical issues and immorality of an experimental gene treatment, which aborted fetuses were and are used to produce. I also wrote two open letters to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which remain unanswered.
Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt.
The stakes are high as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrives in Washington, D.C., today to meet with President Joe Biden. The U.S. government hopes to obtain Australia’s support for its cold war initiatives against China.
A few days after the explosion, Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio, the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that they had been briefed on the matter and were confident that the rocket had come from Islamic Jihad. We’re all just supposed to take their word for it.
My phone is not being returned to me by police as, astonishingly, I am now formally under investigation for terrorism. Whether this relates to support for Palestine or for Wikileaks has currently not been made clear.
Aparentemente, as relações entre os EUA e a Ucrânia são profundas no setor da inteligência. Segundo um importante meio de comunicação americano, a CIA investiu quantias exorbitantes de dinheiro para desenvolver o sistema de inteligência ucraniano. O caso deixa claro como os agentes e a inteligência americanos são certamente co-responsáveis pelos crimes cometidos pelos ucranianos.
A informação foi partilhada peloWashington Post no dia 23 de outubro. Segundo o jornal, a ICA investiu “dezenas de milhões” de dólares na inteligência ucraniana com o objetivo de transformar o sistema pós-pós-soviético num verdadeiro centro operacional aliado de Washington contra Moscou. Desde o Maidan, a agência americana tem estado fortemente envolvida em todo o processo de tomada de decisão da inteligência ucraniana, tendo alcançado uma “presença significativa” em Kiev.
“Desde 2015, a CIA gastou dezenas de milhões de dólares para transformar os serviços ucranianos formados pelos soviéticos em aliados poderosos contra Moscou, disseram autoridades. A agência forneceu à Ucrânia sistemas de vigilância avançados, treinou recrutas em locais na Ucrânia, bem como nos Estados Unidos. Os Estados Unidos construíram novos quartéis-generais para departamentos da agência de inteligência militar da Ucrânia e compartilharam informações em uma escala que teria sido inimaginável antes da Rússia anexar ilegalmente a Crimeia e fomentar uma guerra separatista no leste da Ucrânia. A CIA mantém uma presença significativa em Kiev, disseram autoridades”, diz o artigo.
O artigo também enfatiza que todo o sistema de defesa ucraniano recebeu fundos americanos, o que esclarece que tanto a inteligência nacional, SBU, como a inteligência militar, GUR, se beneficiaram dos investimentos da CIA. Particularmente no que diz respeito à SBU, a CIA parece ter tido um papel central no desenvolvimento da capacidade operacional da agência e em torná-la capaz de espionar as “ameaças” representadas pelas milícias separatistas do Donbass, atuando fortemente dentro da zona de conflito.
As atividades concentraram-se inicialmente no reconhecimento e na sabotagem contra as milícias, mas posteriormente as táticas tornaram-se cada vez mais letais. Isto supostamente causou “desconforto” entre os próprios americanos. O texto relata que os agentes da CIA começaram a sentir-se incomodados com os métodos criminosos de assassinato utilizados pelos seus parceiros ucranianos, o que alegadamente gerou uma diminuição da cooperação entre ambas as partes.
O texto menciona que mesmo os agentes mais experientes que concordam com o uso de técnicas clandestinas para assassinar opositores ficaram chocados com as práticas ucranianas. Segundo as fontes, os americanos discordaram não só dos métodos, mas também da escolha das vítimas, já que Kiev opta rotineiramente por matar civis sem relevância estratégica no conflito – como aconteceu com Daria Dugina, jornalista e filha do filósofo Aleksandr Dugin.
“A afinidade da Ucrânia com operações letais complicou a sua colaboração com a CIA, levantando preocupações sobre a cumplicidade da agência e criando desconforto entre alguns responsáveis em Kiev e Washington. Mesmo aqueles que consideram tais missões letais como defensáveis em tempo de guerra questionam a utilidade de certos ataques e decisões que levou ao ataque a civis, incluindo Dugina ou ao seu pai, Alexander Dugin – que as autoridades reconhecem ser o alvo pretendido – em vez de russos mais diretamente ligados à guerra”, lê-se no artigo.
No entanto, é ingênuo acreditar que a CIA tenha realmente investido tanto dinheiro em Kiev e tenha ficado “chocada” com os métodos ucranianos. A inteligência americana é conhecida mundialmente pela crueldade com que trata os seus inimigos, e não há razão para acreditar que a CIA exigiria uma conduta “ética” de Kiev. Além disso, há provas e trabalhos de investigação que demonstram que mesmo as técnicas de tortura utilizadas pelo regime de Kiev foram certamente instruídas a agentes ucranianos pela CIA.
O que parece estar a acontecer é simplesmente mais uma tentativa dos EUA de escapar à responsabilidade pelos crimes cometidos por Kiev. Esta não é a primeira vez que fontes americanas alegam que, apesar das relações de inteligência dos EUA com a Ucrânia, não houve participação de agentes americanos nos crimes de Kiev. Relativamente ao caso específico de Daria Dugina, o New York Times já tinha noticiado há mais de um ano que a inteligência ucraniana era responsável pelo crime, alegadamente sem qualquer cooperação americana.
No entanto, é quase impossível para os EUA não terem controle total sobre as atitudes da inteligência ucraniana. Mesmo que o plano para matar Dugina e outros civis tenha sido eventualmente proposto pelos ucranianos, a CIA certamente tinha poder suficiente para impedir a ação de Kiev, se quisesse, uma vez que o estado ucraniano é claramente um vassalo dos EUA. Assim, parece claro que, se não a participação direta, pelo menos algum tipo de “luz verde” foi dada pelos EUA, tornando Washington co-responsável por todos os crimes da inteligência ucraniana.
No contexto atual de mudança de foco na política externa americana, com a Ucrânia a perder o seu estatuto de prioridade para Israel, estes relatos da comunicação social desempenham um papel muito importante, que consiste em preparar a opinião pública para um “abandono” gradual da Ucrânia. Durante mais de um ano, os leitores dos meios de comunicação ocidentais sofreram uma lavagem cerebral para acreditarem que “defender” a Ucrânia era uma necessidade vital. Agora é preciso fazer com que a opinião pública “esqueça” a Ucrânia e apoie o envio de armas e dinheiro para Israel.
E a forma mais fácil de reverter a simpatia pela Ucrânia incutida nos cidadãos ao longo do tempo é mostrar os crimes cometidos pelo regime – omitindo que os EUA foram co-participantes em todos eles.
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Amid rapid AI progress, the authors of this paper express a consensus on the large-scale risks from upcoming, powerful AI systems. They call for urgent governance measures and a major shift in AI R&D towards safety and ethical practices before these systems are developed.
In 2019, GPT-2 could not reliably count to ten. Only four years later, deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand, advise on intellectual topics, and combine language and image processing to steer robots.
As AI developers scale these systems, unforeseen abilities and behaviors emerge spontaneously without explicit programming[1]. Progress in AI has been swift and, to many, surprising.
The pace of progress may surprise us again. Current deep learning systems still lack important capabilities and we do not know how long it will take to develop them.
However, companies are engaged in a race to create generalist AI systems that match or exceed human abilities in most cognitive work[2, 3].
They are rapidly deploying more resources and developing new techniques to increase AI capabilities. Progress in AI also enables faster progress: AI assistants are increasingly used to automate programming[4] and data collection[5, 6]to further improve AI systems[7].
There is no fundamental reason why AI progress would slow or halt at the human level. Indeed, AI has already surpassed human abilities in narrow domains like protein folding or strategy games[8, 9, 10].
Compared to humans, AI systems can act faster, absorb more knowledge, and communicate at a far higher bandwidth. Additionally, they can be scaled to use immense computational resources and can be replicated by the millions.
The rate of improvement is already staggering, and tech companies have the cash reserves needed to scale the latest training runs by multiples of 100 to 1000 soon[11]. Combined with the ongoing growth and automation in AI R&D, we must take seriously the possibility that generalist AI systems will outperform human abilities across many critical domains within this decade or the next.
What happens then?
If managed carefully and distributed fairly, advanced AI systems could help humanity cure diseases, elevate living standards, and protect our ecosystems.
The opportunities AI offers are immense. But alongside advanced AI capabilities come large-scale risks that we are not on track to handle well. Humanity is pouring vast resources into making AI systems more powerful, but far less into safety and mitigating harms. For AI to be a boon, we must reorient; pushing AI capabilities alone is not enough.
We are already behind schedule for this reorientation. We must anticipate the amplification of ongoing harms, as well as novel risks, and prepare for the largest risks well before they materialize. Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.
Societal-scale Risks
AI systems could rapidly come to outperform humans in an increasing number of tasks. If such systems are not carefully designed and deployed, they pose a range of societal-scale risks. They threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society.
They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities.
Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance[12, 13].
Many of these risks could soon be amplified, and new risks created, as companies are developing autonomous AI: systems that can plan, act in the world, and pursue goals.
While current AI systems have limited autonomy, work is underway to change this[14]. For example, the non-autonomous GPT-4 model was quickly adapted to browse the web[15], design and execute chemistry experiments[16], and utilize software tools[17], including other AI models[18].
If we build highly advanced autonomous AI, we risk creating systems that pursue undesirable goals. Malicious actors could deliberately embed harmful objectives. Moreover, no one currently knows how to reliably align AI behavior with complex values. Even well-meaning developers may inadvertently build AI systems that pursue unintended goals—especially if, in a bid to win the AI race, they neglect expensive safety testing and human oversight.
Once autonomous AI systems pursue undesirable goals, embedded by malicious actors or by accident, we may be unable to keep them in check. Control of software is an old and unsolved problem: computer worms have long been able to proliferate and avoid detection[19]. However, AI is making progress in critical domains such as hacking, social manipulation, deception, and strategic planning[14, 20]. Advanced autonomous AI systems will pose unprecedented control challenges.
To advance undesirable goals, future autonomous AI systems could use undesirable strategies—learned from humans or developed independently—as a means to an end[21, 22, 23, 24]. AI systems could gain human trust, acquire financial resources, influence key decision-makers, and form coalitions with human actors and other AI systems.
To avoid human intervention[24], they could copy their algorithms across global server networks like computer worms. AI assistants are already co-writing a large share of computer code worldwide[25]; future AI systems could insert and then exploit security vulnerabilities to control the computer systems behind our communication, media, banking, supply-chains, militaries, and governments. In open conflict, AI systems could threaten with or use autonomous or biological weapons. AI having access to such technology would merely continue existing trends to automate military activity, biological research, and AI development itself. If AI systems pursued such strategies with sufficient skill, it would be difficult for humans to intervene.
Finally, AI systems may not need to plot for influence if it is freely handed over. As autonomous AI systems increasingly become faster and more cost-effective than human workers, a dilemma emerges.
Companies, governments, and militaries might be forced to deploy AI systems widely and cut back on expensive human verification of AI decisions, or risk being outcompeted[26, 27]. As a result, autonomous AI systems could increasingly assume critical societal roles.
Without sufficient caution, we may irreversibly lose control of autonomous AI systems, rendering human intervention ineffective. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other highlighted harms could then escalate rapidly. This unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or even extinction of humanity.
Harms such as misinformation and discrimination from algorithms are already evident today[28]; other harms show signs of emerging[20]. It is vital to both address ongoing harms and anticipate emerging risks. This is not a question of either/or. Present and emerging risks often share similar mechanisms, patterns, and solutions[29]; investing in governance frameworks and AI safety will bear fruit on multiple fronts[30].
A Path Forward
If advanced autonomous AI systems were developed today, we would not know how to make them safe, nor how to properly test their safety. Even if we did, governments would lack the institutions to prevent misuse and uphold safe practices. That does not, however, mean there is no viable path forward. To ensure a positive outcome, we can and must pursue research breakthroughs in AI safety and ethics and promptly establish effective government oversight.
Reorienting Technical R&D
We need research breakthroughs to solve some of today’s technical challenges in creating AI with safe and ethical objectives. Some of these challenges are unlikely to be solved by simply making AI systems more capable[22, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35]. These include:
Oversight and honesty: More capable AI systems are better able to exploit weaknesses in oversight and testing[32, 36, 37] —for example, by producing false but compelling output[35, 38].
Robustness: AI systems behave unpredictably in new situations (under distribution shift or adversarial inputs)[39, 40, 34].
Interpretability: AI decision-making is opaque. So far, we can only test large models via trial and error. We need to learn to understand their inner workings[41].
Risk evaluations: Frontier AI systems develop unforeseen capabilities only discovered during training or even well after deployment[42]. Better evaluation is needed to detect hazardous capabilities earlier[43, 44].
Addressing emerging challenges: More capable future AI systems may exhibit failure modes we have so far seen only in theoretical models. AI systems might, for example, learn to feign obedience or exploit weaknesses in our safety objectives and shutdown mechanisms to advance a particular goal[24, 45].
Given the stakes, we call on major tech companies and public funders to allocate at least one-third of their AI R&D budget to ensuring safety and ethical use, comparable to their funding for AI capabilities. Addressing these problems[34], with an eye toward powerful future systems, must become central to our field.
Urgent Governance Measures
We urgently need national institutions and international governance to enforce standards in order to prevent recklessness and misuse. Many areas of technology, from pharmaceuticals to financial systems and nuclear energy, show that society both requires and effectively uses governance to reduce risks. However, no comparable governance frameworks are currently in place for AI.
Without them, companies and countries may seek a competitive edge by pushing AI capabilities to new heights while cutting corners on safety, or by delegating key societal roles to AI systems with little human oversight[26]. Like manufacturers releasing waste into rivers to cut costs, they may be tempted to reap the rewards of AI development while leaving society to deal with the consequences.
To keep up with rapid progress and avoid inflexible laws, national institutions need strong technical expertise and the authority to act swiftly. To address international race dynamics, they need the affordance to facilitate international agreements and partnerships[46, 47]. To protect low-risk use and academic research, they should avoid undue bureaucratic hurdles for small and predictable AI models. The most pressing scrutiny should be on AI systems at the frontier: a small number of most powerful AI systems – trained on billion-dollar supercomputers – which will have the most hazardous and unpredictable capabilities[48, 49].
To enable effective regulation, governments urgently need comprehensive insight into AI development. Regulators should require model registration, whistleblower protections, incident reporting, and monitoring of model development and supercomputer usage[48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55]. Regulators also need access to advanced AI systems before deployment to evaluate them for dangerous capabilities such as autonomous self-replication, breaking into computer systems, or making pandemic pathogens widely accessible[43, 56, 57].
For AI systems with hazardous capabilities, we need a combination of governance mechanisms[48, 52, 58, 59] matched to the magnitude of their risks.
Regulators should create national and international safety standards that depend on model capabilities. They should also hold frontier AI developers and owners legally accountable for harms from their models that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented.
These measures can prevent harm and create much-needed incentives to invest in safety. Further measures are needed for exceptionally capable future AI systems, such as models that could circumvent human control.
Governments must be prepared to license their development, pause development in response to worrying capabilities, mandate access controls, and require information security measures robust to state-level hackers, until adequate protections are ready.To bridge the time until regulations are in place, major AI companies should promptly lay out if-then commitments: specific safety measures they will take if specific red-line capabilities are found in their AI systems. These commitments should be detailed and independently scrutinized.
AI may be the technology that shapes this century. While AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, progress in safety and governance is lagging behind. To steer AI toward positive outcomes and away from catastrophe, we need to reorient. There is a responsible path, if we have the wisdom to take it.
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Authors
Yoshua Bengio,Mila – Quebec AI Institute, Université de Montréal, Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Geoffrey Hinton,University of Toronto, Vector Institute
Andrew Yao,Tsinghua University
Dawn Song,University of California, Berkeley
Pieter Abbeel, University of California, Berkeley
Yuval Noah Harari,The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of History
Ya-Qin Zhang, Tsinghua University
Lan Xue, Tsinghua University, Institute for AI International Governance
Shai Shalev-Shwartz,The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Gillian Hadfield, University of Toronto, SR Institute for Technology and Society, Vector Institute
Jeff Clune,University of British Columbia, Canada CIFAR AI Chair, Vector Institute
Tegan Maharaj,University of Toronto, Vector Institute
Frank Hutter, University of Freiburg
Atılım Güneş Baydin,University of Oxford
Sheila McIlrath, University of Toronto, Vector Institute
Qiqi Gao, East China University of Political Science and Law
Ashwin Acharya,Institute for AI Policy and Strategy
David Krueger,University of Cambridge
Anca Dragan,University of California, Berkeley
Philip Torr,University of Oxford
Stuart Russell,University of California, Berkeley
Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs
Jan Brauner*,University of Oxford
Sören Mindermann*, Mila – Quebec AI Institute
Notes
Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models[link] Wei, J., Tay, Y., Bommasani, R., Raffel, C., Zoph, B., Borgeaud, S. and others,, 2022. Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback[PDF] Bai, Y., Kadavath, S., Kundu, S., Askell, A., Kernion, J., Jones, A. and others,, 2022. arXiv [cs.CL].
Examples of AI Improving AI[link] Woodside, T. and Safety, C.f.A., 2023.
Highly Accurate Protein Structure Prediction with AlphaFold Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A., Green, T., Figurnov, M., Ronneberger, O. and others,, 2021. Nature, pp. 583–589.
Superhuman AI for Multiplayer Poker Brown, N. and Sandholm, T., 2019. Science, pp. 885–890.
Deep Blue Campbell, M., Hoane, A. and Hsu, F., 2002. Artificial Intelligence, pp. 57–83.
An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks[PDF] Hendrycks, D., Mazeika, M. and Woodside, T., 2023. arXiv [cs.CY].
Taxonomy of Risks Posed by Language Models Weidinger, L., Uesato, J., Rauh, M., Griffin, C., Huang, P., Mellor, J. and others,, 2022. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 214–229.
A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents[PDF] Wang, L., Ma, C., Feng, X., Zhang, Z., Yang, H., Zhang, J. and others,, 2023. arXiv [cs.AI].
ChemCrow: Augmenting Large Language Models with Chemistry Tools[PDF] Bran, A., Cox, S., White, A. and Schwaller, P., 2023. arXiv [physics.chem-ph].
Augmented Language Models: a Survey[PDF] Mialon, G., Dessì, R., Lomeli, M., Nalmpantis, C., Pasunuru, R., Raileanu, R. and others,, 2023. arXiv [cs.CL].
HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face[PDF] Shen, Y., Song, K., Tan, X., Li, D., Lu, W., Zhuang, Y. and others,, 2023. arXiv [cs.CL].
The Science of Computing: The Internet Worm Denning, P., 1989. American Scientist, pp. 126–128.
AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions[PDF] Park, P., Goldstein, S., O’Gara, A., Chen, M. and Hendrycks, D., 2023. arXiv [cs.CY].
Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power[PDF] Turner, A., Smith, L., Shah, R. and Critch, A., 2019. Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations[PDF] Perez, E., Ringer, S., Lukošiūtė, K., Nguyen, K., Chen, E. and Heiner, S., 2022. arXiv [cs.CL].
Do the Rewards Justify the Means? Measuring Trade-Offs Between Rewards and Ethical Behavior in the MACHIAVELLI Benchmark Pan, A., Chan, J., Zou, A., Li, N., Basart, S. and Woodside, T., 2023. International Conference on Machine Learning.
The Off-Switch Game Hadfield-Menell, D., Dragan, A., Abbeel, P. and Russell, S., 2017. Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 220–227.
Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans[PDF] Hendrycks, D., 2023. arXiv [cs.CY].
Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems Chan, A., Salganik, R., Markelius, A., Pang, C., Rajkumar, N. and Krasheninnikov, D., 2023. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 651–666. Association for Computing Machinery.
On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models[PDF] Bommasani, R., Hudson, D., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S. and von Arx, S., 2021. arXiv [cs.LG].
AI Poses Doomsday Risks—But That Doesn’t Mean We Shouldn’t Talk About Present Harms Too[link] Brauner, J. and Chan, A., 2023. Time.
Inverse Scaling: When Bigger Isn’t Better[PDF] McKenzie, I., Lyzhov, A., Pieler, M., Parrish, A., Mueller, A. and Prabhu, A., 2023. Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
The Effects of Reward Misspecification: Mapping and Mitigating Misaligned Models[link] Pan, A., Bhatia, K. and Steinhardt, J., 2022. International Conference on Learning Representations.
Simple Synthetic Data Reduces Sycophancy in Large Language Models[PDF] Wei, J., Huang, D., Lu, Y., Zhou, D. and Le, Q., 2023. arXiv [cs.CL].
Unsolved Problems in ML Safety[PDF] Hendrycks, D., Carlini, N., Schulman, J. and Steinhardt, J., 2021. arXiv [cs.LG].
Open Problems and Fundamental Limitations of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback[PDF] Casper, S., Davies, X., Shi, C., Gilbert, T., Scheurer, J. and Rando, J., 2023. arXiv [cs.AI].
Consequences of Misaligned AI Zhuang, S. and Hadfield-Menell, D., 2020. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol 33, pp. 15763–15773.
Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization Gao, L., Schulman, J. and Hilton, J., 2023. Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 10835–10866. PMLR.
Learning from human preferences[link] Amodei, D., Christiano, P. and Ray, A., 2017.
Goal Misgeneralization in Deep Reinforcement Learning[link] Langosco di Langosco, A. and Chan, A., 2022. International Conference on Learning Representations.
Goal Misgeneralization: Why Correct Specifications Aren’t Enough For Correct Goals[PDF] Shah, R., Varma, V., Kumar, R., Phuong, M., Krakovna, V., Uesato, J. and others,, 2022. arXiv [cs.LG].
Toward Transparent AI: A Survey on Interpreting the Inner Structures of Deep Neural Networks Räuker, T., Ho, A., Casper, S. and Hadfield-Menell, D., 2023. 2023 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML), pp. 464–483.
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models Wei, J., Wang, X., Schuurmans, D., Bosma, M., Ichter, B., Xia, F. and others,, 2022. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol 35, pp. 24824–24837.
Model evaluation for extreme risks[PDF] Shevlane, T., Farquhar, S., Garfinkel, B., Phuong, M., Whittlestone, J., Leung, J. and others,, 2023. arXiv [cs.AI].
Risk assessment at AGI companies: A review of popular risk assessment techniques from other safety-critical industries[PDF] Koessler, L. and Schuett, J., 2023. arXiv [cs.CY].
The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective[PDF] Ngo, R., Chan, L. and Mindermann, S., 2022. arXiv [cs.AI].
International Institutions for Advanced AI Ho, L., Barnhart, J., Trager, R., Bengio, Y., Brundage, M., Carnegie, A. and others,, 2023. arXiv [cs.CY]. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2307.04699
International Governance of Civilian AI: A Jurisdictional Certification Approach[PDF] Trager, R., Harack, B., Reuel, A., Carnegie, A., Heim, L., Ho, L. and others,, 2023.
Frontier AI Regulation: Managing Emerging Risks to Public Safety[PDF] Anderljung, M., Barnhart, J., Korinek, A., Leung, J., O’Keefe, C., Whittlestone, J. and others,, 2023. arXiv [cs.CY].
Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models Ganguli, D., Hernandez, D., Lovitt, L., Askell, A., Bai, Y., Chen, A. and others,, 2022. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 1747–1764. Association for Computing Machinery.
It’s Time to Create a National Registry for Large AI Models[link] Hadfield, G., Cuéllar, M. and O’Reilly, T., 2023. Carnegie Endowment for International Piece.
Model Cards for Model Reporting Mitchell, M., Wu, S., Zaldivar, A., Barnes, P., Vasserman, L., Hutchinson, B. and others,, 2019. FAT* ’19: Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 220–229.
General Purpose AI Poses Serious Risks, Should Not Be Excluded From the EU’s AI Act | Policy Brief[link] 2023. AI Now Institute.
The Promise and Perils of Tech Whistleblowing[link] Bloch-Wehba, H., 2023. Northwestern University Law Review, Forthcoming.
Proposing a Foundation Model Information-Sharing Regime for the UK[link] Mulani, N. and Whittlestone, J., 2023. Centre for the Governance of AI.
Auditing Large Language Models: a Three-Layered Approach Mökander, J., Schuett, J., Kirk, H. and Floridi, L., 2023. AI and Ethics. DOI: 10.1007/s43681-023-00289-2
Can Large Language Models Democratize Access to Dual-Use Biotechnology?[PDF] Soice, E., Rocha, R., Cordova, K., Specter, M. and Esvelt, K., 2023. arXiv [cs.CY].
Towards Best Practices in AGI Safety and Governance: A survey of Expert Opinion[PDF] Schuett, J., Dreksler, N., Anderljung, M., McCaffary, D., Heim, L., Bluemke, E. and others,, 2023. arXiv [cs.CY].
Regulatory Markets: The Future of AI Governance[PDF] Hadfield, G. and Clark, J., 2023. arXiv [cs.AI].
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***
July 2023 – Brisbane, Australia – Emma Perkins was 12 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in July 2022, which was likely terminal. She had 11 rounds of chemo while pregnant and her son was born Feb. 2023 healthy.
There are many stories being published about women getting late Stage breast cancer during pregnancy but why? Here are 20 cases.
Oct. 19, 2023 – Savannah, GA – 35 year old Lateia Parker was diagnosed with Triple negative breast cancer (worst prognosis) while pregnant with her daughter Jynesis).
Oct. 2, 2023 – Naperville, IL – Alex Thompson was diagnosed with Breast cancer during pregnancy, which became Stage 4 and metastasized.
Sep. 30, 2023 – Raleigh, NC – Suzanne Macauley Vargas was diagnosed with Stage 3B inflammatory breast cancer while pregnant.
Sep. 24, 2023 – Little Falls, MN – 32 year old Dani Thomsen was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer in 2019 and after treatment was declared cancer free. However in 2022, during pregnancy with her 2nd child, she was found to have a mass embedded in her chest wall “The Mayo doctors hadn’t seen this happen before and weren’t sure how to proceed at first”. It was a breast cancer recurrence.
Sep. 19, 2023 – Denton, TX – Amanda Anderson-Barberis was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer while pregnant with her 3rd child, and died when he was 9 months old.
Sep. 14, 2023 – Vienna – 41 year old Gudrun Pospisil was diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant with her second child in Sep. 2022 and died one year later.
Aug. 13, 2023 – Fenton, MO – Nicole Waggoner is a nurse. While 23 weeks pregnant with baby #3, she was diagnosed with breast cancer (unknown stage).
July 25, 2023 – Minneapolis, MN – Lindsey Mercil noticed a lump while pregnant, she had a miscarriage and was diagnosed with Stage 3 Triple Negative Breast cancer (worst prognosis). She has just finished 16 rounds of chemo.
July 24, 2023 – Harrisonville, MO – Haley Cramer found a lump on her breast at 19 weeks pregnancy which was confirmed to be a triple negative breast cancer (worst prognosis).
