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Countess “Absolutely Terrified” After Bank Accounts Closed Without Explanation

Richie Allen | July 5, 2023

More and more evidence is emerging that banks and building societies are closing the accounts of customers who hold controversial views.

Countess Alexandra Tolstoy told LBC’s Nick Ferrari this morning that she was left “absolutely terrified” after her accounts were closed without explanation.

Tolstoy claims that someone at her bank told her that they were not obliged to provide her with any explanation.

She was left wondering if her Russian sounding surname led to the closure of her accounts.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have both criticised banks for closing the accounts of customers with controversial views.

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Cancer Care and The Role of Repurposed Drugs – Dr. Paul Marik & Dr. Mobeen Syed

FLCCC Weekly Update – June 28, 2023 

Betsy Ashton hosts Dr. Marik and Dr. Mobeen Syed (Dr. Been) to discuss Dr. Marik’s new ‘Cancer Care’ document and look at the role repurposed drugs have in cancer treatment.

Read ‘Challenging the Status Quo: How  learned that much of what he once understood about cancer was wrong:
https://geni.us/FLCCC-Substack-June28

Dr. Marik’s “Cancer Care” doc can e found here:
http://flccc.net/cancer-care

To learn more about our protocols click here:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 2

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here. You can read the first part of this series here. 

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 4, 2023

When an idea is fervently adopted by most of the world’s doctors, scientists and politicians and supported by millions of people, it is a tall order to make the case for a rethink. Such was the experience of biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who 40 years ago developed a detailed theory about Aids that contradicts the generally accepted belief that a deadly virus, HIV, is the cause. Decades of unremitting censorship and rejection preceded her death from heart failure in March 2022, aged 85.

Her story has important, and disturbing, implications for our understanding of what has been happening with the Covid crisis.

Born in Greek Macedonia, she and her brother Dmitris were part of a kinder diaspora sent to Eastern Europe to escape the Greek civil war of 1946-49. She was cared for well, and graduated with a Masters degree in nuclear physics from the University of Bucharest, Romania.

In 1965, at the age of 29, she was reunited with her family in Perth, Western Australia, where they had emigrated. She learned English and joined the staff of the medical physics department at the Royal Perth Hospital, remaining on the books there for more than half a century.

In September 1976 she married Kosta Eleopulos, also a child sent to Romania who eventually found his way to Australia. She blamed herself for his death, five years later, from gastric cancer, believing she should have been able to save him with the knowledge she had acquired.

Her job was to research and improve radiation treatments for cancer patients. The work led her into a deep examination of some fundamentals in biology, in particular how the body’s cells maintain healthy function, and the mechanisms involved when their activity and growth become disordered.

In 1982 the high-prestige Journal of Theoretical Biology published a 21-page paper in which she explored how oxidation causes cell activation and expenditure of energy, while a counterpart process known as reduction enables the cell to absorb and store energy. The processes have a cyclic nature, controlled by a periodic exchange of electrical charge between two proteins, actin and myosin.

Changes in the factors regulating these cycles beyond the point where homoeostatic safety mechanisms are breached can lead to a variety of disorders, including cancer.

When Aids was first reported in 1981, ‘it wasn’t too big a jump to see that oxidative mechanisms had the power to explain much about Aids and perhaps even “HIV” itself,’ says Valendar Turner, an emergency physician at the Royal Perth, one of a small band of doctors and scientists who tried to help Papadopulos’s work become more widely known.

In explaining the seemingly disparate groups of people at risk of Aids, her theory implicated a variety of toxins, all known to be powerful oxidants. These included injected and ingested drugs; nitrite inhalants used for sexual enhancement; repeated infections and many of the agents used to treat them; blood-clotting agents given to haemophiliacs, which in the early days of Aids were made from concentrated extracts of blood from thousands of donors; and anally deposited sperm. Semen in the rectum is separated from blood vessels and the lymph system by a single, easily penetrated layer of cells, whereas the vagina has a thick protective lining.

In this multifactorial theory of Aids, the various contributory factors were unified by their shared ability to put the body’s tissues under a chronic, progressively destructive oxidative assault. This affects all cells in the body, not just immune cells, injuring them to the point of their becoming susceptible to the microbial infections and cancers that underlie the Aids diseases.

Papadopulos also described how this process gave rise to biochemical phenomena which, she maintained, had been misinterpreted as meaning a new virus was present.

She was an immensely dedicated scientist who built up a huge body of work on these lines, citing thousands of studies from the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology in support of her case. Yet of six papers she wrote from these perspectives during the 1980s, only one was published, and even then only after protracted correspondence countering criticism from referees.

Entitled Reappraisal of Aids – is the Oxidation Induced by the Risk Factors the Primary Cause? it was written mostly in 1985 and twice rejected by Nature during 1986. It finally saw the light of day in 1988 in the journal Medical Hypotheses, which although a serious scientific publication does not carry the same weight as the mainstream journals.

A breakthrough appeared imminent when in 2010 Medical Hypotheses accepted two more papers. One reviewed evidence that Aids is not an STI – a sexually transmitted infection – although it can be sexually acquired through the mechanisms described above. The other questioned whether HIV had ever been proven to exist. Both papers, with their every assertion supported by detailed references, entered the pipeline for publication.

A prolonged silence followed, in the wake of which Professor Bruce Charlton, the journal’s editor, explained that the journal’s owner Elsevier, a giant Netherlands-based publisher specialising in scientific and medical content, had ‘intercepted’ the papers. When he insisted on keeping them in press, he was fired. His successor pulled them both.

One of the aims of this series is to appeal to the global scientific community to re-examine the HIV theory, not just because of the harm I believe it to be causing, but because of the clues it gives us as to how and why the Covid pandemic also became so badly mishandled. In both instances, misinformation by powerful agencies played a big part. This robbed the public and most media outlets of the ability to judge the situations accurately.

With Covid, once it was realised that SARS-CoV-2 was on the loose, organised efforts were made to hide the laboratory origin of the virus. If the truth were known, future funds would be at risk. The prestige of biomedical science itself was at stake.

