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Ukraine has ‘assassination directorate’ – ex-security chief

RT | September 5, 2023

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has a dedicated assassination program responsible for taking out Russian “collaborators,” the former head of the agency, Valentin Nalivaichenko, has claimed in an interview with the Economist.

According to the former official, the special SBU division dates back to at least 2015 and was formed from the elite fifth counterintelligence directorate, after Ukraine’s leaders at the time decided that imprisoning people was not enough.

“We reluctantly came to the conclusion that we needed to eliminate people,” Nalivaichenko told the British magazine.

The Economist noted that the unit has been linked to the assassinations of Donbass commanders such as Mikhail Tolstykh, aka ‘Givi’, who was killed in a rocket attack in 2017, Arsen Pavlov, aka ‘Motorola’, who was blown up in an elevator in 2016, and Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the first head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, who was killed in a restaurant bombing in 2018.

Ukrainian intelligence insiders also reportedly told the outlet that the SBU’s fifth directorate currently plays a “central role” in operations against Russia, and that it has carried out attacks such as bombing the Crimean Bridge.

According to the Economist, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is “understood to authorize the most controversial operations,” while other decisions are often delegated.

Since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine broke out in February last year, Kiev’s security services are believed to have been responsible for several high-profile killings of Russian journalists and public officials. These include the August 2022 car bomb assassination of Darya Dugina – the daughter of Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin – and the killing of military blogger Maxim Fomin (also known as Vladlen Tatarsky) in a bomb attack in St. Petersburg in April of this year.

Several of the Ukrainian insiders interviewed by the Economist admitted that they were disturbed by the targeting of “mid-level” targets. “It makes me uncomfortable,” one former SBU fifth-directorate officer said, claiming that some killings were designed to “impress the president rather than bring victory any closer.” The former spy also admitted concerns that Kiev’s assassination campaign appears to be “driven by impulse rather than logic,” the outlet said.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukraine of adopting terrorist tactics, and has criticized its Western backers for allegedly turning a blind eye to its activities.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

German health authorities plead to parliamentary committee that they have yet to evaluate adverse vaccine events because there are too many of them

eugyppius: a plague chronicle – September 5, 2023

The major German political parties will never investigate the pandemic response, because they are all complicit in it. Across the entire political landscape of the Federal Republic, the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland stands alone in its critical stance towards lockdowns and mass vaccination, and only in the state parliament of Brandenburg do they have sufficient seats to gather an investigatory committee on the transgressions of the Corona era. On Friday, 1 September, the AfD-convened Brandenburg Corona Committee summoned Robert Koch-Institut Chief Lothar Wieler (the German counterpart to Anthony Fauci) and Brigitte Keller-Stanislawski, head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Safety and Diagnostics at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut. They were questioned for six hours on the Covid vaccines.

Journalists who eagerly reported Wieler’s every utterance during the Covid pandemic almost totally ignored his committee testimony. Among the few exceptions is Larissa Fußer, who has provided extensive reporting at Apollo News. The picture she paints is incredible: Neither the RKI, Germany’s public health authority, nor the PEI, our pharmaceuticals regulator, have taken even the most basic steps to evaluate the frequency or nature of vaccine injuries, or even the effectiveness of the vaccines in general. Technical problems, staff shortages, and the sheer extent of the data, has prevented them from fulfilling their most basic duties.

Keller-Stanislawski … reported her institute was massively overwhelmed, causing substantial delays in the evaluation of vaccine side effects that persist until this day. For example, she said, data from the “SafeVac” app released by PEI in December 2020 has yet to be analysed. The app was developed by PEI to allow easy reporting of adverse events. … They have received so many reports that they overwhelmed the technical infrastructure supporting the app. Data from 700,000 participants remain unprocessed …

Additionally, PEI staff were dramatically overworked. “There were people who only dealt with deaths and people who only dealt with myocarditis,” Keller-Stanislawski said. “We had much more work than before, all because of this vaccine. We had to get help from other departments because we didn’t have enough people to handle the adverse events.”

The PEI didn’t start evaluating adverse vaccination events yesterday. They’ve been doing this for many years, and yet somehow the world’s most safe and effective vaccine yielded so many adverse event reports that they literally broke their computers and made their routine safety evaluations impossible.

According to Keller-Stanislawski, data from the Association of Statutory Health Insurance and from insurance companies also remain to be evaluated. Although the RKI has developed a program that can process the insurance data, it requires further adjustments, which have yet to be carried out. The insurance data include, for example, doctors’ diagnoses in connection with Covid vaccination that could shed light on vaccine side effects. In other words … the PEI, whose task it is to investigate the safety of Covid vaccines, has published all their reviews on adverse events so far only on the basis of self-initiated reports from physicians and affected patients.

These reports are extremely laborious to prepare and physicians receive no remuneration for time spent writing them. The prevailing ethos among many doctors well through 2021 that the vaccines were “side-effect free” will also have disinclined many physicians even to think of associating health problems with the vaccines in the first place.

Also too, the RKI have never bothered to complete their own study of vaccine effectiveness:

The questioning of … Lothar Wieler … revealed, among other things, that the RKI has not proven on the basis of their own studies the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine. According to Wieler, such a study has been conducted, but it is still being evaluated. … Only shortly before, Wieler had told the committee that monitoring the effectiveness of vaccination was among the central tasks of the RKI.

So, it’s just the core role of the RKI, no big deal that they’ve never gotten around to it.

And then there is this insane tidbit:

The circumstances under which the Committee’s questioning took place were striking. For example, Lothar Wieler was accompanied by an employee of the Federal Ministry of Health, a certain Heiko Rottmann-Großner …. He testified that his task was to ensure that Wieler was complying with his leave to testify. As a civil servant, Wieler requires authorisation to provide information on matters that are subject to official secrecy. The authorisation regulates in detail the topics on which a witness in the civil service may not provide information.

According to media reports, Wieler’s authorisation was multiple pages long, while that of PEI bureaucrat [Keller-Stanislawski] was only one page. … [Rottmann-Großner] repeatedly gave hand signals to Wieler during the questioning, and occasionally he also passed notes to him. Committee members complained of this practice, and ultimately compelled [Rottmann-Großner] to sit two chairs further away from Wieler.

So Wieler came to testify before the Committee not only with extensive gag orders from the Karl Lauterbach’s Health Ministry, but with a special babysitter. Rottmann-Großner is not just anybody. He’s the former head of the “Health Security” subdivision of the Health Ministry; from Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo’s 2021 book Ausbruch, we know that he was an eager and early advocate for lockdowns and other heavy restrictions, demanding a nationwide “shut-down” as early as 24 February, the very day the WHO endorsed Chinese mass containment.

