The Controversy Over Who Is Responsible for Coronavirus Is Heating Up
By Paul Craig Roberts • Institute for Political Economy • April 14, 2020
Let’s hope the Neoconservatives and American presstitutes don’t add a conflict with China to the ongoing virus and economic threats.
First, is the virus a bioweapon? Second who is responsible?
Two sources concluded that the virus was a bioweapon. One is Francis Boyle, who drafted the US implementing legislation for the Biowarfare Convention that became US law in, I believe, 1989. Boyle says the US government violates the law and has 13,000 scientists working on biowarfare research. Boyle said in February that the aerosol gain-of-function of the virus was done at a UNC lab at which a Wuhan scientist was present, and the HIV features were done in Australia where a Wuhan scientist was present. He says the scientists took the work back with them and the result was Covid-19. Also in February or March a scientific paper by scientists in India concluded that the virus was man-made. Their paper was taken down without explanation.
A top virologist, whose statements to the Belgium government concerning the inadequacy of the government’s response to the virus I have posted on my website, tells me that the Indian scientists were mistaken, and that the virus is naturally evolved. As he is not involved in bioweapons work, I do not think he is covering up illegal activity by US and Chinese governments. He shows in his public concern every indication of being a highly principled person of unquestioned ability and character. Moreover, his position seems to be widely shared among experts.
As for responsibility, it seems both China and the US are responsible. It is clear from news reports that the US contributed millions of dollars to the Wuhan level 4 lab for research having to do with bats and coronavirus. What this research was, we don’t know. We only know what they say. But the US government was aware of the bat coronavirus research and helped to fund it. There was also a report that after the virus outbreak the president of China suddenly removed the top people at the Wuhan facility and put in charge a woman who was an expert virologist. Chinese president XI thought something had gone wrong at the lab and said it was the duty of the government to protect the people.
We also know that various Chinese officials and press said the Americans had brought the virus with them when they came to Wuhan to participate in the military games. The Chinese did not mean on purpose, but that someone among the US team was infected without having symptoms, often a feature of the virus. There was some discussion in which US health officials seemed to acknowledge that the virus might have been active in the US before it broke lose in a mass way.
We also know that Trump and now the neoconservative warmongers are blaming China for keeping quiet too long about the virus. This claim as far as I can tell is false. It seems to be mainly propaganda against China.
We also have had reports that a US military lab in Texas was suddenly closed out of pathogen concerns by the Obama regime.
How all this fits together or doesn’t I don’t know.
As the Democrats are blaming Trump for the virus, Trump blames China as that aligns the Democrats with the “enemy” China and is a way of showing that the Democrats are covering up for “Communist China” by shifting the blame to the president of the US.
The politics of the virus will make it difficult for the truth to emerge.
Reactions to the Corona Virus Hint of a Wider Agenda
By James ONeill – New Eastern Outlook – 14.04.2020
The western world has gone into a phase of unprecedented lockdown. Major airlines have ceased international operations. It is an open question is to whether or not they will be able to resume operations when and if the current draconian restrictions are lifted. In Australia, the Federal government has ceased to sit and the government has announced that this parliamentary closure will extend until at least August.
Quite why such a lockdown is necessary is unclear. No convincing explanation has been offered by the government and it is an extreme step that comparable nations in North America, the United Kingdom and all of Europe have found unnecessary. One of the most alarming consequences of this fundamental attack on the notion of Parliamentary accountability is that the decision was met with acceptance by the official Opposition and muted negative comment, if at all, by the major mainstream media.
Media coverage of the pandemic has been extraordinary. At least half of the nightly main television news bulletins have been devoted to coverage of the pandemic, although whether it actually adds to our degree of knowledge is at best debatable.
The statistics as to those affected, dying and recovery are presented each night like some grizzly football score. How accurate or complete those statistics are is a very open question. They are presented however as some form of immutable truth with nary a question as to their accuracy or reliability.
There are serious questions being asked as to the real origins of the current pandemic. We are constantly told by the mainstream media that it originated in China, and that “fact” is presented as something beyond question. The more we learn however, the less reliable that complacent assertion appears to be.
It is true that the first mainstream media reports of the virus came out of China’s Wuhan City, and urban agglomeration of some 12 million inhabitants. That reporting betrayed a number of assumptions that are difficult to sustain.
Where a virus is first reported does not automatically equate with where it began. One reason for this is that people being infected or dying are not necessarily correctly defined as to the cause of death or illness. This is particularly the case here where multiple instances of the illness were initially defined as the current illustration of the annual influenza epidemic which inflict and kill millions of people each year.
A second factor is that a virus can be imported into a country, either by accident or deliberately, by those acting for or on behalf of another nation. This is not idle speculation in the present case. There is now very good evidence that the virus was imported into the city of Wuhan at a time contemporaneous with the holding in that city of the quadrennial Military Games.
