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New German ‘peace party’ already more popular than Greens – poll

Sahra Wagenknecht. © Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto via Getty Images
RT | October 29, 2023

A new German political party – the brainchild of prominent Left Party MP Sahra Wagenknecht, and which is yet to take form – has already left a member of the ruling coalition government trailing behind, a poll commissioned by Bild am Sonntag media outlet indicates. Wagenknecht is a vocal critic of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s cabinet and its policies regarding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

In a report on Saturday, Bild am Sonntag cited two surveys conducted over the course of the week – one which features the so far nameless organization, and another that does not. The media outlet attempted to deduce which existing parties’ supporters were likely to defect to their would-be rival.

Wagenknecht announced her plans at a press conference on Monday, saying that she expects the new party to officially come into being in early 2024.

However, according to one of the polls mentioned above, around 14% of Germans would already vote for the party, putting it in fourth place. Scholz’s Social Democratic Party is just one percentage point ahead, while the other two members of the ruling coalition, the Green Party and the Free Democrats, lag behind Wagenknecht’s dark horse, with 12% and 5% respectively.

If the polls are anything to go by, the party that would shed the highest number of voters if the new group enters the political landscape would be the far-right Alternative for Germany Party (AFD). As things stand, 21% of Germans would vote for the AFD; however, if presented with the Wagenknecht option, 4% would change sides. The new party also seems likely to attract voters who would otherwise back smaller parties that are not represented in the German parliament.

Speaking at the press conference on Monday, Wagenknecht expressed hope that her party will run candidates in regional elections in the eastern regions of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg, as well as in the European Parliament election next year. Explaining the need for a new party, she argued that things “can’t continue like this” or Germans “will probably not recognize our country in ten years.”

Wagenknecht said the party will seek to preserve Germany’s “economic strengths” while working towards social justice. With respect to foreign policy, Berlin should use diplomacy rather than weapon deliveries when dealing with conflicts, she added.

She has been a vocal critic of Scholz’s policies toward Russia regarding the Ukraine conflict, as well as the EU’s sanctions on Moscow, which she says are useless.

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | | Leave a comment

Warrant for Genocide: Netanyahu urges Israeli troops to regard the Palestinians as “Amalek”

In the Old Testament the Amalekites were exterminated: “man, woman and infant”

By Michael Hoffman | Revelation of the Method | October 29, 2023

It’s Sunday, not normally a good day for gaining people’s attention on news or analytical current events’ columns. The ongoing emergency—the massacre of children and other civilians in Gaza however—trumps all other considerations, at least for this writer, so here goes.

Part One: Netanyahu Channels Amalek

In their ignorance (or malice), Old Testament haters will have a field day with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu having channeled “Amalek” as he ordered the Israeli army to invade Gaza on October 28.

This fact is so incendiary that a quick search of the New York Times today reveals that the “newspaper of record” hasn’t dared to mention it thus far.

The Israeli Prime Minister stated: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you says our Holy Bible, and we do remember and we are fighting. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza or around Gaza and in all other regions in Israel are joining this chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that started 3,000 years ago—from Joshua to the heroes of 1948—the Six Day War, the 1973 October war—and all other wars of this country—are hero troops. They have one supreme main goal, to completely defeat the murderous enemy and to guarantee our existence in this country.”

In 1 Samuel 15:3 we find the judgment of God on the Amalekites, in the form of the divine command to Saul, the first King of Israel: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

These are patently the marching orders Netanyahu is giving to the Israeli military (“the most moral in the world”): Slay all the civilians of Gaza and spare them not.

Not even Clarence Darrow could parse it otherwise. There’s no lawyer’s loophole here; no moderating clause, which is why, as of Sunday, October 29, the New York Times and other major media have not dared to report Netanyahu’s genocidal directive.

They’ll get around to it after they have concocted a defense of the indefensible, which is their job. The delay is due to the fact that even the skilled spin doctors at the Times are having difficulty coming up with an explanation that has plausibility: the Israeli Prime Minister’s insinuation to the Israeli Army to commit genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, by invoking the Biblical war with Amalek, is not a warrant for genocide because…

Because what?

A day later and the corporate media haven’t managed to cook up a cosmetic exculpation.

Juan Cole got it partially right: “Netanyahu may have gestured to, and defiled the Bible by excusing his genocide against the civilians of Gaza with reference to 1 Samuel. But his real bible is… Zionism with its Fascist and explicitly colonial ideology.”

I say “partially,” because Mr. Cole succumbs to the humdrum of Leftspeak when he ends his summation of Zionism by describing it as a colonial ideology, which it is, but that is not the most accurate summation of its inspiration and motivation. Zionism is Talmudic.

True, a distinction has to be made between Talmudism in and of itself, as practiced before the ascendance of Zionism in the 19th century, and Talmudism as weaponized by Zionism, a task we undertook in our October 17 column, “The Disaster of Israeli Zionism.”

Only a Biblical illiterate would tell the Israelis, “You must remember… Amalek,” and then ascribe that memory to the Hebrew Old Testament.

To remember Amalek is to nullify the Old Testament!

Yahweh not only ordered the complete extirpation of the Amalekites; that’s only half the story. He ordered every faithful Israelite to blot out the memory of Amalek, so that the name of Amalek would never again be mentioned:

“You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under Heaven. Do not forget!” (Deuteronomy 25:19).

