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An Israeli cabinet meeting devolved into a bitter argument Friday in the wake of the IDF chief announcing plans to launch an inquiry into the military’s failure to respond to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.
Several ministers lambasted IDF Chief-of-Staff Herzl Halevi during a discussion on “the day after” the Gaza War over plans for the IDF to form an investigatory team to probe the security lapses surrounding Hamas’ deadly incursion into Israel.
At issue was opposition to an IDF plan for an internal investigatory committee that would include former Defense Minister and former IDF Chief-of-Staff Shaul Mofaz, IDF intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash and former IDF southern command chief Sami Turgeman.
The committee would be tasked with investigating the military failures that contributed to the Hamas-led October 7 attack, in which over 1.200 people were killed and another 250 were taken hostage.
The results of the committee were intended for internal use, to immediately improve flaws in IDF operations moving forward, and were not expected to constitute a formal investigatory committee.
“This is our professional review – not about policy, but how the IDF acted,” Halevi said.
“Something happened here that the army should learn from. Tomorrow if an incident happens in another sector we want to understand what caused the failure in the chain of command. This is an operational investigation that has implications for the fighting in the north.”
Critics of the IDF investigation plans included allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, such as Transport Minister Miri Regev, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The dispute reportedly turned into a shouting match between them and defenders of the IDF chief such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Education Minister Yifat Shasha Biton.
“I didn’t know about the investigation, but I give the Chief of Staff my full backing. It is his job to check and investigate. If the chief of staff decided to establish an investigation team – I support him,” Gallant said, telling the ministers,
“if they do investigations – it’s none of your business.”
Ben-Gvir reportedly defended his right to question the chief of staff, saying “not all criticism is blasphemy, we are the ministers and this is our job.”
Netanyahu himself ended the meeting at midnight.
Unlike other members of his cabinet, Netanyahu has avoided taking responsibility for the security failures on Oct. 7 amid calls for investigations into him and his government over what led to Hamas’ successful terrorist invasion that killed over 1,400 people.
“Everyone will have to give answers on the debacle — including myself — but all that will happen only after the war,” he said in an address to the nation. “As prime minister, I am responsible for securing the future of the state. And right now, my job is to lead the state of Israel and the people to a crushing victory over our enemies.”
Israel’s stunning security failure raised questions about whether an operational stand down had been ordered as false flag to justify a full-scale assault on Gaza.
According to Jewish Pro-Life Foundation leader Cecily Routman, government sources claimed Netanyahu ordered a 7-hour military stand down to allow Hamas to launch its attack to justify Israeli retaliation against Gaza meant to ultimately wipe the Palestinian enclave off the map.
“Israel as the most sophisticated intelligence in the world. There is no way the government didn’t know that that was going to happen,” Routman said.
Reports later surfaced showing the Israeli government was aware Hamas was planning a large-scale attack a year prior but allegedly didn’t take intelligence reports about it seriously.
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Featured image: Palestinian members of the Ezz al-din Al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas burn military armored vehicle belonging to Israeli forces near Gaza Strip, Gaza on October 07, 2023. Photo by STR APAimages
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The US and Israel have isolated themselves as the two most evil governments on earth. By complying with Washington’s foreign policy, the European puppet governments find themselves despised by their citizens.
Eleven months ago Russia’s president Vladimir Putin described the West to the Russian Federal Assembly:
“They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honor, trust, and decency are not for them. Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything. They grew accustomed to spitting on the whole world.
“It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. They cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN Security Council resolutions on Donbass. The Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.”
It took Russian politicians and journalists a long time to recover from their delusion that with the demise of communism the world was a community governed by agreed-upon rules. Many Russian intellectuals and journalists had an idealized picture of the United States which kept the Russian government off balance in understanding Washington’s intentions toward Russia. How else to explain Russia’s lack of preparedness when Washington overthrew the elected government of Ukraine and when Georgia invaded South Ossetia?
As Putin now understands, the consequences of the Russian government’s mistaken expectation of fair and honorable relations with the West have been severe. Unless the West’s degradation results in collapse, war is inevitable. American and European peoples have no impact on their governments who serve the agendas of the financially powerful. Now that the West has demonstrated for all to see that the West suffers no shame from participation in genocide, even the most westernized Russians are likely to keep a safe distance from Washington’s snares.
Now that the West has completely shattered the trust built during the Soviet era, the threat of nuclear Armageddon again holds sway over the Earth. In the face of this threat, all other threats recede into nothingness.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: The world’s first nuclear explosion – the U.S. ‘Trinity’ atomic test in New Mexico, July 16, 1945. If a nuclear war breaks out today, the devastation caused by modern nuclear weapons would make Trinity’s power look small by comparison. Most life on Earth would likely be wiped out. | U.S. Department of Energy
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January 15, 2024 marks the 95th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), a federally recognized holiday in the United States since 1986.
Dr. King was the most well-known and respected leader within the mass Civil Rights Movement which arose during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.
His assassination on April 4, 1968 took place while he was in Memphis, Tennessee lending his support to a sanitation workers strike. Dr. King was preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign aimed at eradicating poverty in the United States. The Civil Rights leader after 1967, came out forcefully against the U.S. genocidal war in Vietnam making him a target for the federal government to be eliminated.
Between 1957, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed, to 1964, hundreds of thousands of people had become involved in a series of mass demonstrations, boycotts and other methods of civil disobedience. Nonetheless, it was not until the summer of 1964 that the most comprehensive Civil Rights Bill was passed by the U.S. since the 1870s. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was designed to provide authority for the Justice Department to enforce the rights of African Americans to vote in areas of the South.
Important events occurred during the early months of 1964 in St. Augustine, Florida where activists from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized mass demonstrations against segregation and racist violence. The city of 15,000 people was staunchly segregated and routinely denied access to African Americans in all phases of public life.
The St. Augustine Movement was spearheaded by a nationally recognized African American dentist, Dr. Robert Hayling. He initially mobilized young people to engage in mass demonstrations. Repressive measures during 1963-64 brought international attention to the city.
After one demonstration, four young people were arrested and sentenced to six months in a detention center for violating the segregation laws of the State of Florida. Hayling later invited people from around the United States to visit St. Augustine during spring break to participate in actions aimed at breaking down legalized segregation.
Several high-profile whites who visited St. Augustine at the aegis of the activists were arrested, attracting further attention to the city. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the city and attempted to intimidate civil rights activists through kidnapping and shooting into homes in the African American community.
As a result of the intransigence on the part of the authorities in St. Augustine, civil rights workers in St. Augustine armed themselves and began to fire back when shot at by Klan members. During one encounter, a Klansman was killed. Although several people were arrested and charged in the death of the Klansman, they were eventually acquitted because of lack of evidence.
Image: Civil Rights workers killed in Mississippi during June 1964 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
Events in St. Augustine represented a burgeoning militancy in Black communities throughout the South and other regions of the U.S. Undoubtedly, these events in St. Augustine and other areas of the country led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July of 1964.
The situation in St. Augustine was by no means an isolated incident. In 1964, urban rebellions erupted in Harlem and Rochester, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Dixmoor, Illinois; along with Elizabeth, Jersey City and Patterson, New Jersey, among other cities.
Freedom Summer: Full Equality, Self-determination and African Solidarity
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed in April 1960 grew directly out of the protest actions in the South beginning on February 1. Student sit-ins and other demonstrations against segregation spread like wildfire that year.
By 1964, a Freedom Summer project was initiated in Mississippi and Southwest Tennessee by SNCC, CORE and other civil rights organizations. The effort was designed to register African Americans to vote. In Neshoba County, Mississippi during the first phase of the summer project, three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were kidnapped by the police and the Klan. 44 days later, the three were found murdered and buried in an earthen dam.
The bodies of these civil rights workers were found in the aftermath of the signing of the Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2. Eventually the culprits were found and put on trial several times. However, they were never convicted of murder and were sentenced to relatively short prison terms.
Also, that same summer on June 28, Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Shabazz) founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) in New York City after he broke with the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X traveled to Africa and West Asia twice during 1964 where he spent months studying and forming alliances with African and Arab governments, national liberation movements and Muslims in the region. Malcolm submitted an 8-page memorandum to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) at its second summit held in Cairo, Egypt in July. The document called for political support to the African American struggle by independent African states. The adoption of the memorandum by the OAU was a major milestone in Pan-African unity and internationalism.
In addition, the U.S. war against the Vietnamese people accelerated in 1964-65 under President Johnson. In early August 1964, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred which turned out to be a fabrication by the Pentagon to justify the deployment of more troops to South Vietnam under the guise of fighting communism.
The “Gulf of Tonkin” resolution was passed by the U.S. Congress which served as a rationale for the escalation of the war. Over the next decade, more than 58,000 U.S. troops lost their lives while more than a million Vietnamese died, which included both combatants and civilians.
Opposition to the war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia intersected with the movements for Civil Rights, Black Power and other popular struggles. Despite the mass deaths and destruction, the U.S. remains the leading imperialist state with hundreds of military bases and active engagements around the globe.
2024: “The Ballot or the Bullet”
In April 1964 Malcolm X visited Detroit to deliver a major policy address which has been entitled “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Malcolm’s speech at the King Solomon Baptist Church on the westside was a clear representation of the rising revolutionary mood in the African American community.
Like 2024, 1964 was an election year. The masses of people were looking for new avenues of struggle to end institutional racism, national oppression and economic exploitation.
Today the labor movement is in ferment after 2023 witnessed the largest upsurge in industrial actions in decades. Strikes and threatened labor actions occurred in the automotive, transport, services and entertainment industries.
Even though the Biden White House has promoted itself as a pro-labor administration, the conditions of working people have continued to deteriorate. The UAW strike and other industrial actions resulted in marked increases in wages during 2023.
Moreover, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are taking much needed resources from working people to fuel imperialist interventions. The State of Israel is subsidized by the tax dollars of working families in the U.S. This same situation prevails in Ukraine where over $100 billion has been wasted on a war that cannot be won by imperialism.
In Palestine, more than 22,000 people have been killed as a direct result of the military actions by Tel Aviv and its staunchest backers in Washington and on Wall Street. The only Palestinian American Congresswoman from Detroit, the Honorable Rashida Tlaib, is being harassed in an attempt to drive her from office during the election process later in the year.
Consequently, 2024 will be a year of profound challenges for people in the U.S. and internationally. A united front among labor unions and mass organizations will be essential in order for the majority of working and oppressed peoples to reach their political objectives of ending poverty, racism and war.
We must continue to support the organization of workers and People of Color (POC) communities. Only through enhanced organizational capacity and a united front can the progressive movement in this period achieve victory.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: MLK confronts segregated motel owner in St. Augustine during 1964 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
This week’s drone strike on senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in southern Beirut provides compelling evidence that Israel wants to expand the conflict beyond its borders. In the last few weeks, Israel has assassinated a deputy political leader in Hamas (al-Arouri), a senior adviser in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, (Sayyed Razi Mousavi) and “nearly a dozen senior Iranian military officials” (Fox News) at an airport in Damascus.
The crime committed by Lafarge is serious, but it is just one small incidence of western entities supporting terrorists in Syria following Radical Islam. Clooney is singling out a French company, and France is allied with both the U.S. and UK. While the crime affected hundreds of Yazidis, the same crime carried out by the U.S., UK and EU has affected millions of Syrian citizens.
We are now approximately four years removed from the unleashing of the covid so-called pandemic and the consequential measures adopted and enforced world-wide that created terror in the global populace, imposed unprecedented strictures, subverted foundational principles of medicine and foisted an unnecessary and dangerous inoculation upon a mostly unwitting public.
In the aftermath of three months of war in Gaza, we are witnessing an unprecedented surge in settlement activities, including the construction of outposts, roads, fences, and roadblocks initiated by settlers. Settlers persist in seizing control of Area C in the West Bank, further marginalizing the Palestinian presence.
The last four years has been a significant shakeup for some people. Many of those previously identifying as ‘of the left’ have started to wonder what that actually means. At the same time, we have seen a willingness by those usually associated with ‘the right’ becoming more open to engaging with ‘left wing’ voices.
The Iraq War was spawned by a deadly combination of political depravity and media complicity. Unfortunately, on the twentieth anniversary of the war, both elements of that conspiracy are being whitewashed. Instead, politicians and their pundit accomplices are prattling as if the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, not a crime against humanity.
Tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, have been killed or injured. Families are sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet. Areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety have come under bombardment. Medical facilities are under relentless attack.
This Application concerns acts threatened, adopted, condoned, taken and being taken by the Government and military of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, a distinct national, racial and ethnical group, in the wake of the attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023.
More than 100 international groups signed onto a letter released Wednesday by a newly formed Palestinian rights coalition, urging governments across the globe to formally support South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel, accusing the government of genocidal violence in Gaza.
63 year old Diane Wagner was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) on Jan. 3, 2024, which “will soon take Diane’s life”. “Just a few weeks ago, she was healthy & living an everyday normal life.”
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The argument over the Israeli accusation that Hamas used Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital as a shield for its military effort against the Israel Defense Forces has continued, even as the headlines have shifted to the Israel-Hamas prisoner swap.
On Nov. 23, well-known author and online journalist Fred Kaplan weighed in forcefully in favor of the Israeli charge.
In a post on “X,” Kaplan, who writes a weekly column on defense and foreign affairs for Slatemagazine, posted a comment supporting the conclusion of an article in the Israeli daily Haaretz unequivocally supporting the IDF’s position.
Kaplan’s post declared, “Clear evidence in Ha’aretz (which is often critical of Israel govt), that Hamas used tunnels under Al-Shifa hospital as a command center.”
Clear evidence, in Ha’aretz (which is often critical of Israel govt), that Hamas used tunnels under Al-Shifa hospital as a command center. https://t.co/TYneI0JLXy
With that, Kaplan defended the IDF’s justification for closing down Gaza’s largest hospital while carrying out a war designed to destroy vast areas of the world’s most densely populated urban enclave. That hard-line view does not stand up to closer scrutiny.
The Haaretz article in question fails to provide a convincing case for the Israeli government’s claim that Hamas was using the tunnel under al-Shifa Hospital as command center, and therefore that the hospital was being used as a ‘human shield.” Instead it merely shows that the article’s author, Janiv Kubovich, military correspondent for Haaretz, reflects the IDF view of the conflict on the Haaretz staff.
Kubovich does not cite a single piece of evidence for Hamas’ culpability in using the hospital for military purposes that did not come directly from the military spokesman.
The reporter recommended by Kaplan with such high confidence relied completely on the most self-interested sources imaginable on the issue — the IDF’s leading propagandist. It is a source lacking in any independent judgment.
The IDF’s position on Gaza’s hospitals, as articulated by its chief spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, has been extremely rigid and unyielding, in line with the Israeli policy aim of imposing maximum human costs not only on Hamas but on the entire civilian population of Gaza.
That policy requires that all the hospitals must be shut down, and the society be systematically deprived of food and fuel and put under military pressure.
First Rantisi Hospital, Then al-Shifa
When hospitals are used for military purposes, they can lose their protected status under international laws of war.
A common denominator in IDF operations regarding hospitals in Gaza is to repeatedly release videos showing weapons either inside or next to a medical facility to justify shutting it down.
After Rantisi Hospital it was al-Shifa’s turn. On Nov. 11, the IDF began a drumbeat of propaganda ahead of its takeover, calling al-Shifa “the main hub of Hamas activity.”
The Pentagon, which has extremely close ties to the IDF, gave its wholehearted support to the accusation.
To its credit, Haaretz picked up an AP report saying that Israel, “without providing evidence, has accused Hamas of concealing a command post inside and under the compound, allegations denied by Hamas and hospital staff.”
We now know, however, that this well-organized propaganda campaign against al-Shifa could not have been based on actual intelligence on what lay in the tunnel under the hospital. No outsider could have possibly been inside the tunnel to report on what was to be found there, because the entrance to the tunnel had been sealed for an unknown period of time.
Also, the IDF was recently found exaggerating evidence of a Hamas command center under the hospital. As Consortium News reported last week, the IDF on Oct. 27 provided a visual depiction of a vast Hamas presence in no fewer than five buildings of al-Shifa’s enormous campus, as well as what it called a “Hamas underground complex” below the main building. Spokesman Hagari also claimed that there was an entrance to that underground floor from within the hospital building, further incriminating the management of al-Shifa.
But that entire Israeli-U.S. propaganda line was discredited by the subsequent discovery by the IDF — never widely covered by the Western press — that a tunnel below the above-ground office of Hamas held what the IDF believed was the actual high command headquarters of Hamas, as reported by The Jerusalem Post on Nov. 14.
While telling the world that Hamas HQ was under al-Shifa Hospital, the IDF had already found the actual command center 8.5km away, reports Gareth Porter.
The IDF spokesman then explained that the map he had previously presented to the media was meant only to be “conceptual” and, according to a Nov. 23 AP report, not to be taken “literally.”
Evacuation Strategy
By Nov. 12, the IDF strategy for emptying al-Shifa Hospital was already well underway. Haaretz reported on that date that the IDF had phoned the office of the hospital to demand it be completely evacuated.
🚨Al Shifa Hospital.
Complete destruction in the vicinity of Al-Shifa Hospital, the occupation left behind during its siege and aggression to the hospital. pic.twitter.com/32GuenrzF2
That was well before the IDF spokesman arrived at al-Shifa with his staff early in the morning of Nov. 15 (a day after TheJerusalem Post report) to prepare a video displaying Hamas weapons, uniforms and a computer said to have been discovered in the hospital’s MRI rooms just hours earlier that morning.
Haaretz’s Kubovich declares firmly, “There is no way the hospital administrators didn’t know what was happening.” This assertion is based entirely on the fact that the tunnel had siphoned off electricity from the hospital’s above-ground generator.
That certainty depends on the assumption that the hospital’s management had evidence of an extraordinary addition to the normal load. And that would have depended on a relatively long-term use of the facility by Hamas before and during the war that began in May.
The IDF’s Hagari clearly did not know how long Hamas had maintained a presence in the tunnel, which was devoid of any sign of recent use when Israeli forces opened it up.
In his own video Hagari speculated that Hamas had left the tunnel when it knew that the IDF was going to enter al-Shifa. However, Associated Press correspondent Josef Federman, who was also taken on a tour of the tunnel facility, observed that rooms were “bare, small and rusted,” suggesting a long period of disuse.
Which War Was It?
But despite Kubovich’s flat statement that “there is no doubt they were used by Hamas company, brigade and battalion commanders,” it turns out that he was not at all sure the tunnel was used in the current war. Kubovich goes on to say that “fighting was directed from there in recent rounds, if not in the current war [emphasis added].”
In other words, the last time it had been used might have been the previous Israel-Hamas war in 2014. It cannot be taken for granted, therefore, that the al-Shifa Hospital management was aware of the Hamas use of the facility, as Kubovich had asserted.
BREAKING
Director of the Al-Shifa hospital Mohammed Abu Salmiya, along with a number of other doctors have been arrested by Israeli forces. pic.twitter.com/kiz4XIgeIL
The current director of the hospital, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, who was arrested this week for questioning about the alleged Hamas use of the hospital, only assumed his duties in 2019, and in all probability was unaware of any Hamas military use of a tunnel underneath the hospital.
But the IDF’s concern is not with truth. Its concern is for the extreme right-wing Likud government’s intention (based on numerous statements of genocidal intent) to not only destroy Hamas, but impose the greatest number of deaths on the Palestinian population. That required an elaborate effort to indict hospitals as active participants in the war on Hamas’ behalf and dismantling all the hospitals in Gaza, and especially of al-Shifa.
The article touted by Kaplan offers no “clear evidence” of Hamas’ use of al-Shifa Hospital as “command center” in the current war.
Kaplan’s apparent belief that the IDF narrative about al-Shifa Hospital was somehow accurate or truthful fails to take seriously the powerful genocidal threat this extremist Israeli government poses.
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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on U.S. national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.
Featured image: Major General Herzi Halevi, at left, with other members of the Israeli military at the Egypt–Israel border in June. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
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South Korea’s government is engaged in a form of diplomatic and security suicide that defies understanding.
Whereas previous presidents of the left and right understood that it would be fatal to alienate China and Russia, promote war with North Korea, or blindly follow all orders from an increasingly chaotic Washington, President Yoon Suk Yeol is unlike any president in post-war Korea, and perhaps like any politician in Korean history. Whether he is drawing South Korea into preparations for war with China that are destroying the economy, planning for integrated responses to North Korea via missile defense that end South Korea’s sovereignty, or persecuting his opponents of the left and right at home to a degree unseen in the last thirty years, he is truly unique.
The problem is that Yoon is not a diplomat or a politician, but rather a criminal operator who made his way to the top through tricks and deceptions and now the mask has fallen off to reveal an imposter.
The results were clear at the 30th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in San Francisco, President Yoon, for all his toady statements, was unable to secure a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping or US President Joe Biden. In light of how President Park Geun-hye, also a pro-American conservative, great deference from President Xi, the decay of Korean diplomacy is clear. [1]
Compared to other pro-US conservative leaders such as Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye,Yoon has emphasized South Korea, the US, and Japan’s trilateral alliance to an unusually high degree. He has gone as far as to verbally attack China and Russia, regressing Northeast Asia back to the Cold War era framework of ROK-US-Japan Vs North Korea-China-Russia.
In an interview with Reuters on April 19, 2022, Yoon provocatively brought up the “Cross-Strait issue” and told the reporter:
“We are absolutely opposed to changing the status quo by force, along with the international community… (The cross-strait issue) is not simply a matter between China and Taiwan, but a global issue that goes beyond the region, like the issue between North and South Korea. [2]
For China, turning the cross-strait conflict into a global issue like the one between the two Koreas is unacceptable. Therefore, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Qin Gang fiercely responded to Yoon two days later on the 21st. “Those Who Play with Fire over Taiwan Will Burn to Death,” he said. [3]
President Yoon Seok-yul has begun to express strong “anti-Chinese” messages on the cross-strait conflict, something he had never expressed before taking office. To understand the background and history of his anti-China and anti-Russian stance, it is necessary to have a certain understanding of South Korea’s internal affairs and Yoon’s rise to power. The photo is from MBC, a major South Korean broadcaster.
However, Yoon’s bold statement favoring Taiwan over the “Cross-Strait conflict” does not mean the incumbent administration is working closely with the island. Rather, the Taiwanese will feel uneasy with a third party – South Korea in this case – provoking China by bringing up the issue without any prior planning and consultation. Yoon is merely utilizing the “Cross-Strait issue” to embolden the trilateral alliance between the US and Japan to pump up conservative support back home.
Yoon’s actions are souring relations with Russia, a country that has historically been more friendly to South Korea than China. For instance, in the name of supporting Ukraine, Yoon suddenly offered to send arms to the country. In the end, Russia became impatient and invited the solitary North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to de facto retaliate against South Korea through diplomatic and security means. But Yoon characterized this act as another “direct provocation,” and has since repeatedly stated that he is willing to engage in armed conflict, raising tensions in Northeast Asia. [4] [5]
Of course, the ROK-US-Japan alliance is a fundamental principle of South Korean conservatives. However, the trilateral alliance does not require South Korea to unnecessarily disengage itself from China and Russia, especially when Seoul needs to seek cooperation from Beijing and Moscow to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis. Nevertheless, Yoon’s diplomacy is effectively bringing China, Russia, and North Korea closer, and thus destabilizing the region.
Yoon’s Deadly Criminal Past Could Shake Up Northeast Asia’s Diplomatic and Security Order
So why is Yoon Seok-yul putting the regional diplomatic and security order at risk? For starters, he is not a conservative by nature.
A former career prosecutor, Yoon first came to prominence in South Korean politics in 2013 while investigating the National Intelligence Service’s(NIS) presidential election meddling scandal in the early days of the Park Geun-hye administration.
The allegation was that the NIS used internet posts to help Park win the 2012 presidential election. At the time, prosecutor Yoon attacked the legitimacy of Park Geun-hye’s administration by pushing for excessive investigations into the NIH. This caught the eye of South Korea’s progressive Democratic Party.
After bouncing around from job to job, Yoon became the head of the special prosecutor team investigating Park’s impeachment in 2016 when Park administration’s power waned. The investigation eventually led to Park’s imprisonment for bribery charges and a 22-year prison sentence, making Yoon one of the most important figures in the downfall of the conservative forces.
Yoon quickly rose to the top of the prosecutors’ ranks in the Moon Jae-in administration, becoming the chief prosecutor of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office. He began gaining the trust of then-President Moon, a liberal, by arresting more than 200 key conservatives, including Park’s predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, and former Supreme Court Chief Justice Yang Seung-tae. He then rose to the crest of the prosecutors’ organization, the Prosecutor General. [6]
However, as soon as Yoon became prosecutor general, he began to run afoul of the Democratic Party’s supporters by investigating the then justice minister, Cho Kuk, who was considered the next presidential candidate. Over the next year or two, Yoon gradually shifted right, eventually winning the support of the conservatives in becoming the president.
In other words, he initially stood on the liberal side imprisoning conservatives, but suddenly joined the conservative side ahead of the 2022 presidential election, causing an identity crisis.For nearly two years since Yoon took office, Yoon’s prosecutors have been probing Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party, on bribery charges. This is quite ironic considering that Yoon himself led the prosecutors and jailed a slew of conservatives as recently as 2018. [7]
More fundamentally, however, Yoon has been embroiled in serious fabrication controversy early in the Park’s impeachment investigation.
In late 2016, JTBC, a major South Korean broadcaster, reported on a tablet device as evidence that Choi Soon-sil (her legal name is Choi Seo-won), a civilian and mere friend of Park, had received various classified state information. The network promptly submitted the device to prosecutors after breaking the news, and the prosecution accepted JTBC’s report as a “fact”. The public perceived this as the president arbitrarily handing over power to a civilian, and Park’s qualifications as president were called into question. In fact, within a month of the tablet’s appearance, Park was facing impeachment charges and was forced to step down from the presidency four months after the launch of the impeachment inquiry. [8]
President Yoon Seok-yul and Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon, then-chief prosecutor and then-third-in-command of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, respectively, testified during a 2017 (during Moon Jae-In regime) National Assembly oversight hearing that the “Choi Soon-sil tablet” was Ms. Choi’s based on their investigation. The photo is from a report by South Korea’s main broadcaster, JTBC.
However, having already questioned the veracity of JTBC’s reporting and the prosecution’s investigation, I continued investigating the case despite serving a year in prison and undergoing years of trial due to the JTBC lawsuit. Eventually, I obtained conclusive evidence that JTBC and the prosecution had acquired a tablet PC belonging to a Blue House official and fabricated the news report and investigation to attribute the device to Choi Soon-sil. JTBC obtained a real PC that would normally contain confidential Blue House documents and then, in collaboration with the prosecutor’s office, they created a “pseudo-event” making it seem as if a civilian had taken various secrets from the president. That was no easy task, requiring them to fabricate documents regarding various reports and investigations. [9]
To be absolutely clear, Yoon Seok-yeol, the current South Korean president, was a key player in the “tablet manipulation investigation,” a state crime in all senses of the word, from late 2016 to early 2017, and that led to the successful impeachment of President Park.
I have worked together with Choi Soon-sil to launch 20 civil and criminal lawsuits regarding this miscarriage of justice and abuse of power over the past few years. In a recent civil lawsuit, Choi finally forced the court to admit that many of the reports and sensitive materials found on the PC were in fact fabricated.
By supporting Choi’s lawsuits legally and financially, and launching separate lawsuits, I gained access to undisputable evidence of the fabrication of evidence. I filed a complaint against Yoon and his co-conspirator, current Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon, to the Corruption Investigation Office For High-ranking Officials (CIOHO), South Korea’s chief prosecution agency for the investigation of powerful individuals. They launched their investigation this November.
As I was unjustly imprisoned as a result of Yoon and Han’s tablet manipulation investigation, I also filed a civil lawsuit for damages against the two, and that trial is currently underway. [10] [11] [12]
At last Yoon’s crimes of evidence fabrication will be officially exposed. Yoon’s predictable political response is to revert to hardline conservatism to solidify his only base of support. The extremity of his policies, in blatant opposition to Korea’s national interests, means that the diplomatic and security order in Northeast Asia may collapse under the weight of his criminality as policy.
President Yoon’s natural inclination is not to engage in the hard work of policy preparation, working level meetings, or even informal discussions over coffee or tea about where Korea needs to go but rather to come up with some trick to fool everyone and buy off, or frighten off, his opponents.
This criminal politician show could easily deteriorate into a serious Northeast Asian crisis, going even further than current tensions because Yoon would see that as an opportunity to prop up his authority. Granted he has no long-term strategy, Korea’s future would not be all that important for him and his loyal followers.
Sending Journalists to Jail Like the Good Old Days of Military Government of South Korea
President Yoon has gone to great lengths to crack down on the media in South Korea out of fear that they will report on his criminal past. Since the beginning of his administration, Yoon has attempted to replace the management of South Korea’s two public media organizations, KBS and MBC, and has succeeded in doing so at KBS. He has also repeatedly attempted to detain and raid the offices of liberal media outlets such as New Tamsa, News Tapa, and Kyunghyang Newspaper, both of which were foolish enough to report about his giving inconvenient facts. [13] [14]
As a result of ongoing repression, the South Korean media has been unable to cover Yoon’s crimes, let alone the fabricated tablet incident that launched his career. Fortunately, this summer and fall, Japan’s conservative media, Japan Forward and Hanada Monthly, Shukan Post (Weekly Post), and Hong Kong’s leading media, The Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly), have given significant coverage to this story. Unfortunately, the cowardly South Korean media failed to address Yoon’s most damning past crimes, even in the form of quoting these foreign reports. The media has forgone reporting on this issue even when the Yoon administration failed to adequately respond to foreign media reports.
[A] Hong Kong’s leading weekly newspaper ‘Yazhou Zhoukan(Asia Weekly)’ (10/9-10/15/2023) published an interview with Byun Hee-jae regarding the tablet fabrication investigation as its cover story.
[B] On September 11, ‘Japan Forward’, a leading English-language newspaper in Japan, published an interview with Byun Hee-jae on the tablet fabrication investigation. It became the number one most-viewed article in September.
[C] ‘Monthly Hanada’, a leading Japanese monthly magazine, published an article by Byun Hee-jae on the tablet fabrication investigation on November 2 in its online edition.
[D] The December 22, 2023 issue of Shukan Post (Weekly Post), a leading Japanese current affairs magazine with a weekly circulation of 300,000, published a scoop on Yoon’s tablet manipulation investigation.
Although it is natural for South Korea to build on its close relationship with the United States as a central ally, President Yoon has chosen to escalate intentionally hostility towards China, Russia, and North Korea, to cover up his criminal past. Ultimately his gangster diplomacy will be damaging to not only Korea but to the United States and the entire region.
Byun Hee-jae ( 변희재) is a South Korean conservative political commentator
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Notes
[1]Lack of Yoon-Xi summit in San Francisco highlights Seoul’s troubled ties with Beijing
[8] The Fall of the Rule of Law in South Korea: The Impeachment of Park Geun-Hye, Part I: The Media, the Tablet, Public Sentiment, Gookjeong Nongdan, and the National Assembly
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Amal Clooney, the international human rights lawyer, is representing victims of mass atrocities, including genocide and sexual violence, from the Iraqi Yazidi community who are seeking accountability for crimes perpetrated by ISIS.
The case alleges French conglomerate Lafarge SA conspired to provide material and funds to support ISIS terrorist campaigns against the Yazidis.
“Lafarge has admitted to a conspiracy that aided ISIS by providing millions of dollars in cash to ISIS, and is alleged to have provided ISIS with cement to construct underground tunnels and bunkers used to shelter ISIS members and hold hostages, including captured Yazidis,” a news release stated.
Clooney has focused on the French cement company which supported ISIS in Syria in order to remain in business during the war.
The crime committed by Lafarge is serious, but it is just one small incidence of western entities supporting terrorists in Syria following Radical Islam. Clooney is singling out a French company, and France is allied with both the U.S. and UK. While the crime affected hundreds of Yazidis, the same crime carried out by the U.S., UK and EU has affected millions of Syrian citizens.
Weapons sent to terrorists in Syria from the U.S. directly allowed ISIS to obtain substantial amounts of sophisticated supplies which they used against civilians.
A study by Conflict Armament Research found that anti-tank weapons given to the ‘rebels’ in Syria by the U.S. ended up in the possession of the ISIS within two months of leaving the factory.
The U.S. provided extensive lethal and non-lethal aid to many terrorist groups fighting against the Syrian government. The CIA ran a covert program Timber Sycamore to arm, fund and train terrorists in Syria. U.S. President Trump shut the program down in 2017.
In March 2011, the U.S. and NATO began a war in Syria for the purpose of regime change. It was not successful, and the same government in Damascus has remained. However, the U.S.-NATO war was very successful in destroying the country, ruining the economy, killing thousands and sending the largest Syrian migrant wave to Europe in history.
U.S. President Barak Obama praised the FSA as ‘moderate’ rebels fighting for freedom and democracy. But, early on the FSA demonstrated that they were fighting to kill Christians and non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and had no interest in lofty ideals of freedom and democracy. They wanted to over throw the Damascus government with the support of the Obama administration, and realize the dream of a Sunni Muslim governing system which was based on Islamic Law, not civil codes.
In April 2014, investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh exposed the Obama-Clinton “Rat Line”, which was a CIA weapons highway into Syria, serving the terrorists fighting for Obama’s regime change goal. Weapons and ammunition was sent from Libya to Syria via southern Turkey, and the terrorists on the receiving end were affiliated with Al Qaeda, and later aligned with ISIS.
In 2013, Clooney was appointed to a number of United Nations commissions, including as adviser to Special Envoy Kofi Annan on Syria. The U.S. and UK involvement in supporting the terrorists who would later fight alongside ISIS was not any secret.
In 2016, Obama signed into law a defense policy bill which led to U.S. weapons provided to ‘rebels’ ending up in the hands of terrorists following Radical Islam, who became brothers in arms on the Syrian battlefields.
The Yazidis have suffered greatly and should receive justice. Clooney has focused on this one small incidence of ISIS benefiting from a French business. Clooney has ignored that the U.S., UK and their western democratic allies supported, funded, trained and weaponized terrorists in Syria which directly benefitted ISIS.
Where is the international court case to serve justice for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead, maimed, raped, kidnapped and made homeless by the FSA and their allies Al Qaeda and ISIS?
Clooney chose an easy win with the case against Lafarge. Clooney said she hopes to get a financial award for the Yazidis from her case so they can rebuild their lives.
The U.S. has prevented the Syrian people from rebuilding any hospital, school or home because of the U.S. imposed sanctions which prevent importing any products for reconstruction. The U.S. sanctions against Syria prevent any wealthy Arab country, or investor, from developing any reconstruction project to benefit the Syrian civilians, such as the repair of the water infrastructure in Aleppo. Last summer, Aleppo suffered cholera because the water plant is in need of repair.
The Syrians have no court case pending, and have no hope of any recovery from their suffering caused by the U.S.-NATO attack on the Syrian people for regime change.
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We are now approximately four years removed from the unleashing of the covid so-called pandemic and the consequential measures adopted and enforced world-wide that created terror in the global populace, imposed unprecedented strictures, subverted foundational principles of medicine and foisted an unnecessary and dangerous inoculation upon a mostly unwitting public.
Some of us, at the very outset, upon hearing the mainstream messages of bat-inspired trans-species migration of a respiratory virus, suspected that things were amiss. The frenzied media, however, with their ‘case’ counts, death counts and fraudulent reporting about the actual lethality of the pathogen, were unstoppable and relentless, and I can forgive the many who began to shudder at this unexpected turn of events and who lined up for the dubious polymerase chain reaction ‘test’ and who, ultimately, placed every hope upon an emergency so-called vaccine, convinced as they were that our world was engulfed by an incomparable threat.
I have a harder time forgiving doctors who threw their senses and duties out the window, were unperturbed by the omission and suppression of attempts to treat and prevent the pathogen before hospitalization was required, abandoned informed consent, pushed the covid jab and regarded those who preferred to keep their minds and bodies and general health intact by not receiving the jab as a dangerous entity.
I frankly cannot forgive those physicians who, wielding considerable influence in establishment media, used this influence to sway their followers to accept something that has now been shown demonstrably and repetitively to be a health disaster.
Perhaps, however, under the unnerving full-court press of a rabid and unchecked propaganda campaign waged by once highly-regarded journalistic authorities, everyone can be forgiven for having, essentially, lost their wits. Perhaps.
But now, four years hence, as the general picture has clarified itself, anyone with a sentient eye or ear not wedded to mainstream pulp can conclude that there never was a genuine pandemic, there never was a need to lock and shut down the entire world, and there never was or will be a need to inject billions with a gene-altering concoction that has hurt and killed too many to pass muster as a real and viable vaccine.
We can further conclude that the preposterously tremendous control over people exhibited by the roll-out of the covid campaign, and the submission of people to the evisceration of their unalienable rights — these were not organically evolved developments, but consequences of a highly orchestrated deployment of power.
In short, all things covid was a strategically planned operation — a war-crime — the likes of which are unprecedented, and the consequence of which is to move the world towards some kind of autocratic fiefdom wherein we ‘little people’ surviving the first waves of the onslaught will be subjugated to the whims and directives of The Few.
I don’t care how many X followers one may have, or how many Sierpinski triangles one may conjure, how many high-profile interviews one has done, how many conferences one has attended, how many grants one has received, or how many plaudits one has obtained from our freedom-loving community: unless one can see the line and step across it, I regard you as an Enemy.
What line? The line that separates those who understand the concerted efforts of a Global Cabal to inflict the covid mess upon us for purposes of control, versus those who assert that this mess was essentially the result of unfortunate circumstances complicated by greed, incompetence, opportunism, corruption, human error and the like. To espouse the latter is untruthful and enervating: it takes the life out of our tenuously cobbled opposition and plays into our opposition’s hands.
Pick a side. To deny that the genocide visited upon us has been deliberately perpetrated, regardless of what you may invoke in the way of prudence, reason and thoughtful consideration, is to join the ranks of its perpetrators.
Pick a side, the line is clear, and time is short.
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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/ where this article was first published.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Alt-Market.us
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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In the aftermath of three months of war in Gaza, we are witnessing an unprecedented surge in settlement activities, including the construction of outposts, roads, fences, and roadblocks initiated by settlers. Settlers persist in seizing control of Area C in the West Bank, further marginalizing the Palestinian presence. Alongside the ongoing settler violence, reports in November highlighted the establishment of outposts and the paving of roads, contributing to a widespread phenomenon of roadblocks. These obstacles prevent Palestinians from accessing main roads in the West Bank, and barriers are erected along these roads to impede Palestinian movement and presence in various buffer zones.
Report Highlights:
A record number of 9 new outposts in a span of about three months.
A record number of 18 illegal roads paved or authorized by settlers.
The settlers returned to Amona. An outpost that was evacuated in 2017 following a court order. Settlers evacuated it in exchange for financial compensation, and the settlement of Amihai was established.
The Huwara Bypass Road has been nearly deserted since the efforts to open it.
A new phenomenon of settlers closing Palestinian traffic routes against military orders.
Building fences instead of new settlements.
A significant portion of the outposts and roads are located on private Palestinian land.
Peace Now:
“The three months of war in Gaza are being exploited by settlers to establish facts on the ground and effectively take control of extensive areas in Area C. Settlers decide where to build roads and outposts continuously, disregarding the legal status of the land. They persist in constructing outposts on private Palestinian lands, defining open areas, and restricting Palestinian movement in the West Bank. The permissive military and political environment allow the reckless construction and land seizure almost unchecked, with minimal adherence to the law. The result is not only physical harm to Palestinians and their lands but also a significant political shift in the West Bank. The unchecked rampage of the settlers must be stopped now.”
Map of new outposts, roads, and land taken over by the Settlers since October 7
Establishment of Outposts Since the Beginning of the War in Gaza
Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, settlers have established or re-established at least ten outposts, some of which were evacuated in the past and then reconstructed. Certain outposts that were established were later dismantled by the Civil Administration. For instance, two outposts were set up near the Asa’el outpost in the southern Hebron Hills region, and the outpost in Amona was rebuilt after its demolition in the wake of the war.
According to Peace Now’s Settlement Watch team’s examination, nine outposts have been established or re-established on the ground:
1. An outpost north of Asael, on a hill facing the outpost.
2. An outpost west of Amihai in the Shiloh bloc and east of the Palestinian village of Turmus Aya.
3. In the last two years, settlers have attempted multiple times to establish the Givat Haktora outpost between the Ali and Shiloh settlements on land belonging to the Palestinian village of Karyut. It was evacuated by the Civil Administration for a certain period, and after the war began, the outpost was expanded and gained access from the Shiloh settlement.
