By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 13, 2023
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday announced a proposal to eliminate ESG banking and prohibit the financial sector from implementing social credit scores that would otherwise prevent Floridians from obtaining loans, lines of credit and opening bank accounts.
“Today’s announcement builds on my commitment to protect consumers’ investments and their ability to access financial services in the Free State of Florida,” said DeSantis in a statement. “By applying arbitrary ESG financial metrics that serve no one except the companies that created them, elites are circumventing the ballot box to implement a radical ideological agenda. Through this legislation, we will protect the investments of Floridians and the ability of Floridians to participate in the economy.”
The proposal “seeks to protect Floridians from the woke ESG financial scam” by:
“That is a way to try to change people’s behavior. It’s a way to try to impose politics on what should just be economic decisions,” said DeSantis, of ESG. “We are also not going to house in either the state or local government level deposits. And we have a lot of deposit, we got a massive budget surplus in Florida, you have deposits all over the place that go in where state and local government use financial institutions, none of those deposits will be permitted to be done in institutions that are pursuing this woke ESG agenda.”
As Florida’s Voice notes,
The proposal would also aim to make sure ESG will not “infect decisions” at both the state and local governments, such as investment decisions, procurement and contracting, or bonds.
House Speaker Paul Renner said Bob Rommel, R-Naples, will introduce the bill in the House.
“The biggest thing that I think ESG represents is a total hijacking of democracy,” said Renner.
“We’re lucky here in the state of Florida, that we’ve got a governor who will stand up to things like ESG, when others will not.”
Press TV – February 14, 2023
An Israeli soldier has been filmed assaulting a prominent Palestinian human rights activist in front of a famous American journalist in the occupied West Bank city of al-Khalil.
In a video posted on Twitter by Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker on Monday, the Israeli soldier is seen grabbing Issa Amro by his jacket and neck and throwing him to the ground. He then kicks Amro before being pulled away by another soldier.
“I never had a source assaulted in front of me until today when an Israeli soldier who stopped my interview did this … I can’t stop thinking how dehumanizing the occupation is on the young soldiers charged with enforcing it,” Wright, the author of The Looming Tower, wrote in a post on his Twitter account.
The Israeli military claimed in a statement that the incident occurred after the soldier, who was guarding a military post, asked the Palestinian activist who approached the post, to step away.
It further claimed that in response, the Palestinian began recording and cursing at the soldier, and that a verbal confrontation followed, which soon became a physical confrontation, during which the soldier hit the Palestinian.
However, Wright tweeted that Amro had done nothing to justify the “violent assault,” adding that the Israeli military is “misrepresenting” the build-up to the assault on the Palestinian peace activist.
“The soldier initiated the encounter, Amro did not curse him, [he] only asked to call his commander. Nothing to justify the violent assault that followed,” he said.
“Before the assault the other soldiers were afraid to intervene although I warned them it was getting out of hand,” he added.
Amro also posted several videos of the run-up to the incident on Twitter, saying the Israeli military has lied about what happened.
“I was detained outside the military post, I started shouting to bring the commander out, the soldiers refused to tell him, it was a trap for me by them. The commander came out only after I was beaten and grabbed by the throat and kicked and pushed on the ground,” he wrote n another post.
He said that the video is not just about the activist as it tells the story of every Palestinian in Palestine.
“It is not about Issa Amro, it is about the Palestinian women and children who are attacked frequently by Israeli soldiers and settlers. All Palestinians are living under Israeli occupation and apartheid. The video of the attack tells the story of each Palestinian in Palestine,” he added.
The Israeli military said the soldier was jailed for 10 days in a military prison following the incident.
Far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has defended the soldier’s actions, describing the decision to put him in a military prison as a “disgrace.”
Amro, an engineer by profession, is a well-known human rights defender in his hometown of al-Khalil. He is the founder of Youth Against Settlements (YAS), which aims to empower the Palestinian community in the face of Israeli settlers in the Old City of al-Khalil.
He was detained in November days after filming a soldier assaulting an Israeli activist during a visit by Israeli anti-occupation activists to meet Palestinian residents near the Old City of al-Khalil.
Israeli occupation soldiers and Israeli settlers have noticeably been escalating their attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and other areas, in an attempt to forcibly expel Palestinians from their lands and make way for expanding illegal Jewish-only settlements.
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
All the settlements are illegal under international law. The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions. – View videos
Diaspora Jews choose to look the other way as the carnage increases
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 14, 2023
There is what passes for a sick joke among those who watch the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with increasing shock over what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his thugs have been allowed to get away with. It goes something like this: Israel has succeeded in killing or driving out the remaining three million or so Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, describing them as “terrorists.” President Joe Biden, his cabinet and virtually all of Congress respond afterwards by saying how the move was unfortunate but “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Such is the power of Israel as manifested through its Lobby in the US, and the saddest part of the joke is that it reflects quite likely exactly what would happen. The Palestinians have no constituency in the United States, where Israel and its friends rule the roost. But one of the real ironies of watching a genocide being carried out now in the twenty-first century is that the killers come from a group that constantly flaunts its claimed status as history’s perpetual victims. This duality is a convenience, to be sure, providing as it does immunity from its own crimes as it also escalates the criminal policies that might lead to the genocide of a whole category of potential “enemies.”
Israel’s new government, again headed by the monstrous Benjamin Netanyahu, has shifted hard to the right, incorporating as it does the extremist settlers’ movement as well as parties that have spoken casually of forcing the Palestinians out and even of extermination if it comes to that. Half of Israelis are comfortable with the Arabs having minimal civil rights even if they are Israeli citizens and many accept the desirability of forced expatriation of the Palestinians to neighboring states like Jordan or Lebanon. Arab residents of Israel have only limited legal rights and, contrary to the US domestic Israel Lobby’s constant assertion that the Zionist entity is a “democracy,” Israel in reality became an apartheid state by law when it in 2018 declared itself to be legally the nation state of the Jews with “exclusive right of self-determination.”