Representatives of more than 100 nations attended and participated in those games. The United States contingent was of particular interest for a number of reasons.
The first is that its soldier participants had their worst medal performance since the games were first held a half century ago, not winning a single gold medal and finishing well down the medal table.
The second factor was that the hotel where the United States military participants stayed was itself a hotbed of infection, recording more than 40 cases of employees and guests infected by the virus. This is a remarkable coincidence that challenges the laws of probability theory.
A third clue is the way the western media have reported the Chinese experience. They have given prominence to United States President Donald Trump’s description of the pandemic as the “Chinese virus.” We know from 100+ years of experience with the Spanish flu of 1919 how a false label can be used to define an entire country on a wholly false basis.
The record clearly shows that the Chinese government alerted the World Health Organisation as soon as they had established the reality of the virus they were dealing with. This was before most western countries had even acknowledged that there was a problem.
This suspicion has been reinforced in recent weeks by the reporting of western media of the actions of the Russian and Chinese governments to provide assistance where it was asked for. The Italian government for example was refused assistance by its European Union “partners” and it was the Russians who flew in giant planes full of urgently needed medical supplies, taking a lengthy roundabout route because of obstructive flyover permission.
This assistance was greeted with a sneer by the western media who contrived to find some sort of Russian plot in a selfless humanitarian exercise. A similar result was seen in the media’s response to Chinese aid which was denounced as either medically inadequate or done with ulterior motives.
In neither case was that view shared by the governments involved, the medical staff of the overstretched and under resourced hospitals, or the citizens of those countries aided by the Russian and Chinese medical supplies.
The writer Dimitri Orlov, who recently returned to live in Russia after many years residence in the United States, had a cynical but arguably realistic view of the virus. On 8 April 2020 he had this comment to make on his Patreon:
“China has just taught the world a major masterclass in biowarfare defence. It doesn’t matter whether SARS-Covid-19 was concocted in a United States biowarfare laboratory or not. The point is, it could have been, because why else would the United States have bio- warfare laboratories scattered around the globe? And why were they collecting DNA samples from local populations except to target them using bioweapons? And so after some amount of uncertainty and vacillation China opted to treat the SARS-COV-19 outbreak as an act of war and won! Russia has followed suit, and although it is too early to declare victory it too is likely to score a win on the biowarfare front.”
I respectfully share Mr Orlov’s view. We also have the curiously unexplained events at the United States’ Fort Detrick biowarfare facility. In July 2019 the facility was forced to temporarily close, reopening at the end of the year. It is one of the literally hundreds of such United States facilities scattered around the globe.
What makes Fort Detrick of particular interest in the current context was that it was known to be working on a Covid-19 type biological weapon. That the United States had succeeded in developing such a weapon was publicly proclaimed by Johns Hopkins University in October 2019. The timing of this announcement, the problems at Fort Detrick and the outbreak of the coronavirus goes beyond mere coincidence.
The wall to wall media coverage of the outbreak in the western media nonetheless fails to raise these fundamental and clearly relevant points.
It is one of the grim ironies of the present pandemic that the United States may well turn out to be the principal victim, at least among western nations. Even there, some questions exist. We know from the published data thus far that 70% of the fatalities in the United States have been in the black population, that represent only 10% of the national population.
Television pictures showing mass graves being created in public parks will do little to assuage growing public concern that allegedly “the richest country in the world” cannot even properly treat or bury their own disadvantaged citizens.
The consequences of this pandemic are likely to be vastly greater than originally thought. The average citizen would do well to strap themselves in for what is going to be a very bumpy ride.
James O’Neill is an Australian-based Barrister at Law.
The Facts About Crimea Should Be Recognised. And So Should Crimea
By Brian Cloughley | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 14, 2020
Although the redoubtable New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared that the Covid-19 virus “has been ahead of us from Day One. We’ve underestimated the enemy, and that is always dangerous, my friends. We should not do that again” it is too much to expect of most political figures that they should ever admit they were wrong about something. President Trump, for example, flatly refuses to acknowledge that in January 2020 he declared that “we have [the virus outbreak] totally under control”, and there are countless similar instances of denial of realities by other leaders, not only about the pandemic, but about very many facets of international affairs. This reluctance extends to the media, although sometimes, it has to be said, some of the media are forced to recognise facts that to them are unpalatable, and to adjust their position accordingly.
One recent instance of non-adjustment, however, is the Western media’s continuing public relations and propaganda campaign against Russia.
On 9 April Al Jazeera carried a report that “A U.S.-Russian space crew blasted off Thursday to the International Space Station following tight quarantine amid the coronavirus pandemic.
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos’ Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner lifted off as scheduled from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.” There was an excellent 400-word piece about the mission, just as one would expect from Al Jazeera.