4. The reconstructed Sde Yonatan outpost, south of the Palestinian village of Dir Dibwan, on private Palestinian land.
5. The Or Meir outpost, located south of the Ofra settlement on private Palestinian land.
6. An outpost adjacent to the Tuba community in the southern Hebron Hill region.
7. The Yachish Zion outpost, near the Psagot settlement, was reconstructed on a private land after being evicted several times.
8. The outpost in Amona was rebuilt despite being demolished during the war by the Civil Administration.
9. An outpost situated to the west of the Palestinian village of Battir, located in an area designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Read more about this outpost, here.
As of the writing of these lines, there are at least nine outposts that have been established or reestablished and are standing on the ground.
A new outpost north of the Asael outpost in the south Hebron Hill region.
The Or Meir outpost, located south of Ofra.
The Sde Yonatan outpost, south of the village of Dir Dibwan.
The reconstructed Yachish Zion outpost near the Psagot settlement.
The Givat Haktora outpost between the Ali and Shiloh settlements.
Roads
The settlers’ road construction work continues at full pace, and so far, we are not aware of cases where the Civil Administration prevented or canceled paved roads. Also, to our knowledge, no heavy equipment used for road paving has been confiscated, in contrast to the widespread phenomenon of confiscating heavy equipment when Palestinians build without a permit.
So far, at least 18 new roads have been documented as breached by settlers. We estimate the actual number to be higher. The paving of these roads allows for the seizure of extensive new areas along the road’s path, marking territory inaccessible to Palestinians due to settlers’ presence and their convenient access to the area.
These are the roads and paths built since the beginning of the war:
1. Sneh Yaakov/Givaat Ronen Outpost near the village of Burin – Unauthorized road on the lands of the village of Burin.
2. Nahal (Wadi) Kana Nature Reserve – New road breach from the Alonei Shilo outpost towards the Immanuel settlement. The entire road passes through the territory of the Nahal Kana Nature Reserve. The road was initially breached in 2018, and Peace Now has filed a complaint with the police regarding the ongoing work.
3. Escape route from the Immanuel settlement.
4. Southern road to the Peduel settlement.
5. Road breaches in the Shiloh bloc.
6. Road to the Machach farm outpost in Wadi a-Siq.
7. Road to the Sde Yonatan outpost.
8. Road to the new outpost near the Negohot settlement.
9. Southern road to the Yair Farm settlement, towards the Palestinian village of Qarawat Bani Hasan on private Palestinian land.
10. Western road to the Revava settlement in an area that is partially private land.
11. Another southern road to the Palestinian village of Beit Awwa, north of the Negohot settlement.
12. Eastern road breach to the Sham’a settlement in the south Hebron Hills region.
13. Eastern road breach to the Itamar settlement and northeastern road to the Itamar farm.
14. A road breach near Ein Rashash to the Alon road. The road is near the Melech Hashalom outpost and the place where the Bedouin community was expelled at the beginning of the war.
15. A breach of a road north to the Kida East outpost in the east.
16. A breach of a southern road to the Susya settlement in the southern Hebron Hills.
17. Breach of a road near the Abigail outpost towards the east.
18. Breach of a road northwestern to the settlement of Ateret.
In total, since the beginning of the war, settlers have breached or paved at least 18 new roads.
Southern road to the Ya’ir Farm settlement.
Works near the Revava settlement.
Breach of a road from the Kida East outpost towards the north.
Eastern breach to the settlement of Shama in the south Hebron Hills region.
Works near the Itamar settlement.
A breach road near Ein Rashash to the Alon Road.
A breach of a road near Avigail outpost.
The end of a new road southern to Susiya Settlement in south Hebron Hills.
Fencing
Another means of asserting control over extensive open areas involves the construction of fences stretching for hundreds of meters and even kilometers. For example, in the second half of November, settlers began erecting fencing along the Alon Road (Route 578) in the north of the Jordan Valley. The fencing runs parallel to the Maskiot settlement southward, passing through the outpost of the Eretz Shemesh Farm and continuing another 2 kilometers south. The fencing is intended to prevent Palestinian shepherds from grazing in the area.
Additional fencing was set up near the Asa’el outpost in the south Hebron Hills region, stretching for hundreds of meters. The fencing was built along Route 317 up to the Shani Junction. Until the beginning of the war, two Palestinian Bedouin communities resided on the hill south of the road. Both communities were forcibly displaced by the settlers in October. Following this, a new outpost was established on the hill but later evicted by the Civil Administration. Instead of re-establishing the outpost (at that stage), the settlers erected fencing along the road, preventing the return of Palestinians or even their herds to the area, as they had done dozens of times in the past years.
Fence along the Alon Road (Route 578) in the north of the Jordan Valley.
Territorial enclosure by settlers near the Asael outpost.
Road Closures and Blockades
During the current war in the Gaza Strip, we witness an increase in settler involvement in security and civilian decisions related to the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. One emerging trend since the end of October is the prevention of opening roads for Palestinian vehicle use and the closure of entrances to Palestinian villages.
Since October 7th, the military has closed hundreds of entry and exit points to Palestinian towns and villages along the main transportation axes in the West Bank. Towards the end of October, the IDF began to lift some blockades, allowing slightly more freedom of movement for Palestinian vehicles on the main roads in the West Bank. Since that decision, protests and road closures have occurred, initiated by settlers who claim that the army “jeopardizes their security” by allowing Palestinians to leave their villages. In many cases, settlers, including families, women, and children, along with youth, close traffic routes. In most instances, the army secures the protests and complies with the settlers’ demand to keep the traffic routes closed.
Most protests and road closures take place near settlements located between Ramallah and Nablus. For example, throughout October, settlers from Shavei Shomron, led by settler women, protested every evening, demanding the continued closure of the Tul Karem Road (Route 57) to Palestinian traffic. Ariel residents have also prevented the opening of the road several times from the slip road to the route leading to Highway no 5.
Partial List of Closed Roads Under Settler Pressure in the West Bank
Huwara Bypass Road
One of the ongoing infrastructure projects since the beginning of the war is the Huwara Bypass Road. Under the initiative of the Minister of Transportation, Miri Regev, it was decided to advance its opening. The road was opened on 11/11/23 for the benefit of four settlements in the area of Nablus, with an investment of 350 million shekels. Since the road’s opening, settlers continue to travel through the village of Huwara, also making a political statement by claiming that “the Huwara Road belongs to Jews, and that there should be no concession on it.” As of the publication date, it appears that the bypass road is used very sparingly, with minimal daily traffic.
The Road to Yasuf Still Blocked by Settlers (05.12)
Seizure of the Ein Silon Spring
During the war, we are aware of at least one case of settlers seizing control of the Ein Silon spring, located on one of the southern roads from the village of Qusra to Highway 60, in the Palestinian village of Karyut. The road has been unused for many years and is blocked for Palestinian traffic.
Since the end of October, settlers from the Shilo area are arriving almost daily in the spring. In at least one case, settlers were documented vandalizing the structure of the spring. A group of settlers from Shiloh and the surrounding outposts has decided to transform the Ein Silon Spring into a tourist site for settlers. In recent weeks, the settlers cleared the spring and prepared it for visits. Access to it is possible by a relatively convenient dirt road.
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***
“The people of Gaza will not suffer another wholesale displacement to the Sinai from their homes in Gaza.
They have repeatedly stated that “Heaven is closer than Sinai” a sentiment not unlike that once championed by America in out early history — “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death.”
.
In the face of this ongoing genocide, the Biden Administration and Congress refuse to call for a ceasefire.
They continue to provide Israel with the military weapons utilized in these war crimes.
Israel’s strategy to which the Biden Administration and Congress remain complicit will only lead to more death, destruction, and insecurity for the people between the River and the Sea. It risks greater regional war. (CT Mirror)
Video. The World’s Most Documented Genocide in History
The Criminal Balance-Sheet
“Between Oct. 9 and Nov. 13, Israel dropped more than 20,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, an area twice the size of Washington D.C. Following the seven-day pause which began Nov. 24 and ended Dec. 1, Israel resumed its genocidal assault on Gaza. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that Dec. 2 marked the bloodiest day since Oct. 7, resulting in over 1,000 people killed, wounded, or reported missing.
Israel’s assault on the Gazan population, nearly half of whom are children under the age of 18, continues unabated. As of Dec. 27, The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports 29,124 Palestinians killed, of which 11,422 and 5,822 are children and women.
These numbers include those presumed dead under the rubble of homes, hospitals, and schools destroyed by Israel. Nearly 87 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million population have been displaced, many living without shelter or in tents, and without access to medical care, sufficient food, and water, facing disease, starvation, and death.” (CT Mirror)
Video: Middle East War, Genocide in Palestine. Michel Chossudovsky
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The last four years has been a significant shakeup for some people. Many of those previously identifying as ‘of the left’ have started to wonder what that actually means. At the same time, we have seen a willingness by those usually associated with ‘the right’ becoming more open to engaging with ‘left wing’ voices.
The high profile ‘lefty’ British comedian Russell Brand interacting with ‘right wing’ Tucker Carlson, and finding common ground, symbolises these ideological shifts. The Covid–19 event has played a major role here. The draconian response to a purported health emergency involved propaganda operations aimed at maximising fear levels amongst the population and extreme measures including lockdowns and the mandating of experimental gene therapy injections.
As these biosecurity regimes were being trialled across countries, major harm was being done. The resulting ‘collateral damage’ (a euphemism originating during Gulf War 1 designed to obfuscate the fact that civilians were being killed by US bombs) includes significant economic damage to middle- and low-income people and associated small businesses, severe damage to populations in poorer countries, disruption of normal health care routines resulting in missed diagnoses and worsening general physical and mental health, an increase in depression and related suicides, and sharp increases in excess mortality across multiple countries.
Broadly, those identifying as ‘of the left’ have supported official narratives regarding Covid–19. In particular, a perception emerged early on that right wing governments (e.g. the Trump administration in the US and the Johnson Conservative government in the UK) were failing to protect their populations from the alleged Covid–19 threat. As a result, criticism from left-wing politicians frequently demanded even harsher and quicker measures and presented this as a moral imperative based upon concern for community and solidarity.
Relatively few left-wing critics were insightful enough to challenge the devastating impact policies such as lockdown were having on the poorer strata of society and the Global South in countries that adopted these policies. Opposition, what we in this article recognise as the ‘Covid resistance’, more often emerged from the right of the political spectrum and was frequently couched in terms of the protection of individual rights and bodily ‘autonomy’. Within this group there was a good deal of analysis challenging the ‘The Science’.
The escalation in 2022 of the conflict in Ukraine, and now the Israeli military action against Palestinians, introduce new dynamics. In recognition that conflict in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and West Asia (alias the Middle East) is being driven by Western geo-political ambitions, not least of which concerns attempts to maintain US-led dominance of the global system, dissent from left-wing anti-imperialists has been prominent.
Conversely, at least some of the existing right-dominated Covid resistance has adopted either an ambiguous or otherwise outrightly supportive position toward Western policy regarding Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. Within these cleavages, a key subdivision concerns diverging perspectives within the Covid resistance between those who emphasise the continuing drive toward technocratic global governance and those who focus upon the weakening/declining Western Empire and the rise of a multipolar global system.
Looking across the last four years and the ‘rolling thunder’ of events, as Professor Mark Crispin Miller has described them, from Covid–19 through Ukraine to Israel/Palestine, there are at least two processes in play and which can be linked to two distinct power axes.
As well as multiple governments being involved in the construction of this ‘pandemic’—in particular, the US, China, UK and Germany/EU—international organisations such as the UN and WHO, plus influential think tanks like the WEF as well as powerful banking and financial actors, all played central roles.
As such, the power axis involved with the Covid–19 event has a distinctly international, or global, dimension to it. In addition to the draconian responses to the constructed health crisis, we are now witnessing an attempt to consolidate the biosecurity regimes trialled during the early phases of the Covid–19 event.
As manyanalysts are pointing out, the Pandemic Preparedness Agenda (PPA) and International Health Regulations (IHR) are being used to enable organisations, principally the World Health Organisation (WHO), to exert influence over decisions to control populations during declared health emergencies.
This emerging biosecurity architecture is complemented by a parallel drive toward more organised and enforceable censorship regimes. Here, Taibbi et al. have documented the so-called Censorship Industrial Complex whilst there are multiple drives to pass through bills that will create a legal backing for control of alleged ‘disinformation’; see for example, the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK Online Safety legislation.
The combined effect of these health and information control architectures will be the coercion of populations into accepting ‘health measures’ and the stifling of public debate and dissent. All of this represents highly organised propaganda aimed at shaping material and informational realms in order to ‘organise conduct’ and mould beliefs. For a significant number of those in the right-dominated Covid resistance, this process reflects the globalist technocratic agenda and one that is propelling us into a globalised technocratic order.
The second process in play is the continued projection of power by the US and its allies; witness the current wars in Ukraine and West Asia (Middle East). Compared to the Covid–19 event, this process is more easily located within the power axis of the Western Empire, in particular the so-called military-industrial complex (MIC).
Western imperialism obviously pre-dates the Covid–19 event, and the belligerence accompanying it arguably spans centuries. In terms of recent history, the 9/11 structural deep event represents the start of the most recent phase of the West’s attempt to exert influence through military means.
The evidence in support of 9/11 itself being a self-inflicted wound, a manufactured war trigger primarily designed to enable the conditions for a series of regime-change wars under cover of a Western-led global ‘war on terror’, is now overwhelming. Its utilisation as a propaganda narrative designed to underpin multiple regime change wars is also well established.
The initial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by ‘regime-change’ drives in Libya and Syria, have segued into the Ukraine proxy war against Russia and the current support for Israel as it carries out a publicly declared genocidal military operation in Gaza whilst simultaneously targeting Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese and Iranian Resistance factions.
For many analysts, this extraordinary level of belligerence demonstrates the increasing isolation of the Western Empire and, indeed, its declining hegemony. In both military and economic terms, the West has been unable to prevail in the Ukraine and is now facing strategic failure.
Jordan demonstration in support of Gaza
In terms of ideational power, levels of global support for the Palestinians, as Western-backed and the British incubated Zionist project conducts a military campaign which meets the criteria of genocide, suggest that whatever credibility the West possessed in the past is now being further, perhaps catastrophically, eroded.
Certainly, at this stage in the history of the Western US-led empire, it is very difficult to imagine there being sufficient military, economic or ideational capacity necessary to ‘win’ in the Ukraine or the Middle East, let alone engage any other major powers.
Five points follow from this description of what is going on.
First, both processes are real meaning that, quite simply, both Western global military adventurism and drives toward the creation of global governance structures are empirically demonstrable. We can observe them in the proxy military engagements seen in the Ukraine and Gaza, the dystopian experience during Covid–19, and the formulation of legislative frameworks surrounding pandemic preparedness and control of ‘disinformation’. In addition, these processes are occurring simultaneously.
Second, we cannot be sure, at present, of the relationship between the two processes and the two power axes. One possibility is that both processes have a shared global-level origin and that the power axes are more or less aligned. In this scenario the same elite power networks—broadly a network of global technocratic elite groups—are responsible for fuelling both the wars and the biosecurity regimes.
Another possibility is that whilst there are shared interests across elite power blocks with respect to the development and implementation of biosecurity regimes, there are also divergent material and security interests. In this scenario, we see major powers such as the US, China and Russia pushing forward with the development of global biosecurity regimes whilst resource and security driven conflicts roll on.
Also possible is that, rather than emanating primarily from transnational-level elite power networks, both the wars and the biosecurity regimes are largely a function of Western-centric elite power networks with support from factions within opposing nations that have infiltrated governance and public institutions including media. From this perspective, both processes might be explicable as part of Western Imperialism. Detailed and global level power network analysis is essential in order to further assess the relative cogency of these possibilities as well as other plausible hypotheses.
Third, we can, however, be sure that both processes represent clear and present threats to the lives and well-being of people. The responses to the Covid–19 event—including lockdowns and coerced injections—have had a catastrophic impact on populations across the globe. There are grounds now to argue that many deaths attributed to Covid–19 were, in fact, iatrogenic (induced by the treatments and actions of medical professionals), whilst the impact of lockdowns and other societal-level disruptions have caused immense ‘collateral damage’.
The emerging biosecurity architecture described earlier—the Pandemic Preparedness Agenda and the Censorship Industrial Complex—threaten to enable yet further blows to the health of global populations. Western power projection through military means is also catastrophic. For example, the Watson Institute ‘Cost of War’ project recently estimated indirect deaths in post-9/11 war zones—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen—at 3.6 to 3.8 million people. Israeli military action in Gaza, since 7 October 2023, has killed over 20,000 people, at least 50% of them children.
Fourth, in order to try to protect people, both processes and power axes need to be resisted and, in doing so, we must avoid falling into the trap of dismissing resistance to Western Imperialism in places such as Gaza or Ukraine as distractions or otherwise unimportant. For Western-based writers and researchers, it is perhaps easier to engage with threats posed to their own lives and well-being and those of fellow Westerners.
This might create a propensity to prioritise critique of the Covid–19 event. But this should not be done at the expense of support for those at the receiving end of the Western Empire’s firepower in places such as Gaza and Syria. To state a simple but important example, in their current predicament the Palestinian people have priorities that need addressing that are more urgent than any emerging global-level political and economic structures. They are fighting for their existence in Palestine.
Indeed, one could argue there is a level of subliminal white supremacism in the argumentation that conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine or the wider West Asia region are little more than distractions that will facilitate the Western-centric dystopian governance regime.
There is a lack of cultural and historical context or understanding and a projection of Western values (or lack of them), which leads to what appears to be a narrow, myopic focus on the problems that will affect the collective West and nominally ‘civilised’ countries while excluding developing countries or those battling Western neocolonialist projects from the analysis. Is their war against oppression and tyranny of less value than the modern war that is being waged against the predator class vision of our future as humanity?
As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “You pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” Those who perceive Ukraine and Gaza as orchestrated distractions from the threat of a biosecurity state in the West live in the countries that have subjugated the Global South for centuries without respite unless those countries comply with US/UK-led demands and agendas. Resistance leads to Western-dominated plundering of resources and the decimation of culture, civilisation and infrastructure to ensure a developing country is reduced to a dark-age failed state.
There also appears to be little analysis of how people in so-called Global South nations actually feel about the global future or how they instinctively pivot towards the East, having suffered untold horrors at the hands of the West’s military-industrial complex for most of their existence.
Thus, the global cohesion to face a global enemy that threatens all our existence is lacking because of the tendency to literally balkanise discussion into sectors which find it almost impossible to identify areas where overlap is viable.
In other words, until we start to take full responsibility for the misery inflicted by historic strategies still supported today Western regimes, we will never address key root causes of world subjugation. While we address what we consider to be a universal dystopian future, we must also simultaneously address the liberation of the nations we have enabled our governments to prey upon, destroy, rape and plunder. We can’t fight dystopia while dismissing, marginalising or ignoring those already living in it.
The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realise that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests, and in knowing who their enemies are. The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organised, protected robbery.
Franz Fanon
Fifth, recognising that we are up against multiple processes and power axes provides an opportunity for those who perceive themselves to be as ‘of the left’ or ‘of the right’ to rally around a common principle that is to prioritise protecting people against corrupt elites power networks.
Primarily this requires some of the right-orientated Covid resistance to become more fully conversant with the realities of Western imperialism and, at the same time, some of the left-orientated anti-imperialists to wake up to the threats posed by the emerging biosecurity regimes.
At present, the most bitter pill needing to be swallowed by some of the Covid resistance is acceptance of the fact that, whatever the causes and responsibilities surrounding 7 October, the reality is that Israel has played a central role in terms of Western power projection in the Middle East and, as part of this, a terrible injustice has been committed against Palestinians.
A prime example of the schism between the Covid resistance and endorsement of Israel and US neocolonialist designs on the Middle East can be identified in statements from vaccine-opposed Robert Kennedy Jr. and his pivot to “unconditional” support for what is effectively a US military garrison in the Middle East:
Israel is critical and the reason it’s critical is because it is a bulwark for us in the Middle East. It is almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. It is our oldest ally, it’s been our ally for 75 years. It has been an incredible ally for us in terms of the technology exchange and building the Iron Dome which we have paid a lot for—has taught us enormously about how to defend ourselves against missile attack. That military expenditure—75% goes to US companies under the agreement, under the MoU.
If you look at what’s happening in the Middle East now, the closest allies to Iran are Russia and China. Iran also controls all of Venezuela’s oil, Hezbollah is in Venezuela, they have propped up the Maduro regime and so they control that oil supply. BRICS, Saudi Arabia is now joining BRICS so those countries will control 90% of the oil in our world. If Israel disappears, the vacuum in the Middle East, Israel is our Ambassador, our beachhead in the ME, it gives us ears and eyes in the ME, it gives us intelligence, the capacity to influence affairs in the ME. If Israel disappeared Russia and China would be controlling the ME and would control 90% of the world’s oil supply and that would be cataclysmic for US national security.
The war, whether Western-centric or transnational, is against the vulnerable and the disenfranchised of this world—it is impossible to fight a successful campaign against the threat that confronts humanity without collaboration with all oppressed peoples of the world. For the Global South to be liberated from the chains of Western oppression must be a priority to achieve a world united against an oligarchical tyranny, wherever it emanates from.
Moving Beyond Left-Right and the Partitioning of Analysis Sectors
All that is required here is a willingness to acknowledge and engage with the overwhelming evidence we now have that both Western imperial belligerence and nefarious biosecurity regimes are bad for health, autonomy and freedom. Both need to be resisted, and resisted in a way that does not eclipse one or the other.
Common ground can be found through recognition of the power axes in play and the ways in which they exploit, suppress and harm people albeit in different ways and places. Recognition that the problem common to both is the existence of demonstrably corrupt and unrepresentative power elites should be enough to alert people who perceive themselves as ‘left’ or ‘right’ that we all share a common enemy.
It is also probably time for people to abandon the left-right paradigm. As suggested in this article, the divisions and blind spots which the left-right paradigm, respectively, enables and reveals mean that it has probably outlived its usefulness. This evolution will require further concerted thinking with respect to new ways of comprehending and analysing our political universe.
Image: Dr Julie Ponesse
This article is just a start. For now it is enough to recognise that, given the nefarious power axes with which we are having to do battle, our existing political structures are profoundly broken. As noted by Dr Julie Ponesse, fired for refusing the Covid injection:
…our institutions are broken beyond repair. It’s time to build anew: a new economy, a new way of governing, and a new health care system.
Another way of putting this is that if we had anything approaching a functioning democracy or system that genuinely represented the popular consensus, we would not have to endure a state of perpetual war undeniably facilitated by state-managed lies and deception on an epic scale. We would not be on the abyss of a biosecurity world coup that threatens us all with a future of colonisation under the control of forces that effectively occupy our governments.
If anyone doubts the crossover between the genocide that Israel is inflicting upon the seventy-five-year-occupied and persecuted Palestinian people and the incoming biosecurity/surveillance agenda, please take a look at the 2030 Roadmap for UK-Israel Bilateral Relations.
This document lays out the involvement that Israel will have in the future of British healthcare, defence and security, climate issues, trade and investment, cyber, culture, education and higher education, science, innovation and technology. In other words, what originated as a British settler-colonialist project in Palestine after the Balfour Treaty of 1917 will now apparently occupy and influence the essential decision-making processes of British society. From the document:
The vision for our 2 nations also includes health cooperation. We will explore the development of a dialogue between the UK and Israel to address the challenges faced by our healthcare systems, and building on the launch of the pan-Northern UK-Israel health-tech gateway earlier this year. We will also collaborate in order to materialise a pilot program in the north-east of England, which will focus on digital health, telemedicine and expanding health cooperation focus on those areas and other tailor made Israeli technological solutions. Our ambition for closer, mutually beneficial ties is limitless.
In the final analysis, it is important to recognise the scale of the struggle we face. We are living through unusually dangerous and tumultuous times. For some, this means being on the receiving end of hard military power. The threat of regional escalation in the Middle East is very real as we enter 2024.
For many others, lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by the predator classes as populations reel from the deleterious consequences of lockdowns, experimental gene therapy ‘vaccines’ and being terrorised by a pathogen, one that borders on being mythical. Solidarity is of utmost importance in this struggle and we need it now more than ever.
As the (sadly) late legendary journalist John Pilger so aptly said:
Rapacious great power is ruthless and vindictive; many of us can’t imagine because we’re not like that in our lives.
In order to face that great power and to dismantle the projects with which it intends to destroy the world as we know it, we must form a cohesive and united Resistance front, one which is inclusive of East and West and everything in between. We must move beyond the left-right paradigms and understand that the rapacious predator class has no such limits or partitioning restrictions on its strategy. Neither should we.
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Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist and photographer. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards – the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism – whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team.
Dr Piers Robinson is co-Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Media and Propaganda and associated researcher with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 ‘Global War on Terror, member of Panda and BerlinGroup21. He researches and writes on propaganda, conflict and media and was Chair/Professor in Politics, Society ad Political Journalism, University of Sheffield, 2016-2019, Senior Lecturer in International Politics (University of Manchester 2010-2016) and Lecturer in Political Communication (University of Liverpool, 1999-2005).
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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This article was originally published in March 2023.
The Iraq War was spawned by a deadly combination of political depravity and media complicity. Unfortunately, on the twentieth anniversary of the war, both elements of that conspiracy are being whitewashed. Instead, politicians and their pundit accomplices are prattling as if the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, not a crime against humanity.
In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3 percent of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits.
But President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney worked ceaselessly to convince Americans that Saddam was the 9/11 culprit.
Official propaganda trumpeting the Saddam/al-Qaeda link was the linchpin for exploiting 9/11 to justify war. A February 2003 poll found that 72 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shortly before the March 2003 invasion, almost half of all Americans believed that “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 percent of respondents knew that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.
In his official notification of invasion sent to Congress (in lieu of a declaration of war) on March 18, 2003, Bush declared that he was attacking Iraq “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Bush tied Saddam to 9/11 even though confidential briefings he received informed him that no evidence of any link had been found. Three years after the war started, Bush publicly admitted that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.
On March 17, 2003, Bush also justified invading Iraq by invoking UN resolutions purportedly authorizing the U.S. “to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.” In a speech giving Saddam 48 hours to abdicate power, Bush declared, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” In the weeks and months after the fall of Baghdad, Bush repeatedly asserted that U.S. forces had discovered WMDs or that Saddam had weapons programs. “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories,” Bush declared to journalists on May 29, 2003. Five weeks later, he again claimed vindication because “we found a biological lab” in a truck trailer. However, CIA investigators concluded that the trailer had nothing to do with an Iraqi WMD program. False claims by the Bush administration on Saddam seeking uranium in Niger sparked an uproar and leaks seeking to destroy the former ambassador who exposed the sham.
In June 2003, Bush repeatedly denounced “revisionist historians” who kept asking about the missing WMDs. In a November 12, 2003 interview with the BBC’s David Frost, Bush declared that he had sent a team to Iraq “to find the weapons or the intent of weapons.” Bush did not reveal how he defined “the intent of weapons.” The following month, Bush told ABC News that the war was justified because there was “the possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons.” In January 2004, David Kay—the man Bush chose to head the search for WMDs in Iraq—testified to Congress that “we were almost all wrong,” as far as Iraq possessing WMDs. Kay’s testimony demolished one of the prime pretexts for the war.
Bush responded by portraying the lack of evidence as proof of his courage. On February 8, 2004, Bush justified invading Iraq because Saddam “had the ability to make weapons at the very minimum.” This is like justifying a violent no-knock raid on someone’s house because they could have purchased gunpowder and tin cans.
In a March 2, 2004 speech to Homeland Security Department employees, Bush offered a new justification for invading Iraq: “America will not allow terrorists and outlaw regimes to threaten our Nation and the world with the world’s most dangerous technologies.” The mere suspicion that a nation might have “dangerous technologies” justified devastating their land.
But what did George W. Bush really think? That mystery was solved a few weeks later at the annual Washington dinner for the Radio and Television Correspondents Association.Bush performed a skit featuring slides showing him crawling around the Oval Office peeking behind curtains. Bush quippedto the poohbah attendees: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…Nope, no weapons over there…Maybe under here?” The crowd loved it and TheWashington Post headlined its report on the evening: “George Bush, Entertainer in Chief.” Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher, labeled the performance and the press’s reaction that night as “one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of the American media and presidency.”By the time of Bush’s performance, hundreds of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians had already been killed.
Most of the media had embedded themselves for the Iraq war long before that dinner. The Washington Post buried pre-war articles questioning the Bush team’s shams on Iraq; their award-winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained, “There was an attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?’” Instead, before the war started, the Post ran 27 editorials in favor of invasion and 140 front-page articles supporting the Bush administration’s case for attacking Saddam. PBS’s Bill Moyers noted that “of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.” Jim Lehrer, the host of government-subsidized PBS Newshour, explained his timidity in 2004: “It would have been difficult to have had debates [about invading Iraq]…you’d have had to have gone against the grain.” Lehrer’s admission did not disgrace him since groveling to officialdom is the job description for Washington journalists.
In his 1971 opinion on the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Hugo Black declared that a free press has “the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” But during the Iraq War, most of the media preferred to trumpet official lies instead of exposing them.
A 2005 American University survey of hundreds of journalists who covered Iraq concluded: “Many media outlets have self-censored their reporting on the conflict in Iraq because of concern about public reaction to graphic images and details about the war.” Individual journalists commented:
“In general, coverage downplayed civilian casualties and promoted a pro-U.S. viewpoint. No U.S. media show abuses by U.S. military carried out on regular basis.”
“Friendly fire incidents were to show only injured Americans, and no reference made to possible mistakes involving civilians.”
“The real damage of the war on the civilian population was uniformly omitted.”
The media sugarcoated the war and almost always refused to publish photos incriminating the U.S. military. TheWashington Post received a leak of thousands of pages of confidential records on the 2005 massacre at Haditha, including stunning photos taken immediately after Marines killed 24 civilians (mostly women and children). Though the Post headlined its exclusive story, “Marines’ Photos Provide Graphic Evidence inHadithaProbe,” the article noted that “Post editors decided that most of theimages are too graphic to publish.” The Post suppressed the evidence at the same time it continued deferentially reporting official denials that U.S. troops committed atrocities.
In 2007, two Apache helicopters targeted a group of men in Baghdad with 30 mm. cannons and killed kill up to 18 people. Video from the helicopter revealed one helicopter crew “laughing at someof the casualties, all of whom were civilians, including two Reuters journalists.” “Light ’em all up. Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one guy on the recording declared. Army Corporal Chelsea Manning leaked the video to Wikileaks, which disclosed it in 2010. Wikileaks declared on Twitter: “Washington Post had Collateral Murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT to the public.” Wikileaks also disclosed thousands of official documents exposing U.S. war crimes and abuses, tacitly damning American media outlets that chose to ignore or shroud atrocities.
In 2007, Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly declared that at the beginning of the war in Iraq, “everybody in the country [was] behind it, except the kooks.” The “kooks” included UN weapons inspectors, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and many foreign governments. The “kook” label was also attached to Antiwar.com, The American Conservative, Counterpunch, the Future of Freedom Foundation, and an array of individual journalists who often found closed doors to their submissions.Likewise, the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of protestors who took to the streets of American cities to oppose the war were redefined into a laughingstock.
In his rush to war, President Bush showed boundless bad faith—followed by boundless righteousness after his lies were exposed. By the summer of 2008, only 22 percent of Americans approved of Bush and 41 percent said he was the “worst president ever.” But the same media outlets that championed the Iraq War helped resurrect Bush’s public image a decade later. Bush was exalted like the second coming of George Washington for his slams against the Trump administration. By early 2018,a poll showed that 61 percent of Americans approved of Bush, and his support among Democrats quintupled, from 11 percent in early 2009 to 54 percent now. The key to Bush’s rehabilitation was burying his Iraq War record in the Memory Hole.
The media played the same trick to expunge its own tawdry Iraq record. Four years ago, The Washington Post spent a king’s ransom to produce and run a Super Bowl ad on its “Democracy Dies in the Darkness” motto. At that time, the Post was whipping up RussiaGate hysteria and reaping torrents of new subscribers. The Super Bowl ad, a paean to reporters, declared, “When we go off to war…knowing keeps us free.”
But kowtowing leaves people dead. Twenty years after the start of the Iraq War, President Biden is dragging America deeper into a foreign conflict that could spiral into World War III. Most of the mainstream media is again parroting whatever the U.S. government or its foreign lackeys say about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Lies are political weapons of mass destruction, obliterating all limits on government power. The Iraq War should have taught Americans not to trust presidents or pundits who seek to unleash mass carnage. But don’t trust the Washington elite to ever learn or admit that lesson.
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Jim Bovard is a Senior Fellow for the Libertarian Institute and author of the newly published, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty (2023). His other books include Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and seven others. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Washington Post, among others. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
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Three months since the horrific 7 October attacks, Gaza has become a place of death and despair.
Tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, have been killed or injured. Families are sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet. Areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety have come under bombardment. Medical facilities are under relentless attack. The few hospitals that are partially functional are overwhelmed with trauma cases, critically short of all supplies, and inundated by desperate people seeking safety.
A public health disaster is unfolding. Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.
For children in particular, the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out.
Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence – while the world watches on.
The humanitarian community has been left with the impossible mission of supporting more than 2 million people, even as its own staff are being killed and displaced, as communication blackouts continue, as roads are damaged and convoys are shot at, and as commercial supplies vital to survival are almost non-existent.
Meanwhile, rocket attacks on Israel continue, more than 120 people are still held hostage in Gaza, tensions in the West Bank are boiling, and the specter of further regional spillover of the war is looming dangerously close.
Hope has never been more elusive.
Gaza has shown us the worst of humanity, as well as moments of great heroism.
We have seen how violence cannot resolve differences, but only inflame passions and build new generations of danger and insecurity.
We continue to demand an immediate end to the war, not just for the people of Gaza and its threatened neighbors, but for the generations to come who will never forget these 90 days of hell and of assaults on the most basic precepts of humanity.
It is time for the parties to meet all their obligations under international law, including to protect civilians and meet their essential needs, and to release all hostages immediately.
It is time for the international community to use all its influence to make this happen.
This war should never have started. But it’s long past time for it to end.
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Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator
Featured image: Families have been forced to moved repeatedly in Gaza. UN United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
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Dec. 24, 2023 – Fifth Singapore Airlines Pilot Dies at the World’s First Fully Vaccinated Airline
Captain Lee Meng Chye Martin died suddenly on Dec. 24, 2023.
Pilot Deaths on Duty in 2023
Sep. 23, 2023 – Alaska Airlines Pilot Death – 37 year old Captain Eric McRae died suddenly in his hotel room during layover, was to fly that morning
Aug. 17, 2023 – IndiGo Flight (NAG-PNQ) Nagpur to Pune, India, 40 year old Pilot 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!
July 16, 2023 – Small plane – 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.
June 4, 2023 – Small plane – Cessna Citation N611VG flying Tennessee to Long Island, fighter jets spotted pilot slumped over in cockpit unconscious, plane crashed and all onboard died
May 3, 2023 – Air Transat and Air Canada Pilot Eddy Vorperian, age 48, died suddenly during layover in Croatia
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)
Military Pilot Incapacitations and Deaths
July 19, 2023 – 37 year old US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Andrew James Lingenfelter, of Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, died on July 19, 2023 after battle with Pancreatic Turbo Cancer
May 9, 2023 – United Airlines and US Air Force Pilot Lt. Col. Michael Fugett, age 46, died unexpectedly at his home
Pilot Deaths (Not on Duty)
Dec. 5, 2023 – Volaris (El Salvador) Pilot – 30s year old Jose Espinal – El Salvador Pilot for Volaris (El Salvador), Air Jazeera Airways (Kuwait) and former VECA & TACA Airlines, died suddenly on Dec.5, 2023.
Nov. 16, 2023 – Air India Pilot – 37 year old Air India Pilot Captain Himanil Kumar had cardiac arrest at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport during training
Oct. 18, 2023 – Austrian Airlines Pilot – 43 year old Christian Zimmerebner, AUA Austrian Airlines Pilot and member of Dorfgastein mountain rescue, died suddenly on Oct.18, 2023 due to “serious illness”
May 2023 – 4 Singapore Airlines pilots died suddenly in May 2023
May 26, 2023 – Singapore Airlines Pilot – Capt Sebestian Tan Aik Chuang: died May 26, 2023 (cancer)
May 25, 2023 – Singapore Airlines Pilot – Capt Tan Joo Huat Colin: died May 25, 2023 (sudden)
May 24, 2023 – Singapore Airlines Pilot – Capt Fernando Cid: died May 24, 2023 (cancer)
May 11, 2023 – Singapore Airlines Pilot – Capt Wee Loong: died May 11, 2023 (sudden death)
April 13, 2023 – Phil Thomas, graduate of Flight Training Pilot academy in Cadiz, Spain (FTEJerez) died suddenly.
March 17, 2023 – Westjet Pilot – 39 year old Benjamin Paul Vige died suddenly in Calgary
*
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
January 8th, 2024 by International Court of Justice
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To the Registrar of the International Court of Justice, the undersigned, being duly authorised by the Government of the Republic of South Africa, state as follows:
In accordance with Articles 36 (1) and 40 of the Statute of the Court and Article 38 of the Rules of Court, I have the honour to submit this Application instituting proceedings in the name of the Republic of South Africa (“South Africa”) against the State of Israel (“Israel”). Pursuant to Article 41 of the Statute, the Application includes a request that the Court indicate provisional measures to protect the rights invoked herein from imminent and irreparable loss.
I. Introduction
1. This Application concerns acts threatened, adopted, condoned, taken and being taken by the Government and military of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, a distinct national, racial and ethnical group, in the wake of the attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023. South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (‘Genocide Convention’ or ‘Convention’),1 whether as a matter of law or morality. The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip (‘Palestinians in Gaza’). The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. The acts are all attributable to Israel, which has failed to prevent genocide and is committing genocide in manifest violation of the Genocide Convention, and which has also violated and is continuing to violate its other fundamental obligations under the Genocide Convention, including by failing to prevent or punish the direct and public incitement to genocide by senior Israeli officials and others.
2. In preparing this Application, South Africa has paid close attention to the provisions of the Genocide Convention, to its interpretation, and to its application in the years following its entry into force on 12 January 1951, as well as to the jurisprudence of this Court and that of other international courts and tribunals, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. South Africa is highly cognisant of the fact that acts of genocide are distinct from other violations of international law sanctioned or perpetrated by the Israeli government and military in Gaza — including intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, civilian objects and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected; torture; the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; and other war crimes and crimes against humanity — though there is often a close connection between all such acts. South Africa is also aware that acts of genocide inevitably form part of a continuum — as Raphaël Lemkin who coined the term ‘genocide’ himself recognised.2 For this reason it is important to place the acts of genocide in the broader context of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year- long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza, including the serious and ongoing violations of international law associated therewith, including grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention,3 and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, when referring in this Application to acts and omissions by Israel which are capable of amounting to other violations of international law, South Africa’s case is that those acts and omissions are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.
3. South Africa is acutely aware of the particular weight of responsibility in initiating proceedings against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention. However, South Africa is also acutely aware of its own obligation — as a State party to the Genocide Convention — to prevent genocide. Israel’s acts and omissions in relation to Palestinians violate the Genocide Convention. That is the shared view of numerous other States parties to the Convention, including the State of Palestine itself, which has called on “world leaders” to “take responsibility… to stop the genocide against our people”.4 United Nations experts have also repeatedly sounded “the alarm” for over 10 weeks that “[c]onsidering statements made by Israeli political leaders and their allies, accompanied by military action in Gaza and escalation of arrests and killing in the West Bank” there is a “risk of genocide against the Palestinian people”.5 United Nations experts have also expressed their “profound … concern” about “the failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide” against Palestinians, and have called on the “international community” to “do everything it can to immediately end the risk of genocide against the Palestinian people”.6 The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (‘CERD’), acting under its ‘early warning and urgent action procedure’, has also called on “all State parties” to the Genocide Convention to “fully respect” their “obligation to prevent… genocide”.7 This application by South Africa and its request for the indication of provisional measures fall to be considered in that context and in the light of those calls. It is made against the background of South Africa’s foreign policy objective for the attainment of a durable peace between Israel and the State of Palestine, with two States existing side by side within internationally recognised borders, based on those existing on 4 June 1967, prior to the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in line with all relevant United Nations resolutions and international law.
