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Really Simple Syndication – #SolutionsWatch

Corbett • 02/23/2021

#SolutionsWatch isn’t just about the Big Ideas. It’s also about the simple tricks, tips and techniques that we can use to regain power over our lives and help create the world we want. Today, James explores one very simple and tragically under-appreciated tool: Really Simple Syndication.

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February 27, 2021 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

JFK, Allen Dulles, and Indonesia

By Edward Curtin | February 2, 2021

A Review: JFK vs. Allen Dulles by Greg Poulgrain

Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is extraordinary by any measure. The story he tells is one you will read nowhere else, especially in the way he links the assassination of President Kennedy to former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the engineering by the latter of one of the 20th century’s most terrible mass murders. It will make your hair stand on end and should be read by anyone who cares about historical truth.

About twelve years ago I taught a graduate school course to Massachusetts State Troopers and police officers from various cities and towns. As part of the course material, I had created a segment on the history of the United States’ foreign policy, with particular emphasis on Indonesia.

No one in this class knew anything about Indonesia, not even where it was. These were intelligent, ambitious adults, eager to learn, all with college degrees. This was in the midst of the “war on terror” – i.e. war on Muslim countries – and the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. Almost all the class had voted for Obama and were aware they he had spent some part of his youth in this unknown country somewhere far away.

I mention this as a preface to this review of JFK vs. Dulles, because its subtitle is Battleground Indonesia, and my suspicion is that those students’ lack of knowledge about the intertwined history of Indonesia and the U.S. is as scanty today among the general public as it was for my students a dozen years ago.

This makes Greg Poulgrain’s remarkable book – JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia – even more important since it is a powerful antidote to such ignorance, and a reminder for those who have fallen, purposefully or not, into a state of historical amnesia that has erased the fact that the U.S. has committed systematic crimes that have resulted in the deaths of more than a million Indonesians and many more millions throughout the world over innumerable decades.

Such crimes against humanity have been hidden behind what the English playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Prize address called “a tapestry of lies.” Of such massive crimes, he said:

But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

And when one examines the true history of such atrocities, again and again one comes up against familiar names of the guilty who have never been prosecuted.  Criminals in high places whose crimes around the world from Vietnam to Chile to Cuba to Nicaragua to Argentina to Iraq to Libya to Syria, etc. have been – and continue to be – integral to American foreign policy as it serves the interests of its wealthy owners and their media mouthpieces.

In his brilliant new book on U.S./Indonesian history, Dr. Greg Poulgrain unweaves this tapestry of lies and sheds new light on the liars’ sordid deeds. He is an Australian expert on Indonesia whose work stretches back forty years, is a professor at University of the Sunshine Coast in Brisbane and has written four highly-researched book about Indonesia.

In JFK vs. Dulles, he exposes the intrigue behind the ruthless regime-change strategy in Indonesia of the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles, and how it clashed with the policy of President John F. Kennedy, leading to JFK’s assassination, Indonesian regime change, and massive slaughter.

Poulgrain begins with this question:

Would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure that his ‘Indonesian strategy’ rather than Kennedy’s was achieved?

To which he answers: Yes.

But let me not get ahead of myself, for the long, intricate tale he tells is one a reviewer can only summarize, so filled is it with voluminous details. So I will touch on a few salient points and encourage people to buy and read this important book.

Indonesia’s Strategic Importance

The strategic and economic importance of Indonesia cannot be exaggerated.  It is the world’s 4th most populous country (275+ million), is located in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world’s largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home in West Papua to Grasberg, the world’s largest gold mine and the second largest copper mine, primarily owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona, whose past board members have included Henry Kissinger, John Hay Whitney, and Godfrey Rockefeller.

Long a battleground in the Cold War, Indonesia remains vitally important in the New Cold War and the pivot to Asia launched by the Obama administration against China and Russia, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence while he engineered coups at home and abroad. It is fundamentally important in the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific strategy for what it euphemistically calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” While not front-page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain’s historical account.

JFK

Two days before President John Kennedy was publicly executed by the US national security state led by the CIA on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military. It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide.  The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson. But he was praised throughout the third world.

Poulgrain writes:

Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia by bringing Indonesia ‘on side.’ As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008), ‘One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam or Laos.

Of course JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles. And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder on November 22, 1963. Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die.

While the Indonesian mass slaughter of mainly poor rice farmers (members of the Communist Party – PKI) instigated by Allen Dulles began in October 1965, ten years later, starting in December 1975, the American installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965 when the CIA engineered the coup d’état that toppled President Sukarno. The American installed dictator Suharto would rule for thirty years of terror. The CIA considers this operation one of its finest accomplishments. It became known as “the Jakarta Method,” a model for future violent coups throughout Latin America and the world.

And in-between these U.S. engineered mass atrocities, came the bloody coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 and the ongoing colossal U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Dulles’s Secret

What JFK didn’t know was that his plans for a peaceful resolution of the Indonesia situation and an easing of the Cold War were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means and to exacerbate the Cold War by concealing from Kennedy the truth that there was a Sino-Soviet split. Another primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources. But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted  since the 1920s.

Reading Poulgrain’s masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine – oil, minerals, gold, copper, etc.  Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil’s game.

The Discovery of Gold

His murder mystery/detective story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades. He writes:

In the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule – today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold. When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world’s richest gold mine, but this information was not made public.

The geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Sulphur (now Freeport McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger, Dulles’ and the Rockefeller’s close associate) that began mining operations there in 1966.

It was Allen Dulles, Paris-based lawyer in the employ of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in NNGPN for the Rockefellers. And it was Dulles, among a select few others, who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three decades, even from President Kennedy, who had worked to return the island to Indonesian control. JFK “remained uninformed of the El Dorado, and once the remaining political hurdles were overcome, Freeport would have unimpeded access.” Those “political hurdles” – i.e. regime change – would take a while to effect.

The Need to Assassinate President Kennedy

But first JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport Sulphur. Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of “El Dorado,” especially since they had recently had their world’s most advanced nickel refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new manager. Freeport’s losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.

While much has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the covert operations Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s. He makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles’s actions, yet never fully grasped the treacherous genius of it all, for Dulles was always “working two or three stages ahead of the present.” Having armed and promoted a rebellion against Sukarno’s central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail (shades of the Bay of Pigs to come) since a perceived failure served his long-term strategy. To this very day, this faux 1958 Rebellion is depicted as a CIA failure by the media. Yet from Dulles standpoint, it was a successful failure that served his long-term goals.

“This holds true,” Poulgrain has previously written, “only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal. Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’. The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.”

Dulles’ the Devil

Dulles betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe alike during his long career. The rebellion that he instigated and planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror that followed. It was also when – 1966 – Freeport McMoRan began their massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the Alpine region. Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this game since WW I.  Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs, his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were. Poulgrain makes a powerful case that Dulles was the mastermind of the murders of JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba, the first president of a newly liberated Congo.

His focus is on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable), though with the exception of Kennedy (since the how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the how. Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy’s spiritual brother, was a particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles’s plans for Indonesia and colonial countries throughout the Third World. Like JFK, he was committed to independence for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere and was trying to implement his Swedish-style ‘third way,’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.

Poulgrain argues correctly that if the UN Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these colonial countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the Cold War.

He draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South Africa’s “Operation Celeste” and Dulles’s involvement in Hammarskjold’s murder in September 1961. While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him’.” Hammarskjold, like Kennedy, was intent on returning colonized countries to their indigenous inhabitants and making sure Papua was for Papuans, not Freeport McMoRan and imperial forces.

And Dulles sold his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover in Indonesia. Cold War rhetoric, like “the war on terrorism” today, served as his cover. In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere else. Dulles’s covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite patrons.

While contextually different from David Talbot’s portrayal of Dulles in The Devil’s Chessboard, Poulgrain’s portrait of Dulles within the frame of Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish. Both describe an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.

Dulles and George de Mohrenschildt

Poulgrain adds significantly to our understanding of JFK’s assassination and its aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas. Dulles had a long association with the de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The Baron’s brother and business partner was George’s father. Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was Standard Oil’s primary law firm. These negotiations on behalf of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became the template for Dulles’s career: economic exploitation was inseparable from military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of the latter. An anti-red thread ran through Dulles’s career, except when the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable. And the numbers are legion. Their blood didn’t matter.

Standard Oil is the link that joins Dulles [who controlled the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of JFK] and de Mohrenschildt. This connection was kept from the Warren Commission despite Dulles’ prominent role and the importance of the testimony of de Mohrenschildt. Poulgrain argues convincingly that de Mohrenschildt worked in “oil intelligence” before his CIA involvement, and that oil intelligence was not only Dulles’s work when he first met George’s father, Sergius, in Baku, but that that “oil intelligence” is a redundancy. The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite, or those I call The Umbrella People who control the U.S.

While working in 1941 for Humble Oil (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder, Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy (pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany. This was similar to the Dulles’s brothers and Standard Oil’s notorious business dealings with Germany.

It was an intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.

In the midst of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French intelligence agent, “disappeared” for a while. He later told the Warren Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.

“Just when George needed to ‘disappear’, Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team to be subcontracted to NNGPM – the company Allen Dulles had set up five years earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea.” Poulgrain makes a powerful circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went incommunicado in Netherlands New Guinea in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.

“Avoiding adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit.” And who best to help him in this escape than Allen Dulles – indirectly, of course; for Dulles’s modus operandi was to maintain his “distance” from his contacts, often over many decades.

In other words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time prior to JFK’s assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that “the entire focus of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt.” Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc. It was an international web of intrigue that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the usual and unusual operatives.

Two unusual ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller. The eccentric Fomenko – aka “Tarzan” – is the Russian-Australian nephew of de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jean Fomenko. His arrest and deportation from Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had travelled from Australia in a canoe, and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It’s the stuff of a bizarre film. It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he knew a secret about George’s 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. “In April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren Commission – a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George’s record oil discovery] could have changed history – it was decided that electro-convulsive therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko.” He was then imprisoned at the Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.

Equally interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Nelson’s son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page news, “a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan people.” To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as “Shangri-la,” are fighting for their independence.

The Sino-Soviet Split

While the gold in West Papua was very important to Allen Dulles, his larger goal was to keep the Cold War blazing by concealing the dispute between China and the Soviet Union from Kennedy while instigating the mass slaughter of “communists” that would lead to regime change in Indonesia, with Major-General Suharto, his ally, replacing President Sukarno. In this he was successful. Poulgrain says:

Not only did Dulles fail to brief Kennedy on the Sino-Soviet dispute early in the presidency, but he also remained silent about the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing to wield influence over the PKI or win its support. In geographical terms, Beijing regarded Indonesia as its own backyard, and winning the support of the PKI would give Beijing an advantage in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The numerical growth of the PKI was seen by Moscow and Beijing for its obvious political potential. Dulles was also focused on the PKI, but his peculiar skill in political intelligence turned what seemed inevitable on its head. The size of the party [the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest outside the Sino-Soviet bloc] became a factor he used to his advantage when formulating his wedge strategy – the greater the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing over the PKI, the more intense would be the recrimination once the PKI was eliminated.

The slaughter of more than a million poor farmers was a trifle to Dulles.

The September 30, 1965 Movement

In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a fake coup d’état was staged by the CIA’s man, Major-General Suharto. It was announced that seven generals had been arrested and would be taken to President Sukarno “to explain the rumor that they were planning a military coup on October 5.” Suharto declared himself the head of the army. Someone was said to have killed the generals. In the afternoon, a radio announcement was made calling for the Sukarno government to be dismissed. This became Suharto’s basis for blaming it on the communists and the so-called September 30 Movement, and he gave the order to kill the PKI leaders. This started the massive bloodshed that would follow.

With one hand, Suharto crushed the Movement, accusing the PKI of being the ultimate instigator of an attempt to oust Sukarno, and with the other hand he feigned to protect the “father of the Indonesian revolution,” while actually stripping Sukarno of every vestige of political support.

When the generals’ bodies were recovered a few days after Oct 1, Suharto falsely claimed the PKI women had tortured and sexually mutilated them as part of some primitive sexual orgy. This heinous perversion of power was the start of the Suharto era. In total control of the media, he manipulated popular wrath to call for revenge.

If this confuses you, it should, because the twisted nature of this fabricated coup was actually part of a real coup in slow motion aimed at ousting Sukarno and replacing him with the CIA’s man Suharto. This occurred in early 1967 after the mass slaughter of communists. It was a regime change cheered on by the American mass media as a triumph over communist aggression.

New Evidence of U.S. Direct Involvement in the Slaughter

Poulgrain has spent forty years interviewing participants and researching this horrendous history. His detailed research is quite amazing. And it does take concentration to follow it all, as with the machinations of Dulles, Suharto, et al.

Some things, however, are straightforward. For example, he documents how, during the height of the slaughter, two Americans – one man and one woman – were in Klaten (PKI headquarters in central Java) supervising the Indonesian army as they killed the PKI. These two would travel back and forth by helicopter from a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet that was off the coast of Java. The plan was that the more communists killed, the greater would be the dispute between Moscow and Beijing, since they would accuse each other for the tragedy, which is exactly what they did. This was the wedge that was mentioned in the Rockefeller Brothers Panel Report from the late 1950s in which Dulles and Henry Kissinger both participated.

The hatred drummed up against these poor members of the Communist Party was extraordinary in its depravity. In addition to Suharto’s lies about communist women mutilating the generals’ bodies, a massive campaign of hatred was directed against these landless peasants who made up the bulk of the PKI. False Cold War radio broadcasts from Singapore stirred up hostility toward them, declaring them atheists, etc.  Wealthy Muslim landowners – the 1 per cent – made outrageous charges to assist the army’s slaughter. Poulgrain tells us:

Muhammadiyah preachers were broadcasting from mosques that all who joined the communist party must be killed, saying they are the ‘lowest order of infidel, the shedding of whose blood is comparable to killing a chicken.’

For those Americans especially, who think this history of long ago and far away does not touch them, its compelling analysis of how and why Allen Dulles and his military allies would want JFK dead since he was a threat to national security as they defined it in their paranoid anti-communist ideology might be an added impetus to read this very important book. Indonesia may be far away geographically, but it’s a small world. Dulles and Kennedy had irreconcilable differences, and when Dulles was once asked in a radio interview what he would do to someone who threatened national security, he matter-of-factually said, “I’d kill him.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the introduction to JFK vs. Dulles by Oliver Stone and the afterward by James DiEugenio are outstanding. They add excellent context and clarity to a really great and important book.

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 3 Comments

‘Agenda Item 7’ highlights UN inaction over Israeli colonisation

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | February 25, 2021

The US has asked to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council in another move that, superficially at least, spells a departure from the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the institution. However, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, the reasons for the earlier departure from the Council still stand: alleged excessive focus on Israel, as well as the inclusion of nations which the US considers hostile, remain prominent issues for Washington and its rhetoric about “human rights”.

“We need to eliminate Agenda Item 7 and treat the human rights situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories the same way as this body handles any other country,” declared Blinken.

Agenda Item 7 has long antagonised Israel and the US. It makes discussion of Israel a permanent agenda item at the UNHRC and has elicited calls of anti-Israel bias which divert attention from other human rights violations around the world.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has endorsed Blinken’s criticism of human rights abuses by countries – mentioning China and Russia – that “seem to have joined the council only to undermine its work and to deflect criticism of themselves.” However, doesn’t the UN promote a safe space where various dynamics protect human rights abusers under various schemes, while allowing powers such as the US to determine which countries should be defined as violators of such rights? It is precisely the special status awarded to the US and Israel that needs to be challenged, in order to start altering the narrative on human rights and to make the UN and its institutions truly answerable and accomplished in holding rights abusers to account.

Israel has maintained its self-declared exceptionalism to prolong its military occupation of Palestine, a derivative of the colonial process that accelerated during the Trump era and which will most probably also benefit under US President Joe Biden. It is the exceptionalism which Israel created for its own purpose that has set it apart in the international arena. As far as criticism goes, Israel also benefits from the duplicity that comes with the settler-colonial state being a permanent item at the UNHRC, as well as receiving close to unanimous endorsement for its security and “self-defence” narrative. There is, in fact, no anti-Israel bias, but there is intentional ambiguity, in much the same way that Israel is considered as a normal country rather than a settler-colonial enterprise with its origins rooted deep within the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population.

HRW’s recommendations for the US to alter the scrutiny on Israel has more to do with the dynamics of voting on resolutions than encouraging the Biden administration to take a tough stance on Israel’s colonial expansion. The US and Israel know full well that resolutions are non-binding, hold no political value, and are just a veneer for the international community’s contempt when it comes to the Palestinian people’s political and human rights. A far more pressing discussion would centre on how the UN is ignoring its own principles and priorities. Had it acted against Israel’s colonisation of Palestine and its accompanying brutality and cruelty, as it is bound to do in order not to be in violation of international law, there would be no need for “Agenda Item 7” at the UNHRC or anywhere else.

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The massacre of Ibrahimi Mosque

By Bilal Yasin | MEMO | February 27, 2021

Twenty-seven years ago, on 25 February, 1994, an Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein shot at hundreds of Palestinians gathering for Al-Fajr prayer at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the occupied city of Hebron.

Goldstein took advantage of the gathering of the worshippers in the prostration position and the closure of the mosque’s doors by the occupation soldiers, to kill 29 Palestinians and wound more than 150 others.

The massacre did not end until the Israeli forces shot at the attendees of the victims’ funeral, raising the death toll of the massacre to 60.

Despite the atrocity of the massacre, it was widely supported by the Israeli occupation and settlers. When asked if he felt sorry for those killed by Goldstein, Jewish Rabbi Moshe Levinger remarked: “The death of an Arab makes me feel sorry as much as I pity the death of a fly.”

Goldstein is considered a saint by Israeli authorities, who transformed his grave into a shrine and assigned a number of honour guards to perform the military salute every day before his grave.

The Arab and Muslim countries were outraged and condemned the criminal attack via peaceful demonstrations, demanding an end to the Israeli settlements and the prosecution of the occupation for its repeated crimes. However, the Israeli authorities argued that Goldstein was insane and was receiving treatment, making it legally impossible to hold him responsible for his actions. This is how the occupation managed to escape the legal responsibility for this crime.

Despite the attempts of Israeli media to mislead the public about what really happened during the massacre, the United Nations (UN) Security Council approved, on 18 March, 1994, a resolution condemning the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, and called on the Israeli authorities to take measures to protect the Palestinians, including the disarming of settlers.

This decision resulted in the formation of an international mission in the city of Hebron, with the aim of monitoring the practices of the occupation. Because of a report issued by the international mission, which between 1994 and 2019 monitored more than 42,000 violations committed by the Israeli authorities against the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused in January 2019 to extend the stay of the international observers.

The media office of Netanyahu quoted him stating: “We will not allow an international force that works against us to stay any longer,” considering that the mission of the observers, which consisted of documenting violations of his soldiers against the Palestinians, is an anti-Israel act.

The Ibrahimi Mosque massacre was not just a passing event, but rather an act planned to impose a new reality through which the occupation could achieve its goals, seeking to expel the Palestinians from the Old City and control the Ibrahimi Mosque – exactly what Hebron is witnessing now.

Since the massacre, the city of Hebron has been subjected to a series of measures that changed its historical features and strengthened Israeli settlement, including:

  • Closing the Ibrahimi Mosque and the Old City for six months, under the pretext of holding investigations.
  • Unilaterally forming the investigation committee, known as “Shamgar”.
  • The most prominent recommendations of the committee consisted of dividing the Ibrahimi Mosque into a synagogue and a mosque.
  • Imposing tight security measures on the mosque, with electronic gates placed at its entrances.
  • Granting settlers the right to sovereignty over 60 per cent of the Ibrahimi Mosque.
  • Closing the roads leading to the mosque, except for one gate that was subjected to heavy security measures.
  • Closing the Hisbah market, the Hebron Khan Khalil, Khan Shaheen, Al-Shuhada and Al-Sahla streets.
  • Closing more than 1,800 shops in the Old City.
  • Preventing Adhan (the call to prayer) in the mosque dozens of times a month.
  • 1,400 families abandoned their homes, fearing for their lives.

According to the aforementioned, it is clear that the Israeli authorities are encouraging settlers to commit more massacres against the Palestinians by iconising the perpetrator of the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, and refusing to commit to the UN Security Council resolution, recommending the protection of Palestinians and disarming the settlers.

On the other hand, the occupation state restricted the movement of Palestinians and gave the green light to settlers to expand their settlements and kill Palestinians, destroying their property and attacking their religious sanctities. This prompted many residents of the Old City to leave for fear of being harmed by Zionist gangs. Therefore, the international institutions must work harder to end the Israeli occupation and implement UN Resolution 242 to ensure that such massacres do not happen again, and to end the daily violations against Palestinians in the city of Hebron.

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | 2 Comments

This is who they are: Biden’s Syria strike is a stark reminder it’s American Empire that’s back

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 27, 2021

Only someone who hasn’t been paying attention could have been surprised by the US airstrike on Syria, now that an establishment committed to a globalist Empire rather than a constitutional republic is back in charge in Washington.

Democrats love proclaiming one can’t “turn back the clock,” usually to argue against even attempting to undo whatever domestic policies they’ve rammed through when in power. Yet everything about the Joe Biden administration has been about just that: erasing the past four years of Donald Trump and picking up where Barack Obama left off.

Trump also bombed Syria, mind you – launching cruise missiles on two occasions, spurred by spurious reports of “chemical attacks” – as well as the “Iranian-backed militias” in Iraq. Just over a year ago, he ordered the drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani outside the Baghdad airport.

However, he was denounced at the time by congressional Democrats, Biden himself, and his now-spokeswoman Jen Psaki, as well as nearly all US media outlets – the same ones now praising Biden’s bombardment. It’s literally different when they do it, the narrative goes.

That may seem baffling. After all, the American Empire isn’t a partisan thing. The Obamas, Bidens and Clintons have eagerly been on board as much as the Bushes and the Cheneys. That is, until Trump came along and mocked the “endless wars,” spoke of “America first” and rejected the pompous platitudes used to sell overseas imperialism to the rapidly declining American heartland.

For that ‘crime’ he was denounced and rejected by the US establishment, which has repeatedly demonstrated it doesn’t give a damn for the little guy in “flyover country” but prefers the globalist agendas of coastal elites and the military-industrial complex.

One can’t blame Americans for not remembering that the only time Congress overrode Trump’s veto was to keep troops overseas forever, when the media they rely on for their opinions, feelings and values hardly bothered to mention that bit. Make no mistake, though, endless foreign wars is what Biden meant when he said last week that “America is back” and promised a crusade on behalf of “democracy,” whatever that may be.

Also back is the manufacturing of consent. When Trump bombed someone, he just tweeted about it. The “new” administration acts just like the ones of yore, first leaking the talking points to the media. Instead of Trump’s “cowboy” language, Biden’s people use carefully selected propaganda terms, such as “defensive precision strike” and “proportionate military response” that “aims to de-escalate” the situation. The media dutifully follow along, stenographers all.

