Iran’s decisive retaliatory strikes in the face of the United States’ violations have forced Washington to halt and revisit its regional strategy, Army spokesman says.
Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia made the remarks during a televised interview on Saturday, stating that coordinated operations by the Army and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), including airstrikes, missile strikes, and drone operations against US positions in Kuwait, Qatar, and Erbil, Iraq, have brought Washington’s regional strategy to a halt and forced it to alter its strategic approach.
Turning to Iran’s recent retaliatory military operations, Akraminia said the Islamic Republic launched the strikes after the United States violated its commitments under a memorandum of understanding reached last month, and attempted to establish an illegal shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz in violation of the MoU.
Over the past 15 days, he said, the operations focused on US military bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, describing them as among Washington’s most important military installations in the region.
According to the spokesperson, decades of US investment in regional military infrastructure, particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, had made those facilities strategically significant.
However, as a result of Iran’s reprisal, many US facilities across the region have suffered damage severe enough to prevent them from carrying out their previous missions, he stated.
Akraminia cited the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain as a case in point. “There is now virtually nothing left of this base,” he said, hailing the Iranian operations for rendering the outpost effectively unusable.
The spokesman referred to US President Donald Trump’s acknowledgement that Washington had supplied weapons to counterrevolutionary elements based in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, but noted that Iranian strikes have robbed those elements of their operational capability and virtually destroyed the American military infrastructure in Erbil.
The official credited the success of the drone strikes among the operations to Iran’s employing a new generation of loitering munitions, citing deployment of the country’s Arash-2 drones.
‘Retaliatory deterrence’
The Army spokesperson described Iran’s military strategy in the face of the American violations as one of “retaliatory deterrence.”
He said the Islamic Republic’s objective was to raise the cost of aggression sufficiently to deter future attacks.
In the face of the retaliation, the United States has reached a strategic impasse, lacking a coherent strategy either to continue the war or bring it to an end, Akraminia said. The official cited contradictory statements by the US president as evidence of strategic confusion.
Akraminia, meanwhile, said the United States would also bear the greatest long-term strategic costs of the cycle arising out of its violations in light of the significant economic, geopolitical, and security consequences that have resulted from the Islamic Republic’s reprisal.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the spokesperson noted how the United States and the Israeli regime also failed to achieve either their declared or broader objectives during their unprovoked aggression against the Islamic Republic that took place from February 28 to April 7.
He noted that Washington’s publicly stated goals included destroying Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities and eliminating the regional Resistance Front, besides reminding how the US president had also demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender” during the early stages of the aggression.
According to the official, the adversaries also pursued broader objectives, including overthrowing Iran’s Islamic establishment, partitioning the country, and advancing the so-called “Greater Israel” project that features Tel Aviv’s expansionist ambitions.
None of those objectives was, however, achieved, he stated, attributing the outcome to public support, the Islamic Republic’s sagacious leadership, and the performance of the country’s Armed Forces.
“Tonight marks the 147th consecutive night of the people’s presence and support for the Islamic establishment, and this steadfastness demonstrates that the enemy has failed to accomplish its objectives,” the spokesman said, referring to unfailing presence across the country’s streets in support of the Islamic Republic and its defensive and retaliatory operations.
Author’s Note: The framing of prescription drugs as the third leading cause of death, associated with Peter Gøtzsche and Barbara Starfield, is treated here as an underestimate. When heart disease and cancer are themselves largely produced by the same profession’s pharmaceutical and dietary framework, ranking the profession third against its own products misses the arithmetic. The essay does not argue that individual doctors are malicious. It argues that the training installed by the 1910 Flexner Report was an inversion of what heals, that the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations exported that training globally, and that a century of it has produced the epidemic of chronic disease now called the natural burden of modern life.
The essay operates in two registers. When examining establishment evidence against itself, establishment terminology appears. When stating the author’s own analytical position, terrain language governs.
This essay discusses medical topics for informational purposes. It is not medical advice.
The Prosecution
Sarah Myhill has been investigated by the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council more than thirty times across two decades, more than any doctor in the Council’s history.¹ Not one of the complaints came from her own patients. Every complaint came from other medical professionals and regulatory officials. At the 2010 interim hearing, over 800 patient support letters were submitted alongside a petition with 3,615 signatures. Tom Kark, the Queen’s Counsel acting for the government’s prosecution, described the difficulty of the case in plain terms: the problem with the Myhill cases, he said, was that all the patients had improved and all refused to give witness statements.
The prosecution’s complaint was that her patients got better.
Her practice addresses cellular metabolism through nutritional support and toxin removal. Her patients improve. Her regulator has spent twenty years trying to stop her.
What kind of medical profession prosecutes its healers? A profession whose training was designed to do the opposite of what heals. That training runs across the lifespan of every person the profession treats, from injection in infancy to intubation in the ICU at eighty-three, and it has produced the epidemic of chronic disease now called the natural burden of modern life. The pattern operates in London, Sydney, Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo, and São Paulo because the training that produces it was standardized globally from a single source.
A child has a fever of 102.4. The parent reaches for the cabinet, measures a dose from the red and white bottle, and delivers it to the child’s mouth. The doctor’s advice at the last checkup was clear: bring the fever down.
The child’s body raised the temperature to accelerate metabolic clearing. Higher body heat speeds the enzymatic processes that break down and eliminate whatever the terrain is discarding. The fever is the operation. The intervention interrupts it. The doctor did not fail to know this. The doctor was trained to do the opposite.
The inversion is not confined to fever. It structures every intervention the doctor will offer. The body cleanses through fever, discharge, inflammation, diarrhea, skin eruption; training teaches suppression of each. The body signals distress through cholesterol, glucose, blood pressure; training teaches blocking the signals. The body’s operations and the doctor’s interventions map onto each other with the precision of a mirror.
The pattern was installed deliberately and runs across the lifespan of every person the doctor will treat. The evidence assembles across five thresholds: birth, childhood, adult screening, chronic illness, and death. Applied at scale, this training produces harm at scale. The scale is now planetary.
Joy Garner’s Control Group Survey, conducted in the United States because the American vaccine exemption structure was one of the few environments in the industrialized world where a large fully unvaccinated cohort could still be found, established chronic disease in the fully unvaccinated adult population at 2.64 percent. In the vaccinated it runs at 60 percent.² Standard attributable-fraction methodology assigns 95.6 percent of chronic disease in the vaccinated population to vaccination itself.³ Cancer, heart disease, and the diagnoses that account for the majority of deaths across the industrialized world are conditions Garner counted.
This is the arithmetic behind the essay’s subtitle. Heart disease is ranked first among causes of death in every industrialized country. Cancer is second. Prescription drugs are ranked third by Peter Gøtzsche and Barbara Starfield. The ranking treats the first two categories as phenomena the doctor arrived to treat. They are not. The cholesterol hypothesis that produced the statin era, the seed oil epidemic, and the sugar substitution was invented and sustained by the same profession, and exported through the WHO and every major national dietary guideline body.⁴ The injected substrate from childhood, the screening cascades that route the healthy into oncology pipelines, and the suppression of acute clearing across the adult lifespan produce much of what is later counted as cancer. When the top two categories on the mortality list are themselves iatrogenic, ranking iatrogenic third makes no arithmetic sense. The profession is not the third leading cause of death. It is the first.
Not About Bad People
Most doctors entered medicine because they wanted to help. The individual doctor is not the argument. What was installed in the individual doctor is the argument.
The system runs on convergent opportunism, not coordination. The physician, the researcher, the regulator, the journal editor, the medical school department chair — each pursues rational self-interest within a structure whose maintenance no single actor is responsible for. Upton Sinclair named the local mechanism: a man does not understand what his salary depends on not understanding.⁵ Applied across a profession of a million practitioners, that mechanism produces a system that behaves as if it were coordinated while requiring no coordinator.
There is a category of medical practice this argument does not address: acute trauma care. Broken femurs need setting, gunshot wounds need pressure and sutures, genuine appendicitis needs surgery. These interventions support the body’s repair rather than opposing it, and this is what a critic means by “doctors save lives every day.” They do. The concern here is the other category — the management of chronic illness and the maintenance of ostensibly healthy people through screening, prescription, and intervention. This is the majority of what modern medicine does, and the majority of what it earns.
The life expectancy objection runs like this: populations in the industrialized world lived to roughly 47 in 1900 and to the high seventies today, and medicine is given the credit. The arithmetic does not support it. Most of the increase was compression at the bottom — the reduction of infant and childhood mortality, which the data traces to sanitation, nutrition, and clean water rather than to medical intervention. Life expectancy at age 65 has moved much less: from 76 in 1900 to about 85 today. American life expectancy has been declining since 2014.⁶ British, Australian, and continental European life expectancy has stagnated or reversed across the same period. Cardiovascular disease, overdose, and metabolic collapse are the categories driving the decline — domains the profession has managed with confidence for decades.
The Installation
Ignaz Semmelweis noticed in 1847 that women whose babies were delivered by doctors died at rates several times higher than women whose babies were delivered by midwives. The doctors moved between autopsies and deliveries without washing their hands. He proposed the connection and required his students to wash with chlorinated lime. Deaths in his ward fell dramatically.⁷ His colleagues rejected the finding. He was driven from his position, committed to an asylum, and died there at forty-seven, beaten by guards, according to his autopsy. A century later, Bernard Lown challenged the strict-bedrest dogma for heart attack patients and let his patients sit up in a chair at the end of the bed. His colleagues met him on the ward with Nazi salutes, chanting “Heil Hitler” at a Jewish physician for suggesting that his patients need not lie motionless for six weeks. Strict bedrest is now understood to have killed tens of millions of people worldwide. The man who challenged it received the salute.⁵ Medicine has a documented history of destroying the practitioners who correctly identify iatrogenic harm.