4. The facts relied on by South Africa in this application and to be further developed in these proceedings establish that — against a background of apartheid, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, annexation, occupation, discrimination, and the ongoing denial of the right of the Palestinian people to self- determination — Israel, since 7 October 2023 in particular, has failed to prevent genocide and has failed to prosecute the direct and public incitement to genocide. More gravely still, Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group. Repeated statements by Israeli State representatives, including at the highest levels, by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, and Minister of Defence express genocidal intent. That intent is also properly to be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, having regard inter alia to Israel’s failure to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine. It is also clear from the nature, scope and extent of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza, which have involved the sustained bombardment over more than 11 weeks of one of the most densely populated places in the world, forcing the evacuation of 1.9 million people or 85% of the population of Gaza from their homes and herding them into ever smaller areas, without adequate shelter, in which they continue to be attacked, killed and harmed. Israel has now killed in excess of 21,110 named Palestinians, including over 7,729 children — with over 7,780 others missing, presumed dead under the rubble — and has injured over 55,243 other Palestinians, causing them severe bodily and mental harm. Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.
5. South Africa, mindful of the jus cogens character of the prohibition of genocide and the erga omnes and erga omnes partes character of the obligations owed by States under the Genocide Convention, is making the present application to establish Israel’s responsibility for violations of the Genocide Convention; to hold it fully accountable under international law for those violations; and — most immediately — to have recourse to this Court to ensure the urgent and fullest possible protection for Palestinians in Gaza who remain at grave and immediate risk of continuing and further acts of genocide.
6. In light of the extraordinary urgency of the situation, South Africa seeks an expedited hearing for its request for the indication of provisional measures. In addition, pursuant to Article 74(4) of the Rules of Court, South Africa requests the President of the Court to protect the Palestinian people in Gaza by calling upon Israel immediately to halt all military attacks that constitute or give rise to violations of the Genocide Convention pending the holding of such hearing, so as to enable any order the Court may make on the request for the indication of provisional measures to have its appropriate effects. To that end, the Court should order Israel to cease killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinian people in Gaza, to cease the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group, to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, and to rescind related policies and practices, including regarding the restriction on aid and the issuing of evacuation directives.
7. Mindful of the Court’s important role and the exercise of its grave responsibility in circumstances in which the genocidal acts of which South Africa complains have occurred very recently and are ongoing — and have not otherwise been subject to judicial determination or detailed fact-finding — South Africa’s application and request for provisional measures provide a more detailed factual account than might otherwise be usual. That account draws in significant part on statements and reports by United Nations chiefs and bodies and non-governmental organisations (‘NGOs’), as well as eye- witness accounts from Gaza — including from Palestinian journalists on the ground — in circumstances where Israel continues to restrict access to Gaza by international journalists, investigators and fact- finding teams. However, neither the Application nor the request for the indication of provisional measures depends on a determination by the Court of each individual incident or complaint referred to herein. Notably, as the Court’s caselaw makes clear, “[w]hat the Court is required to do at the stage of making an order on provisional measures is to establish whether… at least some of the acts alleged… are capable of falling within the provisions of the Convention”.8 At least some of the acts alleged by South Africa are clearly capable of falling within those provisions.
II. Jurisdiction of the Court
8. South Africa and Israel are both Members of the United Nations and therefore bound by the Statute of the Court, including Article 36 (1), which provides that the Court’s jurisdiction “comprises . . . all matters specially provided for . . . in treaties and conventions in force”.
9. South Africa and Israel are also parties to the Genocide Convention. Israel signed the Genocide Convention on 17 August 1949 and deposited its instrument of ratification on 9 March 1950, thereby becoming a party when the Genocide Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. South Africa deposited its instrument of accession on 10 December 1998. It became applicable between the parties on the ninetieth day thereafter, pursuant to Article XIII of the Convention.
10. Article IX of the Genocide Convention provides:
“Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.”
11. Neither South Africa nor Israel has entered any reservation to Article IX.
12. South Africa has repeatedly and urgently expressed its concerns and condemnation in respect of Israel’s acts and omissions which form the basis of this Application. South Africa and other States Parties to the Genocide Convention have, in particular, made clear that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide against the Palestinian people. By way of example, the Presidents of Algeria,9 Bolivia,10 Brazil,11 Colombia,12 Cuba,13 Iran,14 Türkiye,15 and Venezuela16 have all described Israel’s actions as a genocide, as has the Palestinian President.17 State officials and representatives from Bangladesh,18 Egypt,19 Honduras,20 Iraq,21 Jordan,22 Libya,23 Malaysia,24 Namibia,25 Pakistan,26 Syria,27 and Tunisia,28 have also referred to genocide or the risk thereof in Gaza; as have heads of State and State officials from non-State parties to the Genocide Convention, including Qatar29 and Mauritania.30 Speaking on behalf of the ‘Arab Group’ at the 9498th meeting of the United Nations Security Council on 8 December 2023, ahead of the United Nations Security Council vote on a ceasefire, Egypt’s representative stated that the “[c]ivilian fatalities [in Gaza] lay bare the lie that the war is against an armed group. Rather, it is a collective punishment and genocide against the Palestinian people […] Citing “the extensive destruction of civilian infrastructure and the targeting of United Nations staff members”, he stated that “the forcible displacement of 85 per cent of Gaza’s people, living in dire circumstances, represents . . . an effort to eliminate the Palestinian people.”31
13. Having regard to the fact that the prohibition of genocide has the character of a peremptory norm and that the obligations under the Convention are owed erga omnes and erga omnes partes,32 Israel has been made fully aware of the grave concerns expressed by the international community, by States Parties to the Genocide Convention, and by South Africa in particular, as to Israel’s failure to cease, prevent and punish the commission of genocide. South Africa’s concern has been expressed, inter alia, as follows:
— On 30 October 2023, the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation issued a statement calling on the international community to hold Israel accountable for breaches of international law. Warning that “the crime of genocide, sadly looms large” in Gaza, the statement recalled that “President Lula da Silva of Brazil has called the attacks on Gaza a genocide” and that the South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, addressing the United Nations Security Council on 24 October 2023, had also “reminded the international community not to stand idle while another genocide is unfolding”.33
— On 7 November, addressing the South African National Assembly, South Africa’s International Relations Minister warned that “[t]he crime of genocide sadly looms large in the current situation in Gaza”, recalling that “in 1994, a genocide occurred on the African continent with much of the whole world watching as innocent people were massacred”, and underscoring that South Africa could not stand by and allow that to happen again.34
— On 10 November 2023, the Director-General of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (“DIRCO”), conducted a formal diplomatic démarche of the Ambassador of the State of Israel to South Africa, advising him that while South Africa “condemned the attacks on civilians by Hamas” which “should be investigated for war crimes”, “the response by Israel was unlawful”, and that South Africa “wants the ICC to investigate the leadership of Israel” for crimes including genocide.35
— On 13 November 2023, at a meeting at the Presidential residence with the leadership of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, at which they called inter alia for the re-opening of the South African Embassy in Israel, the President of South Africa, Mr Cyril Ramaphosa “condemn[ed] the genocide that is being inflicted against the people of Palestine, including women and children, through collective punishment and ongoing bombardment of Gaza”.36
— On 17 November 2023, during the course of a State visit to Qatar, the President of South Africa, announced that South Africa was referring the Situation in the State of Palestine to the International Criminal Court, expressing his abhorrence for “what is happening right now in Gaza, which has now turned into a concentration camp where genocide is taking place.”
— Later on 17 November 2023, the Embassy of South Africa in The Hague, acting on behalf of South Africa, jointly with three other States parties to the Genocide Convention — namely Bangladesh, Bolivia, and Comoros — and Djibouti, referred the Situation in the State of Palestine to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, requesting that the Prosecutor vigorously investigate crimes within the jurisdictional scope of the Court, including the crime of genocide, as provided for in Article 6 (a), (b) and (c) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (‘Rome Statute’).38
— On 21 November 2023, addressing the Extraordinary Joint Meeting of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) Leaders and Leaders of invited BRICS members on the situation in the Middle East called to address “ in the Middle East, the President of South Africa asserted that “[t]he deliberate denial of medicine, fuel, food and water to the residents of Gaza is tantamount to genocide.”39
— On 12 December 2023, speaking at the 10th Emergency Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly — at which Israel was represented — the South African Ambassador to the United Nations stated that “[t]he events of the past six weeks in Gaza have illustrated that Israel is acting contrary to its obligations in terms of the Genocide Convention”. She underscored that, “[a]s a UN Member State and owing to South Africa’s painful past experience of a system of apartheid, this impresses on us, as Member States to take action in accordance with international law.”40
— On 21 December 2023, South Africa sent a Note Verbale to the Embassy of Israel in South Africa, in which South Africa raised its concerns about “credible reports that acts meeting the threshold of genocide or related crimes as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, have been and may still be committed in the context of the conflict” in Gaza. The Note Verbale recalled that “[a]s a State Party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, South Africa is under a treaty obligation to prevent genocide from occurring, and therefore calls upon Israel which is also a State Party to the Convention to immediately cease hostilities in Gaza and to refrain from conduct constituting or failing to prevent violations of its obligations under the Convention”. South Africa, “[a]larmed by rhetoric from Israeli officials and others”, also called on Israel “to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide”. This served to communicate directly to Israel South Africa’s claims regarding the fulfilment of its own obligations under the Genocide Convention and breaches by Israel of its obligations under the Genocide Convention and the detail thereof.41
14. Israel has not responded directly to South Africa’s Note Verbale sent on 21 December 2023. However, Israel has publicly rejected any suggestion that it has violated international law in its military campaign in Gaza. Notably, Israel has dismissed as “outrageous and false” the assertion that Israel’s military attacks on Gaza meet “the legal definition of genocide” and are aimed at “not just simply the killing of innocent people and the destruction of their livelihoods but a systematic effort to empty Gaza of its people.”42 Israel denies that its conduct in Gaza violates its obligations under the Genocide Convention, asserting that “[t]he accusation of genocide against Israel is not only wholly unfounded as a matter of fact and law, it is morally repugnant” and “antisemitic”.43 Moreover, Israel has engaged and continues to engage in acts and omissions against the Palestinian people in Gaza as have been asserted to be genocidal and, by its attitude and conduct, has refuted any suggestion that its actions in Gaza are constrained by its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Indeed, the Israeli Prime Minister asserted on 26 December 2023: “We are not stopping. We are continuing to fight, and we are deepening the fighting in the coming days, and this will be a long battle and it is not close to being over.”44 Israel’s own conduct therefore serves to underline the parties’ disagreement. South Africa has not resiled from its own position that it is responsible as a State party to the Genocide Convention to act to prevent genocide or a risk thereof in Gaza.
15. According to the established case law of the Court, a dispute is “a disagreement on a point of law or fact, a conflict of legal views or interests” between parties.45 Such a disagreement or “positive opposition of the claim by one party by the other need not necessarily be stated expressis verbis… the position or the attitude of a party can be established by inference, whatever the professed view of that party”.46
16. There is plainly a dispute between Israel and South Africa relating to the interpretation and application of the Genocide Convention, going both to South Africa’s compliance with its own obligation to prevent genocide, and to Israel’s compliance with its obligations not to commit genocide and to prevent and punish genocide — including the direct and public incitement to genocide — and to make reparations to its victims and offer assurances and guarantees of non-repetition. Given that SouthAfrica’s claim concerns its own obligations as a State party to the Genocide Convention to act to prevent genocide — to which Israel’s acts and omissions give rise — South Africa plainly has standing in relation thereto. Moreover, given that “any State party to the Genocide Convention, and not only a specially affected State, may invoke the responsibility of another State party with a view to ascertaining the alleged failure to comply with its obligations erga omnes partes, and to bring that failure to an end”, South Africa also “has prima facie standing” to submit to the Court its dispute with Israel “on the basis of alleged violations of obligations under the Genocide Convention”.47
17. Therefore, pursuant to Article 36 (1) of the Court’s Statute and Article IX of the Genocide Convention, the Court has jurisdiction to hear the claims submitted in the present Application by South Africa against Israel.
III. The Facts
Map of the Gaza Strip
A. Introduction
18. Since 7 October 2023, Israel has engaged in a large-scale military assault by land, air and sea, on the Gaza Strip (‘Gaza’), a narrow strip of land approximately of 365 square kilometres – one of the most densely populated places in the world.48 Gaza — home to approximately 2.3 million people, almost half of them children — has been subjected by Israel to what has been described as one of the “heaviest conventional bombing campaigns” in the history of modern warfare.49 By 29 October 2023 alone, it was estimated that 6,000 bombs per week had been dropped on the tiny enclave.50 In just over two months, Israel’s military attacks had “wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol, or proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.”51 The destruction wrought by Israel is so extreme that “Gaza is now a different colour from space. It’s a different texture”.52 As stated by the United Nations Secretary-General, in a letter dated 6 December 2023 to the President of the United Nations Security Council,53 of which the United Nations General Assembly took express “note” in Resolution ESIO/22 of 12 December 2023 on the Protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations:54
“Civilians throughout Gaza face grave danger. Since the start of Israel’s military operation, more than 15,000 people have reportedly been killed, over 40 per cent of whom were children. Thousands of others have been injured. More than half of all homes have been destroyed. Some 80 per cent of the population of 2.2 million has been forcibly displaced, into increasingly smaller areas. More than 1.1 million people have sought refuge in UNRWA facilities across Gaza, creating overcrowded, undignified, and unhygienic conditions. Others have nowhere to shelter and find themselves on the street. Explosive remnants of war are rendering areas uninhabitable. There is no effective protection of civilians.
The health care system in Gaza is collapsing. Hospitals have turned into battlegrounds. Only 14 hospitals out of 36 facilities are even partially functional. The two major hospitals in south Gaza are operating at three times their bed capacity and are running out of basic supplies and fuel. They are also sheltering thousands of displaced persons. Under these circumstances, more people will die untreated in the coming days and weeks.
Nowhere is safe in Gaza.
Amid constant bombardment by the Israel Defense Forces, and without shelter or the essentials to survive, I expect public order to completely break down soon due to the desperate conditions, rendering even limited humanitarian assistance impossible. An even worse situation could unfold, including epidemic diseases and increased pressure for mass displacement into neighbouring countries.
While delivery of supplies through Rafah continues, quantities are insufficient and have dropped since the pause came to an end. We are simply unable to reach those in need inside Gaza . . . We are facing a severe risk of collapse of the humanitarian system. The situation is fast deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole and for peace and security in the region. Such an outcome must be avoided at all cost.”55
19. Since that letter was written, the numbers have risen even more starkly: at least 21,110 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed and over 55,243 other Palestinians have been wounded, many severely. 56 The death toll includes over 7,729 children,57 not including the 4,700 women and children still missing, and presumed dead under the rubble.58 Entire multi-generational families have been wiped out completely. Over 355,000 homes equivalent to more than 60 per cent of Gaza’s housing stock in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed.59 1.9 million Palestinians — 85 per cent of the total population — have been internally displaced.60 Many fled the north of the territory to the south, having been ordered to do so by Israel, only to be bombed again in the south, and told to flee once again further south or the south west, where they are reduced to living in makeshift tents in camps with no water, sanitation or other facilities.61 Israel has bombed, shelled and besieged Gaza’s hospitals, with only 13 out of 36 hospitals partially functional, and no fully functioning hospital left in North Gaza.62 Gaza’s healthcare system has all but collapsed, with reports of operations, including amputations and caesarean sections, taking place without anaesthetic.63 A significant proportion of the wounded and sick are unable to access any or adequate care.64 Contagious and epidemic diseases are rife amongst the displaced Palestinian population, with experts warning of the risk of meningitis, cholera and other outbreaks.65 The entire population in Gaza is at imminent risk of famine, whereas the proportion of households affected by acute food insecurity is the largest ever recorded according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (‘IPC’).66Experts warn that silent, slow deaths caused by hunger and thirst risk surpassing those violent deaths already caused by Israeli bombs and missiles.67
20. The United Nations General Assembly has expressed “grave concern over the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population”,68 with the United Nations Security Council noting in particular “the disproportionate effect on children”.69 In its Resolution ES10/22 of 12 December 2023, the United Nations General Assembly also took express “note” of a letter dated 7 December 2023 from the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (‘UNRWA’), addressed to the President of the General Assembly. In the unprecedented letter, the Commissioner-General “predict[s] collapse of the mandate [he] is expected to fulfil” and calls for of its people”.70
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Featured image: At least 90 Palestinians were killed in Sunday’s attack on the Maghazi refugee camp [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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This week’s drone strike on senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in southern Beirut provides compelling evidence that Israel wants to expand the conflict beyond its borders. In the last few weeks, Israel has assassinated a deputy political leader in Hamas (al-Arouri), a senior adviser in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, (Sayyed Razi Mousavi) and “nearly a dozen senior Iranian military officials” (Fox News) at an airport in Damascus. At the same time, Israel has launched multiple unprovoked airstrikes on Lebanon and Syria. All of these incitements suggest that Israel is exploring ways to expand the hostilities beyond Gaza in order to plunge the entire region into war.
C’mon @nytimes. Subheader suggesting a regional war “could draw in the US” like it’s being led versus leading. The @DeptofDefense is very much creating this moment. Don’t position it as responsive. It’s very proactive. pic.twitter.com/qmYrmjcfn6
Israeli provocations across the Middle East are an attempt to draw the United States deeper into a region-wide conflict. Israeli leaders know that their country will not become the dominant regional power unless its enemies –mainly Hezbollah and Iran– are severely weakened. But Israel also realizes that its enemies will not be weakened without US assistance. Thus, the US must be put in a situation where it feels compelled to engage Iran and Hezbollah militarily in order to rescue its closest ally in the Middle East. If Israel opens up a two-front or three-front war with its enemies –as it is currently trying to do– then the United States will be forced to intervene on Israel’s behalf increasing the probability that Israel will emerge as the regional hegemon. That is the underlying goal of the current operation.
None of this, of course, has anything to do with “defeating Hamas” which was the pretext Israel used to obliterate Gaza and push its population towards the Egyptian border. The real objective is to change the basic power-dynamics in the Middle East in a way that best suits Israel’s interests. Here’s an excerpt from an article at the BBC that was filed on Wednesday:
At least 103 people have been killed by two bomb explosions near the tomb of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on the fourth anniversary of his assassination by the US, Iran’s state media report. State broadcaster Irib said dozens more people were wounded when the blasts hit a procession near the Saheb al-Zaman mosque in the southern city of Kerman…. Videos showed bodies on a road and ambulances rushing to the scene….
Is Israel responsible for the terrorist attack in Iran?
The evidence is not conclusive, but it certainly fits with the pattern of recent assassinations and drone attacks in neighboring countries. The bombing incident has also infuriated the Iranian people who have flooded the streets in droves demanding retaliation. Again, the public reaction fits perfectly with Israel’s goal of provoking an emotional over-reaction that draws Iran into a direct confrontation with Israel. Keep in mind, the Biden administration has two carrier groups deployed to the region that are prepared to come to Israel’s aid at a moment’s notice. So, if Iran does respond (with missile attacks or airstrikes) the US is perfectly positioned to join the fray. This might explain why Netanyahu continues to bomb his neighbors with impunity. He knows that Uncle Sam “has his back.”
❗️Multiple casualties reported in Baghdad following US airstrikes on the PMU headquarters at the Iraqi Interior Ministry complex, among them a high ranking resistance leader.https://t.co/VGOJDS5iKupic.twitter.com/TYJyGhCLyK
— Daniella Modos – Cutter -SEN (@DmodosCutter) January 4, 2024
Here’s more from Aljazeera:
Israel has launched attacks on positions in Syria and Lebanon, as part of its ongoing campaign against opposing militaries and armed forces in the Middle East.
“The [Israeli army] struck military infrastructure belonging to the Syrian Army,” the Israeli military said in a post on the social media platform X on Tuesday.
“[Israeli military] fighter jets also struck Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon,” it added, promising it would “continue to operate against any threat to Israel’s sovereignty”.
Why is Israel doing this? Why are they provoking their neighbors even while they are conducting a major operation against the Palestinians in Gaza? Don’t all these incitements suggest that Israel wants to widen the war? Here’s more from Aljazeera:
A drone strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold, killed senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri on Tuesday. The drone hit a Hamas office, leaving six people dead, Lebanon’s state news agency reported.
Hamas confirmed the death of al-Arouri and called it a “cowardly assassination” by Israel, adding that attacks on Palestinians “inside and outside Palestine will not succeed in breaking the will and steadfastness of our people, or undermining the continuation of their valiant resistance”. Who was Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas leader killed in Beirut?, Aljazeera
The assassination of al-Arouri was no more ‘a spontaneous act of revenge’ than the attacks on Syria, Lebanon, or Gaza. They’re all part of a Grand Plan to redraw the map of the Middle East by provoking Israel’s enemies and then drawing Washington into the hostilities. That is the basic strategy in a nutshell. Here’s how political analyst Arnaud Bertrand summed it up on Twitter:
Israel is doing its very best to trigger a regional war by bombing Lebanon and Iran left and right, presumably to get the US more involved in the fighting as some sort of Hail Mary, but neither Lebanon nor Iran nor the US are taking the bait. Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
Bertrand is right; Israel is trying to drag the US into a war of its own making. He’s also right in saying that Iran and Hezbollah have shown great restraint (so far) and have resisted the temptation to retaliate. But how long will that last? After all, they can’t allow Israel to pummel them forever without responding in kind. And they can’t simply roll-over and play dead either. And, that’s not what they’re doing. What they’re doing is following events as they unfold so they have a better idea of Israel’s broader strategy. They are biding their time while Israel moves its troops out of Gaza and up to the northern front where they are likely to clash with Hezbollah militants sometime in the next two weeks. That appears to be what is going on.
Meanwhile, the western media is trying to prepare the public for another conflict in the Middle East by reiterating the claim that a “regional war” may now be inevitable. Check out these recent headlines and see if you can detect a recurrent theme:
Get it? The media is preparing the public for a wider regional war in the Middle East. Articles like these are being used to persuade the masses that conflict is unavoidable and resistance is pointless.
But, in whose interests are these articles being written? Whose geopolitical agenda is being promoted? Which country stands to benefit from a misinformed American public walking sheeplike into another deranged conflagration in which millions die and nothing is gained?
Why, Israel, of course.
From the looks of things, Uncle Sam is going to be asked to provide the military muscle for a lunatic operation that will pit US firepower against Hezbollah and Iran, neither of who pose any threat to American lives or US national security. The objective of this misguided war will be to eliminate Israel’s enemies so that Israel can “secure the realm” and assume the role of regional hegemon, the undisputed ruler of the Middle East.
It’s a pipe dream.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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“Every soldier is a coward at heart.” —Major Bluntschli in ‘Arms and the Man’, George Bernard Shaw
In juxtaposition to the cowardice of Israeli soldiers, every revolutionary aiming for Palestinian freedom bravely faces the Zionist Israeli army which is slaughtering civilians/ non-combatants in Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem in full glare of public view globally.
The Israeli Generals should revisit the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Code of Ethics which states inter alia:
“Purity of Arms
The IDF serviceman will use force of arms only for the purpose of subduing the enemy to the necessary extent and will limit his use of force so as to prevent unnecessary harm to human life and limb, dignity and property.
The IDF servicemen’s purity of arms is their self-control in use of armed force. They will use their arms only for the purpose of achieving their mission, without inflicting unnecessary injury to human life or limb; dignity or property, of both soldiers and civilians, with special consideration for the defenseless, whether in wartime, or during routine security operations, or in the absence of combat, or times of peace.”
The IDF needs to relook at the plight of Nazi Army Generals and political leaders at Nuremberg trials. Just a few of these citations will make them look at the reality:
Nuremberg Executions (Wikipedia)
Final moments of Nazis executed at Nuremberg (The Guardian, 11/09/2009)
‘Death by hanging’: the Nuremberg Trials (The National Archives, 20/11/ 2015)
‘I knew my father would be hanged’: Remembering Nuremberg(Al Jazeera, 20/11/2020)
The Execution of Nazi War Criminals (Famous Trials)
Eight Nazi S.S. Officers Sentenced to Death for 1944 massacre At Ascq (You Tube)
The 2.3 million Palestinians have exposed the fascist character of the self-styled western liberal democracies. Any teenager without exposure to socialism/ communism can appreciate this and hence forth Karl Marx’s work would be more sought after than ever before. This is a positive fall out of Israel’s war on Palestinians.
During the peak of Nazi era the megalomaniac Hitler may not have ever remotely imagined the fall of his empire and top Nazi leaders being brought to justice.
Zionist Israel with its mentors/ allies will go down in history likewise.
True that only a miniscule number of Nazi political leaders/ army generals, soldiers were convicted; but it is equally true that an international trial took place over several years and a few were indeed convicted.
No power on earth can stop the aspirations of freedom loving Palestinians. It is the working class with a broad unity of all forces/ sections of society which have the interest of masses at heart that will overthrow the present ruling classes in Israel, USA, UK, France and Germany.
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P.S. Sahni is a qualified orthopaedic surgeon. He has worked extensively at India-Bangladesh border during the Bangladesh Liberation War resulting in 1971 Bangladesh Genocide of Hindus; the victims of Sikh Genocide in 1984; and amongst victims of 1992 anti-Muslim violence.
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More than 100 international groups signed onto a letter released Wednesday by a newly formed Palestinian rights coalition, urging governments across the globe to formally support South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel, accusing the government of genocidal violence in Gaza.
The International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine is circulating the letter, which asks governments to file Declarations of Intervention before or after the ICJ’s hearing on South Africa’s claim. The case is scheduled to be heard on January 11-12.
“Declarations of Intervention in support of South Africa’s invocation of the Genocide Convention against Israel will increase the likelihood that a positive finding of the crime of genocide will be enforced by the United Nations,” said the coalition.
Groups that have joined the call include Progressive International, World Beyond War, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation (PAL, PEN International-Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild.
“South Africa is correct in charging that under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Israel’s actions ‘are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent… to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial, and ethnic group,” the letter reads.
The letter was released days after South Africa filed its claim, asking the ICJ to declare that Israel has breached its obligations under the Genocide Convention, to which it is a party.
The death toll in Gaza has reached at least 22,313, with at least 57,296 people wounded and thousands feared dead under rubble. Since Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7, with support from the U.S., Israel has bombed hospitals, refugee camps, and residential buildings, all while claiming it is taking steps to protect civilian lives and targeting Hamas.
High-level Israeli government officials have also made numerous statements explicitly calling to wipe out Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, either through warfare or by forcibly displacing them.
South Africa detailed several of the statements in its 84-page complaint, including President Isaac Herzog’s claim that the entire population of Gaza, including roughly 1 million children, are “responsible” for Hamas’ attack and are therefore legitimate military targets; Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s statement that he had “released all restraints” on the military to fight Gaza’s “human animals”; Energy Minister Israel Katz’s demand that “all the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately”; and Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi saying, “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.”
“Finding evidence to establish intent is normally the obstacle to classifying genocide,” saidGuardian columnist Owen Jones of South Africa’s documentation on Tuesday. “You read through the endless statements and are left with no doubts on intent.”
I've read South Africa's case alleging genocide against Israel.
It is one of the most shocking things I've ever read.
It feels like you're reading a gruesome historical document about how a genocide was allowed to happen, then you realise this is now.https://t.co/wg2jwJcCNc
Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, said that
“the increasing global isolation of Israel and the U.S. and their European allies is an indicator that this is a key moment for popular movements to move their governments in the direction of taking these steps and being on the right side of history.”
The U.S. alone vetoed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza at the United Nations Security Council last month, and was joined by just nine other countries in voting against a cease-fire at the U.N. General Assembly, while 153 countries supported the resolution.
“It’s imperative that more states follow South Africa’s historic leadership demanding Israel is held accountable under international law,” said Adely. “One clear and immediate way to do that is to file Declarations of Intervention supporting South Africa’s filing.”
The letter was released days after Haaretz reported that Israeli officials have been warned by legal advisers that a ruling in favor of an injunction against Israel is possible at the ICJ.
On Democracy Now! on Tuesday, international law expert Francis Boyle, who has successfully argued cases before the ICJ, said South Africa has a strong chance of winning its case.
“Based on my careful review of all the documents so far submitted by the Republic of South Africa, I believe South Africa will win an order against Israel to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Palestinians,” said Boyle. “And under Article I of the Genocide Convention, all contracting parties, 153 states, will then be obliged, quote, ‘to prevent,’ unquote, the genocide by Israel against the Palestinians.”
South Africa has filed a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. International law expert Francis Boyle, who has argued successfully at the ICJ, says he believes "South Africa will win an order against Israel." pic.twitter.com/4Ebz02vxVc
Boyle noted that former U.S. State Department official Joan Donoghue is the president of the ICJ, and will likely use her authority “to shape the proceedings in favor of Israel.”
“However, I have also been advised that the Republic of South Africa is, as of now, nominating a judge ad hoc,” Boyle said. “That is their right under the statute of the International Court of Justice. I don’t have a name yet, but I would hope the South African judge ad hoc will do his or her best to try to keep Donoghue straight.”
Collective pressure from other countries, said Palestinian attorney Lamis Deek, could be “a sharp turning point for Palestine” at the ICJ.
“Through the ICJ, South Africa is poised to strike a decisive blow against this brutal genocide and torture campaign led by Israel in coordination with the United States,” said Deek, whose firm convened PAL’s Commission on War Crimes, Justice, Reparations, and Return. “We need more states to file supporting interventions—and we need the court to feel the watchful eye of the masses so as to withstand what will be extreme U.S. political pressure on the court.”
“International humanitarian laws and institutions are meant to be, and must be seen as, tools for the people, not distant abstractions,” he added. “People can—and should—play a strategic and powerful role by integrating this advocacy into their solidarity work, not only until their governments file supporting interventions but until the ICJ delivers justice.”
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The world suffered a great loss when the Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger died December 30 at the age of 84. One fact stands out foremost in his decades-long career as a writer and intellectual: He opposed war and fascism. He thought that the United States and Britain all too often supported war and fascism, and he often had occasion to criticize other intellectuals as lackeys of the state, in a way that will remind readers of LRC of Murray Rothbard’s similar attacks on “court historians.”
To be against fascism, we have to be able to identify the fascists properly. Pilger argues that in the war between Russia and the Ukraine, those who condemn Putin as a “fascist” have matters backwards. It is the Ukrainian leadership who are the real fascists:
“The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias’ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.” See here.
We need to ask ourselves a question about war. Why is it bad? The answer is obvious. It causes an enormous amount of death, injury, and suffering. We see this happening in the war between Israel and Hamas. Millions of Palestinians have been displaced while Gaza has been bombed to smithereens, and the death toll continues to mount. John Pilger strongly supported Palestinian rights, which earned him the obloquy of pro-Israel lobby:
“In 1977, the award-winning journalist and film-maker, John Pilger, made a documentary called Palestine Is Still The Issue (1977). He told how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. In this in-depth documentary, he has returned to the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, and to Israel, to ask why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo — refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.
“The fate and struggle of the Palestinians,” says Pilger, “are not just critical to the overdue recognition of their basic human rights, but are also central to whether the region, and the wider world, are plunged into war. Israel is now one of the biggest military powers in the world. While nothing changes, the dangers become greater. This is a film about a nation of people, traumatized, humiliated and yet resilient. In trying to liberate less than a quarter of historic Palestine, they have had no army, no air force, and no powerful friends — and have fought back with slingshots and now with the terrorism of the suicide bombers.”
One of the best features of Pilger’s work was that he was able to set current events within a larger picture that made sense of them. In an article written in 2016, he warned that the US was building up a nuclear arsenal that threatened the total disaster of war with both Russia and China.
“How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.
In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was all fake. He was lying.
The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.
A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”
In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.
Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian-speaking minority.
This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.
What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.
Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat”. According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.
What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “freedom of navigation”.
What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.
I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.
All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.
The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” — a Dan Rather equivalent, say –asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.
The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers.
This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.
In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cutoff China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.” See this.
Why does the US follow an aggressive foreign policy that threatens nuclear war with Russia and China? Pilger finds the answer in a 1992 plan to dominate the globe:
“Events today are the direct result of plans laid in the 1992 Defence Planning Guidance, a document that laid out how the US would maintain its empire and see off any challenges, real and imagined. The aim was US dominance at any cost, literally. Written by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, who would play key roles in the administration of George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq, it might have been written by Lord Curzon in the 19th century. They formed The Project for a New American Century. America, it boasted, ‘would oversee a new frontier’. The role of other states would be as vassals or supplicants, or they would be crushed. It planned he conquest of Europe, and Russia, with all the zeal and thoroughness of Hitler’s imperialists. The roots of Nato’s current war on Russia and the provocations of China are here.”
For Pilger, history is not a matter of impersonal forces but rather of concrete decisions by particular people. In his account of history, there are heroes and villains. One of his main contemporary heroes was Julian Assange, who courageously leaked documents that proved the warmongering plans of the Washington elite. The US government seeks to extradite Assange, who is now in jail in London on trumped-up charges, and imprison him in a hellhole for the rest of his life. Pilger waged a long campaign to prevent this. Here is what he said in an article written in 2018:
“When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism.”
Image: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.
I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name.
If the powerful lie to us, we have the right to know. If they say one thing in private and the opposite in public, we have the right to know. If they conspire against us, as Bush and Blair did over Iraq, then pretend to be democrats, we have the right to know.
It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury Julian alive in fascist America.
In 2008, a top secret US State Department report described in detail how the United States would combat this new moral threat. A secretly-directed personal smear campaign against Julian Assange would lead to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”.
The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its founder. Page after page revealed a coming war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and democracy.
The imperial shock troops would be those who called themselves journalists: the big hitters of the so-called mainstream, especially the “liberals” who mark and patrol the perimeters of dissent.
And that is what happened. I have been a reporter for more than 50 years and I have never known a smear campaign like it: the fabricated character assassination of a man who refused to join the club: who believed journalism was a service to the public, never to those above.
Assange shamed his persecutors. He produced scoop after scoop. He exposed the fraudulence of wars promoted by the media and the homicidal nature of America’s wars, the corruption of dictators, the evils of Guantanamo.
He forced us in the West to look in the mirror. He exposed the official truth-tellers in the media as collaborators: those I would call Vichy journalists. None of these imposters believed Assange when he warned that his life was in danger: that the “sex scandal” in Sweden was a set up and an American hellhole was the ultimate destination. And he was right, and repeatedly right.
The extradition hearing in London this week is the final act of an Anglo-American campaign to bury Julian Assange. It is not due process. It is due revenge. The American indictment is clearly rigged, a demonstrable sham. So far, the hearings have been reminiscent of their Stalinist equivalents during the Cold War.
Today, the land that gave us Magna Carta, Great Britain, is distinguished by the abandonment of its own sovereignty in allowing a malign foreign power to manipulate justice and by the vicious psychological torture of Julian – a form of torture, as Nils Melzer, the UN expert has pointed out, that was refined by the Nazis because it was most effective in breaking its victims.
Every time I have visited Assange in Belmarsh prison, I have seen the effects of this torture. When I last saw him, he had lost more than 10 kilos in weight; his arms had no muscle. Incredibly, his wicked sense of humour was intact.
As for Assange’s homeland, Australia has displayed only a cringeing cowardice as its government has secretly conspired against its own citizen who ought to be celebrated as a national hero. Not for nothing did George W. Bush anoint the Australian prime minister his “deputy sheriff”.
It is said that whatever happens to Julian Assange in the next three weeks will diminish if not destroy freedom of the press in the West. But which press? The Guardian? The BBC, The New York Times, the Jeff Bezos Washington Post?
No, the journalists in these organisations can breathe freely. The Judases on the Guardian who flirted with Julian, exploited his landmark work, made their pile then betrayed him, have nothing to fear. They are safe because they are needed.
Freedom of the press now rests with the honourable few: the exceptions, the dissidents on the internet who belong to no club, who are neither rich nor laden with Pulitzers, but produce fine, disobedient, moral journalism – those like Julian Assange.
Meanwhile, it is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still believe that freedom is possible. I salute him.”
Let’s do everything we can to carry on John Pilger’s fight against war and fascism and defeat braindead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers. This is my aim at LRC, and this is why we featured so many articles by John Pilger over the past twenty years.
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Featured image: John Pilger, photographed in 2006, whose decades in journalism included Reuters and 23 years at the Mirror, then ITV’s World In Action (Wikicommons)
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On December 6, it was announced with much fanfare that the 10/7 Project, a new “centralized communications operation to promote continued US bipartisan support for Israel; push for accurate, complete coverage of the Israel-Hamas war,” and achieve a “stronger” media “focus” on the victims of October 7’s Al-Aqsa Flood would be launched, by a quintet of the largest Israeli lobby groups on U.S. soil.
Who and what is funding the 10/7 Project isn’t at all clear. Publicity material spoke vaguely of an unnamed “coterie of philanthropists” and the organization’s interest in sourcing “more philanthropic support” moving forward. Future formal financial disclosures may make for fascinating reading, but its founders offer some clues.
The five comprise the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. This is quite the rogue’s gallery of Zionist entities, several of which have deplorable track records of actively whitewashing, if not outright facilitating, Israeli apartheid propaganda activities that have become turbocharged since October 7.
As such, the 10/7 Project’s professed mission of countering “disinformation” about October 7 and “Israel’s response” to the events can only be considered highly disquieting, especially given its target audience is “key media and government influencers.” In reality, of course, the organization is just the latest salvo in the Zionist state’s long-running information war against Palestinians and the Western world. This pitched battle has recently become ever more treacherous, specifically due to Tel Aviv’s genocidal “response” to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
One could be forgiven for thinking the 10/7 Project had already floundered in its objectives. After an initial ripple of mainstream interest, primarily from Israeli outlets and Zionist news platforms, the organization has seemingly vanished without a trace from the media landscape – or at least, its name has. As we shall see, though, it’s evident that in the manner of an iceberg, the 10/7 Project’s public footprint represents but the visible tip of something far larger and considerably more destructive.
‘Stranglehold on Congress’
While the 10/7 Project may not be directly making headlines daily, its parent organizations certainly are. The ADL has since October 7 published a steady stream of reports, lapped up by the media largely without question, testifying to an explosion of “anti-Semitic incidents” across the Western world in the wake of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Shocking stuff, one might think. Yet, as an investigation by MintPress News Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod revealed, the ADL is producing such staggering figures by categorizing anti-Israel and pro-Palestine rallies and corresponding chants at both as individual “anti-Semitic incidents.” Despite the exposure of its embarrassing, Enron-style accounting, the League continues to pump out the same bogus “research” at regular intervals. On December 12, it claimed “anti-Semitism” in the US was now up 337% in the wake of October 7, “an all-time record.”
It is far from the first time ADL definitions of anti-Semitism have failed to pass muster. For example, in December 2022, The Grayzone’s Alex Rubinstein revealed that the League did not categorize Ukraine’s openly Neo-Nazi paramilitary Azov Battalion to be the “far right group it once was.” This, despite the fact that Azov’s mission to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen,” as articulated by founder Andriy Biletsky, remains unchanged.
Meanwhile, the infamous AIPAC – accurately described by U.S. political scientist John Mearsheimer as “a de facto agent for a foreign government, [with] a stranglehold on Congress” – has made clear its significantly intensified mission to rid Washington DC of any elected official possessed of even vaguely anti-war, pro-Palestinian views, by declaring war on lawmakers such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
When AIPAC moves against, or in favor, of particular politicians, they mean business – and depressingly, the organization usually wins. Annually, the organization publishes a report on its “policy and political achievements” that year. Its 2022 installment boasts, among other things, of bagging $3.3 billion “for security assistance to Israel, with no added conditions” and having gifted $17.5 million – the most of any U.S. PAC – to “pro-Israel candidates,” 98% of whom won their elections, in the process defeating 13 anti-Israel challengers.
Conflicts of Interest
The official website of the 10/7 Project is spartan in the extreme. Visitors are offered a “contact us” form, a link to subscribe to its regular newsletter, and a “what we do” section listing purported activities. This includes informing the public “with credible, real-time information about events in Israel and Gaza,” highlighting “excellent reporting,” calling out “biased coverage,” holding “biased media accountable,” and offering “expert spokespeople for press and broadcast outlets.”
Unmentioned anywhere is that the 10/7 Project is represented by a trio of notorious PR and political consultancies – CKR Solutions, OnMessage Public Strategies, and SKDK. Together, they move in the shadows to advance the organization’s interests and messaging publicly and on Capitol Hill. SKDK’s contribution will inevitably be the most insidious and impactful.
Since its founding in 2004, the company has careened from damaging scandal to damaging scandal yet consistently secures major, big-ticket clients. The reason for this is clear. SKDK was founded by and employs a retinue of high-ranking, well-connected Democratic operatives. Among them is Anita Dunn, Barack Obama’s White. House Communications Director, credited as the “mastermind” of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win and widely regarded as a key member of the President’s “inner circle.”
