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‘Medical Error’ Led to Death of 6-Year-Old Who Developed Pneumonia After Measles Diagnosis

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 19, 2025

A child who died in a Texas hospital after developing pneumonia following a measles infection died as a result of “medical error” — including failure to administer the correct antibiotic in time, according to a medical expert who reviewed the child’s medical records.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) obtained the medical records from the family of the 6-year-old girl. The parents said they wanted people to know what happened to their daughter so it wouldn’t happen to other children.

The parents obtained the records from Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock where their child died on Feb. 26.

The parents told Dr. Ben Edwards, who successfully treated their other children for measles, that they didn’t want to use the information uncovered in the medical records to inflame the situation. However, they did want to get the word out about the mistake if it could prevent it from happening to other children.

Dr. Pierre Kory, who has extensive experience in pulmonary and critical care medicine, analyzed the records. He said today in an interview on CHD.TV, “I’ve done medical case reviews from malpractice lawyers for a good part of my career, and this case was tragic.”

According to Kory’s analysis of the records, the girl died from a secondary bacterial pneumonia that had “little to do with measles.”

He added, “When I say it has little to do with measles, secondary bacterial pneumonias can happen after any viral infection.”

Kory said the girl “died of a medical error — and that error was a completely inappropriate antibiotic” for treating the kind of pneumonia she had.

The records showed that the girl was initially admitted to the emergency room (ER) for “secondary bacterial pneumonia,” Kory told The Defender. At that time, her measles rash was already fading.

She was not administered the correct antibiotic for treating her secondary bacterial pneumonia until roughly two and a half days later. By that time, she had declined so severely that doctors had already placed her on a mechanical ventilator, Kory said.

Also, it appears there was a delay of more than nine hours from the time when the correct antibiotic was finally ordered and the time it was given, Kory said. “Less than 24 hours later, she died — and she died rather catastrophically … suddenly her blood pressure crashed and she arrested.”

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., according to a 2016 analysis by Johns Hopkins University researchers including Dr. Marty Makary, Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Hospital initially prescribed inappropriate antibiotic

Kory broke down in more precise medical terms what appears to have happened.

When the girl was admitted to the ER, the staff made a general diagnosis that she had a secondary bacterial pneumonia. “She was clearly being admitted from the community so it was implied that it was a community-acquired pneumonia,” Kory said, referring to how the girl didn’t get the pneumonia from being in a hospital or healthcare facility.

They were “absolutely correct” about that, Kory said.

But what they initially gave her for that diagnosis was incorrect, he said.

Generally, doctors put patients on two antibiotics “to cover all the possibilities” of what specific kind of bacterial pneumonia the patient may have.

Kory said:

“It’s in every guideline — infectious disease, pulmonary — every guideline in the country tells you that for a hospitalized child or adult who gets admitted to the hospital, you put them on two antibiotics.

“One is from a category called beta-lactams, which is like penicillin, cephalosporins. And they [the hospital] got that part correct. They put her on something called ceftriaxone, which was excellent.

“But you always need to pair it with an antibiotic from a different category, which is called a macrolide or a quinolone.”

They didn’t do that part, Kory said. “They didn’t put her on the most common, which is azithromycin.”

Instead, they put her on vancomycin, an antibiotic used for very drug-resistant organisms like MRSA.

According to the Mayo Clinic, MRSA — short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — is an infection caused by a staph bacteria that’s “become resistant to many of the antibiotics used to treat ordinary staph infections.” Most MRSA infections occur in hospitals or healthcare settings, like nursing homes or dialysis centers.

Giving vancomycin to the girl was an inappropriate choice, according to Kory.

He said:

“There’s no reason to think that this child would come in with MRSA from the community, from a Mennonite community. She’s not coming from a facility where a lot of antibiotics are used. So it’s a grievous error and it’s an error which led to her death.”

Hospital didn’t change course of treatment for over two days

The records show that the hospital didn’t adjust the girl’s antibiotics until a test came back showing that she had a type of bacterial pneumonia called “mycoplasma pneumonia.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, mycoplasma is a single form of bacteria that causes an infection that can occur in different parts of the body, such as the respiratory, urinary or genital tracts.

“The tragedy is that mycoplasma is an extremely common — what we call community-acquired — organism,” Kory said. Azithromycin is very effective against mycoplasma, he said.

The hospital staff finally ordered it for her upon seeing her test results. But they should have ordered it much sooner, given that her bacterial pneumonia was community-acquired, Kory said.

Kory said it wasn’t proper doctoring to let her decline for days without adjusting the treatment they were giving her. “You almost have three full days of a seriously declining medical status with no real changes to her treatment plan.”

He added:

“If I’m taking care of someone, and I’m rounding on them every day and I see that today they’re doing a little bit worse than yesterday. And then the next day they’re doing a little bit worse than the day before, I’m going to review exactly what I’m doing and say, ‘What am I missing? What am I missing? What else can I do?’

“And that didn’t happen until a test showed up on a computer. And that’s just not doctoring.”