The mechanism that produced modern medicine’s training is documented. In 1910, Abraham Flexner, funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, published a report evaluating American medical schools.⁸ Within two decades, the number of American medical schools fell from 162 to 66.⁹ Schools teaching homeopathy, naturopathy, and terrain-based approaches were closed. The surviving schools adopted the curriculum the foundations had specified. Rockefeller money — which was Standard Oil money — flowed to compliant institutions. The American Medical Association’s consultation clause prohibited its members from associating with practitioners outside the approved framework, creating a professional monopoly enforced by economic exclusion.
This is the anti-knowledge point. Flexner did not fill a gap in medical education. The gap did not exist. Many of the 162 schools operating in 1910 taught how the body actually heals — homeopathic, naturopathic, terrain-based traditions with functioning clinical practices and patient outcomes that outperformed the emerging pharmaceutical model. What Flexner destroyed was not ignorance but knowledge. What replaced it was not more knowledge but its inversion: a curriculum designed to suppress the body’s healing responses rather than support them. The distinction matters. A profession that lacks the knowledge to heal can be educated. A profession trained to do the opposite of what heals cannot be corrected without abandoning the training that constitutes it.
The model did not stay inside American borders. Flexner himself was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to conduct the same evaluation of European medical education in 1912. The Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division and its China Medical Board carried the template outward across the following decades, funding medical schools in England, Belgium, France, Brazil, Thailand, and China on the same pharmaceutical model, closing or defunding institutions that taught otherwise.¹⁰ The Peking Union Medical College, opened in 1921, became the pharmaceutical training center for East Asia. The World Health Organization, established in 1948, took over the export function internationally. By the middle of the twentieth century, every major medical school on the planet was training doctors on essentially the same curriculum.
John D. Rockefeller personally used homeopathic physicians for his own family throughout his life.¹¹ The man who understood terrain well enough to choose it for himself directed his foundations to fund only allopathic schools, at home and abroad. The framework that produces pharmaceutical dependency was profitable. Terrain medicine was not.
The consequences run through every medical school on the developed continents. Approximately two-thirds of American academic department chairs have financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies, a figure equivalent audits in the UK, Australia, Canada, and continental Europe have found to be broadly comparable.¹² The average medical student, whether in Boston or Manchester or Melbourne, receives roughly twenty contact hours of nutrition instruction across four years, less than one percent of classroom time.¹³ A doctor cannot teach what they were never taught. Taught that symptoms are the malfunction and that the body attacks itself, they prescribe drugs that suppress both. What the training installs is what the training produces.
Birth
The body knows how to birth. Every human being who has ever lived was produced by that process, mostly without medical management.
The training the modern obstetrician receives teaches management, extraction, and control. The process is broken into stages, each with an approved intervention. Consent is technically obtained, in labor, on a hospital bed, surrounded by people in scrubs speaking with confidence and urgency. It is not consent as most people understand the term.
Pitocin, synthetic oxytocin, is delivered by IV during the third stage of labor as a matter of routine.¹⁴ Cochrane reviews show it reduces hemorrhage rates in the overall population, but the absolute risk reduction in low-risk women is small: hundreds of women receive the drug to prevent one hemorrhage that would have occurred. Women who have experienced both physiological and pharmacological third stage describe them as fundamentally different. Natural contractions are productive. Synthetic contractions are violent and overwhelming. Sometimes the drug closes the cervix before the placenta has exited, at which point a doctor’s hand goes inside the uterus to remove the fragments manually.
Fundal massage — deep kneading pressure on the abdomen minutes after delivery — is administered by protocol despite evidence not supporting routine use; many women describe it as the most painful part of their birth. Controlled cord traction is standard. The placenta, left alone, releases in ten to thirty minutes with the mother in a state of physiological calm. Traction rushes what biology completes cleanly and can cause retained fragments that hemorrhage later.
None of these interventions is birth. Each opposes what the body is doing, delivered by a professional trained to consider the intervention a positive contribution.
Childhood
The body of a child clears through fever, discharge, rash, mucus, cough, vomiting, diarrhea, and skin eruption. Every acute episode is the terrain restoring itself. What passes through the child is the accumulated burden the child was carrying: dietary residue, environmental exposure, emotional load. The episode is not the disease. The episode is the resolution of the disease.
Training installs two responses. The first is injection: the introduction of foreign material, including heavy metals, industrial chemicals, and animal-derived proteins, into a body that has developed no method of eliminating them through the digestive tract, because the injection bypasses the digestive tract. The second is suppression: antipyretics for fever, antihistamines for discharge, topical steroids for skin eruption, antibiotics for whatever the acute episode has been diagnosed as.
The pediatric schedule delivers dozens of dose-equivalents of injected pharmaceutical products before the child reaches eighteen. The American schedule has risen from fewer than ten doses in the early 1980s to roughly seventy today. The Australian, British, and continental European schedules are broadly comparable, differing in specific brand names and timing but tracking the same trajectory over the same decades.¹⁵ Each addition is approved by national regulators who move between industry and agency.
The substrate has been photographed. Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari, materials scientists at the Italian National Council of Research, examined forty-four injectable vaccines under electron microscope in 2017 and found tungsten, lead, stainless steel, bismuth, gold, silver, cerium, and rare earth alloys. Nothing on any package insert declared any of it.¹⁶ Pediatric injections had the highest particle counts: Varilrix at 2,723 particles per twenty-microliter drop, Infanrix hexa at 1,821. The body has no enzymatic machinery for breaking down these metals. The particles do not biodegrade. They lodge.
Stanley Plotkin, called an indispensable authority on vaccines by Bill Gates, testified under oath in 2018 that his early vaccine trials had used orphans, mentally disabled children in institutions, and the babies of women in prison.¹⁷ Asked whether he had ethical concerns, he indicated that this was how it had been done. The Nuremberg Code, established after the war to prevent this specific category of medical practice, was not mentioned as a limiting factor in his career.
Roman Bystrianyk pulled the mortality data from archives that had not been digitized.¹⁸ Between 1850 and 1940, measles mortality in the industrialized world fell by 98 percent — the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Whooping cough deaths fell from over 1,000 per million children to fewer than 10 per million between 1850 and 1950, before the pertussis vaccine was in widespread use. Scarlet fever, for which no vaccine was ever deployed, declined at the same rate. The mortality collapse was driven by sanitation, nutrition, and clean water. Medical students see charts that begin in 1950, after the decline was complete.
The child is being loaded with substances the body will spend years attempting to sequester and eliminate. When acute episodes arise as the body attempts to clear the burden, the pediatrician suppresses them. The suppression drives the material deeper. Chronic conditions emerge. What is called childhood asthma, eczema, allergy, autism is in significant part the wake of this process. This is the substrate driving Garner’s gradient: 2.64 percent is what a child’s baseline looks like when the loading does not happen. 60 percent is what happens when it does.
The Pipeline
The man at fifty-five is asymptomatic. He walks into his annual checkup because his wife asked him to. He has no complaints. The physician orders a standard panel.
The cholesterol comes back at 225. The blood pressure reads 134/82. The fasting glucose is 108. Each number crosses a threshold. Each threshold has been progressively lowered by guideline panels whose members hold financial relationships with the manufacturers of the drugs used to treat the redefined condition. In 1988, a cholesterol of 240 was considered elevated; by 2001, the threshold was 200.¹⁹ In 2003, the American Diabetes Association lowered the pre-diabetes fasting glucose threshold to 100.²⁰ In 2017, the blood pressure threshold was lowered to 130/80, converting roughly thirty million Americans into hypertensive patients overnight.²¹ British, European, Australian, and Canadian panels typically adopt the American thresholds within a year or two.
The healthy man leaves the office with three prescriptions: a statin, an ACE inhibitor, metformin. Each drug produces the next diagnosis. The statin causes muscle symptoms in 7 to 29 percent of users;²² the aches are attributed to aging, the man walks less, his bone density declines, and a bisphosphonate is prescribed — a class linked to atypical femur fractures and osteonecrosis of the jaw. The ACE inhibitor produces a persistent cough in 10 to 15 percent of patients; it is switched to an ARB, which produces dizziness, which elevates fall risk. The metformin causes gastrointestinal symptoms in up to 25 percent of patients; these are addressed with another medication or attributed to irritable bowel syndrome, which becomes its own diagnostic pathway.
Every number the man’s body produced was information. Cholesterol delivers repair material to damaged blood vessels; blocking the delivery does not repair the vessels. Elevated blood pressure indicates the body is working harder to move blood through compromised tissue; blocking the pressure does not repair the tissue. Elevated glucose indicates the terrain is not processing carbohydrates effectively; blocking the glucose does not restore the processing. Each intervention addresses the signal, introduces new material the body must now cleanse, and produces effects that become the next diagnosis. The man is progressively poisoned by his own care.
