By Gilbert Doctorow | February 16, 2024
It is remarkable how an invitation to do a live television interview can change your schedule and concentrate your mind.
This afternoon I got a WhatsApp message from TRT, Turkey’s premier English language international broadcaster with whom I had done several interviews a year ago, followed by many months of silence. That is not unusual. Broadcasters rotate experts in and rotate experts out at their pleasure.
The invitation today was to speak about breaking news, the reported death in a remote Yamalo-Nenets prison colony of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny at age 47. A glance at the latest online edition of The Financial Times confirmed that Navalny had indeed died and set out the comments of leading Western statesmen condemning what they considered to be the latest murder by Vladimir Putin of prominent activists who oppose his rule. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, European Council President Charles Michel and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were among those who already had spoken before microphones and were reading from the same anti-Putin script.
In short, what happened in the West this afternoon was a new campaign to vilify Vladimir Putin on the world stage based on a death which was, if I may quote former British PM Theresa May, ‘highly likely’ to have been perpetrated by British Intelligence for this very purpose.
In all of the false flag operations that have been directed by the West against Russia over the past decade or more, I have argued that the old Roman investigative principle of cui bono militated against the Kremlin having been involved in any way. So it is today: why would Putin want to murder Navalny, when the man is now largely forgotten within Russia. Navalny is yesterday’s news and his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign is irrelevant to Russians in the midst of an existential struggle with the Collective West that is being fought on the territory of Ukraine? However, the murder of Navalny clearly serves the interests of that same Collective West as an intended antidote to the major Soft Power coup of the Carlson Tucker interview with Vladimir Putin just a week ago and perhaps even more important, to the follow-up Tucker News Briefs showing his visits to the Kievskaya Metro Station and to an Auchan supermarket in downtown Moscow. This was not Gilbert Doctorow publishing his travel notes of visits to St Petersburg markets and reaching 10,000 readers; it was Tucker Carlson, with a regular U.S. audience of 40 million or more for his every broadcast, and a peak of one billion views for the recent interview.
Let us go beyond the cui bono argumentation to circumstantial evidence that is damning for the Brits. As the Americans like to say, there are ‘fingerprints’ of the Brits all over this death of Navalny.
A fair number of the poisonings and other assorted deaths of people who could be said were ‘inconvenient’ to the Kremlin happened in the U.K., after all. That is where Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch who opposed Putin tooth and nail, was ‘suicided’ and it occurred in 2013 at his London estate when it was widely rumored he was looking for forgiveness for his treachery and was preparing to return to Mother Russia with a trove of documents. Earlier still, the U.K. is where the Berezovsky employee Alexander Litvinenko met his death in 2006 from polonium poisoning in a very British cuppa tea.
However, more recently there were incidents in the U.K. which bear directly on the fate of Navalny, and their timing is very relevant. I am thinking about the Novichok poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Skripal in Salisbury at the start of March 2018, ahead of the 18 March presidential elections in Russia that year, when Putin was making his return to power following the interregnum when Dmitry Medvedev was president.
Hmm. A terrible attack on a Putin enemy in 2018 just weeks before a Russian presidential election. Hmm, again: the date of Putin’s next election happens to be 15-17 March.
The Skripal poisoning was shouted to the skies by the British political establishment. Can you just imagine, they said, that Putin is carrying out revenge murders on British soil! Of course, today, everyone has forgotten about the Skripals, who seem somehow to have survived the Novichok attack which is always fatal and to have been given new identities if they were not simply dumped by MI6 into shallow graves somewhere.
But the Novichok that the Russians were said to have invented also was in production in a chemical weapons facility located not far from Salisbury. Another detail that Western media chose to ignore.
Novichok just happens to be the poison that was allegedly used against Aleksei Navalny back in August 2020 while he was on the stump in provincial Russia working up the population to oppose the oligarchs and crooks who, he said, were running the country. Like the Skripals, Navalny miraculously survived his poisoning by Novichok. He was flown to Germany, where Angela Merkel extended a warm welcome to him and where, during his months long convalescence he oversaw the production by German crews of faked video exposés showing palaces on the Black Sea that were supposedly built for Putin.
Russian doctors at the prison colony were said to have spent half an hour today trying to revive Navalny, but in vain. He is just one more case of collateral damage in the British secret war on Russia
Time was, in the days of Tony Blair, we spoke of the British as the ‘lap dogs’ of Bush. Today it would be more appropriate to say that the British have become the Hound of the Baskervilles, ahead of and likely outside the control of Washington.