More recently Netanyahu has made clear exactly what his government stands for. In late December, he stated that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel.” He was explicit that “all parts” was intended to include the West Bank and even Gaza, which have long been presumed to be the basis of a future Palestinian state. With Washington’s support, they presumably will become part of Eretz Israel, which will stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
To be sure, Israel and its powerful US lobby know very well that the constant claim of victimhood combined with labeling its perceived enemies as antisemites and holocaust deniers to discredit them is little more than a tool employed in part to excuse war crimes and human rights violations committed by the Israelis. In 2002 a former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni revealed in an interview how labeling a critic as an antisemite to discredit what is being is little more than “a trick.” She said “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the US] people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic.” She added that there was an “Israel, my country right or wrong” attitude and “they’re not ready to hear criticism”. Antisemitism, the holocaust and “the suffering of the Jewish people” are used to “justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”
Indeed, there is every indication that Prime Minister Netanyahu will be taking a much harder line not only with the Palestinians, but as well with its foreign “enemies” the Syrians, Iranians and Lebanese. And there is every sign that he has drawn the United States into his web. President Joe Biden, a self-declared Catholic “Zionist”, is politically too weak to take on the Israel Lobby even if he wanted to, and he has in any event surrounded himself with Zionist Jews as a foreign policy and national security team that would consider any weakening of ties with Israel to be unimaginable. Quite the contrary. Jewish power in the US demands unconditional military, financial and diplomatic support for Israel, even as its government moves to the right and becomes more dangerous regionally, threatening to involve the United States in new wars. Seemingly blind to what is developing, the US last month proceeded with the largest wargames ever involving the Jewish state. The games simulated an attack on Iran and could be a model for a series of pointless conflicts initiated by the more hawkish Israeli government.
And there is almost certainly much more to come, including a bill in the Knesset that will make it nearly impossible for Arab citizens to organize political parties. The new government in Israel has also placed police under the control of ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party head Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister. He is exploiting his position to already call for a war to destroy Hamas in Gaza. Meanwhile, the shoot to kill policy vis-à-vis Palestinians has increased the number of deaths already in 2023, totaling twelve on January 25th and 26th alone when a refugee camp at Jenin on the West Bank was raided by the army and two teenagers elsewhere were shot dead. Another shooting a week later took 5 Palestinian lives. Many more Palestinians were wounded in all the army attacks and the Israelis, as is their practice, routinely deny them any access to medical help. The army’s Chief of Staff has declared that its policy on using firearms will not be changed in spite of the large number of civilian deaths. Israeli soldiers and policemen who kill Palestinians, who are routinely described as “terrorists,” are almost never investigated or prosecuted and have been, in some cases, praised in the media and promoted.
And Ben-Gvir is not the only fanatic who has surfaced as a worrisome character in the new government. Another is Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party and now finance minister, who has called for Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and the imposition of citizenship requirements that would make Jewishness a prerequisite for inclusion.
Smotrich’s party aspires to make Israel a theocracy governed by the racist Talmud, and both he and Ben-Gvir have supported the expulsion of Arabs who fail to agree that “the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people.” Smotrich has stated that his immediate plans include authorizing dozens of new and completely illegal West Bank outposts to include continuing the demolition of what he claims are unauthorized Palestinian homes there. Smotrich is also enthusiastically racist when it comes to the Palestinians, asserting that new Jewish mothers in hospitals should be separated from new Palestinian mothers. “[My wife] would not want to sleep next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby in twenty years.”
Zvika Fogel, another prominent right wing Israeli member of parliament, has called for genocide in his promotion of a “final war” against the Palestinians to “subdue them once and for all,” saying in an interview that Israel’s policy of going to war with Palestinians “every two or three years” was no longer good enough and that there should be one last war to “subdue them once and for all. It would be worth it because this will be the final war…”
Home demolitions, property seizures, checkpoints and other round the clock harassment of Palestinians also are increasing in frequency as the Israelis accelerate their expansion into areas that are nominally Palestinian. Palestinians who marry foreigners are not allowed to enter the country with their spouses while the Palestinian flag has now been declared illegal. The possibility that the Arabs will stage a general uprising increases daily, leading to more demands from some Israelis that remaining Palestinian centers of resistance be utterly destroyed.
To be sure, many young Jewish Israelis have recently been demonstrating against their own government’s shift rightwards. And in the United States many liberal Jews are concerned at developments, though they are critical of what is happening for all the wrong reasons. An increasing number of American Jews believe that Israel is indeed an apartheid state and that its treatment of the Palestinians is inhumane to say the least. But they, at the same time, oppose doing anything to punish the Israeli government to make it draw back from its most brutal and dangerous policies. They argue that the Netanyahu government is risking a confrontation with the US government, and the Jewish community will splinter over Israeli human rights abuses, weakening political support in Washington for a strong and enduring relationship with the Jewish state. In a sense the power of the Jewish diaspora both in the US and elsewhere thereby becomes the enabler of Israeli bad behavior even as it disapproves of what is taking place.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
RT | February 14, 2023
Hungary blasted the US over what it says are “outrageous” and “false” accusations of anti-Semitism, leveled by a senior diplomat against Budapest. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mate Paczolay added that while Washington later admitted the mistake, it has not issued a public apology.
On Tuesday, speaking to the Index news site, Paczolay slammed Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN.