Netanyahu “forgot.”

Kindling the memory of Amalek is in express defiance of the command of Yahweh, and as such it is Talmudic, not Biblical. It is of a piece with the Pharisee Hillel’s prozbul-nullification of Yahweh’s Sabbatical year.

The Pharisee Talmud destroys the meaning of the Old Testament, rips it to shreds and stomps it into the gutter.

Rabbi Jacob Neusner, translator of the Yale University Press edition of the unredacted Mishnah (the sacred Pharisee text which comprises the supreme halacha (law) of Orthodox rabbinic Judaism), stated:

“We have already seen substantial evidence that any notion of Pharisaism (or later rabbinic Judaism), as the true and direct descendants of the Old Testament, is contradicted by the most fundamental assumption of one Mishnah-tractate after another. These stand wholly separate from the Priestly Code… And generally contradict it!” (A History of the Mishnaic Law [Brill Academic, 1974], p. 7).

As for why Yahweh ordered Amalek destroyed three millennia ago, that’s a hermeneutic for another day.

Part Two: The Gaza Massacre in 40 Words of Power

Our critics in Europe opine that Americans are slogan-mad, seeking in our haste and frenzied pace to reduce everything sublime to a bumper sticker.

There’s some truth in the observation. On the other hand, compared to our loquacious kindred in the Old World, we occasionally exhibit the laconic virtue of conveying the most meaning with the least amount of words.

Some of the head-scratching over the whys and wherefores of the dehumanization of the thousands of Palestinian children butchered in Gaza with American tax dollars this month of October — the sheer shoulder-shrugging indifference in the face of the carnage, by everyone from John Kirby to Joe Biden and their legion of epigones—can be understood with a few dozen words of power which compel obedience from the Department of Defense to the White House and most of the Western world.

Neither the Neocon Right nor the progressive Left will traverse this territory. Hence, the obligation to utter a proscribed truth which is the key to grasping why the massacre in Gaza is not being opposed by the Biden administration, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, NATO, or the European Union— falls to us, in this obscure column of ours.

From the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 57a, we read:

“Regarding bloodshed, the following distinction applies: if a non-Jew killed another non-Jew, or a non-Jew killed a Jew, the killer is liable for execution; if a Jew killed a non-Jew, he is exempt from punishment.”

My dear kiddies, you who have been infantalized by the refusal on the part of every major news source, whether Muslim, Christian, atheist, Marxist, Conservative or Liberal, to cite this halacha—now you know the real reason why the International Court in The Hague will not be prosecuting Netanyahu or his generals for war crimes. Now you know why the children of Gaza have been murdered, are being murdered and will be murdered in this annus horribilis.

If Mr. Netanyahu wishes to quote ancient passages from holy books, let him quote from Sanhedrin 57 in the Talmud of Babylon, the holiest book of Israeli theology. [BT Eruvin 21b: “Be more careful in the observance of the words of the Scribes than in the words of the Torah”].

Copyright ©2023 by Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816

FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE CONTRA CANCEL CUTLURE

Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. He earns his living as a professional historian. His books are published in the USA, and in translation in Japan and France. His textbook, Judaism Discovered (1,102 pages) is banned by almost all major booksellers and libraries.

Website: www.RevisionistHistory.org

X (Twitter)

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

Place where protests didn’t happen does support Israel

By Yves Engler | October 29, 2023

Apologists for Israeli crimes are constantly gaslighting Palestinians and their supporters. They seek to make those opposing violence and colonialism feel like oppressors.

Last Friday a rally was held in front of Deputy Prime Minister Christya Freeland’s office in Toronto. Freeland recently declared that “Canada stands with Israel” and when she was foreign minister said Canada would act as an “asset for Israel” on the United Nations Security Council.

The poster announcing the rally declared: “PROTEST DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA CHRYSTIA FREELAND OUTSIDE HER TORONTO OFFICE”. During the rally bodies of babies were placed in front of Freeland’s office and at some point a man with an Israeli flag went directly in front of Freeland’s office in a bid to provoke the protesters. There’s video of police intervening and standing in front of the building housing Freeland’s office.

As the rally grew, it reportedly spilled onto the street and intersection directly in front of the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre (MNJCC). According to a Canada Files post, someone came out of the community centre to complain and film the Palestine solidarity rally. Footage was later posted to X claiming a Jewish community centre was targeted by protesters. According to multiple comments online, the initial post was deleted after being bombarded with derisive comments about their inability to look at a map. But Canada United for Israel shared the video tweeting, “Targeting a Jewish community center where there is a kindergarten is pure antisemitism. How can the anti-Israel movement justify scaring children?”

Far right Rebel News founder Ezra Levant quote tweeted that statement claiming “Hamas protesters target a Jewish kindergarten” while the head of the ‘progressive’ media watchdog CanadaLand, Jesse Brown, made a similar claim. The incident was referenced by the Toronto Sun, Toronto Star, National Post and other media.

In a transparent bid to enable Israeli violence and colonialism, apartheid apologists regularly fabricate or distort events to claim victimhood. Over two decades I’ve been privy to repeated examples of this. While I no longer consider the tactic noteworthy, an element of the psychological side of it is. In other domains it would be called gaslighting.

