The US Navy Bought Surveillance Data Through Adtech Company Owned by Military Contractor Which Harvests Location Data From Smartphones
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 13, 2023
A report from 404 Media, for the most part based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, has put the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal that the US Navy was in business with an adtech company – that “just” happened to be owned by a major military contractor.
The company, nContext, is owned by Sierra Nevada Corporation, and what this triangle of surveillance was “keeping in the family” is the business of personal data changing hands, and reportedly, global (globally collected) data, at that.
404 Media writes that the public records it has seen show that the Navy was able to use a software tool (called, the Sierra Nevada nContext Vanir) that the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) uses for its surveillance operations around the world.
nContext, supposedly in the adtech (i.e., marketing) business, is behind developing that tool. However, the publicly available documents do not detail what kind of data the company had at its disposal, that was up for sale.
Above all, this is yet another example of how the ad industry – supposedly innocuous, other than for the suspicious amount of money it generates – actually can, and does at times work in insidious ways.
With this context in mind, the complexity and murkiness of the industry is perhaps not haphazard, but there to muddle up things as much as possible: because what this case shows is that an ad company can be collecting people’s data, allegedly for ad purposes (in and of itself, a highly controversial business) – but it then also gets available to all sorts of contractors, including those working closely with the US government, including the military and law enforcement.
The big picture: a government/country that is actively creating workarounds around its own laws and Constitution, which are supposed to mandate protecting citizens (including their right to privacy) – in this case, their private digital data.
“Crucially, when government agencies buy this data from a commercial entity, they can bypass legal restrictions put in place to protect the transfer and use of that information” – is how 404 Media describes this in its report.
In the specific case explored here, and in some previous Wall Street Journal articles, it appears that the information in question is location data taken from people’s phones and computers.
New Zealand whistleblower released on bail, meanwhile scientists debate meaning of leaked vaccine data
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 12, 2023
Scientists and statisticians continue to review and debate the accuracy and completeness of a large database of COVID-19 vaccine-related deaths released less than two weeks ago by a New Zealand Ministry of Health whistleblower.
Meanwhile, the whistleblower — Barry Young — was charged by New Zealand authorities with “accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes.” The 56-year-old appeared in Wellington District Court on Dec. 4. and was released on bail the next day.
Young, who also has used the pseudonym “Winston Smith,” was a computer systems programmer for New Zealand’s Ministry of Health, administering a computer payment system for certain vaccine administrators.
Police raided Young’s home on Dec. 3, and arrested him. Police raided the home of an associate the same day.
Young, who was reportedly offered two safehouses in New Zealand and one overseas but refused the offers, now faces at least seven years’ imprisonment. According to Newsweek, Young shouted “freedom” as he departed the courtroom on Dec. 4.
Young released the anonymized data with the assistance of Liz Gunn, a former lawyer, television journalist and candidate for public office for the NZ Loyal Party.
According to mathematician Igor Chudov, who analyzed the data, the database included information on the vaccine type, batch number, dose number, vaccination date, age, date of birth and date of death of the anonymized vaccine recipients.
The dataset was related to so-called pay-per-dose providers, such as individual doctors and drugstores. It did not include data on vaccinations administered at mass vaccination centers and by mobile vaccination clinics.
Data raise questions government ‘can’t ignore’
According to the New Zealand Herald, Health New Zealand, the national public health system also known as Te Whatu Ora, has opened an investigation and attempted to discredit the whistleblower, claiming Young “had no clinical background or expert vaccine knowledge.” Some analysts noted Young’s expertise in data administration.
Health New Zealand’s public messaging has centered around the security of personal data. “What [Young] is claiming is completely wrong and ill-informed … We take the security of the information we hold extremely seriously, and this is a significant breach of trust,” said Margie Apa, Health New Zealand’s chief executive.
In an interview with The Defender, Australian attorney Katie Ashby-Koppens said Health New Zealand was also granted an injunction from New Zealand’s Employment Relations Authority, prohibiting the publication of the leaked data.
Ashby-Koppens, who worked with New Zealand groups promoting medical freedom and transparency, questioned the legality of this injunction, which reportedly was used to pressure hosting providers to remove copies of the leaked data stored on their servers, leading some providers to remove accounts hosting the anonymized data.
Minister of Health Shane Reti sought to reassure the public about vaccine safety.
“There are many conspiracy theorists out there who unfortunately disseminate harmful disinformation, however, as Minister and as a physician, the public can and should continue to have confidence in vaccines,” he said. “I am reassured by experts confirming that there is no evidence supporting the allegations that have been made.”
According to the New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) media team, consisting of Dr. Cindy de Villiers, Dr. Alison Goodwin, Dr. Matt Shelton and Anna McLoughlin, such statements are a continuation of official COVID-19 narratives.
“The official mainstream media narrative is that New Zealand did very well during the pandemic, having negative excess mortality,” a spokesperson for NZDSOS told The Defender. “The New Zealand government and media have adopted a ‘shoot the messenger’ approach and then studiously ignored the issue, such that the average person on the street probably is unaware of what is happening in New Zealand.”
Yet, members of the public “who know what is happening absolutely support the whistleblower,” NZDSOS said, noting that “the media is so controlled and captured that large chunks of the population remain unaware of the data release or its significance.”
New Zealand authorities acknowledge only four COVID-19 vaccine-related deaths.
“The data has been very controversial, with people finding opposing things from their analysis of the data, despite being on the same side of the COVID debate,” Ashby-Koppens said. “The data is not complete [but] it raises a lot of questions, questions that the new New Zealand coalition government can’t ignore.”
Norman Fenton, Ph.D., a mathematician and professor emeritus at Queen Mary University of London, also examined the leaked data. He told The Defender the reaction of New Zealand’s authorities to the leak was “very strange.” He added:
“I understand that releasing confidential medical records is a criminal offense, but … the whistleblower only released an anonymized version of the data.
“Given the advanced publicity by people like Steve Kirsch about what the data revealed, I would have thought the New Zealand government would have been better advised to do nothing rather than raiding homes, arresting the whistleblower and erasing files from people who had gained access to the data. It is almost as if they wanted to get more publicity for both the data breach and what the data revealed.”
Presenting one possible reason supporting such an explanation, Fenton said:
“Not surprisingly, this has also led to conspiracy theories of which the most notable is that the government knew that this particular dataset did not contain (as some have claimed) any ‘smoking gun’ on vaccine safety and therefore it was deliberately released so it could be used to discredit ‘anti-vaxxers’ who claimed it did, and also act as a warning against any others who had access to more incriminating data to shut up.”
But for Kirsch, the founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation who examined the data and publicly claimed it proves that the COVID-19 vaccines killed 1 in 1,000 people globally, Young “is a hero.”
“He knew he would risk his life and could spend the rest of his life in jail, but he made the courageous move to expose the data for all to see,” he wrote.
According to NZDSOS, Young is due to appear in court again on Dec. 18 to submit a plea and is “represented by a large legal firm in New Zealand.”
Whistleblower noticed ‘really big safety signals’ in the data
In his Nov. 30 interview with Gunn accompanying the release of the data, Young said he helped build the very database from which the data were leaked. Access to such data led him to note items of concern that he decided to go public with, he said.
“I helped build it. I implemented it,” he said. “When I was looking up the data, I noted discrepancies with the dates of death. People were dying almost straight away after being injected and that sort of prompted my curiosity and I dug a little deeper.”
According to Young, he previously was vaccinated, but said that whether he’d get another dose was “a different story.” He added that he “believe[s] in fundamental freedoms of humans and [that] we shouldn’t have a procedure forced on us because of a mandate,” calling this “a huge overreach by the government.”
Following his release on bail, Young granted an interview to Infowars producer and host Alex Jones, stating that he noticed “really big red flags” and “really big safety signals” in the data. “Statistically, it may be killing people,” he said.
“I just looked at the data and what I was seeing, since the rollout, it just blew my mind. I was just seeing more and more people dying who shouldn’t have been dying. It was just obvious,” Young said. “I want people to analyze this … We need to open it up and the government needs to have an inquiry about it. Just bring it to the public’s attention.”
According to New Zealand police, Young’s post-bail interview with Infowars did not breach his bail conditions. He has since granted other interviews.
Scientists disagree on significance of data
According to NZDSOS, the leaked data “cover[s] vaccines that were administered as pay-per-dose. There are 2.2 million people and approximately 4 million doses included.” This compares to a total of 12.78 million doses administered in New Zealand.
Statistical consultant William Briggs is one of the analysts who reviewed the data. On his Substack, he wrote that “we cannot tell for sure” what the data definitively indicates, as there are important items of information missing.
“There was no cause of death given for anybody,” Briggs said. “Just death date for those who had at least one shot and died in this window. There can therefore be no certain proof of any cause of death,” he wrote.
Briggs added:
“An insurmountable problem in ascribing cause is the lack of data on people who did not get any shots. Their death and age data is missing. There is no comparison group for the people who got shots. …
“… this means there is no natural comparison group and nothing about cause, therefore, can be said with certainty.”
Briggs said that the data indicated a small increase in deaths among young people soon after receiving the first and second dose, but said this may be “because the young tended to get fewer shots.”
The analysis that has perhaps garnered the most analysis, though, comes from Kirsch, who wrote, “There is no confusion any longer: the vaccines are unsafe and have killed, on average, around 1 person per 1,000 doses.”
Kirsch noted that this figure “is consistent with other careful analyses,” such as one by Canadian scientist Denis Rancourt.
According to Kirsch, one safety signal he identified in the data is a “mortality hump that peaks around 6 months after a dose is given.”
“The data from New Zealand is not perfect; it is not a complete sample,” Kirsch conceded. “But, by using a cohort time-series analysis, it doesn’t matter. There is no possible way that this data is consistent with a safe vaccine.”
Fenton, who analyzed the data on his Substack, took a different position, telling The Defender, “The dataset is a very large subset of those vaccinated in New Zealand, and is potentially one of the most important publicly available datasets for examining COVID vaccine safety. But I don’t believe it is the ‘smoking gun’ as some have claimed.”
He noted the absence of a control group (the unvaccinated) and that “the age profile seems higher than the national age profile of [the] vaccinated, so there is some bias.”
However, he said the data “does provide some evidence of lack of safety of the vaccine, in particular supporting our own previous observations (from U.K. data) that in older age groups, all-cause mortality is higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.”
“What is less clear is the claim concerning batches with exceptionally high mortality rates,” Fenton said. “The claim that these batches were especially deadly due to the contents of the vaccine or its delivery is confounded by their very different age and time of vaccination profiles,” he added.
Chudov, in a pair of posts on Substack, also presented his analysis of the data. In his initial post, he suggested the public “be wary” of the data and noted that Gunn “is misinterpreting it by trying to pass normal nursing home deaths as evidence of ‘super deadly batches’ and ‘mass vaccine casualties.’”
In a follow-up post, Chudov acknowledged that some of his original questions about the completeness of the data were subsequently addressed, stating his belief that “Barry Young was more likely to be sincere than insincere in his intentions and actions.” Yet, he said his questions “about nursing home deaths and data quality still apply.”