Joe Biden speaks with SKDK’s Anita Dunn ahead of his State of the Union address in February 2023. Adam Schultz | White House
Ever since Obama’s 2008 election win, SKDK has been plausibly accused of selling privileged access to the White House to clients despite failing to register as a lobbying firm. This means major corporations have a direct means of encouraging – and bribing – the Oval Office to offer tax breaks, shred regulations, dump legislation, smash unions, and generally harm the U.S. public interest with total impunity and in absolute secrecy.
SKDK’s expansive Rolodex also helps politicians get out of serious trouble. In 2018-2019, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan paid the company $200,000 for “crisis communications” assistance after one of his campaign workers sued him for harming her professionally when she complained of sexual harassment by one of his top aides. Meanwhile, in August 2021, it was revealed a senior SKDK staffer personally intervened to suppress negative media coverage of sexual harassment allegations against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Even more perversely, it’s since been revealed that at the same time, SKDK was advising Madigan on how to navigate his public controversy, the company was also helping his former campaign worker bring a lawsuit against the aide who’d sexually harassed her. A more perfect demonstration of the DC blob’s incestuous nature and SKDK’s total lack of ethical and professional scruples one would be hard-pressed to find. And both are highly competitive categories.
SKDK’s website boasts of its work on some of the Democrat’s top pet projects
SKDK played a pivotal role in Biden’s 2020 presidential bid, decisively reversing his fortunes after abysmal performances in various caucuses. While the mainstream media primarily praised the miraculous work of the company and Dunn – his de facto campaign director – there has also been fierce controversy surrounding its electioneering activities. For example, SKDK fired off daily “Misinformation Briefings” to major tech and social media firms, including Google, Meta and Twitter, requesting that specific content be suppressed or removed.
In most cases, the recipients complied, meaning SKDK exerted extraordinary influence over what voters did and did not know and could and could not see during the controversial 2020 Presidential election. Which surely at least partially accounts for Biden’s victory. To make matters even worse, the company was simultaneously. reaping a $35 million windfall from the government of California by running the state’s supposedly bipartisan “get-out-the-vote” campaign. The contract, originally to be financed by local taxpayers, was mysteriously awarded to SKDK on a “no-bid” basis.
‘Dictate Terms’
Clearly, the 10/7 Project was intended to be a very public affair. In an early promotional interview, executive director Josh Isay – perhaps unsurprisingly, until August 2022 SKDK’s longtime CEO – boasted about the “widespread enthusiasm” with which the organization’s “efforts to set the record straight and combat misinformation spouted by Hamas terrorists and their anti-Israel allies” had so far been received:
We look forward to continuing to do the critically important work of providing policymakers and the American public with reliable information about Israel and Hamas, and uplifting the stories of the innocent victims of the October 7th massacre.”
Yet, there is no obvious sign of those ambitions bearing fruit to date. A partial explanation for this failure may lie in the 10/7 Project’s wish to transform the “innocent victims” of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood into human interest stories and atrocity propaganda while elevating the organization’s eponymous date to the position of 9/11 in the American public’s mind.
In the weeks since the 10/7 Project’s inception, it has become ever-increasingly clear the Zionist narrative of what unfolded when Hamas breached Gaza’s armored concentration camp walls – unquestioningly regurgitated over and again for weeks after that by the Western media – is completely and grotesquely fraudulent.
For example, on December 15, it was reported based on social security data that Tel Aviv’s claim that 1,200 civilians died in the initial assault was greatly exaggerated. In reality, just 695 lost their lives. The previous figure was itself a revision from an initial civilian casualty “estimate” of 1,400.
Every civilian death in a warzone is an extremely grave crime. It is surely for this reason that Tel Aviv on December 12 desperately argued “it would not be morally sound” to investigate “friendly fire” incidents in “kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities” during Operation Al Aqsa Flood – civilians killed by Israeli Occupation Forces. Nonetheless, the numbers involved are avowedly “immense.”
Among the “stories of the innocent victims of the October 7th massacre” selected by the 10/7 Project for public “uplifting” in service of whitewashing and justifying the Gaza genocide will have been a great many individuals slaughtered in cold blood by indiscriminate, excessively violent IDF actions. This is all but inevitable. Urgently casting those victims into obscurity while ensuring the entire issue of Zionist “friendly fire” is not examined is now of paramount importance.
More significantly, though, the exposure – and occasional admission – of Tel Aviv’s brazen lies has fundamentally shifted mainstream narratives and sympathies away from Israel and towards the Palestinians. Audiences of every extraction globally can witness the monstrous reality of the genocide in Gaza and learn of Zionist abuse of the Palestinians even before the colonial entity’s founding in 1948 with their own eyes and ears.
Israeli deceit has been so relentless and so readily exposed that even typically subservient Western news networks and their featured pundits are treating official claims with enormous skepticism. Similarly, Zionist violence is so constantly unremitting and wantonly sadistic that graphic reports of carpet bombs maiming and slaughtering every generation of Palestinians are now commonplace.
Meanwhile, developments such as the revelation that IDF soldiers killed three shirtless Israelis waving a white flag, speaking Hebrew and seeking their assistance have traveled widely, in turn highlighting prior examples of identical “peacetime” atrocities inflicted upon Palestinians. By contrast, there has to date been no “misinformation spouted by Hamas terrorists and their anti-Israel allies” to combat at all.
A Losing Battle
As a result, the 10/7 Project and its founders are placed in the invidious position of having to publicly defend the indefensible – namely, a modern-day genocide unfolding on television screens and front page headlines the world over. In such circumstances, overt and unashamed advocacy work is best conducted behind the scenes. Yet, it is precisely in this context that the 10/7 Project may be most dangerous and potent due to its open-door Oval Office access.
Tireless solidarity efforts by European activists, protesters, citizen journalists, and civil society organizations have produced significant results. Paris went from mulling legislation criminalizing anti-Zionism in November to now leading global pressure for a ceasefire. Multiple governments and opposition leaders are likewise changing their tune. Senior British officials openly warn Netanyahu to drastically rein in his unquenchable bloodlust if he wishes to retain any international support.
Stateside, however, while the crusading work of grassroots pro-Palestine voices and groups has been redoubtable, the Biden administration’s commitment to facilitating, encouraging, and exacerbating the Gaza genocide, however it can, remains undimmed. While the President has demanded Netanyahu’s slaughter be wrapped up by the new year, there is no indication material, financial, and diplomatic support upon which the new Nakba depends is being curtailed. On December 18, during an official visit to Tel Aviv, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a bloodcurdling oath:
This is Israel’s operation, and I’m not here to dictate timelines or terms. Our support [for] Israel’s right to defend itself is ironclad, as you’ve heard me say a number of times, and that’s not going to change.”
One way greater pressure could be brought to bear against the Biden administration might be for citizens to demand their elected representatives in Washington to disclose what dealings they may have had with the 10/7 Project or its representatives since its launch.
To ascertain whether and how White House policy and public pronouncements are being directly informed, if not explicitly dictated, by the wishes and wills of a shadowy and unaccountable lobbying coalition with indeterminate but no doubt intimate political and financial connections to the perpetrators of a 21st century Holocaust. Perhaps then the President might be sufficiently embarrassed to at last rein in his out-of-control, genocidal proxy.
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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
Featured image: President Joe Biden participates in a restricted bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Hotel Kempinski in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, October 18, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
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Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu urged that Israel “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death” to defeat them and break their morale, as the US did with Japan.
Eliyahu expressed, in statements to Israeli radio station 103 FM, that Israel must decide the battle by breaking the morale of the Palestinians in Gaza and causing them pain involving their land, destroying homes, breaking their national dream and voluntary immigration. When the presenter interrupted him, saying this was not possible, Eliyahu replied that it was, similar to what happened during the Arab Spring when large numbers of the region’s population immigrated to Germany.
According to the Israeli minister’s statements, the residents of Gaza should be encouraged to immigrate to other countries as part of revenge measures against them after the events of Operation Al-Aqsa flood.
Eliyahu widely criticised Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for the plan he developed for the post-war period, whereby civil affairs in the Gaza Strip would be handled by Palestinian parties not hostile to Israel. Eliyahu argued that no group fit this description.
In November, the Israeli minister called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, wiping it off the face of the earth.
Eliyahu belongs to the far-right extremist Otzma Yehudit party, led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. This party supports building settlements, regaining control of the Gaza Strip and extremist ideas.
Eliyahu’s new statement comes amid Israeli calls to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip and resettle them in other countries.
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Featured image: Far-right Israeli Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu [@Eliyahu_a/Twitter]
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Jan. 6, 2024 – New Glarus, WI – 63 year old Diane Wagner was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) on Jan.3, 2024, which “will soon take Diane’s life”. “Just a few weeks ago, she was healthy & living an everyday normal life.”
Jan. 4, 2024 – Fredericksburg, VA – Marcia Stinson has been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
Jan. 1, 2024 – Beach City, TX – 61 year old Aaron Aguillard was hospitalized on Nov. 11, 2023 with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and died 7 weeks later on Jan. 1, 2024.
Dec. 25, 2023 – Kailua, HI – Fernando Pizarro was diagnosed with CJD on Dec. 4, 2023 and died 21 days later.
Dec. 6, 2023 – Edgewood, TX – 47 year old Texas Firefighter Jody McPherson died on Dec. 6, 2023. “He was recently diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD” Prion disease.
Nov. 25, 2023 – Lakeville, PA – 63 year old Eleanor Meilinger started having neurological symptoms on Aug. 5, 2023 and was diagnosed with CJD. She died 3.5 months later.
Nov. 14, 2023 – Ebenezer, SA, Australia – 60 year old Tony Diotallevi died after a 3 month battle with CJD.
Oct. 25, 2023 – Bonita, CA – 59 year old Rosie Mouritzen died from CJD.
Oct. 9, 2023 – VA – Dianith Benzaquen died a few days after CJD diagnosis she received on Oct. 5, 2023.
Sep. 23, 2023 – San Dimas, CA – 48 year old firefighter Ryan Palmer was diagnosed with CJD on Aug. 2 and died after 7 weeks on Sep. 23, 2023.
Sep. 2, 2023 – Saint-Sauveur, QC, Canada – Maheux family – husband and father has been diagnosed with CJD.
July 25, 2023 – Woodstock, GA – 32 year old Cameron Pistacchio was diagnosed with CJD on July 9 and died 16 days later on July 25, 2023.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
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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John Pilger, who died in his hometown of Sydney aged 84 on December 30, was a unique journalist, equipped with the combination of moral outrage, relentless sleuthing and unparalleled interviewing skills required to understand South Africa’s deep structural injustices. Setting aside all the scoops and awards elsewhere, no one else could have periodically parachuted into this country – first in 1967 when he was banned by apartheid, and lastly in 2017 – and then fit that half-century of dramatic turmoil into a hard-hitting film, Apartheid Did Not Die, and a dozen influential articles and book chapters.
Above all, John represented a chronicler of what can be considered the independent-left critique, one who connected the dots from imperialism to local power relations to suffering individuals with passion and eloquence. No one was spared by his savage pen. He wrote in 2013,
“In 2001, George Soros told the Davos Economic Forum, ‘South Africa is in the hands of international capital’… This led directly to state crimes such as the massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in 2012, which evoked the infamous Sharpeville massacre more than half a century earlier. Both had been protests about injustice. Nelson Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid.”
There were three distinct phases of his work here, resulting in scores of references to South African injustice peppering many of his other international observations – including about Israel’s version of apartheid in his 2002 film Palestine is Still the Issue.
In the first phase, during apartheid, his book Heroes (1986) contains a long chapter covering the gritty realities he encountered in 1967, before he was banned by Pretoria from visiting again.
In the second, after returning in 1995, Pilger was aghast at post-apartheid triumphalism, which meant his 1998 film Apartheid Did Not Die was received with outrage by old and new elite alike. Pilger asked Nelson Mandela what were probably the toughest ethical and practical questions about the new system the president ever received.
Likewise, debating FW de Klerk, Pilger was forthright:
‘Didn’t you and your fellow white supremacists really win?’
It was as if a secret truth had been put to him. Waving away the smoke of an ever-present cigarette, he said: “It is true that our lives have not fundamentally changed. We can still go to the cricket at Newlands and watch the rugby. We are doing okay.”
“For the majority, the poverty has not changed, has it?” I said.
Warming to this implied criticism of the ANC, he agreed that his most enduring achievement was to have handed on his regime’s economic policies, including the same corporate brotherhood… “You must understand, we’ve achieved a broad consensus on many things now.”
Pilger’s mix of hectoring and charm compelled the likes of Anglo-American spokesperson Michael Spicer, real estate mogul Pam Golding and fashion trend-setter Edith Venter to reveal similar white-greed truths. Spicer’s team would later show the film to the firm’s management trainees, I’ve been reliably told, as providing the best example of what not to do in an interview.
Famed liberal journalist Alister Sparks headed up the SABC’s current affairs division in 1998, and was incensed at what he saw as Pilger’s distortions due to “reliance mainly on fringe sources and disaffected people” (such as community activist Mzwanele Mayekiso and lawyer Richard Spoor).
Rebutted Pilger in the Mail & Guardian, “The film’s primary source is Mandela himself, who reveals just how much he has changed his views.” The national broadcaster, he went on, “having bought the South African rights to my film, sought first to ban it, then to muffle it. Sparks’s explanation for this has a Kafkaesque tone similar to Cold War tracts denouncing journalists, writers and playwrights who begged to differ with the regime in the Eastern bloc. He describes me as ‘a man with an ideological mission.’”
Pilger had previously written admiringly of Sparks’s bravery as a journalist reformer, but now complained,
“Inexplicably, my ideological masters and the colour of my party card are never identified, no doubt because it would be too truthful to point out that I have never allied myself with any political group. Indeed, I have always been intensely proud of my independence.”
In a third phase of his engagement, Pilger continued to provoke the elite, especially when after his book Freedom Next Time was published in 2006 and excerpted here, Thabo Mbeki’s finance minister Trevor Manuel and minister in the presidency Joel Netshitenzhe were enraged. The Sunday Independent was the site of a fierce battle over whether progress was really being made.
In his essay, “ANC government has yet to free citizens from the fear of poverty,” Pilger wrote of the “arrogance that comes from undisputed power, which is the conundrum of South African political life – that the vote has given the nation democracy in many ways, but the price has been effectively a one-party state.”
Pilger’s last event here was the inaugural Saloojee Memorial Lecture just over six years ago: “South Africa: how a nation was misled and became a model for the world, and how the people can rise again.” He declared,
“South Africa is where much of my political education took place,” and concluded, “what makes South Africa so interesting and so hopeful and probably unique because there are so many grassroots popular movements.”
In 2008, poet Dennis Brutus, journalist Ferial Haffajee and I hosted John at the Time of theWriter conference in Durban, just after an epic Pilger film fest at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (all his works are online here). Within 20 months, Dennis had passed on, leaving John to lament,
“I was so honored to meet Dennis last year, finally. He was a giant of a human being who changed the world in so many ways. His tenacious humanity inspired so many to go on and not let the bastards win in the long run.”
As can be testified by so many who met him here – or learned about our realities from him – Pilger deserves the same tribute, as his films and writing renew our sense of indignity and our instincts for justice.
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Patrick Bond, Professor, University of the Western Cape School of Government. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
All images in this article are from the author
Featured image: John Pilger in his film, Palestine Is Still the Issue (johnpilger.com)
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I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza War.
Specifically, I am referring to the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.[1] It maintains that Israel’s actions since the war began on 7 October 2023 “are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic … group in the Gaza Strip.” (1) That charge fits clearly under the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.[2]
The application is a superb description of what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is comprehensive, well-written, well-argued, and thoroughly documented. The application has three main components.
First, it describes in detail the horrors that the IDF has inflicted on the Palestinians since 7 October 2023 and explains why much more death and destruction is in store for them.
Second, the application provides a substantial body of evidence showing that Israeli leaders have genocidal intent toward the Palestinians. (59-69) Indeed, the comments of Israeli leaders – all scrupulously documented – are shocking. One is reminded of how the Nazis talked about dealing with Jews when reading how Israelis in “positions of the highest responsibility” talk about dealing with the Palestinians. (59) In essence, the document argues that Israel’s actions in Gaza, combined with its leaders’ statements of intent, make it clear that Israeli policy is “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.” (39)
Third, the document goes to considerable lengths to put the Gaza war in a broader historical context, making it clear that Israel has treated the Palestinians in Gaza like caged animals for many years. It quotes from numerous UN reports detailing Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. In short, the application makes clear that what the Israelis have done in Gaza since 7 October is a more extreme version of what they were doing well before 7 October.
There is no question that many of the facts described in the South African document have previously been reported in the media. What makes the application so important, however, is that it brings all those facts together in one place and provides an overarching and thoroughly supported description of the Israeli genocide. In other words, it provides the big picture while not neglecting the details.
Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government has labelled the charges a “blood libel” that “has no factual and judicial basis.” Moreover, Israel claims that “South Africa is collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.”[3] A close reading of the document, however, makes it clear that there is no basis for these assertions. In fact, it is hard to see how Israel will be able to defend itself in a rational-legal way when the proceedings begin. After all, brute facts are hard to dispute.
Let me offer a few additional observations regarding the South African charges.
First, the document emphasizes that genocide Is distinct from other war crimes and crimes against humanity, although “there is often a close connection between all such acts.” (1) For example, targeting a civilian population to help win a war – as occurred when Britain and the United States bombed German and Japanese cities in World War II – is a war crime, but not genocide. Britain and the United States were not trying to destroy “a substantial part” of, or all the people in those targeted states. Ethnic cleansing underpinned by selective violence is also a war crime, although it is also not genocide, an action that Omer Bartov, the Israeli-born Holocaust expert, calls “the crime of all crimes.”[4]
For the record, I believed Israel was guilty of serious war crimes–but not genocide—during the first two months of the war, even though there was growing evidence of what Bartov has called “genocidal intent” on the part of Israeli leaders.[5] But it became clear to me after the 24-30 November 2023 truce ended and Israel went back on the offensive, that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
Second, even though the South African application focuses on Israel, it has huge implications for the United States, especially President Biden and his principal lieutenants. Why? Because there is little doubt that the Biden administration is complicitous in Israel’s genocide, which is also a punishable act according to the Genocide Convention. Despite his admission that Israel is engaged in “indiscriminate bombing,” President Biden has also stated that “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel. Not a single thing.”[6] He has been true to his word, going so far as to bypass Congress twice to quickly get additional armaments to Israel. Leaving aside the legal implications of his behavior, Biden’s name – and America’s name – will be forever associated with what is likely to become one of the textbook cases of attempted genocide.
Third, I never imagined I would see the day when Israel, a country filled with Holocaust survivors and their descendants, would face a serious charge of genocide. Regardless of how this case plays out in the ICJ – and here I am fully aware of the maneuvers that the United States and Israel will employ to avoid a fair trial – in the future Israel will be widely regarded as principally responsible for one of the canonical cases of genocide.
Fourth, the South African document emphasizes that there is no reason to think this genocide is going to end soon, unless the ICJ successfully intervenes. It twice quotes the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 25 December 2023 to drive that point home: “We are not stopping, we are continuing to fight, and we are deepening the fighting in the coming days, and this will be a long battle and it is not close to being over.” (8, 82) Let us hope South Africa and the IJC bring a halt to the fighting, but in the final analysis the power of international courts to coerce countries like Israel and the United States is extremely limited.
Finally, the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.
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COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines damage the immune system and each additional dose causes additional immune damage, increasing the risk of COVID-19 infection and other infections and complications of infections (such as sepsis, septic shock).
Turleyappeared on “Fox News Sunday” to discuss the process for the president following the House’s recent resolution to launch an impeachment inquiry. Fox Host Shannon Bream asked the legal analyst about his thoughts on those whoclaimthat there is no “smoking gun” evidence on Biden.
A lot of hope is being placed in the ruling of the ICJ. But even if the decision is, as expected, a powerful one, the only enforcement mechanism is the agreement of the parties to the convention that they will take all necessary actions to end the culpable actions and prosecute the perpetrators.
“Leave the World Behind” depicts the unraveling of society in the wake of a surprise attack by an unknown assailant. Many believe the film, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, predicts a cyberattack on the U.S. power grid.
The recent non-story arising from the cabinet documents made available as to why Australia participated in a murderous, destructive and most probably illegal war against Iraq in 2003 proves that point. The documents available showed, for instance, that a country, without mandatory parliamentary consultation, can go to war under the stewardship of a cabal influenced by the strategic interests of a foreign government.
After nine months of warfare, which has been centered in the areas around Khartoum, al-Jazirah state and in sections of the Darfur region, the RSF leader Mohamed Dagalo (Hemedti) indicated that he was interested in unconditional negotiations on ending the conflict. Former interimPrime Minister Abdalla Hamdok put forward a framework for the beginning of talks which drew the support of the RSF leader.
Sweden will join NATO under US command next July. Meanwhile, the United States has already entered Sweden. An agreement was signed last December, that gives them unrestricted access to 17 Swedish military bases. Here the United States can deploy its forces and pre-position weapons.
The US has used armed terrorist organizations for decades as proxies against their adversaries worldwide, including most recently in Syria, Iraq, and against Iran.
Peace activists across the country have embarked on a campaign to mobilize global support for South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The campaign, spearheaded by CODEPINK, World Beyond War, and RootsAction, aims to rally nations to submit a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case at the ICJ.
The economic situation, the domestic political ideology, the individual leader, the context, and other key factors heavily influenced the pursuit of Jamaica’s foreign policy under the leadership of Michael Manley in the 1970s and in in the 1980s.
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Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley stated Sunday that President Joe Biden’s connection to his son, Hunter Biden’s, “corruption” is cause for impeachment given the “enormous amount of evidence.”
Turleyappeared on “Fox News Sunday” to discuss the process for the president following the House’s recent resolution to launch an impeachment inquiry. Fox Host Shannon Bream asked the legal analyst about his thoughts on those whoclaimthat there is no “smoking gun” evidence on Biden.
Turley pushed back against the argument stating that not only has there been an “enormous amount” of evidence against the president and his family, but that most people agree it is “influence peddling.”
“It’s simply not true. I mean, there’s been an enormous amount of evidence put together by the House committees – millions of dollars that have gone through a labyrinth of different accounts and shell companies to Biden family members,” Turley stated.
“There are Biden associates, who said that what the president has said publicly is nonsense, that he did know about this influence peddling. And most people agree that this is influence peddling. This is corruption.”
Turleycontinued to state that there is no necessity to “really show” that the money had “directly” gone to Biden for him to be impeached, emphasizing the “standard” in federal cases that have involved bribery and other similar crimes.
“But I have to correct one notion that is being bantered about and that is that you have to really show that money went directly to the president. That’s not the standard that in federal cases involving bribery and other crimes, giving money to a principal’s family members is in fact a benefit under federal law. Otherwise, everyone would just give money to family members and say it’s not a bribe, it’s not impeachable,” Turley stated.
“And by the way, it is impeachable. I was lead counsel in the last traditional impeachment trial, my client was impeached because benefits were given to a judge’s family member. So many of these congressmen repeating this argument voted on that impeachment and said, it is impeachable.”
The House passed a resolution Dec. 13 to open an impeachment inquiry into Biden, voting 221-212. Following the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson released a joint statement with fellow Republicans Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
The four Republicans stated that not only did the House take a “critical step” into the investigation regarding Biden’s involvement in his family’s foreign affairs, but that “authorizing the inquiry puts us in the strongest position to enforce these subpoenas in court.”
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If the International Court of Justice rules that Israel has committed and is committing genocide, will it save Gaza?
On January 11-12 the ICJ will hear the accusation brought to it by South Africa. Specialists in International law Francis Boyle and (independently) Daniel Machover firmly believe that this is how the ICJ will rule, and that it will invoke the requirement that all 152 countries belonging to the genocide convention – including Israel and the US – must comply by desisting (in the case of Israel) and stopping all contact and services that enable Israel to commit the crime (in the case of the US and all other parties to the convention).
Such a judgment would require Israel to comply with the cessation of very specific terms regarding the offending actions and policies, and with positive remedial actions and reparations to the damage already done, such as provision of food, medicine, shelter, fuel and other requirements of survival that Israel has taken from the population of Gaza. The judgment is also binding on all nations that enable the genocidal actions, such as (and especially) the US. Furthermore, all leaders and individuals who participated in genocidal actions and policies, as well as those who aid and abet, are prosecutable under the Genocide Convention.
A lot of hope is being placed in the ruling of the ICJ. But even if the decision is, as expected, a powerful one, the only enforcement mechanism is the agreement of the parties to the convention that they will take all necessary actions to end the culpable actions and prosecute the perpetrators.
Will Israel comply with the court’s decision? Will the US? Neither nation has much respect for international law, so we may assume that neither country will do anything but denounce the ICJ and South Africa as antisemitic and offer angry excuses as for refusing to comply to the convention to which they both agreed. Nevertheless, the ruling may be effective in ending the genocide, in other ways, as follows:
1. The South African complaint contains massive amounts of evidence, the most damning of which have not been widely reported by the western mainstream press, which is sympathetic and/or beholden to Israel. The publicity surrounding the court case will help to expose these facts and bring them to the attention of a wider audience.
2. Legislators and policy makers that have thus far followed the dictates of the powerful Israel Lobby may detect weakness in Israel’s position, and simultaneously their own vulnerability before their constituents if they do not back the ICJ ruling, challenging the “special relationship” between Israel, the US and other NATO countries.
3. There will be great public agitation to hold Israel accountable. Demonstrations will become larger and more widespread. Calls and letters to legislators and other public officials will increase in number and frequency.
4. Tainted by the ICJ decision, the Biden administration and the Democratic Party will feel increasingly threatened by loss of seats and power in the 2024 elections. Already, seventeen staffers of Biden’s reelection committee have published a letter, calling on him to use US power to create a ceasefire now in Gaza or face disastrous consequences in the November elections.
5. In the face of an ICJ conviction of Israel, nations that have until now not taken a strong position will feel empowered to respect their obligations under the convention, and engage more fully in a concerted effort to pressure Israel through sanctions and diplomatic measures. China, Russia, India and the Arab monarchies, in particular, may find it untenable to maintain normal relations, and will participate in a growing consensus to compel Israel to end the genocide.
I did not include in the above points any consequences from within Israel itself, whether at the political or popular level. This is because I do not expect that an ICJ conviction per se will cause a change. The Israeli government, armed forces and even the population have become so radicalized and bloodthirsty that only practical measures such as suspension of arms deliveries, economic aid and loss of markets for Israeli products and services (mainly military in character) are capable of effecting a halt to Israeli determination to continue the genocide to its conclusion.
But the results that I describe above are by no means certain. They are only the best case that we can realistically hope for. They depend upon principled actions in great numbers around the globe, and we don’t even know if that will be enough, only that it will not happen without such action.
Furthermore, the most that the ICJ ruling is likely to produce in the short run is an indefinite (but not necessarily permanent) ceasefire and humanitarian aid to the Gaza population. There is increasing discussion in Israel, the US and the UN about what Gaza will look like after the fighting ends. As usual, the voices of the people in Gaza and the rest of Palestine will be disregarded. Israel wants the population to disappear, but its fallback position is to eliminate Hamas, install a compliant puppet government and return to a sealed concentration camp that will impoverish and crush the hopes of the people.
The US and Europe will undoubtedly accept this “solution”, after halfheartedly arguing for better economic opportunity and more freedom. But it is totally unrealistic, because the Palestinians themselves will never accept the status quo ante. Neither is it feasible to eliminate Hamas, because its goals and methods will remain with unlimited replacements for the leaders, fighters and adherents. You can’t kill an idea. Any solution that denies them the freedom enjoyed by all countries, to travel to and trade directly with other nations and to provide for their own defense, among other normal rights of nations, will most definitely be rejected. They expect and will demand these rights, and reparations as well, for the crimes committed against them.
Some have suggested a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli agreement that finally creates two states, which has eluded negotiators for many decades. But there is no reason to suppose this will be any more achievable now than with the Oslo Agreement. The Israelis will readily agree to such negotiations, with the interim solution being a return to the Palestinian concentration camp, with continuing encroachment by Israeli settlements. Israel loves endless negotiations that go nowhere, but the Palestinians are not fools. They will never accept it, even if the puppet Palestinian Authority does.
Even if the fanciful possibility of a two-state solution is achieved, with a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, the problem will not end. How and why did the genocide come about in the first place? The answer is simple: it’s because genocide is at the core of the Zionist objective: a Jewish state. Such a state must be founded on genocide, because it is impossible to create or maintain it without removing or eliminating most or all of the non-Jews. Since the founding of the Zionist movement in the 19th century, this has been a foundational principle, set forth in its formative documents.
That principle is not going to go away with the creation of two states. In the ideology of Zionism, two states would be a temporary accommodation on the road to its mission. If there are two states, the Jewish one will continue to repress and expel its 20% Palestinian minority in order to prevent it from becoming too large, which many Israelis think it already is. It will still have plans to retake Sinai, south Lebanon, the East Bank, and of course the West Bank and Gaza, and to use forms of genocide in all of the territory that it controls.
Legal scholar Daniel Machover, who predicts and sees the need for an ICJ ruling of genocide against Israel, nevertheless fails to see this source of the problem. He insists on preserving the existence of a racist Zionist state that will ultimately destroy the two-state solution that he foresees. So do many other shortsighted scholars, analysts and politicians.
But don’t worry. The two-state “solution” will never see the light of day. Palestinians will insist on the same rights and privileges as all persons in all countries, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And they will continue to resist until they get them. The only workable alternative to annihilation of one side by the other is most likely the South African model of a single state with equal rights for all, in which case the destructive, self-destructive, racist and supremacist ideology of Zionism will vanish into the dustbin of history.
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They are unlikely to be revelatory, will shatter no myths, nor disprove any assumptions. Cabinet documents exist to merely show that a political clique – the heart of the Westminster model of government, so to speak – often contain the musings of invertebrates, spineless on most issues such as foreign policy, while operating at the behest of select interests. Hostility to originality is essential since it is threatening to the tribe; dissent is discouraged to uphold the order of collective cabinet responsibility.
The recent non-story arising from the cabinet documents made available as to why Australia participated in a murderous, destructive and most probably illegal war against Iraq in 2003 proves that point. The documents available showed, for instance, that a country, without mandatory parliamentary consultation, can go to war under the stewardship of a cabal influenced by the strategic interests of a foreign government. The Howard government, famously buried in the fatty posterior of the US imperium, was always going to commit Australian military personnel to whatever military venture Washington demanded of it. (In some cases, even without asking.)
It was modish to suggest during the “Global War on Terror” that governments with fictional weapons of mass destruction might pass them on to surrogate non-state actors. It was fashionable to misread intelligence material alleging such links, and, when that intelligence did not stack up, concoct it, as Tony Blair’s government happily did, sexed-up dossiers and all, in justifying Britain’s participation in the mauling of Iraq.
The larger story in the recent documents affair over Iraq was what documents were withheld from the provision to the Australian National Archives in 2020. In his January 3 press conference, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albaneseoutlined the process. Normally, cabinet documents would be released two decades after their creation. Such documents are provided to the Archives three years in advance by the government of the day. But on this occasion, 78 were omitted from the transfer, enabling Albanese to point the finger firmly at his predecessor, Scott Morrison. (Those documents have since been transferred to the Archives.)
In Albanese’s view,
“Australians have the right to know the basis upon which Australia went to war in Iraq. Australians lost their lives during the conflict and we know that some of the stated reasons for going to war was not correct in terms of the weapons of mass destruction that was alleged Iraq had at the time.”
Australians, he went on to say, had “a right to know what the decision-making process was”.
The mistake in question had to be corrected, and the Archives had to release the documentation provided to them. A constricting caveat, however, was appended to the declaration: the release of the documents had to “account for any national security issues […] upon the advice of the national security agencies.”
The caveat is a good starting point to suggest that this documents saga, and the restrictions upon the disclosure of the missing 78 Cabinet records, are set to continue. For one thing, Albanese has added to the farce of secrecy by commencing an independent review that is barely worth that title. The review is to be chaired by the very sort of person you would expect to bury rather than find things: Dennis Richardson, former director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation and former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
Richardson’s appointment continues a practice of partisan control over a process that should be beyond the national-security fraternity. There are fewer strings of accountability, as would apply, say, to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. There are no terms of reference outlined. Short of simply being a political manoeuvre that might cast a poor light on the previous government’s practices, it is unclear what Richardson’s purpose really is apart from justifying the retention of any of the said documents from public view.
Either way, he will be on a tidy sum for the task, something which he is becoming rather used to. As The Klaxonreports, Richardson has been well remunerated by the PM&C for previous work. A $50,000-a-month contract was awarded to him last year for “strategic advice and review” between August 2 and October 31. The department refuses to state what it was for, preferring the insufferably vague justification of some “need for independent research or assessment”. Be on guard whenever the term “independent” is coupled with “inquiry” or “assessment” in an Australian government context.
A media release from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet further notes that no department official or Minister has a direct role in the release or otherwise of the documents in question; the Archives will have the final say on whether those documents will be released or otherwise, whatever Albanese says. Researchers, transparency activists and those keen on open government, are almost guaranteed disappointment, given the habitual secrecy and dysfunction that characterises the operation of that body.
If there is a true lesson in this untidy business for the Albanese government, it must surely lie in the need to debate, discuss and dissent from matters that concern the entanglement of Australia, not merely in foreign wars but in alliances that cause them. That, sadly, is a lesson that is nowhere being observed. Howard’s crawling disposition has found its successor in Albanese’s obsequiousness, in so far as foreign conflicts are concerned. Wherever the US war machine is deployed, Australia will hop to its aid with gleeful obedience.
And as for anything to do with revealing the Australian decision-making process about the decision to invade, despoil and ruin yet another Middle Eastern state in 2003, one is better off consulting records from the White House and the US State Department.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected]
Featured image: A Long Range Patrol Vehicle-mounted SASR patrol in western Iraq (Licensed under Fair Use)
I vaccini mRna sono: “un pericolo per la salute e l’integrità del genoma” e per questo andrebbero aboliti. Il Dipartimento della Salute dello Stato della Florida si muove concretamente per scrivere la parola fine, una volta per tutte, alla somministrazione dei vaccini mRna.
Il capo del dipartimento sanitario dello Stato americano, Joseph Abiodun Ladapo denuncia apertamente il rischio di contaminazione del Dna umano. “Se i rischi dell’integrazione del Dna non sono stati valutati per i vaccini mRna -dice –, questi non sono appropriati per l’uso negli esseri umani”.
Ladapo scrive all’FDA e al CDC: l’approvazione accelerata dei farmaci è rischiosa
In una lettera inviata poche settimane fa al commissario della Food and Drug Administration Robert M. Califf e al direttore del Centro per il controllo e la prevenzione delle malattie (CDC), Mandy Cohen, Ladapo scrive: “Garantire che i prodotti farmaceutici siano sicuri ed efficaci per il pubblico è la missione principale della Food and Drug Administration. Questa funzione è essenziale e funge da base per la fiducia del pubblico nelle agenzie di regolamentazione e nei funzionari sanitari. Sebbene le approvazioni accelerate per i farmaci soggetti a prescrizione esistano da oltre due decenni, la crisi degli oppioidi e la pandemia di Covid-19 sono solo due esempi che illustrano i rischi associati a questi processi accelerati per le approvazioni dei farmaci”.
A sostegno della sua tesi, il chirurgo alla guida dell’ente sanitario ricorda che già nel 2007 la Food and Drug Administration, l’ente governativo statunitense che si occupa della regolamentazione dei farmaci, aveva prodotto un report nel quale segnalava che: “L’integrazione del Dna potrebbe teoricamente avere un impatto sugli oncogeni umani, i geni che possono trasformare una cellula sana in una cellula cancerosa” e che l’integrazione del Dna potrebbe “provocare instabilità cromosomica”.
Come rileva Patrizia Floder Reitter in un articolo pubblicato oggi sul quotidiano ‘La Verità’, si tratta di “dichiarazioni che hanno dato un altro, violento scossone alla credibilità delle verifiche effettuate dall’agenzia regolatoria statunitense”.
I precedenti in Florida: vaccini mRna sconsigliati ai bambini e ai maschi under 40
Non un fulmine a ciel sereno se si considera che il capo del Dipartimento della sanità dello Stato della Florida, già nel marzo 2022 aveva sconsigliato la somministrazione dei vaccini anti covid ai bambini sani e qualche mese più tardi, precisamente il 7 ottobre 2022, la stessa raccomandazione era arrivata anche per quanto riguarda i maschi sotto i 40 anni perché, come si legge in una nota dello stesso dipartimento: “Il beneficio della vaccinazione è probabilmente controbilanciato da un rischio insolitamente alto di morte per cause cardiache tra gli uomini di questa fascia di età”.
Dagli Stati Uniti all’Europa. Il caso della Florida segue quello della Danimarca, che, a settembre dello stesso anno, aveva interrotto le somministrazioni dei sieri anti-Covid in tutti i soggetti sotto i 50 anni, ad eccezione delle persone fragili.
Ron DeSantis: vietato obbligare i dipendenti a vaccinarsi
Lo stesso governatore Ron DeSantis aveva consigliato a tutti i cittadini con meno di 65 anni di non effettuare il richiamo e aveva firmato un pacchetto di leggi contro le norme federali che obbligano i lavoratori a vaccinarsi. Disposizioni che, di fatto, vietano ai datori di lavoro privati di imporre la somministrazione dei vaccini mRna ai propri dipendenti permettendo a questi ultimi di “scegliere tra numerose esenzioni, incluse ma non solo, problemi religiosi o di salute, gravidanza o futura gravidanza”.
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“Leave the World Behind” depicts the unraveling of society in the wake of a surprise attack by an unknown assailant. Many believe the film, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, predicts a cyberattack on the U.S. power grid
A cyberattack that will make the COVID pandemic look like a minor inconvenience in comparison has been repeatedly “promised” in recent years by World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab
“Leave the World Behind” doesn’t preach preparedness ideologies or indulge in apocalyptic fantasies. Instead, it offers a glimpse into the potential ramifications of societal breakdowns and the human condition’s capacity for both despair and resilience
It urges viewers to confront their own vulnerabilities, fostering a critical examination of our dependency on interconnected systems and the importance of building individual and communal resources
Take inspiration from the film, not to live in fear, but to act with intention. Build your own “ark,” hone your skills and cultivate a strong community around you. By embracing preparedness, you can face the uncertainties of the future with resilience and hope
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Video
In the video above, Patrick Bet-David, Adam Sosnick, Tom Ellsworth and Vincent Oshana with the PBD Podcast discuss whether Barack Obama’s chilling new Netflix film based on Rumaan Alam’s unsettling novel, “Leave the World Behind,” might be predicting that a cyberattack on the U.S. power grid is imminent.
Certainly, a cyberattack that will make the COVID pandemic look like a minor inconvenience in comparison has been repeatedly “promised” in recent years by World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab and other globalists.
Lightly-Veiled Narratives
“Leave the World Behind” doesn’t just depict the unraveling of society as we know it in the wake of a surprise attack by an unknown assailant, it serves as a stark wake-up call for us to consider our own preparedness for a world without the familiar crutches of modern infrastructure.
Forget zombies and alien invasions; this film dives into the scarier, more plausible possibility of a slow, insidious breakdown of the systems that underpin our daily lives. Approaching this film with awareness helps unpack several lightly-veiled narratives.
Technocratic centralized global agendas like The Great Reset, depopulation, or social credit scoring systems that will erode autonomy could manifest through engineered crises that rally public obedience. Whether it’s from bioterror events, cyberattacks, lockdowns or strategic electric grid sabotages that override liberty for “security,” societal PTSD primes people to accept new norms for stability.
Totalitarian tip-toe tactics and manufactured chaos lets hidden hands manipulate populations toward desired power shifts disguised as natural outcomes. Disaster births massive opportunities for control when the public is too overwhelmed to scrutinize capital flows or ask questions.
Cui Bono?
Who benefits? Those who orchestrated the crisis. Interestingly, one of the false narratives this film tries to casually embed in the public psyche is that there is no shadowy cabal pulling the strings. Quoted from the film:
“A conspiracy theory about a shadow group of people running the world is far too lazy of an explanation, especially when the truth is far scarier. No one is in control. No one is puling the strings. When an event like this happens, the best even the most powerful people can hope for is a heads-up.”
“Do you actually believe that no one pulls the strings?” Bet-David asks. I for one don’t. There’s ample evidence to show that certain groups, organizations and individuals are paving the path for humanity, oftentimes decades in advance, if not longer. Schwab has even admitted as much. During remarks at the May 2022 WEF Summit in Davos he told the carefully curated audience:1
“The future is not something that just happens. The future is built by us, by a powerful community, as you here in this room.”
Conspiracy Theory or Cautionary Tale?
