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Largest Study of Its Kind Finds Excess Deaths During Pandemic Caused by Public Health Response, Not Virus

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 19, 2024

A study released today of excess mortality in 125 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic found the major causes of death globally stemmed from public health establishment’s response, including mandates and lockdowns that caused severe stress, harmful medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccines.

“We conclude that nothing special would have occurred in terms of mortality had a pandemic not been declared and had the declaration not been acted upon,” the authors of the study wrote.

Researchers from the Canadian nonprofit Correlation Research in the Public Interest and the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières analyzed excess all-cause mortality data prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning with the March 11, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic declaration and ending on May 5, 2023, when the WHO declared the pandemic over.

The results, presented in a detailed 521-page analysis, establish baseline all-cause mortality rates across 125 countries and use those to determine the variations in excess deaths during the pandemic.

The researchers also used the baseline rates to investigate how the individual country variations in excess death rates correlated to different pandemic-related interventions, including vaccination and booster campaigns.

Not all of the results on a country-by-country basis were the same. For example, in some countries, mortality spikes occurred before the vaccines were rolled out, while in other places, the mortality spikes tracked closely with vaccine or booster campaigns.

In some places, excess mortality rates returned to baseline or close to baseline in 2022, while in others, the rates persisted well into 2023. Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., lead author of the study, told The Defender the disparities result from the complex nature of pandemic measures — and the data — in different areas.

Once Rancourt’s team was able to establish the baseline and excess mortality data for each place, they clustered and examined the data through different filters to interpret it, and drew several conclusions.

Data ‘incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death’

The researchers established that there was significant excess mortality worldwide between March 11, 2020, and May 5, 2023.

Overall excess mortality during the three years in the 93 countries with sufficient data to make an estimate is approximately 0.392% of the 2021 population — or approximately 30.9 million excess deaths from all causes.

The conventional explanation for the excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rancourt said, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus caused virtually all deaths — and there would have been even more deaths if there hadn’t been a vaccine.

The variations in excess all-cause mortality rates across space and time, the authors wrote, “allow us to conclude that the Covid-period (2020-2023) excess all-cause mortality in the world is incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death.”

They said the theory that the virus caused the deaths is propped up by mass virus-testing campaigns that should be abandoned.

‘Idea that vaccines saved lives is ridiculous’

Rancourt and his team cited several factors they believe disprove the theory that the virus caused a spike in all-cause mortality.

For example, they wrote that excess mortality surged almost simultaneously across several continents when a pandemic was declared, while there were no comparable surges in areas that had not yet declared a pandemic.

This suggests that pandemic interventions like lockdowns, which were implemented synchronously across many countries, likely caused the surges.

The researchers also pointed out the significant variation in mortality rates during the pandemic in all time periods, even across different political jurisdictions directly adjacent to each other. If the virus caused the deaths, it would follow that the infection fatality rate would be the same, or at least similar across political boundaries.

The researchers also found a lot of variability in death rates within countries over time, which also would not be an expected outcome if those deaths were caused by a pathogen.

Rancourt said they found “the idea that the vaccine saved lives is ridiculous,” and based on flawed modeling as he and colleagues also showed in a previous paper.

Here again, they found no systematic or statistically significant trends showing that vaccination campaigns in 2020 and 2021 reduced all-cause mortality.

Instead, they found that in many places, there was no excess mortality until the vaccines were rolled out, and most countries showed temporal associations between vaccine rollouts and increases in all-cause mortality.

Medical interventions — including denial of treatment — caused premature deaths

Rancourt said the excess deaths his team identified are strongly associated with the combination of two major factors — the proportion of elderly in a country’s population and the number of people living in poverty. Both factors increased peoples’ vulnerability to “sudden and profound structural societal changes” and “medical assaults.”

While the proximal cause of death may be classified on death certificates as a respiratory condition or infection, the researchers noted, they argue the true primary causes of death are actually biological stress, non-COVID-19-vaccine medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccination rollouts.

The study provides an overview of plausible mechanisms for this hypothesis, including research showing that some people experienced severe biological stress from measures like mandates and lockdowns.

“If you structurally change the society by preventing people from moving, breathing, working, having their lives, having to stay at home, lock them in. If you do all these incredibly huge changes, structural changes in society, that is going to induce biological stress,” Rancourt told The Defender.

“There’s very compelling scientific evidence that biological stress is a massive killer,” he added.

Rancourt also pointed out that the stress of lockdowns affected poor people quite differently than it did people who could easily work from home, have food delivered and live relatively comfortably.

The authors also pointed to extensive evidence showing that medical interventions — including denial of treatment — caused premature deaths.

Such interventions included but were not limited to the denial of antibiotics and ivermectin against bacterial pneumonia, the systematic use of mechanical ventilators, experimental treatment protocols, new palliative medications and overdoses, isolation of vulnerable people and encouraged voluntary or involuntary suicide.

The March-April 2020 COVID-19 peak they identified in several countries is difficult to explain without such medical interventions, they wrote.

17 million excess deaths tied to COVID vaccines

Finally, the researchers projected that 17 million of the excess deaths they identified were associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, confirming the findings of their previous research on a smaller sample of countries.

Those vaccine-related estimations were based on analyses of places that had large spikes immediately following vaccination or booster campaigns and also by examining the numbers of vaccine doses and their relation to deaths over time.

Thirty percent of the countries they analyzed had no excess deaths until either the vaccine rollouts or the booster campaigns. And there were significant correlations between COVID-19 vaccine rollouts and peaks or increases in excess all-cause mortality. Ninety-seven percent of countries showed a late-2021 or early-2022 peak in excess all-cause mortality temporally associated with booster rollouts.

It is highly unlikely, the researchers wrote, that the vaccine-mortality associations are coincidental.

Rancourt noticed that people critical of this idea point to the fact that in some places, there are sometimes campaigns or booster campaigns that aren’t associated with spikes in excess mortality.

However, he said vaccination campaigns don’t always lead to such spikes because vaccination was not related to death in the same way in every situation. Vulnerability factors like the age of those vaccinated, the health of the population and other sociological factors related to stressors on the immune system change how they are affected by vaccine toxicity or the vaccines’ effects on the immune system.

Based on their analysis and interpretations, they concluded, “We are compelled to state that the public health establishment and its agents fundamentally caused all the excess mortality in the Covid period.”

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.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Ministers Were Informed Of mRNA Lies During Mandates, Cardiologist Reveals

Dr Aseem Malhotra had a direct line of communication to the Health Secretary

By JJ Starky | The Stark Naked Brief | July 19, 2024

We’ve had another mainstream breakthrough.

Yesterday, Dr. Aseem Malhotra appeared on TalkTV to discuss the UK government’s Covid response in light of Baroness Hallett’s report on the first module of the Covid Inquiry.

Commentators were surprised. Most predicted that the Covid Inquiry chair’s report would echo sentiments seen during proceedings, suggesting that lockdowns, despite all credible evidence, were the only viable solutions for dealing with Covid.

So when Hallett’s team concluded that “the imposition of a lockdown should be a measure of last resort… indeed, there are those who would argue that a lockdown should never be imposed,” it almost seemed strange.

During the interview, much like his January 2023 appearance on the BBC where he pivoted from discussing statins to linking Covid vaccines to cardiovascular issues, Malhotra shifted the focus to vaccines.

He covered a lot of detail in quick succession. He argued that the term “vaccine” used for mRNA products is misleading, as they are better described as gene technologies. He cited peer-reviewed reanalysis of Moderna and Pfizer’s clinical trials, which showed an adverse event rate closer to 1-in-800, a figure that outweighed Covid hospitalisation risk. He also mentioned that Israel saw a 25% increase in cardiac events among people aged 16-39 during the vaccine rollout.

