Coexistence in Israel’s ‘mixed cities’ was always an illusion
By Jonathan Cook | Axis of Logic | May 26, 2021
Last weekend Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “terrorists” those Palestinian citizens who have been protesting decades of state-sponsored discrimination. Vowing that “anyone who acts like a terrorist will be handled like one”, he said: “Arab law-breakers are attacking Jews, burning synagogues and Jewish homes.”
Netanyahu has been far from alone in his denunciations of nearly two weeks of protests inside Israel by the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian by origin. They are the remnants of the Palestinian people, most of whom were ethnically cleansed at Israel’s founding in 1948.
Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, who is usually seen as far more moderate than Netanyahu, has called Palestinian protesters inside Israel a “bloodthirsty Arab mob” and described their actions as a “pogrom” against the Jewish community.
Both have remained largely silent about the wave of even greater violence against Israel’s Palestinian minority, both from the police and armed Jewish far-right gangs.
General strike
On Tuesday the Palestinian minority observed a general strike in protest at the wave of violence being directed at Palestinians in the region, most especially in Gaza. There, more than 200 people – and more than 60 children – have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
At the same time, the minority’s main political body, the Follow-Up Committee, called on international organizations to protect Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens from the combined – and seemingly coordinated – backlash by Israel police and mob Jewish mobs.
Adalah, a leading legal organization for the minority, echoed the Follow-Up Committee, saying the Israeli government was “giving a free hand to racist and violent oppression” Arab citizens have been left with no alternative except to appeal to the nations of the world to force Israel to protect them”.
In the main sites of confrontation, in a handful of what Israel misleadingly terms “mixed cities”, it is Palestinian citizens who have been paying the steepest price.
These cities, several of them close to Tel Aviv, are historic Palestinian communities most of whose inhabitants were expelled in 1948. Even since, the small ghettoized Palestinian populations left behind have been aggressively “Judaized” – in what amounts to a long-term process of Jewish ethnic and religious gentrification to erase their presence.
Danger of pogroms
The first death from the clashes in the “mixed cities” was a Palestinian citizen who was shot in Lod, near Tel Aviv, by a group of Jewish residents. All the suspects in the murder are reported to have been released after the police minister, Amir Ohana, was among the senior politicians expressing outrage at the arrests.
Another early incident involved a Palestinian taxi driver being dragged from his car south of Tel Aviv by hordes of masked Jews who beat him savagely in front of Israeli TV cameras and hundreds of onlookers, with police nowhere in sight. Earlier, the same mob rampaged through the town of Bat Yam smashing any stores that looked like they were owned by Palestinian citizens.
Despite Netanyahu and Rivlin’s claims, it is Palestinian communities inside Israel that have been in far more danger of pogroms than the Jewish majority.
In the balance of power, the state’s security forces are tribally Jewish, the government and policy-makers are all Jews, a large proportion of the Jewish citizenry own weapons, and the media speaks for its Jewish population, not its 1.8 million Palestinians.
In a sign of the growing dangers, the Israeli media reported this week that applications for gun licenses – usually available only to Jewish citizens – had risen seven-fold.
Ohana, the police minister, has suggested Jewish citizens act as a “force multiplier” for the police – that is, they should be allowed to take the law into their own hands. And footage has shown police and armed far-right Jewish gangs cooperating in attacks on Palestinian communities in the mixed cities, even as those cities were supposed to be under curfew.
‘Reload the gun magazine’
Like Netanyahu, leading Israeli media figures have been openly inciting vigilante-style violence against Israel’s Palestinian minority.
In one example, a senior TV anchor, Dov Gil-Har, equated the protests by Palestinian citizens against state-sponsored discrimination with historic pogroms against Jews. Earlier, he had suggested to his Jewish viewers – 80 per cent of the country’s population – that the solution to the protests was to “reload the gun magazines”. When challenged by a Palestinian interviewee, he added that he might use his own weapon on the protesters.
The constant message to the Jewish majority has been the Palestinian public are a menace and that it may be necessary for Jews to take the law into their own hands.
And this has been happening just after the violent far-right – Jewish fascists – made unprecedented ground in March’s election, securing six seats in the 120-member parliament and possibly a place in government if Netanyahu can engineer a coalition.
Liberal incitement
But worrying as the direct incitement by Israeli politicians and the media against the Palestinian minority is, it is being strongly reinforced by a much more subtle “othering” by Israeli Jewish liberals. They have masked their own incitement in the more refined language of archeological preservation, Jewish-Arab coexistence, and religious tolerance.
In official Israeli discourse, the “mixed cities” – with Haifa the showroom – have long been presented as rare places where Jewish and Palestinian citizens live in close proximity, offering a potential model for greater understanding and cooperation between the two populations.
The flip side is less often highlighted: the “mixed cities” are just about the only communities where Jewish and Palestinian citizens have some sort of daily interaction.
In the rest of the country, Israel has imposed strict residential segregation. Palestinian citizens are confined to some 120 overcrowded, communities where they are starved of land, planning permits, industrial areas and classrooms for their children.
Herded together
But even in the “mixed cities”, there is no real mixing.
Before Israel’s creation on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, cities like Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Lod (Lydd), and Ramle were some of the most important in Palestine.
