Deputy chief of the Islamic Jihad resistance movement Ziyad Nakhala
Secretary General of Islamic Jihad Palestinian Resistance movement Ziad Nakhale stressed that the so-called “Deal of the Century” target the Palestinian people and the entire nation.
In a statement released a day after the announcement of US President Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan”, Nakhale described the plan as a conspiracy “that represents a great challenge to our nation and unprecedented bullying.”
Trump started his plan by blaming Arab and Muslim world for not recognizing Israel,” Nakhale added.
He noted that Washington “wants to make our people slaves to Israelis after a long history of struggle, resistance and sacrifices.”
“They (US administration and occupation authorities) think they can simply change the history… They think they can wipe out our culture.”
“This stage is different and needs more forms of resistance,” Nakhale said, lashing out at Arab states’ stances towards the “Deal of the Century.”
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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UK Gov’t not bothered. ‘Israel is our friend, has an unquestionable right to exist, shares our values, has a right to defend herself, mustn’t be punished even for war crimes…’
When Israel confiscated a Palestinian medical jeep it may not have sounded like a big deal. But it was, and still is, a matter of life and death to hundreds of oppressed people and the Israelis know it.
Haaretz reported earlier this month that Israel had impounded the only vehicle available to a medical team that provides assistance to 1,500 Palestinians living inside an Israeli military firing zone in the Palestinian West Bank. It’s the second time in a year that the vehicle serving residents of Masafer Yatta in the south Hebron hills has been confiscated, cutting off healthcare to an isolated and impoverished population.
The jeep and medical team belong to the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry. They visit small villages in the area, accessible only by dirt roads, every week. The excuse for this outrage was that the team weren’t allowed there without prior co-ordination, since the area was inside a firing zone. The team’s doctor said medical assistance was necessary for these villages because of their long distance from a city and lack of financial resources. “We come here with all the medications we can administer outside a hospital to treat the villagers.”
When the jeep was previously confiscated it was returned after 6 months on payment of a 3000 shekel fine. All that time the team were unable to provide basic medical care as it was the only vehicle capable of traveling those roads.
The firing zone covers 7,400 acres and Israel declared it a closed military zone in the 1980s. In 1999, the army expelled the residents, arguing that they were living there illegally. But a temporary injunction by the Israeli Supreme Court let them return when they provided evidence that they had lived in the area long before Israel’s occupation in 1967.
The story is symptomatic of the evil permeating the Holy Land under Israel’s military occupation for 70+ years.
Last week Baroness Jenny Tonge, in a parliamentary question, asked what representations the UK Government intended making to the Israeli government. On 24 January Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister for the Commonwealth, UN and South Asia, replied: “We have made clear to the Israeli authorities the importance of medical assistance being available to Palestinians, most recently on 30 October 2019.” And that was it.
Tariq Ahmad is a Muslim of Pakistani origin. Since his elevation to the Lords he seems to have joined the ranks of those anxious to downplay Israel’s crimes and guarantee the rogue state’s impunity.
For example, in a debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict last March he said: “Any party that believes in the destruction of Israel of course cannot be party to a peace process. The UK Government have made it clear that, before taking part in any peaceful negotiations on the two-state solution, any party at the negotiating table needs to agree the right of Israel to exist.”
He didn’t mention the equal need to agree the Palestinians’ right to exist and the UK Government still refuses to recognize Palestinian statehood. Doesn’t that bar Britain from the peace table? And once again we’re fed nonsense about a ‘two state solution’. Given the many irreversible facts on the ground that the Israelis have been allowed to create with impunity, what would it look like? Yeah, too messy and ridiculous to even begin to describe. Netanyahu has said repeatedly that there will be no Palestinian state during his tenure as Israel’s prime minister. He declared: “We will not withdraw from one inch…. There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel…. This is the inheritance of our ancestors. This is our land…. We are here to stay forever.”
And that from somebody who, like most of his vile comrades, has no ancestral links whatever to the ancient land of Israel and therefore no claim to it.
So that disqualifies the Israeli government too from any peace process. As for the US administration, it is so overloaded with Zionist pimps, has fouled up so many peace moves, is so discredited by its past and present performances, and is so contemptuous of international law that it too has no place at the peace table.
The Montevideo Convention of 1933 on Statehood sets out the criteria for becoming a state and these include a defined territory. So when it comes to “agreeing Israel’s right to exist”, Lord Ahmad surely knows that Israel has always refused to declare its borders. So which Israel would he like us all to recognize? Israel behind the borders drawn by the UN Partition Plan? Israel behind the 1967 armistice borders? Israel with its boot on every Palestinians’s neck and illegally occupying the entire Palestinian territory? Or Israel seen by many as a brazen ‘racist endeavor’ that has just passed laws declaring itself “the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it”?