But the standout moment came when Malhotra discussed his involvement in a court case in Finland concerning an entrepreneur who was denied entry to a café because he was unvaccinated.

Malhotra revealed that he witnessed a World Health Organisation (WHO) chief scientist testify under oath that by December 2021, the mRNA vaccine offered zero protection against Covid. He then disclosed that he had texted Sajid Javid, the UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, informing him of this testimony, but Javid effectively ignored it.

Former UK Secretary State for Health and Social Care Sajid Javid

It has been difficult to gauge what certain officials knew at what time. However, now we have an indication that some were categorically made aware that their policies were illogical and at direct odds with the evidence-base.

Press releases show that Javid’s department finally revoked the Covid vaccine mandate for health and social care staff on March 15, 2022, months after Malhotra made contact.

In November 2021, a survey of industry leaders estimated that up to 20,000 carers had already quit or been sacked over mandatory jabs. Given the mandate carried on to March the following year, that could be a vast underestimate.

Malhotra, who once advocated for everyone to receive the vaccines before his father reportedly passed away from them, notably said, “This is the biggest corporate crime committed by the drug the industry.”

TalkTV did not post the interview on YouTube as the platform continues to issue strikes to channels discussing the topic. So here it is in full.

Summary of Hallett’s Report on the Covid Inquiry:

  • Ad Hoc Intervention: Epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse described lockdown as an ad hoc intervention with no prior planning, guidelines, or clear expectations.
  • Lack of Scrutiny on Consequences: The novelty of the lockdown approach meant there was no time to scrutinise its potential side effects, leading to ill-prepared policies with unknown consequences.
  • Significant Economic Impact: The report highlights the 25% drop in GDP between February and April 2020 due to lockdowns, representing a major gap in the UK’s assessment of pandemic risk.
  • Missing Topics: The report does not discuss the UK government’s evidence that the Test and Trace system had minimal impact on reducing Covid infections despite its high cost.
  • Balancing Factors in Health Emergencies: The report emphasises the need for a balanced approach in health emergencies, considering economic impact, social wellbeing, and effects on education, as advocated by former chief medical officer Sally Davies.
  • Exclusion of Certain Testimonies: Testimonies from Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty are notably absent, indicating a potential shift from previously dominant perspectives during the pandemic.
  • Real Story of the Report: The report suggests that the UK was not prepared for the “wrong pandemic”, but rather that it resorted to an unprecedented policy without a proper evidence base or risk assessment. It advocates that lockdowns should be a measure of last resort, and perhaps never used at all.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Reviewing the Extraordinary Unsolved Murder of Seth Rich

DNC Staffer Seth Rich, murdered on July 10, 2016
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | July 20, 2024

The murder of Seth Rich—in the middle of one of the most brutal presidential election years in history—has always struck me as an example of the authorities NOT investigating a matter of public interest. The mainstream media and half the country were so blinded by partisan passions that they couldn’t see the grounds for suspecting that the young man’s murder was politically motivated. Just a few hours after the incident occurred—before there was any time to perform an investigation—the Metropolitan Police Department announced that the murder appeared to be a “botched robbery.”

Since Seth Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016—12 days before Wikileaks published embarrassing DNC e-mails—there has been much speculation that he could have been the source because he was upset about how the DNC had treated Bernie Sanders. A good investigator wouldn’t speculate about the crime, but he would certainly notice that, statistically speaking, the murder is extraordinary.

Seth Rich was shot in the back near his apartment building, and though he was carrying a valuable watch, wallet, and cell phone, these were not taken by the assailant. Perhaps it was a botched robbery, as the Metropolitan Police Department quickly announced, but shooting a guy in the back without taking his valuables is not typical of armed robbery. Other robberies in the same neighborhood around the same time followed the conventional pattern of the assailant threatening the victim and demanding his or her valuables instead of opening fire on the victim.

In the year 2016, there were 135 homicides in Washington D.C., which has a resident population of 672,000, which comes to approximately one murder per 5000 residents— a dramatic decline from the city’s murder rate in the early nineties. Incidentally, the Metropolitan Police conducted an analysis of homicide for the years 1998-2000—after homicide rates had dropped significantly—and concluded that the primary motives were

1) Argument/conflict

2). Drug related

3). Revenge/retaliation

4). Robbery

5). Gang related.

During this period, homicides were not equally distributed throughout the city, but were concentrated in particular neighborhoods. 92% of the victims were African Americans 3.2% were Hispanic and 3.2% were white. Though one must consider the possibility that homicide trends in DC have changed since 2000 (apart from merely decreasing in numbers) it’s notable that, of the currently unsolved homicides in Washington DC in the year 2016, Seth Rich is the only white victim in a city that is now 44% white.

Julian Assange has always insisted the DNC e-mails were leaked and not hacked. Former NSA technical director William Binney has also insisted that if the DNC e-mails were hacked, it would be child’s play for the NSA to establish the precise routing of the hack, which indicates that the e-mails were more likely leaked by an insider.

Regarding motive, a good investigator would consider the hypothesis that Seth Rich was murdered NOT in retaliation, but to eliminate him as a witness that the DNC e-mails were leaked by an insider and not hacked by Russians. Almost immediately after the embarrassing e-mails were published, Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired CrowdStrike to perform a forensic cyber analysis of the serverCrowdStrike falsely proclaimed it was Russian hackers who were responsible, and never presented evidence to support this assertion.

Regarding the assailant: A good investigator would consider the hypothesis that he was contracted to murder Rich but knew nothing about his target or the motive for killing him. This hypothesis is consistent with Rich being murdered as he approached the entrance to his home—that is, the contract killer was provided only with the address and a photograph of his target.

Another notable aspect of this crime was the extremely emotional tone of press reporting from the same reporters who so passionately embraced the Russian meddling story. The mere suggestion that Seth Rich’s murder was politically motivated prompted these same people to angrily denounce this (perfectly reasonable hypothesis) as “wild, right wing conspiracy theory” and to demand that reporters cease and desist from exploring this hypothesis.

While the murder of Seth Rich was done at night and many of the details were concealed, the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump was performed in broad daylight with millions watching. The fact that proper security was withheld from the event is so obvious that people have a hard time believing it was an intentional act.

Surely, naive people think, those currently in power wouldn’t perform such deeds so out in the open. And yet, there it is, plain to see, right under everyone’s nose.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Could Trump’s election end NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia?

Strategic Culture Foundation | July 19, 2024

The presidential nomination of Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance as his running mate raises the prospect of a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Ukraine. Both have been vociferous critics of the NATO proxy war and the arming of the Kiev regime. Vance has even proposed a peace settlement that is close to Moscow’s demands.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is recently pushing peace diplomacy, has voiced optimism that the omens are good for a settlement later this year to the worst war in Europe since the Second World War – if Trump and Vance are elected.

Only days after Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, he was officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate amid ecstatic scenes at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

After the tumult and drama over the last week – a long time in politics, as the saying goes – the Trump election campaign is in the driving seat. His vice presidential running mate is 39 years of age and gives the Republican Party a youthful zest. Both men are very much singing from the same hymn sheet regarding their “Make America Great Again” vision.

Trump has united the GOP under his leadership. All former party rivals lined up this week in Milwaukee to endorse the former real estate magnate in his bid to seek re-election to the White House in November. That helps to solidify his manifesto, which bodes well for diplomacy in Ukraine.

By contrast, the election campaign of Democrat incumbent President Joe Biden has run into a ditch. This week he was self-isolating in Delaware having reportedly incurred a third-time Covid infection. Biden increasingly looks toast. His apparent mental decline – the latest gaffe this week was not remembering the name of his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, referring to him haltingly as “a black man” – has provoked a crisis in the Democratic Party and the largely favorable U.S. corporate news media. Senior figures including former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are reportedly urging Biden to stand down and pass the torch to a younger candidate. Panic is in the air.

