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UK to Deploy Royal Navy Warship to Ex-Colony Amid Guyana-Venezuela Dispute

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 24.12.2023

Guyanese President Irfaan Ali and Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro met in mid-December under the aegis of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the Caribbean Community to defuse tensions around the disputed region of Essequibo. The two agreed to “continue dialogue to resolve the dispute over the Essequibo territory.”
The UK has decided to re-task Royal Navy warship the HMS Trent and deploy it to Guyana after Christmas, according to British media reports.

Instead of scouring the Caribbean in search of drug smugglers, the warship will take part in joint naval exercises with the former British colony and Commonwealth member. The decision was reportedly prompted by the current flare-up of the territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela.

“HMS Trent will visit regional ally and Commonwealth partner Guyana later this month as part of a series of engagements in the region during her Atlantic Patrol Task deployment,” a UK Ministry of Defense spokesperson was cited as saying.

The HMS Trent is a Batch 2 River-class offshore patrol vessel, named after the River Trent. Commanded by Commander Tim D. Langford, it is designed to carry out tasks that include “counter-piracy, anti-smuggling, fishery protection, border patrol, counter terrorism, humanitarian aid, search and rescue, general patrols and defence diplomacy,” as per the Royal Navy website.

The warship will stay in Barbados, the Caribbean region of the Americas, during Christmas, after which it will be heading for Guyana. Its activities will reportedly be carried out at sea, and will not involve docking in Guyana’s capital, Georgetown.

Earlier in December, when Britain’s Foreign Office Minister for the Americas and Caribbean David Rutley visited Guyana, he was quoted as saying that the UK would work internationally “to ensure the territorial integrity of Guyana is upheld.”

The border between Guyana and Venezuela, which runs through the Guyana-Essequibo region, known for its abundant oil reserves, has been a source of territorial dispute for several decades.

Venezuela gained independence from Spain in 1845 and recognized Essequibo – a zone of 160,000 sq. km – as part of its sovereign territory. In 1899, however, the United Kingdom filed and won an arbitration claim to recognize Essequibo as part of its then-Caribbean colony of British Guiana. Independent Guyana referred the dispute to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2018. This came after Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro objected to former Guyanese president David Granger granting oil exploration rights off the Essequibo coast to ExxonMobil, the US-French oil transnational.

Venezuela held a referendum earlier this month in which almost 96% of the population voted in favor of incorporating the Essequibo region, which makes up two-thirds of the territory controlled by Guyana, into the country. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro put forward a proposal to the parliament, suggesting the establishment of Venezuela’s 24th state, named Guyana-Essequibo. He also produced a new map showing the disputed region of Essequibo as part of Venezuela. Besides referring to Essequibo as a “zone of integral defense,” Venezuela’s president proposed a deadline of three months for oil companies to halt offshore operations in the area. Last Sunday, a referendum was conducted to reaffirm Caracas’s claim to Essequibo. The majority of citizens voted in favor of establishing a state on the disputed territory.

According to Venezuelan media, President Nicolas Maduro has already officially signed decrees to incorporate the western region of neighboring Guyana into Venezuela, ratifying a total of six documents. In addition, Maduro signed a decree facilitating the creation of specialized units within the state oil and gas company PDVSA — PDVSA Essequibo and the Guyana Venezuelan Corporation — CVG Essequibo. To oversee the newly formed state, Major General Alexis Rodriguez Cabello was appointed as the sole head of the 24th state.

Venezuela and Guyana have since agreed not to threaten or use force in any circumstances to settle the dispute, as per a joint statement, published by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The sides also agreed to meet in Brazil within the next three months to “consider any matter with implications for the territory in dispute” and immediately establish a joint commission on the level of foreign minister and experts to address the dispute.

December 24, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Junk Science Alert: Met Office Set to Ditch Actual Temperature Data in Favour of Model Predictions

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | December 23, 2023

The alternative climate reality that the U.K. Met Office seeks to occupy has moved a step nearer with news that a group of its top scientists has proposed adopting a radical new method of calculating climate change. The scientific method of calculating temperature trends over at least 30 years should be ditched, and replaced with 10 years of actual data merged with model projections for the next decade. The Met Office undoubtedly hopes that it can point to the passing of the 1.5°C ‘guard-rail’ in short order. This is junk science-on-stilts, and is undoubtedly driven by the desire to push the Net Zero collectivist agenda.