By this time, the child was in the intensive care unit. “And from my review of the records,” Kory continued, “the antibiotic was ordered at 11:00 p.m., or approximately 11:00 p.m., and as far as I can tell, it was not administered until 9:00 a.m. the next morning.”

“So not only did you have several days delay of decline without the appropriate antibiotic,” he said, “but then when they realized that they were missing the appropriate antibiotic, it took them, as far as I can tell, 10 hours to administer it.”

By the time the girl received the correct antibiotic, she was already on a ventilator.

Father ‘simply wants the truth out’ so the public can talk about measles vs. vaccine risks

Edwards and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker also reviewed the medical records. They concurred with Kory’s analysis.

Edwards said, “As Dr. Kory’s pointed out, unfortunately this was a big mistake, a tragic mistake — and I agree — a fatal mistake.”

However, Edwards said the girl’s father— who gave CHD permission to report on the medical records — didn’t intend “to inflame the situation or cause more division and more just hot rhetoric.”

Edwards told a brief story to illustrate how divisive the media coverage of the West Texas measles outbreak has been.

The day the girl died, Edwards was in the middle of an interview with a reporter. “I remember that reporter grabbing his phone as the alert just came from the news announcing the ‘first measles death.’”

Edwards said there was “almost a giddiness” in the reporter’s response to the news.

“It was disgusting, actually,” he said. “I want people to know Peter [the father] doesn’t want this information to be used on the other side in the same almost giddiness kind of way of, ‘Aha, we got you.’”

The girl’s father “simply wants the truth to be told so that other kids who potentially could go down the same path as his daughter won’t have to.”

The parents aren’t sharing the information “to give one side more ammunition” in the ongoing public debate around measles.

The father told Edwards, “I love my neighbor — and my neighbor’s my enemy. My neighbor’s the one who hurt me. My neighbor’s the one who offends me.”

Edwards said he wants the public to understand the father’s reason for letting the medical records go public so that “we can maybe come to the table on this.”

Edwards added:

“There’s potential risk — complications and death — from MMR [the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine]. We need to have that conversation at the table, both sides in a truthful, honest manner for the sake of these children.

“That’s what he wants.”

Watch CHD.TV interview with Dr. Pierre Kory:

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.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | 10 Comments

Demonstrations in American, European cities condemning Israeli crimes in Gaza


Thousands gathered outside the British government headquarters in London on Tuesday evening
Palestinian Information Center – March 19, 2025

Thousands of pro-Palestinian activists marched through the streets of American and European cities to condemn the resumption of the Israeli occupation’s war of extermination against the Gaza Strip that resulted in the martyrdom and injury of hundreds, most of whom children and women.

The marches began in cities like Seattle in Washington State, San Francisco in California, and Milwaukee in Wisconsin, protesting the U.S. administration’s approval of violating the ceasefire agreement, as shown in footage shared by pro-Palestinian pages on social media.

Participants in the protests demanded a ban on arming Israel while it commits genocide in Gaza, as well as the release of Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil.

In Minneapolis, dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the Israeli consulate, holding signs demanding an end to the genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The Minneapolis demonstration, announced just four hours prior to its gathering, garnered significant attention as it coincided with rush hour in the city.

In France, demonstrators in Place de la République in Paris condemned Israel’s breach of the ceasefire agreement and the resumption of attacks on the Gaza Strip.

The protesters called for an end to the war on Gaza, an immediate end to the blockade of the Strip, halting Israeli genocide in Gaza, holding Netanyahu and occupation leaders accountable, and boycotting Israel.

In Italy, clashes erupted between police and pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Milan, where hundreds called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza amidst stalled ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas.

Footage shows columns of red smoke filling the air, while the sounds of explosions echoed through the Italian city’s streets. Protesters were seen marching, raising Palestinian flags and signs that read “Hands off the West Bank” and “Glory to the martyrs, freedom for the prisoners,” before being attacked by police forces.

In the Dutch capital Amsterdam, another demonstration was held in support of Gaza and against the genocide being committed by Israel against Palestinians.

Cities like Ankara, Istanbul, Diyarbakır, and other Turkish cities also witnessed demonstrations condemning the Israeli massacres against residents of the Gaza Strip.

Protesters accused Israel of committing genocidal crimes through its ongoing aggression against the Gaza Strip and called on the international community to hold it accountable for these crimes.

Turkish organizations, including the Anadolu Youth Association, the Humanitarian Relief Organization, and the Turkish Institutions Coalition for Jerusalem, called for organizing supportive demonstrations for the Gaza Strip in various Turkish cities and for the continuation of the boycott against Israel and products from supporting companies.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic Magazine & Columbia’s Pulitzer Board advocated killing Palestinian journalists

Why does the “safety” framework never apply to Arab students?