In brief, those screaming loudest “it’s just a Jewish institution that has nothing to do with Israel” are generally best placed to know this is untrue. Those who’ve been through the MNJCC – and similar institutions – know they are deeply Zionistic.

MNJCC operates an “Israel Connection” program and promotes the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) Toronto’s annual Walk for Israel. It hosted and cosponsored an Israeli general’s talk, which was held in tandem with the Israeli consulate.

The Thomas & Marjorie Schwartz preschool centre & Junior Kindergarten housed there has three pictures posted on MNJCC’s site. In one the kindergartners are smiling with an Israeli and Canadian flag hanging on the wall. In its “core elements” the kindergarten describes​ “Israel as a Source and Resource”.

The MNJCC elementary school shows a picture with dozens of Israeli flags. On its Instragram the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School (DJDS) recently posted that “Jewish people have always had and always will have a relationship with Israel. We continue to stand in solidarity with Israel.” Days into that country’s horrific siege and violence in Gaza, DJDS posted on October 13 that “classes created inspirational cards for Israeli soldiers, and sent cards full of well wishes to former classmates now living in Israel.” The MNJCC school’s site notes, “Each year, our school warmly welcomes two young Israelis to the Paul Penna DJDS community. We are delighted to partner with UJA Federation, the Downtown Jewish Community School, and The First Narayever Congregation on this fantastic initiative. These teens have completed high school and have chosen to defer their army service in order to become Israeli ambassadors or ‘shlichim’, spending a year focused on presenting contemporary Israel to our students in passionate, creative ways.”

MNJCC has deep ties to UJA Toronto, which brings young Israeli ‘shlichim’ to live with Toronto families so they can do outreach in schools and community organizations. At the top of UJA’s website, which is prominently linked on the MNJCC site, is an Israel financial appeal and its official advocacy arm is the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

Alongside a link to UJA Toronto, MNJCC’s site links prominently to the JCC Association of North America. The top of that site notes “JCCs of North America Stand With Israel”.

MNJCC’s namesake funded a major project at the racist Jewish National Fund’s Canada Park, which is built on the remnants of three Palestinian villages in the West Bank. On the board of the JCC, Miles Nidal is a staunch anti-Palestinian.

Even if the target of Friday’s protest had been the JCC it would be altogether legitimate (though considering the political climate, organizers should seek to detail the JCC’s anti-Palestinianism in promotional literature). No organization that promotes and defends Israel the way MNJCC does can then claim, “we are simply Jews, not backing Israel” when it becomes convenient to deny the connection.

It’s highly manipulative for individuals who know the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre is part of a network of anti-Palestinian institutions to claim protesting it is antisemitic. Call the complaints what they really are: gaslighting.

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism | , | 1 Comment

Why I Support Hamas

And you should too

BY KEVIN BARRETT | OCTOBER 29, 2023

In this week’s False Flag Weekly News I outperformed Cat McGuire (for once) in saying things the ADL won’t like. Angered by the genocide of Gaza, I uttered many uncomplimentary and/or inflammatory remarks about the Chosen People and their Chosen State. But of all of the “oy vey” things I said, what the ADL will hate the most is my open declaration of support for Hamas.

And that, of course, is the most obvious reason to support Hamas: “They” really, really don’t want you to. The strategists who are trying to keep the genocide of Palestine going apparently realize that if significant numbers of Westerners start openly supporting Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance, the Zionist goose will be well and truly cooked. That’s why they’ve used advanced propaganda techniques to inject the obligatory “I don’t support Hamas, but” disclaimer deep into the collective unconscious of the West in general and its relatively-Palestine-savvy people in particular.

“They” don’t really care if you deplore the massacre of thousands of Gazan women and children. “They” don’t mind if you support a two-state solution, or even a one-state solution. “They” can live with you calling for a ceasefire. “They” could care less if you utter words like apartheid or even genocide.

It’s like when Joel Stein said “I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.” The Zionist position is: “I don’t care if Americans think we’re committing human rights violations, apartheid, or genocide. I just care that we get to keep committing them.”

Americans complaining about Zionist human rights violations, apartheid, and genocide won’t stop those things. They will only be stopped at gunpoint. And it really does matter that people support the right of genocide victims to pick up guns and stop the genocide.

Jews, who think of themselves as paradigmatic genocide victims, should be the first to support armed resistance against genocide. And indeed, the smartest and most courageous Jews do. Check out what David Rovics has to say about Al-Aqsa Flood being the new Warsaw Ghetto uprising:

Hamas is the closest thing to an elected government the Palestinians have.  In fact, the last time they had a real election in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas won by a landslide….Physically fighting back against an occupying army, according to international law that all the countries in the world have signed on to long ago, is justified, and is not “terrorism.”

Why Supporting Hamas Is Strategically Savvy

In any struggle between two sides, the outcome will be largely determined by the intensity of support enjoyed by each party to the conflict. Small, weak countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan were able to defeat the mighty USA because they were far more intensely committed to ending US occupation than Americans were committed to maintaining it. Like the Palestinians today, they were willing to accept a lopsided casualty ratio as they continued raising the price of occupation to the point that the occupier opted to stop paying it.