The Grayzone | February 15, 2024
In the latest Grayzone report from the ground in Gaza, 39-year-old mother Abier Mohammed Gheben describes how invading Israeli forces kidnapped her and subjected her to humiliation and violent threats as they interrogated her in captivity.
Defence for Children Palestine | February 13, 2024
Abdulhakim, 13, was injured in the Israeli military’s assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. As he recovers in a hospital in southern Gaza, there is no room for him and many others, so his bed remains in the hallway.
By Ben Bartee | Armageddon Prose | February 16, 2024
The last couple of years have been hell for the SSRI hustle.
First, in 2022, landmark research shot a God-sized hole in the “low serotonin causes depression” biochemical voodoo narrative, previously accepted uncritically as Gospel and which has sustained the multi-billion-dollar SSRI racket for decades.
Via Molecular Psychiatry :
“Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without, and methods to reduce serotonin availability using tryptophan depletion do not consistently lower mood in volunteers. High quality, well-powered genetic studies effectively exclude an association between genotypes related to the serotonin system and depression, including a proposed interaction with stress. Weak evidence from some studies of serotonin 5-HT1A receptors and levels of SERT points towards a possible association between increased serotonin activity and depression. However, these results are likely to be influenced by prior use of antidepressants and its effects on the serotonin system. The effects of tryptophan depletion in some cross-over studies involving people with depression may also be mediated by antidepressants, although these are not consistently found.”
Bet you didn’t see that report on Fox News or MSNBC!
Unvarnished veritas: the reason you tune into independent media like Armageddon Prose.
Legacy media producers/executives/news actors know how their bread gets buttered, and it’s not by informing their audience; it’s by selling (patented) erectile dysfunction and depression drugs wall-to-wall on every commercial break and keeping their mouths shut about the industry’s lies and abuses in between said commercial breaks.
Now, in research published late last year, we learn that psychotherapy alone not only beats antidepressants alone for combatting depression, but that it beats the combination of both!
In other words, antidepressants are worse than useless for treating depression in tandem with psychotherapy.
Via Frontiers in Psychiatry :
“The results showed that antidepressant exposure significantly increased the risk of suicide and suicide attempt when compared with no antidepressant usage among children and adolescents…
Among the antidepressants, SSRI use was associated with an increased risk of suicide and suicide attempt…
Clinicians should evaluate carefully their patients and be cautious with patients at risk to have treatment emergence or worsening of suicidal ideation (TESI/TWOSI) when prescribing antidepressants to children and young patients.
Thirty-four relevant RCTs were included. Psychotherapy-only was stronger than combined treatment (1.9% v. 3.7%; OR 1.96 [1.20–3.20], p = 0.012) and ADM-only (3.0% v. 5.6%; OR 0.45 [0.30–0.67], p = 0.001) in decreasing the likelihood of [severe adverse events] in the primary and trim-and-fill sensitivity analyses. Combined treatment was better than ADM-only in reducing the probability of SAEs (6.0% v. 8.7%; OR 0.74 [0.56–0.96], p = 0.029), but this comparative efficacy finding was non-significant in the sensitivity analyses. Subgroup analyses revealed the advantage of psychotherapy-only over combined treatment and ADM-only for reducing SAE risk among children and adolescents and the benefit of combined treatment over ADM-only among adults. Overall, psychotherapy and combined treatment outperformed ADM-only in reducing the likelihood of SAEs, perhaps by conferring strategies to enhance reasons for living. Plausibly, psychotherapy should be prioritized for high-risk youths and combined treatment for high-risk adults with MDD.”
As Pfizer exhorted the peasants at this year’s Super Bowl commercial pageantry, “Here’s to Science™”! (Except when it runs counter to financial interests; then it gets defunded and shelved and its practitioners run out of the field and any professional licenses confiscated by the state.)
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
2nd Smartest Guy in the World | February 15, 2024
The WEF-captured government of France has pushed through a draconian new law entitled Article 4. This Orwellian and unconstitutional color of law power grab is a purposely poor attempt at obscuring the irrefutable slow kill bioweapon death and destruction data.
What makes Article 4 particularly incendiary is that the majority of the French population has been outright refusing all “vaccinations.” Throttling their free speech as it pertains to gene modifying poisons will only increase the already heightened tensions between the criminal Macron administration and the awakening French populace, by design.
Between WEF puppet Trudeau in Canada and WEF puppet Macron in France, there is now a race to create the most totalitarian technocommunist nation in the West, with France now taking a slight lead; to wit:
These policies and “laws” are nothing more than an extension of the ongoing democide, and the associated iatrocide.