There are reports that Biden may throw in the towel within the next few days as the Democrats head into their National Convention to officially nominate their presidential candidate. The trouble for the Democrats is they do not have a viable alternative candidate at this late stage in the campaign – with less than four months to election day on November 7.

That means there is now a serious chance that Trump could return to the White House after he lost the election in 2020, which MAGA loyalists hotly disputed as “stolen”.

That election outcome turns attention to one issue in particular: the war in Ukraine. The conflict erupted in February 2022 and has cost the lives of over 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Under the Biden administration and aligned European NATO members, there is no sign of the war coming to an end. Biden and European allies have pledged to keep sending weapons to Ukraine and tens of billions of dollars to prop up a hopelessly corrupt NeoNazi regime in Kiev.

Trump and Vance have pitched a diametrically opposite policy on the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

That stance is causing the Deep State and its military-industrial complex acute anxiety. The Ukraine war racket has been a bonanza that vested interests in the U.S. ruling class do not want to end. That tension provides a plausible explanation for the attempted assassination of Trump during an open-air rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. Salient questions remain about how the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old student, gained access to such a high-security position to fire his rifle at Trump.

The Republican candidates have warned that the Ukraine conflict is in danger of spiraling into a nuclear world war. Trump has said that he would end the war immediately by cutting off the military aid spigot and forcing the Kiev regime to begin negotiations with Russia.

Tantalizingly, JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been even more explicit in proposing that the warring parties should accept the territorial gains made by Russia – including Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson provinces – and that Ukraine must accept Moscow’s demand that it remain neutral and outside of the NATO alliance.

Such a position is a breath of fresh air for its rationality. Many respected American scholars and diplomats have also recommended this historically coherent position as a solution, including Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. At least Trump and Vance seem to be cognizant of this reality, unlike the Biden administration and the rest of the Democrat Party, along with the Western media establishment and European minions who insanely push a fraudulent war to the last Ukrainian.

Moreover, polls show that the majority of American citizens (and Europeans) would prefer to see a diplomatic solution to the worst war in Europe since 1945.

Hungary’s Orban has admirably advocated peaceful diplomacy and for his troubles, his government has been sanctioned by the European Union establishment. Slovakia’s Robert Fico has also called for an end to the war in Ukraine, which many believe led to an assassination attempt on his life in May.

The conflict in Ukraine is a senseless, bloody slaughter that should never have escalated if Russia’s peace proposals in December 2021 had been accepted instead of dismissed out of hand by the Biden administration and its NATO lackeys in Europe. Also, a peace deal was possible in April 2022 but again was scuppered by malicious U.S. and British intervention.

If an American presidential candidate is proposing a diplomatic end to the conflict then that should be welcomed. It seems that common sense is prevailing.

Having said that, however, there are caveats. The Trump-Vance rhetoric could be empty pre-election canvassing for votes.

Trump’s record is one of hyping expectations and not delivering. When he ran for the presidency in 2016, he promised to normalize relations with Russia – and did not deliver.

He also boasted about solving the conflict in the Middle East with a “deal of the century” – only to embolden Israeli aggression towards Palestinians and Iran.

A reality check is strongly advised on what Trump and Vance can achieve.

While both men express skepticism about “endless wars” and NATO, it should be borne in mind that the conflicts the U.S. empire is fueling have a systematic cause. The United States is desperately fighting to maintain its failing hegemony against the rise of a multipolar and more democratic global order.

Washington and its European vassals are unleashing wars as a matter of necessity for preserving their erstwhile global dominance. History teaches that wars are always the refuge of the Western imperialist ruling classes.

It is notable that while Trump and Vance talk about ending conflict in Ukraine, they are at the same time talking belligerently about confronting China and Iran.

Trump and the MAGA Republicans are deprecated by the U.S. establishment as being “isolationists” in their vision of pursuing “America First”.

But the notion of “isolationalism” is an oxymoron when one considers the objective reality of U.S. imperialism. Foreign wars are an insatiable appetite for Western dominance.

American relations with the rest of the world are all about power projection, dominance and ultimately using violence to assert its “might is right” presumed national privileges. That applies whether the incumbent in the White House is a Democrat or Republican.

Trump may sound more reasonable on the issue of conflict in Ukraine with Russia. That alone makes him a more plausible candidate compared with the reckless warmongering of Biden and the Democrat-Deep State nexus.

The war in Ukraine must be stopped as soon as possible and a more reasonable security arrangement for Europe must be negotiated as Russia has long been consistently advocating.

Any diplomatic opening towards achieving peace and ending the killing must be welcomed.

Trump and Vance might just deliver on ending the hostilities in Ukraine which in itself would be a huge step forward away from the abyss of all-out war with Russia. On that score alone, their election might bring about an improvement.

But alas there is a contradiction. Don’t expect world peace to break out in other parts of the globe, because U.S. imperialism is cranking up its war machine. Trump and Vance are hawkish in their policy towards China and Iran.

A comprehensive solution to ending U.S. aggression and militarism is not a change of personnel at the White House. A profound, systematic change in American politics and economics is required.

Is partial peace sufficient? Maybe it is for now.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , | 3 Comments

Ukraine ‘Shot Itself in the Foot’ by Banning Transit of Lukoil Crude to Hungary and Slovakia

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 20.07.2024

Hungary and Slovakia stopped receiving oil from Russian oil giant Lukoil via the Soviet-built Druzhba (‘Friendship’) pipeline which runs through northwestern Ukraine after Kiev imposed a transit ban. Financial analyst Paul Goncharoff says the move is both counterproductive and shortsighted, but that hasn’t stopped Ukraine’s authorities before.

Officials in Budapest and Bratislava confirmed this week that the delivery of oil supplies purchased from Lukoil through the Druzhba oil pipeline network had dried up.
Slovakian oil transporter Transpetrol said non-Lukoil Russian deliveries appear unaffected so far.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Budapest is receiving oil via the TurkStream pipeline, running from Russia through the Black Sea to southeastern Europe, but that supplies via Druzhba had been stopped “due to a new legal situation” imposed by Kiev.

“We are now working on a solution that would allow oil transit to restart as Russian oil is very important for our energy security,” Szijjarto said Tuesday.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Moscow doubts whether dialogue with the Ukrainian companies responsible for oil transit on this issue is possible.

“This sort of decision was made not at the technical, but the political level. We don’t have any dialogue here,” he said.

Druzhba is one of the longest and largest oil pipeline networks in the world, with a capacity to ship about 66.5 million tons of oil annually. The network branches off in southern Belarus into a northern route running through Poland to eastern Germany, and a southern route, which winds through southwestern Ukraine to the Hungarian and Slovakian borders.

Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic negotiated with Brussels in late 2023 to allow them to maintain their pipeline-based imports of Russian oil, citing a lack of access to sea-based deliveries, and lack of opportunities to receive substantial amounts of oil from other sources.

The three countries collectively imported about 15 million tons of Russia divided roughly evenly between them in 2022, and dropped purchases modestly (between 2 and 10 percent) in 2023, according to Russian oil transport giant Transneft.

Shipments of Russian oil to Poland and further west to Germany via Druzhba’s northern branch were halted by Warsaw in early 2023.

Last month, Ukraine formally banned the transit of crude produced by Lukoil – Russia’s second-largest oil company, through the section of Druzhba running through Ukraine.

The move signals another short-sighted escalation by Ukraine’s pro-Western elite which will ultimately harm ordinary Ukrainians in the long run, says veteran financial analyst Paul Goncharoff.

“Whether Ukraine can afford to further escalate the situation surrounding the movement of energy resources is a moot point. Escalation on all fronts has passed all reasonable limits, politically, economically and militarily. They cannot afford it economically [nor] politically as they have now estranged both Slovakia and Hungary, [but will continue to escalate], regardless of cost, as their marching orders from Washington along with the servile echoes of Brussels and their insistence to ‘demonstrate resolve’” dictate, Goncharoff told Sputnik.