The Western propaganda apparatus currently allows and tacitly encourages pro-Zionist intensity, while making pro-Resistance intensity taboo. “I stand with Israel” is acceptable, even mandatory; “I stand with Hamas” is practically illegal and unthinkable.

When Side A is passionately and intensely supporting its fighters, while Side B mumbles apologies and obligatory disclaimers, obviously Side A will enjoy a morale advantage that will translate into an advantage on the battlefield. But when Side A is a criminal aggressor and genocide perpetrator, it may find it difficult to maintain its intense support, and to prevent neutral people who care about justice from becoming passionate supporters of the other side. So it will use every propaganda trick in the book to prevent neutrals and lukewarm supporters of the other side from becoming brazen and passionate.

The best way to change that pro-genocide Overton Window is to throw a brick through it. And tied to that brick, a simple message: “I SUPPORT HAMAS.”

Pro-Vietnam-War people really hated it when Jane Fonda high-fived Hanoi as thousands of Americans gathered in the streets to shout their support for the Viet Cong: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” But that, and US troops fragging their officers, is what ended the war. Humanitarian complaints about napalmed babies and My Lai massacres were only useful insofar as they pissed off enough people to the point that they realized that the Vietnamese resistance fighters were the good guys, and Uncle Sam was the villain, and that all decent people had a moral duty to support the Vietnamese resistance. That shifted the Overton Window radically, to the point that “withdraw ASAP and to hell with the consequences” became a middle-of-the-road position and then a political reality.

If we can get a small but noticeable number of Americans openly and brazenly cheering for Hamas at the top of their proverbial lungs, it will have the same effect on ZOG that Al-Aqsa Flood had on Israelis: It will drive them crazy, puncture their inflated sense of invulnerability, and incite them to lash out in irrational and strategically counterproductive ways. ZOG’s mask will come off, and it will show its psychotic, genocidal face to America, just as the Israelis have shown theirs to the region, the BRICS nations, and the Global South.

And the Overton Window will shift. Pretty soon “end aid to Israel” and “one-state solution” will become middle-of-the-road positions and then political realities.

Why Supporting Hamas Is Your Moral Duty

I began by explaining why supporting Hamas is strategically savvy, rather than addressing the moral argument, because much of my audience already understands what I am now about to say. For them, the strategic benefits of supporting Hamas may not be evident, even though the moral arguments are.

So I risk belaboring the obvious in stressing that the most important point—the forest that people miss while peering at the trees—is that the Palestinian cause is just, and the Zionist one unjust. Every just war theory, whether Christian, Islamic, or secular, is based on the non-aggression principle: The side that initiates aggression, in this case by crossing the seas to invade and murder and steal the other side’s land and property, is in the wrong, while those fighting to stop that aggression are in the right. No sane person who takes the time to study the history of Palestine in a reasonably comprehensive and unbiased way can fail to conclude that there has never been a war in history that has been more obviously and completely just than the Palestinian war against Zionist invasion, occupation, and genocide.

And of all the big lies uttered in history, there has never been a bigger one than “The Israeli-Palestine conflict? It’s complicated.” No it isn’t. And it isn’t a conflict, it’s a genocide. The rights and wrongs are not the least bit complicated.

Zionist attempts to obfuscate the injustice of their genocidal project are so absurd that they would be hilarious if there were not right now more than a thousand Gazan children buried beneath the rubble of what used to be their homes, suffering and dying slowly in some cases, expiring quickly and mercifully in others. Consider the most popular excuses:

“Yahweh gave us Palestine 3,000 years ago. Surely that should count for something! What?! You don’t honor Yahweh’s 3000-year-old real estate deals?!!”

*“We deserve Palestine because of the Holocaust. So why isn’t Israel in Germany? Umm… next excuse!”

“We are an ethnic group so we deserve a state of our own. And yes, we know that there are tens of thousands of ethnic groups on Earth, and that virtually none of them have states, but we are just so special that we deserve one! And if you don’t agree, you are anti-Semitic!”

“We have gotten into terrible conflicts with every neighbor we’ve ever had, and have been expelled from more than 100 countries for no reason at all except that our neighbors like to pointlessly persecute us, so you ought to sympathize and side with us no matter what we do.”

“There are lots of terrible injustices, so if you complain about this one, you must be an anti-Semite!” Alternate version: “Genghis Khan (or Pol Pot or Stalin or Hitler) killed more people than we have, so why are you attacking us, you anti-Semite?”

“The Palestinians and their supporters, as we portray them in our propaganda machine, are very bad, wicked people, so you should cheer for us as we steal their stuff and exterminate them.”

“We are a democracy even though we murdered or expelled most of the people who should be voting in our elections.”

“Israel’s existence is really, really beneficial to US national security, even though it makes billions of people in geopolitically-crucial energy-rich countries hate America’s guts.”

“You have to support us because we call our enemies ‘terrorists’ and other nasty names.”

And when all else fails:

“Support us and do what we say, or you’ll never work in this town again!”

Refuting the extant arguments for Israel’s existence would be superfluous and an insult to the reader’s intelligence. They are not even arguments, just inarticulate, incoherent grunts and howls of tribally-intoxicated psychopathy.

But it may be worth unpacking one of them: the “terrorist” blood libel. Terrorism is usually defined as “A military tactic consisting of deliberately attacking civilians to incite fear and achieve a political objective.” And that is exactly what “Israel” is: A terrorist organization. Zionist terrorists have been attacking and terrorizing the civilian population of the territory they invaded, namely Palestine, ever since they got there. The various Zionist terror groups were so drunk on terrorism that they even terrorized each other, as well as their fellow aggressors and invaders, the British, in a bloody orgy of terror that has no parallel in modern history. Much of the story can be found in Thomas Suarez’s State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel.

So the conflict is between terrorists who crossed the seas to attack the Palestinian civilian population in order to kill some and scare the others into leaving; and the civilian population they have been terrorizing. On one side, the Zionist terrorists; on the other, the Palestinian anti-terrorist Resistance. In this as in so much else, the Zionist propaganda machine has turned reality on its head.

Today, the Zionist terrorists continue to deliberately target and mass-murder Palestinian civilians by the thousands. About two-thirds of the Palestinians they kill are women and children. The Zionists probably kill about a hundred civilians for every Hamas fighter. Compare that to al-Aqsa Storm, the Hamas operation that killed roughly equal numbers of Israeli military fighters and civilians. And of the civilians killed in al-Aqsa Storm, the majority were killed by the Israeli military, whether accidentally in crossfire, or deliberately in accordance with the Hannibal Directive, which recommends eliminating both hostage-takers and hostages using overwhelming firepower in order to prevent the enemy from using hostages as a bargaining chip.

Hamas, unlike the Zionists, primarily targets the Israeli military, when it can. Clearly, al-Aqsa Storm primarily targeted the IDF. Hamas’s orders were to take hostages, but to avoid killing unarmed civilians. And while there may have been a few instances of Palestinians killing civilians, photo evidence proves that the worst carnage—music festival goers caught in heavy artillery crossfire, houses and kibbutzes and other buildings full of people destroyed by tank and artillery shells—was perpetrated by the IDF. Hamas soldiers, carrying light weapons, could not possibly have caused that kind of damage, or killed those large numbers of people.

This and most of the rest of the damage to civilians on October 7 was meted out by Israeli heavy weapons, not Hamas’s light firearms

But what about the rockets? Since unlike Israel, Hamas doesn’t enjoy billions of dollars worth of of US-taxpayer-provided weaponry, it fires relatively unsophisticated rockets that cannot take out hardened military targets, but do frighten and occasionally harm Israeli “civilians.” So… is that terrorism? No—because Israelis are settlers, not civilians. Under international law, military resistance against occupation, including targeting settlers, is legitimate. So we can argue about proportionality—I would assert that Hamas errs on the side of mercy by doing a whole lot less settler-killing than it has every right to be doing — but at the end of the day, international law, morality, and basic common sense dictate that Hamas’s use of rockets to retaliate against massive genocide is justifiable… and rational, as part of a multi-pronged strategy to keep raising the costs of occupation to the point that the genocidal occupier will finally take Helen Thomas’s advice and “get the hell out of Palestine.”

Arguing with Orwell’s O’Brien

You know who has lost the argument not only by Godwin’s law a.k.a. reducto ad Hitlerum, but also by which party feels the need to use coercion to force the other party to shut up. The Zionist terrorists have not only lost the argument, they have no argument. No wonder they ceaselessly invoke Hitler and the Nazis. And no wonder they constantly run professors out of universities, get media personalities fired, launch specious persecutions and prosecutions, and generally terrorize everyone into going along with their genocidal absurdities.

Arguing with a Zionist is like arguing with Orwell’s O’Brien: He knows he’s full of shit, has no compunctions about it, and is going to do whatever it takes to ruin your life.

By saying “I like Hamas,” I’m supporting an anti-terrorist group that the Zionist terrorists have falsely and mendaciously labeled, in true Orwellian fashion, “terrorists.” Maybe they’ll try to get me prosecuted for “material support for anti-terrorism,” though I haven’t mailed so much as a dirham to Hamas, POB 123, Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine, nor have I contributed to any Hamas GoFundMe’s or bought any donuts from the nice little old Hamas ladies at the local mosque. (If they were selling baclava, I’d consider it.)

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll probably have to admit that the reason that you haven’t yet come around to openly supporting Hamas is fear: fear of what the Zionists might do to you. Well, I’m here to tell you that fear isn’t the right word for that. The correct word is cowardice.

The Palestinians continue to unite in resistance to genocide, even as the Zionists respond by forcing their children to die agonizing deaths, by the thousands, beneath mountains of rubble. And you can’t even openly and publicly admit that you support that Resistance? Come to think of it, maybe cowardice isn’t the right word. It isn’t strong enough.

Come on, grow some stones. Say it with me: “I… SUPPORT… HAMAS.”

Video link

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , | 8 Comments

Israeli ground troops face fierce resistance inside Gaza

The Cradle | October 29, 2023

The Palestinian resistance has continued to confront Israeli ground troops penetrating the Gaza border, after Tel Aviv announced an expansion of limited ground incursions into the besieged strip on Friday.

The Qassam Brigades launched a surprise attack on Israeli forces on Sunday “after infiltrating behind their lines and clashing with enemy forces” who were making an incursion northwest of Beit Lahia, their Telegram channel said. 