Or will he and the rest of Boris Johnson’s ministerial stooges now insist on Israel according to the preposterous ‘deal’ put forward by Trump and his son-in-law?
Let’s not forget that the new state of Israel’s admission to the UN in 1949 was conditional upon honoring the UN Charter and implementing UN General Assembly Resolutions 181 and 194. It has failed to meet these obligations and to this day repeatedly violates provisions and principles of the Charter.
Israel doesn’t even comply with the rules of the EU-Israel Association Agreement of 1995 which require adherence to the principles of the UN Charter and “respect for human rights and democratic principle (which) constitute an essential element of this agreement” in return for trading privileges. Here too Israel grabs the privileges without delivering on the obligations.
Should everyone be expected to accept Israel’s right to exist while Palestinians are denied the right to their state?
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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Despite Trump’s apparent show of strength in the cynical ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan, he is actually helping Netanyahu destroy Israel, the European colony in Palestine.
Palestinian envoy to Britain Husam Zomlot said the announcement was a “piece of political theatre” and will push the situation “over the cliff and into apartheid”. Hamas rejected the plan as “nonsense” (RT 2020). Netanyahu, who has always been focussed on the expansion of ‘Greater Israel’, said that the Zionist state owes both Kushner and Trump “an eternal debt of gratitude”.
Trump’s ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan (“A vision to improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people”) is a revised version of the 2019 Kushner plan (the so-called “deal of the century”), which offered an illusory promise of long term money (mostly Gulf Arab money) in exchange for political surrender. The new version speaks of a “realistic two state solution” – because “Israel has now agreed to terms for a future Palestinian State” – with a tiny Palestinian statelet cramming the majority Arab population of historic Palestine into 15% of the land. Israel would control the vast majority of the West Bank (White House 2020). With no sovereign powers for the statelet, this deliberately enhances the status quo of a single state.
Trump’s latest plan follows a series of initiatives hostile to Palestinian and Syrian interests: breaching international law to recognize Jerusalem as a Zionist possession, breaching international law to annex the Syrian Golan, trying to legitimize the multiple Israeli colonies on the West Bank, demanding (in the Kushner plan) an effective Palestinian surrender on statehood and adopting the IHRA claim that any anti-Israel criticism is ‘racist’ and so illegitimate (IHRA 2016).
At this stage in the history of the colony, the 72 year old illusion of a ‘two state solution’ remains the main obstacle to a democratic Palestine. Trump’s plan seems an ‘advance’ on the Kushner Plan, in trying to keep that illusion alive. A majority of liberal Jews in the USA, for example, still hold to the two state illusion. But Netanyahu and his colleagues have always wanted it all.
The problem for the more ambitious Zionists is two-fold: (1) Palestinians have resisted, by guerrilla warfare and by not going away, and now slightly outnumber Jewish Israelis in historic Palestine; (2) destruction of the two state myth, and widespread recognition that there is only a single apartheid state, will bring a dramatic collapse in Israeli legitimacy across the world.
The more astute Zionist leaders know this. Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert recognized that “if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights … the State of Israel is finished” (Olmert 2007).
Historically, Israel as a sectarian European colony, has always relied on substantial ethnic cleansing. On 3 December 1947, as the campaign intensified, Zionist leader David Ben Gurion told his party faithful that the “40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state” was “not a solid basis for a Jewish state .. only a state with at least 80% Jews is a solid and viable state” (Pappe 2006: 76).
For that reason, Ben Gurion’s ‘Plan Dalet’ of March 1948 called for operations “destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control … [the operations required are] encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state” (Pappe 2006: 68; Vidal 1997).
That plan was carried out and featured the Deir Yassin massacre of 9 April, where 107 villagers were killed, and a series of expulsions in which 531 villages and eleven urban neighborhoods were destroyed and 800,000 became refugees (Pappe 2006: xiii; Vidal 1997).
Yet despite this ethnic cleansing, military domination and annexations, Israeli agencies confirm that the current Arab population of historic Palestine (Arab Israelis plus those on the West Bank and in Gaza) is roughly equal to the population of Jewish Israelis.
A report from Jerusalem in 2011 showed that the Palestinian population of that city had risen from 25.5% in 1967 to 38% in 2009 (AIC 2011: 10, 12). The Jewish Virtual Library shows that the Jews of Israel / 1948 Palestine have declined from a peak of 88.9% in 1960 to 74.7% in 2017 (JVL 2017). In parallel, officials from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and the military run civil administration of the Occupied Territories (COGAT) say that the Arab population of Gaza, the West Bank and Arab [second class] citizens of Israel, along with residents of the annexed East Jerusalem municipality, add up to 6.5 million, about the same number as “Jews living between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean” (Heller 2018).
For all the apparent advances of Israeli power, Palestinian resistance has enhanced both the ‘demographic threat’ to Israel and the colony’s illegitimacy, in the international sphere.