“The real consequences should become very clear in 3-4 months as winter descends on Ukraine, and any energy goodwill there may still be in countries neighboring Ukraine will be scarce to nonexistent,” the observer expects.

At this stage, Goncharoff says, Russian oil exporters not affiliated with Lukoil can still send oil through the Druzhba pipeline, but “how long this possibility will continue is anyone’s guess.”

“In discussions I have had with persons closely involved in this trade, there are swap workarounds being looked at in order not to deprive Slovakia or Hungary from needed and contracted resources. Unfortunately, the political reality is such that it is likely any workarounds will raise a hue and cry from the West, and they will try to close the workarounds off as well, if for no other reason but to be politically correct,” the market analyst said.

Ultimately, the old saying “shooting oneself in the foot” is an apt description for Kiev, Brussels and Washington’s policy today, “while the world looks on, shaking its collective head in wonder,” Goncharoff concluded.

Russian oil and gas flows to Europe have dropped dramatically following the escalation of the conflict in the Donbass into a full-fledged proxy war between Russia and NATO. The decline in Russian energy flows west prompted Moscow to reorient part of its energy trade to its BRICS partners (particularly China and India) and pushed EU countries and the UK to kick off a global scramble to secure the energy needed to power their economies.

The West’s attempts to “punish” Russia by cutting off energy purchases have so far had a boomerang effect, raising prices and undermining Europe’s global industrial competitiveness against China and the United States. Traditional European industrial powerhouse Germany has been hit particularly hard, facing the outflow of major manufacturers looking for greener pastures, and cheaper energy costs, in countries abroad.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Economics | , , , | 5 Comments

Australia uses ‘illegal surveillance’ against pro-Palestinian student protesters: Activist

Press TV – July 20, 2024

Authorities at a top university in Australia have used illegal surveillance methods against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who have for several months been protesting against Israel’s atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

Students at the University of Melbourne staged encampment protests and sit-in strikes to force the university to cut ties with weapons manufacturers, divest from Israeli firms, and “end its complicity in the genocide in Gaza,” said protest organizer Dana Alshaer.

Alshaer, one of the main organizers of UniMelb for Palestine, told Turkish news agency Anadolu that along with 20 other students, she is now facing “extremely baseless” allegations of misconduct from the university and the threat of expulsion.

“They targeted five main organizers of UniMelb for Palestine, and they also targeted some prominent students who have been very visibly present during rallies and protests on campus,” said Alshaer.

“In the misconduct allegations,” she said, “the university included CCTV footage and Wi-Fi location tracking as evidence … so there’s been a use of surveillance technologies against students.”

Alshaer said the university clarified in 2016 that “their Wi-Fi tracking cannot and will not be used to identify students.”

“However, what we saw in the misconduct allegations and documents that were sent to us is that Wi-Fi tracking has been used to track students.”

Alshaer also raised concern “over the university’s possible and potential use of facial recognition programs.”

She said the university is using these misconduct allegations as a punishment “for students who defied the university’s ties with weapons manufacturers … and challenged the university’s ongoing complicity in the genocide in Gaza.”

She said that that university “is punishing students for standing up against [Israel’s] genocide” in Gaza.

Alshaer said that after their month-long Gaza solidarity encampment protests, they managed to push the university to disclose in June its links with US weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems, as well as over $15 million in research partnerships and investments with the US Department of Defense.

Despite being targeted by the university, she said, the students are determined to continue their activities for Palestine.

Pro-Palestine encampment protests that began at Columbia University in the United States in April and spread across campuses nationwide and worldwide, have faced harsh police crackdown and led to hundreds of arrests.

The protesters have been calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies that support the regime’s atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism | , | 2 Comments

How western Big Tech giants enable Israel’s occupation

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | July 20, 2024

On 10 July, Hebrew newspaper Maariv reported that 46,000 Israeli businesses have been forced to shut down due to the ongoing Gaza war and its devastating effect on the economy. The outlet referred to Israel as a “country in collapse.”

Regular readers of The Cradle will be well aware of the scale of the occupation state’s economic collapse since the Gaza genocide began. Yet, its effect on the precipitous decline of Tel Aviv’s once-thriving tech sector remains underexplored.

Complicity in occupation infrastructure

In mid-June, mainstream news outlets reported that chip giant Intel was halting expansion of a major factory project in Israel, which was slated to pump an extra $15 billion into the occupation entity’s economy.

Intel is just one tech giant whose fortunes have soured since Palestinian freedom fighters breached Gaza’s concentration camp walls on 7 October 2023.

The same fate has been suffered by many tech companies profiteering from illegal Zionist settlement expansion, which also provide infrastructure and resources used to oppress Palestinians and enforce Tel Aviv’s apartheid.

Multiple consumer-facing western companies that not only profit from illegal Jewish settlement expansion but actively provide core infrastructure and resources used to oppress Palestinians and enforce Tel Aviv’s apartheid could now be subject to lawsuits.

This week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s continued presence in occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and should come to an end “as rapidly as possible.” Notably, the court opened the door to “reparations” for any illegal actions carried out by Israel and other entities since 1967.

The ICJ’s landmark judgment means the long-term viability of these tech firms’ operations in the occupied territories is moribund – for fear of legal repercussions, if nothing else.

Fittingly, given Germany is currently in the dock at the ICJ for its support and facilitation of the genocide in Gaza, Munich-headquartered tech conglomerate Siemens is among the culprits.

The firm is “focused on automation and digitalization in the manufacturing industries, intelligent infrastructure for buildings and distributed energy systems, smart mobility solutions for rail transport, and medical technology and digital healthcare services.” Its products are profuse throughout the occupation state and its illegal settlements.

Traffic control systems and traffic lights produced by Siemens can be found in areas of the West Bank where Palestinian residents are forbidden from traveling. In 2014, the company’s Israeli subdivision RS Industries won a tender to provide traffic control systems across the Jerusalem Municipality too – East Jerusalem, designated as the capital of the Palestinian state, was occupied in 1967, and falls within the ICJ’s mandate.

Elsewhere, Siemens provides its DDEMU model cars for the Tel Aviv Jerusalem Fast Train and, in 2018, was awarded a $1 billion contract by the entity-owned Israel Railways to supply 330 electric cars as part of Israel’s electrification project, which includes the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem Fast Train (A1).

A highly controversial project that passes through two areas of the West Bank, including privately owned, occupied Palestinian land, it is intended for exclusive use by Israeli Jews.

Don’t Buy Into Occupation (DBIO) states: “Siemens’ activities are of concern, as they are linked to the provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements.”

However, the company’s activities extend far further. Through its Israeli representative, Orad Group, the company provides equipment and technology to the notorious Israel Prison Service (IPS).

In 2004, the Orad Group provided a Siemens technology-based perimeter security system to Gilboa prison — a detention center specifically designated for Palestinian political prisoners. Siemens also supplies the IPS with a sophisticated fire detection and extinguishing system.

Connecting settlements

US brand Motorola is widely recognized for its innovative smartphone devices. However, DBIO has meticulously documented the involvement of Motorola’s Tel Aviv division in settlement expansion over the past decade.

The tech giant has collaborated closely with Israeli occupation forces, the Ministry of Defense, and Zionist settlement councils across the illegally occupied territories. A prime example of this collaboration is the surveillance system “MotoEagle,” designed to monitor settlers on appropriated land, operate within occupation military bases, and oversee the Gaza concentration camp’s separation wall.

Notably, Motorola-produced radar stations have been installed on illegally appropriated private Palestinian land, restricting Palestinian movement in these areas. Furthermore, Motorola supplies the Ministry of Defense’s Zramim System, a smart card operation utilized at Israeli checkpoints to monitor goods transportation.