In a paper led by Professor Richard Betts, the Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office, it is noted that the target of 1.5°C warming from pre-industrial levels is written into the 2016 Paris climate agreement and breaching it “will trigger questions on what needs to be done to meet the agreement’s goal”. Under current science-based understandings, the breaching of 1.5°C during anomalous warm spells of a month or two, as happened in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023, does not count. Even going above 1.5°C for a year in the next five years would not count. A new trend indicator is obviously needed. The Met Office proposes adding just 10 years’ past data to forecasts from a climate model programmed to produce temperature rises of up to 3.2°C during the next 80 years. By declaring an average 20-year temperature based around the current year, this ‘blend’ will provide ”an instantaneous indicator of current warming”.

It will do no such thing. In the supplementary notes to the paper, the authors disclose that they have used a computer model ‘pathway’, RCP4.5, that allows for a possible rise in temperatures of up to 3.2°C within 80 years. Given that global warming has barely risen by much more than 0.2°C over the last 25 years, this is a ludicrous stretch of the imagination. Declaring the threshold of 1.5°C, a political target set for politicians, has been passed based on these figures and using this highly politicised method would indicate that reality is rapidly departing from the Met Office station.

Using anomalous spikes in global temperature, invariably caused in the short-term by natural variations such as El Niño, is endemic throughout mainstream climate activism. ‘Joining the dots’ of individual bad weather events is now the go-to method to provoke alarm. So easily promoted and popular is the scare that an entire pseudoscience field has grown up using computer models to claim that individual weather events can be attributed to the actions of humans. ‘Weather’ and ‘climate’ have been deliberately confused. Climate trends have been shortened, and the weather somehow extended to suggest a group of individual events indicates a much longer term pattern. Meanwhile, the use of a 30-year trend dates back to the start of reliable temperature records from 1900, and was set almost 100 years ago by the International Meteorological Organisation. It is an arbitrary set period, but gives an accurate temperature trend record, smoothing out the inevitable, but distorting, anomalies.

By its latest actions, the Met Office demonstrates that the old-fashioned scientific way lacks suitability when Net Zero political work needs to be done. Trends can only be detected over time, leading to unwelcome delays in being able to point to an exact period when any threshold has been passed. Whilst accepting that an individual year of 1.5°C will not breach the Paris agreement so-called guard-rail, the Met Office claims that its instant indicator will “provide clarity” and will “reduce delays that would result from waiting until the end of the 20-year period”. The Met Office looks forward to the day when its new climate trend indicator comes with an IPCC ‘confidence’ or ‘high likelihood’ statement such as, “it is likely that the current global warming level has now reached (or exceeded) 1.5°C”. In subsequent years, this might become, “it is very likely that the current global warming level exceeded 1.5°C in year X”.

Why is this latest proposal from the state-funded Met Office junk science-on-stilts? A variety of reasons include that climate models have barely an accurate temperature forecast between them, despite 40 years of trying. Inputting opinions that the temperature of the Earth might rise by over 3°C in less than 80 years is hardly likely to improve their accuracy. There are also legitimate questions to be asked about the global temperature datasets that record past temperatures. Well-documented poor placing of measuring devices, unadjusted urban heat effects and frequent retrospective warming uplifts to the overall records do not inspire the greatest of confidence. At its HadCRUT5 global database, the Met Office has added around 30% extra warming over the last few years.

December 24, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Anglo-American War on Russia – Part Twelve (NATO Wants War)

Tales of the American Empire | December 21, 2023

The American empire is expanding to rule the world with the help of its NATO vassal states. In 2008, American President George Bush announced that NATO wanted to add Ukraine to NATO, even though most Ukrainians opposed the idea. Russia announced this would be unacceptable while Germany and France said now is not the time to add Ukraine.

NATO now has 31 members who all must approve of new members, so it’s politically impossible to add Ukraine to NATO while it fights with Russia. However, the United States had already made Ukraine de facto member and wanted a war to occur.

Ukraine never implemented the 2015 Minsk peace accords nor the 2019 Steinmeier Formula agreement and continued random tank and artillery fire into rebel held cities, killing some 14,000 ethnic Russians since 2015. On the eve of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, the buildup of Russian troops on the eastern border of the Donbas was heavily reported. Unreported was the buildup of Ukrainian troops on the Donbas’ western border that preceded it. Ukraine had massed 60,000 troops along its border with Donbas rebels.