In a statement released earlier on 29 October, Hamas’ Qassam Brigades announced that they “continue to confront the Zionist forces penetrating the Al-Amiriyya area northwest of Beit Lahia, where they engaged in armed clashes with them and targeted enemy vehicles with … mortar shells.” 

The Qassam Brigades “carried out several sniping operations. The enemy admitted that a number of its soldiers were wounded in the clashes with our Mujahideen who … are still targeting enemy forces.” 

They also targeted on Sunday morning a “gathering of enemy vehicles” with a suicide drone, according to the resistance group’s Telegram channel. 

The armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement, the Quds Brigades, also announced on 29 October targeting Israeli forces attempting to enter the northern Gaza Strip with rockets and mortar shells. 

Israel’s military announced earlier on 29 October that one of its officers was seriously hurt and another soldier moderately injured “in the northern Gaza Strip overnight.” 

The Qassam Brigades released a video on Saturday evening, 28 October, showing their destruction of an Israeli armored vehicle believed to be carrying over a dozen soldiers. The attack took place near the Gaza Strip’s Shujaiya area. 

Over the past week, Israel has carried out “limited” ground incursions into northern Gaza aimed at testing the waters for the planned invasion. The Israeli army said it struck several Hamas targets during small-scale incursions on 25 and 26 October. 

Israeli troops took heavy losses the week before that while attempting to enter the Gaza Strip on land. 

Tel Aviv announced on 27 October that it is “expanding” its limited ground activity in Gaza.

However, an army spokesman told ABC News that day that “the expanded operations taking place in Gaza are not an official ground invasion.” 

So far, Israel has delayed fully invading Gaza and attempting to carry out its stated goal of “eradicating” Hamas, who are well prepared for an Israeli ground invasion. 

Many experts, including The Cradle’s Hasan Illaik, have said recently that Israel will be unable to bear the cost of launching a full ground assault on the Gaza Strip. Such an invasion could also instigate the opening of several new fronts and the outbreak of regional war. 

“We want to convey to our enemy that we are impatiently awaiting the opportunity to introduce [its forces] to new forms of demise,” Qassam Brigades spokesman, Abu Obeida, said on 28 October. 

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | 1 Comment

Israel Faces ‘Near Impossible Task’ in Gaza

By Scott Ritter – Sputnik – 29.10.2023

Israel has conducted a series of ground incursions into Gaza over the course of the past week, each one building on the other, increasing in scope and scale. This appears to be part of an Israeli strategy to lean gradually into an operation that, when finished, falls just short of a general assault on Gaza.

At the end of the day, however, Israel will most likely not be able to defeat the military forces of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance forces defending Gaza. Israel will have to either seek to defeat Hamas by laying siege to the Gaza Strip or commit to a full-scale attack on Gaza designed to clear the territory of all Hamas fighters.

History suggests that any such assault will be extremely difficult to accomplish.

The example of Operation Hubertus, the final German assault on Stalingrad, stands out. The Germans brought in elements of seven elite “Pioneer” battalions — combat engineers with extensive experience in urban warfare, having paved the way for prior German victories in Rostov and Voronezh. The Pioneers were the masters of military demolition, highly trained specialists in house-to-house fighting and the use of explosives and flame throwers. Around 1,800 of these elite assault engineers were assembled for the final drive to push the defending Soviet soldiers from Stalingrad.

On the first day of operations, the Pioneers suffered nearly 30% casualties. After several days of fierce fighting, the Pioneers were stopped less than 100 meters from their objective. However, their forces suffered between 60-70% casualties, and could not proceed further.

Operation Hubertus was doomed to fail from the beginning. According to an account of the fighting, “The constant bombardment and artillery shelling created a battlefield in which the Soviet defenders largely held the advantage over the assaulting Germans. The fields of rubble and craters were perfectly designed for defensive actions and could be improved with relatively little effort. This also provided ample hunting ground for the ever-present Soviet snipers.”

A similar observation can be made regarding the Allied attacks on Monte Casino, in Italy, in early 1944. A massive aerial bombardment destroyed a 6th century abbey. Elite German paratroopers dug into the rubble, and for months successfully held off repeated attacks. There can be no doubt that the excessive bombardment of Monte Casino ended up strengthening the positions of the German defenders.

In the battle of Iwo Jima, it took US Marines more than a month to secure the tiny island, largely because the Japanese had dug some 18 kilometers of tunnels into the 21-square kilometer island, some of which were more than 70 meters underground, from which they rode out heavy bombing and shelling, only to emerge and ambush the advancing Marines.

If one combined the above ground rubble of Monte Casino with the below-ground tunnel network of Iwo Jima, you might approximate the hellish scenario awaiting Israel in Gaza.

Over 500 kilometers of tunnels dug in under the 360 square kilometers that comprise the Gaza Strip, these tunnels are purpose built, designed to serve as transportation corridors, command centers, supply depots, dormitories and hospitals, defensive positions, and in support of offensive action. Simply put, there has never been a military operation against a target such as the one presented by Hamas in Gaza.

Israel has trained a small number of its elite special forces to carry out limited-scope operations in an underground environment. These operations, typically involving hostage rescue or direct action (i.e., eliminating a high value target), are conducted under very controlled circumstances, with the attacking forces proceeding only when the circumstances support a favorable outcome. As such, the experiences of these troops are counterproductive when it comes to transferring knowledge to the conventional forces that would bear the brunt of any Israeli assault on Gaza.

Simply trying to navigate the rubble-strewn streets of Gaza will be a nearly impossible task for the Israeli troops. The going will be slow, and the Israeli infantry will have to operate dismounted, exposing themselves to sniper fire and ambushes. Israeli vehicles will find themselves hemmed in without the ability to maneuver, making themselves vulnerable to mines, improvised explosive devices, and anti-tank weaponry. Close air support under these circumstances will be very difficult, effectively neutralizing Israel’s greatest advantage.

If Israel does not sync its above-ground actions with a simultaneous effort to defeat Hamas’ underground tunnel-based defenses, then the situation above ground will become even more precarious, with Hamas emerging from tunnels behind the Israeli forces, cutting them off and inflicting heavy casualties. But Israel is going to be operating largely blind underground, probing into a tunnel network designed by Hamas to protect against any such effort. Israel’s best bet would be to simply locate tunnel entrances and seal them off, leaving the Hamas forces underground to die of thirst, hunger, oxygen deprivation, or disease. But this will require the physical occupation of every square meter of the city, an immensely difficult problem from both a logistical and operational standpoint. It will also expose more Israeli forces to harm, resulting in a dramatic increase in casualties.

By reacting to the Hamas attack of October 7 in the way it has, Israel has literally walked into a trap designed by Hamas to defeat any Israeli incursion. Israeli forces are neither trained, equipped, organized, nor motivated to carry out the kind of brutal, bloody, and physically demanding combat that will be required to defeat Hamas above and below the ground in Gaza. Israeli political and military leaders have boxed themselves into a corner with their aggressive winner-take-all rhetoric. But now that the time has come to pay the price of their collective verbiage, the question becomes is this a price Israel is willing and able to pay?

The answer is probably no. Israel has defined victory as being predicated on the total defeat of Hamas as a military organization. This is most probably a mission impossible. Hamas, therefore, emerges victorious simply by surviving. Given the strong defensive position Hamas finds itself in, through a combination of its immense tunnel network and the destroyed urban environment brought on by Israeli bombardment, it is highly likely that Hamas will be able to hold off a concerted Israeli assault until which time the Israel Defense Forces, like the German Pioneer battalions in Stalingrad, exhaust themselves on the field of battle.

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | 1 Comment

India’s solidarity with Israel is untenable

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | OCTOBER 29, 2023 

India’s muscular diplomacy, an attribute of the present government, has run into heavy weather. Body blows from multiple sources — spat with Canada; Maldives’ triumphalism about evicting Indian servicemen;  China-Bhutan normalisation, etc. — testify to it.

On top of it comes the latest diplomatic faux pas at the UN GA over the Gaza situation and a not-entirely unrelated shock and awe dealt out by Qatar over the past week. Doha has handed down death sentences to eight Indian ex-naval officers on charges of spying for Israel. 

Whichever way one looks at the Explanation of Vote (EoV) on Thursday’s UN General Assembly resolution on Gaza, India’s abstention was a mistake. Simply put, our diplomacy has become entrapped in our solidarity with Israel.

The topmost consideration for India at the UN GA debate should have been that the draft was tabled by the Arab and OIC countries with whom India has fraternal ties, and, second, it called for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce” in Gaza, which is an urgent necessity. 

Yet, France outclassed Indian diplomacy, exposing the need for more creative UN diplomacy on our part. France not only sought that some reference to Hamas’ raid into Israel on October 7 be made in the draft, but while on a recent visit to Tel Aviv, President Emmanuel Macron even proposed an alliance of like-minded countries to take on Hamas militarily.

Yet, when the crunch time came, France ultimately voted for the Arab resolution and issued an EoV justifying it. As France saw it, the imperative need today is to stop the fighting and the compelling reality is the importance of being on the right side of history when it comes to the Middle East crisis, where it has high stakes. The point is, in the final analysis, what stands out for the record is the actual voting, not the EoV. 

It was apparent that the Canadian amendment — at Israel’s behest and sponsored by Washington from the rear — was a clumsy attempt to divide the votes  by calling for “unequivocally rejecting and condemning the terrorist attacks by Hamas.” In a notable speech that drew wide acclaim, Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN Munir Akram highlighted the contradiction.

If Canada was being fair in its amendment, he said, it should as well agree to name Israel as well as Hamas. “We all know who started this. It is 50 years of Israeli occupation and the killing of Palestinians with impunity,” Akram argued, therefore, not naming either side was the best choice. 

It appears that India was taken aback by Akram’s intervention at the UN GA during Agenda Item 70, Right to Self-Determination where he forcefully linked the Palestine issue and Kashmir problem. Alas, India’s abstention has only left the centre stage to Pakistan to occupy. This could be consequential. A prudent course would have been to identify with the stance of the Arab countries unequivocally, since this is a core issue for them and it is playing out in their region, first and foremost.  

India should have factored in that feelings are running high in the West Asian region and the US-Israeli propaganda that the Arab world paid only lip-service to the Palestinian cause doesn’t hold good. There is unmistakable anger and anguish among the regional states and a groundswell of opinion has appeared demanding a settlement of the Palestine issue as an imperative of regional stability. 