Whether “Leave the World Behind” proves conspiracy theory or cautionary tale, arm yourself with provisions and principles that will check any tyranny rising from the orchestrated ashes. We the people, united, will never be defeated. Where decentralization flourishes, so does freedom.
This controversy extends beyond the film’s story, weaving into questions about media’s potential to influence real-world events and the anxieties of a society constantly on the precipice of change.
The film centers around the Sanford family, their idyllic Hamptons vacation shattered by cryptic warnings of a brewing catastrophe. As communication networks flicker and the familiar hum of infrastructure fades, the Sanfords are forced to confront a sobering reality: Their existence depends on a web of interconnected systems precariously balanced on the edge of collapse.
This vulnerability, mirrored in countless aspects of modern life, becomes the film’s central theme, serving as a stark reminder of our reliance on electricity, internet and logistical supply chains that now seem so easily disrupted.
Predictive Programming?
But “Leave the World Behind” isn’t merely a cautionary tale: It’s a catalyst for uncomfortable questions. Some speculate it constitutes predictive programming due to the inclusion of cryptic signs and symbols. Predictive programming theory suggests media subtly expose future agendas in a way audiences ingest without resistance.
In the video above, Dutch legal philosopher Eva Vlaardingerbroek discusses the predictive programming angle of the film on Bannon’s “War Room.” Like many others, she believes the film is showing us what globalists like the WEF have in store for us.
Archie, the Sanfords’ son, sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Obey” throughout the film, throws suspicion into the narrative. The “Obey” T-shirt is a reference to the 1988 John Carpenter film “They Live,” which similarly deals with society’s obsession with mass media and the public’s inability to see the body snatchers for what they were. In short, people were unable to see reality as it was.
Is Archie’s “Obey” T-shirt simply a nod to the childish expression of rebellion, or a chilling foreshadowing of a future where compliance becomes paramount in the face of chaos?
Adding further fuel to the fire is the film’s production company — Higher Ground Productions, cofounded by Barack and Michelle Obama. This connection, many say, also suggests a veiled agenda.
Dangers of Relying on Modern Conveniences
The Sanfords’ reliance on modern-day comforts and technology highlights the dangers of complacency and the fragility of our existence. In contrast, Mr. Scott, the enigmatic neighbor, embodies preparedness and resourcefulness. His stockpiling of supplies and proactive approach showcases the power of personal responsibility in the face of crisis.
“Leave the World Behind” doesn’t preach preparedness ideologies or indulge in apocalyptic fantasies. Instead, it offers a glimpse into the potential ramifications of societal breakdowns and the human condition’s capacity for both despair and resilience. It urges viewers to confront their own vulnerabilities, fostering a critical examination of our dependency on interconnected systems and the importance of building individual and communal resources.
Easter Eggs Hidden in the Movie
While there have been many articles written about the hidden messages in the movie, most of them miss the most important ones. In my view, it is these Easter eggs that push the movie into a good watch. There is no doubt in my mind that these concealed communications had nothing to do with the Obamas, who produced the film. They were far more likely put in by editors of the film.
The video above helped me identify the ingenious and intricately concealed Easter eggs embedded in the movie, which illuminate the imminent importance of trust as a pivotal element in the catastrophic circumstances depicted in the movie. Within this cryptic storytelling, the vital role of trust during tumultuous times is unraveled.
The narrative strategically implies that the values and structures individuals build their lives upon might become obsolete overnight, and it exposes the unfortunate reality that amidst turmoil, human nature often leads to a disintegration of unity, where trust erodes, and individuals tend to betray rather than help one another. As such, the film unveils the inherent vulnerabilities in human interactions.
At its core, the narrative hints at the unsettling reality that in a crisis, human relationships will likely falter. This exposes vulnerabilities as people, driven by instinct or desperation, might betray one another, leaving the very essence of trust fractured in the face of adversity.
The video above has a completely different take on Rose’s character. Her childlike innocence amidst the chaos is a stark contrast, and her naiveté serves as a lens through which we witness innocence amid the turmoil, as she grapples with an unfamiliar situation.
Rose symbolizes a profound truth about trusting oneself — an attribute that often wanes as individuals transition into adulthood. Her role as a surrogate for all children becomes evident, offering a profound lesson amid turbulent times.
Children, with their unwavering trust in themselves, can serve as powerful role models and teachers in tumultuous moments. Rose’s innocence mirrors this unwavering trust, highlighting a valuable lesson lost in the journey to adulthood — a reminder to rekindle trust in oneself, especially in times of uncertainty and upheaval.
Rose’s obsession with watching the final episode of “Friends” may also be symbolic of her desire for resolution, an answer to the question, “How does it end?” which is something the viewers of “Leave the World Behind” do not get.
Avoid Venturing Outside Your Home During the Initial Chaos
While the film may raise uncomfortable questions about media manipulation and societal control, it also offers a beacon of hope — the hope that by acknowledging our vulnerabilities, fostering resilience, and engaging in honest conversations, we can emerge from the shadows of potential collapse more informed, adaptable and empowered.
I believe there is a very real possibility that the scenario the movie depicts could happen. Given everything we know, it would be foolish to ignore this warning and be unprepared for a disaster like this.
In case of a grid failure and infrastructure collapse, understanding that chaos will prevail in the streets is crucial, and must inform your decisions and preparations. And, the longer the grid failure persists, the more severe the chaos will become. While lockdowns might not be enforced, venturing outside of your property will be perilous.
Being able to stay sheltered at home will be paramount for safety, considering the risks of harm or worse amidst the chaos. So, preparation is key; identifying and acquiring essentials now, while you still can, is crucial. Two fundamental necessities stand out: food and water. Both are addressed in the sections below.
Food Prepping
Most prepping advice is clueless about optimal health, and while their suggestions of crackers and beans will keep you alive, it will also worsen your health.
After careful analysis and reflection, I suggest you consider stocking enough of the healthy provisions listed below to last you for two to eight weeks, as they will improve your health. If you are storing larger quantities, it will be helpful to rotate your food items and eat the oldest ones first.
Healthy Carbs
Consider stocking several pounds of fruit for each adult. These items are perishable and may only last up to two weeks. Fruit is, without a doubt, the healthiest carbohydrate you can consume. Choose your favorite fruits. Bananas are less than ideal because of their tendency to create higher tryptophan levels. The fruits should be ripe and sweet; otherwise it is best to avoid them.
You can store fruit juices in your freezer. They are typically in plastic bottles and if you freeze them the plastic expands and will accommodate the extra volume, whereas if they are in glass the container will break. The best commercial juice is the Evolution brand, as it is cold pressed and unpasteurized. Uncle Matt’s is one of the next best.
White rice stores well and is far better than brown rice, the fibers of which don’t digest well and therefore feed endotoxin-producing bacteria in your gut. It is not unreasonable to store eight 20-pound bags of white rice as an emergency source of calories for yourself, pets and your community. It can be stored for years as it is mostly pure carbohydrate with very little fat that can go rancid and, unlike most all other grains, has virtually no linoleic acid (LA).
Protein/Fat
In nature protein typically comes with fat, so I combined them. You can easily store a few months of meat in a freezer, but vegetarians will need other options. Meats from ruminant animals (not chickens or pigs) is typically very low in LA and are therefore the better choice. Also stock up on a high-quality protein powder. Make sure you enjoy the taste. I use our Collagen Complex Protein powder, which tastes great.
Eggs yolks are one of the finest nutrient dense foods on the planet as they contain both choline and vitamin K2. I personally consume six egg yolks a day from chickens I raise to have a very low LA content. I would caution against consuming much of the egg whites long-term. If a crisis catches you short of food, then it would be helpful to have the extra protein from egg whites. Just be sure to cook them first.
It is best to consume your egg yolks raw, which can easily be done by creating a smoothie or putting them in the white rice, which turns to rice pudding if you add a sweetener.
There is compelling science to support that butter and ghee should be considered essential because they contain odd-chain saturated fats like pentadecanoic acid and heptadecanoic acid. Both fats are ultimately metabolized to succinic acid, which is an important nutrient to keep the Krebs cycle moving smoothly. You can also drink milk for both fat and protein. It is mostly water, though, so it’s less than ideal for long-term storage, as it takes up so much space.
Shelf-Stable and Nonperishable Foods
You may also want to stock up on freeze-dried foods, which have a shelf life of 25 years or more. Other good long-term storage options that do not require refrigeration include canned salmon, canned cod livers, sardines in water (avoid ones preserved in vegetable oil), powdered milk and whey and other nutritional powders you can mix with water.
Ideally, you’ll want to store food in a cool, dark place with low humidity. Bags of rice are best stored in a sealed food-grade bucket with some oxygen absorbers. Vacuum sealing food can also extend shelf life. Fermented vegetables are also easy to make and will allow you to store fresh veggies (ideally from your own garden) for long periods of time.
Your favorite dried beans can also be a useful source of food as they can be soaked in water and sprouted, and some can even be consumed without cooking. But experiment with these before you just store them and aren’t sure if they will work for you.
Electricity for Preserving and Cooking Food
You can be highly confident that at some point you will not have any electrical power for a few weeks. There are two primary survival needs for electricity and both are related to food. One is preserving your food and the other is cooking it.
There are two options and for many it would be helpful to consider both. One is solar and the other is a gas generator. Neither of these solutions is cheap and can easily cost over $1,000 to 10 times that, or more, depending on your needs.
A starting place to research your options would be Amazon, to give you an idea of the more inexpensive options.2
While solar roof panels would be ideal, if you are hooked up to the grid and selling your electricity back to your utility, which most people do, then you will be unable to use your solar system during an outage as there are safety switches installed in most systems that prevent them from turning on, as it could put current into the system when repair technicians are working on downed lines.
If you have a generator and enough fuel, you could likely pulse it on and off to keep your refrigerator and freezer cold. Ideally, you will want to pair your generator with a battery storage solution like the ones from Yeti. This is an example of a 3,000-watt model3 that could run your freezer and fridge for 12 to 24 hours depending on how big they are.
If you don’t have a generator, then a small 12-volt refrigerator4 could be used. You could purchase solar panels for about $1/watt of power and pair it with a battery so you can store the energy.
You just need to determine how many watts you need for your refrigerator and secure the appropriate size pane. The refrigerator in the example above requires about 50 watts per hour or 1200 watts per day. A 250-watt solar panel should produce about 200 watts per hour when the sun is shining.
If it is cloudy, you won’t get much power, but it could theoretically power the refrigerator depending on sunlight availability. You can always purchase more panels for security. The benefit of sticking with a DC refrigerator is that the solar panel can power that directly, and there is no need to use an expensive inverter to convert the DC power from the solar panel to AC current.
Other options that will allow you to cook water and food during a blackout include (but are not limited to) solar cookers, which require neither electricity nor fire, small rocket stoves, propane-powered camping stoves and 12-volt pots and pans that you can plug into a backup battery.
Water
You’ll also want to secure a potable water source, as you can survive far longer without food than you can without water. An ideal system to consider, especially if you also have a garden, is to install a large cistern to collect rainwater.
Since I have a full acre of land that I grow food on, I have a 5,000-gallon cistern that collects rainwater from the gutters on my roof. This serves to augment my irrigation system but is also a large emergency source of water. Another strategy is to install a series of connected rain barrels to your gutters.
If you live next to a river or pond or have a swimming pool, you may not need a cistern as you can simply filter the water from them. I discuss this and other strategies in “How to Secure Your Water Supply for Emergencies.”
Also remember to stock up on means to purify less-than-ideal water sources. Examples include water purification tablets or drops, and/or independent water filtration systems that can filter out pathogens and other impurities (meaning a filtration system that is not tied to the tap in your home, in case pumps go down and you have no tap water).
Even a small survival water filtration system is better than nothing, as drinking contaminated water can result in serious illness and/or death. Having a rain barrel connected to your gutter downspout is a good idea. You can use it to water your garden, and in a worst-case scenario, you have a source of fresh water to drink, cook and take sponge baths in.
Be Prepared
“Leave the World Behind” reminds us that while societal collapse may seem like a distant dystopian fantasy, a little foresight and preparation can transform you from a helpless victim into an empowered survivor.
You can take inspiration from the film, not to live in fear, but to act with intention. Build your own “ark,” hone your skills and cultivate a strong community around you. By embracing preparedness, you can face the uncertainties of the future with resilience and hope, leaving the world behind, not with panic, but with the strength to navigate a new path forward.
I would encourage you to do the mental exercise of imaging if the scenario depicted in the film occurs. The obvious plan is to do everything you can to survive the two to four weeks during the chaos. You will want to avoid traveling at all costs as there will be a great risk in doing that. So, let’s make like a Scout, be prepared, and get everything you need to hole up in your home for this possibility. If it happens you will never regret being prepared.
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Since April 15 the two most armed institutions inside the Republic of Sudan have turned the weapons on each other resulting in massive deaths, destruction and dislocation in this oil-rich state of 46 million people.
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have tens of thousands of soldiers now fighting over the future direction of the country.
After nine months of warfare, which has been centered in the areas around Khartoum, al-Jazirah state and in sections of the Darfur region, the RSF leader Mohamed Dagalo (Hemedti) indicated that he was interested in unconditional negotiations on ending the conflict. Former interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok put forward a framework for the beginning of talks which drew the support of the RSF leader.
“The Coordination of Civilian Democratic Forces (Taqaddum) has called on the Chair of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), Ismail Omar Guelleh, to ensure civilian participation in the upcoming meeting between the leaders of the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). This request comes as IGAD is facilitating direct talks between Sudanese Army Chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF Commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, ‘Hemedti,’ which were originally scheduled for late December but were postponed. Saleh Ammar, a spokesman for the Civil Forces Alliance in Eastern Sudan and a member of the Tagaddum delegation that met with Djiboutian President Guelleh, stated that the demand for civilian participation was a key topic of discussion during the meeting. Ammar further indicated that all IGAD member states support the inclusion of civilians in all stages of the political process.”
Although these events have provided a glimpse of hope among Sudanese for a rapid conclusion to the war, the loss of life and property due to the RSF-SAF war has been a severe setback to the democratic movement which arose five years ago. During the concluding weeks of 2018 demonstrations erupted in Sudan over the rising cost of living among workers and professional people.
By April 2019, longtime President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was overthrown by his colleagues since the initial protests sparked by runaway inflation soon turned political by demanding the resignation of the then head-of-state. Thinking that the removal of al-Bashir would halt the mass demonstrations in Sudan, a Transitional Military Council (TMC) was established after the coup of April.
Nonetheless, even after the putsch, the popular resistance committees remained in the streets holding a sit-in and street occupation outside the defense headquarters in Khartoum. After two months on June 3, apparently the SAF and RSF made a decision to remove the demonstrators from the capital. This military and security action proved to be extremely bloody. Over 100 people were reportedly killed prompting another political crisis in Sudan.
The repressive measures taken by the security forces in early June 2019 were designed to prevent a real democratic transition in Sudan. The military has its own interests in the economic structures of the country. Ousted President al-Bashir was wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) which could implicate other top-level military officials if the former leader was ever sent to The Hague to face trial. Al-Bashir has not been sent to the Kingdom of the Netherlands to answer charges against him after nearly five years since his removal.
Efforts by neighboring Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the 55 member-states African Union (AU) eventually resulted in a negotiated agreement for the establishment of a Transitional Sovereign Council (TSC) which ostensibly would turn over the governance of the state to a democratically elected administration after three years. This struggle over the character of the transitional process continued up until the April 15 outbreak of violence between the RSF and the SAF.
After the collapse of the first transitional process in October 2021 and the removal of interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, the political situation remained stalled. Therefore, when the eruption took place on April 15, the democratic movement was not in any position to push towards a peaceful resolution of the intra-military conflict.
Addis Ababa Declaration
On January 2, a statement was issued by a coalition of mass organizations called the Coordination Body of the Democratic Civil Forces (Taqaddum) and the RSF in Ethiopia. The aim of the declaration was to set out principles for the end of the war between the military factions.
Sudan former PM with Coordination Body of the Democratic Civil Forces (Taqaddum) (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
Taqaddum was formed in October 2023 in Addis Ababa in an attempt to unite the civil society groupings which had been fractured in the aftermath of the failure in deciding on the details of the transitional process. Even after the removal of Hamdok in October 2021, further fissures occurred within the democratic movement in Sudan.
However, Malik Agar, the current Deputy Chairperson of the Sovereign Council under the leadership of SAF General Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, rejected the Addis Ababa Declaration saying that the groups which signed the statement were already aligned with the RSF. Agar in a press statement on January 3 said that the proposed meeting between Al-Burhan and Delgado in Djibouti was not confirmed. Agar noted that the meeting would be based upon the Jeddah Agreement which was discussed after the fighting began in 2023.
“We have made our conditions clear and stated upfront that there will be no negotiations without the immediate withdrawal of the RSF from homes, institutions, and cities, including Wad Madani and the cities they occupy in Darfur. If this happens, there will be a second, third, and fourth stage. We still have time to stop the war and time to end it.”
General al-Burhan echoed the sentiment of Agar during a lecture delivered to soldiers in the SAF on January 5. He described the RSF leader as a “traitor” who needs to be held accountable for his actions. See this.
Meanwhile the actual text of the Addis Ababa Declaration read in part as follows:
“Acknowledging that communication and political dialogue between all civil forces, who truly believe in democratic transformation, and the leaders of the warring military forces, is inevitable to stop the war, tackle its devastating impact, realize peace, and restore the path of democratic transformation; We, in Taqaddum and RSF, have determined to end this war and make it the last war in Sudan; and to complete and deepen the course of the December Revolution, by achieving the well-deserved democratic civil rule, equal citizenship, just distribution of power and wealth, economic prosperity, solid peace, and sustainable solutions to Sudan’s crisis.”
Peaceful Resolution Would Benefit the Entire Region
The scheduled meeting between al-Burhan and Hemedti in December did not materialize. The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional East African organization, was set to sponsor the talks between the two military belligerents in Djibouti.
There is a pressing desire both inside the country and regionally for a peaceful resolution to the war. Official statistics reveal that approximately 12,000 people have been killed in the fighting since April 15. Tens of thousands more are suffering from injuries and gunshot wounds.
United Nations estimates say that since the beginning of the fighting, 7.2 million people have been dislocated with 1.4 million of them crossing the border into other neighboring states. Societal institutions including healthcare, education, civil services and humanitarian relief agencies have been paralyzed due to the conflict.
Contiguous states in East and Central Africa were already faced with development issues amid the post-pandemic situation and the problems centered around severe weather events including drought. Unfortunately, the AU and the other official regional groupings have failed in their efforts to end the war.
Consequently, it is essential that these official entities along with the political parties, coalitions and civil society groups continue to work for an end to the war. However, the ongoing military dominance of Sudanese politics must be effectively ended to place the country on a path of sustainable peace and development.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Sudan delegation meets with Djibouti President (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
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Sweden will join NATO under US command next July. Meanwhile, the United States has already entered Sweden. An agreement was signed last December, that gives them unrestricted access to 17 Swedish military bases. Here the United States can deploy its forces and pre-position weapons. Nuclear weapons are not mentioned in the Agreement, but the United States will have exclusive control over pre-positioned weapons, therefore there is the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons in Sweden also.
The USA signed a similar agreement with Finland last December, which joined NATO under US command last April. Finland grants the United States unrestricted access to 15 military bases, including the prepositioning of weapons and the entry of US planes, ships, and military vehicles. Since the United States has exclusive control over these forces, it can deploy both nuclear weapons and carriers at Finnish bases.Five of the 15 bases are located in Lapland on the Russian border.
At the same time, the United States is deploying the new B61-12 nuclear bombs in Europe. They are deployed in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey to replace the B61 nuclear bombs. The B61-12s may also be secretly located in Poland and other European countries. While their deployment is underway, the Pentagon announced the decision to develop a further variant of the bomb, called B61-13. It will have a power output of 360 kilotons, much higher than the B61-12’s maximum output of 50 kilotons.
The Pentagon reports that “the B61-13 will provide the President of the United States with additional options against more resistant military targets and targets over large areas”. In other words, the United States is deploying first-strike nuclear bombs in Europe, clearly aimed at Russia, to destroy command centre bunkers and large areas of strategic importance. Russia’s response is inevitable: it has completed the deployment in Belarus of tactical nuclear weapons capable of hitting US-NATO nuclear bases in Europe. At the same time, the risk of nuclear war is growing in the Middle East, where Israel – the only nuclear power in the region – is preparing, with US support, to attack Iran.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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The recent bombing in Iran and US support of terrorism in Iran:
The US has used armed terrorist organizations for decades as proxies against their adversaries worldwide, including most recently in Syria, Iraq, and against Iran;
US weapons and equipment “fell into the hands” of ISIS and other terrorist organizations, consisting of the largest, most effective militant groups participating in the US proxy war against Syria;
US government and corporate-funded think tanks like the Brookings Institution in its 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” policy paper proposed using listed terrorist organizations like the MEK to undermine, coerce, and possibly even overthrow the Iranian government;
The 2009 paper suggested MEK be “delisted” as a terrorist organization by the US State Department, which the Department eventually did in 2012 following intense lobbying and media campaigning by senior US and European representatives;
The MEK is currently still supported by senior US-European representatives with undermining, coercing, and overthrowing the Iranian government remaining as a key Western geopolitical objective;
Western media warns the recent terrorist attack in Iran could trigger a wider regional conflict, which the US has openly sought since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023;
The 2009 Brookings paper feared Iran might not retaliate against US provocations, denying the US the wider regime-change war it sought;
Between the US-backed brutalization of Gaza and now a terrorist attack on Iran itself, the US is making it as politically unlikely as possible for Tehran to avoid retaliation if and when a major US or Israel strike on Iran takes place.
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New Yorker – The Redirection, Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism? (2007): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20…
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Peace activists across the country have embarked on a campaign to mobilize global support for South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The campaign, spearheaded by CODEPINK, World Beyond War, and RootsAction, aims to rally nations to submit a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case at the ICJ.
The focus is on holding Israel accountable for alleged genocide in Gaza and putting an end to the tragic suffering of an imprisoned population. Delegations from major cities engaged with U.N. missions, embassies, and consulates worldwide, urging countries to invoke the Genocide Convention at the United Nations’ judicial arm.
The campaign started two weeks ago with an open call for people to join in a petition and letter-writing campaign urging countries to invoke the genocide convention and charge Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice. Since then, over 30,000 people signed the petition, accompanied by an impressive 118,290 letters sent to various countries urging support of the cause.
The nationwide delegations of “grassroots diplomats” took on this campaign because officially appointed U.S. diplomats continue to insist on supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, rejecting the sentiments of a majority of people in the U.S. and around the world who want a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby calls South Africa’s 84-page suit accusing Israel of genocide “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Notably, the United States supported Ukraine invoking the Genocide Convention last year in the International Court of Justice with far less evidence.
In the first week of January, delegations of grassroots diplomats embarked on a petition and letter delivery campaign across the United States, urging missions, consulates, and embassies to support South Africa’s legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the U.N. Convention on Genocide. While the visits and deliveries varied from city to city, the overall reception by staff and representatives in each U.N. Mission, Embassy, and Consulate was encouraging and supportive, with some delegations able to meet directly with country representatives.
The NYC delegation visited around 30 U.N. missions, engaging in significant diplomatic efforts. They had a positive meeting with Colombia’s U.N. Ambassador, Arlene Tickner, exploring the potential for a Declaration of Intervention to support South Africa’s legal action. Another meeting took place with the Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the U.N. At the Bolivia Mission, the delegation received a warm reception, providing a letter and petition. A productive meeting occurred with the Bangladesh U.N. Consul, who expressed interest in connecting with legal experts. The NYC team met African Union diplomats who offered support and suggested additional efforts for South Africa. A meeting at the South Africa Mission involved discussions with the counselor and Deputy Permanent Representative. The delegation expressed their gratitude and support to the South African government. The South African representative acknowledged and appreciated the delegation’s work in their peace work.
The D.C. team engaged in diplomatic efforts, meeting with the Deputy Minister at the Colombian Embassy to encourage the Colombian government’s continued stance against Israeli actions and to join South Africa’s case. They visited and submitted their petition to the Ghanaian, Chilean, and Ethiopian Embassies, urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. The team also had discussions with the Bolivian Embassy. Currently, they are arranging a meeting with the Turkish ambassador to further their diplomatic initiatives.
Three delegations from Miami divided their efforts to visit ten consulates, including those of Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, France, Honduras, Ireland, Spain, and Turkey. The delegations had the opportunity to meet with consular generals from Bolivia, Honduras, and Turkey, all notably welcoming and receptive. In addition, the Miami team reached out to the Turkish ambassador in Washington, D.C., further extending their diplomatic efforts. The Türkiye Consulate in Miami emphasized the visit on their social media platform, underscoring the significance of the engagement.
Miami team at Turkish consulate (Source: CODEPINK)
The Tampa team focused on a single visit to the Greek Consulate, accompanied by a representative from CAIR Florida, based in Tampa. CAIR is a nationwide federation of legally independent chapters dedicated to safeguarding the civil liberties of Americans. The Greek Consulate warmly received the delegation, expressing appreciation for a gift of olive oil. Furthermore, they assured the team they would forward the petition and letter to the Embassy of Greece in Washington, D.C., indicating a positive reception and willingness to address the delegation’s concerns.
Orlando engaged with five consulates representing Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Haiti, and Colombia. The meeting at the Haitian Consulate was mainly positive, with a productive discussion with an Assistant Consul urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. Similarly, the delegation met with the Vice Consular of Colombia, delivered a petition, and urged their support for South Africa’s case against Israel, indicating a proactive approach in advancing their diplomatic efforts.
In Houston, the delegation reported successful engagements during their visits. They met with the Consulate of Belize staff and spoke with Consulate General Francisco Leal of Chile. The Honduran consulate staff extended kindness during their visit. The delegations also visited the Pakistan consulate as part of their diplomatic efforts.
The San Francisco delegation visited three consulates – Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. They engaged with the staff at the Chilean and Brazilian consulates, delivering the petition and letter at the Colombian Consulate, situated in the same building as the Israeli Consulate. Security at the building instructed the delegation to wait outside for a representative. However, the doors were subsequently locked, preventing entry. In response, the delegation affixed the petition and letter to the building’s door to convey their message.
The delegation in Los Angeles visited nine foreign consulates in the city, including Belize, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, Colombia, and Kuwait. The delegation expressed gratitude to the staff at the South African Consulate for South Africa’s filing in the ICJ that charges Israel with genocide. As a goodwill gesture, the activists brought flowers, a simple yet well-received token of peace and unity. They also had an encouraging meeting with Bolivian Consulate Gabriella Silva, who supported the delegation’s effort.
Delegations from Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and San Antonio also made visits to their local Consulates. Prior to deliveries, Turkey, Malaysia, and Slovakia publicly came out in support of South Africa’s filing. Since then, Jordan announced that they will file a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case.
This grassroots diplomatic effort represents a unified plea for justice, demanding global solidarity against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tireless advocacy seeks to bridge nations in support of South Africa’s pursuit of justice in the International Court of Justice.
Deliveries will continue into the first of next week with the hopes of engaging with as many missions, consulates, and embassies as possible before the start of the ICJ hearing on Jan. 11.
The oral argument of South Africa will take place on Thursday 11th January 2024 and Israel’s oral argument on Friday 12th January 2024. The hearings will be streamed live and on demand on the ICJ’s Website and on the UN Web TV.
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Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She writes about the intersection of militarism and the human cost of war.
Featured image: Sf CA US Chilean consulate (Source: CODEPINK)
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A member of British Parliament demanded the foreign secretary “take the strongest possible action against” Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the U.K., after she appeared on a radio broadcast of LBC and told host Iain Dale in no uncertain terms that Israel’s military must target civilian infrastructure in Gaza—a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
Hotovely told Dale that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have found that “every school, every mosque, every second house, has an access to tunnel,” referring to the tunnels used by Hamas—which were first built when Gaza was under Israeli control in 1980.
“That’s an argument for destroying the whole of Gaza, every single building,” Dale said, prompting Hotovely to ask, “Do you have another solution, how to destroy the underground tunnel city?”
Journalist Hamza Ali Shah said the ambassador’s statement amounted to “a clear call for genocide.”
Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely says every school, mosque and second house is a target for Israel.
Asked if that’s effectively a call for the destruction of all of Gaza, she asks “do you have another solution?”
Hotovely is hardly the first Israeli official to publicly call for genocidal violence in Gaza—even as the government continues to claim it is targeting Hamas and protecting civilian lives and as the U.S., which has provided military aid for Israel’s bombardment and vehemently defended the IDF, claims accusations of genocide are “meritless.”
But her statement on British national radio underscored how genocidal language has become commonplace among Israel’s mainstream political class since the country began its bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attack.
British journalist Robert Carter said Hotovely’s comments make her “a good pick for Israel’s envoy to the U.K.”
“She always finds a way to properly sum up how evil Israel’s colonialist project is and what Tel Aviv’s true ambitions are—the total genocide and land theft of all Palestine,” he said.
Mitchell Plitnick cautioned observers against dismissing Hotovely’s remarks as the musings of a extremist whose views are outside the mainstream under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Understand, Tzipi Hotovely is not Smotrich or Ben Gvir. She is a long time Likud stalwart, very much a part of Netanyahu's team, from his party. Here, she calls for #genocide." When asked about it, she doubles down. This is the very heart of what the US is supporting. https://t.co/6IyfM7cb4r
Afzal Khan, a Labour MP, wrote to British Foreign Secretary David Cameron to demand that Hotovely’s comments be met with “stern denunciation” from the government.
“The situation is unfathomable, and the words of the Israeli ambassador make clear that it is the intention of the Israeli government to continue with its horrific bombardment and ground fighting until there is nothing and no one left in Gaza,” wrote Khan.
The Israeli Ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely, has encouraged the full destruction of Gaza. This is a clear call for the genocide of Palestinians.
I've written to the Foreign Secretary, calling on him to condemn this and to take the strongest possible action against the Ambassador 👇 pic.twitter.com/qksXFkC4JM
Others, including Guardian columnist Owen Jones and research analyst Naks Bilal, said Hotovely should be expelled from her role.
“The Israeli ambassador has gone on national British radio and incited genocide,” said Jones. “This is an illegal act under the 1948 Genocide Convention. As such, the U.K. must expel Tzipi Hotovely immediately.”
[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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In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later.
They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power’.
Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’
Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On 7 March, [2023] the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry.
‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.
There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.
No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligensia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life’.
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice’, wrote Eagleton.
Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as ‘the movement’, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’
At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling’ of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.
Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.
As for ‘the movement’, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.
When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years since, America has gone to war with the world.
According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.’
‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population.
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’.
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’
He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’
I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein‘s ‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’, spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target’.
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people.
‘We knew…,’ he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’
This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’
On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.
The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission’, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged’.
In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China’, in the words of his Defence Secretary.
There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose’.
At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.
Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’.
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.
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John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20th century.
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The economic situation, the domestic political ideology, the individual leader, the context, and other key factors heavily influenced the pursuit of Jamaica’s foreign policy under the leadership of Michael Manley in the 1970s and in in the 1980s.
The era of the 1970s was a significant period in political history for not only Jamaica but also, the Caribbean in which there was the rise in leftist politics, a new sense of nationalism and intellectual traditions that challenged the dominant neo-liberal orthodoxy in examining Caribbean development. These unique experiences within the domestic, regional and international environments have moulded Manley’s approach to foreign policy based on his strong, philosophical belief system about Third World development.
On the other hand, the era of the 1980s marked a serious shift in political ideology due to a changing international environment that was primarily focussed on trade liberalization, economic growth, foreign investments, political conservatism and promotion ofpro-American values to ensure that the dominant ideology of capitalism remains tightly intact. Thus, Seaga’s approach to foreign policy in Jamaica mirrored his personal biases against the leftist model for development and he forged alliances with right wing political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan of the United States of America in order to place more focus on economic gains for Jamaica and the Caribbean rather than, the foreign policy goals ofsocial justice and equity for humanity and third world states, that were pursued by Manley, in the 1970s.
The reading ‘Jamaica’s Foreign Policy’ explores a plethora of critical insights on how foreign policy has been constructed in Jamaica in the 1970s and 1980s, the factors that have affected the shaping of domestic foreign policy, the determinants, and goals of foreign policy. In the reading ‘The New Foreign Policy’, Laura Neack (2008) defines foreign policy as a “policy or a program that serves a guide to behaviour intended to realize the goal an organization has set for itself” (p.9). This definition of foreign policy by academic scholars is skilfully matched with the context that helped to shape Jamaica’s foreign policy in the 1970s whereby issues in the international environment also influenced issues in the domestic and regional environment.
The program that was developed for Jamaica to realize its goals of equity, social justice, economic emancipation, and a brand-new sense of nationalism was pursued by the individual leader Michael Manley and his administration in the 1970s, against the context of newly independent third world states forging a path of self- determination and the rejection of capitalist development. In addition, this context of shaping Jamaica’s foreign policy also led to intellectual scholarship in the Caribbean that challenged neo-liberal growth models prescribed by Sir Arthur Lewis and Williams Demas by describing the unique structural weaknesses in the economic situation ofsmall states using historical analysis. This argument can be further proven by Norman Girvan (2009) in his seminal essay ‘Plantation Economy in the Age of Globalization’ where he postulates that the “plantation school of thought asserted the specificity of the Caribbean experience despite the fact that neo-liberal economics is seen as the panacea for development” (p.1).
It must be noted that Jamaica was no exception in this unique school of thought. Theeconomic situationinfluenced foreign policy and was largely characterized by the elite controlling the wealth and production, repatriation of foreign investments and thus caused the masses of Jamaica to be disenfranchised. The economic situation of Jamaica, as a third world state, proved that it was pruned to exploitation of its resources in the international political economy due to small size. With reference to this argument, one can conclude that Jamaica, before Manley’s rise to power, was employing a structuralist approach to its foreign policy in which “the government had no real choice and decisions have been dictated by the capitalist elite.” It was the economic situation of Jamaica, the rise in radical intellectual scholarship and the quest for self-determination internationally that helped to shape Manley’s personal belief system and world views. Manley’s personal belief system and world views, as an individual leader, were also translated into re-defining Jamaica’s domestic political ideology and foreign policy. This is most evident in fact that he used democratic socialism as the new domestic political ideology to guide the foreign policy.
In a 1977 television interview with an American journalist, Manley expressed his motivation behind choosing democratic socialism as a model for Jamaica’s development and foreign policy. He stated, “society succeeds best when it articulates purposes.” This therefore means that a successful development model of a state must incorporate harnessing the power of the masses. His motives also included building a more equal and just society for all citizens, removing historical barriers of colourism and social class and charting a path of economic self-reliance of Jamaica. This was further revealed in his foreign policy decision of establishing the International Bauxite Levy in which he not only defended the national interest of Jamaica’s resourcesbuthe also ensured that this foreign policy decision is in close alignment with the domestic political ideology of democratic socialism, his world views and the specifity of Jamaica’s economic situation.
Using Magaret Hermann’s 1980 Personal Characteristics model in Foreign Policy, one can argue that Manley had placed high emphasis on national honour and identity, and he believed that Jamaica should hold centre stage. He had also displayed high conceptual complexity and thrived on the foreign policy goal of co-operation. As a result, Manley, as an individual leader, helped to shape Jamaica’s foreign policy in manner that it would be an outstanding small state in the global arena on topical issues such as fair trade for developing countries. This was portrayed in Jamaica’s leading role in negotiations of the first Lome Agreement in 1975 and Jamaica being the chair of G-77 countries in the Non-Alignment Movement meetings. His high conceptual complexity is mirrored in the fact that he displayed deft, intellectual rigour in understanding issues in third world development and how the international environment affects developing states and their issues.
Foreign policy analyst, Robert Putnam explained that a leader must pay attention to both domestic and international environment in pursuit of foreign policy and Manley attempted to display this balance in domestic and international affairs by forging significant ties with Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba and Socialist International to achieve national interests in domestic foreign policy.
To further add to this discussion, when one uses the systems level of foreign policy analysis, one can also posit that the multi-level interactions and bi-lateral relations on regional issues were closely aligned to the domestic political ideology of democratic socialism and Manley’s controversial stance towards the capitalist model of development. Also, when applyingthe state level of analysis, Manley interacts in a co-operative manner with other decision makers within his organization, the People’s National Party (PNP) to achieve foreign policy goals of co-operation internationally while pursuing equitable social reforms for citizens domestically.
Despite his motives to build a more just and equal society for all domestically and aligning himself with left wing leaders such as Fidel Castro of Cuba through co-operation on foreign policy goals, Manley’s rationality in foreign policy decision making was affected by personal biases and misperceptions. His misperceptions lie in the fact that a purely socialist model was ideally suited for Jamaica’s economic situation and the Jamaican public including the opposition, Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) had a serious misperception about democratic socialism being equivalent to communist dictatorship.
These misperceptions led to a serious opposition from the United States of America, which eventually caused Jamaica’s domestic political ideology to have a negative impact on its economic development. This was due to the fact that, there were institutional constraints, in which the model of development pursued in foreign policy, had proven to be unstable and had cause the country to be crippled economically. Additionally, these misperceptions in foreign policy decisions also fostered Manley’s electoral loss in 1980 and the rise of Edward Seaga who promoted pro-American ideals on the capitalist model of development. Neack (2008) posits, “as environments shift, issues change” and her postulation is quite relevant to examining foreign policy in Jamaica in the 1980s under the leadership of Edward Seaga.
Image: Edward Seaga (Licensed under the Public Domain)
Edward Seaga also allowed Jamaica to lead in international trade matters related to the Caribbean Basin Initiative and had forged alliances with right wing leaders such as Ronald Reagan of the United States and Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom and the establishment of the International Democratic Union but the shift in ideas was still quite evident. Edward Seaga’s foreign policy was largely domestic with special focus on economic expansion as he personally believed that the domestic political ideology of democratic socialism ruined Jamaica’s economic situation by plunging it into debt and thereby allowing the country to rely on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for monetary assistance. Edward’s pursuit of foreign policy was strengthened and supported by powerful capitalist superpowers and right wing coalitions. This shows that foreign policy is indeed a nested game and the behaviour of other states, particularly superpowers, towards a developing state like Jamaica, can determine the successful or failed fate of domestic foreign policy goals. In concluding, ‘Jamaica’s Foreign Policy’ reading reveals the role of the leader, a state’s economic situation, context and other major factors that influence foreign policy decisions, actions, and implications.
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Tina Renier is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Sources
Girvan, N. (2009). Plantation Economy in the Age of Globalization. Foreword to Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy by Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt. University of the West Indies Press. p.1.
Hermann, M. (1980). Explaining Foreign Policy Behaviour using the Personal Characteristics of Political Leaders.International Studies Quarterly. 24 (1), pp. 7-46.
Neack, L. (2008). The New Foreign Policy: Power Seeking in a Globalized era. Md: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Chapter 1.
Featured image: Michael Manley (Licensed under the Public Domain)
La Svezia entrerà nella NATO sotto comando USA il prossimo luglio. Intanto gli Stati Uniti sono già entrati in Svezia. Un accordo stipulato lo scorso dicembre concede loro accesso illimitato a 17 basi militari svedesi.Qui gli Stati Uniti potranno schierare proprie forze e preposizionare armamentiLe armi nucleari non sono menzionate nell’Accordo, ma gli Stati Uniti avranno il controllo esclusivo sugli armamenti preposizionati,quindi la possibilità di schierare in Svezia anche armi nucleari.Un accordo analogo è stato stipulato dagli USA lo scorso dicembre con la Finlandia, entrata nella NATO sotto comando USAlo scorso aprile.La Finlandia concede agli Stati Unitil’accesso illimitatoa 15 basi militari, compreso il preposizionamento di armamenti e l’ingresso di aerei, navi e veicoli militari statunitensi. Poiché sono gli Stati Uniti ad avere l’esclusivo controllo su tali forze, essi possono schierare nelle basi finlandesi sia armi che vettori nucleari.Cinque delle 15 basi si trovano in Lapponia al confine con la Russia.
Contemporaneamente gli Stati Uniti stanno schierando in Europa le nuove bombe nucleari B61-12. Esse vengono disclocate in Italia, Germania, Belgio, Paesi Bassi e Turchia in sostituzione delle bombe nucleari B61. È possibile che le B61-12 siano segretamente dislocate anche in Polonia e altri paesi europei. Mentre è in corso il loro schieramento, il Pentagono annuncia la decisione di sviluppare un’ulteriore variante della bomba, denominataB61-13.Avrà una potenza di360 kiloton, molto superiore a quella massima della B61-12 da 50 kiloton. Il Pentagono comunica che“la B61-13 fornirà al Presidente degli Stati Uniti ulteriori opzioni contro obiettivi militari più resistentie contro obiettivi su grandi aree” . In altre parole, gli Stati Uniti stanno schierando in Europa bombe nucleari da first strike, chiaramente dirette contro la Russia, per distruggere i bunker dei centri di comando e grandi aree di importanza strategica. Inevitabile la risposta della Russia: essaha completato lo schieramento in Bielorussia di armi nucleari tattiche in grado di colpire le basi nucleari USA-NATO in Europa.
