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Celebrities and Online Personalities Sign Letter, Telling Social Media Platforms To Crackdown On “Hate”

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 29, 2023

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has rounded up a bunch of celebrities to bolster a letter to social media platforms, asking them to censor “hate” towards the LGBT community.

With the signatures of over 250 celebrities and community leaders, the organization has directed its fervor toward the giants of the digital world. Addressing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok.

In the public letter the organization charged that the platforms were nurturing platforms where “high-follower anti-LGBTQ hate accounts” proliferated. A group of celebrities, including the likes of actors Elliot Page and Jameela Jamil, alongside singer Ariana Grande, lent their ink to this plea.

The offending content, as per the letter, was outlined as speech that makes what they allege are falsehoods about gender-based procedures for minors, specifically “content that spreads malicious lies about medically necessary healthcare for trans youth.”

“Directing hate toward queer and trans public figures online is a vehicle to promote hate and violence against all LGBTQ people,” the letter states. “This translates to real-world harm.”

GLAAD’s post elaborated, saying, “This is leading to real-life harm, like death threats against healthcare providers and violence against trans and LGBTQ people.”

The group also complained about “Anti-trans hate speech, including targeted misgendering, deadnaming, and hate-driven tropes.”

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Palestinian journalist wins wrongful termination appeal against DW

The Cradle | June 29, 2023

Palestinian-Jordanian journalist Farah Maraqa on 28 June announced winning an appeal filed by Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) media network over her unlawful dismissal for alleged “antisemitism.”

The decision comes nine months after the German judiciary ruled that her dismissal by state-owned broadcaster DW on charges of anti-Semitism was “legally unjustified,” which the German broadcaster appealed.

“It is a relief that the judge ruled in Farah’s favor and held Deutsche Welle accountable for this illegal dismissal,” Giovanni Fassina, director of the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), which advocates for the legal rights of Palestinians in Europe, said at the time.

In February 2022, DW fired Maraqa alongside five other Arab journalists – all Palestinian or Lebanese – accusing them of “antisemitism” in social media posts and articles they had written for outside publications.

The charges were based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) controversial extended definition of antisemitism, which includes criticism of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land and the system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians.

The definition, which Germany adopted, has been criticized as a means of silencing pro-Palestinian support and dissent against Israeli policies.

In May 2021, DW reportedly sent an internal two-page memo to employees banning them from using terminology such as “colonialism” and “apartheid” when describing Israel.

Over the past few years, western outlets have come under fire for firing or suspending Arab journalists over alleged “antisemitism.”

In March, France24 suspended four journalists from their Arabic branch at the behest of the pro-Israel media monitoring organization, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

Last October, the New York Times (NYT) fired Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salam over social media posts supporting Palestinian resistance factions.

The freelance journalist was dismissed after the Israeli lobby organization Honest Reporting alerted the NYT of his posts.

Social media giants like WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok have also been accused of silencing or “purging” Palestinian journalists in Gaza and the occupied West Bank who report on Israeli war crimes.

Furthermore, Google employees accused the tech giant of censuring them for protesting against a controversial $1.2 billion contract signed with Israel to provide the country with advanced artificial intelligence (AI), which many fear will worsen human rights abuses in Palestine.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Iran takes Canada to court for violating sovereign immunity

The Cradle | June 29, 2023

Iran has filed a legal case against Canada at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the pretext of violating Iran’s sovereign state immunity by designating the country as a “sponsor of terror.”

The Hague-based court confirmed in a statement that Iran launched the case against Canada on 26 June.

A statement on the official website of the Iranian government said that Canada presented these accusations under “false and wrongful” pretenses.

In the press release by the ICJ, Iran contends that “Canada has adopted and implemented a series of legislative, executive, and judicial measures against Iran and its property [since 2012] in breach of its international obligations.”

Iran argues that “as a sovereign state, it is entitled to sovereign immunities from jurisdiction and from enforcement under customary international law” and requests the Court to adjudge and declare that “by failing to respect the immunities of Iran and its property, Canada has violated its international obligations towards Iran.”

In 2021, a Canadian court awarded 107 million Canadian dollars ($84m) to the families of six victims who were killed when Iranian forces shot down a Ukraine International Airlines flight near Tehran in January 2020, which was labeled an “act of terrorism” by Ontario judge Edward Belobaba.