In that context, Trump and Netanyahu are building an even more extreme illegitimacy, by consolidating a more openly apartheid state. In a report commissioned for the UN several years back, legal scholars Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley (2017), made it clear that Israel had already become an ‘apartheid state’, which is a crime against humanity. The international community had a responsibility to dismantle such a regime, they said.
Richard Falk, who had been a Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine for the UN, said that Palestine was wining the legitimacy battle: “Palestine is winning what in the end is the more important war, the struggle for legitimacy, which is most likely to determine the political outcome”. In the context of anti-colonial struggles, he continues, citing Vietnam, Algeria and Iraq, “the side with the greater perseverance and resilience, not the side that controlled the battlefield, won in the end” (Falk 2014).
Ironically it is the Palestinian Authority (PA), paid and contracted by the US and the Israeli regime, that helps keeps alive the illusion of two states. The PA blocks a clear and unified Palestinian strategy to dismantle apartheid Israel in favor of a single democratic state.
But where the PA has failed, Netanyahu and Trump are succeeding. While Israeli expansion has been blocked by the Lebanese resistance in the north and the resistance of Gaza in the south, Netanyahu has persisted with a steady colonization of the West Bank, undermining any viable Palestinian state.
Now Trump has added to this drive, offering only the fig leaf of a powerless ghetto on a small part of the West Bank and in Gaza. Israel’s contempt for the people of Gaza is plain. This is reminiscent of the failed Bantustan Homelands solution offered by apartheid South Africa, just before that regime collapsed (SAHO 2020). More open apartheid in Palestine will mean the death of Israel. Thank you Trump and Netanyahu.
References
AIC (2011) ‘Jerusalem: facts and figures’, Alternative Information Center, December, Jerusalem and Beit Sahour, Palestine
Anderson, Tim (2008) The Future of Palestine, Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, 7 August, online: https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/future-palestine-1/
Falk, Richard (2014) ‘On ‘Lost Causes’ and the Future of Palestine’, The Nation, 16 December, online: https://www.thenation.com/article/lost-causes-and-future-palestine/
Falk, Richard and Virginia Tilley (2017) Palestine – Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture; East Jerusalem Vol. 22, Issue 2/3, 191-196; also available here: https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/israeli-apartheid/
Heller, Jeffrey (2018) ‘Jews, Arabs nearing population parity in Holy Land: Israeli officials’, Reuters, 27 march, online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-population/jews-arabs-nearing-population-parity-in-holy-land-israeli-officials-idUSKBN1H222T
IHRA (2016) ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism’, online: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism
JVL (2017) ‘Demographics of Israel: Jewish & Non-Jewish Population of Israel/Palestine (1517 – Present), Jewish Virtual Library, online: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present
Olmert, Ehud (2007) ‘Olmert to Haaretz: Two-state Solution, or Israel Is Done For’, Haaretz, 29 November, online: https://www.haaretz.com/1.4961269
Pappe, Ilan (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, London
Pappe, Ilan (2014) ‘Israel’s incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto’, Electronic Intifada, 13 July, online: https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-incremental-genocide-gaza-ghetto/13562
RT (2020) ‘Trump proposes a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine in ‘win-win opportunity’ for both sides’, 28 January, online: https://www.rt.com/news/479412-trump-two-state-solution-israel/
SAHO (2020) ‘The Homelands’, South African History Online, online: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands
Vidal, Dominique (1997) ‘The expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined’, le Monde Diplomatique, December, online: https://mondediplo.com/1997/12/palestine
White House (2020) ‘President Donald J. Trump’s Vision for Peace, Prosperity, and a Brighter Future for Israel and the Palestinian People’, 28 January, online: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-vision-peace-prosperity-brighter-future-israel-palestinian-people/
Dr. Tim Anderson is Director of the Sydney-based Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies. He has worked at Australian universities for more than 30 years, teaching, researching and publishing on development, human rights and self-determination in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. In 2014 he was awarded Cuba’s medal of friendship. He is Australia and Pacific representative for the Latin America based Network in Defence of Humanity. His most recent books are: Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (2015), The Dirty War on Syria (2016), now published in ten languages; Countering War Propaganda of the Dirty War on Syria (2017) and Axis of Resistance: towards an independent Middle East (2019).
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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One of the few growth industries in Donald Trump’s United States is the protection of Jewish citizens and their property from a largely contrived wave of anti-Semitism that is allegedly sweeping the nation. Even while potentially catastrophic developments in the Middle East continue to unfold, the threat of anti-Semitism continues to dominate much of the news cycle in the mainstream media.