Israel’s leaders made it a priority to drive almost all of the Palestinian residents out of these cities during the Nakba and into exile, as part of a policy of making sure there was no educated, urban elite to organise political or diplomatic resistance to its ethnic cleansing campaign.
Today, most of the Palestinians in the “mixed cities” are descended not from the original families living there but from refugees who got trapped in them as they were trying to flee to safety in 1948. The Israeli army often herded the refugees together into the poorest areas of these historic Palestinian cities – neighborhoods Jews did not want to inhabit – while Israel decided what to do with them.
The descendants of the refugees still live in these deprived neighborhoods, typically renting from Amidar, an Israeli state-run property company. For decades, Amidar has denied them permission to renovate or improve their homes. It is usually only too ready to evict them if a state agency or Jewish investors decide these Palestinian families are in the way of a “Judaization” project.
Which is the necessary background for understanding the way the Israeli media, including a respected liberal newspaper like Haaretz, has been engaging in its own covert incitement when covering the latest events in the “mixed cities”.
Much attention has been given to the torching by Palestinian protesters of synagogues and yeshivas, or Jewish seminaries. The sight of Torah scrolls being evacuated from charred buildings has encouraged the Jewish public to conclude that these attacks were driven by antisemitism – a variation of the fear that Palestinians want to push the Jews into the sea.
Preposterously, Lod’s mayor compared these scenes to Kristallnacht – the notorious night of Nazi pogroms against German Jews in 1938 – as if Israel’s Jewish majority were not protected by one of the strongest armies in the world.
But there are practical, far more mundane reasons why synagogues and yeshivas were among the first buildings attacked in Lod.
Settler outposts in Israel
Over the past three decades, Israel’s main effort to “Judaize” the “mixed cities” has been waged through a religious war of attrition. A section of the settler population has been encouraged to “redirect” their attention from the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel. They have slowly encroached into the “mixed cities” as local municipalities and state agencies have lured them with special funding for their extremist seminaries and synagogues.
Homes and land are being taken over in Palestinian neighborhoods to house these new fanatical outposts of the main West Bank settlements inside Israel.
That has had very damaging consequences. The religious extremists have tried to whip up more nationalist sentiments among the local Jewish population of the mixed cities, increasing tensions with Palestinian neighbors. Just as is happening in East Jerusalem’s Old City, these Jewish religious fanatics are seeking to drive Palestinian families out of their own communities.
For years there has been especial anger in Jaffa about the takeover by Jewish religious extremists of the Palestinian parts of the city. That culminated weeks before the current clashes with an attack by two brothers on the head of a yeshivathere.
Even the Israeli court that examined the indictment against the brothers ultimately rejected police claims that the attack was antisemitic. Like many other families, the brothers have been fighting eviction from their home by a government agency. The attack reflected their anger that religious extremists are seeking out, and being offered, new properties in their neighborhood.
Following the incident, Palestinian families held a demonstration chanting: “Jaffa for Jaffans, settlers out.”
The huge resentment among Palestinians in the “mixed cities” towards these new religious occupiers can be explained by the urgent desire for self-preservation, not antisemitism.
‘Barbarians at the gate’
Similarly, the Israeli media have been aghast at the attacks on important archeological sites in places like Acre and Lod. The media’s barely veiled thesis is that these attacks have revealed Palestinian citizens to be, as Israeli Jews long suspected, barbarians at the gate. The impression has been cultivated that the minority’s behavior is little different from the Taliban blowing up the Buddhist Bamiyan statues.
Last week the Israel Antiquities Authority’s chief scientist, Gideon Avni, told Haaretz : “In Acre, an entire life’s work, meant to capture world attention through its archaeological value, went down the drain. In Lod, they [Palestinian residents] tried to destroy the attempt to empower and lift up the city as a center of antiquities.”
But again, there are good practical reasons why Palestinian residents of the “mixed cities”, especially in Lod and Acre, would be targeting archeological sites.
The Palestinian cities now defined as “mixed” are mostly located next to or over Roman, Crusader and Mumlak ruins.
Israel destroyed the Palestinian character of these communities from 1948 onward by expelling most of the Palestinian population, and then gradually Judaized their [environs] as public spaces. Archeology, like religion, has been weaponized against the Palestinian inhabitants of the “mixed cities” to assist in their erasure.
Archeology theme parks
Israel’s politicization of archeology has focused on layers of history unrelated to, and meant to overshadow, its recent Arab Palestinian past. Further, archeological preservation and related tourism ventures have become the pretext for yet again ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their historic cities.
The clearest example has occurred in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Israel Antiquities Authority has allied with a settler organization, Elad. Together, using highly dubious archeological evidence, they have been creating a Disney-style “Kingdom of David” theme park within and below a Palestinian neighborhood called Silwan.
The City of David site has been expanding for more than three decades, aided by the government and Jerusalem municipality. Dozens of armed Jewish settler families have moved into the neighborhood in violation of international law.
In the latest development, Israel is preparing to evict many dozens of Palestinians in the coming weeks as it expands the City of David.
It was these moves that in part fueled the tensions that sparked the current Palestinian protests inside Israel and the rocket fire from Gaza.