Cresce allo stesso tempo il rischio di guerra nucleare in Medioriente, dove Israele – unica potenza nucleare della regione – si prepara, con l’appoggio statunitense, ad attaccare l’Iran.
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First published on January 29, 2021
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The Imaginary and Theoretical Virus known as SARS-CoV-2, a concept which has been used by the NWO (New World Order) controllers to shut down the world, is becoming more and more exposed as the months go by.
Although those who believe in the COVID cult – both those orchestrating the scamdemic and those blindly following along – will insist the virus is real, the truth is that there has still been no compelling or conclusive evidence that a real SARS-CoV-2 virus exists.
Admissions by governmental scientists and organizations worldwide, as well as omissions and obfuscations by those same people and agencies, reveal the shocking truth. As hard as it may be for the COVID cultists to admit, the emperor truly has no clothes.
There is no virus, other than a digital, theoretical abstraction made on a computer from a genomic database. The virus has never been isolated, purified, sequenced, characterized and proven 100% to exist.
Don’t believe it? That’s okay; it’s good to be skeptical. See the evidence below for yourself and make up your own mind.
#1 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: The Virus Has Never Been Isolated According to Koch’s Postulates or River’s Postulates
We’ll start with this, because this is the cornerstone of the whole scam. All the following information and evidence below stems from the fact the so-called experts have never isolated and purified the virus according to the gold standard of Koch’s postulates, or even the modified River’s Postulates. Koch’s postulates are:
The microorganism must be identified in all individuals affected by the disease, but not in healthy individuals.
The microorganism can be isolated from the diseased individual and grown in culture.
When introduced into a healthy individual, the cultured microorganism must cause disease.
The microorganism must then be re-isolated from the experimental host, and found to be identical to the original microorganism.
River’s postulates were proposed by Thomas M. River in 1973 to establish the role of a specific virus as the cause of a specific disease. They are modifications of Koch’s postulates. They are as follows:
The viral agent must be found either in the host’s (animal or plant) body fluids at the time of disease or in cells showing lesions specific to that disease.
The host material with the viral agent used to inoculate the healthy host (test organism) must be free of any other microorganism.
The viral agent obtained from the infected host must produce the specific disease in a suitable healthy host, and/or provide evidence of infection by inducing the formation of antibodies specific to that agent.
Similar material (viral particle) from the newly infected host (test organism) must be isolated and capable of transmitting the specific disease to other healthy hosts.
Whichever set of postulates is used, SARS-CoV-2 fails the test. Dr. Andrew Kaufman does a great job explaining why in this video. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (allegedly causing the disease COVID-19) has not been shown to be present only in sick people and not in healthy ones.
The virus has never been isolated, which must be done with proper equipment such as electron microscopes and which cannot be achieved through CT scans (as the Chinese were using) and the flawed RT-PCR test.
The January 24th 2020 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019 describes how the scientists arrived at the idea of COVID-19: they took lung fluid samples and extracted RNA from them using the PCR test. It admits that the coronavirus failed Koch’s postulates:
“Further development of accurate and rapid methods to identify unknown respiratory pathogens is still needed … our study does not fulfill Koch’s postulates.”
#2 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: Top Chinese Scientist Admitted They Never Isolated the Virus
All claims that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been isolated have turned out to be unsubstantiated. Meanwhile, there have been actual admissions by officials that they haven’t isolated it. The chief epidemiologist of the Chinese CDC (Center for Disease Control) admitted “they didn’t isolate the virus” in this video clip.
#3 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: CDC Stated No Quantified Isolate Was Available
The US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in its July 2020 report CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel admits that it had been running PCR tests based not on an actual viral isolate (an actual sample or specimen taken from an infected human), but rather “stocks” of “transcribed RNA” taken from a gene bank to “mimic clinical specimen”:
“Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV were available for CDC use at the time the test was developed and this study conducted, assays designed for detection of the 2019-nCoV RNA were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA (N gene; GenBank accession: MN908947.2) of known titer (RNA copies/μL) spiked into a diluent consisting of a suspension of human A549 cells and viral transport medium (VTM) to mimic clinical specimen.” (pg.43)
#4 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: CDC Admitted They Made a Digital Virus of 30,000 Base Pairs Using 37 Actual Sample Base Pairs
“In other words, it is a Frankenstein virus which has been concocted and stitched together using genomic database sequences (some viral, some not). It has never been properly purified and isolated so that it could be sequenced from end-to-end once derived from living tissue; instead, it’s just digitally assembled from a computer database. In this paper, the CDC scientists state they took just 37 base pairs from a genome of 30,000 base pairs which means that about 0.001% of the viral sequence is derived from actual living samples or real bodily tissue. In other words, they took these 37 segments and put them into a computer program, which filled in the rest of the base pairs. This computer-generation step constitutes scientific fraud.”
We designed 37 pairs of nested PCRs spanning the genome on the basis of the coronavirus reference sequence (GenBank accession no. NC045512). We extracted nucleic acid from isolates and amplified by using the 37 individual nested PCRs.”
Another way to say this is that the “virus” has been constructed using a technique called de novo assembly which is a method for constructing genomes from a large number of (short or long) DNA fragments, with no a priori knowledge of the correct sequence or order of those fragments. You can read more about it here.
#5 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: European Corman-Drosten Paper Used an “In Silico” Genome of an “In Silico” Virus
The original Corman-Drosten paper admits they used a theoretical virus sequence for all their work and calculations. They, like the CDC and every government and agency, claim this is only because no isolate was ever available. I wonder if any of these scientists every asked WHY the isolate has never been available?
“In the present case of 2019-nCoV, virus isolates or samples from infected patients have so far not become available to the international public health community.”
“The first and major issue is that the novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (in the publication named 2019-nCoV and in February 2020 named SARS-CoV-2 by an international consortium of virus experts) is based on in silico (theoretical) sequences, supplied by a laboratory in China, because at the time neither control material of infectious (“live”) or inactivated SARS-CoV-2 nor isolated genomic RNA of the virus was available to the authors. To date no validation has been performed by the authorship based on isolated SARS-CoV-2 viruses or full length RNA thereof.
…
Nevertheless these in silico sequences were used to develop a RT-PCR test methodology to identify the aforesaid virus. This model was based on the assumption that the novel virus is very similar to SARS-CoV from 2003 (Hereafter named SARS-CoV-1) as both are beta-coronaviruses … in short, a design relying merely on close genetic relatives does not fulfill the aim for a “robust diagnostic test” as cross reactivity and therefore false-positive results will inevitably occur. Validation was only done in regards to in silico(theoretical) sequences and within the laboratory-setting, and not as required for in-vitro diagnostics with isolated genomic viral RNA. This very fact hasn’t changed even after 10 months of introduction of the test into routine diagnostics.” (emphasis added)
#6 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: UK Government Couldn’t Produce Evidence
The governments of many nations around the world couldn’t seem to come up with a real virus either when challenged to do so. More evidence proving the “virus” is constructed on a computer database from a digital gene bank comes from Frances Leader, who questioned the UK MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) whether a real isolated virus was used to make the COVID vaccine. Leader found that the WHO protocols that Pfizer used to produce the mRNA do not appear to identify any nucleotide sequences that are unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Leader asked if the “virus” was actually a computer generated genomic sequence, and ultimately the MHRA confirmed they had no real specimen:
“The DNA template does not come directly from an isolated virus from an infected person.”
In July 2020, a group of concerned academics wrote a letter to the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in which they asked him to produce independently peer reviewed scientific evidence proving that the SARS-CoV-2 “virus” has been isolated. To date they have not received a reply. Similarly, UK researcher Andrew Johnson made a Freedom of Information Request to Public Health England (PHE). He asked them to provide him with their records describing the isolation of a SARS-COV-2 virus to which they responded:
“PHE can confirm it does not hold information in the way suggested by your request.”
#7 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: Australian Government Couldn’t Produce Evidence
In other Commonwealth nations it’s the exact same story. In Australia scientists from the Doherty Institute falsely announced that they had isolated the SARS-CoV-2 virus. When asked to clarify the scientists said:
“We have short (RNA) sequences from the diagnostic test that can be used in the diagnostic tests.”
“The reliability of COVID-19 tests is uncertain due to the limited evidence base…There is limited evidence available to assess the accuracy and clinical utility of available COVID-19 tests.”
#8 SARS-CoV-2 the Theoretical Virus: Canadian Government Couldn’t Produce Evidence
Researcher Christine Massey made a similar Freedom Of Information request in Canada, to which the Canadian Government replied:
“Having completed a thorough search, we regret to inform you that we were unable to locate any records responsive to your request.”
#9 SARS-Cov-2 the Theoretical Virus: Over 40 Institutions Worldwide Can’t Answer the Basic Question
In fact, Christine Massey and her colleague in New Zealand
“have been submitting Freedom of Information requests to various institutions in Canada, NZ, Australia, Germany, the U.K., the U.S. etc., seeking any records that describe the isolation of a “COVID-19 virus” (aka “SARS-COV-2”) from an unadulterated sample taken from a diseased human … As of December 16, 2020, >40 institutions in Canada, U.S., New Zealand, Australia, U.K., England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Denmark, and the European CDC have provided their responses, and none could locate any record describing the isolation of any “COVID-19 virus” aka “SARS-COV-2” directly from a diseased patient.”
#10 SARS-Cov-2 the Theoretical Virus: Previous Coronaviruses Have Not Been Isolated
The Spanish health journal Salud published a great article in November 2020 entitled “Frauds and falsehoods in the medical field” where it exposes the lack of evidence not only for the isolation of SARS-CoV-2, but also for the isolation of other past coronaviruses (unofficial translation here). The scam runs deep. Jon Rappoport has done great work exposing how the exact same scam blueprint was played out in the 1980s (with Fauci in charge, leading the fraud) when scientists asserted there was a new virus called HIV, and it was causing AIDS. The COVID scamdemic greatly mimics other historical fake pandemics such as the 1976 swine flu pandemic. The article is Salud states:
“The genetic sequences used in PCRs to detect suspected SARS-CoV-2 and to diagnose cases of illness and death attributed to Covid-19 are present in dozens of sequences of the human genome itself and in those of about a hundred microbes. And that includes the initiators or primers, the most extensive fragments taken at random from their supposed “genome” and even the so-called “target genes” allegedly specific to the “new coronavirus”. The test is worthless and all “positive” results obtained so far should be scientifically invalidated and communicated to those affected; and if they are deceased, to their relatives. Stephen Bustin, one of the world’s leading experts on PCR, in fact says that under certain conditions anyone can test positive!
…
We have been warning you since March: you cannot have specific tests for a virus without knowing the components of the virus you are trying to detect. And the components cannot be known without having previously isolated/purified that virus. Since then we continue to accumulate evidence that no one has isolated SARS-CoV-2 and, more importantly, that it can never be isolated … In this report we are going to add the results of a particular research we have done from the data published on the alleged SARS-CoV-2 and on the protocols endorsed by the WHO for the use of RT-PCR as well as the data corresponding to the rest of the “human coronaviruses”. And the conclusions are extremely serious: none of the seven “human coronaviruses” have actually been isolated and all the sequences of the primers of their respective PCRs as well as those of a large number of fragments of their supposed genomes are found in different areas of the human genome and in genomes of bacteria and archaea …”
Their report analyzed human coronaviruses 229E (said to have been isolated in 1965), OC43 (in 1967), SARS-CoV (in 2003), NL63 (in 2004), HKU1 (in 2005) and MERS-CoV (in 2012). And just to repeat in case you missed it: they discovered the alleged sequences of SARS-CoV-2 are found in both humans and bacteria! This means all the various in silico models of SARS-CoV-2 contain existing human genetic sequences, so it is little wonder that people test positive when the primer or standard being tested against contains human sequences.
Conclusion: The COVID Cult is a Colossal Fraud and Superstition
How did this all start? Chinese scientists took lung fluid samples and claimed they had discovered a novel or new virus. The Gates-Rockefeller WHO backed them up. In the WHO’s Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCov Situation Report 1, they state:
“The Chinese authorities identified a new type of coronavirus, which was isolated on 7 January 2020……On 12 January 2020, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus for countries to use in developing specific diagnostic kits.”
With the evidence presented above, the WHO’s assertions and claims are utterly baseless. They constitute outright fraud.
The world has been shut down over a lie – a coldly calculated, carefully curated lie – that was simulated and war-gamed for decades in advance. The COVID cult is an irrational superstition based on nothing but in silico, theoretical, make-believe viral sequences. Yet, the real-world consequences for millions who have been thrown into stress, despair, poverty, joblessness, alcoholism and suicide is anything but theoretical.
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First published on January 10, 2023
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A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest. – A Tibetan proverb
Let’s hope the silently growing forest represents a mass-awakening.
From the looks and evidence – ever more visible to even the ignorant – we are living in a Death Cult – a cabal-driven death cult, with a key objective to do away with: eliminate a large segment, if not the majority of the world population.
Who is executing this Death Cult? And on behalf of whom?
Three entities come to mind.
1. The World Economic Forum (WEF)
– a Cologny (lush suburb of Geneva, Switzerland)-registered NGO; a never-voted-for “influencer” organization that has amassed power and money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, like no other NGO around the world. Its founder and eternal chairman, Klaus Schwab (84), is an engineer cum economist, with origins linked to the former Third Reich Nazi-leadership.
By the way, the WEF is holding their annual Davos conference from 16-20 January 2023. The pathology of this outfit and of those elitist billionaires and corporate honchos attending is reflected in this year’s even more dystopian agenda. Have a look at the official program.
This is only the visible agenda. None of us, the commons, knows what’s going on behind closed doors in special secretive sessions. We feed on leakages, and as Globalism is fading, they become ever more abundant.
2. The World Health Organization (WHO)
– goes as a specialized UN Agency – which in reality it isn’t. It was founded in 1948 by Rockefeller, a eugenist and obsessed globalist, who was (and still is) aiming at controlling the world population through health (and death), and who is hellbent to make the Mother Earth a better place through a One World Order. WHO was then “bought” into the UN system.
At that time, Rockefeller with Standard Oil, had also a monopoly on petrol. He decided that pharmaceuticals, up to the 1950’s, mostly based on plants and plant chemistry could be made from petro-chemicals. WHO, according to its bylaws, a disease-preventive health organization, became, thus, largely a curative pharma-based and pharma-pushing organization.
While the bulk of the budget from other UN agencies stems from member countries’ contribution, WHO is funded at least to two-thirds or more by the private sector, mostly the pharma industry, as well as the Bill Gates Foundation.
A conflict of interest is more than evident. WHO should not be a UN agency. WHO – against its scientific staff’s better knowledge — has declared Covid as a deadly pandemic, spreading fear, imposing lockdowns, face masks, social distancing and more human-denigrating measures.
Eventually, WHO, strongly nudged by the WEF (and the powers behind the WEF) was coercing governments to “vaccinate” their populations with never-before tested genetically-modifying mRNA injections, of which nobody but the producing pharma-industry knows the composition – contents that has turned out deadly for tens of millions of people and mounting.
By the end of 2022, excess mortality in western countries amounts to between 15% and 25% — in some countries even higher.
All of the western used so-called vaccines are, in fact, bioweapons.
This horrendous vaxx fraud is also a multi-billion, if not trillion, bonanza for the pharmaceuticals.
The Covid jabs also contain sterilization agents for both men and women, resulting already by now in drastically falling birth rates in western countries. The term “western countries” means all of Europe and the worldwide Anglosaxonia.
So far, all fits well within the Rockefeller, Gates, Soros, et al’s eugenist agenda.
WHO is truth censuring through social platforms – NewsGuard, an organization of “True Journalism”, tracking credibility of news and information websites and online misinformation, provides WHO regularly with lists of the most important “influencers” of “misinformation” in matters of health, alias conspiracy theorists; people who do not conform with the official narrative.
WHO forwards this list to the different social media platforms, requesting them to block the accounts of the “perpetrators”, or to clandestinely hide or limit their social media inputs. This is called “shadow banning”.
WHO works closely with the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. The IFCN has a databank with more than 10,000 “fact-checked false information”, most of them related to WHO dictates.
IFCN is mainly funded by the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Soros Open Society Foundation, Google and Facebook. Coincidentally, the Gates Foundation and the US government are also the biggest donors of WHO.
This WHO censuring information can be read in full in German, under Point 5 here.
To top it all off, WHO is currently preparing a so-called Pandemic Treaty. Under this Treaty, if approved, WHO’s DG would have the power to declare worldwide pandemics as he, alias the ruling class, sees fit to control the masses. Compulsory vaccinations could be military enforced. This would be an authority above each of the member countries’ National Constitution. So far trial votations have not succeeded, as several country blocks, for example, in Africa, do not agree.
But the beat goes on with coercing and potentially bribing of country delegates. A final vote should take place in the course of 2023. If approved, the lawless Pandemic Treaty rule should enter into effect at the beginning of 2024.
If so, this is a call on each WHO member to leave WHO.
3. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
– has long ceased being a defense alliance of North Atlantic countries. It has become a worldwide war machine with access and use of some 850 US military bases around the world.
NATO is not only a multi-billion-dollar income generator largely for the US military industrial complex (MIC), but it is also an important US GDP engine, contributing an estimated 30% of the US GDP, counting all NATO-related and dependent industries and services.
NATO is the provoker, funder and main executer of the Ukraine-Russia war – the US-Russia proxy war. Its expansionism has become a monster octopus, stretching its tentacles completely and all-controlling around Mother Earth.
Other than non-stop provoking Russia, NATO also fulfills a role in the Great Reset / UN Agenda 2030 eugenist agenda, as killing is one of its chief purposes.
NATO enters any territory where the “conventional” media lie-machine, and social engineering are failing or not completing their people-ordaining goals fast enough. Russia, by far the largest and resource-richest country of our planet, was in the US hegemon’s cross-hairs for over a century. The 2014 Maidan Coup, engineered by the EU / NATO, was a planned prelude to a war with Russia.
The without scruples NATO war machine would not shy from a hot WWIII – which could easily turn nuclear, all-destructive and all-killing.
Playing with Russian ethics, knowing that President Putin has no intention to annihilate a country that up to recently and for over 300 years in the past was an integral part of the Russian Empire, then-the Soviet Union. Ukraine is inherently and historically a part of Russia, even as an ally after it became independent in 1991. Ukraine was forcefully and viciously detached from Russia by western aggression for greed and pathological grandeur.
Now western aggressions may backfire as President Putin may soon have no other choice than to obliterate what’s left of Ukraine, to finally stop the war – and the senseless killing, the misery of the hapless and suffering population.
Be aware, NATO is ready for weaponized interference wherever a “human conflict” cannot be resolved by the WEF / WHO oppressive tyrannical means.
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We, the People, of the world have largely only little or no saying in how our world, our countries, even our communities are run. And this already for several decades.
In the last three years, the common people’s exclusion from what is still sold as a democratic process has reached a pinnacle. With the onset of a fake plandemic at the beginning of 2020 – the beginning of an agenda long ago planned, the UN Agenda 2030 — the beginning of the larger Agenda 21 (all of the 21st century), officially decided at the UN Environment Conference in Rio in June 1992 – the so-called United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit‘.
The long-haul precursor to this was the 1968 Rockefeller-founded Club of Rome’s book “Limits to Growth” (LTG) of 1972. The concepts and principles of this book are the blueprint for what is currently – and probably at least for the coming 10 to 50 years – being implemented.
LTG is the basis for the Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution — and the UN Agenda 2030, also called WHO’s Decade of Vaccination. Following are the main life-curtailing threats we are facing today, listed not necessarily in order of priority. Remember, they are all inter-linked and inter-acting.
Population reduction, a massive genocide, through fake Covid “vaxxes” that are carefully engineered as gene-modifying mRNA killer-injections.
The US / EU / NATO-provoked war between Russia and Ukraine; a US-Russia proxy war, pumped up to the tune of about 155 billion dollars-worth of western weaponry and “budgetary support” money in less than a year – more than Ukraine’s entire GDP for 2020 ($151 billion); some US$112 billion from the US, the rest from Europe and other western countries.
Most of the money flow right back into the western, mostly US, military industrial complex (MIC) and into the pockets of corrupt politicians (see this interview with Col. Doug Macgregor or watch below).
It is about fake “climate change”, fake biodiversityloss. See this.
Manipulated energy shortages, a proven combined manipulation of “sanctions” on Russia, and the worst western government-sponsored terror sabotage act in recent history, the torpedoed Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Russian hydrocarbons, mostly gas, provided at least 40% of all of Europe’s energy uses.
Engineered food shortages, leading to famine – and a new artificial toxic way of food production; geoengineered crop-destroying weather catastrophes; food staple speculations; forced supply-chain disruptions and more are responsible for “food shortages”. The world can produce enough food for at least ten billion people, see this; it’s a mere question of banning speculation and introducing a just food distribution system;
Compromised banker’s engineered hyper-inflation, leading more rapidly to poverty; crisis after crisis caused demolition of the western economy, bankruptcies, unemployment, poverty, unaffordable food and / or housing, disease and death – genocidal death.
Worldwide network of 5G microwaves – and would you believe, and soon to come all-controlling, potentially deadly Sixth Generation (6G), whose target date is coverage of the entire planet by 2030.
Absolute control – via the all-invasive QR code. See this.
Digitization of everything, the objective of Klaus Schwab’s designed 4th Industrial Revolution (see this), including
Digitization of money – may result in turn-on, turn-off money, expiring money, blocked or canceled money for misbehavior, potentially resulting in lack of sustenance for non-behaviors, no food, no energy, no housing – disease – death
Universal Basic Income (UBI) – can be controlled and is slated to become “You own nothing but are happy” – Klaus Schwab’s glorious ending of the Great Reset, and finally
A WHO / pharma controlled worldwide tyrannical “health system” (sic), through a so-called Pandemic Treaty which, if approved by the World Health Assembly, would overreach every UN / WHO member country’s Constitution, putting the Director General of WHO in charge of health (and death) issues worldwide, in each country.
It might amount to compulsory vaccination, enforced by the military, for whatever WHO decides is or might be a worldwide threat to health. Even the common flu.
If approved in 2023, the Pandemic Treaty would become effective at the beginning of 2024.
This would be an absolutely lawless rule against the will of ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD.
If the Pandemic Treaty is approved – and even if it is not approved – this is a call on all nations to EXIT WHO, which has become a biased pharma-led eugenist-funded terror organization.
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The world is faced with a multi-disaster scenario caused by ultra-rich neo-Nazi multi-billionaire elitists and the international data / IT and finance system that controls some 25 to 30 trillion-dollar equivalent of the world’s assets, maybe more – and can leverage every country of this planet to do their bidding.
These are the dark Cult Masters, acting from the shadows of supra-governments, like the US and the European Union, mainly via their well-funded executive, or implementing, instruments – WEF, WHO, NATO.
This is what happened at the beginning of the 2020 covid hoax. The 2010 Rockefeller Report called this first phase – The Lockstep Scenario – see this.
Indeed, in unison, all 193 UN member countries (194 WHO members), their corrupted leaders and media blasted the same fear-imposing message – lockdown, obligatory people-demeaning face masks, social distancing, working from home – so you would lose personal contact with your friends and colleagues.
Today, all these above-mentioned Limits to Growth measures are wrapped in a constant and permanent fear campaign, to demoralize and subjugate people into submission. A fear campaign carried out by mainstream media, all owned by 13 media conglomerates who own 90% of the media worldwide. In unison they slam down these fear messages in lockstep 24 / 7 / 52 on the world populations. See this.
These corrupt media moguls are paid billions of dollars to comply with the power-money psychopaths’ request, to spread the world with lies – with deadly lies. They are party to the mass-murderers, as they know what they are doing. Their management must face the laws of justice.
Just as a parenthesis, looking at what these US Treasury generated dollars really are: They are worthless, unbacked money – dollars that are simple debt for the US Treasury; debt that is never paid back. Or as the former FED Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2011, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that”. See this.
Therefore, money dished out to corrupt organization is worthless for the “spender”- the creator of the money, the US of A, but they buy the world for the recipients.
We are living in the midst of a Cabal-directed Death Cult.
The majority of the people haven’t noticed yet. But the awakening has begun.
Remember the Tibetan Proverb of the silently growing forest. And as trees connect with each other, so do humans by their spirituality – not transhumans, but humans that we still are.
And let us never let an abject power-hungry non-elected criminal like Klaus Schwab, with his roots in the Third Reich, and his NGO, the World Economic Forum dominate humanity.
May the forest grow to a critical mass that can, by its sheer solidarity, togetherness of thought and will power, overcome the pathological objectives of the psychopaths’ wish for power and money dominance.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
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“And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.”
With each passing year, censorship of major stories in the public interest appears to get worse.
Think about unspoken truths at the heart of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The missing information demonstrating the COVID-19 situation was anything but “Safe and Effective.” Or the evidence that “Russia-gate” tying President Trump to Vladimir Putin was not so much a “big catch” as a “red herring.”
And at the same time, people who articulate such statements are denounced as writers of “dis-information,” probably conceived inside the Kremlin to mislead people. These sorts of counter-attacks represent a new tactic for confronting the “Ministry of Truth.” TheGrayzone, Mint Press News, and ConsortiumNews among others have faced attacks on their journalism by the powerful in this regard.
Global Research and the Global Research News Hour endeavours continually to get access to the stories the powers that be do not want you to see! As long as we keep going, we will strive to speak the unspeakable, especially in times of War when the Truth is the first target.
We begin this new year, 2024, with a look at the truths of 2023 which have been considered vital to understanding items very much in the public interest that have been trodden over by the military-state-corporate machinery with plans to build expressways of compliance into the brains of the multitudes. This is necessary activity for those wanting to maintain democracy as safe for corporate greed and elite ambition.
Global Research News Hour intends to emulate the dog Toto from The Wizard of Oz, unmasking the villains in charge in this broadcast.
In our first half hour, we are joined one again by Project Censored’s associate director Andy Lee Roth who gives us a run down of some of what his team considers the most censored stories of 2023, and also highlights some of the other components of the book Censored 2024. In our second half hour, activist and author Yves Engler will highlight what he thinks are the most censored stories from a Canadian foreign policy perspective. Finally, we will hear from Ryan Cristian of the Serena Shim Award winning TheLastAmericanVagabond.com about what important story he feels the mainstream media left out of discussion.
Andy Lee Roth is the Associate Director of Project Censored, a media research program which fosters student development of media literacy and critical thinking skills as applied to news media censorship in the United States.
Yves Engler has been dubbed “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch), “in the mould of I.F. Stone” and “part of that rare but growing group of social critics unafraid to confront Canada’s self-satisfied myths” (Quill & Quire). He has published twelve books with a thirteenth coming out in February.
CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.
WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.
Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.
CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am.
Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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An airline has been rocked by the sudden death of two flight attendants; one while on the plane and another in a hotel during a stopover. There were no reported underlying health issues for either flight attendant.
A 52 year old British Airways flight attendant tragically collapsed as the busy 13-hour flight from London Heathrow to Hong Kong prepared to depart.
Travelers were reportedly in their seats and the doors were locked when the flight attendant, who was not identified, crumpled to the floor in the back of the plane.
A passenger trained in first aid tried to save the man as the pilot urgently called for medics, but he died at the scene, the Sun reported.
“Sadly, despite the best efforts of our crew, a patient was pronounced dead at the scene,” London Ambulance Service said in a statement to Metro UK.
The flight was delayed until the following day with different pilots and crew in charge, the Sun reported.
May 20, 2023 – British Airways Flight BA886 flight attendant (stewardess) collapsed on flight from Heathrow, London to Bucharest, Romania, forcing captain to divert and land the plane in Budapest, Hungary.
A British Airways stewardess has collapsed during a flight from London to Romania, forcing the pilot to change course.
The ‘medical emergency’ – which took place on Saturday evening during the 170-passenger Airbus A320 flight from Heathrow to Bucharest – forced the captain to stop in Budapest to seek critical care for the cabin-crew member.
The flight was then delayed for a further 21 hours as the stewardess was escorted to a hospital in the Hungarian capital by a fellow crew member.
BA confirmed that she was in full recovery as of yesterday, despite now-discounted fears from staff that she was having a heart attack.
A BA source told The Sun: ‘It seemed very serious at the time and the captain had no option but to divert.
‘She was quite a young woman and was clearly very unwell and a medical emergency was declared.
‘Another crew member went with her to hospital as soon as the plane landed but the delay meant that the limit on the number of hours staff had worked was exceeded.
‘The plane was unable to resume its journey and all passengers and crew were forced to overnight in Budapest.
‘Hundreds of passengers waiting for the plane in Bucharest for a return flight to Heathrow were also delayed by almost a whole day and also had to be found hotels for the night.
‘It’s caused an enormous amount of disruption for passengers left stranded.
‘But the wellbeing of the stewardess had to be put first in the circumstances.’
The airline has declined to reveal the identity of the sick woman as well as what caused her to collapse.
Flight attendants who collapsed in past year:
June 21, 2023 – American Airlines flight attendant Carol Wright collapsed at the early stage of Flight from Venice to Philadelphia International Airport (VCE-PHL) on June 21, 2023. her colleagues attempted to perform CPR. The pilots for the flight made the decision to declare an emergency and divert to Dublin Airport (DUB).
Dec. 21, 2022 – Air Albania flight attendant Greta Dyrmishi, age 24, died suddenly in-flight after plane landed in the UK (Dec. 21, 2022). A post-mortem found that the 24-year-old had died from sudden adult death syndrome (SADS).
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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Back channels between Iran supporting the Shiite Houthis and Saudi Sunni supported puppet government in Yemen through the United Nations just revealed the 9-year Yemeni “civil war” is coming to an end with a brokered peace plan.
With reports that over two years ago the Yemen conflict death toll had reached 377,000 lives, peace now at this moment reflects the ongoing sea change occurring in the Middle East. This phenomenal development is a direct consequence of the crumbling, weakened unipolar US hegemon that earlier this year witnessed emerging global power China mediate normalized relations between the two Islamic regional Middle East powers Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The Anglo-American-Zionist Empire stranglehold isn’t what it used to be, maintaining its divide and rule juggernaut creating conflict around the globe at will to ensure unchallenged power is concentrated in fewer hands. But pushback resistance to this old hegemony now is fiercer than ever, and warships belonging to multipolar powers China and Russia are in the Middle East at the ready to back Iran in the growing conflict.
But last Monday December 18th, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s announcement of a 10-nation coalition dubbed Operation Prosperity Guardian, formed to break up the Houthi Red Sea trade embargo to Israel, is the latest failure of the US-Israel rogue state partnership.
With France, Italy and Spain already dropping out of this US command operation, the UK Express ran the Saturday December 23rd headline “Joe Biden warned ‘no one takes him seriously’ as EU brutally snubs US.”
Three nations broke with the US, stating that they will only follow NATO or EU’s maritime plan for restoring free navigation in the Persian Gulf. The monumental geopolitical power shift from West to East taking place right now is by Rothschild City of London design blowing up the world bully US finding itself and Israel increasingly isolated and despised outcasts in the eyes of the Global South world nation majority, with even historic European vassals abandoning the Zionist-US sinking ship.
Meanwhile, riding high off its apparent success defeating the mighty US naval fleet’s agenda amidst Yemen’s very effective interdiction campaign targeting Israeli linked ships traversing the Red Sea, on top of capitalizing on worldwide momentum supporting Palestinians, Sanaa’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Al-Ezzion X stated that Yemen is considering forming its own international alliance in support of the Palestinians:
[The alliance] will be open to all revolutionary and liberation movements, in addition to the elites, countries, and oppressed peoples in the world.
Independent journalist Vanessa Beeley reported on X and UK Column News last Wednesday that the Houthi strategy of stopping all vessels headed for Israel appears to be working as it’s reported that no Israeli bound cargo ship has arrived in Israel for at least two weeks and not expected for several more. The David/Houthi is winning the Goliath Israel/US war.
With oil and shipping companies not chancing passage through the targeted Red Sea lane, it looms catastrophic for the global economy since the world’s maritime oil import traffic has been severely disrupted.
The Houthis have also made it clear that if Israel stops its genocide in Gaza and permits humanitarian aid in, the blockade and global crisis will also be over. Mounting pressure falls squarely on Israel/US to reach a ceasefire and hostage exchange. Yet the US persists its support of the Israeli war and Bibi the Butcher refuses to let up in his bloodbath, despite publicly declaring a lower intensity combat phase of the war will begin either this final week of 2023 or first week of 2024.
Today on UK Column News (1pm UK time) I will cover the latest on Yemen and how Ansarullah is already winning the war against the US-led global coalition destined for failure in the 'graveyard of invaders' which is the Yemen. pic.twitter.com/ZKXhuyiAjO
With Israel’s war against Hamas clearly failing, openly admitted in Wednesday’s Washington Post and Thursday’s The Guardian, and the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia all but over, as yet another enormous, costly, humiliating defeat for the US/West, irreversible destruction of Western civilization is fully underway. On Christmas Eve during his weekly cabinet meeting, Bibi the Butcher lamented losing 15 more IDF soldiers over the weekend, admitting:
The war is exacting a very heavy cost from us. However, we have no choice but to continue to fight.
Tell that to the more than 21,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza you relentlessly keep killing with thousands of your nightly airstrikes targeting refugee camps butchering over 8,000 innocent children. The latest barbarism on Christmas killed over 100 Palestinians at the Maghazi refugee camp. Survivors conclude:
There’s no safe place in the Gaza Strip… What should we do? We are civilians, living peacefully and wanting only safety and security, yet we are suddenly struck by Israeli warplanes without any warning.
While families are being tragically pummeled and crushed to death by 2,000-pound US bombs as the latest Gaza carnage, ironically just 40 short miles away across the walled border sits Jesus’ birthplace Bethlehem in the West Bank. This year Bethlehem is a solemn ghost town while any other year it’s teeming with Christian pilgrims celebrating the birth of our Lord’s son. This is such a blasphemous insult and sin to God and every worshipper of God on this earth.
Both Bibi and Biden are mere puppets following their masters’ orders to sacrifice the US, Israel and the West, all according to a long-scripted plan by the financial elites.
Arguments can be made for who’s fooling who, but the evil goes far deeper and longer than personality egos clashing. Just like the onetime US Congress darling Zelensky in Ukraine, using his fight against Russia as the fight for “Western democracy,” Netanyahu is using this exact same game plan:
This is not only ‘our war’ but in many ways your war… This is a battle against the Iranian [or Russian] axis… now threatening to close the maritime strait of Bab Al-Mandeb… It is the interest… of the entire civilized community.
Citizens of the world are finally awakening to these shocking atrocities being systematically perpetrated nonstop for centuries against the divided and conquered, terrorized and traumatized human race.
With the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) “Net Zero” wet dream plan embraced by globalist aficionados like the Clintons and Pope Francis, “urgent depopulation” becomes their rallying cry in answer to their concocted climate change hoax.
The Sunday December 24thEU Times headline reads “Experts Admit WEF Planning to Erase 4 Billion People Within Years.” It opens with:
The World Economic Forum and various globalist leaders are fervently advocating for the phasing out of fossil fuels, presenting their ambitious ‘Net Zero’ goal as a cornerstone of the WEF and UN’s comprehensive plans for humanity, specifically encapsulated in ‘Agenda 2030’ and ‘Agenda 2050.’ However, leading experts are sounding alarm bells, warning that the potential consequences of this ‘Net Zero’ goal could be nothing short of catastrophic, resulting in the deaths of over four billion people or more.
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Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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The State of Florida has called for a halt of the use of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccines, setting a precedent for the implementation of similar decisions not only across the United States, but Worldwide.
The evidence is overwhelming.
Read the letter of Florida State Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo below
We call upon people across the United States to pressure State officials to cancel the mRNA Covid-19 once and for all.
The evidence of mortality and morbidity resulting from vaccine inoculation both present (official data) and future (e.g. undetected microscopic blood clots) is overwhelming.
The official data (mortality and morbidity) as well as numerous scientific studies confirm the nature of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine which is being imposed on all humanity.
Our thanks to Dr. William Makis
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 5, 2024
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Dr Joseph Ladapo takes the gloves off against the MRNA shots which he describes as ‘the antichrist of all products’.
He slams the FDA for failing to follow its own requirements for testing whether or not the DNA has integrated into the human genome.
There are many additional reasons to halt COVID-19 Vaccines (beyond DNA Contamination) and I present some of them in this article:
Immune System Damage
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines damage the immune system and each additional dose causes additional immune damage, increasing the risk of COVID-19 infection and other infections and complications of infections (such as sepsis, septic shock).
This is illustrated in the Shrestha et al. study published April 19, 2023 (source), which showed that among 51,017 Cleveland Clinic healthcare employees, those who took more COVID-19 vaccines had higher risk of COVID-19 infection:
On Sep. 13, 2023 – Florida Surgeon General recommended against COVID-19 boosters for individuals under age 65, due to “safety and efficacy concerns.”
WHO VigiAccess Database documents 5,273,122 adverse events associated with COVID-19 Vaccines as of Jan. 4, 2024.
WHO VigiAccess – most adverse events are in highly COVID-19 mRNA Vaccinated countries and 65% of the adverse events are suffered by women.
WHO VigiAccess – Over 180,000 pediatric adverse events have been reported.
Dec. 9, 2023 – My article on 25 babies age 0-2 who died after Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine, Flu Vaccine, or died from SIDS
Oct. 24, 2023 – My article on 68 children ages 0-12 who died after COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination.
Nov. 3, 2023 – My article on 60 teenagers ages 13-19 who died suddenly since May 2023.
WHO VigiAccess – 13,621 pregnancy complications including 6390 spontaneous abortions.
On May 10, 2023 – Florida Surgeon General wrote to FDA Commissioner about COVID-19 Vaccine adverse events including 3% myocardial injury risk identified in two studies (researchers from Thailand, Switzerland).
If Florida Becomes First Jurisdiction to Halt COVID-19 Vaccines, Then Alberta, Canada Must be Second
“Although the full DNA sequence of the Pfizer plasmid was provided at the time of initial filing, the sponsor did not specifically identify SV40 sequence…the residual plasmid DNA is present in the final product as DNA fragments…the original risk benefit analysis that supported the initial approval of the Pfizer vaccine continues to be valid.”
“Using previously published primer and probe sequences, quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and Qubit® fluorometry was performed on an additional 27 mRNA vials obtained in Canada.
Canadian doctors have 54% excess mortality in 2022
Canadian Medical Association responded to my letters and data by deleting all Canadian doctor deaths and data from their own website for the years 2022 and prior
Canadian children dying suddenly during record flu season Nov. 2022 – Feb. 2023 with record pediatric influenza deaths.
Feb. 27, 2023 – My article on 96 Canadian Children dying suddenly during a 3 month period Nov.2022 to Feb. 2023
My Take…
I believe Florida will be the first jurisdiction to halt all COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines, hopefully in the next few weeks or months.
I also believe that Alberta, Canada CAN AND SHOULD be the second jurisdiction to halt COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines, at the very least in children under the age of 19.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith can lean heavily on the following:
Following Florida’s leadership that puts people ahead of pharmaceutical profits
Health Canada’s admission on DNA contamination and its failure to address it
The DNA contamination work done in Canada by Dr.David Speicher PhD at University of Guelph
The National Citizen’s Inquiry Final Report of Nov. 28, 2023 (which includes my data on Canadian doctor deaths)
“Unknown cause of death” being the #1 cause of death in Alberta since 2021
Statistics Canada “Deaths 2022” Report of Nov. 27, 2023 showing 16,043 deaths of “Unspecified cause” in 2022.
Doctors have been repeatedly threatened by Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons throughout Canada – they are not allowed to report adverse events for COVID-19 Vaccines or they will lose their medical license.
Mainstream peer-reviewed research on COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse events is almost entirely fraudulent.
Alberta Healthcare Officials, Public Health Officials and Alberta Health Services Executives who have spent the last 3 years burying evidence of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Injuries and Deaths.
I hope to see COVID-19 Vaccines halted in Florida and Alberta, Canada as soon as possible.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
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“I am certain soon we can look forward to a family of rockets named after martyred leader Saleh al-Arouri,” Deputy Chair of the Political Bureau of Hamas and founder of the Martyr Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
It is beyond me how Israel has failed to figure out that a martyred Palestinian leader exerts a vastly more powerful hold on his people’s imagination and will to resist than a living one.
After decades of targeting and killing a long list of Palestinian leaders (or imprisoning them), Israel has not learned that another generation of leaders, stronger and fiercer than their predecessor, emerges inevitably. It makes me wonder if Israel is merely stupid or insane. There is a saying that goes, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
To people following Israel’s war on Gaza and unaware of Israel’s policy of targeted killing, the assassination in Lebanon of Saleh al-Arouri, Deputy Chair of the Political Bureau of Hamas and founder of the Martyr Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, may have come as a surprise. My own reaction included an element of surprise but for a different reason. I had been betting incorrectly that Israel and the US were smarter than to risk a war with Hezbollah.
Some Israeli ministers who had not received Netanyahu’s memo to keep their mouths shut about the killings foolishly tweeted congratulations to Mossad and Shin Bet on the deed, thus proving that they are not motivated by deterrence, but rather by revenge and hubris.
Not that targeted killing of Palestinian leaders has ever been effective as a deterrence measure. A few days before the assassination of al-Arouri and several of his comrades (collateral damage?), I had watched a presentation on al-Jazeera Arabic showcasing the various families of home-made rockets in the possession of the Palestinian armed resistance. Each slide showed a group of rockets with the picture next to it of an assassinated leader after whom the class of rockets was named.
Ayyash Rocket, named after martyred engineer Yahya Ayyash; Ranteesi Rocket, named after martyred leader Abdel Azziz al-Ranteesi; Abu Shammaleh Rocket, named after martyred leader Mohammad Abu Shammaleh; Attar Rocket, named after martyred leader Raed al-Attar; Ja’abari Rocket, named after martyred leader Ahmad al-Ja’abari; Rocket M90, named after martyred leader Ibrahim al-Maqadmeh
I am certain soon we can look forward to a family of al-Qassam Brigades’ rockets named after martyred leader Saleh al-Arouri.
Al-Qassam Rocket, named after Sheikh Izzedine al-Qassam
Israel has used extrajudicial executions (aka targeted killing) of Palestinian leaders openly since 2001, giving itself a license to kill, including in the territories of other States. By re-characterizing individuals as “terrorists” (al-Arouri was also on the US terrorism list with a bounty of $5m (£4m) on his head since 2018), Israel and the US justify such killing within the framework of the law of armed conflict, thus blurring and expanding that law (also known as international humanitarian law) and making the global order less safe for everybody. Read “10 things the rules of war do” published by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and you will immediately notice that the US and Israel are violating every single rule in Gaza.
In an article titled, ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 76: Extrajudicial Killings of Men in Front of Their Families in Gaza, we learn that “Israeli forces have reportedly conducted extrajudicial executions in front of families in Gaza as international leaders continue to discuss Israel’s conduct with little to no action, while negotiations between Israel and Hamas waver as war rages on.”
Extrajudicial executions are illegal under international law and are considered a fundamental violation of human rights and an “affront to the conscience of humanity.” In the same way that Israel argues falsely (most recently as it defends itself against genocide accusation at ICJ) that its policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza or the West Bank is consistent with international law, “because Israel is engaged in armed conflict with terrorists,” it lies about the people it targets by saying they are “usually killed by conventional military means, not through deception, and the targets of the attacks are not civilians but combatants or are part of a military chain of command.”
The following statistics give an idea of how this policy works in bolstering Israel’s repressive measures against Palestinians: “… from the beginning of the second intifada, on 29 September 2000, to the end of 2010, Israeli security forces killed 4,927 Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, 970 of them minors (under age 18). At least 2,227 of the fatalities were not taking part in hostilities. Another 239 were the object of a targeted killing. Thousands more were injured. [These figures do not include the casualties in Operation Cast Lead.]”
Palestinians have yet to be deterred by Israel’s policies and the cover of impunity the US gives them.
Predictably, the reaction is quite the opposite as is evident in the following press statement issued by the joint leadership of the People’s Democratic Party and the Arab Socialist Labor Party in Lebanon on Jan 3, following the assassination of al-Arouri and his comrades. The two parties offered their condolences and affirmed “The natural response to the crime will be to escalate the resistance in Gaza, the West Bank and all supporting fronts, and the enemy entity will be under the fire of resistance from southern Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.”
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This article was originally published on the author’s blogsite.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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AUKUS, the trilateral pact between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, was a steal for all except one of the partners. Australia, given the illusion of protection even as its aggressive stance (acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, becoming a forward base for the US military) aggravated other countries; the feeling of superiority, even as it was surrendering itself to a foreign power as never before, was the loser in the bargain.
Last month, Australians woke up to the sad reminder that their government’s capitulation to Washington has been so total as to render any further talk about independence an embarrassment. Their Defence Minister, Richard Marles, along with his deputy, the Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy, preferred a different story. Canberra had gotten what it wanted: approval by the US Congress through its 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorising the transfer of three Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy, with one off the production line, and two in-service boats. Australia may also seek congressional approval for two further Virginia class boats.
The measures also authorised Australian contractors to train in US shipyards to aid the development of Australia’s own non-existent nuclear-submarine base, and exemptions from US export control licensing requirements permitting the “transfer of controlled goods and technology between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States without the need for an export license.”
For the simpleminded Marles, Congress had “provided unprecedented support to Australia in passing the National Defense Authorization Act which will see the transfer of submarines and streamlined export control provisions, symbolising the strength of our Alliance, and our shared commitment to the AUKUS partnership.”
Either through ignorance or willful blindness, the Australian defence minister chose to avoid elaborating on the less impressive aspects of the authorising statute. The exemption under the US export licensing requirements, for instance, vests Washington with control and authority over Australian goods and technology while controlling the sharing of any US equivalent with Australia. The exemption is nothing less than appropriation, even as it preserves the role of Washington as the drip feeder of nuclear technology.
An individual with more than a passing acquaintance with this is Bill Greenwalt, one of the drafters of the US export control regime. As he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last November, “After years of US State Department prodding, it appears that Australia signed up to the principles and specifics of the failed US export control system.” In cooperating with the US on this point, Australia would “surrender any sovereign capability it develops to the United States control and bureaucracy.”
The gem in this whole venture, at least from the perspective of the US military industrial complex, is the roping in of the Australian taxpayer as funder of its own nuclear weapons program. Whatever its non-proliferation credentials, Canberra finds itself a funder of the US naval arm in an exercise of modernised nuclear proliferation. Even the Marles-Conroy media release admits that the NDAA helped “establish a mechanism for the US to accept funds from Australia to lift the capacity of the submarine industrial base.” Airily, the release goes on to mention that this “investment” (would “gift” not be a better word?) to the US Navy would also “complement Australia’s significant investment in our domestic submarine industrial base.”
A few days after the farcical spectacle of surrender by Australian officials, the Congressional Research Service provided another one of its invaluable reports that shed further light on Australia’s contribution to the US nuclear submarine program. Australian media outlets, as is their form on covering AUKUS, remained silent about it. One forum, Michael West Media, showed that its contributors – Rex Patrick and Philip Dorling – were wide awake.
The report is specific to the Navy Columbia (SSBN-826) Class Ballistic Missile Submarine Program, one that involves designing and building 12 new SSBNs to replace the current, aging fleet of 14 Ohio-class SSBNs. The cost of the program, in terms of 2024 budget submission estimates for the 2024 financial year, is US$112.7 billion. As is customary in these reports, the risks are neatly summarised. They include the usual delays in designing and building the lead boat, thereby threatening readiness for timely deployment; burgeoning costs; the risks posed by funding the Columbia-class program to other Navy programs; and “potential industrial-base challenges of building both Columbia-class boats and Virginia-class attack submarines (SSNs) at the same time.”
Australian funding becomes important in the last concern. Because of AUKUS, the US Navy “has testified” that it would require, not only an increase in the production rate of the Virginia-class to 2.33 boats per year, but “a combined Columbia-plus-Virginia procurement rate” of 1+2.33. Australian mandarins and lawmakers, accomplished in their ignorance, have mentioned little about this addition. But US lawmakers and military planners are more than aware that this increased procurement rate “will require investing several billion dollars for capital plant expansion and improvements and workforce development at both the two submarine-construction shipyards (GD/EB [General Dynamics’ Electric boat in Groton, Connecticut] and HII/NSS [Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding]) and submarine supplier firms.”
The report acknowledges that funding towards the 1+2.33 goal is being drawn from a number of allocations over a few financial years, but expressly mentions Australian funding “under the AUKUS proposed Pillar 1 pathway,” which entails the transfer component of nuclear-powered submarines to Canberra.
The report helpfully reproduces the October 25, 2023 testimony from the Navy before the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House of Armed Services Committee. Officials are positively salivating at the prospect of nourishing the domestic industrial base through, for instance “joining with an Australian company to mature and scale metallic additive manufacturing across the SIB [Submarine Industrial Base].” The testimony goes on to note that, “Australia’s investment into the US SIB builds upon on-going efforts to improve industrial base capability and capacity, create jobs, and utilize new technologies,” and was a “necessary” contribution to “augment VACL [Virginia Class] production from 2.0 to 2.33 submarines per year to support both US Navy and AUKUS requirements.”
The implications from the perspective of the Australian taxpayer are significant. Patrick and Dorling state one of them: that “Australian AUKUS funding will support construction of a key delivery component of the US nuclear strike force, keeping that program on track while overall submarine production accelerates.”
The funding also aids the advancement of another country’s nuclear weapons capabilities, a breach, one would have thought, of Australia’s obligations under the Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Defence spokesman for the Australian Greens, Senator David Shoebridge, makes that very point to Patrick and Dorling. “Australia has clear international legal obligations to not support the nuclear weapons industry, yet this is precisely what these billions of dollars of AUKUS funding will do.”
The senator also asks “When will the Albanese government start telling the whole truth about AUKUS and how Australians will be paying to help build the next class of US ballistic missile submarines?”
For an appropriate answer, Shoebridge would do well to consult the masterful, deathless British series Yes Minister, authored by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn. In one episode, the relevant minister, Jim Hacker, offers this response to a query by the ever-suspicious civil service overlord Sir Humphrey Appleby on when he might receive a draft proposal: “At the appropriate juncture,” Hacker parries. “In the fullness of time. When the moment is ripe. When the necessary procedures have been completed. Nothing precipitate, of course.” In one word: never.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected]
Featured image: The USS John Warner, a nuclear-powered submarine of the type Australia will soon be developing. Source: US Navy
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“Another to haunt for all time. Oh to be able to stop the clock, turn back the hands, reverse the ticking, now and of history, for so much, of its recorded horrors of the “chronicle of lies agreed on.”” —Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, January 5, 2024
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Behold, in Gaza, there is no new year, just old afflictions – life in tents without water or blankets, point-blank death for grandmothers and children, half the population starving, the broken and displaced “living out our nightmares before we even dream them” as Western leaders avow their genocidal fantasies. For Jews, writes Abe Louise Young, the times call for confronting “the killing myth” that is Israel, “an anathema to faith, an equation with an error: A country built on top of another country (that) is not the way home.”
On Thursday, Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli ambassador to the U.K., said the quiet rabid part out loud when she argued Israel must destroy all of Gaza because “every school, every mosque, every second house” sits on a tunnel – even though most tunnels in Gaza were built decades ago by Israel – thus offering up on British national radio what critics agree is now an alarmingly common, clear “call for genocide.” Her candor was grimly praised by U.K. journalist Robert Carter for exposing “how evil Israel’s colonialist project is and what (its) true ambitions are – the total genocide and land theft of all Palestine.” And so it goes. The Israeli assault on Gaza, as well as the West Bank, lurches bloodily on, with harrowing stories of mass executions of families, bodies left in the street for days under Israeli gunfire, prisoners forced to strip, adults going hungry to feed their kids, the forced departure of residents from their longtime “home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world.” “This year has been very bad,” says a mother of five forced to flee to multiple schools. “When my daughters look at pictures from the past they start to cry. We have lost everything beautiful.”
Under the brutal, random orders of an Israeli military that views as “terrorists” anyone who doesn’t comply with the latest evacuation order, families are forced to repeatedly flee from home to home, neighborhood to neighborhood. Across Gaza City last month, that pitiless policy brought multiple deaths. In one neighborhood, Moemen Raed al-Khaldi lay wounded and still for three days amidst the bodies of his dead relatives after soldiers suddenly stormed their house; they told the family to leave in Hebrew, which none of them understood, and in the ensuing confusion they shot dead his grandfather, grandmother, uncle, a pregnant woman and several others staying there. Nearby, his six year-old cousin also survived after soldiers shot his parents in front of him. In al-Rimal neighbourhood, soldiers ordered 24 residents of a building to evacuate; retired UN worker Kamel Mohammed Nofal was explaining that his four adult children, there with their spouses and nine children, were deaf and blind when soldiers shot him dead. At least 11 others were killed in al-Rimal, including an 8-year-old girl; the UN is investigating it as a(nother) war crime.
For those who survive, 90% have been displaced as Israel calls for evacuations from more and more areas, most recently around Khan Younis, where over 620,000 people once lived. Perhaps half of them have now fled to coastal Al-Mawasi, an empty, narrow strip of sand stretching south toward Rafah. Al-Mawasi was home to about 6,000, mostly Bedouin farmers and fishermen; today, hundreds of thousands of refugees live packed into makeshift tents. They stand in long lines for water, roam the streets looking for food or firewood – uprooting trees, collecting paper, taking down now-useless electrical poles – and despair that their children go to bed hungry and wake up cold. “We left the house crying for the (warmth) we left behind,” laments Muhammad Sadiq, who’d never fled Khan Younis in past wars, “and we went (to) a barren land with only sand.” Said 40-year-old mother Reem Al-Atrash, “People carry their tents, bedding, clothes and sorrows, and walk toward the unknown, weighed down by all their fears. Here we are just passers-by, living out our nightmares before we even dream them.”
Meanwhile, “Gaza is starving.” In what aid workers call “the impossible reality of Gaza,” at least half the population is said to suffer from severe hunger – young children face the greatest risk – and all of it is classified in “a state of crisis,” with the highest share ever recorded of people facing “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.” Workers say many adults already go hungry so their kids can eat, but in the coming weeks at least 10,000 children under five could suffer “severe wasting,” the most life-threatening form of malnutrition: “The threat of dying from hunger is real.” Atrocities have also spread to the West Bank, where over 300 Palestinians, including 80 children, have been killed in attacks by soldiers and settlers, and the IDF have detained hundreds more “suspected of terrorist activities.” For Palestinians already long besieged and terrorized, says Nowar Nabil Diab, “Our memories are being erased.” He mourns his home, his sky, his morning with “a cup of tea and a feta sandwich” while listening to Lebanese singer Fairouz;, now, he fears looking out a window. “Life is dwindling,” he says. “Fear is a loyal friend. It will never leave us.”
Still, amidst “the most savage war conducted in the 21st century against a civilian population,” one in which its perpetrator refuses to even consider ending a brutal occupation almost universally condemned, White House spokesperson John Kirby says there is no U.S. plan to look into Israeli abuses and “we have not seen anything that would convince us we need to take a different approach (trying) to help Israel defend itself.” Shame, shame. They forget: “Never again” means “never again.” Recalling a Haitian resistance akin to that of Palestinians, some cite the Creole, “Tout moun se moun” – Every person is a person. For Jews today, writes Abe Louise Young, it is time to “look in the mirror.” “I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people,” Young writes. Today, “I cannot celebrate or sing about this plot.” Instead, we must “tell of the lives stolen, of murdered fathers and mothers, teachers and bakers, fishermen and painters, newborns and toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, their hopes, skill, love and humor. This telling must be done.”
Here’s the entire piece. With thanks to Vox Populi:
New Seeds For Old Stories
by Abe Louise Young.
“When I was a child, everything I heard & read about Israel was aspirational. We saved our quarters in cardboard boxes emblazoned, “Plant Trees In Israel!” People said, “Next year in Jerusalem!” to mean goodbye, to celebrate New Year’s Eve. We sang of Yisrael in plaintive prayers that seemed older than petrified wood. Being connected to something ancient made me feel more real (and when you are a little girl, many things conspire to make you feel unreal.)
Now, I understand that this Israel I learned of is a myth. Yisrael is a timeless spiritual space–the holy core, the center of everything. But Israel was built like a physics equation spliced into a river, a laboratory sent into a bloodstream. An equation with an error. A country built on top of another country, another culture it tried to bury, thinking the world too busy or guilty-feeling to care about the human beings living there; naming the Holocaust’s collective loss reason enough—good reason—to move in, to push out, with carte blanche.
An example: Today, I learn that the editor of the Jerusalem desk for the New York Times lives in a house built above a house stolen from a Palestinian editor and BBC Arabic Service journalist named Hasan Karmi. Hasan was forced under threat of death to leave his home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world. The Karmi family became refugees from Palestine in 1948 so a Jew fleeing Nazi Europe could move into their house (free of charge), could call it his own address and refuge: Israel.
Did he use their plates? Their artwork? Did he keep or destroy Hasan’s library? Where are their family papers and embroideries? Their birds and their dog, Rex? The children’s clothes and toys? The president of Hebrew University inscribed his name on the facade. When the New York Timesbought the new home built on top of it, the Karmi family had been erased.
I cannot celebrate or sing about this plot. The words that rise up are unfair, unjust, unholy.
I spoke to my father yesterday. He said, “There were very few Arabs in Israel when it was founded. Just a few, and they left willingly.” I said, “Dad, you’ve been lied to. Have you heard of the Nakba?” “What is that?” he asked, “propaganda?” I order an oral history collection about the expulsion of 750,000 Arab people from Palestine to be sent to his doorstep, a Hanukkah present. He sends me Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. A miracle for whom?
Israel today denies that the people of Palestine exist as people. They are called dogs, human animals. How else to pretend that you did not steal their beds, their roofs, their gardens, doves, foods and dances, make them flee barefoot, execute them in lines against a wall? How else to pretend you do not confine them in prisons and a concentration camp, fly drones overhead that shoot bullets at anything that moves?
But people are not easy to erase. They write poems, keep archives, have children to tell stories to. They wear iron keys to the stone homes their great-grandparents built around their necks, even as they starve in plastic tents in the rain.
They share videos on Instagram of white phosphorus, made in Arkansas, burning through the legs of infants. They share videos of singing together while bombs drop, of baking bread on a metal plate held over burning paper as Israel starves them. They share videos of people they love dying, of mothers mourning, of babies and bodies pulled from rubble; they write new endings, they cry on camera. We hear the voices of Motaz, Plestia, Bisan around the globe; we read poems by Mosab, Rafaat, Naomi out loud.
What can we do? What can we do? How do we turn the hands of history, interrupt the seige? Around the world we call and plead with politicians to stop sending money and bombs to Israel, we hang ceasefire signs from buildings and overpasses, boycott, mass in millions to march, we watch our glowing phone screens and retch as we see Israeli snipers execute Palestinian children, soldiers press buttons to bomb mosques, bakeries, hospitals and universities. We cry out as we see the apartment buildings fall with families inside them, rage as we see Israeli soldiers laugh and dance with the lace underwear from dead women’s dresser drawers.
All this for a myth. For stolen land. All this for a myth. For stolen land. To make a place for Holocaust survivors and atone for European crimes, to help Western presidents control the Middle East, and again, again, for white people’s “safety” at the expense of brown people’s lives.
Again.I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people. Now I understand the killing myth, an anathema to faith
Israel, this is not the way home. Israel, we must look in the mirror. Yes: descendants of a holocaust immediately created another holocaust: oh painful, terrible truth. Oh repetition compulsion. Oh catastrophe. Truth tribunal, please commence; help us into a true story.
Those who continue to slaughter must be restrained by all nations of the world working together. The sacred, battered place must become one where people of any faith and race can live in freedom, without violence or apartheid, with equal rights to enjoy bread, love, children, the sea and the sunset, stories and buying tomatoes.
Each stolen home, each stolen acre of Palestine must be returned and every prisoner freed.
To tell of the lives stolen, of murdered fathers and mothers, teachers and bakers, fishermen and painters, newborns and toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, their hopes, skill, love and humor, will take many generations. This telling must be done. Each name of a soul taken must be spoken, engraved and gilded, embroidered with tatreez; each life must be grieved.
I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people. Now I understand the killing myth, an anathema to faith. I want the money Jewish children save to go to the people of Palestine for five hundred years. I want all the years of the U.S. payments, $318 billion to Israel, to pour into Palestinian hands as reparations. We must return what was stolen, heal what was harmed, apologize for every life ended. Let the next trees planted be peace groves, be olives and oranges watered by indigenous hands; protected by safe, loving, hands, tree-tending hands.
Let us learn from them how to live again on holy land.”
[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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Abby Zimet has written CD’s Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women’s, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: [email protected].
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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2023 has been an eventful year with both highs and lows. I no longer recognize the peaceful Sweden I was born in and the medium-sized city of Norrköping, where I have lived peacefully for 25 years, is starting to feel more like Chicago in the late 1920s.
This summer, the entrance to a house I often pass on the way to my band’s rehearsal studio was destroyed by a bomb attack. A week later, thieves broke into our studio and stole music equipment. It was not hard to guess who and why. In the courtyard outside, drug dealing has been going on for some time time.
Just one month later, an explosion blew the roof off an apartment building in the same district. This time, it was a freak accident where an electric scooter that caught fire while charging indoors and then ignited a number of spray bottles kept nearby. During the technical investigation, the police found a large stash of drugs.
A few weeks ago, a seventeen-year-old boy was shot to death in broad daylight outside the grocery store where I usually shop and a month earlier, a man was murdered in a nearby restaurant. This is a continuation of a gloomy development.
The city I moved to is no longer recognizable. Shootings have become commonplace. Criminal networks operate in the background. To curb crime, surveillance cameras were recently installed outside the entrance to our apartment building.
Everything to “ensure our safety”. This happened just a couple of days after the Swedish government declared at a press conference that it would crack down on crime through more surveillance in public spaces.[1] All to restore order out of the chaos that this same Swedish government had invited in 2015 when opening our borders to more refugees than our small nation was able to take care of.
Swedish police official figures: Detonations, preparations and attempts 2023
In the rest of the world, unrest has also continued. While the war in Ukraine has developed into a deadlocked trench war, another war was again sparked in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas.
This time, after a particularly suspicious act of terrorism where a terrorists were able to cross the world’s most monitored border without problems and spread terror for several hours before there was any reaction from Israeli security forces. The attack and the resulting retaliation has once again caused division in the world. The motto “divide and conquer” is more relevant than ever. This conflict risks spreading and resulting in a major global war.
In my formerly neutral and peace-loving Sweden, which in 2022 took the historic decision to join NATO because of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, an agreement was recently made to make seventeen of our military bases available to NATO even before the membership is formalized.[2] At the same time, the arms industry rejoices over new lucrative contracts. Ammunition stocks are depleted and need to be replenished.
Sweden has so far contributed SEK 22.2 billion in military (rather than humanitarian) support to Ukraine.[3] At the same time, financial support to peace organizations has been terminated. It is clear that Sweden has become little more than a vassal state, with no real independence of our own, that primarily serves the big corporations and their owners.
Now preparations seem to be in the making for a major conflict in line with old Biblical prophecies.
At the same time, efforts to strengthen the UN organization to guarantee “peace and order” in a fragmented world continue. This year, United Nations will hold its pivotal Summit of the Future with the goal of setting the guidelines for a new global order with a new and upgraded UN.
Negotiations are also underway to give the WHO greatly expanded powers. This is similar to the situation during World War II when the foundations of the United Nations were negotiated while Berlin and Tokyo were carpet-bombed.
During 2023, I have followed the work at the UN and analyzed the eleven Policy Briefs that were released between March and September. These are to serve as a basis for the “Pact for the Future” that is to be concluded and signed on 22-23 September 2024. Together with the World Health Organization’s new Pandemic Treaty which is to be signed at the World Health Assembly in May 2024, it will in a concrete manner transfer power from the nations to a supranational level.[4]
This means that we will not be able to choose our own path in dealing with future pandemics. In addition, the UN wants to create an “emergency platform” that will be automatically triggered in the event of a global crisis. This opens the door for totalitarian powers on global scale.
An International Focus
After having written and lectured primarily for a Swedish audience, last New Years I set the goal of finding a larger audience outside Sweden. During 2023, I have therefore shifted my focus and started writing more in English. This has so far resulted in sixteen articles and a growing international interest.
My most read article, “Why the President of the Club of Rome tried to stop the approval of my dissertation”, has currently had close to 17,000 views. This was written after a visit to the birthplace of the Club of Rome, Accademia dei Lincei in Rome (where I also found interesting connections to Sweden and the Swedish 17th Century Queen Christina who abdicated and moved to Rome).
I have also lectured in our neighboring Nordic countries. In April, I was the opening speaker at the Spotlight Conference in beautiful Stavanger, Norway. A conference, organized by the Binders Initiative and Children’s Health Defense Europe, with high-profile speakers such as American scientist Sasha Latypova, British parlamentarian Andrew Bridgen and Swiss lawyer Philip Kruse.
In early May, I also had the privilege of giving a lecture in the Finno-Swedish city Ekenäs and meeting a dedicated group of free thinkers.
I then met the inspiring Irish youtuber Ivor Cummins for an interview in Stockholm. Ivor has perhaps done more than anyone to spread my research over the past year. Among other things, he noticed and shared my opening address from the Northern Light Convention in Malmö 2022. The address has so far had 284,000 views, while the interview has reached 120,000 views. This meant that the first English edition of my 2019 book Rockefeller: Controlling the Game quickly sold out.
Ivor and I also met for an interview in connection with The Doctors Appeal’s conference “On Guard for the Liberty of Mankind” at Johannesberg Manor outside Stockholm in late September.
It was a fantastic opportunity to meet like-minded people. At the same conference, I also met American economist Catherine Austin Fitts, who did a follow-up interview with me. I will now contribute with an article about the digital world brain to the next Solari Report. The eminent Whitney Webb also appears in the same issue.
Shortly after the conference, I was invited as a contributor to the American M.D. Meryl Nass’Door to Freedom initiative. On behalf of this collaboration, I held two lectures in English in Stockholm that were filmed, in order to contribute to spreading knowledge about the UN’s Pact of the Future and the declaration of the “planetary state of emergency” called for by agenda-setting individuals and organisations such as the Club of Rome.
During 2023, I have also been interviewed by, among others, Daniel Estulin, James Corbett, and Tom Nelson.
In April, my 2020 book The Global Coup d’Etat (Globalny Zamach Stany) was published by Polish Vin Ross Publishing, and in September the Rockefeller book (Les Rockefeller: Maîtres du jeu) was released by French publisher Editions Jean-Cyrille Godefroy.
Within the next few months, Skyhorse Publishing will be releasing Rockefeller: Controlling the game in the US (pre-order here) and later The Global Coup d’Ètat.
Another unexpected surprise was that Awakening Records will be reissuing the 1993 album Lay it to Rest with my old band Captor on vinyl and cassette.
Next up is the filming of the Temple of Solomon lecture series in English. The plan is also to publish it as a book, along with the Temple of Solomon album by my band Wardenclyffe as soundtrack, before next Christmas. This was already the plan for 2023, but unfortunately other things got in the way.
This year will in all probability be as eventful and I will do my best to continue analysing what is happening on the world stage. I hope to have the opportunity to lecture in Europe and other parts of the world (contact me if you want to organize).
2024 will be a decisive year. Will we experience the unforeseen “black swan” event that Klaus Schwab predicted at the World Government Summit 2023? The cyber attack that WEF has been preparing for since 2019 to wipe the slate clean for the new digital order? Will a planetary emergency be declared?
We must, however, not give up despite all the negative things that keep happening. I still believe in the goodness and creative abilities of man. More and more people are waking up and looking elsewhere for more reliable information than the government and corporate propaganda. National and global authorities’ attempts to control the narrative by censoring alternative media are in fact signs of desperation.
Like many others in the wake of the many crises of recent years, me and my wife have also gotten many new friends, supporters, and met many wonderful people from all around the world. This is one of the upsides of the many tragedies and threats facing us as a species.
Many thanks to everyone who supported me during the year and witnessed my talks. If you are not one already, please support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. This is more important than ever. Unlike those who work for the global agenda and are afforded limitless resources, I rely solely on my supporters and book sales to be able to continue my research and writing.
I end this personal review of 2023 with my speech “A Human Emergency” at the conference “On Guard for the Liberty of Mankind”:
With the wish for a New Year that truly will be a turning point for humanity!
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“I wish I could have died with them” – crying Hamada Abu Sleyma told Al-Mayadeen Media Network, an independent Arab satellite news channel. He said he just left home for five minutes trying to buy some bread from a nearby bakery, when an Israeli airstrike hit his family’s house, destroyed it completely and buried his entire family alive.
He reckoned they are all dead. He built his tent on the rubble of his family house, as he wanted to be close to his loved ones, even in death – and just in case, he said, tears in his eyes, I may hear calls for help from under the debris.
This 2-min video-clip speaks for itself, recorded by Al-Mayadeen Media Network.
There are simply no words to describe the ever-increasing intensity of the horror, the atrocities, the relentless, merciless genocide – targeting mostly civilian populations, and in particular women and children. It is clearly an act of eradicating and brutally eliminating Palestinian people. Targeting children and women is wiping out the next generation – children and the bearers of children.
Up to now, more than 22,000 people were murdered by the Zionist-directed Israel Defense Forces (IDF); and there is no end in sight for the killing. To the contrary, the Biden Administration has just declared gearing up American armament for the Middle East, by sending two aircraft carriers, loaded with about 50 fully armed war planes to the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf area. Nuclear weapons were not mentioned, but they are for sure part and parcel of the weaponry – ready to step up the killing and risking a never-seen before worldwide catastrophe.
When will the world be interfering in this atrocious grand-scale homicide?
World, wake up!
Intervene!
The killing orgy you are allowing to happen today to Palestine, may hit YOU tomorrow.
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PeterKoenig 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.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
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John Pilger has been winning awards since 1966, for his journalism and, later, his documentary film-making. Harold Pinter observed: ‘He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is.’ The Financial Times, on the other hand, has called him ‘a master propagandist’.
Huw Spanner began corresponding with him by email on 2 November 2020.
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Huw Spanner (HS): We’re starting this conversation on the very eve of the US presidential election. What do you think is at stake?
John Pilger (JP): Well, Donald Trump is a caricature of the American system and Joe Biden is the embodiment of the American system. Either way, we shall end up with an American President. There will be superficial changes if Trump loses, but the system will not change. The rich will continue to grow richer, and the poor poorer. The majority of people – Americans and the rest of us – will be the losers.
What is known as ‘American foreign policy’ will continue to promote violence, plunder and lawlessness across the world, ignoring sovereignty and abandoning democracy and diplomacy in a bid to restore America’s perceived dominance of 25 years ago. This ‘mission’ is bipartisan to both Republicans and Democrats, though it is based on the mostly liberal belief that ‘exceptional’ America has the divine right to do as it wishes.
The priority is to subvert China and Russia and influence or overthrow their governments. This is unlikely to succeed,but what may happen is open warfare, especially nuclear war in Asia, by mistake. Russia is almost as well defended as the Soviet Union was; and China is rapidly (and reluctantly) preparing seriously to defend itself. ‘For the first time,’ says the respected Union of Concerned Scientists in the US, ‘China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert … This would be a significant – and dangerous – change in Chinese policy.’1
President Obama, who [in 2009] was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, initiated an entirely unnecessary bellicose campaign against China. While declaring that he was freeing the world from the ‘tyranny’ of nuclear weapons, he secretly increased America’s production of nuclear warheads at a faster rate than any President during the first Cold War.
This is important to understand, because the so-called news these days is so integrated into Anglo-America’s rapacious planning, and the deceit that accompanies it, that most people haven’t a clue what our governments are doing. They still look favourably on Obama and regard Trump as a maniac – which he may well be, but no more maniacal than his predecessors, if their policies and actions are a measure. With Joe Biden at his side, Obama started seven wars, a presidential record.2
HS: I take your point about Obama’s record overseas, but still most people would say that he’s a decent and principled man.
JP: A form of ‘identity politics’ says he is, certainly – but apart from gestures, slogans, the fawning of the media, what evidence do you have that Obama was a decent and principled man?
HS: I was merely appealing to an intuition that, at a personal level, he would be a better next-door neighbour, say, or a better godfather to a child, than Trump would be. But let’s not argue about that!
JP: Some of the greatest scoundrels have been perfect godfathers (in more ways than one). Obama’s now infamous Tuesday ritual when he selected the names of those to be murdered by the US military’s drones3 – ‘suspected’ terrorists who often weren’t – would disqualify his description as a man of decency and principle.
People’s ‘intuition’ is important, but it so often needs knowledge and a consciousness.
HS: Do you believe that the US political system tends to promote to power people who are morally corrupt, or is it more that anyone in power, even if they were genuinely the best of people, would find themselves obliged to do wicked things?
JP: The short answer is that all power corrupts sooner or later, in varying forms and degrees, unless it is accountable.
HS: You’ve spent much of your life scrutinising the actions of people in power, in many parts of the world. Have you observed a pattern in how power corrupts? Are there particular fault lines in human nature?
JP: Suggesting that a ‘fault line in human nature’ is the cause of a failure of principle in some is an easy option. People in power are the product of systems, whose stewardship often requires the surrender of principle.
HS: Maybe we could take an egregious example. Some years ago, Desmond Tutu said of Aung San Suu Kyi: ‘She inspires me with her gentle determination. In the face of the viciousness of the military regime … she has demonstrated just how potent goodness is. Men, armed to the teeth, are running scared of her. When those men are no more than the flotsam and jetsam of history, her name will be emblazoned in letters of gold.’4
Nowadays, however, even Burma Campaign UK is condemning her for her government’s repressive actions – not least in imprisoning journalists.5 How do you make sense of her conduct in power?
JP: Desmond Tutu is a magnificent human being, and generous. He was being generous in saying that Suu Kyi’s name would be ‘emblazoned in letters of gold’. I, too, admired Suu Kyi. I interviewed her [in 1996] when she was under house arrest6 and corresponded with her after she was released. (I used to send her books, mainly fiction and poetry, which she appreciated.) I still admire the extraordinary fortitude with which she faced her incarcerators and the inspiration she gave her people then.
Where did her strength come from? She is a deeply religious person, and this may be part of the answer. She is also deeply conservative. The only clue that her book, Freedom from Fear,7 gives is that it offers no vision for political change. I once asked her what kind of Burma she wanted beyond elections – how she would protect her people against corporate exploitation and the notorieties of imposed debt and [International Monetary Fund] ‘structural adjustment’ regimes. The impression she gave was that she would not oppose them; it was a steely reply.
Some would describe this as a liberal pragmatism. Her current alliance with Burma’s generals, who were responsible not only for her own torment but for crimes against humanity, not least the persecution of the Rohingya, has ensured her a place at their table. She has refused to defend the Rohingya, a minority defamed by Burma’s extremist monks. Is she influenced by them? Or is she simply the ‘pragmatist’ who retains power by turning away from inconvenient horrors? As the latter, she would fit comfortably into the Western system of ‘democracy’.
HS: You have documented so much injustice and suffering around the world, generally among those who have the least resources. Are they inevitable ‘collateral damage’?
JP: ‘Collateral damage’ is a cynical term used by militaries (and corporations) to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions. As for it being ‘inevitable’, I don’t see what is inevitable about injustice and suffering among ‘those who have least resources’ when resources are denied them. Some 1,200 children die from malaria every day, says Unicef.8 They die in countries denied resources to which they have a right and which are their own sovereign wealth.
Unless you believe in a divinity, nothing is inevitable.
HS: Can you envisage a system of government that would not ‘require the surrender of principle’ but would genuinely allow decent people to exercise power justly and humanely? Have you seen such a system in your travels around the world?
JP:A system of government that does not require the surrender of principle is one that strives to deliver political, social and economic justice. Yes, I can envisage it – as long as I don’t have to envisage perfection. As human beings are less than perfect, their best-laid plans will be flawed. And yes, I have seen parts of systems that exercise power justly and humanely.
This power may be compromised as a reformist or revolutionary government struggles to prevent its subversion by both domestic and foreign influences. Still, principle is not necessarily surrendered, or it is preserved in a shared popular memory. Latin America offers up striking examples of this. In all societies, there is always a seed beneath the snow.
HS: That is a very hopeful image! The optimism of it puts me in mind of the slogan El pueblo unido jamás será vencido (though it strikes me that ‘never being defeated’ is not quite the same thing as being victorious).
JP: Yes, it is hopeful. Perhaps what truly distinguishes humanity from other species is not so much our brainpower as our optimism. That seems extraordinary to say at a grim time like this, but even when we fail to recognise it, optimism is our motor. It moves us on the greyest morning; it fools me into believing I can do more than my faculties allow – that I can swim up the wall of a wave before it breaks, as I did when I was 21. Audacity is always necessary: just enough to ensure we ‘go on’.
Those who struggle against the odds for principle and justice may pause and rest, but they ‘go on’. I have met so many of them, and invariably I leave their company optimistic. Ahmed Kathrada – I knew him as ‘Kathy’ – spent 18 years on Robben Island as a political prisoner with Nelson Mandela. When I returned to South Africa after my long banning, he took me to Robben Island and his cell, turning the key in what looked like a stone closet, five feet by five feet. When we entered, the two of us filled it. ‘I slept on the floor for the first 14 years,’ he said. ‘I had a raffia mat, that’s all. And the light was always on, always burning bright.’
Such sheer moral and physical courage, limitless ingenuity and what I can only describe as ‘optimism of the spirit and purpose’ kept Kathy and his comrades going. Of course they were exceptional, but there are a lot of exceptional people.
HS: Are you confident of the ultimate victory of el pueblo (as Tutu was in South Africa9), or do you foresee that the struggle will go on forever? Are world affairs essentially chaotic, or do you see prevailing winds and currents that are carrying us all inexorably in one direction? Lately, there have been dramatic twists in the story in Ecuador,10 Brazil11 and Bolivia,12 but do they fit into any coherent larger narrative?
JP: As you say, there have been ‘dramatic’ shifts in many countries lately – in 2019 Bolivia saw a coup that overthrew the reformist indigenous government of Evo Morales. And yet, within a year, the people had risen up, demanded a new election and voted by a landslide to throw out the coup plotters. The exiled Morales is now back in Bolivia. If we were served with real news, that astonishing turnaround – and its poder del pueblo,13 as they still say in Latin America – might have cheered some of us up.
Even in times as gloomy as these, the breeze can change suddenly, unexpectedly. Few predicted the restoration of democracy in Bolivia. Precious few foresaw the end of apartheid or the fall of the Berlin Wall. I didn’t; I should have been more optimistic.
HS: Your recent column titled ‘Another Hiroshima is Coming… Unless We Stop It Now’ began with the image of ‘the shadow on the steps’: the silhouette of a young woman burnt into the granite by the flash of the atom bomb in 1945. You wrote that on your visit in 1967 you ‘stared at the shadow for an hour or more.’14
I’ve read that you like to ‘mull’. Can you say what was going through your mind then?
JP: When I first saw dead young soldiers on a battlefield, their new boots upended in the stillness, I stared at them. How could this be? The Hiroshima shadow was different. The woman on the steps of the bank was not on a battlefield. There were no soldiers; she was not meant to be in immediate danger – Hiroshima was a civilian city going about its normal business. She was vaporised waiting for a high-street bank to open. (That’s why Peter Watkins’ The War Game15 is so disturbing and memorable – it shows the criminal terror of nuclear war.)
I was mesmerised by the shadow because it was evidence of something that was beyond the imagination, yet it touched almost every nerve. [The great US war correspondent] Martha Gellhorn and I talked about this, and she spoke about her similar reaction to the horror of reporting just-liberated Dachau.
‘Mulling’ – now, that is altogether different! It’s serene, relaxing, a switch-off, an escape. My mother used to say of me, ‘His head is always in the clouds.’ I think I trained it to come down to earth. A pity.
HS: An online review of your pick of other writers’ investigative journalism, Tell Me No Lies,16 observed: ‘It engenders a feeling of intense rage.’ Is anger an important ingredient in your work and the work you admire? Or should a journalist seek to be objective and dispassionate?
JP: From memory, Tell Me No Lies was generally received not as a work of ‘rage’ but as a celebration of enlightening and humane investigative journalism.
Rage or anger on their own are pointless, or worse. Much of the media directs phoney rage at its assorted targets. Of course, if you are not genuinely angered by injustice, or duplicity, on the part of power, you have allowed your humanity to be appropriated. The dispassion or objectivity you cite is often intended to disguise political bias – the BBC are especially skilled at this sleight of hand.
I recommend the quote on the jacket of Tell Me No Lies by T D Allman, one of America’s finest journalists: ‘Genuine objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by “reliable sources” but by the unfolding of history. It is journalism that 10, 20, 50 years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.’
HS: I can see that much that passes for journalism misrepresents or misinterprets events, whether inadvertently or deliberately; but do you think one can say (as Allman would seem to imply) that events have a single ‘meaning’ and that it is possible for a good journalist to get it right?