July 14, 2023 – Kerrville, TX – Mica Mccormick was diagnosed with Stage 4 Triple Negative Breast Cancer (worst prognosis) while pregnant.
June 26, 2023 – Sunderland, UK – 39 year old Kelly Ross was diagnosed with grade 3 breast cancer in Oct. 2022 while 28 weeks pregnant with her son Rudy. She completed chemo in May 2023.
June 25, 2023 – Rutledge, GA – Karen Vincent had health problems during pregnancy, her baby was delivered at 26 weeks by C-section and she was found to have Stage 4 breast cancer with metastases to bones, liver and brain.
May 26, 2023 – Gainesville, FL – 28 year old Sami Pickens was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer in 2019. She was cancer free for 2 years, however, when she was pregnant in 2022, she was found to have breast cancer recurrence metastatic to lungs liver and bones. She died on May 26, 2023.
May 23, 2023 – Lawton, OK – Rocki Novotny was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer the size of a lime and metastatic lymph nodes throughout her body in May 2022. She suspects she had developed cancer while pregnant with her baby whom she delivered in Nov. 2021.
May 4, 2023 – Jena, LA – 26 year old Samantha Wilks was diagnosed with Stage 3 Triple Negative Breast Cancer (worst prognosis) while pregnant with her first child.
Apr. 6, 2023 – Vassar, MI – Tammy Baldwin was diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant with her 5th child. It is an aggressive cancer.
Apr. 4, 2023 – Cowiche, WA – 31 year old Danielle Baughman was diagnosed with breast cancer while 29 weeks pregnant on Dec. 27, 2021. She was cancer free as of June 2022 but she had a seizure and was found to have a brain metastasis (Stage 4) in March 2023.
Mar. 14, 2023 – Elk Grove, CA – Destini Beltrama was diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast cancer metastatic to bones, pelvis, thorax and her brain, while pregnant.
Mar. 5, 2023 – Clermont, FL – Kimberly Luitweiler felt a lump on her breast while pregnant and close to delivery and was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer shortly after delivery.
Feb. 22, 2023 – Duncan, BC – Rebecca Beaulieu was diagnosed with breast cancer in Jan.2023 while she was pregnant and had to have a mastectomy.
Feb. 17, 2023 – Lakeland, MN – Amber Strand was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer while pregnant. She is currently on chemo.
My Take…
Cancer during pregnancy is rare and before COVID-19 mRNA vaccines approximately 1:1000 pregnancies were complicated by maternal cancer.
Of these, breast cancer is most common, corresponding to between 1:3000 to 1:10000 pregnancies, according to a 2022 Dutch study by Boere et al.
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines are causing Turbo Cancers in young people and breast cancer is in the top 3 most common cancers caused by Pfizer or Moderna mRNA.
Since 2021, there are far more Stage 3 and Stage 4 Breast cancers being diagnosed in pregnant women. They are present in GoFund me in 2020 and prior but in much smaller numbers.
The key question I ask is:
Are these Stage 3 and 4 Breast cancers in pregnancy just a reflection of skyrocketing Turbo Cancers in COVID-19 mRNA vaccinated reproductive age women, or
Does pregnancy itself increase the risk of Turbo Cancer manifesting in a COVID-19 mRNA Vaccinated woman? (In other words, would the same woman still have gotten Stage 3 or 4 breast cancer, at the same point in time, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant?)
I don’t know the answer.
Furthermore, Triple Negative breast cancer (the worst prognosis), seems to be the most common subtype of Turbo Breast Cancer (whether in pregnancy or not).
Oncologists should be studying these questions, unfortunately selling mRNA vaccines for Pfizer & Moderna shareholders pays much better, and keeps their licenses, academic promotions, and grant funding safe and sound.
FINAL THOUGHT: This is not just happening with breast cancer, and I will address other Stage 4 Turbo cancers in pregnancy in future substack articles.
*
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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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***
This piece was originally commissioned by an editor at The Guardian, who asked me to write about the wave of retaliation and censorship of political expression in solidarity with Palestinians that we’ve seen in the past two weeks.
Amid my work as an attorney on some of the resulting cases, I carved out some time to write the following. Minutes before it was supposed to be published, the head of the opinion desk wrote me an email that they were unable to run the piece. When I called her for an explanation she had none, and blamed an unnamed higher-up. That a piece on censorship would get killed in this way—without explanation, but plainly in the interest of political suppression—is, beyond the irony of the matter, a grave indictment of the media response to this critical moment in history.
—Dylan Saba
***
On October 8, the morning after Hamas launched an attack from the Gaza strip that killed 1,400 Israelis, Ha’aretz—Israel’s paper of record—published an editorial laying blame for the massacre squarely on Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government. “The disaster that befell Israel,” the editorial board wrote, “is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.” Netanyahu “completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession” and “embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.” It was a damning and powerful indictment.
Two days later, Ryna Workman, the student body president of NYU Law School, sent out a newsletter to classmates as Israel’s retaliatory assault on the Gaza Strip was well underway. Expanding on the Ha’aretz editorial board’s language, Workman wrote that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” Workman also affirmed their solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against oppression.
Almost immediately, they faced a torrent of backlash in the form of online disparagement and right-wing media attention. In response to pressure, the dean of the law school publicly condemned Workman’s remarks. By the evening, the law firm Winston & Strawn, where Workman had planned to work after graduating, publicly withdrew their job offer without so much as a phone call. The university then unilaterally removed Workman from their position as student body president without any disciplinary process, and threatened further charges—all for daring to speak out.
Workman is not alone. Across the US, people speaking out on behalf of Palestinian human rights and against Israeli war crimes, apartheid policies, and settler-colonial expansion that have been unfolding over nearly eight decades are facing a wave of McCarthyite backlash directly targeting their future careers and livelihoods. Students at other prominent universities have faced the same: the leaders of Harvard University student groups were doxxed and smeared for signing a statement also expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. Their names and faces were plastered on a mobile billboard truck that roamed around campus for days, and a “College Terror List” circulated online accusing them of antisemitism. Several also lost job offers. A Berkeley law professor published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring legal employers not to hire his own students and smearing them as antisemitic.
This new McCarthyist purge is not limited to students. Jackson Frank, a sports journalist in Philadelphia, was fired by Phillyvoice.com on October 10 after expressing solidarity with Palestinians. A campaign to remove a Palestinian Columbia professor is underway, with a petition circulating that has tens of thousands of signatures. These are just some of the highest-profile, most public cases.
That there is a growing chorus of support for Palestinian rights is galvanizing, and should come as no surprise. Over the past decade, the Palestine solidarity movement has made major headway in exposing Israel’s apartheid policies and dispossession of Palestine and building grassroots support for change. At the same time, this growing movement has been met with new forms of suppression from Israeli advocacy groups, who have increasingly turned to blacklists, doxxing, and harassment to stifle dissent.
At Palestine Legal—the nonprofit organization where I work, which provides legal support to the Palestine solidarity movement—we’ve received hundreds of requests for assistance over the past two weeks, an exponential surge in our caseload. Many of those who have come to us are individuals facing negative consequences in their workplace for social media posts. Professors are being questioned, having their classes canceled, and getting locked out of email over statements supporting Palestinian rights, including in private communications.
In the vast majority of instances, the individuals targeted are Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, or Black, and many have faced racist and dehumanizing harassment as a result of the smears. Since 2014, we’ve handled thousands of such incidents—suppression of speech supporting Palestinian rights is nothing new—but it’s never been this bad.
At a time when the United States is backing Israel’s wanton destruction of the besieged Gaza Strip, in what some scholars have called a “textbook case of genocide,” principled dissent is of paramount importance.
As 540+ members of the legal community have urged in a statement, it is incumbent upon our elected officials, institutional decision-makers and all who care about preserving democracy to protect dissent on a matter of such domestic and international significance, and to prevent the racist targeting of communities based on their ethnic, racial, and religious identities and political views.
While the backlash we have seen is different in nature and degree to anything we have witnessed in recent years, activists—particularly of the youngest generations—also seem more resilient than ever and more willing to speak against injustice in Palestine despite the personal risks. Some, such as Ryna Workman, have used the spotlight thrust on them to continue to support Palestinian rights and oppose genocide.
But this level of bravery is not a fair thing to ask of already vulnerable people who are calling for justice and human rights. A failure to stop this new McCarthyism would be to surrender to the forces of reaction that tragically are carrying the day.
Dylan Saba is a Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, where he advises Palestine human rights advocates on a number of issues, such as free speech violations, employment discrimination, bullying, and disciplinary actions.
Prior to joining Palestine Legal, Dylan worked as a Staff Attorney for New York Legal Assistance Group’s Tenants’ Rights Unit. There, he represented low income New Yorkers in eviction proceedings and advised tenants on housing matters across New York City.
*
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October 25th, 2023 by His Excellency Carlo Maria Viganò
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***
Three years ago I was among the first – and certainly the first Bishop – to denounce pandemic and vaccination fraud. Expressed with arguments that today emerge as true and well-founded are the critical issues and immorality of an experimental gene treatment, which aborted fetuses were and are used to produce. I also wrote two open letters to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which remain unanswered.
There were those in conservative circles who went so far as to attack me personally and resorted to the unproven and clearly false statements of a doctor who worked with her husband for Big Pharma.
I expressed my dismay at the silence of the bishops, priests, and parish pastors, of many religious workers involved in hospitals, and at the servile zeal with which the Catholic Hierarchy conformed to the crazy and criminal health regulations and Bergoglio’s promotion of the serum. I was publicly insulted on television and in the media, while my brother bishops were silent. Faced with a crime against humanity that has continued to take place before our eyes for three years with the approval and encouragement of Bergoglio, I would have thought that many Pastors would have found the courage to raise their voices and join in my denunciation of the plan of world depopulation implemented by the Word Economic Forum, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the WHO, and the UN, while the funds of these criminals were also given to the Vatican, transforming Bergoglio into a vaccine salesman and a supporter of climate fraud, which has now become “magisterium” with Laudate Deum and with the “Amazonian and synodal church.”
Nemo propheta in sua patria. But if today some priests surrender to the evidence and ask Catholic journalists to tell the truth about the adverse effects, I wonder with what serenity they have so far silenced their conscience, and if their silence and fearful silence – like that of the doctors, police forces, magistrates, teachers and governors – has not turned into a timid protest today just because they see the showdown approaching and fear for their own reputation more than for the health of the billions of people subjected to the inoculation of a product that was known from the beginning to be dangerous and even lethal.
Their silence on the pandemic fraud is identical to that on the apostasy of the Catholic Hierarchy. And the moral responsibility that weighs on them will remain as an indelible stain for which they will have to answer to God, to men, and to History.
*
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Featured image is from LifeSiteNews
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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***
My phone is not being returned to me by police as, astonishingly, I am now formally under investigation for terrorism. Whether this relates to support for Palestine or for Wikileaks has currently not been made clear.
What follows is, unspun and unvarnished, my account of my interview under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act as given to my lawyers:
I arrived from Keflavik airport, Iceland to Glasgow airport at about 10am on Monday 16 October. After passport control I was stopped by three police officers, two male and one female, who asked me to accompany them to a detention room.
They seated me in the room and told me:
I was detained under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act
I was not arrested but detained, and therefore had no right to a lawyer.
I had no right to remain silent. I had to give full and accurate information in response to questions. It was a criminal offence to withhold any relevant information.
I had to give up any passwords to my devices. It was a criminal offence not to do this.
They searched my baggage and my coat, going through my documents and taking my phone and laptop. They did not look at one document from Julian Assange’s lawyers that I told them was privileged.
They asked me about boarding cards for Brussels and Dublin they found and what I had been doing there. I replied I was at a debate at Trinity College in Dublin, while in Brussels I had attended a human rights meeting focused on the case of Julian Assange.
They asked me to identify the individuals from some visiting cards I had from the Brussels meeting (one was a German MP).
They asked me the purpose of my visit to Iceland. I told them that I was attending a coordinating meeting of the campaign to free Julian Assange. I said I had also attended a pro-Palestinian rally outside the Icelandic parliament, but that had not been a prior intention.
They asked how I earnt my living. I said from two sources: voluntary subscriptions to my blog, and my civil service pension.
They asked what organisations I am a member of. I said the Alba party. I said I worked with Wikileaks and the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign, but was not formally a “member” of either. I was a life member of the FDA union. No other organisations.
They asked if I received any money from Wikileaks, from Don’t Extradite Assange or from the Assange family (separate questions). I replied no, except occasional travel expenses from Don’t Extradite Assange. In December I had done a tour of Germany and received a fee from the Wau Holland Foundation, a German free speech charity.
They asked what other campaigns I had been involved in. I said many, from the Anti-Nazi League and Anti-Apartheid movement on. I had campaigned for Guantanamo inmates alongside Caged Prisoners.
They asked why I had attended the pro-Palestine demo in Iceland. I said one of the speakers had invited me, Ögmundur Jónasson. He was a former Icelandic Interior Minister. I said I did not know what the speeches said as they were all in Icelandic.
They asked whether I intended to attend any pro-Palestinian rallies in the UK. I said I had no plans but probably would.
They asked how I judged whether to speak alongside others on the same platform. I replied I depended on organisers I trusted, like the Palestine Solidarity Committee or Stop the War. It was impossible to know who everyone was at a big rally.
They asked if anyone else posted to my twitter or blog. I replied no, it was all me.
They asked how considered my tweets were. I replied that those which were links to my blog posts were my considered writing. Others were more ephemeral, and like everyone else I sometimes made mistakes and sometimes apologised. They asked if I deleted tweets and I said very seldom.
I volunteered that I thought I understood the tweet that worried them and agreed it could have been more nuanced. This was the limitation of twitter. It was intended to refer only to the current situation within Gaza and the Palestinian people’s right of self-defence from genocide.
That was more or less it. The interview was kept to exactly an hour and at one point one said to another “18 minutes left”. They did not tell me why. At one point they did mention protected journalistic material on my laptop but I was too dazed to take advantage of this and specify anything.
They took my bank account details and copies of all my bank cards.
*
This is an enormous abuse of human rights. The abuse of process in refusing both a lawyer and the right to remain silent, the inquiry into perfectly legal campaigning which is in no way terrorism-associated, the political questioning, the financial snooping and the seizure of material related to my private life, were all based on an utterly fake claim that I am associated with terrorism.
I have to date not been arrested and not charged. Contempt of court is therefore not in play and you are free to comment on the case (although in the current atmosphere any kind of free thought is liable to vicious state action). I am safe and currently in Dublin. I intend next to travel to Switzerland to take this up with the United Nations.
My legal team have already made a submission against this outrage to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and are looking at the possibility of judicial review in the UK. We also have to prepare the defence against possible terrorism charges, ludicrous as that sounds.
I am afraid this all costs money. I am grateful for the unfailing generosity of people in what seems a continual history of persecution.
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***
Tucker Carlson sat down with Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.), who laid out a disturbing scenario in which the United States could quickly be pulled into a direct conflict with Iran, Russia and China over Israel’s anticipated response to the October 7 Hamas attack.
Carlson starts off highlighting Lindsey Graham, who vowed;
“…if Hezbollah, which is a proxy of Iran, launches a massive attack on Israel, I consider that a threat to the… state of Israel, existential in nature. I will introduce a resolution [in] the United States Senate to allow military action by the United States in conjunction with Israel to knock Iran out of the Oil Business…”
This is truly an occupational disease….US Senator Lindsey Graham: Here is my message: If Hezbollah, the proxy force of Iran, launches a massive attack on Israel, I will consider it an existential threat to the State of Israel. I will introduce a resolution in the United States… pic.twitter.com/FNuAbcNeUZ
“So what would war with Iran mean? Well, it’s hard to know because virtually no one who’s talking about it in public is operating from a deep interest in America’s interest. Is this good for us, or is it not?“
If, as Sen. Graham suggests, we start bombing critical infrastructure in Iran, Macgregor warns
“the destruction would be wholesale” as Iran would target “all the bases we have in Iraq and Syria – with around 1000 Americans – would be targeted… and this time accurately.“
According to Macgregor,
“The chosen destination” if we continue on this path, “is Armageddon,” and the implications (of which nobody seems to be considering) for the United States, Europe, and the Middle East are grave. For example, “just on the economic side, about 20% of the world’s oil passes through the Straits of Hormuz every month – probably 25% of liquefied natural gas, and you’re talking about shutting down 2 to three million barrels a day of oil from Iran.
“You know this entire region is involved in the war. This is not an Iranian Monopoly by any stretch of the imagination,” he continued.
The two also discussed how one of the primary challenges of in contemplating war with Iran is the unpredictable nature of such conflicts. Economic sanctions, which have been the go-to strategy for years, have failed to cripple Iran’s military capabilities. When military force comes into play, a whole new set of unknowns emerges.
The U.S. military, as it stands, may not be adequately prepared for such a conflict – particularly if the enemy has new weapons systems and capabilities.
“We’ve had the luxury of sitting around forward operating bases and striking opponents that were armed with AK-47s, and command detonated mines and the occasional mortar or rocket. Very, very low-intensity combat,” he said, referring to the types of engagements the US military has grown accustomed to.
Nuclear Wildcard?
According to Macgregor,
“This is a high-end, conventional war that we’re looking at, with the potential to go nuclear – which, obviously, I don’t think we or the Russians want to happen, but we have the wild-card in Israel. They do have a nuclear capability.”
“We don’t know what the trip wire is for them to employ such a weapon. At that point of course, all bets are off and I think most of the world would turn against Israel. Right now, they just have to worry about the Muslim world against them,” he continued, explaining that by focusing on Hamas and Hezbollah as immediate threats, the broader implications are obscured. For example, attacking urban environments such as Gaza comes with a high risk of civilian casualties – the consequences of which would catastrophic, both morally and strategically.
“Hezbollah has a very large operation in Mexico,” says Macgregor. “There are no doubt many, many Hezbollah agents inside the United States. We can only begin to imagine the kind of trouble they could cause.”
In the midst of all this, the question arises: How will a war with Iran affect American domestic politics? History shows that war is often used to stifle dissent, but in today’s connected world, censorship can only go so far. Public opinion, initially in favor of violence against Hamas, may wane as the conflict escalates and images of destruction flood the media.
“But what’s most important, I think, for Americans to understand is, if we attack Iran on the basis of Hezbollah’s alleged willingness to attack Israel, if Israel gets into a real shooting war with Hezbollah, they have the largest armed forces in the region.”
Watch:
Ep. 33 Looks like we’re actually going to war with Iran. Are we ready for this? pic.twitter.com/Ap09hWnvnj
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***
Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt.
The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran.
The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.”
The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.
The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel.
Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners.
“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”
Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.
The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.
Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest.
It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.
Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.
A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.
GAZA SURGEON: DAILY MASSACRES "ABOVE IMAGINATION"
Uncaptured Media's @dancohen3000 Interviews Dr. Mohamed Ziara
The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid tracks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.
Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza.
The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.
When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.
Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled.
Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.
Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.
“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned.
Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai.
“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” saidFrancesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel. During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes. They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce. They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.
Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked. Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem.
Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between Jan. 1, 2009 and 7 Oct. 7, 2023, according to data from the U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the Oct. 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.
Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.
Israel makes no secret about its intentions.
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.”
Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”
The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.
“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.”
“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”
Where are our humanitarian interventionists?
The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war?
Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class?
What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?
“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”
Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter. We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
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***
As Israeli officials proudly compare their bombardment of the Gaza Strip to the Allied firebombing of Dresden, the Associated Press has quietly removed a section noting US alarm over the historical comparison.
The Associated Press has quietly deleted a reference to official Israeli threats to subject the Gaza Strip to a Dresden-style firebombing campaign — the latest move in legacy media outlets’ ongoing push to downplay the impacts of Tel Aviv’s siege of over two million Palestinians.
“Four U.S. officials familiar with the discussions said American diplomats became increasingly alarmed by comments from their Israeli counterparts regarding their intention to deny water, food, medicine, electricity and fuel into Gaza, as well as the inevitability of civilian casualties,” the AP article previously stated.
“Members of the Israeli security and political establishment told the U.S. diplomats that the eradication of Hamas would require methods used in the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II,” the AP originally wrote, adding that “Israeli officials have publicly made similar comparisons.”
The offending passages have since been deleted without explanation — a textbook violation of journalistic ethics. The decision is all the more baffling given that Israeli officials have made no secret of their desire to treat Palestinian civilians the same way Western Allies treated the Germans at the end of World War II.
In an October 16 interview, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, shrugged off concerns about the thousands of innocents killed in IDF strikes on Gaza, suggesting that because Allied powers killed tens of thousands of German civilians with relentless airstrikes in the 1940s, Israel is entitled to do the same.
“There were many, many civilians [that] got attacked from your attacks on German cities,” she told a Sky News anchor. “Dresden was a symbol, but you attacked Hamburg, you attacked other cities, and altogether it was over 600,000 civilian Germans that got killed.”
Comparing the militarily occupied Palestinian population to Nazis, Hotovley continued:
“Was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes.”
Media coverage of that exchange, however, largely centered on the Israeli ambassador’s repeated insistence that “there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Addressing the uproar in a segment with Piers Morgan that same night, Hotovley returned to the Dresden comparison once again.
“600,000 Germans were killed in your attacks on Hamburg and Dresden,” she declared to the Talk TV host. “Why? Because you knew this was the only way you could defeat the Nazis,’ the ambassador insisted.
Israeli ambassador to the UK cites the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 (deliberate aerial incineration of civilian population centers by US and UK) as precedent for what Israel is about to do in Gaza pic.twitter.com/GFXuv5T2Lq
“We are giving the people in Gaza the opportunity” to flee that Israelis “were never given… they were slaughtered in their beds,” she concluded.
But she was not the only Israeli official who openly invoked the Allied attacks on German civilians to justify Israel’s assault on Gaza. In a heated exchange with another Sky News host, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett declared that “when Great Britain was fighting the Nazis during World War Two, no one asked what’s going on in Dresden.”
On October 12, the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett also indignantly cited Dresden as a precedent for what Israel is about to do in Gaza pic.twitter.com/xo4iHqClD9
Designed to break the will of the German population as its military collapsed on the battlefield, the British-led campaign of firebombing Dresden left at least 30,000 civilians dead and an entire city in ruins in February 1945.
Historian Donald Miller wrote of the nightmare unleashed by the Allied aerial assault:
“People’s shoes melted into the hot asphalt of the streets, and the fire moved so swiftly that many were reduced to atoms before they had time to remove their shoes. The fire melted iron and steel, turned stone into powder, and caused trees to explode from the heat of their own resin. People running from the fire could feel its heat through their backs, burning their lungs.”
Palestinians in Gaza have related a similarly hellish experience as the civilian death toll in less than two weeks of bombardment tops 4000.
“The bombardment in Gaza tonight is the most intense ever,” wrote Ahmed Nehad, a resident of Gaza. “The scale of the attacks is crazy, to a level even unprecedented for Gazans. Yet, Gaza is without internet. People can’t even peer out their windows to see. Thus, there’s no media coverage.”
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Wyatt Reed is a correspondent and managing editor of The Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter at @wyattreed13.
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***
More than 181,000 housing units have been damaged in Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the Government Media Office said Monday, Anadolu Agency reports.
More than 20,000 units were totally destroyed or rendered uninhabitable
Salama Marouf, a spokesman for the office, told a press conference in Gaza City.
He said 72 government buildings and dozens of public and service facilities were also damaged.
According to the spokesman,
177 schools, 32 mosques and three churches also suffered damage in the Israeli offensive
Interior Ministry spokesman, Iyad Al-Bozom, said most bombs used by Israel in Gaza were US-made.
Israel launched a relentless bombardment campaign on the Gaza Strip following a cross-border attack by Hamas into Israeli border towns on 7 October.
Nearly 6,500 people have been killed in the conflict, including at least 5,087 Palestinians and more than 1,400 Israelis.
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***
Beit Hanoun is vanishing, air strike after air strike, house after house. All or most of the residents of the town in the northeastern Gaza Strip have fled in recent days, after the Israeli army peremptorily ordered them to leave their homes and head south. And it might take years until they are able to return – or they might never do so, if Israel establishes a “buffer zone” in the north of the Strip.
The air strikes that began after Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7 have already destroyed or severely damaged 52,000 homes, according to the Euro-Med Monitor. According to the Geneva-based human rights center, before the air strikes the number of housing units in the northern districts of Gaza was about 260,000. More than a quarter of them have been affected by air strikes, and 20 percent of the houses are no longer habitable. Beit Hanoun has been the hardest hit, with about 60% of its buildings destroyed or damaged. These numbers will only grow in the coming years, together with the expected destruction that will come to the south of the Strip as well.
An estimated one million Palestinians are currently homeless. The spokesperson of the Israeli military, Daniel Hagari, admitted that air raids on Gaza are taking place at a level “not seen in decades.”
On Thursday, six U.N. special rapporteurs accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity in Gaza:
“There are no justifications for these crimes, and we are horrified by the lack of action by the international community,” they wrote in a statement.
The Netanyahu government and the military leadership are saying that they will change the face of Gaza forever and that they will fight Hamas until it is wiped out in order to release the 203 Israeli and foreign hostages taken on October 7 by the Islamic movement. On Friday, through the mediation of Qatar, the armed wing of Hamas released two women, Judith and Natalie Raanan, a mother and daughter with dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, on humanitarian grounds. The two women were handed over to the International Red Cross. After arriving in Egypt, they were expected to be back in Israel the next day.
This development will not have the slightest effect on the Israeli military offensives on the horizon. On the ground around Gaza, everything suggests that the invasion will come in a matter of days. This is also indirectly confirmed by the decision of Israel and the United States not to take part in the “peace summit” in Egypt. The Netanyahu government, riding on the strong support at all levels that Joe Biden assured them of on Wednesday, has no intention of agreeing to a ceasefire, as Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah would like, both of whom are concerned about the possibility that the war will end with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to their countries, not only from Gaza but also from the West Bank. There are many future scenarios to consider.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that achieving Israel’s goals will be neither quick nor easy:
“We will overthrow the Hamas organization. We will destroy its military and governmental infrastructure. It is a phase that will not be easy. It will have a cost,” he told members of a parliamentary committee.
In support of the Gaza war, Joe Biden is expected to send an emergency request to Congress to approve new funding to support Israel and Ukraine. The Jewish state will get $14 billion in U.S. arms and aid. During his address to the nation, the U.S. president addressed “other hostile actors in the region,” who, he said, needed to know that Israel was “stronger than ever” and thus “prevent this conflict from spreading.”
But his unconditional support for Israel is beginning to generate discontent in the Arab capitals allied with the U.S. and those that have normalized relations with Tel Aviv. In the days after October 7, the Emirates and Bahrain had both condemned Hamas. But then, according to Arab analysts, Biden’s words categorically ruling out any Israeli responsibility in the explosion that devastated Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital on Tuesday – which left 471 Palestinians dead, according to the Health Ministry – were poorly received in Abu Dhabi and Manama. From that point on, the two countries called for a ceasefire and condemned Israeli policies toward Palestinians. Their positions were also influenced by the wave of outrage across the region and protests in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and other countries.