As Ukraine slowly loses its war with Russia, many fear NATO will intervene militarily. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenburg has spent years selling the dangerous idea of adding Ukraine to NATO. This led to disaster, yet Stoltenburg still promotes this insane idea that would lead to a world war.

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“German agency suspends certification for NordStream 2”; DW; November 11, 2021; https://www.dw.com/en/german-agency-s…

Related Tale: “The American Colony Called Germany”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adfyC…

“Germany’s Economy is in Freefall”; Remix; September 2023; https://www.bitchute.com/video/bo10lE…

“Address by the President of the Russian Federation”; Vladimir Putin; The Kremlin; February 21, 2022; http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president…

Related Tales: “The Anglo-American War on Russia”; https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

December 24, 2023 Posted by | Video | , , | Leave a comment

The Impact Of Heat Pumps On Electricity Demand

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 22, 2023

Following on from the post about heat pumps, I thought I would have a look at their impact on electricity demand.

My analysis reckoned on a typical household consumption of 3857 KWh with a heat pump. If we assume that they will only be used for heating for six months every year, that equates to 643 KWh a month, or 21 KWh a day.

At the coldest times of year, that average will increase substantially, so we could well be looking at 30 KWh a day then, since the heat pump will have to work much harder.

Although heat pumps are designed to provide low level heat continuously, I suspect that many will turn them off at night because it is too warm to sleep. We usually have our bedroom windows open all winter at night!

If we assume then that the heat pumps are in use for 14 hours a day, that gives average hourly electricity demand of 2.1 KWh. This assumes that the heat pump runs at a constant power rating. In practice, the system would have to work harder in the early evening as temperatures drop.

There are about 24 million homes with gas and oil boilers, so a peak demand of 2.1 KW amounts to 50 GW for the country as a whole. To that we can add demand from offices, shops etc, which currently use gas and oil.

Along with demand from EVs, the UK would need well over 100 GW of capacity to meet peak demand.

This is all twenty years or more away. But if the government’s target of 600,000 heat pumps a year is met, even within the next ten years, we will be needing at least 13 GW of extra grid capacity, at a time when dispatchable power generation is being shut down.

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 2 Comments

Author of Study Used to Vilify Unvaxed Had Ties to Pfizer

New Peer-Reviewed Research Shows Why the Study Was Flawed

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 22, 2023

During the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians, scientists and media organizations vilified unvaccinated people, blaming them for prolonging the pandemic and advocating policies that barred “the unvaccinated” from public venues, businesses and their own workplaces.

But a peer-reviewed study published last week in Cureus shows that a key April 2022 study by Fisman et al. — used to justify draconian policies segregating the unvaccinated — was based on the application of flawed mathematical risk models that offer no scientific backing for such policies.

Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto epidemiologist was the lead author of the April 2022 study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), which the authors said showed that unvaccinated people posed a disproportionate risk to vaccinated people.

Fisman has worked as an adviser to vaccine makers Pfizer, Seqirus, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Pasteur. He also advised the Canadian government on its COVID-19 policies and recently was tapped to head up the University of Toronto’s new Institute for Pandemics.

Fisman told reporters the key message of the study was that the choice to get vaccinated is not merely personal because if you choose to be unvaccinated, you are “creating risk for those around you.”

The press ran with it.

Headlines like Salon’s, “Merely hanging out with unvaccinated puts the vaccinated at higher risk: study,” Forbes’ “Study Shows Unvaccinated People Are At Increased Risk Of Infecting The Vaccinated” or Medscape’s “My Choice? Unvaccinated Pose Outsize Risk to Vaccinated” proliferated in more than 100 outlets.

The Canadian Parliament used the paper to promote restrictions for unvaccinated people.

However, in the new study published last week, Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., and Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., show that Fisman’s “susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR)” model, used to draw his conclusions, had a glaring flaw in one of its key parameters — contact frequency.

When they adjusted that parameter to account for real-world data, the model produced a variety of contradictory outcomes, including one showing that segregating unvaccinated people can increase the epidemic severity among the vaccinated — the exact opposite of what Fisman et al. purported to show

Hickey and Rancourt, researchers at Canada’s Correlation: Research in the Public Interest, concluded that without reliable empirical data to inform such SIR models, the models are “intrinsically limited” and should not be used as a basis for policy.

The Canadian researchers attempted to publish their paper in CMAJ, where Fisman had published his original study, but the editor — a collaborator of Fisman’s — refused even to review it.

The open-access version of CMAJ also declined to publish the article even after it received favorable peer reviews.