Palestinian drivers, merchants, and transport companies are compelled to register their personal information in this system, enabling Tel Aviv to monitor all entry and exit points meticulously.

The company is also a preferred contractor for internal security systems in numerous occupation settlements. The Jordan Valley regional council, encompassing more than 20 settlements in the occupied West Bank, employs multiple Motorola products, including command and control systems and surveillance cameras. Additionally, the Population and Immigration Authority in the settlement of Beitar Illit uses Motorola for its security needs.

In 2022, Motorola Solutions secured a contract to provide security cameras and entrance control resources for the Jerusalem Light Rail’s (JLR) entire Green Line. This route links the Gilo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem with the city center and the Ramat Eshkol, Ma’alot Dafna, and French Hill settlements, facilitating connectivity between settler enclaves and supporting settler movement. Consequently, Motorola has been listed in the UN’s database of firms profiting from illegal settlement expansion.

Powering apartheid

Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE), which split from personal computer and printer provider Hewlett Packard in 2015, is one of the most profitable US corporations. However, it is less well-known that HPE supplies and manages much of the technological infrastructure underpinning the occupation state’s apartheid and settler colonialism.

For example, HPE provides “Itanium” servers and maintenance services to Tel Aviv’s Population and Immigration Authority. This computerized Israel’s checkpoint system while storing vast amounts of information on all Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and non-citizen Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem.

HPE directly contracts with the illegal settler municipalities of Modi’in Ilit and Ariel, two of the largest Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, providing them with a range of services. Additionally, HPE maintains the central server system for the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), placing the company at the core of Tel Aviv’s use of mass incarceration to suppress Palestinian resistance. A 1994 Human Rights Watch report highlighted this by noting:

“The extraction of confessions under duress, and the acceptance into evidence of such confessions by the military courts, form the backbone of Israel’s military justice system.”

Moreover, HPE is the primary provider of the Basel system, an automated biometric access control system employed at Israeli checkpoints and the Gaza apartheid wall. ID cards distributed under Basel are integral to the systematic discrimination against Palestinians.

The checkpoints, by design, segregate and fragment the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its inhabitants, separating workers from their places of employment, students from their schools, and families from each other through electrified fences, watchtowers, and concrete barriers.

Electronic counter intifada

This system is part of a broader state of siege under which Palestinians have lived for decades, significantly intensified by the sealing off of Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli navy, another HPE customer, relies on the company’s IT infrastructure and support services. The siege severely restricts the movement of goods and people in and out of Palestinian territories, aiming explicitly to crush Palestinian resistance.

In 2006, Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” It was hoped hunger pangs through limited caloric intake might encourage Palestinians to reject Hamas or at least force its fighters to temper their resistance efforts. The starvation of Palestinians has only galvanized their support for Hamas and their yearning for freedom from Israeli occupation.

The occupation state failed to crush the Palestinian resistance via Operation Swords of Iron, an effort so catastrophic that even Israeli media has branded it a “total defeat.”

Following Iran’s successful 14 April retaliatory strikes against Israel, Tel Aviv’s reign of impunity appears to be nearing its long-overdue end. It is only a matter of time before major western tech firms like HPE, which facilitated the oppression of Palestinians, will face consequences for their complicity.

This investigation is the second in a series at The Cradle that examines illegal investments by western corporations in the occupied Palestinian territories and/or that assist Israel in implementing its apartheid system. The first investigation can be found here.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Israel’ attacks Yemeni civilian facilities, Sanaa vows heavy price

Al Mayadeen | July 20, 2024

Israeli war jets launched a series of airstrikes on Saturday targeting Yemen’s province of Hodeidah on the Red Sea coast.

The aggression targeted an oil refinery, leading to a massive fire that can be seen kilometers away.

Al Mayadeen’s correspondent reported that the strikes targeted the Ras Kathib power station in Hodeidah, igniting the oil storage facilities.

The Yemeni Ministry of Health reported martyrs and wounded as a result of the aggression, confirming that civilians suffered severe burns due to the fires.

Israeli Kan 11 channel citing a US official reported that the Israelis conducted an attack in Yemen.

Civil defense teams are battling to extinguish the fires and flames engulfing the targeted zone, our correspondent added, noting that the size of the blaze is making the task extremely difficult.

Yemeni sources informed Al Mayadeen that these airstrikes were coordinated between US and Israeli forces, indicating that the nature of the targets hit by the aggression shows the blindness of the enemy.

They emphasized that there will be a response to the aggression.

Israeli media quoted official American sources stating that 25 F-35 fighters attacked multiple targets in Yemen in several attack waves.

Furthermore, an Israeli media platform mentioned that Italians assisted “Israel” with refueling aircraft in Yemeni airspace.

Following the Israeli aggression, the head of Yemen’s negotiating delegation, Mohammad Abdul-Salam, affirmed that pressuring Yemen to cease supporting Gaza is “a dream that will not come true for the Israeli enemy.”

“The brutal Israeli aggression will only increase the determination and the steadfastness of the Yemeni people and its brave armed forces in an escalating manner.”

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | 1 Comment

Ongoing Jewish Influence in the Transformation of Ireland

By Marshall Yeates | Occidental Observer | July 20, 2024

The ‘softening up’ of Ireland for the ongoing scheme of mass population replacement is set to gather pace following the appointment of Nigerian Ebun Joseph in the Orwellian role of “Special Rapporteur for the National Plan Against Racism.” The stated aim of this plan is to “make Ireland a place in which the impacts of racism are fully acknowledged and actively addressed.” In other words, the goal of the plan is to brainwash the Irish population into a sense of White guilt, or as a recent article in The Spectator put it, “the Nigerian-born Special Rapporteur will deliver regular reports to the Irish government about how hideously white and racist Irish people are.” The national Plan Against Racism will begin a process where special rights and privileges are handed to foreigners while the Irish become second class citizens in their own land. The reason for the implementation of the plan, according to Shane O’Curry, Director of the Irish Network Against Racism (INAR), is that “migrants in Ireland are reporting not feeling safe across the board in all areas of life.” Mr O’Curry does not appear to be concerned about the declining sense of safety among Irish women and children thanks to these same migrants, but I suspect that Mr O’Curry is on too high a salary, much of it provided by globalist NGOs, to concern himself with such matters. Nonetheless, as will be explained below, Ebun Joseph is merely the figurehead for something that has a distinctly Jewish complexion, because Ireland’s National Action Plan Against Racism has Jewish origins.

Alice Feldman and the Need for an “Anti-Racist Ireland”

Ebun Joseph is a direct protege of Jewish-American academic Alice Feldman, a sociologist at University College Dublin. It was Feldman who supervised Joseph’s PhD, and it was Feldman who groomed Joseph for her current role as the face of Irish ‘anti-racism’. Athough a whole host of Irish and ethnic minority names have been listed as authors of the “National Plan Against Racism,” even the briefest of research reveals that it was first conceived as far back as 2003 and that the author of a plan bearing this precise name was none other than Feldman herself — a draft document carrying that name is listed among her publications for 2003. According to Feldman’s own profile on the University College Dublin website, “Over the past two decades, I have worked in research, advisory and volunteer capacities with many civic, community and other organisations in Ireland involved in anti-racism, migration and interculturalism work.” In other words, like other Jews to be discussed in this essay, she has invested more than twenty years in opposing the interests of the native Irish. Feldman has also perfected the art of linguistic academic nonsense, once describing her work as drawing “on a trans disciplinary variety of traditions to cultivate and mobilise decolonial praxes that intervene in the global colonial legacies underpinning the current necropolitical moment.”