Meanwhile, back in the USSA, the Center for Disease Crimes (CDC) is still at it with their “Trust the Science” mendacity and murder:
Readers of this Substack fully appreciate the myocarditis and turbo cancer epidemics currently underway — not to mention soaring excess non-PSYOP-19 mortality — since the rollout of the “vaccines:”
Removing all BigPharma legal liabilities and prosecuting the various “health” agencies like the FDA, CDC, NIH, et al. has never been more urgent.
France’s Article 4 is just a hint at what is to come, especially if the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty scam ever passes in the various nations that they are attempting to further hijack.
They want you dead.
Do NOT comply.
RT | February 16, 2024
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky have signed a security pact under which Berlin will supply Kiev with military and economic aid for another ten years.
Inked on Friday, the 10-page agreement commits Germany to providing “unwavering support for Ukraine for as long as it takes in order to help Ukraine defend itself” and restore its 1991 borders. In addition to retaking the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, this feat would also involve the seizure of Crimea from Russia, which some American officials and Kiev’s former military chief view as next to impossible.
On top of military aid, the plan binds Germany to training Ukrainian police officers, transferring weapons manufacturing technology, paying for green energy projects, and a range of other efforts to help the Ukrainian government “continue providing services to its people”
Speaking at a ceremony in Berlin, Zelensky said that the details of the agreement “are very specific and involve long-term support,” and that the pact proves that one day “Ukraine will be in NATO.”
Germany is Ukraine’s second-largest Western backer, behind only the US. To date, Berlin has given Kiev €22 billion ($23.7 billion) in assistance, including €17.7 billion in military aid, according to figures compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. When aid transferred via the EU is included, Germany has handed over a total of €28 billion to Ukraine, Scholz said on Friday.
In addition to signing the decade-long pledge to Ukraine, Scholz announced a new package of military aid worth €1.1 billion. It will include 36 self-propelled howitzers, 120,000 artillery shells, and additional ammunition for Ukraine’s German-provided Iris-T air defense systems.
Germany’s outlay has hurt its own military readiness, with the New York Times reporting in November that training exercises are routinely canceled due to ammunition shortages, while German soldiers have yet to fire their latest howitzers, all of which have been sent to Ukraine.
Scholz’s decision to sanction Russian energy imports has also hammered the German economy, with industrial output falling by 2% last year, while the entire economy shrank by 0.3% in the same time period, according to the country’s Federal Statistical Office. One in three German manufacturers is currently considering moving abroad, Federation of German Industries (BDI) chief Siegfried Russwurm told Bild on Saturday, citing persistent inflation and high energy costs.
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | February 15, 2024
We are living through one of history’s longest and most excruciating versions of “We told you so.” When in March 2020, the world’s government decided to “shut down” the world’s economies and throttle any and all social activity, and deny kids schooling plus cancel worship services and holidays, there was no end to the warnings of the terrible collateral damage, even if most of them were censored.
Every bit of the warnings proved true. You see it in every story in the news. It’s behind every headline. It’s in countless family tragedies. It’s in the loss of trust. It’s in the upheaval in industry and demographics. The fingerprints of lockdowns are deeply embedded in every aspect of our lives, in ways obvious and not so much.
Actually, the results have been even worse than critics predicted, simply because the chaos lasted such a long time. There are seemingly endless iterations of this theme. Learning losses, infrastructure breakages, rampant criminality, vast debt, inflation, lost work ethic, a growing commercial real estate bust, real income losses, political extremism, labor shortages, substance addiction, and more much besides, all trace to the fateful decision.
The headlines on seemingly unrelated matters go back to the same, in circuitous ways. A good example is the news of the electric vehicle bust. The confusion, disorientation, malinvestment, overproduction, and retrenchment – along with the crazed ambition to force convert a country and world away from oil and gas toward wind and solar – all trace to those fateful days.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles. In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.”
Reading the story, it’s clear that the reporter is downplaying the sheer scale of the boom-bust.
That’s not to say that Tesla itself is going bust, only that it has a defined market segment. The technology of EVs simply cannot and will not become the major way Americans drive. It might have seemed otherwise for a moment in time but that was due to factors that traced exactly to pent up demand caused by lockdowns and huge errors in supply management due to bad signaling.
Looking back, the lockdowns hit in the spring of 2020 and supply chains were entirely frozen by force. This might have been a major problem for car manufacturers that had long relied on just-in-time inventory strategies. However, at the very time, the demand for travel collapsed. Commutes came to an end, and vacations too. At that same time, pre-arranged government subsidies and mandates for EVs flooded the industry, all of which were later ramped up by the Biden administration.
As demand picked up, retailers sold their old inventory of cars and looked to manufacturers for more but the chips needed to complete the cars were not available. Many cars were put on hold and lots emptied out. This continued through the following year as used car prices soared and stock was otherwise depleted.