In a letter sent, with supporting documentation, to the CMAJ and the Canadian Medical Association, Hickey and Rancourt recounted the “tedious saga” whereby the journal editors “concocted a multitude of ancillary and unnecessary objections, apparently intended to be insurmountable barriers” to publishing their study.

They later published the study in the peer-reviewed journal Cureus.

Rancourt tweeted a link to the study results along with a montage of pandemic-era media clips scapegoating unvaccinated people.

‘A policy based on nothing’

SIR models were commonly used as the basis for pandemic policies, often with fatal flaws research has since shown.

Fisman et al. designed their study to measure the impacts of segregating two groups — vaccinated and unvaccinated people — applying a SIR model to predict whether the unvaccinated pose an undue risk to the vaccinated during a severe acute respiratory viral outbreak, based on variable degrees of mixing among the groups.

However the model, Hickey and Rancourt wrote, failed to consider the impacts of that segregation on “contact frequencies,” a key parameter in predicting epidemic outcomes.

Instead, it assumed contact frequencies among the majority (vaccinated) and socially excluded (unvaccinated) groups would be equal and constant, which “is not realistic,” Hickey told The Defender.

In other words, the model assumed the two groups would be separated, yet living the same parallel existence — socializing, working, shopping and coming into contact with others in exactly the same ways.

But in the real world, segregation meant the unvaccinated were barred from many public places, so their contact frequencies were severely curtailed.

Hickey and Rancourt implemented the SIR model again, testing for a degree of segregation that ranged from zero to complete segregation and allowing the contact frequencies for individuals in the two groups to vary with the degree of segregation.

When they ran the model using the more realistic estimation of how different segregation policies might generate different contact frequencies among the two groups, “we found the results are all over the map,” Hickey said.

By segregating unvaccinated people from the vaccinated majority, he said, “You can have an increase in the attack rate among vaccinated people or you can have a decrease.”

“Negative epidemiological consequences can occur for either segregated group, irrespective of the deleterious health impacts of the policies themselves,” they wrote.

Hickey said the variable outcomes were very sensitive to the values of the parameters in the model, namely infectious contact frequency.

But he said, in the real world there are no reliable measures for contact frequency, and without reliable measures for model inputs, the model is essentially meaningless.

They concluded that the degree of uncertainty is so high in such SIR models that they cannot reasonably inform policy decisions.

“It’s a policy based on nothing basically,” Hickey said.

“We cannot recommend that SIR modelling be used to motivate or justify segregation policies regarding viral respiratory diseases, in the present state of knowledge,” the study concluded.

‘Fisman’s Fraud’ 

Modeling had a major impact on the pandemic response in Canada and globally, statistician Regina Watteel, Ph.D., who chronicled the impact of the Fisman paper in her book “Fisman’s Fraud: the Rise of Canadian Hate Science,” told The Defender.

As a key figure in modeling the pandemic in Canada, Fisman “was involved in Canada’s pandemic response at all levels,” she said.

He was also influential as a public figure, making numerous disparaging comments about “anti-vaxxers” from early on and advocating policies like vaccine passports and school closures long before he received a major grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for his SIR modeling study.

Fisman was open in interviews about the fact that the point of the 2022 study was to “undermine the notion that vaccine choice was best left to the individual,” Watteel said.

The 2022 modeling paper didn’t just present mathematical results, the authors also made political claims.

The paper stated:

“The choice of some individuals to refuse vaccination is likely to affect the health and safety of vaccinated people in a manner disproportionate to the fraction of unvaccinated people in the population.

“Risk among unvaccinated people cannot be considered self-regarding, and considerations around equity and justice for people who do choose to be vaccinated, as well as those who choose not to be, need to be considered in the formulation of vaccination policy.”

Despite serious concerns raised by numerous researchers in the CMAJ article’s response section, the mainstream international press widely promoted the article as proof the unvaccinated posed a danger to the vaccinated.

Fisman publicly advocated for vaccine mandates and passports and told reporters the impetus behind the modeling study was not a scientific question of the effects of segregation on infection rates, but the political question of, “What are the rights of vaccinated people to be protected from unvaccinated people?”

A few days after the study was published, the parliamentary secretary to the Ontario Ministry of Health used the study to defend proposed travel restrictions, Watteel showed in her book.

As a result, she wrote, it “has generated a massive trail of misinformation.”