Ebun Joseph

Looking into the relationship between Feldman and Joseph, it is clear that Feldman is quite the activist, though content to let the Nigerian be the public figure advancing her agenda. A description of one of their partnerships reads:

UCD (University College Dublin) academics Dr. Ebun Joseph and Dr. Alice Feldman led a talk on Thursday 2nd July entitled “So What Next: Becoming Anti-Racist via Zoom.” … Joseph is a race relations consultant, Career Development Specialist and module coordinator for UCD’s Black Studies module. Feldman works in the UCD School of Sociology and is a convenor of the UCD MA Race, Migration and Decolonial Studies and Decolonial Dialogues Platform. The academics commented during the webinar that they already have a long working relationship. Joseph and Feldman focused on two topics: white fragility and anti-racism allyship. Feldman said she believed white fragility needed to be understood by white people so they can do the work of anti-racism allyship. … They discussed how when white people defensively deflect during conversations about race out of discomfort, or the fear that they are being attacked, they put the exhausting responsibility on people of colour to ensure that they feel comfortable and as a result, the conversation is closed. They both believe that if we cannot have open conversations about race and racism, we cannot change it. Joseph stressed that there are only racists and anti-racists; if someone defensively says they are not a racist, that merely means that they are a racist in denial. Joseph added that silent racists are in the majority whereas the loud, violent racists are in the minority. Feldman said that an anti-racist needs to accept that they live in a racist society and they should examine the way racism can be eradicated from the organisations they are a part of. … The academics would like there to be a compulsory anti-racism module in UCD because they feel we cannot expect to have an anti-racist society if we do not teach anti-racism.

Alice Feldman

A 2020 article for Gript rightly pointed out that

the ideology of Doctors Joseph and Feldman, which is corrupting the Irish academy as it has corrupted the universities of other western democracies, is Critical Race Theory. This theory, whatever about those who espouse it, can be used as perniciously as the spurious race theories that have gone before it. It is racialism directed against white people: no more nor no less. Its methods are the boots and petrol bombs of Antifa and Black Lives Matter allied to a craven intellectual capitulation on the part of the deracinated bourgeois liberals and lefties who control much of the institutions where the poison is disseminated.

Laura Weinstein and the Dangers of “Irish Inbreeding”

Feldman is not the first American Jew to arrive on Irish shores and start telling the Irish they have no ethnic interests. Back in 2019, Laura Weinstein, a New York PhD living in Ireland and claiming to be an expert in Irish history and culture waded into Ireland’s growing immigration debate. Of all the aspects of Irish history and culture Weinstein could have chosen to focus on, she decided she was most interested, like Feldman and others, in the “myth” of a homogeneous Irish identity and “right wing Irish nationalism.”

Laura Weinstein

Weinstein employed her Twitter account to the trolling of Irish political figures opposed to mass immigration. In one example she responded to a post by the National Party by implying that Irish opposition to immigration would leave the Irish like “neurotic” “inbred” “dogs.” She wrote: “Gene flow as a result of immigration prevents the negative impact of inbreeding. But, go ahead and constrain migration and gene flow if you want to create a race of humans that reflects the neuroticism of “pure bred” dogs. Just be sure to hold a referendum on inbreeding first.” Not only was Weinstein’s fixation exceedingly strange and unsettling, it was also fanciful. Genetic studies have shown the Irish already possess a diverse gene pool in the form of genetic clusters of Scandinavian, Norman-French, British, and Iberian origin. This is a considerably wider gene pool than that of Dr Weinstein’s Ashkenazi Jews, who are descended from a single group of 350 people. It will come as no surprise to readers of this website that Weinstein is acutely concerned about the preservation of her own people, and is listed by Algemeiner as “an antisemitism analyst at the ADL.” “Inbreeding” for me, but apparently not for thee.

Ronit Lentin’s Deconstruction of the Irish

As well as being a direct protege of Alice Feldman, Ebun Joseph is the ideological child of Ronit Lentin, the Israeli Jew who in 1997 established Ireland’s first “Ethnic and Racial Studies” programme, and thereby ushered in the arrival of Critical Race Theory in Ireland. Lentin was also a colleague and collaborator with Alice Feldman in an early 2008 side project of the National Action Plan Against Racism. From 1997 until 2012 Lentin was Head of Sociology, and acted as director of the MPhil program in “Race, Ethnicity, Conflict.” She was also the founder of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, from which she advocated an open-door immigration policy for Ireland and opposed all deportations, as well as engaging in activism to liberalise Irish abortion laws.[1] As an academic and “anti-racist” activist, Lentin formulated what would become some of the cardinal facets of Irish self-recrimination on matters of race, beginning with her definition of Ireland as “a biopolitical racist state.”[2]  By her own account, before she began her work on stoking Irish race guilt in the early 1990s, “most people were not conscious that Irish racism existed.”[3]

Ronit Lentin

In some senses Lentin introduced the concept of an Irish racism. Her first step in assuring the Irish that they were indeed racist was to deny their existence as a people. She asserted that the Irish were merely “theorised as homogeneous — white, Christian and settled.”[4] Quite who had developed this theory of the Irish, and when, was never specified by Lentin, nor did she attempt to show that the White, Christian, and settled status of the vast majority of the Irish population was anything other than a matter of fact and reality. It appears to have sufficed for Lentin simply to assert that Irishness was nothing but a theory, and to leave it at that. She was particularly aggrieved by the fact the Irish, apparently unaware they were a figment of their own imagination, voted (80 percent%) to link citizenship and blood (ending “birth-right citizenship) by constitutionally differentiating between citizen and non-citizen in a June 2004 Citizenship Referendum. This move was taken primarily in order to stop African “birth tourism” and “anchor babies” by African women, which had become increasingly common by the early 2000s. To Lentin, however, the move was symbolic of the fact “the Irish Republic had consciously and democratically become a racist state.”[5] She concluded that any idea of the Irish as historical victims should be dispensed with, and that “Ireland’s new position as heading the Globalisation Index, its status symbol as the locus of “cool” culture, and its privileged position within an ever-expanding European Community calls for re-theorising Irishness as white supremacy.”[6]

So, in Lentin’s worldview, Irishness is not only a fiction, but a racist, “white supremacist” fiction. Lentin’s advice to the Irish, should they wish to rid themselves of the delusion of peoplehood, was to engage in mass celebrations of “diversity and integration and multiracialism and multiculturalism and interculturalism,”[7] Lentin adds: “I propose an interrogation of how the Irish nation can become other than white.” Keeping up the family tradition, Ronit Lentin’s daughter Alana moved to Australia several years ago, where she quickly established herself as an equally rabid promoter of White guilt and engaged in successive critiques of Australian “racism.” She is now President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, and has penned articles for The Guardian asserting that Australian identity is as fictional as that of the Irish, and demanding Australia adopt an open borders policy so that it too can become other than White.

Katrina Goldstone and the Flooding of Ireland

Working alongside Feldman and Lentin on the 2008 collaboration relating to the early National Plan Against Racism was the Irish Jewish writer Katrina Goldstone. Goldstone remains a board member of New Communities Ireland, “Ireland’s largest independent migrant-led national network of more than 150 immigrant-led groups comprising 65 nationalities,” an organisation similar to Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, the Deputy Director of which is the Sephardic Jew Bill Abom. Goldstone has described herself as being “involved in asylum rights and minority issues” for more than two decades.

Katrina Goldstone

Louise Derman-Sparks and The Perils of Racist Irish Children

“Teaching anti-racism” is a top priority for Jewish ethnic activists across the West, and involves inculcating a sense of White guilt and shame about expressing White ethnic interests. The groundwork for the brainwashing of Irish children was laid by Katherine Zappone, an American lesbian who served as Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth from 2016 to 2020. In 2016 Zappone unveiled the “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Charter, and Guidelines for Early Childhood Care and Education.” The document opens by explaining these guidelines for transforming Irish education in an anti-White direction “are informed by national and international equality and antidiscriminatory educational approaches and practice. They draw heavily on the anti-bias approach developed by Louise Derman-Sparks in the USA.”