Fundamentally, the tectonic plates in regional politics have shifted following the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement under China’s mediation, which in turn triggered new thinking in West Asia giving impetus to a focus on development. Equally, the regional states prefer to address their issues increasingly on their own steam without external interference. China and Russia understand this but the US refuses to see the writing on the wall. 

Therefore, it will prove to be damaging to our interests if a growing perception crystallises that Indians are carpetbaggers. The Indo-Israeli fusion through the past decade hasn’t gone unnoticed in the Muslim countries. They resent it, perhaps, but it may not surge into view because Arabs are a hospitable people. That said, their resentment may surface if push comes to shove and their core interests are involved. 

The US-Israeli attempt to put the lid on the region’s growing strategic autonomy is one such core issue. It is far from the case that the regional states — be it Qatar, Iran, Egypt, Syria or even Turkey — do not understand that the Biden administration’s grandiloquent idea of a India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor is in reality a wedge to disrupt the nascent trends of unity among regional states so as to insert Israel into the regional processes and rekindle the flame of sectarian schism and geopolitical rifts, which the US invariably exploited to impose its hegemony in West Asia historically. 

That is why, the three-way Qatar-India-Israel tangled mess of espionage, which should never have been allowed to happen, becomes a litmus test of mutual intentions in the geopolitics of the region. Lest it is forgotten, Qatar and Israel had once collaborated since the mid-nineties to prop up Hamas as an Islamist antidote to the secular-minded PLO under Yasser Arafat.

In a recent interview with the Deutsche Welle, former Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert disclosed, inter alia, “We know that the Hamas was financed with the assistance of Israel— for years — by hundreds of millions of dollars that came from Qatar with the assistance of the state of Israel, with the full knowledge and support of the Israeli government led by Netanyahu.”          

That convergence — rather, Faustian deal — ended in 2009 following the three-week Gaza Massacre by Israel, whereupon, Doha drew closer to Tehran. Nonetheless, a pragmatic relationship continued, and in 2015, the Qatari government facilitated discussions between Israel and Hamas in Doha in search of a possible five-year ceasefire between the two parties. Suffice to say, Indian diplomacy is swimming in shark-infested waters. The news from Doha this week is a wake-up call. 

Equally, our public discourse on Hamas as a terrorist organisation and our branding of that national liberation movement is surreal, to say the least. Although it may be difficult today for the government to openly deal with Hamas, it shouldn’t be that we lack a proper understanding of Islamism. If ever a Palestine settlement comes to fruition, Hamas will have a lead role in it as the fountainhead of resistance. India’s political elite must bear in mind this reality. 

Eliminating the Hamas from the political landscape is no longer possible, given the massive grassroots support it enjoys among the Palestinian people, which is of course a proven fact in the successive elections held in Gaza and West Bank. 

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Iran vows to ignore US warnings on Israel

RT | October 29, 2023

Tehran will ignore US warnings not to intervene in the Hamas-Israel conflict, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has said. He also blasted the West over alleged reluctance to help end the hostilities.

In an interview with Qatar-based Al Jazeera on Saturday, Raisi said that Washington “is asking us not to move while providing broad support to the Zionist entity… This is an invalid demand.”

The Iranian president also claimed that Israel’s expanded ground operations in Gaza were a failure, describing it as “the second victory [for Palestinians] following [the launch of] Operation al-Aqsa Storm,” referring to the initial surprise attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7.

He also said that the United States had sent messages to the ‘Axis of Resistance’ – referring to an informal alliance of anti-Western and anti-Israel forces in the Middle East – and “received a practical and public answer on the ground.”

Raisi went on to accuse the US and some unnamed European countries of “obstructing the ceasefire in Gaza,” calling such policies “a crime.” He added that “the United States’ calculations in the region are completely wrong, and said it will not achieve its goals with a new Middle East,” stressing that Tehran’s support for the Palestinians “is not subject to compromise.”

After the Hamas attack on Israel earlier this month, US President Joe Biden pledged unconditional support for Israel while warning Iran to be “careful.” At the same time, he stopped short of backing a cessation of hostilities, with several US media outlets reporting that the State Department had distributed a memo to its diplomats advising them to avoid calling for “de-escalation” or a “ceasefire” in Gaza.

Publicly, Biden has said that ceasefire talks cannot begin until Hamas releases more than 200 hostages. Meanwhile, on Monday, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called for a “humanitarian pause” in the conflict, saying he believed there was consensus among the bloc’s members on the matter.

Raisi’s comments come after Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned the US that “new fronts will be opened up” against Washington if it does not change its policies in the Middle East, including its unequivocal support for Israel.

October 29, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

October 28, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, Video, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

PHARMA GIANT LOOKS TO ESCAPE RECKONING FOR THIRD TIME

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | October 26, 2023

One of the world’s most powerful corporations is on the ropes as Johnson & Johnson is looking at its third attempt at leveraging bankruptcy to avoid an onslaught of lawsuits over asbestos-laced baby powder, which they allegedly hide the dangers from consumers for decades.

October 28, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Leave a comment

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.

October 28, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

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.

October 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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