There are a number of things that all Americans should know about the anti-Semitism hysteria. First of all, the extent to which there is actual anti-Semitism and the back story to many of the incidents has been deliberately distorted or even ignored by the press and by the government at all levels. Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews for either their religion or their ethnicity, but many of the so-called anti-Semitic incidents are actually related to the policies advanced by the state of Israel. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which have a vested interest in keeping the number of anti-Semitic incidents high, deliberately conflate the two issues in their reports.
In its 2018 report, ADL reported “1,879 acts,” in the United States during the course of the year. It is not a particularly large number given the size and population of the U.S. and also with respect to what is included. There were certainly some physical attacks, including two shooting incidents at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, but most of the incidents were much less kinetic, including shouting and name calling on university campuses between groups supportive of and opposed to Israel’s repression of the Palestinians.
Politicians, the media, and Jewish leaders have all blamed much of the alleged violent anti-Semitism on “white supremacists,” but any examination of the actual incidents does not support that view. Anyone who has any knowledge of the so-called white groups is aware that they are little more than a fringe movement within a fringe movement. Most of the physical attacks on Jews actually are carried out by blacks and most of those attacks are based on aggressive behavior by the largely Hasidic Jewish communities in New York City and surrounding areas. Hasidic Jews are relatively easy to identify as targets because of their distinctive attire, but the tension between the black community, which is being displaced by gentrifying and hostile Hasidic communities, is the root cause of the problem, not religion or race.
Indeed, the whole story of Hasidic community growth and its impact on some established neighborhoods has been pretty much ignored by the mainstream press. Hasidic activities in Brooklyn, in Jersey City, in New York ex-urb Bloomingburg and Lakewood and Toms River, New Jersey are deplorable, and attempts by local communities to fight back are regularly met with claims that the locals are anti-Semites. Hasidim routinely register their homes as places of worship to avoid property taxes, making other local residents pay for police and fire services as well as maintenance of infrastructure. When sufficient Hasidim become residents to get elected to the public school board, they divert the funding of state provided education to support their own private schools. As Hasidim get married within their community and do not register with the state, the women routinely file as single mothers to get public childcare subsidy checks. The men often do not work at all so they can study the Talmud so they are able to engage in wholesale welfare fraud, claiming poverty, to get food stamps, social security, and other money services.
Hasidim also do not consider the judicial system applicable to themselves. They have private courts that have served to hide criminals including even child molesters in their community. Once they achieve a certain presence in a town or city neighborhood, they buy up buildings and force long-term residents out. They ignore building codes and zoning to bring in co-religionists with their large families, and, once established, they create enclaves that are hostile to outsiders.
That has been the source of much of the tension with blacks in New York City and Jersey City as well as with suburban and rural whites north of New York City and in Lakewood and Toms River, New Jersey.
A final source of anti-Semitism incidents is Jews themselves who, for various reasons, either lie or fabricate tales of their persecution. In a recent incident, a Jewish student set a fire in a dormitory at Yeshiva University. In other incidents, bomb threats and graffiti were attributed to “white supremacists” but later determined to have been done by young Jewish males.
No matter how one regards the anti-Semitism issue, there is one thing for sure, and that is that 2020 will cost non-Jewish taxpayers a lot of money. There will be considerable money in the pipeline for Jewish groups to establish and maintain security for their buildings and other facilities with the federal government not surprisingly leading the charge. On Dec. 31, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is Jewish and regards himself as the protector of Israel in the Senate, said he would introduce legislation to quadruple the Department of Homeland Security’s annual Nonprofit Security Grant Program. It would make available $360 million. The grant program is already completely corrupted through the kind offices of folks like Schumer and serves essentially as a free handout to Jewish organizations. Over 90% of the money disbursed annually now goes to Jewish recipients for security and infrastructure upgrades, a percentage that will surely continue.
There is a certain irony in all of the tax money going to protect the wealthiest and most politically powerful demographic in the United States, but that is how politics works in Washington and also at the state and local level. Police resources in New York and other cities will now be redirected to concentrate on Jewish neighborhoods and synagogues. Rockland County in New York state is going one step farther, paying for a private security force dedicated to protecting Jews and their property.
Schumer will also increase funding for a program that pays for Department of Justice experts to train state and local officials in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes while Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would for the first time both define attacks on Jews as domestic terrorism while also at the same time making domestic terrorism a federal crime.
And there also will be increased pressure to make holocaust education mandatory in public schools. Currently, 12 states require holocaust instruction in their public school curricula, though that includes five of the six biggest states. A bipartisan bill would provide money for school districts to develop and improve their own curricula with the ultimate objective of making such education mandatory through the United States.
The response of government to the alleged wave of anti-Semitism is understandable given the political power of the Jewish community. But it is inappropriate for the state to commit scarce resources to pressure groups when students get into shouting matches at a university or religious extremists seek to carve out enclaves for themselves at the expense of an existing community. That is where government has to step back, and it also should avoid the usual remedy of throwing money at the problem. The money belongs to the American taxpayers and this is one instance where it should stay safely in their pockets.
Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | New York City, United States |
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The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis has demanded Google demonetize climate skeptics, and provide education to millions of people who have been exposed to “dangerous misinformation”.
Letter from Congress
If the letter is not readable on your device, the original link is available here.
The key actions demanded:
- Stop promoting climate denial and climate disinformation videos by removing them immediately from the platform’s recommendation algorithm.
- Add ‘climate misinformation’ to the platform’s list of borderline content
- Stop monetising videos that promote harmful misinformation and falsehoods about the causes and effects of the climate crisis.
- Take steps to correct the record for millions of users who have been exposed to the climate misinformation on YouTube.
The people who wrote that letter seem to believe ordinary people are too stupid to figure things out for themselves; they think voters have to be guided into making acceptable choices, by experts like the Democrat majority members of The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | United States |
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The United States does not currently have a landfill for nuclear waste from the defence industry, which is normally stored inside metal canisters buried underground near the nuclear plants where it was produced.
The United States could face the risk of nuclear contamination due to inadequate nuclear waste storage methods, a new publication in the journal Nature Materials revealed.
According to the lead scientist behind the research, Xiaolei Guo, the existing techniques are insufficient to keep waste stored safely, as the material used in the current storage methods quickly becomes corroded, raising the risk of nuclear waste leaking into the soil, water and air.
The research team carried out an experiment in simulated conditions under Yucca Mountain where the US waste repository is expected to be built. They found that the corrosion level of stainless steel, used in storage canisters, was ‘severe’ due to chemical reactions being accelerated by nuclear waste.
“In the real-life scenario, the glass or ceramic waste forms would be in close contact with stainless steel canisters. It creates a super-aggressive environment that can corrode surrounding materials”, Guo said.
According to the scientist, if the casing of the containers gets damaged, the high-level radioactive material could cause ecological devastation.
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Militarism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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During the 1990s, Portugal was devastated by a drug crisis where one in every 100 people became addicted to heroin and the rate of HIV infection soared to become the highest in the European Union.
But, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Portugal’s radical move to put an end to the carnage should prove an example to other countries dealing with similar problems, especially the United States where opioids have killed more people than the totality of American military casualties in Vietnam, both Iraq wars and Afghanistan combined.
That move was decriminalizing the consumption of all drugs and Portugal became the first country to do it.
The policy saw the status of using or possessing drugs for personal use remain illegal. However, offenses were changed from being criminal in nature which involved prison as a possible punishment to being administrative if the amount possessed was no more than a ten-day supply. Needle exchange programs have also been in place since 1993 and today, all drug users can exchange syringes at pharmacy counters across Portugal. Drug treatment was also expanded and improved with successful results.
Finding historical data highlighting the severity of the addiction problem during the late 1990s is difficult but some important numbers do exist which help to show just how remarkable Portugal’s recovery has been. The following infographic pulls data together from several sources to illustrate some key developments.
You will find more infographics at Statista
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Human rights, Portugal |
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Drinking skim or low-fat (1 percent) instead of whole milk seems to promote obesity in children, according to a meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. As summarized by Nicholas Bakalar in the Times :
“Canadian researchers analyzed 14 prospective studies including 20,897 children up to 18 years old. The studies compared children who drank whole milk (3.25 percent fat) with those given milk containing less than 2 percent fat.
“Combining the data from these studies, the scientists calculated that compared with children who drank low-fat milk or skim milk, those who drank whole milk were at a 39 percent reduced risk for overweight or obesity, and the risk for obesity declined steadily as whole milk consumption increased.
“The authors speculate… It may be that children who drink whole milk consume fewer calories from other food. Some studies suggest that milk fat has properties that make people feel full. Reverse causality could also be at play: It’s possible that skinny children have parents who offer them whole milk to fatten them up.
Our vote is for explanation B, milk fat has properties that make people feel full, i.e., satisfied.
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science |
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Do we want to live in a world in which medical journals are afraid to publish certain conclusions?
I recently described an organized campaign against a medical journal that published research over the objections of anti-meat activists. After the Annals of Internal Medicine refused to halt publication, the US Federal Trade Commission was urged to intervene. So was the Philadelphia district attorney’s office.
Do we really want to live in a world in which medical journals are afraid to publish certain conclusions because activists will sic the authorities on them? Does it really need to be said that, once government officials and the courts start second-guessing medical journals, free speech and honest scholarship are as good as dead?
So who, precisely, tried to get this research retracted before it saw the light of day? Who arrogantly wanted to extinguish the public’s right to hear that the evidence linking meat consumption and poor health is quite weak?
A lot of people who should know better. People associated with prestigious institutions.
Let’s start with David L. Katz, of Yale University. In a bizarre newspaper column Katz implies the journal is guilty of “information terrorism.” In his universe, this isn’t a matter of different researchers examining the same evidence and coming to different conclusions. It’s a matter of anyone-who-disagrees-with-me-has-nefarious-motives. It’s how-dare-you-challenge-the-prevailing-consensus!