The screening industry that generated the initial three thresholds operates continuously alongside the pharmacy. The distinction it buries is between disease-specific mortality and all-cause mortality: a screening program can reduce deaths from breast cancer while total deaths remain unchanged, because the treatment kills as many people as the disease prevented. Across the major screening programs, when all-cause mortality is calculated, the benefit largely disappears.²³
Behind the arithmetic sits a reservoir. Approximately 70 percent of men in their seventies have prostate cancer at autopsy, while only about 3 percent die from it. Up to 39 percent of middle-aged women show evidence of breast cancer at autopsy; lifetime risk of dying from it is under 4 percent. Polyps sit in half of older colons. Every screening test dips into this reservoir. Every person pulled from it becomes a patient who cannot benefit from treatment, because they were never at risk.²³
PSA testing has been called a public health disaster by Richard Ablin, the researcher who discovered the antigen.²⁴ For every man whose life is extended by PSA screening, estimates suggest 30 to 100 are overdiagnosed and treated with surgery or radiation. Impotence and incontinence are the price of the overtreatment. Mammography follows the same pattern: the Cochrane review found that for every 2,000 women screened over ten years, approximately one has her life extended and ten are treated unnecessarily for conditions that would never have progressed.²⁵ The colonoscopy case was decided in 2022 when the NEJM published the NordICC trial, the first randomized controlled study of colonoscopy screening ever conducted. It followed over 84,000 people for ten years and found no significant reduction in deaths from colorectal cancer.²⁶ The CT scan produces the cancers it looks for: a 2025 analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine projected that the 93 million CT scans performed in the United States in 2023 will cause approximately 103,000 future cancers, roughly 5 percent of all new cancer diagnoses each year.²⁷
The system is sustained, in significant part, by the people it overdiagnosed. Every woman treated for a non-progressing DCIS becomes, in her own telling, a survivor. Every man whose indolent prostate cancer was cut out becomes a testimonial at the next fundraiser. They believe the screening saved their lives, and they say so — to their families, their neighbors, and their parliaments. The screening programs’ most effective advocates are the people who never had the disease being screened for. They are not lying. The framework that taught them to be grateful cannot acknowledge the mistake without dismantling itself.²³
The pipeline captures the healthy adult and converts him into a chronic patient by treating the body’s signals as the malfunction.
The count is not small, and it is not confined to one country. Approximately 40 million Americans take statins; global prescriptions run to hundreds of millions. Approximately one million prostate biopsies are performed each year in the United States alone; between 0.5 and 2 percent produce sepsis.²⁸ Nearly 500,000 American women have been diagnosed and treated for DCIS since widespread mammography began, with proportionally similar figures from the UK, Australia, and continental Europe; the majority of those cancers would never have progressed. Peter Gøtzsche estimated prescription drugs to be the third leading cause of death in the industrialized world, at approximately 200,000 attributable American deaths per year. Barbara Starfield’s broader iatrogenic estimate ran to 225,000 American deaths when unnecessary surgery, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, and adverse drug effects were combined. Neither figure includes the deaths from heart disease and cancer whose upstream causation is the profession’s own framework. At the Gøtzsche rate, American medicine alone kills more Americans every year than the country lost in Vietnam, and more every two years than in World War II. Since 1910, at any defensible average of the annual rate, American medicine has killed more Americans than the country has lost in every war it has ever fought, combined. Applied globally, the iatrogenic death total across the century since Flexner runs into figures that no single war or genocide of the modern era approaches.²⁹
Chronic Illness
Multiple sclerosis is labeled autoimmune, incurable, and progressive. The words function together. Autoimmune assigns cause to the body itself, a self-attack whose origin cannot be investigated because it is defined as intrinsic. Incurable forecloses investigation of resolution. Progressive tells the patient what to expect and enrolls them in a lifetime of pharmaceutical management.
Hal Huggins found that MS patients who had mercury amalgams removed from their teeth showed elimination of specific protein bands in their cerebrospinal fluid that had been present before removal.³⁰ The bands were the establishment’s own laboratory markers. Their disappearance corresponded to clinical improvement. The finding was not integrated into treatment protocols. Herbert Shelton described the mechanism a century ago.³¹ The body attempts to expel accumulated toxic burden through acute symptoms; pharmaceutical intervention suppresses the symptoms and adds new toxic material; the new material triggers new symptoms, which are suppressed in turn. What medicine calls progressive disease is the predictable consequence of continuous poisoning combined with continuous suppression.
The financial architecture rewards the labeling. Chronic Care Management billing codes provide recurring monthly reimbursement for conditions expected to last at least twelve months. MS drugs cost fifty-seven to ninety-three thousand dollars per year. A 2025 JAMA Network Open study found pharmaceutical companies paid $164 million to doctors treating MS patients between 2015 and 2019, and physicians who received these payments prescribed the paying companies’ drugs at higher rates.³²
The words the doctor uses are physiologically active. A 1983 British trial divided over 400 cancer patients into three groups; two received chemotherapy, the third received saline. Among the 130 patients who believed they were receiving chemotherapy but were actually getting salt water, 31 percent developed hair loss, 35 percent nausea, and 22 percent vomiting.³³ The side effects they expected produced themselves. A meta-analysis of 130 studies covering 8,219 participants found the nocebo effect clinically significant across somatic and affective outcomes.³⁴ In 1992, a man diagnosed with metastatic esophageal cancer died within weeks of his prognosis. His autopsy found a single two-centimeter nodule on his liver. There was no metastatic spread. His doctor stated the pathological cause of death could not be determined.³⁵ The expectation killed him.
When a doctor tells a twenty-five-year-old that his condition is incurable and progressive, the doctor is administering an intervention. It has no informed consent form, no adverse event reporting system. It is delivered with authority to a patient trained since childhood to trust that authority. It measurably worsens outcomes. Neither the doctor nor the patient recognizes it as an intervention at all.
The Specialties
The inversion runs across every branch of medicine. Two specialties demonstrate it with unusual clarity.
Psychiatry invented the diseases it treats. The chemical imbalance theory of depression, offered as biological fact to millions of patients, was never demonstrated in the research literature. Kenneth Kendler, coeditor of Psychological Medicine, wrote in a 2005 editorial that the search for neurochemical explanations of psychiatric disorders had failed to produce the biological markers the field had promised.³⁶ Robert Whitaker’s investigation of American disability data found psychiatric disability rose sixfold between 1955 and 2007 — a curve that inverts what any real treatment would produce. Martin Harrow’s fifteen-year NIMH follow-up of schizophrenia patients found 40 percent of those who stopped taking antipsychotics were in recovery at fifteen years, against 5 percent of those who remained on medication. The FDA’s 2004 meta-analysis of pediatric antidepressant trials found children on the drugs showed twice the rate of suicidal thinking and behavior compared with placebo.³⁶
Dentistry runs the same inversion on the mouth. No dental school in the United States has a preventive specialty; the American Dental Association has been asked to establish one and declined. Weston Price, who chaired the ADA’s research section from 1914 to 1928, documented in the 1930s that fourteen isolated populations on traditional diets showed decay in less than one percent of teeth examined, and that the same populations one generation after the introduction of refined flour and sugar showed decay in thirty to sixty percent. Ralph Steinman’s laboratory work at Loma Linda established that teeth are hydraulic systems governed by an endocrine signal from the hypothalamus, and that sugar reverses the fluid flow, pulling debris inward through microscopic tubules. The bacteria on the tooth surface are not the cause of the cavity; they are pulled in by the reversal of the flow that should have carried them out. Silver amalgam fillings are approximately fifty percent mercury by weight and release vapor for the life of the filling. Ninety-two percent of American adults have had caries. The specialty that could prevent it does not exist because the profession that repairs it cannot fund itself by graduating dentists who advise patients to eat liver and pastured butter.³⁷
Death
Dying used to happen at home. Within living memory, most people died surrounded by family, in their own beds. The process was understood as natural — not comfortable, not painless, not medicalized.
The condition that brings the person into the ICU is often the accumulated wake of substrate delivered by the same profession decades earlier. The terminal cancer at eighty-three is not the natural end of a long life. It is the destination of a trajectory that began with the injection at age two and was compounded across the decades by pharmaceuticals administered for signals the body was sending.
Roughly half of Americans now die in hospitals or nursing facilities.³⁸ The proportions in the UK, Australia, Canada, and continental Europe are comparable. End-of-life spending absorbs between 13 and 25 percent of Medicare program costs, with equivalent audits of the NHS and Australian and Canadian systems showing similar concentrations.³⁹ Chemotherapy administered within two weeks of death — treatment that cannot extend life meaningfully and almost certainly worsens its quality — happens to a measurable percentage of cancer patients across every industrialized nation with a functioning oncology system.
The system does not have a protocol for stopping. It has protocols for doing. Intubating, resuscitating, monitoring, medicating, scanning, testing. The treatment produces complications. The complications produce further treatment. The question “should we continue treating?” is structurally difficult to ask in an environment designed around the assumption that treatment is always the answer.
The dying body is completing a process. The training the ICU physician received teaches indefinite postponement of the ending, not comfort, not honest acknowledgment, not permission to stop. The final weeks of a life become the most medically intensive and most expensive weeks of the lifespan. What is billed for is not the extension of life. It is the extension of dying.
The Tell
If the inversion were ignorance, healers would be welcomed. They are punished instead. The system’s behavior toward its healers is what distinguishes ignorance from inversion.