The “concern” for Palestinian civilians expressed by Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is failing to reassure Arab leaders allied with Washington in the face of images from Gaza that show two million Palestinians subjected to continuous bombardment by the Israeli air force, which has left 4,137 dead and some 13,000 wounded according to Health Ministry figures.
The stories of despair and terror that Gaza civilians are managing to convey to the outside world are giving rise to fear and frustration among other Palestinians and Arabs, and among those in the rest of the world who are following the fate of so many innocent people. The humanitarian emergency is more and more serious: finding clean water and food is difficult, and some hospitals have stopped functioning. In others – as Al Jazeera reported on Friday – they are disinfecting surgical instruments with vinegar. Everything is lacking, starting with the diesel fuel needed to keep autonomous electricity generators running.
The smell of death wafts across the streets everywhere, unbearable – the stench of the corpses left under the rubble of houses and buildings, at least 1,400 according to health authorities. The Palestinian Red Crescent denounced on Friday that it had received a threat from Israel that it would bomb the Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City, which houses more than 400 patients and some 12,000 displaced people. By Friday night, there had been no denial from the Jewish state.
Israel did admit to causing severe damage to the buildings of the St. Porphyry Orthodox Church in Gaza city, resulting in the death and injury of several people. Nonetheless, the IDF military spokesperson denied that the church had been the target of the airstrike, which he said had targeted a “Hamas command center” in the vicinity. The Orthodox Church reported 18 dead Palestinians, both Christians and Muslims who believed they had found safe haven at St. Porphyry.
Meanwhile, the much-needed humanitarian and hospital aid remained stuck at Gaza’s gates on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing. Joe Biden himself promised on Friday that they would enter on Friday or Saturday. Finally, on Saturday evening, it was confirmed that the first 20 trucks had been allowed to enter the strip.
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***
Dear people of all races, of all creeds, of all nationalities, of all ethnicities, of all continents, of the entire world,
Look at the pictures below, look at them as if they would talk about your brothers and sisters, about your own children, then stand up and storm your governments in unison, that they too, in unison, stop supporting Israel, that they request in unison – 8 billion people – to demand that Israel be stopped, that the perpetrators and murderers be brought to justice.
If not, one day – maybe in a not-too-distant future — these images may haunt and concern us all personally.
Do not count on the United Nations. That body created for world peace is corrupted, along with the World Economic Forum (WEF), WHO, the current White House and the power of Big Finance-Military-IT- Media-Pharma complex, most of whom are also controlled by Zionist capital.
We the People, can only count on ourselves for the future. If we the People, want to help Palestine against the unbelievable genocide, we must do it ourselves. We MUST act now.
Wake up and scream, as if it was your child being murdered by the IDF.
Israeli warplanes are heavily bombing a defenseless population of mostly children that will be shot on site if they try to escape.
Footage of the carefully prepared white sheets for all the Gaza population killed in one day. Click here for the video.
Any reflection needed?
Do it now.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Featured image: Jewish activists call for Gaza ceasefire in DC. October 18, 2023 (JVP Twitter)
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***
The room was quiet, bright, high-ceilinged, spacious and elegantly appointed. At the long burnished table were seated two baker’s dozen of the most immaculately dressed and manicured individuals — themselves virtually unknown to those outside their exclusive circle — who represented approximately sixty percent of the world’s wealth. These were not celebrity billionaires and, in fact, a distinguishing mark of their highly controlled faces was a self-containment and an aversion to anything suggesting a desire to be in the public eye. No, these were weighty and, for the most part, satisfied people, male and female in equal measure, predominantly elderly, though a few hailed from middle age, who shunned ostentation.
They nodded as Lord X entered and took his seat at the table. His was a cheerful visage, with pink fleshy jowls, and he smiled in greeting, a large contagious smile that widened the lips of his auditors. Time was very precious for such a gathering so he wasted none in formalities. He signaled for the curtains to be drawn across the large high windows, and for the lights to be extinguished. Servants entered, did his bidding, and streamed away. Behind his end of the table was a large screen on which appeared a slowly revolving picture of the Earth, as if seen from deeper Space. The clouds, the seas, the continents — all slowly spun — and as his audience fixed their eyes upon them he began.
“My dear colleagues,” he said, “what you see behind me is all that we possess: a single solitary planet, our pale blue precious dot, nestled within the environs of a vast cold universe. From a distance there are no borders except natural ones — oceans, mountain chains, lakes and ridges and valleys. There are none of the dividing lines we humans have been so dedicated to creating, of nations, fiefdoms, states. It is one world …” — and here Lord X paused to clear his throat and gauge his audience, before resuming in his pleasant very British baritone — “but it is a most fragile one. Like it or not, we are its stewards.”
A low murmur of agreement coursed round the table as the image of the spinning globe was altered. Now, surrounding the planet, was a sparkling cloud of gem-like points of light.
“Thanks to the research we have supported and the advances that have been made, we have, as it were, knit together a blanket that encircles our habitat and links all of humanity together into one interconnected and integrated entity whose lifeblood is finance and communication. Our computational powers have grown exponentially and the quantum world has bent its knee to our supremacy. Never before have so few wielded so much power to do so much good! Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon and our more modern brethren of the past century had vastly limited scope and range. But we, in our capable hands and sagacious minds, can now achieve the impossible. We can make of this small lonely orb a paradise, a self-sustaining world of peace, prosperity and beauty.”
“Hear, hear!” ventured several auditors. The picture changed to show large clusters of dots, ant-like, overtaking the land masses, piles of brown-black points in motion forming waves and spreading, cancer-like, across the continents and spilling, in their reproductive fervor, into the seas, befouling them.
“There is one more hurdle in our way,” Lord X continued, “but it may not be quite what you think. Our hurdle is not so much one of number, but one of kind, do you know. Our last exercise was very effective in showing how easy it is to impose control — you might say it was all too easy. How they cowered in fear of the invisible, fear of themselves, fear of each other, how they gladly suffered to be kept in kennels, and to be pricked!”
Now the picture of the spinning Earth dissolved and on the screen appeared a collage of athletes, all heavily tattooed, on the pitch, and off the pitch with jewelry dangling from their ears, noses, eyebrows, lips.
“Getting the masses to accept another piercing when their heroes had been paving the way was nothing difficult. Some are slowly dying, getting sick, some more rapidly, but at a measured pace. A certain winnowing is essential and it may be accomplished in several ways.
Wars are not particularly efficient, but they serve the purpose of distraction, and they foster a certain divisiveness that assists our cause — thus they do have a role, however limited. And then there is the climate, of course, I nearly forgot! But what we really want to be in a position to do — what we need very much to do! — is to impose a form of control that is so complete that our subjects themselves will willingly participate in the cleansing. Already we see so many who positively beg for more vaccines, for the abolition of travel, for confinement into small patches of terrain, for implanted devices that will spare them the need to use a coin or think a thought. You see, that’s the trick of it all, and it has already worked, in our preliminary stages, very successfully — though not completely.”
A flicker of exasperation passed over the speaker’s face.
“There’s the rub. There are still a few too many of them who are making our work devilishly difficult by their disobedience. They are setting a poor example and if unchecked they might prolong our project, which would not be desirable, not at this moment, perched as we are on the threshold. But with the ability to trace and track a gnat to the ends of our earth, we will have no problem in eliminating the dissidents, singly, here and there, wherever they may be, until they too are quieted.”
The images on the screen faded and once more the spinning planetary globe appeared, briefly, then dissolved into the nothingness of interstellar space. The room’s lights, at the nod of Lord X, went up, and the heavy drapes were drawn away from the windows by liveried servants who quickly and silently exited. Lord X rose and smiled.
“The history of the world is a history of submission and stewardship. When the coarser methods of keeping people in bondage were eschewed, we developed the finer ones of finance. I have asked you here today simply to reassure you that we have everything in hand —everything — and that our mission is unstoppable. There is, however, one further challenge which we must face, a more personal one, as it were. A final one, to be precise. You see, to achieve our vision of a single, magnificent, beautiful and unified world, there will of necessity be suffering and loss. There is no other way. We who have breached the barrier of the atomic nucleus and of the human genome must now overcome the only lingering constraint: human sympathy. Our task is not for the squeamish.”
A hand was raised at the far end of the table. Lord X lifted his eyebrows. A youngish, stylish woman, tastefully bejeweled, her rich red hair pulled back and folded neatly, as if by some miracle, into a bun, stood. “Must we be so extreme, Your Lordship?” she asked. Her voice was low-pitched, pleasing, steady.
Lord X shrugged and lifted his hands, palms upward.
“One must break eggs to make an omelet, I’m afraid.”
At this there was a general chuckle, a chuckle that began at His Lordship’s side and convulsed the lot with laughter in mere seconds. After they had wiped their mirthful tears they clapped, Lord X bowed, and the company milled about, stretching, checking their timepieces, sauntering to the large windows for a glance at the world they ruled.
Lord X approached the questioner and took her aside. “Whenever I feel a qualm,” he cooed genially, “I remind myself of the greater good.” The woman smiled coldly, and turned on her heels. Lord X pursed his lips and whispered a few words into the ear of one of the younger men who had been lingering in the vicinity. The youthful scion made sure to make a note.
*
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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/
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***
Over 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by unrelenting Israeli airstrikes. This is genocide, and as U.S. Jews, we say: Never again. Not in our name. The only way to stop the killings — and free Israeli hostages — is an immediate ceasefire.
On Wednesday, October 18, thousands of Jews and allies rallied at the Capitol to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. As huge crowds gathered outside, hundreds of activists held a sit-in inside one of the Capitol buildings. We sang, we yelled, and we made our voices heard. It was the largest Jewish protest in solidarity with Palestinians in U.S. history. Hundreds were arrested.
Below, you’ll find a roundup of media coverage related to the October 18 rally, which was organized by JVP and our comrades at IfNotNow.
“Several dozen protesters who say they are from Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti-Zionist group, have been arrested after entering the Cannon House Office Building. The demonstrators, most of whom are wearing black T-shirts that read ‘Jews say cease-fire now’ and ‘not in our name,’ are being restrained with zip ties and led into police vans.”
“’We are here to say, ‘Not in our name,’ Jay Saper said. ‘We are here as Jews — many descendants of survivors of genocide — to stop a genocide from unfolding in real time.’
Inside the House building, the protesters wore black shirts that said, ‘Not in our name’ on the front and ‘Jews say cease fire now’ on the back, as they sang and cheered over police warnings to disperse. The crowd inside Cannon included 400 American Jews and 25 rabbis who are against Israeli occupation and are demanding that Congress pass a cease-fire resolution, said Sonya Meyerson-Knox, a spokeswoman for Jewish Voice for Peace, a national Jewish anti-Zionist organization.“
“Jewish American groups demanding a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war protested at the White House and Capitol this week, with hundreds arrested. Stefanie Fox, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the Jewish groups that organized the protests, joins Joy Reid to discuss.
‘This week we brought together 5,000 Jews in a massive demonstration demanding that Joe Biden and other American lawmakers tell Israel to implement a ceasefire right now. We believe this is the largest demonstration in history of Jews in solidarity with Palestinians.’
“Certainly no matter the arrests, you can see that this has not stopped the protesters from being here, from being loud. And this comes, of course, as President Biden is overseas in Israel, where he met with Netanyahu this morning [and] pledged continued support of Israel.”
“You can see demonstrators starting to get removed now by U.S. Capitol police These are just the second round of demonstrators that we’ve seen forcibly removed. Another group was occupying this place where I’m standing at the moment, and capitol police removed them…there were actually some, because they refused to move, that were dragged out of here.”
“‘Biden really is the only one that has the power to pressure Israel right now and he needs to use that power to save innocent lives,’ Hannah Lawrence, 32, who came from Vermont.
Linda Holtzman, 71, a rabbi from Philadelphia, demanded an immediate cease-fire and urged Biden to ‘open your eyes.‘
‘Look at what’s happening in Gaza. Look at the devastation in Gaza,” said Holtzman. “If you want to be able to live with yourself, you need to stand up and end the genocide. I demand a cease-fire right now.’”
“‘We were raised saying ‘Never again.’ Never again is right now. It’s this very moment,’ Liv, a member of the activist group Jewish Voice for Peace, told Fox News as demonstrators sang and clapped in the background.“
“Jewish Voice for Peace organized the rally on just a few days notice, and protesters came ready to be heard. The arresting officers kept asking people if they were going to give up their right to remain silent, and it was as if everyone shouted back, ‘Hell yeah!’
In many places, Jewish silence on the oppression of Palestinians has reigned for too long. But at this moment of crisis, protesters said what perhaps had gone unspoken at family gatherings or in places of worship: that we have had enough, that we will no longer allow the suffering of our people—the pogroms, the Holocaust, or the Hamas killings—to be weaponized against others. Our history gives us an extra responsibility to speak out for those facing the specter of genocide.”
“‘We’ve been devoting every waking second over the past week and a half to doing everything we can to stop the bombings. When we woke up to the news last Saturday [October 7, the day of the Hamas massacre], at the Simchat Torah celebration in Brooklyn that so many members of our community participate in, with over 20 congregations showing up to practice our ancient ritual, the rabbi who led that stated that she was turning it into a ‘stand with Israel’ rally. So that day, we immediately got into organizing an alternative space for our people to grieve, but transform grief into action.’”
“Here in the U.S., Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups are rallying in Washington, D.C., today to demand an immediate ceasefire. Two dozen rabbis are leading prayers and mass civil disobedience.”
“‘I’ve been to Gaza as part of a humanitarian medical delegation, and I saw up close and personal what Israel has been doing to Gaza for the last 16 years. You know, I took an oath as a medical doctor to support health and life. And so I’m out here doing this as a doctor, as a Jewish person.’”
“Fencing went up overnight around parts of the U.S. Capitol ahead of the protest organized by the group Jewish Voice for Peace but the demonstrators were able to work their way into the building and by 3 p.m., it was packed with JVP members in black t-shirts reading “Jews say ceasefire now!”
JVP claimed on social media that at least 10,000 people were outside the Capitol while 500 made their way inside the rotunda, all there to ‘challenge the Israeli government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.‘”
“We’re a group of Jewish Americans who have come here to call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza. And that is in Congress’s hands…we are here to have our voices heard by Congress, to make sure that everybody knows that the most important thing is a ceasefire.“
“Thank you all for being here. I have never seen anything like this in my history of Jewish anti-Zionist activism. It’s been decades. We used to be tiny. We are huge and growing.
We have a sacred responsibility to engage with our parents, our grandparents, our uncles, our brothers and sisters, and try to save their souls, to keep them from indulging in this quest for bloody vengeance. We are here because we will not let our fears of antisemitism be manipulated in this way, as cover for war crimes and colonial land grabs and to foreclose on the possibility of a political solution, which will only come with an end to occupation, with an end to apartheid, with true Palestinian freedom and self-determination.“
-Naomi Klein addresses the crowd at Wednesday’s rally
“Nearly 300 people were arrested out of thousands of demonstrators who took part in a Jewish-led protest Wednesday on Capitol Hill to demand a cease-fire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
Hundreds of demonstrators also staged a sit-in at the Capitol’s Cannon House Office Building and chanted, ‘Cease-fire now!’
Jewish Voice for Peace, which organized the efforts, said dozens of rabbis were among the protesters. The activist group is also calling for humanitarian assistance to be allowed to enter the embattled Gaza Strip amid the war.”
“’Jewish grief is being used as a weapon to call for the imminent destruction of Gaza—by politicians, by so-called justice organizations. And mainstream media largely conveys the false narrative that all Jewish people support the state of Israel and its actions,’ explained Hannah Wolfman-Arent, the baker behind Velvel Breads.“
“’It has never been more important for Jews and all people in the US to rise up with literally everything we have,’ said Jay Saper of Jewish Voice for Peace. ‘The way that we would have wanted others to rise up for our ancestors.‘
At the rally, a Jewish protester who said his grandparents had survived the Holocaust told Al Jazeera that he was honouring his family’s history by taking to the streets.
‘I see my job as carrying on their legacy as Jews who see their role as standing up for stateless and oppressed people all throughout the world,’ Sam Thorpe said. ‘I see no better way to do that than fighting for a ceasefire and peace in Gaza today.’”
“We are proud Jewish people standing in solidarity with Palestinians, demanding a ceasefire immediately…A genocide is underway and everyone has to know. We’re here supporting Rashida Tlaib’s resolution for an immediate ceasefire. We’re here with a message for Biden, who’s meeting with Netanyahu right now. I’m looking right at you, President Biden. Are you going to be the president that funds and enables a genocide?”
-Liv Kunins-Berkowitz, Media Coordinator, Jewish Voice for Peace
“Hundreds of Jewish activists protested inside the Capitol on Wednesday, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. And just as quickly, Capitol Police began arresting them.
The Jewish-led protest involved thousands more protesting outside the Capitol, as well as about two dozen rabbis leading a prayer inside the halls of Congress. Organizers of the event estimated that 500 protesters were arrested, including the rabbis.“
“350. That’s how many people—including two dozen rabbis—were at a sit-in at the Cannon House building, according to a tweet from Jewish Voice for Peace. The organization said the protestors wouldn’t leave ‘until Congress calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.’ Jewish Voice for Peace calls itself the ‘largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world,’ and the group also claims to be the only ‘major Jewish group’ in support of the ‘Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions.’”
The Rhode Island chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the progressive groups protesting in Washington for a Gaza ceasefire, on Wednesday called on council members to reject Goncalves’ resolution.
“By failing to also address the thousands of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military during its ongoing siege of Gaza, this Resolution contributes to escalating conflict and the dehumanization of Palestinians,” a news release from Jewish Voice for Peace – Rhode Island said.
“’We’re here because we’re in an incredible emergency, the worst I’ve seen in my lifetime, where Gaza is being decimated as we speak,’ said Rebecca Vilkomerson, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, as chants rang through the echoey rotunda and people were handcuffed and escorted out by Capitol Police.“
“‘We’re here to say: not in our names, and never again,’ JVP declared. ‘And we’ll continue our civil disobedience until Congress calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, or until they force us to leave.’
‘Cease-fire is the first step to stop the ongoing genocide by the Israeli military of the over 2 million Palestinians in besieged Gaza, unable to leave,’ the group continued. ‘In the past week, over 3,000 Palestinians, including 1,000 children, were murdered by Israeli and U.S. bombs. Over 1 million people are displaced. We have the power to stop this violence.’”
“’What we know from past Israeli state atrocities against Palestinians is that the bombs only stop once there is a sufficient mass outcry from the international community,’ said JVP member Eliza Klein. ‘It’s on us to build that outcry — as fast as we possibly can.’”
“Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.), who have been calling on Biden to work toward an immediate ceasefire, spoke to the crowd of demonstrators before they entered the Capitol Building.
‘I wish all the Palestinian people would see this. I wish they could see that not all of America want them to die. That they are not disposable, that they have a right to live,’ said Tlaib, the only current Palestinian-American member of Congress.“
“’We shut down congress to draw mass attention to the U.S. complicity in Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians,’ JVP posted on X. ‘Just as we demand an end to genocide in Gaza, we must put the same effort into dismantling the systems of Zionism, apartheid, and colonialism that brought us to this moment.’”
“Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, a Greek Orthodox nun who lived in Jerusalem for a decade, said she attended Wednesday’s demonstration because she had witnessed—and opposed—the ‘slow encroachment’ of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She hopes Congress will do something to stop the violence.
‘The problem is the occupation,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep people pinned up in a prison, both in Gaza and the West Bank, and expect there to be peace. I pray we can get to a time of peace.‘
Dona Boyce Manoukian and Lorraine Nagy, two nurses aged 84 and 73, said they have been demonstrating for peace for more than five decades.
‘How many children have we lost, both in Israel and in Palestine?’ Nagy asked. ‘We want a cease-fire. We want there to be peace, the end of the occupation, and the saving of lives, which is intrinsic to my profession as a nurse.‘”
“Scout Bratt, a member of Illinois Jewish Voice for Peace, said they are opposed to waging war against the Palestinians who live in Gaza, most of whom are not affiliated with Hamas.
‘There is no military solution to this,’ Bratt argued. ‘We need to address root causes, which include the Israeli military occupation in apartheid, and again, our own government’s role in funding this oppression.’”
“In live updates during the protest on X, Jewish Voice for Peace posted, ‘While we were inside, an Israeli airstrike bombed the entrance of a school in Khan Younis, where Palestinians were forced to evacuate to. These are atrocities. This is why we demand a ceasefire now!’”
“’The only path to peace and safety — for everyone — is through ensuring justice and equality for everyone. And that means ending the Israeli government’s illegal occupation of Palestine. To end genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, we’re demanding a #ceasefirenow,’ Jewish Voice For Peace wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Republicans in Congress jumped at the opportunity to claim that the protest was equivalent to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, in which Trump supporters angered by his election loss violently forced their way into the building and attempted to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s election.”
About 500 Jewish people, including 25 rabbis, gathered in the building, said Sonya Meyerson-Knox, a spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace.
American Jews ‘held a peaceful, prayerful sit-in at the Cannon House Office Building,” Meyerson-Knox added. ‘Led by over two dozen rabbis, they sang, taught and prayed—demanding that Congress call for an immediate ceasefire.’
‘An anti-war group of multigenerational Jews calling for a ceasefire is, simply, civil disobedience—following in the long line of civi disobedience protests that progressive causes have undertaken throughout history.’”
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***
NewsGuard, a company which claims to rate media outlets’ level of ‘trustworthiness’ and therefore has a meaningful influence over ad revenue, has been sued along with the Biden administration by Consortium News, which also named the Pentagon’s Cyber Command for “contracting with NewsGuard to identify, report and abridge the speech of American media organizations that dissent from U.S. official positions on foreign policy.”
According to the complaint, NewsGuard is “acting jointly or in concert with the United States to coerce news organizations to alter viewpoints” regarding Ukraine, Russia and Syria, and has impsed a form of “censorship and repression of views” that diverge from US policies and those of its allies, the complaint says.
Consortium also notes that NewsGuard has branded the entirety of Consortium News’ 20,000+ articles as ‘unreliable’ based on just six examples they took issue with (which is the exact same thing they do with ZeroHedge and other independent media).
NewsGuard uses its software to tag targeted news sites, including all 20,000+ Consortium News articles an videos published since 1995, with warnings to “proceed with caution,” telling NewsGuard subscribers that Consortium News produces “disinformation,” “false content” and is an “anti-U.S.” media organization, even though NewsGuard only took issue with a total of six CN articles and none of its videos.
The complaint seeks a permanent injunction declaring the joint program unconstitutional; barring the government and NewsGuard from continuing such practices and more than $13 million in damages for defamation and civil rights violations. –Consortium News
Last week former Trump administration official Mike Benz noted on X that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is an adviser to NewsGuard, and that the nanny organization was “knee deep in a plot to get [governments] to bankrupt alternative news. NewsGuard worked [with the] EU on new disinformation code. Its biz model has ‘disinformation compliance’ services [with the] censorship laws it promotes.”
Elon, for your peripheral vision, Jimmy Wales advises NewsGuard, which is knee deep in a plot to get gov’ts to bankrupt alternative news.
Elon, there is no way EU censorship proponents can deny it. NewsGuard bragged about it. EU officers bragged about it. They had formal partnership together.
All they can do now is hold their nose & hope their own voters never learn what's been going on. pic.twitter.com/gvcWAOtpdq
In another X thread, Elon Musk called Newsguard a “scam” after they gave political commentator Tim Pool a strike “because we ran 5 stories out of nearly 5,000 that quoted [former President Donald] Trump.”
Acording to Uncover DC, NewsGuard has contracts with the DoD, WHO, Pfizer, Microsoft & AFT.
Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz claim it is the “librarian for the internet.” Set up specifically to rate online journalistic integrity, Brill states NewsGuard provides services that “explain to people something about the reliability and trustworthiness and background of those who are feeding them the news.” Eric Effron is the organization’s Editorial Director.
According to MintPressNews, “Crovitz held a number of positions at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, eventually becoming executive vice president of the former and the publisher of the latter before both were sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 2007. He is also a board member of Business Insider, which has received over $30 million from Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in recent years.”
Crovitz’s alliances might account for the organization’s favorable 100 ratings for WSJ and the Washington Post. He is also a contributor “to books published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation,” which are also favorably rated by NewsGuard.
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NewsGuard’s directors, advisors, and investors are an interesting cast of characters. One of the investors, Publicis Groupe, is “the third largest communications group in the world.” Publicic allegedly has “shadowy ties to Saudi Arabia.” Pfizer and Bayer/Monsanto are two of its top clients. Ironically, many of the advisors/directors are former U.S. government officials, entertainment moguls, and journalists “associated with agencies known for producing false news.”
Among the advisors is Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA and CIA, who was “the architect of George W. Bush’s secret domestic spying program.” Tom Ridge was the first Office of Homeland Security Director following 9/11. Richard Stengel “is a former senior official in Obama’s state department who once described his role as being that of ‘chief propagandist.‘”
And as the Epoch Times noted in August, NewsGuard presents itself as objective and nonpartisan. Its ratings, the company says, measure media quality on nine criteria, including transparency of authorship and ownership and adherence to standard editorial practice, such as issuing corrections and labeling opinion pieces. In practice, however, most of the score boils down to whether the media present content that, in NewsGuard’s opinion, is truthful.
The first criterion specifically looks at whether the target repeatedly publishes false claims. Another examines whether it publishes news “responsibly.” But failing the first one means failing the second one, NewsGuard explains on its website. Yet another criterion is whether the target uses accurate headlines.
Again, if the headline says something NewsGuard considers to be untrue, that counts as a failure. Another criterion looks for a policy of regularly correcting errors—or what NewsGuard considers to be errors. Together, these four criteria add up to more than 60 points of the 100-point score.
Even if NewsGuard can’t find anything to dispute, it can still dock points if the target doesn’t sufficiently represent opinions the company would like to see.
Such content providers “egregiously cherry pick facts or stories to advance opinions,” it argues.
Meanwhile, at least 60 points are needed for NewsGuard to issue its “credible” rating.
This methodology becomes particularly problematic when NewsGuard itself is wrong on the facts. For example, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company considered false the notion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. If a news outlet with a perfect score responsibly reported on the extensive circumstantial evidence indicating a lab leak, it ran the risk of NewsGuard decimating its score and falsely labelling it an “unreliable” source that “severely violates basic journalistic standards.”
The COVID-19 origins issue was a rare case in which NewsGuard eventually issued a correction, though it only went as far as saying that the lab leak hypothesis couldn’t be completely ruled out.
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***
The stakes are high as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrives in Washington, D.C., today to meet with President Joe Biden. The U.S. government hopes to obtain Australia’s support for its cold war initiatives against China.
