Palestinian prisoners reach agreement to achieve demands, end hunger strike
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | April 16, 2019
Palestinian prisoners have reached an agreement with the Israeli prison administration to achieve their demands and suspend their hunger strike, the Battle of Dignity 2, on Monday, 15 April. The agreement came as hundreds of Palestinian prisoners were engaged in their eighth day of a collective hunger strike.
According to the leadership of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, the agreement includes the installation of public telephones in the prison sections, which prisoners would be allowed to use three times a week for 15-minute calls, as well as stopping the installation of cell-phone jamming devices. In addition, the repressive measures and sanctions imposed in the past year upon the prisoners will also be lifted, while fines imposed on prisoners in recent struggles inside the prisons would be reduced. Hundreds more prisoners have been set to join the hunger strike in the coming days, especially 17 April, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society said that the agreement also included provisions to transfer the women prisoners from Damon prison to another detention center; the prisoners have repeatedly cited harsh, difficult conditions unsuitable for human life in the Damon prison. In addition, sick prisoners would be returned to the previous section in the Ramleh prison clinic, an area that was considered better than their current location.
The National and Islamic Forces held a press conference in Gaza City to highlight the prisoners’ final statement. “The battle is not over; the hardest phase of this struggle is to implement what has been agreed upon,” the prisoners wrote, noting that previous agreements have been repeatedly broken by the Israeli prison administration.
They saluted the prisoners in section 4 of the Negev desert prison and section 1 in Ramon prison who were attacked by Israeli repressive forces, noting that “their great sacrifices underline that freedom and dignity are… human rights that cannot be denied.” They saluted Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, occupied Palestine ’48 and exile and diaspora, as well as supporters of freedom around the world, journalists and prisoners’ centers, that stood with the prisoners in their struggle. The statement particularly saluted “the people and leadership in Gaza,” noting their unity in commitment to the struggle.
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network expresses its strongest salutes and greetings to all of the Palestinian prisoners on this occasion of victory. These achievements follow on many historical accomplishments of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, on the front lines of the Palestinian liberation struggle, extracting their victories through great sacrifice, with their bodies and lives on the line. As Palestinian Prisoners Day approaches, we emphasize our continuing dedication to work for the freedom of all Palestinian prisoners and the freedom of Palestine from the river to the sea.
In addition, we urge people around the world to continue their solidarity activities to support the Palestinian prisoners, throughout the coming days, months and years, until their freedom is achieved. In particular, we emphasize the cases of three Palestinian prisoners who remain on hunger strike: Hussam al-Ruzza (61), Mohammed Tabanja (40) and Khaled Farraj (31). Al-Ruzza has been on hunger strike since 19 March – nearly one month – while Tabanja and Farraj have been on hunger strike since 25 March. All are held without charge or trial under administrative detention orders, and their detention has been repeatedly and arbitrarily renewed.
They are among nearly 500 Palestinians out of approximately 5,500 Palestinian prisoners jailed with no charges and no trial for indefinitely renewable periods under administrative detention. The end of administrative detention is a long-time demand of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement and supporters of justice and liberation around the world. Join the call to free Hussam al-Ruzza, Mohammed Tabanja, Khaled Farraj and all Palestinian prisoners!
Italian banking major to pay hefty US fine for Iran sanctions-busting
RT | April 16, 2019
European subsidiaries of Italy’s biggest bank UniCredit have pleaded guilty to US charges of violating sanctions against Iran and other countries. The lender has agreed to pay $1.3 billion to settle the six-year probe.
UniCredit’s units in Germany, Austria and Italy admitted to illegally moving of hundreds millions of dollars via the US financial system on behalf of sanctioned entities, according to the US Treasury Department. The violations reportedly included sanctions programs against [alleged] weapons of mass destruction proliferation.
The resolution, which is among the largest ever related to US sanctions laws, followed last week’s $1.1 billion settlement reached by London-based banking multinational Standard Chartered with American and British authorities over similar misconduct.
The latest case revealed that UniCredit’s subsidiary in Germany processed more than 2,000 payments totaling over $500 million through US financial institutions. In addition, over two years through 2012 all the three of the bank’s units reportedly carried out transactions, withholding information on sanctioned persons or countries from the US authorities.
The US Treasury Department noted that the illegal cash proceedings were carried out to several states subject to US penalties, including Burma, Cuba, Libya, Sudan, and Syria.
Since 2004, some 15 European lenders paid about $18.5 billion to US authorities to resolve claims over violating Washington’s sanctions programs. A record $8.9 billion settlement was reached by French international banking group BNP Paribas in 2015.
Trump Dances to Israel’s Tune
More wag-the-dog means war for America
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • April 16, 2019
So newly reelected Israeli monster-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted, with a grin, that America’s President Donald J. Trump followed through on his proposal to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group. Bibi was smiling because the timing of the move, one day before the Israeli election, strongly suggests it was done to assist him against what had become a very strong opposition challenge. That Trump likely colluded with Netanyahu to blatantly interfere in the election has apparently bothered no one in Israel or in the tame American media.
The gift from Washington came on top of recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, threatening members of the International Criminal Court if they try to prosecute Israel for war crimes, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, removing the word “occupation” from the State Department’s assessments of human rights infringements on the West Bank, eliminating relief funding for Palestinian refugees, leaving the U.N. Human Rights Council because it was too critical of Israel, and looking the other way as Israel declared itself a state only for Jews. Washington also ignored the bombing of hospitals, schools and water treatment infrastructure in Gaza while Israeli army snipers were shooting unarmed demonstrators demanding their freedom.
The labeling of the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group is particularly disturbing as it means that the United States military by virtue of the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) now has a mandate to attack the IRGC wherever it appears, including in Syria or even in the waterway the Straits of Hormuz, where the guard has regular patrols in small boats. It is a de facto declaration of war and it comes on top of a number of deliberate provocations directed against Iran starting with the withdrawal from the nuclear agreement Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) one year ago, which led to the unilateral imposition of harsh sanctions directed against the Iranian economy to bring about a popular uprising as well as regularly repeated false claims that Iran is the leading “state sponsor of terrorism.” Next month, the U.S. will begin enforcing a unilaterally declared worldwide sanction on any and all Iranian oil sales.
Netanyahu pledged to annex Israeli settlements on the largely Palestinian West Bank if elected, which is undoubtedly a move cleared in advance with the Trump team of foreign policy sociopaths as it de facto puts an end to any delusional speculation over a possible two-state negotiated solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict. It will also lead to a massive upsurge in violence as the Palestinians object, which is neither a concern for the White House or Netanyahu, as they are assuming that it can be suppressed by overwhelming force directed against an almost completely unarmed civilian population.
And Trump will no doubt expect Bibi to return the favor when he is running for reelection in 2020 by encouraging American Jews who care about Israel to support the Republicans. Trump is focused on his own electability and is absolutely shameless about his betrayal of actual American interests in the Middle East, possibly because he has no inkling of the actual damage that he is doing. His speech last week before the casino multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson-hosted Jewish Republican Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas was a disgusting pander to a group that includes many key players who have little or no concern for what happens to the United States as long as Israel flourishes. The only good news that came out of the meeting was that Adelson himself appears to be “gravely ill.”
Trump at times appeared to be speaking to what he thought was a group of Israelis, referring to “your prime minister” when mentioning Benjamin Netanyahu and several times describing Israel as “yours,” suggesting that deep down he understands that many American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. At another point, Trump declared that “The Democrats have even allowed the terrible scourge of anti-Semitism to take root in their party and their country,” apparently part of a White House plan to keep playing that card to turn American Jews and their political donations in a Republican direction before elections in 2020.
Trump also told the Republican Coalition audience how he came to a decision on recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He described how “he’d been speaking to his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, as well as U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman and his Israel adviser, Jason Greenblatt, over the phone about an unrelated issue when he suddenly brought up the Golan Heights.” Trump shared how “I said, ‘Fellows, do me a favor. Give me a little history, quick. Want to go fast. I got a lot of things I’m working on: China, North Korea. Give me a quickie.’ After the advisers filled him in, Trump said he asked Friedman: ‘David, what do you think about me recognizing Israel and the Golan Heights?’ Friedman, apparently surprised by the suggestion, reacted like a ‘wonderful, beautiful baby,’ Trump said, and asked if he would ‘really … do that.’ ‘Yeah, I think I’m doing it right now. Let’s write something up,’ Trump said he responded, prompting applause and cheers from his audience in Las Vegas. ‘We make fast decisions and we make good decisions.’”