In 2023, Myhill was suspended for nine months for recommending ascorbic acid, cholecalciferol, iodine, and ivermectin for the condition attributed to COVID-19. The Tribunal stated that her recommendations undermined public health. Erasure from the register was rejected on the grounds that it would “deprive the public of an otherwise good doctor with over 30 years’ experience.”⁴⁰
A doctor whose patients improve. A protocol that addresses cellular metabolism rather than suppressing symptoms. Recommendations that cost pennies compared to pharmaceutical management. Investigated more than thirty times, not for harming patients, but for undermining the paradigm that requires her patients’ conditions to remain incurable.
The pattern is not new. Semmelweis was destroyed in 1847 for observing that his colleagues were killing patients. Lown was met with Nazi salutes in the 1950s. Myhill’s case is contemporary. If the training were simply incomplete, healers would fill the gap. If the pharmaceutical approach were the best available given current knowledge, alternatives would be welcomed as data emerged. Neither is what happens. Terrain medicine schools were closed by Flexner, terrain practitioners are stripped of their licenses, and the doctors whose patients improve most reliably become the doctors most reliably prosecuted. The system knows the right answer well enough to recognize its practitioners and exclude them.
The Kitchen
Every ordinary childhood illness that now fills pediatric waiting rooms was managed at home by mothers and grandmothers for centuries before the pediatrician existed. What they used is still on the shelf. Honey for the cough — in a University of Pennsylvania trial, honey outperformed dextromethorphan for nighttime cough in children over one.⁴¹ Salt water gargles for the sore throat. A warm compress on the ear; four out of five acute middle ear inflammations resolve on their own within three days, per Cochrane review.⁴¹ Ginger and garlic. Broth. Sunlight, water, rest, warmth, sleep. The kitchen holds most of the toolkit. What the toolkit does not hold, the yard and the sun do.
The mechanism is single. The terrain is the patient. The interventions are supportive: they give the terrain what it needs to complete the clearing that the symptoms represent. Fever is metabolic heat that speeds the clearing; give water and rest. Cough is the airway expelling debris; give honey and warmth. Vomiting and diarrhea are the fastest routes the body has for emptying itself; give broth and time. Skin eruptions are the terrain pushing outward; keep the skin clean and let the clearing happen.
Recovery times have not changed. A cold takes about a week. The flu takes ten days. What the pharmaceutical era added to these timelines was not speed. It added the toxicity of the intervention on top of the illness that was already going to resolve.
The kitchen table works the other way as well.
The Kitchen Table Again
The parent’s hand goes to the cabinet. The bottle is red and white. The child’s fever is 102.4. Behind the parent’s hand stands the doctor. Behind the doctor stand the medical school, the Flexner Report, the Rockefeller money that funded it, and the pharmaceutical industry that has become one of the largest industries on the planet.
The parent does not need to understand any of this in the moment. The parent needs to know one thing. The fever is the operation. The intervention interrupts the operation. Leave the child alone. Offer water. Offer rest. Do not administer the drug that opposes what the body has decided to do.
Every choice a parent makes for a child eventually becomes a choice the child makes for themselves. The child learns whether the body is trustworthy or whether the body is the enemy. That lesson accumulates across a childhood and shapes every medical decision the child will make as an adult. Multiplied across the pediatric schedule, the annual physical, the first prescription, the first surgical referral, the first diagnosis of chronic illness — by the time the person arrives in the ICU at eighty-three, the pattern is complete. The final capture is the destination of a trajectory that began with the red and white bottle.
The parent chooses. The neighbor does not. The pediatrician down the street does not. Every industrialized country’s institutions are now hostile in essentially the same way, because the training that produced those institutions came from essentially the same source. The choice remains available. It has never been popular. It is the difference between the 2.64 percent and the 60 percent. It is the difference between the profession that heals and the profession that has become the first leading cause of death.
The One-Minute Elevator Explanation
The doctor is trained to do the opposite of what heals. When the body raises a fever to clear an illness, the doctor gives a drug to lower the fever. When cholesterol rises to repair damaged blood vessels, the doctor gives a statin to block it. When the body signals distress through blood pressure or blood sugar, the doctor blocks the signals without addressing what produced them.
This is not a gap in the doctor’s education. It is the doctor’s education. In 1910, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded the Flexner Report, which closed the American medical schools teaching how the body heals and standardized every surviving school on the pharmaceutical model. The Rockefeller Foundation then exported the same template across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Every industrialized country’s medical schools now train on essentially the same curriculum. Rockefeller himself kept homeopathic doctors for his own family.
The result runs across a lifetime. In childhood, the pediatric schedule injects dozens of doses of products that contain undeclared tungsten, lead, stainless steel, and rare earth alloys the body cannot break down. In adulthood, the annual checkup pulls asymptomatic people into pharmacy pipelines that produce the very conditions the next round of screening will identify. In chronic illness, the same profession that produced the damage names it autoimmune. In dying, the ICU postpones the ending until the bills exhaust the estate.
Joy Garner’s Control Group Survey found chronic disease in the fully unvaccinated at 2.64 percent. In the vaccinated it runs at 60 percent.
If this were ignorance, healers would be welcomed. They are not. Semmelweis was destroyed in 1847 for observing that his colleagues were killing patients. Sarah Myhill has been investigated more than thirty times, not because her patients complained but because they got better.
The doctor is not the third leading cause of death. The doctor is the first.
If you want to follow this, read Malcolm Kendrick on heart disease, Thomas Cowan on cancer and the water body of the cell, and Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk on the mortality data.
How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old
Your body knows how to get better when you are sick. When you get a fever, your body is making itself warmer to fix what is wrong. When you cough, your body is pushing something out. When your skin gets red and itchy, your body is sending the bad stuff outside where it can leave.
Doctors go to school for a long time. But most of what they learn is how to make the fever go away, how to stop the cough, how to make the itchy skin stop being itchy. When the body is working to get better and the doctor stops the body from working, the sickness cannot finish. So it stays.
Doctors also give shots. The shots have tiny pieces of metal in them, too small for your eyes to see. Your body knows how to clean up food and dirt. It does not know how to clean up metal. So the metal stays inside, and where it stays, the body gets sick.
Most doctors are kind people who thought they were going to help. But their school did not teach them how the body heals. They are doing what they were taught. What they were taught is not what makes you better.
When something bad happens to your body, the best thing is usually to let the body do what it knows how to do. Rest. Water. Warm blankets. Good food when you are ready. Time.
There are some doctors who know this. But the other doctors get very angry at them and try to take away their license. That is how you know the other doctors know these good doctors are right. If they were wrong, no one would care.
References
General Medical Council. Records of investigations against Dr Sarah Myhill, 2001–2023, obtained by Freedom of Information Act request and compiled at drmyhill.co.uk. The Tom Kark QC statement is drawn from the 2010 Interim Orders Panel hearing transcript.
Garner, J. Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated. Control Group Survey, 2020. See also thecontrolgroup.org for methodology and state-level breakdown.
Unbekoming. “The Primary Cause: An Essay on One Impost, Three Shadows.” Lies are Unbekoming, July 2026. The attributable-fraction calculation is developed in the section titled The Numbers.
Kendrick, M. The Clot Thickens: The Enduring Mystery of Heart Disease. Columbus Publishing, 2021. Kendrick, M. The Great Cholesterol Con. John Blake Publishing, 2008. Ravnskov, U. The Cholesterol Myths. NewTrends Publishing, 2000.
Unbekoming. “The Mechanics of Stable Falsehood: An Essay.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025. The convergent-opportunism framework is developed in Sections IV and X, drawing on Paul Collits. The Bernard Lown case is drawn from Malcolm Kendrick’s account, cited in that essay. The Sinclair maxim is from Sinclair, U. I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. University of California Press, 1935.
Case, A., Deaton, A. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2020. See also National Center for Health Statistics, “Mortality in the United States, 2018,” NCHS Data Brief No. 355, 2020, and subsequent NCHS annual updates documenting the American life expectancy decline that began in 2014 and continued through the pre-COVID period.
Semmelweis, I. P. Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers [The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever]. C. A. Hartleben, 1861.
Flexner, A. Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. 4, 1910.
Brown, E. R. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979.
Brown, E. R. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979, Chapters 5-7 for the international export of the Flexner model. See also Farley, J. To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951). Oxford University Press, 2004; and Bu, L. Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century. Praeger, 2003, for the China Medical Board and the Peking Union Medical College. The Carnegie Foundation commissioned Flexner’s European survey, published as Flexner, A. Medical Education in Europe. Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. 6, 1912.
Bealle, M. A. The Drug Story: A Factological History of America’s $10,000,000,000 Drug Cartel. Columbia Publishing, 1949. Rockefeller’s use of homeopathic physicians is discussed throughout, drawing on the diaries and correspondence of the Rockefeller family physicians.
Campbell, E. G., et al. “Institutional academic-industry relationships.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 298(15): 1779–1786, 2007.
Adams, K. M., Kohlmeier, M., Zeisel, S. H. “Nutrition education in U.S. medical schools: latest update of a national survey.” Academic Medicine, 85(9): 1537–1542, 2010.
Begley, C. M., Gyte, G. M. L., Devane, D., McGuire, W., Weeks, A. “Active versus expectant management for women in the third stage of labour.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 2, 2019.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, current year, compared with 1983 schedule. Historical comparison compiled by the National Vaccine Information Center. Dose counts vary by counting methodology; the figures here reflect the NVIC compilation counting all recommended pediatric doses including boosters and annual influenza injections through age eighteen.