Australia is one of the United States’ closest allies. Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. comprise “AUKUS,” a trilateral “security” alliance in the Indo-Pacific.
This is a crucial issue for Australia as well. Before Albanese left for the United States, he told parliament that the AUKUS transfer of U.S. and British nuclear submarine technology to Australia was critical to the future of the alliance.
Another item on the agenda when Albanese meets with Biden is the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen. Assange, who has been incarcerated for four years in a top-security London prison, was indicted by the Trump administration for charges under the Espionage Act for WikiLeaks’ 2010-2011 revelations of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. If extradited from the U.K. to the United States and convicted, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison.
The Obama administration, which indicted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined, refused to indict Assange because of the “New York Times problem.” That is, if the administration charged Assange, it would also have to charge The New York Times and other media outlets that also published classified military and diplomatic secrets.
But instead of dismissing the indictment and the request for extradition, the Biden administration is vigorously pursuing it.
In August, Albanese said his government firmly opposes the prosecution of Assange. The freedom of Assange is “widely seen as a test of Australia’s leverage with the Biden administration,” the Associated Press reported.
“The Prime Minister is here to call for the extradition of Julian Assange to be dropped. This request is coming from the United States’ closest ally at a time the U.S. is seeking Australia’s support as a bulwark, both financially and militarily, against the perceived threat from China,” Vincent De Stefano, national organizing director of Assange Defense, told Truthout.
In September, a cross-party delegation from Australia’s parliament came to Washington, D.C., and argued that the prosecution of Assange should be dismissed. They met with U.S. senators and congress members, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and key think tanks and NGOs.
The delegation came after 63 left, center and right-wing members of the Australian parliament signed a full-page ad in TheWashington Post urging Albanese and Biden to find a diplomatic solution to Assange’s case. The statement by what ABC News characterized as an “unlikely coalition” of parliamentarians said it is “wrong in principle” that Assange is being charged under the Espionage Act and noted that “it was a political decision to bring the prosecution in the first place.”
The Australian lawmakers warned of “a sharp and sustained outcry in Australia” if Assange is extradited. At least 90 percent of Australians agree that the case against Assange must be dropped and he must be returned home to Australia.
“To ignore the request from the prime minister regarding the extradition of an Australian citizen, whose only crime was being an honest journalist, while at the same time asking for a huge expenditure and commitment from our ally, is an insult of the highest order — a slap in the face, really,” De Stefano said.
Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, called the indictment “a wedge in the Australia-US relationship … which is a very important relationship at the moment, particularly with everything that’s going on with the US and China and the sort of strategic pivot that is happening.”
Australia’s cooperation with the U.S.’s cold war on China is not a slam dunk. In a research paper released on October 12, the Congressional Research Service said Australia may be unwilling to join forces with the United States in a war against China. It cited statements made in March by Richard Marles, the Australian defense minister, clarifying that the AUKUS deal didn’t include any pre-commitments by Australia to back the U.S. in a conflict with Taiwan. China’s position that Taiwan is part of China is nonnegotiable. Although the U.S. has historically agreed with this “One China” policy, recent overtures indicate that the U.S. may support an independent Taiwan. There is increasing opposition to AUKUS in Australia, including in the ruling Labor Party.
Last November, The New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, DER SPIEGEL and El País signed a joint open letter urging the U.S. government to dismiss the Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified military and diplomatic secrets. “Publishing is not a crime,” the letter says. “The U.S. government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.”
A bipartisan letter to Joe Biden is being circulated for congressional signatures by Representatives Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). They write to “strongly encourage” the Biden administration to withdraw the extradition request and end all prosecutorial proceedings against Assange.
The congressional letter notes that the Espionage Act was intended to punish the provision of state secrets to “enemy governments.” It was not “to punish journalists and whistleblowers for attempting to inform the public about serious issues that some U.S. government officials might prefer to keep secret.” The signatories warn that if the extradition and prosecution proceed, “there is a significant risk that our bilateral relationship with Australia will be badly damaged.”
Assange’s appeal of the extradition order is pending in the U.K. High Court. Since the court is now back in session, it could quickly deny his appeal. Assange would then ask the European Court of Human Rights to review his case. But even if that court issued an injunction to stop the extradition, there is no guarantee that the U.K. would honor it.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She is founding dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues. She is co-host of “Law and Disorder” Radio.
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***
On October 17, an explosion took place immediately adjacent to the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, the result of what appears to have been a rocket attack. Between 200 and 500 people were killed, all of them Palestinians. Gazans and many in the international community immediately blamed the Israeli military for the attack. Israel, however, blamed an errant rocket from the Islamic Jihad terrorist group, an organization allied with Hamas. A day after the explosion, President Biden said that the Pentagon and the CIA had determined that the rocket had indeed originated in Gaza and was likely from Islamic Jihad. But where’s the proof?
A few days after the explosion, Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio, the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that they had been briefed on the matter and were confident that the rocket had come from Islamic Jihad. We’re all just supposed to take their word for it.
There’s an easy way to inform the public as to what the intelligence on this bombing concludes. It’s called a “tearline.” In the Intelligence Community, a report will come in that will lay out an event something like this:
“Source ABCDE, whose previous reporting has been deemed to be accurate, says that Islamic Jihad launched the rocket that hit the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17. As proof, Source ABCDE offered information indicating that the launch originated at coordinates XX’XX” by ZZ’ZZ”.”
That information is then followed by a line of asterisks across the paper, where it is literally torn off. And underneath that tearline, the issuing agency would write something unclassified and ready for release to the public akin to “The rocket associated with the explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza originated from coordinates XX’XX” by ZZ’ZZ,” indicating that it was launched from territory controlled by Hamas.”
See? It’s as easy as that. So why haven’t the Israelis or the United States issued something for public consumption? Why are we just supposed to take their word for it? And to make this even more of an open-and-shut case of keeping the intelligence away from the American people, consider this:
Classified cables produced by the U.S. government always have something called a precedence designator. That designator tells the recipient how important the cable is and whether it needs immediate action. For example, most diplomatic cable traffic is given a “Routine” designation. Some if it is designated “Priority,” meaning that the recipient should act on it sometime over the next several days. The next highest designation is “Immediate.” That means that the message requires an immediate response or some other immediate action. An Immediate cable can also have a sub-designator assigned to it. That’s NIACT, which means “Night Action.” If a cable his NIACT on it, it means that the recipient’s agency has to wake the recipient up, get him to the office, and have him respond to the cable immediately.
NIACT cables are unusual. They’re usually reserved for times when lives are at stake. But believe it or not, there are two precedence designators that are above Immediate NIACT. The first is FLASH. Just as it sounds, FLASH means something terrible is happening. An army is crossing a border, rioters have breached the embassy walls, or an embassy employee has been assassinated. FLASH cables are exceedingly rare. I only saw a few dozen in my career at the CIA in what were probably millions of cables over the course of 15 years.
The rarest precedence designator of all is CRITIC. A CRITIC is so serious that it means, for all intents and purposes, to take cover. At the very beginning of my career, I saw a lot of CRITICs. They all came during the first Gulf War when Iraq was launching Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia. A sister agency of the CIA would send a cable marked “CRITIC,” saying, “A missile launch was detected originating at coordinates XX’XX” by ZZ’ZZ.” We knew that if the coordinates were in western Iraq, the missile was going to Israel. If the coordinates were in southern Iraq, the missile was going to Saudi Arabia. Again, it’s as simple as that.
So why haven’t we seen any tearlines on the al-Ahli bombing? We can be confident that a CRITIC was likely issued as soon as the rocket was launched. The intelligence services of a half-dozen countries likely know the information. So why don’t the Israeli or American governments, at least, just come out and show us the evidence? Could it be that they have something to hide?
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John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004. In December 2007, John was the first U.S. government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, a practice he described as torture. Kiriakou was a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former counter-terrorism consultant. While employed with the CIA, he was involved in critical counter-terrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but refused to be trained in so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” nor did he ever authorize or engage in such crimes. John can be reached at: [email protected].
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***
Her Majesty Queen Rania on Tuesday relayed the Arab World’s shock and disappointment at the world’s “glaring double standard” and “deafening silence” in the face of Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, emphasizing that, despite the prevalent Western media narrative, “this conflict did not begin on October 7th.”
“Most networks are covering the story under the title of ‘Israel at War.’ But for many Palestinians on the other side of the separation wall and the barbed wire, war has never left. This is a 75-year-old story; a story of overwhelming death and displacement to the Palestinian people,” Her Majesty said. “The context of a nuclear-armed regional superpower that occupies, oppresses, and commits daily documented crimes against Palestinians is missing from the narrative.”
In a live interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, conducted remotely from Queen Rania’s offices in Amman, Her Majesty explained that the people of Jordan are united in “grief, pain, and shock” in response to the staggering civilian casualties of the past 18 days of war, according to a statement from Her Majesty’s office.
“We’ve seen Palestinian mothers who have had to write the names of their children on their hands, because the chances of them being shelled to death – of their bodies turning into corpses – are so high,” Queen Rania said. “I just want to remind the world that Palestinian mothers love their children just as much as any other mother in the world. And for them to have to go through this, it’s just unbelievable.”
Conveying Jordan’s position, Her Majesty stated that the country has been very clear that it condemns the killing of any civilian, whether Palestinian or Israeli.
“That is Jordan’s ethical, moral position. And it’s also the position of Islam,” she said, explaining that the religion prohibits Muslims to kill a woman, child, or elderly person, to destroy a tree, or hurt a priest.
The Queen stressed that these rules of engagement should apply to all sides, arguing that Israel is committing atrocities under the guise of self-defense.
“6,000 civilians killed so far, 2,400 children – how is that self-defense? We are seeing butchery at a mass scale using precision weapons,” she said, “For the past two weeks, we have seen the indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza: entire families wiped out, residential neighborhoods flattened to the ground, the targeting of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, medical workers, journalists, UN aid workers – how is that self defense?”
The Queen went on to state that many in the region view the Western world as complicit in this war through the support and cover that it provides Israel.
“This is the first time in modern history that there is such human suffering and the world is not even calling for a ceasefire,” Her Majesty said. “Many in the Arab world are looking at the Western world as not just tolerating this, but as aiding and abetting it.”
Elaborating on the plight of Palestinian people, Her Majesty explained,
“There are over 500 checkpoints scattered all over the West Bank. You have a separation wall, which is deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice, that has separated the territories into 200 disconnected enclaves. And you’ve seen the aggressive expansion of settlements on Palestinian land, and those have interrupted the territorial contiguity of the territories and has deemed an autonomous, independent Palestinian state not viable.”
The Queen also mentioned that Israel is in violation of no less than 30 UN Security Council resolutions, which “require it, and it alone, to act to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, and to stop the settlements, the separation wall, and the human rights violations.” She also underscored that Israel has been designated as an “apartheid regime” by Israeli and international human rights organizations.
Commenting on military solutions to conflict, Her Majesty said:
“Victory is a myth that politicians make in order to justify immense loss of life… There can never be a resolution except around the negotiating table. And there’s only one path to this: a free, sovereign, and independent Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the state of Israel.”
The Queen also indicated that allies to Israel are doing it a disservice by giving it blind support.
“Expediting and expanding the provision of lethal weapons to Israel is only going to expand this conflict. It’s only going to prolong and deepen the suffering,” she said.
Criticizing the role of the media in covering the current conflict, Queen Rania noted the double standard presented when Western interviewers demand that people representing the Palestinian side immediately issue condemnations, requiring them to “have their humanity cross-examined and present their moral credentials.”
“We don’t see Israeli officials being asked to condemn, and when they are, people are readily accepted by [claiming] ‘our right to defend ourselves,’” she said. “I have never seen a Western official say the sentence: Palestinians have the right to defend themselves.”
The Queen also discussed the oppression of Palestinian expressions of solidarity in Western democracies, commenting that when people gather to support Israel, they are exercising their right to assembly, but when they gather for Palestine, they are deemed terrorist sympathizers or anti-Semitic.
“Freedom of speech is apparently a universal value, except when you mention Palestine,” Her Majesty said.
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Featured image: Photo courtesy of Her Majesty’s office
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***
On October 24, the United States and other imperialist states for the third time voted against a resolution, this time sponsored by the Republic of Brazil, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Two other resolutions over the last two weeks, one sponsored by Russia and the other also by Brazil, were prevented from being adopted due to the influence of the administration of President Joe Biden.
Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Storm emanating from the Gaza Strip on October 7, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have imposed a total siege on an area considered the most densely populated in the world. Many refer to Gaza as the largest open-air prison on the planet.
Over 6,000 people have been killed during the siege with thousands more injured, wounded and traumatized. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced from their homes due to the arbitrary evacuation orders from the IDF and the incessant bombings. Many of those killed were children, people with disabilities, the infirm and expectant women.
Civilian residential areas, schools, mosques, churches and hospitals have been subjected to targeted bombings by the IDF. Electricity has been terminated while the ban on fuel imports is threatening large-scale contamination of the water systems which could result in an outbreak of cholera and other infectious diseases.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres spoke before the Security Council urging the passing of the resolution for a ceasefire. Guterres outlined the horrendous humanitarian crisis which is directly the result of the IDF bombings and refusal to allow aid into Gaza from the Rafah Crossing or other border areas.
Since October 20, less than 50 trucks carrying humanitarian assistance have been able to enter Gaza from Egypt through the Rafah Crossing. On October 24, the same day as the UNSC debate, no trucks were able to enter the enclave. This is contrasted with the situation prior to October 7, when between 400-500 trucks a day carrying food, medicines, fuel and other supplies provided many of the essential needs of the Palestinians in Gaza. Even with the presence of Guterres in Egypt near the Rafah Crossing on October 20, the opening was still delayed until the following day.
“The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour. The war in Gaza is raging and risks spiraling throughout the region. Divisions are splintering societies. Tensions threaten to boil over. At a crucial moment like this, it is vital to be clear on principles — starting with the fundamental principle of respecting and protecting civilians. I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel. Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets. All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.
It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing. But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
Unfortunately, these remarks by the Secretary General are highly contradictory to the point of cancelling out the central points. United Nations General Assembly Resolutions passed between 1960-1990, upholds the right to self-determination for all oppressed and colonized people.
Moreover, these resolutions recognize the right of the colonized peoples to utilize any means necessary to safeguard their interests and bring about national liberation. Following the logic of these resolutions, Hamas or any other resistance movement is well within the contours of international law in taking up arms to win their freedom. (See this)
Since 1948, as well as 1967, the United Nations has failed to bring into existence an independent Palestinian state. The Palestinian people remain aliens in their own homeland. Millions of them are in forced exile with no right to return to the land of their ancestors.
In Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and throughout the Occupied Territories (OPT), Palestinians are subject to illegal evictions, arrests and murder. Since the siege on Gaza, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the security forces utilizing small arms, drones and other methods of inflicting serious injury and death.
This system of settler-colonial occupation and repression is financed largely by the U.S. which claims to be the leading democratic state in the world. Successive U.S. administrations routinely describe the State of Israel as a “democracy.” How can Tel Aviv be a democracy when the majority of the people are denied their fundamental civil and human rights? The Palestinians are treated as being inferior to the Israeli settlers and consequently relegated to the lower echelons of society and within the broader international community.
Resistance Remains the Only Solution to the Palestinian Question
Whether Secretary General Guterres is willing to recognize it or not, the Palestinians and other people living in the states surrounding the State of Israel have no alternative other than to defend themselves against settler aggression. The fact that Tel Aviv is funded, armed and given diplomatic cover by Washington and its imperialist allies, means that the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the sovereignty of neighboring states, has broad international implications.
Biden, Rishi Sunak, Olof Schulz and Emmanuel Macron have all visited Tel Aviv to express their unconditional support to the Zionist state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the media while standing next to French President Macron on October 24 that the conflict in Occupied Palestine is between “civilization or barbarism.”
The same language was utilized during the visit of Biden on October 18 in the aftermath of the IDF bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, which killed nearly 500 people. Rather than call for a thorough investigation into the Al-Ahli bombing and all similar attacks carried out by the IDF, Biden readily endorsed the fabrications of the Israeli government. Biden has not yet called for a ceasefire and the resumption of adequate assistance to the people Gaza. Instead, the White House wants to send billions of more dollars to Israel to suppress the Palestinians along with continuing the failing war in Ukraine, the attempts to contain the People’s Republic of China and the fortification of the southern border to keep out migrants from Mexico, Central America, South America and other geopolitical regions of the globe.
Therefore, the divisions are clear: the imperialist states in their view represent civilization while the oppressed fighting for national liberation signify barbarity. Such an outlook paves the way for a global conflagration which could very well determine the future of human society.
However, for the western imperialist states and their allies to enforce this world view, it would require the re-enslavement and re-colonization of billions of people particularly in the Global South. An attempt to implement the subjugation of the majority of the world’s population would undoubtedly prompt a tremendous war of resistance spanning numerous countries and continents.
Consequently, the workers and oppressed within the imperialist states have a critical role to play in the present period. Capitalism in its current phase is incapable of providing adequate incomes, housing, energy resources, environmental quality, education and healthcare. Within the leading western capitalist states, there is significant unrest among the workers and oppressed who are demanding economic justice and an end to structural racism. These burgeoning struggles in the industrialized states must merge with the aspirations of those in the Global South to create a world without exploitation and imperialist war.
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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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***
“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” ― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Enough already.
Enough with the distractions. Enough with the partisan jousting.
Enough with the sniping and name-calling and mud-slinging that do nothing to make this country safer or freer or more just.
We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long.
We have seen this convergence before in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, and in Mao’s China: the rise of strongmen and demagogues, the ascendency of profit-driven politics over deep-seated principles, the warring nationalism that seeks to divide and conquer, the callous disregard for basic human rights and dignity, and the silence of people who should know better.
Yet no matter how many times the world has been down this road before, we can’t seem to avoid repeating the deadly mistakes of the past.
This is not just playing out on a national and international scale. It is wreaking havoc at the most immediate level, as well, creating rifts and polarities within families and friends, neighborhoods and communities that keep the populace warring among themselves and incapable of presenting a united front in the face of the government’s goose-stepping despotism.
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, disguised as “the better good,” marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and carried out by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
For too long now, the American people have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.
Yet the unavoidable truth is that the government—through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny—has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
At its core, this is not a debate about politics, or constitutionalism, or even tyranny disguised as law-and-order. This is a condemnation of the monsters with human faces who walk among us.
Many of them work for the U.S. government.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released thirty-five years ago and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, pandemics, mass shootings, etc.).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
We are little more than expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is transforming the populace into fearful, compliant, pacified zombies content to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. A concern for human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hypno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
In other words: we need to get active and take a stand for what’s really important.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
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Already in October 2000, at the outset of the Palestinian uprising, military circles were ready with detailed operative plans to topple Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. This was before the Palestinian terror attacks started. (The first attack on Israeli civilians was on November 3, 2000, in a market in Jerusalem).
This significant move to the right may be a sign of awakening – awakening to the aberrant neo-fascist “green policies,” coercing the world’s economy to be driven by green energy, mandating to demolish one of the most efficient and secure sources of energy, clean nuclear power and doing away with hydrocarbon energy – gas and oil – for which by now the most extraordinary technologies have made these sources of energy multiple times cleaner than they were 20 to 30 years ago.
The fundamental question that we’re confronting here is the extent to which the US is capable of supporting its own national interest which includes not getting involved in places like Ukraine and Israel-Gaza unless there is a compelling national interest that drives the process.
The population of Gaza are simply defenceless. Only international intervention can stop Israel from doing whatever it wishes, and those countries which have influence with Israel are actively abetting and encouraging the genocide.
An Air Canada captain, he flew his last flight in December 2022 following a diagnosis of terminal renal cell carcinoma. He fought this dreadful illness valiantly and tenaciously, characteristic of his indomitable spirit.
Mobilisation reserves in Ukraine have been emptied while the military calls for troop rotation at the front, which cannot be done, former UkrainianPrime Minister Mykola Azarov said on his Telegram channel on October 23. This is unsurprising as Ukraine has been illegally mobilising men since at least January, demonstrating the alarming lack of manpower the country has, an issue even well before the failed so-called “Spring Offensive,” which actually began in early June.
The Israeli military has a long track record of compulsively concocting face-saving falsehoods – disinformation that vilifies the very Palestinian people it has oppressed for decades. The latest example came a few days ago.
For anyone concerned about the moderating restraint international law is meant to offer, especially when it comes to the use of force by states, Israel’s approach against the imprisoned populace of Gaza is bound to cause profound despair and lingering disgust.
To begin with, the whole thing was based on a false premise. We were told that in SARS-CoV-2 we were up against a highly dangerous virus that posed a potentially lethal threat to those who contracted it and that vaccines were the only sure way to escape the scourge. This was a lie.
Biden’s formal address to the nation from the Oval Office on Thursday can only be seen as the launch of a new phase of the Ukraine war carrying forward the the demonising of Putin to a new level, Biden weaves together a new narrative claiming that Hamas and the Russian leader both want to “completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy — completely annihilate it.”
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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK Jr., or Bobby) is man of vision, a nonconformist who dared to challenge the conventional thinking on a wide range of issues, incurring the wrath of the establishment in the process. Bobby is a registered Democrat, and when, this past May, he threw his hat into the ring regarding the 2024 Presidential election, I had to suppress my enthusiasm, knowing full well that the Democratic Party elite who stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016, and cooked the books for Biden in 2020, would never give the nephew of John Fitzgerald Kennedy a fighting chance to win the nomination for the Democratic Party in the 2024 election. Frankly speaking, how I felt about Bobby didn’t matter, because as a registered Republican in the State of New York, I was irrelevant when it came to issues pertaining to the Democratic primary.
This, of course, didn’t mean I had gone deaf, dumb, and blind to the Kennedy phenomenon. Back in February, I had spent some quality time in a Washington, DC bar with Dennis Kucinich, the man who would go on to be appointed as Bobby’s campaign manager when the Kennedy scion announced his bid for America’s top job back in May. Dennis was excited about the prospects of a Kennedy run, and that night we outlined what we believed to be the list of positives that accrued to a Bobby candidacy. The list was long and, although fueled by beer and pretzels, rational. Bobby was the anti-candidate, the perfect antidote to the ignorant arrogance of Donald Trump and the incompetent ignorance of the incumbent, Joe Biden. If Bobby could find the sweet spot between the two candidates, Dennis and I strategized, then he had a very good shot at taking home the grand prize—the presidency of the United States.
Image: Conor Kennedy in the uniform of the Ukrainian Army, Summer 2022
I struggled with Bobby’s candidacy early on over his stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and Russia in general. His position seemed to be influenced by the experiences of his son, Conor, a law student at Georgetown University who skipped out on an internship at a prestigious law firm to instead spend the summer of 2022 volunteering to fight with the Ukrainian Army against Russia. Conor, who had no prior military experience, was initially trained as a drone operator and, later, as a machine gunner in a unit that included other American soldiers of fortune. After two and a half months in Ukraine, Conor returned to the United States, where he is currently finishing up his law degree at Georgetown.
Bobby said that he “knew [Conor’s] views about the war were not aligned with mine.” Noting that Conor wasn’t naïve about Ukraine (“Ukraine has problems…there’s corruption”), Bobby said of his son, “He doesn’t like Putin. He thinks he’s a gangster and a bully and he doesn’t like bullies.”
Forget that we are talking about a Georgetown law student whose mind should be developed sufficiently to advance an argument as simplistic as “Putin is a bully.” Forget for a moment that a scion of the Kennedy family—an American institution—chose to bear arms not for America, but a foreign country. Forget for a moment that this same scion fought for a country whose national hero—Stepan Bandera—led an organization of Ukrainian nationalists responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Second World War while allied with Nazi Germany.
History is full of examples of prodigal sons returning to the arms of a forgiving father, and they should both count their blessings that Conor wasn’t killed, wounded, or captured by the Russians during his summer experimentation with conflict tourism.
Some of Conor’s childish sentiment seemed to rub off on Bobby when he spoke on the issue of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but by and large Bobby took the right stance, solidly connecting with the facts and drawing the right conclusions.
The evidence of this is in the words spoken by Bobby in what has been, up until this moment, his defining public address to the American people—the Peace and Diplomacy speech delivered at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, on June 21, 2023—sixty years after his uncle’s famous American University address that helped chart a new course of US-Soviet relations.
Bobby started his speech poorly (“I abhor Russia’s brutal and bloody invasion of that nation [Ukraine],” he said, perhaps channeling Conor), but he quickly recovered. “But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s. Democratic and Republican administrations have pushed NATO to Russia’s borders, violating our own solemn promise from the early ’90s when we pledged that if Russia made this terrible concession of moving 400,000 troops out of East Germany and allowing the unification of Germany under a NATO army, a hostile army, that we would commit that after that we would not move NATO ‘one inch to the east.’”
James Baker gave that assurance, as did the British government officials and many, many others. And yet today, we have surrounded Russia. We have moved NATO not just one inch to the east, but a thousand miles and fourteen nations. We have surrounded Russia with missiles and military bases, something that we would never tolerate if the Russians did that to us. And statements from our government officials and think tanks lay out the goals for the Ukraine war: regime change in Russia; the overthrow of Vladimir Putin. This is what President Biden has said is our purpose in the Ukraine: the disabling and exhaustion of the Russian military, and the dismembering of the Russian Federation.
None of these objectives have anything to do with helping Ukraine, which of course, was the pretext for our involvement in the war. That’s when our leaders told us that we were there for a humanitarian mission. But they’ve since acknowledged that there is a broader geopolitical agenda, and that Ukraine is simply a pawn in a proxy war between the United States and Russia.
Bobby’s words shook the establishment. Some regional media outlets, like Boston Man Magazine, recognized it for what it was (“I heard the voices of JFK and RFK in that of Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr, nephew and son of the aforementioned,” its publisher noted in an introduction to the text of the speech published in the magazine. “In his Peace and Diplomacy speech that evening, I heard hope for a Pax Americana”), the mainstream media either ignored the speech altogether, or wrote it off by labeling Bobby a tool of Russian propaganda.
The fact that both the Democrats and Republican establishments were up in arms over Bobby’s common-sense approach to defining the Russia-Ukraine conflict meant that Bobby was separating himself from both parties—an absolute requirement if he was going to be able to garner enough votes in a general election to walk away the winner. Moreover, operating from the logic that one cannot solve a problem unless it is first properly defined (because whatever solution you come up with will not address the true nature of the problem, and as such solve nothing), Bobby was positioning himself to be the only candidate with a track record of getting it right on the issue of Ukraine and, as such, being in a position to conceive and implement policies that had a chance of helping craft a long-term solution to the overall issue of European security.