Putting the Trump story about the Golan Heights in some kind of context is not really that difficult. He wanted an answer to please Netanyahu and he went to three Orthodox Jews who support the illegal Israeli settlements and have also individually contributed financially to their growth so he was expecting the response that he got. That he was establishing a precedent by his moves on Jerusalem and the Golan apparently did not occur to him as his administration prides itself on having a foreign policy vision that extends no longer than the beginning of next week, which is why he hired Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. And then there is always the doleful Stephen Miller lurking in the background as well as the three musketeers of Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman for really serious questions relating to why acceding to the wishes of parasite state Israel should continue to be the apparent number one priority of the government of the United States.
Donald Trump neither poses nor answers the question why he feels compelled to fulfill all of the campaign pledges he made to the Jewish community, which by and large did not vote for him, while failing to carry out the promises made to those who actually did support him. The absurd Jewish Republican Coalition narrative about how Trump gave Israel the Golan Heights should have resulted in a flood of opprobrium in the U.S. media about his profound ignorance and fundamental hypocrisy, but there was largely silence.
The nonsense going on in Las Vegas in front of a lot of fat cats who regard the United States as little more than a cash cow that they control as well as in the White House itself unfortunately has real world consequences. America is being led by the nose by a well-entrenched and powerful group of Israeli loyalists and this will not end well. The U.S. doesn’t even have a Middle Eastern foreign policy anymore – it has a “to do” list handed by Netanyahu to whomever is president. The fact that the current man in charge in Washington is either so ignorant or so deluded as to allow the process to escalate until the U.S. is drawn into yet more catastrophic wars is beyond regrettable. U.S. foreign policy should not depend on the perceptions of Kushner and company. It should be based on real, tangible American interests, not those of Israel. Someone should explain that to the president.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Medicare for All 64-Year-Olds
By Dean Baker | CEPR | April 12, 2019
The push for universal Medicare was given new momentum by Bernie Sanders campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination. While it is still quite far from becoming law in even an optimistic scenario, it is certainly now treated as a serious political position. This is probably best demonstrated by the fact that the Medicare for All (M4A) bill put forward by Washington representative Pramila Jayapal has 107 co-sponsors, nearly half of the Democratic caucus in the House.
As much progress as M4A has made, it will still be a huge lift to get it implemented. A universal Medicare system would mean shifting somewhere around 8 percent of GDP ($1.6 trillion at 2019 levels) from the private system to a government-managed system. It would also mean reorganizing the Medicaid program and other government-run health care programs, as well as the Medicare program itself. The current system has large co-pays and many gaps in coverage, such as dental care, that most proponents of M4A would like to fill. It also has a large role for private insurers in the Medicare Advantage program, as well as the Part D prescription drug benefit.
The difficulty of a transition is demonstrated by the fact that there is no agreed-upon mechanism for paying for this expansion of Medicare. Instead of a specific financing mechanism, the Jayapal bill features a menu of options. Actual legislation, of course, requires specific revenue sources, not a menu. The fact, that even the most progressive members of the House could not agree on a financing proposal that they could put their names to, shows the difficulty of the transition.
If it is not likely that we will get to M4A in a single step, then it makes sense to find ways to get there piecemeal. There have been a variety of proposals that go in this direction. Many have proposed lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from the current 65 to age 50 or 60. The idea is that we would bring in a large proportion of the pre-Medicare age population, and then gradually go further down the age ladder. (We can also start at the bottom and move up.)
This sort of age reduction approach is a reasonable incremental path, but going to age 50 or even age 60 would still be a considerable expense. There are over 60 million people in the age cohorts from 50 to 64. Including these people in Medicare at a single point would be a very serious lift. Even the more narrow group from age 60 to 64 still has almost 20 million people. That would a substantial expense.
But we can make the first step even more gradual. We can just add people when they turn age 64 instead of the current 65. At first glance, this would be a bit less than 4 million people. Medicare’s payments per enrollee (net of premiums) are roughly $11,500. That would translate into $46 billion annually, roughly 1.0 percent of the total budget.
But this is likely to hugely overstate the actual cost for two reasons. First, many 64-year olds will already have their insurance covered by the government. Roughly 20 percent of this age group is on Medicare as a result of being on Social Security disability. At least 10 percent more is covered by Medicaid. If we add people who are getting insurance as current or former government employees, we would almost certainly get over 40 percent already being insured through some government program, and possibly as high as 50 percent.
In addition, the Medicare costs for the new group of 64-year-olds are likely to be far less than the overall average. On average, people in this age group would have health care costs of around 70 percent of the over 65 population as a whole. But the least healthy portion of the 64-year-old population is likely already covered by either Medicare, as a result of disability, or Medicaid.
If we assume that the average costs for the people we are adding to the government’s tab are half of the overall average for Medicare, this gets us $5,750 per person. If we assume that we are adding 60 percent of this age group, that comes to 2.4 million people. That gives us a total tab of $13.8 billion, less than 0.3 percent of total spending, or roughly the amount the Pentagon spends in a week. It would be pretty hard to argue that this is not an affordable tab.
If even that expense proves too much for the deficit hawks to handle, then maybe we can move up the age of eligibility by one month or one week. At that point, we’re talking about the cost of a few weekends for Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Doing this one-year reduction in the Medicare age would be a test of how easily a reduction in the age of eligibility can be done. It should open the door to further reductions in future years. It is also likely to be popular politically. People in their late 50s and early 60s will surely appreciate the fact that they are one year closer to qualifying for Medicare. That is especially likely to the case with people who do not have good insurance through their employer and/or have serious health conditions.
The proposal for a one-year reduction in the age of eligibility should also help to clarify where things stand within the Democratic caucus. Many members have argued against having the party endorse M4A.
Some of this opposition undoubtedly reflects realistic political concerns that a quick switchover from the current system to M4A will not be popular in many districts. Many people are satisfied with the insurance they have now and will be reluctant to support what they will view as a big leap into the unknown. Perhaps these people can be convinced over time that a universal Medicare-type system will be at least as good for them, but they are not there now.
However, some of the pushback stems from the fact that many Democrats have long depended on campaign contributions from the health care industry. While the party has not gotten as much money as the Republicans, many members do get substantial contributions, which they are not prepared to abandon.
Medicare for All 64-Year-Olds should be a great way to clearly identify these people. They can’t have a principled objection to moving up the age of Medicare eligibility by one year. Nor can they plausibly claim that this is some budget-busting proposal. Congress routinely approves spending increases of this size for the military without batting an eye.
If some Democrats in Congress dig in their heels and insist that Medicare for All 64-Year-Olds is something that they cannot support, it is not because they are afraid that it won’t work. It’s because they are afraid that it will.
Of course, lowering the age of Medicare eligibility is not the only thing that we should be doing as part of near-term health care reform. We should look to open Medicare to the population as a whole on a voluntary basis. We should also look to make the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act more generous. And, we should be looking to bring our payments for prescription drugs, medical equipment, and doctors more in line with payments in other wealthy countries.
We pay twice as much in all three areas as other wealthy countries. There is no justification for such massive overpayments in the United States. In the case of prescription drugs and medical equipment, in the short term, we should adopt the same sort of price controls as are used in other countries. In the longer term, we should be moving away from patent monopoly financing for the development of these items. We should instead do direct upfront public funding, with the idea that these products will in the future be sold as generics at free market prices (see Rigged, chapter 5 [it’s free]).
But lowering the Medicare age to 64 is a really big first step. It is also a great way of clarifying the debate by letting us know which Democrats work for the health care industry.
Zarif’s reminder to E3: No prohibition on enrichment under JCPOA
Press TV – April 15, 2019
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has reminded the Europeans that a 2015 nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, does not prohibit the country from enriching uranium.
Zarif’s reprimand in a Monday tweet came after French Ambassador to the US Gerard Araud said Tehran should not need to be “massively enriching uranium after the JCPOA.”
“Reminder to our E3 partners in #JCPOA: There is NO prohibition on the enrichment of uranium by Iran under #NPT, JCPOA or UNSCR 2231,” Zarif tweeted, addressing France, Germany and Britain.