On the other hand, the New York Times, as ascertained from a search of its website on 10 April, didn’t mention the mission at all. The Washington Post carried a twelve-word item that read in its entirety “By Associated Press April 9, 2020 — A U.S.-Russian space crew has blasted off to the International Space Station.” End.
The reason for reluctance on the part of the U.S. mainstream media to inform the world about such an important international event is that Russia played the major part in a successful space mission with the United States. Imagine the news cover if the spacecraft hadn’t been a Russian Soyuz, but a U.S.-produced SpaceX (still under vastly expensive development) launched from the Kennedy Space Centre. There would have been front-page headlines with “Keep America Great” exhortations from the space commander in Washington.
And so the propaganda of the third Cold War continues, involving all sorts of important international affairs, not least being Crimea which (whisper this) is doing very nicely, thank you, having been restored to Mother Russia.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the Washington Post marked the sixth anniversary of the restoration with a piece on 18 March that (albeit reluctantly) recognised Crimea’s accession to Russia. It noted, among other things, that “in Crimea itself, the annexation was popular, especially among Crimea’s large population of older ethnic Russians. More than five years later, and billions of roubles of investment later, it remains popular.” It is mandatory in the West to use the word “annexation” when referring to the accession of Crimea to Russia following a popular referendum, but even the Post can’t escape the facts, which are so distasteful to the propagandists.
In 1783 Crimea became part of Russia and remained so until, as recorded by the BBC, “In 1954 Crimea was handed to Ukraine as a gift by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who was himself half-Ukrainian.” The majority of citizens wanted to rejoin Russia rather than stay with crippled post-revolution Ukraine which would have victimized them because of their Russian heritage. One of its first actions “was to repeal a 2012 law recognising Russian as an official regional language” and governance from Kiev boded badly for minorities.
It was rarely stated that 90 percent of the inhabitants of Crimea are Russian-speaking, Russian-cultured and Russian-educated, and they voted to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” (in the words of the Declaration of Independence of 1776) in order to rejoin Russia. It would be strange if they had not wanted to accede to a country that not only welcomed their kinship, empathy and loyalty but was economically benevolent concerning their future, as has now been amply demonstrated by ensuing growth and prosperity. As even the Washington Post had to acknowledge, “Crimea’s three largest ethnic groups are, by and in large, happy with the direction of events on the peninsula.”
At the time that these ethnic groups were voting to rejoin their mother country, five years ago, the West, and most notably the administration in Washington, decided to oppose any such move. It didn’t matter that it was a fair and free vote, because there are ways to defeat common sense and national aspirations while creating the impression that it is wrong for people to express their feelings and wishes if these favour a nation that is anathema to those who make the rules.
For example, the government in Crimea invited observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to witness and assess the conduct of the referendum held to determine whether the people of Crimea wished to remain under the Kiev government or rejoin Russia. There were no strings attached, and the invitation was sent to the HQ of the OSCE in Vienna. Then there was a pause during which the matter was considered in who knows what halls of power. And the OSCE conjured up an intriguing excuse for refusing to assess conduct of the plebiscite. As Reuters reported, “a spokeswoman said Crimea could not invite observers as the region was not a full-fledged state and therefore not a member of the 57-member organization. ‘As far as we know, Crimea is not a participating state of the OSCE, so it would be sort of hard for them to invite us,’ she said. She also said that Ukraine, which is an OSCE member, sent no invitation and that the organization ‘respects the full territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine’.” You couldn’t make it up.
The feelings and aspirations of Crimea’s citizens didn’t matter to the OSCE or to the West as a whole. The West wanted, and still wants, Ukraine to rule Crimea, and seems determined to pester and sanction Russia accordingly. But nobody can seriously imagine for one moment that Russia is going to hand over Crimea to the Kiev government. So what is the answer?
Nobody expects the Great and the Good of the West to openly admit they were wrong about Crimea, and that the region and its citizens are in fact immeasurably better-off than they would be had they been subjected to rule by Kiev. But there is usually a way out of such a dilemma, and one that can be gently implemented without embarrassment. All that the West needs to do is quietly accept the status of Crimea and remove anti-Russia sanctions without fanfare. There would be discontent among the ultra-nationalists in Kiev, of course, but the world would be a more secure and happier place. Surely that’s a worthy aim to be achieved?
More on “North Korean Hackers”
By Konstantin Asmolov – New Eastern Outlook – 14.04.2020
North Korean hackers are an unavoidable subject of discussions considering the recent hype about them yet again. Hence, it is worth looking into the wrongdoings they have been accused of and to what extent they are guilty once more.