Watteel concurred that Fisman et al.’s study was based on bad modeling. She added that by omitting publicly available current data that contradicted the data they presented in the article, the study was actually “fraudulent.”

Fisman et al. published the paper during the so-called Omicron surge, which was dominated by infections among the fully vaccinated. By spring 2022, people who were boosted had disproportionately more infections than others, according to data on the government of Ontario COVID-19 website and reproduced in Watteel’s book.

However, none of that publicly available data was included in the study.

Instead, Watteel wrote:

“Fisman et al. concocted a model to generate the results they wanted, completely omitting any reference to readily available real-world data that contradicted their results (falsification). They went on to state the contrived results as facts (data fabrication) and then proceeded to inform public policy based on the fabricated results.

“The researchers continued to push the false narrative long after numerous scientists rebuked the findings and provided evidence of the findings’ falsity. This indicates a willful misrepresentation and misinterpretation of research findings.”

CAMJ editor, Fisman colleague, blocks review of Correlation article

Hickey told The Defender when they submitted their paper critiquing SIR models like Fisman’s to CAMJ in August 2022, editor Matthew Stanbrook, M.D., Ph.D. — who also works at the University of Toronto and has collaborated with Fisman on academic articles, grants and courses — rejected the article without even sending it for peer review.

Hickey and Rancourt appealed the decision and requested Stanbrook recuse himself. The journal suggested they resubmit their study to the open-access version of CAMJ, which they did. It was rejected without going through peer review.

They appealed that decision and the paper was sent for review. A few months later, they received two positive reviews with requested corrections. They responded to the reviews and made corrections to the paper, expecting publication.

The journal then informed them there had been a “technical error” and the journal — which is supposed to have an entirely transparent peer-review process — had failed to send them concerns from anonymous internal editors and an anonymous statistician.

Hickey told The Defender :

“It is their policy that the reviewers’ names are public and that the review reports and the revision, like the responses by the author, all that stuff is public. That’s the policy. There’s no escaping that.

“And yet what do they do? They use anonymous internal people to put barriers up and make pretexts to not publish even in the face of positive reviews.”

Those anonymous comments included a suggestion that they should use Fisman’s flawed mathematical analysis, Hickey said. The authors responded to those comments in what they have now also posted on their website as a stand-alone article.

Months later, they requested an update on the journal’s plans for the article and were informed that the journal decided the article would not be suitable for its audience and suggested they instead publish in a modeling journal.

All of their collected critiques of Fisman’s 2022 paper are also collected on the Correlation website.

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.

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Canadians supporting Palestine face job loss, condemnation

MEMO | December 22, 2023

Expressing support for Palestinians in the ongoing conflict in Gaza risks Canadians being fired, suspended from their jobs and calls not to be hired, the country’s public broadcaster reported on Friday, reports Anadolu Agency.

It is a development in other countries, including the US and Europe, and affects various employment fields, such as the service sector, education, health care, the law and media. “I can tell you personally, in the last month and a half, I’ve probably spoken with someone at least once a day [about this],” Jackie Esmonde, a labour lawyer at the Toronto-based firm Cavalluzzo Law, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). “They’re not always cases that we take on, but we do have eight to 10 cases that we’re actively working on at the moment.”

She said these are not cases of hate speech or support for terrorism.

In November, the University of Ottawa suspended Dr Yipeng Ge after a social media post that said: “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The university interpreted this to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Jewish people from Israel.”

Others have suffered job suspensions for posts that featured the words “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions.

In November, 650 lawyers, law students and professors from across Canada published an open letter that says there has been a “chilling effect” on freedom of expression since the start of the Israeli-Hamas conflict on October 7.

Meanwhile, lawyers interviewed by the CBC said they were not aware of anyone facing consequences for social media posts supporting Israel.

And two employees at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies – a non-profit human rights organization that fosters antisemitism education – told the CBC that teachers at the centre have been told to report students who make statements critical of Israel.

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 2 Comments

Israel bombs Gaza with one-tonne bombs where civilians were sent to take refuge

MEMO | December 23, 2023

During the first six weeks of the war on Gaza, Israel routinely used one of the largest and most destructive bombs supplied by the US in areas it deemed safe zones for civilians, according to an analysis of visual evidence conducted by the New York Times published on Friday.

The report showed Israel’s bombardment using bombs weighing approximately one tonne in an area in southern Gaza, to which civilians were displaced under the pretext of seeking safety.