Iranian officials have said the shooting of the plane was an accident caused by “human error” in operating a surface-to-air defense system due to being on “high alert” following retaliatory strikes on US bases for the killing of Top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

In May of 2021, the spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry Saeed Khatibzadeh described the application of Canadian judicial procedures as a “quite political approach,” saying: “the Canadian court, following the US courts, first identifies the accused, then resorts to any relevant or irrelevant information in public sources, especially cyberspace, to find a reason for its biased and predetermined mentality.”

Canada listed Iran as a “sponsor of terror” in 2012 and broke diplomatic ties as relations frayed over Tehran’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, its nuclear program, and its stance on Israel.

On 13 March, 2012, Canada amended section 6 of the State Immunity Act (SIA) to remove the immunity from the jurisdiction of a foreign State listed by Canada as a supporter of terrorism, the application for the legal case states.

Following the amendment, section 6.1 of the SIA provides that “a foreign state that is set out on the list referred to in subsection (2) is not immune from the jurisdiction of a court in proceedings against it for its support of terrorism on or after January 1, 1985.”

The ICJ was set up after World War II to resolve disputes between UN member states. Its judgments are final but can take years.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , | Leave a comment

EU to renew Iran sanctions under defunct nuclear deal: Report

The Cradle | June 29, 2023

European officials recently informed Iran that they plan to renew EU ballistic missile sanctions set to expire in October, according to sources in the know that spoke with Reuters.

The renewal will be conducted under the parameters of the defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which officials say Iran “violated” by moving forward with developing its nuclear energy program after the US unilaterally exited the deal in 2018 and reimposed crushing sanctions.

Other reasons the EU is giving for renewing the sanctions are Russia’s use of Iranian drones in Ukraine and “the possibility of Iran transferring ballistic missiles to Moscow.”

“The Iranians have been told quite clearly [of plans to keep the sanctions], and now the question is what, if any, retaliatory steps the Iranians might take and [how] to anticipate that,” a western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The decision to uphold the sanctions would be the first significant instance of the E3 group of nations — France, Germany, and the UK — not abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.

EU mediator Enrique Mora, who co-ordinates talks to restore the 2015 deal, raised the issue of keeping the sanctions when he met Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani in Doha on 21 June, but the latter reportedly refused to discuss the matter, according to an unnamed Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.

“Maintaining sanctions, in any capacity and form, will not hinder Iran’s ongoing advancements,” the Iranian official is quoted as saying. “It serves as a reminder that the west cannot be relied upon and trusted.”

Since 2017, the Islamic Republic has significantly advanced with its ballistic missile and satellite launch programs. The country last month made waves by revealing a hypersonic missile with a potential 2,000-km range.

This progress, on top of Tehran’s enrichment of uranium at 60 percent purity and a China-brokered détente with Saudi Arabia, set off alarms in the west and pushed Washington to begin ‘de-escalation talks‘ with Iran.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

China: Guantanamo prison just tip of iceberg in US’ ‘deplorable’ record of rights violations

Press TV – June 29, 2023

China says the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is just the tip of the iceberg in human rights violations committed by the United States, weeks after the United Nations slammed Washington for inhumane treatment of prisoners at the notorious offshore military prison.

In February, UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ni Aolain granted unprecedented access to the US-run detention center in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay and released her report on her four-day visit to the infamous prison on Monday.

Ni Aolain, who became the first UN human rights investigator allowed to visit the camp, harshly criticized the White House in her scathing report for continuing to subject the 30 men held at the prison, commonly known as Gitmo, to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

On Thursday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, when asked to comment on the 23-page report, said at a regular briefing that for the past two decades, the Gitmo has repeatedly been exposed for its abuses, but Washington persistently refused to shut it down despite making promises to do so.

“In the past two decades and more, it has been revealed many times that inmates were abused in the detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay, causing outrage in the international community. The US has promised time and again to close the detention center, yet till today dozens of individuals are still imprisoned in the facility at the Guantanamo Bay and only few of them have been indicted or convicted,” she said.

“Over the decades, the US has set up ‘black sites’ in at least 54 countries and regions in the name of the “war on terror” to secretly detain ‘suspected terrorists’, carry out arbitrary detention and use torture to extort confessions.

