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India key to alternative payment mechanism for Russia

By Paul Antonopoulos | April 13, 2022

The war in Ukraine has focussed attention on Russia’s global exports as sanctions on the country have led to sharp rises in various commodity prices. As Russia is a key supplier of not just oil and gas, but also wheat, metals and fertilizers, the problem is further aggravated due to Russia’s exclusion from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) mechanism, which means that payments for trade with Russia are not permissible in dollars.

Indian exporters have payments of around $400-500 million pending in Russia due to the war in Ukraine and the subsequent economic ban on the country and its exclusion from the SWIFT mechanism by the western powers. In 10 months of FY22, India’s exports to Russia totalled $2.85 billion against $7.90 billion of imports, according to Bank of Baroda Economic Research data.

Discussions on a Rupee-Ruble trade mechanism is an inevitability after Russia’s exclusion from SWIFT. As economic sanctions against Russia are used as a weapon of war by the western powers, the countries trading with the Eurasian Giant need to have an alternative mechanism for payments. Some experts have suggested to identify an Indian bank in which Russia would deposit rubles, while India will deposit rupees. Russia would use all the rupees it gets from Indian importers to buy goods; Indian exporters would use the rubles to pay for imports from Russia.

This is especially crucial for India as sanctions on Russia have adverse effects on Indo-Russian trade. Amidst the uncertainties, there has been a substantial depreciation in the Rupee (Rs. 77/Dollar), making Indian imports more expensive. However, India’s non-weapon non-oil trade with Russia is miniscule, and so the effect would be minimal.

None-the-less, the exclusion of Russia from SWIFT as part of sanctions meant that millions of dollars in payments for Indian tea, steel, chemicals and pharmaceuticals have been held up. Tea exporters say that the necessity of rupee payment has come if the dollar payment has become impossible. This is significant when considering that India is the largest exporter of tea to Russia, amounting to 43-45 million kilograms.

The rupee-ruble trade mechanism will likely open an alternative channel for the Global South to continue trading with Russia. This would be possible because many Russian banks are already present in India. Large Russian banks with a presence in India include VTB, Sberbank and Gazprombank. Russia’s state-owned development bank VEB is also engaged in such trade.

VEB and the Reserve Bank of India are in the process of finalising an alternative transaction platform to facilitate bilateral trade. Apart from facilitating India-Russia bilateral trade, the Rupee-Ruble platform might facilitate the Global South’s alternative financial transactions with Russia.

Increasing economic sanctions have created problems in other currency zones as well, particularly Iran, demonstrating why many countries are entering into currency swap deals to continue trading without depending on the dollar.

The post-World War western dominated financial architecture is a skewed global financial system. In view of this, the Rupee-Ruble mechanism may open an era of trade without dollars. The global financial system should not be leveraged as a weapon of war by any group of countries, otherwise it would lose trust.

The biggest problem for developing countries arises from the fact that Russia exports significant quantities of grains and has imposed a halt on grain shipments to its neighbours in the Eurasian Economic Union until the end of August. This is to “maintain stability on the Russian market”. The two largest buyers of wheat from Russia, Egypt and Turkey, have seen disruptions in supply due to closure of Black Sea ports as the war in Ukraine rages on. As Russia and Ukraine supply one-third of the total global supplies of wheat, the disruption in supply has pushed prices up.

What the West has not considered though is that the problem might be complicated further due to Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT mechanism. In such cases, Rupee-Ruble trade will be another step towards the de-dollarization of the global economy as countries seek safety from potential sanctions and economic attacks from the West. As the Global South suffers from a war being waged in far off eastern Europe, it is inevitable that they will explore an alternative payment system as they do not want to lose their economic relations with Russia and will use the Indian model as a guiding principle.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Washington warns against ‘preserving’ ties with Moscow

Samizdat | April 13, 2022

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will issue a stark warning to countries “sitting on the fence” when it comes to sanctions against Russia in a speech to be delivered on Wednesday, saying that such “short-sighted” policies would not go unnoticed.

In a speech at an Atlantic Council event amid Moscow’s ongoing military offensive in Ukraine, Yellen will say that the US government remains fully committed to pushing Russia “further towards economic, financial, and strategic isolation,” according to an excerpt quoted by the media.

“And let’s be clear, the unified coalition of sanctioning countries will not be indifferent to actions that undermine the sanctions we’ve put in place,” Yellen will say.

In her opinion, the measures being imposed on Russia by the US and its allies are necessary because the future of the international order, “both for peaceful security and economic prosperity,” is now at stake. However, she will emphasize that some countries are still “sitting on the fence, perhaps seeing an opportunity to gain by preserving their relationship with Russia and backfilling the void left by others.”

Such behavior, the US Treasury Secretary will stress, is “short-sighted.”

The warning comes two days after US President Joe Biden called on India, which has not introduced sanctions against Moscow, not to increase its energy imports from Russia. In a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Biden offered assistance in the search for other sources of energy supply, explaining that it is not in India’s interests to increase its dependence on Russia.

Another big international player – China – has also been the subject of US criticism for its ‘neutral’ position on the Ukrainian conflict. Last month, the US administration went even further by warning Beijing of “the implications and consequences” which would follow if China decided to provide any material support for Russia.

There are also increasing tensions in the EU. Hungary and Poland, which were staunch allies prior to the conflict in Ukraine, had moved away from each other even before current events due to their very different relationships with Russia.

The events of the past six weeks have apparently driven them even further apart, with Warsaw announcing that it would freeze bilateral relations until Hungary aligns itself with Kiev. The European Commission also warned Hungary against fulfilling Moscow’s request and paying for the Russian gas in rubles, saying it would violate the sanctions regime.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Britain’s military facilities being enhanced to host new US nukes: Report

Press TV – April 13, 2022

British underground military facilities are being upgraded for use in storing US nuclear weapons as part of an extensive nuclear arms modernization program pursued by Washington, US military budget documents show.

In the Biden administration’s 2023 military budget request, the UK was added to the list of countries where infrastructure investment is under way at “special weapons” storage sites, alongside Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands – all countries where the US stores an estimated 100 B61 atomic bombs, the UK-based The Guardian daily reported Tuesday.