By Adam Johnson | The Column | March 14, 2025

In 2002, Columbia University Pulitzer Prize board member, alleged “anti-authoritarian” expert, and Atlantic Magazine columnist Anne Applebaum explicitly advocated in Slate magazine that Israel kill Palestinian journalists for the crime of making Israelis and Americans look bad. In her article, “Kill The Messenger,” there is little subtlety or equivocation about not only Israel’s right to blow up Palestinian media infrastructure, but to kill reporters for simply doing their job:

“… the official Palestinian media is the right place for Israel to focus its ire. In fact, in the reporting of the Middle East conflict, which almost always focuses on yesterday’s violence and today’s body count, the crucial role of the Voice of Palestine—the official broadcasting arm of the Palestinian Authority—has often been overlooked. Nor is the problem just radio and television. If you want to understand why the Oslo peace process failed, or where suicide martyrs come from, it is worth taking a closer look at all the Palestinian Authority’s official media…

Until then, the Voice of Palestine will remain what it has become: a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war.”

This article, which Applebaum has never explained or renounced, is useful when contextualizing the current witch hunt on college campuses targeting anti-Gaza genocide protestors under the Planck Length-thin auspices of promoting “student safety” and “combatting anti-semitism.”

What’s especially noteworthy is that Applebaum never even bothers laundering her promotion of the execution of Palestinians media workers in the language of “terrorism” or “material support for terrorism”—she is simply lobbying Israel kill Palestinian media workers for the mere fact that they are making Israel and the US look bad. Indeed, a key example of coverage justifying their killing Appelbaum cites is an extremely banal political cartoon. As she writes:

… they are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, anti-American. A recent cartoon in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the Palestinian Authority official daily, showed a blindfolded George Bush aiming missiles indiscriminately at a dartboard covered with the names of Arab states. One of his darts had hit the bull’s eye marked “Afghanistan.” Another had gone astray and hit an Arab man in the back. The caption read, “The war in Afghanistan is only the beginning.” While there is plenty of other anti-Americanism in other Palestinian media, and indeed in Arab media everywhere, this is the voice of the Palestinian Authority, the government of Yasser Arafat, a frequent visitor to the White House.

Applebaum believes a cartoon depicting George W. Bush as a warmonger makes Palestinian media a legitimate target worthy of summary killing. “Anti-Americanism,” one is lead to believe is not only a form of racism but a mode of speech that strips one of their protected civilian status.

This is an extraordinary, illiberal, and racist opinion, yet Applebaum is allowed to remain in good standing among liberal and academic elites because racism and casual bloodlust targeting Palestinians and Arabs simply doesn’t register or matter in the “student safety” calculus.

Imagine, if you will, a Columbia professor or Pulitzer prize committee member advocating the summary killing of Israeli or American media workers because they undermined the cause of Palestinian liberation in their reporting. If this article surfaced it would stir up immediate outrage and condemnation, the academic in question would be quickly fired, apologies would be made and and new policies would be promised. But with Applebaum calling for the killing of Palestinian reporters, an article that goes semi-viral on Twitter every few months, no one cares. Nothing happens. It’s just another routine, normal Serious Foreign Policy opinion from a Serious Foreign Policy Expert.

Columbia University President Katrina Armstrong is currently working with Trump officials, DHS, ICE, and other government agents seeking to deport and imprison anti-Israel protestors for the simple fact that—according to Trump officials themselves— they have ideological viewpoints the Trump regime doesn’t like. Columbia, and many other universities, are maximally complying with these demands ostensibly to promote “campus safety” and “combat hatred.” Indeed, making students “feel safe” has been the high-minded liberal reason for virtually every university administrator cracking down on free speech, both before and after Trump took office. “We are focused,” Armstrong said in a press release last year, “on ensuring [student] safety, supporting their wellbeing, and protecting their ability to learn.”

“I have said it before, and I will say it again,” Armstrong insisted, “discrimination and harassment, including hate language, calls for violence, and the targeting of any individuals or groups based on their beliefs, ancestry, religion, gender identity, or any other identity or affiliation have no place at Columbia.”

Except that it does. Columbia, which manages and awards the Pulitzer prize, has no problem putting someone with a history of advocating the killing of Arab civilians in a position of power, helping determine who in journalism is worthy of its highest award, and creating an atmosphere on campus that makes clear to its Palestinian students that they are subhuman and unworthy of normal protections under the laws of war.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 2 Comments

Death toll from Israel’s renewed offensive on Gaza rises to 970

Press TV – March 19, 2025

Gaza’s health ministry says Israel’s renewed savagery has led to the massacre of at least 970 people in 48 hours.

The wave of deadly airstrikes that shattered a fragile ceasefire in Gaza on Tuesday has so far claimed the lives of at least 970 people across the besieged territory, the health ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

Before the resumption of the offensive, the death toll from the regime’s 15 months of genocidal war recorded by the ministry at midday on March 17 stood at 48,577.

By midday on Wednesday, the figure had risen to 49,547, the ministry said.

The health ministry also registered “one death and five severe injuries among foreign staff working for UN institutions.”

It said Israel attacked a UN headquarters in Deir el-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on Wednesday.

The victims had been taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the health ministry said.

Israel’s military denied attacking a UN building in Gaza.

The UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) confirmed the death of one of its staff by an explosive that was “dropped or fired” on its building in Deir el-Balah.

“An explosive ordnance was dropped or fired at the infrastructure and detonated inside the building,” it said, adding that five others were injured.