Lod mosaic attacked
Watching Silwan’s long-running oppression through archeology, Palestinians in the “mixed cities” have seen a strong echo of their own experiences. The main difference is that the archeological assault inside Israel focuses not only on Jewish history but embraces any historical period that distracts from Palestinian heritage.
Israel has misleadingly sold these archeological projects as “tourism development” and “urban renewal”, often claiming they are designed to improve “Jewish-Arab relations”.
One of the targets of the current protests was a soon-to-be-opened museum for the Lod Mosaic, a world-renowned, almost complete Roman mosaic found in 1996. It had been traveling the world until belated funding meant it could be housed in a poor Palestinian-majority neighborhood next to the old city where it was unearthed.
Although the mosaic was unharmed in last week’s attack, the new building’s glass frontage was smashed.
The residents’ resentment towards the new Lod Museum needs to be understood in two contexts: decades of obscuring the Palestinian heritage of Lod, as well as the visibility of its current Palestinian population; and the investment by Israeli authorities in projects to bring tourists to Lod, even as they continue to neglect local Palestinian residents, who suffer from high levels of poverty.
Lod’s old city was mostly destroyed in the 1950s to erase its Palestinian character. The streets, even in Palestinian neighborhoods, have been given Hebrew names.
Lod municipality recently unveiled plans to renovate another historic site, a Mamluk khan that was used as the city’s main market until 1948. Over the heads of the local population, it is due to be turned into a Judaized cultural space, housing cafes and arts and crafts shops.
And as with Silwan, Lod is developing local tour programs – sometimes in coordination with incoming settler populations – that highlight an ancient Jewish heritage and ignore the city’s Palestinian past and present.
Or as a report from Emek Shaveh, an Israeli organization of dissident archeologists, recently concluded: “The city of Lod thus erases once again the city’s glorious heritage and views its Arab residents as a nuisance.”
Families face eviction
In Acre, archeology has become an even more overt weapon to be used against the local Palestinian population. Since 1948, they have been largely confined to the seafront old city, where they were long ignored and mired in poverty.
But while the United Nations’ decision to designate the old city a World Heritage Site 20 years ago came to the rescue of the ancient buildings there, it did little to help the local inhabitants. In fact, their situation has become even more precarious as Israel, Jewish investors and foreign countries have poured money into the old city’s “development”.
Overseeing these projects are the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Acre Development Corporation, neither of which have consulted with the local or national Palestinian leaderships in Israel.
Gideon Avni, of the Antiquities Authority, told the Haaretz newspaper: “These symbols [in Acre] are being destroyed in front of our eyes.” Another unnamed expert echoed him: “Gangs of looters have systematically destroyed property after property.”
One of the main targets in Acre was the Antiquities Authority’s conservation center, supported by the Italian government.
The old city of Acre was built in the 18th century by a Palestinian ruler, Daher el-Omar, atop the ruins of an earlier Crusader city. But the Israeli authorities have been sidelining this important Palestinian layer – just as it has excluded the local Palestinian population – to encourage tourists to head into the underground, Crusader Acre.
Even when Palestinian heritage is being preserved in Acre, it has been repackaged as “Ottoman” – presented to Israeli Jews and tourists as a legacy of Turkish colonial influence rather than as the cultural and architectural artifacts of local Palestinians who lived under Ottoman rule.
One of the most visible Palestinian buildings is the well-preserved Khan al-Umdan, once the city’s main market, located in the harbor.
It has been sealed off for years as the Development Corporation has been finding investors to turn it into a luxury hotel. Palestinian families living in the warrens of alleys around the khan are facing eviction so as not to detract from the new ambience the Israeli authorities hope to create for tourists.
Disneyfication of Acre
Aiding this process have been wealthy Jewish investors, such as Uri Jeremias. They have been the driving force behind the gentrification of Acre’s old city above ground to take advantage of the new tourism. Jeremias’s small empire started with a fish restaurant on the seafront and has expanded to include a popular ice cream parlor and an ambitious hotel called the Efendi.
As the name suggests, the Efendi has contributed to the Disneyfication of Acre, remaking some of the old city’s most impressive Palestinian buildings into a hotel where tourists can experience generic “Ottoman” splendor, shielded from the poverty outside and from any trace of meaningful Palestinian heritage.
It is not surprising that Jeremias’s properties were also attacked, as was another hotel, the Arabesque.
In a fawning portrait in the Haaretz newspaper, Evan Fallenberg, owner of the Arabesque, was able to present his hotel as simply a site of cultural and economic renewal, and a symbol of “Jewish-Arab coexistence”. He called it “a labor of love shared by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike”.
Referring to his assumptions about Acre as a “model of successful coexistence”, Fallenberg added: “What gave me hope over the past few years is that this was some kind of microcosm of what could happen in this country, and it’s in danger of being lost now.”
Illusion of coexistence
But that coexistence model in the “mixed cities” was always an illusion, one that the protests finally served to smash. Coexistence worked for one ethnic group only, Jews. It was built on the continuing Judaization of these historic Palestinian communities to erase their Palestinian heritage and drive out their Palestinian populations.
