Israel targets journalists, kills their families as Big Tech & Biden admin silence Palestinians
BY WYATT REED · THE GRAYZONE · OCTOBER 27, 2023
With Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killing at least twenty Palestinian journalists—and the Biden administration working to muzzle others—Big Tech is quietly coordinating with Tel Aviv to muzzle Palestinian media outfits.
Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed three Palestinian journalists on October 25 in one of the deadliest days for local reporters since the military’s bombing campaign began nearly three weeks before. As the hours passed, footage appeared showing the moment Ramallah-based journalist Mohammed Farra learned that his wife and children were all killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s Khan Younes neighborhood.
Similarly heart-rending scenes would play out more than once over the course of the day. Elsewhere in the besieged coastal enclave, an Israeli airstrike killed the wife, son, daughter and infant grandson of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh.
Israel’s attacks on Palestinian journalists came hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured “American Jewish community leaders” that he urged Qatar’s government “to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza” during a recent trip to Doha.
Suspicions that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Dahdouh’s family were quickly bolstered by comments from News 13 journalist Zvi Yehezkeli.
“Generally we know the target,” Yehezkeli told audiences within hours of the strike, adding, “for example, today there was a target: the family of an Al Jazeera reporter.”
“In general, we know,” he concluded.
If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Dahdouh’s outlet found itself in Israeli crosshairs. In 2021, the Israeli military leveled the Gaza tower that housed the officers of both the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The following year, Israeli forces assassinated renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, a veteran Jerusalem-based correspondent for Al Jazeera, in a shooting that drew international condemnation but was largely ignored by the US government, which echoes the Israeli government’s position that her killing was “unintentional.” Under Blinken, the State Department has distanced itself from its initial expressions of outrage and no longer calls for either an independent investigation or criminal charges for the perpetrators.
Big Tech censorship targets Palestinian journalists after Israel targets their homes
As the US and Israel rush to censor the voice of Palestinian journalists, Big Tech censorship has proven indispensable to Israel’s propaganda war. In the aftermath of October 7, multiple social media platforms have suspended or deactivated profiles belonging to numerous prominent journalists, human rights advocates, and Palestinian activists. The crackdown follows years of complaints alleging double standards when it comes to anti-Zionist content on social media.
Accounts operated by Eye On Palestine disappeared from Instagram, Facebook, and X on October 25, leaving more than 6 million followers unable to access one of the most popular resources providing firsthand footage of destruction in Gaza. A spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, insisted the suspensions were not politically motivated, asserting “We did not disable these accounts because of any content they were sharing.”
Despite Meta’s denial, it is worth recalling the company’s record of complying with Israeli government censorship requests. Following the approval of a so-called “Facebook Bill” aimed at clamping down on digital “incitement” in 2016, fanatical former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked bragged that Facebook, Twitter and Google were complying with 70 percent of their takedown orders.
Tamer Al Mishal, a Palestinian journalist who has served as a crucial Gaza-based news source for many years, put a face to that statistic. In September, Al Mishal made waves when he published an exposé on Al Jazeera illustrating how Meta coordinated with Israeli intelligence to stifle pro-Palestinian content. When he attempted to access his social media profile days later, the reporter made an alarming discovery: his Facebook page had completely ceased to exist.
He wasn’t the only one. The week before, Meta suspended the Instagram account of Palestinian influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza after he shared footage of the remnants of his apartment building, where 15 of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrikes.
“Palestinian journalists in Gaza are not just facing the Israeli occupation,” Shadi Abdelrahman, a local reporter with years of experience covering events in Gaza from the ground, explained to The Grayzone. “They also have to overcome a lot of censorship by Facebook, YouTube,” he told The Grayzone, adding: “anything on social media, they need to be very careful because they will get their accounts banned.”
“Working as a journalist in Gaza is not an easy job,” he says, not only “because you are being censored by social media, [but] also it can cause problems with Israeli authorities, especially if you’d like to leave through any crossing which is controlled by Israel.”
If you’re outspoken in your coverage, Abdelrahman says, Israeli authorities “will consider you as an enemy.”
During 2021’s Great March of Return, “those journalists who were attending the weekly marches and covering it were targeted deliberately by Israel.”