UNOPS Executive Director Jorge Moreira da Silva said he was “shocked and devastated” by the death of a staff member.

“This was not an accident.” he said, adding that “attacks against humanitarian premises are a breach of international law.”

Bulgaria’s foreign ministry said later in the day that one of its citizens working for the United Nations was killed in Gaza, without specifying where in the territory.

Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel threatened on Tuesday that the massacre of women and children in Gaza was “only the beginning.” He stands accused of committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Israel-Hamas Ceasefire Farce

By Ilana Mercer • Unz Review • March 18, 2025

‘A ceasefire is when the Israelis fire and we cease.’ ~ Refaat Al-Areer, RIP

Nobody can quite determine any longer which of the two countries, America or Israel, is the Great Satan and which is the Little Satan. ~ ilana

“We’re the United States. We’re not an agent of Israel. We have specific interests at play.” So said Trump Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs Adam Boehler to Zionist enforcer Jake Tapper, on CNN.

Boehler had been deputized by President Donald Trump to bypass Bibi Netanyahu and negotiate directly with Hamas. More to the point, Boehler had described Hamas, whom by now very many around the world consider resistance fighters, as holding points of view that merit a hearing. He even suggested, as Jewish Insider reported, that—lo—! “they’re actually pretty nice guys.” Hamas, that is.

Whatever was he thinking! Boehler was off his leash. Israeli officials were scurrying about in an attempt to get him back on it.

Talking to Hamas? Now Trump was talking!

Unlike the president’s Gaza Rivera plan to evict Palestinian survivors from Gaza; negotiations with Hamas do indeed constitute “out-of-the-box thinking,” if not original thinking. Unoriginal, because diplomacy, namely talking to adversaries, is standard statecraft. At least it ought to be.

Excerpted but barely in the Washington Examiner, the testy Boehler-Tapper televised exchange took time to propagate to the Internet. You see, US Deep Tech, Google included, generally cover for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which is also business partner to American tech. These multinationals are not about to throw sand in the IDF’s military bearings.

Tech multinationals (or Deep Tech, as I call them) have, after all, supplied the IDF with the killer infrastructure required to “build artificial intelligence (AI) programs designed to produce human targets with little human oversight.” (The other reasonable conclusion is that these multinationals are undisturbed by genocide.)

Talking to Hamas would certainly have been inconceivable under Joe Biden, alias Genocide Joe, remarks commentator extraordinaire Mouin Rabbani, a Palestinian. And while Trump has prioritized negotiations over American dual-national captives; his bold move broadcasts some salient facts about the situation:

Israel is an obstacle to an accord; to closing out the genocide. It is especially eager to avoid phase II of the January 17, 2025 ceasefire agreement. Not that the media system had noticed, but Israel never quite quit the killing.

By March 13, Israel had violated the ceasefire agreement upwards of one thousand times, in the estimation of Jon Elmer, military analyst at the Electronic Intifada. Staggering, perhaps, but utterly predictable historically. “Israel,” reminds a dejected Chris Hedges—he is a famed war correspondent—“has assassinated more people than any other people in the Western World.”

In the hours right after the ceasefire deal was announced; Israeli forces killed at least 87 Palestinians, 23 of them children. Quipped the late Refaat Al-Areer: “A ceasefire is when the Israelis fire and we cease.” As in “expire.” A mild-mannered, bookish Palestinian scholar, Dr. Al-Areer was murdered in his Gaza residence, in December of 2023.

Indeed, the low-grade killing across the coastal strip had continued throughout phase I of the “ceasefire.” To be exact, Israel had started up the killing fifteen minutes into the ceasefire’s implementation. Since January 15, 2025, Israel has murdered an average of three people every 24 hours—150 Palestinians since the start of the ceasefire on 19 January 2025.

No sooner were the Israelis steered by Steven Witkoff, in January, to a ceasefire; than the urge to kill overcame them. Israeli newspapers were telling about the “salty” language Witkoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, had deployed with Netanyahu, instructing the Israeli prime minister’s aides, as follows (and I paraphrase), “I don’t care that today’s your Sabbath. Get down here and sign this [old] ceasefire on the dotted line.” I ad-libbed “old” in, because the January-15 accord was modeled after one Hamas had composed in May of 2024.

Did Witkoff remind Netanyahu that the Israeli army, the IDF, does not rest up on the Seventh Day from the slaughter of innocents, and that, surely its commander-in-chief could get off his duff to make peace on the holy Sabbath?! Probably not. Still, what transpired was refreshing, even delicious.

The March 2025 violations of the agreement have seen Israel halt the meager aid let into starving Gaza, and cut off the remaining supply of electricity to Gaza. Because the main desalination water-treatment plant is producing a fraction of its prior output, running as it is only on generators—only one-in-ten Gazans currently has access to safe drinking water.

From the start, Israel had failed to allow into Gaza the agreed-upon medicines, fuel, food, housing units (15 out of a promised 60,000), tents (20 percent of the requisite 200,000), heavy earth-moving machinery, spare parts, construction material, and alternative energy systems, like generators.