By the time matters became desperate in the fall of 2021, manufacturers discerned a heightened demand for EVs and began to retool their factories for more. There was even a time when cars were being shipped without power steering, just to meet the demand.
It might have seemed for a time like the crazed period we just lived through was birthing a completely different way of life. A kind of irrationality, born of shock and awe, swept industry and culture. The EV was central to it.
This demand seemed to pan out in 2022 as Americans grabbed whatever cars were available, perhaps willing to give the new doohickies a shot. So on it went as more carmakers threw more resources at production, benefitting from massive subsidies and staying in compliance with new mandates for reducing their carbon footprint.
There was no particular reason to think anything would go wrong. But then the next year began to reveal uncomfortable truths. Cold weather dramatically cuts the range of the EVs. Charging stations are not as readily available on longer trips, charging takes longer than one expects, and having to plan such matters adds time. In addition, the repair bills can be extremely high if you can find someone to do it.
Tesla as a manufacturer had planned out all such contingencies but other carmakers less so. Very quickly the EVs gained a bad reputation on a number of different fronts.
“Last summer, dealers began warning of unsold electric vehicles clogging their lots. Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen and others shifted from frenetic spending on EVs to delaying or downsizing some projects,” writes the Journal. “Dealers who had been begging automakers to ship more EVs faster are now turning them down.”
In short, “the massive miscalculation has left the industry in a bind, facing a potential glut of EVs and half-empty factories while still having to meet stricter environmental regulations globally.”
Today, lots are selling the cars at a loss just to avoid the costs of keeping them around.
Truly, this has been one spectacular boom-bust in a single industry. There seems to be no real end to the bust either. These days it appears that everyone has given up on any chance of actually converting the mass of American cars to become EVs. All recent trends are headed in the other direction.
Meanwhile, the EV is deeply loved by many as 1) a second car, 2) for well-to-do suburban commuters, 3) who own homes, 4) can charge overnight, and 5) have a gas car as a backup for cold weather and out-of-town trips. That is to say, the market is becoming exactly what it should be – a street-worthy golf cart with very fancy features – and not some paradigmatic case for the “great reset.” That’s simply not happening, despite all the subsidies and tax breaks.
“A confluence of factors had led many auto executives to see the potential for a dramatic societal shift to electric cars,” writes the Journal, including “government regulations, corporate climate goals, the rise of Chinese EV makers, and Tesla’s stock valuation, which, at roughly $600 billion, still towers over the legacy car companies. But the push overlooked an important constituency: the consumer.”
Indeed, the American economy, much to the chagrin of many, still primarily relies on consumers to make choices in their best interest. When that doesn’t happen, no amount of subsidies can make up the difference.
This story is impossible to understand without reference to the crazed illusions caused by lockdowns. Those are what provided the respite of time to allow automakers to retool. Then they boosted demand artificially for transportation after a long period in which inventory had been depleted.
Then the whole ridiculous ethos of the “great reset” convinced idiotic corporate executives that nothing would ever be the same. Maybe we would get 15-minute cities powered by sunbeams and breezes after all, along with a social-credit system that would allow the authorities to decommission our ability to drive in an instant.
It turns out that the entire bit, including the fake prosperity of the lockdown economy, made possible by money printing and grotesque levels of government spending, was unsustainable. Even sophisticated car companies bought into the nonsense. Now they are paying a very heavy price. The new market depended on a panic of buying that turned out to be temporary.
In short, the illusions of these horrible policies have come crashing down. It was born of liberty-wrecking policies under the cover of virus control. Every special interest seized the day, including a new generation of industrialists seeking to displace the old ones by force.
More and more, it’s obvious what a disaster this was. And yet no one has apologized. Hardly anyone has admitted error. The big shots who wrecked the world are still in power.
The rest of us are left holding the bag, and paying very high repair bills for cars that are non-optimal for driving from one town to another and back again in the cold weather that was supposed to be gone by now had the “climate change” prophets been correct. They turn out to be as correct as those who promised us that we would no longer need “fossil fuels” and that the magic inoculation would protect everyone from a killer virus.
What astonishing illusions were born of this nutty and destructive period. At some point, not even corporate CEOs will be tricked by the experts.
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute.
By Anthony Murdoch | Life Site News | February 15, 2024
OTTAWA, Ontario — On the second anniversary of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government’s use of the Emergencies Act (EA) to quash the truckers’ Freedom Convoy in 2022, the heads of the protest, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, and a host of others have filed a $2 million lawsuit against the Trudeau government.