On 30 May 2019, radio station Voice of America reported that in the opinion of US intelligence agencies, the DPRK, facing economic difficulties due to imposed sanctions, was engaging in cyberattacks against banks and other financial institutions in order to obtain money. Erin Cho, the head of the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (an agency of the Department of Homeland Security), pointed out that North Korean cyber attacks were targeting virtual currency, a relatively new means of stealing money.
Former US State Department senior adviser Balbina Hwang also generated publicity with her statements in August 2019. The visiting professor at Georgetown University talked about a story by the Associated Press that “cited a report from the United Nations Security Council” about North Korea’s use of cyberspace to launch “increasingly sophisticated attacks to steal funds from financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges to generate income. The hardest-hit was South Korea, the victim of 10 North Korean cyberattacks, followed by India with three attacks and Bangladesh and Chile with two each”.
As it turns out, “South Korea’s Bithumb, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, was reportedly attacked at least four times”. Two attacks occurred in February and July 2017, each resulting in losses of approximately $7 million, “while a June 2018 attack led to a $31 million loss and a March 2019 attack to a $20 million loss”.
13 September 2019, the US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions against hacking groups from the DPRK: the Lazarus Group and two of its subsidiaries, Bluenoroff and Andariel. According to the Treasury Department, in 2014, the Lazarus Group was responsible for the cyber attack against Sony Pictures and also for infecting 300,000 computers with viruses in 150 nations world-wide. Bluenoroff managed to steal $1.1 billion from various financial institutions, including $80 million from the central bank of Bangladesh. Andariel is suspected of crimes targeting the South Korean government and infrastructure, and also of attempting to steal classified military information.
At the end of September 2019, experts from the Kaspersky cybersecurity company detected previously unheard of spyware Dtrack, designed by the Lazarus Group, in networks of Indian finance organizations and research centers. This malware can provide access to a device it has infected allowing data to be either uploaded to it or downloaded from it. The spyware is somewhat similar to DarkSeoul, linked to a cyber attack against South Korea in 2013.
In October 2019, Patrick Wardle, the Principal Security Researcher at Jamf (a software provider for the Apple platform), said that hackers, believed to be sponsored by North Korea, had “found a novel way to attack Apple Macs”. They did so by using a fake cryptocurrency trading app. To add legitimacy to the software, the group even created JMT Trading, a front company “complete with an official-looking website”.
In January 2020, Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky reported that the Lazarus Group had accrued large amounts of cryptocurrency by using Telegram, a popular messaging app that uses its own proprietary security protocol. In fact, links to groups hosted by malicious Telegram users can be found on many fake websites. In addition, the Lazarus Group continues to design and launch numerous fraudulent websites (as for instance, Union Crypto Trader) that appear to be trading platforms for cryptocurrency or ICO hosts (Initial Coin Offering) but, in reality, they are used to steal users’ confidential information. The malware developed by the Lazarus group is also “capable of loading in devices’ memory (RAM) exclusively, bypassing hard drives”, which makes it even more dangerous.
The latest incident possibly related to hackers from the DPRK occurred in January 2020 when 16 North Korean computer programmers were “found to have been working in Cambodia illegally” and were subsequently ordered to leave the country. However, soon it came to light that they were not hackers but temporary IT staff working for a “Chinese online gambling operation”.
On 17 February 2020, ESTsecurity (a cyber security company based in Seoul) reported that a North Korea-linked group was probably responsible for hacking the smartphone belonging to Thae Yong-ho, a former DPRK diplomat who defected to South Korea in 2016. The hackers used “spear phishing” to access his new name, text messages, photographs and other information. According to security experts, their attack patterns “were similar to those formerly used by North Korean hacking groups”, such as Geumseong121, that targeted “the websites of government departments, North Korea-related organizations and media officials”. The name of the group is fairly patriotic. There is also a possibility that some other team of hackers “used such attack patterns to give the impression of being a North Korean group.” According to Mun Chong-hyun from ESTsecurity, Geumseong 121, believed, in the opinion of South Korean experts, to be backed by DPRK intelligence agencies, was capable of hacking mobile phones of a number of ROK citizens, such as Thae Yong-ho, whose work is related to North Korea and foreign policy. Mun Chong-hyun also pointed out that phishing emails and messages contained, for example, “an attachment that, when clicked, directed the reader to a website masquerading as the website of a North Korean human rights organization based in the US”. Once users were lured to such a website, their devices were infected with malicious files or software that then accessed “systems and sensitive data”.
2 March 2020 The US Department of Justice charged two Chinese citizens, Tian Yinyin, and Li Jiadong, with money laundering. They were indicted for stealing more than $100 million as a result of two cyber attacks. But, according to a joint investigation conducted by U.S. intelligence and South Korean law enforcement agencies, starting at the end of 2017, North Korean hackers have stolen cryptocurrency from exchanges, and have then laundered approximately $250 million with the aid of the Chinese nationals. The funds are believed to have been used to finance North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. It was not the first time such accusations were made. In 2017, the United States alleged that Chinese company Mingzheng International Trading Ltd “facilitated prohibited” monetary transactions on behalf of a North Korean bank. Prosecutors “said they would seek $1.9 million in civil penalties”.