Katz is the founder/director of the True Health Initiative. That organization describes itself as a “voice of reason and consensus.” It claims to be “fighting fake facts” and “combating false doubts” via an “evidence-based” approach. Shutting down competing perspectives is not the voice of reason. It’s the voice of authoritarianism.
Neal Barnard, of George Washington University’s School of Medicine, heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. It was his organization that appealed to the Trade Commission and then to the district attorney.
Other signatories to the letter urging the journal to halt publication include Frank Hu, JoAnn E. Manson, Eric Rimm, Meir Stampfer, and Walter Willett. All of these people are associated with Harvard’s School of Public Health. That entity has a party line where meat is concerned. It’s difficult to imagine a researcher with an alternative perspective surviving there long. I wrote about Willett’s vegetarian climate change activism last year.
These are the other individuals who took the highly unusual step of trying to influence the editorial decisions of a respected medical journal:
Dariush Mozaffarian – a Dean at Tufts University
Richard Carmona of the University of Arizona
Christopher Gardner of Stanford University
David J.A. Jenkins and John Sievenpiper of the University of Toronto
Dean Ornish of the University of California
Kim A. Williams of Rush University
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | David L. Katz, Dean Ornish, George Washington University, Neal Barnard, United States, University of California, Yale University |
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The New York Times headline was an attention grabber worthy of Sen. Joe McCarthy: “How Amazon, Geico and Walmart Fund Propaganda.” A subhed explained: “Algorithms are sending ads by American brands onto Russian disinformation sites.” The op-ed by L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall St. Journal, culminated in a sales pitch for his latest venture, NewsGuard. The company’s business plan is to do for internet news sites what Red Channels did for Hollywood movies: maintain a blacklist. Patriotism for personal profit —perfect plan.
Crovitz’s first paragraph invoked Lenin and Putin:
Lenin is sometimes said to have predicted that capitalists would sell Russia the rope with which they would be hanged.* Yet not even Lenin could have imagined Vladimir Putin’s success in getting some of the largest Western companies to subsidize his disinformation efforts by advertising on his government-run “news” websites.
The top programmatic advertiser on Mr. Putin’s Sputnik News site? The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, through ads bought on behalf of Berkshire Hathaway’s Geico insurance. Sputnik News peddles Kremlin propaganda on topics such as Syria and straightfacedly reports Mr. Putin’s denials of interfering in other countries’ elections.
Isn’t a “news site” supposed to report the news straightfacedly? Did Crovitz expect Sputnik to scowlingly report Putin’s denials? Or mockingly? Is that how they would handle the story at the Wall St. Journal? (Of course not. The WSJ would simply ignore Putin’s denials.) As for poor Syria, millions of Americans got a look at Bashar Al-Assad in a 60 Minutes segment that aired in 2015. He’s an ophthalmologist, his wife is a banker, they met in London, they are not religious zealots. The interviewer was hapless Charley Rose, an unlikely Kremlin agent.
Crovitz can only estimate how much US companies spent advertising on Sputnik and RT (Russia Today), but he can name names and try to shame:
Geico is hardly alone in financing propaganda through what’s called “programmatic advertising,” ads that are placed automatically by algorithms, without judgment based on the content or journalistic standards of the websites. Mr. Putin’s leading disinformation arm, RT.com, attracted programmatic advertising from 477 companies and brands over a recent six-month period… Among RT.com’s top 20 programmatic advertisers: Amazon, PayPal, Walmart and Kroger. For Sputnik, its 196 programmatic advertisers in addition to Geico included Best Buy, ETrade and Progressive Insurance.
These all-American brands don’t intend to subsidize the Kremlin. The problem is that with programmatic advertising brands can target the kinds of audiences they want to reach online, rather than specifying, as they once did, on which websites their ads should appear. As a result, these ads inadvertently end up on all kinds of inappropriate sites…
Whatever the amount, companies are supporting websites that are the very definition of corporate social irresponsibility. RT describes its role as encouraging people in other countries to “question more” — that is, promoting divisiveness in the United States and Europe.