“Some of them were shot in the knees, some of them were shot in the legs. Some of them got killed,” Abdelrahman recalled.
On Instagram, meanwhile, users noted an apparent ‘glitch’ temporarily translated the Arabic word for “Palestinian” into “Palestinian terrorist.”
During an October 26 raid in Jenin, the Israeli army destroyed the memorial to Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent it killed there a year before.
My Golden Retriever Confronts the Medical Juggernaut
By Clayton J. Baker, MD | Brownstone Institute | October 27, 2023
Recently, our golden retriever, Bailey, got kennel cough. She hasn’t been in a kennel in years, but that’s what they called it: kennel cough.
Please forgive my ignorance in the matter. You see, I’m just a people-doctor. I’m not a veterinarian like, say, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. I can’t claim to be an expert on kennel cough.
But as far as I can tell, “kennel cough” appears to be vet-speak for a nonspecific respiratory tract infection in dogs. It seems to be a term veterinarians use much as I would “bronchitis.”
Do you know what a golden retriever with kennel cough sounds like? After all, people-doctors have historically described kids diagnosed with croup as having a “barking” cough.
Well, based on my limited experience, a golden retriever with kennel cough sounds like a Canada goose. Bailey was repeatedly emitting a medium-pitched grunt/honk, lower in register than a duck’s quack but higher than one of those old-fashioned ah-oo-ga automobile horns.
It’s kind of a Honk! Honk! Honk! with the H’s partially dropped. It’s actually quite alarming. Trust me, you don’t want to hear your golden retriever sounding like something it retrieved.
Now, Bailey is a good girl, and I love her dearly. But my wife loves that dog more than life itself. Sometimes I wonder if she’d donate her own liver if it were necessary to save her.
So my wife calls Bailey’s veterinarian, and she tells them about her symptoms.
I should mention that my wife is a doctor, too. Just a people-doctor like me, mind you, not an expert on kennel cough like Albert Bourla. But a medical case presentation is a medical case presentation, and she knows how to present a case.
So what did Bailey’s Primary Care Provider tell my wife after hearing the medical history from a fellow medical professional? Well, they told her that it sounds like kennel cough, and that they can see Bailey in 2 or 3 weeks.
Incidentally, this veterinary practice – I am not making this up – had recently been bought out by some kind of veterinary investment firm which, over the past couple of years, also bought multiple other practices in the area, including the only veterinary emergency room in town. Soon after those acquisitions, they closed down the emergency room.
My wife says to them, “2 or 3 weeks? Bailey will either be fully recovered or dead by then.”
“Well, we’ve been chronically short-staffed,” they replied. “We’re blocked up for urgent appointments…etc., etc.”
A brief, polite back-and-forth ensued, but ultimately Bailey’s “provider” didn’t offer an urgent appointment.
In their defense, this veterinary group knows what really is important. A couple of months earlier, at Bailey’s routine checkup, her doctor noted concerning “plaque buildup” on her teeth.
Do you know what Bailey’s doctor recommended? Doggie dental cleaning. Under general anesthesia. Seven hundred dollars, cash on the barrelhead.
They also have never delayed care when it comes to Bailey’s vaccines.
You see, according to the American Animal Hospital Association Guidelines (generously supported by Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health, Elanco Animal Health, Merck Animal Health and Zoetis Petcare), all dogs should be vaccinated for:
- Distemper
- Adenovirus
- Parvovirus
- Parainfluenza
- Rabies
while many or most dogs, depending on “lifestyle and risk”, should be vaccinated for
- Leptospirosis
- Lyme disease
- Bordetella
- Canine influenza
and some should even be inoculated with Rattlesnake Toxoid.
I will add, these vaccines are not one-and-done shots. Most of them are recommended to be boosted annually, or at minimum every 3 years.
But again, the experts know what is really important. For example, while Bailey has fortunately avoided any major orthopedic problems to date, we know at least one golden retriever who has had both ACLs reconstructed, and other dogs who have had total hip replacements. Advanced orthopedic surgeries, while admittedly costly, are an essential component of the golden retriever’s healthcare armamentarium.
(This probably sounds selfish, but I just hope and pray Bailey doesn’t develop gender dysphoria. I don’t think we can afford to take her down to Cornell to have them surgically construct a neophallus for her.)