Tourism and archeological preservation were simply more convenient, image-conscious ways to go about Judaization in the 21st century. They attracted less attention and international opposition than Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations and wholesale community demolitions of the previous century.
By stripping out this context – of Israel’s ongoing Judaization of Palestinian communities inside Israel – Israeli liberals have only deepened the incitement against Palestinian citizens. They have confirmed the picture presented by the right, whether it be President Rivlin’s “bloodthirsty mob”, Netanyahu’s “terrorists”, or the mayor of Lod’s “Kristallnacht”.
In doing so, Israeli liberals have offered their own form of legitimacy to the rationalizations by Jewish far-right gangs for their violence against Palestinian citizens: that they are protecting Jews and Jewish honor, that they are averting pogroms.
In defense of a non-existent coexistence, Israeli liberals have thrown their hand in with the far-right, exposing the Palestinian minority to the very real threat of Jewish pogroms.
The author lives in Nazareth, Israel.
Biden Regime Support for Palestinian Unity and Conflict Resolution with Israel?
By Stephen Lendman | May 27, 2021
Since Hamas won the last democratically held Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, the US and Israel pursued a divide and control strategy.
In January 2005, Israel installed Mahmoud Abbas as puppet Palestinian Authority (PA) president.
A figure with no legitimacy, he serves Israeli/Western interests and his own at the expense of millions of Palestinians he long ago betrayed for special benefits afforded him.
Despite his term of office expiring in 2009, he remains in office, refusing to hold new elections for one invented reason after another, none legitimate.
Throughout at least most of his illegitimate tenure, he’s been hostile toward Hamas and indifferent toward millions of Palestinians he doesn’t give a damn about and it shows.
He’s a quisling leader hostile to what democratic rule is all about.
A former aide once called him the “sultan of Ramallah” — thin-skinned and vengeful, tolerating no opposition, remaining in power as long as Israel considers him useful.
In 1993, he was part of the Oslo team that negotiated unilateral Palestinian surrender to Israeli interests, his signature on the capitulation.
In office over 16 years, he did nothing to interfere with Israeli theft of Palestinian land — nothing to contest their dispossession, nothing to support their rights beyond meaningless lip service.
Collaborating with the enemy is treason — the highest of high political crimes.
Abbas has been guilty at least since abandoning Palestinian liberation efforts in September 1993.
In service to Israeli interests, he prevented Palestinian unity by supporting Israeli opposition to what’s important in pursuing their liberating struggle.
On Monday, Haaretz dubiously reported that “a new US approach to Hamas could be in the making (sic).”
It cited a 2018 report by the Washington-based Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in cahoots with the Brookings Institution. See below.
According to former Congressman Ron Paul, CNAS is the “neocon wing of the” undemocratic Dem party, adding:
It “argu(es) against US troops ever leaving Iraq and has endorsed the…doctrine of preventative warfare” — aka naked aggression against invented enemies.
“The Center is perhaps best known for pushing the failed counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
It supports US global dominance by brute force — no matter the cost — if less extreme methods don’t work.
The CNAS/Brookings report expressed support for “pursu(ing) the political and physical reintegration of Gaza and the West Bank, in a manner that promotes a two-state solution and avoids the permanent separation of the two territories,” adding:
It also called for “stabiliz(ation) (of) Gaza, address(ing) the dire humanitarian and economic conditions, and prevent(ing), or if necessary shorten(ing), any future conflicts between Hamas and Israel.”
CNAS and Brookings one-sidedly support all things Israel, what’s always been at the expense of long-suffering Palestinians.
CNAS supported Hillary’s presidential ambitions because of her rage for military solutions in pursuit of Washington’s hegemonic aims
In October 1997, the Clinton co-presidency falsely designated Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah as foreign terrorist organizations in deference to Israeli interests.
Hamas is historic Palestine’s legitimate government.
In 2018 legislative elections, Hezbollah candidates and allies won a 67-seat majority.
They’re not terrorist organizations, not earlier or now.
It’s inconceivable that Israel would go along with supporting or at least permitting Palestinian unity to include an end to its Gaza blockade — in place since 2007.
Given US/Israeli rage for endless wars and instability to advance their hegemonic agendas, it’s also inconceivable that they’d go another way on what relates to over half a century of Occupied Palestine.
The Jewish state has longstanding rock-solid bipartisan support in Washington that’s highly unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.
The CNAS report also expressed concerns about Palestinian unity. Contradicting what it appeared to endorse, it said:
Unity “could partially legitimize Hamas or, worse, give it an opening to gain power in, or even seize control of, the West Bank.”
“Reintegration could also lead to a model like that of Lebanese Hezbollah, in which Hamas remains a heavily armed militia, free from the burdens of civilian governance but wielding veto power in government.”
Hamas and Hezbollah maintain military wings for self-defense, their UN Charter right — what the CNAS report left unexplained.
Both Israel and the US have always opposed a legitimate peace process and Palestinian self-determination — while pretending otherwise.
It’s why over half a century of Israeli/Palestinian negotiations on these issues always failed.
With dominant hardline US/Israeli regimes in power, a sea-change from longstanding support by both nations for divide, control, and perpetual war by hot and/or other means to endorsing Palestinian unity, self-determination and conflict resolution sounds more like Hollywood fiction than reality.