To accuse RT of “promoting divisiveness” in the US and Europe is really ludicrous. As if African-Americans would accept the murder of their children by police if it weren’t for outside agitators —the essential White Supremacist line. John Stewart, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore, John Oliver, Samantha Bea and others reported and commented on the same events covered by RT, and their tone was every bit as biting towards racist cops, the ascendant arms industry, greed-driven bankers, mine owners, for-profit healthcare…
“Question more” was the signature sign-off line of Larry King, who conducted interviews on RT that seemed no different than the ones he conducted for 25 years on CNN. Then his show was called “Larry King Live;” on RT it was “Larry King Now.” I forget who King was talking to in the spring of 2016 when he mentioned that Donald Trump had phoned him to discuss the pros and cons of running for President. “Donald Trump is no buffoon,” King cautioned his guest. “It’s a big mistake to write him off as a buffoon.” King has interviewed the Donald more than 100 times over the years. He has been talking to people on-air since the late 1950s. After gaining popularity with radio shows based in Miami and New York, he reached a nationwide audience in 1985 with an all-night show on which a 90-minute interview was followed by call-ins from listeners. Larry King is as American as baseball. (Watching LA Dodger games on TV in recent years, you’d see him sitting behind home plate and seriously observing the field.)
Rosie used to watch RT on the small Panasonic atop the refrigerator. The hour-long news show, produced in New York, was informative. Most of the on-air talent seemed to be American 30-somethings, politically “progressive.” The women were all smart, urbane and way more appealing than the harpies at Fox News. I didn’t think the male comedians were funny, but they thought they were. There was a very clear explainer of financial news named Ed Harrison but RT dropped him before we in the East Bay suddenly stopped getting it about a year ago.
RT.com is but one example, Crovitz writes, cyberspace is full of sites that no reputable company should support with ad buys. He points to three he considers totally loony:
Among the top 20 advertisers on the site Healthy Holistic Living, which has promoted milk thistle as a cancer treatment, are Amazon, Citibank, Hertz and Hilton —as well as the Navy Federal Credit Union. A site called Healthy Food House, which ran an article that said, “Our aim today is to persuade you that there is no such a disease as cancer, as it is only a B-17 deficiency,” carried advertising from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Its top two advertisers were Amazon and Google. A website perhaps appropriately called The Mind Unleashed, which blamed Israel for the Sept. 11 attacks and claimed that certain foods are better than radiation or chemotherapy for cancer treatment, ran advertising from Procter & Gamble, CBS and Best Buy.
To avoid getting sidetracked by milk thistle, let’s stipulate to Crovitz’s basic point: the current programmatic advertising model results in reputable companies buying space on websites their executives and shareholders would disdain for one reason or another. Crovitz has the solution, but before pitching it, he points out the inadequacy of alternative approaches:
Some advertisers have tried to keep their ads off inappropriate sites. Procter & Gamble stopped advertising on YouTube in 2017 for a year because its ads kept appearing alongside videos promoting pedophilia and white supremacy. The broader problem, however, remains.
Some advertisers are trying a cure worse than the disease. Instead of deciding which websites to support with advertising and which to shun, advertisers use a black list* (sic) of words like “Trump,” “taxes” and “antitrust,” keeping their ads off web pages that mention such topics. This amounts to a boycott of serious news.
Other advertisers such as JPMorgan Chase have had their staff try to decide which news sites are safe for their brands. However, the lists they compile can quickly become outdated because there are so many new purveyors of misinformation.
This is Crovitz’s message to prospective clients: Avoiding guilt by association with unsavory websites is too important to leave up to “staff” or algorithms, only dedicated specialists can protect you, hiring experts is a PR imperative! And BTW:
“The company I work for, NewsGuard, provides this service for a fee.”
The Times IDs Crovitz as “co-founder and co-chief executive officer of NewsGuard, which rates news publishers based on their reliability.” Wikipedia tells us that he co-founded a company called Journalism Online that was sold two years later for $45 million. Crovitz has become one of the one percent and deploying his internet acumen against the arch-villain. “If this approach catches on,” he wrote in conclusion to his op-ed, “Mr. Putin will just have to spend more of his government’s own money to promote its disinformation.”
NewsGuard is a good name for a company whose purpose is to guard against the American people receiving certain kinds of news. Whichever company becomes the go-to arbiter of news publishers’ “reliability” will in effect be a very powerful censor.
* The link is to a Wall St. Journal story by Suzanne Vranica that ran August 15, 2019 headlined “Advertisers Blacklist News Stories Online.” At least the WSJ editors know that blacklist is one word, not two, but the usage is jarring. News stories don’t get blacklisted, people do —and not just labor organizers and dissident writers. Vranica and Crovitz point to different words that could trigger a “don’t advertise” warning for clients. She wrote:
“Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more than 400 words, including ‘bomb,’ ‘immigration,’ and ‘racism.’ Also off-limits: ‘Trump.’”
Fred Gardner is the managing editor of O’Shaughnessy’s. He can be reached at fred@plebesite.com
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | New York Times |
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The coordinated leak of the Bolton manuscript has revived Democrats’ hopes for calling the former National Security Advisor to testify at Trump’s trial in the Senate, Mitch McConnell reluctantly admitted last night.
And as Republican frustration with the mustachioed neocon reaches a boiling point, President Trump – who famously fired Bolton via Twitter – has taken to his favorite social media platform to bash his former NSA.