Still regionally omnipotent, still resistless—Israel has now put its exterminatory foot to the floor again. The Jewish State continues to bleed the region like a leech, seizing Lebanese and Syrian territory, including the Golan Heights. As I write, via the chyron scroll across the screen comes news that Israel has just extinguished nine lives in Northen Gaza, and two in southern Lebanon, where a ceasefire is in effect.

Unless it is killing things, Israel is just not happy. Flora and fauna, too. Israeli genociders, candid economists might say, have a high time-preference mindset. In such an uncivilized society, impulses (to kill) are privileged over contractual commitments (to quit killing). Not some of the livestock, but all of the livestock. As hard as it is to believe, but under decades of a medieval blockade, Gaza’s farmers had, before October 7, fed a third of their people. Croplands, irrigation systems, batteries of greenhouses, living things that produce flowers then give fruit: everything has gone the way of cattle, poultry and family pets: dead.

The term Carthaginian Peace has lost its meaning under Israel’s malign sway. The bad idea of “peace” through crippling the opponent Israel has replaced with the idea of “peace” through conquering and killing the opponent off. Conversion is complete. The structural violence that is the State of Israel the US duopoly has helped normalize. Genocidal violence, yes or no, saturation bombing of civilians, pros and cons, and forced mass expulsion of starving, subjugated people—if not de rigueur, these state crimes are now part of normal governance in the West.

On top of all that, there was never a ceasefire in the West Bank. The West Bank’s civilians, so closely clustered, have been strafed from the air. For the first time in 20 years, tanks travel all over what are urban neighborhoods.

The depopulation underway in this de facto annexed territory hardly even percolates through to the West’s press. Yet thousands of West Bank Palestinians are being plucked from their homes, some detained, mostly without charges, at times shot on the spot; always degraded, tortured, and sicced upon by fulminating Jewish settlers, who “work” cheek-by-jowl with Israeli soldiers.

A screen picture of any day in the life of a subject in the State of Satan seconds my description. Taken on February 15, the captured headlines via Ha’aretz tell of 30,000 Palestinians driven from Jenin, a so-called refugee camp in the West Bank. The number of people evicted and dispossessed from these “camps” has since ballooned to close on 50,000. The West Bank’s Palestinians are denied access to their agricultural land, which means that soon it will lie fallow, and settlers will colonize it.

I call places like Jenin “so-called” camps because these were proper cities, not tent cities. As was noted in the Journal of Middle-East Studies (1992), these “camps are similar to any other urban neighborhoods,” into which they have evolved.

I’d been to Jenin. Our family had been invited as guests by generous residents. Childhood in Israel saw me visiting what I then knew as The Triangle: Tira, Tulkarem and Jenin. In the 1970s, these were not yet cities, but were definitely no nylon-dome encampments. My step-father, a doctor, headed healthcare clinics in what he called The Triangle. Daily, he’d return home laden with export-quality fresh produce. His patients were poor, yet so very generous. Upon the town’s doctor, a South African Jew who was appreciated in his role as a healthcare provider, they showered respect, affection and gifts.

We’d also be invited as a family to feasts held on the occasion of a wedding. The tables groaned with heavenly cuisine. Bestowed, this was a great honor, and these were grand affairs, an example of a culture in which hospitality and generosity are defining values. An invitation meant that you were never ignored. A lovely, if genteel, welcome awaited.

I do not know if the term Triangle deployed then denotes the same cluster of cities and villages. I do know that Jenin today is 70-percent levelled. Burdened by history like never before, I note, too, that Tira is no longer visible on the map.

Although the occupation army has pulled out of the Netzarim Corridor, which divides Gaza, it retains a presence in southern Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. The serial-killer state had hoped, with Trump’s backing, to renege entirely on the ceasefire agreement, and, in particular, on its Phase-II obligations to permanently end the offensive and “withdraw armed forces from the Gaza Strip completely.” In order to “surmount the obstacle” that is Israel, the Trump Administration had, therefore, chosen to speak directly with Hamas leaders.

Early in January of 2025, there was hope. Trump is an Alpha Male; Bibi Netanyahu is a kept man. How long can the ego-bound leader of a Super Power tolerate being bossed about by the leader of a “sh-thole country,” to use Trump’s old coinage?

Two months distant, and hope is fading. Trump chose to channel son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner, the nepotistic scion of a dodgy New York realtor, and an empty husk of a man, has had his eye on the waterfront property of a conquered and dying people. He had said as much about Gaza in 2024.

In essence, some of the world’s wealthiest men were coveting the property of the world’s poorest and most persecuted people.

Soon to follow was Trump’s Gaza plan, a gaudy vulgar production, replete with bearded belly dancers. “Trump Gaza,” the plan’s title, was not “out-of-the-box thinking,” as some in the president’s Westen coalition had dubbed it. Rather, it sits on a continuum of evil. It is an extension and completion of Joe Biden’s genocide.

Eager, it would seem, to write the Palestinian People’s obituary, Trump had vowed to assume control over Gaza, rebuild it and evict the survivors of a genocide committed by client state Israel.

