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UN Agency Unveils Action Plan To Regulate Speech on Social Media Platforms

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 9, 2023

Yet another United Nations agency – this time the Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – has joined the contentious efforts to use UN resources in the “war on misinformation.”

UNESCO is not lagging behind some of the veterans of this “war” regarding the kind of alarmist language its leadership is choosing to use to justify the policy.

Thus, Director-General Audrey Azoulay presented an action plan, saying that online disinformation is “a major threat to stability and social cohesion.”

A press release announcing the plan referred to the phenomenon of misinformation as “a scourge” and one that is intensifying. Those behind all this must hope that this is enough to explain what UNESCO – formerly known mostly for protection of world heritage sites and raising funds for underprivileged children – is even doing “fighting disinformation.”

But here’s the plan: to somehow not harm freedom of speech, and yet push for social media companies to hire more “moderators” that speak all the major languages and whose job would be “effective control of content.”

A lot of attention seems to be given to strengthening censorship capacities in languages other than English; that could explain why, according to UNESCO’s statement, the plan has received support particularly from some countries in Latin America and Africa.

Over the past number of years, the whole world could see how efficiently the notion of “misinformation” and the tools to counter it can be turned into proper weapons of censorship; there is likely no shortage of governments that would like to replicate what has been happening in English speaking countries.

“Electoral integrity” also crops up in the press release announcing the UNESCO initiative, and here the proposed solution is “risk assessment” as well as flagging content, more “transparency” around political ads – and who they are meant to target.

Finally, UNESCO somehow manages to work its core task and purpose into the whole thing – namely, culture. And that’s done by calling for “highlighting the risks faced by artists and the need for online access to ‘diverse cultural content’ (quotation marks here are UNESCO’s) as a fundamental human right.”

As for who needs any of this from UNESCO, and why – the agency justified its involvement by mentioning an opinion poll it commissioned, involving 8,000 respondents in 16 countries.

And because “85% of citizens are worried about the impact of online disinformation (on elections)” – we now have this “action plan.”

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

The Israel Exception to Free Speech

Israel’s stranglehold on American foreign policy must be identified and eliminated

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 10, 2023

Last Tuesday there took place a disgraceful display of visceral malignancy in the United States House of Representatives Chamber in the south wing of the Capitol building. The House, long characterized by its aversion to truth, justice and what was once the American way, has been corrupted by special interests who have effectively bought an overwhelming majority of legislators, to include the leadership of the two major political parties. In the area of foreign policy, as well as a spill-over into many domestic and constitutional issues, there is no more powerful lobby than that of the state of Israel, and its power was on full display on Tuesday afternoon when Representative Rashida Tlaib was censured for the crime of being of Palestinian ancestry and speaking up against the ongoing genocide of her people by the Jewish state. Nearly all Republicans voted to condemn her together with a considerable number of her fellow Democrats.

On the following day, the White House added its own condemnation of Tlaib, referring specifically to the phrase “from the river to the sea” used by her, a slogan conveniently regarded by some like the fanatical Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as an Arab rallying cry for the eradication of Israel. ADL’s ghastly director Jonathan Greenblatt inevitably equates use of the phrase with “antisemitism” and ADL insists that “’From the River to the Sea’ is a Hamas call to annihilate Israel” while also “claiming [that] it is a rally of coexistence [which] gives cover to terror.” Tlaib, for her part, was resurrecting a memory of the Palestine that once was, and she has asserted that the slogan is “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.” Pro-Palestinian protesters do also use the slogan as a plea for their long-delayed nationhood, but groups like ADL prefer to claim that the activity provides “material support for Hamas,” and, as Hamas is a US listed terrorist group, that equates to aiding terrorists. Tlaib had also particularly angered the White House through her recently posted online video that accused President Biden of supporting genocide in the Gaza Strip, a seemingly undisputable assertion.

One might argue that even Congressmen are protected by the First Amendment right to free speech, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Bill of Rights does not apply when Israel is concerned, either in the halls of Congress or on college campuses, where Palestinian groups are being harassed and banned. The Tlaib censure vote can be seen as part of the bipartisan effort to protect the state of Israel from any and all criticism. Rashida Tlaib broke no law, did not threaten anyone, nor did she call for the destruction of any nation, yet she was excoriated by a series of her comrade-speakers in the House for something akin to a crime against humanity due to her turning against what was repeatedly described as one of America’s closest allies, a best friend and the only democracy in the Middle East, all of which are lies. Israel is no ally, which would require a certain reciprocity, a word that apparently does not exist in Hebrew. And in the current crisis Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated that he will not be moved by US interests to mitigate the slaughter no matter how much Blinken-Biden suck up to him to make him budge. And as for the claim of democracy, Israel only grants citizenship with full rights to Jews, hardly a democratic measure. Apparently, cutting off the massive amounts of US aid, including the current $14.5 billion to pay for exterminating the Palestinians, is not even on the table. Israel will always get its pound of flesh and will call all the shots in its relationship with Washington.

Tlaib’s comments are in the context of a White House that believes it is free to send bombs to Israel to slaughter Palestinian children — without even revealing how many plane loads of weapons have been delivered or are on their way. And then there are members of Congress like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who are free to advocate a “total war” against what he calls “the most extremist population on Earth,” i.e. the Palestinians. But verbal criticism of what is clearly a genocide and a massive violation of international law that has the US government as an accessory in a war crime is impermissible and there are even concerns that the Tlaib censure could become the foundation for a criminalization of any criticism of Israel under the assumption that all critics are ipso facto antisemites and the comments themselves amount to a “hate crime.”

Consider for a moment the precedents to Tlaib’s disgrace who are still in office untouched by any procedural steps to define what are acceptable rights of legislators. Beyond Senator Lindsey Graham’s unchallenged invitation to a mass murder, there is Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey whose apparent tendency to accept bribes has been a particularly lurid tale in part because much of the loot consisted of $480,000 in cash stuffed into jacket pockets, closets and in a safe, along with 13 gold bars, two of them marked as 1 Kilogram in weight to the value of more than $100,000. Both men are still walking around free of censure!

Israel’s love of the United States is only skin deep, if it is as much as that. Recall for a moment the comments by Israeli prime ministers on the nature of the relationship. Consider Ariel Sharon’s 2001 comment: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it… I don’t care what the American people think, I own the congress!” Or Netanyahu’s famous quip also in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily!” So that is what “America’s best friend’s” leadership actually thinks about the United States and its people! It is a cash cow to be milked and otherwise exploited for political cover before being disposed of when its usefulness is gone.

Sharon also famously said “I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian, I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him.” It squares the circle on why the Gazans erupted in rage on October 7th. Palestine was one nation from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea when Israel was founded in 1948. Since that time, Israel has been ethnically cleansing the Palestinians for three quarters of a century, has stolen and plundered their land, has replaced or eradicated hundreds of villages, has besieged Gaza for nearly 2 decades, and has engaged in mass starvation and now in genocidal mass killing. In the fighting preceding Israel’s independence, three quarters of a million Palestinians were driven from their homes and sent into refugee camps by Israeli militias, together with tens of thousands who were killed outright. Now the refugee camps in Gaza are being bombed together with churches, hospitals, schools and apartment blocks and we have only just learned that some Israeli officials are considering using one of their nuclear bombs to completely wipe out Gaza. It is surprising that the Palestinians have shown as much restraint as they have.

Given the damage that a corrupting Israel has done to America’s political system, it is important to ask what good the relationship with Israel has done for the average American whose tax dollars support the Zionist enterprise together with its plan to remove the Palestinians. The answer is that nothing good has come out of the so-called alliance, which has cost the US $260 billion in direct aid adjusted for inflation since 1946. Plus there is the large sum of $14.5 billion more recently approved and pending currently as some kind of war fund to enable Netanyahu to crush the Palestinians. Israel regularly gets $3.8 billion yearly in direct aid from the US Treasury, a gift from Barack Obama, that is more than what goes to all other countries combined. And there is also more-or-less “off the books” considerable additional money from special and joint military projects, dubious charities and state level development boards that bring the total up to roughly $10 billion per year, which does not include the billions in financial aid that are in reality bribes paid to Egypt and Jordan to maintain peace with the Jewish state. The handout from Uncle Sam helps make Israel a very wealthy country which can afford to give its Jewish citizens free health care and college education as well as subsidized housing.

And being joined at the hip to the Jewish state has a considerable downside, requiring the use of the US United Nations veto at regular intervals to protect the client state as well as involvement in unneeded wars in places like Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Libya with Iran coming up next. Nor has Israel hesitated to kill Americans when it felt that the US was not fully supportive of its interests and the White House is so constrained by its “alliance” that it has essentially covered up the crimes against its own citizens. Last year’s sniper killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which produced only a whimper from the Jewish dominated State Department, plus acceptance of Israeli lies about the incident, is a prime example. And then there is the killing of 34 sailors and the injuring of 172 more on the USS Liberty in international waters on June 8th 1967. The US Navy largely unarmed intelligence ship was monitoring the ongoing fighting with Egypt when it was attacked by Israeli planes and torpedo boats. Efforts to send US aircraft carrier warplanes to assist the ship were called back by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who also orchestrated a cover-up exonerating Israel from blame. One hopes he and his Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara are now burning in hell.

The US government is so averse to challenging Israel that many believe that there are other unrevealed influences at play, possibly to include the Jeffrey Epstein/Mossad pedophile sex trafficking caper. It has long been true that candidates for high office in the US are approached by agents of the Zionist lobby and coerced into signing a pledge to support Israel. In return, the candidates who accept receive substantial political contributions and positive media. If they say “no” they are frequently targeted for defeat and go the way of Cynthia McKinney, Charles Percy, William Fulbright, Pete McCloskey and Paul Findley.

Congressman James Traficant of Ohio was perhaps the most aggressive voice in Congress in the 1980s and 1990s in expressing a critique of Israel’s power. He was inevitably controversial and was eventually imprisoned for seven years on a corruption charge that many subsequently considered to be a government set up. He had argued, among other things, that “Israel has a powerful stranglehold on the American government” explaining how Israel was “controlling much of our foreign policy” and “influencing much of our domestic policy.” He claimed quite plausibly that former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz, working for Israel, had “manipulated” President George W. Bush into the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Traficant maintained in the 1990s that “We’re conducting the expansionist policy of Israel and everybody’s afraid to say it. They control much of the media, they control much of the commerce of the country, and they control powerfully both bodies of the Congress. They own the Congress.” If Traficant were still with us, he would be astonished to see how Jewish influence has actually increased, with 35 states having some rules or legislation punishing advocates of boycotts of Israel and bills currently before congress authorizing automatic war against Iran and even the expulsion of Palestinians from the US. The State Department has an ambassador who monitors so-called antisemitism and the White House has recently declared a war against what it describes as “surging antisemitism.”

Currently, everyone opposing the US engagement with Israel in its extermination of the Arab population in the area it controls is being labeled an anti-semite and speaking up for the Palestinians is becoming a good way to get kicked out of university and unemployed. Israel’s friends are busy compiling lists of students who support the Palestinians and are working on schemes to circulate their names to deny them jobs once they graduate. Rashida Tlaib is only the latest affront to the dignity and common sense of the US Constitution but she is certainly not going to be the last victim of the Jewish lobby, which must be labeled for what it is, made to register as the agent of the Israeli apartheid state, and excluded from unilaterally making the policies that all of us Americans have to pay the price for in the Middle East.

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

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Arab-Iran amity is a geopolitical reality

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | NOVEMBER 9, 2023 

The forthcoming first visit by Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi to Saudi Arabia on November 13 marks a milestone in the rapprochement between the two countries mediated by China in March. The relationship is fast acquiring a qualitatively new level of solidarity in the context of the Palestine-Israel conflict. 

This marks a shift in the tectonic plates in regional politics, which has long been dominated by the United States but no longer so. The latest China-UAE initiative on Monday to promote a ceasefire in Gaza was rounded off with an extraordinary spectacle of diplomacy at the UN headquarters in New York as the two countries’ envoys read out together a joint statement to the media. The US was nowhere to be seen. 

The events since October 7 make it abundantly clear that the US attempts to integrate Israel into its Muslim neighbourhood on its terms is a pipe dream — ie., unless and until Israel is willing to turn its sword into plowshares. The ferocity of the Israeli revenge attacks on the people of Gaza — “animals” —  smacks of racism and genocide.  

Iran knew all along the bestiality of the Zionist regime. Saudi Arabia too must be in a chastened mood following the wake-up call that it must first and foremost learn to live in its region. 

Raisi is heading for Saudi Arabia against the backdrop of a historic shift in the power dynamic. King Salman invited Raisi to speak on Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza at a special summit of Arab states, which he is hosting in Riyadh. This signifies a profound Saudi realisation that even its willingness to be involved in the Abraham Accords under American persuasion has alienated the Arab public.  

There is a fallacy in the western discourse about a Russia-China-Iran axis in West Asia. This is a nonsensical misinterpretation. A consistent three-fold foreign policy principle that Iran pursued right from the Islamic Revolution in 1979 is that, one, its strategic autonomy is sacred; two, the countries of the region must take their destiny into their own hands and solve regional issues themselves without involving extra-regional powers, and, three, foster Muslim unity howsoever long and winding that road might seem. 

This principle had severe limitations due to force of circumstances — principally, in the conditions engendered by the colonial policy of divide and rule pursued by the US. Circumstances were even deliberately engineered, such as the Iraq-Iran war, where the US encouraged the regional states to collaborate with Saddam Hussein to launch an aggression against Iran to stymie the Islamic revolution in its infancy. 

Another painful episode was the Syrian conflict. There, again, the US actively canvassed among regional states for a regime change in Damascus with the ultimate objective of targeting Iran by using the terrorist groups that Washington incubated in Occupied Iraq. 

In Syria, the US brilliantly succeeded in pitting the regional states against each other and the result is plain to see in the ruins of what used to be the throbbing heart of Islamic civilisation . At the peak of the conflict, several western intelligence agencies were freely operating in Syria assisting the terrorist groups to rampage the country whose cardinal sin was that, like Iran, it too consistently put primacy on its strategic autonomy and independent foreign policies through the cold war and post-cold war eras alike. 

Suffice to say, the US and Israel met with great success in fragmenting the Muslim Middle East by exaggerating the threat perceptions and convincing several Gulf Arab states that they faced direct threats or even attacks by Iranian proxies, as well as alleged Iranian support for dissident movements.

Of course, the US capitalised on it by selling huge volumes of weapons and more importantly, to finesse the petrodollar as a key pillar of the western banking system. As for Israel, it directly benefitted from demonising Iran in order to draw attention away from the Palestine issue, which has all along been the core issue in the Middle East crisis.

Suffice to say, the rollout of the Iran-Saudi-China agreement has reduced the hostility that existed between Riyadh and Tehran for the better part of the recent decades. Both countries sought to build on the momentum generated by the success of the secret Beijing talks with regard to their commitment to non-interference. It must be noted, however, that the relations between Gulf Arab countries and Iran had already improved significantly over the last two years.  

What western analysts miss is that the wealthy Gulf states are fed up with their subaltern life as sidekicks of the US. They want to prioritise their national life in directions they choose and with partners who respect them, eschewing any zero-sum mindset, unlike in the Cold War era, for reasons of ideology or power dynamic. 

That is why, the Biden Administration cannot accept that the Saudis today work with Russia on the OPEC+ platform to fulfil their commitment to extra voluntary oil supply cuts, while also negotiating with the US on nuclear technology, and at the same time moving on the diplomatic track with Beijing to douse the fire set ablaze in the Levant a month ago from spreading to the rest of the West Asian region. 

Evidently, the Saudis are no longer rolling with pleasure at the prospect of a US-Iran confrontation. On the other hand, Saudis and Iranians have a shared concern that their new thinking with primacy on development will dissipate unless there is regional stability and security.

Thus, it is sheer naïveté on the part of Washington to bracket Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran as one grouping — as Blinken did during his latest visit to Tel Aviv on Monday — and juxtapose it with the rest of the region. The canard that Hezbollah and Hamas are “terrorist” movements is about to be exposed. Truth be told, how are they any different from Sinn Féin, which was historically associated with the IRA?  

Such naïveté underlines the absurd US-Israeli-Indian venture to create a West Asian QUAD 2 (“I2U2”), which today looks laughable — or the quixotic plot hatched in New Delhi recently during the G20 summit to get the Saudis on board the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor project, with the fond hope that it “integrates” Israel and creates business for Haifa Port, isolates Iran and Turkey, rubbishes Russia-led International North-South Corridor and shows the middle finger to Beijing’s Belt and Road. Whereas, life is real. 

Taking all things into account, it is the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s regional tour to Israel and his summit with a select group of Arab states in Amman over the last weekend that has turned into a defining moment in the Gaza crisis.

The Arab foreign ministers point blank refused to buy into any of the invidious proposals put forward by Blinken with malicious intentions to preserve Jewish interests —  “humanitarian pause” instead of ceasefire; refugee camps for the people from Gaza escaping from Israel’s horrific, brutal attacks that would be funded with Arab money but would eventually lead to Jewish settlements in Gaza; contours of a post-war arrangement for Gaza that will leave the debris to be handled by the Palestinian Authority and reconstruction to be financed by the Gulf states while Israel continues to dominate it in the all-important security sphere; preventing Iran from going to the rescue of Hezbollah and Hamas as they are put into Israeli meat grinders of American make. 

It was rank hypocrisy. The Arab foreign ministers spoke up in one voice to articulate their counter proposal to Blinken’s — immediate ceasefire. President Biden seems to see the writing on the wall, finally — although,  intrinsically, he continues to be the world’s number one Zionist, as someone once called him, and his motivations are largely borne out of his own political survival as the 2024 election draws closer. 

Be that as it may, the high probability is that it is now a matter of time before the global community insists on stopping the Israeli apartheid state in its tracks. For, when Muslim countries unite, they call the shots in the emerging multipolar world order. Their demand that a settlement of the Palestine problem brooks no further delay has gained resonance, including in the Western Hemisphere. 

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in Gaza becomes inoperable following Israeli attack

MEMO | November 10, 2023

The Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in western Gaza City was rendered inoperative on Friday due to Israeli attacks, leading to the tragic death of a child because of oxygen deprivation, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported.

The hospital was targeted twice, its Director, Mustafa Al-Kalhalut, said, Anadolu Agency reports.

“One attack targeted the hospital’s gate and the other was directed at the departments in the hospital” the Director said in a release, adding that “the hospital suffered great damage and the patients were left without oxygen resulting in the death of one child.”

Al-Kalhalut highlighted that the power supply to life-sustaining equipment in the Intensive Care Unit, which housed several children, was also severed. As a result, the hospital has been unable to offer any services beyond the Intensive Care Unit, where eight patients were currently receiving treatment.

“No one could reach the hospital and ambulances on the road were also targeted,” the Palestinian doctor said.

The Director appealed to the Red Cross and international bodies for urgent assistance to rescue the staff and patients of Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital.

Almost all hospitals in the besieged Gaza Strip came under Israeli attacks and airstrikes in the last 24 hours, including Al-Shifa, which saw at least four rounds of Israeli airstrikes in the same period.

Israel has launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip – including hospitals, residences, and houses of worship – since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas on 7 October.

At least 11,078 Palestinians have been killed, including 4,506 children and 3,027 women. The Israeli death toll, meanwhile, is nearly 1,600, according to official figures.

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Protesters shut down UK arms factory to ‘disrupt Israeli war machine’

Press TV – November 10, 2023

Hundreds of trade union members have blocked the entrance of Britain’s largest weapons maker, calling for an immediate end to arms supplies to Israel amid the regime’s brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Demonstrators gathered outside the gate of the BAE Systems site in Rochester, Kent, on Friday.

They were holding Palestinian flags and chanting slogans like “Stop Arming Israel,” “ceasefire now,” and “How many kids have you killed today?”

One organizer said more than 400 trade unionists were involved in the action at the site.

Union members were calling for “an end to the UK government’s complicity in war crimes being committed in Palestine”, which includes an end to arms sales to the occupying regime and support for an immediate ceasefire.

A teacher and member of the Nation Education Union, who took part in the protest said, “As a teacher, seeing 185 schools and other educational institutions in Gaza bombed is utterly heartbreaking.”

“We’re here today to disrupt the Israeli war machine and take a stand against our government’s complicity and we urge workers across the UK to take similar action in their workplaces and communities,” she added.

The factory, run by BAE Systems, claims it does not directly export equipment to Israel. Activists say the company – which includes the site being blockaded – “provides 15% of the components in the F-35 fighter jets that are currently being used in the bombardment of Gaza.”

The value of components supplied by BAE Systems to Israel could be worth more than £300m since 2016, according to campaigners.

Similar protests were also held outside Israeli-owned factories in Britain.

Two of Israel’s biggest weapons factories, Elbit and Rafael, both have operations in the United Kingdom.

The governments of the UK, the United States and the European Union member states have been providing Israel with weapons and military assistance, since the regime launched its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip on October 7.

Palestinian officials in the besieged Gaza Strip say the Israeli regime has dropped more than 32,000 tons of explosives on the territory in its ongoing war of aggression.

Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the besieged enclave has now killed and injured more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Fallout From Catastrophic Ukraine Depleted Uranium Explosion Reached England

Sputnik – 10.11.2023

In May 2023, a powerful blast rocked the city of Khmelnitsky located in Ukraine about 200km away from the border with Poland when a Russian strike wiped out a Ukrainian ammunition depot where British-supplied depleted uranium was stored.

Dr. Christopher Busby, a physical chemist and scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, has stepped forward to address the naysayers who tried to discredit his warnings about the potentially dangerous consequences of the depleted uranium munitions depot explosion.

On May 19th I wrote an article for Sputnik about the Khmelnitsky explosion. I had examined gamma radiation data from detectors to the North West of the attack site, which showed increases in radiation from points in Poland near the Ukraine border, and through Germany. I concluded that the belief that a warehouse containing Uranium weapons supplied by the UK had been hit and that the Uranium had exploded in a huge fireball, and that the particles produced by the explosion had drifted with the wind at the time across Europe.

The article produced considerable argument on the internet, with a large number of self-described fact-checkers and “experts” weighing it to say that my conclusions were nonsense. This is how the internet is controlled these days. It was written off as a “Russian Fake” (e.g. fakenews.pl)

The fact is, that although Uranium is a weak gamma emitter, through its daughter Thorium-234, there are other situations where the gamma signal will increase at detectors, principally the natural radioactive gas, radon, which can increase during rainfall and low pressure systems. A Polish lab claimed that the increased signal was from Radon, reporting the presence of the Radon daughter Bismuth 214, as if to write off the claim of a Uranium cloud passing across Poland. But, I pointed out that there were no low pressure systems at the time that would explain the sudden increase in gamma. This is where the matter was left.

Uranium in air is not measured in Europe as far as I know, and the only data that is obtainable is the Uranium in air data from the High Volume Air Samplers (HVAS) at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston in Berkshire. These were set up in the early 1990s following a public enquiry into a child leukemia cluster near the site. The law requires AWE to measure Uranium (and Plutonium and Tritium) at regular intervals at positions near the factory but also far from the weapons factory. I have used these data before to identify Depleted Uranium from the Iraq wars that drifted to England.

So, to follow up the Khmelnitsky argument, I have just obtained Uranium data from the AWE using a Freedom of Information request. They sent me the data in an Excel File, and I used the graphical function if Excel to plot the data they sent. Fig 1 plots the filter levels for three of the offsite locations. The results show that I was right. In the May15th -June 15th Offsite Filters operating at the time, there is a very clear signal for the month following the explosion. I have also obtained data for the onsite locations, and these also all show the same footprint increase.

It may interest those who believe that the media is controlled, that the same thing happens with the scientific peer-review literature. I sent my paper on the increases in Uranium in air from the Ukraine war to two journals which have published my papers before, papers about the effects of Uranium. The first, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health totally refused to consider it. I then sent it to Conflict and Health, which sent it to a reviewer, but refused to publish it. This is astonishing, given that I supplied the raw data to both journals. I put the paper up on a preprints site where it received attention.

The graph in Fig 1 shows that the Uranium in air in South East England went up by about 600ng/cubic metre from particles released by the Khmelnitsky explosion. What does this mean? The mean size of a Uranium particle is below 1 micron. An individual inhales about 24 cubic metre a day. So, if the particles were there for a month, or 30 days we can average the lung intake as 0.432mg. Doesn’t sound much, does it? But it converts into 200 million particles per person in the area, and of course in the track of the plume in the UK. Not good, given the effects we found in Fallujah.

My study of Fallujah, published in 2010, showed that there was a huge increase in cancer and congenital malformation in babies, and general horrifying signal of genetic damage in the population after the use of Uranium weapons there in the second 2003 Iraq war. We later identified excess Uranium in the mothers of the birth defect children using hair samples and mass spectrometry, tracking the increases back to the 2003 exposures by cutting the long hair samples into sections, a kind of historic ice core way of interrogating the past.

Clearly from our studies in Iraq, the genetic and cancer health effects of Uranium particles are significant. Indeed, they are arguably the main cause of the cancer in the Hiroshima victims who were exposed to Uranium particles in the “black rain”.

Levels in Poland, Germany, and everywhere else on its journey to England, will have been much higher. But there are no measurements available.

Fig 1. 4-weekly air filter results for Uranium, offsite samplers at Aldermaston, Tadley, and Reading. Khmelnitsky Ukraine explosion was on 14thMay 2023 (1805-1506) s Normal background is 200.

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

Washington “botched up” and now Kiev must accept worse peace conditions – retired US Colonel

By Ahmed Adel | November 10, 2023

Kiev will have to accept even worse conditions in peace negotiations because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put his faith in the United States, former Pentagon adviser and retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor said in an interview with the Judging Freedom YouTube channel. Macgregor’s voice is not alone in sharing this belief, especially now that the world’s attention has shifted from Eastern Europe to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

“When he halted the advance of his forces in response to a stated willingness on the Ukrainian side to accept neutrality, he was being very serious,” the former Pentagon adviser said of Russian President Vladimir Putin, adding that then Washington intervened in the dialogue between Moscow and Kiev, and “that was all botched badly.”

Macgregor agreed with independent commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano’s view that the conditions in the Ukraine negotiations will not be the same as two years ago. In addition, Western elites continue to lie, according to the retired US colonel.

“Zelensky was promised everything, and Zelensky believed it. He’s going to end up like everybody else that’s ever cooperated with us over time, out of a job and maybe lose his life in the process,” Macgregor pointed out.

Earlier, Macgregor highlighted that sooner or later, the US will have to admit the truth about defeat in the Ukrainian conflict publicly.

Russia has repeatedly expressed its readiness for negotiations, but the Ukrainian authorities have imposed a legal ban on them. The Kremlin also noted that there were no prerequisites for the situation to become peaceful now while achieving the objectives of the special operation remained an absolute priority for Moscow.

Macgregor’s comments echo what Karen Kwiatkowski, a former US Air Force lieutenant colonel, also said in an interview with Judging Freedom.

“I don’t think he’ll be in Ukraine. I don’t wish him ill, but I don’t think he’ll be in Ukraine, and if he is in Ukraine, he might be underground,” said the expert, adding that the Kiev regime “destroyed their country, lost half their population” but will still end up with a similar peace deal that was offered to them beforehand.

Kwiatkowski drew attention to the recent death of Major Yuri Chistyakov, assistant to the commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. In her opinion, his apparent assassination signals the “collapse” of the Ukrainian political and military structure. She believes that Ukrainian politicians and generals are now worried about their survival.

The expert noted that reports about the West’s attempts to persuade Zelensky to conduct peaceful negotiations with Russia put him in a “terrible position he brought on himself in many ways. He’s done for.”

The entire world already sees Ukraine’s president as no more than a “US puppet,” she said. “The puppet master is done, the game was over, the show was over.”

Valerii Zaluzhnyi said in an article published on November 1 in The Economist magazine that Ukrainian forces have reached a stalemate and that “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”

In the five months since launching its counter-offensive, Ukraine has advanced by just 17 kilometres in one section of the long front, which itself speaks of the catastrophic failure. More disturbingly, these measly gains in the much-lauded counteroffensive, with the propaganda behind it beginning in autumn 2022, have come at an immense cost.

Ukraine’s armed forces lost approximately 90,000 military troops killed and wounded during the counter-offensive it launched a few months ago without accomplishing any substantial tactical successes, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu announced on October 30.

“Only since June 4 – that is, since the start of the West’s widely publicised and generously funded Ukrainian counter-offensive – Kiev has lost over 90,000 military personnel killed or wounded, 600 tanks, and nearly 1,900 armoured vehicles of various classes. At the same time, no tactically significant successes were made on the battlefield,” Shoigu said.

With the world’s attention now nearly completely shifted to the Middle East, Kiev has an even weaker negotiating position than it already had because of the catastrophic failure of the counteroffensive and the near destruction of its military. For this reason, Zelensky, even if he continues to deny it, is under increased pressure to open negotiations with Moscow.

NBC News reported on November 4, citing one current US official and one former US official familiar with the discussions, that Washington and Brussels have begun talking with the Ukrainian government about possible peace negotiations with Russia, including what they might need to give up. Reportedly, the discussions started in October during a meeting including NATO members due to concerns that the Russia-Ukraine war had reached a stalemate.

However, this is a false belief since the war is only at a stalemate because Russia has been in a defensive position, except in Artemovsk (Bakhmut) and a few other locations, for over a year. Once Moscow launches its offensive, the stalemate will be broken in a way that will devastate Ukraine. For this reason, Macgregor and Kwiatkowski are urging Zelensky towards accepting a peace deal [to avert] the loss of more life and territory.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 2 Comments