Funding agencies, and journals such as Science, Nature and The Lancet which depend heavily on advertisements related to biomedical research, put their weight behind attempts to persuade us that the virus had a natural origin. Anyone who suggested otherwise was labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’. At the same time, exaggerated fears about the risks involved among those ‘in the know’ about the virus’s genetically engineered status led to the betrayal of long-established principles for pandemic management as well as vaccine safety.

Anthony Fauci, who stood down at the end of 2022 as head of the US Government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was central to this cover-up in early 2020, and in the subsequent drive for mass vaccination. He showed a frightening degree of certainty in his leadership abilities (attributed by some to his Jesuit education) declaring in a 2021 interview: ‘Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ He condemned as ‘ridiculous’ the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by 60,000 doctors and scientists, opposing lockdowns and urging that protection should be focused on the most vulnerable. He likened it to ‘Aids denialism’, an insult long used by the Aids industry to stifle questioning of the HIV theory.

The US ended up with one of the highest Covid death rates in the world.

Money plays a big part in maintaining the illusions. The drug companies that won the race with the mRNA vaccines earned a $100billion jackpot. Vast sums were spent on advertising and on grants for scientific, medical, consumer and civil rights groups who helped to promote the jab. Largesse of this kind readily distorts judgment. Beneficiaries find it all too easy to close their minds to arguments that might jeopardise the flow of cash.

Most mainstream media went along with the obfuscations, and the many damaging policies that came in their wake, including false predictions of spread, extended lockdowns, neglect of treatment protocols, and an experimental, poorly tested vaccine promoted globally as safe and effective, in the hope of gaining some kind of redemption for science. According to a recent reanalysis of trial data reported in the journal Cell, the mRNA vaccines had no effect on overall mortality.

Fauci set a similar lead on Aids. When the syndrome was first recognised, he was the newly appointed head of NIAID. He supported the ‘deadly virus’ theory of Aids to the hilt, telling the New York Times in 1987, just three years after HIV’s purported discovery, that the evidence it causes Aids ‘is so overwhelming that it almost doesn’t deserve discussion any more’. As with Covid, dissenting voices were not tolerated.

Yet the virus theory reeked of bad science from the start. Callous disregard of the first Aids victims because of their ‘fast-track’ urban gay lifestyle gave way to an urgent search for a less discriminatory explanation for the syndrome, and a front-runner proposal was that a virus might be involved. US Government researcher Robert Gallo, in what he called his ‘passionate’ phase, determined that if that was the case, his team should be the first to identify it.

When the French scientist Luc Montagnier tentatively suggested that genetic material he had drawn from Aids patients’ lymph nodes could mean a virus was present, British and American experts, including Gallo, dismissed the idea. But after finding a way to amplify the material sent to him by Montagnier, Gallo announced at a government-backed press conference that the ‘probable’ cause of Aids had been found. A blood test for what would soon be called the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was in the pipeline, and a vaccine would be available within two years. Gallo did not acknowledge that he had worked with material sent to him by Montagnier.

Decades later, the search for a vaccine continues, with Africans usually the main test subjects. There have been more than 250 failed trials, costing billions of dollars.

As we shall see, the ‘HIV’ test rushed out on the basis of Gallo’s work did not demonstrate the presence of a specific virus. It had value as a broad screen for blood safety, but was never validated for diagnostic purposes. Nevertheless, it was nodded through for wider use at a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva in April, 1986, after regulators were told it was ‘simply not practical’ to stop this.

As the idea grew that all sexually active people were at risk, the test kits became big earners, and an international row broke out over who should get the credit. Eventually a profit-sharing agreement was brokered by the French and American governments, but in the meantime the high-profile dispute helped to consolidate the theory in most people’s minds. The idea that both Montagnier and Gallo were mistaken in equating an ‘HIV-positive’ test result with risk of Aids became as unthinkable as a religious heresy.

There was one prominent challenger, who met the same fate as scientists questioning Covid orthodoxies. In 1987 US molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg, a world expert on retroviruses, of which HIV was supposed to be one, published a long scholarly article in the journal Cancer Research arguing that HIV was a harmless passenger among the many infections picked up by Aids patients, and by those at risk for Aids. Everything he knew about retroviruses told him this could not possibly be the cause of such a devastating illness as Aids.

The alarm this caused was revealed in an internal memo about the paper from the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to recipients including the Surgeon General and the White House. Headed MEDIA ALERT, it warned:

‘This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy (If this isn’t the virus, how do we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything about transmission? How could you all be so stupid and why should we ever believe you again?) and we need to be prepared to respond.’

The journal’s editor was astonished that he did not receive a single letter in response, though Duesberg learned privately from a number of colleagues that they had been shaken by his analysis.

Like a person hiding some guilty secret, the scientific world was refusing to admit publicly that such a huge mistake could have been made. We are witnessing a similar state of denial today regarding deaths and injuries caused by the Covid vaccines.

On November 17, 1988, the late John Maddox, then editor of Nature, who rejected numerous submissions from Duesberg on HIV and Aids, wrote to him: ‘I am glad you correctly infer from my letter that I am in many ways sympathetic to what you say. I did not ask you to revise the manuscript, however. The danger, as it seems to me, is that the dispute between you and what you call the HIV community will mislead and distress the public in the following way. You point to a number of ways in which the HIV hypothesis may be deficient. It would be a rash person who said that you are wrong, but . . . if we were to publish your paper, we would find ourselves asking people to believe that what has been said so far about the cause of Aids is a pack of lies.’

Well . . . yes! But isn’t error-correction supposed to be science’s great strength?

Duesberg, previously a shining star in the virological world with a $350,000 ‘outstanding investigator’ award from the National Institutes of Health, became persona non grata in the mainstream scientific community. His subsequent research grant applications were rejected. Graduate students were advised to steer clear of him. Fauci and others refused to attend conferences or broadcast debates if he was to contribute. Publication of papers became difficult. His university could not fire him, but while other faculty members dealt with weighty matters such as teaching policies and speaker invitations, he was placed in charge of the annual picnic committee.

In contrast, today Gallo tops a list of National Institutes of Health scientists who shared an estimated $350million in royalties between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report by Open the Books, a nonprofit government watchdog.

Incomprehension and intolerance of any criticism of ‘HIV’ have continued through the decades. When President Mbeki of South Africa set up a panel in 2000 to look into Aids science,he became the subject of an international campaign of ridicule to bring him down.

When Celia Farber, a brilliant American journalist covering the controversy since the mid-1980s, wrote a major piece about it for Harper’s in 2006, the Columbia Journalism Review condemned her for espousing a ‘crackpot theory’, ‘widely refuted for years’.

When the journal Frontiers in Public Health published a peer-reviewed article in 2014 by Dr Patricia Goodson, a highly respected professor of health education, entitled ‘Questioning the HIV/Aids hypothesis: 30 years of dissent’, there were immediate protests. The article was allowed to stand, but with several invited critical commentaries to go alongside it ‘to ensure that all readers understand that the causal link between HIV and Aids cannot be called into question’.

Five years later, following the appointment of a new editor, Dr Paolo Vineis of Imperial College London, the article was retracted. This was not because of any errors, but because it was reaching too many people. It had received more than 91,800 views, while the commentaries had fewer than 19,000 between them. Announcing the retraction, the Frontiers editorial office said it had been decided that the article ‘presents a public health risk by lending credibility to refuted claims that place doubt on the HIV causation of Aids’.

The claims have not been refuted: they have been suppressed. Leaders of the scientific world have stubbornly refused to discuss them, just as they are refusing now to face the evidence of extensive harm from the mRNA Covid injections.

In both instances, with such extreme sensitivity to any criticism, the question arises: What are they trying to hide?

I have dedicated How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis to Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos in the hope that her endeavours will not have been in vain and that finally her work and genius will get the attention and recognition it deserves.

Next: Where ‘HIV’ pioneers first went wrong

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Exposing the COVID hospital protocol

By Stella Paul | American Thinker | July 3, 2023 

If you’re driving in Ridgefield, N.J., you may notice history being made. The first billboard of a statewide campaign is now up on Route 1, highlighting the deadly hospital protocol during COVID that took thousands of innocent lives.  More billboards should be coming soon.

I’ve been writing about the Hospital Death Protocol for some time, explaining how the federal government paid big bonuses to hospitals if they treated patients with the lethal drug Remdesivir, then ventilated and killed them. Many people now know about the damage from the vaccines, mandates, and lockdowns, but news of the medical carnage in the hospitals has been sparse.

Fortunately, a group of volunteers is determined to get the word out. I think of them as the Bereaved Army. They lost a parent or spouse or sibling or child to what one eyewitness doctor called “organized homicide,” and they won’t stop fighting ’til they get justice.

I spoke with Charlene Delfico, the state chair of the New Jersey chapter of FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, which organized the billboard campaign. “I lost my stepdad to the death protocol in Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. My mother was admitted at the same time. She survived thirty days of brutal torture and came home unable to move or talk. She’s slowly recovering. But they put my stepdad on a ventilator and ran roughshod over him until he died.”

In her grief, Charlene found her way to FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, a nationwide group of people who lost a loved one to the hospital protocol. A few survivors of the protocol participate, too — but not many, because most people forced into the federally subsidized “treatment” for COVID didn’t make it.

“We’re all connected because of this tragedy throughout the country,” Charlene said. “It’s an amazing group of people, and we’re all working together. We’re creating the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project (CHBMP.org), a living record of what happened. We gather videos and written testimonies and documentation for history. And we’re working to get justice for our murdered loved ones and to make sure that other people never have to go through what they did.

“As a group, we’ve had discussions about putting up billboards, but they’re expensive to take on. The brother of one of the hospital victims in New Jersey has been active, handing out flyers and trying to get attention. One day, he walked into the billboard company and said he wanted to do this.

“We made a logo that shows the Hippocratic Oath being torn in half, surrounded by the phrase ‘Crimes Against Humanity,’ because that’s what the hospital protocol was. And we posed the question ‘Covid Death… Are You Sure?’ to get people thinking and questioning about what happened.

“We already have other state chapters of FormerFeds interested in putting up billboards and we’re planning on having planes with our slogan fly across the Jersey shore beaches this summer. We’ve got car magnets and bumper stickers and things are really starting to move.

“We’re not stopping, and we never will till we get justice. I get inspiration from my favorite quote: ‘Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.'”

Stella is on twitter @stellapaulny.  You can write her at stellapaulny@gmail.com.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Israel’s bloodcurdling ‘poison policy’ to replace Palestinians with Jewish settlers

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | July 4, 2023

A shocking document last September revealed that, during the 1948 Nakba, Zionist militias engaged in a wide-ranging chemical and biological warfare campaign to expel indigenous Palestinian communities from their lands, slow the advance of intervening Arab armies, and poison citizens of neighboring states.

This unconscionable use of biological weapons on civilian targets, which sought to infect the local Palestinian population with typhoid, dysentery, malaria, and other diseases by contaminating local water supplies, was subject to a concerted coverup at the time – one that was maintained by the Zionist state for decades thereafter.

Even after its exposure, the Israeli academics who helped break the story were at pains to diminish its significance, unconvincingly arguing it was a failed strategy promptly jettisoned and forgotten about as a result.

But newly declassified Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) files starkly underline this narrative to be an abject lie. Released by the Jewish Settlements Archival Project, an initiative of New York University’s Taub Center for Israel Studies, they amply show that the Israeli occupiers employed much the same tactics in order to purge Palestinian areas to make way for illegal settlements in the West Bank, and elsewhere.

Facts on the ground

In 1967, Tel Aviv emerged victorious in the Six Day War and effectively annexed significant swaths of surrounding territory from neighboring Arab states.

Israel’s occupation of these areas, and indeed the construction of settlements for Jewish colonists, was and remains absolutely illegal under international law and has been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations. Initially, successive Israeli governments claimed the settlements were the work of individual settlers and non-governmental entities such as the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization, and insisted that the state neither approved of nor could prevent their expansion.

Again, the newly-released papers starkly demonstrate this to be a deliberate deception. The trail begins in January 1971, when the cabinet of then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir met to discuss the forthcoming construction of settlements. The need for unfailing public secrecy about what was about to happen was considered paramount. At the start of the summit, the premier requested:

“Before we move forward with our discussion, there’s something I’d like to ask. It was our habit that for anything that has to do with settlements, outposts, land expropriations, and so on, we simply do and do not talk [about it]… Lately, this … has broken down, and I’m asking ministers for the sake of our homeland to hold back, talk less, and do as much as possible. But the main thing, as much as possible, is to talk less.”

This extended to Meir demanding ministers not attend settlement opening ceremonies, and avoid being seen by the media anywhere near the sites. In April 1972, this oath of silence remained very much in force, with minister without portfolio Yisrael Galili reminding his cabinet confederates at a meeting to “refrain from dealing with the matter in the press, as it could cause damage.”

Around this time, the Israelis began constructing the first illegal Jewish settlement, Gitit, in the West Bank. Kickstarting the criminal enterprise required displacing Palestinians from the nearby village of Aqraba. This was first attempted by brute force, with IDF soldiers demanding they vacate the area to make way for a new military training zone.

The Palestinians ignored them, and continued cultivating the land, prompting Israeli forces to damage their tools. When they still refused to budge, the IDF was ordered to use vehicles to destroy crops, and dispossess the indigenous population. Soldiers struck upon a radical, bloodcurdling solution: a crop duster would rain down toxic chemicals, lethal to animals and dangerous for humans, to precipitate their departure.

Still, Aqraba’s population refused to budge, prompting the IDF to up its devilish campaign’s ante quite considerably. In April 1972, the military’s Central Command met with representatives of the Jewish Agency’s settlements department. They established “responsibility and schedule for the spraying,” at such a density that it would preclude humans from inhabiting the area for several days “for fear of stomach poisoning” and animals for a full week.

The Jewish Agency was given the job of obtaining the plane, which it did from Chemair, a local crop-dusting company. The explicit aim was to “destroy the harvest” of the Palestinians, and forcibly expel them from the area in perpetuity.

The next month, the destruction was so severe that Aqraba’s mayor wrote to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. They stated the village had 4,000 residents, who until recently had cultivated “145,000 dunams of agricultural land.” Now, after “the authorities” had burned wheat and confiscated land, the Palestinians were left with just 25,000 dunams.

“The damage is unbearable … how will we be able to provide for ourselves?” the mayor despaired.

Israeli occupation forces finally took over the land in May 1973. Tel Aviv was asked for permission to “seize the land for the purpose of establishing a settlement,” which was granted. Three months later, construction commenced.

‘Get cover for it’

While Israeli governments covertly encouraged and facilitated the creation of illegal settlements, it is clear there was some internal dissent on the issue at various times.

In 1974, the head of the Israel Lands Administration began steps to establish another Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Ma’aleh Adumim, before the government had made a formal decision on the matter. Former IDF general turned Knesset representative Meir “Zarro” Zorea actively lobbied the Jewish Agency to allocate an appropriate budget for the effort, suggesting the organization “funnel money to settlement activity and get cover for it after a while, when I request budget approval.”

At a subsequent cabinet meeting however, then-Housing Minister Yehoshua Rabinovitz was dismayed, declaring, “this has no budget, and I don’t know how work is being started without sitting down with us.” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin attempted to calm him, stating, “that’s what we’re meeting about right now.”

“There might be room for clarifying this issue, but I wouldn’t suggest going into it today. I know it may not be following the neatest definitions, but I’m in favor of them starting to carry out this infrastructure work,” he added.

Later on, the aforementioned Yisrael Galili pressed ministers to define Ma’aleh Adumim as “an A-class area,” thereby granting it and its Jewish settler population greater benefits from the government, despite the fact it would lie in illegally occupied territory. The Israeli government officially granting the settlement this classification would, by definition, amount to a de facto endorsement, in contradiction to its official public stance.

“I’m surprised that you don’t understand that this whole subject is one of the ingenious methods to alleviate a process that could be very dangerous internally in Israel,” Galili explained.

These shocking communications remained concealed for half a century before the Jewish Settlements Archival Project released them to the world. It is almost inevitable that a great many more incriminating documents remain sealed in the IDF’s vaults. The project’s archives end in summer of 1977, and as of January 2023, there are 144 illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem, housing 450,000 colonizers.

Stealing that much land, and displacing so many people in the process, was a vast undertaking that frequently met bitter local resistance, which continues today. Given the efficacy of chemical and biological warfare in stealing Palestinian land over so many years, there is no reason to think this heinous approach wasn’t employed again and again over the years.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu’s remarks should prompt a major paradigm shift in occupied Palestine

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | July 4, 2023

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is known to be against the establishment of a Palestinian state, but now he has made it clear that he wants to go even further. “We need to eliminate [Palestinian Arab] aspirations for a state,” he told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee as reported in Israeli media on 26 June. The right-wing leader added that his government is “preparing for the day after Abbas,” referring to the 88-year-old head of the Palestinian Authority. “We have an interest in the [Palestinian] Authority continuing to work. In the areas in which it manages to act, it does the work for us.”

Some people, including Palestinian Authority officials, seemed surprised by his words, which is odd, given that Israel’s intentions regarding Palestinian freedom and statehood are known even to political novices.

The official spokesperson for the Palestinian presidency retorted by emphasising that only an independent Palestinian state can achieve “security” and “stability”. This terminology is often used by Palestinian officials to induce sympathy in the US, as such language is borrowed from Washington’s narrative about Palestine and the Middle East. Practically-speaking, “security” is almost always linked to Israel, and “stability” is related to the US agenda and interests in the region.

For Israel, however, such language lacks any urgency, because “security” from Tel Aviv’s perspective is obtained through unconditional US support and “security coordination” between the Israeli military occupation and the PA. Both are already satisfied. That is why Netanyahu told the Knesset committee that the PA “does the work for us” and added, “And we have no interest in it collapsing.” In other words, the Israeli prime minister sees the PA as another line of defence against the very Palestinians whose interests the Authority is supposed to represent and promote.

As for “stability”, this is of little concern to Israel, for in practical terms it defines stability as its own complete dominance over the Palestinians. Actually, make that the whole region.

None of the above assertions are predicated on complex analyses or guesswork; they are extracted from official Israeli statements and actions on the ground.

When Israel’s far-right Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in March that there was “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people,” he was not giving a history lecture, or merely engaging in hate speech. He was stating circuitously that Israel is neither morally, legally nor politically accountable for its actions against those who do not exist in the twisted Zionist worldview.

His remarks were consistent with the ongoing pogroms carried out by his supporters, the armed and dangerous illegal Jewish settlers across the occupied West Bank, against Palestinians in Huwara in February and, more recently, against Turmus Ayya and other Palestinian towns and villages. Neither the Americans nor the Europeans have imposed any punitive measures against Smotrich or even against the gangs of settlers who torched Palestinian homes and cars, killing and wounding many in the process.

Yet that is only a microcosm of the larger picture, whereby Israel says and does what it wants, while the Americans continue to read from an old political script as if nothing has changed on the ground. There can be no doubt, though, that US foreign policymakers know very well that Israel has zero interest in a just and peaceful settlement to its military occupation of Palestine.

We are entitled to ask, therefore, why the US government insists on following the same tired formula and urges both sides to re-engage in the so-called “peace process” and return to negotiations. This mantra continues to define US foreign policy, as it has done since the early 1990s, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed the Oslo Accords. Oslo made a bad situation much worse; the number of illegal settlements and settlers has since tripled, and the Palestinian people are even more vulnerable, not only to Israeli violence but also to the PA’s repression and corruption. It is surely no coincidence that Abbas played a key role in getting the Oslo Accords signed.

Although Oslo was unfair to the Palestinians since it operated largely outside acceptable international paradigms and had no enforcement clauses or deadlines, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders objected to it anyway, because — albeit symbolically — it expected Israel to behave in a certain manner. To be told not to build or expand settlements, for example, has always infuriated Netanyahu, who has lashed out even at his American benefactors many times in the past over this issue, most notably under the administration of President Barack Obama.

Israeli leaders feel that they are above any law or expectations emanating from outside, even if these expectations are quite minimal and made by close allies, such as Washington. With time, of course, Netanyahu prevailed, not only over any supposed “pressure” from the US and the international community, but also over the more “liberal” political forces in his own society.

Now, armed with a stable coalition government and apparently immune from any meaningful criticism, let alone tangible consequences for his actions, the Israeli leader is ready to carry out his right-wing agenda without hesitation.

Hence his recent remarks, which are a more emboldened version of the comments made in October 2004 by top Israeli government advisor Dov Weissglas, who explained the true intentions behind the Israeli military deployment in Gaza in 2005. It was an Israeli tactic aimed at “freezing the peace process,” Weissglas told Haaretz. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.”

Even though this “whole package” has, indeed, been long removed from the Israeli agenda, the country’s leaders kept referencing a Palestinian state anyway in order to satisfy the minimal expectations of US policy. Netanyahu has played this game on more than one occasion, including his February interview with CNN, where he argued that a Palestinian state is possible, but only if it has no sovereignty. Now, he is ready to move past that seemingly old language, to new political territories, where even the aspiration for an independent Palestine is not permissible.

While Netanyahu’s disturbing but honest language is likely to invite yet more Israeli violence and Palestinian resistance, it should also bring about greater clarity by shelving, once and for all, the fraudulent discourse of “security”, “stability” and the moribund “peace process”.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Responsibility for Israel’s right to exist’ pillar of Germany’s national security strategy

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
The Cradle | July 3, 2023

On 14 June, Germany announced its first National Security Strategy since the end of World War II under the slogan “To promote world peace in a united Europe.”

While the strategy takes aim at several “integrated security” elements, from military and “terrorist” threats to those posed by climate change, healthcare, and “the decline of democracy,” the document also stresses that a central security pillar for Berlin is to “take on responsibility for Israel’s right to exist.”

“We will continue to bear responsibility for Israel’s right to exist … The responsibility for Israel’s right to exist remains a permanent commitment for us,” the executive summary reads.

While Germany’s position is not new, it confirms what many have seen as certain through the years. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has repeatedly emphasized that Germany’s support for Israel’s “right to exist” is a national interest and “must never be questioned.”

During the visit of former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid to Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that Germany “will always stand by Israel and that Germany and Israel. They are the closest allies, strategic partners, and friends.”

Berlin also remains one of the most important trading partners for Tel Aviv, as the volume of trade exchange between the two reached $5.2 billion in 2020. Both nations also partner in several defense projects.

Following the start of the war in Ukraine, Scholz described it as a “turning point” and stressed, “Germany must stand on the right side of history.” However, since making these statements, Berlin has only redoubled its reliance on US diktats, even after the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing cut the EU nation off from vital natural gas supplies.

In an article published by Foreign Affairs, Scholz stressed that today’s priority is “the defense of the rules-based world order,” that is, the defense of US hegemony over the world order, including Israeli supremacy in West Asia.

In this regard, Berlin’s National Security Strategy takes aim at Iran by accusing the Persian nation of “violating the human rights of its own citizens,” “pursuing its nuclear ambitions,” and even of “blocking efforts” to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was blown up by the US in 2018.

The document also takes aim at Russia, calling it “the most significant threat to peace and security in the Euro-Atlantic area” while calling China “a partner, competitor and systemic rival.”

Moreover, the document highlights that Germany “owes its security, as well as peace at the heart of Europe, to the United States of America.”

It also reaffirms Germany’s commitment to NATO, saying Berlin will increase its military spending to 2 percent of its GDP.

Another security issue for Berlin is the delivery of oil and gas from West Asia and spreading “democracy and protecting human rights” via government-funded NGOs.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Thousands displaced from Jenin as Israeli siege enters second day

The Cradle – July 4 2023

Around 3,000 Palestinians were forced to leave the Jenin refugee camp overnight on 4 July, as the Israeli army pushed ahead with the second day of the largest military invasion into the occupied West Bank since 2002.

“There are about 3,000 people who have left the camp so far,” Jenin deputy governor Kamal Abu al-Roub told AFP on Monday night, highlighting that 18,000 people live there.

Palestinians leaving their homes told reporters that Israeli forces had threatened to target them if they refused to leave, while some said the troops fired live shots at their homes.

Several families were tear-gassed as they fled for safety.

According to the mayor of Jenin, Nidal Obeidi, the Israeli army started demolishing homes in the refugee camp after displacing their residents.

“Those being targeted now are not just the resistance fighters, but civilians are being killed and wounded as well,” he told Al Jazeera.

Tel Aviv’s brutal invasion of the flashpoint West Bank city started in the early hours of 3 July and has left at least 10 Palestinians dead. Over 100 others have been wounded.

Shelling and fighting continued overnight. In the early hours of Tuesday, Israeli warplanes launched a series of airstrikes in the Al-Damej neighborhood, while drones could be seen flying over the camp.

The Israeli siege involved drone strikes, Apache helicopters, and ground forces, including army bulldozers that tore up streets across Jenin. The offensive has been widely described as one of the worst Israeli attacks on the West Bank since the end of the Second Intifada.

While reporting on the siege, several journalists reported they were directly targeted by Israeli live fire. Al Araby TV correspondent Ahmed Shehadeh said the army destroyed his camera while he and four other journalists were taking refuge inside one of the homes in the camp before being evacuated by the Red Crescent.

While the Israeli military initially declined to say how long the siege of Jenin would take, army spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced on Tuesday morning that the operation “could end faster than initially expected, even within a matter of days.”

The operation was launched in response to the unprecedented rise of armed resistance in the West Bank, which has become a significant threat to Israeli cities and illegal West Bank settlements.

Confronting the massive invasion are several different resistance factions, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) Jenin Brigade, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and groups linked with Hamas.

The Jenin Brigade claims they have shot down at least four Israeli drones since the start of the siege.

Solidarity with Jenin has been pouring in from across West Asia and North Africa, with dozens of nations condemning the Israeli aggression.

A general strike was announced in the occupied West Bank for Tuesday, while people in Gaza held rallies to express solidarity with the people of Jenin.

Gaza resistance factions on Monday said in a statement, “We call on all our people in cities, villages, and camps, especially around Jenin, to confront the Israeli occupation and support Jenin.”

“We call on the resistance fighters in all arenas to respond to any aggression if the Israeli occupation continues its crimes against our people.”

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Christianity’s Survival in Israel Is Under Attack

Extremist government headed by Netanyahu promotes de facto ethnic cleansing

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 4, 2023

Israel’s new government is still taking shape, but some of the policy changes being promoted are so Jewish-centric that they will inevitably impact disproportionately on minority disadvantaged communities like the Palestinian Christians and Muslims. The government itself is already being described in the press as the “most extremist or right wing in Israel’s history,” though what exactly that means is left to the perception of the reader. Several government ministers have even at times been excoriated for some of their extreme views inclusive of encouraging homicidal genocide or even the complete removal of all non-Jews by force from the country and occupied territories.

The Joe Biden Administration, in which nearly half of all senior appointments are Jews, as well as nearly everyone who deals with foreign policy, is doing its part to comply with traditional White House submission to Israel’s perceived interests. Israel is in the driving seat, and Biden knows it, declaring himself to be personally a Zionist. Much has been made of the fact that Biden has not invited Netanyahu to the White House to congratulate him on his latest electoral victory over concerns relating to the proposed judiciary changes and increasing settlement expansion, but it is clear that Israel and America’s Jewish Lobby are fully in control of both the White House and Congress.

Israel has certainly morphed into a nice place if one likes to feel racially and morally superior while shooting Arab children. This move of the Israeli government rightwards is reflected in a shift in popular sentiment. A recent poll by Israel Democracy Institute revealed that a record-high 62% of Israeli Jews place themselves on the right wing of the political map. The shift is best appreciated by examining the profiles of several of Netanyahu’s new ministers. The one most often cited is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party. Ben-Gvir, who calls for deporting Arabs, has been charged with crimes 50 times, and convicted on eight occasions, including once for involvement in a Jewish terrorist group. Ben-Gvir is notorious for his provocations directed against Palestinian Muslims and Christians, which have included marches of armed settlers flaunting Israeli flags through Arab quarters of cities and towns. To cap the irony, though he is a persistent law violator he has been the National Security Minister since November 2022, which gives him authority over the police. He is currently seeking to have the Knesset pass legislation explicitly conferring legal immunity on all Israeli soldiers for any and all killings of Palestinians and also pressed the parliament to institute a formal, judicially administered death penalty for “terrorists”, which would mean any Palestinian who physically resists the Israeli occupation.

Another extremist politician who has obtained a major ministry in the Netanyahu government is Bezalel Yoel Smotrich who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. He has recently completed a controversial trip to the United States where he met with American Zionist leaders. Smotrich is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and lives in an illegal settlement in a house within the Israeli occupied West Bank that was also built doubly illegally outside the settlement proper. Smotrich supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes any form of Palestinian statehood, and even denies the existence of the Palestinian people. He has now been granted authority over settlement development and support on the West Bank.

Though Israel’s internal enemies, such as they are, are frequently characterized as Muslims, the dwindling ancient Christian community in Israel and what remains of Palestine has also been under increasing pressure as Israel becomes less multi-cultural and more a state designed only to accommodate Jews. Increasing illegal settlement growth in largely Christian areas has also threatened the survival of many Christian villages and towns. Nevertheless, Israel remains a home to 185,000 Christian Palestinians, most of whom reside in Nazareth, Haifa and Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of people of partial or full Christian ancestry, some of whom are married to Jews, live in Israel as well. Beyond that, there are many Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, institutions, holy places and cemeteries in Israel.

Several months ago, the head of the Roman Catholic church in Israel, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, said that Christians have faced difficult challenges since the formation of Netanyahu’s far right-wing government last December. According to Pizzaballa, his government has emboldened ultra-nationalist religious activists, many of whom are armed settlers, and some of whom have harassed male and female members of the clergy and vandalized religious property. Pizzaballa observed how “The frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new. These people feel they are protected … the cultural and political atmosphere can now justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.” A colleague, Francesco Patton, the Custodian of the Holy Land, elaborated how “We are horrified and hurt in the wake of the many incidents of violence and hatred that have taken place recently against the Catholic community in Israel.” He described the desecration of a Lutheran cemetery, the vandalizing of a Maronite prayer room, urination on holy sites, destruction of sacred images and the spraying of “death to Christians” on church property, all taking place shortly after the new government was installed. He also noted “the responsibility of the leaders, of those who have power,” adding that the Israeli police routinely failed to investigate such incidents after the churches reported them.