A Final Comment
During 11 days of Israeli terror-bombing and shelling of Gazan residential areas — causing large-scale mass slaughter and destruction — the Biden regime blocked four Security Council statements that expressed mild criticism of Israel.
One-sided US support for the Jewish state and indifference toward Palestinian rights reflect longstanding bipartisan policy in Washington.
It remains unchanged.
Facebook says it will stop banning claims Covid-19 is man-made, citing ‘new facts and trends’
RT | May 27, 2021
Having spent months mercilessly removing any claims that the novel coronavirus may not have evolved naturally, Facebook said it will no longer do so. The move comes as Wuhan lab leak theory is gaining mainstream attention.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of [Covid-19] and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that [Covid-19] is man-made from our apps,” a Facebook spokesperson told Politico on Wednesday evening, in an emailed statement.
“We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,” Facebook added.
Back in February, “following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO),” Facebook said it was banning a number of “debunked” and “false” claims – including saying that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.”
So far, it appears Facebook (which also owns Instagram) is the only one to reverse course. Twitter and Google’s YouTube did not respond to Politico’s request for comment about their own policies.
The change of heart comes after the White House announced a 90-day deadline for the US intelligence community to produce a “definitive” assessment of where the novel coronavirus originated, with President Joe Biden claiming the spies were torn between “human contact with an infected animal” and “a laboratory accident.”
Until just a few weeks ago, however, merely suggesting the possibility of a “laboratory accident” – not even claiming that the virus was man-made – was grounds for getting censored on social media.
ZeroHedge, a news blog famously censored for daring to suggest the man-made origin of the virus, reacted to the Facebook volte-face with a meme used to express annoyance.
Twitter banned ZeroHedge for “abuse and harassment” in February 2020, following a hit piece by BuzzFeed. They were allowed to return in June, after Twitter said it had “made an error in our enforcement action.”
The previously heavily-enforced orthodoxy about the origin of the virus was that it naturally evolved in animals and somehow jumped to humans in an incident involving the wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Any mention of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, conducting research into the bat coronavirus family, was off-limits.
US corporate and social media alike have spent the past year insisting that the mere suggestion the virus may have escaped from the WIV – even by accident, as Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed – was a conspiracy theory with zero merit. A State Department inquiry into the origin of the virus, which began under Trump, was ordered shut by Biden in March, CNN reported this week citing a Foggy Bottom spokesman.
Facebook exec Nick Clegg says Facebook should spread “free expression” around the world
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim the Net | May 26, 2021
Facebook’s Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, in a tone-deaf opinion piece, encouraged America to spread not only its technologies but also its values, including “free expression.”
While the remarks are commendable, they are also ironic coming from an executive of a giant social media platform with a very poor record of respecting the freedom of speech.
“The US risks becoming a nation that exports incredible technologies, but fails to export its values,” Clegg wrote in the op-ed published on CNBC.
Clegg also offered a recommendation on how the US can regulate Big Tech platforms and spread American values around the world.
“By focusing on the areas where there is agreement on both sides, Congress can break the deadlock and create the most comprehensive internet legislation in a generation. In doing so, it can help to preserve the American values at the heart of the global internet.”
The Facebook exec rightfully condemned China’s massive internet censorship:
“The Chinese internet model — segregated from the wider internet and subject to extensive surveillance.”
He also noted Turkey, Vietnam and Russia, as countries that “have taken steps in a similar direction.”
Clegg continued to suggest that, “The open, accessible and global internet we use today has been shaped by American companies and American values like free expression, transparency, accountability and the encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship. But these values can’t be taken for granted.”
Clegg’s piece was objectively commendable from a free speech stand point. However, it is hard to ignore the fact that he did not call out Big Tech platforms for their continued disregard for freedom of speech. The company he works at, for example, repeatedly censored the former president and millions of other American, and has refused to reinstate Trump’s accounts.
Bolivia to Request Extradition of Añez Regime’s Top Official
teleSUR | May 26, 2021
Bolivia’s Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo confirmed that his country will ask the United States for the extradition of Rodrigo Mendez. He served as chief of staff to Arturo Murillo, who was interior minister in the coup-born regime led by Jeanine Añez (2019-2020).
He was arrested in Florida for requesting a bribe of US$582,000 to grant a contract for the purchase of tear gas ammunition for the coup-born regime.
The purchase from the Brazilian company Condor was for almost US$7 million. The acquisition was made through the U.S. company Bravo Tactical Solutions with an alleged overprice of US$2.3 million, which would have been used in bribes.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that Mendez allegedly received a second bribe payment up to US$714,000 in cash.
The evidence gathered from text messages, e-mails, and bank records revealed that Mendez was requested to write a letter to the Brazilian manufacturer to insist that the Añez regime would only buy the products through Bryan Berkman’s company.
Del Castillo explained that the extradition would be requested through Interpol channels and diplomatic notes to the U.S. State Department.
“We are sending the corresponding notes so that these people come to account to the Bolivian people,” he said, adding that Mendez and Murillo “took advantage of the opportunity to sow drug trafficking and corruption in our country.”
The Bogus January 6 Commission Poses a Real Threat to Freedom
By James Bovard – Mises Wire – 05/25/2021
“Truth will out” is the most popular fairy tale in Washington. Members of Congress are clashing over whether politicians will appoint an “independent” commission to reveal the facts behind the January 6 Capitol ruckus. Proponents are portraying the issue as a simple choice between “truth or Trump.”
Recent history provides no reason to expect a politically controlled process to expose facts that undermine powerful politicians. Congress has long been worse than useless as a fact-finding agency. “Oversight” is a euphemism for stupefying congressional procedures designed to avoid discovering information that might embarrass their allies. A senior House Republican admitted in 2004: “Our party controls the levers of government. We’re not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to cause heartburn.” Most members of Congress are more likely to grovel before federal agencies than to challenge their power. “How are you so great and how can we help you?” is the usual response when the FBI director testifies, as Guardian columnist Trevor Timm noted in 2016.
There is no reason to presume that a commission investigating January 6 would not be hogtied official stonewalling. Former Senate Intelligence Committee staff director Andy Johnson observed in 2014: “The fog of secrecy made a mockery of oversight” of the CIA torture scandal. The Obama administration did not object even when the CIA illegally spied on a congressional committee to thwart the torture investigation. Both Bush and Obama administration officials repeatedly lied during congressional testimony on war on terror policies but faced no consequences. But everything would be different in this investigation, right?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her team want a congressionally appointed commission in lieu of disclosing what actually happened on January 6. Cameras posted in and around the Capitol recorded fourteen hundred hours of film on January 6, but very little of the evidence has been publicly disclosed. Fourteen news organizations have requested that the Justice Department publicly release key videos on the federal court’s electronic dockets but no such luck. Capitol Police chief lawyer Thomas DiBiase warned that “providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will … [cause that information to be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again.” But it is also “interfering with the democratic process” to withhold evidence of actions which have been endlessly demonized by the president, top congressional leaders, and their media allies.
Disclosing the video could settle the question of whether most protestors behaved like violent attackers or gaping tourists. Julie Kelly, writing for American Greatness, recently posted a forty-five-second video clip of protestors after they entered the Capitol that day. Capitol Police officer Keith Robishaw tells a group of protestors: “We’re not against … you need to show us … no attacking, no assault, remain calm.” The citizens shown in that clip don’t appear to have been hell-bent on overthrowing the government that day.
The media is touting the fact that Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the cochairs of the 9/11 Commission, have endorsed a commission to investigate January 6. But invoking Kean and Hamilton is like relying on the Three Stooges as references for a job application at a pie factory.
Kean and Hamilton issued a joint statement boasting about the 9/11 Commission: “We put country above party to examine, without bias, the events before, during, and after the attacks…. The January 6th attack on the US Capitol was one of the darkest days in our history. Americans deserve an objective and accurate account of what happened. As we did in the wake of September 11, it is time to set aside partisan politics and come together as Americans in common pursuit of truth and justice.”
The 9/11 Commission “pursued truth and justice” by permitting the White House to edit the final version of their report before it was publicly released. Despite its canonization inside the Beltway, that report would not be admissible in a court of law, because it relied on torture for many of its key assertions. The New York Times’s Philip Shenon, the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, noted that “more than a quarter of the report’s footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred to detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s ‘enhanced’ interrogation program.” Shenon reported that commission members “forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators posed them on the panel’s behalf. The commission’s report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods [including waterboarding] were used in gathering information.” The commission’s report was released months after shocking photos from Abu Ghraib and key Justice Department and Pentagon memos leaked out, exposing the Bush administration’s torture regime. Yet, as Shenon noted, “The commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.” The 9/11 Commission became profoundly complicit in the torture at the same time it pretended to objectively judge the Bush record.
The commission report was released in July 2004 at the same time that Bush was exploiting the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War for his reelection campaign. The commission ignored evidence compiled by a joint House-Senate investigation revealing that Saudi government agents bankrolled multiple Saudi hijackers in the US prior to the attacks (fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis). But the Bush administration suppressed those twenty-eight pages of that congressional report and they were not released until 2016. Bush embraced Saudi leaders while insisting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was somehow to blame for 9/11. If the 9/11 Commission had quoted the 2002 FBI memo stating that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these [9/11 hijacker] terrorists within the Saudi Government,” Bush might have been seriously damaged, but 9/11 commissioners chose to serve the White House rather than truth. Kean and Hamilton remain venerated by the media, because their kowtowing buttressed public trust in the political system.
Would an investigation of January 6 be more honest than the investigation of September 11? President Biden and Democratic congressional leaders are vested in the “terrorist attack/Pearl Harbor” narrative that they established within hours of the fracas. Democrats still refer to the protestors murdering a Capitol Police officer long after the belated revelation that he died of natural causes. The New York Times noted that that advocates of a January 6 commission insist it is “an ethical and practical necessity to fully understand the most violent attack on Congress in two centuries.” Tell that to the Puerto Rican nationalists who shot up Congress in 1954 or to Congressman Steve Scalise and two other Capitol employees who were shot by a Democratic Party zealot in 2017. If such “facts” are the baseline for accuracy, then citizens can start scoffing long before a commission issues a final report.