Whew. Let’s step back and review. As I said, I’m no expert on these matters, like Albert Bourla. I want to make sure I’ve got all this correct.
Our golden retriever must navigate a healthcare system that cares so much for her health and well-being that it’s willing to intubate and anesthetize her for a tooth cleaning. Cha-ching!
In the name of vaccination, it will repeatedly inject her with numerous inoculations, up to and potentially including rattlesnake toxoid. Cha-ching!
It offers any number of extensive and expensive Orthopedic surgeries – as long as Bailey’s owner pays. Cha-ching!
And yet, when she gets sick with an acute respiratory infection, it tells her to stay home and wait, offers no treatment, and refuses to see her. Even though, should she become severely ill, her emergency health care system has been decimated by corporate profiteers.
Do I paint an accurate picture, or do I exaggerate?
Fortunately, Bailey’s story has a happy ending.
As so many other concerned patients and family members do, we consulted Dr. Internet. I know, I know, patients are supposed to trust the experts, and refrain from doing their own research – but you’ll have to forgive us. After all, it’s the family dog we’re talking about here. And we did discover some interesting information.
According to our research, the most common first-line treatment for kennel cough is doxycycline, an inexpensive, generic, people-antibiotic that’s been around since the 1960’s. The primary purpose of prescribing it here is to treat against Bordetella, the most common bacterial cause of the disease.
Incidentally, Bailey is up to date on all her recommended vaccines, so the fact that she got kennel cough in the first place raises its own set of questions. I won’t head down that rabbit hole here, except to ask:
If a disease doesn’t merit the patient being seen, assessed, and treated when they contract it, why is obsessive vaccination against it so necessary?
My wife called back, and in her very polite but insistent way, explained that if they weren’t going to see Bailey, we were ‘requesting’ a prescription, which in the end they wrote. I half expected them to say, “Doxycycline, but that’s human paste!” To their credit, they didn’t.
You’ll be glad to hear that after commencing empirical, early treatment with a cheap, decades-old, repurposed drug, Bailey improved almost immediately. Whether this was due to the doxycycline, her own immune system (God gave her one too, we must not forget), or both, we cannot be certain. Anyway, the goose honk is gone, her appetite is back, and she’s got the frequent zoomies again.
But the whole episode left me with a lingering, uneasy, even unhealthy feeling. It’s not exactly déjà vu, but rather the sensation that I’d been through something very similar – and similarly unpleasant – before.
Whatever could that be?
C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
How Pfizer Hid Nearly 80% of COVID Vaccine Trial Deaths From Regulators
By Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 27, 2023
Pfizer-BioNTech delayed reporting vaccine-associated deaths among BNT162b2 clinical trial participants until after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the product.
The vaccine makers also failed to account for a large number of subjects who dropped out of the trial.
Together, these strategies kept regulators and the public ignorant of a 3.7-fold increase in cardiac deaths among subjects who received the vaccine, according to analysis in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.
The authors of the paper described it as a “forensic analysis,” defined by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology as “the use of scientific methods or expertise to investigate crimes or examine evidence that might be presented in a court of law.”
What the analysis shows
Corinne Michels, Ph.D., retired distinguished professor of biology at Queens College, New York, led the DailyClout Pfizer/BioNTech Documents Investigations Team on what the authors claim was the first independent examination of original data from the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (BNT162b2) clinical trial.
Investigators looked at each of the 38 deaths occurring between July 27, 2020, the start of phase 2/3 of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine trial, and March 13, 2020, the end date culminating in Pfizer-BioNTech’s 6-month interim report.
This trial phase involved 44,060 subjects. Half received a dose of BNT162b2, half got a placebo consisting of an inactive sterile salt solution.
The trial was unusual because at week 20 after the FDA issued the EUA for the vaccine, trial subjects in the placebo group were allowed to switch to the vaccinated group and receive their first BNT162b2 shot.
Switching from the placebo to the vaccinated group — or “unblinding” — normally occurs when the benefit of the drug is so great that not treating subjects becomes unethical. For example, investigators might consider unblinding a cancer trial if at some point all untreated patients deteriorated or died but all treated patients improved.
Unblinding conditions may be specified in the study design, but they usually involve input or review from medical ethicists.
Of 20,794 unblinded placebo subjects in the Pfizer trial, 19,685 received at least one dose of BNT162b2.
Normally the decision to unblind a vaccine trial would be based on the product’s safety and effectiveness in reaching certain endpoints or objectives. Endpoints for a drug to prevent viral infections might be a positive test or self-reported COVID-19 illness (the “case” numbers that drove much of COVID-19 policy), illness requiring hospitalization or death.
But, perhaps unexpectedly, after 33 weeks the data revealed no significant difference between deaths in the vaccinated and placebo groups for the initial 20-week placebo-controlled portion of the trial.
After week 20, after most former placebo subjects had received the vaccine, deaths among those in the vaccine group continued unabated.
The authors revealed “inconsistencies” between data presented in Pfizer-BioNTech’s 6-month interim report and subsequent publications by Pfizer-BioNTech trial site administrators:
“Most importantly, we found evidence of an over 3.7-fold increase in the number of deaths due to cardiac events in the BNT162b2 vaccinated individuals compared to those who received only the placebo.”
This means that 79% of relevant deaths were not recorded in time to be included in Pfizer’s regulatory paperwork.
By not including relevant subject deaths in the case report, Pfizer obscured cardiac adverse event signals, allowing the EUA to proceed unchallenged.
How did Pfizer get around legal, ethical obligations?
The Pfizer-BioNTech data, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, uncovered four additional deaths in the vaccine group and one more in the placebo group — but Pfizer failed to include these data in their FDA submission despite an explicit study design requirement to do so.
These data, and how they differ from what Pfizer-BioNTech reported in their applications, are summarized in Table 3 of Michels’ study.
One case involved a 63-year-old woman who died 41 days after receiving the shot, but whose death only entered the data pool 37 days later. Another was a 58-year-old woman whose death 72 days after vaccination went unreported for 26 days.
Had Pfizer-BioNTech met their legal and ethical obligation to report all serious adverse events their data would have shown equal deaths in placebo and vaccine groups — which would have shown no clear benefit for the vaccine.
How were they able to skirt those obligations?
For one, they were able to hide behind the the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which provided an almost impenetrable liability shield for vaccine manufacturers for “medical countermeasures” in response to any “public health emergency.”
Second, because COVID-19 was viewed as a national health emergency, regulators abandoned the established, patient-centered, safety-based approval process requiring years of preclinical animal testing — and Pfizer-BioNTech unsurprisingly went along.
Timing of death reports raises questions
Michels also raised issues regarding total death reports and their timing.
Since the death total from both study groups, 38, appeared “surprisingly low” to study authors — particularly during a pandemic — they undertook their own analysis based on population mortality expectations at the time.
Assuming that age-adjusted death rates for the study subjects were similar to those of the general population, they estimated that 222 subjects should have died from July 27, 2020, to March 13, 2021. The reported number, 38, is just 18% of the expected number.
Michels explained this by the large number, 4.2% of “discontinued subjects.” The most concerning of these were subjects “lost to follow-up,” which means missing scheduled visits or other required activities.
Pfizer-BioNTech tried to reach these subjects via phone, certified mail or through their emergency contact but despite their efforts could not account for 395 subjects who had dropped out.
The authors wrote:
“These are not insignificant numbers and could easily account for the low number of deaths reported in this safety period of the trial. Given the importance of knowing the status of each trial subject, there should have been greater effort to locate these individuals.
“Additionally, Pfizer/BioNTech was responsible for oversight of the trial sites. Sites with excessive numbers of lost to follow-up should have been evaluated for performance.”
Michels was also concerned over how certain trial centers had many dropped-out subjects while others had none or just a few.
Ninety-six of 153 trial sites (63%) reported 0 or 1 subjects lost to follow-up and 34 (22%) reported 2-5 dropouts. But four sites reported more than 20 subjects lost to follow-up, amounting to about 5% of all trial subjects.
Since the vaccine makers were responsible for trial site oversight, the authors wrote, “Sites with excessive numbers of lost to follow-up should have been evaluated for performance.”
Finally, based on the data, it appears Pfizer-BioNTech was in no hurry to enter death reports before the EUA submission deadline, particularly for the BNT162b2 group.
Of the 38 reported deaths only one case was added on the day the subject died. Delays of 20+ and 30+ days were common.
One death took 72 days to find its way into the database, and all were entered as occurring on the reporting day, not on the actual date of death.
Of the eight subjects in the vaccine group that should have been reported by Dec. 10, 2020, the EUA application cutoff, the average reporting delay was 17.5 days for subjects in the vaccine group, but just 5.9 days for deaths among subjects in the placebo group.
Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Peter Hotez Notices Too Many Sudden Deaths Among His Friends, “Champions of Global Health”
Hotez unwittingly joins the trend of “died suddenly” reports
BY IGOR CHUDOV | OCTOBER 28, 2023
Many COVID vaccine skeptics reported an unusual number of “sudden deaths” happening lately.
Such reports are always dismissed as “biased.” And, perhaps, they are biased. I have to admit that I am biased, too, and that keeps me from blaming Covid vaccines for various isolated incidents that I know of.
However, we now have Peter Hotez, one of the most rabid Covid vaccine promoters, unwittingly join the “reporting unusual sudden deaths” club.
Professor Hotez’s today’s tweet laments the sudden passing of his “close colleagues and friends.” Peter mentions that they were “still active when they passed,” so he means sudden deaths.
His suddenly deceased friends were “champions of global health”; tireless Covid vaccine advocates like himself. Professor Hotez is not sure what to blame. Overwork? Exhaustion? – he asks.
I am also not sure; perhaps it is climate change or stress his friends experienced from seeing vaccine misinformation online.
Trends in U.S. Tornado Damage and Incidence
A new paper shows that U.S. tornado damage and strong tornado incidence are both sharply down, but you’ll only read about that here
By Roger Pielke Jr. | The Honest Broker | September 25, 2023
In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising:
[A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.
The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.
Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom:
The analysis presented in this paper indicates that normalized tornado damage in the US from 1950 to 2011 declined in all three normalization methods applied (two are statistically significant one is not). The degree to which this decrease is the result of an actual decrease in the incidence of strong tornadoes is difficult to assess due to inconsistencies in reporting practices over time. However, an examination of trends within sub-periods of the dataset is suggestive that some part of the long-term decrease in losses may have a component related to actual changes in tornado behaviour. Further research is clearly needed to assess this suggestion.
You can see that we were exceedingly cautious in how we framed the possibility that things were not actually getting worse. even so, our work was ignored by the Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment, which instead claimed the opposite, contrary to the evidence and peer-reviewed research:
[T]here is reason to expect increased tornado frequency and intensity in a warming climate
A new paper has just been published by Zhang and colleagues — Time trends in losses from major tornadoes in the United States — which updates and extends our 2013 analysis. They find:
[B]oth the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time.
Their analysis confirms our earlier work:
[O]ur findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards
You can see the results of their normalization for 1954 to 2018 in the figure below.
Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1954-2018. Source: Zhang et al. 2023
Compare their results with ours in the figure below, which I have just updated through 2022.
Normalized U.S. annual tornado losses, 1950-2022. Source: Updated from Simmons et al. 2013.
Zhang et al. also find that the strongest tornadoes have also declined appreciably since 1950. The figure below shows their presentation of trends in tornadoes of various intensities (with F1 the weakest and F5 the strongest). You can see that the incidence of tornadoes of F2 strength and stronger have decreased. In our 2013 analysis we found that ~90% of damage results from tornadoes of F2 strength or stronger.
In the 11 full years following our analysis, 9 of 11 have seen overall below average tornado incidence in the United States — 2023 will wind up slightly above average. There is simply no evidence to support claims that tornadoes are getting worse or causing more damage. In fact, the evidence indicates the opposite and peer-reviewed research is strongly in agreement.
Why has the downward trend occurred? Might climate change play a role? You rarely see such questions asked or explored in the scientific literature.
Studies that normalize disaster losses occupy a prominent place in scientific research — they are widely published and cited, have reached conclusions that are frequently and successfully replicated and are commonly utilized in insurance and reinsurance. However, despite all this these studies are all but comprehensively ignored by the media and the scientific assessments of the IPCC and US National Climate Assessment.
Why is this literature ignored?
Misinformation on extreme weather and disasters sits out in plain sight, and is easily refuted — yet there seems to be exceedingly strong social norms and political pressures to simply not call things straight. It is really remarkable.
I am confident that good science will win out in the end. It just might take a while. Meantime, here at THB, I’ll keep sharing the science behind the curtain.
Western Media ‘Cancel’ the Ukraine Conflict as Palestinian Genocide Exposes Their Lies and Fake News
Strategic Culture Foundation | October 27, 2023
The horrendous violence and suffering in Gaza have dominated the global news cycle. That is not untoward given the dreadful scale of disaster where over 7,000 people, mainly civilians and nearly half of them children, have been killed over the past three weeks by Israeli bombardment and siege.
Death toll numbers are obsolete within a day, such is the wanton murderous destruction by the Israeli regime. And yet Joe Biden and other Western politicians minimize this criminality by trying to cast doubt on the casualty numbers. How utterly despicable of Biden and his Western accomplices to this genocide.
But what is also notable is the abrupt cancellation of Ukraine as a story by Western media. The wholesale relegation of interest in Ukraine is truly astounding. The precipitous fall-off in Western media coverage reflects how the proxy war in Ukraine was always a contrived geopolitical agenda devoid of any purported principle of Western democracy.
For nearly 19 months the hostilities in Ukraine have been plastered all over Western news media. The conflict was described as the biggest in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Western governments and media outlets roundly condemned Russia for alleged aggression towards Ukraine and it was hysterically proclaimed that the whole of Europe was under threat from a would-be Russian invasion if Ukraine was not defended.
The violence in Ukraine was portrayed as a bloody manifestation of U.S. President Joe Biden’s “grand narrative” about a global Manichean struggle between “democracy and autocracy”. The Western public was lectured that it was vitally imperative that hundreds of billions of dollars and euros were spent to support Ukraine against alleged Russian belligerence because this conflict was a line in the sand for supposed Western democratic values and civilization.
This narrative was always a travesty of Hollywood proportions. As many informed people rightly discerned (those who do not rely on Western news media propaganda), the conflict in Ukraine was and is a proxy war against Russia ordained by the United States and its NATO military vehicle. The war is part of a wider geopolitical struggle by the U.S.-led Western imperialist bloc against Russia, China, and other nations of an emerging multipolar world that repudiates American-dominated hegemony.
Lamentably, the proof of that analysis is evinced by the obscene genocidal violence in the Middle East. For the past three weeks, the Western-backed Israeli regime has been slaughtering Palestinian civilians with impunity. The United States and the European Union have effectively endorsed this criminality under the fraud of Israel’s “right to self-defense”, and Western media have amplified and reinforced this fraud with their distorted reporting.
Of course, this shockingly criminal aggression has dominated the global news cycle. Every media outlet around the world has been transfixed by the barbarity, albeit differing in their perspective on how much blame to apportion to the Israeli regime or to the Hamas Palestinian militant group that triggered the escalation in violence with its mass killings of 1,400 Israelis on October 7. (It is now becoming clear that many of those deaths were actually caused by the Israeli military using indiscriminate excessive lethal force.)
In any case, the point here is how remarkable is the sudden cessation in Western media coverage of the war in Ukraine. For the past three weeks, there has hardly been any mention of that conflict. This peremptory absence is phenomenal. For months on end, the war in Ukraine was given non-stop, saturation coverage – albeit with an anti-Russian propaganda spin – and then just like that there is a void in any attention to what had been previously billed as an existential crisis for Europe and Western democratic civilization.
It’s not as if the hostilities in Ukraine have really diminished. Far from it, the battling between the NATO-backed Kiev regime forces and the Russian military has been as fierce as in previous months. Over the past week alone, it is estimated that more than 2,000 Ukrainian troops were killed by Russian forces on the frontlines in the Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.
How is that absence in Western media explained? Part of the “cancelling” of the Ukraine conflict in Western media coverage is due to the failure of the NATO-backed counteroffensive that was launched in early June. That military venture was hyped as the expected breakthrough against Russian forces after months of heavy weapons supply from NATO leading up to the counteroffensive. The gambit has been a disastrous anti-climax in NATO terms. Up to 90,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been lost in four months adding to a total of 400,000 Ukrainian military deaths over the entire conflict so far. The great NATO surge has been an abject calamity. Russian defense lines all along a swathe of former Eastern Ukrainian territory (now part of the Russian Federation) reaching down to Crimea and the Black Sea remain formidably intact and invulnerable.
The expenditure of $200 billion in military and other aid by the United States and the European Union for propping up a corrupt Nazi regime in Kiev can now be seen as the biggest farce and scandal of modern times. The Western governments and their servile media must therefore not let the Western public see this grotesque waste of money and human life. Public attention must somehow be diverted to avoid the resounding political repercussions.
The slaughter of Palestinians going on in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank territory is a global shame that certainly deserves priority attention. A ceasefire must be called immediately and the mass murder and siege must end. Palestinian rights must be defended and a proper peace settlement to the conflict must be pursued urgently in a genuinely brokered legal and diplomatic framework – not the disingenuous process that Washington and the European Union have been peddling for decades.
However, even the extensive Western media focus on the violence in Gaza is not out of a genuine concern for facts, let alone truth or justice. It is, as usual, a cover-up for the Israeli regime’s crimes and the complicity of Western states in the decades-long genocide against the Palestinians. A genocide that has going on for 75 years since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 by British and American subterfuge as our columnist Finian Cunningham contended this week.
No, the Western media saturation coverage of terrible events in Gaza over the past three weeks is driven in large part by the onerous need to divert attention from the scandal and debacle of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
The quickness and expedience of canceling Ukraine as a story by Western media and their governments is a powerful demonstration. The purported concerns about Ukraine were never about principle or the alleged narrative of defending democracy. If there was any credible substance to that narrative then how is it dispensed with so readily? It is something to behold how Western media have simply dumped Ukraine as if it were damaged goods of no longer any use, or, worse, a soiled rag.
It is a further diabolical tragedy in the long-suffering of the Palestinian people. Not only are they being annihilated, starved and denied their basic human rights by the Western-backed Israeli regime. Their suffering is also poignant proof of the callous deception and criminality of the United States and its Western partners in Ukraine.
Russia: Israel’s bombardment of Gaza unlawful
Press TV – October 28, 2023
Russia has shown its strongest reaction to the Israeli regime’s nonstop bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip by labeling the three-week campaign targeting the civilians in the Palestinian territory “unlawful.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in remarks published by the Belarusian state news agency Belta on Saturday that the carnage is against international law and could create a decades-long catastrophe in the region.
Lavrov said Israel has been “indiscriminately using force against targets where civilians are known to be present.”
He warned that Israel’s stated goal of seeking to eradicate the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas would require a total destruction of Gaza, an enclave of over 2.3 million people located on the Mediterranean.
“If Gaza is destroyed and 2 million inhabitants are expelled, as some politicians in Israel and abroad propose, this will create a catastrophe for many decades, if not centuries,” said the Russian foreign minister.
“It is necessary to stop, and to announce humanitarian programs to save the population under blockade.”
Israel’s savagery began on October 7 in response to a Hamas operation in the occupied territories which led to over 1,400 deaths among settlers and regime troops.
Israelis were already angered by Moscow’s decision to host a Hamas delegation in the midst of the conflict in Palestine.
Russian authorities have defended the move while Hamas leaders say they have received a request from Moscow to look for eight people identified by Russia as possibly being among hostages taken by the group’s fighters during the blitz into the occupied territories.
Figures released by Gaza’s health officials on Saturday showed the Israeli bombardment has killed more than 7,700 Palestinians, including over 5,000 women and children.
Hamas resists Israeli offensive in Gaza after violent night of airstrikes
Gaza City during an Israeli airstrike on 8 October, 2023. (Photo Credit: MAHMUD HAMS / AFP)
The Cradle | October 28, 2023
Gaza-based Palestinian resistance faction Hamas announced on 28 October that its forces successfully held back invading Israeli troops who overnight launched large-scale ground operations into the coastal enclave under the cover of intense air raids.
Hamas says its forces dealt “heavy losses to the enemy’s ranks” as they repelled the ground incursion. Nonetheless, heavy clashes continue in several points of the northern Gaza Strip.
“The enemy fell into ambushes set up by the Palestinian resistance on several fronts. Kornet missiles and Yasin shells were used to repel the attack, and we expect the enemy to try again. The Israeli regime used helicopters to evacuate the wounded and the dead from the battlefield,” the Hamas statement reads.
For their part, Israeli media claims there are “no reports of Israeli casualties” and that “ground forces, including infantry, combat engineering forces, and tanks, remained inside Gaza […] operating deeper into the Hamas-run territory than previous limited incursions.”
On Friday night, the Israeli army began what officials described as an “expansion” of their ground operations into Gaza after several nights of “limited incursions” that were also repelled by the Palestinian resistance.
According to local reports, the elite US Delta Force has been accompanying Israeli troops into the besieged territory. However, Washington maintains that its forces only provide logistical advice to Tel Aviv.
The Israeli ground offensive was launched under the cover of a violent campaign of airstrikes by the Israeli air force, which decimated the northern Gaza Strip with hundreds of bombs, including internationally banned white phosphorous and cluster munitions.
Despite the intensity of the Israeli offensive, the Gaza resistance continued to launch rocket attacks toward the occupied territories, setting off alarms in several settlements.
As the clashes continue, Gaza remains unreachable to the outside world after Israel cut off all phone and internet services to provide cover for the genocide being committed against Palestinian civilians.
“This communications blackout means that it will be even more difficult to obtain critical information and evidence about human rights violations and war crimes being committed against Palestinian civilians in Gaza and to hear directly from those experiencing the violations,” Erika Guevara Rosas, senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns at Amnesty International, said in a statement on Friday.
UN agencies and human rights organizations say they can still not reach their staff and health facilities inside Gaza.
Gaza suffers near-total information blackout
RT | October 27, 2023
Internet and cell phone services stopped working in Gaza on Friday night, after Israel “expanded” its military operation against Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave.
The largest telecommunications provider in Gaza, Paltel, has announced “a complete severance of all communications and Internet services” due to intensified Israeli strikes.
“The intense bombing in the last hour caused the destruction of all remaining international routes linking Gaza to the outside world,” the company said.
Netblocks, a company that tracks internet connectivity globally, confirmed the information blackout, calling it “the largest single disruption to internet connectivity in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict and will be perceived by many as a total or near-total internet blackout.”
International media outlets, including RT, have partially lost contact with their crews and stringers on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told news organizations that Israel “cannot guarantee your employees’ safety, and strongly urge you to take all necessary measures for their safety,” according to a letter sent to Reuters and AFP.
The head of RT Arabic, Maya Manna, said there was no contact with correspondents and photographers operating in the Palestinian enclave as of Friday evening. The sole message came from an RT stringer in the area, describing a “very violent bombing.”
“I don’t know what to do with my children and my family. Everyone is afraid, everyone is terrified, and there is screaming everywhere in the Gaza Strip,” Masoud Abu Jarash, a local reporter, told RT.
According to an NBC News crew member, who was also able to message colleagues, “all internet, electricity and everything” has been cut off. “The situation we’re in is difficult, so difficult and very dangerous. We’re being extensively shelled by artillery and by air,” the unnamed staffer said.
The UN children’s agency also lost contact with their colleagues in Gaza, with UNICEF chief Catherine Russel saying she was “extremely concerned about their safety and another night of unspeakable horror for 1 million children in Gaza.”
The international healthcare charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said there was no contact with some of their Palestinian colleagues.
“We are particularly worried for the patients, medical staff and thousands of families taking shelter at Al Shifa hospital and other health facilities,” MSF said, expressing deep concern over the situation regarding one of Gaza’s biggest medical centers.
Israel has accused Hamas of turning hospitals into “headquarters for their terror,” referring specifically to Al Shifa, and even published an “illustrative video” which supposedly points out the “different locations in and under the hospital which are being used to plan and implement terrorist activities.”
Hamas claims that by cutting off communications from Gaza, Israel is attempting to “cover up the crimes of the occupation without any oversight or accountability,” and tries to “create an image of victory,” a senior official, Osama Hamdan, told Al Jazeera.
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From the Archives
The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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