“The detention center at the Guantanamo Bay is just the tip of the iceberg. The ‘black sites’ are a typical example of the US trampling on the rule of law and infringing on human rights,” Mao further said.

She also stressed that Washington needed to “earnestly reflect upon its deplorable record on human rights, apologize and provide reparation to the victims and hold those who authorized and inflicted tortures on detainees accountable.”

During her visit to the Guantanamo prison, Ni Aolain, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and at Queens University in Belfast, met with a range of the 34 prisoners who were then detained. The number has now dropped to 30, including the five inmates accused of plotting the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11.

“After two decades of custody, the suffering of those detained is profound, and it’s ongoing. Every single detainee I met with lives with the unrelenting harms that follow from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention,” she said at a press conference on Monday.

Ni Aolain, who visited the notorious prison as an independent UN monitor, did not, however, express harsh criticism for the fact that 19 of the 30 inmates had never been charged with any crime, some of whom have been held there for two decades, and only said their situation was a matter of “profound concern.”

The Gitmo opened in 2002 under the-then US president George W. Bush to held detainees captured during the so-called “war on terror” after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001.

It became synonymous with prisoner abuse by the US in the early years of “war on terror”, gaining global notoriety for the widespread use of torture and other violations of human rights that took place in it.

Many detainees were reportedly subjected to psychological and physical abuse — including waterboarding, beating, exposure to deafening noise, and sleep and food deprivation — as part of their “enhanced interrogation,” the accounts of which were gradually leaked to the outside world by the few lawyers who visited the prison and the inmates who have since been released.

Washington’s promises of closing down the site go back to the first tenure of former President Barack Obama, between 2009 and 2013.

Obama had made the closing of Guantanamo one of his top priorities and issued an executive order to do so soon after taking office in 2009. However, he failed to achieve that goal by the end of his second term in the face of stiff opposition in Congress. His successor, Donald Trump, rescinded Obama’s order to close Guantanamo.

Officials of President Joe Biden say they aim to close the infamous prison but the detention facility remains in operation as the administration has transferred several detainees in recent years.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Nicaragua takes complaint to UN over US refusal to pay compensation for backing death squad

Press TV – June 28, 2023

Nicaragua has lodged a complaint with the UN against the US for its refusal to comply with a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering it to compensate Managua for its support of a notorious death squad in the 1980s.

The announcement was made by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at a ceremony in Managua commemorating the 37th anniversary of the ruling by the International Court of Justice, which condemned the US for carrying out military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua.

“We will go to court to accuse the United States so that they repair the damage they have done to Nicaragua as much as possible,” said Ortega.

He said the decision was made despite friendly nations advising him that taking the matter to the UN will be an exercise in futility.

“When we talked about going to court to sue the United States, even brotherly nations, friendly nations, told us: that is a lost case, you will not even be able to make any progress there in court.”

“The Court has undoubtedly been a point of reference in the battle for independence, for the sovereignty of Nicaragua, in the face of the recourse of the powers, of the use of force, we have defended ourselves with the force of law.”

The Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry has written a letter to UN chief Antonio Guterres, calling on the body to make the US pay its long-overdue debt to Nicaragua.

The United States has long been accused of interfering in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, as well as many other Latin America nations.

President Ortega came to power in 1979 with the victory of the Sandinista Revolution that toppled US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Then-US President Ronald Reagan, citing the threat of an expansion of Cuban and Soviet influence in the region, signed off on US financing for a right-wing militia, called the Contras, to launch cross-border attacks against the Sandinistas.

The ICJ in 1986 held that the US had violated international law by supporting the Contras and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors.

The United States refused to participate in the proceedings, and following the judgment withdrew from the ICJ.

The US also blocked enforcement of the judgment by the UN Security Council and thereby prevented Nicaragua from receiving any compensation.

Ortega, who helped depose the Somoza dictatorship in the late 1970s, has been in power for 16 consecutive years. He served as president in the 1980s before losing power in 1990. He, however, staged a stunning comeback in 2007.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

EU delivers ‘neither peace nor prosperity’ – Hungarian PM

RT | June 29, 2023

The Hungarian government has blasted the EU, declaring that in its current state it brings “neither peace nor prosperity” to member states. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who was attending a summit of bloc leaders in Brussels, offered a similar assessment of the bloc.