By removing the pitiful exhibits from the scene of the crime; Donald Trump would be covering-up the crime of genocide. Next, he planned to conclude Biden’s genocide by scattering the survivors across the Middle East. Israel will have been rescued. Gazans will have ceased to exist as a nation. The forced displacement and mass murder of Gaza’s Palestinians would have been achieved, completed.

Who said crime doesn’t pay? When the Superpower inverts the moral order of the universe; the Crime of All Crimes pays—and then some.

As Trump told it, nobody quite knows how or why Gaza became a “demolition site.” Somehow, the soil got soaked through with the blood of tens-of-thousands of Palestinians, and a toxic mix of 50-million tons of building debris. Somehow, piles of bodies decay beneath the surface. Somehow, garbage is piled as high as the bodies, were they to be stacked. Open sewage runs through what remains of the streets, and the byproducts and contaminants of munitions, like unexploded ordnance, lie everywhere.

It’s all a big mystery.

The other thing nobody can quite determine is which of the two countries, America or Israel, is the Great Satan and which is the Little Satan.

Back to Boehler: Israel went barking mad when our ex-envoy failed to show monk-like devotion to Israel, asserting, instead, American foreign-policy independence. The Lobby was marshalled. Fervid assurances were soon provided. Soon enough, Adam Boehler was gone. After being “nominated for the Senate-confirmed position of Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs,” he was demoted to “special government employee,” reports Ha’aretz. Found deficient in Zionist solidarity, Boehler “withdrew his nomination.”

The median elapsed time between an American official opposing anything Israel and then dropping out of history is getting shorter.

Like Joe Biden did before him, president Trump followed the Israeli prime minister on a leash. On March 5, he bellowed on Truth Social:

“Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you.” Buoyed, at 2:00 AM today, March 18, Israel murdered over 400 Gazans. It is currently demanding that Hamas hand over hostages for nothing.

Will the Palestinians wronged and ruined get a reprieve? Will the mercurial Trump, who, to his credit, is ideologically unattached to Israel, cut Israel dead, as he ought to? These possibilities are looking remote.

***

Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian theorist, author and essayist. Her new book is “The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy” (February 2024). Mercer is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish and grew up in Israel from which she fled, aged 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, the Israeli military.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

US scraps monitoring of alleged ‘Russian sabotage’ – Reuters

RT | March 19, 2025

The US has halted a multi-agency program set up to detect and counter potential “sabotage, disinformation, and cyberattacks” it claims Russia could launch against the West, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing current and former officials.

The outlet says it could not verify if the order came from US President Donald Trump.

The program, initiated under former President Joe Biden and led by the country’s National Security Council, involved at least seven US security agencies and the EU, to counter alleged Russian “hybrid activities,” the outlet said.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Western officials have accused Russian intelligence agencies of conducting a covert campaign to weaken US-led support for Kiev. They claimed that Moscow has been “escalating a shadow war against Western nations” allegedly involving arson attacks, assassination attempts, election interference, damage to undersea cables, and other plots.

Russia has repeatedly dismissed the accusations as “unfounded,” with the Kremlin describing the allegations of so-called “Russian sabotage” as “empty and ephemeral.”

Since assuming office for the second time, Trump has diverged from Western efforts to isolate Russia, and instead opened direct communication with Russian President Vladimir Putin, while publicly clashing with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, the article noted.

Trump administration officials ignored calls to continue the monitoring effort, the outlet claimed, adding that “much of the work has come to a standstill” since Trump took office in January.

Asked about Washington’s suspension of a “hybrid warfare campaign” monitoring, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters that the Trump administration was trying to get rid of “everything ineffective, corrupt and implausible,” something he said was “understandable.”

Over the past several months, there have been multiple cases in which telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged by vessels operating from Russian ports, triggering speculation that Moscow was behind the damage. However, an investigation carried out by NATO prosecutors has failed to find any evidence connecting the incidents to Moscow.

Peskov has previously stated that “it is quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any grounds.”

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s Latest Statements on Ukraine ‘MOSTLY TRUE’ – The Hill

Sputnik – 19.03.2025

POTUS’ remarks come amid a “steady diet of disinformation” about Ukraine that Western audiences have been fed for more than a decade, The Hill’s contributor, Alan Kuperman, underscores.

He points to an array of Ukraine-related facts that the Western public should have known:

  • Right-wing Ukrainian militants were the ones who triggered the 2014 Maidan violence which led to resignation of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych
  • Zelensky added fuel to the fire of “a wider war” by violating the Minsk peace agreements and seeking NATO military aid and membership
  • Zelensky campaigned in 2019 on a pledge to prevent further war, but reneged after winning the elections, “apparently less concerned about risking war than looking weak on Russia.”
  • The subsequent increase in weapons imports from NATO countries by the Zelensky regime proved the last straw for Russian President Vladimir Putin
  • Former US President Joe Biden “contributed crucially” to the escalation of the Ukraine conflict by failing to force Zelensky to comply with Putin’s request to implement the Minsk accords
  • If Trump had been the US president at the time, he wouldn’t have provided Zelensky with “such a blank check”, which emboldened Ukraine and further sparked the standoff.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Using Medicalization to Suppress the Exercise of First Amendment Rights

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | March 19, 2025

A repugnant tactic of authoritarianism is categorizing people’s desire for or exercise of freedom as illness that government should suppress. An example of this was the deeming of dissidents in the Soviet Union as mentally ill to justify their detention and punishment.