The three European countries opted to remain in the nuclear deal after US President Donald Trump abandoned it last May and reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Araud tweeted Saturday that “sanctions could be reimposed” on Iran once the nuclear deal expires after 10 years, prompting the Islamic Republic to summon France’s ambassador to Tehran.
“Neither now, nor in 2025 or beyond. Might be useful for European partners to actually read the document they signed on to, and pledged to defend,” Zarif retorted on Monday.
In January, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian threatened Iran with sanctions if it did not address what he alleged as international concerns over Tehran’s ballistic missile program.
“We are ready, if the talks don’t yield results, to apply sanctions firmly, and they know it,” Le Drian said.
Earlier this month, Britain, France and Germany accused Iran of “developing missile technology in violation of UN resolution,” and called for a full UN report in a letter delivered to UN chief Antonio Guterres.
The EU trio also claimed that Iran’s launch of a space vehicle and unveiling of two new ballistic missiles in February were inconsistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which was adopted just after the signing of the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Resolution 2231 calls on Iran “not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”
Iran denies having any such program and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly confirmed the peaceful nature of Tehran’s nuclear activities.
In his Saturday tweet, deleted later, Araud said, “As we said in 2002 that enriching uranium without a credible civilian program was illegal under the NPT, we’ll be able to react likewise in 2025 if necessary. Sanctions were imposed. Sanctions could be reimposed.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry called Araud’s remarks “unacceptable” and in “open violation” of the nuclear deal.
The ministry’s Hossein Sadat Meidani called for an explanation from Paris, saying that if the case is not addressed, Tehran will pursue it based on the mechanisms envisaged in the JCPOA.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi also warned France of adverse effects of Araud’s remarks, saying such statements amount to blatant violation of the nuclear accord.
Under the JCPOA, Iran undertook to put limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of nuclear-related sanctions imposed against the country.
Last month, IAEA head Yukiya Amano once again reaffirmed Iran’s compliance with its commitments under the deal.
The noble corruption of climate science
By Larry Kummer | Fabius Maximus | April 11, 2019
The climate change campaign hits a dead end
On 24 June 1988, James Hansen’s testimony to the Senate began the campaign to fight anthropogenic global warming. During the following 31 years we have heard increasingly dire forecasts of doom. Some describe the distant future, beyond any reasonable forecasting horizon (due to both technical and social uncertainties). Some describe the near future. Many attribute almost all current extreme weather to our emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) – using impossible to validate methods.
Karl Popper said that successful predictions, especially of the unexpected, were the gold standard of science (see here). That is a problem for climate activists. The Earth has been warming since the mid-19th century, when the Little Ice Age ended. The rate of warming in the past four decades (since 1977) is roughly the same as that during the four decades up to 1945. Anthropogenic GHG became a major factor only after WWII. So warming has occurred as predicted, but a naive forecast (without considering GHG) would have also predicted warming. There are explanations for this, but it makes model validation difficult (perhaps why it is seldom attempted: see links in section f in the For More Info section of this post).
Worse, the weather has not cooperated. Major hurricanes avoided America for 11 years, ending in 2017. Warming slowed during what climate scientists called the “pause” or “hiatus” (see links about its causes). And most forms of extreme weather have no obvious increasing trend. So surveys show little public support in America for expensive measures to fight climate change.
Activists grow desperate
“The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine –
“Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: what climate change could wreak
– sooner than you think.”
Expanded into a book: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.“The five ways the human race could be WIPED OUT because of global warming.”
By Rod Ardehali at the Daily Mail. H/t to the daily links at Naked Capitalism.
Promo for Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, a book by Bill McKibben.
Activists responded to the uncooperative weather by making ever-more dire predictions (many of which have passed their due date and been proven false). All extreme weather was “climate change.” They made more vivid propaganda (e.g., the 10:10 video, showing a teacher exploding the heads of students who do not accept her propaganda). They increased the volume of their claims, with more 2-minute hate sessions for dissenters (with lies about even eminent climate scientists). The long-term effects of this are (hopefully) small, since these fear barrages have been the Left’s go-to tactic since the 1960s (see some classics of the genre).
But one tactic might have awful long-term consequences. Many activists are climate scientists (see the many stories about depression among them, overcome by fears about their worst-case scenarios, such as this and this). Some have reacted with noble lie corruption (from Plato’s The Republic). However well-intended, it might weaken the public’s trust in science (as might the replication crisis, of which this is an example, if they learn about it).
The Noble Lie in action
Obvious evidence of this is climate scientists’ relentless focus on RCP8.5, the worst-case scenario in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. As a good worst-case should be, it is almost impossible to happen without unlikely assumptions (details here; also see Dr. Curry’s articles). Yet it receives the majority of mentions in the climate science literature – usually with no mention of its improbable nature (see this history). Activists exaggerate these papers, whose stories are uncritically reported by journalists. A decade of this bombardment has a fraction of the Left terrified, certain that we are doomed.
For a recent example, see “A glacier the size of Florida is on track to change the course of human civilization” by “Pakalolo” at the Daily Kos. Widely reposted, quite bonkers. See the details here.
Worse, climate scientists remain silent when activists exaggerate their work, even when they materially misrepresenting it. The most extreme doomster predictions are greeted by silence. Even over-top climate doomster claims receive only mild push-back. For example, see the reactions to “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells. WaPo: “Scientists challenge magazine story about ‘uninhabitable Earth’.” Climate Feedback: “Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on “The Uninhabitable Earth” gets wrong.” It was too much even for Michael Mann.
Yet leading climate scientists are quick to loudly condemn skeptics – even fellow climate scientists – for questioning aggressive claims about climate change. Allowing activists to call scientists “deniers” for challenging the current paradigm is imo among the most irresponsible actions by leaders of science, ever. By ancient law, silence means assent to activists’ behavior. They are guilty of “aiding and abetting.” For more about this, see About the corruption of climate science.
But in the past few years, activist scientists’ desperation appears to have pushed them to take another step away from science.
Papers to generate alarmist news!
As Marc Morano of Climate Depot says, recent studies often appear designed to produce media stories for alarmists. I see several of these every week. The most recent is “Key indicators of Arctic climate change: 1971–2017” in Environmental Research Letters (April 2019), by scientists at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland in Copenhagen. Abstract:
“Key observational indicators of climate change in the Arctic, most spanning a 47 year period (1971–2017) demonstrate fundamental changes among nine key elements of the Arctic system. …Downward trends continue in sea ice thickness (and extent) and spring snow cover extent and duration, while near-surface permafrost continues to warm. Several of the climate indicators exhibit a significant statistical correlation with air temperature or precipitation, reinforcing the notion that increasing air temperatures and precipitation are drivers of major changes in various components of the Arctic system. …
“The Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th Century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic. The indicator time series of this study are freely downloadable at AMAP.no.”
Ecowatch describes it in their usual apocalyptic fashion: “Researchers Warn Arctic Has Entered ‘Unprecedented State’ That Threatens Global Climate Stability.”
The paper is odd in several ways. It is evidence showing the broken peer-review process. Five times they describe conditions in the arctic as “unprecedented.” But they start their analysis with data from the 1970’s. Given the various kinds of long-term natural fluctuations, five decades of data is too brief a period to draw such a bold conclusion.
The authors neglect to mention that the Arctic was also warm in the 1930’s. Which is strange since one of the authors, Uma S. Bhatt, was also a co-author of a major paper on the subject: “Variability and Trends of Air Temperature and Pressure in the Maritime Arctic, 1875–2000” in the Journal of Climate, June 2003. She did not even cite it in their new paper. Abstract …
“Arctic atmospheric variability during the industrial era (1875–2000) is assessed using spatially averaged surface air temperature (SAT) and sea level pressure (SLP) records. Air temperature and pressure display strong multidecadal variability on timescales of 50–80 yr [termed low-frequency oscillation (LFO)]. Associated with this variability, the Arctic SAT record shows two maxima: in the 1930s–40s and in recent decades, with two colder periods in between.
“In contrast to the global and hemispheric temperature, the maritime Arctic temperature was higher in the late 1930s through the early 1940s than in the 1990s. … Thus, the large-amplitude multidecadal climate variability impacting the maritime Arctic may confound the detection of the true underlying climate trend over the past century. LFO-modulated trends for short records are not indicative of the long-term behavior of the Arctic climate system.