It is hard for me to put into words, what a scandal this is. The Federal Republic forced literally millions of Germans to receive not just one, not just two, but at least three novel Covid jabs against a virus that posed genuine risk to very few of them. In many cases the state threatened unemployment for noncompliance, shut the unvaccinated out of public life for months, and even tried to mandate vaccination via the Bundestag. Despite these grave violations of personal autonomy and bodily integrity, the bureaucrats who supported these crimes and justified them with relentless lies about virological doom now plead that their offices simply don’t have the time to establish how safe or how effective the jabs they continue to promote actually were. It’s a lot of work bro, they’re understaffed you know, there’s so much data.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Spike Protein Linked to Alzheimer’s Acceleration

SARS-CoV-2 Spike amyloid fibrils specifically and selectively accelerates amyloid fibril formation

BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

During the last two years, several people in my broad social circle have told me that one or more of their parents seemed to experience a rapid cognitive decline during this time period. A British friend’s recent account is typical. On a trip home to visit her parents, she was stunned to learn that her father was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, as he’d seemed perfectly alert, engaged, and intellectually lively just two years ago. What could account for his precipitous decline? She confirmed that her father had received COVID-19 vaccines and multiple boosters since early 2021.

This anecdote was consistent with my general perception that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—to which our bodies are exposed from COVID-19 infection and COVID-19 vaccination and boosters—may be accelerating underlying, inflammatory disease processes such as arteriosclerosis and Alzheimer’s. In this scenario, a man who was destined to have a fatal heart attack at 74 due to his underlying arteriosclerosis has one at the age of 54 because the spike protein produced by the COVID-19 vaccine and boosters, has markedly accelerated the disease. A similar acceleration of the Alzheimer’s disease process of amyloid fibril formation in the brain struck me as plausible.

With my British friend’s anecdote fresh on my mind, I read with keen interest a paper—published on a preprint servicer by Larson, Hellstrand, et al. at Linkoeping University in Sweden—titled SARS-CoV-2 Spike amyloid fibrils specifically and selectively accelerates amyloid fibril formation of human prion protein and the amyloid β peptide.

As is now typical of our infernally corrupt academic medical establishment, the authors only mention exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 spike during COVID-19 infection, and mention nothing about massive, uncontrolled exposure to the spike from COVID-19 vaccines and boosters.

As Dr. McCullough frequently emphasizes, those who are at the greatest risk of developing disease syndromes caused by the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are people who are repeatedly exposed to it through the vaccine, boosters, and infections. Because the COVID-19 vaccines do NOT prevent infection and may even impair natural immunity, those who continue to receive these shots are simply increasing their repeated exposure to the dangerous spike.

See SARS-CoV-2 Spike amyloid fibrils specifically and selectively accelerates amyloid fibril formation of human prion protein and the amyloid β peptide.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

Have we only seen the tip of the iceberg for mRNA vaccine harms?

A slow-motion car crash

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | September 5, 2023

To those of us well-versed in the biology and emerging safety data relating to the injections referred to as “covid vaccines”, what is playing out before us is like a slow-motion motorway pile-up: we can see it unfolding, causing immense harm, have no idea when it will stop, and feel powerless to do much about it.

At present, it is unknown for how long this ghastly experiment will continue and how much further harm will be caused.

However, unfortunately there are reasons to believe the following may well be the case:

  1. It will take much longer for the harms caused to be acknowledged by the “establishment” and so the injections will continue to be administered for some time yet – albeit to smaller and smaller groups as time progresses, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm in different locations.
  2. Even if the injections were to stop now, it is unknown how much the harms caused thus far have actually come to light, and how much may manifest over the ensuing years or even decades.

One category of reasons for the above is essentially political.  We are referring here to the complete failure on the part of those we previously relied upon to ensure pharmaceutical interventions are safe. The reasons for this are willful blindness on the part of our regulatory authorities, combined with the by now rather obvious capture of these institutions by two different interested parties:

  1. Politicians who will apparently stoop to anything, including installing transnational coordinated censorship regimes, to keep their monumental errors hidden; and
  2. Big Pharma, desperate to ensure that their bonanza continues as long as possible.

But as well as the above there are some inherent biological reasons which may hinder and delay the ending of this unprecedented catastrophe.

For a variety of reasons which are listed below, many uncertainties remain concerning the biological action of repeated doses of the mRNA products. However, what is known suggests that many of the harms they cause are mediated by inflammatory and autoimmune processes induced (potentially) throughout the body.

To recap the principal mode of action, the lipid nanoparticles carry mRNA into some of the recipient’s cells. These cells express spike protein – which is foreign to the body. The body’s immune system creates antibodies to that protein, as well as attacking and destroying the cells which express the protein.

In contrast to the original claims made – that the product would be broken down in the deltoid (shoulder) muscle with little or no distribution throughout the body, it turns out that the product DOES become widely distributed – potentially to every organ system. Of course, this should not have been surprising, since the whole point of the lipid in the lipid nanoparticles is to make them able to cross membranes and become distributed, to help with their original role as conveyors of targeted drugs to cancerous cells.

Moreover:

  • The amount of spike protein produced is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, as is the duration over which it is produced. High levels of spike antibodies have been found many months after injection, suggesting continued creation of the protein.
  • The spike protein produced has inbuilt differences compared to the natural version – the replacement of uridine by pseudouridine – designed to ensure the mRNA is less degradable. Other changes (eg codon optimisation) may well alter the folding characteristics of the protein produced – with unknown consequences.
  • It is thought that the spike protein my translocate to the nuclei of cells… cancer
  • The repeated creation of spike from multiple injections may have deleterious effects, both on the ability to fight similar viruses (so-called “tolerance” created through changing the type of antibody created) through to immune exhaustion (reducing the body’s ability to fight other pathogens or cancers)
  • The LNPs themselves (notwithstanding their “payload”) may well be pro-inflammatory in themselves…
  • The significance of above-tolerance levels of DNA contamination left-over from the bacterial plasmids used in the high-volume manufacturing process are as yet unknown.

Much of the harm observed appears to be inflammatory or auto-immune in nature. Both these processes are usually chronic, not acute problems. It is perfectly possible that once started, they continue for months or even years. Notably, chronic inflammation is thought to have a central role in many of the chronic pathologies increasingly suffered by Westerners over the past few decades.