Many Western armies use bombs of this size, but munitions experts confirmed that US forces no longer drop them in densely populated areas, according to quotes by the newspaper.

The newspaper reported that it had programmed an artificial intelligence tool to scan satellite images of southern Gaza in search of craters resulting from this type of bomb. Its reporters manually reviewed the search results, looking for craters 13 metres or more.

According to munitions experts, only bombs weighing one tonne would create craters of this size in Gaza’s light, sandy dirt.

The investigation identified 208 craters in satellite images and drone footage. Due to limited satellite images and differences in bomb effects, many instances were likely not captured. However, the findings reveal that the one-tonne bombs pose a widespread threat to civilians seeking safety in southern Gaza.

The newspaper quoted the remarks of an Israeli army spokesperson, claiming that Israel’s priority is to destroy Hamas and “questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage,” adding that the Israeli army “takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”

US officials say Israel must do more to minimise the number of civilians killed in its war on Hamas.

The Pentagon has increased its arms shipments to Israel, including smaller bombs considered more suitable for use in densely populated and urban environments like the Gaza Strip. Despite this, since October, the US has supplied Israel with more than 5,000 MK-84 munitions — a type of one-tonne bomb.

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Almost all Saudi nationals oppose Arab ties with Israel, poll finds

Press TV – December 23, 2023

A new survey has found that 96 percent of Saudi Arabian citizens want Arab countries to cut all types of ties with Israel in response to the occupying regime’s war on Gaza.

Conducted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank based in Washington, the survey saw almost every Saudi agreeing with the proposal “Arab countries should immediately break all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel, in protest against its military action in Gaza.”

The study further found that a big majority of the Saudis (91%) believe that “despite the destruction and loss of life, this war in Gaza is a win for the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.”

The majority of respondents in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt held favorable views towards the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, but saw a 30-point growth in its popularity in the case of Saudi Arabians, compared to August.

The survey said 87% agree with the suggestion that “recent events show that Israel is so weak and internally divided that it can be defeated someday.”

Conducted to measure the change in shift of attitudes of Saudi nationals after the bloody war broke out, the survey was conducted from November 14 to December 6.

The results of the study are a clear manifestation of the difficulties the United States is going to face as it advocates for intertwined Arab-Israeli cooperation.

Prior to the war, the US was actively working towards achieving an agreement to normalize Saudi Arabia-Israel relations.

Earlier in September, during an interview with Fox News, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stated that the two countries were getting closer to such an agreement “every day.”

After the war broke out, Riyadh put a pause on normalization talks and has made its diplomatic outreach public as one that seeks “to stop the ongoing escalation.”

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has significantly suppressed support for allowing contact with Israelis.

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

The US and Israel face a powerful new enemy in the Middle East conflict

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | December 23, 2023

In yet another case of blowback, reflecting the failure of Western military interventionism in West Asia, Yemen’s Ansarallah (Houthi) movement has inserted itself as an active participant in the ongoing war between Israel and Gaza. First launching batches of loitering munitions, ballistic and cruise missiles towards Israel, Ansarallah then moved on to prevent the passage of Israeli-owned or operated ships through the Red Sea, before announcing a complete closure of the shipping route for any vessels destined to dock at the port of Eilat.

After the Houthis seized a number of ships, while attacking others with drone strikes, activity at Eilat has dropped some 85%. International and Israeli shipping companies have opted to take the long route, which in some cases takes an additional 12 days, to reach Israel with their cargo, a costly diversion to say the least. In opposition to this, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin traveled to the region and announced the formation of a multinational naval task force to be deployed in the Red Sea. Despite talk of the coalition including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even the United Arab Emirates, the only Arab nation that joined was Bahrain.

So, without a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution to back them up, usually required to make the militarisation of a territory legal under international law, the US has launched yet another foreign intervention. This one is significant because it failed to convince any major regional players to join, demonstrating the decline in American influence, but has also elevated the status of Yemen’s Ansarallah.

Under former US President Barack Obama, Washington backed the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen back in 2015. Since then, some 377,000 people have died, largely as a result of the deadly blockade imposed on the majority of the country’s population, while some 15,000 civilians have died due to direct conflict. The objective of the Saudi-led intervention, which received the backing of the US and UK, was to remove Ansarallah from power in the nation’s capital, Sanaa. Although the group does not enjoy international recognition as Yemen’s governing force, it rules over more than 80% of the population, has the support of two-thirds of the nation’s armed forces, and operates a government out of Sanaa.