Gatti, A. M., Montanari, S. “New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro- and Nanocontamination.” International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination, 4(1): 00072, 2017.
Deposition of Stanley A. Plotkin, M.D., taken in Doe v. Doe, Court of Common Pleas, Michigan, January 11, 2018. Transcript widely available; excerpts published by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense.
Humphries, S., Bystrianyk, R. Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History. CreateSpace, 2013. See also dissolvingillusions.com for the underlying mortality graphs drawn from U.S. Vital Statistics and UK historical mortality records.
National Cholesterol Education Program. Third Report of the Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults (ATP III). National Institutes of Health, 2001. Compared with the 1988 ATP I guidelines.
Genuth, S., et al. “Follow-up report on the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus.” Diabetes Care, 26(11): 3160–3167, 2003.
Whelton, P. K., et al. “2017 ACC/AHA/AAPA/ABC/ACPM/AGS/APhA/ASH/ASPC/NMA/PCNA Guideline for the Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Management of High Blood Pressure in Adults.” Hypertension, 71(6): e13–e115, 2018.
Bruckert, E., Hayem, G., Dejager, S., Yau, C., Bégaud, B. “Mild to moderate muscular symptoms with high-dosage statin therapy in hyperlipidemic patients — the PRIMO Study.” Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy, 19: 403–414, 2005. Higher-end figure from patient-reported outcome studies including the STOMP trial and USAGE survey.
Unbekoming. “The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find: An Essay on Threshold Manipulation, Overdiagnosis, Cascades, and the Markers That Aren’t What They Claim.” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026. The disease-specific vs all-cause mortality distinction, the autopsy reservoir data, and the survivor-as-advocate mechanism are developed across the essay’s four groups. Primary sources for the autopsy reservoir figures include Welch, H. G. Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why. University of California Press, 2004; and Welch, H. G., Schwartz, L., Woloshin, S. Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. Beacon Press, 2011.
Ablin, R. J. “The Great Prostate Mistake.” The New York Times, Op-Ed, March 9, 2010. Extended in Ablin, R. J., Piana, R. The Great Prostate Hoax: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Gøtzsche, P. C., Jørgensen, K. J. “Screening for breast cancer with mammography.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 6, 2013.
Bretthauer, M., Løberg, M., Wieszczy, P., et al. “Effect of colonoscopy screening on risks of colorectal cancer and related death.” New England Journal of Medicine, 387(17): 1547–1556, 2022.
Smith-Bindman, R., Chu, P. W., Azman Firdaus, H., et al. “Projected lifetime cancer risks from current computed tomography imaging.” JAMA Internal Medicine, published online April 2025.
Loeb, S., Vellekoop, A., Ahmed, H. U., et al. “Systematic review of complications of prostate biopsy.” European Urology, 64(6): 876–892, 2013. See also Unbekoming, “The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find,” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026, for the fuller catalog including statin utilization (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), DCIS overdiagnosis figures (Bleyer & Welch, NEJM 2012), and the harm arithmetic across the major screening programs.
Gøtzsche, P. C. Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. Radcliffe Publishing, 2013, for the ~200,000 US annual iatrogenic death estimate. Starfield, B. “Is US health really the best in the world?” Journal of the American Medical Association, 284(4): 483–485, 2000, for the 225,000 estimate covering combined iatrogenic causes including unnecessary surgery, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, and adverse drug effects. US war death totals compiled from US Department of Defense casualty statistics and Congressional Research Service reports: American Revolution (~4,435), War of 1812 (~2,260), Mexican-American War (~13,283), Civil War (~620,000), Spanish-American War (~2,446), World War I (~116,516), World War II (~405,399), Korean War (~36,574), Vietnam War (~58,220), Persian Gulf War (~383), Iraq War (~4,431), Afghanistan War (~2,459). Total US war deaths across the country’s history: approximately 1.35 million.
Huggins, H. A. It’s All in Your Head: The Link Between Mercury Amalgams and Illness. Avery Publishing, 1993. The CSF protein band findings are discussed in Chapter 4.
Shelton, H. M. Human Life: Its Philosophy and Laws. Health Research, various editions from 1928. The acute-to-chronic progression mechanism is developed across Shelton’s collected works, particularly The Hygienic System series.
Bove, R., et al. “Financial Payments from the Pharmaceutical Industry to Neurologists Treating Multiple Sclerosis and Prescribing Patterns.” JAMA Network Open, 2025. Chronic Care Management billing figures from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data compiled by AAFP practice analysis.
Fielding, J. W. L., Fagg, S. L., Jones, B., et al. “An interim report of a prospective, randomized, controlled study of adjuvant chemotherapy in operable gastric cancer: British Stomach Cancer Group.” World Journal of Surgery, 7(3): 390–399, 1983. See also Roytas, D. Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments. Independently published, 2024, for the placebo/nocebo cancer-trial data compiled from this and related studies.
Petersen, G. L., Finnerup, N. B., Colloca, L., et al. “The magnitude of nocebo effects in pain: a meta-analysis.” Pain, 155(8): 1426–1434, 2014.
Meador, C. K. “Hex Death: Voodoo Magic or Persuasion?” Southern Medical Journal, 85(3): 244–247, 1992.
Unbekoming. “The Top 10 Myths of Modern Psychiatry: An Essay.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025. Primary sources include Whitaker, R. Anatomy of an Epidemic. Broadway Books, 2010; Breggin, P. R. Toxic Psychiatry. St. Martin’s Press, 1991; Harrow, M., Jobe, T. H. “Factors involved in outcome and recovery in schizophrenia patients not on antipsychotic medications.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195: 406–414, 2007; the FDA 2004 meta-analysis of pediatric antidepressant trials; and Kendler, K. S. “Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 162: 433–440, 2005.
Unbekoming. “12 Things Your Dentist Was Trained Not to Tell You: An Essay on the Profession Trained for Repair, Not Prevention.” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026. Primary sources include Price, W. A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1939; Meinig, G. E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Bion Publishing, 1998; Nara, R. O., Mariner, S. A. Money by the Mouthful. Oramedics International Press, 1979; Steinman, R. R., Leonora, J. “Relationship of fluid transport through the dentin to the incidence of dental caries.” Journal of Dental Research, 50, 1971.
Cross, S. H., Warraich, H. J. “Changes in the Place of Death in the United States.” New England Journal of Medicine, 381: 2369–2370, 2019. Institutional deaths (hospital plus nursing facility) accounted for approximately half of American deaths in 2017 (29.8% hospital, 20.8% nursing facility).
Lubitz, J. D., Riley, G. F. “Trends in Medicare payments in the last year of life.” New England Journal of Medicine, 328(15): 1092–1096, 1993, for the higher end of the range. French, E. B., et al. “End-of-life medical spending in last twelve months of life is lower than previously reported.” Health Affairs, 36(7): 1211–1217, 2017, for the lower end. The range reflects genuine methodological disagreement about how end-of-life spending is measured and attributed.
Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service. Determination on Dr Sarah Myhill, 2023. Full text available through the MPTS decision archive.
Paul, I. M., et al. “Effect of honey, dextromethorphan, and no treatment on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 161(12): 1140–1146, 2007. Venekamp, R. P., et al. “Antibiotics for acute otitis media in children.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 6, 2015. Rovers, M. M., et al. “Antibiotics for acute otitis media: a meta-analysis with individual patient data.” Lancet, 368(9545): 1429–1435, 2006.
This essay draws on the framework developed across the Unbekoming library, including The Unvaccinated (2026), Medicalized Motherhood (2026), The Screening Trap (2026), Chronic Conditions (2026), Heart Disease Reconsidered (2025), and The Architecture of Deception (2025). Readers who find the argument here compelling will find the evidence developed in greater depth in those volumes.
At least one sailor was killed and another injured in a Ukrainian strike on a cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea, the Iranian Foreign Ministry has said, denouncing the attack as an act of aggression and warning of potential retaliation.
The drone attack was publicized on Saturday by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, who bragged on X about achieving “very strong results with long‑range strikes in the Caspian Sea.” The strikes affected “vessels used in military cargo shipments involving Iran, as well as a warship,” Zelensky claimed on X.
Tehran responded to the incident later in the day, confirming its commercial vessel came under the “Ukrainian regime’s attack” in the landlocked waterway. The strike killed one sailor aboard the vessel and wounded another one, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement without providing any details on the extent of the damage sustained by the ship.
The ministry condemned the attack as an act of aggression that “risks further fueling and expanding the flames of war.” It urged other nations to take a “responsible stance toward this reckless action by the Ukrainian regime” and hold its leadership accountable.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will not hesitate to protect its national interests and security. It is clear that the responsibility for the consequences of the Ukrainian regime leader’s adventurism will lie entirely with that regime, as well as its backers and instigators,” the ministry warned.
The ministry reiterated that “Iran has never intervened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” while arguing that Kiev’s actions show it has been “dangerously seeking to spread war and instability.” Ukraine has repeatedly accused Tehran of supporting Moscow in the hostilities, namely by supplying it with assorted drones and missiles.
While Moscow and Tehran have never attempted to hide their close cooperation, which is governed by bilateral agreements, both have dismissed the Ukrainian claims regarding large-scale arms shipments. While the Russian Geran-2 and the Iranian Shahed-136 UAVs do bear distinctive similarities, both, as well as analogous drones fielded by multiple countries, including the US in recent years, are inspired by the Dornier DAR drone developed in West Germany in the mid-1980s.