The report cites Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), as saying that the British site being upgraded to host the nukes is the US airbase at RAF Lakenheath, located 100 kilometers northeast of London.

As part of the US nuclear arms modernization bid, the report says, “The B61 has been given a new lease of life with a guidance system, the B61-12 variant, due to go into full production in May.”

Washington’s 2023 budget request states that NATO “is wrapping up a 13-year, $384m infrastructure investment program at storage sites in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and Turkey to upgrade security measures, communication systems, and facilities.”

This is while Britain has become anxious to assume a more assertive role when it comes to its own nuclear deterrent, according to the report, which noted that London announced last year that it would boost its own stockpile of Trident nuclear warheads by 40 percent to 260 – the first such increase since the end of the cold war.

It further cited British government sources as saying that the UK has “a clearer appreciation” of its role as a nuclear weapons state in a renewed era of state competition with Russia and China.

According to the daily, the British Defense Ministry did not comment on the upgrade mentioned in the US budget, though one official said, “We won’t provide anything on this as it relates to the storage of nuclear weapons.”

It then underlined that the development comes “just four months after the arrival in Lakenheath of the first of a new generation of nuclear-capable US combat aircraft, the F-35A Lightning II, the first such deployment in Europe.”

The report further cited Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, as saying that the upgrade of the British storage facilities is “an early sign that the US and NATO are preparing to engage in a protracted and maybe heightened standoff with Putin’s Russia.”

“The administration should provide some clarity about the military necessity and goals of possibly bringing nuclear weapons back to the UK,” Kimball emphasized.

The developments in Europe are part of a broader retreat from arms control, the daily also noted, adding that the Biden administration’s nuclear posture review – which has been sent to Congress but not yet declassified – reportedly do not include the changes the US president pledged during his campaign.

In 2020, Biden claimed he would formally declare the sole purpose of nuclear weapons to be deterrence of a nuclear attack against the US or its allies. But the review leaves open the option of using nuclear arms to respond to non-nuclear threats as well.

However, the nuclear disarmament group CND said the “quiet announcement” by the US amounted to more militarization at a time of growing risk and would add to the risks faced by the British public. CND’s General Secretary Kate Hudson said she feared it could lead to US warheads being redeployed in Britain, insisting, “Nuclear weapons don’t make us safe – they make us a target.”

The US withdrew its B61 munitions from Lakenheath in 2008, marking the end of more than half a century of maintaining a US nuclear stockpile in Britain. At the time of the withdrawal, the gravity bombs were widely considered as militarily obsolete and hopes were higher for further disarmament by major holders of nuclear weapons.

In the 1990s, RAF Lakenheath had 33 underground storage vaults, where 110 B61 bombs were stored, according to the FAS. Since their withdrawal, the vaults have been dormant. Kristensen said he believed the vaults are now being upgraded so the new B61-12 bombs can be stored there.

According to Kristensen, when the new B61-12 bombs are delivered – expected next year – they will replace older models already there, noting that the Lakenheath upgrade is intended to provide more flexibility to move the nuclear weapons around Europe.

“One of the things they have talked about is protecting the deterrent against Russia’s improved cruise missiles capabilities,” Kristensen asserted. “So they could be trying to beef up the readiness of more sites without them necessarily receiving nukes, so that they have the options to move things around in a contingency if they need to.”

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Testing Mania: Illogical and Harmful

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 12, 2022

This adapted excerpt is from Dr. Scott W. Atlas’ bestselling book, A Plague Upon Our House, published by Bombardier. 

By the time I arrived at the end of July 2020, the administration had already developed a massive testing capacity from scratch. Nearly a million tests per day were being conducted. The effort was led by Admiral Giroir, who was assigned the thankless task of overseeing that project.

I understood why the VP was so excited when he had displayed that simplistic chart on my first visit. And over the next weeks the administration continued to successfully facilitate and distribute tens of millions of point-of-care PCR tests and, later, rapid antigen tests. This was a significant accomplishment, but it was clear from the beginning that the White House did not understand how or when to use testing. To my thinking, it was a response to political pressure more than anything else.

From my very first meeting in the Oval Office back in July and again over subsequent meetings, President Trump expressed great frustration about testing. It was easy to see why. You could not turn on the news, even the most superficial talk show, without the lead story admonishing the administration for “the lack of testing.” For months, the country had been inundated with that message—not just from public health types who had now become household names, but from every pundit, talk show host, and news anchor. It became pure groupthink. Celebrities who had no understanding or expertise at all were now stridently opining about the unquestionable urgency of massive, widespread, on-demand testing.

Reminiscent of stock market frenzies, esoteric technical terms that had formerly been unknown to the public like “contact tracing” now became common parlance. Testing for this virus had turned into a national, indeed, international obsession. And to me, that obsession was not just misguided, it was harmful, creating more fear, more frenzy, more irrational policies. Yes, testing was an essential tool in the pandemic. And yes, months before I was involved in any way in Washington, there had been a failure to develop and deliver enough tests when they were needed the most. But by the time I came to DC at the end of July, a massive capacity to test had been quickly developed. The problem now was that it was not being leveraged to save lives. Schools and businesses were closed; people were cowering in their homes. Meanwhile, older people kept dying by the thousands.

Criticizing the administration about testing was more than a natural extension of that obsessive mindset. It was low-hanging fruit for the president’s political opponents. There had been almost no preexisting testing capacity from the outset, so naturally it would take some time to meet the challenge. The obsessive demand for testing rapidly escalated into a hyperpartisan issue. I remembered Pelosi’s mantra—“test, test, test; trace, trace, trace!”—as if she, or any politician for that matter, had any understanding of the appropriate testing policy. She was not alone, though. That mantra was echoed on every news network, regardless of political leaning. No dissenting opinion was even visible to most Americans.

That political heat provoked the expected reaction in the White House. Long before my arrival, testing became Priority Number One. Beyond an important public health policy question, it was an election season, and a contentious one at that. This environment elevated testing into the priority of the president’s closest counselors, his political advisors at the highest levels, and operationally, therefore, the vice president’s Task Force. Presumably, like all politicians, the president was politically motivated, too.