To determine if the claims of increased violence and hate crimes directed against Christians were true, on June 26th the liberal leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent one of its journalists dressed as a priest into downtown Jerusalem. Within five minutes, the journalist Yossi Eli “was derided and spat at, including by a child and a soldier… A bit later a man mocked [him] in Hebrew, saying, ‘Forgive me father for I have sinned.’ Then an 8-year-old spat at [him], as did [another] soldier when a group of troops passed by later.”

Given what is going on on-the-ground, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has called for an investigation into the role that Israeli-US dual national settlers are currently playing in the recent wave of violence directed against both Christian and Muslim Palestinian towns and villages. ADC Executive Director Abed Ayoub has said that “We have strong reason to believe that American citizens are among the key perpetrators of the most recent brutal and violent attacks.” Since June 21st, armed Israeli settler mobs have been terrorizing Palestinian villages in the West Bank on a nearly daily basis. They have destroyed homes, burned vehicles, and killed at least one Palestinian. For decades US Citizens have moved to Israeli settlements, which they use as bases for regularly engaging in violence against Palestinians, all with impunity, as the Israeli police and army provide the Arabs with no protection and instead often protect the settlers. Many of these US Citizens also take advantage of American charitable and non-profit tax laws to fund illegal settlements and initiate violence against Palestinians.

In another major incident, five weeks ago dozens of Israeli extremists, primarily Orthodox Jews, disrupted a Christian prayer event for pilgrims near the Western Wall. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King and leading Rabbi Avi Thau led the protesters. Denouncing the Christians as “missionaries” trying to convert Jews, the extremists spat at and cursed the pilgrims, many of whom were ironically normally strongly pro-Israel evangelical Christians from the US. Deputy Mayor King said that Christians should enjoy freedom of worship “only inside their churches.”

According to Protecting Holy Land Christians, an organization established by Christian groups to raise awareness of threats their religion, 2022 was “one of the worst years for Christians in Jerusalem to date.” The organization reported spitting attacks, vandalism, and property theft as mechanisms of erasure. And there are other accounts of how Christians have been subjected to increasing persecution. A recent report details how Palestinians have been targeted by what it calls settler-colonialism, which is a series of measures intended to destroy their communities and drive them from their land. It identifies seven policies that Israel uses against Palestinians throughout the whole of Mandatory Palestine (1948 Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank including East Jerusalem) and also to punish those in exile: “denial of residency; land confiscation and denial of use; discriminatory planning; denial of access to natural resources and services; imposition of a permit regime; fragmentation, segregation and isolation; denial of reparations; and suppression of resistance.” The report concludes “Whether these policies are considered separately or taken together, they amount to forced population transfer, a grave breach of international humanitarian law (IHL).”

To cite only one example of how it works, the venerable Armenian Christian community has been the victim of a controversial land sale in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City Armenian Quarter that is being developed as a luxury resort which will effectively destroy a neighborhood that has existed for seven hundred years. The Australian-Israeli developer who obtained the land apparently did so through a shady deal with a bribed community official that circumvented local zoning and property sale regulations. The religious leadership of the Armenian community, which numbers less than 1,000, fears that the resort will force many families, already suffering under Israel’s rule, to depart.

Recently, these essentially genocidal measures have included the outright theft of their historic buildings and land by the government, and denial of other rights, including refusal to permit gatherings of the faithful at the existing churches on major holidays like Christmas and Easter. There have also been many physical attacks on individual Christians carried out by extremist Jews as well as desecration of Christian religious sites and destruction or defacement of Christian relics and statuary. A conference in Jerusalem held last Friday to address the issue of increased violence against Christians attracted a number of diplomats, scholars and representatives of religious groups, but it was boycotted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The US Embassy also did not send a representative or observer, indicating clearly that it was not interested in the plight of Christians in Israel, or rather that it did not even want to admit that there was a problem.

So there you have it. The new Israeli government is not very interested in human rights for anyone who is not a Conservative or Orthodox Jew. It is, in fact, essentially hostile to all Palestinians and foreigners, be they Muslim, Christian or even irreligious. They denigrate such people as what Germans in the 1930s would have referred to as “untermenschen” meaning subhumans, a word then used to describe Jews, ironically enough. That the United States ignores all of Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations is disgraceful, but par for the course as American Jews who are advocates for Israel have corrupted and taken firm control of the political process. And do not think for a second that Israel’s leaders give one damn about the United States and its people. Recall for a moment how former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to Americans in a discussion with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” And more recently Netanyahu said “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” That is what they really think of us.

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.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Has China Just Checkmated the US by Banning Rare Earth Exports?

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 04.07.2023

China’s ban is a response to the West’s not-so-well thought out strategy of economically decoupling from the People’s Republic, Asia-Pacific consultant Thomas W. Pauken told Sputnik.

China has imposed restrictions on exporting two strategic raw materials, gallium and germanium, which are crucial for the world’s electronic chip-making industry. The US mainstream press called Beijing’s move a “second counter-measure” in the unfolding Sino-American tech confrontation, which followed the People’s Republic sanctioning America’s Micron Technology (MU) in May.

Last October, the Biden administration unveiled an unprecedented set of export controls that restricted Chinese companies from purchasing advanced chips made anywhere in the world using US technology, as well as chip-making equipment.

The US media noted at the time that Washington’s move would thwart “China’s technological ambitions,” bragging that the global semiconductor industry was “almost entirely” dependent on the US and its allies. Now American newspapers are admitting China has played “a trump card in the chip war.”

“I find it rather laughable that [the Biden regime] actually thought that they’re going to win this tech war,” Thomas W. Pauken II, the author of US vs China: From Trade War to Reciprocal Deal, and a consultant on Asia-Pacific affairs, told Sputnik. “You don’t have access to the rare earth, you don’t have access to the supply chains in order to produce these electronics – you’re totally destroyed, you’re devastated, the US knew about this. They knew how much they were reliant on the rare earths. They knew how much they had to rely on China in order to reshore their factories. And instead of trying to find ways to cooperate, they just decided to go ahead and just do these nasty, terrible attacks against China and then just somehow think they’re going to score a victory here.”

Why Didn’t Team Biden See This Coming?