Some analysts also pointed to official data indicating that excess deaths in New Zealand continue to be significantly above the long-term average — 17% in September and early October 2023, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Some also pointed to data indicating sharp increases in the incidence of heart attacks in New Zealand.
Yet, Apa said, “We assure people there is no evidence whatsoever that vaccination is responsible for excess mortality in New Zealand and that they can continue to have confidence in the vaccine,” in remarks quoted by the New Zealand Herald.
“We hope that additional independent assessment of the data by credible analysts will lead to further scrutiny of the vaccine rollout in [New Zealand] and that the whistleblower will not have risked everything for nothing,” activist group Voices for Freedom wrote.
Political questions surrounding the data leak, subsequent government actions
According to Voices of Freedom, Young reached out to them “a couple of years ago” and had reached out to several other organizations during this period, prior to telling Gunn about the data and releasing it with her assistance.
Voices of Freedom, as well as some other analysts, have nevertheless raised questions as to whether Gunn handled the release appropriately.
Young and Gunn told Infowars they attempted to contact Winston Peters, leader of the New Zealand First political party and current deputy prime minister and foreign minister, regarding the data, but were unsuccessful in doing so.
But according to analyst Tony Mobilifonitis, Peters “most likely is limited in what he can do because of the delicate politics of the three-party coalition.” Analyst Markus Mutscheller wrote that while Peters had previously “aligned with the NZ freedom movement … His priority is always to keep his position of power in the cabinet. Without it, he can’t do anything.”
NZDSOS told The Defender, “So far, there has been no public comment by NZ First or the ACT party, both of which championed a broader inquiry,” adding that Reti “is from the National Party, which firmly backs the use of mandated vaccines.”
“The Associate Minister of Health, Casey Costello, is from NZ First, who is well aware of what is happening. However, ministers are not able to comment on cases that are before the court,” NZDSOS added.
According to the New Zealand Herald, an inquiry examining New Zealand’s COVID-19 pandemic response has been convened. However, according to NZDSOS, it is unlikely to examine the leaked data, as the inquiry “specifically excludes vaccine efficacy and does not include vaccine safety.” Instead, it aims to “strengthen … preparedness for, and response to, any future pandemic.”
According to NZDSOS, “The new coalition government has promised a broader public inquiry, but terms and conditions have not been decided upon to date. It is not clear whether there will be additions to the existing inquiry or whether a completely new inquiry will commence. Our preference is for a brand-new inquiry.”
‘Still no letup’ in narrative that COVID vaccines are ‘safe and effective’
Several scientists, analysts and activists have called on the New Zealand government to release full, anonymized COVID-19 vaccine data and its own analysis.
“They should release the data on the unvaccinated so that a full direct comparison can be made,” Fenton said. “We also need all the (anonymized) patient-level data on new health conditions/hospitalizations since 2021, for both vaccinated and unvaccinated, so that we can determine the true level of vaccine adverse reactions.”
Similarly, NZDSOS said, “The best approach would be to release all the data in an anonymized form and for the Ministry of Health to discuss their analysis.”
Kirsch wrote, “Nobody will debate me on this,” adding that New Zealand authorities “should be releasing the full [12 million-person] record dataset to remove all doubt and prove to the world the vaccines are safe.”
“Clinical outcomes are never improved by keeping public health data hidden from public view,” Kirsch wrote. “Yet every health authority in the world has kept this critical record-level safety data hidden from view.”
In a subsequent Substack post, Kirsch wrote, “Health New Zealand: Where is your analysis of your data? Why aren’t you publishing it?”
Voices for Freedom called on New Zealand authorities “to be transparent with NZ’s vaccination data,” noting that “There appears to be no official denial of the accuracy of the downloaded Health NZ data set.”
NZDSOS said that New Zealand authorities have a history of not being transparent, telling The Defender that Official Information Act requests are fraught with “often lengthy delays and redaction of data” and the system “is not particularly functional.”
“Some of these requests have been acknowledged, but the length of time in releasing information of this kind in any form has been delayed time and time again … We have not heard of any data/information releases that have come out yet,” NZDSOS said.
Fenton said New Zealand authorities are not being forthcoming regarding the data because it would likely “reveal much more evidence on just how ineffective and unsafe the vaccines have been and on how it likely has led to increased all-cause mortality in all age groups who have taken it.”
“There is still no letup in attempts by governments and pharma companies to close down all discussion and evidence of vaccine harms and to maintain the ‘official’ line that these vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ and need to continue to be given,” he added.
“It appears that the measures taken to silence Barry and avoid discussing the data are designed to deter others from doing the same thing,” NZDSOS said. Similarly, Fenton shared his belief that “the very public actions taken against the whistleblower [were] likely intended to dissuade other whistleblowers everywhere, not just in New Zealand.”
NZDSOS said that prospective whistleblowers should nevertheless not be dissuaded.
“Do what will allow you to sleep at night. It is not about any legal advice, as we know that it is likely that the legal system is compromised. It is about doing what is right,” NZDSOS said. “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
Important points regarding the WHO’s proposed Pandemic Treaty and major changes to the IHR
By Meryl Nass, MD | December 11, 2023
The Committee roster can be found here.
1. The WHO is not an honest broker.
- a. Its Director-General has repeatedly lied about the WHO’s 2 proposed treaties: the pandemic treaty/agreement, and International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments, claiming they do not seize sovereignty, when there is no doubt they do precisely that. See Why Does the WHO Make False Claims Regarding Proposals to Seize States’ Sovereignty? by David Bell, MD, PhD and attorney Thi Thuy Van Dinh, PhD.
- b. The WHO appears to have deceived the public about whether the amendments “approved” in May 2022 followed the legally required procedure of a full WHA vote. Twelve members of the European Parliament wrote to the WHO on November 28, 2023 asking for evidence that the WHO actually conducted a vote of the entire World Health Assembly to pass several new amendments in May 2022, with a 48 hour deadline. The WHO did not respond, and the twelve European parliament members declared the May 2022 amendments null and void last week.
- c. The WHO’s principal legal office, Steven Solomon, stated in early October that the IHR working group did not have to follow the required procedure (found in the existing 2005 version of the International Health Regulations) to make public the draft of new proposed amendments 4 months in advance of a vote. Thus, we may not see the new amendments until after the WHO members have voted on them.
2. The WHO’s proposed treaties are unconstitutional
- a. They demand that nations perform surveillance of their citizens’ social media footprints and censor them to prevent ‘infodemics’ (too much information, according to the WHO’s definition), misinformation and disinformation, surveil
- b. They say that nations should give up the intellectual property rights of their citizens.
- c. There is no due process for the declaring or ending of public health emergencies of international concern, for which no standards exist.
3. In the Oct. 30 draft of the treaty, A new WHO Secretariat and Conference of Parties for pandemics are to be established in the future and will make their own rules. Thus, agreeing to this means providing a blank check to the WHO to do whatever it wants at some later date.
4. The 2 proposed treaties ignore existing international law prohibiting the proliferation of biological warfare agents (the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 2004 Security Council Memorandum 1540) and demand that nations search out new agents (a.k.a. “potential pandemic pathogens”) and share them with the WHO, which will “share them globally.” The WHO has already established a BioHub for this purpose and a Pathogen Access and Benefits System.
5. The proposed treaty and amendments also demand that nations perform 2 additional forms of surveillance of their citizens: microbiological surveillance of their populations, animals and ecosystems for pathogens, and surveillance and sharing of medical and hospital records, both of which violate privacy protections.
6. The proposed amendments remove the guarantee of “Human rights, dignity and freedom of persons” that are found in the current international health regulations.
7. The two proposed treaties are both binding, whereas the earlier IHR were recommendations only, apart from minor requirements for notification of certain outbreaks to the WHO. The two proposed documents would give the WHO and particularly its Director-General vast authority to manage healthcare globally. The current Director-General is not a medical practitioner and instead has a PhD in Community Health.
8. The WHO lacks the personnel and expertise to manage international pandemics and other health concerns. Any developed nation has within it much more capacity to understand and manage medical events within its borders, and likely international events as well.
9. The proposed treaty calls for rapidly produced vaccines and for nations to implement domestic legislation to permit the use of unlicensed medical products without manufacturer liability, instead “managing” the liability issues using existing models, such as the US’ Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, which has so far compensated 8 Americans for injuries related to EUA COVID products (primarily vaccines) from the 12,358 claims filed. https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data
10. It is apparent that in the process of developing the “Pandemic Accord” and amendments to the IHR, WHO/WHA positioned itself in a combined law-making/executive/expert/censorship role, which is a well-known path to usurpation of unrestrained power. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the proposed Amendments grant expressly such power to the WHO.
11. The WHO receives 85% of its funding from voluntary contributions, and only 15% from dues paid by its 194 member nations. Most of the voluntary contributions are earmarked for special projects that the WHO carries out. When President Trump withheld US funding in 2020, Bill Gates became the WHO’s top funder. The (unelected) WHO serves many private masters, yet seeks to govern the world’s population.
12. Virtually every recommendation the WHO made for managing the COVID pandemic was counterproductive. Why would we give the WHO the power to enforce the same bad advice on the US and world?
Dr. Meryl Nass Rejects Maine Medical Board’s Conditions for Reinstating Medical License
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 13, 2023
The Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine on Tuesday voted unanimously to extend the suspension of Dr. Meryl Nass’ medical license to a period of 39 months, saying she had violated rules set by the board in caring for three patients with COVID-19.
The board ruled that Nass, a biological warfare expert and an outspoken critic of federal COVID-19 policies, had “exhibited incompetency” or failed to meet standards of care in her treatment of the patients.
It imposed a fine of $10,000 toward hearing costs and a two-year probationary period during which Nass would be required to personally finance the costs of engaging professional oversight of her work, take courses in ethics and medical recordkeeping and undergo a competency evaluation, among other things.
The board issued its decision in a three-minute hearing during which neither side was permitted to present closing arguments.
Nass wrote on her substack that the hearing was an “anticlimactic finish” to a case that has dragged on since anonymous complaints were first filed against her in October 2021 for making “misleading” statements.
Those complaints were filed soon after the board issued a position statement, stating that licensees could face disciplinary action if they “generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation.”
Nass, a practicing internal medicine physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory board, was subsequently investigated by the Maine board and faced the initial suspension of her license on Jan. 12, 2022, for spreading COVID-19 “misinformation.”
The board also accused her of improperly prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for three patients for off-label uses of those drugs and failing to keep proper records and medical documentation.
Just prior to her first October 2022 hearing, the board suddenly dropped the charges of “misinformation,” but her license remained suspended and the board continued to investigate the charges related to her treatment of three patients with COVID-19, even though there were no patient complaints related to that treatment.
The board based their Tuesday decision on this set of charges.
Rather than conducting the hearings about the allegations against Nass over consecutive days, the board held single-day hearings about every other month since October 2022 — with Nass’s ability to practice medicine suspended the entire time.
During its seventh day of hearings in September, the board discussed its decision against her and a series of penalties that would be imposed on her. The six board members present and eligible to vote at the September hearing voted that her actions were grounds for discipline on eight of the 13 counts against her.
However, the board never formally finalized that decision and order, or responded to Nass’s inquiries about the decision until Tuesday’s hearing, Nass told The Defender.
Nass said she does not intend to comply with the conditions imposed by the board to recuperate her license, because “their interpretation of what happened and what I’m guilty of completely ignores all the testimony in the hearing that lasted almost a year.”
That included testimonies from Nass’ patients who, according to Nass’ attorney, all made “glowing comments” about her availability, her medical advice and her handling of their cases and expressed anger that Nass was being targeted by the board for their cases.
In total, Nass said that nine people’s testimonies and hundreds, or even thousands of documents demonstrating the legality and ethics of her practices were ignored by the board.
“What they essentially have done is said that I have to practice according to their way of looking at things, or I will never be able to get an unrestricted license back. So I will not be practicing medicine again, according to their requirements,” Nass said.
Instead, Nass is suing the board and its individual members in federal court, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution.
The complaint alleges the board engaged in retaliatory conduct against Nass, and suspended her medical license for publicly expressing her dissenting views on official COVID-19 policies, the COVID-19 vaccine and alternative treatments.
“Because she was outspoken, the board targeted Dr. Nass as someone to silence,” her attorney, Gene Libby told The Defender in August when Nass filed the lawsuit.
CHD President Mary Holland agreed. Speaking to Nass about the board hearings on CHD.TV in September, she said the hearing sounded like a “show trial” that is “really about showing a power dynamic” rather than about seeking justice or finding out what happened.
Holland said it seemed Nass was targeted “to send a message to doctors everywhere that, ‘You don’t get to do what you think is in the patient’s best interest. You do what we tell you to do.’”
The first round of oral arguments in Nass’ lawsuit against the board is scheduled for Jan. 10, 2024, before Judge Jon Levy in Portland, Maine.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
A New Standard By Which to Measure Infamy
Reality is just more collateral damage in the war on Gaza – and humanity (part II of a series)
(part I, on Israel’s experiments in televised genocide and the international community’s suicidally obsequious response, is here)
Helen of desTroy | December 12, 2023
With all eyes on the historically unprecedented bloodbath Israel is unleashing in Gaza, the transnational parasite class headquartered there is working overtime to accelerate the expansion—and criminalization—of “antisemitism” in the West, taking advantage of the geopolitical chaos they’ve unleashed to expand the sphere of attitudes and behaviors thus classifiable as rapidly as possible in the hope that even the most outrageous overreach will be perceived as the New Normal once the political atmosphere re-congeals. It’s a cynical gambit, but alarmingly likely to succeed, given their top-down control of the media and their previous success in both broadening the term’s definition beyond recognition and shoehorning that expanded definition into law (discussed at length elsewhere on this site) in both public and private life.
Smashing the Overton Window
When several dozen Harvard University campus organizations signed their names to an open letter stating “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the October 7 Hamas raid, the risibly-named hasbara group Accuracy in Media targeted the students with billboard trucks featuring their photos alongside the text “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” deploying the trucks first on campus and later to students’ parents’ neighborhoods with the stated goal of turning them into unemployable pariahs. Included on the display was a website urging the reader to petition Harvard’s board of trustees to expel these “despicable, hateful students” and their organizations — all over a letter that contained no references to Jews and limited its criticism to the Israeli government. AIM president Adam Guillette nevertheless boasted of rigging Google search results for the targeted students’ names to prominently display the smear site, telling the New York Post that the letter-writers’ failure to “explicitly condemn Hamas” constituted overt antisemitism. Similar libel-on-wheels campaigns were inflicted on Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, the latter targeting university president Elizabeth Magill herself for having allowed the campus to host a literary event featuring Palestinian writers that one detractor bizarrely referred to as an “antisemitic Burning Man” — weeks before the raid.
The same campuses were simultaneously deluged with complaints — cc’ed to any media outlet within kvetching range – from wealthy, mostly Jewish donors (including Jeffrey Epstein’s benefactor Leslie Wexner in high moral dudgeon) demanding crackdowns on the imaginary plague of “antisemitism on campus,” up to and including the firing of professors over their advocacy for Palestine and the ouster of university presidents for allowing that advocacy to take place. The Anti-Defamation League and other hasbara groups backed by compromised toadies like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio framed college fixtures like Students for Justice in Palestine as literal terrorists starting pogroms in the cafeteria. Astroturfed “student groups” like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Israel Alliance” fostered this delusion, bending the ear of domesticated media with claims that students lying on the floor to protest the slaughter in Gaza in a classic “die-in” protest somehow posed a threat to the safety of Jewish students, in a sick echo of Israel’s own claims that flattening entire Palestinian neighborhoods is necessary for “self-defense.” That none of these episodes of antisemitic “intimidation” were ever recorded on the thousands of smartphones in their vicinity was immaterial — the media establishment knew which side of its challah was buttered. After students at both Harvard and Columbia Law Schools reportedly had job offers rescinded for signing onto their respective schools’ open letters in support of Gaza, over two dozen of the largest law firms in the US leaned into the supposedly antisemitic trope of “Jews control the legal system” and wrote a sternly-worded directive to the nation’s top law schools to crack down on the scourge of “antisemitic harassment” or risk none of their graduates ever working in the industry again. Collective punishment — it’s not just for Palestinians anymore.
Within weeks, UPenn, Harvard, and Columbia had all announced antisemitism “task forces,” complete with plans of action lifted directly from the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a self-righteous panderfest that sank without a ripple when it was unveiled earlier this year. Columbia suspended its chapters of SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace. Pro-Palestinian professors targeted by petitions backed by the hasbara machine were forced to eat their words to keep their jobs — and more than a few were forced out anyway. Several of the Harvard student groups that signed the fateful open letter issued public retractions in a panicked bid to save their employment prospects as a growing swarm of hedge funders and corporate CEOs demanded the school furnish them with the membership rosters of those groups to use as a “do-not-hire” blacklist, and the Harvard Law Review spiked a thoroughly-vetted article on Israel’s genocide in Gaza (a piece the journal had commissioned from a Palestinian doctoral candidate just weeks before) not because it contained factual errors, but because a majority of the journal’s 100 editors feared for their own career prospects.
The individuals whose lives are upended by this kind of socioeconomic terrorism are mere collateral damage in a campaign that is clearly aimed at all of academia, the Frankfurt School’s tried-and-true shortcut to the American collective consciousness. The targeted schools were selected for their potential to set a nationwide trend, as hedge fund parasite and UPenn donor Marc Rowan acknowledged in his demand that university president Liz Magill be fired for not immediately begging forgiveness for allowing a student group to host a Palestinian writers’ festival on campus two weeks before the Hamas raid, rather than their vulnerability to pressure campaigns. Harvard has more money in its endowment than over half the countries on Earth and could easily weather the storm if a few snowflake donors opted to skip their usual conspicuous displays of philanthropy this year, and the other two aren’t far behind. That students at 100 colleges staged a walkout for Gaza even after weeks of this treatment speaks to a massive shift in public opinion, and ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt can be heard freaking out about the “major generational problem” Israel faces with regard to Generation Z on a leaked phone call with fellow Lobby bigwigs obtained by Iranian media last month.
The genocidal cat may be out of the bag, but Big Parasite is determined to ram it back in, tie the bag back up, and drown it in the Dead Sea. It was thus not especially surprising when Susan Sarandon, already reviled among liberals for her refusal to ditch her principles to support Hillary Clinton in 2016, was fired by United Talent Agency for suggesting Jews lacked a monopoly on suffering during a speech she gave at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York, or when screenwriter Aaron Sorkin fired his agent, Maha Dakhil, for accusing Israel of genocide in an Instagram post, or even when Lebanese-born porn star Mia Khalifa lost her Playboy podcast over tweets expressing empathy with Palestinians. Everyone knows Jewish elites have called the shots in the US entertainment industry since its birth. But with control of academia seemingly slipping away, anything less than total ideological lockstep in Hollywood has become suddenly intolerable. The industry’s failure to issue a full-throated demand for bloody vengeance immediately following the Hamas raid, the New York Times declared breathlessly, was not just an outrage, but an antisemitic one. And Hollywood’s faithful didn’t stop at denouncing their colleagues — they unloaded on everyone from the establishment media editors who correctly reported Israel’s airstrike on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, to the Writers’ Guild of America (which had just secured favorable contracts for its members after a months-long strike but hadn’t condemned Hamas fast enough), to the TikTok executives unable to inflate traffic for pro-Israel hashtags to the same level as pro-Palestine terms with the platform’s established censorship algorithms. By failing to suppress all pro-Palestine discourse, TikTok executives were enabling the next Holocaust, dozens of Jewish celebrities nearing their sell-by dates, including Amy Schumer, Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman, informed two of the platform’s Jewish executives in a Zoom struggle-session that would have been hilarious if not for its real-world repercussions. Armed with cooked data from the ADL, which had conveniently begun counting all pro-Palestinian protests and uses of phrases like “from the river to the sea” in its already-skewed accounting of “antisemitic incidents,” the industry’s dregs literally demanded TikTok (and other social media platforms) give them a magic button to press to disappear the “hate” — which the executives promised to do to the best of their ability. Calls to shut TikTok down have predictably surged among Republican politicians, particularly primary candidates who seem to be campaigning harder for Israeli political office than any in the US. Nikki Haley claimed during last week’s debate that every half-hour of TikTok use made a person 17% more antisemitic, a howler that met with zero laughter from an audience obediently spooked by the platform’s power after Israeli operatives had astroturfed a campaign around Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” to frame TikTok as a hive of antisemitism seducing impressionable young minds to the dark side. If they could not dupe young Americans into supporting Israel as they had their parents, Big Parasite would have to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
cleanliness is antisemitic
Selling savagery
To ensure opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza becomes guaranteed career suicide, the Israeli Lobby must widen the exception it has already (and wildly unconstitutionally) carved out of the First Amendment for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to include pro-Palestinian speech of any kind. Congress did the heavy lifting earlier this month with a full-frontal assault on the dictionary, explicitly expanding the already bursting-at-the-seams concept of “antisemitism” to include anti-Zionism. Adopted unanimously save for lonely vertebrate Rep. Thomas Massie, the resolution bemoans a world in which protesters can “spew hateful and vile language amplifying antisemitic themes” in the US’ capital and “4 masked men” can tear an Israeli flag off the wall of a Philadelphia restaurant but is apparently OK with 150 Palestinian children being blown sky-high every day by American-made bombs dropped by Israel’s finest.
But while simply declaring anti-Zionism is antisemitism makes Big Parasite’s job manufacturing consent for its Gaza genocide much easier, it is as fundamentally incompatible with reality as declaring steel a vegetable or Israel a democracy. Jewish religious doctrine has no place for Zionism — Jews aren’t supposed to return to the Holy Land until the Messiah shows up, and most of them don’t recognize any past or current claimants to that title — but then most of Israel’s inhabitants aren’t particularly religious, and the ones that are wouldn’t be caught dead fighting for the IDF, details generally left out of stateside hagiographies of the “special relationship.”
A who’s-who of controlled opposition has been deployed to sell Israel’s case for ethnic cleansing, led by purported free-speech crusaders from histrionic trainwreck Laura Loomer and Musk-anointed professional whiner Bari Weiss to conservative college blog CampusReform. The latter’s content transformed practically overnight on October 8 from criticism of woke damage and thought-policing in higher education to a baying chorus of self-righteous slopaganda-spewers suggesting those who oppose the IDF’s brutality should be not only deplatformed but personally harassed, many articles including lists of names of professors and even students whose only transgression was opposing the Israeli occupation. That such spiteful malingering brought this supposedly conservative outlet into ideological lockstep with professional Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Michael Rapaport, who not only conflated failure to condemn Hamas with antisemitism but threatened these newly-minted “antisemites” with the withdrawal of financial support from their projects, supposedly on behalf of a cabal of Jews who were “making a list” in order to punish the insufficiently-genocidal in the future, does not appear to bother anyone on the Right. Indeed, Rapaport has done a 180 and embraced the candidacy of the man he endearingly refers to as “Pig Dick” for president, thanks apparently to the latter’s unquestioned subservience to Israel, and his fellow grifters in the Trump camp have welcomed him as the prodigal son.
At the same time as the Right was extending its Big Tent to include anyone who could hold up an Israeli flag without shitting themselves, conservative influencers who strayed even slightly from the path dictated by Tel Aviv in the hours after Hamas’ incursion were publicly and messily sacrificed, no matter how enthusiastically they had deep-throated the Zionist cause in the past. Charlie Kirk, the founder of conservative campus group Turning Point who is regularly heckled at his own events for his slavish devotion for Israel, was publicly crucified as an antisemite for suggesting someone in Netanyahu’s government must have known about Hamas’ plans before October 7. Abandoned by the Zionist masters he’d relentlessly shilled at the cost of his early grassroots supporters, a suddenly-friendless Kirk began manically cucking to atone for his moment of doubt, even as those initial suspicions were completely validated by the news that Tel Aviv had not only had Hamas’ exact invasion plan in hand a year before October 7 but had ignored numerous warnings by IDF troops stationed at the Gaza border who observed Palestinian militants “rehearsing” the plan in the weeks preceding that invasion.
The most valuable horse in Netanyahu’s stable is billionaire troll Elon Musk, the self-appointed guru of “free speech absolutism” (now with more loopholes). Fresh off suing neoliberal-centrist smear merchant Media Matters over a ruinous outbreak of advertiser boycotts supposedly triggered by a manipulation of Twitter that forced ads to appear alongside neo-Nazi content, Musk simped his way across Israel earlier this month, dutifully parroting his hosts’ explanation that they were slaughtering the people of Gaza because Palestinians “think it’s OK to kill civilians” (the 18,000 civilians Israel has massacred in the space of two months having apparently been murdered only with extreme regret). He even repeated the claim that Palestinian hatred for Israelis must stem from antisemitic propaganda they’re taught as kids in school rather than the reality of living with those Israelis’ boots on their necks and spit in their eyes for generations. With regular condemnations from the Anti-Defamation League bolstering his anti-woke cred, Musk convinced millions of adoring fanboys that he had bought Twitter to return it to its mythical heyday as the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party™ by occasionally tweeting into the tamer fringes of the Narrative — despite ratcheting up obedience to government censorship requests, putting a World Economic Forum lackey in the driver’s seat, and building a privatized social credit score system far worse than anything ever actually seen in China. The Israeli trip punctuated his latest redemption arc, which began when he questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians and really caught fire with an acknowledgment that “Jewish communities” aren’t huge fans of white people before our hero learned a Valuable Lesson about the legitimacy of genocide in the service of real estate acquisition. When he flipped off New York Times DealBook smarm-meister (and close personal Musk friend of 16 years) Andrew Ross Sorkin onstage after coming home, credulous dissidents across the West swooned.
The Lobby deliberately courts influencers with cross-partisan appeal like Musk, Democratic congresswoman-turned-Fox News pundit Tulsi Gabbard, and vaccine safety advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to create the false impression that a Zionist consensus supersedes all the usual sociopolitical divides. These assets are allowed to gain political traction with vocal, even eloquent opposition to the US’ Israel-fellating neocon foreign policy, and only once their antiwar or pro-First Amendment bona fides are firmly established are they ordered to “come out” as pro-Israel. Their most devoted followers will dutifully embrace their incongruous drift into warmongering and censorship, accepting cognitive dissonance as the cost of doing business (don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good! ) and even coaxing some skeptics into riding that sunk cost fallacy all the way into the pasture of Righteous Goyim. A thick folder of compromising material is kept by these assets’ handlers, capable of being deployed piecemeal to ensure that anyone who starts to get cold feet over duping their followers into embracing the violent racist death cult currently occupying Palestine can be persuaded to resume full obedience before they’ve passed the point of no return. Big Parasite loves a good ritual humiliation, and there’s nothing like dangling the tapes from those long-ago trips through the friendly skies on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express in front of a hungry reporter to make even an intelligent person spout the most aggressively ignorant Ziofascist thuggery this side of a Likud party meeting while flanked with obscene grifters like Shmuley Boteach, declaring with a straight face that the IDF is not only the most moral army in the world but does not — has never! — deliberately target(ed) civilians.
On the record advocating for Palestine? They can probably still use you, given how few people can stand by what Israel is doing in Gaza without becoming violently ill. Just publicly recant your ideological crimes, preferably with a pained look on your face, and start puking out cult dogma, as Musk did while Israeli President Isaac Herzog clapped like a seal during the former’s apology tour. Countless social media influencers have come forward since October 7 showing off emails from Israeli PR firms offering insulting sums in exchange for “sponsored” content, a poisoned hook that not only renders the entire pool of Israel/Palestine social media content questionable but allows Israel to claim plausible deniability regarding its own dismal performance in TikTok’s metrics — see, those dastardly Palestinians must be paying for their traffic, maybe we should ban TikTok after all! And when Israel can’t get their (wo)man, they are not above using AI to fake it. Model Bella Hadid, whose Palestinian father’s family lost their home in Safed during the 1948 Nakba when a Jewish refugee family from Europe to whom the Hadids had given shelter took over their home while the Hadids were away, was deepfaked into an apology video in which “she” recanted her past support for Palestine and embraced Israel, claiming to have “taken time to truly learn the historical context.”
October 7 is the new January 6
Big Parasite’s efforts to collapse any daylight between “free-speech” crusaders and Zionist zealots is a desperate bid to prevent any empathy from developing between its own victims in Palestine and in Washington — specifically those who’ve found themselves in social-credit purgatory, unable to board a plane or open a bank account due to attending the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” protest. Despite similar experiences with over-the-top Orwellian surveillance and harassment by Big Brother and Big Tech for behavior which no reasonable person would define as crime, conservatives have been repeatedly lied to by Israel-affiliated “America First” sites like Breitbart and the Free Beacon that they have absolutely nothing in common with Palestinians and Palestine advocates who’ve been facing similar treatment from the US government for so long that an entire organization, Palestine Legal, arose to defend them in court. When hundreds of Jewish peace activists were arrested on Capitol Hill a week after the Hamas raid, J6 patron saint Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused her colleague and Congress’ sole Palestinian, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, of leading a “pro-Hamas insurrection,” demanding Tlaib be censured and the demonstrators receive the same harsh sentences as the Stop the Steal crowd. She justified her sudden embrace of the police-state tactics she’d railed against for the previous two years by offering up the stale hasbara nugget that to be pro-Palestinian was to support Hamas, citing the ADL — which has called Greene herself “somewhere between deranged and demented” — in her desperate reach to denounce Jewish Voice for Peace as an extremist group.
Similarly, when conservatives better known for fighting the Biden administration’s unconstitutional crackdown on social media had a chance to join hands across the aisle with liberal university presidents struggling to flex their own disused First Amendment rights against the Lobby’s McCarthyite demand for a loyalty oath during this month’s campus antisemitism hearing, they chose instead to join the neocons in piling on the Ivy League women. It wasn’t so much the universities’ insufficient bubble-wrapping of the Jewish Campus Experience™ that bothered what should have been natural allies, but not hiring “enough” conservative and/or pro-Trump faculty and for overdosing on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion kool-aid — claims that were at best irrelevant, at worst unproven, and made the questioners look like petty bullies trafficking in entitled male resentment.
Billed as a hearing on “college campus antisemitism,” the House Education and Workforce Committee’s sadistic four-hour interrogation of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT last week proved once again the impossibility of appeasing one’s way out of tyranny. Despite having cooperated promptly and exhaustively in reorienting their universities’ campus life around the fictional scourge of antisemitism after October 7, dropping everything to assemble a whole new layer of bureaucracy capable of protecting the Ivy League’s Jewish snowflakes from accidental contact with student activism, Claudine Gay (Harvard), Liz Magill (UPenn), and Sally Kornbluth (MIT) were bullied and harassed in the name of stopping antisemitic bullying and harassment by making speech the Lobby doesn’t like an actionable disciplinary offense. When none of the presidents cracked under the full gale force of Rep. Elise Stefanik’s pearl-clutching tantrum even after she revealed their universities would be turned inside out with Title VI investigations, a nasty little tactic capable of ripping a multi-million dollar hole in one’s institution, one of UPenn’s Jewish sugar daddies threatened to drill an even bigger hole in the school’s war chest if Magill was allowed to stay, claiming he had anonymously donated $100 million in options from his Stone Street Asset Management firm — and that those options could be yanked back the minute he felt the school was no longer representing his Values faithfully. Because the board didn’t want to play chicken with a $100 million gift — not when there was a nice responsible Jewish girl already standing by as vice-chair waiting to fill Magill’s uncooperative shoes — it was done.
Greenblatt was soon troping up a storm on CNN as he gloated about Magill’s demise, claiming he could have helped UPenn — they’d contacted him, after all, as had Harvard — but they just wouldn’t do what he wanted. This wishlist had somehow metastasized from establishing an antisemitism task force to ordering that task force to ‘solve’ antisemitism within a designated time frame, purging university curricula of references to Israeli apartheid, adopting a hate speech code prominently featuring the bloated-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness IHRA definition of antisemitism (long since rejected by its creator as unfit for purpose) to be centered within a revamped Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, and correspondingly stepped-up punishments meted out to students, professors, administrators, and even the university itself if a Jewish student felt momentarily uncomfortable. Meanwhile, for hesitating before stripping students of their rights, then apologizing for crimes they did not actually commit, these university presidents have been doubly condemned to eternal “Jewish media torture” (for some idea of what to expect, refer to the character assassination of British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn).
The aim of the elaborate and frankly absurd manipulations Big Parasite has visited upon the minds of the West over the last two months is to normalize the most severe punishments for the slightest deviation from total fealty to the Israeli line — not so much shifting the Overton window as throwing a cinderblock through it in an epistemological Kristallnacht while somewhere, Jonathan Greenblatt screams like a little girl. Such upheaval is deliberately, unmanageably chaotic to ensure it cannot be reversed without extreme difficulty. It is now supposedly normal to be blacklisted, to lose one’s job and to get suspended from school for uttering “free Palestine.” Being refused a hotel room — or one’s constitutional right against self-incrimination — because of perceived failure to adequately condemn events that transpired halfway around the world and have no bearing on one’s life is not only viewed as socially legitimate but expected. The popular pro-Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea” was alchemically transmuted in a matter of hours on October 7 into a terrorist threat meaning the genocide of all Jewish Israelis (when in reality Jews peacefully lived among the Arab population of Palestine when it stretched from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea before the 1948 Nakba), and merely uttering it on Twitter – or even using the word “decolonization” – is cause for suspension, courtesy of Elon “I pretended to sue the ADL so you’d let me hand over your biometrics to Israel” Musk. An entire Twitter account with accompanying website was created to cement a bogus equivalency between removing posters of Israeli hostages from the American walls they’ve been irrelevantly posted on and “Jew hate.” Such “hate” need not mention Israel or Jews at all — Starbucks sued its own employee union over their social media posts expressing solidarity with Gaza, and the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce launched a campaign against the popular cafe chain with the slogan, “Drinking a cup of Starbucks is drinking a cup of Jewish blood.” Wave a Palestinian flag at a protest? You might as well be heiling Hitler.
To make sure this avalanche of fraud stays put, Big Parasite has made a bold grab for the control room of the internet itself, consolidating what is already near-total control so as to prevent even the slightest pin-pricks of light from hitting the retinas of the populations they must keep in the dark to complete their atrocities unmolested. In October, the US Federal Communications Commission quietly passed a measure giving itself total control of the transmission of all content across US internet infrastructure in the name of upholding “equity,” leaning on an already legally-absurd concept in order to justify something so far outside the bounds of law it might as well have been written in feces on the walls of an asylum. The agency’s own commissioner, Brendan Carr, took to social media to warn Americans what was in the works, explaining that the plan “hands the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the country.” Just as the people of Gaza have been all but muzzled by Israel’s deliberate shutdown of electricity and internet and blockade of fuel deliveries to the enclave, so will Americans find that their words can no longer reach an audience — either inside the US or outside its borders — if the FCC thinks it might hurt an influential Jew’s feelings. This is not speculation — the ADL made the argument for targeting internet infrastructure to suppress wrongthink earlier this year, and especially after the Biden administration had its wrist slapped for playing Ministry of Truth at the platform level with the Missouri v Biden decision, it has become abundantly clear to Big Parasite that preventing the transmission of such material is a much more final solution than trying to prevent its publication.
Preemptive self-defense
By equating pro-Palestinian speech with the literal genocide of Jews, Big Parasite’s agents in the West are not just dismantling the last remaining safeguards against state-sponsored censorship — they are opening the door to monstrous acts of “preemptive self-defense,” a concept only the diseased minds running the Israeli government would ever have had the chutzpah to attempt in real life. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked cited just such a rationale for killing Palestinian children, whom she memorably referred to as “little snakes” in 2015, while the IDF’s “one shot, two kills” t-shirt has become a critical artifact for understanding the Israeli mind. As a desperate Israel runs out of threadbare narratives to brandish in the hope of distracting from the abattoir it’s operating in Gaza, American dissidents risk losing quite a bit more than just their jobs when they challenge Bibi the butcher.
coming soon to a boardroom near you
Israel has made it clear: support for Palestinians is support for Hamas. Anyone found to be supporting Hamas is a terrorist. All terrorists must die. And by the way, we’re gonna send the IDF around to all your countries — if Mossad isn’t already there — to make sure we got them all. Oh, and the US Congress has decided anti-Zionism makes you a terrorist too. Sleep tight!
The line between character assassination and actual assassination has never been thinner, especially with Big Parasite’s control of AI — both through operational algorithms and the feeder material, which is sourced from Wikipedia or its even less reliable cousin Wikidata more often than you’d like to think. They do not need TikTok users’ approval or even consent to insert the most aesthetically and morally repugnant content directly into the collective consciousness, especially once Musk fanboys start lining up for their Neuralinks and find themselves completely unable to question why their thoughts are suddenly expressed with an Israeli accent (“the tewwowists are coming!”)
Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer chillingly predicted his own demise as the result of “Bari Weiss and her likes” in a tweet less than a month before Israel bombed his sister’s house last week, killing him and half a dozen family members. Below a screenshot of his inbox, which was overflowing with poorly-spelled death threats, was a tweet from the perennially-butthurt Weiss spotlighting him for joking about whether an Israeli baby supposedly found in an oven in the world’s least original atrocity propaganda recipe had been cooked “with or without baking powder.” Weiss, like Musk, Gabbard, Kennedy, and any of countless other controlled-oppo personalities, presents herself as a fierce foe of cancel culture while hypocritically embracing it against anyone opposed to the genocide of Gaza, to the point that she has apparently moved up to helping cancel them for real.
the next butthurt loser you mock online might be working for Peter Thiel
Weiss last week retweeted an ominous message from Palantir, the Orwellian “security” firm founded by billionaire technofascist Peter Thiel. The company, it said, had opened its arms to Jewish students pissed that their universities wouldn’t evict pro-Palestinian students from campus wholesale. Palantir has offered such wannabe-Kissingers positions in a secretive new initiative apparently targeting those universities — and potentially anyone else who gets in the way, since putting killing machines in the hands of insecure nerds with grudges is not exactly self-limiting — with “actions on the battlefield.”
Witnessing the rollout of this repressive control agenda should only spur dissidents to greater activity, as many are beginning to understand — at least on a subconscious level — that if Gaza and the West Bank fall, these predators will come knocking on our doors (and while Jonathan Greenblatt may look like Nosferatu, he does not have to be invited in). Thousands of artists, writers and performers have hit back against the effort to delete Palestine from the discourse as a pretext for deleting it from history, fully aware that the censorship campaign they are facing off against represents an existential threat precisely because of the heavy-handed unpersoning of so many of their peers. One day we may find ourselves “deplatformed” only to realize we have to pay a toll to reenter the real world — and it’s Worldcoin or no world for you.
The twin spirals of silence and complicity are already twisting into an epistemological barbed wire fence, completing the Total Demoralization project that has been underway since Zionism took its first breath and shouted that this planet was not big enough for the both of us. They are correct — it isn’t big enough at all — but it is not we who have to go.
Britain secretly sent 500 extra troops to Cyprus base being used to supply weapons to Israel
By Matt Kennard | Declassified UK | December 12, 2023
Britain secretly deployed 500 additional troops to its bases on Cyprus after Israel began bombing Gaza, it can be revealed.
The UK government has said previously that it deployed 1,000 troops to the East Mediterranean to support Israel but it did not reveal how these troops were distributed.
But in a letter to Alba MP Kenny MacAskill, seen by Declassified, defence minister James Heappey wrote that on 27 November half these troops were in Cyprus.
Britain now has “approximately 500 additional service personnel deployed to Cyprus,” Heappey wrote in a surprising admission.
Britain has two “Sovereign Base Areas” on Cyprus – known as Dhekelia in the east of the island and Akrotiri in the west – which are large, highly secretive military and intelligence installations comprising 3% of the island’s land area.
The major UK air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, has long been the staging post for British bombing campaigns in the Middle East, and sits 180 miles from Tel Aviv. The flight time is 40 minutes.
The extra UK troops takes the number of British military personnel deployed on the island to 2,717. The UK bases also host 273 British civil servants.
The US military has also had a base on British territory on Cyprus for nearly half a century, but its size was kept secret from the public before Declassified recently revealed that 129 US airmen are permanently deployed to RAF Akrotiri.
It is not known if additional US personnel have also been deployed to Britain’s Cyprus bases to help support Israel’s bombing of Gaza, as the British government refuses to make public any information about American activities on the UK territory.
Defence minister James Heappey also revealed in his letter that Britain has sent extra troops to Egypt, Israel and Lebanon, but he refused to say at what levels. “I have withheld specific numbers for these countries for operational security reasons,” he wrote.
The UK military personnel were said to be deployed “to support contingency planning and UK humanitarian aid efforts”.
The 500 extra UK troops deployed to Cyprus do not include British special forces, which operate completely outside of democratic oversight.
The Sun reported on 27 October that Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS), the army’s elite special force, was on “standby” in Cyprus to – it was claimed – rescue British hostages held captive by Hamas and Britons who are trapped in Gaza.
The UK military’s “D-Notice” committee, which seeks to stop the media publishing information it claims would damage national security, requested on 28 October all media editors to not publish information relating to SAS operations in Gaza.
There has been no further reporting on the SAS’s role in Gaza, while the UK military refuses to confirm or deny if the SAS has been on the ground in Gaza since Israel began bombing the territory.
It is unclear if the Cypriot government has been told of the SAS deployment—or the extra UK troops.
Declassified recently revealed that over 30 military transport flights, operated by the RAF, had flown from RAF Akrotiri to Tel Aviv since the bombing of Gaza began.
But Cypriot government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis told the Cyprus Mail he had received no information about the flights. The UK, meanwhile, denied it is sending “lethal aid” or “military equipment” to Israel from RAF Akrotiri.
Declassified then reported the US was using RAF Akrotiri to transfer weapons to Israel. Respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that over 40 US transport aircraft have flown to RAF Akrotiri carrying equipment, arms and forces.
The planes have been loaded with cargo from strategic depots belonging to the US and NATO in Europe, Haaretz reported, with around half the US flights said to be “delivering military aid”.
The Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides was asked about the US deliveries in a press conference, and said: “There is no such information, our country cannot be used as a base for war operations”.
Kenny MacAskill, the MP who asked the questions in parliament, told Declassified: “We require openness and accountability about what is happening at Britain’s bases on Cyprus and the role they are playing in Israel’s criminal bombing of Gaza. 500 additional military personnel to Cyprus is a huge deployment given the large contingent already based there. What is their role?”
He added: “It’s 20 years since the UK was taken into a war in Iraq based on lies and deceit. That cost the lives of millions and still causes harm today as refugees and terrorism testify to. Iraq wasn’t in my name and neither are these actions. We need to be told what is being done by our government.”
Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt
From Dallas to Gaza: Was JFK’s Assassination Instrumental is Strengthening Zionist Israel?
By Rick Sterling | Global Research | December 13, 2023
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 60 years ago. If he had lived and won a second term, the Israeli Palestinian conflict would have evolved differently. Possibly the path toward Israeli apartheid and genocide in Gaza could have been avoided.
In his short time in office, Kennedy changed US foreign policy in significant ways. As documented in the book “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it still matters”, JFK resisted the CIA and military industrial complex in the policies he set regarding the Third World and Soviet Union. The Vietnam War, assassination of Indonesia’s President Sukarno, and continued hostility to Cuba and the Soviet Union would not have happened had Kennedy lived and won a second term.
Less well known, Kennedy’s policies also challenged and opposed the military and political ambitions of Zionist Israel. At the time, Israel had only existed for thirteen years. It was still evolving and the course was not totally set. There was significant international resolve to find a compromise solution regarding Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba. When Israel attacked Egypt and seized the Sinai peninsula in 1956, the Eisenhower administration demanded Israel withdraw from the captured territory. They complied.
At this time, in the early 1960’s, prominent Jewish voices criticized the racism and discrimination of the Israeli government. Israelis like Martin Buber assailed Ben-Gurion and noted that “At the inception of the state, complete equality with the Jewish citizens was promised to the Arab population.” Many influential Israelis realized their long term security and well-being depended on finding a just settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population.
In the United States, the Jewish community was divided and many were anti-Zionist. The American Council for Judaism was influential and anti-nationalist. The racist and militaristic character of Israel was not yet set in stone. Nor was American Jewish support for Israel. When Menachim Begin came to the United States in 1948 he was denounced by prominent Jewish leaders including Albert Einstein. They said Begin, who later became Israeli Prime Minister, was a “terrorist” who preached “an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.” Many American Jews had mixed feelings and did not identify with Israel. Others supported Israel but on the basis of there being peace with the indigenous Palestinians.
There are four key areas where the Kennedy policy was substantially different from what followed after his death.
Kennedy Was Not Biased in Favor of Israel
The Kennedy administration sought good relations with both Israel and the Arab nations. Kennedy aimed to extend US influence throughout the Middle East, including with nations friendly with the Soviet Union and at odds with NATO partners.
JFK personally supported Arab and African nationalism. As a senator in 1957, he criticized the Eisenhower administration for supporting and sending weapons to France in their war against the Algerian independence movement. In a 9,000 word presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he criticized “western imperialism” and called for the US to support Algerian independence. Algerian President Ben Bella, who France had tried to assassinate and considered far too radical by many in NATO, was given a huge and impressive welcome to the White House.
Kennedy changed the previous frosty relations with the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. For the first time, the US approved loans to them. Kennedy wrote respectful letters to the Arab presidents before he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion to Washington. The Arab leaders could see the difference and responded with appreciation. Those who claim there was no difference with Kennedy ignore the fact that Egypt’s Nasser, Algeria’s Ben Bella and other nationalist leaders saw a big difference.
In 1960, when Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he spoke at the Zionists of America Convention. He made complimentary remarks about Israel but also expressed the need for friendship with all the people of the Middle East. He said the US should “act promptly and decisively against any nation in the Middle East which attacks its neighbor” and “The Middle East needs water, not war; tractors, not tanks; bread, not bombs.”
Kennedy frankly told the Zionists, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.” By maintaining objectivity and neutrality on the Israeli Arab conflict, Kennedy wanted to steer the Jewish Zionists away from the racist, militaristic and ultra-nationalistic impulses which have led to where we are today.
Kennedy Wanted the Zionist Lobby to Follow the Rules
The second difference in Kennedy’s policy is regarding Zionist lobbying on behalf of Israel. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), organizations that promote or lobby on behalf of a foreign government are required to register and account for their finances and activities. Under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Department of Justice (DOJ) instructed the American Zionist Council (AZC) to register as agents of a foreign country. AZC is the parent organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC).
As documented in detail here, on 21 November 1962, the Assistant Attorney General wrote to them “the receipt of such funds from the American sections of the Jewish Agency for Israel constitutes the (American Zionist) Council an agent of a foreign principal… the Council’s registration is requested.”
The emergence of Israeli political influence was also scrutinized in the Senate. Under Senator William Fulbright, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings in May and August 1963. They revealed that tax free donations to the United Jewish Appeal, supposedly for humanitarian relief in Israel, were being channeled back to the US where the money was used for lobbying and Israeli public relations.
Attorneys for AZC stalled for time. On August 16, 1963, a DOJ analyst reviewed the case and concluded, “Department should insist on the immediate registration of the American Zionist Council under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
On October 11 the DOJ demanded that AZC register and “Department expects a response from you within 72 hours.”
On October 17, a DOJ memorandum reports that attorneys for AZC pleaded for not being required to register as foreign agents. They offered to provide the required financial disclosures but that registering as a foreign agent “would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement.” As indicated in this discussion, political zionism was not yet dominant in the American Jewish community and was actively opposed by the American Council on Judaism and other Jewish groups.
Kennedy Supported Palestinian Rights
A third difference is regarding Palestinian rights. Although he was only 44 when he became president, Kennedy had more international experience than most US presidents. In 1939 he spent two weeks in Palestine. In a lengthy letter to his father, he described the situation and difficulties. He wrote,
“The sympathy of the people on the spot seems to be with the Arabs. This is not only because the Jews have had, at least some of their leaders, an unfortunately arrogant, uncompromising attitude, but they feel that after all, the country has been Arabic for the last few hundred years … Palestine was hardly Britain’s to give away.”
In comments that are still true, Kennedy remarks how the Jewish residents are divided between “strongly Orthodox Jewish group, unwilling to make any compromise” and a “liberal Jewish element composed of the younger group who fear these reactionaries”. His analysis is sympathetic to both Jewish and Arab peoples and addresses the difficulty but necessity to find a compromise solution.
In the early 1960’s, the US State Department was not locked in to a biased acceptance or approval of Israeli policies. The US supported UN Resolution 194 resolving (in paragraph 11) that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” This has become known as the “right of return”.
On November 21, 1963, the day before Kennedy’s assassination, the NY Times has two news stories which exemplify the discord between Washington and Tel Aviv. A report from the United Nations is titled “Israel Dissents as U.N. Group Backs U.S. on Arab Refugees”. It begins,
“A United States resolution calling for continued efforts to resolve the predicament of the Palestinian Arab refugees was approved tonight 83 to 1… Israel cast the single negative vote… The issue centers on a 1948 resolution whose key section, paragraph 11, concerns the future of the Arabs who were displaced from their homes by the Palestine conflict. They have been living in the lands bordering Israel … The revised United States text calls on the Palestine Conciliation Commission to ‘continue its efforts for the implementation of Paragraph 11’.”
The second NYT story is titled “U.S. Stand Angers Israel”. It reports from Jerusalem that “Premier Levi Eshkol expressed extreme distaste today for the United States’ position in the Palestine refugee debate… Israel’s anger was conveyed ‘in the strongest terms’ to the US Ambassador … The Israeli Government is upset about the American resolution before the UN Political Committee and by American maneuvers over the issue.” Israel was angered and objecting because the Kennedy administration was trying to resolve the Palestinian refugee situation including the right of return.
Kennedy Tried to Stop the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program
The fourth and biggest contention between Kennedy and the Israeli leadership was regarding their developing nuclear weapons. This issue was kept so secret that crucial documents and letters have only been released in recent years.
President Kennedy was a strong advocate for stopping nuclear proliferation. After the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, he realized how easy it would be to intentionally or accidentally trigger a catastrophic nuclear war. If nuclear weapons were allowed to spread to more countries, the risks of global catastrophe would be all the greater. It was also predicted that if Israel acquired nuclear weapons capability, they would become more aggressive and less likely to reach a compromise agreement regarding Palestinian refugees.
When intelligence indicated that Israel might be trying to build a nuclear weapon at Dimona in 1962, Kennedy was determined to find out if this was true, and if so to stop it. This caused an intense diplomatic confrontation between JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The proof of this has recently been revealed in the exchange of letters between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his successor Levy Eshkol. They are all labeled “Top Secret” or “Eyes Only”.
It is important to see the sequence and some details to understand how intense this showdown was. These communications are all from 1963. (Note to reader: skip ahead to the next section if you become tired of the detail in the following exchanges.)
In March the US State Department instructed the US Ambassador to inform the government of Israel (GOI) that for “compelling reasons” the “USG seeks GOI assent to semi-annual repeat semi-annual visits to Dimona, perhaps May and November, with full access to all parts and instruments in the facility, by qualified US scientists.”
On April 19 the State Department instructed the US Ambassador to Israel to “press” for an “affirmative reply” to the earlier request for semi-annual inspections of Dimona.
On April 26, Israeli PM Ben Gurion replied to President Kennedy. He evaded the issue of nuclear facility inspections and instead expressed his concern regarding a recent proclamation from Egypt, Syria and Iraq. He compared Egyptian President Nasser to Germany’s Hitler.
On May 4 JFK responded to Ben Gurion’s concerns and underscored the US commitment to Israel and peace in the Middle East. He told the Israeli leader he is much less worried about an “early Arab attack” than the “successful development of advanced offensive systems”.
On May 8, a Special National Intelligence Estimate concluded, “Israel intends at least to put itself in a position to be able to produce a limited number of weapons” and that “unless deterred by outside pressure [the Israelis] will attempt to produce a weapon sometime in the next several years.” The analysis predicted that if Israelis had the bomb it would “encourage them to be bolder in their use of the conventional resources both diplomatic and military in their confrontation with the Arabs.”
On May 10, US State Department sent an “Eyes Only Ambassador” telegram to the US Ambassador to Israel. The ambassador was instructed to remind the Israeli leadership that they have previously agreed to the bi-annual inspections. The telegram also says Israeli concerns about Arab development of a nuclear bomb “are not valid” because there is nothing comparable to the “advanced Israeli program.”
The tensions between the Kennedy administration and Tel Aviv caused the Israel lobby to escalate pressure on the White House. This is revealed in a May 11 TOP SECRET State Department memo regarding “White House Concern with Arab-Israeli Matters”. It begins,
“In recent weeks, as you are aware, it has become increasingly clear that the White House is under steadily mounting domestic political pressure to adopt a foreign policy in the Near East more consonant with Israeli desires. The Israelis are determined to use the period between now and the 1964 Presidential election to secure a closer, more public security relationship with the Unites States, notably through a public security guarantee and a cooler, more antagonistic relationship beween the United States and the UAR [United Arab Repubic].”
Source
This is a highly interesting memo showing Israeli influence in US foreign policy and electoral politics. It further shows Kennedy’s effort to mitigate this influence while standing firm on the goal to stop nuclear proliferation.
On May 12, 1963 Ben Gurion wrote another long letter to President Kennedy. Again evading the US request, Ben Gurion gives a distorted history including the claim that Palestinian refugees left Palestine “at the demand of Arab leaders”. He again compares Nasser to Hitler and suggests the danger of a new Holocaust.
He says, “Mr, President, my people have the right to exist … and this existence is in danger.”
Source
On May 19, Kennedy responded to Ben Gurion emphasizing the importance he placed on not allowing the spread of nuclear weapons.
“We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel.”
Kennedy underscores the “deep commitment to the security of Israel” but says the commitment and support “would be seriously jeopardized” if the US is unable to obtain reliable information about “Israel’s efforts in the nuclear field.”
On May 27, Ben Gurion responded to Kennedy saying that the nuclear reactor at Dimona “will be devoted exclusively to peaceful purposes”. He counters Kennedy’s request for bi-annual visits starting in June by suggesting annual visits “such as have already taken place” starting at the end of the year. The condition is significant because the previous “visit” to Dimona was restricted in time and space.
The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center as viewed from a Corona satellite in the late 1960s (Public Domain)
On June 15, Kennedy wrote to Ben Gurion after he had received a scientific evaluation of the minimum requirements for a nuclear site inspection, After welcoming Ben Gurion’s assurances that Dimona will only be devoted to peaceful purposes, Kennedy issued a polite ultimatum. “If Israel’s purposes are to be clear to world beyond reasonable doubt, I believe the schedule which would best serve our common purpose would be a visit early this summer, another visit in June 1964, thereafter at intervals of six months.” He specifies that the “visit” must include access to all areas and “sufficient time be allotted for thorough examination.”
On June 16, the US Embassy in Israel reported that Ben Gurion resigned as Israel’s Prime Minister. This was a huge surprise; the explanation was that it was for “personal reasons”. It is likely that Ben-Gurion knew the contents of the forthcoming letter from Washington (received at the embassy the day before). The impact of his resignation was to stall for time. US Ambassador Barbour suggested waiting until the “cabinet problem is worked out” before sending JFK’s near ultimatum to the next Prime Minister.
Kennedy did not wait long. On July 4, he wrote to new Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol. After congratulating Eshkol on becoming new Prime Minister, he goes straight to the point “concerning American visits to Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona.” Kennedy says, “I regret having to add to your burdens to soon after your assumption of office, but …” He then goes on to request inspections as was requested in the letter to Ben-Gurion and that “support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized” if this is not done.
On July 17, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy that he needed to study the issue more before responding to Kennedy’s request for visits to Dimona. US Ambassador Barbour added that Eshkol verbally conveyed that he was “surprised” at Kennedy’s statement that US commitment to Israel might be jeopardized. Indicating Israeli defiance, Eshkol told the US Ambassador “Israel would do what it had to do for its national security and to safeguard its sovereign rights.”
On August 19, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy re-iterating the “peaceful purpose” of Dimona and ignoring the request for a summer inspection. He proposed the inspection take place “toward the end of 1963”.
On August 26, Kennedy wrote to Eshkol accepting the visit at year end but emphasizing it needs to be done “when the reactor’s core is being loaded and before internal radiation hazards have developed.” Kennedy set these conditions because they were essential for determining whether the facility could be used for developing a nuclear weapon.
On September 16, State Department prepared a Memorandum of Conversation with a counselor from the British Embassy. There was joint concern but agreement that Dimona would be visited and inspected “prior to the activation of the reactor.”
After the Assassination of JFK on November 22
After Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) became president, US mideast policy changed significantly. From the start, LBJ told an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend. But you have found a better one.” The Israeli publication Haaretz says, “Historians generally regard Johnson as the president most uniformly friendly to Israel.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs writes “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy with Israel’s Policies” and “Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his.”
On the crucial issue of Dimona inspection, the Israelis ignored JFK’s condition and the reactor went critical on December 26. When the inspection occurred three weeks later, they could not inspect the areas that had been irradiated. A handwritten comment on the report says, “We were supposed to see this first!” We do not know what would have happened it JFK had been in the White House but given the intensity of his effort, and deep convictions regarding the dangers of nuclear proliferation, it would not have been ignored as it was under LBJ.
Under LBJ, relations with Egypt deteriorated. The US stopped providing direct assistance loans and grants to Egypt. The US became increasingly antagonistic to President Nasser, as desired by the Israel lobby.
US support for a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue decreased and then stopped.
The Department of Justice efforts to require the American Zionist Council to register as foreign agents became increasingly weak until they were dropped under LBJ’s new Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The sequence of exchanges includes:
On December 11, 1963, the AZC attorney wrote to the DOJ saying, “Our client is not prepared to register as an agent of a foreign government.” Instead, he proposed to provide “voluntarily” the required financial information.
In January and February 1964, there were more exchange between AZC and the DOJ. AZC expressed concern because the American Council on Judaism publicly said that AZC was acting as “propaganda agents for the state of Israel and that the Jewish Agency was being used as a conduit for funds for the Zionist organization in the United States.”
In summer 1964 Nicholas Katzenbach becomes Attorney General. Negotiations continued. DOJ staff noted that AZC was “stalling” and not providing acceptable information despite the increasingly special and favorable treatment. In spring of 1965 the DOJ accepted that AZC was NOT required to register as foreign agent. Their financial information was kept in a unique expandable folder. In November 1967 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) applied for a federal tax exemption. The US Treasury Department granted it, backdated to 1953.
Increasingly Aggressive and Uncompromising Zionist Israel
The successful development of nuclear weapons added to Israel’s aggressive actions and unwillingness to resolve the Palestinian refugee crisis.
With intelligence information provided by Washington, Israel made a surprise attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967. The “Six Day war” was a crucial turning point in middle east history. Israel quickly defeated the unprepared combined armies. In the West, public perception of Israel changed overnight. The mythology of Israeli military (and general) superiority was created. Among the American Jewish population, doubts and concerns about Israel evaporated and support skyrocketed.
Israeli leaders arrogance and deceit is exemplified by the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War. The communications navy vessel was monitoring the air waves in the eastern Mediterranean when it was attacked by Israeli aircraft and boats. Thirty four US sailors were killed and 172 injured. Amazingly , the ship managed to stay afloat. The plan was evidently to sink the ship, blame it on Egypt and consolidate US support and hostility to Egypt and the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson over-ruled the calls for help from the vessel, saying “I will not have my ally embarrassed.”
The deadly incident was covered up for decades.
We do not know for sure what might have happened had JFK not been assassinated. It is possible that Israel would have been stopped from acquiring the bomb. Without that, they may not have had the audacity to launch the 1967 attacks on their neighbors, seizing the Golan, West Bank and Gaza Strip. If the Zionist lobby had been required to register as foreign agents, their influence would have been moderated. Perhaps Israel could have found a reasonable accommodation with Palestinians in one or two states.
Instead, Israel hardened into an apartheid regime committing increasingly outrageous massacres. As Kennedy warned in 1960, Israel has become a “garrison state” surrounded by “hate and fear”. The assassination of John F Kennedy insured Zionist control of Israel, suffering for Palestinians and permanent instability.
*
Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the San Franciso Bay Area of California. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Copyright © Rick Sterling, Global Research, 2023
Penn Students’ Lawsuit Shows Campus Antisemitism Uproar Is A Manufactured Crisis
Vast majority of “incidents” are merely expressions of unwelcome political views
By Brian McGlinchey | Stark Realities | December 12, 2023
Saturday’s resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill came after months of controversy — and a viral-video grilling of Magill in a congressional hearing — over allegations the school has become a hotbed of antisemitism.
While those allegations have been given widespread credence, a Stark Realities analysis of dozens of claimed antisemitic incidents at Penn finds that, apart from a small handful of cases, the great majority are merely instances in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engage in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with.
Conveniently, a catalogue of supposed examples of anti-Jew bigotry at Penn is laid out in a federal lawsuit filed last week against the school by two Jewish students who allege it “has transformed itself into an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment, and discrimination.” In the suit, dual American-Israeli citizen Eyal Yakoby and American Jordan Davis seek “substantial damages in an amount to be determined at trial.”
For those wanting to look beyond what’s been said about Penn by grandstanding politicians, click-seeking news outlets and sensationalist social media posters, the 84-page complaint is a valuable resource. Unlike the sloppy court of public opinion, real courts demand a detailed presentation of specific allegations.
However, scrutiny of the Penn complaint — prepared by Philadelphia lawyer and Penn law grad Eric Shore and New York City law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres — confirms the campaign against the Philadelphia school is just the latest component a broader, long-running drive to censor political expression that’s critical of the State of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians.
In support of that drive, conservatives who’d previously and rightfully bashed campus viewpoint censorship and crackdowns on flexibly-defined “hate speech” are among the most vocal advocates of installing a new censorship regime to keep students “safe” from anti-Israel rhetoric.
Objective readers of the complaint will quickly note a number of red flags, starting with strident, vitriolic language referring to “rabidly antisemitic professors” and “Jew-hating” speakers who “spew antisemitic venom” by “bellowing into bullhorns to express their hatred for Israel.”
However, the complaint’s foremost flaw is its repeated assumption that various political concepts, views and slogans promoted by critics of Israel are inherently antisemitic or genocidal. This kind of attack isn’t unique to the Penn complaint; it’s constantly used by Israel’s advocates to silence the opposition. Among the forbidden ideas:
- Anti-Zionism. A philosophy embraced by many Jews, anti-Zionism opposes the idea of a Jewish nation-state. Opposing the concept of such a Jewish state doesn’t automatically make someone a bigot any more than opposing a white state or a Christian state does. The Chavurah, a progressive Jewish group at Penn, recently rejected this charge, saying that “continual conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism undermines any chance for productive dialogue at Penn concerning Israel.”
- Questioning Israel’s “right to exist.” No country has a right to exist. Countries are mere political arrangements. There’s nothing inherently bigoted about campaigning for a different political order between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The State of Israel has no more “right to exist” than did the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, or does North Korea or the United States.
- “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” As I wrote last month, “while any slogan will mean different things to different people, this one has been used for decades by Palestinians seeking the same liberties as Israeli Jews throughout the entire territory ruled by the State of Israel.” For most, it’s a call for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement. While some may be reasonably concerned about how that would play out, the idea isn’t inherently genocidal or antisemitic.
- The Palestinian “right of return.” This concept argues that Palestinians displaced by the 1948 creation of Israel should be allowed to return to their homes. It isn’t inherently embedded with bigotry, as the complaint suggests. Indeed, its advocates would argue the concept is a counter to Israeli ethnocentrism.
- “Singling out” Israel for criticism. This preposterous standard, routinely advanced by Zionists, suggests that it’s antisemitic to criticize policies of the Israeli government if you don’t simultaneously criticize other governments guilty of the same sins.
- Calling Israel an “apartheid state.” A great many Jews say Israel satisfies the definition of apartheid — for starters, Hebrew University Holocaust professor Amos Goldberg, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
- Accusing Israel of genocide. While the suit is filled with accusations of genocidal intent on the part of pro-Palestinian activists, the plaintiffs would have us assume it’s antisemitic to argue that Israel’s bombardment of civilian areas in Gaza and displacement of Palestinians amounts to genocide.
- Urging boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In another display of double-standards, Israel’s backers cheer on economic warfare against Iran, but the BDS movement — which aims to achieve better treatment of Palestinians by using similar economic tactics — is supposedly a bigoted enterprise.
The most controversial term, “intifada,” has been chanted by pro-Palestinian protesters at Penn and around the world. Roughly translating to English as “shaking off,” intifada refers to an uprising against Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians have engaged in two previous intifadas. While the tactics included suicide bombings targeting civilians, Palestinians also engaged in peaceful protests, rioting, and attacks on Israeli government targets ranging from mere stone-throwing to deadly rocket attacks.
“It is not a term against Jews, it is a term against the Israeli government,” said Glenn Greenwald last week on his show, System Update. “Just like you’re allowed to say ‘I think we should bomb Iran’ or go to war in Iraq or ‘flatten Gaza,’ people are allowed to say, allowed to opine…in the United States of America, that the repression by the Israeli government has become sufficiently severe that an uprising or even violence against the State of Israel is warranted.”
“Intifida” played a key role in last week’s Capitol Hill grilling of then-Penn president Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
[…]
Finally, in what may be the complaint’s “jump the shark” moment, the plaintiffs accuse Penn of discriminating against Jews “by intentionally reducing its Jewish enrollment.” Jews represent about 2.4% of the US population, but occupy 16% of Penn’s prized enrollment slots.
The complaint decries the fact that the Jewish share has fallen from about a third of students in 2000, a trend they say the school has “intentionally engineered.” The plaintiffs don’t specify which non-Jewish populations are now over-represented at Jews’ expense. – Full article
Biden regime has no plans to restrict military aid to Israel, officials say
Press TV – December 13, 2023
US officials have revealed that the administration of President Joe Biden has no plans to withhold military aid from Israel despite the aggravating humanitarian situation caused by the regime’s relentless military campaign in Palestine’s Gaza.
The CNN quoted officials as saying on Wednesday that there will be no changes to US positions on the transfer of weapons and munitions to Israel despite growing calls by Democratic lawmakers and human rights organizations for Washington to stop its open support for Israel until the regime commits to a ceasefire or at least to measures that can protect civilians amid the Gaza war.
A US official said that Washington would rely on Israel’s assessment of whether its attacks on civilians in Gaza are proportional and legal rather than independently evaluating Israeli strikes on civilians that it deems unlawful and concerning.
A congressional source also said that the State Department had failed to provide any assurances to lawmakers that the Biden administration would monitor how Israel would use a consignment of tank ammunition that was recently supplied to the Israeli regime without congressional consent.
The State Department transmitted an emergency declaration to US lawmakers late on Friday notifying them of the sale of thousands of tank munitions to Israel, a move that had been done without observing the standard 20-day period that congressional committees normally have to review such sales.
Democratic lawmakers have called on Biden to stop supplying military aid to Israel as the regime goes on with its indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Gaza.
That comes as Biden said this week that he has had tough conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s military campaign but did not threaten to cut off aid and said his administration will do nothing other than protect Israel.
“We’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing,” said Biden while addressing Democratic donors in Washington.
More than 18,600 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli attacks that started on October 7, the day on which the Palestinian resistance group Hamas launched a major operation into the occupied territories near Gaza, killing some 1,200 Israeli settlers and military forces.
Ukraine’s Botched Counteroffensive Ignites New ‘Mantras’ in US – Lavrov
Sputnik – 13.12.2023
With Ukraine’s counteroffensive obviously failing, the United States has taken up a new rallying cry, which is to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from winning in Ukraine so that “NATO is not conquered,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
“After the collapse of the so-called counteroffensive, [people] in Washington stopped talking about Russia’s strategic defeat on the battlefield and, during Zelensky’s latest visit, activated a new mantra: ‘don’t let Putin win in Ukraine’, otherwise all of NATO will be conquered and then America won’t sit through it,” Lavrov said during the “government hour” in the Federation Council, upper house of the Russian parliament.
“We are ready for such a challenge and will continue to firmly defend our truth,” Lavrov emphasized.
The top Russian diplomat also noted that “it is not easy for our ill-wishers to come to grips with the fact that the bet on the sanctions blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has completely failed.”
“Therefore, those who launched the hybrid war against us won’t admit their mistakes, they are trying to use more and more illegitimate tools to wear down Russia, as they say, relishing the dream of eliminating our country as an independent geopolitical value,” the Russian diplomacy chief explained.
Mainstream propaganda machine doubles down on ‘Russia losing’ fantasies
By Drago Bosnic | December 13, 2023
Even before the start of the special military operation (SMO), the mainstream media had been running several propaganda narratives, almost simultaneously. Shortly before the SMO and in the first few days, there was the claim that Russia would take Kiev in three days and most of Ukraine in a week. However, as this didn’t happen (nor was it ever planned to unfold this way in the Kremlin), the mainstream propaganda machine went full afterburner in the opposite direction. Now, Moscow was suddenly losing, the Kiev regime forces are unbeatable, the Russians are suffering from extremely low morale due to massive losses, they’re running out of missiles, shells, fuel and so on, and so forth.
These ludicrous myths never stopped and continued until the failure of the much-touted counteroffensive. That was when many in the political West adopted a somewhat less propagandistic tone and tried mixing in some “realism”. However, this didn’t have the desired effect on the populace in Western Europe and North America. Thus, there’s a slow return to the most ridiculous propaganda one could possibly imagine. For instance, the Wall Street Journal claims that the Neo-Nazi junta will be “able to seize the initiative on the battlefield in 2025 if it can hold out against Russia until the end of next year”. This narrative is being pushed despite the fact that the United States, its primary backer, is about to stop the money flow.
The report initially doesn’t come off as propagandistic as one would expect, but towards the end, the authors still tried pushing debunked propaganda narratives. There are several instances of somewhat unexpected admissions, such as the obvious failure of the Kiev regime’s counteroffensive, as well as the dwindling financial support from the political West. The report also touched upon the growing divisions within the Neo-Nazi junta and the fact that its battered military will need time to recover. However, in a response to the WSJ, its Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba challenged this with a claim that “any pause in the fighting now would allow Russia to regroup and prepare for large-scale offensive operations”.
Kuleba even stated that the Kiev regime forces are preparing fresh brigades for “new counteroffensive and defensive operations”. The WSJ supported the idea and even went as far as to claim that “2024 will be the year of the recovery [for the Neo-Nazi junta troops]”. However, the authors admit that this comes with an important caveat, as the Kiev regime and its NATO overlords will need to “work through their current adversities and continue delivering supplies to troops, an emerging best-case scenario among Western strategists is that next year becomes a year of rebuilding for Kiev’s military“, adding that “the hope would be that a limited number of Ukrainian soldiers can hold Russian forces at bay”.
This would supposedly “allow NATO countries time to train fresh Ukrainian troops, expand armament production and restock Ukraine’s arsenals”. As indicated during a recent NATO meeting, the political West hopes that Russia’s incremental offensive operations will fail, “resulting in a depletion of its manpower and munitions, potentially offering Ukraine better prospects to retake the battlefield initiative in the spring of 2025, if it gets through next year”. However, the WSJ concluded the report with a not-so-optimistic remark of a Ukrainian infantry sergeant who said that when he talks to people at home he tells them that “everything is going well” and doesn’t describe what he sees or feels, which isn’t so upbeat.
“What is the point?”, the WSJ quoted the Ukrainian sergeant.
While the WSJ certainly is part of the mainstream, it’s still a bit more reputable than many other outlets of America’s massive propaganda machine. For instance, the infamous CNN is beating its own records in laughable claims by publishing that “Russia has lost a staggering 87% of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks”. Of course, this information came from “a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress”. The assessment was sent on December 11, as the Republican-dominated Congress was in the middle of effectively canceling the “Ukraine aid”.
The “intelligence” assessment supposedly found that “the war has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force”. Then came the numbers game, where CNN claims that “of the 360,000 troops that entered Ukraine, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, 2,200 of 3,500 tanks and 4,400 of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers have also been destroyed, a 32% loss rate”. CNN says it reached out to the Russian Embassy for comment, which is yet to respond. The most likely scenario is that His Excellency Ambassador Anatoly Antonov is still laughing uncontrollably after reading all this. And he certainly isn’t the only one.
“The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said on CNN’s State of the Union on December 10, adding: “So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?”
Even CNN had to admit that “Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable”, as its “highly anticipated counteroffensive stagnated through the fall”, and that “US officials believe that Kiev is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months”. As for the alleged “staggering losses” of the Russian military, the truth is that Moscow hasn’t been this strong militarily since at least the 1980s. In addition, the Kremlin is effectively returning to a Soviet superpower level with its latest military strategy shift. The very idea that Russia lost well over 300,000 soldiers is beyond ludicrous, as the country would be littered with new military cemeteries in virtually every major settlement. On the contrary, it’s precisely Ukraine that looks like that thanks to the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi junta.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Former Federal German Minister Under Merkel Warns: Germany Heading To A Climate Tyranny
“Basic rights in crisis mode” in Germany. The real threat to democracy.
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | December 12, 2023
“How we live, heat, get around, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly be dictated by the state,” a former German federal minister warns.
Kristina Schröder, who served as the Federal Family Minister from 2009 to 2013 in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, recently commented that Germany currently finds itself on a dangerous environmentally dogmatic path under the current leadership.
Pandemic as the blueprint
In a commentary published at Der Pragmaticus, she writes: “The pandemic has provided a blueprint for the climate movement on how to enforce fundamental restrictions on basic rights.”
“Germany is heading in the direction of a radical climate protection dogma that almost completely ignores the costs of the path taken. And once again, the two predominant patterns of argumentation in the pandemic can be observed: A refusal to weigh things up and an ends-justify-the-means mindset,” Schröder adds. “I am convinced that large sections of the climate protection movement are also fighting our way of living and our economy at least as much as they are fighting climate change.”
CO2 as the virus to fear
Schröder adds that it is easy to see that CO2 is being viewed as a virus and to imagine future measures to curb it: “there is a threat of regulations affecting our most private lifestyles. How we live, heat, get around, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly be dictated by the state.”
Schellnhuber “3 tonnes per year”
She also speaks critically of Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the former director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) who proposes “every citizen could be given a CO2 budget of three tons per year.” The average German emits 11 tons per year, and thus getting down to just 3 would certainly entail draconian restrictions and regulations.
But so far many Germans have been acting complacently about such drastic proposals, Schröder notes, adding: “This eager willingness to relinquish fundamental freedoms is all the more disturbing as a crucial question is hardly being asked, let alone answered: Does effective climate protection really have to mean such losses of freedom and prosperity?”
Schröder, who contributes regularly to Welt, also wonders why in Germany there’s such a “blindness to the costs” of reducing CO2. “Why this indifference to the loss of freedom and prosperity?” And: “Why this longing for bans, renunciation and penance?”
“Powerful lever” against capitalism
In Schröder’s view, for the activists, climate protection is “a powerful lever to push back the hated capitalist system.”
She concludes:
“I am certain that if a technical solution were to be found tomorrow that would allow us to render CO2 harmless overall, large sections of the radical climate protection movement would not be relieved, but disappointed.”
For the greens and the many activists, it’s follow our politics! It’s not about science.
Read Kristina Schröder’s full commentary here (German).
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The myth of the ‘Arabs versus Jews’ narrative
By Roqayah Chamseddine | Al-Akhbar | July 31, 2014
The transformation of Zionism as a political ideology to Zionism as a religious ideology begins, in part, with Theodor Herzl’s “infatuation with British imperialism,” as noted by literary scholar and cultural historian Eitan Bar-Yosef in his book A Villa In The Jungle: Herzl, Zionist Culture, And The Great African Adventure. “Herzl’s phrase – a ‘miniature England in reverse’ – preserves the imperfect colonial mimicry that stood at the heart of Herzl’s Zionist project, and which was exposed so explicitly… in his decision to align himself with the British Empire.” Herzl would form the Zionist Organization (now The World Zionist Congress) in 1897 and promote the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while continuing to identify with British colonialism and those who facilitated colonialism – the colonialists themselves. While Herzl, in his book The Jewish State, published in 1895, argued that the ‘Jewish question’ was not social or religious but political, the historical account of the rise of religious Zionism shows that it began to take hold not long before the passing of Herzl in 1904. … continue
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