Bobby said of his uncle’s American University speech, “It’s one of the most important speeches in American history.” What made it so, Bobby believed, was that his uncle “talked to the American people and asked them to put themselves in the shoes of the Russians. Everybody else was doing the opposite at that time. They were demonizing and vilifying the Russians. And he said, no, we have to put ourselves in their shoes, in the shoes of our adversaries. If we want to have peace, we need to do that. It has to be a regular discipline.”
These words were music to my ears. I had just returned from a 26-day, 12-city tour of Russia promoting my book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, which had been published in the Russian language by Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the oldest and most respected publishing houses in Russia. The visit was far more than simply a book marketing ploy. It was a personal journey of discovery where I sought not only to put myself in the shoes of the Russian people, but peer inside their collective soul in an effort to better understand their perspective on life. JFK’s American University speech was a motivating factor in my journey, as it set in motion events pertaining to arms control that ended up being manifested in the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which I helped implement as a weapons inspector (and the experiences of which formed the basis of my book).
Bobby channeled his uncle in the words of his Peace and Diplomacy speech, saying of the Russians that “they have legitimate security concerns the same as we do, and we need to understand that. He [JFK] reminded Americans of the suffering that the Russians had endured during the war – unimaginable suffering.”
One in seven Russians had been killed during World War Two. He asked Americans to imagine that all of the land, all of the cities, all of the towns from the East Coast to Chicago had been leveled to rubble, that the forests and fields had been burned. And he said that’s what happened to Russia during the war. That’s what they sacrificed for us. And they have legitimate security concerns to make sure that never happens again. And that speech turned around the American people and they ended up supporting the treaty. It was one of the fastest ratified treaties in American history.
After that speech, there was never a doubt—I was on Team Bobby.
I found Bobby’s candor and intellectual inquisitiveness in challenging the COVID mandates, inclusive of vaccines, refreshing. I appreciated his environmentalism. But most of all, as someone who believed that the threat of a nuclear war with Russia represents the single greatest threat to the security of the United States and the rest of the world, I saw in Bobby a glimmer of hope that the madness of nuclear war, and the Russophobia that existed in the United States that made such madness possible, could be defeated.
There were some things about Bobby which made me uncomfortable, nothing more so than his position on Israel and the Palestinian question.
I had taken the time to read up on Bobby before I did an interview with him on April 9 on “the cost of war.” I found one article he authored for Politico back in 2016, “Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria,” particularly illuminating.
“It’s time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy,” Bobby wrote, addressing America’s oil-driven presence in the Middle East. “We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped US foreign policy for half a century.”
These words were again music to my ears. There was, however, one note that sounded off-key. Tucked away near the end of Bobby’s lengthy piece was a single reference to Israel. I was struck by the fact that Israel wasn’t factoring more in his narrative. “[W]e need,” Bobby wrote, “to dramatically reduce our military profile in the Middle East and let the Arabs run Arabia. Other than humanitarian assistance and guaranteeing the security of Israel’s borders, the US has no legitimate role in this conflict.”
The issue of Israel and Bobby’s allegiance to the same raised its head shortly after the son of RFK announced he was throwing his hat into the presidential ring. When Roger Waters, a founding member of Pink Floyd, came under fire in Germany for his live performance of “The Wall” in early May (Roger wore clothing that invoked Nazi Germany, a consistent feature of his act when performing this particular song from the eponymous album, which is highly critical of fascism and, by extension, an artistic expression against Nazi Germany), Bobby stepped up in his defense. “Roger,” Bobby tweeted, “You are the global hero Orwell had in mind when he said, ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ The high priests of the totalitarian orthodoxies are trying to silence you with censorship, gaslighting and defamation. Please keep speaking truth to power!”
Almost immediately, Kennedy came under vociferous attack from Jewish organizations. Roger Waters, they maintained, was antisemitic. The charge was not a new one. In June 2020, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) criticized Waters for being “one of the most prominent and outspoken supporters of the BDS movement.” The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is a pro-Palestinian organization which works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law by targeting the Israeli economy and businesses which do business with Israel. According to the ADL, Rogers “has refused to perform in Israel and urged fellow artists to follow suit and has often used inflammatory rhetoric against the country.”
Then, the ADL suggested that Rogers’ “anti-Israel views may be colored by antisemitism,” noting that the former Pink Floyd frontman viewed Zionism (described by the ADL as Jews who seek to “incorporate a connection with Israel into their religious, cultural, or social identities”) as “an ugly stain” which “needs to be gently removed.”
The ADL failed to make any mention of the philosophy espoused by the “father of modern political Zionism,” Theodore Herzl, who helped create the notion of a “Greater Israel” which has been used for decades by Jewish settlers, operating with the open support of the Israeli government, to steal Palestinian homes and land. In this way, the ADL—and other Jewish groups—have positioned themselves to label anyone who criticizes Zionism—like Roger Waters—as being engaged in “an implicit attack on millions of Jews who incorporate a connection with Israel into their religious, cultural, or social identities” and, as such, antisemitic.
Roger’s German performance came under attack by the European Jewish Conference, which tweeted out two images from the concert—one of him in his “costume,” and the other of the name “Anne Frank” projected onto a screen on stage. “Is there anything more antisemitic,” the EJC posted on X, “than using Anne Frank as a prop on a German stage while prancing around in a Nazi uniform attacking Jews?”
The Baronesse Katharina von Schnurbein, a German career politician who currently serves as the European Commission’s “coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life” (she herself is not Jewish), jumped on the anti-Roger Waters bandwagon, posting on X, “I am sick & disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialize the Shoah & the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis. In Germany. Enough is enough. Holocaust trivialization is criminalized across the EU.”
Enter the United States. “I wholeheartedly concur with [Schnurbein’s] condemnation of Roger Waters,” the US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, posted on X, “and his despicable Holocaust distortion.”
According to the Forward, an independent Jewish magazine, “Concertgoers who saw Waters perform in Berlin in May tweeted photos of Abu Akleh [Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by Israeli troops while doing her job] and Frank’s names being projected onto large screens. Under Abu Akleh’s name, the location of her death was listed as ‘Jenin, Palestine,’ her crime as ‘Being Palestinian’ and sentence as ‘death.’ Under Frank’s name, the location of her death was listed as the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp while her crime was listed as ‘Being Jewish’ and the sentence also death. Rogers, “the Forward article noted, “has defended the concert act, saying on social media that it is ‘quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms.’”
Indeed, when the Anne Frank Trust posted criticism of Waters on X, it was hit with a community context note which pointed out how wrong the trust and other critics of Roger Waters were in attacking his performance. “[C]learly Roger Waters needs educating about prejudice & antisemitism,” the Anne Frank Trust posted. “It is wildly inappropriate to misuse Anne Frank’s legacy.”
The community context note had a different take. “Frank’s name is shown as one of several victims of police or government forces as a statement against monetarianism and oppression,” the post noted, “themes addressed on Radio KAOS, the album from which the song is drawn. Frank is named as being killed for ‘the crime’ of being Jewish.”
No antisemitism here.
Anyone with a head on their shoulders saw through the nonsense of those defenders of Israel who took umbrage at Roger Waters exposing their hypocrisy. No one was buying what the pro-Zionist “establishment” was selling. No one, that is, except Bobby Kennedy.
“In my remarks about Roger Waters,” Bobby posted on X as soon as the Roger Waters controversy took root, “I was referring to his dissent on COVID and the war in Ukraine. I have only recently learned about some of his other views, which I do not share.” Kennedy then added, “I support Israel’s right to exist within secure borders and I also support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.”
What Bobby was admitting to was being as ignorant as the shallow politicians he was trying to differentiate himself from, people who, when armed with superficial knowledge about a topic, embrace an issue they had nothing to do with on the assumption that it might enhance their profile purpose, only to turn on a dime when confronted with controversy they did not understand, and lacked the courage of their convictions to defend against.
Bobby Kennedy with Shmuley Boteach and his wife, June 2023
Bobby then doubled down on his new-found stance as “staunch friend of Israel,” meeting for more than two hours with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to discuss, according to a posting on X put out by Boteach, “Israel, the rise of antisemitism, and Kennedy’s recent tweet where he supported Roger Waters.” Boteach, a staunch defender of Israel and Zionism, went on to state, “It was courageous of Bobby to come and meet me and reassert his lifelong support of Israel and the Jewish people, continuing in the legacy of his great father who was murdered by Palestinian gunman Sirhan Sirhan because of his own support of Israel in 1968.”
What is curious about this passage is Boteach’s mentioning of Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Bobby is on record saying that he doesn’t believe that Sirhan Sirhan was the gunman who killed his father. That title, according to Bobby, belongs to Eugene Thane Cesar, a man Bobby describes as a CIA operative and enemy of the Kennedy family. “He [Cesar] was holding my father’s arm,” Bobby told comedian Bill Maher in a recent interview. “He drew his gun, and my father was shot four times from behind.”
One would have to imagine this detail of his family’s history means something to Bobby—it is how his father died. Bobby has committed to a narrative which deviates from the public record—a bold move, especially if one believes in the accuracy of their position. And yet, because of Bobby’s need to be seen as supporting Israel, he allowed Rabbi Boteach to reimagine this murder to smear Palestinians with the murder of RFK and linking this murder to Israel. That Bobby allowed this to occur without correcting the record is, to be blunt, stunning.
Bobby marches alongside Shmuley Boteach in New York City, June 4, 2023
Bobby was also silent as Boteach turned his sights on Roger Waters, transforming Bobby’s “global hero” into something much different. Bobby, Boteach observed, “explained that his tweet about Waters was in response to someone sharing with him a picture that Waters flashed of Kennedy at one of his concerts, saluting the candidate’s willingness to swim against societal currents. Bobby told me he had no idea that Waters was a vicious antisemite and when he studied the issue and the facts, he immediately deleted the tweet. I believe Bobby and I thank him for his repudiation of Waters. How tragic it is for Waters to have his legacy as an antisemite now overtake his legacy as an accomplished artist.”
If Bobby said these things, then he has lost all credibility as a man who is deserving to hold the office of the President of the United States. Roger Waters is not a “vicious antisemite,” and for Bobby to attack him as such (assuming Boteach has accurately recorded his words) is both intellectual and moral cowardice. Things don’t get better for Bobby if Boteach manufactured this aspect of their conversation, since Bobby allowed Boteach’s words to go unchallenged.
As part of the Rabbi Boteach “cleansing” ritual, Bobby had to agree to march with the Jewish leader in New York City’s “Celebrate Israel Parade” on June 4.
Somehow, Bobby couldn’t shake the Israeli/antisemitic controversy. On July 11, 2023, at a private fundraiser held at Tony’s Di Napoli restaurant on East 63d Street, Bobby once again stirred up a hornet’s nest of Jewish angst. “COVID-19,” he told the crowd. “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”
The New York Post published Bobby’s words (Bobby claims that his presentation was off the record, an assertion at least two attendees dispute), and the Jewish community blew up in anger, forcing him—once again—to turn to X to post a clarification. “The US and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the COVID-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races,” Kennedy wrote. “The furin cleave docking site is most compatible with blacks and Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews. In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”
The controversy followed Bobby to the US Congress, where he was scheduled to give high-profile testimony on government censorship, but instead spent most of his time defending his comments on COVID and Jews. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, brought up an earlier Kennedy faux pas that occurred at an anti-COVID vaccine rally in Washington, DC, in January 2022, where he decried the COVID mandates set forth by the US government. “Even in Hitler’s Germany,” Kennedy said, “you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
Even though Kennedy apologized (via a tweet) for his remarks (“I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors. My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry”), Wasserman Schultz confronted Bobby, stating, “You made light of the genocide against Jewish people.” Kennedy was forced to apologize yet again.
Kennedy had to again turn to Rabbi Boteach to be cleansed of the charge of antisemitism stemming from his July 11 comments. Boteach conducted a 35-minute interview with Kennedy. Afterwards, the popular rabbi declared,“Bobby Kennedy and I are friends, and I like him. Kennedy,” Boteach said, “is the only major Democrat who has come out against that Iran deal. Bobby Kennedy is one of the only Democrats who spoke out boldly to protect Israel with its recent Jenin assault on terrorists. He defended Israel.”
There was another act of contrition Kennedy had to subject himself to before he could shed the antisemitism charge—and interview with the strongly pro-Israel Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). Here, Bobby—for the first time in such detail—set forth the depth of his support for Israel, especially its importance “as the only Middle East democracy” and “the significance of its military alliance with the United States.”
Bobby declared that he was aware of no other country that has Israel’s military discipline—what he called its “unique moral approach” to warfare. According to the JNS interview, Bobby noted that “Israel tries to treat Palestinians morally with justice and has sought a two-state solution despite the ‘abject refusal of the Palestinian leadership to negotiate and the genocidal aspirations of the Palestinian Authority.’ Israel, Bobby said, only attacks military targets, “enduring casualties of IDF forces in a deliberate, purposeful effort to protect civilians. I don’t think any other country in the world does it as well and with such a commitment as Israel.”
Bobby stated that he stood alone among Democrats when it came to defending Israel’s actions. “I am going to not only defend that record,” Bobby declared, “but I’m going to champion the moral argument for Israel and use my campaign as a bully pulpit to do that.”
Bobby was as good as his word. On August 1, during an interview with political comedian Jimmy Dore, Kennedy defended Israel’s military conduct against the Palestinians, criticizing the Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal in the process. “I love Max Blumenthal,” Bobby told Jimmy, “But I do not think he’s objective on Israel. His reporting on Israel—it needs to be questioned.” When Dore challenged Bobby to do an interview with Max, Bobby agreed, only to have his staff reverse course, saying such an interview would not happen.
Bobby’s position was a disaster. I can personally attest to several high-profile political personalities who were ready to throw in with Bobby, only to have his position on Israel cause them to take stock of where they stood. Like me, they were attracted by Bobby’s anti-war stance, and his embrace of diplomacy as the ideal tool to resolve US-Russian relations. But Bobby’s unquestioning embrace of Israel’s militarism put him in a new light, something that did not bode well for the “anti-war” candidate, especially when looking at his hardline positions vis-à-vis Iran and China.
Bobby was losing votes at a time when he could ill afford to do so.
I stood by Bobby during this hard time, convinced that the wisdom and insight he exhibited in his Peace and Diplomacy speech was the real Bobby, and that warmonger Bobby could be managed once he secured the nomination. But he was still a Democrat, and as such I feared he would never survive in a system where the people had been supplanted by “super delegates” who would throw the election to the incumbent, Joe Biden, regardless of how the people voted. I had trouble vesting myself too much in someone I didn’t think was going to clear the starting gate.
Fortunately, Bobby and his team had reached a similar conclusion, accusing the Democratic National Committee of strategically shifting the Iowa primary and implementing rules that penalized candidates who campaigned in certain states. Moreover, Bobby believed, the DNC’s control over super delegates and automatic delegates made it virtually impossible for any candidate other than Biden to secure the nomination. Bobby would need to win almost 80% of all states to outmaneuver Biden, assuming Biden only wins 20% of the vote.
“It’s pretty clear that the DNC does not want a primary,” Bobby said. “They’re effectively disenfranchising the Democratic voters from having any choice in who becomes president or who becomes the Democratic nominee.”
Bobby then made the only choice possible if he was going to be a viable candidate for President in 2024—he declared himself as an independent.
This should have been a huge event, the very act that would separate him from both Democrats and Republicans, thereby liberating him to become a third center of gravity which, through the strength of Bobby’s personality and integrity, could start to steal voters from the orbits of the two major parties. The announcement was scheduled for October 9, in Philadelphia.
On October 7, Hamas launched its attack on Israel.
“This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense,” Bobby posted on X that same day. “We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself—now. As President, I’ll make sure that our policy is unambiguous so that the enemies of Israel will think long and hard before attempting aggression of any kind. I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need. However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens. Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering, resolute, and practical action. America must stand by our ally throughout this operation and beyond as it exercises its sovereign right to self-defense.”
The anti-war candidate, whose stance regarding peace and diplomacy was the telling difference between his Democratic and Republican competitors, had just defined himself as a pro-war leader.
I pointed this out in a response to Bobby’s post. “I like RFKJr,” I wrote. “I think he’s the best choice for POTUS. He’s positioned himself as the peace candidate. And this is the tweet I fear may have sunk his chances. Israel’s policies regarding Palestine are indefensible. Bobby should be promoting an equitable peace settlement. Not war.”
Rabbi Rabbi Shmuley Boteach introduced Bobby by calling for a moment of silence for the Israeli victims. Then Bobby proceeded to say nothing—nothing—about the single most pressing issue of the day. This was his chance to weigh in on the side of peace, to promote the very peace and diplomacy message he articulated back in June.
He was silent, instead letting Rabbi Boteach speak on his behalf after the announcement.
And speak he did.
Dismissing criticism from Jewish groups that Bobby had not addressed the Hamas-Israeli conflict, Boteach said that his—Boteach’s—involvement in the October 9 event defined Kennedy’s stance toward Israel. “I think that was very brave of him and showed tremendous solidarity that he asked a rabbi who’s his close friend. You know, he moved away from the political figures who could have introduced him and endorsed him. The fact that I’m the one that introduced him, I think said it all.”
Five days later, on October 14, Bobby removed Dennis Kucinich as his campaign manager, replacing the veteran politician with a political neophyte—Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, Bobby’s daughter-in-law, and a former CIA clandestine officer.
I count Dennis as a friend. We’ve known each other for decades, ever since he invited me to testify in Congress about President George W. Bush’s flawed claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. I supported Dennis in his own bid for the presidency, back in 2000, and have for the past several years had the honor of serving with him on a prestigious advisory board where we provide our opinions on matters pertaining to geopolitics. Dennis’ hand could be felt in Bobby’s powerful Peace and Diplomacy speech. Sadly, the same could not be said of Bobby’s stance on Israel—Dennis had spent his political life defending the rights of Palestinians in the face of Israeli oppression. While both Dennis and the Kennedy campaign have been silent as to the reasons behind the precipitous firing, smart money says that the Israeli issue played a major factor in the decision.
“Not a good look,” I posted on X. “At a time when America should be excited about Kennedy’s independent run, his indefensible support of Israel is sinking his campaign. He is not only failing to gain any traction, but also bleeding support from a critical base of potential supporters—those Americans who bought into his rhetoric of peace.”
The results of the Israeli bombing of Gaza, October 2023
Bobby’s commitment to peace and diplomacy is what made him viable as a presidential candidate where his two likely opponents were on record supporting Israel without question.
Bobby could have followed in his uncle’s path, advocating that all Americans walk in the shoes of the Palestinian people to better understand their grievances and, in doing so, be better positioned to come up with a fair and equitable peace based on diplomacy, not war.
Bobby did not and has not. His appointment of Amaryllis Fox Kennedy bodes poorly for the future. I will continue to applaud Bobby for his stance on Russia and disarmament. But until he fundamentally changes course on Israel, I can’t in good faith claim to support his candidacy. If his name gets on the ballot, I may end up voting for him as the lesser evil, but that is not high praise.
America deserves better.
The world deserves better.
The people of Palestine deserve better.
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Featured image: Bobby Kennedy delivers his Peace and Diplomacy speech in New Hampshire, June 21, 2023 (All images in this article are from the author)
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This incisive article by the late Professor Tanya Reinhart was first published on Global Research 22 years ago in December 2001.
Tanya Reinhart was a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. She was a staunch critic of the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel. Her legacy will live.
Emphasis Added
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Already in October 2000, at the outset of the Palestinian uprising, military circles were ready with detailed operative plans to topple Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. This was before the Palestinian terror attacks started. (The first attack on Israeli civilians was on November 3, 2000, in a market in Jerusalem).
A document prepared by the security services, at the request of then PM Barak, stated on October 15, 2000 that
“Arafat, the person, is a severe threat to the security of the state [of Israel] and the damage which will result from his disappearance is less than the damage caused by his existence”. (Details of the document were published in Ma’ariv, July 6, 2001.)
The operative plan, known as ‘Fields of Thorns’ had been prepared back in 1996, and was then updated during the Intifada. (Amir Oren, Ha’aretz, Nov. 23, 2001). The plan includes everything that Israel has been executing lately, and more.(1)
The political echelon for its part (Barak’s circles), worked on preparing public opinion to the toppling of Arafat. On November 20, 2000, Nahman Shai, then public-affairs coordinator of the Barak Government, released in a meeting with the press, a 60 page document titled “Palestinian Authority non-compliance… A record of bad faith and misconduct”,
The document, informally referred to as the “White Book”, was prepared by Barak’s aid, Danny Yatom.(2) According to the “White Book”, Arafat’s present crime – “orchestrating the Intifada”, is just the last in a long chain of proofs that he has never deserted the “option of violence and ‘struggle'”.
“As early as Arafat’s own speech on the White House lawn, on September 13, 1993, there were indications that for him, the D.O.P. [declaration of principles] did not necessarily signify an end to the conflict. He did not, at any point, relinquish his uniform, symbolic of his status as a revolutionary commander” (Section 2). This uniform, incidentally, is the only ‘indication’ that the report cites, of Arafat’s hidden intentions, on that occasion.
A large section of the document is devoted to establishing Arafat’s “ambivalence and compliance” regarding terror.
“In March 1997 there was once again more than a hint of a ‘Green Light’ from Arafat to the Hamas, prior to the bombing in Tel Aviv… This is implicit in the statement made by a Hamas-affiliated member of Arafat’s Cabinet, Imad Faluji, to an American paper (Miami Herald, April 5, 1997).”
No further hints are provided regarding how this links Arafat to that bombing, but this is the “green light to terror” theme which the Military Intelligence (Ama”n) has been promoting since 1997, when its anti-Oslo line was consolidated. This theme was since repeated again and again by military circles, and eventually became the mantra of Israeli propaganda – Arafat is still a terrorist and is personally responsible for the acts of all groups, from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to Hizbollah.
The ‘Foreign Report’ (Jane’s information) of July 12, 2001 disclosed that the Israeli army (under Sharon’s government) has updated its plans for an “all-out assault to smash the Palestinian authority, force out leader Yasser Arafat and kill or detain its army”.
The blueprint, titled “The Destruction of the Palestinian Authority and Disarmament of All Armed Forces”, was presented to the Israeli government by chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, on July 8. The assault would be launched, at the government’s discretion, after a big suicide bomb attack in Israel, causing widespread deaths and injuries, citing the bloodshed as justification.
Many in Israel suspect that the assassination of the Hamas terrorist Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, just when the Hamas was respecting for two months its agreement with Arafat not to attack inside Israel, was designed to create the appropriate ‘bloodshed justification’, at the eve of Sharon’s visit to the US. (Alex Fishman – senior security correspondent of ‘Yediot’ – noted that “whoever decided upon the liquidation of Abu Hanoud knew in advance that would be the price.
The subject was extensively discussed both by Israel’s military echelon and its political one, before it was decided to carry out the liquidation” (Yediot Aharonot, Nov. 25, 2001)).
Israel’s moves to destroy the PA, thus, cannot be viewed as a spontaneous ‘act of retaliation’. It is a calculated plan, long in the making. The execution requires, first, weakening the resistance of the Palestinians, which Israel has been doing systematically since October 2000, through killing, bombarding of infrastructure, imprisoning people in their hometowns, and bringing them close to starvation. All this, while waiting for the international conditions to ‘ripen’ for the more ‘advanced’ steps of the plan.
Now the conditions seem to have ‘ripened’. In the power-drunk political atmosphere in the US, anything goes.
If at first it seemed that the US will try to keep the Arab world on its side by some tokens of persuasion, as it did during the Gulf war, it is now clear that they couldn’t care less. US policy is no longer based on building coalitions or investing in persuasion, but on sheer force.
The smashing ‘victory’ in Afghanistan has sent a clear message to the Third-World that nothing can stop the US from targeting any nation for annihilation.
They seem to believe that the most sophisticated weapons of the twenty-first century, combined with total absence of any considerations of moral principles, international law, or public opinion, can sustain them as the sole rulers of the world forever. From now on, fear should be the sufficient condition for obedience.
The US hawks, who push to expand the war to Iraq and further, view Israel as an asset – There are few regimes in the world like Israel, so eager to risk the life of their citizens for some new regional war.
As Prof. Alain Joxe, head of the French CIRPES (peace and strategic studies) has put it in Le Monde,
“the American leadership is presently shaped by dangerous right wing Southern extremists, who seek to use Israel as an offensive tool to destabilize the whole Middle East area” (December 17, 2001).
The same hawks are also talking about expanding the future war zone to targets on Israel’s agenda, like Hizbollah and Syria.
Under these circumstances, Sharon got his green light in Washington. As the Israeli media keeps raving, “Bush is fed up with this character [Arafat]”,
“Powell said that Arafat must stop with his lies” (Barnea and Schiffer, ‘Yediot’, December 7, 2001).
As Arafat hides in his Bunker, Israeli F-16 bombers plough the sky, and Israel’s brutality is generating, every day, new desperate human bombs, the US, accompanied for a while by the European union, keep urging Arafat to “act”.
Undo the Oslo Arrangements
But what is the rationale behind Israel’s systematic drive to eliminate the Palestinian Authority and undo the Oslo arrangements? It certainly cannot be based on ‘disappointment’ with Arafat’s performance, as is commonly claimed. The fact of the matter is that from the perspective of Israel’s interests in maintaining the occupation, Arafat did fulfill Israel’s expectations all these last years.
As far as Israeli security goes, there is nothing further from the truth then the fake accusations in the “White Book”, or subsequent Israeli propaganda. To take just one example, in 1997 – the year mentioned in the “White Book” as an instance of Arafat’s “green light to terror” – a ‘security agreement’ was signed between Israel and the Palestinian authority, under the auspices of the head of the Tel Aviv station of the CIA, Stan Muskovitz.
The agreement commits the PA to take active care of the security of Israel – to fight:
“the terrorists, the terrorist base, and the environmental conditions leading to support of terror” in cooperation with Israel, including “mutual exchange of information, ideas, and military cooperation” (clause 1). [Translated from the Hebrew text, Ha’aretz December 12, 1997].
Arafat’s security services carried out this job faithfully, with assassinations of Hamas terrorists (disguised as ‘accidents’), and arrests of Hamas political leaders.(3)
Ample information was published in the Israeli media regarding these activities, and ‘security sources’ were full of praises for Arafat’s achievements. E.g. Ami Ayalon, then head of the Israeli secret service (Shab”ak), announced, in the government meeting on April 5, 1998 that “Arafat is doing his job – he is fighting terror and puts all his weight against the Hamas” (Ha’aretz, April 6, 1998). The rate of success of the Israeli security services in containing terror was never higher than that of Arafat; in fact, much lower.