Orban’s position was relayed via his government’s official Facebook account on Tuesday, the first day of the high-profile two-day gathering in Brussels. The statement apparently came from an interview that the Hungarian leader had given to the German media earlier in the week.

Asked by the German tabloid Bild whether he could explain the rising popularity of Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing political party, the prime minister cited disillusionment with the EU as a possible cause.

“The European Union was created for two reasons. The first is peace – and now there is war. The second is prosperity – the economy is in an increasingly worrying state, it is difficult to maintain competition and it is increasingly difficult to ensure prosperity for people,” Orban argued.

“That is why I see the so-called protest parties gaining strength everywhere in Europe. I’m not talking about Germany alone, I’m talking about Europe in general,” he added.

Hungary stands out among EU members for having consistently criticized the West’s approach to the Ukraine conflict. Arming and training Kiev’s troops and punishing Russia with economic sanctions have not brought a truce any closer and have caused serious damage to the bloc itself, according to Budapest.

Ukraine is one of the top items on the agenda of the EU summit. The bloc’s leaders are expected to offer some form of security guarantees to Kiev and provide assurances of continued military assistance.

Orban told Bild that Ukraine has no chance to win against Russia regardless of the amount of Western money that is poured in, because eventually Kiev will run out of manpower.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

The disgrace of Australia’s pandemic betrayal

By Paul Collits | TCW Defending Freedom | June 27, 2023

What exactly do you do when your country betrays you and disgraces itself before the world?  When you find out that it is run by thugs and goons? When just about no one in the political class has the moral compass and the spine to stand up for you? When your fellow citizens turn on you if you dared to question things?

If you are John Stapleton, a retired Aussie journalist, you write a 450-page book about it. You call it Australia Breaks Apart. You write uncomprehendingly, elegantly, passionately, even elegiacally, ashamed, still shaking your head in disbelief, three years after a ho-hum virus called by the powers-that-be ‘Covid’ reached our shores.

Surely these words could be written about just about every country in the world, you might think. Two quick responses – we were the worst, and surely we, of all places, should have been above all this.

Whether the book explains to international readers how this all happened, I’m not sure. I am far from certain that anyone could explain it. But let us explore what the book does do.

The title suggests one of the main themes, that of division and enmity. There were members of the dobber class, the Covid winners (largely in the employ of government or corporates), the lap-top class, the blatherers. People on ‘the other side’ were routinely demonised. Granny killers, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis and so on. Many of these folks were morally upright, seasoned professionals, not rent-a-crowd ideologues. Australia did indeed break apart, literally as well as socially. State and territory borders were closed by spooked politicians on a whim and for very few Covid cases. Fear and derangement were everywhere. Subjugation.

There are things in the book that even those who lived through the nightmare will not have known. These matters should have been known, and most likely would have been, if not for the cover-ups and the wilful non-reportage of stories in the interest of defending ‘the narrative’.

The book tells not only the story of Covid policy excesses, but also of a resistance movement that grew into something astonishing. This underground, though in plain sight, movement of angry men and women became hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It has remained invisible only because the quisling Covid class and their corrupt media puppets refused to acknowledge that it even existed, other than being a ‘tiny’ bunch of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists to be ignored.

John Stapleton doesn’t ignore them. He tells their story. This makes his book unique. The expected villains are all there, in graphic detail – Victoria premier Daniel Andrews, a truly appalling political figure, the thug police, the slippery bob-each-way villain-prime minister Scott Morrison, the other premiers and chief ministers, the unaccountable bureaucrats, the public health gauleiters, the Pharma-funded academics, the media shills. But what emerges in the book is an account of how resistance to tyranny can form and grow. This will be an invaluable resource when the medical totalitarians come for us next time, as surely they will.

The story is told through the eyes of Old Alex (the author), an old-time ‘pressman’ with a nose for a story and an unquenchable desire to unearth the truth. And, importantly, an open mind and no corporate constraints. Like many Covid dissidents, Stapleton made new friends during the Covid years, just about all of them independent truth-tellers. Citizen journalists. And he lost all sense of mainstream journalism having a soul and a purpose. Silent journalists were high up on Stapleton’s list of Covid criminals to be despised. But the stories of new voices and new connections among the refuseniks show the book to be about heroes as well as villains.