On 23 March 2020, the Cyprus Police issued a public warning saying they had received a number of complaints regarding telephone calls that appeared to come from North Korea, as the numbers started with 00850 (the DPRK country code). There were grounds to believe that it was a “scam leading to recipients” being overcharged.
Unfortunately, all of these disconcerting reports do not provide any evidence to support their claims. And some time ago, the author conducted his own investigation into such incidents. And we would simply like to remind our readers about its outcomes.
- The claim that the attack patterns were similar to those used by other North Korean groups is unjustified. After all, since there are few unique hacking tools, most hackers have a limited arsenal at their disposal. It is common practice for them to use each other’s attack patterns to not only save time but also misdirect and shift the blame elsewhere. Considering the fact that North Korea’s involvement in the previous attacks was not proven, the so-called evidence could actually turn out to be an extrapolation. A vicious cycle is thus created, as one “highly likely” claim multiplies, and for some reason, this uncertainty is not reflected in conclusions drawn, and DPRK involvement is then viewed as an “incontrovertible” fact.
- The hackers’ use of typically North Korean linguistic expressions also does not prove DPRK involvement. After all, any criminal group may choose to utilize such language (e.g. Chollima) in order to cover up their tracks and deceive law enforcement agencies.
- Hiding IP addresses or caller ID spoofing are common tools used by scammers. In fact, a VPN (a Virtual Private Network) allows you to change your apparent location.
- Discussions about hacking seemingly secure networks not connected to the internet (as for instance, banking systems) usually prompt the question “But how is that possible?” A virus needs to be introduced somehow, and this is possible when a device is connected to the internet. If a network cannot be infected in this manner, then a saboteur (not malware) is probably involved. Another possibility is that the system in question was not completely secure or isolated from the outside world due to a high level of incompetence.
- Public accusations along the lines of ‘X could have been involved in Y’ are mere speculation if they are not supported by evidence. Statements, such as ‘groups with ties to Pyongyang’, also fall into the same category, as it is important to prove such a relationship. After all, simply saying ‘hackers target enemies of the DPRK’ is not evidence. In addition, the Lazarus Group, Bluenoroff and Andariel are highly unusual names for hacker groups, in comparison to Geumseong121, taking into account how isolated North Korea is as a nation.
- In fact, there are ongoing debates about where the Lazarus Group is from among experts. It is especially enjoyable to hear the word “Chollima” in reference to its subgroups. Chollima is a mythical winged horse capable of travelling 1,000 li (400 km) per day. For a long time, the animal symbolized the speed of North Korea’s economic development, which, over a period of at least two years, has increased 10-fold. Hence, nowadays, it is customary to refer to such progress with the expression “Mallima”.
Interestingly, it is not only cyber crime that is on the rise in North Korea itself, where there are over 600,000 mobile phone users, telephone scams are spreading there too. According to defectors from the DPRK, criminals often “pretend to be law enforcers or financial supervisors” who threaten to arrest people they target if they do not pay up. “Such classic scams still work because victims do not dare question the identity of the purported government officials”.
In all likelihood, the DPRK and pro-North Korea hackers are responsible for the so called “phishing campaigns designed to obtain passwords and other personal information” once a victim opens a link or an attachment sent in a message. In September 2019, such correspondence with malware was sent to “people working in the North Korea field.” These types of attacks, using email addresses that appear to belong to “people working on North Korea issues”, started as far back as 2010.
According to a report by Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (a cybersecurity company) issued in January 2020, “a group of hackers suspected to be linked to North Korea” had attacked “a U.S. government agency and researchers working on DPRK issues with a new type of malware”. They “sent emails with six different Microsoft Word documents in Russian that contained malicious macros aiming to give attackers control over the recipients’ computers.”
The latest “malicious email campaigns” occurred at the end of February 2020.
In summary, an interesting situation is seemingly taking shape. Sanctions imposed against the DPRK are forcing the nation to look for new ways of generating income. And since the use of digital technologies is not prohibited by them and is also difficult to monitor, North Korea has seemingly started to bank on this sector. Any work performed by DPRK IT specialists and software developed by them are not covered by sanctions. And Pyongyang has begun to take advantage of this by, for example, using money transfer apps (designed similarly to Chinese analogues) that allow users to bypass standard bank procedures to send and receive money.
Clearly, there is a push to shut down such tools and tighten the digital blockade, hence, the reports about hackers. But for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and it is possible that, just as in self-fulfilling prophecies, myths about North Korean hackers may just become a reality.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History is a Leading Research Fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Mossad False Flag Attacks on Jews
Is anti-Semitism really increasing?