Ansarallah came to power following a popular revolution against then-Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi in 2014. Months later, Hadi resigned and fled the country after Ansarallah militants had decided to take over by force. In the midst of a seven-year war, the political, social and armed movement that is often referred to as “the Houthi rebels” operates as the de facto government of Yemen, but is yet to receive recognition at the UN, which instead recognises the ‘Presidential Leadership Council’ that was created in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2022.

The context above is crucial for understanding the capabilities of Yemen’s Ansarallah, which was downplayed as a band of “Iran-backed rebels” in Western corporate media for years. While the governments of the collective West have tried to pretend that the Yemeni group is insignificant, Washington’s recent decision to form a multi-national naval coalition to confront the Houthis is an admission that they are a major regional actor. In fact, Ansarallah is the only Arab movement that controls state assets and a standing army that is participating in the ongoing war with Israel.

The reality that the US is now confronting is something that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE came to realize early last year. Following two separate drone and missile attacks on Abu Dhabi and Dubai in January of 2022, it became apparent that the West’s current level of support could not provide sufficient security for the UAE. Up until a nationwide ceasefire was brokered in April 2022, Ansarallah had also demonstrated its developed missile and drone capabilities, striking valuable economic targets inside Saudi Arabia too.

Despite receiving a lot less attention than it deserved, Ansarallah forces strategically timed their second attack on the UAE to coincide with the arrival of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the country. This was a clear message to the Emirati and Saudi leaderships that Western support will not provide sufficient security. It’s likely because of this threat from Yemen that Riyadh sought a security pact with the US, in order to make a normalization agreement with Israel possible. Such a security pact would have stipulated that an attack on one is an attack on all, hence dragging the Americans into a direct war against Yemen in the event that the conflict was to flare up again.

The US attempted to help topple the current government in Sanaa, but ended up creating a battle-hardened group that has domestically developed capabilities well beyond those it possessed at the start of the conflict in 2015. In his first foreign policy address after taking office in 2021, US President Joe Biden pledged to end the war in Yemen. However, instead of pursuing a Yemen-Saudi deal, the White House abandoned its pledge and sought to broker a Saudi-Israeli deal instead. That fatal decision is coming back to bite policymakers in Washington.

Backing the Israelis to the hilt in their war on Gaza, spelling out that there are no red lines as to how far the government of Benjamin Netanyahu can go, the US has allowed a Palestine-Israel war to expand into a broader regional Arab-Israeli conflict. The threat of escalation between the Israeli army and Lebanese Hezbollah is growing by the day, while Ansarallah leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi has stated that his forces “will not stand idly by if the Americans have a tendency to escalate and commit foolishness by targeting our country.”

By every metric, US diplomatic stock has dropped internationally as a result of its handling of Israel’s war on Gaza. It has failed to convince any major regional actors in West Asia to back its escalatory agenda, all of which are standing on the same side as Russia and China in calling for a ceasefire. The world sees the hypocrisy of Washington. For the sake of comparison, the death toll in Gaza today is said to have exceeded 23,000, the majority being women and children. Israel has killed this many people in just over two months, while in the first two years of the ISIS/Daesh insurgency in Iraq, the UN estimated that the terrorist group killed some 18,800 civilians. The total number of civilians killed by ISIS in Syria is set at just over 5,000.

The level of human suffering being inflicted in Gaza is without precedent, breaking records in modern history for the tonnage of explosives dropped on such a small territory, in addition to the highest number of journalists, medical workers, and children killed in a single conflict. In reaction, the US government has repeatedly blocked ceasefire resolutions at the UNSC, gives Israel unlimited support unconditionally, and now threatens to drag a coalition of Western nations into a war on Yemen. The solution here is very simple: Ansarallah has said the blockade on ships to Israel will end when the war on Gaza ends. Washington has the ability to stop the war, but refuses to do so, while its threats against Yemen will not work to achieve any result beyond further escalation.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Inside a Gaza hospital under siege

The Grayzone | December 21, 2023

Suhaib spent six months in Israeli military detention without charge

December 23, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Rumble blocks Brazil

RT | December 22, 2023

The video sharing service Rumble announced on Friday that it would disable access to all users from Brazil pending its legal challenge of the Brazilian court order to censor certain creators.

Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski revealed the move in a post on X (formerly Twitter), noting that the court orders clashed with the company’s mission to “restore a free and open Internet.”