Hence the tail of visible harm could manifest over a long timeframe. Moreover, because chronic inflammatory and autoimmune processes, by their nature, build slowly over time, the individual is likely to become habituated to ill effects, until a critical event occurs after some longer period.

A good example of this is with coronary artery disease. It is thought that inflammation is an important part of the pathophysiology in which a “plaque” builds up in the arterial wall. This may be asymptomatic until it ruptures causing a total blockage resulting in a “heart attack”. If the injections are accelerating this inflammatory process, the course of the pathological process may appear identical to that previously seen in many people, although it has been brought on and accelerated beyond what that person would otherwise have experienced; however, because it is within the range of possible or even probable illnesses observed, it gets dismissed as “one of those things”.

Cigarette manufacturers used to deny their products caused lung cancer by pointing out non-smokers who suffered the same fate. It was, in fact, only by rigorous epidemiological analysis that the link could be unequivocally proven. For the covid injections, it is deeply concerning that authorities seem to be doing everything possible to hinder access to the data which would permit such analyses to be performed.

Another reason why harms may be difficult to identify is that in some cases the pathological processes may be merely reducing physiological reserve, something which can go unnoticed for years or decades. Most of the body’s systems have significant inbuilt redundancy, which is why a kidney, or a significant part of the liver, can be lost while still maintaining good physiological and biochemical control. But if someone loses a kidney, they are more likely to suffer renal failure as they get older and the efficiency of their kidneys declines, and the available reserve falls away. Likewise, if part of the heart is damaged when young (eg through myocarditis), they may well make a full recovery in the short term in the sense of being physiologically normal, but be more vulnerable to suffering from heart failure (where the heart can’t pump blood around the body sufficiently) after losing some more heart muscle tissue after – say – a heart attack in middle age.

Finally, it should be noted that because of the wide distribution throughout the body (something rather obvious given the wide range of reports in the various adverse event databases), the harms appear to be manifesting in an extremely wide variety of symptoms and disorders. These will be problematic to diagnose, requiring lengthy and complex investigation, with multiple pathologies being possible. Such profiles of types of harms have not generally been observed with pharmaceutical products before; in most cases, the adverse effects are more limited in scope, and more closely temporally related to dosing (though there are some exceptions).

In conclusion

It is not possible to say whether we are at the beginning, or near the end of, the harms caused by these agents.

A combination of what may be termed “political” reasons, together with the inherent biological characteristics of the mRNA “vaccines”, all mitigate against the injections being identified and accepted anytime soon as being the causative agent of significant and sustained harms being experienced by an unacceptably large number of people.

Moreover, it remains likely that they will continue to be administered for some time yet – at least to certain groups in certain places – prolonging and exacerbating the harms already caused.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

The Global War on Thought Crime

By David James | Brownstone Institute | September 4, 2023

Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.

In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.

In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”

One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning.

The authorities use variants of the word “information” to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth but that is not the focus. Do these laws, for example, apply to the forecasts of economists or financial analysts, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Of course not. Yet economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people.

The laws are instead designed to attack the intent of the writers to create meanings that are not congruent with the governments’ official position. ‘Disinformation’ is defined in dictionaries as information that is intended to mislead and to cause harm. ‘Misinformation’ has no such intent and is just an error, but even then that means determining what is in the author’s mind. ‘Mal-information’ is considered to be something that is true, but that there is an intention to cause harm.

Determining a writer’s intent is extremely problematic because we cannot get into another person’s mind; we can only speculate on the basis of their behaviour. That is largely why in literary criticism there is a notion called the Intentional Fallacy, which says that the meaning of a text cannot be limited to the intention of the author, nor is it possible to know definitively what that intention is from the work. The meanings derived from Shakespeare’s works, for example, are so multifarious that many of them cannot possibly have been in the Bard’s mind when he wrote the plays 400 years ago.

How do we know, for example, that there is no irony, double meaning, pretence or other artifice in a social media post or article? My former supervisor, a world expert on irony, used to walk around the university campus wearing a T-shirt saying: “How do you know I am being ironic?” The point was that you can never know what is actually in a person’s mind, which is why intent is so difficult to prove in a court of law.

That is the first problem. The second one is that, if the creation of meaning is the target of the proposed law – to proscribe meanings considered unacceptable by the authorities – how do we know what meaning the recipients will get? A literary theory, broadly under the umbrella term ‘deconstructionism,’ claims that there are as many meanings from a text as there are readers and that “the author is dead.”

While this is an exaggeration, it is indisputable that different readers get different meanings from the same texts. Some people reading this article, for example, might be persuaded while others might consider it evidence of a sinister agenda. As a career journalist I have always been shocked at the variability of reader’s responses to even the most simple of articles. Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from positive to intense hostility.

To state the obvious, we all think for ourselves and inevitably form different views, and see different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronising and infantilising, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. That is simply wrong.

Governments often make incorrect claims, and made many during Covid.

In Australia the authorities said lockdowns would only last a few weeks to “flatten the curve.” In the event they were imposed for over a year and there never was a “curve.” According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020 and 2021 had the lowest levels of deaths from respiratory illness since records have been kept.

Governments will not apply the same standards to themselves, though, because governments always intend well (that comment may or may not be intended to be ironic; I leave it up to the reader to decide).

There is reason to think these laws will fail to achieve the desired result. The censorship regimes have a quantitative bias. They operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of social media and other types of “information” is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities.

But what is at issue is meaning, not the amount of messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative, especially ad hominem attacks like accusing anyone asking questions of being a conspiracy theorist, eventually become meaningless.

By contrast just one well-researched and well-argued post or article can permanently persuade readers to an anti-government view because it is more meaningful. I can recall reading pieces about Covid, including on Brownstone, that led inexorably to the conclusion that the authorities were lying and that something was very wrong. As a consequence the voluminous, mass media coverage supporting the government line just appeared to be meaningless noise. It was only of interest in exposing how the authorities were trying to manipulate the “narrative” – a debased word was once mainly used in a literary context – to cover their malfeasance.

In their push to cancel unapproved content, out-of-control governments are seeking to penalise what George Orwell called “thought crimes.” But they will never be able to truly stop people thinking for themselves, nor will they ever definitively know either the writer’s intent or what meaning people will ultimately derive. It is bad law, and it will eventually fail because it is, in itself, predicated on disinformation.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 1 Comment

Israel’s twisted logic makes the murder of Palestinian children a matter of state policy

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | September 5, 2023

Israel murders Palestinian children as a matter of state policy. This claim can be demonstrated easily and is supported by the latest findings of a Human Rights Watch report. The question is: why?