Kiev has actively tried to become involved in the Middle East conflict triggered by the US-Israeli attack on Iran earlier this year. The Ukrainian leadership has claimed to have secured deals with Gulf states to provide them with specialists and technology to counter Iranian drones and is hoping to secure additional anti-aircraft systems and munitions in exchange.
More than 200 Ukrainian military experts have been deployed to the Middle East under the deals, according to Zelensky. Ultimately, the group reportedly sustained personnel casualties and equipment damage in an Iranian strike on a depot in Dubai during the first wave of active hostilities in the region. Kiev has denied the incident took place.
In the occupied West Bank, the story often starts too late.
It starts when an Israeli settler is killed, injured, or frightened. It starts when Israeli officials speak, when the army enters Palestinian villages, and when headlines describe a “clash” or a “terror attack”. Suddenly, the settler becomes the victim, the Palestinian village becomes the threat, and the occupation disappears from the story.
But Nablus cannot be understood from the middle of the story.
For years, Palestinian villages around Nablus have lived under daily pressure: land seizures, settlement expansion, military raids, road closures, intimidation, and settler violence.
This is not a normal conflict between two equal communities. It is a system where one side expands with weapons, army protection, and state support, while the other side is expected to remain silent.
That is why the recent events of yesterday near Nablus cannot simply be called a “clash”. The word sounds neutral, but the reality is not neutral. A clash suggests two equal sides. But there is no equality between armed settlers living on occupied land and Palestinians living in villages surrounded by settlements, checkpoints, and military control.
Of course, individual settlers can suffer. Death is death. Fear is fear. No human pain should be mocked or ignored. But the pain of one incident cannot erase the larger reality. A settler can be a victim in one moment, while still being part of a wider system that causes fear, dispossession, and daily suffering for Palestinians.
This is the contradiction: the executioner becomes the victim only when the story is cut away from its history.
When the headline begins with Israeli pain, Palestinian pain becomes invisible. The settler becomes a civilian under attack. The Palestinian becomes a security threat. The settlement becomes a neighbourhood. The occupied village becomes a battlefield. The army becomes “protection”. Resistance becomes “terrorism”. And the occupation, which created this whole reality, disappears.
This is not by accident. This is how power protects itself.
The settlement movement has always tried to make its presence in the West Bank look normal. It wants the world to see settlers as ordinary residents, not as people living inside a political project built on occupied land. It wants attacks on Palestinians to look like isolated events, while every Palestinian reaction is used to say that Palestinians are violent and must be controlled.
But the truth is simple: a system built on domination cannot bring security.
It can bring temporary control. It can create fear. It can silence people for a while. It can build walls, checkpoints, settler roads, and military zones. But it cannot bring peace. When land is taken, when homes are attacked, when settlers enter Palestinian villages, and when the army protects one side only, violence is not an accident. It becomes part of the system.
This does not mean every settler carries the same guilt. It does not mean every Israeli death should be dismissed. It means that individual suffering should not be used to hide collective power. The victimhood of the settler cannot be used to erase the long victimhood of the occupied.
Yet this is what often happens.
The Palestinian is asked to explain his anger. The settler is rarely asked to explain why he is there. The village is asked to condemn violence. The settlement is rarely asked to justify its existence. The occupied are told to stay calm, while the occupier calls control “security”.
That is why the phrase “when the executioner becomes the victim” matters. It is not a denial of human pain. It is a refusal to forget the political reality.
A settler killed in one incident may be a victim of that incident. But the settlement project remains a machine of dispossession. The grief of one Israeli family does not erase the daily fear of Palestinian families living beside armed settlers, checkpoints, and expanding settlements. One tragic day does not erase decades of occupation.
Nablus shows this clearly. The more Israel protects settlements, the more tension it creates. The more settlers expand, the more Palestinian space shrinks. The more Palestinian life is controlled, the more resistance becomes likely. Then, when violence erupts, Israel presents itself as surprised, as if it had no role in creating the conditions.
This is the oldest trick of domination: create the wound, then cry when the wound bleeds.
The question after Nablus is not only who fired first. That question matters, but it is not enough. The deeper question is: who built the reality where armed settlers, occupied villages, military raids, and daily humiliation became normal?
Who allowed settlers to move through Palestinian land with confidence, while Palestinians move through their own land with fear? Who turned settlements into protected facts, and villages into security zones? Who decided that Palestinian life could be restricted every day, then acted shocked when this reality produced violence?
Until these questions are answered, every incident will be treated as a beginning, when it is actually only another consequence.
When the executioner becomes the victim, the world must be careful. It must see human pain, but it must also see the political structure. It must mourn the dead, but it must not forget the system that keeps producing death.
Because the real tragedy is not only that people die. The real tragedy is that occupation creates the conditions for death, then asks the world to feel sorry when those conditions return to its own doorstep.
Beijing prohibited 14 EU companies from obtaining Chinese dual-use goods on 24 July, targeting Europe’s defense industry shortly after the EU included 14 Chinese and Hong Kong firms in its 21st sanctions package against Russia.
Announcing the measures with immediate effect, the Chinese Commerce Ministry called the bloc’s conduct “egregious” and demanded the EU “immediately correct its wrongdoing, eliminate the egregious impact, and safeguard the overall interests of China–EU relations with concrete actions.”
The restrictions cover dual-use items, goods, software, and technology with both civilian and military applications, including rare earth elements used to build drones and chips.
Parties outside China are also barred from transferring Chinese-origin dual-use goods to any listed entity, though exporters may request permission in exceptional cases or when a shipment is deemed “truly necessary.”
Rheinmetall leads the list, alongside Polish electronics producer Vigo Photonics, Italian electric motor manufacturer Lafert, French drone developer Cavok UAS, Czech truckmaker Tatra, Dutch naval engineering firm IHC Merwede, and several optics and laser companies.
Germany and France each have three entries, Italy and Poland each have two, and the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania each have one.
China’s mission to the EU lodged a formal protest, voicing “strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition” to the measures and rejecting attempts by the bloc to place responsibility for the war in Ukraine on Beijing.
It added that China “firmly opposes the EU’s unwarranted listing and sanctioning of Chinese companies and citizens.”
The 21st package subjected 51 entities to tighter export curbs on dual-use goods and technologies over their support for Russia’s military and industrial complex.
Companies based in India, Turkiye, and the UAE were listed alongside those from mainland China and Hong Kong.
Brussels targeted small trade and logistics operators in port cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dalian, while Beijing focused on Europe’s defense industry.
Cui Hongjian, a former diplomat who heads European studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the South China Morning Post (SCMP) that the disparity does not make the response any less reciprocal from Beijing’s perspective, noting that successive EU packages have named far more Chinese firms overall than China has named in return.
“Since this whole episode arose from the Russia-Ukraine war, I think it’s understandable that China is now pointing its retaliation at Rheinmetall,” Cui said. “From Beijing’s point of view, if it’s going to retaliate, the retaliation has to bite.”
European Union leaders imposed yet another raft of sanctions on the Russian Federation this week. This is the 21st package of political and economic strictures that the 27-nation bloc has deployed against Russia over the past four years.
The EU sanctimoniously claims that the measures are a demonstration of rebuke for Russia’s alleged unprovoked aggression and invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
This pretense of European principle is farcical.
Anyone who has objectively studied the Ukraine conflict knows that the United States and its European NATO partners incited the war by orchestrating the violent coup in Kiev in 2014, followed by the deliberate weaponizing of the NeoNazi regime that the Western imperialists covertly directed for a geopolitical confrontation with Russia. That many people aren’t aware of that history is largely due to the brainwashing propaganda of the Western media.
The EU’s sanctions policy is therefore properly understood as economic warfare, and as supplementary to a larger military strategy to defeat Russia. It is part of “Total War,” as a former French finance minister clumsily admitted in March, 2022.
While the NATO-armed Ukrainian regime steps up long-range air strikes deep in Russia in an attempt to damage oil and gas infrastructure and the Russian economy, the EU’s sanctions are aimed at achieving the same objective.
This has nothing to do with using trade and financial measures to show political and moral support for Ukraine as an alleged victim of Russian aggression. It is all about maximising confrontation with Russia to defeat it.
The use of unilateral sanctions is illegal under international law and expressly prohibited by the United Nations Charter. They constitute a form of criminal aggression. The EU is in criminal violation of international law, as is the U.S., which also blatantly wields sanctions to intimidate other nations, currently 30, including Russia, China, Iran and Cuba.
In any case, the EU’s policy meets the definition of insanity, as manifested by repeating a futile action multiple times and expecting a different result.
Russia is arguably the most sanctioned country in the world given the 21 rounds that the EU has fired and the hundreds of banks and other businesses that it has targeted. Yet Russia’s economy has not buckled, as desired.
Even more insanely, it is the European economies that have suffered grievously from the self-imposed exclusion of trade and business with Russia, particularly the loss of affordable energy supplies. The EU is rapidly deindustrializing due to soaring economic costs. Germany, once the economic powerhouse of Europe, is crippled as it imports more expensive American fuel in place of the traditional Russian supplies which historically underpinned Europe’s industries.
European citizens – a combined population of 500 million – are hit with a calamitous cost-of-living crisis that in large measure is caused by the sanctions policy of their political leaders. These so-called leaders are decimating their own economies and societies.