The lawsuit, announced yesterday by Freedom Convoy lawyer Keith Wilson, includes Lich as well as other convoy leaders Chris Barber, Tom Marazzo, Danny Bulford, and a host of others.
“On the 2-year anniversary of the Federal Government illegally invoking war measures against its citizens and targeting key protestors in Ottawa by freezing their bank accounts, today Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, Tom Marazzo, Danny Bulford and other protestors who were targeted by @JustinTrudeau and @cafreeland have filed lawsuits against the Federal Government.”
Wilson said that Section 24 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms “gives Canadians the right to sue their government for damages when Charter rights are violated.”
“Doing so affirms the seriousness of respecting Charter rights and is intended to deter future governments from breaching Canadians’ fundamental rights.”
Wilson noted that the lawsuits seek $2 million in damages.
Lich, on X (formerly Twitter) noted about the lawsuit on Wednesday that “Accountability is a thing. It’s go time!”
“Happy Emergencies Act Day! I hope you all look back and fondly remember how your government shot you with rubber bullets and tear gas for your own good!” she also wrote.
Tom Marazzo, who was also involved with the Freedom Convoy and is a 25-year Canadian army veteran, said about it that it was “2 years ago today, instead of celebrating Valentine’s Day, the most corrupt government in Canadian history, launched an all out illegal assault on the Rights and Freedoms of every Canadian citizen in Canada, with the help of the NDP, Bloc, MSM and the Banks.”
“2 years later, they are all still in power with no end in sight. The one question that is never addressed, by any of them is why did Canadians feel so desperate that they had to go to Ottawa in the first place???” wrote Marazzo on X.
Further details about the lawsuit will be forthcoming in the next few days.
The lawsuit comes just after a Canadian federal court last month ruled that the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act to quash the truckers’ Freedom Convoy in 2022 was unconstitutional. The court ruled that the use of the EA was a direct violation of the Charter and thus “not justified.”
The EA controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.
An investigation into the use of the EA, as per Canadian law, was launched by Trudeau. However, it was headed by Liberal-friendly Judge Paul Rouleau, who led the Public Order Emergency Commission. This commission was to investigate the Liberal government’s unprecedented use of the EA against the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protest. Unsurprisingly, the commission exonerated Trudeau’s use of the EA.
Freedom Convoy leaders Lich and Barber have been involved in a lengthy trial after being charged and taken to court by the federal government for leading the protests. The trial has not yet concluded and has been put on hold, with its resumption date uncertain. It is also not yet clear how the recent court ruling will affect the trial.
In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Trudeau’s government enacted the EA on February 14, 2022. Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23.
During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister. Rebel News reporter Alexa Lavoi, while covering the Freedom Convoy, was shot point blank in her leg with a rubber pellet, which police were using against protesters.
On February 14, 2022, the day the EA was invoked, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland mandated certain bank accounts be frozen under the EA. In total, close to $8 million in funds from 267 people were locked. Additionally, 170 bitcoin wallets were frozen.
The freezing of bank accounts by Freeland without a court order was an unprecedented action in Canadian history and was only allowed through the Liberal government’s invocation of the never-before-used EA.
Press TV – February 16, 2024
Top security officials of Iran and Kyrgyzstan have raised their objection to the West’s interference in the domestic affairs of regional countries and its efforts to impose its demands and will on them.
Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Akbar Ahmadian and Secretary of the Security Council of the Kyrgyz Republic Marat Imankulov held a meeting in Bishkek on Friday.
The two sides voiced concern over measures by certain Western countries to finance terrorist groups in Afghanistan and their bids to step up acts of terror in Central and West Asia.
They also discussed ways to promote cooperation in various political, security and military fields, especially in the fight against terrorist groups such as Daesh.
Ahmadian invited his Kyrgyz counterpart to travel to Iran which was accepted by Imankulov.
The SNSC secretary is in the Kyrgyz capital at the head of a delegation to take part in the 6th Summit of Secretaries and Advisors of National Supreme Councils of regional countries on Afghanistan.
Top security officials of regional countries, including Iran, Russia, China, India, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, are scheduled to discuss Afghanistan’s most important security and political issues and their impacts on the region.
RT | February 16, 2024
The US-led strikes against targets in Yemen are illegitimate and have no justification under the UN Charter, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said on Friday at a meeting of security officials from regional powers.
The US and UK, with support from allies, have launched dozens of attacks since January against the Houthis, a Yemeni armed movement. The stated intention was to protect maritime traffic from the militants, who have targeted trade vessels with raids and drone strikes in an attempt to put pressure on Israel.