Journalism had very few dissidents who spoke out. Nor did the public servants or politicians or the police, but there were a few brave souls among the latter (for example) who broke ranks and saw Covid police brutality as a hill on which (professionally) to die. There was Andrew Cooney in New South Wales and Krystle Mitchell in Victoria.   

These brave hearts were not willing to go along to get along, as rubber bullets penetrated backs, grandmothers were shoved to the pavement then pepper-sprayed, and the heads of mentally challenged innocents were smashed against concrete floors in downtown Melbourne. These stories of fascist policing were systematically smothered by the legacy media and the protesters pilloried and defamed.

The book details so much more. The scandal of the quarantine camps, for example. Those gazillion-dollar, Orwellian white elephants. The bullshit Covid-speak pronouncements from on high. The thousands upon thousands of (often massive) fines for Covid misdemeanours. The National Cabinet mutual protection narratives. All based on lies. Deadly lies. Some of the Covid class still promote the shots. Amid the ever-rising, murky waters of excess deaths. Including, perhaps, that of the Australian legend Shane Warne. Deaths still unexamined by the Covid class.

We need this book, and those like it. More straight history than exposé, but no less significant for this. True crime reporting, if you will. And if you didn’t hate the Covid class before you open the book, I guarantee you will by the end, if not sooner.

There are those who might say, why dredge it all up again since we have ‘moved on’? Well, among those that Covid refuseniks detest the most, the ‘let’s just move on’ types rank pretty high. This book should be for them to read and to reflect upon. To contemplate the massive pain caused, and to ponder the fact that it is all likely to happen again, what with the great reset people and the pandemic planning industry already on high alert for the first opportunity to crank up the machine again. Moving on, not holding ‘them’, the Covid class, to account, will only make the next instalment all the more likely.

Oh yes, for those who lived through the nightmare, John Stapleton’s gripping book, while reviving painful memories in great detail, is a must-read account of the evil that men (and women) do. It is a thundering reminder, too, of the need for Covid accountability, and a spur to further action among a new Coalition of the Willing minded to pursue it, and who simply must not give up the fight in the face of performative Covid class insouciance. It is ironic, too, that Australia Breaks Apart has been published just as the stampede for the exit door by Covid’s decision-makers has reached a crescendo.

In the dying days of the narrative, there was a national election, with one party of despised Covideers replaced by another, and around a third of now largely unrepresented voters, many of them the deplorables featured in Stapleton’s book, refusing to support either major party. The great political escape raises the question, was all the protesting worth it? I recently put a similar question to Ian Plimer, the doyen of Australian climate sceptics – why does he keep writing books when the climate writing seems to be on the wall? He replied that it was critical that when the history of all this comes to be written one day, there will be a record of the madness.

Buy this book, this chronicle of the new totalitarianism, the definitive account of Covid Australia, then circulate it widely among those might think it didn’t really matter what they did to us. A short review cannot do justice to this deeply authentic, often transcendent and, indeed, magisterial work. An astonishing achievement. An Australian story.

See also:

Essential Reading for the Dissident, the Disenfranchised, the Disillusioned

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Why More US Bradley Armored Vehicles Won’t Boost Ukraine’s Counteroffensive

By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 28.06.2023

What Washington has delivered to Ukraine is a non-upgraded version of the Bradly armed vehicles with restricted combat capabilities, retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, told Sputnik.

The Biden administration has announced another $500 million military package to Kiev, which includes, among other weaponry, 30 US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

At least 17 such vehicles were earlier damaged or destroyed by Russian troops amid the Ukrainian army’s unsuccessful counteroffensive attempt. Will an additional batch of the Bradley vehicles be of use to the Ukrainian military? Former Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski has her doubts.

“Well, if you have ever watched the 1998 movie “The Pentagon Wars” you might wonder how we ever developed them in the first place! And of course, they are from 1980s technology and design, because of the lag time in the US military acquisition system of that era, and today as well,” she told Sputnik.

THE PENTAGON WARS – 1998 HBO MILITARY COMEDY FILM BASED ON A TRUE STORY OF THE BRADLEY TANK

The ex-Pentagon analyst said that with the mothballed Bradleys delivered to Ukraine, the US is now in the process of upgrading these infantry fighting vehicles.

“Its replacement program was actually initiated in 2010, and the production by the winning company (or a combination) won’t begin until 2027. In a comprehensive land-sea-air battlespace, the Bradley adds mobility and protection to other parts of the combined arms array, but without the ‘rest of the system’ its capabilities are limited, as we see in Ukraine today,” Kwiatkowski noted.

She made it clear that the Bradley supplies to Ukraine are something that American Rheinmetall and General Dynamics will benefit from, as “they refine and propose their best design” of the Bradleys.

When asked whether the development of a new vehicle could entail a US military budget increase, Kwiatkowski said that “part of the strategy of NATO expansion and relevance, that has been the story of Ukraine for over a decade, is how to upgrade older weapons systems with European support and cash along with maintaining the massive US military industrial complex into the foreseeable future.”

“The US defense budget has grown every year in my lifetime, and not a single war has been ‘won’. The upcoming Pentagon budget is $842 billion, and this does not count the entire intelligence budget, so we are well over a trillion dollars annually in 2024. Because of the influence and pervasiveness of the defense industry in every state, this budget will continue to grow until the United States is bankrupted,” she concluded.

Both Kiev and Washington have acknowledged that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is progressing slower than expected, with one Pentagon official citing an American military representative who conceded that the counteroffensive is “not meeting expectations on any front.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, stressed that Kiev had failed to reach any strategic objectives at the beginning of its counteroffensive, losing more than 180 tanks and over 400 armored vehicles.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Covering up crime – the real purpose of the Covid Inquiry

By Dr Mark Shaw | TCW Defending Freedom | June 27, 2023

Why is there so little discussion about why those responsible for deceiving the public in relation to Covid policy have not been subject to a criminal investigation? Are we really meant to believe that no crimes have been committed, that it was all ‘happenstance’? Have their positions of authority exempted them from action being taken? Or are there other reasons?

As the Covid Inquiry started, it is an irony that, almost simultaneously, Boris Johnson was found guilty of the ‘crime’ of misleading Parliament. He was aware of the potential punishment and decided to jump before he was pushed but, either way, the effect of the Parliamentary Standards Committee’s verdict on their inquiry was to end his political career. Yet if politicians or those in power mislead the public there seems to be no such ‘justice’.

What I want to demonstrate here, with evidence, is that the Covid Inquiry is as much a means of deceiving the public as the Covid policy instigators achieved. The inquiry’s alleged aims are to ‘help Government and society learn from the pandemic and better prepare for further epidemics’. Lady Hallett has also stated that ‘no one will be found guilty or innocent in the inquiry – the idea is to learn lessons’.

Such statements preclude any investigation into whether any crimes have been committed. What I am seeing in this inquiry is a platform to allow those (fully or partly) responsible to stage excuses and divert attention from that most paramount of issues: that we, the public, were painfully and utterly deceived. The matter of stalling is significant here because most of the national outrages which have come to light in recent years e.g. the sub-postmasters, Grenfell, blood transfusion and maternity scandals, all stem from ‘crimes’ committed long, long ago (ten to 30-plus years), ensuring that justice has all but been denied.

Typical of the smokescreens, irrelevance and delaying tactics of the inquiry was the appearance last week of England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty. His platitudes – the ‘big weakness’ was a lack of ‘radicalism’ in thinking before the crisis took hold, ‘the terrible truth’, the ‘tragedy’ that ‘pandemics feed off inequality and drive inequality’ and while ‘we did pick up on it, [the knowledge] needs to be embedded right from day one’ – seemed directly aimed at quelling further questions, putting responsibility beyond him and even warning of future pandemic threats such as sexually transmitted diseases.

With his self-pitying talk, the perpetrator became the victim, not the public on whom his policies were imposed, thus deflecting any possibility that he and others may be (criminally) responsible.

On what basis are we to decide whether crimes were committed by those co-ordinating Covid policy? According to Oxford Reference, the definition of a crime is as follows: ‘A crime is held to be an offence that goes beyond the personal and into the public sphere, breaking prohibitory rules or laws, to which legitimate punishments or sanctions are attached, and that requires the intervention of a public authority (the state or a local body).’

With regards to the elements of a crime: ‘It is generally agreed that the essential ingredients of any crime are (1) a voluntary act or omission (‘actus rea’), accompanied by (2) a certain state of mind (‘mens rea’ or’mental state’) – whereby guilt is attributed to a person who acts ‘purposely’, ‘knowingly’, ‘recklessly’ or, more rarely, ‘negligently’.

A large class of ‘public welfare offences’ involving such things as economic regulations or laws concerning public health and safety also exist where the mens rea requirement does not apply in order to allow the prosecution to establish the defendant’s intent, or even negligence.

The principle of legality is recognised in almost all legal systems throughout the world as the keystone of criminal law. It is employed so that there can be no crime without a rule of law; thus, immoral or antisocial conduct not forbidden and punished by law is not criminal.

Is there a chance that the actions taken by those co-ordinating Covid policy were not covered by a particular rule of law and so could not be broken? I don’t believe so. What I do believe is that we can demonstrate that there was a failure of duty of care and that harmful and potentially injurious acts were wilfully committed against the UK population as follows:

● No cost/benefit or weighing of harmful v beneficial effects. The public were not given fair warning that these considerations had not been carried out and that, in effect, the public health was being risked with the potential to cause more harm than good socially, healthwise and economically.

● Clear evidence that the public were deliberately frightened and misled over the true threat of the virus to make them comply with orders.

● The public were denied fair scrutiny of Covid 19 policy via emergency legislation that bypassed a democratic process of rigorous Parliamentary debate.

● Experts and opinion formers who held contrarian views were prevented from airing these views in parliament and were actively censored throughout the MSM. A secret surveillance unit in Whitehall was set up to monitor and spy on dissenting voices and censor dissenting platforms. 

● Number 10 press briefings displayed unbalanced representation through slides, datasets and transcripts. 

● Failure to warn the public of the limitations of modelling to forecast the nature and course of a pandemic, especially when carried out by a single or very limited number of establishments.

● Failure to scrutinise the warp speed emergency authorisation of novel gene therapies as vaccines, exposing the public to inadequately tested products with minimum quality control.

● Constant and insistent claims that these ‘vaccines’ were safe and effective’; prevented transmission; provided better protection than natural immunity.

● The promulgation that it was a public duty to be vaccinated.

● Failure to properly scrutinise the MHRA adverse event reports linked to Covid vaccines.

● Failure to investigate the marked and statistically significant increase in excess deaths.

There are possibly more examples but the focus here is on those for which we have the most clear and damning evidence.

The Covid Inquiry is ignoring what might allow us, in Lady Hallett’s own words, ‘to learn lessons’ about the abuse of power. By holding an inquiry prior to investigating to what extent the public were deceived (legally or illegally), there is little chance that ‘society will learn from the pandemic and better prepare for further epidemics’.

June 28, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

We Are Finally Entering a Phase of Covid ‘Narrative Collapse’, Says Oxford Epidemiologist

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 27, 2023

As new research confirms that lockdowns caused immeasurable harm, particularly to children, University of Oxford Professor of Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta has written in the Telegraph that “we are entering a phase of ‘narrative collapse’”. However, many are still refusing to recognise that the problem wasn’t just school closures; it was lockdown. Here’s an excerpt.

It is understandable that, during lockdown, some professionals were cautious so as not to antagonise those who had the power to put an end to these practices. But it is time to put such concerns aside and establish a rational framework that prevents such a disaster from recurring.

It was clear from the outset that the risk of dying from SARS-CoV-2 infection was negligible in healthy children. It follows that they did not need protection from infection. Closing schools, forcing them to wear masks and endure the hardships of social distancing, and vaccinating them, could only be justified in terms of stopping community spread. None of these measures had a reasonable impact on the dynamics of infection.

So, is the lesson that, next time, we must lock down but keep schools open? Many of us would bargain for that, especially if we put higher education institutions into the mix, as young adults were also robbed of critical experiences at a delicate time in their lives. But by the time we implemented all these compassionate exclusions to lockdown, including the maintenance of all essential services, what we are looking at is the focused protection of the vulnerable rather than a policy that is effective against the spread of infection.

This is because there is no halfway house when it comes to halting the spread of a new pathogen. The curve between a full-scale lockdown and let-it-rip is anything but a steady slope.

It could be argued that the reason closing schools made hardly any difference was because lockdowns are, ultimately, an extremely ineffective way of stopping spread. Certainly, border closures can be used in very specific circumstances to prevent a pathogen from exiting or entering a community. But there were no credible empirical or theoretical reasons to believe that we could use social distancing measures to snuff it out once it was here. There were plenty of reasons to believe that trying to do so would cause a lot of harm.