When the police or army shoot a child anywhere in the world, it can usually be argued, at least in theory, that the killing was an unfortunate and tragic mistake. But when thousands of children are killed and wounded in a systematic, “routine” and comparable method within a relatively short period of time, there has to be something very deliberate about it.

In a recent report — “West Bank: Spike in Israeli Killings of Palestinian Children” — HRW reaches a strong conclusion based on an exhaustive examination of medical data, eyewitness accounts, video footage and field research, the latter pertaining to four specific cases.

One is the case of Mahmoud Al-Sadi, a 17-year-old Palestinian boy from the Jenin Refugee Camp. He was killed last November, 320 metres away from fighting between invading Israeli forces and Jenin resistance fighters. Mahmoud was on his way to school and carried nothing that could be seen, from the soldiers’ point of view, as threatening or suspicious.

The story of the Jenin boy is typical and is repeated often throughout the occupied West Bank, sometimes daily. The predictable outcome, as HRW puts it, is that these killings are followed with “virtually no recourse for accountability”.

As of 22 August, 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank have been killed in 2023, adding yet more tragic numbers to a foreboding year that promises to be the most violent since 2005. This year “already surpasses 2022 annual figures, and the highest figure since 2005,” in terms of casualties, reported Tor Wennesland, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East, during a UN briefing on 21 August.

These statistics, among other factors — including the expansion of illegal Israeli Jewish settlements in the West Bank — “threatens to worsen the plight of the most vulnerable Palestinians,” according to Wennesland.

Those “most vulnerable Palestinians”, however, exist beyond the realm of statistics. When Israeli soldiers killed 2-year-old toddler Mohammed Tamimi on 5 June, the little boy’s name was added to an ever-expanding roll call of shame. The memory of the infant, however, like the memory of all other Palestinian children, is etched into the collective consciousness of all Palestinians. It deepens their pain, but also compels their struggle and their resistance.

For Palestinians, the killing of their children is not a random act of a military that lacks discipline and fears no repercussions. Palestinians know that the Israeli war on children is an intrinsic component of the larger Israeli war on every single one of them.

Of course, Israel does not declare officially that it is targeting Palestinian children on purpose. That would be a public relations disaster. Some Israeli officials in the past, however, have let their guard down, offering a strange and troubling logic.

Palestinian children are “little snakes”, wrote Israeli politician Ayelet Shaked in 2015. In a Facebook post, published in the Washington Post, Shaked called for the killing of “the mothers of the [Palestinian] martyrs.” In doing so, she declared war on all Palestinians. “They should follow their sons,” she wrote, “nothing could be more just.” Shortly afterwards, Shaked rather ironically became Israel’s justice minister.

But not all Israeli officials are candid about the killing of Palestinian children, and even their mothers. Data collected by international rights groups, however, leaves no doubt that the nature of the killings is part of a comprehensive strategy developed by the Israeli military. “In all cases,” recently investigated by HRW, “Israeli forces shot the children’s upper bodies.” This was done without the “issuing of warnings or using common, less lethal measures.”

Specifically, the killing of Palestinian children is a centralised and deliberate Israeli military strategy. The same twisted logic, now applied to the West Bank, has already been used in the besieged Gaza Strip. UN figures show that, in the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza in 2008-9, 333 Palestinian children were killed; other estimates put the figure at 410. In the 2012 Israeli offensive against Gaza, 47 children were killed; in 2014, there were 578 killed; in 2021 it was 66; and in 2022 17 children were killed in the besieged territory by Israeli soldiers.

Between 2018 and 2020, 59 Palestinian children were killed in what was known as the “March of Return” protests that took place at the fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip. All the children were killed from a distance by Israeli snipers.

When the numbers of dead and wounded children are tallied, they are in the thousands. According to the UN, there were precisely 8,700 Palestinian child casualties between 2015 and 2022.

Even the callous and often dehumanising term “collateral damage” cannot justify such statistics. And although the war on Palestinian children is clearly intentional, protracted and ongoing, not a single Israeli military or government official has ever been held accountable in an international court. Moreover, the UN “List of Shame for Killing Children” has never branded Israel, although other countries have been “named and shamed” for far fewer crimes against children.

As the killing of children is perceived — according to the twisted logic of the likes of Shaked — to be functional for Israel, given the absence of any accountability, the occupation state finds no reason or urgency to end its war on Palestinian children. And with the constant loosening of the rules of military engagement in Israel, and the terrifyingly genocidal language used by its extreme far-right ministers and their massive constituency, more Palestinian children are likely to lose their lives in the near future.

Despite this, the most that UN officials and rights groups seem to be able to do now is to count the alarming number of child casualties. Alas, no number is large enough to dissuade Israel from killing Palestinians, including children.

The problem for Palestinians is not just that of Israel’s violence, but also the lack of international will to hold Israel accountable. Accountability requires unity, decisiveness of will and action. This task should be a priority for all countries that genuinely care about Palestinians and universal human rights. Without such collective action, Palestinian children will continue to be killed in large numbers and in the most brutal ways, a tragedy that will continue to pain, in fact, shame, us all.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | 3 Comments

Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer counters USA Today’s ‘fact-check’ on CO2 levels

Media’s ‘fact-checking resorted to lies & omissions’

By Dr. Ian Plimer | Climate Depot | September 4, 2023

Media Claim: Climate skeptic’s claims about CO2 levels, ice ages, and animals misleads. Fact check (by Kate S. Petersen, USA TODAY)

The article claims, “Neither Plimer nor the social media user responded when USA TODAY asked which “six great ice ages” they were referencing.”

That is a lie. USA TODAY did not contact me despite the fact that I am easily contactable.

USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Human greenhouse gas emissions, not El Niño, drive climate change”. Nowhere have I claimed El Niño drives climate change, and it has never been shown that human emissions drive global warming. If it could be shown, then it would also have to be shown that the modern warming is completely different from previous warming. This has not been done.

USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Greenhouse gases, not Milankovitch cycles, drives modern global warming”. This is contrary to data on the Earth’s orbit, solar activity and plate tectonics. Furthermore, it has never been shown that greenhouse gases drive climate change.

USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Humans are responsible for a significant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.” If one molecule of plant food in 83,333 molecules in the atmosphere is a significant amount, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. It would also have to be shown that the molecules of plant food of natural origin do not drive global warming.