”Washington and London have unleashed a war with Yemen under the pretext of securing freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. They are trying to drag other nations of the region into it,” Patrushev said. “However, their strikes on the positions of the Houthis are absolutely illegitimate and have nothing to do with the right of self-defense… contrary to what Washington claims.”
The Houthis were a major party in the civil war in Yemen and the primary opponents of the Saudi-led military intervention launched in 2015. They have emerged from the conflicts as the de-facto government of a large portion of the country.
Houthi forces have been targeting passing ships they believe to have ties with Israel in an attempt to enforce a naval blockade of the Jewish state – in retaliation for Israel’s siege of Gaza, which West Jerusalem has conducted with the stated goal of obliterating the Palestinian militant movement Hamas.
Tensions are on the rise globally, Patrushev said, claiming that the core reason for the violence is “the Western intention to hold on to its dominance in world affairs at all cost.”
“People in Washington are convinced that doing so would be easiest amid a global chaos,” he added.
Patrushev delivered the report to his counterparts from China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. The event’s main focus was on the situation in Afghanistan.
By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | February 16, 2024
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is facing the gravest existential crisis in its 74-year history, as funding cuts by several western countries come on top of ongoing atrocities perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.
The UN agency is unique in being the only one dedicated to a specific group of refugees in specific areas, and the only relief organization that operates a full-fledged educational system. UNRWA is also the only organization mandated to work in Gaza and distribute aid to the two million people currently trapped and starved in the besieged enclave.
To compound these challenges, the occupation wants to see it dismantled.
UNRWA must be destroyed
In January, Israel alleged that Palestinian members of UNRWA’s staff participated in the resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, leading the US and 18 other nations to swiftly suspend funding for the organization.
The suspensions were met with shock, as UNRWA plays a key role in providing food and medicine to starving Gazans struggling to survive Israel’s siege and bombardment of the coastal enclave.
However, Israel’s allegations are not based on any evidence. They are instead part of a classified plan prepared in advance by Israel’s foreign ministry to destroy UNRWA. It believes that UNRWA “works against Israel’s interests” by perpetuating the dream of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the idea of armed struggle against occupation.
The foreign ministry plan leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 on 28 December, set out a three-stage process to eliminate UNRWA in Gaza, using the Hamas-led resistance operation as a pretext:
First, prepare a case alleging UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas; second, reduce UNRWA’s field of activity and find replacement service providers; and third, transfer UNRWA’s responsibilities to another entity.
Channel 12 noted that Israel wants to move slowly, given that the US government sees UNRWA as crucial to humanitarian efforts in Gaza. The foreign ministry is seeking to gradually build the case for ousting the organization as part of the discussions on “the day after” the war – should Hamas be dismantled.
A sequence of events
According to a report by The New York Times, the “sequence of events” that led the US to suspend UNRWA funding began on 18 January when Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director general at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, met with Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA in Tel Aviv.
Weissbrod showed Lazzarini a dossier from Israeli intelligence claiming that 12 UNRWA employees had participated in the 7 October attacks.
After the meeting in Israel, Lazzarini made no effort to confirm the validity of the claims. Instead, he flew to New York to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and immediately began firing the employees, a UN official said.
The Guardian reported that Lazzarini was later asked in a press conference if he had looked into whether there was any evidence for the allegations presented to him by Weissbrod.
“No,” Lazzarini replied, “the investigation is going on now.”
Lazzarini said he made the “exceptional, swift decision” due to “the explosive nature of the claims,” rather than any evidence.
Lazzarini said he did not even read the dossier himself because it was in Hebrew. Instead, Weissbrod “was reading this and translating for me,” he said.
How did the US know?
The same New York Times report notes that UNRWA informed US officials about the allegations on 24 January. Just two days later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the suspension of funding to UNRWA.
Shockingly, the State Department made the announcement amid reports that Gaza was on the brink of famine, and despite acknowledging that “UNRWA plays a critical role in providing lifesaving assistance to Palestinians, including essential food, medicine, shelter.”
Like Lazzarini, Blinken made the decision without seeking any evidence from Israel, but solely based on the supposedly serious nature of the allegations alone. Blinken justified his decision to suspend aid to starving Palestinians by saying, “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible.”
In a seemingly coordinated effort, other countries – including Germany, Britain, and Australia – swiftly followed suit. Even Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged suspending aid without first receiving any evidence from Israel or even asking Lazzarini to share any evidence he might have.
The funding crisis escalated to such an extent that Juliette Touma, the UNRWA director of communications, said that after “decades of working together,” in “just over 24 hours, nine of our donors suspended funding to UNRWA.”
Another dodgy dossier
As criticism of the aid suspensions mounted, Israeli foreign ministry officials released a dossier to several foreign news organizations.