During a UN event on Thursday, Thomas-Greenfield cited Hungary as an example of a place where anti-Semitism is on the rise, noting that “a Holocaust memorial was vandalized” there. In a transcript later released by Washington’s mission to the UN, this phrase was crossed out.
An explanatory note said that Thomas-Greenfield was referring to a statue in Sweden of diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis in Hungary during WWII.
“It is quite outrageous that the US ambassador made baseless and false claims about Hungary in front of the… public,” the spokesman said, adding that the Hungarian delegation was not given an opportunity to speak, and was able to complain only after the event had ended.
Paczolay noted that “the American side admitted behind closed doors that it made a mistake.” However, it never issued “a clarifying or an apologetic statement,” which he said is the “minimum expectation in diplomacy” in this type of situation.
If the mistake was indeed unintentional and resulted from a “lack of preparation,” then it is “incomprehensible why the representation does not issue a statement in order to resolve the situation,” he said.
Earlier this month, Hungarian-US relations were marred by another diplomatic spat. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto called out David Pressman, Washington’s ambassador to Budapest, over alleged “interference” in the nation’s internal affairs.
Pressman had commented that local decision-makers “continue to push policies endorsed by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” referring in particular to Hungary’s opposition to the Western sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine conflict.
Surprising admission deviates from usual narrative
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | February 14, 2023
USA Today raised some eyebrows when it deviated from the usual narrative by acknowledging “little by little” Russia is winning the ground war in a pivotal area of Ukraine, citing a quote given by a pro-Ukraine spokeswoman.
The admission was in relation to the battle for the city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Russia has been fighting fiercely to take back the city since last summer, and now appears to be pouring more manpower into the region to finish the job.
“They have been trying to take the city since July,” Iryna Rybakova, press officer for Ukraine’s 93rd Brigade, told BBC. “Little by little they are winning now. They have more resources, so if they play the long game they will win. I can’t say how long it will take.”
Moscow has established control of both main roads into the city, with only one back route left open, making it increasingly difficult to get supplies to Ukraine troops.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office also admitted that the turf war had become “difficult,” while Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said, “We’re seeing a very tough battle in which the Russians aren’t sparing neither themselves nor us.”
As Chris Menahan notes, the statements contradict legacy media narratives that Russia is running out of weapons and supplies, which has been the dominant mantra since just after the start of the conflict.
“Nonetheless, the US and NATO keep stringing Ukraine along with this BS to encourage them to fight their proxy war with Russia,” writes Menahan.
“The most likely outcome of this war is that Russia will take the Donbas and Ukraine will agree not to join NATO and recognize Crimea as Russian, which is an outcome that could have been achieved 10 months ago (with a tiny fraction of the deaths and the EU/global economy intact) if the US and NATO didn’t bribe the Zelensky regime with over $100 billion to keep the war going in perpetuity.”
For months now, numerous mainstream media outlets have been pushing the narrative that Russia is being routed in many areas of Ukraine and that the war could have entered its final phase.
Much of this appears to be little more than pro-NATO propaganda to boost morale, which paradoxically in the longer term could actually harm morale if Ukrainian forces aren’t prepared to dig in for a prolonged war.
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 14, 2023
Clean product tanker rates soared last week after the European Union and G-7 nations targeted Russia’s petroleum sales. Restrictions on Russian crude exports began in early December. The sanctions have been a ploy by Western countries to limit Russian crude and crude product exports, though it’s definitely not working.
Sanctions have redirected Russian energy flows from Europe to Asia. The rejiggering of supply chains means Russia has to rely more on tankers. According to Bloomberg, this has led to a 400% surge in the daily rates for clean product tankers.
The latest data from the Baltic Exchange in London shows clean product tankers rates have reached $55,857 per day, surging 58% just last Thursday.
According to trading giant Trafigura, Russia relies on a “shadow fleet” of tankers to move crude and crude products. The trading firm said the fleet is about 600 ships.
Bloomberg said the surge in tanker rates has been “spurred in part by a bifurcation of the fleet with some tankers serving Moscow’s interests and others the international market. It highlights a possible flipside of aggressive measures aimed at limiting Russia’s petroleum revenues.”
“Russian volumes continue to flow at more or less the same rate and that takes up a lot of ships.”
“Ultimately, the spike shows demand is pretty good, and the fundamentals are strong,” Lars Bastian Ostereng, an analyst at Arctic Securities.
About 400 tankers, or 20% of the global fleet, recently “switched” from hauling fuels for traditional countries to carrying Russian petroleum products, Trafigura’s co-head of oil trading Ben Luckock said in a recent Bloomberg interview. That has reduced the number of tankers for traditional routes and is leading to the skyrocketing cost of freight.
Bloomberg pointed out that surging rates aren’t entirely because of the tanker “switch.” It’s also due to more crude flowing by water following Western sanctions on Russia. Much of those energy exports are now being sent to Asia.
“We see no indication that Russia will have to cut back its exports of crude or refined products,” said David Wech, chief economist of Vortexa, during a presentation late last week.
Furthermore, crude prices have edged over $86 a barrel following last Friday’s announcement that Russia will reduce crude oil production by 500,000 barrels per day. This is in response to Western price caps on purchasing Russian fuel.
By Wyatt Reed – Sputnik – 14.02.2023
In his first interview since publishing his bombshell story on the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh fleshed out the details of his explosive report exposing the role of the US Navy in blowing up critical German-Russian energy infrastructure.
American journalist Seymour Hersh is “taking heat” over his recent explosive report documenting how the US sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, the legendary reporter revealed in a new interview.