“Users with unpopular views are free to access our platform on the same terms as our millions of other users,” Pavlovski wrote. “Accordingly, we have decided to disable access to Rumble for users in Brazil while we challenge the legality of the Brazilian courts’ demands.”

Brazilians who lost their access to Rumble content have only their courts to blame, he added, noting that he hoped the judges would reconsider their decision so that the service could be restored soon.

“I will not be bullied by foreign government demands to censor Rumble creators.”

In a follow-up post, Pavlovski noted that Rumble was “the only company at our scale that holds the line for free speech and American values,” and that he hoped some day other Big Tech companies would do the same. “I will continue to lead by example until that day arrives,” he added.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and hosts the ‘System Update’ show on Rumble, noted that the Brazilian Supreme Court is “consumed with censoring political speech,” to the point that it banned platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp for failing to immediately obey their censorship orders.

This is the second time Rumble has suspended service in a country over a censorship row. In November 2022, Pavlovski defied France’s orders to censor certain Russian-language outlets, citing the company’s free speech mission.

Pavlovski, a Canadian tech entrepreneur, founded Rumble in 2013 after seeing YouTube giving priority to influencers after getting acquired by the search engine giant Google. The platform grew in popularity starting in 2020, after a mass purge of dissident voices by Silicon Valley, and continued in 2021 with the influx of US conservatives censored elsewhere.

December 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

How the cabal’s false narratives are used to gain their true objectives

BY MERYL NASS | DECEMBER 21, 2023

One Health issues a booklet and finally, kinda, sorta tells us what One Health is about.

“A guide to implementing the One Health Joint Plan of Action at national level”

See page 30:

I do the decoding [italics ].

  1. “Provide adequate guidance and tools for the effective implementation of One Health approaches to promote the health of humans, animals, plants and ecosystems and to prevent and manage risks at the human–animal–plant–environment interface.”

This drills into the reader’s brain the idea that the human-animal or human-environment interface is a dangerous place to be, that the risks must be acknowledged, and major efforts made to manage them. Note the absence of evidence supporting the assertion that major risk exist when humans are exposed to animals and nature.

  1. Reduce the risk and minimize local and global impacts of zoonotic epidemics and pandemics by understanding the linkages and drivers of emergence and spillover, adopting upstream prevention and strengthening One Health surveillance, early warning and response systems.

The concept that pandemics are caused by “spillover” from animals is asserted, as is the very shaky idea that one can prevent and identify pandemics early using “surveillance” “warning and response systems”—which tellingly are never defined in any detail since no methods have ever worked.

  1. Reduce the burden of endemic zoonotic, neglected tropical and vector-borne diseases by supporting countries in implementing community-centric, risk-based solutions, strengthening policy and legal frameworks from the local to the global level and across sectors, and increasing political commitment and investment.

Blather about helping developing nations without saying anything specific, except that they need to strengthen “policy and legal frameworks”—such as implementing legislation for authorization of unlicensed, liability-free drugs and vaccines? They need more political commitment—commitment to what, exactly, is ominously left unsaid. And naturally more investment (and commissions) are needed.

  1. Promote awareness, policy changes and action coordination among stakeholders to ensure that humans, animals and ecosystems achieve health and remain healthy in their interactions with and along the food supply chain.

The ominous missing information about the policy changes and action desired should make you very nervous. Now the “food supply chain” is invoked, turning food and the methods by which it travels from farm to kitchen fair game for the purveyors of One Health.

  1. Take joint action to preserve antimicrobial efficacy and ensure sustainable and equitable access to antimicrobials for responsible and prudent use in human, animal and plant health.

It sounds like there is a plan to withhold antibiotics from us in the name of preserving their efficacy. Pharmacists were made to monitor azithromycin use as well as hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine and mefloquine use during the COVID time. Bacterial pneumonias were untreated until the victim’s lips turned blue. Expect more of this.

  1. Protect and restore biodiversity, prevent the degradation of ecosystems and the wider environment to jointly support the health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems, underpinning sustainable development.

This will be the justification to move people off the land in areas where species are said to be threatened. It may also lead to enforced changes in land use, based on my earlier readings of Daszak, Fauci and the Lancet One Health commission. And of course we must give up our simple pleasures in the name of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Who voted for them, and why are we being frog-marched into a SDG future, even though we don’t know where it is leading?

_________________

 

The cabal that delivered COVID and its pandemic response plan to us wants to solve the rest of the world’s problems for us, too. Will YOU let them?

December 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

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