The discussion around the effects of Covid policies on children confirms that we are entering a phase of ‘narrative collapse’ in the perception of how the crisis was handled. But it still needs to be accepted that keeping a lid on the spread of Covid without closing schools is a fantasy; there is therefore no way to reconcile the philosophy of lockdown with avoidance of harm to children. The only coherent strategy is one of focused protection, in which vulnerable people are protected without imposing egregious costs on those not at risk.

Worth reading in full.

June 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Serious adverse events from Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine are not “rare”

Maryanne Demasi, reports | June 27, 2023

Drug regulators and public health agencies have saturated the airways with claims that serious harms following covid vaccination are “rare.”

But there has been very little scrutiny of that claim by the media, and I could not find an instance where international agencies actually quantified what they meant by the term “rare” or provided a scientific source.

The best evidence so far, has been a study published in one of vaccinology’s most prestigious journals, where independent researchers reanalysed the original trial data for the mRNA vaccines.

The authors, Fraiman et al, found that serious adverse events (SAEs) – i.e. adverse events that require hospitalisation – were elevated in the vaccine arm by an alarming rate – 1 additional SAE for every 556 people vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.

According to a scale used by drug regulators, SAEs occurring at a rate of 1 in 556 is categorised as “uncommon,” but far more common than what the public has been told.

Therefore, I asked eight drug regulators and public health agencies to answer a simple question: what is the official calculated rate of SAEs believed to be caused by Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, and what is the evidence?

The agencies were FDA, TGA, MHRA, HC, PEI, CDC, ECDC and EMA.

The outcome was startling.

What is the official SAE rate?

Not a single agency could cite the SAE rate of Pfizer’s vaccine. Most directed me to pharmacovigilance data, which they all emphasised does not establish causation.

The Australian TGA, for example, referred me to the spontaneous reporting system but warned, “it is not possible to meaningfully use these data to calculate the true incidence of adverse events due to the limitations of spontaneous reporting systems.”

Both the German regulator (PEI) and European CDC referred me to the European Medicines Agency which, according to its own report, saw no increase at all in SAEs. “SAEs occurred at a low frequency in both vaccinated and the placebo group at 0.6%.”

The UK regulator MHRA went so far as to state it “does not make estimations of a serious adverse event (SAE) rate, or a rate for adverse reactions considered to be causally related for any medicinal product.”

The US FDA, on the other hand, did conceded that SAEs after mRNA vaccination have “indeed been higher than that of influenza vaccines,” but suggested it was justified because “the severity and impact of covid-19 on public health have been significantly higher than those of seasonal influenza.”

Despite analysing at the same dataset as Fraiman, the FDA said it “disagrees with the conclusions” of the Fraiman analysis. The agency did not give specifics on the areas of disagreement, nor did it provide its own rate of SAEs.

Expert response

In response to the criticism, Joe Fraiman, emergency doctor and lead author on the reanalysis said, “To be honest, I’m not that surprised that agencies have not determined the rate of SAEs. Once these agencies approve a drug there’s no incentive for them to monitor harms.”

Fraiman said it’s hypocritical for health agencies to tell people that serious harms of the covid vaccines are rare, when they have not even determined the SAE rate themselves.

“It’s very dangerous not to be honest with the public,” said Fraiman, who recently called for the mRNA vaccines to be suspended.

“These noble lies may get people vaccinated in the short term but you’re creating decades or generations of distrust when it’s revealed that they have been misleading the public,” added Fraiman.

Dick Bijl, a physician and epidemiologist based in the Netherlands, agreed.  “It goes to show how corrupted these agencies are. There is no transparency, especially since regulators are largely funded by the drug industry.”

Bijl said it’s vital to know the rate of SAEs for the vaccines. “You must be able to do a harm:benefit analysis, to allow people to give fully informed consent, especially in young people at low risk of serious covid or those who have natural immunity.”

Bijl said the mainstream media has allowed these agencies to make false claims about the safety of vaccines without interrogating the facts.

“The rise of alternative media is strongly related to the lies being told by the legacy media, which just repeats government narratives and industry marketing. In the Netherlands, there is a lot of discussion about the distrust in public messaging,” said Bijl.

June 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

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