The conflict, the misjudgment about issues like testing and other advice coming out of the Task Force, occurred when the president was swayed too much by his political advisors instead of believing in his own common sense. That advice matched the message of the Task Force, especially that coming from Redfield and Birx, whose decision-making background was tied almost exclusively to testing. That was one of the many problems stemming from the HIV backgrounds of Birx and Redfield. SARS2 had already spread to millions, and it spread by breathing in close proximity; the role and practical application of testing in a virus like HIV couldn’t have been more different. In the end, it was easy to see how the advice to the president was to focus on testing.

Understandable for everyone, that is, except the president. He never agreed, because to him it made no sense. He couldn’t understand why we would test people who were not sick. It was as simple as that. President Trump talked to me privately in the Oval Office about many different things, but almost always, our discussions came back to the subject of testing. The president spoke very bluntly and resorted to common sense rather than any data. He knew nothing specific about the medical rationale for testing. He went with his gut feeling and placed no filter on stating his opinions.

“Why are we testing healthy, younger people? Why don’t we just test sick people?” he would ask.

“And if we test more, we find more cases. But those people aren’t sick!” he would point out, exasperated, echoing what he said many times to the press.

And that seemed rather straightforward, on its face. His point was simple logic—test and you shall discover “cases,” especially with COVID, since a large number, maybe half or more, of infections were asymptomatic. He was also correct that in clinical medicine, the definition of a “case”—a patient—is not generally based on a test seeking out something in a healthy, asymptomatic person.

That is not how medicine is practiced, a point I tried to explain time and again to the Task Force troika of doctors. I had that perspective, because I am a doctor who has been an expert for decades on the significance of diagnostic tests showing abnormalities without symptoms. And wasn’t it also important to consider that the overwhelming majority of people did not have a serious illness, even when symptomatic? As for mildly ill patients with COVID, “standard of care” for them was strict isolation, with or without testing. 

Testing, though, was the way—the only way—to find infected people who had no symptoms. In high-risk settings, contagious people with asymptomatic infections would be critical to find, no doubt. But the goal, the rationale for testing, became a key point of confusion and disagreement. We needed to protect high-risk people, absolutely. The question was how. We knew who was at risk, so there were two alternatives: 1) indirectly protecting the “vulnerable” by confining and locking down everyone else, or 2) doing everything to protect high-risk people directly.

By the time I set foot in the White House, the nation, with few exceptions, had already been using the Birx-Fauci lockdown restrictions—the indirect strategy—for months. Why was there no admission that the lockdown strategy did not work? It undeniably failed to protect the elderly. Nursing home deaths were piling up, comprising up to 80 percent of total deaths in some states—and in the meantime the lockdown policy was destroying everyone and everything else. Einstein may or may not have said it, but everyone knew it: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Yet the strategy was to continue doubling down on the failed lockdowns that were devastating to so many, especially those outside the “elite.” Reality was being denied, and that remains the case today. Regardless, the answer to the failure, the available tool for those all-in on stopping all cases, was more testing!

Unbeknownst to the White House, several top epidemiologists and infectious disease experts had opined that massive testing of healthy people in settings that were not high-risk was not appropriate at this stage of a pandemic. That was apparent to me from months of lengthy discussions with leading epidemiologists at Stanford and elsewhere. There were already tens of millions of Americans who had been infected; even the CDC estimated a tenfold larger number compared to the confirmed number, as verified by early studies on SARS2 antibodies.

Contact tracing was also “futile” at this point, as Dr. Bhattacharya later wrote in a paper I distributed at a Task Force meeting. Contact tracing was a tool for newly emerging pandemics, new outbreaks perhaps. Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, a world-renowned epidemiologist, repeatedly stressed the lack of logic in mass testing at this stage and the irrationality of focusing on cases by positive tests. Moreover, PCR tests were detecting virus fragments or dead virus in people who were not even contagious. Yet no one in the Task Force would even entertain this discussion.

The question about the role of testing was fundamental. It wasn’t simply surveillance for the purpose of knowledge—testing was the key to a strategic policy. It was not enough to consider testing through the limited prism of an epidemiologist, the way Birx and Fauci did (even though they, like me, are not epidemiologists). In medical practice, if you referred a patient with low back pain to a neurosurgeon, the most likely outcome was surgery. That’s exactly why I always referred patients to neurologists first—they had more perspective. Some might think of the adage “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Testing was the main tool in the epidemiology toolbox, their only tool, really. That was very limiting in defining its role in overall policymaking.

At this juncture, the testing was not being done to yield statistically valid surveillance information—a legitimate use of testing in the midst of a pandemic. This was diagnostic testing, with broad-reaching policy aims. In this pandemic, a positive test was a major driver of the policy of quarantining and isolating healthy people with low-risk profiles—shuttering businesses, closing schools— in short, a key to locking down the country. That’s why health policy experts like myself with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists are needed. Because no one with a medical science background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House. That lack of perspective was the main source of the tunnel-vision focus on preventing the spread of infections to the exclusion of all other considerations.

It was baffling to me, an incomprehensible error of whoever assembled the Task Force, that there were zero public health policy experts and no experts with medical knowledge who also analyzed economic, social, and other broad public health impacts other than the infection itself. Shockingly, the broad public health perspective was never part of the discussion among the Task Force health advisors other than when I brought it up. Even more bizarre was that no one seemed to notice.

The president clearly understood that testing healthy people for a disease that did not make them sick made little sense and would only lead to confining them. I agreed with that common sense view, although with important exceptions, and sitting in the Oval Office I explained the absurd extension of the logic of “test, test, test.” What was the “necessary” number, anyway? One million per day? Not even close. One hundred million per day? Nope. How about everyone in the country—330 million per day, every day.

Even if you could accomplish that goal, the tests themselves were only a snapshot in time. Seconds later, any given person could become infected. So 330 million per day, every fifteen minutes—maybe that would satisfy the testing mania! No matter how many tests were performed, there would never be enough.

The need for increased testing, but in a smarter, more targeted way, still needed to be explained to the president. And I did just that, repeatedly, whenever I had a chance—in concise, short doses. As always, he listened intently. But he had no time or patience for a detailed presentation. That is one reason why we got along well. I was capable of speaking succinctly, articulating the bottom line. More importantly, he knew I spoke directly, no BS.