It’s often said that journalism is ‘a first rough draft of history’, and history is often revised (or often needs to be), surely?
JP: Does anything have a single meaning? Contradictions often rule us as human beings, so why should man-made actions be different?
Journalism is a rough draft of history in very few cases: for example, William Howard Russell’s reporting from the Crimea, Wilfred Burchett’s reporting from Hiroshima, Morgan Philips Price’s reporting from 1917 Russia. As journalists, they got the historical meaning of momentous events right at the time – but that’s rare!
HS: You often quote the maxim ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.’ In recent years, there has been a huge loss of trust in ‘the government line’,17 but in many cases it would seem that what has replaced that trust is not a healthy, informed scepticism but a willingness to believe everything under the sun.18 Does this make the task of the investigative journalist harder in some ways, or merely different?
JP: My sense is that the trust in government and parliamentary politics began to die with Harold Wilson’s Labour government [in 1964–70]. Perhaps it recovered briefly in 2017 when Jeremy Corbyn19 – or the movement outside his party that he represented – seemed to promise so much.
I would say it’s now rock-bottom. There are spivs in power and the corruption that produced them runs through the sinews of the civil service they have politicised. Revolving doors now spin between government, the Civil Service and the casino world of voracious corporatism. Imagine a few years ago a company as rotten as Serco given tens of millions of pounds to turn back an epidemic,20 or a ‘venture capitalist’ (married to a Tory minister) running the nation’s vaccination programme!21
Read The Plot against the NHS by Colin Leys and Stewart Player,22 who document how the Department of Health was Americanised and subverted by management consultants and assorted parasitic enemies of public health. The way this British government has handled the pandemic is scandalous. There will surely be a reckoning – but in what form?
I don’t agree that people now ‘believe everything under the sun’. A great many of us are disorientated politically because we are unrepresented in a system devoted to inequity and insecurity. There is no real political opposition in Parliament to the extremism of those in charge. It is as if power speaks with a united, almost evangelical voice. Brexit was for a great many Britons a protest vote, a cry of resistance.
HS: That takes us back to the ‘meaning’ of events. Two days after the 2016 referendum, you published a column titled ‘Why the British Said No to Europe’,23 in which you said that ‘millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.’
That seems simplistic to me. I wonder what you would say about the (marginally fewer) people who voted to stay in the EU: that they were happy to be ‘bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt’? Or that they refused to be led by the nose by Johnson,24 Farage25 et al?
JP: I am sorry if you regard my view as simplistic. The propaganda that so many ordinary Britons were racists or stupid was very much a liberal, metropolitan view. The group of far-right extremists who appropriated the Brexit cause – the cynical Johnson and the small cabal of nationalists – did not represent the majority but provided juicy media fodder.
HS: Last August, a French journalist26 commented that if Johnson was running France, there would be daily demonstrations and a general strike. Do you think that generally the British are more docile, or compliant, politically than other nations?
JP: The Chartists, the great Liverpool resistance during the General Strike, the RAF mutineers, the miners, the dockers, the Greenham Common women’s movement, the Poll Tax movement, the anti-Iraq invasion movement, Extinction Rebellion and so on and on… docile? I don’t think so.
In their own way, the British are far more rebellious, and politically and culturally adventurous, than many nations – certainly more so than my own compatriots. That’s why the arts and comedy, and science and sheer enlightened invention, have flourished.
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[15] See bbc.co.uk/programmes. The drama-documentary was commissioned by the BBC in 1965 but has been televised only once, in 1985 (despite winning the 1967 Oscar for best documentary feature).
[16] Tell Me No Lies: Investigative journalism and its triumphs (Jonathan Cape, 2004)
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The visit by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to Russia on December 24-29 presented an extraordinary spectacle reminiscent of the halcyon days of Indo-Soviet relations. There was an unnameable ecstasy in Jaishankar’s words on Russian soil. He even took a walk on the Red Square in the middle of Russian winter. But the minister is anything but a sentimental diplomat, who can handle emotions not necessarily as encumbrance but turning them instead into great optics.
This Russia visit will stand out in Jaishankar’s diplomatic career drawing comparison alongside his stellar role in elevating the India-US relationship to a crescendo. The paradox is, Jaishankar’s mission quintessentially aimed at strengthening India’s strategic autonomy in a complex international environment. An apt metaphor will be of a cruise ship caught in the storm (but not sunk) and in distress searching for a harbourage it is familiar with.
Plainly put, Jaishankar’s Moscow trip aimed to create space for Indian diplomacy. The chronicle of India-Russia relationship is replete with similar situations. The UN Security Council resolutions on plebiscite in Kashmir, 1956 Hungarian uprising, Prague Spring, birth of Bangladesh, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan — the list includes some fateful moments in modern history.
If the past two years have seen the US-Indian relationship soaring high and then nosediving shortly thereafter, the main reason is to be found in the Biden administration’s growing frustration that Modi Government refused to join the West’s caravan to sanction Russia, India pragmatically increased its oil imports from Russia by leaps and bounds, which became a major source of budgetary support but moderated the bite of West’s ‘sanctions from hell’ against Russia and indirectly contributed to the phenomenal recovery of the Russian economy, which is registering currently an impressive 3.5% growth this year. India-Russia bilateral trade has since registered a massive increase from an insipid level to touch $50 billion in 2023.
Somewhere along the line, as it happens, the headiness of success inebriated the Indian decision makers, as they sought to gravitate toward the western camp for creating an even more beneficial matrix of ‘cooperation’. There is nothing wrong in pursuing a balanced policy in self-interest, but in this case, the strategy was fundamentally flawed as it was predicated also on the notion that Russia was destined to lose the war in Ukraine. The Indian establishment drew hasty conclusions from the military setbacks suffered by Russian forces in the early phase of Ukraine war. The famous remark that ‘this-is-not-en-era-of-wars’ typified that surreal outlook.
The Americans, of course, were elated that India was showing the middle finger at Russia’s ‘special military operation’ and word went around the global commons that India was ‘distancing’ from Russia. That period of the US-Indian bromance lasted for almost an year until the middle of 2023 when Russian forces returned to the battlefield in Ukraine with a brilliant strategy of attritional war, went on to crush Kiev’s ‘counteroffensive,’ and eventually seized the initiative as summer turned into autumn last year.
Meanwhile, three things happened. First, it was becoming apparent that the countries of the Global South were lock, stock and ditching the US and drifting toward the Russia-China axis, which of course put India in a quandary, as it also aspired to be the leader of the so-called Global Majority.
Second, the western narrative on Ukraine began fraying at the edges and signs of ‘war fatigue’ appeared in Europe and the US. Third, most important, the Biden administration had a profound rethink on ties with China, which were in a free fall, and from June onwards, top US officials began knocking at the door in Beijing seeking greater predictability in their relationship and pressing for a summit between President Biden and President Xi Jinping.
Suffice to say, the climate of US-China relations has improved since the summit in San Francisco in November. But the turnaround inflicted a collateral damage on Delhi — it diminished India’s worth to Washington as ‘counterweight’ to China. Curiously, the shift in the geopolitics of the Far East also happened to coincide with the current acrimony that erupted over alleged Indian plots to kill American and Canadian citizens.
Enter Russia. Sensing that the US-Indian bromance was heading south, Russia began lionising Modi. Last month, with an eye on Washington, Putin showered fulsome praise on Modi for refusing to be “frightened, intimidated or forced to take any actions, steps, decisions that would be at variance with the national interests of India and the Indian people.”
New Delhi expects that the US will be bogged down in its domestic politics through 2024. With US-China tensions easing, the Indo-Pacific strategy is in the back burner and consequently, the US hasno reason to fawn over India. Nonetheless, this is not the end of the Indian-American saga. Once the next US administration settles in, there will be renewed efforts in Delhi to pick up the threads. Make no mistake, for the Indian elites, the US remains the most consequential partner and it is guaranteed that Washington will reciprocate.
For the present, though, the fact that Russia has gained the upper hand in the war in Ukraine also means that India has no more requirement to do tight-rope walking vis-a-vis Moscow’s rupture with the West. Thus, the annual India-Russia summit is going to be resumed in 2024 after a two-year break. India is also in a better position to push back the US criticism on human rights issues now that Washington has lost the moral high ground over Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Overall, it is payback time for the Modi government. Jaishankar is savouring every moment of it even after his return from Moscow.
The bottom line is that India and Russia have expanded their agenda on the templates of geopolitics and strategic interests to mutual benefit. Going forward, beyond the optics, the efficacy and sustainability of the optics will be severely put to test at the BRICS summit in Kazan in October, which Putin will be chairing.
Bellwether to be Watched
The big question is whether India will show the presence of mind to hit the US’ core interests by going along with the creation of a BRICS currency to challenge the dollar and the US-dominated international financial and trade architecture, a project which carries Putin’s imprimatur and aims at conclusively demolishing America’s exceptionalism and global hegemony — and it enjoys China’s support, too. Interestingly, the Global Times has featured an extraordinary commentary against this tumultuous geopolitical backdrop praising the Modi government sky-high for its policies. Has the time come for dusting up the Russia-India-China (RIC) format? There are no easy answers.
Equally, another bellwether to be watched is the trajectory of Russian-Indian defence cooperation, which has been historically the anchor sheet of the two countries’ strategic relationship. Take away the defence ties and India-Russia ties become an empty husk. That is why the US has been persistently demanding that India reduces its arms purchases from Russia as a mark of alignment with the West and in the spirit of deepening ‘interoperability’ with American weapnry.
However, at the joint press conference with Jaishankar following the talks in Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dropped a bombshell. He disclosed that the discussions covered “prospects for military-technical cooperation, including joint production of modern weapons.” Lavrov added:
“We made progress in this area as well. Our interaction is strategic in this respect. Strengthening this cooperationmeets the national interests of our states and helps maintain security in Eurasia. We have respect for our Indian colleagues’ efforts to diversify ties in military-technical cooperation. We also understand and are willing to support their initiative to manufacture combat hardware under the ‘Make in India’ programme. We are ready to interact with them in this respect.” [Emphasis added.]
The outstanding performance of Russian weaponry in the Ukraine war and the overall surge of the Russian defence industry in the past year would put Russia in a strong position to regain its footing as India’s number one partner by far in military technology. The trajectory on this front will provide conclusive evidence of a new thinking in Delhi with regard to the geopolitics of the India-Russia-US triangle.
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Featured image: India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (L) and President Vladimir Putin (R) in Moscow during a five-day visit to Russia (Dec 24-29, 2023)
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Total control of every aspect of life for every single person on the planet, that’s the goal.
That’s been apparent to anyone paying attention for years, if not decades, and any tiny portion of remaining doubt was removed when Covid was rolled-out and members of the establishment started outright saying it.
Covid marked an acceleration of the globalist agenda, a mad dash to the finish line that seems to have lost momentum short of victory, but the race is still going. The goal has not changed, even if the years since may have seen the agenda retreat slightly back into the shadows.
We know what they want conceptually, but what does that mean practically?
What does a potential “global government” actually look like?
First off, let’s talk about what we’re NOT going to see.
1 – They are not going to declare themselves. No, there will almost certainly never be an official “world government”, at least not for a long time yet. That’s a lesson they learned from Covid — putting a name and a face on globalism only foments collective resistance to it.
2 – They’re not going to abolish nationhood. You can be sure Klaus Schwab (or whoever) isn’t ever going to appear simulcast on every television in the world announcing that we’re all citizens of ze vurld now and that nation states no longer exist.
In part because that is likely to focus resistance (see point 1), but mainly because tribalism and nationalism are just too useful to all would-be manipulators of public opinion. And, of course the continuing existence of nation states in no way precludes the existence of a supra-national control system, any more than the existence of Rhode Island, Florida or Texas precludes the existence of the Federal government.
3 – There will never be an overt declaration of a change of system. We will not be told we are united under a new model, instead the illusion of regionality & superficial variance will camouflage a lack of real choice across the political landscape. A thin polysystemic skin stretched tight over a monosystemic skeleton.
Capitalism, communism, socialism, democracy, tyranny, monarchy…these words will steadily dilute in meaning, even more than they have already, but they will never be abandoned.
What globalism will bring us – I suggest – is a collection of nation-states largely in name only, operating superficially different systems of government all built on the same underpinning assumptions and all answering to an unelected and undeclared higher authority.
…and if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially what we have already.
The only major aspects missing are the mechanisms by which this rough model can be transformed into a flowing network, where all corners are eroded and all genuine sovereign powers become entirely vestigial.
That’s where the three main pillars of global rule come in:
Digital Money
Digital ID
“Climate Action”
Let’s take a look at each one in turn.
1. Digital Money
Over 90% of the nations of the world are currently in the process of introducing a new digital currency issued by their central bank. OffG – and others – have been covering the push for a Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) for years now, to the point where we don’t need to rehash old talking points here.
Simply put, entirely digital money enables total surveillance of every transaction. If the currency is programmable, it would also allow control of every transaction.
Clearly CBDCs are a potentially dystopian nightmare which will infringe the rights of anyone forced to use them….but how are they a building block of global government?
The answer to that is “interoperability”.
While the world’s national CBDCs will notionally be separate from one another, the majority are being coded to recognize and interact with each other. They are almost all being developed along guidelines produced by the Bank of International Settlements and other globalist financial institutions, and they are all being programed by the same handful of tech giants.
A June 2023 report for the World Economic Forum noted the importance of “Central Bank Digital Currency Global Interoperability Principles”and concluded:
It is crucial for central banks to prioritize interoperability considerations early in the design process by adhering to a set of guiding principles. To facilitate global coordination and ensure harmonious implementation of CBDCs, the development of a comprehensive set of principles and standards becomes imperative. Drawing upon previous research and collaborative efforts, this set of principles can serve as a robust foundation, guiding central banks to proactively consider interoperability from the outset of their CBDC initiatives. By adopting these principles, central banks can work towards creating a cohesive and interconnected CBDC ecosystem.
Commenting on the report, the World Economic Forum website noted[emphasis added]:
To ensure successful implementation and promote interoperability, global coordination becomes paramount […] adhering to interoperability principles, CBDCs can advance harmoniously, leading to efficient and interconnected digital payment systems.
It doesn’t take a genius to decode “global coordination”, “cohesive ecosystem”, “harmonious advancement” and “interconnected payment systems”.
There is no practical difference between 195 “interoperable” and interconnected digital currencies, and one single global currency.
In fact “interoperability” is the watchword for all globalist power structures moving forward. Which leads us neatly onto…
2. Digital Identity
The global push for mandatory digital identities is even older than the digital currency agenda, dating back to the turn of the century and Tony Blair’s “national identity cards”.
For decades it has been a “solution” posited to every “problem”.
Clearly, just as with CBDCs, a far-reaching digital identity service is a threat to human rights. And, just as with CBDCs, if you interconnect national digital identity platforms you can build a global system.
Again, it’s all about “interoperability”. They use the exact same language.
Interoperability is crucial for developing efficient, sustainable, and useful identity ecosystems.
The Nordic and Baltic Ministers for Digitalization publicly called for “cross-border” operational digital IDs.
NGOs like Open Identity Exchange(OIX) are publishing reports on “the need for data standards to enable interoperability of Digital IDs both in federations within an ID ecosystem, and across ID ecosystems.”.
The list of national governments introducing digital IDs, “partnering” with corporate giants to do so and/or promoting “cross border interoperability” is long, and growing longer all the time.
In October 2023 the United Nations Development Program published their “guidelines” for the design and use of digital identities.
There is no practical difference between 195 networked digital identity platforms and one single global identity program.
OK, so they have global currency and identity programs in place. Now they can control and monitor everyone’s movements, financial transactions, health and more. That’s surveillance and control mechanism, all handled in a distributed model designed to obfuscate the very existence of a global government.
But what about policy?
How does this global government hand down policy and legislation without giving away its existence?
Climate change, that’s how.
3. “Climate Action”
Climate Change has been at the forefront of the globalist agenda for years. It is the Trojan horse of the antihuman technocrat.
As long ago as 2010, noted Climate Change “experts” were suggesting that“humans are not evolved enough” to combat climate change and that “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”
States will remain unable to solve global crises like climate change until they let go of their sovereignty
For years climate change has been sold as the reason we might be “forced” to abandon democracy or sovereignty.
Alongside this, there is a prolonged propaganda narrative dedicated to changing “climate change” from an environmental issue into an everything issue.
At this point all national governments agree “climate change” is an urgent problem requiring global cooperation to solve. They host massive summits at which they sign international agreements, binding nation states to certain policies, for the sake of the planet.
Having established that model, they are now widening the “climate change” purview. Changing “climate change” into the answer to every question:
Obviously, “climate change” was always going to impact energy and transport.
Agriculture & food, public health, energy & transport, trade, fiscal & taxation policy, even education. Almost every area of government is now potentially covered by the “climate change” umbrella.
They no longer need a one-world government, they just need a single panel of “impartial international climate change experts” working to save the planet.
Through the lens of “climate change”, these experts would be empowered to dictate – sorry, recommend – government policy in almost every area of life to every nation on the planet.
Do you see it yet?
This is global government in the modern world, not centralised but distributed. Cloud computing. A supranational corporate-technocrat hivemind. With no official existence or authority, and therefore no accountability, and funneling all their policy decisions through one filter – climate change.
There won’t be a single global currency, there will be dozens and dozens of “interoperable” digital currencies creating an “harmonious payment ecosystem”.
There won’t be a single global digital identity service, there will be a series of “interconnected identity networks” engaging in the “free flow of data to promote security”.
There won’t be a global government, there will be international panels of “impartial experts”, appointed by the UN who make “policy recommendations”.
Most or all of the countries of the world will follow most or all of the recommendations, but anyone who calls these panels global governments will be forwarded fact-checks from Snopes or Politifact highlighting that “UN expert panels do NOT constitute a global government because they have no legislative power”.
This, I suggest, is how global government will take shape in 2024 and beyond.
Compartmentalized, utterly deniable…but very, very real.
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A US military official told Al Mayadeen that US occupation forces in Syria and Iraq have been subjected to at least 118 attacks since October 17.
Since that date, 10 days after the launch of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has been targeting US occupation bases in the two countries and has confirmed in its statements, that the strikes are an effort to end the US illegal presence in the region and come in support of the steadfast Resistance in Palestine.
According to statements, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has so far targeted a number of US bases including Ain al-Assad, Kharab al-Jir, al-Shaddadi, Harir, al-Tanf, Rmelan, al-Malikiyah, and near the Conoco and al-Omar fields, in addition to US occupation forces near the Erbil airport and in the Green Village.
The operations were conducted by using a variety of drones and rockets which targeted specific locations and hit their targets.
This comes amid a rift in the US between those who seek to withdraw forces from the region and those who insist on keeping them despite the continuous hits and losses of lives and injuries that are anticipated with the ongoing escalations.
Keeping US forces in Iraq and Syria Could Lead to ‘Catastrophic’ Losses
The American Conservative published a report by Dan Caldwell entitled Our National Disgrace in Iraq and Syria, in which it said that US forces were risking their lives “needlessly” due to “policy paralysis and lack of political courage.”
The magazine reported that when Greg Carlstrom, an economist, interviewed an American diplomat last year, he asked him about the Biden administration’s policy in Syria, and in response, the official “shrugged and laughed.”
Carlstrom then underscored that “One group certainly not laughing about President Biden’s Syria policy (or lack thereof) is the over 70 US troops injured” after attacks started raining in on US bases in Syria and Iraq, especially since the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Rather, the report highlighted that the presence of US occupation forces in Syria and Iraq “risks a catastrophic loss of American life that could escalate into a major war.”
Moreover, it was noted that the fact that a number of US policymakers insisted on “sustaining” these existing policies “is a national disgrace.”
The publication stressed, “Policy inertia and political cowardice have condemned American service members in Iraq and Syria” saying the forced served “as soft targets for those looking to punish the US.” In short, Carlstorm stated that “withdrawal is the only path forward that prioritizes both American lives and interests.”
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The Israeli government is increasingly adopting the “voluntary” resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza as official policy, with a high-ranking official disclosing that it has engaged in discussions with multiple countries regarding the potential for such moves.
According to the Times of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is discreetly exploring the acceptance of thousands of migrants from Gaza, with the Democratic Republic of Congo being one of the countries under consideration.
“Congo will be willing to take in migrants,” said a senior source in the security cabinet, “and we’re in talks with others.”
During a Likud faction meeting on Monday, Netanyahu announced that he is involved actively in arranging for the voluntary migration of Gazans to other countries.
“Our problem is finding countries that are willing to absorb Gazans,” he said, “and we are working on it.”
Addressing Likud Knesset Member Danny Danon’s claim that, “The world is already discussing the possibilities of voluntary migration,” the prime minister acknowledged the challenge of finding countries willing to accept Gazans, but emphasised ongoing efforts in that regard. Despite these discussions, the idea of voluntary migration has faced widespread rejection from the international community.
The US State Department yesterday slammed recent statements by far-right Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir advocating the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians out of Gaza, calling the rhetoric “inflammatory and irresponsible”, Reuters has reported.
The comments from the ministers appeared to underscore fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to forcibly displace and ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territories, just as Zionist terrorist gangs did in historic Palestine in 1948.
While reports have emerged of offers for Arab forces and governments to administer Gaza, such as the Palestinian Authority or a combined force of Arab states, the predominant view on the part of Israel’s far-right government has been for Israel itself to re-occupy the Strip, expel its Palestinian population and resettle the land with Israelis and Jewish settlers.
Israel is continuing with its brutal military offensive in Gaza despite global calls for a ceasefire in the 11-week-old war. The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October against Israeli military bases and settlements in the vicinity of Gaza, during which 1,139 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed, many of them by “friendly fire” from the Israel Defence Forces. The operation was in response to “daily Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people and their sanctities,” said Hamas, notably Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem. Around 240 Israelis were captured during the operation, 110 of whom have already been exchanged for some of the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel.
Palestinian health authorities say that more than 22,000 people have been killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes since 7 October, most of them children and women. Israeli bombs have laid much of the occupied Palestinian territory to waste. Thousands more Palestinians are buried under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure. Nearly all the enclave’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes, many several times. A humanitarian catastrophe is engulfing Gaza, with famine looming.
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As Israel takes out hospitals and civilian infrastructure, infectious diseases and famine threaten to kill many more people. Several Israeli soldiers have been reported infected during the ground operations, one has died.
The real danger in the Red Sea is not a solitary Iranian ship. It is not even the Houthis’ drone and missile attacks. The true danger is the drumbeat for Western military action against Yemen. The Sunday Times reported that the U.K. was preparing to launch strikes in concert with the U.S. and possibly one other European government.
Recent FOIA-obtained data from the Department of Emergency Services in Westchester, NY reveal a shocking number of vaccine emergency calls as well as requests for ambulances to be “on standby.”
Israel’s Lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water.
The African National Congress (ANC), the oldest liberation movement turned political party on the continent, is a longtime ally of the Palestinian people. Both the ANC and the resistance movements representing the Palestinians, viewed the plight of South Africans as quite similar to the indigenous people now dominated by the State of Israel.
Over 200 active duty and retired service members are vowing to hold the Biden administration accountable for ‘trampling’ on their rights by enforcing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The mandate enacted in August 2021 led to the forced firing of over 8,000 service members who refused the shot on religious or medical grounds.
Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it? All the signs seem to point in this direction.
The ideologies and struggles of de-colonization were geared at dismantling white supremacy and political and economic domination of the domestic affairs of Caribbean states by metropolitan powers in an effort to create modern nations with the status of being self-autonomous.
Manet was the father of modern art according to Clement Greenberg – the Immanuel Kant of painting – because he probes the conditions of painting itself. In fact, this is true of both painters here. Both are steeped in the history of Western painting, both have made thorough studies of Rubens (“Rubens is God,” Manet would exclaim).
Expect the UK to intervene on Israel’s side in the South African case against Israel for Genocide at the International Court of Justice. If Israel loses, British ministers, civil servants and military personnal could end up in the dock for genocide – not only in the Hague, but in the UK.
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In this fictitious interview that never took place – the first and principal question would have been about the cost of the Israel-Gaza/Palestine War, and who would pay for it.
The short answer was the cost of the war may be Israel itself — meaning, the existence of Israel. After the genocide they have committed and are still committing in occupied Gaza and now also in the West Bank, they cannot be forgiven. Such a country cannot be allowed to exist. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are wantonly killing civilians. So far more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed of whom at least two-thirds are women and children.
After all, Israel is not even a real country. She has been established on a piece of land historically Palestine, Zionist-coerced out of the UK government, former colonial power of this part of the world – without any justification. The spineless UK leadership was then as it is today bending over backwards in the face of Zionist pressure and assumed might – and, because the powers of the “winners” of WWII all-out backing of the Zionists throughout the world.
An absurdity. But we are living in a sick-sick world, way beyond Orwellian description.
Sometimes it looks as if there was no possible healing, that we passed the point of no-return. Going back to a civilized and ethical behavior, by We, the People in the west, also called the Global North, is no longer possible.
For the creation of Israel, the UK had the backing of the young United Nations, created in 1945. At the time, in 1948, of the Zionist-forced Israel, the UN was only 53 members strong, also cowardly in the face of the former colonial powers and the “winners” of WWII – and the pressure of Zionism.
Under the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), the League of Nations (precursor to the United Nations) formally gave control of Palestine to the British government. Britain’s job was to implement the Balfour Declaration, which had been signed three years earlier, stating Britain’s desire to create a homeland in Palestine for the Jews.
The Balfour Declaration came about by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour writing on November 2, 1917, to Britain’s most illustrious Jewish citizen, Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild (real name Rosh Yilf), expressing the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The letter would eventually become known as the Balfour Declaration.
The rest is history.
Or history in the making.
The Palestinians were never asked their opinion.
After all, they were no longer under the colonial power of the UK.
By any decent international law, they should have had a decision power over their own homeland.
That was bitterly denied to them by the international community, which then like today, had no ethics, no morals and can easily be called the murderous, genocidal west, led by the self-styled – but rapidly fading – empire, the United States of America.
From the looks, law, especially international law, already then did only exist for the common people. Their Highnesses, the Lordships, and later the transatlantic elites, made their own laws as they suited them best for the moment. Today it’s called the “rules-based order”.
Very likely the UK was coerced by the Zionists into allocating Palestinian land to the creation of Israel, way before the Balfour letter, so that the Balfour Declaration became a mere rubberstamping of the fact.
In the aftermath of this horrendous ongoing Gaza massacre, having extended long ago into the West Bank, Israel could be wiped off the map and no longer exist. The falling empire and its western puppets can no longer afford pumping not just billions but eventually trillions into Israel and the region to make it livable again.
In fact, Israel is wiping herself off the map. This war will stop as soon as weapon deliveries and money stop flowing. Israel under Netanyahu can no longer face the world.
The flow of money will stop, as the dollar and its little cousin, the Euro, are every day worth less and rapidly moving into the direction of “worthless”. While per se, it has not mattered so far, as new dollars and Euros are printed as need.
However, there comes the point when even the complicit but money-thirsty Wall Street and BlackRock on top, are taking cautiously note of the fast and irreversibly accumulating national debts, risking a major industrial collapse, as in bankruptcies, and a rapidly faltering economy precisely in these countries led by the self-styled world elite, those still dreaming of a One World Order, with a One World Government.
There may be genocidal leaders, whose brutality and corrupted obedience was read, a.k.a. analyzed before they were put into their positions, like Ursula von der Leyen. Irish Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Clare Daly, called European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “Frau Genocide” over the EU’s stance on Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
Ms. Daly accused the EU Commission president of
“swooping in and overriding the foreign policies of elected governments” in recent months, while cheerleading a “brutal apartheid regime that she calls a ‘vibrant democracy.’”
Speaking from the European Parliament podium on 24 December, Ms. Daly added that von der Leyen was “elevated to power without a single vote from the citizens.”
This opinion is shared by hundreds of EU Parliament members and EU staffers, as evidenced by Irish Times which reported at least 842 EU staffers, who had signed a letter denouncing the Commission’s stance on Israel.
The document reportedly accused von der Leyen of giving a “free hand to the acceleration and legitimacy of a war crime in the Gaza Strip.”
This EU example is valid for most EU member countries, where 90% of the people condemn Israel for the war crimes it keeps committing – and this against the official policy of their compromised and corrupted governments.
Zionists are sitting everywhere in influential roles. So, these governments are everywhere around the western world.
Outside these powers of Government influence, large independent institutions, like Amsterdam’s largest and high-end Department store, De Bijenkorf, is openly calling for boycotting Israeli goods. See video below.
Similarly, the Algerian DJ Snake has issued a strong pro-Palestine statement, depicting this telling picture about Gaza and The World. See video below.
There are many money and weapon parallels between the Israeli and Ukraine aggressions. Both are leading to human mass-killings that are encouraged by the soulless west.
The consequences, or aftermath of these wars will be massive dying for years to come, from dehumanized living conditions, famine, diseases, bankruptcies, unemployment, suicide – all blending in perfectly with the Great Reset’s and the UN Agenda 2030’s major goal – massive population reduction.
Mind you, that is only one front, where this Goal Numero Uno is played out.
And mind you again, it will not happen when We, the People, will resist.
Israel, after 75 years of dishonest creation and existence – and especially after this horrendous never-before seen in recent history democide — is definitely no longer a viable and trustworthy country, if ever it was.
Scott Ritter goes as far as saying that the Israeli State is no longer allowed to exist and to pollute the face of the earth; he is no longer in favor of a Two-State Solution, but a One-State-Solution, and the One State is Palestine; going on saying, the concept of a Jewish State called Israel is dead. Listen to his full 3-min short video.
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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 at 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: Palestinian rescue services remove the bodies of members of the Shaaban family, all six of whom were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, western Gaza, October 9, 2023. (Mohammed Zaanoun)
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It must be time for another round of hyperventilating about Iranian naval vessels. Bloomberg published this report today:
Iran’s dispatch of a warship to the Red Sea is its boldest move yet to challenge US forces in the key trade route, emboldening Houthi militants whose missiles have disrupted shipping over the past two months.
Tehran is unlikely to want direct confrontation — its old frigate being no match for the US-led maritime task force patrolling the waters off Yemen — but it takes the projection of Iranian power in the region to another level.
The Iranian government periodically sends its ships to show their flag in different places, and every time there is a ridiculous overreaction in the West. In 2021, they sent two of their ships into the Atlantic. Deranged hawks feared might be headed to Venezuela (to supply them with speedboats!), but it turned out that they were just on their way to participate in a commemorative event in Russia. Then two ships made a port call in Rio de Janeiro last year, and we were once again treated to a hawkish freakout over the dire “threat” that these ships allegedly posed to the entire hemisphere. Now they have sent a frigate to the Red Sea, which is even less remarkable than sending ships into the Atlantic. It must be time to panic again.
As everyone understands, one frigate poses no real threat to the many U.S. ships that have been sent to run interference for Israel’s atrocious war in Gaza protect “freedom of navigation,” and this particular frigate is fifty year-old relic of the pre-revolutionary monarchy’s military spending spree. Sending one ship into an international waterway isn’t projecting much power at all, so it is hard to take seriously claims that it takes Iranian power projection to “another level.” The fact that the Iranian government is sending only one ship shows that it has no intention of doing anything in the Red Sea, and it is at most signaling its support for Houthi actions. All of this underscores that the hawkish fear of Iran as a would-be regional hegemon is laughable.
The real danger in the Red Sea is not a solitary Iranian ship. It is not even the Houthis’ drone and missile attacks. The true danger is the drumbeat for Western military action against Yemen. The Sunday Times reported that the U.K. was preparing to launch strikes in concert with the U.S. and possibly one other European government:
Under the plans the UK would join with the US and possibly another European country to unleash a salvo of missiles against pre-planned targets, either in the sea or in Yemen itself, where the militants are based.
It is understood that the co-ordinated strikes could involve RAF warplanes or HMS Diamond, a Type 45 destroyer which successfully destroyed an attack drone with a Sea Viper missile in the Red Sea this month.
A statement is expected to be released by Britain and the US in the coming days that will warn the Houthis to stop attacking commercial vessels or face the West’s military might.
As I said last week, this is extremely stupid. The Houthis will almost certainly ignore these warnings, and then the U.S. and its partners will then feel compelled to back up their ill-advised threats by escalating. When the first rounds of strikes achieve little or nothing, there will be predictable demands for more. Rather than acknowledge failure, the Biden administration and the other governments will then press on with a bombing campaign that will kill many Yemenis without stopping Houthi attacks. That in turn would likely provoke more Houthi attacks on a wider range of targets. Instead of stabilizing the region and ensuring safe passage for commercial vessels, this would have the opposite effect on both counts.
The one thing that might actually stop the attacks for the foreseeable future would be to pressure the Israeli government to halt its destructive campaign, so of course this is the one option that no Western government is seriously contemplating.
The idea that the US should open a new front against the Houthis in response to their attacking shipping in protest of the Gaza massacre instead of, you know, *ending support for the Gaza massacre* is one of the most DC-brained things ever.
If the U.S. successfully pressed for a ceasefire and an end to the siege, it is likely that Houthi attacks on commercial shipping would also stop. The U.S. ought to be pressing for a ceasefire and an end to the siege anyway because its support for the collective punishment of the people of Gaza is a terrible crime. It would have the added benefit of reducing tensions elsewhere in the region.
Further escalation is exactly the wrong thing to do if the U.S. doesn’t want the war to spread. That means that the U.S. should be leaning hard on the Israeli government to scrap any plans it might have for a new campaign in Lebanon, and it also means shutting down all this talk of striking targets in Yemen. The U.S. can’t afford and shouldn’t seek new wars anywhere, and especially not in the Middle East.
If the Biden administration chooses escalation on one or more fronts, it will be responsible for the ensuing regional disaster.
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Top officials from around the world have firmly dismissed the possibility of a second Nakba – the “catastrophe” in the late 1940s when Zionist militias forcibly displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians for the establishment of the State of Israel – or what more recently high-ranking far-right Israeli officials have called “voluntary” resettlement of Palestinians overseas.
Israel unveiled its nefarious design amid a brutal war on Gaza, where it has killed nearly 23,000 people since October 7 – most of them women and children.
Despite growing global pressure on Israel to end what has been described as a “collective punishment” of Gaza’s civilians, the far-right Netanyahu had doubled down on its rhetoric along with the military offensive.
In recent days, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrichhas called for Palestinian residents in besieged Gaza to leave “voluntarily” to be replaced by Israelis.
Ultra-nationalist Security Minister and rabble-rouser Itamar Ben Gvir made similar remarks, calling the exodus of Palestinians and the establishment of Israeli settlements a “correct, just, moral and humane solution”.
According to The Times of Israel, a senior Israeli official has held talks with several countries over what it calls the “potential absorption” of Palestinians.
Congo is alleged to have held “secret contacts” about the prospect of taking in Palestinians.
Saudi Arabia, according to The Times of Israel, was also discussed amid a construction boom in the Kingdom concerning the prospect of taking in “hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for work.”
However, the idea has been quickly condemned by the international community.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk has said he was “very disturbed” after comments by senior Israeli officials calling for Palestinians to leave Gaza.
“Very disturbed by high-level Israeli officials’ statements on plans to transfer civilians from Gaza to third countries,” Turk wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The European Union’s top foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, also condemned the remarks and the possibility of displacing Palestinians from Gaza.
“I strongly condemn the inflammatory and irresponsible statements by Israeli ministers Ben Gvir & Smotrich slandering the Palestinian population of Gaza and calling for a plan for their emigration,” he wrote X, formerly Twitter.
Borrell also underscored how “forced displacements are strictly prohibited as a grave violation of IHL (international humanitarian law), and words matter.”
The UK has said that it “firmly rejects any suggestion of the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza”.
In a written statement, it added that it “share(s) the concerns of our allies and partners that Gazans should not be subject to forcible displacement or relocation from Gaza.”
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew the last of its troops and settlers from Gaza, ending its occupation of the coastal enclave dating back to 1967. Nevertheless, today, Israel holds close control over the territory’s borders, leaving some rights groups to declare it an open-air prison.
Even Israel’s all-weather ally, the US, baulked at the idea.
State Department Spokesman Matthew Millerissued a written statement condemning the remarks while calling the rhetoric “inflammatory and irresponsible”.
“We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately,” he said.
Publication Axios described the US’ remarks as “the strongest public condemnation the Biden administration has voiced against Israeli government officials since Hamas’ October 7 attack.”
It added that the US remarks signal “the growing concerns in the Biden administration that Netanyahu isn’t reigning in the radical-right wing ministers in his coalition.”
However, Ben Gvir – who in 2007 was convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist group that had made previous calls for genocide against Palestinians – rebuffed the US’ rebuke.
“I really admire the United States of America, but with all due respect, we are not another star in the American flag,” he said on social media.
Ben Gvir went on to underscore the pursuit of Israel’s interests behind the plan to displace the Palestinians.
“The United States is our best friend, but first of all, we will do what is best for the State of Israel: the migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow the residents of the enclave to return home and live in security and protect the IDF soldiers,” he added on X.
Other nations have earlier expressed fears about the potential displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
In November, almost a month into Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov linked the resettlement of Palestinians to a threat to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
After a meeting with his Kuwaiti counterpart Salem Abdullah Al Jaber Al Sabah, Lavrov underscored that any potential resettlement plans would not bring peace to the region but only sow the “grapes of wrath”.
The ongoing Israeli onslaught has levelled large areas of Gaza to the ground, leaving swathes in ruins.
Reportedly, 60 percent of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, and around two million residents have been displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicines.
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On December 30, the newly-formed International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine convened around the urgent need for nations to invoke the Genocide Convention as a way to end the State of Israel’s devastating bombing campaign and additional war crimes being committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. That effort advanced on December 29 when South Africa submitted a well-documented case against Israel to the International Court of Justice.
The Coalition—which includes Progressive International, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Black Alliance for Peace, Popular Resistance, CODEPINK, the National Lawyers Guild and numerous other groups—strongly supports the call issued on January 2 by the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Coordinating Committee (PAACC) urging governments to support South Africa’s complaint with Declarations of Intervention, which can be filed before or after the hearing, scheduled to take place on January 11 and 12, 2024.
Declarations of Intervention in support of South Africa’s invocation of the Genocide Convention against Israel will increase the likelihood that a positive finding of the crime of genocide will be enforced by the United Nations such that actions will be taken to end all acts of genocide and those who are responsible for the acts will be held accountable.
“It’s imperative that more states follow South Africa’s historic leadership demanding Israel is held accountable under international law,” said Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild and member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She added, “One clear and immediate way to do that is to file Declarations of Intervention supporting South Africa’s filing in the ICJ under the Genocide Convention. The increasing global isolation of Israel and the US and their European allies is an indicator that this is a key moment for popular movements to move their governments in the direction of taking these steps and being on the right side of history.”
Adely led an international delegation to Cairo last November to demand the opening of Rafah border crossing.
Ajamu Baraka, chair of the coordinating committee of the Black Alliance for Peace, which has repeatedly condemned Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in occupied Palestine, stated,
“The action by the South African government is a courageous attempt to do no less than salvage the credibility of the international mechanisms that were meant to protect human rights and international law. The South African petition is a reminder that it is a legal and moral imperative for states and international civil society to oppose impunity. Genocide has been identified as one of the most egregious international crimes. If the Israeli state and its backers are allowed to escape justice and international condemnation, it will strip the current international system of justice of any legitimacy.”
Lamis Deek, a Palestinian attorney based in New York, whose firm convened the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation’s Commission on War Crimes Justice, Reparations, and Return and co-launched the Global Legal Alliance for Palestine, added that
“This is the rare case where collective social pressure urging governments to support the South African case can be a sharp turning point for Palestine. Through the ICJ, South Africa is poised to strike a decisive blow against this brutal genocide and torture campaign led by Israel in coordination with the United States. We need more states to file supporting interventions- and we need the court to feel the watchful eye of the masses so as to withstand what will be extreme US political pressure on the Court. International Humanitarian Laws and institutions are meant to be, and must be seen as, tools for the people, not distant abstractions. People can- and should- play a strategic and powerful role by integrating this advocacy into their solidarity work, not only until their governments file supporting interventions but until the ICJ delivers justice.”
The International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine urges human rights, labor, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and other groups to increase public pressure by mobilizing to demand that their respective countries immediately submit Declarations of Intervention to the International Court of Justice. No matter how the World Court decides South Africa’s case, the coalition is committed to ending the genocide in Palestine and will continue to take action to make this the reality.
The International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine is currently building global support for this effort by circulating a sign-on letter, which already has over 100 endorsing organizations. The letter can be read and endorsed here.
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Featured image: Demonstrators in Berlin take the streets in solidarity with Palestine (Photo: Montecruz Foto)