Derman-Sparks is an American Jew who “pioneered” anti-bias and anti-racism courses for children in the 1980s through such works as Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for ChangeAnti-Bias Education for Young Children and OurselvesTeaching/Learning Anti-Racism: A Developmental Approach, and What If All the Kids Are White? Derman-Sparks travelled to Ireland on at least one occasion, in October 1998, to preach her doctrine, giving a keynote speech at a conference on early-years education with a paper titled “Education without Prejudice for the Early Years.”

A good example of Derman-Sparks’ work, which is being incorporated into the teaching of Irish children, can be found in an article for the American Federation of Teachers in which Derman-Sparks states:

Biologically, there is no such thing as race. All people are members of one race, Homo sapiens, the human race—even though everyone does not look the same. … Diversity does not cause prejudice, nor does children noticing and talking about differences, as some adults fear. … Very early, white children come to value their whiteness, presume it is the definition of normal, and believe that therefore all other skin colors are strange and less than. While early childhood teachers want all children to like who they are, the challenge for an anti-bias educator is to enable white children to like who they are without developing a sense of white superiority.

In What If All The Kids Are White? (2011), Derman-Sparks writes that “White children’s learning to be “White” is part of the maintenance of systemic racism, and “Whiteness” plays a significant role in the behaviour of all White adults.”[8] By incorporating the work of Derman-Sparks into the national education system, Ireland has sealed the fate of its youth, consenting to the ongoing brainwashing of generations.

***

The Nigerian Ebun Joseph is often ridiculed by the right-wing media, both for the extremes of her positions and for her ineptitude at articulating her ideas. She is a figurehead being used by others behind the scenes, and she absorbs much of the jokes and hostility. Joseph is certainly an ideological activist who sees ‘racism’ even in Irishness itself. A good example occurred in 2019 when she was mistakenly served blackcurrant juice instead of house wine at the Galway Bay Hotel. Whereas others might have simply mentioned the mistake to staff, Joseph declared herself the victim of racism. As this affair gathered pace, she took to social media to demand: “Please, more Blacks go there. They can’t discourage us from going where we want!” Ireland now has this person, so militant over a glass of juice, ordering the government to make the nation less ‘racist.’

It would be a mistake, however, to take Ebun Joseph lightly. She has been groomed for her role and she will attempt to perform it with aggression and dedication, to the detriment of the Irish and to the great satisfaction of her mentors. Across the West there has been a pattern of elite-led brainwashing, where ideas cooked up by hostile Jewish academics are fed to students who go on to become the nation’s professional class and from there disperse into the general population. Joseph wants the “anti-racism” material cooked up by her mentors made compulsory in the education system. These ideas infect police forces, the media, and Human Resources departments. They penetrate every aspect of life until they are inescapable. Critical Race Theory isn’t satisfied until everything about European culture and peoplehood is destroyed. There is no set target when it can be agreed that Ireland is sufficiently “diverse,” and there is no point at which the Irish will have the smear of racism lifted from their heads. Under the gaze of Critical Race Theory, the existence of a single Irish family is racist. The Irish will cease to be racist, only when they cease to be; when they are utterly replaced and when nothing of Ireland remains. These are the dictates of new rulers, of a conquering class who have not arrived with swords and guns, but with sob stories, lies and a perverted academic blackmail.


[1] See Lentin, R. (2013). A Woman Died: Abortion and the Politics of Birth in Ireland. Feminist Review105(1), 130

—136.

[2] R. Lentin, After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (Dublin: Metro Eireann Publications, 2006), 3.

[3] Ibid., 1.

[4] Ibid., 2.

[5] Ibid., 55.

[6] Ibid., 107.

[7] Ibid., 165.

[8] Derman-Sparks, Louise., Ramsey, Patricia G.. What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. (United States: Teachers College Press, 2011), 31.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

From Clinton Fraud to Trump-Zelensky Call: Recalling CrowdStrike’s Shady Politics Amid IT Outage

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 20.07.2024

A sloppy update to software made by US cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has taken PCs and servers used by airlines, railways, banks, broadcasters and even medical facilities around the world offline. For anyone following US politics over the past decade or so, the company’s name should be eerily familiar.

CrowdStrike is making global headlines (and causing global headaches) this week after an update released Friday morning afflicted thousands of corporate machines running Microsoft products with the infamous blue screen of death error.

While the company has already put out a fix, the buggy update is expected to cause billions of dollars and hours in lost productivity, and experts say it may take “weeks” for businesses and governments worldwide to fully recover.

But behind the company’s reputation as a major provider of endpoint security products is the odd routineness of its name popping up in US politics.

During the 2016 US presidential election, the Clinton campaign asked none other than CrowdStrike for help investigating the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee – which had revealed embarrassing info about the party’s efforts to rig the nomination process in Mrs. Clinton’s favor.

CrowdStrike’s probe gave rise to the very first claims that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and the company provided its “forensic evidence and analysis” to the FBI, starting the ball rolling on the Russiagate conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia to “steal” the election.

CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry admitted under oath in congressional testimony in 2017 that the company had no “concrete evidence” to back up its “Russian hackers” story, but by that point it was too late, and Trump would spend virtually the entirety of his term in office dogged by the “collusion” claims.

CrowdStrike’s name also came up in the infamous 2019 phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, with the then-US president asking Zelensky to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” with CrowdStrike’s server, which Trump said was in Ukraine. The Trump team was convinced that CrowdStrike planted evidence on the DNC server to frame Russia while covering up Ukraine’s own efforts to “weaken the Trump bandwagon” during the 2016 race. Democratic politicians and anti-Trump media dismissed the president’s suspicions as groundless.

The Trump-Zelensky phone call, in which he also asked Kiev to look into then former vice president Joe Biden’s role in firing of a prosecutor probing his son Hunter Biden’s alleged corrupt activities while working for Ukrainian energy company Burisma, wound up sparking the first Trump impeachment in 2019.

CrowdStrike was also one a handful of firms tapped by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2021 to work out a ‘whole-of-nation’ cyber defense plan. The initiative has been criticized as an attempt to strengthen the US intelligence and Big Tech’s surveillance powers using cybersecurity as a cover.

The same year, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz blamed Russian hackers for the 2020 SolarWinds hack attack on the US Federal Government, but curiously admitted the company had no information of its own “to corroborate that finding.”

‘PR Nightmare’

“The PR aspect is of course a nightmare for CrowdStrike,” veteran independent cybersecurity expert Lars Hilse told Sputnik, commenting on Friday’s outage and the impact it’s had on the company’s image and stock price.

CrowdStrike’s market cap plunged by $12.5 billion, and its CEO George Kurtz saw over $320 million shaved from his personal fortune. The company stock’s price fell from about $343 to $302 per share, signaling that about 12 percent of the company’s market value has been wiped out.

Interestingly, not everyone in the company came out of the outage in the red, with Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry selling off 4,000 shares of CrowdStrike Holdings’ common stock on July 15 for $371.32 per share, or $1.49 million total, according to Security and Exchange Commission data.

Hilse says the main “lesson” from the CrowdStrike mess will be the demand that cybersecurity companies improve testing before rolling out critical updates – something especially important if they’re done as “a single update being pushed to a plethora of customers running cloud-based solutions, including those responsible for the flawless operation of critical infrastructure like airports, banks, etc.”

“With increasing reliance on technology comes exponentially increasing impact on society if these technologies fail, whether through a deliberate/targeted attack, or a faulty piece of software, like in this case,” Hilse emphasized.