This kind of smoke-and-mirrors perception management is how war has become normalized for Americans. Trump’s rejection of it – whatever his motivation – is one of the reasons he was so hated by the establishment. Biden was sold to the American people as a return to normal – and for the establishment, this is precisely what “normal” looks like.

This normalization of behavior that ought to be illegal, immoral and unacceptable is, frankly, quietly horrifying. Almost no one seems to care that the US has no legal right to be in Syria, or bomb Syria, or even keep troops in Iraq anymore.

Legal concerns? How quaint. The US bombing whomever, whenever and wherever has become the “dog bites man” of the old journalism joke – that’s not news, editors would say, come to me when “man bites dog.”

Instead, we have otherwise serious people dispassionately describing the strike as “solid persuasion” and noting – correctly – that it “probably doesn’t matter” who gets attacked.

There is another disturbing dimension to the “Obama restoration” the US establishment is so bent on effecting. It was the Obama-Biden administration that backed “moderate rebels” – many of whom turned out to be Al-Qaeda affiliates – in Syria in hopes of regime change in Damascus, kicking off a war there almost ten years ago.

Trump focused instead on defeating Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists, letting the same people who lied to him about troop numbers deceive him about abandoning (but not really) the regime change agenda.

If someone with a solid predictive record who claims to have sources within the Biden-Harris administration is to be believed, they want Syrian President Bashar Assad “gone by any means necessary and have no concern for the consequences.”

After all, those consequences are almost always borne by the foreigners that get bombed and the ‘flyover’ Americans who end up in the military – including the very same “underprivileged communities” the Democrats claim to be so concerned about – and not the powerful.

This obviously leaves those Americans who hoped for $2,000 stimulus checks, universal healthcare or higher minimum wage – those who believed the “that’s not who we are” Obama-era hype about empathy and decency – holding the empty bag and scratching their heads.

Which is why perception managers will no doubt feed them another manufactured outrage as a distraction, any moment now. Because that is who they are. Always have been.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator 

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, War Crimes | , | 5 Comments

Ten Fatal Errors: Scientists Attack Paper That Established Global PCR Driven Lockdown

By Celia Farber | Uncover DC | December 3, 2020

War has broken out in the scientific literature that strikes at the existential core of Covid-19 and its proposed causative virus.

At the heart of the controversy lies the fact that the creators of the most commonly used test, the RT-PCR, published instructions for how to test for SARS-CoV-2 “without having virus material available,” in their own words, relying instead on the Chinese scientists’ genetic sequence published on the internet.

The paper “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time PCR” was published 24 hours after it was submitted to Eurosurveillance, clearly evading peer review. Its lead authors were Christian Drosten and Victor Corman, which is how it took on the title  “Corman-Drosten paper.” It provided the “recipe,” or work flow for the Covid-19 diagnostic test, quickly applied all over the world, after it was accepted as the standard of testing by the WHO.

German scientist Christian Drosten was also a co-discoverer of the SARS-associated coronavirus, and developed a test for it in 2003. Drosten, who heads the Charite Institute of Virology in Berlin, and a team of fellow scientists in Europe and Hong Kong, moved very quickly, as soon as cases of the illness were being reported out of Wuhan in December of 2019. They submitted the paper on Jan. 21, it was published in Eurosurveillance on Jan. 23, and was immediately accepted as the standard of testing internationally, by the WHO, which began sending test kits to affected regions.

In the harrowing months that followed, amid lockdowns, economic collapse, school closures and widespread panic, few were aware of the immense problems with the paper, which tragically offered a testing method that would yield between 80 and 97 percent false positive results, due to a non existent gold standard which would be the virus itself.

It all came to a head on Nov. 30, when the Corman-Drosten foundation paper was challenged by 22 international scientists who wrote a letter demanding the paper’s retraction, along with an extensive critique citing 10 errors in the paper it deemed “fatal.”

Titled “External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-Cov-2 Reveals 10 Major Flaws At The Molecular and Methodological Level: Consequences For False-Positive Results,” the paper’s lead author is Dr. Pieter Borger, an expert on the molecular biology of gene expression. Several other esteemed names are associated with the paper including Dr. Michael Yeadon, former VP of Pfizer and outspoken critic of much of the so-called science beneath the WHO’s global lockdown, masking, and school shut-down measures.

I reached one of the authors, Dr. Kevin Corbett, at his home in London. He spoke simply and with controlled apoplexy. He confirmed and cast additional light on the shocking fact that the paper was written in the absence of a viral isolate, among many other problems.

“Every scientific rationale for the development of that test has been totally destroyed by this paper. It’s like Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the Covid test,” he said. “When Drosten developed the test, China hadn’t given them a viral isolate. They developed the test from a sequence in a gene bank. Do you see? China gave them a genetic sequence with no corresponding viral isolate. They had a code, but no body for the code. No viral morphology.”

I asked him to define “viral morphology” for the layperson.

“In the fish market,” he said, “it’s like giving you a few bones and saying that’s your fish. It could be any fish. Not even a skeleton. Here’s a few fragments of bones. That’s your fish. Listen, the Corman/Drosten paper, there’s nothing from a patient in it. It’s all from gene banks. and the bits of the virus sequence that weren’t there they made up. They synthetically created them to fill in the blanks. That’s what genetics is; it’s a code. So its ABBBCCDDD and you’re missing some what you think is EEE so you put it in. It’s all synthetic. You just manufacture the bits that are missing. This is the end result of the geneticization of virology. This is basically a computer virus.”

In an interview posted on his Twitter feed, Dr. Pieter Borger said, “The virus wasn’t in Europe and the paper was already finished.”  He said these facts “should have been on television long ago. I explained it on LinkedIn, but you get banned if you do.” Regarding PCR he said, “You are not detecting a virus.

“Once I heard a good comparison,” he continued. “If you go to a junkyard and you find a wheel or a hubcap from a Mercedes, and a steering wheel of a Mercedes, can you infer that you are in a Mercedes garage at that moment? If you only see those two parts? No, you can’t. You don’t know anything about it… you only know you have a steering wheel, you can find those things everywhere. In every junkyard you can find them.” He describes the RT PCR tests as having “no relevance for the diagnosis whatsoever.”

German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich who is central to a growing group of lawyers, scientists, politicians, and even secret pharmaceutical whistleblowers, said in an interview, “We believe that in order to make this house of cards collapse, we have to attack the PCR test. The fact is, there are no asymptomatic infections.”

This seemingly radical claim was bolstered by a paper out of Wuhan of all places, published by Nature.com, which found no “viable virus” in PCR positive cases.

“The screening of the 9,865,404 participants without a history of COVID-19 found no newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, and identified 300 asymptomatic positive cases with a detection rate of 0.303 (95 % CI 0.270–0.339)/10,000. … A total of 1174 close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases were traced, and they all tested negative for the COVID-19. … Of the 34,424 participants with a history of COVID-19, 107 tested positive again, giving a repositive rate of 0.310% (95% CI 0.423–0.574%.) Virus cultures were negative for all asymptomatic positive and repositive cases, indicating no “viable virus” in positive cases detected in this study.”

Dr. Corbett, a Ph.D., and retired RN elaborated: “There are 10 fatal errors in this Drosten test paper. Public Health England is a co-author on it. All the public health authorities across the EU have co-authored this paper. But here is the bottom line: There was no viral isolate to validate what they were doing. The PCR products of the amplification didn’t correspond to any viral isolate at that time. I call it ‘donut ring science.’ There is nothing at the center of it. It’s all about code, genetics, nothing to do with reality, or the actual person, the patient.”

I read him some of the critiques from the other side, that say it’s been isolated “all over the world.”

“Yes, there have since been papers saying they’ve produced viral isolates. But there are no controls for them. The CDC produced a paper in July, I think it was, where they said: ‘Here’s the viral isolate.’ Do you know what they did? They swabbed one person. One person, who’d been to China and had cold symptoms. One person. And they assumed he had it to begin with. So it’s all full of holes, the whole thing.”

One of their 10 challenges is the stunning fact that EuroSurveillance published the paper 24 hours after it was submitted back in January. “Twenty-four hours,” Dr. Corbett said incredulously. “That never happens. It takes months to get a review done. They turned this around in 24 hours. It was waved through, it was not peer-reviewed. There’s no standard operational procedure for this test. There’s major and minor concerns about this paper and we go through it all here. it should be retracted. If they retract it, it means the whole thing falls to bits. The whole edifice collapses. It’s a house of cards built on sand and we’ve just moved the sand.”

The authors of the Drosten paper, for their part, were dismissive on social media. One of them, Marion Koopman, referred to the Borger et al critique as “ongoing nonsense.” Drosten himself launched ad-hominem attacks at some of the authors via Twitter.

Koopman tweeted: “The labs on this paper all had worked with SARS, had samples from SARS patients in their freezers. So that made it possible to do a first check of how this would work. A valid choice in an emerging disease outbreak, where you are in the blind phase.”

At press time, Eurosurveillance at least did acknowledge to the paper’s authors that they had received it and were reviewing it. When asked on Twitter if there had been a response, lead author Peter Borger replied that the response among scientists had been overwhelming in its support.

From his home in Germany, Reiner Fuellmich said, “The reason why I decided to speak out is that I didn’t want these crazy people who are pulling the strings behind the scenes to rule the world. I had no idea when I came out with my first video that these people and their corporations were such a powerful block. We are up against some really powerful and devious and bad, evil people. But they’re not a united front. We on the good side so to speak, I am firmly convinced that we have the better people, who know much more not just intellectually. The thing is . . . we’re humans, and they’re not.”