USA TODAY’s rating of a talk I gave was “Partly false” regarding six major ice ages, and then played semantic games as to whether an ice age or a glaciation within an ice age could be considered an ice age.

The key points of my talk were not addressed. These were:

(a)   Ice ages and glaciations were initiated when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than today (e.g. Huronian, Cryogenian, Permo-Carboniferous) hence, atmospheric carbon dioxide could not drive global warming.

(b)  Increases in atmospheric temperature are followed by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is the opposite of the climate activist mantra that suggests an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global warming.

(c)   For decades, I have asked climate activists to give me half a dozen scientific papers that show unequivocally that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. This has not been done.

It appears that fact-checking resorted to lies and omissions of pertinent information. Ideologically-blessed activist fact checkers with no scientific training give little confidence.

Emeritus Professor Ian Plimer,

The University of Melbourne,

Australia 

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

FBI and DOJ Are Sued For Concealing Biden Administration Censorship Pressure

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 4, 2023

America First Legal (AFL) has taken legal action against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). AFL alleges that these federal agencies are unlawfully withholding records that may reveal the Biden administration’s manipulation of the 2022 midterm elections through censorship initiatives.

Last year, journalist Matt Taibbi, in his investigative series “The Twitter Files” unearthed communication between the FBI’s National Election Command Post (NECP) and its San Francisco Field Office. The NECP had reportedly flagged 25 Twitter accounts for “misinformation” right before the November 2022 elections and had asked for coordination with Twitter for subsequent actions.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

Further evidence coming from litigation between Missouri and the Biden administration disclosed that the FBI had run a continuous operations center to root out “disinformation” and “misinformation.” During a deposition, FBI agent Elvis Chan conceded that the agency had indeed prompted social media platforms to engage in content suppression, which he acknowledged led to de facto censorship.

Responding to these unsettling revelations, AFL sought to unearth further details through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made in late December 2022. However, their quest hit a legal roadblock when the FBI labeled the request as “overly broad” in February 2023. An appeal yielded no relief, with the DOJ upholding the FBI’s original denial on August 23, 2023.

The lawsuit filed last week by AFL aims to challenge the murky policies of the FBI and the DOJ, which they claim are concealing critical information under the guise of combating disinformation. In essence, AFL is advocating for the public’s right to scrutinize how labels like “misinformation” or “disinformation” might be weaponized to disrupt the democratic process.

Reed D. Rubinstein, Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigations at AFL emphasized the gravity of these allegations.

“Mr. Chan’s deposition contains significant evidence that the Biden government’s political censorship operation was fully engaged to blind the American people in advance of the 2022 midterm elections. Given that AFL is seeking documents directly related to his testimony, there is strong reason to believe that the FBI and DOJ are illegally stonewalling to protect their election interference means and methods. Three times now, in 2016, 2020, and 2022, the Deep State has put its thumb directly on the scale to influence our elections and aid Democrat party candidates — the American people have a right to know what else the FBI has waiting for 2024,” said Rubinstein.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 2 Comments

Nonstop Media Bias From Russiagate to the Biden-Crime-Family Coverup

By Victor Davis Hanson | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 4, 2023 

Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s influence-peddling businesses.

The president further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.

Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.

Had journalists just been honest and independent, then-candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election.

The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.

Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.

Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.

They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe — variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.

They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.

They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.

Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the president of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter US policy to suit his payers.

Those two crimes — bribery and treason — are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.

In denial, the media has instead pivoted with hysterical glee over various weaponized prosecutions of former President Donald Trump.

But now, to use a progressive catchphrase, the proverbial “walls are closing in” on Joe Biden.

So will we at last expect the media finally to confront the truth?

Answer — only if Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health continues to deteriorate geometrically to the point that he can no longer finish his term or run for reelection — and thus becomes expendable.

Such a cynical view of the media is justified given their record of both incompetence and unapologetic deceit.

From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.”

When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth?

Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his leftwing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,” “dream team,” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time?

Not at all.

Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.”

The country then wasted another year.

The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Andrew Vindman had caught Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens — given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent — to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid.

On that accusation Trump was impeached.

A group of 51 former intelligence agency officials claimed that The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it.

Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling.

And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and California Rep. Adam Schiff.

The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Biden, who had likely committed them.

Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop.

The FBI later admitted it had verified the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop.

The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.

Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.

The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.

No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic, and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.

Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.

For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Billionaire oligarch George Soros’ fund claims it bought Polish media outlet to stop ‘oligarchs’ from controlling media

BY JOHN CODY | REMIX NEWS | SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

George Soros’ fund recently bought a major stake in Polish media publisher Gremi Media, leaving Polish conservatives to criticize the move as national elections gear up in October. However, the fund justified its move in a statement by claiming it bought the media to stop “oligarchs” from buying up independent media.

The Soros Economic Development Fund explained in a statement its position regarding why it bought Gremi Media, which owns the major newspapers of Rzeczpospolita and Parkiet,

“Since 2005, independent media in Europe has been under increasing threat from the concentration of capital in the hands of politicians and politically committed oligarchs,” wrote the fund. “The financial crisis of the late 2000s and social media technology have disrupted traditional media models and made it easier for wealthy oligarchs and governments to buy up news companies. Many governments have changed their regulatory environment to exert greater control over information, and the use of public funds to finance media has led to a breakdown in media independence.”

Soros is one of the richest people in the world and widely considered to be a “politically committed oligarch” who has bought up media organizations across the West. For example, Soros’ fund just paid $400 million to purchase Vice Media after it went bankrupt. Soros has also played an active role in buying up Hispanic radio stations across the United States. Soros has already been active in Poland as well, including with Radio Zet, the country’s second-largest radio station in 2019.

Soros accrued billions from currency speculation and has been convicted for insider trading.

Pluralis, a company owned by billionaire oligarch George Soros, acquired a majority stake in Gremi Media, the publisher of Polish newspapers including Rzeczpospolita and Parkiet last week. This means that Pluralis will take control of Gremi Media, Boguslaw Chrabota, editor-in-chief of Rzeczpospolita, told Polish news agency PAP.

Pluralis now owns 931,000 shares in Gremi Media, representing 52 percent of the capital and 57 percent of the votes on the company’s board.

“This means that Pluralis will take control of Gremi Media and will have full decision-making powers in management and editorial matters. Given that he took over the company to expand it, not to liquidate or destroy it, I hope that all the value will be retained and that the company will continue to grow,” said Boguslaw Chrabota, who stated that Pluralis does not intend to interfere in media content and will only manage business interests.

Not everyone thinks Pluralis will abstain from interfering in the editorial process, however, and many are questioning the incredible media power Soros and his various funds and NGOs have. Latvian daily Neatkariga, for instance, wrote:

“The Polish media in the hands of the Soros family must adhere to the ideology that Soros has been cultivating, developing and spreading for decades, whether through money or other means. … Soros is one of the most controversial figures of our time. The political environment in every country where his money surfaces is confronted with aggressive, intolerant activity by the Soros media and NGOs.”

The paper notes that Soros has followed a different playbook in Latvia. There, he did not buy influential media but invested millions in shaping public opinion, creating and funding various NGOs, such as Delna and Providus.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Who’s Afraid of an Alternative for Germany?

By Conor Gallagher – naked capitalism – September 4, 2023

The media describes them as far-right, anti-European Union, anti-immigrant, fascist, etc. But what exactly are the positions of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party? Why is it steadily gaining in public opinion polls, and why is the German establishment so afraid of them?

Various AfD party members have made comments in recent years that, depending on your point of view, are offensive or were blown out of proportion by the media. I’m not going to review all those here but instead wanted to look at what policies are contained in the AfD platform. The party’s “Manifesto for Germany” is a 93-page document that covers just about everything, but I want to focus here on areas that the media most frequently focus on  – immigration, the EU, and nationalism, as well as the set of positions that I would argue is the real reason for hyperventilating over AfD’s rise: foreign policy.

On the EU:

We oppose the idea to transform the European Union into a centralised federal state. We are in favour of returning the European Union to an economic union based on shared interests, and consisting of sovereign, but loosely connected nation states.…

We believe in a sovereign Germany, which guarantees the freedom and security of its citizens, promotes economic welfare, and contributes to a peaceful and prosperous Europe.

Should we not succeed with our ideas of a fundamental reform within the present framework of the European Union, we shall seek Germany‘s exit, or a democratic disso- lution of the EU, followed by the founding of a new Euro- pean economic union.…

European politics are characterised by a creeping loss of democracy. The EU has become an undemocratic entity, whose policies are determined by bureaucrats who have no democratic accountability.

On the Euro currency:

We call for an end to the Euro experiment and its orderly dissolution. Should the German Federal Parliament not agree to this demand, Germany’s continued membership of the single currency area should be put to a popular vote. …

The Euro actually jeopardises the peaceful co-existence of those European nations who are forced into sharing a common destiny by the Eurocracy. The introduction of this currency has led to resentment and confrontation amongst countries in Europe. Countries incurring economic difficulties within the single currency area are forced to restore their competitiveness by such measures as internal devaluation and associated budgetary constraints (austerity policies), rather than exploiting the tool of currency adjustments. Tensions amongst European nation states can inherently be ascribed to the Euro.

AfD doesn’t just oppose the Euro for altruistic reasons. The party also objects to any form of financial equalization between the richer and poorer euro countries and claims Germany shoulders an unfair burden in propping up the weaker members of the eurozone.

The political programme provides very little on labor policy, but AfD does want to provide financial incentives for Germans to reproduce. Here is the party on low birth rates and immigration:

In order to fight the effects of this negative demographic development, political parties currently in government support mass immigration, mainly from Islamic states, without due consideration of the needs and qualifications of the German labour market. During the past few years it has become evident that Muslim immigrants to Germany,in particular, only attain below-average levels of education, training and employment. As the birth rate is more than 1.8 children amongst immigrants, which is much higher than that of Germans, it will hasten the ethnic-cultural changes in society.

The attempt to counteract these developments by increasing the rate of immigration will inevitably lead to the estab lishment of more parallel communities, particularly inlarge cities, where integration with the native population is already a problem. The spread of conflict-laden and multiple minority communities erodes social solidarity, mutual trust, and public safety, which all are elements of a stable commu- nity. The average level of education will continue to drop.

Greater political support for parental work, as well as education and family policies which are focused on the needs of families and young couples wanting to start a family, will once again lead to birth rates at a self-sustaining rate in the medium to long-term. We regard the closing of the gap between the actual number of children being born, and the desire of 90% of young Germans to have children, as a central element of our political platform.

The document goes on for many pages about protecting the nation’s culture and how Islam is not a good fit for Germany. What exactly  is that culture?

The AfD is committed to German as the predominant culture. This culture is derived from three sources: firstly, the religious traditions of Christianity; secondly, the scientific and humanistic heritage, whose ancient roots were renewed during the period of Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment; and thirdly, Roman law, upon which our constitutional state is founded.

Islam does not belong to Germany. Its expansion and the ever-increasing number of Muslims in the country are viewed by the AfD as a danger to our state, our society, and our values. An Islam which neither respects nor refrains from being in conflict with our legal system, or that even lays claim to power as the only true religion, is incompatible with our legal system and our culture. Many Muslims live as law-abiding and well-integrated citizens amongst us, and are accepted and valued members of our society. However, the AfD demands that an end is put to the formation and increased segregation by parallel Islamic societies relying on courts with shari’a laws.

Here is the AfD immigration policy in a nutshell:

Current German and European asylum and refugee policies cannot be continued as in the past. The ill-fitting term “refugee” used for all the people who enter Germany irregularly with the aim to stay here forever, is characteristic of this misguided policy. It is necessary to make a distinction between political refugees and people fleeing from war on the one hand, and irregular migrants on the other. It is the AfD’s view that true refugees should be granted shelter as long as there is war in the countries of origin. Irregular migrants, who are not persecuted, have no right to claim protection, contrary to refugees. Once the reasons for fleeing, such as an end to wars, or political and religious persecution, no longer applies, shall residence permits of refugees be terminated. These refugees need to leave Germany. Germany and its EU partner countries should provide incentives for those who have to leave. It is in the interest of domestic and foreign peace if refugees return to their home countries and contribute to the political, economic and social reconstruction of these countries.

We advocate moderate legal immigration based on qualitative criteria where there is irrefutable demand, which can neither be satisfied from domestic resources, nor by EU immigration. The interests of Germany as a social, economic and cultural nation are paramount.

On militarization,  foreign policy and the US:

Currently, the operational readiness of the German Armed Forces is severely compromised. Due to poor political decisions and mismanagement, our armed forces have been severely neglected for over three decades. The operational readiness has to be fully restored so that the armed forces will be able to perform all their responsibilities. This is an essential prerequisite for the acceptance of Germany as an equal partner by NATO, the EU and the international community.

Membership of NATO corresponds to Germany‘s interests with regard to foreign and security policy, as long as NATO’s role remains that of a defensive alliance. The AfD believes that predictability in meeting commitments towards NATO allies is an important goal of German foreign and security policy, so that Germany can develop more political weight to shape policies, and gain influence. We advocate that any engagement of NATO must be aligned to German interests, and has to correspond to a clearly defined strategy.

Wherever German Armed Forces, as part of NATO operations, are involved beyond the borders of its Alliance partners’ territory, shall, in principle, only be carried out under a UN mandate, and only if German security interests are taken into account.

On Germany’s occupation by allied troops (i.e., the US):

… 70 years after the end of World War II, and 25 years after the end of a divided Europe, the renegotiation of the status of Allied troops in Germany should be put up for discussion. The status of Allied troops needs to be adapted to Germany’s regained sovereignty. The AfD is committed to the withdrawal of all Allied troops stationed on German soil, and in particular of their nuclear weapons.

And on Russia:

The relationship with Russia is of prime importance, because European security cannot be attained without Russia’s involvement. Therefore, we strive for a peaceful solution of conflicts in Europe, whilst respecting the interests of all parties.

Why Is AfD Surging in Popularity?

AfD is a relatively new party – it was founded in 2013. It first began to gain a foothold among disenchanted voters in East Germany during the refugee crisis in 2017, but with the onset of the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis in Germany, their support has been growing and spreading. What originally made AfD so attractive in East Germany?

According to Manès Weisskircher who researches social movements, political parties, democracy, and the far right at the Institute of Political Science, TU Dresden, AfD’s support in the East can be primarily traced to three factors:

  1. The neoliberal ‘great transformation,’ which has massively changed the eastern German economy and continues to lead to emigration and anxiety over personal economic prospects.
  2. An ongoing sense of marginalization among East Germans who feel they have never been fully integrated since reunification and resent liberal immigration policies in this context.
  3. Deep dissatisfaction with the functioning of the political system and doubt in political participation.

Recent polling contains interesting findings with regards to the AfD. It shows that 44 percent of Germans supporting the party do not have far-right views, but they are more concerned with inflation (90 percent) and immigration (87 percent) than the general public (78 and 56 percent, respectively). A whopping 78 percent of those who said they would vote for AfD said they would do so to show they were unhappy with current policies.

The rise of the AfD is rooted in the crisis of German neoliberalism, and the current war in Ukraine that accompanies it. The idea that the West would cause Russia to collapse, divide it into pieces and plunder its natural resources has spectacularly backfired.

The German economy is instead the one in a freefall. In response, Berlin continues to liberalize immigration laws to attract more foreigners with the hope it will help the economy – this despite the fact that half of German citizens would like the country to take in fewer refugees than it currently does.

A record high of 71 percent of the German public are not satisfied with the work of the federal government, according to a recent Deutschlandtrend survey. The current government is unresponsive to the concerns of working class voters. Foreign minister Annalena Baerbock famously summed up that reality last year:

The AfD is the only party in Germany making the connection between Berlin’s bellicose policy towards Moscow (and increasingly Beijing as well) and the worsening economic conditions for Germans.

The Greens, rather than examine their own failings, are blaming voters for not fully understanding their policies. They’ve launched a “charm” offensive to better explain their wisdom while simultaneously escalating their charges against the AfD. Tobias Riegel writes at NachDenkSeiten [machine translation]:

The [Green] chairman of the Europe Committee in the Bundestag, [Anton] Hofreiter, is currently warning against the AfD and has accused it of treason. He also did not rule out a ban on the party, as reported by the media . Two sentences by Hofreiter are particularly striking. On the one hand:

“You have to be aware of the incredible danger that the AfD poses to democracy and the rule of law, as well as to the prosperity of many people; that has not yet arrived in all parts of society.”

And on the other hand:

“There is also insufficient awareness of the danger that the AfD poses to our country’s external security in this difficult situation with increasingly aggressive dictatorships such as Russia and China. The AfD is predominantly a group of traitors who act not in the interests of our country but in the interests of opposing powers.”

If you swap “AfD” for “Greens” and if you swap “Russia” for “USA”, you could almost think Hofreiter is talking about himself and his leading party friends in these quotes.

Meanwhile, the country’s Left Party, which is considered a direct descendant of the Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany until reunification, has completely collapsed after abandoning nearly all of its platform in an attempt to appear “ready to govern.” Much like the bourgeoisie Greens, the Left increasingly stands for neoliberal, pro-war and anti-Russia policies. Former Left voters have increasingly switched to the AfD in response.

As long as the AfD is the only party in Germany willing to connect the dots between US control over German foreign policy and the increasing toll that is taking on the citizens’ standard of living, it will likely continue to attract voters.

Why Is There Such an Outcry Over AfD?

For years now, the German establishment has been throwing the kitchen sink at the AfD. There are of course allegations of Russia connections. They hate the disabled. They are extremist and must be monitored.  A former AfD representative was also  allegedly part of a coup plan involving 25 geriatrics that were inspired by QAnon and were somehow going to take over the government. Stories on the coup plot almost always focus on the AfD link and warnings that they are getting “more extreme.”

Most of these scare stories about the AfD originate from Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), which last year won the right to surveil AfD members after judges allowed the party to be branded a “suspicious entity.”

German authorities are now able to monitor and intercept mail correspondence, phone calls and online conversations. It can also limit members’ ability to get employment in the public sector and make it more difficult to obtain licenses for weapons.

(In the past, the BfV investigated members of the Left Party suspecting them of intending to replace the existing economic, political and social order with a socialist or communist system.)

Much of this seems ripped straight out of the US playbook for dealing with Trump and unruly voters in general: ignore the voters, blame the voters, and then release spooks.

The media hysteria over the AfD is reminiscent over the constant ringing of alarm bells over the election of the Italian Prime Minister and her Brothers of Italy party last year. Fascism was on the march, they declared. Well, Meloni has turned out to be a pretty run-of-the-mill corporate stooge who toes the line on the EU and NATO. Even her anti-immigrant rhetoric gave way to ensuring the arrival of a certain number in order to maintain the supply of cheap labor for Italian businesses. And the freak out over Meloni died down as soon as she proved her devotion to the EU and NATO.