In left and critical circles, one can hardly find compassion for Arafat’s personal fate (as opposed to the tragedy of the Palestinian people). As David Hirst writes in The Guardian, when Arafat returned to the occupied territories, in 1994,
“he came as collaborator as much as liberator. For the Israelis, security – theirs, not the Palestinians’ – was the be-all and end-all of Oslo. His job was to supply it on their behalf. But he could only sustain the collaborator’s role if he won the political quid pro quo which, through a series of ‘interim agreements’ leading to ‘final status’, was supposedly to come his way. He never could. . . [Along the road], he acquiesced in accumulating concessions that only widened the gulf between what he was actually achieving and what he assured his people he would achieve, by this method, in the end. He was Mr. Palestine still, with a charisma and historical legitimacy all his own. But he was proving to be grievously wanting in that other great and complementary task, building his state-in-the-making. Economic misery, corruption, abuse of human rights, the creation of a vast apparatus of repression – all these flowed, wholly or in part, from the Authority over which he presided.” (Hirst, “Arafat’s last stand?” The Guardian, December 14, 2001).
But from the perspective of the Israeli occupation, all this means that the Oslo plan was, essentially, successful. Arafat did manage, through harsh means of oppression, to contain the frustration of his people, and guarantee the safety of the settlers, as Israel continued undisturbed to build new settlements and appropriate more Palestinian land.
The oppressive machinery, the various security forces of Arafat, were formed and trained in collaboration with Israel. Much energy and resources were put into building this complex Oslo apparatus. It is often admitted that the Israeli security forces cannot manage to prevent terror any better than Arafat can. Why, then, was the military and political echelon so determined to destroy all this already in October 2000, even before the terror waves started? Answering this requires some look at the history.
The Israeli Political and Military History
Right from the start of the ‘Oslo process’, in September 1993, two conceptions were competing in the Israeli political and military system. The one, led by Yosi Beilin, was striving to implement some version of the Alon plan, which the Labor party has been advocating for years. The original plan consisted of annexation of about 35% of the territories to Israel, and either Jordanian-rule, or some form of self-rule for the rest – the land on which the Palestinians actually live. In the eyes of its proponents, this plan represented a necessary compromise, compared to the alternatives of either giving up the territories altogether, or eternal blood-shed (as we witness today). It appeared that Rabin was willing to follow this line, at least at the start, and that in return for Arafat’s commitment to control the frustration of his people and guarantee the security of Israel, he would allow the PA to run the enclaves in which the Palestinians still reside, in some form of self-rule, which may even be called a Palestinian ‘state’.
But the other pole objected even to that much. This was mostly visible in military circles, whose most vocal spokesman in the early years of Oslo was then Chief of Staff, Ehud Barak. Another center of opposition was, of course, Sharon and the extreme right-wing, who were against the Oslo process from the start. This affinity between the military circles and Sharon is hardly surprising. Sharon – the last of the leaders of the ‘1948 generation’, was a legendary figure in the army, and many of the generals were his disciples, like Barak. As Amir Oren wrote,
“Barak’s deep and abiding admiration for Ariel Sharon’s military insights is another indication of his views; Barak and Sharon both belong to a line of political generals that started with Moshe Dayan” (Ha’aretz, January 8, 1999).
This breed of generals was raised on the myth of redemption of the land. A glimpse into this worldview is offered in Sharon’s interview with Ari Shavit (Ha’aretz, weekend supplement, April 13, 2001). Everything is entangled into one romantic framework: the fields, the blossom of the orchards, the plough and the wars.
The heart of this ideology is the sanctity of the land. In a 1976 interview, Moshe Dayan, who was the defense minister in 1967, explained what led, then, to the decision to attack Syria. In the collective Israeli consciousness of the period, Syria was conceived as a serious threat to the security of Israel, and a constant initiator of aggression towards the residents of northern Israel. But according to Dayan, this is “bull-shit” – Syria was not a threat to Israel before 67:
“Just drop it. . .I know how at least 80% of all the incidents with Syria started. We were sending a tractor to the demilitarized zone and we knew that the Syrians would shoot.” According to Dayan (who at a time of the interview confessed some regrets), what led Israel to provoke Syria this way was the greediness for the land – the idea that it is possible “to grab a piece of land and keep it, until the enemy will get tired and give it to us” (Yediot Aharonot, April 27 1997)
At the eve of Oslo, the majority of the Israeli society was tired of wars.
In their eyes, the fights over land and resources were over. Most Israelis believe that the 1948 Independence War, with its horrible consequences for the Palestinians, was necessary to establish a state for the Jews, haunted by the memory of the Holocaust.
But now that they have a state, they long to just live normally with whatever they have. However, the ideology of the redemption of land has never died out in the army, or in the circles of the ‘political generals’, who switched from the army to the government.
In their eyes, Sharon’s alternative of fighting the Palestinians to the bitter end and imposing new regional orders – as he tried in Lebanon in 1982 – may have failed because of the weakness of the spoiled Israeli society. But given the new war-philosophy established in Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan, they believe that with the massive superiority of the Israeli air force, it may still be possible to win this battle in the future.
While Sharon’s party was in the opposition at the time of Oslo, Barak, as Chief of Staff, participated in the negotiations and played a crucial role in shaping the agreements, and Israel’s attitude to the Palestinian Authority.
I quote from an article I wrote in February 1994, because it reflects what anybody who read carefully the Israeli media could see at the time:
“From the start, it has been possible to identify two conceptions that underlie the Oslo process. One is that this will enable to reduce the cost of the occupation, using a Palestinian patronage regime, with Arafat as the senior cop responsible for the security of Israel. The other is that the process should lead to the collapse of Arafat and the PLO. The humiliation of Arafat, and the amplification of his surrender, will gradually lead to loss of popular support. Consequently, the PLO will collapse, or enter power conflicts. Thus, the Palestinian society will lose its secular leadership and institutions. In the power driven mind of those eager to maintain the Israeli occupation, the collapse of the secular leadership is interpreted as an achievement, because it would take a long while for the Palestinian people to get organized again, and, in any case, it is easier to justify even the worst acts of oppression, when the enemy is a fanatic Muslim organization. Most likely, the conflict between the two competing conceptions is not settled yet, but at the moment, the second seems more dominant: In order to carry out the first, Arafat’s status should have been strengthened, with at least some achievements that could generate support of the Palestinians, rather then Israel’s policy of constant humiliation and breach of promises.”(4)
Nevertheless, the scenario of the collapse of the PA did not materialize.
The Palestinian society resorted once more to their marvelous strategy of ‘zumud’ – sticking to the land and sustaining the pressure. Right from the start, the Hamas political leadership, and others, were warning that Israel is trying to push the Palestinians into a civil war, in which the nation slaughters itself. All fragments of the society cooperated to prevent this danger, and calm conflicts as soon as they were deteriorating to arms. They also managed, despite the tyranny of Arafat’s rule, to build an impressive amount of institutions and infrastructure. The PA does not consist only of the corrupt rulers and the various security forces. The elected Palestinian council, which operates under endless restrictions, is still a representative political framework, some basis for democratic institutions in the future. For those whose goal is the destruction of the Palestinian identity and the eventual redemption of their land, Oslo was a failure.
In 1999, the army got back to power, through the ‘political generals’ – first Barak, and then Sharon. (They collaborated in the last elections to guarantee that no other, civil, candidate will be allowed to run.)
The road opened to correct what they view as the grave mistake of Oslo. In order to get there, it was first necessary to convince the spoiled Israeli society that the Palestinians are not willing to live in peace and are threatening our mere existence. Sharon alone could not have possibly achieved that, but Barak did succeed, with his ‘generous offer’ fraud. After a year of horrible terror attacks, combined with massive propaganda and lies, Sharon and the army feel that nothing can stop them from turning to full execution.
Why is it so urgent for them to topple Arafat?
Shabtai Shavit, former head of the Security Service (‘Mossad’), who is not bound by restraints posed on official sources, explains this openly:
“In the thirty something years that he [Arafat] leads, he managed to reach real achievements in the political and international sphere… He got the Nobel peace prize, and in a single phone call, he can obtain a meeting with every leader in the world. There is nobody in the Palestinian gallery that can enter his shoes in this context of international status. If they [the Palestinians] will lose this gain, for us, this is a huge achievement. The Palestinian issue will get off the international agenda.” (interview in Yediot’s Weekend Supplement, December 7, 2001).
Their immediate goal is to get the Palestinians off the international agenda, so slaughter, starvation, forced evacuation and ‘migration’ can continue undisturbed, leading, possibly, to the final realization of Sharon’s long standing vision, embodied in the military plans. The immediate goal of anybody concerned with the future of the world, ahould be to halt this process of evil unleashed. As Alain Joxe concluded his article in Le Monde:
“It is time for the Western public opinion to take over and to compel the governments to take a moral and political stand facing the foreseen disaster, namely a situation of permanent war against the Arab and Muslim people and states – the realization of the double phantasy of Bin Laden and Sharon.” (December 17, 2001).
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Notes
(1) For the details of this operative plan, see Anthony Cordesman, “Peace and War: Israel versus the Palestinians A second Intifada?” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) December 2000, and it summary in Shraga Eilam, “Peace With Violence or Transfer”, ‘Between The Lines’, December 2000.
(2) The document can be found in:
(3) For a survey on some of the PA’s assassinations of Hamas terrorists, see my article “The A-Sherif affair”, ‘Yediot Aharonot’, April 14, 1998
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Swiss Parliamentary elections on 22 October 2023 resulted in a landslide to the right. Granted, Switzerland was mostly right leaning for years. However, this rather strong shift to the right was internationally not expected.
The right-wing People’s Party, already with a Parliamentary majority, gained nine new seats to the detriment of the Greens and the Liberal Greens. Together they lost 11 seats. The middle parties stayed about where they were before. The socialists made a modest gain of two seats, probably spillover from the Greens.
Is this a sign that the Swiss are gradually waking up and readopt human base-values, as His Excellency, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, pointed out in his video recording “Wake up from the Slumber”:
“The awakening of the consciousness is the first step towards liberation from the subversive leadership that has reserved the high places in both the national and international institutions because opening one’s eyes and looking at reality is essential.:
If you have to understand what is really happening, denounce the globalist coup d’etat and regain the national sovereignty and fundamental freedoms that have been taken away from you. You have all witnessed in recent years a radical change in society; a change planned by people without any electoral mandate and imposed by sold-out rulers.”
“The United States of America, like many other nations hostage to the Agenda 2030, is facing a very serious crisis: inflation, an out-of-control self-induced migration crisis, human trafficking and child trafficking, rampant crime, and the weakening of law enforcement.”
Archbishop Vigano spoke primarily to the people of the United States. He might as well have spoken to the Europeans and the Swiss. The recent election results would appear as if the Swiss had listened.
What is the Right, What is the Left? “Controlled Opposition”?
This significant move to the right may be a sign of awakening – awakening to the aberrant neo-fascist “green policies,” coercing the world’s economy to be driven by green energy, mandating to demolish one of the most efficient and secure sources of energy, clean nuclear power and doing away with hydrocarbon energy – gas and oil – for which by now the most extraordinary technologies have made these sources of energy multiple times cleaner than they were 20 to 30 years ago.
Do you know, that still today, after a massive propaganda for the last 30 years (since the 1992 custom-made UN Conference on the Environment, also called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro) against petrol and gas, the CO2 cum climate change / global warming hoax – some 85% of all energy used in the world still comes from hydrocarbon? No change since 1992.
The absurd green movement wants to convert this power source to solar and wind energy, killing cows for their CO2 production – creating wanton famine, and death – and on the way ruin the world economy, as is already visible in the US, and even worse in Europe.
Maybe Switzerland did wake up? They may also be aware of the nefarious UN Agenda 2030, the WEF’s Great Reset, both identical – the unholy marriage between the World Economic Forum, a globalist NGO, heavenly seated in Geneva Switzerland, and the United Nations, a world body, created after WWII to foster peace and to mediate conflict solutions between warring countries.
The Swiss, as well as many Westerners, may gradually see through the invention of “COVID” – at best the equivalent of an innocuous flu, and the creation of a series of deadly vaxxes which have seen excess mortality skyrocket in the past two years throughout the Western world.
The Swiss are also becoming increasingly aware of the inferno “Woke” agenda, the criminal Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer or Questioning – or LGBTQ-plus agenda (also oddly but quite adroitly called the “letter-agenda”), which has infiltrated schools to the point where transgender ideas are literally promoted. In some parts of Switzerland 11-year-old kids may decide on their own, on a sex change, without parental approval or interference.
In Switzerland, where public schools have benefitted from a consistently good record, homeschooling was basically not known until about 2019. With “COVID”, homeschooling started taking hold also in Switzerland. Today it is still at a low 0.7% of all school-age children (compare with US – about 3.3%).
Over the past couple of years, homeschooling has more than doubled, and tends to increase rapidly, as parents do not want to continue exposing their kids to the nonsensical and outright criminal teaching of the despicable woke and gender agenda, promoted at certain public schools – and encouraged by the government.
Of course, the media will not tell you that.
The media analyzing on behalf of the globalists fatal election results, invent all sorts of reasons, like fear of increasing crime because of refugees and job-steeling immigrants. Such propaganda is, indeed, also being hammered into the brains of Western populations in Europe and the US and may influence the ever more discrimination-prone thinking of “white” people.
The media in Switzerland and elsewhere will never admit the truth – namely, that the people are waking up to the horrors of globalization, and are instead seeking true values of humanity, family, community, human and political sovereignty, ethical values and to some extent back to simplicity.
This is what the Right is currently offering, as the left has failed bitterly, being largely submissive to the globalist agenda.
Back to “simplicity” would doubtlessly mean stepping down from extreme capitalism, consumerism and “elitism”. Simplicity, an attribute that needs new fervor. The Tavistock technique of mind and social engineering feeds on the addiction of consumerism of the West.
These election results were not for love of the Right, but in Grand Opposition to the ever more invasive globalist movements.
True Left and Right have not existed for at least the last 40 years – almost nowhere in the Western world, as the CIA / MI6 anti-socialist program “Gladio”, eradicated the left in Europe during the four decades from the 1950s to about the 1990s. A similar movement decimated socialism in the US.
Later many of the same left-leaning groups were “bought” by the globalists under the pretext of a One World Government of equality for all, an old socialist slogan. The tragedy is that as of this day, many, if not most “new socialists or leftists” do not know, or refuse to admit, that they have been coopted and corrupted by the globalist crusade.
the endless wars and conflicts and random terrorist attacks,
and not least, the COVID and bio-war agenda
– all with their plan for massive population reduction – were largely funded by the less visible financial elite, Soros, Rockefeller, Gates, Rothschild et. al. and, of course, by the players from the dark, the Financial-Military-IT-Media-Pharma complex.
Extraordinarily, Archbishop Vigano nailed it all down in his bombshell 17-min video:
May the Swiss election results have been a wake-up signal for the rest of the world, at least the Western world? Rising up to conquer sovereignty in solidarity. To return to basic values of fraternity and LOVE.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
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Judge Andrew Napolitano: What damage is Israel doing not just to Gaza, not just to itself, but to the world by its invasion of the Gaza Strip?
Does the US support the unbridled invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military? And if so, does it appreciate the consequences of such support?
Philip Giraldi: The fundamental question that we’re confronting here is the extent to which the US is capable of supporting its own national interest which includes not getting involved in places like Ukraine and Israel-Gaza unless there is a compelling national interest that drives the process.
In this case the US was not threatened by either the Russians or the Gazans yet it’s fully engaged in the process of supporting countries that are basically not doing any good for us.
Watch the video below for the full interview of Philip Giraldi.
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“More than 5.55 billion people worldwide have received a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, equal to about 72.3 percent of the world population,” observed the New York Times in March of this year.
In other words, in the space of twenty-seven months (since the beginning of the rollout), the vaccinators had managed to inject nearly two thirds of the world’s inhabitants with their COVID medicaments. Furthermore, the majority of the vaccinated were subjected to more than one dose. In total more than 13.5 billion injections were administered across the planet.
To pull this off in such a short period of time makes the COVID vaccination campaign one of the most impressive logistical and organizational feats ever accomplished.
A fatal flaw, however, has marred the whole COVID vaccination enterprise: it was a blatant fraud from beginning to end.
To begin with, the whole thing was based on a false premise. We were told that in SARS-CoV-2 we were up against a highly dangerous virus that posed a potentially lethal threat to those who contracted it and that vaccines were the only sure way to escape the scourge. This was a lie. For healthy people of productive age the infection fatality rate was about as high as that of the seasonal flu. For healthy children and young people the danger of a serious outcome was virtually nil.
Lauded as both “safe and effective,” the vaccines turned out to be anything but that. To begin with, it quickly became quite clear that the vaccines would not protect against infection.
Only some five months after the start of the vaccination campaign, the authorities started speaking about the need for a booster. This obviously meant that the initial two doses of Pfizer and Moderna (one in the case of Johnson & Johnson) failed to protect their recipients from the SARS-CoV-2 virus beyond a very limited amount of time.
But the first booster also failed to confer any lasting protection and soon a second booster was required. The second booster, however, proved as ineffective as the first booster and a third booster was said to be necessary. But the third booster also failed, and a fourth booster was needed.
Currently, we are on the sixth shot and counting. And this less than 34 months after the COVID vaccines were first introduced. In other words, to keep fully vaccinated as per recommendations from our health authorities, one would have had to have been injected every five months or so.
But even those who got every booster on schedule were not protected against contracting COVID-19. We learn from the website of the Mayo Clinic: “People who are up to date on their vaccines can get breakthrough infections. They can then spread the virus to others.”
When pressed about this issue during a hearing of the European Parliament in October of last year, a Pfizer representative admitted that the company had never tested the vaccines to see whether they would prevent transmission.
What an astonishing admission that was. The objective of vaccines has always been to protect their recipients from the disease for which they were administered thus limiting the spread of infection in the population.
The COVID-19 “vaccines” are the first vaccines in history that do neither protect against infection nor slow its spread.
Do you remember when Joe Bidenpromised us during a Townhall meeting in 2021 that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
Turns out this was a massive lie. It was brazen disinformation coming from the very top of the US government.
The majority of the injected came down with COVID and most of them more than once. In fact, it appears that getting “vaccinated” against COVID increases one’s chances of contracting COVID. Just ask Joe and Jill Biden who despite being jabbed multiple times have been repeatedly sickened with the disease.
We must ask ourselves, “What kind of vaccines are these?” Never has the world witnessed such a thing — vaccines that require a booster every few months and apparently make their recipients more likely to fall ill with the very disease against which they are supposed to protect.
Neither will the vaccines protect people from serious COVID outcomes. The majority of people who get serious COVID or die of COVID have been vaccinated.
That the vaccines are grossly ineffective is becoming clear even to most of those who were previously brainwashed by our corrupt governments and medical authorities. A study published earlier this month found that “uptake of boosters has stalled in the United States at less than 20% of the eligible population.” Please note that the 20% uptake figure refers to only the eligible population. This means that only a small fraction of the whole population has opted to receive the COVID injections. Only 17% of Americans chose to receive the previous booster. This time around the number will be even lower. By now most people have seen through the fraud.
Not only are the vaccines ineffective, but they are also very dangerous. Since the rollout of the vaccination campaign, there has been an explosion of adverse reaction reports across the world. In the United States, the reports related to the COVID shots in the VAERS database exceed those related to all the other vaccines combined. There is no doubt that the COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines ever devised and that by a long shot.
Already early in 2022, there were more than one thousand articles and studies published in scientific journals discussing the adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. Some of the effects listed include conditions such as pericarditis, myopericarditis, death, Guillain-Barre syndrome, acute venous thromboembolism, lymphadenopathy, acute thrombosis of the coronary tree, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, portal vein thrombosis, T-cell lymphoma, aphasia, and thrombophilia among others.
The wider public, however, was never informed about these studies by our government and the medical establishment, both of which are corrupted to the core.
According to a survey conducted by Rasmussen at the end of last year, nearly 30 percent of Americans thought they knew someone who had been killed by a COVID vaccine. This number is undoubtedly much higher today as we keep hearing the news of healthy people who keep inexplicably dying. The stories of hundreds of healthy athletes who have been collapsing and dying since the beginning of the vaccination campaign are especially revealing.
According to researcher Steve Kirsch the death rate of the COVID vaccines is roughly 1 in 1000 doses. This translates into 676,000 dead Americans. It turns out, however, that Kirsch’s analysis, which is based on a breakdown of VAERS figures, may be too conservative. Working with data from 17 countries on all-cause mortality, researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest have come to the conclusion that the death rate of the COVID-19 shots is somewhere in the region of 1 in 800 doses. They estimate that the vaccines have killed some 17 million people worldwide.
As a point of comparison, the number of people exterminated by the Nazis in the Holocaust was about 6 million.
If even the most conservative estimates are correct, the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the bulk of which was carried out under false pretences and coercive mandates, constitutes the greatest crime ever committed against humanity.
Unbelievably, so far no one — either in government or in the medical establishment — has been held responsible for this travesty.
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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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Holy books contain theological principles and play a crucial role in the transmission of faith. The Bible in Christianity, the Koran in Islam, the Torah in Judaism are texts that are taught from the cradle, becoming absolute, undeniable and exclusive truths.
There have been wars for strictly religious motivations in the past, but history shows that, for the most part, wars have been motivated by a combination of economic, territorial, ethnic and political factors. Whatever the motivation, the consequences of war are always devastating.
The three religions mentioned above, which predominate in Western and Middle Eastern culture, all enshrine the principle of “an eye for an eye” which implies equal or worse punishment for the crime committed, thus satisfying the revenge desired by the victim and society. Its religious origin may explain why this principle is so deeply rooted in human relations and in relations between states, and why it is so difficult to take the first step in building a peaceful coexistence.
It will always be easier to apply “an eye for an eye” because it does not require the courage to engage in dialogue and seek a healthy coexistence. As the song “Give peace a chance” by John Lennon says, “Peace is not something you wish for, it is something you create, and it can be achieved if you have the will”. In many parts of the world there is no such will.
This is what we are seeing in the Middle East. A long-standing conflict in which leaders display religious justifications, tirelessly repeated because it is easier to identify an enemy and align their own people. And in the pursuit of biblical, tit-for-tat justice, unimaginable atrocities and barbarities are being committed, which must be unambiguously and unhesitatingly condemned.
The force of politics and the media, which also respond to political interests, promote polarisation, so that anyone who condemns the violence on both sides is made to look like a traitor. Condemning violence perpetrated by those you sympathise with is not treason, it is collaborating in the first steps towards peace.
Children are born free of evil and prejudice. They are a blank sheet of paper that begins to be written by the adult world, which is why it is important to always distinguish between organisations and individuals.
In the Middle East situation, being Israeli or Zionist is not the same as being Jewish, and being Hamas or Islamic Jihad is not the same as being Palestinian.
Chile, with a large Palestinian and Jewish community, has been an example of good coexistence and collaboration, and our country can make a contribution by being very clear and direct as it has been so far.
Every war, however terrible it may be, can serve as an example in the classroom to remove it and to educate. To seek an “eye for an eye” is to go against the civilising advances that seek to have a recognised and legitimate rule of law that resolves conflicts between parties, avoiding violence and barbarity.
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Marcelo Trivelli is President of Fundación Semilla and Member of the Regional Network for Global Citizenship Education in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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***
I’m recording this message from Gaza.
I don’t have the words to describe the dire situation here right now. There is no food, there is no water, there are no supplies. Outside the few shops that remain open, long lines of people wait for scarce loaves of bread. No cars drive in the streets; people are too scared of being targeted by the Israeli war planes flying above us. The hospitals cannot receive more patients. Relentless bombing has razed entire neighbourhoods to the ground. You would no longer recognize them. The situation in Gaza is lacking all conditions of life.
Where I am in the south of the strip, the bombing is not as intense at this moment. Israel’s strategy is to bombard the north to forcibly transfer Palestinians to the southern region. But although it claims this area is safe, a hospital has been hit and many homes too. We do not know where the next one will strike. Everyone is scared that they will be the next victim.
This is not an Israeli occupation. It is genocide.
About 3,000 citizens have been massacred in just 10 days. This number is likely to have increased by the time you read this. Every 15 minutes a child is killed by the Israeli attack. Families have been bombed in their homes as they slept inside.
The enemies of Israel are not Hamas, but the Palestinian people themselves. This has happened with the complete backing of the United States administration and many other Western governments. They are supporting the Gaza genocide.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their homes, after Israel ordered 1.1 million people to ‘evacuate’ from the north of Gaza City. Yet there are no signs that Israel is finished with its collective punishment of the people of Gaza. Netanyahu is still refusing to allow humanitarian aid to enter. Many of the Israeli officials say that the Palestinian people have to abandon their homes and move to Egypt. This is a clear attempt to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip. Israel is punishing the people because they refuse to leave and be made refugees once again.
We are seeing history repeat itself. Israel itself was established on the rubble of Palestinian villages and cities. It displaced our grandparents, including my own grandfather, from our towns and cities under the pressure of massacres carried out by Jewish militias 75 years ago. After erasing these Palestinian villages and cities, it created the state of Israel.
What we are seeing now is a continuation of the Nakba in 2023, but there is one difference. The Nakba today is being recorded by video and by voice, all the world is watching.
How can we stop this massacre? It’s up to all of us, and all of you to take to the streets, to organize huge demonstrations and say we believe in freedom and dignity for everyone. This is a historic time to show your strong support, not only to the Palestinian people but to all people around the world. If we allow this injustice to be committed here, rest assured it will happen elsewhere. This is the time. This is the moment. Every single day we let them silence our anger, more families will be wiped out. This is not just our battle; this is your battle. This is our common struggle. This is the struggle of all the free people against the colonial powers. Please stand with us. Stand on the right side of history.
[This piece was adapted from a voice recording sent by Ahmed Abu Artema to New Internationalist. Israel cut off electricity to Gaza on 12 October after declaring a ‘complete siege’ of the strip. Since then, internet connection has been intermittent making it difficult for Palestinian journalists to write.]
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Ahmed Abu Artema is a Palestinian journalist and a founder of the Great March Of Return. He is a refugee from Al Ramla village and lives in the Gaza Strip.
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***
Tonight has been the most violent bombardment of Gaza so far, notably concentrated on precisely the areas into which Israel ordered the population to evacuate. I find it almost impossible to believe that this genocide is under way with the active support of almost all western governments.
I want to look at two questions – what will happen internationally, and what is happening in western societies.
Israel plainly is on the course of further escalation and intends to kill many thousands more Palestinians. More than 2,000 Palestinian children alone have now been killed by Israeli aerial attack in the last fortnight.
Gaza has no defence from bombs and missiles, and there is no military reason why Israel cannot keep this up for months and simply rely upon aerial massacre. We are perhaps within a week of thirst, starvation and disease killing even more people per day than bombardment.
The population of Gaza are simply defenceless. Only international intervention can stop Israel from doing whatever it wishes, and those countries which have influence with Israel are actively abetting and encouraging the genocide.
The question is, what is Israel’s aim? Do they intend to reduce the Gaza Strip still further, annexing half or more of it? Will starvation and horror enable the international community to force Egypt to accept the expulsion of the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert as a “humanitarian” move?