“The accelerated warming and a shift of the atmospheric pressure pattern from anticyclonic to cyclonic in recent decades can be attributed to a positive LFO phase. It is speculated that this LFO-driven shift was crucial to the recent reduction in Arctic ice cover. Joint examination of air temperature and pressure records suggests that peaks in temperature associated with the LFO follow pressure minima after 5–15 yr. Elucidating the mechanisms behind this relationship will be critical to understanding the complex nature of low-frequency variability.”
Starting their analysis in the 1970s is misleading without disclosing that was a cold spell. There was concern then about global cooling (but not a consensus). See here and here for details. Starting in the 1970’s makes current conditions look extraordinary. Since we are in the warming period following the Little Ice Age, robust comparisons should include previous warm periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene climatic optimum.
A later paper provides more detail, showing the temperature anomaly in 2008 was aprox. 1°C warmer than the ~1940 peak: “Role of Polar Amplification in Long-Term Surface Air Temperature Variations and Modern Arctic Warming” by Roman V. Bekryaev et al. in Journal of Climate, 15 July 2010. Is that a one standard deviation from the long-term mean? Three? Are temperatures a normal distribution? They do not say. Climate science papers often use arcane statistics, but usually ignore the basics. (Here is an as yet unpublished estimate of arctic sea ice back to the 1880s. Here is a 2017 paper with arctic temperatures and sea ice extent back to 1900)
Two comments from climate scientists on this paper.
“It is normalization of data cherry picking.”
— Dr. Judith Curry (bio). She her analysis of arctic sea ice trends here and here. She writes at Climate Etc.“Of course, if these changes are predominantly due to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and/or the LFO, we should see a reversal. If not, the trend would continue. Time will eventually sort this out. But a proper literature summary should still be provided with papers that might disagree with the theme of a newer paper. All peer-reviewed perspectives on this subject should be given.”
— Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. (bio).
See other examples in the comments. These kind of stories are coming along like trolleys.
This is a follow-up to About the corruption of climate science.
Conclusions
Science has been politicized, distorting its results, before. It will be again. But climate science provides essential insights on several major public policy issues. Losing reliable guidance from it could have disastrous consequences. Worse, the high public profile of climate science means that a loss of public confidence in it might affect science as a whole.
Let’s hope that the leaders of climate science come to their senses soon, despite their personal, institutional, and ideological reasons to continue on this dark path.
For More Information
Hat tip on the ERL 2019 paper to Naked Capitalism’s daily links, who uncritically run climate alarmist articles, a one-side flow of information without context – terrifying their Leftist readers (other than that, their daily links are a valuable resource – which read every morning).
Why Attenborough’s Walrus Claims Are Fake
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 14, 2019
Our Planet has showcased hundreds of walruses falling off a 260ft cliff to a slow, agonising death in heartbreaking scenes
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/8800576/netflix-david-attenborough-our-planet-walrus-heartbreaking/
Last week, the new Netflix series, Our Planet, was launched with great fanfare. Narrated by David Attenborough, however, one segment made headlines around the world, showcasing hundreds of walruses falling off a 260ft cliff to a slow, agonising death in heartbreaking scenes.
Narrating the disturbing scene in the second episode, Attenborough began:
“They do so out of desperation not choice.
“Their natural home is out on the sea ice, but the ice has retreated away to the north and this is the closest place to their feeding grounds.
“Every square inch is occupied, climbing over the tightly packed bodies is the only way across the crowd – those beneath can get crushed to death.
“In a desperate bid to avoid the crush they try to head towards the cliffs.
“But walruses’ eyesight out of the water is poor, but they can sense the others down below, as they get hungry they need to return to the sea.
“In their desperation to do so, hundreds fall from heights they should never have scaled.”
But the story quickly began to unravel.
Zoologist, Dr Susan Crockford, suspected that the event was actually a well publicised incident in October 2017, at Ryrkaypiy in NE Russia, when a group of polar bears drove several hundred walruses over the cliffs to their deaths, before feasting on the corpses.
Then a couple of days later, Andrew Montford was able to positively identify Ryrkaypiy as the location in the Our Planet film. The Netflix producers denied seeing any polar bears, but this does not alter the fact that many bears were in the area at that time.
There is however another rather more sinister possible explanation for the stampede. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS):
Walruses often flee haulouts en masse in response to the sight, sound, and especially odours from humans and machines.
So it is perfectly possible that it was the filmmakers themselves who caused the stampede up the cliffs.
Indeed, as this aerial shot showed, there must have been some sort of helicopter or drone flying immediately above the walrus, which seems to me to be an utterly irresponsible thing to do.
As the US Fish and Wildlife Service also note, events like this one are not uncommon:
Some haulout sites include shorelines that grade from little topographical relief to steep slopes and cliffs. As large numbers of walruses gather at these sites, the first to arrive move further inland and may eventually settle at the tops of the steeper slopes and cliffs. As most animals head back to sea to feed, those on the steeper slopes and cliffs are also rested and ready to feed and sometimes take the most direct route down the slope or off the cliff. This behavior has resulted in serious injuries and deaths. As with most animals whose eyes are oriented to the side of their head, rather than forward, walrus’s depth perception is likely poor and they are nearsighted.
Sea Ice and Haulouts
Regardless of the exact cause of the stampede, why were the walrus at Ryrkaypiy in the first place? Is it the case that they were forced to go ashore, because their sea ice had melted?
The US Fish and Wildlife Service explain the Pacific walrus’ migratory habits:
The distribution of Pacific walruses varies markedly with the seasons. Almost the entire population occupies the pack ice in the Bering Sea in the winter months. Through the winter they generally congregate in three areas, immediately southwest of St. Lawrence Island, south of Nunivak Island, and in the Gulf of Anadyr in Russia. As the Bering Sea pack ice begins to break up and melt in spring walruses begin to move northward and their distribution becomes less clumped. By late April walruses can be found from Bristol Bay northward to the Bering Strait. During the summer months, as the pack ice continues to recede northward, most of the population migrates into the Chukchi Sea. The largest concentrations are found near the coasts between 70 N latitude and Pt. Barrow in the east, and between the Bering Strait and Wrangel Island in the west. Concentrations, mainly of males, are also found on and near terrestrial haulouts in the Bering Sea in Bristol Bay and the northern Gulf of Anadyr throughout the summer. In October the pack ice begins to develop in the Chukchi Sea, and large herds begin to move southward. Many come ashore on haulouts on the Russian side of the Bering Strait region. Depending on ice conditions, those haulout sites continue to be occupied through November and into December, but with the continuing development of ice, most walruses move south of St. Lawrence Island and the Chukchi Peninsula by early to mid-December.
https://www.fws.gov/alaska/fisheries/mmm/walrus/wmain.htm
In short, adult males migrate south in summer, and haulout in Bristol Bay and the Gulf of Anadyr. (Per the red dots).
There is a very good reason for these haulouts, as the FWS go on to explain:
Walruses depend on hauling out to complete their moult and grow new hair, to whelp, to nurse young, and just to rest.
Hauling out is what they do naturally, not what they are forced to do because there is no sea ice around.
Whereas the males head south, the females and juveniles follow the sea ice north, as it recedes in Spring, eventually going as far as Wrangel Island and Point Barrow. Crucially, as the ice begins to grow back in October, these large herds follow it back south, often coming ashore at places like Ryrkaypiy on the Russian coast (No 51 on the map above). As the map indicates, such hauling out is commonplace and widespread along that stretch of coastline. (Green dots).
Remember that the Ryrkaypiy incident occurred in October 2017.
The earlier the sea ice reforms, the earlier the walrus arrive on Ryrkaypiy. This is the total opposite of Attenborough’s version, that they are there because of a lack of sea ice.
How he can get such a basic fact as this wrong is beyond my comprehension.
Walrus are thriving
Given all of this mayhem and loss of sea ice, you might think that walrus were an endangered species. But you would be wrong.