Russian cybersecurity specialist Alexei Lukatskiy told Sputnik Russia has been able to dodge the CrowdStrike bullet thanks to strong homegrown cybersecurity companies. Friday’s outages thus serve as another important “lesson” for Russia, which has been “gradually switching away from products by foreign vendors to Russian ones,” that it’s on the right track, he said.

Another important takeaway, according to Lukatskiy, is the modern world’s increasingly critical level of dependence on computers. “IT has penetrated into a wide array of different areas, and the owners of companies working in critical industries must understand all the consequences and evaluate the unacceptable events that may occur due to the seeming failure of an ordinary computer…,” he said.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Recall that CrowdStrike Lied About DNC Server “Hack” in 2016

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | July 20, 2024

second I saw the news yesterday that computers all over the world had been taken down—causing widespread disruptions to travel, medical care and an array of businesses—I couldn’t help wondering if it was an implicit reminder of how dependent we are on global computer systems, and therefore how vulnerable we are.

Then I saw the outage was purportedly traced to CrowdStrike—the same Austin-based cybersecurity hired by the DNC in 2016 to investigate the alleged “hack” of its server. The security breach resulted in the leak of incredibly embarrassing e-mails revealing John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and DNC leadership performing all manner of Machiavellian machinations.

Back then, when I read the Wikileaks e-mails, I immediately wondered, “How are these villains going to change the subject from the content of their e-mails to something else? What misdirection trick are they going to pull?”

Enter CrowdStrike, which the DNC hired to do a forensic cybersecurity analysis of the DNC server. Shortly thereafter, CrowdStrike claimed that Russian agents had hacked it.

It didn’t matter that there was no evidence of this, as CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry admitted under oath in a declassified December 2017 interview before the House Intelligence Committee. The lying mainstream media still ran with the story that became Russian Collusion HOAX—the biggest fraud of the decade.

Even though former NSA Technical Director, William Binney, tried to tell anyone who would listen that the leak must have resulted from a DNC insider who downloaded the e-mails onto a storage device, no major mainstream media outlet would listen to him.

I wondered about Binney’s concept on a DNC insider when I researched the mysterious death of DNC insider Seth Rich (An Extraordinary Unsolved Murder in Washington D.C.) shortly before the accusation of Russian hacking was made.

Did Rich—who was apparently disaffected with the DNC because of its shabby treatment of Bernie Sanders—reveal to someone that he knew that the leak was not the result of an external hack, thereby prompting the perception that he could easily debunk the Russian-Collusion Hoax if he weren’t silenced forever?

Now, less than one week after whoever is running this country allowed a would-be assassin to climb onto a roof and take a shot at Donald Trump on a stage 400 feet away, we are told that CrowdStrike’s defective update to its security software knocked out global IT systems.

It seems to me that CrowdStrike should be viewed with grave suspicion and that businesses should be asking if it is prudent to have CrowdStrike software running on their computer systems.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , , , | 2 Comments

Retro Israel panel defies ‘America First’ foreign policy

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | July 10, 2024

The National Conservatism Conference, which professes to represent a new conservatism to “understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing,” has a foreign policy problem.

On the one hand the organizers and proponents rail against a globalism dominated by supranational neo-liberal institutions, and progressive litmus tests and ideas, but on the other they want borderless solidarity with other like minded nationalists across the globe. And for some reason this precludes them from talking too much about the biggest U.S. foreign policy issue in years, the Ukraine war, for which there is no panel scheduled over the course of the event, Monday through today.

It also means talking about Israel from a predominantly Israeli nationalist perspective. And talking about the Gaza war purely in the frame of Islamic extremism and the “mullocracy” of Iran. In other words, this is only an American interest insofar as, according to the speakers on Tuesday, U.S. presidents are accused of going too easy on Iran, which in part led to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. And now Washington has to help fix it.

Moreover, American political elites have allowed the “Islamosupremacists” to influence college campuses and Democratic administrations and turn Americans (in this case, Democrats) against not just Israel, but all Jews.

As Ben Weingarten charged in the one Israel panel — “Islam, Israel & the West” — the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have had a grip on Washington since the George W. Bush administration, where the then-president had the temerity to declare that “Islam is peace.”

If that sounds familiar it is because the same people in the room today, 20 years older and graying at the ears, said the same exact thing after 9/11. But the difference here is that Israel is fighting its own war and making it an American war on terrorism and Islam is not going to work this time. What this national conservatism conference was missing was a true conversation about what is in America’s interest as it pursues policies with Israel, Iran, and the greater Middle East.

Instead we got old chestnuts from Weingarten, an “investigative reporter” for the Federalist, talking about “the troubling views held by large percentages of American Muslims (who) are or subscribe to the same worldview as Islamic supremacists who seek to impose… a theopolitical, Sharia-based ideology on America, wholly antithetical to our constitutional republic; while leftists and Islamic supremacists are in some ways polar opposites, traditional patriotic Americans are the chief stumbling block to each side achieving its objectives.”

To him, American protests against Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which have resulted in at 38,000 (or more) dead, the vast majority of the population displaced and hungry, most of the Strip’s civilian infrastructure (homes, electricity, hospitals, schools) damaged if not destroyed by American-made bombs, is merely the “the predictable consequence of an unholy alliance between progressives and Islamic supremacists that has for several years been fundamentally transforming not only the Democratic Party but America.”

Eugene Kontorovich, an Israeli legal scholar who now teaches at George Mason University’s Anton Scalia Law School, spent his time on the panel railing against international institutions including the United Nations, which he said were dominated by anti-Jewish, pro-Islamist ideologues that were in essence working for Hamas. This conveniently renders, at least to his mind, International Criminal Court charges against Israel, including the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian population, absolutely meaningless (plus, as he has suggested, the U.S. military does it too, a favorite justification among Israeli military apologists since Oct. 7).

Instead he calls the Israel operation in Gaza “clearly the most restrained war in modern times, with the lowest proportion of civilian casualties of any war in modern times.” Again, no conversation about whether the current U.S.-backed strategy will actually protect Israel in the long-term or destroy it from within, or whether it is in America’s interest to push it along.

No doubt, the discussion appealed to the paranoia among this retro crowd that Islamists have more power than they actually have in Washington (which is why Netanyahu is getting a red carpet on Capitol Hill this month, weapons and money slushing to Tel Aviv, and votes sailing through Congress cutting off aid to Palestinians and the very institutions Kontorovich abhors?).

But the National Conservatism conference, founded by the Edmund Burke Foundation under the tutelage of Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony, should not be confused with the America First foreign policy now being debated in conservative circles today. After three days of programming, that much is clear.

There were a few counterbalances — a thoughtful discussion about the future of NATO, which included realist Sumantra Maitra, and remarks from Elbridge Colby, a self-described conservative realist. During a plenary speech, he said U.S. foreign policy must be rooted in the goals of preserving fundamental American interests of freedom, security, and prosperity, and cast in the lens of prioritization and power balancing. While North Korea, Russia, and Iran pose threats, he contended, they are regional threats to traditional U.S. allies and partners but not existential threats to those aforementioned American core interestsTherefore, he said, they are not foreign policy or security priorities for which the U.S. needs to militarize.

He does suggest, however, that China is a threat to the U.S. economy and the security of our allies in the region, and that requires priority. “Strategy and conservative realism would call for balance of manifest strength in Asia, but also openness to a modus vivendi in China. We must be laser focused on the rightful conservative goal here, to preserve peace, if at all possible, but decent peace, one that ensures Americans are safe, free, and prosperous, and most high necessity prevents China from dominating Asians.”

While not all realists and restrainers agree with Colby’s China perspective here, his brief against the primacist foreign policy of the last 70 years sits well with a growing faction of conservative foreign policy (American interest-focused) today, much to the contrast of the Israel panel dominated by the throw-back ideological rhetoric of the past.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute.

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, Militarism | , | Leave a comment