Trump begins by slamming Bolton’s disloyalty, claiming that Bolton begged him for a “non-Senate approved” job and that Trump caved and gave it to him despite “many saying ‘don’t do it, sir’.”
Trump also mocked Bolton’s tendency toward gaffes during TV appearances, like the time he claimed the US was looking at “the Libya model” to handle North Korea. He was immediately roasted by national security experts who noted that Gadhafi’s decision to surrender his nuclear ambitions eventually led to his overthrow and brutal murder.
Moving on, the president said that if he followed Bolton’s advice, the US would be in “World War Six” by now – a reference to Bolton’s famously interventionist views, particularly regarding Iran. It’s believed that, if Bolton had his druthers, the US would have authorized a full-blown invasion.
It turns out Donald Trump isn’t the only Republican president who regrets trusting Bolton. Former President George W. Bush said he regretted his decision to recess-appoint Bolton as his top envoy to the United Nations over the objections of the Senate after it became clear he wouldn’t be confirmed.
“Let me just say from the outset that I don’t consider Bolton credible,” Bush reportedly told an assembled group of political writers, according to the Federalist.
Trump’s criticisms come after the WSJ editorial board said Bolton should be allowed to testify, once again breaking with the Trump administration.
Bolton skeptics – of which there are many – have accused the hotheaded former NSA of merely trying to sell books with the stunt (since getting another job in government is probably out of the question). Of course, this type of attention from the president should only help Bolton achieve that goal. After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Yet Democrats are giving a former “warmonger” the Comey treatment.
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite | United States |
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As in any political battle, truth has been one of the major casualties of the impeachment proceedings against President Donald J. Trump.
While the Democratic impeachment managers have accused Trump repeatedly of dishonesty – often with good reason – they themselves have twisted the truth to serve their own political agenda.
Impeachment manager Adam Schiff, for example, claimed that “more than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies” and that the military aid [which Trump subverted] was for “such essentials as sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, radar… and other support for the war effort.”
While the military aid may have assisted the war effort, Schiff’s comments are misleading because the majority of those killed have been Eastern Ukrainians who died at the hands of the Ukrainian military that the U.S. has armed – not the Russians.
The UN Monitoring Mission on Human Rights determined that of the approximately 13,000 people killed between April 2014 and December 2018, 3,300 of the victims were civilians, 4,000 were Ukrainian military and 5,500 “Russian-backed armed militants.”
Thus, according to Schiff, Russia is responsible for killing 5,500 of its own men!
Human Rights Watch found that the Ukrainian military actually caused many of the civilian deaths by “us[ing] explosive weapons with wide-area effect in populated areas, including near school buildings, in violation of international humanitarian law.”
But this doesn’t fit with Schiff’s alarmist views about Russia, which are straight out of the 1950s McCarthy era.
At the hearings, Schiff frequently referenced the danger of “Russian expansion” and its efforts to “remake the map of Europe” and quoted a witness who stated that “the U.S. aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Sounding like Ronald Reagan or any one of the most hawkish of cold warriors, this assessment has no basis in reality.
Among other things, it ignores that Russia under Putin was the first country to offer sympathy to the U.S. following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and has repeatedly pushed for better diplomatic relations.
Schiff’s misinformation extends to his defense of Joe Biden.
In his opening statement, Schiff claimed that Biden never wanted the “corrupt prosecutor removed in order to stop an investigation into Burisma Holdings, on whose board Biden’s son Hunter sat.”
However, Biden has been filmed in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations bragging about his efforts to blackmail the Ukrainian government by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan if that prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was not removed.
Shokin had never actually been censured or indicted for corruption, although his successor, Yuriy Lutsenko was.
The latter settled the case with Burisma and its chief executive Mykola Zlochevsky by allowing it to pay a $7 million fine when the company stood accused of evading $40 million in taxes – a clear victory for Burisma.
Lutsenko did not even have a law degree and has been characterized by Ukrainian officials as a crooked political appointee of Ukraine’s former Prime-Minister Petro Poroshenko, whom Biden had cultivated close ties with.
(For more information on this see Olivier Berrayer’s documentary, Ukraine-Gate- Inconvenient Facts.)
Schiff and other Democratic Impeachment Managers such as Sylvia Garcia of Texas claimed that under Shokin the investigation against Burisma had lain “dormant.”
However, Shokin told ABC News in an interview – which was conveniently never aired – that this was not true and that the case was proceeding prior to his removal in February 2016.
The Ukraine-Gate saga has commanded a huge amount of attention and contributed to the rising fame of Schiff who has been praised in some circles for his magnificent performance.
By spreading misleading or outright false information about Russia and Ukraine, and drumming up anti-Russian sentiment, the consequences of the hearings, however, could be even more damaging then the Trump presidency.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).
January 29, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | ABC News, Ukraine, United States |
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