In America, there has long been resistance against an effort to similarly have the United States government medicalize the exercise of gun rights as a means to circumvent the constitutional protection of the right to bear arms contained in the Second Amendment. In the 1990s this resistance led to congressional imposition of a spending prohibition against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) advocating or promoting gun control.

The effort to prevent the US government from using medicalization to crack down on gun rights appears to have had a success in the new Trump administration with the removal from the HHS website of a guns and public health advisory from the preceding Biden administration. Abené Clayton reported Monday at the Guardian :

The Trump administration has removed former surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ website. This move was made to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to protect second amendment rights, a White House official told the Guardian.

The strange thing is that while the Trump administration appears to be taking action to cut off HHS threats to Second Amendment rights, HHS is helping lead Trump administration efforts to expand US government threats to First Amendment rights. Medicalization to restrict free speech, assembly, and petition is on the ascendancy at HHS as demonstrated by a March 3 announcement by HHS, the Department of Education (ED), and the General Services Administration (GSA) concerning the US government’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, created the month before, reviewing actions or inactions of Columbia University relative to “antisemitism” and potential penalties that may be imposed upon that university. This is all justified in the announcement by reference to a January 29 executive order of President Donald Trump that employs a peculiarly expanded definition of antisemitism incorporated into an executive order from Trump’s first term that includes positions against the Israel government in addition to the commonly understood definition that concerns positions against an ethnicity or religion.

“Anti-Semitism – like racism – is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” declared HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in the announcement. That is medicalization in a nutshell: Your “bad thoughts” are a plague the government must stop to protect public health.

Four days later — on March 7, HHS, ED, and GSA were back with a new announcement that, due to review by the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, about 400 million dollars in US grants to Columbia University had been canceled, with more grant cancelations expected to follow. Then, on March 13 the HHS, ED, and GSA followed up with a letter to Columbia University using the denial of funding as leverage to demand the university crack down on free speech, assembly and petition, as well as change, and even hand to US government control over, a variety of university policies and procedures.

Meanwhile, the US government is making an example of Mahmoud Khalil who was involved in protests challenging US foreign policy and related to Israel at Columbia University. The US government has arrested and detained him, and is seeking his deportation, because Khalil apparently did nothing more than exercise First Amendment protected rights.

These actions against Columbia University are not one-off. A February 28 press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ) listed ten universities — Columbia University plus George Washington University; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California — as subject to visits from the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism because their campuses “have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023.” Expect the list to keep growing.

Leo Terrell, described in the February DOJ press release as “[l]eading Task Force member and Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights,” made clear in an included quote that the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism means business. He stated:

The Task Force’s mandate is to bring the full force of the federal government to bear in our effort to eradicate Anti-Semitism, particularly in schools. These visits are just one of many steps this Administration is taking to deliver on that commitment.

It looks like we are witnessing the beginning of a major crackdown on First Amendment rights. The US government, however, will claim this development is nothing to worry about because the purpose is to make America healthy again.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

NSW Premier Chris Minns Calls Free Speech a Government Liability

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | March 18, 2025

Chris Minns, Premier of New South Wales, Australia, has done something that politicians rarely do — he’s said the quiet part out loud. In a rare moment of honesty, he’s admitted that the government sees free speech as a liability.

“I recognize and I fully said from the beginning, we don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community and have people live in peace.”

Meaning: Your rights are negotiable, and the price is social harmony — as defined by the state.

The absurdity of this argument is hard to overstate. Historically, the country thrived on its rough-and-tumble political culture, where disagreements were hashed out in public rather than smothered under layers of legalese. The idea that Australians must now muzzle themselves to accommodate imported conflicts is an outright admission of failure by the political class.

Minns and his allies argue that restricting speech is necessary because multiculturalism has made Australia too volatile to handle open debate. But let’s take a step back. Why is Australia suddenly on edge? Is it because everyday Australians have become more hateful and intolerant, or is it because the government has spent decades encouraging division through identity politics?

The immediate context for Minns’ comments is the recent passage of hate speech laws, pushed through Parliament in a frenzy of moral panic. The justification? A crisis that turned out to be a hoax, reportedly concocted by criminals looking for lighter sentences — something the government allegedly knew early on.

MLC John Ruddick didn’t mince words when he addressed this in Parliament:

“Parliament was misinformed by the Minns government about the urgency of the bills referred to in one A, B, and C… this House calls on the Minns government to repeal the bills… and apologize for both misleading this Parliament, preventing a Parliamentary Inquiry, and further curbing free speech principles by these reactionary bills.”

Minns’ response? Doubling down:

“There have been some that have been agitating in the Parliament to nullify the laws to remove them off the statute books. Think about what kind of toxic message that would send to the NSW community.