From day one, I always reminded myself—if, and whenever, the president of the United States asks for my opinion, I am going to give it.

No holds barred—otherwise, what was I there for? Even on my very first visit to the Oval Office, when he complained about wide-spread testing, I bluntly told him, “You are a hamster on a wheel,” knowing that others in the room would probably recoil at hearing that. But President Trump knew it, even repeating the phrase later himself.

There was, I explained, a more nuanced approach to the policy of testing. There were serious reasons to test, important reasons to actually increase testing, but in a strategic way. The question was how to leverage that testing capability to have the most impact—to save the most lives and to facilitate reopening the country, which was the right goal from both a health perspective and the president’s stated policy.

I thought my approach was obvious. This was simple logic, and it reiterated exactly what I had written months before: let’s focus testing on where it really mattered, and increase it. High-risk environments, where high-risk people lived and worked. Nursing homes, a tinderbox of risk for its elderly, frail residents, were an obvious target. Knowing that cases were brought in by the staff, they needed to be tested, and tested far more frequently, perhaps every day. I also pushed for more point-of-care tests in places independent-living seniors frequented, like senior centers; visiting nurses taking care of seniors at home; and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where high-risk faculty members were more concentrated.

While the president understood and fully supported this, he remained frustrated, as did I, because his most trusted advisors didn’t fully sign on to a strategic approach to testing. At one point he offhandedly remarked, “You’ll have to convince my son-in-law of that.” Naturally, Kushner and everyone else had been deferring to Fauci and Birx on all things medical. To make matters worse, the Fauci-Birx testing strategy was not merely unfocused; their strategy bizarrely prioritized more testing in the lowest-risk people and the lowest-risk environments—students and schools—while letting the deaths continue in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, where a once-per-week schedule was assumed to be effective.

Politics seemed to be the main driver of those in the inner circle advising the president—that was their job. But the politics were irrelevant to me. The frenzy about testing everyone, everywhere, at all times, including low-risk people in low-risk settings, was incorrect, illogical, and harmful.

The funny thing was that while almost everyone assumed the president was only making excuses, somehow covering up for an “inadequate” testing capacity, there were valid reasons to use testing very differently in order to maximize its benefits. Despite the clamor of the “experts” in the public sphere, and almost the entire media narrative pushing the opposite view, the president happened to be correct. Instead of massively testing everyone on demand, testing should be leveraged to do what everything should have been geared toward in the first place—protecting the high-risk, saving lives, and opening society up as soon as possible.

What was most remarkable to me from the inside was that even though the president expressed his points about testing very clearly, and many top epidemiology experts agreed, the COVID Huddles and other strategic operations were run in a different world. The messaging, the public events, the operational strategy, and the communications team pushed ahead with a focus on producing and delivering more testing to low-risk environments, schools, and communities. Reminiscent of Catch-22, when 150 million antigen tests became available weeks later, I was asked by several people in the COVID Huddle, “Well, now that we have these tests, what do we do with them?”

Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

WHERE DID THE REST OF THE INTERNET GO?

TruthstreamMedia | April 11, 2022

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April 13, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Biden mobilizes US military industry to arm Ukraine

Samizdat | April 13, 2022

US President Joe Biden is looking to mobilize the military industry and send another $750 million worth of the Pentagon’s own weapons stockpile to Ukraine, according to new reports citing anonymous officials in Washington. This is on top of the $1.7 billion worth of goods sent to Kiev courtesy of American taxpayers since the conflict escalated on February 24.

So far the US “lethal” aid has consisted mainly of Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger portable anti-air systems.

Now Biden is preparing to escalate the aid to include heavy artillery and other systems, worth three-quarters of a billion or so, Reuters reported on Tuesday citing two US officials. The official announcement could come within a day or two, the agency added.

Biden wouldn’t need congressional authorization for this, either, as it would be done under a Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which authorizes transfer from current US military stocks in response to an emergency.

This would put the amount of US military aid to Kiev at over $2.4 billion since Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, when added to the White House’s own figures made public last week.

The US has sent more than 1,400 Stingers and 5,000 Javelins to Ukraine already, Financial Times (FT) reported on Tuesday citing the Pentagon. This amounts to a third of the US stock of Javelins and a quarter of its Stingers, estimated the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank. At current production rates, it will take 3-4 years to restock on Javelins and at least five for the Stingers.

Production levels will be one of the topics at the meeting between the Pentagon officials and top eight US weapons manufacturers, which both Reuters and FT said is scheduled for Wednesday. Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and L3 Harris Technologies are expected in attendance.

Kiev has reached out to US allies far and wide – from its NATO neighbors all the way to South Korea – asking for airplanes, tanks and artillery in particular. On Saturday, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said that Berlin could not afford to send any more weapons without depleting its own stocks too much. By Monday, however, the Rheinmetall conglomerate said it could refurbish some obsolete Leopard 1 tanks and send them east.

Last week, Slovakia announced it would send its only battery of S-300 air defense systems to Ukraine, and get US-made “Patriots” to replace them. On Monday, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the battery had been obliterated in a cruise missile strike against a hangar in Dnepropetrovsk, a city Ukrainians call Dnipro, the day before.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lawmakers reject amendment to prevent monitoring of unvaccinated

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | April 12, 2022

All Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee voted against an amendment that could have protected the unvaccinated from being tracked.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 gives federal agencies like the FBI, DOJ, and DHS the authority to “analyze and monitor” activities of domestic terrorism and “take steps to prevent domestic terrorism.”

The current administration’s program for tackling domestic terrorism includes monitoring the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories online.

In February, the DHS released a memo that pays attention to those who claim election fraud in 2020’s presidential race and those who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19.

“There is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19,” the DHS memo read.

“Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021.”

“COVID-19 mitigation measures – particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates – have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures.”

Following the release of the memo, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs proposed an amendment to the act to protect unvaccinated Americans from being tracked.

“None of the funds authorized to be appropriated in this Act shall be used to monitor, analyze, investigate or prosecute any individual solely because that individual declined the administration of a vaccine to COVID-19 or expressed opposition to such administration,” Biggs’ proposed amendment read.

According to a tweet by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, every Democrat in the House Judiciary Committee voted against the proposed amendment.

“Due to a troubling DHS bulletin, @RepAndyBiggsAZ offered an amendment to prevent the targeting of Americans due to their views on COVID vax,” Massie wrote.

“Every Dem. voted against his amdt!”

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Vaccine is linked to long-term child heart problems, but still the jabbing goes on

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | April 12, 2022

AN American follow-up study of children suffering the heart muscle inflammation myocarditis after having their second dose of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was published in the Journal of Pediatrics on March 25 this year.

The research at the Seattle Children’s Hospital looked at 16 males, with an average age of 15, three to eight months after their initial diagnosis with myocarditis a short time after vaccination.

The authors used electrocardiograms (ECG) and cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) scans to examine abnormalities in the heart such as myocardial scarring, fibrosis, strain, and reduced ventricular muscle extension, which can be associated with reduced capacity to pump blood and increased risk of heart attack.

They found that although there was some measure of resolution after three to eight months, most subjects still had some persistent abnormalities.

‘Although (initial) symptoms (such as chest pain, and exercise intolerance) were transient and most patients appeared to respond to treatment (solely with NSAIDS – non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs – such as ibuprofen), we demonstrated persistence of abnormal findings on CMR at (three to eight months) follow-up in most patients, albeit with improvement in extent of LGE.’

LGE is late gadolinium enhancement, a measure of the heart’s capacity to pump efficiently.

The authors warned: ‘The presence of LGE is an indicator of cardiac injury and fibrosis and has been strongly associated with worse prognosis in patients with classical acute myocarditis.

‘A meta-analysis including eight studies found that presence of LGE is a predictor of all-cause death, cardiovascular death, cardiac transplant, rehospitalisation, recurrent acute myocarditis and requirement for mechanical circulatory support.’

For those who wish to review a detailed evaluation of this study by a medical expert, you can watch this video.

Here in New Zealand, the latest Medsafe Adverse Effects Report #41 lists 12,000 people who have experienced chest discomfort and 6,000 shortness of breath (all ages) following mRNA vaccination – both classic symptoms of myocarditis.

The authors of the Seattle study concluded: ‘In the cohort of adolescents with Covid-19 mRNA vaccine-related myopericarditis (a complication of acute pericarditis), a large portion have persistent LGE abnormalities, raising concerns for potential longer-term effects.’

It is clear that little has been done in New Zealand to follow up those stricken by adverse effects. Many reporting to emergency departments or GPs with chest pain, tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), or shortness of breath have been told that everything will be OK without clinical assessment. In many cases these symptoms were not even registered with CARM, the national database of adverse reactions to medicines and vaccines.

Even though the Seattle study had few participants, it red-flags the possibility of subsequent cardiac events. It raises the possibility that sub-clinical adverse effects of mRNA vaccination may have serious longer-term impacts on health.

Until now, these have been classified as non-serious in New Zealand. Persistent reports of cardiac events in the weeks and months following mRNA vaccination among ostensibly fit and healthy people of all age groups and genders, but especially men, can no longer be ignored or dismissed as unrelated. They need to be investigated.

This underlines the fact that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination roll-out has been undertaken in the absence of long-term follow-up testing, which often requires the use of sophisticated equipment such as CMR and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans.

Moreover, heart disease is not the only category of serious illness whose incidence may be increased by mRNA vaccination, as other recent studies suggest.

Possible long-term adverse effects include cancer, kidney and liver disease, and neurological conditions. A recent court-ordered document release shows Pfizer, and probably the New Zealand government, is aware of cases.

But our government is still persisting with advertising suggesting that mRNA vaccination is safe and effective. This is not supported by research – the jab comes with some serious risks.

Moreover, the government was well aware of the risks from the start. An internal document released under the Official Information Act dated February 10, 2021 and signed by Ashley Bloomfield, Director-General of Health and Chris Hipkins, Covid Response Minister, discussing provisions for the vaccination of border workers, says: ‘Current data suggests severe adverse reactions are less than 1.1 per cent.’

Following ten million injections, as we have had in New Zealand, that would amount to more than 100,000 adverse reactions (a figure not inconsistent with the grossly under-reported 55,000 adverse reactions registered with CARM).

Did either Ashley Bloomfield, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, or Chris Hipkins ever hint to the public or the media that this was the expected outcome?

No they did not. They told the public the vaccine was completely safe and effective. They hid facts. More than this, Ardern deleted the 33,000 reports of adverse effects that were posted on her Facebook page. She gaslighted the public.

In the light of the Seattle study and other recent findings of potential long-term health issues associated with mRNA vaccination, we will now look at the very recent official advice given to New Zealand’s Prime Minister and Cabinet.

A letter dated March 13, 2022 has been sent by the Strategic Covid-19 Public Health Advisory Group (the David Skegg committee) to Dr Ayesha Verrall, Associate Minister of Public Health.

It is entitled Vaccine Mandates and aims to review the government’s strategy for minimising harms to health, society and the economy caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The committee assured the minister: ‘We have been able to take a completely fresh look at the evidence.’

The signatories to the letter are Dr David Skegg, an epidemiologist; Dr Maia Brewerton, a clinical immunologist, allergist and immunopathologist; Professor Philip Hill, an epidemiologist and public health expert; Dr Ella Iosua, a biostatistician; Professor David Murdoch, a clinical microbiologist and Dr Nikki Turner, an immunologist interested in preventive child health. All are vaccine advocates.

Point 29 of the letter calls for more measures to encourage children to be vaccinated. Point 12 asserts: ‘As we now deal with a large Omicron outbreak, vaccination is undoubtedly reducing the numbers of people who are becoming seriously ill and require hospital treatment.’

However, current New Zealand data discussed in articles at the Hatchard Report  reveal that the rates of hospitalisation are equivalent for vaxxed and unvaxxed.

Not a single scientific reference is included in this letter. Not a single reference is made to adverse effects of vaccination (currently running at 30 to 50 times higher than that of any previous vaccine).

Not a single reference is made to any need for informed consent prior to vaccination. The theme running throughout the letter is a need to normalise the use of vaccination mandates when they are needed in New Zealand in future.

The right of employers to enforce vaccine mandates is described as ‘common’. High vaccination rates are said to reduce absenteeism and the collapse of public services and commercial businesses.

The letter admits that the protection provided by the Covid-19 vaccines wanes after a few months and says the term ‘booster’ should be avoided. It recommends the needed number of mRNA vaccinations should be described as a course, and raises the imminent desirability of a fourth vaccine dose for at least some people.

Point 28 says: ‘For some cases, it would be appropriate for vaccination to be a condition for new employment.’ This clause recommends the broad use and normalisation of vaccine requirements in New Zealand for many illnesses and in many service sectors.

Unaccountably, the letter says: ‘Encouraging vaccination in the general population was not one of the specific objectives of vaccine mandates.’

It also says that vaccine hesitancy has been much less in New Zealand than other countries and that people ‘have been prepared to accept redeployment and redundancy’. In essence, denying the obvious coercion involved in mandates.

The letter recommends that mandates continue in use for health care workers, aged and disabled caregivers, corrections workers and border staff. There will be a review in six months.

The overall content of the letter appears to suggest that vaccines have been the key element ensuring low Covid-19 incidence. It completely fails to discuss the obvious point that this success has been achieved through border controls and contact tracing, not mRNA vaccination.

The long-term health effects of mRNA vaccination are becoming more obvious through published research findings. Meanwhile, the government advisers have their heads in the sand. Their careers have been built upon vaccination and now it seems that, to save the government, they are prepared to ignore the obvious deficiencies of mRNA vaccination.

One Chicago professor commented this week: ‘New Zealand science is circling the drain.’

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Ukrainian opposition leader arrested, Zelensky shares photo of rival in handcuffs

Samizdat | April 12, 2022

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his delight on Tuesday after Kiev’s successor to the Soviet-era KGB arrested the country’s most prominent opposition leader.

The President shared a photo of his handcuffed rival Viktor Medvedchuk on social media, with the caption: “A special operation was carried out by the SBU. Well done! Details to follow.”

Medvedchuk heads the second largest party in the national parliament, the “Opposition Platform – For Life.” He was previously placed under house arrest, last year, as part of Zelensky’s clampdown on dissent, which was granted tacit approval by the regime’s Western supporters.

Formed in 1991, to replace the KGB, the SBU is Ukraine’s main intelligence and security agency.

Medvedchuk, who opposed the 2014 Kiev Maidan, and believes the country’s Western turn to be detrimental to Ukraine’s interests, has led his party since 2018. He previously served as Chief of Staff to former President Leonid Kuchma, in the early 2000s.

Some Western commentators have labelled him as Vladimir Putin’s “closest ally in Ukraine.” However, the Russian President has described Medvechuk as a “Ukrainian nationalist.”

In 2019, Opposition Platform – For Life won 13% of the vote in a parliamentary election, making it the country’s largest opposition faction. Last year, polls showed that it had passed Zelensky’s Servant of the People as the most popular party in the state.

That seemed to prompt a crackdown by Zelensky, who closed media outlets associated with Medvedchuk. Soon after, the politician was arrested on politically motivated “treason” charges.

Medvedchuk has rejected accusations of being “pro-Russian,” insisting his party represents millions of ordinary Ukrainians. In February 2021, he accused Zelensky of seeking to establish a dictatorship in Ukraine and suppress the legally elected opposition.

Authorities in Kiev also charged Zelensky’s predecessor Petro Poroshenko with treason, back in December 2021 – on the same charge as Medvedchuk: illegally buying coal from the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk and thus “financing terrorism.” Poroshenko made a big deal out of publicly returning to Ukraine in January, and a Kiev court refused to jail him.

Unlike Medvedchuk, Poroshenko has substantial support in the West.

The US and its allies have sought to justify their support for Ukraine by saying Zelensky is a democrat fighting for freedom, and have presented Russia’s actions towards Kiev as motivated by a fear of democracy.

Moscow sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, following a seven-year standoff over Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements and end the conflict with the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. Russia ended up recognizing the two as independent states, at which point they asked for military aid.

Russia demands that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two Donbass republics by force.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Palestine’s widening geography of resistance: Why Israel cannot defeat the Palestinians

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | April 12, 2022

There is a reason why Israel is insistent on linking the series of attacks carried out by Palestinians recently to a specific location, namely the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. By doing so, the embattled Naftali Bennett’s government can simply order another deadly military operation in Jenin to reassure its citizens that the situation is under control.

Indeed, on 9 April, the Israeli army had stormed the Jenin refugee camp, killing a Palestinian and wounding ten others. However, Israel’s problem is much bigger than Jenin.

If we examine the events starting with the 22 March stabbing attack in the southern city of Beersheba (Bir Al Saba’) – which resulted in the death of four – and ending with the killing of three Israelis in Tel Aviv – including two army officers – we will reach an obvious conclusion: these attacks must have been, to some extent, coordinated.

Spontaneous Palestinian retaliation to the violence of the Israeli occupation rarely follows this pattern in terms of timing or style. All the attacks, with the exception of Beersheba, were carried out using firearms. The shooters, as indicated by the amateur videos of some of the events and statements by Israeli eyewitnesses, were well-trained and were acting with great composure.

An example was the 27 March Hadera event, carried out by two cousins, Ayman and Ibrahim Ighbariah, from the Arab town of Umm Al-Fahm, inside Israel. Israeli media reported of the unmistakable skills of the attackers, armed with weapons that, according to the Israeli news agency, Tazpit Press Service, cost more than $30,000.

Unlike Palestinian attacks carried out during the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000-05) in response to Israeli violence in the occupied territories, the latest attacks are generally more pinpointed, seek police and military personnel and clearly aimed at shaking Israel’s false sense of security and undermining the country’s intelligence services. In the Bnei Brak attack, on 29 March, for example, an Israeli woman who was at the scene told reporters that “the militant asked us to move away from the place because he did not want to target women or children.”

While Israeli intelligence reports have recently warned of a “wave of terrorism” ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, they clearly had little conception of what type of violence, or where and how Palestinians would strike.

Following the Beersheba attack, Israeli officials referred to Daesh’s responsibility, a convenient claim considering that Daesh had also claimed responsibility. This theory was quickly marginalised, as it became obvious that the other Palestinian attackers had other political affiliations or, as in the Bnei Brak case, no known affiliation at all.