The bankruptcy is political and moral. The strains are showing within EU member nations, as seen from the wrangling and watering down of the latest round of sanctions. Several countries were clamoring for exemptions to limit damage to their national interests.
Greece wanted waivers on restrictions over its international shipping of Russian oil and gas. Germany and Portugal wanted exemptions from sanctions on Russian fisheries. Austria, Bulgaria, France, and Italy also appealed for curbing prohibitions to protect their various interests.
As Euronewsheadlined: “Chaotic sanctions negotiations expose cracks in EU front versus Russia.”
The outlet reported that the collective policy is starting to harm national interests, which is leading to infighting among the EU members.
“It’s getting more and more difficult to find common ground. We saw that this week,” said one diplomat about the fractious negotiations.
Another diplomat commented: “The [European] Commission [the EU’s executive branch] is running out of options for what to include. It has to become more creative, and every package is more complex and takes longer to negotiate.”
In other words, the policymakers in Brussels are insolvent from failing political ideas over their illegal sanctions. They are also politically bankrupt because these elitist, Russophobic officials are making European citizens suffer severe economic consequences without any democratic mandate. They are imposing a ruinous policy like a dictatorship, one that is aggravating tensions and hostilities towards all-out war.
European elites have caused two world wars already over the past century; they seem to be driving a third one.
But here is the kicker: this insane policy is a total fraud. It is bereft of any supposed righteousness or avowed concern for Ukraine and the defense of democracy.
The hypocrisy is glaringly exposed by the European Union’s indifference to war crimes that the United States and the Israeli regime are perpetrating on a massive scale.
As former European Members of Parliament Mick Wallace and Clare Daly pointed out this week, the EU leadership has said nothing about the United States waging a war of aggression against Iran now in its fifth month. Thousands of Iranians have been killed by American and Israeli bombing, and U.S. President Donald Trump is repeatedly making genocidal threats to destroy the nation, diabolically hinting at the use of nuclear weapons.
On the other side of the world, as Wallace and Daly also note, thousands of children in Cuba are being starved to death under a maximum blockade on the island country by Washington. The EU has made not the slightest criticism of the U.S., never mind any condemnation of this barbarism.
This week, as European elites were drawing up their 21st round of dubious sanctions on Russia, the same officials declined to issue any sanctions against the Israeli regime for its ongoing genocide against Palestinians, a genocide enabled by the U.S. and, it has to be said, by European countries trading with Israel.
The double standard of the EU leadership is not just idiotic duplicity. It is proof of its political and moral bankruptcy and systemic fraud. There was a time when some European politicians would speak out to oppose U.S. wars and crimes. Not anymore. The entire European political class is putrid from corruption and complicity.
On so many levels, the EU sanctions on Russia are self-defeating. The ultimate defeat is the fatal corrosion of its own institutions and abject lack of authority. European politicians are delegitimizing themselves and their claim to govern. People of Europe and around the world can see what the EU has become: an elitist warmongering project that is sacrificing its own citizens.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei has dismissed European Union claims of concern for human rights in Iran as “sheer hypocrisy,” criticizing remarks by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas regarding what she described as “human rights concerns” in the country.
Baghaei questioned how the EU’s professed commitment to human rights could be reconciled with its provision of logistical and technical support for deadly attacks “deliberately targeting the Iranian people, including civilians and vital national infrastructure,” according to the statement.
The spokesman noted that the EU has refrained from condemning “the most obvious war crimes” and has not expressed any sympathy for Iranian children killed by US and Israeli bombs and missiles, “the execution of which has been made possible by European logistical and technical support.”
Baghaei concluded by saying that this stance “is not just a loss of credibility, but a trivialization of evil and the most obvious form of hypocrisy.”
European Union announces new sanctions on Iran
On July 24, 2026, the European Union imposed new restrictive measures on five Iranian judges and a leading figure of an Iranian cyber group, citing alleged “serious human rights violations”.
The sanctioned judges serve on Iran’s regional courts in addition to Nima Salehi, founder of the Ashiyane cyber group, which the bloc said cooperates closely with Iran’s Cyber Police (FATA) and the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC). The EU accused the group of carrying out cyberattacks against domestic opponents and foreign institutions.
The new designations bring the EU’s Iran human rights sanctions regime to 269 individuals and 53 entities. The measures include asset freezes, travel bans within the EU, and a prohibition on providing funds or economic resources to those listed.
This comes amid continued US aggression on Iran, which has killed hundreds of civilians and targeted significant civilian infrastructure including bridges and desalination plants.
US attacks 16 cities in Iran in 13th consecutive night of aggression
The United States launched a new wave of attacks on Iran, marking the 13th consecutive night of US attacks, according to US Central Command (CENTCOM). The campaign, which Washington said aims to target Iranian military capabilities and threats to commercial shipping, began at 6:45 pm Eastern Time.
Iranian media reported explosions in multiple locations throughout the country. Local officials confirmed strikes in Bandar Abbas, Jask Port, Konarak Port, Ahvaz, Omidiyeh, Andimeshk, Khorramabad, Anarak, Nain, Borujerd, Taft, Shirkuh, Firuzabad, near Khondab in Markazi Province, and on Qeshm Island. Al Mayadeen’s correspondent reported that the US attacked 16 Iranian cities in total.
In Hormozgan Province, the deputy governor for political and security affairs said several civilians were injured during the attack on Bandar Abbas Port. IRNA reported power outages affecting parts of the port following the strikes, with provincial emergency officials later stating electricity would be restored within an hour. Iranian state television reported that air defenses were activated in Tehran as explosions were heard elsewhere.
The Khuzestan Province Council reported that four people were killed and five others were injured in attacks targeting the vicinity of Ahvaz.
Iran’s IRGC announced that its forces intercepted and destroyed a US Tomahawk cruise missile over Kahnuj in Kerman Province. According to Fars News Agency, the IRGC commander in Kahnuj said the missile was detected and destroyed while still in the city’s airspace.
Iranian news agency Fars reported, citing satellite imagery, that the United States has evacuated two military bases in the UAE and Qatar.
According to the agency, US forces evacuated Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
Fars said satellite images from Sentinel-2, dated July 24, 2026, showed the evacuation of the US military base in the UAE. The agency said five US military aircraft had been stationed at Al Dhafra three days earlier, while the satellite images showed that they had since been evacuated.
US reportedly evacuates Al Dhafra Air Base
Al Dhafra Air Base is located south of Abu Dhabi and hosts the US Air Force’s 380th Air Expeditionary Wing. It is considered a key strategic hub for reconnaissance, aerial refueling, and air defense operations, as well as a major center supporting military operations in the region and providing intelligence coverage across West Asia.
Fars also reported that satellite images showed Washington had fully evacuated Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
Al Udeid Air Base is located west of Doha and is considered the largest US military base in West Asia. It hosts the forward headquarters of US Central Command (CENTCOM) and the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing.
The two bases played a key role in US military operations during the latest US aggression against Iran, which began on February 28 and resumed more than three weeks ago.
Destruction of fighter jets at Azraq base and acknowledgment of casualties
The developments coincided with the release earlier on Sunday of additional satellite images documenting the destruction of a military aircraft hangar inside Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, also known as Azraq Air Base, in Jordan, which hosts US forces.
Earlier today, the IRGC conducted a simultaneous missile and drone strike against the US base in Azraq, Jordan, targeting fighter shelters and a large parking ramp, according to the IRGC’s Public Relations Office.
In a statement, the IRGC reported that the operation was carried out in the early morning hours as part of the 20th wave of Operation Nasr 2. The strike was launched in response to the US aggression the previous night, the statement said.
“With a crushing and simultaneous missile and drone attack on the fighter shelters and a large parking ramp at the American base in Azraq, Jordan,” the IRGC said, “at least two American fighter jets and three American aircraft were completely destroyed while inflicting major damage on a number of others.”
The strikes came shortly after a series of successive attacks launched by Iranian armed forces against US bases in the region, including Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where the US side acknowledged the deaths of two American soldiers and the loss of another.
Earlier, US network Fox News reported that at least 13 American soldiers had been injured as a result of recent Iranian attacks targeting US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan.
Damage in Erbil and fires at a Kuwaiti power station
As part of the simultaneous Iranian attacks, footage circulated showing a fire breaking out at a Kuwaiti power station following an Iranian strike.
Additional footage and satellite images also showed the extent of damage inflicted on the US military base in the city of Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, after it was targeted by Iranian missile strikes.
In this context, media outlets reported that US officials acknowledged that Iran’s missile capabilities had undergone significant qualitative development, enabling them to effectively bypass US interception and defense systems deployed across the region.
The officials explained that Tehran now possesses advanced missiles capable of traveling at extremely high speeds and maneuvering during the final phase of their trajectory before striking their designated targets.
It is worth noting that Tehran maintains that it harbors no hostility toward the peoples of the region, stressing that its strikes are aimed at US bases in response to repeated US aggression on Iranian territory that has killed and wounded civilians, including women and children.
The UK has canceled a major army exercise in Kenya after the two countries failed to resolve a dispute over Nairobi’s powers to prosecute British soldiers accused of committing crimes in the East African nation.
The planned Exercise Haraka Storm, involving the 1st Battalion and The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, was reportedly scheduled to begin in September in central Kenya’s Laikipia County. It will instead be held outside Kenya, the British Ministry of Defence said on Thursday, according to The Guardian. Kenya’s Standard newspaper reported that the training would be moved to neighboring Tanzania.