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • April 14, 2020
Even though distracted by the havoc resulting from the coronavirus, the United States and much of Europe is engaged in a frenzied search for anti-Semitism and anti-Semites so that what the media and chattering class are regarding as the greatest of all crimes and criminals can finally be extirpated completely. To be sure, there have recently been some horrific instances of ethnically or religiously motivated attacks on synagogues and individual Jews, but, as is often the case, however, quite a lot of the story is either pure spin or politically motivated. A Jewish student walking on a college campus who walks by protesters objecting to Israel’s behavior can claim to feel threatened and the incident is recorded as anti-Semitism, for example, and slurs written on the sides of buildings or grave stones, not necessarily the work of Jew-haters, are similarly categorized. In one case in Israel in 2017, the two street swastika artists were Jews.
Weaponizing one point of view inevitably limits the ability of contrary views to be heard. The downside is, of course, that the frenzy that has resulted in the criminalization of free expression relating in any but a positive way to the activity of Jewish groups. It has also included the acceptance of the dishonest definition that any criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitism, giving that nation a carte blanche in terms of its brutal treatment of its neighbors and even of its non-Jewish citizens.
Jewish dominated Hollywood and the entertainment media have helped to create the anti-Semitism frenzy and continue to give the public regular doses of the holocaust story. Currently there are a number of television shows that depict in one form or another the persecution of Jews. Hunters on Amazon is about Jewish Americans tracking and killing suspected former Nazis living in New York City in the 1970s. The Plot to Destroy America on HBO is a retro history tale about how a Charles Lindbergh/Henry Ford regime installs a fascist government in the 1930s. One critic describes the televisual revenge feast “as one paranoid Jewish fantasy after another advocating murder as the solution to what they perceive as the problem of anti-Semitism.”
But, as always, nothing is quite so simple as such a black and white portrayal where there are evil Nazis and Jewish victims who are always justified when they seek revenge. First of all, as has been demonstrated, many recent so-called anti-Semitic attacks on Jews involve easily recognizable Hasidic Jews and are actually based on community tensions as established neighborhoods are experiencing dramatic changes with the newcomers using pressure tactics to force out existing residents. And after the Hasidim take over a town or neighborhood, they defund local schools to support their own private academies and frequently engage in large scale welfare and other social services fraud to permit them to spend all their days studying the Talmud, which, inter alia teaches that gentiles are no better than beasts fit only to serve Jews.
The recent concentration of coronavirus in Orthodox neighborhoods in New York as well as the eruption of measles cases last year have been attributed to the unwillingness of some conservative Jews to submit to vaccinations and normal hygienic practices. They also have persisted in illegal large gatherings at weddings and religious ceremonies, spreading the coronavirus within their own communities and also to outsiders with whom they have contact.
Regularly exposing anti-Semitism is regarded as a good thing by many Jewish groups because the state of perpetual victimization that it supports enables them to obtain special benefits that might otherwise be considered excessive in a pluralistic democracy. Holocaust education in schools is now mandatory in many jurisdictions and more than 90% of discretionary Department of Homeland Security funding goes to Jewish organizations. Jewish organizations are now lining up to get what they choose to believe is their share of Coronavirus emergency funding.
Claims of increasing anti-Semitism, and the citation of the so-called holocaust, are like having a perpetual money machine that regularly disgorges reparations from the Europeans as well as billions of dollars per year from the U.S. Treasury. Holocaust and anti-Semitism manufactured guilt are undoubtedly contributing factors to the subservient relationship that the United States enjoys with the state of Israel, most recently manifested in the U.S. Department of Defense’s gift of one million surgical masks to the Israel Defense Force in spite of there being a shortage of the masks in the United States (note how the story was edited after it first appeared by the Jerusalem Post to conceal the U.S. role but it still has the original email address and the photo cites the Department of Defense).
And then there is the issue of Jewish power, which is discussed regularly by Jews themselves but is verboten to gentiles. Jews wield hugely disproportionate power in all the Anglophone states as well as in France and parts of Eastern Europe and even in Latin America. If anti-Semitism is as rampant as has often been claimed it is odd that there are so many Jews prominent in politics and the professions, most especially financial services and the media. Either anti-Semitism is not really “surging” or the actual anti-Semities have proven to be particularly incompetent in making their case.
Further muddying the waters, there have been a number of instances in which Jews have themselves been responsible for what have been claimed to be anti-Semitic incidents. There has also been credible speculation that some of the incidents have been false flags staged by the Israeli government itself, presumably acting through its intelligence services. The objective would be to create sympathy among the public in Europe and the U.S. for Israel and to encourage diaspora emigration to the Jewish state. The recent tale of Israeli-American Michael Kadar, who has been credited with many of early 2017’s nearly two thousand bomb scares targeting Jewish community centers and synagogues worldwide, is illustrative.
Kadar, who holds both Israeli and American nationality, was arrested in Ashkelon Israel on March 2017 by Israeli police in response to the investigation carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Kadar’s American address was in New Lenox Illinois but he actually resided in Israel. Kadar’s defense was that he had a brain tumor that caused autism and was not responsible for his actions, but he was found to be fit for trial and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in June 2017. He was apparently subsequently quietly released from prison and returned to Illinois in mid-2018. In August 2019 he was arrested for violation of parole on a firearms and drugs offense.
The court in Tel Aviv convicted Kadar on counts including “extortion, disseminating hoaxes in order to spread panic, money laundering and computer hacking over bomb and shooting threats against community centers, schools, shopping malls, police stations, airlines, and airports in North America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Denmark.” It claimed that “As a result of 142 telephone calls to airports and airlines, in which he said bombs had been planted in passenger planes or they would come under attack, aircraft were forced to make emergency landings and fighter planes were scrambled.”
It was also claimed by the court that Kadar had gotten involved with the so-called restricted access “dark web” to make threats for money. He reportedly earned $240,000 equivalent worth of the digital currency Bitcoin. Kadar has reportedly refused to reveal the password to his Bitcoin wallet and its value is believed to have increased to more than $1 million.
The tale borders on the bizarre and right from the beginning there were many inconsistencies in both the Department of Justice case and in terms of Kadar’s biography and vital statistics. After his arrest and conviction, many of his public, private and social networking records were either deleted or changed, suggesting that a high-level cover-up was underway.
Most significant, the criminal complaint against Kadar included details of the phone calls that were not at all consistent with the case that he had acted alone. The threats were made using what is referred to as spoofing telephone services, used by marketers to hide the caller’s true number and identify, but the three cell phone numbers identified by the Department of Justice to make the spoofed calls were all U.S.-based and one of them was linked to a Jewish Chabad religious leader and one to the Church of Scientology’s counter-intelligence chief in California. In addition, some of the calls were made when Kadar was in transit between Illinois and Israel, suggesting that he had not initiated the calls.
DOJ’s criminal complaint also included information that the threat caller was a woman who had “a distinct speech impediment.” Michael Kadar’s mother has a distinct speech impediment. Oddly enough she has not been identified in any public documents and the Israelis claimed that Michael was disguising his voice, but she is believed to be Dr. Tamar Kadar, who resided in Ashkelon at the same address as Michael. Dr. Kadar is a chemical weapons researcher at the Mossad-linked Israel Institute for Biological Research (“IIBR”).
Michael appears to have U.S. birthright citizenship because he was born in Bethesda in 1990 while his mother was a visiting researcher at the U.S. Army Military Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). While Dr. Kadar was at USAMRIID, anthrax went missing from the Army’s lab and may have been subsequently used in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks inside the U.S., which resulted in the deaths of five people. The FBI subsequently accused two USAMRIID researchers of the theft, but one was exonerated and the other committed suicide, closing the investigation.
So, there are some interesting issues raised by the Michael Kadar case. First of all, he appears to have been the fall guy for what may have been a Mossad directed false-flag operation actually run by his mother, who is herself an expert on biological weapons and works at an Israeli intelligence lab. Second, the objective of the operation may have been to create an impression that anti-Semitism is dramatically increasing, which ipso facto generates a positive perception of Israel and encourages foreign Jews to emigrate to the Jewish state. And third, there appears to have been a cover-up orchestrated by the Israeli and U.S. governments, evident in the disappearance of both official and non-official records, while Michael has been quietly released from prison and is enjoying his payoff of one million dollars in bitcoins. As always, whenever something involves promoting the interests of the state of Israel, the deeper one digs the more sordid the tale becomes.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) 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.
If Coronavirus Overwhelms Gaza, Israel Alone will be to Blame
What is already a crisis in the territory barely needs a nudge from Covid-19 in order to be tipped into a health disaster
By Jonathan Cook | The National | April 14, 2020
The Palestinians of Gaza know all about lockdowns. For the past 13 years, some two million of them have endured a closure by Israel more extreme than anything experienced by almost any other society – including even now, as the world hunkers down to try to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.
Israel has been carrying out an unprecedented experiment in Gaza, using the latest military hardware and surveillance technology to blockade this tiny coastal enclave by land, air and sea.
Nothing moves in or out without Israel’s say-so – until three weeks ago, when the virus smuggled itself into Gaza inside two Palestinians returning from Pakistan. It is known to have spread to more than a dozen people so far, though doctors have no idea of the true extent. Testing equipment ran out days ago.
Unless Gaza enjoys a miraculous escape, an epidemic is only a matter of time. The consequences hardly bear contemplating.
Countries around the world are wondering what to do with their prison populations, aware that, once it takes hold, Covid-19 is certain to spread rapidly in crowded, enclosed spaces, leaving havoc in its wake.
Gaza is often compared to an open-air prison. But even this analogy is not quite right. This is a prison that the United Nations has warned is on the brink of being “uninhabitable”.
In the prison of Gaza, many inmates are undernourished, and physically and emotionally scarred by a decade of military assaults. They lack essentials such as clean water and electricity after repeated Israeli attacks on basic infrastructure. And the 13-year blockade means there is only rudimentary medical care if they get sick.
Social distancing is impossible in one of the most crowded places on earth. In Jabaliya, one of eight refugee camps in the enclave, there are 115,000 people packed together in little more than a square kilometre. Comparable population density nearby in Israel is typically measured in the hundreds.
There are few clinics and hospitals to cope. According to human rights groups, Gaza has approximately 60 ventilators – most of them already in use. Israel has 15 times as many ventilators per head of population.
There is little in the way of protective gear. And medicines are already in short supply or unavailable, even before the virus hits. Gaza’s infant mortality – an important measure of medical and social conditions – is more than seven times higher than Israel’s. Life expectancy is 10 years lower.
Unlike a normal prison, Gaza’s warden – Israel – denies responsibility for the inmates’ welfare. Since it carried out a so-called “disengagement” 15 years ago, dismantling illegal settlements there, Israel has argued – against all evidence – that it is no longer the occupying power.
That should have been proved an obvious lie when Palestinians, choking on their isolation and deprivation, began rallying in protest two years ago at the perimeter fence that acts as a cage locking them in. Demonstrators were greeted with live fire from Israeli snipers.
Around 200 people were killed, and many thousands left with horrific injuries, mostly to their legs. Medical services are still overwhelmed by the need for long-term surgery, amputations and rehabilitation for the disabled protesters.
What is already a crisis barely needs a nudge from the coronavirus to be tipped into a health disaster.
And with most of the population already below the poverty line, after Israel’s blockade destroyed Gaza’s textile, construction and agricultural industries, the economy is no shape to withstand an epidemic either.
Most governments, including Israel’s, maintain a degree of control even in the face of this most unexpected emergency. They could prepare for it, even if many were slow to do so. They can marshall factories to produce ventilators and protective equipment. And they have the resources to rebuild their health services and economies afterwards.
If they fail in these tasks, it will be their failure.
But Gaza is entirely dependent on Israel and an international community preoccupied with its own troubles. Even if health authorities can secure ventilators and protective equipment in the current, highly competitive global market, Israel will decide whether to let them in. Equally, it could choose to seize them for its own use, in order to placate growing domestic criticism that it is short of vital equipment.
The blame for Gaza’s plight – now and in the future – lands squarely at Israel’s door.
Israel should be helping Gaza, but it is doing the precise opposite. Last week, Israeli planes sprayed herbicide to destroy the crops of Gaza’s farmers – part of a policy to keep clear sight-lines for Israeli military forces.
Moreover, in this time of crisis, Gaza’s food insecurity is only set to deepen. For the past year, Israel has been starving both Gaza and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank of the taxes and duties it collects on their behalf and that rightfully belong to the Palestinian people. Many families have no money for food.
The US has aggravated this financial crisis by cutting funds to the United Nations refugee agency, UNRWA, which cares for many of Gaza’s families expelled by Israel from their homes decades ago and forcibly crowded into the enclave.
The little influence retained by Hamas relates to the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held illegally in Israel. Hamas wants them out, especially the most vulnerable, aware of the danger the virus poses to them in Israel, where the contagion is more advanced.
It is reported to be trying to negotiate a release of prisoners, offering to return the corpses of two soldiers it seized during Israel’s infamous attack on Gaza in 2014 that killed more than 500 Palestinian children.
If Israel refuses to trade, as seems likely, or denies entry to much-needed medical supplies, Gaza’s only other practical leverage will be to fire missiles into Israel, as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has threatened. That is the one time western states can be expected to notice Gaza and voice their condemnation – though not of Israel.
But if plague does overwhelm Gaza, the truth about who is really responsible will be hard to conceal.
Modelling the horrifying conditions in Gaza, Israeli experts warned last year of an epidemic like cholera sweeping the enclave. They predicted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians storming the fence to escape contagion and death.
It is the Israeli army’s nightmare scenario. It admits it has no response other than – as with the fence protests – to gun down those pleading for help.
For decades Israel has pursued a policy of treating Palestinians as less than human. It has minutely controlled their lives while denying any meaningful responsibility for their welfare. That deeply unethical and inhumane stance could soon face the ultimate test.
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