The confusion and misinformation continued for days. Shortly after the Tel Aviv attack, Israeli media, citing official sources, spoke of two attackers, alleging that one was trapped in a nearby building. This was untrue as there was only one attacker and he was killed, though hours later in a different city.

A number of Palestinian workers were quickly rounded up in Tel Aviv on suspicion of being the attackers simply because they looked Arab, evidence of the chaotic Israeli approach. Indeed, following each event, total mayhem ensued, with large mobs of armed Israelis taking to the streets looking for anyone with Arab features to apprehend or to beat senseless.

Israeli officials contributed to the frenzy, with far-right politicians, such as the extremist, Itamar Ben Gvir, leading hordes of other extremists in rampages in occupied Jerusalem.

Instead of urging calm and displaying confidence, the country’s own Prime Minister called, on 30 March, on ordinary Israelis to arm themselves. “Whoever has a gun license, this is the time to carry it,” he said in a video statement. However, if Israel’s solution to any form of Palestinian resistance was more guns, Palestinians would have been pacified long ago.

To placate angry Israelis, the Israeli military raided the city and refugee camp of Jenin on many occasions, each time leaving several dead and wounded Palestinians behind, including many civilians. They include the child, Imad Hashash, 15, killed on 24 August while filming the invasion on his mobile phone. The exact same scenario played out on  9 April.

However, it was an exercise in futility, as it was Israeli violence in Jenin throughout the years that led to the armed resistance that continues to emanate from the camp. Palestinians, whether in Jenin or elsewhere, fight back because they are denied basic human rights, have no political horizon, live in extreme poverty, have no true leadership and feel abandoned by the so-called international community.

The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas seems to be entirely removed from the masses. Statements by Abbas reflect his detachment from the reality of Israeli violence, military occupation and apartheid throughout Palestine. True to form, Abbas quickly condemned the Tel Aviv attack, as he did the previous ones, making the same reference every time regarding the need to maintain “stability” and to prevent “further deterioration of the situation”, according to the official Wafa news agency.

What stability is Abbas referring to, when Palestinian suffering has been compounded by growing settler violence, illegal settlement expansion, land theft, and, thanks to recent international events, food insecurity as well?

Israeli officials and media are, once again, conveniently placing the blame largely on Jenin, a tiny stretch of an overpopulated area. By doing so, Israel wants to give the impression that the new phenomenon of Palestinian retaliatory attacks is confined to a single place, one that is adjacent to the Israeli border and can be easily ‘dealt with’.

An Israeli military operation in the camp may serve Bennett’s political agenda, convey a sense of strength, and win back some in his disenchanted political constituency. But it is all a temporary fix. Attacking Jenin now will make no difference in the long run. After all, the camp rose from the ashes of its near-total destruction by the Israeli military in April 2002.

The renewed Palestinian attacks speak of a much wider geography: Naqab, Umm Al Fahm, the West Bank. The seeds of this territorial connectivity are linked to the Israeli war of last May and the subsequent Palestinian rebellion, which erupted in every part of Palestine, including Palestinian communities inside Israel.

Israel’s problem is its insistence on providing short-term military solutions to a long-term problem, itself resulting from these very ‘military solutions’. If Israel continues to subjugate the Palestinian people under the current system of military occupation and deepening apartheid, Palestinians will surely continue to respond until their oppressive reality is changed. No amount of Israeli violence can alter this truth.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Enemies Seeking to Sow Discord between Iran Afghanistan: Iranian Minister

Al-Manar – April 12, 2022

Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi stated that the recent attacks against diplomatic missions in in Herat and Kabul have aimed at sowing discord between Iran and Afghanistan.

Vahidi described the recent events as the enemies’ plan seeking to make a schism between Iran and Afghanistan, saying that the “Iranians have always been a good host for Afghan refugees, and the actions of some people in Herat and Kabul have aimed at sowing discord between the two nations,” Vahidi said as quoted by Mehr news agency.

The attacks are part of enemies’ plan seeking to make a schism between Iran and Afghanistan, he added.

The Iranian minister also called on Afghan officials to be vigilant and take care of such issues.

In recent weeks, unverified videos purporting to show Afghan refugees being mistreated in Iran have been published on social media, angering many Afghans.

On Monday, crowds of Afghan people gathered in front of Iran’s embassy in Kabul and its consulate general in Herat, throwing stones at the buildings and damaging the security cameras.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Searching for War Criminals

They are nearer than you think

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 12, 2022

The United States is now insisting that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be put on trial for “war crimes” committed in Ukraine. As Putin is still insisting that he will attend the upcoming G20 summit in November on the island of Bali, Indonesia, it will be a great opportunity to have US Marshalls snatch him from the stage and whisk him off to a federal courthouse in Virginia for justice to be served. Or a form of justice anyway, since the United States has no actual jurisdiction over where Putin’s alleged crimes might have taken place and it will be impossible to prove that he actually ordered anyone to carry out so-called “crimes against humanity.” We’ll see how it all works out.

Indeed, there is no other phrase that has been more misunderstood and generally abused of late than “war crimes” or “war criminals.” It belongs with several other labels, including “weapons of mass destruction” and “crimes against humanity” that are used to indicate an adversary has crossed a red line and is so deplorable that anything that is done to him either during actual fighting or in the aftermath is completely acceptable. Going back to Greek and Roman times it has always been understood that even in wartime there are certain activities that are unacceptable, but the attempted definition and codification of “war crimes” as a concept is largely a twentieth century creation used to inflict additional punishment on the losers after the fighting is over. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War punished Germany far beyond what most would consider reasonable, largely because the victorious powers were able to do so without any consequences until the next war began. Likewise, the linked concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity came largely out of the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials, which shaped the legal arguments around alleged German behavior, not that of the allies.

The Second World War certainly included atrocities of various kinds on both sides, but the Anglo-American deliberate bombing of German cities has to stand out as particularly disproportionate. Forty-two thousand mostly civilians died in Hamburg in the 1943 firebombing and the bombing of Dresden in 1945, at a point when Germany was on the verge of defeat, was remarkable in that the city was not a military target and was full of refugees from the east. At least 200,000 civilians died. Judge Andrew Napolitano has suggested that the greatest war crime in history, if one makes a case based on unnecessary human suffering, was President Harry Truman’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which almost certainly killed more than 200,000 mostly civilians, when Japan was preparing to surrender. As Truman was on the side that won the war and controlled the prosecution process, there were no legal consequences or punishment relating to his decision, though critics since 1945 have sometimes decried the first use of nuclear weapons.