The biggest illusion behind the push for a January 6 commission is that there is a political constituency in Washington for truth. But that hasn’t been the case for decades. As French essayist Paul Valery warned long ago, “At every step, politics and freedom of mind exclude each other.”
In the same way that it took almost fifteen years for some key facts about the 9/11 attacks to be revealed, it may be months or years until key damning revelations about the Capitol clash are extracted from federal agencies or private individuals and groups. Creating a pseudoindependent commission is more likely to codify a deceptive but politically profitable storyline than to expose facts that undercut powerful Washingtonians or government agencies.
A façade of political “truth” can be more dangerous than no disclosure at all. Biden and congressional Democrats are seeking to turbocharge their push for a new domestic terrorism law to permit widespread federal crackdowns on their opponents. Any rigged commission would likely pour gasoline on a fire that could singe far more American rights and liberties.
Facebook to fact-check and suppress individual users
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | May 26, 2021
Personal Facebook accounts that are flagged by Facebook’s fact-checkers for repeatedly sharing “misinformation” will now have all their posts suppressed in the news feed as part of the tech giant’s latest crackdown on content that challenges the narratives of its fact-checking partners.
Facebook also announced that it will start dissuading its users from liking pages that are flagged by its fact-checkers via a pop-up that forces users to complete an additional step before they can like the page. When users attempt to like flagged pages, this pop up appears, tells users that the page has “repeatedly shared false information,” and asks them to choose whether to “Go Back” or “Follow Page Anyway.”
Additionally, the tech giant will start presenting users with a redesigned notification when their posts are flagged by fact-checkers. This new notification will encourage users to view the fact-check and delete their post.
The targeting of personal accounts is one of the most far-reaching Facebook censorship measures to date with an enforcement measure that previously only affected pages, groups, and domains, now applying to all of Facebook’s 2.8 billion users.
Facebook’s announcement comes days after one of its third-party fact-checkers, Politifact, quietly walked back its Wuhan lab leak fact-check.
For over a year, countless Facebook users have had their posts censored based on this fact-check which branded the idea that COVID-19 was created in a lab as a “debunked conspiracy theory.” But now that the mainstream media and fact-checkers have finally admitted this may not be a conspiracy, they’re allowed to discuss the Wuhan lab leak as a potential coronavirus cause with impunity.
Those who were censored based on this retracted fact-check would have had the reach of their flagged posts slashed by as much as 95%. And under Facebook’s new rule targeting personal account, entire accounts could now be suppressed based on erroneous fact-checks.
Global heating: Study shows impact of ‘climate racism’ in US – BBC
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | May 26, 2021
The clown Matt McGrath is at it again:
A new study says that black people living in most US cities are subject to double the level of heat stress as their white counterparts.
The researchers say the differences were not explained by poverty but by historic racism and segregation.
As a result, people of colour more generally, live in areas with fewer green spaces and more buildings and roads.
These exacerbate the impacts of rising temperatures and a changing climate.
Cities are well known magnifiers of a warmer climate.
The surface urban heat island effect is the technical term for the impact that the buildings, roads and infrastructure of cities have on temperatures.
All that concrete and asphalt attracts and stores more heat, ensuring that both days and nights in big urban areas are much warmer than the surrounding locations.
But, within cities, there are often large differences in this heat island impact, with areas rich in trees and green spaces noticeably cooler than those that are dense with housing and industry.
A previous study in the US found a correlation between warmer neighbourhoods in big cities with racist housing practices dating back to the 1930s.
Back then, areas with large African-American or immigrant populations were “redlined” in documents by federal officials, and deemed too hazardous for home loans and investment.
This led to a concentration of poverty and low home ownership rates in some parts of big cities.
This new study takes a broader look at these warmer neighbourhoods and the people who are affected by them.
Using satellite temperature data combined with demographic information from the US Census, the authors found that the average person of colour lives in an area with far higher summer daytime temperatures than non-Hispanic white people.
The actual paper, which is here, does not mention “racism” at all. So why does McGrath introduce it as a concept, never mind inventing the term “climate racism”?
Quite what the “racist” housing policies of the 1930s have to do with 21st century America is beyond me. There has been nothing to stop people moving out of those areas since, as millions have. (This is known as “black flight”, with first the black middle class, followed by the working class, moving out to the suburbs, as the whites did before them. What is left tends to be the “underclass”. See here for more details.)
It is well known that poor people, particularly in inner cities, all around the world suffer worse outcomes in all sorts of ways, for instance healthcare, education and job prospects. And, as McGrath now seems to have realised, the urban heat island effect is far more significant than the tiny amount of climate warming seen in the last century.
Maybe instead of wasting trillions on fighting climate change, we should spend a fraction of it on improving inner cities.
MORE Flagrant Data Manipulation from the CDC
New report is further evidence the CDC is deliberately hiding post-vaccine “breakthrough cases”
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | May 26, 2021
A new report, published just yesterday, has provided yet more evidence that the CDC is manipulating data to conceal the number of “breakthrough infections”.
A “breakthrough infection” (or “breakthrough case”) is defined as a person who tests positive for Sars-Cov-2 infection, despite already being fully vaccinated. And this new report finds that the CDC’s official record of breakthrough cases is:
likely a substantial undercount.
Going on to explain:
The national surveillance system relies on passive and voluntary reporting, and data might not be complete or representative. Many persons with vaccine breakthrough infections, especially those who are asymptomatic or who experience mild illness, might not seek testing.
Which is partially accurate, but also a pretty major lie by omission.
It is probably true that vaccinated people with no symptoms are unlikely to seek testing, but it is also true that, on March 17th, the CDC updated their advice on testing policy to specifically exclude such people from testing protocols:
Screencap of CDC’s testing guidelines
So, while it’s certainly true that “breakthrough cases” are likely a substantial undercount, it is dishonest to pretend that this is just an accident of the system. Rather, the system is specifically designed to hide such cases.
Of course, this report only goes up to the end of April, the “undercount” will only have gotten worse since then, because the CDC changed their rules AGAIN to make it even harder to keep an accurate count of breakthrough cases.
As we wrote last week, as of May 1st the CDC will no longer be counting mild or asymptomatic cases as “breakthrough infections”, choosing to focus only on hospitalisations and deaths.
According to the CDC’s own report, though, over a quarter (27%) of breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, and a further 61% were only mildly ill. Conversely, only 10% of them were ever hospitalised, and only 2% died:
Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died.
So, the CDC has taken their “substantial undercount”, and then slashed it by 90%. The official figures, moving forward, will be so inaccurate as to be completely useless.
The CDC claims these changes “will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance.” But that is an obvious and absurd lie.
Statistical studies have shown up to 86% of Covid “cases” never experience symptoms. To exclude such cases from your vaccine effectiveness studies is to poison your data in order to prop up a pre-determined conclusion. It is, at the very best, extremely poor science.
Of course, the truth is far more cynical even than that.
From the beginning of the so-called “pandemic”, waves of asymptomatic “cases” were deliberately created by running unreliable PCR tests on 100,000s of perfectly healthy people every day.
The entirely predictable false positives were called “cases”, and these manufactured “cases” of Covid19 were used to build up the illusion of a global plague.
This was a prolonged campaign of deception in order to bring about sweeping changes in the construction of our society.
To this point “asymptomatic cases” have been the backbone of the Covid narrative. But now the CDC has attempted to remove them from the reckoning by instructing medical labs and hospitals around the country to stop looking for them, but only in those who have had the “vaccine”.
This is a new prolonged campaign of deception, spinning the narrative that these untested, experimental “vaccines” truly are “effective” against a “pandemic” that was built on statistical smoke and mirrors.
In short: before the vaccine they needed “asymptomatic infections” to create a “problem”, after the vaccine they are actively hiding “asymptomatic infections”, because their existence undermines their “solution”.
“Breakthrough infections”, existing in anything approaching large numbers, effectively means one of three things is true: either the tests are unreliable, the “vaccines” are ineffective…or both.
To anyone interested in the truth, keeping an accurate count of these “breakthrough infections” is therefore vitally important.
The corollary of that, of course, is that anyone attempting to conceal, minimise or ignore them is NOT interested in the truth. Such behaviour is, in fact, a tacit admission of deception.
JHU Prof: Half Of Americans Have Natural Immunity; Dismissing It Is ‘Biggest failure Of Medical Leadership’
“Please, ignore the CDC guidance”
By Steve Watson | Summit News | May 26, 2021
A professor with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has said that there is a general dismissal of the fact that more than half of all Americans have developed natural immunity to the coronavirus and that it constitutes “one of the biggest failures of our current medical leadership.”
Dr. Marty Makary made the comments during a recent interview, noting that “natural immunity works” and it is wrong to vilify those who don’t want the vaccine because they have already recovered from the virus.
Makary criticised “the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history” for not clearly communicating the scientific facts about natural immunity compared to the kind of immunity developed through vaccines.
“There is more data on natural immunity than there is on vaccinated immunity, because natural immunity has been around longer,” Makary emphasised.
“We are not seeing reinfections, and when they do happen, they’re rare. Their symptoms are mild or are asymptomatic,” the professor added.
“Please, ignore the CDC guidance,” he urged, adding “Live a normal life, unless you are unvaccinated and did not have the infection, in which case you need to be careful.”
“We’ve got to start respecting people who choose not to get the vaccine instead of demonizing them,” Makary further asserted.
The professor’s comments come amid a plethora of media generated propaganda suggesting that natural immunity isn’t enough, and that those who do not choose to take the vaccine should be socially ostracised.
The likes of the World Health Organisation have even shifted the definition of ‘herd immunity’, eliminating the pre-COVID scientific consensus that it could be achieved by allowing a virus to spread through a population, and insisting that herd immunity comes solely from vaccines.
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Only a Beginning… Charles Malik’s vision of an emergent Pax Judaica
By David Miller | Tracking Power | November 12, 2026
In August 1949, three months after Israel joined the United Nations, Lebanon’s envoy in Washington sent his government a long report. Charles Malik, no firebrand, had signed the UN Charter and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His Report on the Present Situation lay largely unread until Dar An-Nahar printed it in 2002. … continue
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