Let’s not pretend that any of the concern over the AfD is due to its proposed policies regarding German culture and immigrants. It is because the party is advocating for positions that are a direct threat to Brussels and Washington. If it went forward with efforts to get Germany off the euro or boot US troops out of the country, it would collapse the whole EU-NATO system.

Despite the media and intelligence agency pressure, the AfD only seems emboldened. Beyond the party platform, AfD members have since gone further in their criticisms of the US.

Here’s Member of the European Parliament Maximilian Krah:

“It is certain that the German government was informed of the sabotage beforehand by the Americans. This is the only explanation for Scholz’s awkward silence. With the addition of a woke and irresponsible warmonger like [Foreign Minister Annalena] Baerbock, who declares that Germany is at war with Russia, nothing surprises me.

The problem is that this is tearing the German economy to pieces and significantly impoverishes Germany. Moreover, the billions spent by Germany on this gas project, which ensured us cheap energy, are lost, but the coalition which governs Germany does not care. Officially, Scholz knows nothing. Apparently, we live in a democracy.”

The AfD is also increasingly critical of Berlin’s stance towards China, which it believes is being driven by US interests and Germany’s detriment. From  Deutsche Welle :

The AfD has positioned itself in opposition to the German government’s critical policy toward ChinaBerlin’s China Strategy, published in mid-July, for example, was denounced by Bystron, the AfD’s foreign policy spokesperson, as the “attempt to implement green-woke ideology and US geopolitical interests under the guise of a strategy for German foreign policy.”

The description of China in the strategy as a rival — as well as a partner and competitor — was for Bystron “the consequence of the US’ confrontational course toward China. This confrontation and division are not in the interests of Germany as an export nation,” he said.

For political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder from the University of Kassel, the AfD’s foreign policy positions demonstrate an attempt to set itself apart from the other German political parties. Geopolitically, said Schroeder, the AfD sees the traditional Western ties with the United States, which it regards as hegemonic, as having past their use-by date.

“The AfD considers Washington to be more part of the problem than part of the solution to the challenges facing Germany,” he told DW. “That’s because the AfD considers the US an imperial actor whose vested interests cannot be reconciled with those of Germany.”

The AfD is essentially calling for a return to the Angela Merkel foreign policy based on Wandel durch Handel (“transformation through trade”). It relied on cheap Russian gas imports and exports to its largest trading partner, China.

There is now a central disconnect to Germany’s foreign policy and domestic policy. As Berlin follows the wishes of the US, lives for the citizens of Germany will  continue to worsen. How can Germany reconcile this?

German Chacellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende was essentially a promise to the US that Germany will from now on take up its sword in defense of US hegemony and morally superior purposes (such as Baerbock’s feminist foreign policy that aligns neatly with Washington’s enemy list) against Russia, China, Iran, and whoever else threatens the “rules-based order.”

The AfD, whether you agree or disagree with its other positions, is for now the sole German party standing against such an arrangement.

The German state’s harassment of the Left Party appears to have worked in getting it to abandon its previously “radical” goals of empowering workers, dissolving NATO and getting US troops out of Germany. We’ll have to wait and see what path the AfD takes.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Romania Debunked Kiev’s Latest Lie Aimed At Escalating The NATO-Russian Proxy War

BY ANDREW KORYBKO | SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

CNN reported on something immensely important during their online news stream on Monday that didn’t receive anywhere near the attention that it deserved, namely that Romania debunked Kiev’s latest lie aimed at escalating the NATO-Russian proxy war. This brief news blurb here noted that Romania’s condemnation of Russia’s latest Danube River strike clarified that this didn’t pose a threat to its territory despite Kiev claiming that some of Russia’s kamikaze drones fell and exploded in that NATO country.

If there was any truth to that allegation, then it could have led to a serious crisis, yet Bucharest debunked Kiev’s claim precisely because it was a bald-faced lie similar in spirit to the one that this regime dangerously spewed ten months ago in November 2022. Back then, a Ukrainian S-300 air defense missile misfired into Poland, but neither Washington nor Warsaw bit the bait that Kiev dangled before them as was explained here and here, thus averting a potentially apocalyptic scenario to their credit.

This latest provocation followed last week’s two drone attacks against Pskov that were also assessed here to have been aimed at escalating the conflict, albeit in that case by provoking Russia into attacking NATO out of self-defense instead of the inverse. Since it failed to achieve the desired response, Kiev decided to take a page from the last year’s Polish playbook by falsely alleging that Russia once again attacked NATO, but Romania also didn’t bite the bait this time around either.

Even though none of the past week’s three provocations tricked Russia and NATO into directly attacking one another, that doesn’t mean that everything might soon de-escalate once the rainy fall weather forces an end to the failing counteroffensive. Instead of seizing the opportunity to resume talks with Russia after President Putin made it abundantly clear earlier this summer that he’s interested in compromising, Kiev is arguably preparing to perpetuate the conflict into next year.

Three sequential developments in just as many days from Saturday through Monday provide evidence of this policy. They can respectively be read herehere, and here, but will be now be summarized for the reader’s convenience since they’re relevant to the present piece. The first event on Saturday concerned the arrest of Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky on corruption charges despite him having previously funded Zelensky’s rise to power, which consolidated US influence over him ahead of his re-election bid.

The second took place the day later and involved Zelensky firing his Defense Minister, thereby further consolidating the US’ influence after it complained via unnamed officials who spoke to two leading media outlets that Kiev’s counteroffensive was in trouble because it didn’t follow the Pentagon’s advice. That same day, the Ukrainian leader also removed a raft of mild medical issues that hitherto exempted citizens from the draft and ordered that all medical personnel (mostly women) register for service.

Finally, Monday saw leading Polish media report about the likely possibility that Ukraine will issue international arrest warrants for the tens of thousands of its draft-dodging males in that country and perhaps eventually all across Europe too, which is aimed at replenishing its depleted armed forces. Taken together, these sequential developments compellingly prove that Kiev intends to perpetuate the proxy war after failing to escalate it, though that doesn’t mean more such provocations won’t be attempted.

This insight suggests that Kiev is pursuing a two-track policy: 1) it attempts to provoke an escalation of the conflict; but 2) it’s also preparing to perpetuate the conflict into next year if the former fails. Last November’s precedent that was set by Poland and the US after they refused to bite the bait that Kiev dangled before them likely informed Romania’s response over the weekend, which hints that NATO doesn’t want to escalate the conflict, but that doesn’t mean that the bloc is against perpetuating it.

September 5, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , , | 1 Comment