Celia Farber is half-Swedish and being raised there, she knows socialism from the inside. She has contributed to the Epoch Times, Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone and more. She left the legacy media, never to return. She is the recipient of the Semmelweis International Society Clean Hands Award For Investigative Journalism. She is the author of Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS, and the editor of The Truth Barrier, an investigative and literary website. She co-hosts The Whistleblower Newsroom with Kristina Borjesson on PRN, Fridays at 10 a.m.

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | 8 Comments

‘Slow’ Atlantic Ocean may cause climate chaos–Or There Again Maybe Not!

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 27, 2021

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The Atlantic current system which maintains mild weather in Europe is at its weakest in over a millennium, most likely because of climate change, scientists have found.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is part of a system of ocean currents which acts as a conveyor belt to move water around the Earth, redistributing heat and acting as a key link in maintaining the world’s climate.

It began a serious slowdown around 1850 and is now at its lowest point in 1,000 years, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience.

It is not certain what the impact of further weakening will be on weather patterns, but scientists believe it could bring more heatwaves in Europe, and sea level rise on the east coast of the US.

The impact of changing water temperatures is also potentially devastating for some marine life, with the slowdown already linked to lower cod numbers off Maine.

Some evidence suggests there could be a ‘tipping point’ sometime after 2100 when the system collapses, which could cause intense winter storms in Europe and a significant cooling effect across the northern hemisphere that would not be offset by global

Co-author Dr David Thornalley, from University College London said: “This study shows the increasing evidence in support of the modern Atlantic Ocean undergoing unprecedented changes in comparison to the last millennium, and in some cases longer.”

Scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany looked at 11 different sources of data, including tree rings, ocean sediment and corals.

The AMOC has only been directly measured since 2004, leaving scientists to rely on indirect measurements such as these to monitor historic change, which produce imprecise results.

Dr Laura Jackson, a Met Office scientist specialising in AMOC who was not involved in the study, said there were “still uncertainties associated with using these indirect observations.”

But the paper adds to previous research that found a weakening of the AMOC, with one study suggesting there has been a 15 per cent decrease since the mid-century. – Telegraph

In other words they only have data since 2004, and are relying highly unreliable proxies further back Translation – Junk Science!

Meanwhile, another finds exactly the opposite:

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https://os.copernicus.org/articles/17/285/2021/

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 2 Comments

World Economic Forum – “Lockdowns Improving Cities Around The World.”

By Richie Allen | February 27, 2021

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Tweeted yesterday that “Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.” The tweet was accompanied by a video showing deserted streets, empty factories and grounded planes. It’s not very subtle.

The WEF’s rather blunt point is that air pollution and Co2 emissions are down due to lockdowns. Further into the video, the viewer is shown packed motorways and a caption that reads; “the drop (in traffic) won’t slow climate change unless we lock in emissions cuts.” Like I said, not very subtle. The WEF is saying that lockdowns are good for the environment.

Talk Radio breakfast presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer wasn’t amused. She tweeted;

“The WEF are stark raving insane if they think lockdowns are quietly improving our cities. Genuinely scary.”

The barrister Francis Hoar tweeted;

Isn’t it lovely to see all these quiet, dead cities, closed factories and grounded aircraft. Take this as a warning that if lockdowns are accepted in any circumstance, they will be imposed for climate reasons before long. Lockdowns should be prohibited in any circumstances.”

I said on The Richie Allen Show last summer, that lockdown type restrictions to tackle climate change are an inevitability. Last year, World Economic Founder Klaus Schwab declared that the pandemic was a; “narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world and our economic and social foundations.”

Every single one of us needs to acquaint ourselves with Klaus Schwab, The Great Reset and The Fourth industrial Revolution. Writing in The Sociable, journalist Tim Hinchcliffe had this to say about Schwab and The WEF:

Prior to this year, implementing worldwide lockdowns that destroy businesses, wreck the economy, and leave people destitute and stripped of their constitutional rights while trying to enact invasive contact tracing, immunity passports, and otherwise massive bio-electronic surveillance apparatuses would never have been accepted by the citizens of a free society.

But the coronavirus pandemic has opened a “narrow window” for a “golden opportunity,” and once this crisis is over, the Davos club fears that the window may be shut forever.

Tyranny arrives in subtle stages. It’s slow at first, but before you realize it even exists, it has already won. That is what I see happening with the unholy merger of “the great reset” with “the new normal.”

Those who pull the strings have been begging for a global crisis to unleash their worldwide restructuring of society and the economy.

For more on The Great Reset, .listen to The Richie Allen Show Monday – Thursday from 5 pm – 7 pm.

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 1 Comment