But after seeing the dossier, both the Financial Times and the UK’s Channel 4 reported that it provided “no evidence” for the claims.
Former UNRWA head Chris Gunness compared it to the “dodgy dossier” used by Tony Blair to take Britain to war in Iraq.
“There is no actual evidence. There are accusations,” Gunness concluded.
Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, tried to justify its refusal to provide any actual evidence by claiming, “the very nature of the allegations makes it impossible for Israel to share all the evidence it has with UNRWA.”
“They think that we can give them intelligence information, knowing that some of their employees work for Hamas? Are you serious?” he asked.
But Israeli propagandist and spokesperson Eylon Levy declined to say if Israel had provided evidence even to the US and UK governments. “I’m not personally aware of what material may have been passed on between our intelligence agencies,” he stated to Channel 4 when pressed for proof of the claims.
Links to Hamas?
The Israeli foreign ministry continued to implement the three-step leaked plan to destroy UNRWA by making additional allegations of UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas.
On 29 January, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported claims based on Israeli intelligence that “1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza has links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups.”
The article also provided no evidence, citing only Israeli intelligence, and was co-written by Carrie Keller-Lynn, an American who volunteered for the Israeli military and has a personal relationship with an Israeli army spokesperson.
Even if true, the allegations are meaningless. Hamas is the governing party in Gaza, making it self-evident that many UNRWA employees would be sympathetic or have family ties to the resistance movement.
Similarly, it would be unsurprising if an employee of an Israeli NGO or aid group was sympathetic to the Israeli army or had family members in the ruling Likud party.
As Haaretz noted, UNRWA employees in the West Bank and other countries where the organization operates are usually more aligned with whatever Palestinian faction is dominant in that area.
‘We could not verify this’
The Israeli foreign ministry’s plan to paint UNRWA as linked to Hamas soon continued with new and bizarre allegations that Hamas had placed a massive data center directly underneath the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.
The Times of Israel claimed that the data center was “built precisely under the location where Israel would not consider looking initially, let alone target in an airstrike.”
But Israel has been bombing UNRWA schools and other UN facilities for decades, including when large numbers of civilians have been sheltering in them. No Hamas leader would imagine this would provide it any protection.
But as OSINT analyst Michael Kobs has shown, the alleged data center the Israeli army showed to foreign journalists was not under the UNRWA headquarters.
Kobs also notes that when Tageschau journalist Sophie van der Tann was taken through a tunnel to see the alleged data center, she stated, “We could not verify” it was under the UNRWA headquarters.
Erasing the right of return
But why is Israel determined to destroy UNRWA?
One reason is Israel’s ongoing effort to slowly starve Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
At the beginning of the war on 7 October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant notoriously ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, saying, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” The late January campaign to suspend UNRWA funding then came at a time when “famine” was already “around the corner” in Gaza, according to UN Emergency Relief Chief Martin Griffiths. Israeli officials knew that suspending funding for UNRWA at this time would only bring famine closer. One Israeli military official acknowledged to the WSJ on 13 February that “Without UNRWA, there is no humanitarian aid in Gaza.”
But there is another reason Israel wants to destroy UNRWA, which predates the current war.
Palestinian political analyst and researcher Hanin Abou Salem explained that Israel wants to dismantle UNRWA because it transmits refugee status from generation to generation, which keeps the right of return for Palestinian refugees alive and “ensures that their hopes for returning to their ancestral homeland do not perish with the death of the original 1948 refugees.”
If UNRWA is dismantled and replaced by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), as Israel hopes, this will guarantee that Palestinians can only be resettled in third countries and never return to the homes and lands from which Israel forcibly expelled their grandparents during the Nakba.
In 2017, Israel launched a propaganda campaign against UNRWA and succeeded in convincing the Trump administration to cut around $300 million in funding to the organization the following year, only for the Biden administration to restore $235 million in 2021.
Destroying an idea
But with the start of the war on 7 October, Israel feels it has a second chance, not only to destroy the right of return, but also the “idea” of armed struggle to achieve it.
Noga Arbell, a researcher at the right-wing Kohelet Forum, recently explained that UNRWA needs to be “annihilated” because it is the “source of the idea.”
“It gives birth to more and more terrorists in all kinds of ways. UNRWA needs to be wiped out immediately – now – or Israel will miss the window of opportunity.”
UNRWA allegedly ‘gives birth to terrorists’ through its 706 schools, where some 543,075 Palestine refugee children receive free basic education.