According to the FWS:
The size of the Pacific walrus population is uncertain. The size of the pre-exploitation population (1700’s) may have been between 200,000-250,000 animals. Cooperative aerial surveys by the U.S. and the former Soviet Union (now Russia) occurred in 1975, then at five-year intervals until 1990. The 1975 survey estimated the population size at 221,360. The joint census conducted in 1980 estimated population size at 246,360. Surveys conducted in 1985 and 1990 produced estimates of 234,020 and 201,039, respectively. Cooperative aerial surveys ceased in 1995 due to budget limitations and unresolved methodological problems. After much deliberation and testing, another aerial survey occurred in 2006 incorporating advanced thermal imaging and telemetry technologies, resulting in an estimate of 129,000 animals with a confidence interval of 55,000-550,000. The estimates generated from these aerial surveys are conservative minimum population estimates that are not useful for detecting population trends.
In 2012, a new approach to population estimation using the genetic fingerprint of individual walruses within a mark-recapture framework began testing. Two aspects of the approach were successfully assessed in 2013, the genetic identification of individuals and the ability to collect an adequate sample. The surveys then continued through 2017. A preliminary estimate for the year 2014 was about 283,000 individuals and a confidence interval of 93,000-479,000. The data for subsequent years is currently under analysis.
The decline in population in the 1980s and 90s was largely due to an increase in hunting, which followed a relaxation of harvest restrictions.
https://www.fws.gov/alaska/fisheries/mmm/walrus/pdf/final-pacific-walrus-species-status-assessment.pdf
The FWS also state that:
Pacific walrus population size has varied substantially in the last 150 years, it increased between 1960 and 1980 and may have reached the carrying capacity of the marine environment
In other words, the current population, which is believed to be similar to those earlier ones, may also be at maximum levels of sustainability.
Certainly, if Our Planet is correct about there being 100,000 walrus at Ryrkaypiy, the global population must be much greater than estimated, and would explain why the beach there was so crowded.
What we do know is that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found after a comprehensive review in 2017 that the Pacific walrus does not require protection as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Breathtaking dishonesty
The migratory habits of walrus are pretty basic knowledge, which a natural historian such as David Attenborough should be familiar with.
Why then has he chosen to ignore the truth, and instead present a fictionalised account?
Is it to further his own political agenda? Is it simply incompetence? Or has he merely followed the script given to him by the WWF?
We don’t expect to hear the truth from the WWF. But if Netflix doesn’t quickly correct and retract this particular segment of the series, it will be highly damaging for their own credibility at a time when they are just embarking on producing serious documentaries.
As for Attenborough’s upcoming programme for the BBC on climate change, this little episode offers a clue about how inaccurate and biased it will be.
Canada to Russia: Interference Is Okay If It Destabilizes You but Not the Other Way Around
By Matthew EHRET | Strategic Culture Foundation | 15.04.2019
In the midst of one of the most de-stabilizing scandals to rock Canada in years, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland announced on April 5 that the threat of “Foreign interference” going into the October 2019 elections was at an all-time high.
Sitting beside her UK counterpart at a G7 meeting in France, Freeland stated: “Interference is very likely and we think there have already been efforts by malign foreign actors to disrupt our democracy”. Her warning was echoed by an embattled puppet Prime Minister in Ottawa who stated it is “very clearly that countries like Russia are behind a lot of the divisive campaigns … that have turned our politics even more divisive and more anger-filled than they have been in the past.”
The Measures to Defend the British Deep State
In order to counteract this “foreign threat”, several Canadian mechanisms have been announced to “keep democracy safe” in alignment with the G7, Five Eyes and NATO. These mechanisms are:
The creation of an “Incident Public Protection Panel” run by five Privy Council bureaucrats under the Clerk of the Privy Council which will exist outside of the authority of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, whose job is to maintain the integrity of elections. In defense of this mysterious group, Canada’s Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould stated that “it won’t be one person who will decide what Canadians will be allowed to know”(apparently having five people decide is more democratic). The new Clerk of the Privy Council is Ian Stugart, who served as former deputy minister to Chrystia Freeland until just a few weeks ago.
A Security and Intelligence Election Threats Task Force which will incorporate all of Canada’s intelligence agencies such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Freeland’s Global Affairs Canada. All of these agencies are Privy Council organizations.
The Rapid Response Mechanism of the G7 created in June 2018 and headquartered in Ottawa Canada in Freeland’s Global Affairs Office and Privy Council Office.
While Russia is being set up as the scapegoat of the collapsing western liberal establishment, this most recent red alarm by Freeland and Canada’s response to the “danger” is useful for two reasons:
First and foremost, Freeland’s shameless warnings over “foreign interference” have become so loud that an irony has become unavoidable. She has after all been caught red handed behind the destabilization of both Ukraine and Venezuela. Secondly, by reviewing the mechanisms being created by Canada to counteract this “threat”, a clear insight is provided into the inner workings of the actual foreign influences which infiltrated Canada many decades ago.
Chrystia Freeland: Regime Change Princess of Ukraine and Venezuela
On the first point, Freeland’s role as a co-architect of the nazi-fueled overthrow of a pro-Russian government in February 2014 is now well known. Aside from her family’s Nazi connections going back to her grandfather Michael Chomiak’s leading role as a Nazi collaborator in WWII, and her own mother’s role in helping to draft Ukraine’s neo-liberal constitution, Freeland herself not only befriended leading neo-Nazi collaborators such as Canadian Ukrainian Congress’ president Paul Grod and but has also promoted NATO’s anti-Russian expansion across eastern Europe.
Less well known but equally important is Freeland’s leading role in planning for the Venezuelan coup attempt which has been recently halted thanks to Russia’s March 23rd intervention.
Working alongside fellow Oxford operative Ben Rowswell (now head of the Canadian International Council/ Chatham House of Canada) during his three year tenure as Ambassador to Venezuela (2014-2017), Freeland set up a program for regime change which involved a two-part formula of 1) mobilizing mass direct support for the overthrow of a government, and 2) gaining international support for said overthrow.
Rowswell’s on-the-ground work was designed to achieve the former as he himself admitted in a 2017 interview saying “We became one of the most vocal embassies in speaking out on human rights issues and encouraging Venezuelans to speak out”. Before leaving his post to become the head of the Chatham House of Canada, he tweeted “I don’t think they (anti-Maduro forces) have anything to worry about because Minister Freeland has Venezuela way at the top of her priority list”.
Working on fulfilling the 2nd part of the formula, Freeland directed the creation of the “Lima Group”. A Global News article of January 24 described the group in the following terms: “Playing a key role behind the scenes was Lima Group member Canada, whose Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke to Guaido the night before Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony to offer her government’s support should he confront the socialist leader”.
It shouldn’t be too surprising in our day and age that a nation with such a high reputation as “polite Canada” is in actuality, an active agency for regime change and global governance. Canada’s very Prime Minister did assert in 2016 that “Canada is the world’s first post national-state nation”. What may surprise some readers is that Canada itself was infiltrated by a foreign player many years ago and what we will briefly see is that Canada can only be called the “world’s first post national-state nation” because it never really became a genuine nation in the first place, but was always manipulated by a foreign power… although not the one you think.
The “Foreign Influence” Controlling Canada
While a longer presentation is needed to do this story justice, it is enough to note for now that neither Freeland, nor Rowswell are operating on behalf of Canada’s interests, but are rather both operatives run by an entity that took over Canada many decades ago and are currently directed by two interlocking organizations: The Privy Council Office and the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Group.
The Privy Council Office
The Privy Council office was set up in 1867 in order to act as the British hand guiding its newly formed confederacy (Canada nearly became a part of Lincoln’s America in the wake of the Civil War. The only thing stopping that outcome was Britain’s creation of a confederation. The full story is told in the Imperial Myth of Canada’s National Policy). While its power was always great, there was still room for independent policy making by nationalistic elected officials when the international conditions were favorable.
This was nearly entirely destroyed during the reign of technocratic golden boy Pierre Elliott Trudeau during his 1968-1973 reform of the Federal Government under the guidance of the OECD’s Sir Alexander King. It was during this time Sir King’s Club of Rome (Ottawa branch) was set up in Ottawa under the guidance of Trudeau and his clerk of the Privy Council Michael Pitfield, and other neo-Malthusian technocrats such as Privy Council President Michel Lamontagne, Maurice Strong, and Governor General Roland Mitchener. It was from this control point in Ottawa in 1971 that the work later to become known as Limits to Growth was funded by tax payers and which became the bible for the new Malthusianism and blueprint for the “post-industrial society”. It is from this cybernetics central node that the web of governance both in Canada and also across other British infiltrated territories in the Trans-Atlantic system is coordinated under the directives of London.
Sir Alexander King, working through the Club of Rome advanced the Malthusian revival known as “Carrying Capacity” which presupposed a world of fixed resources and discounted the parameter of human creativity
The current President of the Privy Council is Justin Trudeau’s childhood friend Dominic Leblanc, son of former Governor General (i.e.: Head of State of Canada) and co-controller of the Canada 2020 think tank which created Justin as an Obama-modelled puppet in 2006. Following in the footsteps of Pierre Trudeau’s Limits to Growth, it is this very network which is at the heart of the Green New Deal now being pushed internationally. Another leading member of Canada2020 is Facebook Canada’s Kevin Chan who will be working closely with the Freeland’s Security and Intelligence Election Threats Task Force.
The oath of every member of the Privy Council member (which includes both private individuals and also every cabinet minister of government) is: “I, [name], do solemnly and sincerely swear that I shall be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council for Canada.” Additionally to becoming a Privy Councillor, the Prime Minister must additionally give another oath stating: “I, [name] do swear (declare) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors.
The Milner-Rhodes Trust Group
Coordinating closely with the Privy Council office for over 100 years is an organization known as the Round Table Group (c.1902) which was created with funds from South Africa’s “race patriot” and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes who wished to use his wealth in order to advance a “church for the extension of the British Empire” and “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire.”
Upon Rhodes’ death in 1902, Lord Alfred Milner directed Rhodes’ trust and created the Round Table Movement across all British Territories. The trust was also directed towards the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship system designed to indoctrinate talented young minds around the world in Oxford before deploying them back into their countries of origin in order to infiltrate all public and private fields of influence. The Roundtable groups (dubbed the Council on Foreign Relations upon its creation in the United States in 1921), changed its name several times and today is known as the Royal Institute for International Affairs/Chatham House in the UK and the Canadian International Council (CIC) in Ottawa*.
Regime Change disciple Ben Rowswell’s presidency as head of the CIC and Chrystia Freeland’s status as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar (having been brought into Liberal politics via Rhodes Scholar/Canada2020 controller Bob Rae in 2013) should give any thinker a moment of grave pause.
The Strategic Issue at Hand
As ugly as this picture may appear to some, it should not cause sadness or even anger.
Only pity mixed with a dose of hope are appropriate, since we are in fact witnessing the desperate death rattle of a Monarchical system of empire which has too long poisoned the well of human civilization and which must now give way for something better. Although this imperial system may be deploying every asset and dirty trick it has in opposition to the new paradigm now emerging under the guiding leadership of Russia and China, it is becoming increasingly clear that this empire cannot win. Its regime change plans have failed, its Green New Deals are failing and even the irrational aesthetical traditions underlying this system of post-modernism are giving way to an optimistic artistic sensibility that seeks to re-unite beauty with truth evidenced by the renewed interest in classical art and music during the recent Belt and Road Musical Festival on March 24, 2019.
Russia and China’s leadership have not only consolidated a partnership of nations across Eurasia and Africa around this new paradigm, but they have also found what no one thought was possible just a few years ago: a potential ally in an America which is returning to its nationalist sensibilities under the surprising leadership of Donald Trump.
During Trump’s two first years as President, the long British infiltration of America has finally begun to fall apart with the collapse of the Mueller investigation and the exposure of the British-run deep state that Mueller was a part of.
The question now remains: With the impending meltdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, and olive branch of cooperation which China has offered to the west via the Belt and Road Initiative and the World Landbridge which can bring this system of development into the Americas and Africa, will America join hands as an ally and will Canada follow suit in order to become a true sovereign nation freed of all foreign imperial influence once and for all?
* Original research on the Roundtable/Rhodes Trust infiltration of North America can be found in the Canadian Patriot #18 (British Roots of the Deep State Exposed), Canadian Patriot #19 (Green New Deal vs New Silk Road) and volumes 2-4 of the Untold History of Canada.
French-Made Weapons Reportedly Used in Yemen War, More Arms to Be Delivered
Sputnik – April 15, 2019
Journalists claim to have uncovered the “massive use” of French-made weapons in war-torn Yemen through a leak of secret military documents.
Radio France and investigative reporters from the NGO Disclose say they have obtained a classified 2018 report about French arms sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which form part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi militiamen in Yemen since 2015.
The paper was allegedly compiled last September by France’s military agency DRM and handed over to President Emmanuel Macron and other cabinet-level officials. It apparently contains a list of all French weapons deployed in Yemen by the two Arab monarchies.
“These include Leclerc battle tanks, long-rod penetrator ammunition, Mirage 2000-9 fighter jets, COBRA counter-battery radar systems, Aravis armoured troop-carrying vehicles, Cougar and Dauphin helicopters, CAESAR truck-mounted howitzers,” reads a statement on Disclose’s website.
The journalists went on to claim that some of the French-made weapons are being used in combat operations in Yemen, including in civilian zones. Specifically, two French-made warships — a missile-launching corvette and a warfare frigate — are said to be taking part in the naval blockade of Yemen, as per the report.
The leaked report appears to include a map titled “Population under threat of bombs”, which indicates the deployment of 48 CAESAR guns near the Saudi-Yemeni border.
“Put more simply, the guns are used to bombard Yemeni territory to open up a path for the tanks and armoured vehicles invading the country,” the journalists argue. The population living within the range of potential artillery fire is estimated at being over 436,000.
According to the report, at least 129 CAESAR howitzers are due to be delivered to Saudi Arabia between by 2023.
French authorities are yet to comment on the matter.
French Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly said in a radio interview in February that the military had “recently sold no weapons that can be used in the Yemeni conflict”.
Last October, she rejected claims that domestically made weapons were targeting civilian population. “To my knowledge, the weapons we have sold recently have not been used against civilians,” she told reporters.
The minister also described France’s weapons exports to Saudis as “relatively modest”, saying they were subject to tight restrictions. “We don’t sell weapons like they’re baguettes,” she added.
Disclose and Radio France note, meanwhile, that the French parliament has been “deliberately kept apart” from this information by the government, which has so far given only “fragmentary answers or even falsehoods”.
Israeli businessmen, officials cancel Bahrain visit amid national outcry
Press TV – April 15, 2019
An Israeli delegation of merchants and officials has canceled its planned participation in a business conference in Bahrain amid growing national outcry over the Persian Gulf kingdom’s warming ties with the Tel Aviv regime following years of clandestine contacts.
A spokeswoman for Israel’s Economy Ministry said a planned visit to Bahrain this week by Israel’s Economy Minister Eli Cohen had been “delayed because of political issues.”
A group of around 30 Israeli business executives and regime officials was scheduled to participate in the event, which is organized by the US- based Global Entrepreneurship Network and will run in Manama from April 15 to 18.
At least three Israeli speakers, including the Israel Innovation Authority’s deputy chief, Anya Eldan, were scheduled to speak at the event.
“While we advised the Israeli delegation they would be welcome, they decided this morning not to come due to security concerns and a wish not to cause disruption for the other 180 nations participating,” the organization’s president Jonathan Ortmans told Reuters.
Earlier this month, Bahrain’s most prominent Shia cleric Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim strongly denounced the Manama regime’s decision to host an Israeli delegation in the business conference.
“Hosting and greeting the Zionists at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, is a bold step on a dishonorable path; that of humiliation, capitulation and shamelessness,” he said in a statement carried by the Arabic-language Lua Lua television network.
Sheikh Qassim further underlined that the Israeli regime tops the list of Muslim world’s enemies, and that Manama’s plan to host Israeli delegates was in line with its attempts to compromise and normalize ties with the enemy.
This is a clear sign of the Manama regime’s disregard for Islam and the will of the nation, the top cleric pointed out.
Last month, members of the Bahrain parliament issued a statement, rejecting the visit.
“Parliament stresses its support for the just cause of the brotherly Palestinian people, and it will remain a priority for the Bahraini and Arab people,” the statement read.
It added, “The end of the Israeli occupation and the withdrawal from all Arab land is an absolute necessity for the stability and security of the region and for a fair and comprehensive peace.”
Some street protests were also held in Manama in condemnation of the planned visit.
Russia’s RT Arabic television news network reported on March 4 that Abdullah ibn Muhammad Al ash-Sheikh, the speaker of Saudi Arabia’s Consultative Assembly, together with his Emirati and Egyptian counterparts had opposed a paragraph in the final communiqué of the 29th Conference of the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union in the Jordanian capital city of Amman, which demanded an end to efforts aimed at normalizing ties with Israel and condemned all forms of rapprochement with the occupying regime.
The paragraph stated that “one of the most important steps to support Palestinian brethren requires the cessation of all forms of rapprochement and normalization with the Israeli occupiers. Therefore, we call for resilience and steadfastness by blocking all the doors of normalization with Israel.”
On February 17, a report published by Israeli Channel 13 television network said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had held a “secret meeting” with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita last September.
Additionally, the Warsaw conference, a US-sponsored gathering that was held in the Polish capital on February 13-14, brought together Netanyahu and representatives from a number of Arab states, including Oman, Morocco, Saudi Arabic, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt.
The Israeli regime also recently re-launched a “virtual embassy” in a bid to “promote dialogue” with the Persian Gulf Arab states.
“The Holocaust” Is a Myth That Conceals Our Shame
By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • April 15, 2019
“Most of the time ‘history’ is institutionally engaged in concealing our shame.” —Gilad Atzmon
I love the words, music, and soul of my Israeli-born truth jihadi brother Gilad Atzmon. In fact, I enjoy his company so much that just about every year I take up the largely thankless task of organizing a public event for him here in Israeli-occupied Madison, Wisconsin. Last year the local Israeli Occupation forces got Gilad banned at the last minute from Wil-Mar Community Center. The director refunded our money and told us, in so many words, that Wil-Mar’s obligatory suppression of free speech was all about the Benjamins. So we directed people down the block to the Orton Park rotunda, the local equivalent of Hyde Park Speakers Corner.
One of Gilad’s most memorable lines was: “History exists to conceal our shame.” Citing Lyotard, who asserts that the real historian’s task is to unveil the shame, Gilad has analyzed such events as the Balfour Declaration. According to Gilad, the official history of the Balfour Declaration as a magnanimous gesture by the powerful British toward the oppressed Jews exists to conceal the shameful truth: It is the Britons (not to mention the Palestinians) who were and still are oppressed by the Zionist Jews, not the other way around.[1] This truth is shameful to both Britons and Jews. It is shameful to Britons that they have allowed themselves to be used in such degrading fashion. It is even more shameful that they have been unable to face the awful reality for 100 years and counting. Likewise, it is shameful to Zionist Jews that they have profited mightily by posing as the oppressed, when in truth they are the oppressor. And of course there is the shared British-Jewish shame at enabling and perpetrating the Palestinian Holocaust.
Now some might argue that Gilad’s analysis is correct insofar as it uncovers British shame. The Brits, after all, are the world’s leading experts in hyper-politeness and its shadow, shame, which emerges into the light when polite pretenses fail.
But the Jewish Zionists, the argument continues, are utterly shameless. Their intelligence agency’s motto is “By way of deception thou shalt do war.” How shameless is that? About as shameless as the Lavon Affair, the USS Liberty massacre, and 9/11, that’s how shameless. The Zionists’ one-word slogan (and future epitaph) is chutzpah, a word whose definition is: “That quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” Like the psychopath, the guy with chutzpah always plays the victim, especially when he is victimizing others.
French historian Laurent Guyénot analyzes Jewish-Zionist shamelessness rather brilliantly in his article “Israel, the Psychopathic Nation.” (For the full story, read his masterpiece From Yahweh to Zion.) Guyénot notes that this psychopathic shamelessness is orchestrated by a manipulative, profiteering tribal elite. Most ordinary Jews are not aware that their collective behavior is so shamelessly psychopathic. Guyénot’s insight helps us understand how Zionist Jews, like Britons, are being manipulated by the lying, shame-concealing historiographers.
The notion that “’history’ is institutionally engaged in concealing our shame” obviously applies to the Holocaust. This fact is admitted, even highlighted, by official historiographers. But they look only at one side of the story.
The Official Story: “Holocaust Denial” Conceals Nazi Shame
Defenders of orthodox Holocaust history claim that holocaust revisionists conceal their shameful sympathy with Nazis who killed six million Jews. This is in fact the main argument against “holocaust denial” in such books as Shermer and Grobman’s Denying History and Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust. That this argument is an empty ad-hominem with no relevance to the empirical issues in question does not seem to have occurred to these authors.
The reductio ad absurdum of “Holocaust denial conceals the shame of the gas chambers” is Keith Kahn-Harris’s Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The author claims that “Holocaust denial is not just eccentricity; it is an attempt to legitimate genocide through covert means. Denials of the harmfulness of tobacco, of the existence of global warming, and other denialisms, are, similarly, projects to legitimate the unspeakable.” This suggests a very useful all-purpose argument, suitable for any occasion or topic: “Anyone who disagrees with me does so to conceal their secret love of mass murder.” The next step: “Anyone who disagrees with me is a mass murderer and should be executed.” A fine excuse to kill your opponents en masse! This would be funny if they weren’t already locking people in maximum security prison, destroying YouTube livelihoods, and burning books because the individuals so targeted had the temerity to disagree with the likes of Keith Kahn-Harris. It may be only a matter of time before the executions commence. One hopes they will try to use Nazi-style hydrogen cyanide gas chambers, which would drastically limit their ability to actually kill significant numbers of dissidents.
But Kahn-Harris, Lipstadt, Shermer and Grobman, and other gatekeepers are not entirely wrong. There is a grain of truth somewhere in those vast, arid sand dunes of ad hominem bullshit. It is true that some people of German heritage like Ernst Zundel, Germar Rudolf, and Monika Schaefer voice their own versions of history in part to dispel the guilt and shame that the sacred narrative of the Holocaust has laid on the heads of the German people. Monika Schaefer speaks eloquently about this legacy of shame in her masterful YouTube Sorry Mom I Was Wrong About the Holocaust, which should have have been awarded “best foreign short documentary” at the Oscars, but instead won her a year in maximum-security lockup.
If it is partly true that some Holocaust revisionists spin their histories to conceal or absolve shame—and I personally believe that National Socialist Germany’s treatment of Jews among others was in fact shameful, regardless of the extent to which the conventional history of the Holocaust may be false or exaggerated—it is obvious that the conventional story is “institutionally involved in concealing our shame.” By focusing so relentlessly on the metaphysical evil of the big-H Holocaust, our cultural custodians conceal the at least equally shameful behavior of World War II’s victors.
“The Holocaust” Conceals the Shame of World War II
The real Holocaust, of course, was the war itself. 70 million people were massacred, two thirds of them civilians. Those nearly 50 million civilians were singled out for extermination on the basis of their ethnicity, just as surely as a vastly smaller number of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs may have been by the Reich. When the Allies firebombed Dresden, which was not a military target, more than 100,000 innocent civilians were deliberately burned to death for the crime of being German. Centuries of German cultural achievement, too, went up in flames. Now that is a real holocaust: a gratuitous burnt offering.
And Dresden is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Anyone who honestly explores the history of the deliberate Allied firebombings of civilians, the respective treatment of prisoners by both sides, the atrocities against Germans during the invasion and occupation of their homeland, the firebombings and nuclear bombings of Japanese civilians, the brutal torture that elicited false confessions from “Nazi war criminals,” and so much more, will inevitably conclude that, as Pogo might say, “We have met the Nazis and they are us.”
Not convinced? Listen to my interviews with:
- MS King, author of The Bad War;
- Tom Goodrich, author of Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947;
- Gerard Menuhin, author of Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil;
- James Perloff on “myths and realities of World War II.”
For those who would rather read than listen, I recommend Ron Unz’s “American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany” and more generally the excellent collection of World War II articles at Unz.com. And concerning the shameful way the US was hoodwinked into joining the demonic bloodbath euphemistically known as World War II, Gore Vidal’s novel The Golden Age offers more truth, disguised as fiction, than most supposedly nonfictional histories.
We Americans, of course, are not the only ones who recount dubious histories of World War II to conceal our shame. Russia, too, demonizes Hitler and bans “holocaust denial” to hide its own shameful Stalinist history and its own war crimes against Germans. Japan minimizes both its own crimes and the crimes committed against it—the former for obvious reasons, the latter to save face in light of seven decades of shamefully abject submission to its criminal civilian-nuking occupiers. France pretends that most 1940s Frenchmen were partisans of the “heroic resistance” and that only a tiny minority supported the “evil Nazi collaborator Pétain,” when the reality was precisely the opposite.
What broader conclusions might we draw about the role of history as a shame-concealment mechanism? Our best guide along these dark and twisted paths is René Girard, the recently-deceased Stanford professor who taught that all culture is based on a murder and a lie. The primordial murder, according to Girard, is the lynching of a scapegoat. This act of human sacrifice forms the basis of every culture, the foundation of every myth. It occurs when the group’s mimetic-desire-driven rivalries get so out of hand that mass mayhem is in the offing. Suddenly the group turns in unison against a scapegoat—usually a marginalized or powerless figure—and murders them. Shared blood-thirst, murderous exaltation, and guilt solves the rivalry problem and re-unites the group. But the unifying blood-guilt cannot be admitted to. The reality is too tawdry and horrible. So a myth—a sacred lie—gradually takes shape around the memory of the victim. Surely the victim must have had some sort of miraculous sacred power, since (by being murdered) the victim has solved the rivalry problem and brought unity and cohesion to the group! Soon a monument is designated or erected in honor of the “sacred victim,” who eventually becomes a minor or even major deity, to be propitiated in annual sacrificial rites that commemorate and disguise the original act of primordial slaughter.
Every culture is held together by foundational myths based on this template. Pagan gods are just distorted memories of slaughtered scapegoats. The Abrahamic religions sublimate sacrifice by asking Abraham and his descendants to stop scapegoating and sacrificing their children (a ubiquitous practice in the ancient Mediterranean and elsewhere) and to kill and roast a sheep instead. Christianity goes one step further and makes Christ the scapegoat to end all scapegoats and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. (That didn’t work out too well, did it?) In all of the above cases, foundational sacred stories, a.k.a. myths, arise to explain how the society in question began, and to justify its current ways.
Secular mythologies, too, are rooted in repressed memories of sacrifice and blood-guilt. The foundational myth of the Enlightenment, with its deities of reason, progress, and tolerance, grows out of the sacrificial bloodletting of the Wars of Religion and the accompanying witch-burnings and heretic-huntings. The foundational American myth of the Revolution and its Founding Fathers conceals the shame of equally horrific fratricidal bloodletting of a scale and ferocity that most Americans today have never heard about—because the “history” taught in our schools exists precisely to erase that shame. Likewise with the Civil Rights mythologies that emerged from the oceans of gore spilled in the Civil War.
Girard’s theory explains the otherwise inexplicable “sacred victim syndrome.” Why is Arlington Cemetery so sacred, especially on Memorial Day?[2] Why are people who ask questions about 9/11 silenced by screams of “You’re insulting the victims”?[3] And why is it sacrilege and blasphemy, punished by maximum-security-prison time in many leading Western countries, to question the sacred six-million-victim Holocaust?
Differences between political cultures are largely based on the degree of divergence of their foundational mythologies. For Zionists, Jews in general, and the sacred six million in particular, are eternally sanctified victims, in whose name the most appalling excesses are legitimate and necessary. For Palestinians, by contrast, the martyrs murdered by the Zionists, emblematic of all displaced and thus “sacrificed” Palestinians, are the sacred victims at the foundation of the political mythos of Resistance.
Similarly, for Americans, the nearly 3000 people murdered on 9/11/2001 are sacred victims who deserve honor and commemoration on each anniversary of “Black Tuesday.” (The 9/11 sacrificial rites, designed by Philip Zelikow and other specialists in “the creation and maintenance of public myths,” were engineered to bring about this convergence of Israeli and American mythology.) Non-Westerners, especially Muslims, are more likely to remember Madeleine Albright’s comment that America’s murder of half a million Iraqi children under the Clinton regime was “worth it.” Many are aware that the US has killed 27 million Muslims in the continuing holocaust set off by 9/11. For them, it is America’s victims, not its victimized, who are more notable as well as vastly more numerous.
If, as Girard said, all culture is based on murder and lies, can we ever stop killing and lying? Marxists think a materialist utopia would do the trick. But murderous and uncontrollable mimetic-desire-driven envy is ubiquitous, even (especially) among those whose material needs are fully satisfied.
Liberal-progressive types seem to think that exposing relatively harmless bits and pieces of their own culture’s shameful histories might help. Take Howard Zinn—please! When liberal progressives reveal the shame of slavery and oppression of women, they are really buttressing the modern secular-progressive myth that celebrates the “progress” that “we” have supposedly made—concealing our shameful slaughter of 27 million Muslims in the 9/11 wars on the grounds that “they” oppress women, adhere to traditional religion, and in other ways remind us of our own hated, barbarous ancestors. If people like Zinn really wanted to stop their own countries from murdering millions, they would attack and annihilate the myths of the Holocaust and 9/11. But that is the furthest thing from their minds. Why? Because they are complicit in the murder of millions, and they desperately desire to conceal that complicity.
Likewise all of the supposed “identification and sympathy with victims” displayed in today’s fashionable deification of sexual deviance serves to cover our ongoing mass murders of dozens of millions of real victims. By casting homosexuals, an economically privileged class, as sacred victims, we conceal our shameful massacres, displacements, and exploitations of the genuinely poor and downtrodden (most of whom don’t care much for homosexuality) including those in our own country. It seems that the scam of leveraging fabricated or exaggerated victimhood for tribal solidarity and profit, which should have been copyrighted by the Jews, has now been subjected to multiple copyright infringements—which would certainly make for an interesting and revealing series of lawsuits. But even the ADL doesn’t have quite that much chutzpah.
If Marxism and secular-progressive materialist liberalism can’t solve the murder-and-lies problem, whatever possibly could? Traditional religion seems to have a mixed record. Though Girard argued that Christianity exposes the scapegoating mechanism (“Oh shit! We just lynched God!!”) and is responsible for all of the alleged progress in humanitarianism since then, the historical record does not really bear this out. Still, it must be admitted that real Christians, like the Mennonite, Amish, and Quaker farmers here in western Wisconsin, excel at eschewing participation in America’s periodic orgies of sacrificial carnage. Likewise, real Muslims, unlike secularized Uncle Toms and obscurantist Wahhabis, are blessed with unusually peaceful souls and communities, as anyone who has lived among them knows.
Ultimately it is the mystical dimension of traditional religion that holds the most hope for overcoming the murderous lies at the heart of human nature and culture. The mystics have a novel interpretation of sacrifice: Instead of materially murdering the Other, we must learn to spiritually sacrifice the Self. The Sufis call this fana’, the annihilation of the ego (the Self that Commands Evil). This spiritual self-sacrifice liberates us from desire, the goal of Buddhist teaching as well. Those who have achieved such an overcoming-of-self enjoy the freedom to reject the desire-driven Girardian scapegoating mechanism, and step outside of its myth-based cultural constructs into the light of al-Haqq: an Islamic term that translates as Truth, God, Reality.
Notes
[1] One obvious example of Jewish power and British powerlessness is the ongoing witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and the non-Zionist wing of the Labor Party. Another was related to me by Gilad Atzmon himself: When he fled Israel and arrived in London, Gilad, despite his anti-Zionism, was born Jewish, and therefore able to plug into the local Jewish network and make lots of easy money playing rigged games in London real estate. There was so much kosher money available, Gilad said, that he eventually had to quit in order to save his soul and his sanity. Obviously nobody of any other ethnicity could land in London nearly penniless and friendless and receive such a lavish sinecure on a silver platter. But well-connected Jewish nepotism networks exist everywhere where wealthy Jewish communities are established, offering Jews power and privileges that non-Jews do not enjoy.
[2] Answer: Because we still sacrifice our children—only now in wars instead of on bloody altars—and are lying about it, as we must if we are to live with ourselves.
[3] And why have the forces of repression been so successful at deplatforming alternative media using the “insulting the victims” ploy? Those figures in the alternative media who have come off as insensitive in the way they talk about alleged victims and survivors at Sandy Hook and elsewhere have provided their opponents with a perfect excuse to silence critical voices in general.
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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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