“And I think the advocates for those changes need to explain what do they want people to have the right to say?

“What kind of racist abuse do they want to see or to be able to lawfully see on the streets of Sydney?”

This is an old trick — framing any challenge to speech restrictions as a demand for open racism. It’s dishonest, it’s lazy, and it conveniently ignores the fact that these laws will never be enforced evenly.

These laws will be used against dissenters. Against people who question government policies. Against critics of the ruling ideology.

If democracy means anything, it means the right to speak freely — even when that speech is unpopular. Even when it makes politicians uncomfortable. Because when free speech is sacrificed on the altar of “social harmony,” what you’re left with isn’t peace — it’s silence. And that silence is exactly what governments crave.

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

‘Death blow for the euro’ – AfD’s Weidel slams Germany’s massive new debt package

Remix News | March 19, 2025

The German Bundestag passed a historic debt package for defense and infrastructure yesterday, effectively changing the constitution to allow a suspension of the debt brake. However, a number of top German opposition politicians are making dire predictions about what this nearly €1 trillion in new debt will mean for Germany and Europe.

The largest opposition party to emerge from national elections, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), was perhaps the most vehemently opposed to the package. However, the BSW, the Left Party and the Free Democrats (FDP) all filed lawsuits against the deal and fought tooth and nail to stop it, but all of those lawsuits failed.

The co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, is calling the debt a “death blow for the euro.” She said the debt will have a negative impact on future generations, consumers and taxpayers. Furthermore, she believes there will be massive disruptions in the credit markets in the future, rising interest rates, and a “spillover effect on the other eurozone countries.” Already, interest rates on European debt have risen sharply, and the fear is that periphery countries could see their borrowing costs skyrocket. In such a scenario, the euro could be significantly weakened.

She said Merz broke his election promises in dramatic fashion. In fact, the promise to keep the debt brake was even contained within the party election program of the CDU. There is already a sharp backlash amongst the party’s members to the betrayal, with some Germans already canceling their membership to the party.

“This is nothing less than the worst voter deception I have ever seen in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany,” said Weidel.

There was no significant dissent within the parties that passed the new debt package, with only Jan Dieren (SPD), Mario Czaja (CDU), and Canan Bayram (Greens) voting “no” to the package. In the end, the new debt package passed with a comfortable margin above the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution, with 513 for the deal and 206 against.

Of course, the opposition parties are outraged. The law passed under the old Bundestag, the one that had just been voted out of power. It was championed by Friedrich Merz, who promised his CDU would keep the debt brake in place. It represents a historic spending spree, but one with many handouts to the Green Party, including a commitment to “climate neutrality by 2045” enshrined in the constitution.

Among the speakers featured in the debate in the Bundestag was AfD MP Alexander Gauland, who was also a co-founder of the party.

“A lot of right and wrong things have been said in the course of this debate, both last Thursday and today. I would therefore like to make a few personal comments. Mr. Merz and I were in the same party for many years. I left because I could no longer tolerate Angela Merkel’s destruction of the CDU as a conservative-liberal bourgeois alternative to the left-green mainstream. Mr. Merz became a victim of her will to power,” he said.

Gauland also said he had high hopes for Merz at first, with a potential turnaround on immigration and a return to center-right policy, but instead, Merz has allied with the left and blocked a deal with the AfD.

“You sacrificed everything that was still conservative or middle-class in the CDU in order to become chancellor,” said Gauland. “Mr. Merz, you will probably become Federal Chancellor with the kind of policies we have seen in recent years. This policy will fail in the same way as the previous traffic light system. Not even their transatlantic ally in Washington supports their desperate endeavors to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s answers.

“Even if I have had doubts about my own party from time to time in recent years. Today, I am proud and happy to have launched it together with others in 2013. Because as of this week, the Merz CDU is the continuation of the Merkel CDU. Keep it up, Mr. Merz, and you will have to take responsibility for Germany’s decline in the future.”

Meanwhile, the CDU, CSU and Social Democrats (SPD) were triumphant.

Merz said that the financial package opens up “a perspective for our country that is urgently needed in the times we live in today.”

“Today’s decision is an unmistakable signal of Germany’s assumption of responsibility for a secure Europe and an economically stable Germany,” said CSU state group leader Alexander Dobrindt.

SPD leader Lars Klingbeil described the financial package as a “historic compromise” between the SPD, CDU/CSU, and the Greens. He said the debt would help rebuild Germany and beef up the military.

“The world is currently being re-measured; no one is waiting for Germany and no one is waiting for Europe,” said Klingbeil.

FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr slammed Merz, saying he will lead “the first debt-ridden coalition in the Federal Republic of Germany.” He accused Merz of wanting to lead a government “that is prepared to sacrifice tomorrow’s prosperity for short-term election gifts.”

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Peace Negotiations & the End of NATO

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs with Prof. Glenn Diesen
Glenn Diesen | March 18, 2025

The US and Russia negotiate an end to the proxy war in Ukraine: What is realistic to expect, how can Europe’s bellicose reactions be explained, and is this the end of NATO?

March 19, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment