Scientific Study Traces the Evolution and Migration of SARS-CoV-2. Where did the Virus Originate?
Review of an Important Peer Reviewed PNAS Study entitled Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, by Peter Forster, Lucy Forster, Colin Renfrew, and Michael Forster
By Allen Yu | Global Research | April 24, 2020
Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes by Peter Forster, Lucy Forster, Colin Renfrew, and Michael Forster published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Sciences of America (PNAS)focuses on a study of the genomes of 160 covid-19 patients.
As readers may know, viruses are RNA-based entities that periodically and regularly undergo mutations. One can study these mutations and almost like clockwork trace their evolution – i.e. their lineage and migration pattern.
The authors specifically employed a methodology known as “character-based phylogenetic networks”. The technique has been used as the “method of choice” to reconstruct prehistoric human population movements, language evolution, various ecological studies, and some 10,000 phylogenetic studies of diverse organisms – and now virology.
This is an early study – the sample size is only 160 humans – with 100 types. However, the results are stunning. Among the key conclusions:
- There are three major types of coronaviruses, A, B, and C, with type A being the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 in humans and showing 96.2% similarly to a particular strain of virus in bats.
- Most of the viruses in China and Wuhan are of type B while most of the viruses found in America, Europe and Australia are of type A and C. Type C is not found in Mainland China but is found in significant numbers in Hong Kong, S. Korea, and Taiwan.
- While Type B is found in large numbers across Mainland China (including Wuhan), it is not found in significant numbers around the rest of the world.
- The methodology used was successfully used to trace several clinically verified cases of virus travel from Wuhan out to various nations, including Brazil and Italy. As such, the authors conclude the “character-based phylogenetic networks” methodology was useful and appropriate for studying the spread and evolution of the coronavirus.
- Yet, according to the methodology, the earliest sample of virus studied – collected on December 24 2019 in Wuhan – WAS NOT close to being the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.
According to the authors:
In a phylogenetic network analysis of 160 complete human severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) genomes, we find three central variants distinguished by amino acid changes, which we have named A, B, and C, with A being the ancestral type according to the bat outgroup coronavirus. The A and C types are found in significant proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia. (To read the complete scientific report in pdf click here)
Some observations…
First, most of the viruses in the West do not seem to have arisen from China. The authors identified Type B as the main virus type found in Mainland China, with that Type mostly confined to Mainland China and Types A and C predominant outside China – including U.S., Europe and Australia.
Two reasons given for why Type B variants (“China’s virus,” if you must) did not expand much beyond Mainland China: one being “complex founder scenario” and second “the ancestral Wuhan B-type virus is immunologically or environmentally adapted to a large section of the East Asian population, and may need to mutate to overcome resistance outside East Asia.”
Since I have yet to see any reputable studies that shows any strains of the coronavirus having any affinity or dislike to any ethnicity of people, let’s focus on “complex founder scenario” and “environment” resistance.
The authors have noted many perplexities in the study. But if we consider the possibility that coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan, those perplexities all go away. More specifically, let’s presume a scenario where the virus was already circulating under the radar in the West and were carried to Wuhan in December or some time before, where it then spread locally within China.
Consider the fact that the authors had noted that Type B variants outside China did not show the “one-month” variations that would have been expected were Type B variants and descents to have traveled out of China to infect the rest of the world.
But if Type B variants – including Type C “descendants” – were already communally established and transmitted outside China, then this paradox easily goes away.
Assuming the virus to have been brought to Wuhan instead of originating from Wuhan would also constitute a “complex founding scenario” that the author hypothesized could solve the riddle.
This assumption also provides an explanation for the “environmental resistance” the author hypothesized. If the virus arrived in Wuhan with the Chinese authorities quickly closing down the city soon afterwards, the virus would not have had chance to spread to the rest of the world. The Chinese government’s shutting down of Wuhan in January could easily form the “environmental resistance” the authors hypothesized for the Type B virus.
Finally, it is important to note that in this study, of the 160 samples, most are from patients in China, only a few from outside Asia. In this study, the authors had tentatively labelled Type C as a descendant of Type B found in China. But while Type B is found mostly in Wuhan, it has also been found in significant numbers outside China. As more data from outside China comes live (one hopes soon), the same methodology will probably reveal that the predecessor to Type B and Type C arose outside not inside China. Type A and Type C thus all arose outside China and independently of China.
While the current study is China-centric (most data are from China), it already has established that the virus did not arise in Wuhan. The authors noted importantly in the data supplement section, “the oldest isolate from 24 December 2019 (brown node, week 0) lies diagonally opposite to the bat virus outgroup root.”
As we get more data, studies such as this will shed a lot of light on the origins of the coronavirus. It is really too bad, such a shame that the U.S. and Europe has missed such critical times testing and tracking the viral flow. It is worth noting that U.S. officials are blaming China for the virus. But even with limited data, the authors have been able draw some preliminary conclusions regarding the geographic origins of the virus.
***
The title of the PNAS article is:
Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes (pdf)
authors: Peter Forster , Institute of Forensic Genetics, Münster, Germany, Lucy Forster, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Colin Renfrew, Fluxus Technology Limited, Colchester, UK, and Michael Forster, Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology, Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany
***
Copyright © Allen Yu, Global Research, 2020
Israel and World Jewry
By Evan Jones | American Herald Tribune | April 24, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic hits the world. Undeterred, the Israeli forces of Occupation (including the settlers) escalate the rampage and the outrages. Murders, harassment and arrests, home demolitions, destruction and/or theft of virus aid equipment and food and brutalizing of aid workers, Gaza crop poisoning on a grand scale, West Bank crop destruction, etc. Spitting on Palestinians is now de rigueur. Business as usual. Sadism on a grand scale. Whence the motivation? And the collective psychological reward? The Jewish God is a militant deity.
Israel is a pariah state. It is an apartheid state in its construction, [1] from its inception as an ethnocracy, not one for which the label ‘apartheid’ is merely a dangerous prospect on the horizon with a completely colonized West Bank.
How does Israel survive as such, given that apartheid South Africa has disappeared into history. It survives essentially because of support from the institutionalized structures of establishment world Jewry. Period.
Don’t talk Christian Zionists, as they are a side issue, crazies succoured to dilute the central causal lineage.
The US umbrella is tangibly of enormous importance. But behind the White House compliance is the Zionist lobby, from Truman onward (albeit with occasional wobbles). The Zionist lobby owns Congress; those members they don’t own they simply extrude (starting with William Fulbright in 1974, Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, etc.). The massive role of the US in supporting Israel is a product of institutionalized American Jewry – now centred on the peak body AIPAC.[2] The argument that US support of Israel is an instrumental means of projecting US power in the Middle East is diversionary; the posited hierarchy of master and proxy won’t wash. Cui bono?
The Zionist lobby only recently destroyed what was left of the integrity of the British Labour Party, installing a functionary at its head. The British state is Zionist-occupied territory; ditto that of France, Germany (hobbled by the Jewish holocaust), Canada and Australia.
Israel, as a racist state, is engaged in criminality sui generis. It was a guaranteed outcome known from the start. Theodore Herzl noted (1896):
‘An infiltration [of Jewish migrants to Palestine] is bound to end badly. It continues to the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened … Immigration is consequently futile unless based on an assured supremacy’. Violence was implicit in Zionism from the outset.[3]
The native population felt itself threatened immediately, but the Zionist movement found solace and then salvation in the arrival of World War, the Balfour Declaration and subsequently the British Mandate over Palestine. Until the Zionists could muster the firepower to create its ‘promised land’ unilaterally by terrorism. That firepower was acquired from British training en masse, just prior to World War II (to quell the Arab rebellion) and during the War itself.
As David Hirst notes, regarding the massacres and bombings by Jewish forces in response to the MacDonald White Paper of May 1939: [4]
‘The ideological roots of ‘gun Zionism reach back to Theodor Herzl himself. It was inevitable, as he foresaw, that armed force would eventually come into its own as the principal instrument of a movement which, in its earlier and weaker phase, could only rely on the protection of an imperial sponsor. That phase was now drawing to a close.’
Israeli criminality must be sheeted home to the personnel within the institutions of the Israeli state – politicians, the military and intelligence services, the judiciary, etc. They are crimes of individuals, groupings, institutionalized, the personnel being uniformly Jewish.
Isn’t this criminality bad for world Jewry and what it means to be Jewish? Apparently not. Establishment Jewish institutions, with one voice, sign up for Israel’s crimes. More, support of Israel is their raison d’être – all while simultaneously shedding crocodile tears about anti-Semitism. The global Jewish community, whether Jewish individuals like it or not, is implicated in Israeli criminality by the dominant Jewish organizations who claim to speak for national Jewish communities.
The Wikipedia entry of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), clearly sanctioned by its subject, notes: ‘The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, represents the interests of the Australian Jewish community to …’. Here’s a representative conflation of the interests of the state of Israel and of a national Jewish community in its entirety.
John Lyons was Middle East correspondent for The Australian newspaper during 2009-15. His Balcony Over Jerusalem [5] is notable for the attention paid to the lobby. Like all budding Middle East correspondents, Lyons was inevitably the subject of attempted seduction and, failing that, subsequently the subject of escalating attacks for his endeavour to fulfil his role as independent reporter. A senior Israeli military officer observed to Lyons: ‘The Israel lobby in Australia is the most powerful lobby in the world in terms of impact it has within its own country’.
The nation-based lobby works to ensure that its own government (whichever Party is in power) remains complacent, acquiescent, if not blood red in support. It also works tirelessly to control the information flow. Because Israel stinks, disinformation (lies, counter-narratives, fairy stories) and censorship have to be an integral part of the lobby’s activities. Lyons recounts how, in particular, AIJAC’s Colin Rubenstein constantly pressured senior management at The Australian to close down his reporting. (Senior management of the Murdoch-owned paper supported Lyons, in spite of the attempted scuttling by a middle level editor).
The other major Australian media chain, Fairfax (now Nine Entertainment), owner of the major Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra dailies, has faced the same pressure. Ditto the publicly-owned television stations ABC & SBS. Fairfax/Nine has persistently caved in, granting privileged access to the opinion and letters pages to pro-Israel apologists. An ex-Fairfax journalist, friend, confirms that the pressure of the lobby on management was relentless and intolerable.
In early January, in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age we have Rubenstein glorifying the assassination of Qasem Soleimani as ‘arch-terrorist’, presiding over a claimed multi-tentacled terrorist expansionist reach of Iran in the Middle East, destabilising everything in its wake. Rubenstein even has Iran behind the assassination of Lebanon’s Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Surprisingly, the online comments editor allowed multiple responses from ‘woke’ readers to Rubenstein as an Israel front man, whereas editors scrupulously deny such feedback in the print version of the newspaper. In the same issue of the papers we have an AIPAC flunkey claiming on cue that the essential issue behind US-Iran escalating tension is ‘the pressing need to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons’, bizarrely accusing Iran of undermining the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal.
Rubenstein was in the Herald again in late January, claiming that plenipotentiary Jared Kushner’s ‘Middle East Peace Plan (sic)’, in the formulation of which no Palestinian authorities were invited, is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Thus are Australians fed the regular odious drip, very rarely opposed in print, of the innate necessity and justice of Israel’s criminality.
Rather than the association between Israel and its global Jewish community support being severed as the daily brutality of the Israeli forces of Occupation accumulates, the association has recently been reinforced. The notable vehicle for this reinforcement has been the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism. The Definition skirts over ‘Holocaust Remembrance’ but pays majority attention to the treatment of Israel.
Thus we find that rational criticism, driven by conventional humanitarian principles, of Israel’s criminality is labelled anti-Semitic. More, IHRA personnel and Jewish organizations flog this definition, pressuring, pressuring national governments into submission to accept the definition and to act as repressive agents against free-thinking citizens of those countries.
And to those who object? The issue is concisely contained in a recent skirmish in faraway New Zealand. The brief report on stuff.nz deserves quoting at length. It turns out that the Wellington Jewish Council had requested New Zealand’s capital city to adopt the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. But the Wellington Progressive Synagogue objected, claiming that the definition ‘had the potential to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism (opposition to the state of Israel), as it had already done overseas’. Too kind – not ‘potential’, as the point of the definition is precisely to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Said Progressive Synagogue spokespersons: ‘Its new effect is to regulate the speech of people like ourselves: law-abiding non-Zionists who call for the unexceptional application of law and human rights in Israel/Palestine; Jews and non-Jews alike’. Quite.
The NZ Jewish Council responded that ‘the IHRA definition explicitly stated criticism of Israel could not be regarded as antisemitic’. A dishonest retort. The text includes the sentence ‘… criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’. But this is transparently a ruse to deflect from the substance of the definition’s text for which the sentence is an aberration. And the meaning of ‘similar to that levelled against any other country’? Criticisms of Israel are aimed precisely at structures and practices that set it apart from other countries, including some countries that are utterly on the nose. The IHRA mob mean – we will be the arbiters of what is acceptable criticism. But, in truth, what is ‘acceptable’ criticism is an empty set.
But here’s the clincher. The Jewish Council continues: ‘The writers of the opinion piece were “fringe” and did not have a mandate to speak on behalf of the Jewish community – unlike the Jewish Council’.
‘Fringe’? ‘Mandate’? This is it in a nutshell. If you don’t support Israel 100 per cent, you aren’t a real Jew. And on what basis does the Jewish Council’s presumed ‘mandate’ rest?
Michelle Weinroth, author and member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, nails the fraud and duplicity behind the IHRA push:
‘If the IHRA definition turns a blind eye to the veritable culprits of heinous racism, it nonetheless targets the anti-racist defenders of Palestinian human rights, many of whom are conscientious Jews. … it masquerades as an innocuous, educational, and preventative measure while acting as a penal code that aggresses the advocates of human rights, silencing them with veiled threats. … At its heart sits a false equation between the state of Israel and Jews more generally.’
A false equation between Israel and Jews ‘more generally’. Here’s another one. Recently brought to light, an earlier tussle took place in September 1991 when Israel demanded a $10 billion loan guarantee, which President George H Bush viewed as a means of undermining the forthcoming Madrid peace conference (Blankfort, fn.2). Bush Sr threatened to deny Israel the loan guarantees if the large contingent of migrants from the Soviet Union were to be directed into West Bank settlements. Philip Weiss reports:
‘The Israel lobby group the American Jewish Committee (AJC) decided to support the Israeli government against the White House in 1991 over illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank, even though many officials at the organization privately backed the president. The AJC reasoned that a leading Jewish organization in Washington had a “primary responsibility” to stand up for Israel because the country represents the “collective will” of the Jewish people, an AJC official says.’
Israel represents the collective will of the Jewish people? Were ‘the Jewish people’ consulted?
One of the more remarkable attempts to associate Israel with the ‘collective will’ of the Jewish people, via the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, is a statement by one Robert Wistrich to the UN Commission on Human Rights, published on 10 September 2004.[6] Wistrich’s parents’ lives were blighted by anti-Semitism, and his subsequent stellar academic career was devoted to this very subject. Yet this statement is a wretched mishmash, devoid of logic and history, and conveniently oblivious to Israeli criminality. And this during the Prime Ministership of noted humanist Ariel Sharon. Wistrich claims:
‘Much of the mobilizing power of “anti-Zionism” derives from its link to the Palestinian cause. Since the 1960s, the [Palestine Liberation Organization] has worked hard to totally delegitimize Zionism and the policy has largely succeeded: this anti-Zionism involves a total negation of Jewish nationhood and legitimate Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Israel …’
Legitimate sovereignty in Eretz Israel? Sure. Wistrich’s tribalism has overridden his rigorous academic training. Curious, there are no Jewish dissenters in his grab bag of mad dog anti-Semites in a pragmatic coalition all aimed at the destruction of Israel.
Wistrich couldn’t really avoid this elephant in the room, so he grabbed the bull by the horns in a 2014 issue of Commentary (preaching to the converted). [7] Well-known Jewish intellectuals who don’t toe the Party line are accused of having been mentally and morally captured by infantile Marxism, etc., and/or anti-Americanism, their left-wing blinkered obsessions then finding its next object of abuse post-Vietnam in Israel. Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Howard Zinn (‘Hatred for America, the West, and Israel thrives beneath the cloak of human rights and social justice’), Eric Hobsbawm, Shlomo Sand, Ilan Pappé – all are excoriated for their sins.
In particular, Wistrich couldn’t have ignored Shlomo Sand, whose cannon volleys in The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) and The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012) blasted Wistrich’s self-assured self-righteousness to shreds. Wistrich dismisses Sand (‘his pseudoscientific delegitimization of Israel’) as merely having ‘revived long-discredited theories – such as Arthur Koestler’s deranged notion that Ashkenazi Jews sprang from Khazars who converted in the 10th century C.E.’. Wistrich ignored that Sand, in genuine scholarly fashion, put Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) into context with a considerable literature on the same theme.
The rhetoric of these contemptible lefties, claims Wistrich, ‘divorced from historical truth and geopolitical reality, negates any possibility of reform or redress concerning genuine grievances’. Genuine grievances? A chink in the armour? How could there be grievances against Israel that were genuine (the ‘empty set’ again), and who would decide? Evidently not the Palestinian victims or their Jewish sympathizers.
We have a comparable affair when French elder statesman Robert Badinter addressed UNESCO in December 2016,[8] appropriating Holocaust remembrance to plug Israel as synonymous with Jewry per se. Badinter played the same card as Wistrich:
‘What is certain is that in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anti-Semitism has once again spread widely under the name of anti-Zionism. We must have the lucidity to recognize that under this label that refers to Zionism, it is indeed the Jews, and Jews everywhere, who are targeted. And I would say that anti-Zionism under the surface is nothing but the contemporary expression of anti-Semitism, namely, hatred of the Jews.’
The ‘not in my name’ communities, declining to join wholeheartedly the cause of Israel über alles, have been written out of the story. Einstein, Freud, Arendt, camp survivors like Hajo Meyer; individual authors, bloggers and/or activists; non-compliant Jewish organizations; Israeli human rights organizations; etc. It’s the Spinoza syndrome – ignored if too famous; otherwise excommunicated because ‘self-hating’ Jews, ‘fringe’ elements, etc.
When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem,[9] highlighting the bureaucrat over the monster, even her fame didn’t save her from damnation. Daniel Maier-Katkin highlights the ongoing character assassination and its character:[10]
‘[A] campaign against the memory of Hannah Arendt continues, and the ideology that rationalizes and justifies ad hominem attacks and menacing gestures against Jews who dare to criticize Israel persists. As Rabbi [Michael] Lerner and Justice [Richard] Goldstone have learned, a Jew who fears that Israel is on a path that leads to destruction, or who is skeptical of a “divine mission to possess the land,” or concerned about the legality or morality of unrelenting military strategies to secure regional domination, will be attacked as self-hating and anti-Semitic.
‘To hate oneself is ipso facto pathological, and this, it is asserted, leads to irrational hatred of Israel, which is seen as the embodiment of the Jewish people. Thus, defenders of Israeli policies aim to exclude Jewish critics from public discourse by defining them as crazy persons, driven to anti-Semitism by self-loathing. In this way Lerner’s criticism of Israel, or Goldstone’s, or Arendt’s is dismissed as arising from psychological or spiritual disturbance rather than reasoned argument or an ethical posture. Calumny, an old-fashioned blend of slander, distortion, and innuendo, has been a recurring instrument of intimidation in post-Holocaust Jewish politics.’
In sum, Israeli state and settler criminality persist because it is supported uniformly by dominant national Jewish bodies, with de facto support and/or passivity from sections of the Jewish population. This institutionalized structure never fails to claim that it acts for Jewry in its entirety. Dissidents from the demand for unqualified support are cast aside from the tribe.
Is it not then possible, indeed probable, that some cool-headed people will reason that it is appropriate to become an anti-Semite? A stance rooted not in a time-worn shibboleth, but on the seeming support of the vast majority of world Jewry for Israeli criminality and inhumanity? Ersatz anti-Semitism (criticism of Israel), manufactured by the Zionist lobby as cover-up, thus potentially fosters substantive anti-Semitism. The real thing.
The Canadian (Jewish) philosopher Michael Neumann earlier nailed the implications:[11]
‘Inflating the meaning of ‘anti-Semitism’ to include anything politically damaging to Israel is a double-edged sword. … The more things get to count as anti-Semitic, the less awful anti-Semitism is going to sound. …
‘Since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to be anti-Semitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of anti-Semitism becomes morally obligatory. It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labelled anti-Semitic… The more anti-Semitism expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks.
‘Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism is a moral obligation.’
The ‘not in my name’ communities, in their myriad dimensions and considerable expenditure of energy, have made not a jot of difference to Israel’s project. Why?
Gideon Levy, long-time Haaretz journalist providing a window into Israel’s soul, has honed in on the denial, conscious amongst its leaders, subliminal amongst the bulk of the populace, that accompanies Israel’s ongoing criminality. And behind it? Here is Levy in March 2018 (he said the same in an Australian lecture tour in November 2017):
‘There are three core values of Israeli culture that enforce the totalitarian discourse.
‘The first value: we are the chosen people. Secular and religious will claim it. Even if they don’t admit it they feel it. If we are the chosen people, who are you to tell us what to do. The second very deeply rooted value: we are the victims, not only the biggest victims, but the only victims around…. I don’t recall one occupation in which the occupier present himself as the victim. Not only the victim– the only victim….
‘There is a third very deep rooted value. This is the very deep belief again everyone will deny it but if you scratch under the skin of almost any Israeli you will find it there, the Palestinians are not equal human beings like us. They don’t love their children like us. They don’t love life like us. They were born to kill, they are cruel, they are sadists, they have no values, no manners… This is very, very deep rooted in Israeli society. And maybe that’s the key issue. As long as this continues, nothing will move. We are so much better than them, so much more developed than them, more human than them.’
One of Sydney’s Jewish schools, Moriah College, has as its ‘core values’ (not atypical):
‘We strive to foster critical thought, cultural interests, tolerance, social responsibility and self-discipline. … Moriah not only aspires to achieve excellence in academic standards, but maintains and promotes among its students an awareness of and a feeling for Jewish traditions and ethics, an understanding of and a positive commitment to Orthodox Judaism and identification with and love for Israel.’
Critical thought, tolerance, social responsibility, and identification with and love for Israel? Take your pick. You can’t have both.
Endnotes
[1] vide Uri Davis’ Apartheid Israel, 2004; itisapartheid.org.
[2] Jeffrey Blankfort has meticulously documented the rise of AIPAC from the 1950s to its current status as the key determining force in US Middle East foreign policy. ‘Rendering unto AIPAC’, Counterpunch magazine, January 2014.
[3] David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, 1977, third edn., p.140.
[4] Hirst, p.221.
[5] John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir, with Sylvie Le Clezio, 2017.
[6] The Statement is reproduced in the Jewish Political Studies Review, Fall 2004, and made available online.
[7] Wistrich, ‘Judeophobia and Marxism’, Commentary, December 2014.
[8] Robert Badinter, ‘Antisémitisme: tirer les enseignements de l’histoire’, UNESCO, 6 December 2016, reproduced to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January. The speech in English, ‘Anti-Semitism: Learning the lessons of history’, is reproduced here.
[9] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963.
[10] Daniel Maier-Katkin, ‘How Hannah Arendt Was Labeled an “Enemy of Israel”’, Tikkun, Nov/Dec 2010.
[11] Michael Neumann, ‘What is Anti-Semitism?’, in Cockburn & St.Clair (eds.), The Politics of Anti-Semitism, 2003.
Pages From The Auschwitz Death Registry Volumes
Long-Hidden Death Certificates Discredit Extermination Claims
By Mark Weber – The Journal of Historical Review – Fall 1992
Over the years, Holocaust historians and standard Holocaust studies have consistently maintained that Jewish prisoners who arrived at Auschwitz between the spring of 1942 and the fall of 1944, and who were not able to work, were immediately put to death. Consistent with the alleged German program to exterminate Europe’s Jews, only able-bodied Jews who could be “worked to death” were temporarily spared from the gas chambers. Holocaust historians also agree that no records were kept of the deaths of the Jews who were summarily killed in the camp’s gas chambers because they were too old, too young or otherwise unable to work. [1]
However, Auschwitz camp death records — which were hidden away for more than 40 years in the Soviet Union — cast grave doubt on these widely accepted claims.
Inmate deaths at Auschwitz were carefully recorded by the camp authorities on certificates that were bound in dozens of death registry volumes. Each “death book” (Sterbebuch) contains hundreds of death certificates. Each certificate meticulously records numerous revealing details, including the deceased person’s full name, profession and religion, date and place of birth, pre-Auschwitz residence, parents’ names, time of death, and cause of death as determined by a camp physician.
These death registry volumes are designated as “secondary books” (Zweitbücher), suggesting the existence of a still-inaccessible set of “primary books.”
The death registry volumes fell into Soviet hands in January 1945 when Red Army forces captured Auschwitz. They remained inaccessible in Soviet archives until 1989, when officials in Moscow announced that they held 46 of the volumes, recording the deaths of 69,000 Auschwitz inmates.
These 46 volumes partially cover the years 1941, 1942 and 1943. There are just two or three volumes for the year 1941, and none at all for the years 1944 or 1945. [2] It is not clear why so many volumes are still missing. According to informed International Red Cross officials, the most likely explanation is that they were misplaced by the Soviets, and might therefore turn up later. (There is no indication that Auschwitz camp authorities made any effort to destroy any of the volumes.) [3]
“No one seems to know yet what become of the numerous missing volumes,” the journal Red Cross, Red Crescent has reported. “Are they still gathering dust in one of the numerous archives throughout the [former] USSR? Anything is possible, but this last hypothesis seems most likely. The mere thought that there are more than 3,250 archival centers in the USSR is enough make anyone’s head spin.” [4]
Russian officials have permitted an agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) — the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, Germany — to make copies of the 69,000 death certificates. Microfilm copies of the documents have reportedly also been given to the American Red Cross, and the original volumes have been turned over to the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland.
Although archive officials have not permitted independent researchers to freely examine and evaluate the death registry volumes, the IHR recently obtained copies of 127 of the death certificates from German journalist and researcher Wolfgang Kempkens, who obtained copies of more than 800 of them from sources in Poland and Russia.
Published here — to our knowledge for the first time anywhere — are facsimile reproductions of 30 of these certificates. (Because of the Journal’s page size, the documents reproduced here are reduced to 55 percent of original size.)
In selecting which certificates to reproduce here, preference has been given to those recording the deaths of Jewish prisoners who were indisputably too old to have been able to work.
Consistent with the Sterbebuch records, other German wartime documents show that a very high percentage of the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz were not able to work, and were nevertheless not killed. [5]
For example, an internal German telex message dated September 4, 1943, from the chief of the Labor Allocation department of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), reported that of 25,000 Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, only 3,581 were able to work. All of the remaining Jewish inmates — some 21,500, or about 86 percent — were unable to work. [6]
This is also confirmed in a secret report dated April 5, 1944, on “security measures in Auschwitz” by Oswald Pohl, head of the WVHA agency responsible for the concentration camp system, to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Pohl reported that there was a total of 67,000 inmates in the Auschwitz camp complex, of whom 18,000 were hospitalized or disabled. In the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau), supposedly the main extermination center, there were 36,000 inmates, mostly female, of whom “approximately 15,000 are unable to work.” [7]
The evidence shows that Auschwitz-Birkenau was, in fact, established primarily as a camp for Jews who were not able to work, including the sick and elderly, as well as for others temporarily awaiting assignment to other camps. [8]
Along with the two documents above, the long-hidden certificates reproduced on the following pages discredit a central pillar of the Holocaust extermination story. As revealing as these documents are, though, there is little doubt that a careful examination of all of the many thousands of documents in the Auschwitz death books — as well as other, still-inaccessible wartime records — would bring us much closer to finding definitive answers to the central questions of Germany’s wartime Jewish policy. It is high time for archival officials in Poland, Germany, Russia and Israel to open all their records to independent scholars.
Notes
1. Probably the most often cited “evidence” for extermination at Auschwitz are the “confessions” and “affidavits” of former camp commandant Rudolf Höss. See, for example, Höss affidavit of April 5, 1946 (Nuremberg document 3868-PS), and: Rudolf Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, Steven Paskuly, ed. (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1992), pp. 27, 31, 32, 34, 157, 159.; As Prof. Robert Faurisson has explained, the Höss “confessions” are error-ridden statements obtained by torture. See: R. Faurisson, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87, pp. 389-403.; Other often-cited “eyewitness accounts” confirming the alleged Auschwitz extermination program include: Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (Fawcett Crest pb. edition, 1985?), pp. 23-24.; Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (Granada, pb., 1981), pp. 83.
2. Jean-Louis Amar, “Death Camps: The Archives Open,” Red Cross, Red Crescent, January-April 1990, pp. 24-26. This journal is apparently an official publication of the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
3. E. Schulten, “Endlich Glasnost …,” Waldeckische Landeszeitung, Nov. 2, 1989.
4. J.-L. Amar, “Death Camps: The Archives Open,” Red Cross, Red Crescent, January-April 1990, p. 26.
5. This has recently been obliquely confirmed by Auschwitz State Museum official Franciszek Piper. See: F. Piper, “Estimating the Number of Deportees to and Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp,” Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem: 1991), Vol. 21, pp. 70-71.
6. Helmut Eschwege, ed., Kennzeichen J (Berlin: 1966), p. 264. Source cited: Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw. German document No. 128.
7. Nuremberg document NO-021. Published in: Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals (Washington, DC: 1949-1953), Vol. 5, pp. 384-385. (This is also known as the NMT “green series.”)
8. This is also the considered view of Dr. Arthur Butz. See: A. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (IHR, 1983), p. 124.
Captions
The cover of an Auschwitz death registry volume (Sterbebuch) containing 1,500 certificates from July and August 1943. |
This Auschwitz camp death certificate reports that prisoner Josef Buck, a Jewish teacher from Kattowitz, was 65 years old when he died on August 1, 1941. “Weakness of old age” is given as the cause of death. |
|
Josek [sic] Nisenkorn, a Jewish laborer, was 71 years old when he died in Auschwitz on August 11, 1941. “Weakness of old age” is given as the cause of death by camp physician Dr. Siegfried Schwela, who himself later died of typhus. |
Chaim Richter, a Jewish salesman, was 81 years old when he died in Auschwitz on March 1, 1942, of “weakness of old age.” |
|
Samuel Mandel, a Jewish tailor, was 74 years old when he died in Auschwitz on March 26, 1942. Physician Dr. Entress reported the cause of death as “influenza with heart failure.” |
Ernestine Hochfelder, a Jewish inmate who had been deported to the camp from Slovakia, was 70 years old when she died in Auschwitz on June 4, 1942. “Physical weakness and old age” is cited as the cause of death. |
|
Josef Hoffmann, a Jewish butcher, was 89 years old when he died of “old age” on June 22, 1942. |
Abraham Stieber, a Jewish salesman from Slovakia, was 79 years old when he died on July 2, 1942, of “old age.” |
|
David Reichman, a Jewish farmer, was 70 years old when he died on July 22, 1942, of “old age.” |
Tibor Pollak, a Jewish secondary school student from Slovakia, was 14 years old when he died on July 26, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Meyer recorded “heart and circulatory failure” as the cause of death. |
|
Albert Janos, a Jewish cook born in Russia, was deported to Auschwitz from Bordeaux, France. He was 48 years old when he died on August 10, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Entress recorded the cause of death as sepsis with inflammation of tissues. |
Gerszon Wajsbort [sic], a Jewish merchant deported to Auschwitz from Paris, was 40 years old when he died on August 10, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Meyer recorded the cause of death as accumulation of fluid in the lungs and heart failure. |
|
Armin Horn, a Jewish salesman deported to the camp from Slovakia, died on August 19, 1942, at the age of 70. Camp physician Dr. Thilo recorded the cause of death as “accumulation of fluid in the intestine and weakness of old age.” |
Tadeusz Jaworski, a Catholic Pole from Krakow, had just turned 19 years old when he succumbed to typhus on August 22, 1942. |
|
Abraham Trijtel, a Jewish student from the Netherlands, was 14 years old when he died on September 4, 1942, of “acute inflammation of the stomach intestine.” |
Jettchen Fuld, a Jewish inmate, was 67 when she died on October 10, 1942. Old age and physical weakness is given as the cause of death. |
|
Salomon Serlui, a Jewish laborer from the Netherlands, was 67 when he died in Auschwitz on October 16, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Kremer reported a stomach ulcer as the cause of death. |
Renö Hirschfeld, a Jewish tailor born in Berlin in 1878, was 64 when he died on November 2, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Kitt reported “weakness of old age” as the cause of death. |
|
Freide [sic] Littmann, a Jewish inmate from Leipzig, Germany, was 70 when she died of “old age”on January 11, 1943. |
Wolf Eisenhöndler, a Jewish student from Berlin, was 14 when he died on January 13, 1943. “Sepsis with pneumonia” is reported as the cause of death. |
|
Josephine Kohn, a Jewish inmate born in Hungary who had been living in Leipzig, was 69 years old when she died on February 10, 1943. Auschwitz camp physician Dr. Kitt reported “weakness of old age” as the cause of death. |
Emil Kaufmann, a Jewish attorney deported from Germany, was 78 years old when he died of “old age” on February 15, 1943. “Weakness of old age” is given as the cause of death. |
|
Julius Sonnenberg, a salesman from Germany, was 65 when he died on February 27, 1943, of “angina pectoris.” His religion is cited as “non-believing, formerly Jewish.” |
Abraham Blok, a Jewish butcher from the Netherlands, was 70 years old when he died of “old age” on March 6, 1943. |
|
Franz Waitz, a Catholic laborer, was 67 years old when he succumbed to typhus on June 21, 1943. His death was certified by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz camp physician who was sensationally stigmatized after the war as the “angel of death.” |
Josef Daniel, a Catholic laborer from rural Moravia, was 18 years old when he ed his life on June 21, 1943, by “suicide by high-voltage electrical current.” |
|
Max Lichtenstaedt, a Jewish salesman from Berlin, was 73 years old when he died in Auschwitz on July 21, 1943. “Uraemia” is given as the cause of death. |
Peter Diessenberg, a baby, was just one year old when he died in Auschwitz on December 27, 1943. |
|
Johanna Seiner, a Jewish inmate who had been deported to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp in Bohemia, was 72 years old when she died of “old age” on December 27, 1943. |
Zeli Gieclik, a Jewish tailor, was 34 when he died on December 12, 1943. Camp physician Dr. Fischer reported “sudden heart failure” as the cause of death. This is the last certificate in death registry volume 25, which is the final volume for the year 1943. |
From The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1992 (Vol. 12, No. 3), pages 265-298.
The bipartisan “small business” swindle: Billions for banks and corporations, pennies for workers and shopkeepers
By Barry Grey | WSWS | April 23, 2020
Scores of multi-million- and billion-dollar corporations are receiving free handouts from the government under the “small business” relief fund grotesquely misnamed the “Paycheck Protection Program” (PPP). The program was launched last month as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, with $349 billion in taxpayer funds.
Billed as a lifeline to small businesses and their employees, the program has been exposed as a cynical fraud. Multiple reports have emerged showing that it is first and foremost a cash cow for large businesses and the Wall Street banks. It is yet another example of how the corporate-financial elite is exploiting the coronavirus catastrophe to further enrich itself at the expense of society and at the cost of human lives.
The CARES Act was passed with the unanimous support of the Democrats in the Senate—including the votes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—and by voice vote in the House, with no effort by so-called “progressives” such as Democratic Socialists of America members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to stall, let alone defeat, its passage.
While big restaurant chains and other firms whose stock is traded on Wall Street gobbled up large portions of the “small business” relief money, and the major Wall Street banks pocketed $10 billion in loan fees, family-owned restaurants, barber shops, beauty salons, retail stores and other small firms were pushed to the back of the line or denied relief outright.
The program ran out of funds last Thursday, less than two weeks after it was launched, leaving hundreds of thousands of small businesses high and dry and their millions of laid-off employees facing destitution. Now the Trump administration and Congress are rushing to inject an additional $310 billion into the PPP.
On Wednesday, the Senate passed by unanimous consent a new $484 billion bailout bill, whose central component is the renewal of the PPP. At the urging of the Democrats, looking to provide a “progressive” fig leaf to the pro-corporate measure, and with the agreement of Trump, the bill tacked on a totally inadequate $75 billion for hospitals and a derisory $25 billion for COVID-19 testing.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced that the Democratic-controlled chamber will vote on the new bill on Thursday. On Tuesday, she hailed the passage of the bill in the Senate, declaring that the Republicans “have seen the light—and we had a great victory for the American people.”
Among the businesses that have received low-interest PPP loans, which are to be forgiven if the firms use 75 percent of the money to keep their workers employed for eight weeks, are:
- The Ruth’s Chris steakhouse chain, with some 5,000 employees at over 100 locations in 2019 and $468 million in revenues. It received two PPP loans totaling $20 million. The total compensation for CEO Cheryl J. Henry was $6,105,629 in 2018. The stock price of the chain’s parent company, Ruth’s Hospitality Group, has risen by 112 percent over the past month.
- The Potbelly Sandwich Shop chain, with around 6,000 employees at 474 locations in 2019 and revenues of $410 million. The company received a PPP loan for $10 million. Total compensation for CEO Alan Johnson in 2018 was $1,668,251. Potbelly stock has risen 70 percent over the past month.
- The Shake Shack restaurant chain, with some 6,000 workers at 254 locations in the US and internationally and $595 million in revenues in 2019. It received $10 million in PPP loans. Total compensation for CEO Randy Garutti in 2018 was $3,805,410. Shake Shack stock has risen 40 percent over the past month. On Sunday, Shake Shack announced it was returning its PPP loan.
- The J. Alexander’s restaurant chain, with 2,700 employees at 46 locations in 2019 and $304 million in revenues in 2016, received $15.1 million in PPP loans. Total compensation for CEO Mark Parkey was $591,000 in 2019. J. Alexander’s stock has risen by 2 percent over the past month.
Other large firms that received PPP loans include:
- The Ohio-based biotech company Athersys, which raised almost $60 million in a stock offering on Monday. Its shares have nearly doubled in 2020.
- Indiana-based coal operator Hallador Energy, which received $10 million after it laid off 60 workers in March.
- Data storage company Quantum took $10 million.
- Nicola Motor, backed by giant hedge funds and asset management firms and valued at $4 billion, received a loan of $4 million.
According to a Financial Times article published on Tuesday, 83 publicly traded companies received a combined $330 million in loans from the PPP program, an average of $4 million each. The combined stock value of these firms at the end of 2019 was $12 billion.
Other published figures show how the program is skewed to big companies. More than 25 percent of the $349 billion in loans went to fewer than two percent of the firms that got relief. And more than one out of every four dollars in the fund went toward big loans of $2 million and above.
Meanwhile, just eight percent of small businesses that have applied for aid under the CARES Act have received money.
JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank, processed many of the biggest loans and cashed in the most on the program. Only six percent of its smaller customers got PPP loans, 18,000 out of the 300,000 that applied. But nearly all of the 5,500 larger companies that applied for PPP loans, customers of the bank’s commercial banking business, received them.
A class action lawsuit filed Sunday in federal court in Los Angeles alleges that four banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and US Bancorp—rushed loans to the biggest businesses to maximize their earnings. The suit alleges that the banks prioritized larger loans to bigger firms instead of processing applications in the order in which they arrived in order to generate bigger processing fees.
Sections of corporate media, prominent Democrats and even Trump are feigning shock and dismay over the funneling of “small business” loans to big corporations and the banks. On Tuesday, Trump, for fairly obvious political reasons, singled out Harvard University, which received bailout money under a different part of the CARES Act, and demanded that it return its loan.
These statements are utterly fraudulent. One is reminded of Captain Renault’s shock at discovering that gambling was taking place at Rick’s Casino in the film Casablanca.
As the media and both parties were well aware, restaurant and hotel chains, hedge funds and other corporate interests carried out intensive lobbying of their political servants in Congress prior to the passage of the CARES Act. One result was the insertion of a loophole allowing restaurant and hotel chains to evade the much trumpeted provision restricting the PPP loans to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. The bill that was passed on a fully bipartisan basis allows restaurant and hotel chains to receive loans so long as none of their individual units has more than 500 workers.
There is nothing in the measure renewing the PPP passed by the Senate on Wednesday that addresses this free pass for the chains.
Moreover, the law is written so as to facilitate self-dealing and corruption. There is not even a requirement that the federal Small Business Administration (SBA), which oversees the PPP, disclose to the public or to Congress the recipients of the loans.
Even if more small businesses eventually receive money from the program, the jobs of millions of workers will not be preserved, since the loans are designed to cover payroll for only eight weeks. The public health crisis and the economic disaster will last far longer. With no serious aid to the 22 million who have already lost their jobs and the millions more who will follow in the coming days and weeks, thousands of restaurants and other small businesses will go bankrupt and permanently shut their doors.