In Gaza, UNRWA uses Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks and supplements these with its own materials. Israel has long been irked that these textbooks include lessons on the life of one of the most famous symbols of Palestinian armed resistance, an 18-year-old young woman and Palestinian refugee born in Lebanon, Dalal al-Mughrabi.
In 1978, Mughrabi led a group of Palestinian guerrillas from PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party to carry out an operation in Israel.
According to the Israeli version of events, Mughrabi “led one of the deadliest suicide attacks in Israel’s history,” by hijacking a bus and taking its passengers hostage on the highway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. During the operation, the bus exploded, and “38 Israelis were murdered, including 13 children.”
Israel claims that UNRWA is, therefore, teaching “mass murder” by using PA books that encourage everyone to be like Mughrabi.
However, Palestinians claim that Israeli forces killed the hostages.
You can kill a revolutionary, but not the revolution
According to a 2008 report in the Guardian, Mughrabi and the Palestinian guerillas intended to attack the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv and hijacked two buses carrying civilians on the coastal road near Haifa. Along the way, they engaged in an intense 15-hour gun battle with Israeli forces.
Palestinians maintain the bus exploded, killing the guerillas and hostages, after it was fired on from the air by Israeli helicopters or elite Israel commandos, in a possible early instance of the mass Hannibal Directive.
Israeli forces implemented the Hannibal Directive on 7 October, killing large numbers of their own civilians – and burning many of them alive – using attack helicopters, tanks, and drones, while blaming all these deaths on Hamas.
Even if Israel succeeds in executing its plan to destroy UNRWA, while starving and bombing tens of thousands to death in Gaza, it will not be able to erase the spirit of Dalal al-Mughrabi and the thousands of martyrs like her who have sacrificed themselves for the freedom of Palestinians.
Within 24 hours of the unsubstantiated accusations against UNRWA, the US, the UK, and 14 other nations suspended funding to the organization the Wall Street Journal described as the “main pillar of operations to move food aid, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza.”
The abruptness of these cuts was particularly jolting in light of the looming threat of famine, as highlighted by Griffiths, who warned that Gaza was on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
These drastic measures were instigated by allegations based on a dubious six-page dossier, arguably part of a meticulously crafted plan orchestrated by Israel’s foreign ministry, aimed at dismantling the humanitarian and educational infrastructure serving internally displaced Palestinians.
This concerted effort to undermine UNRWA is nothing short of a calculated strategy to exert control over the narrative surrounding Palestinian refugees and to once again reshape the demographics in Palestine.
MEMO | February 16, 2024
An elderly Palestinian woman, Umm Muhammad Musmah, has categorically refuted the Israeli army’s propaganda that soldiers had found her last month while shackled inside a building and provided her with medical aid, Anadolu news agency reported.
Umm Muhammad. who is currently receiving treatment in the Gaza European Hospital in the city of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, told the agency that it was the Israeli army soldiers who had detained her, handcuffed and beaten her then filmed her for propaganda purposes.
She said she was chained and kept outdoors in the cold weather and deprived of food throughout her detention which lasted for nearly two weeks.
Recounting the harsh experience, Umm Muhammad said: “I was arrested [by occupation forces] with many citizens from the Ma’an area, east of the city of Khan Yunis, and [the soldiers] tied my hands, while the weather was very cold. I tried to untie myself, but could not.”
“I was left without food, and was beaten during the arrest,” she added.
In a post published on X on 26 January, the Israeli occupation army added a video of the elderly Palestinian woman being carried on an ambulance stretcher, accompanied by Israeli soldiers.
Israeli army spokesman, Avichay Adraee, claimed that an Israeli army’s drone had located the woman while combing an area in Gaza after she had taken shelter in the building while her hands were shackled and she was suffering from bad health.
“While providing medical care to her, the elderly woman told the force that all her family members had fled to the south, and that Hamas saboteurs arrived at her house wearing military uniforms and handcuffed her two days ago and ordered her to say that our soldiers did that,” he claimed, adding that the Israeli forces provided medical treatment to the elderly woman and released her later.
Israeli forces have repeatedly published claims which have later been disproven. Including claiming it didn’t bomb Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on 17 October 2023 and kill 500 Palestinians in Gaza.
Over the past few months, Palestinians have been released from Israeli captivity and left to make their own way to shelters or to find their families in Gaza. The detainees have shown signs of torture and pictures from their detention show them being humiliated and degraded, stripped of their clothes and left outside in the winter cold.
Just this week, a detained Palestinian civilian was sent into Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis with his wrists tied together and ordered to tell those taking shelter in the hospital to evacuate it. He was then killed by sniper fire, while three Palestinians who were heeding his advice and who tried to travel through the designated evacuation route were all killed.
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By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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