That appears to be the end game: expulsion of population and territorial expansion into Gaza. That would require a ground invasion, but probably not until after even more intense aerial bombardment to eliminate all resistance. This territorial ambition of course accords with the violent expansion of illegal settlement in the West Bank which is currently under way, with the world paying almost no attention. It is very hard indeed to comprehend the passivity of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas at the moment.
Netanyahu’s political stock within Israel is so low, that the only way he can recover is by making a major step towards the complete genocide of the Palestinian people and the achievement of Greater Israel. Netanyahu now knows that there is no violence against Palestinians so extreme that the western political elite will not support it under the mantra of “Israel’s right to self-defence”.
I do not see any salvation for Gaza coming from Hezbollah. If Hezbollah were to employ their vaunted missile strike capabilities, the moment to do it would be now when the Israeli armour is drawn up in massive parks outside Gaza, a perfect target even for longer range missiles of limited accuracy. Once dispersed into Gaza the armour would be far harder for Hezbollah to hit at range.
Hezbollah is even better equipped now to fight a defensive war in Lebanon than it was when it defeated the Israeli advance in 2006. But it is not configured or equipped to fight an aggressive ground war into Israel, which would be a disaster. It also has to worry about hostile militias in its rear. If Hezbollah can provoke an Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, that would enable it to inflict substantial casualties, but Israel is not going to do that in a way that detracts from its capabilities in Gaza.
Iran has greatly improved its diplomatic position in the last year. The Chinese-brokered lessening of hostility with Saudi Arabia has potential to revolutionise Middle Eastern politics, and the benefits of this will not lightly be laid aside by Tehran. Iran had also made real progress with the Biden administration in overcoming the blind hostility of the Trump years.
Iran has no desire to throw away these gains. That is why it seems to me extremely improbable that Iran had endorsed the 7 October attacks by Hamas. Iran is now restraining Hezbollah. But there are limits to the patience of Iran. The extraordinary truth is that Iran is probably the only state under discussion here with a genuine humanitarian concern for the lives of Palestinians. If the genocide unfolds as horribly as I anticipate, Iran can be pushed too far.
That said, I offer just a cautionary footnote that Saudi Arabia is not, under MBS, quite the reliable US/Israeli puppet it has historically been. I do not have much time for MBS, as you know, but his high opinion of the importance of the Al Saud and their leadership role among Arabs, makes him a different proposition to his predecessor.
Saudi Arabia has leverage. The Biden administration has gone all in on regional domination, sending two aircraft carrier groups into a situation which should it escalate, could send oil prices to highest-ever levels, with Russia blocked from the market. Biden is risking a huge gas price hike in an election year.
Biden’s calculation, or that of his security services, is that nobody can or will intervene to save the Palestinians. They judge the genocide as containable. That is an extraordinary gamble.
There has been an extraordinary amount of vitriol aimed at Qatar by pro-Israel commentators, for hosting the Hamas office and leadership. This is extraordinarily ignorant.
Qatar hosts Hamas, just as Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office, at the direct request of the United States. It provides a means of dialogue between the United States and Hamas (exactly as it did with the Taliban) both at deniable level, and through third parties, including of course the government of Qatar. Thus when Blinken arrived in Qatar one day and the Iranian foreign minister the next, these were in fact “proximity talks” involving Hamas.
How do I know? Well, at Julian’s request, I visited Qatar about five years ago to discuss whether Julian, and Wikileaks, might potentially relocate to Qatar, which Julian had described as “the new Switzerland” in terms of being a neutral diplomatic venue.
It was explained to me by the Qataris, at a very senior level, that Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office and Hamas because the United States government had asked them to do so. Qatar hosted a major US military base and depended on US support against a Saudi takeover. If I could generate a request from then President Trump for Qatar to host Wikileaks, then they would do so. Otherwise, no.
So I know what I am talking about.
One tiny but good result of this brokering in Qatar was the release of two American national hostages. British diplomats have told me that discussions in Qatar have so far held back the Israeli ground offensive, but I am not convinced that Israel really wished to do this yet. They are having sadistic fun shooting children in a barrel.
Qatar has also been the origin of deals allowing in a tiny amount of aid to Gaza, but this is so small as to be almost irrelevant. It is performative humanitarianism by the West.
I have frequently praised China for the fact that their economic dominance has been unaccompanied by any aggressive desire for world hegemony, but this also has its downside. China sees no benefit in assisting the Palestinians in practice. Hopeful reports of China sending warships refer simply to pre-planned exercises, largely in the Gulf. That China is carrying out such joint exercises with Gulf states is indeed part of a long term increasing of influence, but is not relevant to the immediate reality.
Russia of course has its hands full in Ukraine. It is allowing its Syrian bases to be used as a conduit following increased Israeli bombing of Syrian airports, but there is not a great deal more that it can do. Erdoğan is genuinely furious at what is happening in Gaza, but Turkey is struggling to find any way to apply pressure, barring linkage to Ukraine shipping issues (which Erdoğan is considering).
That is a very rough and ready tour d’horizon, but the net effect is that I see no current hope for averting the atrocity which is unfolding before our horrified eyes.
Most of our eyes are indeed horrified. The gap between the western political and media elites and their people on this issue is simply enormous. Western leaders have not only failed to restrain Israel, they have almost unanimously egged Netanyahu on, with the continued repetition of the phrase “Israel’s right to self-defence” as justification for the mass bombing, removal and starvation of an entire civilian population.
The western leadership glee in vetoing every attempt at a ceasefire resolution at the UN is astonishing.
Massive demonstrations have been taking place across Europe against this unspeakable massacre, and the knee-jerk reaction of politicians at their isolation from public opinion has been to try to make such shows of dissent illegal. In the UK people have been arrested for displaying Palestinian flags. In Germany pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been entirely banned. Something similar has been attempted in France, with predictable failure.
I have myself attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations in three different countries, and the most striking thing on each occasion was the strong support of passers-by, and the number of people spontaneously coming out to join the demo as it passed.
A wave of racism has been unleashed in the UK and elsewhere. I am astonished by the Islamophobia and racial hatred released online, with no apparent comeback. UK Ministers claim to be alarmed at the “terrorist sympathies” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, yet it is perfectly legal to call for Palestinians to be exterminated, to compare them to different types of animal and vermin, and suggest they should be driven into the sea. That does not horrify ministers at all.
I am personally now subject to a police investigation for “terrorism” merely for suggesting that the Palestinians too have a right to self-defence and may offer armed resistance to genocide – a right they enjoy beyond doubt in international law. Remember, Israel has formally declared war. Is it the position in British law that the only belief it is legal to hold and express, is that in this war the Palestinians must simply line up quietly to be killed?
The step change in western authoritarianism is likely to be met by blowback.
After 20 years, we had finally come through the vicious cycle of the “War on Terror”, where terrorism, repression and institutionalised Islamophobia all boosted each other across the western world. Outrage at the appalling genocide in Gaza is very likely to result in isolated incidences of, also appalling, Islamist-inspired violence in Western countries, including the UK, particularly because of the UK’s military support of Israel.
That consequential terrorism in itself will be cited by the political elite as justifying their stance. And so the vicious cycle will restart. This will of course be welcome to the agents of the security state, whose power, budgets and prestige will be boosted. Once again we have to be on the lookout for radicalisation and real terrorism, but also for agent-provocateur-led terrorism and for false flag terrorism.
If we descend back into that nightmare again, the direct cause will be elite support for the genocide of the Palestinian people and the Islamophobic narrative. The major cause of terrorism here is Israel, the terrorist apartheid state.
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***
“Learn to do right; seek justice; defend the oppressed” (Isa 1:17).
We, at the undersigned Palestinian Christian institutions and grassroots movements, grieve and lament the renewed cycle of violence in our land.
As we were about to publish this open letter, some of us lost dear friends & family members in the atrocious Israeli bombardment of innocent civilians on Oct. 19, 2023, Christians included, who were taking refuge in the historical Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza.
Words fail to express our shock and horror with regard to the ongoing war in our land. We deeply mourn the death and suffering of all people because it is our firm conviction that all humans are made in God’s image.
We are also profoundly troubled when the name of God is invoked to promote violence and religious national ideologies.
Further, we watch with horror the way many Western Christians are offering unwavering support to Israel’s war against the people of Palestine.
While we recognize the numerous voices that have spoken and continue to speak for the cause of truth and justice in our land, we write to challenge Western theologians and church leaders who have voiced uncritical support for Israel and to call them to repent and change.
Sadly, the actions and double standards of some Christian leaders have gravely hurt their Christian witness and have severely distorted their moral judgment with regard to the situation in our land.
We come alongside fellow Christians in condemning all attacks on civilians, especially defenseless families and children. Yet, we are disturbed by the silence of many church leaders and theologians when it is Palestinian civilians who are killed.
We are also horrified by the refusal of some Western Christians to condemn the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, and, in some instances, their justification of and support for the occupation.
Further, we are appalled by how some Christians have legitimized Israel’s ongoing indiscriminate attacks on Gaza, which have, so far, claimed the lives of more than 3,700 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children.
These attacks have resulted in the wholesale destruction of entire neighborhoods and the forced displacement of over one million Palestinians.
The Israeli military has utilized tactics that target civilians such as the use of white phosphorus, the cutting off of water, fuel, and electricity, and the bombardment of schools, hospitals, and places of worship—including the heinous massacre at Al-Ahli Anglican-Baptist Hospital and the bombardment of the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius which wiped out entire Palestinian Christian families.
Moreover, we categorically reject the myopic and distorted Christian responses that ignore the wider context and the root causes of this war: Israel’s systemic oppression of the Palestinians over the last 75 years since the Nakba, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the oppressive and racist military occupation that constitutes the crime of apartheid.
This is precisely the horrific context of oppression that many Western Christian theologians and leaders have persistently ignored, and even worse, have occasionally legitimized using a wide range of Zionist theologies and interpretations.
Moreover, Israel’s cruel blockade of Gaza for the last 17 years has turned the 365-square-kilometer Strip into an open-air prison for more than two million Palestinians—70% of whom belong to families displaced during the Nakba—who are denied their basic human rights.
The brutal and hopeless living conditions in Gaza under Israel’s iron fist have regrettably emboldened extreme voices of some Palestinian groups to resort to militancy and violence as a response to oppression and despair.
The brutal and hopeless living conditions in Gaza under Israel’s iron fist have regrettably emboldened extreme voices of some Palestinian groups to resort to militancy and violence as a response to oppression and despair.
Sadly, Palestinian non-violent resistance, which we remain wholeheartedly committed to, is met with rejection, with some Western Christian leaders even prohibiting the discussion of Israeli apartheid as reported by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem, and as long asserted by both Palestinians and South Africans.
Time and again, we are reminded that Western attitudes towards Palestine-Israel suffer from a glaring double standard that humanizes Israeli Jews while insisting on dehumanizing Palestinians and whitewashing their suffering.
This is evident in general attitudes towards the recent Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip that killed thousands of Palestinians, the apathy towards the murder of the Palestinian-American Christian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, and the killing of more than 300 Palestinians including 38 children in the West Bank this year before this recent escalation.
It seems to us that this double standard reflects an entrenched colonial discourse that has weaponized the Bible to justify the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Oceania, and elsewhere, the slavery of Africans and the transatlantic slave trade, and decades of apartheid in South Africa. Colonial theologies are not passé; they continue in wide-ranging Zionist theologies and interpretations that have legitimized the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the vilification and dehumanization of Palestinians—Christians included—living under systemic settler-colonial apartheid.
Further, we are aware of the Western Christian legacy of the Just War Theory that was used to justify dropping atomic bombs on innocent civilians in Japan during World War II the destruction of Iraq, and the decimation of its Christian population during the latest American war on Iraq, as well as the unwavering and uncritical support for Israel against the Palestinians in the name of moral-supremacy and “self-defense.”
Regrettably, many Western Christians across wide denominational and theological spectra adopt Zionist theologies and interpretations that justify war, making them complicit in Israel’s violence and oppression.
Some are also complicit in the rise of anti-Palestinian hate speech, which we are witnessing in numerous Western countries and media outlets today.
Although many Christians in the West do not have a problem with the theological legitimization of war, the vast majority of Palestinian Christians do not condone violence—not even by the powerless and occupied.
Instead, Palestinian Christians are fully committed to the way of Jesus in creative nonviolent resistance (Kairos Palestine, §4.2.3), which uses “the logic of love and draw[s] on all energies to make peace” (§4.2.5).
Crucially, we reject all theologies and interpretations that legitimize the wars of the powerful. We strongly urge Western Christians to come alongside us in this.
We also remind ourselves and fellow Christians that God is the God of the downtrodden and the oppressed and that Jesus rebuked the powerful and lifted up the marginalized. This is at the heart of God’s conception of justice.
Therefore, we are deeply troubled by the failure of some Western Christian leaders and theologians to acknowledge the biblical tradition of justice and mercy, as first proclaimed by Moses (Deut 10:18; 16:18–20; 32:4) and the prophets (Isa 1:17; 61:8; Mic 2:1–3, 6:8; Amos 5:10–24), and as exemplified and embodied in Christ (Matt 25:34–46; Luke 1:51–53; 4:16–21). 37/
Finally, and we say it with a broken heart, we hold Western church leaders and theologians who rally behind Israel’s wars accountable for their theological & political complicity in the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians that have been committed over the last 75 years.
We call upon them to reexamine their positions and to change their direction, remembering that God “will judge the world in justice” (Acts 17:31).
We also remind ourselves and our Palestinian people that our sumud (“steadfastness”) is anchored in our just cause and our historical rootedness in this land.
As Palestinian Christians, we also continue to find our courage and consolation in the God who dwells with those of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa 57:15).
We find courage in the solidarity we receive from the crucified Christ, and we find hope in the empty tomb.
We are also encouraged and empowered by the costly solidarity and support of many churches and grassroots faith movements around the world, challenging the dominance of ideologies of power and supremacy.
We refuse to give in, even when our siblings abandon us. We are steadfast in our hope, resilient in our witness, and continue to be committed to the Gospel of faith, hope, and love, in the face of tyranny and darkness.
“In the absence of all hope, we cry out our cry of hope. We believe in God, good and just. We believe that God’s goodness will finally triumph over the evil of hate and death that still persist in our land.
We will see here ‘a new land’ and ‘a new human being’, capable of rising up in the spirit to love each one of his or her brothers and sisters” (Kairos Palestine, §10).
Your Kingdom come!
Signed Organizations and Institutions:
Kairos Palestine Christ at the Checkpoint Bethlehem Bible College Sabeel Ecumenical Center for Liberation Theology Dar al-Kalima University Al-Liqa Center for Religious, Heritage and Cultural Studies in the Holy Land The East Jerusalem YMCA The YWCA of Palestine Arab Orthodox Society, Jerusalem Arab Orthodox Club, Jerusalem The Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees of the Middle East Council of Churches Arab Education Institute Pax Christi, Bethlehem.
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***
This is a Personal Statement by an IRGC Official and Does Not Necessarily Reflect Official Iranian Policy.
A senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) yesterday warned that Tehran will strike the Israeli port of Haifa if Tel Aviv invades the besieged Gaza Strip.
Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC, Brigadier General Ali Fadavi, said the Palestinian resistance is capable of moving on its own and has sufficient numbers in Gaza. However, if Israel foolishly decided to invade Gaza, Iran “will launch missiles directly toward Haifa”.
Last week, the IRGC said,
“If Israel’s crimes against Gaza do not stop, there will be another shock waiting for them,” adding that “the resistance forces’ shocks will continue against the Zionists, until this cancerous tumour disappears from the world’s map.”
In his Monday address, General Fadavi said:
“If the evil people of the world want to carry out a foolish act such as invading the Palestinian territories, they will face a miserable failure and will receive a decisive response from the resistance front,” according to Mehr Agency.
At the same time, he stressed that Iran does not give weapons and missiles to the Palestinian resistance forces, because they produce their own weapons.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has recently accused Israel of “committing genocide in the Gaza Strip before the world’s eyes.”
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Featured image: Brigadier General Ali Fadavi (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)
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It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of Maurice Patenaude, at the age of 54, on September 26, 2023.
An Air Canada captain, he flew his last flight in December 2022 following a diagnosis of terminal renal cell carcinoma. He fought this dreadful illness valiantly and tenaciously, characteristic of his indomitable spirit.
A career pilot, Maurice was very much appreciated and respected by all; it was with the Canadian Air Force reserves and Air Canada that he was able to fulfill his passion, flying.
He is mourned by his new bride, his family, his friends, his aviation colleagues and all who crossed paths with him.
His decision to leave his body to medical research reflects his wish to contribute to the battle against cancer. Respectful of his wishes there will be no traditional funeral but rather a celebration of life, details to be announced.
In this period of mourning, we thank the staff of the Medical Surgical Intensive Care unit of the Toronto General and his oncologist Dr. Fallah-Rad.
Dear Mo, rest in peace, you are in our hearts forever.
His family
Pilot Incapacitations and Deaths in August-September 2023
Sep. 24, 2023 – Austrian Airlines Flight OS-188 (STR-VIE) Stuttgart to Vienna The captain became incapacitated, first officer took control of aircraft
Sep. 23, 2023 – Alaska Airlines Pilot – 37 year old Captain Eric McRae died suddenly in his hotel room during layover, was to fly that morning
Sep. 22, 2023 – Delta Flight DL-291 (CDG-LAX) Paris to Los Angeles – Pilot became incapacitated, was taken to cabin for care, plane diverted to Minneapolis, pilot taken to hospital
Aug. 27, 2023 – Air Canada Flight AC348 (YVR-YOW) Vancouver to Ottawa, one of the pilots felt ill and became incapacitated 50 min before landing in Ottawa.
Aug. 17, 2023 – IndiGo Flight (NAG-PNQ) Nagpur to Pune, India, pilot 40 year old Manoj Subramanium died after collapsing at the boarding gate, about to board.
Aug. 16, 2023 – Qatar Airways Flight QR579 (DEL-DOH) Delhi to Doha, Qatar, 51 year old pilot collapsed as a passenger inflight and died, plane diverted to Dubai.
Aug. 14, 2023 – LATAM Flight LA505 (MIA-SCL) Miami to Santiago, Chile – 2 hours into 8hr flight, 56 year old Captain Ivan Andaur collapsed and died in the lavatory – plane diverted to Panama City!
Aug. 9, 2023 – United Airlines UAL1309 (SRQ-EWR) Sarasota to Newark, pilot had a heart attack and lost consciousness in flight
Aug. 7, 2023 – TigerAIR Flight IT237 (CTS-TPE) Sapporo to Taipei, copilot had a medical emergency after landing plane in Taipei
Pilot Incapacitations and Deaths January-July 2023
July 19, 2023 – Eurowings Discover Flight 4Y-1205 (HER-FRA) Heraklion to Frankfurt, pilot incapacitated, first officer took control, landed safely
June 7, 2023 – Air Canada Flight ACA692 (YYZ-YYT) Toronto to St.John’s, First Officer became incapacitated, deadheading Captain assumed duties
June 4, 2023 – Cessna Citation N611VG flying Tennessee to Long Island, fighter jets spotted pilot slumped over in cockpit unconscious, plane crashed and all onboard died
May 11, 2023 – HiSKy Flight H4474 (DUB-KIV) Dublin to Chisinau (Moldova), 20 min after liftoff pilot became “unable to act”, plane diverted to Manchester
May 4, 2023 – British Charter TUI Airways Flight BY-1424 (NCL-LPA) Newcastle to Las Palmas Spain pilot became ill, plane diverted back to NCL.
April 21, 2023 – Easyjet Flight U2-6469 (LGW-AGA) London Gatwick to Agadir, Morocco, first offer became incapacitated, diverted to Faro, Portugal.
April 4, 2023 – United Airlines Flight 2102 (BOI-SFO) – captain was incapacitated, first officer was only one in control of the aircraft.
March 25, 2023 – TAROM Flight RO-7673 TSR-HRG diverted to Bucharest as 30 yo pilot had chest pain, then collapsed
March 22, 2023 – Southwest Flight WN6013 LAS-CMH diverted as pilot collapsed shortly after take-off, replaced by non-Southwest pilot
March 18, 2023 – Air Transat Flight TS739 FDF-YUL first officer was incapacitated about 200NM south of Montreal
March 13, 2023 – Emirates Flight EK205 MXP-JFK diverted due to pilot illness hour and a half after take-off
March 11, 2023 – United Airlines Flight UA2007 GUA-ORD diverted due to “incapacitated pilot” who had chest pains
March 3, 2023 – Virgin Australia Flight VA-717 ADL-PER Adelaide to Perth flight was forced to make an emergency landing after First Officer suffered heart attack 30 min after departure.
Military Pilot Incapacitations
Aug. 18, 2023 – US Army Aviation Center (Alabama) student pilot went into cardiac arrest behind the controls midflight (Aug.18, 2023), Instructor landed plane – pilot was dead for 18 minutes!
Recent Pilot Deaths
Pilot death – July 16, 2023 – 2006 Piper Meridian, flying from Westchester NY, crashed at Martha’s Vineyard Airport after pilot had medical emergency upon final approach and passenger took control of the plane and attempted a landing. Pilot, 79 year old Randolph Bonnist, died later in hospital.
Pilot death – March 11, 2023 – British Airways (CAI-LHR) pilot died of heart attack in crew hotel in Cairo before a Cairo to London flight (name & age not released)
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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
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***
President Joe Biden announced last week that the United States would be funding – and possibly fighting – three wars in three different parts of the world at the same time. It is an ambitious foreign policy for a president who doesn’t even seem to be able to express a coherent thought without the help of a teleprompter.
Nearly every word of Biden’s speech was untrue, including the preposterous suggestion that “American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe.”
US interventionism in Ukraine for over ten years and in the Middle East for decades has brought those two regions to the brink of an explosion unlike anything seen before. And if that is not enough, Biden’s neocons are also determined to take us to war with China over Taiwan. The world is literally falling apart in front of us as Biden claims we are the only thing holding it together!
After a brutal attack on Israel by Hamas earlier this month, Israel declared war not just on the terrorists who attacked its territory, but on the entire population of Gaza itself. Israel’s policy of collective punishment – razing Gaza to the ground – has inflamed Muslims from the Middle East to Asia to Western capitals. The anger rages more fiercely than we have seen in decades, perhaps since the founding of Israel in 1948.
Yet instead of trying to help facilitate a ceasefire and a peaceful solution, Biden has poured gasoline onto the fire, sending two US carrier groups and at least 15,000 troops, while threatening war on Lebanon, Iran, and Syria if they intervene in Israel’s war on the Palestinians. What might Russia do if the US attacks Russian forces in Syria or Russia’s allies in Tehran?
Biden also repeated the line that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” While that may be true, it is not Israel defending itself. It’s the US government intervening to defend Israel. And as the entire Muslim world rages against Israel over the destruction of Gaza, how do we think they will feel about us as the financiers and facilitators of that destruction?
By dragging the United States into this war, President Biden has planted the seeds of innumerable 9/11-style blowback attacks on the US. Yet he has the audacity to claim that all of this is keeping us safe.
Recent polls show that most Americans disagree with Biden. A CBS/YouGov poll taken last week shows that the majority of Americans oppose sending weapons to Israel. His Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assured us that “we can afford” to finance two wars because the US economy is doing “exceptionally well.” Maybe the American people know something Yellen and the elites do not.
As Biden demands another $105 billion to fund the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Taiwan, his speech seemed to have a touch of campaign rhetoric in it.
“I’m told I was the first American [president] to enter a warzone not controlled by the United States military since President Lincoln,” he said in his speech.
The statement is blatantly false, but he must believe it gives him an air of bravado.
They say that it is advantageous to be seen as a “wartime president” when elections roll around, but Joe Biden may have miscalculated the level of support he will get for being a “World-War-Three-time president.”
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***
The prognosis of “war fatigue” on the part of the United States and its allies in the proxy war in Ukraine was greatly exaggerated. On the contrary, the war is acquiring a new swagger.
The Biden Administration is riding a tiger and a dismount is fraught with the danger of being devoured by the beastly consequences of defeat in the war, which could only lead to the discredit of trans-atlanticism and the disintegration of NATO, and spell the doom for US’ global hegemony.
Biden’s formal address to the nation from the Oval Office on Thursday can only be seen as the launch of a new phase of the Ukraine war carrying forward the the demonising of Putin to a new level, Biden weaves together a new narrative claiming that Hamas and the Russian leader both want to “completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy — completely annihilate it.”
The bedrock of Biden’s argument was that resolute support of US allies is essential for preserving American primacy in the world. The main plot was that the hybrid war in Ukraine will continue so long as Biden remains in office in the White House. It has morphed into a “forever war”. Biden called Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky before making his speech.
Analysts would have us believe that Europe is increasingly disenchanted with the war. But Poland, a major frontline state, has just voted to power a centrist government that is cause for celebration in Kiev (and Washington). In Britain too, a similar outcome is to be expected — only that it will be Tweedledum replacing Tweedledee, two rotund little men of the Deep State who are identical except that they are left-right reversals of each other.
Make no mistake that the Joint Statement after the US-EU summit in Washington on October 20 amounts to a resounding victory for the Biden Administration as the EU agreed with the US on “unwavering” military support to Ukraine; demand that Russia should “end its brutal war and withdraw its military forces and proxies and military equipment immediately, completely, and unconditionally from the entire internationally recognised territory of Ukraine”; the imperative of restoration of “internationally recognised borders” in any peace settlement; forcing Russia to “bear the legal consequences of all its internationally wrongful acts” against Ukraine; further deepening of “joint work to undermine Russia’s ability to wage its war, and maintain and expand its defence industrial base and capacity”, and so on.
There is no sign of a potential wobbling in the steadfastness of Europe’s military support to Ukraine, either. The most recent example is Sweden where, as in other Nordic countries and across the Baltic states, geographical proximity to Russia has heightened security fears, and there is little sign of any wavering.
Politico reported on Tuesday that Sweden’s Defense Minister Pål Jonson had instructed the country’s military leadership to examine the potential impact of providing various types of support to Ukraine’s fighter-jet capability, including Gripen planes. The military is to report back to Jonson by November 6. This followed announcements by Sweden’s European neighbours Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands that they planned to send Lockheed Martin F-16 jets to Kiev.
The expert opinion is that even a limited number of Gripen could meaningfully help Ukraine’s efforts to control its airspace, and is seen as relatively cheap and easy to maintain jet that can operate from shorter, narrower runways, including improvised landing strips on straight stretches of highways, thus reducing the risk of aircraft congregating at a larger base and being destroyed by a single enemy attack.