In a wide-ranging discussion on the War Nerd podcast, Hersh called on US President Joe Biden to come clean to the American people about the Biden administration’s role in the attack. The journalist underscored that the US public is being misinformed about the proxy war in Ukraine en masse.
Last week, Hersh published a dizzying report detailing how US Navy divers planted C-4 charges on the Nord Stream pipelines during a NATO training exercise and then remotely detonated them with a Norwegian reconnaissance plan.
The veteran war journalist suggests media outlets are refusing to cover his new revelations because “they think that the story I wrote supports Russia” – which “it does,” he concedes.
But Hersh said that despite being “colossally bad” for the European economy and “inexcusable,” the American government’s intentional attack on the critical energy infrastructure of a US ally is not technically illegal under international law.
“The law on the sea is very interesting. There are treaties that go back to 1884, when we began to lay telegraph lines across the ocean, and if you inadvertently or deliberately ran across the line that was a real bad deal.”
But “there were mostly economic consequences” for those infractions, Hersh pointed out, noting there’s actually “no law on the books that says deliberately blowing up a pipeline is a crime.”
Such a crime “has never been considered,” Hersh said, but there are “certainly a lot of law about damages, if you damage a pipeline. And this is a pipeline that’s probably going to cost… — there’s a Swiss company that did an estimate — 1.5 billion to fix the pipelines.”
Asked if he’s ever covered anything like a government “blowing up your ally’s critical infrastructure,” Hersh replied that the Biden administration “didn’t see it that way.” Instead, Biden “saw that gas as a weapon, Hersh claimed, “because as long as Russia was selling that much gas they thought Russia would weaponize if… there was a war.”
In reality, Hersh said “the fear was: Biden wants this war.”
“Don’t ask me why presidents want war. I think it’s good for their ratings. I just don’t know.”
“But Biden was very big on showing the Russians that in the Ukraine, with Ukrainian bodies, soldiers, we’ll show ‘em – we can stand up to Russia,” the journalist explains.
Anti-Russian posturing is “good politically in America too,” Hersh added, noting that in the US, “we all, you know, we wake up everyday kicking Russia and Putin, our…”
“Our nemesis,” the host chimed in.
In the comprehensive interview, Hersh took aim at outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, who he said are only interested in burning his source for the Nord Stream story. According to his recent report, that anonymous figure had “direct knowledge of the operational planning” of the pipeline attack.
“I think what the newspapers… think I should do” is “use his name and get him put in jail” – something which would end my career,” Hersh added, stating that under no circumstances would he ever give up a source. “Inside the community, I protect people.”
“I’m taking heat, I have a source, I’m taking heat – but that’s okay, that’s my job, right? But it’s their job to understand the business a little better.” And in terms of the conflict in Ukraine, mainstream Western outlets “don’t seem to have anybody inside,” Hersh said.
“The coverage of the Ukrainian war is, compared to what I’m hearing from my friends who have access to the information… it’s – the thinking is so dumb.”
“The war I know about isn’t the war you’re reading about,” Hersh said cryptically, pointing out that military operations against Russia were by no means going well. “No, of course not. Are you kidding?”
While he admitted Russian forces “made great misjudgments,” he acknowledged “they have a 350,000 man regular army that hasn’t gone in yet.”
One of the likely causes for those waves of misinformation may be what the host refers to as the “Bellingcats and the OSINT [open source intelligence] bros.”
Responding to their mention, Hersh doesn’t mince words: “No one cares about those people.”
The storied journalist seemingly suggested instead that Bellingcat, the self-professed ‘independent’ outlet upheld by much of the mainstream media, is actually a British intelligence operation:
“I mean, why don’t you think about their nexus to certain intelligence agencies in a certain country,” Hersh asked rhetorically. “You know, you get to know who’s who.”
“But there are legitimate people complaining” about his reporting as well, he added.
“It’s amazing to me how they fall in line, my colleagues,” the reporter expressed. “When I was at the New York Times, they didn’t do that.”
“I’m not sure they underestimate the American people,” Hersh said. “We’re ready to accept the fact that an American president did this.”
And “it’s not only accepting it,” the journalist added. “You have to hold the president to account.”
Of the mainstream Western outlets that covered the story, Hersh faced fierce pushback from most of them, which tended to emphasize White House and CIA denials of the Nord Stream allegations.
Reuters called his jaw-dropping exposé a “blog post,” and one headline from Insider described the report as a “claim by a discredited journalist” which the authors insist “is proving a gift to Putin.”
Hersh faced major attacks on his reputation in the wake of stories debunking now–discredited claims from Western governments about Syrian forces using sarin gas, and for his writings dismantling the official story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. As for the criticism, he says he’s “used to it.”
But this time, it “sort of stunned me because this was such an obvious story,” he said.
As Hersh noted in his story, top US officials – including Biden – repeatedly threatened to sabotage the pipeline in the event that Russian troops engaged Ukrainian forces.
Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland warned in January: “if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
“So what does that mean?” Hersh asked. “I don’t know what anybody’s thinking but I’Il tell you what that means: that’s called a threat.”
“A friend of mine put it this way: what you’ve done, [Seymour]… you’re an expert at deconstructing the obvious. What else was it? What else was it?”
“The Russians didn’t do it, [and] if the Russians didn’t do it, which country in NATO [did]?” he questioned.
“It’s just not even a hard story to understand – the president of the United States and the undersecretary of state both said they were going to do it and then they did it,” Hersh stated, adding: “they waited a long time but they cut off oil.”
“Literally within a month of the actual event,” Hersh noted, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “gave a speech in which he talked about stopping Russia from weaponizing oil and gas – ‘now is the time we can do it,’ he said.”
Meanwhile, the effect on the European economy is “devastating.”
As Hersh pointed out, Germany’s BASF, the largest chemical producer in the world, shut down nearly 100 plants and “has actually been talking to China about moving some facilities there.”
In terms of “the economic stuff, which hasn’t been reported nearly enough in the Western press here,” Hersh said, “this is called, I guess you could [say], shooting off your left foot.”
“For no reason whatsoever, yes, we shot ourselves in the foot. Yes, it’s stupid beyond belief. Yes.”
“I would think that it’s certainly, unquestionably, a wonderful degree of stupidity at the White House and on [the] part of the president. It’s just stupid – it’s just damn stupid.”
The journalist said it’s unlikely Biden will face scrutiny for his actions in many mainstream media outlets anytime soon, because “this White House,” Hersh said, has “the New York Times and the Washington Post and MSN and CNN fronting for them.”
And “the enemy is Fox News.”
But “the only reporter that has called me from any TV station – outside of somebody that’s running out of the kitchen of their mother’s house” was Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Hersh declined the request, but said Carlson has been “dead right” about the Nord Stream attack. “And I’ll tell you something else – Tucker’s been right about is the war in Ukraine.”
The reporter repeatedly emphasized his unwillingness to discuss his sourcing, explaining “the one thing government’s good at is tracking down people who talk.” But ultimately, he suggested the information could be coming from someone inside the US oil and gas industry, telling his interviewer: “there’s something called a pipeline industry.”
“There’s an industry [with] American companies involved. They build pipelines around the world. Are you listening to me? They know what happened,” Hersh said. “The last thing they want to do is end up in a goddamn newspaper story, but they know who did what.”
“Of course they know – they built the goddamn things!”
“I’m not talking necessarily about Nord Stream 1 or 2, but they build pipelines and they talk to divers, and they know what’s happening, they know who has the capability, and they know what they hear inside,” Hersh concluded.
RT | February 14, 2023
The media frenzy over “spy balloons” and unidentified flying objects over North America is sadly not about first contact with extraterrestrials, but an engineered panic for political misdirection, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Monday.
“It’s not aliens. I wish it were aliens. But it’s not aliens. It’s just the ol’ engineered panic, an attractive nuisance ensuring [national security] reporters get assigned to investigate balloon bulls**t rather than budgets or bombings” such as the Nord Stream, Snowden tweeted.
Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a story last week describing how the US and Norway blew up the pipelines transporting Russian natural gas to Germany last September. The US government denounced it as false.
Over the next several days, the US military began shooting down “objects” in the sky over North America. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Monday that the US government still doesn’t know who owns the three objects brought down over the weekend. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said there was “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity,” however.
Kirby had announced the downing of a “high-altitude object” off the coast of Alaska on Friday. US fighter jets brought down an “unidentified, unmanned object” over the Yukon in northwest Canada on Saturday. The third object was shot down on Sunday afternoon over Lake Huron as it approached Michigan.
“While authorities don’t yet know what the objects are, they are not a threat,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters on Monday. “They do not present a military threat to anyone on the ground. They do however present a risk to civil aviation and potentially an intelligence collection threat. And we’ll get to the bottom of it,” he added.
Austin also said the three objects were different from the Chinese ‘spy balloon’ the US shot down over South Carolina last week. The aerostat, which Beijing described as a weather balloon blown off-course by the winds, had passed over most of the continental US before it was destroyed by a F-22 fighter jet.
The Pentagon’s reluctance to describe the ‘objects’ or show any debris that may have been recovered has fueled speculation about their potential extraterrestrial origin. Space magnate Elon Musk joked about “friends of mine” stopping by. Meanwhile, opposition lawmakers have expressed frustration at the lack of official explanations by the White House.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee, demanded the Pentagon and the president “tell us what they know – and what they don’t – immediately.”
“What in the world is going on?” wondered fellow Kentuckian and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor. “The administration has still not been able to divulge any meaningful information about what was shot down,” he said, asking if the radar sensitivity may have been turned up after the Chinese balloon incident.
BY LARRY ROMANOFF • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 12, 2023
This essay is the Introductory Chapter to a new series of E-books which will very soon be published on bluemoonofshanghai.com.
When I began doing my historical research in earnest perhaps 20 years ago in Shanghai, my interest was driven by primarily two things: one was the incessant American propaganda flooding the world, and particularly China, with an entirely unjustified air of moral superiority that masked all of the American crimes and atrocities committed over centuries. The second was the irritating flood of negative propaganda about China, filling the print and airwaves about China’s mostly imaginary inferiority to the exceptional Americans. From this, I intended to write a series of articles, and perhaps a book or two, that illuminated the opposite side of these two pictures. This is an oversimplification, but my research and writing interests were limited to an attempt to rectify the standard narrative of “China bad; US good”.
But near the beginning of this enterprise, I encountered a statement that said, “The history of the world is the history of the Jews.” That remark registered on me and remained in my memory because it startled me and because it made no sense to me at the time. However, as I progressed with my research into things Chinese and American, I would occasionally encounter references to Jews but, at the time, I had absolutely no interest whatever in the Jews, and I initially would delete those references. In my mind, I had a clean story line which I was pursuing and those increasingly occasional references to the Jews were contaminating my story line and confusing my approach. But eventually I had to realise that the references to the Jews were not contamination but were in fact the real story line.
As one example, I was researching the opium travesty inflicted upon China by – as we were all taught – “the English”. But as I delved deeper into the historical record, I was surprised to discover that “the English” had nothing to do with the opium (except as military enforcer) and that the entire opium landscape was 100% Jewish, primarily Rothschild and Sassoon, with Kadoorie and a few other families. Those families may have held British passports, but they were all Jews and not “Englishmen“. This is also true of the HSBC bank which was created solely to launder the Jews’ drug money – a talent in which it still specialises today. The same pattern appeared to evolve in almost any historical topic I chose to investigate. I was, as we all were, taught, indoctrinated, propagandised and browbeaten to believe that the Russian Revolution was really Russian, and I was very surprised to learn that it was 99.9% Jewish, and that “Russians” had nothing to do with it except as victims. Similarly, I was taught the two World Wars were caused by Germany and that gallant little England prevailed over an evil enemy, but was again surprised to learn that it was the European Jews who contrived mightily to bring about both World Wars, that in fact Germany resisted war until the very end, and was the victim of a massive hate campaign by the Jews who wanted it destroyed.
In an earlier essay, I ended with these words:
The Boer Wars were a British story, but the manuscript was written entirely in Jewish handwriting. In like fashion, the two World Wars, the British East India Company, the unconscionable looting, famines, and slaughters of India, and China’s opium century with its vast atrocities of slaughter, misery, and slave-trafficking, were “British stories”, but the manuscripts for these were also written entirely in Jewish handwriting. Similarly, the stories of Yugoslavia, Greece, Iraq, Libya, and Syria today are “American stories”, but these also were written entirely in Jewish handwriting.
This is where we are today. These several volumes were originally to be titled, “America’s Dirtiest Secrets”, but that title no longer strictly applies because there is no sensible way to separate the actions of the Americans from their Jewish masters who gave the orders. For example, we know the media stories of the US hijacking of Iraq and believed this was done to remove a dictator. But our perception is severely altered when we learn the invasion was done entirely on Jewish orders, that the so-called “Provisional President” of Iraq – Paul Bremer – was a Jew and was taking all his orders from the Jews in the City of London, and that further those Jewish bankers have confiscated all of Iraq’s assets and are taking – free – more than 2/3 of Iraq’s oil. Likewise, we were taught it was the British military (with a bit of French help) that looted the 10 million priceless artifacts from China’s Summer Palace (the Yuanmingyuan) and then utterly destroyed it. But again, our perception changes when we learn the British did so under the orders of the Jews Rothschild and Sassoon, and that a great many of those priceless artifacts ended up in Jewish hands and remain there to this day.
In similar fashion, we were all taught about the famous British aviator “Bomber Harris” who won eternal fame for the incendiary carpet-bombing of countless dozens of German cities like Dresden, creating firestorms that incinerated millions of German civilians in one of the world’s greatest wartime atrocities. But again, our perception is severely altered when we learn that it was a Jew named Frederick Lindemann, sent by the Rothschilds as an “advisor” to Churchill, who brought with him the notion of carpet-bombing civilians with incendiary bombs, and that Churchill simply obeyed his Jewish masters in executing this program to help effect “the total destruction of Germany” that the Jews wanted. In like fashion, we were taught that the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to hasten the end of the war and “to save lives”. But again, our conceptions are thrown in disarray when we learn that it was a Jew, Bernard Baruch, ostensibly “the most powerful man in America” at the time, who not only chose Japan as the target for these bombs, but also personally selected the cities to be incinerated. Our conceptions are even more challenged when we learn that Baruch’s motivation may well have been retaliation to both Japan and Nagasaki for their expulsion of all the Jews prior to the war. (See End Notes)
And with both Europe and especially with Vietnam, in the application of napalm for incinerating civilians, it was indeed the Americans who extensively applied napalm during World War II, in “vast but historically-deleted genocidal incendiary attacks both in Europe and on Japanese cities, as well as during the wars in Korea and Vietnam”. But it was a Jewish chemist named Louis Fieser who developed napalm in a secret laboratory at Harvard University in 1942, and America’s Jewish masters who engineered its use on civilians. Even worse, in Vietnam, the locals discovered they could evade incineration by diving into any body or container of water to extinguish the flames. But it was another Jew, again at Harvard, who engineered the infusion of napalm with white phosphorus, which cannot be extinguished once lit, and will burn a man right through to the bones even under water. In all cases, the Americans did the dirty deeds, but they were “just following orders” from their Jewish overlords.
And we realise, as with all such events in the past, that the American military is, just as the British military was doing in the past, functioning as “The Bankers Private Army”. And thus, in real terms, there is no sensible way to separate the actions – the “Dirtiest Secrets” of the Americans – from the “Dirtiest Secrets” of the Jews who issued the Americans and British their marching orders. We cannot disassociate the Mafia boss from his own orders executed by his own underlings.
And thus, while in these books we will be apparently (and superficially) examining America’s Dirtiest Secrets, there will in almost every instance be a distinct under-layer of Jewish influence and control. It is true we will see a few occasions or events where the Americans appeared to act independently – as in the hijacking of Hawaii – with no apparent evidence of Jewish involvement, but these are very few. And so, what we are really discussing and exposing in these pages are the Jews’ Dirtiest Secrets, and we will see that in virtually every instance the Jews operate admirably and very efficiently with what they call “A Gentile Front”, with some non-Jew apparently in charge but with a full complement of Jews in the background instigating, inciting, and ordering Gentiles to execute their plans.
One striking such example you will read about is US President Wilson’s Creel Commission, which perpetrated an astonishingly intense propaganda campaign designed to create a “white-hot hate” for Germans and lead Americans into a World War no one wanted. Creel was selected by Wilson’s Jewish handlers, quite likely by the so-called “Colonel” House, who was a Jew and whose real name was Huis, but it was the Jews Lippman and Bernays who were actually in control of the entire effort. This Jewish manipulation was so effectively done that Creel became the lightning rod for all the historical disapprobation while Bernays is celebrated today as “The father of public relations” in America. In fact, Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was the Father of War Marketing, a template invented and executed by the Jews in the most despicable manner imaginable.
In many cases, these situations include historical events that have been so deeply buried by the Jewish media and Jewish book-publishing industries that perhaps not one person in a million has any knowledge of their existence. One such situation consists of the unremitting and unconscionable atrocities inflicted on Germany and the German people during – but especially after – both World Wars, atrocities committed primarily by the Americans but done under the orders of their Jewish masters. This was so widespread – and so true – that today it is illegal in Germany for anyone to even attempt to research atrocities committed against Germans. The reason is that anyone attempting such research would quickly discover that it was the Jews who were responsible for all those atrocities, by both hate propaganda and direct influence, and the Jews naturally don’t want those truths escaping confinement. Thus, the German government was forced to pass a law rendering illegal any investigation into such matters, and most German people today have no knowledge of the incredible betrayals and atrocities inflicted upon them by the Jews. They are instead taught by Jewish-authored books and by Jewish university professors, aided immensely by the Jewish-controlled mass media, that it was Germans who inflicted atrocities on the Jews.
Another such example is the incendiary carpet-bombing of nearly 100 Japanese cities – long after Japan had agreed to surrender – carried out by the American Curtis LeMay and resulting in the deaths of about 50% of the population of all those cities, done in the same manner as the Jews arranged for Germany and with the same blood-thirsty determination to utterly destroy Japan and the Japanese as they had for Germany and the German people. This immense and unconscionable atrocity, which resulted in the deaths of at least 10 million civilians – almost all women and children – was so heavily excised from history, including the re-writing of all Japanese history books, that almost no one in Japan has any knowledge of it, and no one outside Japan either. The excision in this case was so total that even Japan’s national population statistics were completely forged, fabricated, and re-calculated after the war, to entirely bury the fact of one of the greatest war-time atrocities in history.
The Japanese also do not research atrocities committed against Japan because they have been taught by their Jewish masters, as in Germany, the same things and for the same reasons. Nobody today in Japan has any knowledge of the involvement of the Jews in their destruction. This is not to dismiss atrocities that were indeed committed by the Japanese against others, but to illuminate the fact that the Jews committed much worse atrocities against the Japanese, and yet have such near-total control over the media, over book-publishing, and over the government itself, that these events have been totally excised from the historical record and the knowledge is deleted from the world’s consciousness. Again, this condition is much abetted by “the Gentile Front” where the Jews used the Americans to perpetrate these horrendous crimes while remaining hidden in the background. And again, let’s not forget that it was a Jew – Bernard Baruch – who chose Japan as the victim for the new atomic bombs and who personally selected the cities to be incinerated, almost certainly done as punishment for Japan’s prior eviction of all the Jews.
It would be of use to you to read two of my previous E-books on Propaganda and the Media[1] and Bernays and Propaganda[2], to help gain an appreciation of some of the methods used by the Jews to ensure silence (and ignorance) about past events. One of the tenets of propaganda is that we have a powerful tendency to believe the first thing we read or hear about a topic, especially if those statements are repeated a number of times. Later, even when faced with incontrovertible proof, facts that cannot be disputed, proving that our now-accepted beliefs are in fact false, we are surprisingly reluctant to change our minds, and we will “hesitate and waver and continue to believe there must be some other explanation”. Our minds are apparently unable to accept that we have believed lies.
This is important because the Jews use this to great advantage to pre-empt the discovery of their atrocities and prevent rational thought. Typically, if knowledge of their past crimes is showing signs of escaping historical confinement, the Jews will use this propaganda tactic to “get there first”, with some Jewish author quickly writing a book or treatise on the subject that is replete with lies and falsified history that attempts to exclude the Jews from involvement and, if at all possible, to blame the victim.
When the truths of China’s opium travesty were beginning to creep out of the sarcophagus and into the daylight of public knowledge, a Jewess named Julia Lovell was there with a book titled Opium War in which Jews are not even mentioned and which she categorised as a “tragic-comedy”, the hundred or so million Chinese being killed by the Jews apparently being funny to her. But a great many Americans and others, unfamiliar with the true circumstances and never having read anything else, will tend to believe this woman’s despicably false version of events and the Jews will perhaps be spared exposure.
Another such situation occurred when the truth of the mysterious depopulation of Easter Island was beginning to escape confinement. That truth seems to be that it was Jewish slave traders who kidnapped virtually the entire population of Easter Island as slaves to work their guano mines in Peru. Immediately upon this leakage, a Jew named Jared Diamond from the University of California was there with a book explaining that the Easter Islanders simply had some violent disagreement among themselves and killed each other off. Diamond was ridiculed by other academics for his foolish theory that “had not a shred of evidence to support it”, but his book wasn’t written for academics. It was written for the great unwashed of the US who had no knowledge of these events and would likely accept Diamond’s false version. And once again, the Jews might be spared exposure.
The same thing happened again when details began to emerge and leak about the Holland Tulip Bubble having been entirely staged by Jewish ‘bankers’, what with their futures market and all the rest, and not at all a “public mania” as we have been told, but a deliberate attempt to take advantage of public greed and gullibility and empty half the bank accounts in Holland. Once again, immediately on the risk of these leaks becoming public there was a female Jewish author on hand to write a “definitive” work on the topic which oddly made no mention of Jews, but furthermore claimed that no financial losses had occurred to anyone. In fact, this Jewess solemnly claimed that she had access to all the records in Holland and that through the most diligent search she found records of only a few people in Holland who had gone bankrupt during that time, and all those were bankrupt due to “property speculation“ and nothing to do with tulips. In real life, that so-called “bubble“ bankrupted probably half the people in Holland, but once again the Jews are there to pre-empt the truth and to propagate an entirely falsified version of history to protect themselves from exposure.
I have written elsewhere that at least 90%, and maybe even 95%, of everything that you know, or think that you know, or that you believe to be true about history, is wrong. To re-state another way, if we were to take the history of the entire world for the past 500 years and condense it into a history book of 100 pages, at least 50 of those pages would be blank. This is the amount of history – almost entirely involving the Jews – that has been so thoroughly excised from the historical record that it has literally evaporated from human consciousness with almost no living persons having any knowledge of it. And of the remaining 50 pages in this book, probably 45 are so extensively Photoshopped, sanitised, twisted, with crucial details omitted, that they are largely a work of fiction. And of course, anyone attempting to open this historical sarcophagus and expose the contents, is denounced as a deranged revisionist spreading misinformation. And, if the Jews are at all mentioned in this “revisionism”, we have the added attraction of being labeled an “anti-Semitic, holocaust-denying, Nazi Jew-hater”. Most of those souls attempting this historical illumination have very often paid with their careers, their reputations, their bank accounts, sometimes with their freedom and, in some cases, with their lives. These Mafia overlords in the City of London, the Khazar “so-called” Jews, are today just as brutal, savage, and filled with contempt for humanity as they were 1,000 years ago.
David Edwards was quoted in the “Third World Traveler“ as having written:
”Even open-minded people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn and Susan George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true‘. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence again.”
This is the condition we face today in dealing with these recovered historical truths. In the case of the Jews, they know the truth but are frantic and nearly desperate to keep it buried and under confinement, which is why they so vengefully and viciously attack en masse whenever these facts emerge into daylight. With the Americans, their ignorance of their own nation’s criminality is founded on a blind faith and conviction based on a century of clever Jewish propaganda that is almost always flatly contradicted by the facts. But even citizens of the victim nations – like Germany – suffer enormous shock and disbelief when confronted with the historical truths of their own country, because the Jews and the Jewish media have for nearly 100 years browbeaten them with a totally false historical narrative. Friends sent to German acquaintances my articles on the Jews’ 1933 worldwide boycott of Germany and some related items, with those Germans replying that they found even those brief articles too painful to read at one sitting because, while the evidence was incontrovertible, it contradicted everything they’d been taught all their lives about themselves and their country, and the shock of learning that the things they “knew” were all lies, was emotionally too painful to bear.
At the same time, the world has been subjected to a century or more of outrageously false positive propaganda about the Jews, an almost incomprehensible volume of rose-tinted misinformation about the Jews as the world’s impoverished, misunderstood, persecuted “chosen ones“. In truth, there is little about the Jews and Israel today that is not based on fabricated historical mythologies, buried history, biased presentations, facts twisted so badly as to be often unrecognisable. Probably 95% of what the world knows about the Jews, their history, their massive crimes spanning centuries, their astonishing contempt for both humanity and truth, their conduct in international affairs, is not only wrong, but violently wrong. And to the same extent, the world has also been subjected to enormously and brutally false negative propaganda and misinformation about other nations – about the Jews’ victims, an equally incomprehensible volume of black-tinted information whereby the Jews typically seek to blame their victims for the atrocities perpetrated against them.
These buried historical truths are the content of my books and articles, the history of the world (or parts of it) as it really was, and is, harsh provable truths and documented realities without the vast carpet of propaganda, jingoism, and misinformation that Jewish media power has used to blanket and blind the world for well over a century.
END NOTES
The incendiary bombing of German working-class neighborhoods was planned in detail by the Jews. Since at least the early 1900s, Rothschild had owned most of the armament and munitions factories in Germany. It was through those that he supplied Japan (and Russia too) with the weapons for their war in 1905. During the Second World War the Jews didn’t want all their factories bombed to rubble when the Allies began flying over Germany. Their solution was to kill all the factory workers instead but leave the factories untouched. And it was the Jew Frederick Lindemann, sent by Rothschild to Churchill as an advisor, who brought the scheme to him. We have records of Lindemann’s submission of his plan to the war cabinet urging this method and suggesting that “greater flesh-incineration-per-bomb could be achieved” that way. This is further documented by a memo dated March 30, 1942, from Lindemann to Churchill that resulted in those intense terror-bombing campaigns of German civilians. The working-class neighborhoods were high-density, with these incendiary munitions creating natural intense firestorms that incinerated virtually every living thing in many of them. The British and the Americans, obeying the plans of their Jewish leaders, executed one of the most barbaric and inhuman atrocities of the war.
As I discuss in my essay on Japan, where the same was done there, the country’s population statistics were heavily forged, fabricated, and recalculated after the war to bury the evidence of these atrocities. I am almost certain the same was done with Germany. I haven’t the resources or time to delve into this with Germany, and researching atrocities against Germans is now illegal in Germany, but it is almost a certainty that Germany’s population statistics were massaged in the same was as those of Japan, to hide the truth. There had to have been many many millions of civilians killed in these raids, which were nothing more than an inhumanly deliberate attempt to depopulate Germany. And this doesn’t include the normal war casualties nor the 12 million to 15 million German civilians killed after the war from execution, starvation and migration, nor does it include Eisenhower’s Death Camps nor the perhaps additional million civilian deaths from Operation Paperclip.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
NOTES
[1] Bernays and Propaganda
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BERNAYS-AND-PROPAGANDA-.pdf
[2] Propaganda and the Media
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ENGLISH-PROPAGANDA-and-THE-MEDIA.pdf
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