The People’s Republic boasts 63% of the world’s rare earth mining, 85% of processing, and 92% of magnet production. As per the 2022 US Geological Survey, between 2017 and 2020 the United States imported a whopping 78% of its rare earth metals from China, followed by Estonia (6%), Malaysia (5%) and Japan (4%).

Back in 2019, the Asian giant warned the Trump administration about including rare earths in Beijing’s technology-export restrictions, as Washington stepped up pressure on Chinese telecom firm Huawei. Donald Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, continued to raise the stakes in a technological tit-for-tat with China by implementing the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022 and introducing semiconductor restrictions last October. In December 2022, US policy-makers were lively discussing possible bans on TikTok, a Chinese short-form video hosting service.

Speaking to Sputnik at the time, Pauken projected that Biden’s China strategy would eventually backfire on Washington. “If the US moves forward on decoupling, they’re only hurting themselves, because most of the supply chains on the high-tech side originate from China,” the Asia-Pacific consultant warned last December.

Given that 94% of the world’s gallium and 83% of germanium is produced in China, the US may find itself in a heap of trouble in the aftermath of Beijing’s export ban, according to the expert.

“You have to realize that a lot of the electronics are produced and need these rare earths ingredients,” Pauken said. “Without these rare earth ingredients, they can do absolutely nothing. This is an absolutely devastating hit to the US markets. And obviously, if they want to continue this policy of decoupling from China, it’s only going to hit them harder and harder. I’m not too sure why these countries thought they could somehow strike against China and then not get hit back by the country. This is basic reciprocity. Reciprocity means that if you hit one country with trade barriers, the other country is going to also respond with their own type of trade barriers as well. And so these tariffs are absolutely important to American factories, and they’re going to be shut down and they’re going to have a very hard time continuing their operations.”

Biden Administration’s ‘Childish’ China Policy

Pauken criticized the Biden administration’s China policy as inconsistent and “childish”. He referred to the Chinese “spy balloon” incident which made a lot of fuss in the US but eventually turned out to be a nothingburger: “A few days ago, we discovered that the spy balloon was not even a spy balloon, it was not even monitoring the US,” the expert remarked.

To complicate matters further, Joe Biden publicly dubbed his Chinese counterpart, Chairman Xi Jinping, a “dictator” almost immediately after Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent trip to Beijing. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s forthcoming visit to the People’s Republic is also surrounded by controversies, given that the White House is considering an order restricting investments in China.

According to Pauken, Biden’s China experts both misunderstand and underestimate the People’s Republic’s odds of withstanding the pressure and coming out on top.

For instance, while commenting on Beijing’s ban on Micron Technology in May, the Asia-Pacific consultant drew attention to the fact that the move apparently shows that China is no longer as “dependent” on the US semiconductor industry as it used to be. “Obviously, [the Chinese] have probably set up supply chains in place and have chips made in China that are maybe not equal in quality to Micron, but close enough so that they could handle the impact of no more Micron chips coming to China,” the expert suggested at the time.

“[Biden aides are] trying to take control of the US foreign policy, which is absolutely disastrous right now,” said Pauken, commenting on the recent ban. “And these are the people who are probably working for Biden, trying to think that he’s going to win and he’s going to end up coming out a big loser and they’re going to destroy the US economy. (…) The only way to turn away from this is for countries to try to find ways to improve their trade deals with China. And if they find that they can improve their relations with China, they will likely not be hit hard by this rare earths export ban.”

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

China’s export controls on gallium likely to hit US defense industry: experts

By Liu Xuanzun – Global Times – July 4, 2023

China’s recently announced export controls on gallium could hit the US defense industry, as this material, with China being the leading producer and supplier in the world, is widely used in advanced radar systems installed on warplanes, warships and ground installations, experts said on Tuesday.

Starting August 1, China will impose export controls on gallium and germanium as well as several chemical compounds involving the two materials, according to a notice China’s Ministry of Commerce and General Administration of Customs released on Monday.

Items meeting certain characteristics shall not be exported without approval, the notice stated.

The move aims to safeguard national security and interests, it said.

Gallium and germanium are used in the making of semiconductors and other electronic components, observers said.

Chinese military analysts said that the export controls, particularly those on gallium, could hit the US defense industry at a time when the US is attempting to militarily contain China’s development.

Gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN) are the most basic materials in the making of the transmit receive modules on active electronic scanning array (AESA) radars, which are widely used on modern warplanes, warships and ground installations, Fu Qianshao, a Chinese military aviation expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

For example, US’ defense companies Raytheon and Northrop Grumman are reportedly introducing new AESA radar systems based on GaN, which provide superior performance than previously used GaAs. The latest radars for the F/A-18E/F carrier-based fighter jet and the F-35 stealth fighter jet also incorporate GaN.

Both GaN and GaAs are included on China’s list of export controls.

China accounts for about 85 percent of global gallium reserves, meaning that it is unlikely for the US and other Western countries to avoid using the Chinese materials without significant cost, Fu said.

The US frequently deploys its warplanes and warships on China’s doorsteps for close-in reconnaissance, provocative transits and exercises as well as showcasing deterrence purposes, in addition to continuing arms sales to the island of Taiwan, which are obvious attempts to contain China’s development and harm China’s national security and interests, analysts said.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Russia foils Ukraine drone attacks on Moscow

Press TV – July 4, 2023

Russia says its Air Force units have foiled a Ukrainian drone attack on the capital Moscow, though one of the attacks prompted authorities to briefly close one of the city’s international airports.

The Russian defense ministry said on Tuesday that four drones were downed by the country’s air defense systems on the outskirts of Moscow.

The fifth drone, it said, was jammed and crashed into the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region.

There were no casualties or damage, according to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin.

Authorities temporarily restricted flights at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport for several hours early on Tuesday.

They diverted a number of flights from Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to two other Moscow main airports.

Russia’s foreign ministry denounced the attack as terrorism.

“The Kiev regime’s attempt to attack an area where civilian infrastructure is located, including the airport, which incidentally also receives foreign flights, is yet another act of terrorism,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

“The international community should realize that the United States, Britain, France – permanent members of the UN Security Council – are financing a terrorist regime,” she said.

Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine. It has in recent weeks increased drone attacks, targeting energy facilities

The attacks gained momentum last month when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his military has begun the offensive against Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, said formerly that Kiev was suffering massive losses in its offensive against his country.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

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