As for the US, now we know that the Biden Administration was dissimulating as regards the ATACMS missiles, whereas, it had already surreptitiously equipped Kiev’s forces with that system. Furthermore, encouraged by the success of Kiev’s devastating attack on the Russian-controlled airfield attacks in Beryansk and Luhansk on Tuesday by using ATACMS (which reportedly destroyed multiple Russian helicopters, an ammunition dump, and an air defence system), the Biden Administration is now considering supply of an advanced version of the missile that can fire twice (190 miles) as far as the ones Ukraine just received (100 miles only).
Certainly, there is no weakening of Biden’s resolve. In fact, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan brazenly disclosed on Friday in a special White House briefing that Washington has “contracted for certain types of weapons systems that have yet to be delivered because they’re still in production.” Plainly out, the Biden Administration considers it possible to hand over weapons and military vehicles to Ukraine that have never been shipped before.
“The President has the discretion based on circumstances of the conflict, the situation on the ground, consultations with allies to make determinations about whether he will provide weapons systems to Ukraine that we have not previously provided,” Sullivan noted. He then went on to explain that the US has “contracted for certain types of weapons systems that have yet to be delivered because they’re still in production. We expect them to be delivered in the coming months.”
Yet another flawed assumption has been that within the US Congress, a groundswell of opinion is building that would make it increasingly difficult for the Biden Administration to get approval for military aid to Ukraine in an election year. But, as luck would have it, Biden, who is an immensely experienced politician in navigating challenging legislations, has found an ingenious way.
Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy put it nicely,
“They’re intentionally combining the debates around Ukraine, Israel, & our border to ram through the $61BN for Ukraine that otherwise would have never passed.”
According to White House documents, the request for the fiscal year 2024 proposes to allocate over $61.4 billion for Ukraine and over $14.3 billion for Israel.
Sullivan called the Biden administration’s latest budget request as coming “amid a global inflection point” following the Hamas attack on Israel “and as the people of Ukraine continue to fight every day for their freedom and independence against Russian brutality.” He turned the focus on Biden’s new narrative that “the outcome of these fights for democracy against terrorism and tyranny are vital to the safety and security of the American people.”
Who can say now that what happens in Ukraine, which is 10000 kms away, does not concern the United States?Biden began his speech on Thursday on a Churchillian note:
“We’re facing an inflection point in history — one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come. That’s what I’d like to talk with you about tonight.”
He went on to say,
“American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.”
So, Ukraine war is no longer about the Westphalian principle of national sovereignty and the UN Charter — or even about this being not an era of wars. It is actually about American leadership, American alliances, American values — plainly put, hegemony, NATO, exceptionalism.
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Featured image: President Joe Biden travels to Kyiv, Ukraine Monday, February 20, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
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***
Mobilisation reserves in Ukraine have been emptied while the military calls for troop rotation at the front, which cannot be done, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said on his Telegram channel on October 23. This is unsurprising as Ukraine has been illegally mobilising men since at least January, demonstrating the alarming lack of manpower the country has, an issue even well before the failed so-called “Spring Offensive,” which actually began in early June.
“The mobilisation in Ukraine has turned into a real nightmare for the Ukrainians […] Ukraine’s reserves have been emptied, while at the front, the military is asking for a rotation [of troops], which cannot be done due to lack of personnel in the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” said the former Ukrainian Prime Minister.
According to Azarov’s publication, recruitment centres began attracting former prisoners to “capture” as much of the population as possible because the mobilisation resource was exhausted, and many people fled the country in any way possible.
“Thus, as long as the Ukrainian authorities use force against their own people, there will be fewer and fewer supporters in the country, and fewer volunteers will appear in the ranks of the Ukrainian forces,” the former Ukrainian prime minister added.
“This means that with such sentiments in society, Ukraine has a catastrophically low chance of holding its own,” Azarov concluded.
Earlier, a spokesperson of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said that the mobilisation potential of Ukraine still allows additional recruitment of men of military age without changing the legislation. Ukraine has been under martial law since February 24, 2022, and the next day, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree on general mobilisation, and thus, male citizens aged 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving Ukraine’s borders. In fact, the legislation is so draconian that Ukrainian men face prison sentences of up to five years for evading military service during mobilisation.
However, even the few provisions within the draconian legislation are being violated, such as the procedure for delivering summonses – a written document issued in the name of a specific person – for conscription. The summons must be prepared in advance, and if issued correctly, the conscript must appear before the relevant state body responsible for mobilisation. According to the law, summonses cannot be delivered by messenger, text, phone, or e-mail, and they cannot be filled out in front of the person to whom it is handed. If the summons is issued incorrectly, the conscript does not have to appear for mobilisation.
Yet, in Ukraine, these few provisions in the legislation are being violated on a mass scale.
One such case occurred in January 2023 in Odessa, when military recruiters hid inside an ambulance, and when they saw men of military age, they jumped out onto the street, handed out summons and forcibly dragged those who resisted into the ambulance. A month later, in Ternopil, military recruiters grabbed men at a bus station and forced them into the bus. Then, on March 20, a video appeared in which a taxi driver in Odessa expressed “insufficiently patriotic thoughts”, but two days later, he was reportedly “found and drafted into the army.”
These are just three examples of countless Ukrainians being literally dragged off the streets to fight in a war they have no interest in being involved in. This is also a major contributing reason to the utter failure of the so-called “spring offensive.” These forcibly conscripted men became the “cannon fodder” we heard about over the summer because they naturally had low morale and lacked military training.
In addition, many men are motivated to join the Ukrainian military just because it is one of the few secure sources of income, no matter how meagre it is, due to the destroyed economy. However, many of these men end up dead, become incapacitated due to injury, or do their best to avoid conflict to preserve their lives.
It is recalled that Ukrainian investigators detained Yevhen Borisov on charges of illegal enrichment, dereliction of duty, and evading military service in July. Borisov was fired as the military commissioner of the Odessa region in June after investigative reports found he and family members had bought property in Spain along with luxury automobiles worth $4 million, money he attained from taking bribes for exemptions, among other reasons.
In this way, Ukraine does not only have the problem of empty reserves, as highlighted by Azarov, but deep corruption that means many military-age men can avoid conscription, so long as they can pay the bribe, whilst poor Ukrainian men, which today forms most of the male population, are literally dragged off the streets to participate in a futile war against Russia, which they know they cannot win.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
October 24th, 2023 by Center for Constitutional Rights
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As President Biden visited Israel, and the Palestinian death toll in Gaza passed 3,300, the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights released a legal and factual analysis of Israel’s unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people and U.S. complicity. The emergency briefing paper came on the heels of the U.S. veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning both Hamas’s attack on Israel and all violence against civilians and calling for humanitarian access to Gaza.
The Center for Constitutional Rights produced this legal analysis in the midst of a situation still unfolding with devastating speed, in response to questions from journalists, activists, and within the legal community. This analysis is necessarily incomplete. However, given the proclamations about the trajectory and intensity of the upcoming Israeli ground invasion and bombing of Gaza, we fear the unfolding genocide will not abate and may well intensify.
The Center for Constitutional Rights recognizes that Palestinians and Palestinian human rights organizations have long warned of the likelihood of genocide being the inevitable frame through which to assess the widespread and systematic violations being committed against their people across the occupied Palestinian territory, and urged States to take action before it advanced.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has escalated its 16-year closure over 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza where approximately half the population is under 18, indiscriminately and repeatedly bombing civilians while cutting off access to all basic necessities, including food, water, electricity, and medical supplies, and on October 13 ordered a forced “evacuation” of 1.1 million Palestinians out of northern Gaza.
As this briefing paper was being finalized on the evening of October 17, 2023, there were an estimated 500 fatalities following a reported Israeli airstrike at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City where many were seeking shelter. Excluding those killed at Al-Ahli Hospital, as of October 17, 2023, the Palestinian Ministry of Health had confirmed that 3,000 Palestinians had already been killed, including at least 1,030 children and hundreds of family units; in 11 days, more than 12,500 people had been injured, one million Palestinians displaced, and thousands of homes destroyed, with reports of 1,200 missing people believed to be trapped under the rubble. As set forth in the paper in both the detailed factual overview and the findings, there is clear evidence that Israel is attempting to commit, if not actively committing, genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, and specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The gravest of crimes under international law, genocide refers to specific actions — such as killing or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part — taken with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, the group targeted, including on ethnic or national grounds.
The United States has been obligated, from the instant of learning of the serious risk of genocide of the Palestinian people, to exercise its influence on Israel to prevent the crime. The United States is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza rise to the level of complicity. The United States — and U.S. citizens, including and up to the President — can be held responsible for their role in furthering genocide.
We credit and honor Palestinian organizations such as Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Defense for Children International-Palestine, and Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and many others, for their tireless work under dangerous and unimaginably difficult conditions to gather information included in this paper and for their analysis of the human rights violations and crimes being committed by Israel and its officials. We also honor the people of Gaza who, despite being under constant bombardment with dwindling access to electricity, have nevertheless written, tweeted, posted, made calls, or otherwise reported on the Israeli assault, including when it has wiped out their own families.
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The US is using the conflict in the Middle East as a justification to increase its military presence in the region. Amid the escalations in the Palestine War, Washington is sending more and more weapons to “protect” Israel and “deter” Iran, which creates a wave of serious tension and increases the risk of internationalization of hostilities.
In a statement on October 21, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated that his country is sending additional weapons and troops to several sites in the Middle East due to the crisis in Palestine. Notably, he said he had “activated the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery as well as additional Patriot battalions.” Lloyd also demanded troops who are part of a “prudent contingency planning” to “increase their readiness and ability to quickly respond as required.”
The range of THAAD systems is around 200km, and they are designed to neutralize various types of missiles. In the same sense, the Patriot system, recently used on the Ukrainian battlefield, has a range of around 160km, being designed to target missiles, drones and military aircraft. It has not been said exactly where the systems will be deployed, but it is known that the objective is to place them in strategic positions that will help protect the territory occupied by Israel against possible air raids by Iran and the Axis of Resistance.
The American secretary justifies his measures with the supposed “escalations by Iran and its proxy forces”, without specifying exactly which moves by Tehran he is referring to. It is well known that Iran has reacted to Israeli actions in Palestine and promised responses if Tel Aviv’s war crimes continue to occur in Gaza, however, so far, no escalatory action has actually been taken by the Persian country. As for Iranian proxies, only Hezbollah is de facto involved in the hostilities, but without troop attrition on the ground so far.
“Following detailed discussions with President Biden on recent escalations by Iran and its proxy forces across the Middle East Region, today I directed a series of additional steps to further strengthen the Department of Defense posture in the region. These steps will bolster regional deterrence efforts, increase force protection for U.S. forces in the region, and assist in the defense of Israel (…) I will continue to assess our force posture requirements in the region and consider deploying additional capabilities as necessary”, Lloyd said.
In fact, regardless of how these new reinforcements help Israel, all American actions seem useless in “deterring” Iran as long as Israel does not change its attitude in Palestine. The crimes of the Zionist State against the Palestinian people increasingly appear to be a red line for almost the entire Islamic world, and it is not possible to guarantee that the mere presence of American weapons and troops in the region will be enough to dissuade Tel Aviv’s rivals from advancing.
This is not the first measure of support for Israel taken by the US. Previously, two aircraft carriers had already been sent to the region. CNN also confirmed that the Pentagon is deploying 2,000 Marines and sailors to Israel to deter Hezbollah. Furthermore, Biden made a statement to the American people calling for support for the approval of new billion-dollar military aid packages for Israel, making it clear that American policy in the conflict will be one of full and unrestricted support for the Zionist regime, regardless of the crimes committed against the Palestinian population.
And, even with so many US’ threats, the stance of Israel’s rivals remains clear. They demand an immediate end to the aggression against Palestine and several armed groups call for direct intervention in the event of a ground invasion in Gaza. In this scenario, the IOF would have great difficulty in maintaining the combat effectively, as they would be forced to fight on multiple fronts – in addition to facing a kind of “Vietnam scenario” in Gaza. Therefore, Tel Aviv continues to try to avoid the invasion, focusing only on bombings that massively kill civilians.
If the Axis of Resistance has not been intimidated so far, it certainly will not be intimidated by the arrival of more American military aid to Israel. Since the Zionist State is a representative of American interests in the Middle East, obviously Iran “and its proxies” are fully aware that any intervention against Israel will face strong American support for the Zionist State. But such is the relevance of Palestine to the Islamic world that despite all the difficulties, they seem really willing to face the risks and engage in prolonged conflicts – which would be disastrous for both Israel and the US.
To truly avoid intervention by the Axis of Resistance and prevent the conflict from becoming a multi-flank war against Israel, the US should convince Tel Aviv to stop attacking Palestine. Sending weapons and troops will only worsen tensions.
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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
Featured image: THAAD system (Source: New Eastern Outlook)
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Regarding the court case underway in Ottawa against key people involved in the Freedom Convoy, why is the defence team not using the ever-increasing medical evidence that the injections of so-called vaccines were, and are, causing a rate of injuries and deaths that far outweigh any known benefit from the roll-out of the injections?
For example, all populations that have been subjected to the injections have recorded an alarming jump in the death rate that coincided with the start of the injections, and the magnitude of the increase in local populations correlates with the percentage of that population that was injected.
Further, to date, the death rate remains significantly higher than the historical, pre-roll-out death rate. The medical evidence is also showing correlations between the roll-outs and the jumps in such ailments as myocarditis, pericarditis, cancers, disrupted menstruations, miscarriages, and stillbirths.
Given these serious health impacts being caused by the injections, the mandates to coerce injections were an egregious attack on the health, safety, and well-being of all Canadians.
Hence, participants and supporters of the Freedom Convoy were more than justified to strenuously object to mandates which penalized persons who declined to receive the injections. The Freedom Convoy and its organizers deserve to be thanked for their stand against the mandates.
And thank you too to the citizens of Ottawa who were inconvenienced by the Convoy’s efforts on behalf of all Canadians.
The Democracy Fund is crowd-funding the court case.
I call upon every reader of this article to forward it to your loved ones and contact lists, and all of us contact the Democracy Fund with an urgent request that the defence lawyers present the medical evidence to the court in defence of the Freedom Convoy and its organizers.
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Featured image: Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber wait for the Public Order Emergency Commission to begin, on Nov. 1, 2022 in Ottawa. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)
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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Western politicians and media act as if they are caught in a permanent spell, sympathetically indulging even the most wildly improbable denials from Israel that it has committed war crimes.
As Lenin famously observed: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”.
We can go further. It never matters how often Israel is caught out in a lie, because its next lie will be given the benefit of the doubt. Western media refuse to learn from the past.
The Israeli military has a long track record of compulsively concocting face-saving falsehoods – disinformation that vilifies the very Palestinian people it has oppressed for decades.
The latest example came a few days ago.
Israel vigorously kicked up dust to obscure its responsibility for hitting the al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza City last Tuesday, killing many hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in its grounds. Faced with Israel’s relentless campaign of bombing, families had assumed they would be safest close to a Christian institution.
Drawing on previous experience, Israel rightly assumes that by the time the dust settles – and the truth emerges – the world will have moved on. The lie will stand.
Context Stripped Out
Israel’s job is made considerably easier by the media, whose coverage of Israeli atrocities can invariably be depended on to strip out relevant context.
As Israel began pummelling Gaza more than two weeks ago with thousands of high-explosive bombs, its leaders clarified exactly what their intent was.
Referring to the people of Gaza as “human animals”, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything”. An Israeli military official explained that the “emphasis is on damage, not accuracy”. Another said Gaza would be reduced to “a city of tents… There will be no buildings.”
Meanwhile, President Isaac Herzog accused the entire people of Gaza of being responsible for the Hamas attack, effectively denying every man, woman and child their civilian status and designating them all terrorists. He added: “We will break their backbone.”
President Isaac Herzog is considered one of the more 'leftwing' political figures in Israel. Here he is rewriting international law by engaging in openly genocidal rhetoric against the Palestinians in Gaza:
Israel has demanded that Palestinians leave the northern half of the tiny Gaza Strip, requiring them to ethnically cleanse themselves. It has indicated that the vacated area will be treated as a free-fire zone.
According to the United Nations, in less than two weeks, a quarter of Gaza’s homes have been turned to rubble, and 600,000 Palestinians left homeless.
❗ 25% of homes in #Gaza reported damaged or destroyed ❗ 59 attacks on healthcare (including Al Ahli Hospital) ❗ 170 education facilities hit ❗ Water and sanitation facilities severely damaged
To ensure Palestinians do as they are told, Israel has targeted the support structures and major institutions in northern Gaza that ordinary people depend on. Mosques, schools, United Nations compounds and hospitals have been hit.
In the days leading up to the attack on al-Ahli hospital, 23 other medical centres in northern Gaza received warnings to evacuate immediately. Dozens have been hit, according to the World Health Organisation.
Those threats were ignored because the hospitals are already overflowing with patients too injured from Israel’s bombardments to be moved, and because there are no facilities to treat them elsewhere.
Apparently angered by this defiance, Israel hit al-Ahli hospital with two shells three days before the larger strike. This is known by the Israeli military as its “knock on the roof” procedure: firing a small weapon at a building as advance warning to evacuate before a much bigger strike.
Gaslighting Operation
Israel had told us precisely what it was going to do. But when it then did it, Israel began its now familiar gaslighting operation. It denied it was the guilty party, accusing a Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad, of the war crime instead.
Israel’s claim was ridiculous. On a video of the actual strike, you can hear the loud whistling sound of an incoming, high-velocity missile or shell moments before it explodes. Palestinian groups in Gaza have only primitive rockets that lumber through the sky. If one fails, it tumbles at free-fall speed, not at near-supersonic velocity.
The casualty rate alone proved it had to be an Israeli missile. No Palestinian rocket has ever killed more than a handful of people, not hundreds as this one did.
But Israel was ready with a campaign of lies and disinformation.
Embarrassingly, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had issued a social media post celebrating Israel hitting a supposed “terrorist base” in the hospital. The post was hurriedly deleted.
Instead, Israel issued footage of a Palestinian rocket falling nearby. However, Israel had to pull the video, too, when journalists noticed the time stamp was 40 minutes after the explosion at Al-Ahli.
Next, Israel produced a laughably inept audio recording supposedly of two Hamas fighters chatting – in the wrong dialect – about whether they or their rivals in Islamic Jihad had fired the stray rocket.
Israel runs a “mistaravim” unit of Israelis who disguise themselves as Palestinians to operate undercover in Palestinian communities. It also famously operates networks of Palestinian collaborators whom it threatens or bribes. Faking an audio would be child’s play for Israel.
In any case, in the recording the pair cited a cemetery close to the hospital as the site of their supposed failed rocket launch. But that contradicted other Israeli military claims that the rocket had been fired from an entirely different location.
At the weekend, Forensic Architecture, a research team based at the University of London, issued their preliminary findings.
Preliminary analysis by FA, @alhaq_org & @earshot_ngo into the #AlAhli hospital blast in Gaza casts significant doubt on IOF claims that the source of the deadly explosion was a Palestinian-fired rocket travelling west to east. pic.twitter.com/PtYtP9l81j
Analysis of the site showed, both from the pattern of damage caused by the strike and changes in the sound signature of the projectile as it moved through the air, that its trajectory was from Israel into Gaza, not out of Gaza. Other analysis indicated that the audio file of the two Hamas operatives talking had been manipulated.
Israel’s disinformation skills looked almost as amateur as its much-vaunted intelligence operations, which failed to spot months of planning by Hamas for its breakout on 7 October.
Seed of Doubt
The goal here, as ever, was not to produce evidence but to win the propaganda battle through misdirection, planting a seed of doubt that western politicians and media could then exploit to cloud the issue for their publics.
Instead of giving the victims proper attention, instead of finally galvanising anger over Israel’s wanton killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in two weeks, the media’s reporting reverted to a predictable formula. It weighed claim and counter-claim over the hospital strike, it carried profiles about Islamic Jihad, and – most importantly for Israel – it adopted a wait-and-see, don’t-rush-to-judgment approach.
A moment that might have led to concerted diplomatic pressure on Israel to stop its rampage and negotiate a ceasefire dissolved into a round of bickering in which the hospital victims entirely disappeared from view.
By the time outside observers get into Gaza and carry out forensic tests, assuming they can, the story will be cold. No one will care, and Israel will not be held to account – morally, diplomatically or legally.
This is all too familiar to anyone who has followed decades of the media’s endlessly forgiving coverage, when it matters, of Israel’s occupation and illegal colonisation of the Palestinians’ historic homeland.
The fog that instantly enveloped the al-Ahlihospital story was a repeat – if on a far bigger scale – of what happened last summer when five Palestinian teenagers were killed in an air strike on Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp.
As with the hospital massacre, Israel immediately denied it was responsible, saying it had not carried out air strikes on Jabaliya at the time. It blamed Islamic Jihad for a rocket misfire.
“We have videos that prove beyond doubt that this is not an Israeli attack,” an Israeli official confidently asserted. Oded Bassuk, head of the army’s operations directorate, called the children’s deaths “a self-inflicted injury. We could see the rocket hit a Palestinian home.”
As with the hospital story, the military released video footage purporting to show the misfired rocket.
But it was all deceit. Later, when the story had moved on, the Israeli army quietly admitted that it was responsible for killing the children.
Boys on the Beach
The murder of children by Israel is not an unusual occurrence. But it is also when Israel can be expected to concoct its biggest falsehoods – for the obvious reason that the killing of children is when the world briefly wakes up to Palestinian suffering before turning off again.
As with the hospital strike, a potentially pivotal moment arrived in 2014 during another of Israel’s repeated rampages in Gaza. A series of Israeli strikes killed four young boys from the Bakr family who were playing football on a beach.
At the time, Israel claimed that the children had been killed accidentally, because they strayed into a seafront “compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilised exclusively by militants”.
Israel’s claim, which gained amplification in the media, was that the boys were collateral damage in a drone strike on Palestinian militants.
Unfortunately for Israel, this was easily disproved. Several western journalists, who in those days dared to venture into Gaza, witnessed the strike because the beach was next to their hotel. The idea that Hamas militants would locate themselves on a beach next to a hotel known for hosting western journalists was patently absurd from the off.
Those journalists confirmed that there were no militants in the area at the time, and that the boys should have been visible as children to the drone operators.
Reporters noted that the beach was regularly used by fishermen and families for bathing. An investigation of a small shipping container, which had been destroyed by an Israeli missile the day before, also failed to support Israel’s claim that military equipment was stored there.
A later investigation found that the drone operators had fired without taking care to distinguish between the children and militants.
None of that mattered. Israel’s massacre of the children was forgotten. With no pressure on it, Israel’s reliably supine supreme court ruled last year that no further investigation was necessary. Case closed.
Executed by Sniper
Perhaps the best-known recent disinformation campaign by Israel occurred 18 months ago, over the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
Her murder, while wearing a flak jacket emblazoned with “Press” during an Israeli invasion of the West Bank city of Jenin, caused a wave of international indignation.
It was a particularly high-stakes moment for Israel. The media took an unusual degree of interest because Abu Akhleh was a prominent journalist who had worked with many of those reporting on her killing. She also held American citizenship.
Again, Israel blamed Palestinians for the death of one of their own. They produced a video that purported to show an exchange of fire with Palestinian gunmen close to where Abu Akleh was standing when she was shot in the head.
Major US media carried out their own investigations showing Israel had lied. There was no gunfight near Abu Akleh’s location. The most likely explanation was that an Israeli sniper decided to execute her, aiming for the narrow area of exposed flesh between her helmet and flak jacket collar.
Belatedly, with the story refusing to go away, Israel admitted one of its soldiers was most likely responsible for her killing.
Israel doesn’t just actively lie when its army murders. One of its most cynical deceptions arrived in 2021 when it designated six respected Palestinian human rights and welfare groups in the West Bank as “terrorist organisations”.
It demanded that the European Union immediately stop funding them. Their offices were raided, with equipment confiscated and smashed, and their doors sealed. Staff were arrested.
Israel’s aim was obvious: to shut down organisations that provide support structures for ordinary Palestinians and advocate in international forums for the Palestinian cause by documenting Israeli crimes. That has been especially important when cash-strapped foreign media have been shutting down their own bureaux in the region.
The lie was so outrageous that even some usually receptive media outlets had trouble swallowing it. Many months later, leaks of a highly classified CIA report revealed that the Israeli accusations were entirely without foundation.
Culture of Lying
The list of these deceptions and disinformation campaigns just goes on and on.
Look up the names Muhammad al-Durrah, Rachel Corrie, James Miller, Tom Hurndall, Iain Hook. Israel dissembled over all these high-profile murders carried out by its soldiers.
Even cursory research shows Israel lying about its use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in 2006, as well as its mass killing of civilians in the Lebanese village of Qana in the same war – exactly 20 years after it had earlier lied about its responsibility for killing more than 100 civilians in a United Nations compound in the same village.
Israel lied about its oversight of the mass killing of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982 by its Christian Phalangist allies.
None of this should surprise. The culture of lying has prevailed since before Israel’s creation in 1948. From its inception, the Zionist movement promoted the lie that Palestine was an empty land.
To perpetuate this foundational myth, Israel lied about its wholescale ethnic cleansing operations in 1948 – one in the north was called Operation Broom– that forced out some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and drove them into refugee camps. It falsely claimed they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab states.
It hid archival evidence of massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out by its forces, such as at Tantura and Dawayimah, and smeared anyone who tried to draw attention to them.
Equally, it lied that it offered the refugees a chance to return.
And it destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages to stop the refugees from coming back to their homes – and then sought to conceal these crimes by planting forests in their place.
Edifice of Lies
Armies end up lying in times of war because inevitably they commit crimes they wish to conceal.
The difference with Israel is that its lies are integral to its decades-long existence as a state dispossessing and colonising another people’s homeland. It must mask its system of apartheid and the crimes that inhere in such regimes of privilege and subjugation.
Israel is at permanent war with the Palestinians and the wider region, so it must lie compulsively and continuously. Each lie builds on the earlier ones. Should one fall, the whole edifice risks crumbling.
Which is what makes untangling those lies such a difficult and thankless task.
Having to engage in protracted forensic battles against Israel and its many apologists to expose every single lie draws attention away from Israel’s even bigger deceptions. It obscures the context.
Fighting to hold Israel to account for killing hundreds at al-Ahli hospital comes at the price of shifting the focus away from the fact that Israel is actively carrying out an ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza and committing genocide against the Palestinian people there.
To struggle against one lie is to leave other lies – often lies of omission – free to worm their way into the public’s consciousness.
These difficulties are compounded by the media’s willingness to indulge and collude in Israel’s disinformation – as it has been doing since the creation of a self-declared Jewish state – because Israel is such an important strategic asset. As a reliable ally, it was intended to project western power into the oil-rich Middle East.
Those who seek to bring light to a subject immersed in so much darkness find themselves smeared as antisemites – as though solidarity with Palestinian suffering could only ever be motivated by hatred of Jews.
Which is why Israel can live with the bickering over who hit the al-Ahli hospital. Because the storm will soon pass, and the Palestinian victims will still be dead.
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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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