The response of the ruling classes in the US and around the world to the coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated the utter failure of the capitalist system. In every country, countless thousands of lives are being sacrificed to the insatiable drive of a tiny financial aristocracy for personal wealth, whatever the cost in death and human suffering.
The ruling classes are focused on devising ways to profit off of the pandemic. The absurdly named “Paycheck Protection Program”—an example of Orwellian Newspeak—is a case in point.
But the oligarchs, like the ancien regimes of old, are digging their own graves. Mass anger and opposition is growing by leaps and bounds. Strikes and protests by workers are taking place on virtually every continent. It is this international movement, made conscious of its revolutionary aims and tasks, that offers the way out for humanity from the nightmare of pandemics, poverty and war.
Craig Murray Defence Fund Launched
By Craig Murray | April 24, 2020
I know of four pro-Independence folk who were last week phoned or visited by Police Scotland and threatened with contempt of court proceedings over social media postings they had made weeks back on the Alex Salmond case. Then on Monday, a Scottish journalist I know had his home raided by five policemen, who confiscated (and still have) all his computers and phones. They said they were from the “Alex Salmond team” and investigating his postings on the Alex Salmond case. He has not to date been charged, and his lawyer is advising him at present to say nothing, so I am not revealing his name.
Then on Tuesday morning, a large Police van full of police pulled up onto the pavement right outside my front gate, actually while I was talking on the phone to a senior political figure about the raid on my friend. The police just sat in the van staring at my house. I contacted my lawyers who contacted the Crown Office. The police van pulled away and my lawyers contacted me back to say that the Crown Office had told them I would be charged, or officially “cited”, with Contempt of Court, but they agreed there was no need for a search of my home or to remove my devices, or for vans full of police.
On Thursday two plain clothes police arrived and handed me the indictment. Shortly thereafter, an email arrived from The Times newspaper, saying that the Crown Office had “confirmed” that I had been charged with contempt of court. In the case of my friend whose house was raided, he was contacted by the Daily Record just before the raid even happened!
I am charged with contempt of court and the hearing is on 7 July at the High Court in Edinburgh. The contempt charge falls in two categories:
i) Material published before the trial liable to prejudice a jury
ii) Material published which could assist “jigsaw identification” of the failed accusers.
Plainly neither of these is the true motive of the Crown Office. If they believed that material I published was likely to have prejudiced the jury, then they had an obvious public duty to take action BEFORE the trial – and the indictment shows conclusively they were monitoring my material long before the trial. To leave this action until after the trial which they claim the material was prejudicing, would be a serious act of negligence on their part. It is quite extraordinary to prosecute for it now and not before the trial. … continue
New US Health Spokesman Says Rothschild Family ‘Craves Control’, Blames Soros Over Virus
Sputnik – April 24, 2020
Last week, Michael Caputo, who worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was appointed by POTUS as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The newly nominated spokesman for US the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Michael Caputo, has blamed George Soros and the Rothschild family for trying to exploit the coronavirus pandemic in order to promote their own agendas, according to CNN which managed to uncover more than 1,000 Caputo tweets he deleted before entering office.
In a now-scrapped tweet on 15 March, Caputo, who is infamous for his remarks on social media, responded to self-proclaimed China analyst Jack Prosobiec, who speculated on Twitter why billionaire investor and philanthropist Soros allegedly adheres to his favourite political causes rather anti-COVID-19 efforts.
“Are you kidding? Soros’s political agenda REQUIRES a pandemic”, Caputo claimed, in what was followed by another tweet, in which he posted a Soros photo captioned “The real virus behind everything”, also adding skulls and crossbones.
In a separate tweet last month, Сaputo slammed economist David Rothschild as “an inbred elitist sphincter whose family craves control”, adding, “that’s one reason why he constantly lies about President Trump”.
— Michael R. Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) April 23, 2020
The economist, thought to be not related to the Rothschild gamily, is known for his fierce criticism of Trump who David Rothschild claims is seeking “to murder” people in a bid to stay in power.
Trump nominated Caputo as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the HHS on 12 April, a decision that was reportedly in part due to POTUS’ frustration over the way department secretary, Alex Azar was dealing with communications during the COVID-19 crisis.
CNN, in turn, reported that ahead of entering office, Caputo had deleted more than 1,300 tweets and retweets on his Twitter page from late February to early April, including those pertaining to the coronavirus. CNN managed to unearth the tweet by using the Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine”.
Russia dismisses as ‘baseless’ US claims on IRGC satellite launch
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova
Press TV – April 23, 2020
Russia has dismissed as “baseless” claims by the United States that the recent launch of Iran’s first-ever military satellite by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) violates a United Nations Security Council resolution endorsing the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers.
On Wednesday, the IRGC Aerospace Force launched the Nour (Light) satellite via the Qassed (Carrier) carrier, a move US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quick to condemn as a violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231.
“This would not be the first time that a nation that has flagrantly breached the norms of international law and violated UNSC resolution 2231 is trying to deflect international condemnation by baselessly accusing Iran of noncompliance with the requirements of the Security Council,” Russia’s Sputnik news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying at a briefing on Thursday.
She noted that neither the resolution nor the 2015 Iran nuclear deal restrict Iran’s right to explore space to peaceful ends.
She added that Iran has made it clear that it does not intend to develop nuclear weapons, unlike the US, which has over the past months unveiled several plans to expand its nuclear arsenal.
“There are no, there have never been, and hopefully there will never be nuclear weapons in Iran. Iran, adhering to the resolution, does not develop, test or use ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons, unlike the United States, which surprises the world every single day with news about plans to develop their nuclear missile capabilities,” she said.
The remarks came after Pompeo said Iran needed “to be held accountable” for the launch, claiming that the move violated UNSC Resolution 2231.
This is while the resolution in question calls on Iran “not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”
The Nour-1 is Iran’s first multi-purpose satellite with application in the defense industry, among other areas. It is also the first Iranian satellite with an expected operational life of more than a year in Earth’s orbit.
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Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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