If killing civilians unnecessarily is the standard definition of a war crime, then America’s most recent five presidents have been war criminals. In other words, historically speaking, accusations of war crimes, which have no real meaning in law and are both infinitely elastic and subject to interpretation, have often depended on which side of the fence one is standing on when the war ends. And it gets more complicated than that, given the politics of what is sometimes referred to as the rules based international order, which in theory arose from the ashes of World War Two. The new world order was US-centric from the start, with the United Nations (UN) situated in New York City, the World Bank in Washington, and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. At the UN, American primacy was reinforced through the creation of a Security Council, which alone has the power to authorize military action against a rogue state. The Security Council had five permanent members, each of whom was armed with a veto, meaning that no effective action against them could ever take place no matter what they had done. And so it has played out, with the US plus China, Russia, Britain and France being effectively immune from censure authorizing military action by the United Nations.

It is of particular interest to observe that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague was set up to deal with “war crimes and crimes against humanity” that were otherwise ignored. Neither the US, nor the Russians nor the Israelis recognize the authority of the court and the US has stated that no ICC investigator will be allowed entry into the United States. Given that, it becomes possible to witness how the whole farce of war crimes and other violations of the new world order have played out in practice.

Currently the US and its allies are waging economic warfare on Russia without an actual declaration of war, to include an avalanche of sanctions plus completely illegal confiscations of the property of Russian citizens. It is also blocking Moscow from the use of the international monetary conventions and systems that it has had access to. The clearly stated intention is to destroy the Russian economy due to Russia having been charged by the US government with the commission of what it is calling war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin argues in turn that Ukraine’s apparent intention to join NATO, which is a hostile military alliance directed against Russia, is a direct threat to his country and is already manifesting itself in military action undertaken against breakaway parts of Ukraine which are largely inhabited by Russian speakers and ethnics.

There are other issues, but those are the most important. It should also be noted that the issues themselves were at least somewhat negotiable prior to the outbreak of fighting, which Putin sought to do but Joe Biden and NATO were not interested. So ultimately the war, from a third-party point of view, is pitting a Russian vital interest against what really amounts to no genuine interest at all for NATO and the US, apart from goading the Russian bear and removing its government as a way to prevent against any change in the international order.

Since objective reality has no place in United States foreign policy, it is interesting to look at how the US sees itself and how it regards other countries that are doing what Russia is doing or worse. When it comes to its own self-perception, America’s so-called leaders believe that their global leadership role is one by right and they can do no wrong by virtue of a quality referred to as “American exceptionalism.” That is of course a mythical attribute created to permit the United States to get away with mass murder and regime change without any consequences.

A principal beneficiary of American financial and political largesse is, of course, Israel, which consists not only of people “chosen” by Yahweh but also by the media, the United States Senate, House of Representatives and the White House. A comparison of what Russia is doing that is being condemned by Washington versus what both what the US and Israel have been able to get away with might be considered to be in order.

Russia has invaded Ukraine after months of warnings that the status quo was untenable in national security terms, largely due to intentionally fruitless negotiations with stonewalling United States representatives and NATO. Israel, widely acknowledged to be an apartheid state, is currently bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, unnoticed by the US media and the Biden Administration. It in the past has attacked all its neighbors, including the renowned Seven Days War in June 1967 which was a surprise attack staged against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Subsequent to that war, Israel occupied nearly all of what had been Palestine. It also seized the Golan Heights belonging to Syria and has recently received consent from Washington to illegally annex Arab East Jerusalem as a part of Israel, making the whole of the city Israel’s capital. The Golan Heights have also recently been annexed with Washington’s approval and there are 700,000 heavily armed and violent Jewish settlers now sitting in 261 settlements on stolen Palestinian land on the West Bank.

And what has the United States and its allies done to dissuade Israel? Well, nothing. One rule for Israel and the US and another quite different Washington dictated “rules based” system for everyone else, most particularly if one is Russian. In fact, the more belligerently Israel behaves, the more it gets in terms of US taxpayer money and made-in-USA weapons. Israel has also been the favored destination for traveling congress-critters of late because it is an election year and Jewish donors are being hotly pursued. Recently, a large group of Democrats was departing just before former Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Tel Aviv on Miriam Adelson’s private jet so he could kiss Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s ring and also spend some quality time with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ironically, while Joe Biden was turning the screws on Russia, the Congress was showering gifts on Israel above and beyond the billions of dollars in “aid” that the wealthy Jewish state already receives. Alison Weir of IfAmericansKnew has examined the recently signed pork laden 2022 federal government spending bill and has identified numerous line-item instances of money going directly to Israel or in support of causes that benefit Israel in some fashion. She estimates that Israel’s economy, which is able to support both free medical care and higher education, now benefits to the tune of $22 million per day from the United States taxpayer, for a total of $8 billion per year, and the number might actually be much higher. And there are other sources of income indirectly funded by the US Treasury, most notably the ability of Israel-focused charities to contribute tax exempt money to Israeli foundations and groups. Many of the “charities” are essentially fraudulent, funding the illegal settlements, domestic terrorism and other anti-Palestinian activities. Every artifice is used by some Jewish groups and billionaire donors to keep the US dollars flowing to Israel while no one of any significance in the federal government complains about the double standard when one compares Israel to Russia. And the Zionist controlled media are completely silent.

The hypocrisy that pervades United States foreign policy is difficult to ignore, but Washington has successfully manipulated its financial instruments to keep its remaining friends and allies in line. Whether that will survive the inevitable pushback coming from Russia, China and a number of non-aligned nations remains to be seen. At a minimum, the Cold War alignment that was broken in 1991 and which seems to again be taking shape around the Ukraine issue appears to have exceeded its expiry date. Ukraine might indeed wind up doing severe damage to the Russian economy, but it seems plausible that it will also bring with it the long overdue demise of American hegemonistic fantasies and NATO.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

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