“It is with regret that the necessary licences required to allow training to take place in Laikipia later this year have not been forthcoming,” a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said.
The African state hosts a permanent British Army training support unit, known as BATUK, in Nanyuki, about 200km (125 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi. British troops have trained there since Kenya’s independence in 1963, conducting infantry exercises, as well as engineering and medical deployments under a bilateral defense cooperation agreement.
Kenyan lawmakers have, however, withheld approval for a renewed bilateral defense agreement amid demands for greater jurisdiction over serious offenses committed by British troops. Funding for BATUK is also reportedly under negotiation.
The unit has faced widespread allegations of misconduct, including murder, rape, and environmental pollution. A two-year Kenyan parliamentary investigation report released last December accused British soldiers of murder, sexual assault, torture, and forcibly evicting residents near Nanyuki. It also documented claims involving civilian deaths and injuries from unexploded ordnance, pollution, toxic-waste disposal, and damage to wildlife habitats.
Former serviceman Robert Purkiss has been charged in Kenya with the 2012 murder of 21-year-old Agnes Wanjiru. He is contesting extradition from Britain. Wanjiru’s body was found in a septic tank near a Nanyuki hotel after she was last seen with British troops. Purkiss denies the charge.
Last year, Britain agreed to pay £2.9 million ($3.9 million) to more than 7,700 Kenyans and an environmental group over a 2021 wildfire accidentally started by British troops. The blaze destroyed more than 12,000 acres of the Lolldaiga Hills and reportedly caused one death.
The Ministry of Defence said it remained committed to its defense partnership with Kenya and would continue talks aimed at resuming training.
Nelson Koech, chairman of the Kenyan parliament’s defense committee, said Nairobi is seeking stronger accountability measures, greater protection for local communities, and implementation of the BATUK inquiry’s recommendations.
The two governments are “actively engaging to address these outstanding issues,” The Guardian quoted Koech as saying.
Kiev is targeting civilian infrastructure in Russia in an attempt to provoke Moscow into responding in kind so that Ukraine can “play the victim,” knowing Western media will largely ignore attacks on Russian civilians, former Pentagon senior security policy analyst Michael Maloof has told RT.
Thursday marked the third Ukrainian strike on warehouses belonging to Russia’s largest e-commerce retailer, Wildberries in an escalation of Kiev’s campaign against Russian civilian infrastructure. Ukraine has claimed the company supports Russian military logistics, an allegation denied by both Moscow and Wildberries itself. In a separate attack the same day, Ukrainian forces also struck storage facilities at a poultry farm near St. Petersburg.
Speaking to RT on Friday, Maloof described the attacks as a deliberate “terrorist” strategy.
“They’re doing it purposely in order to lure Russia to start hitting civilian targets… thereby knowing that the Western press will take that information and run with it,” he said.
“And that’s all that you’ll ever hear. You never hear about the attacks in Russia on civilian targets… And so I think the Ukrainians are just trying to play victim once again.”
Maloof dismissed Kiev’s assertion that Wildberries – an online marketplace comparable to Amazon – is a legitimate military target.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd in the extreme.”
He argued that Ukraine expects most Western media outlets not to scrutinize its claims or “see the fraud” behind the justification for attacking the company.
According to Maloof, the broader campaign against Russian energy, food and other civilian infrastructure is aimed primarily at shaping public opinion abroad and securing continued Western financial support.
“It’s propagandistic purposes” designed to win “billions of euros” to continue the conflict, he said.
Maloof added that Ukraine’s European backers are fully aware that civilian sites are being targeted but choose to overlook it.
“They’re using Ukraine for their purposes: ultimately to attack Russia themselves,” he said. “All of this is instigated by the Europeans.”
The United States has presented its new nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia as a gift: reactors, technology, investment, prestige, and the radiant promise of a peaceful atomic future. Washington is forever giving gifts of this kind. Curiously, they tend to arrive fitted with surveillance equipment, political conditions, and a discreetly concealed choke chain.
This is not merely a civil nuclear agreement. It is a disciplinary instrument aimed at Mohammed bin Salman — a strategic summons issued to a crown prince who has recently behaved less like an obedient client and more like the ruler of an indispensable state.
Its message is simple: Saudi Arabia may diversify its economy, its diplomatic partners, and even its wardrobe of alliances, but it may not diversify the source of its ultimate protection. That franchise still belongs to Washington.
The agreement therefore concerns nuclear energy only in the same sense that a prison contract concerns architecture. Its deeper purpose is to reconstruct American authority over a kingdom that has begun imagining life beyond the imperial security nursery.
Riyadh has committed three increasingly intolerable offenses.
First, it has moved too close to Pakistan. The Saudi–Pakistani relationship is hardly new: money, soldiers, intelligence cooperation, religious patronage, and strategic ambiguity have bound the two states for decades.
What has changed is the context. As confidence in American protection has weakened, Pakistan has ceased to look merely like a useful military subcontractor and begun to resemble a possible component of an alternative security architecture.
That possibility is especially sensitive because Pakistan is nuclear-armed. No formal Saudi–Pakistani nuclear arrangement has been acknowledged, and neither capital needs one publicly declared. Strategic ambiguity is useful precisely because it performs deterrence without submitting an invoice to the International Atomic Energy Agency. A defense pact, carefully suggestive official language, and decades of intimate military cooperation can generate considerable anxiety without anyone having to unveil a warhead in Riyadh.
Washington’s nuclear offer is designed to interrupt that imagination. It tells the Saudis: there will be no Pakistani shortcut to strategic autonomy. If the kingdom wants reactors, fuel-cycle expertise, advanced technology, and the political symbolism of nuclear modernity, those ambitions must pass through American gates. The atomic future may be Saudi, but the key to the laboratory must remain in Washington.
Second, Mohammed bin Salman has shown insufficient enthusiasm for the campaign against Iran. Riyadh has no sentimental attachment to Tehran; states do not exchange friendship bracelets. But it has learned, after years of expensive confrontation, that permanent hostility to Iran is a ruinous American luxury financed by Gulf vulnerability. Saudi–Iranian accommodation is not ideological reconciliation. It is an insurance policy against being drafted into someone else’s war.
This is precisely what makes it objectionable to Washington and Israel. An autonomous Saudi Arabia might decline to become the logistics platform, financier, diplomatic choir, and eventual target of a regional war against Iran. It might decide that oil facilities, desalination plants, investment plans, and glittering megaprojects are poorly served by turning the Gulf into a missile exchange. Such ingratitude cannot be encouraged.
The nuclear deal places Washington back at the center of Saudi strategic planning. Technology creates dependency; dependency creates leverage; leverage restores obedience.
The reactor is not merely an energy source. It is a thirty-year listening device embedded in the kingdom’s national-security imagination.
Third, Riyadh has refused to normalize relations with Israel on Washington’s preferred terms. Saudi leaders continue to tie normalization to a credible pathway toward Palestinian statehood — an inconvenient demand in an imperial order that prefers Palestinians as humanitarian statistics rather than political subjects. Trump’s subsequent insistence that the nuclear arrangement depends on Saudi entry into the Abraham Accords merely stripped the agreement of its ceremonial clothing.
The bargain is now indecently clear: Washington will help construct Saudi Arabia’s nuclear future if Riyadh helps rehabilitate Israel’s regional standing. Nuclear cooperation becomes diplomatic blackmail. The kingdom is invited to purchase strategic reassurance with Palestine. This is less a treaty than a geopolitical obedience course: sit beside Israel, distrust Iran, step away from Pakistan, and receive your reactor.
China and Russia are the other uninvited guests at the signing ceremony. Saudi Arabia is not merely another energy producer; it is the central Arab power in OPEC, a financial heavyweight, and a pivotal actor in the emerging multipolar order. Its relations with Beijing and Moscow challenge Washington not because Riyadh has become anti-American, but because it has become insufficiently exclusive.
Empire does not require affection. It requires the absence of alternatives.
A Saudi nuclear program built with Chinese or Russian assistance would deepen technological, financial, and strategic relationships that Washington can no longer confidently control. American companies want the contracts, certainly, but the larger concern is architectural: whoever builds the reactors helps shape the dependencies surrounding them.
Nuclear cooperation produces decades of training, maintenance, fuel arrangements, regulatory influence, security coordination, and elite access. Washington is not selling machinery. It is purchasing strategic occupancy.
The irony is exquisite. The United States portrays the agreement as evidence of restored strength, yet its generosity reveals its weakness. A hegemon secure in its position does not need to offer extraordinary concessions to retain an old client. It does so when the client has discovered competing suppliers, alternative protectors, and the invigorating sensation of being courted.
Nor does the agreement simplify nuclear diplomacy with Iran. Washington has spent years treating Iranian enrichment as uniquely sinister while now constructing a far more permissive vocabulary for Saudi ambitions. The distinction will be explained through the usual theological machinery of empire: allies possess peaceful atoms; adversaries enrich malicious ones. Centrifuges, apparently, acquire moral character from the flag hanging above them.
The result is a nonproliferation doctrine so intellectually elastic that it can be folded into a campaign brochure.
Mohammed bin Salman may believe Saudi Arabia has accumulated enough leverage to escape the old hierarchy. Washington’s answer is this agreement: not quite a reward, not quite a threat, but an elegant combination of both. America will protect the kingdom — from Iran, from uncertainty, and above all from the dangerous temptation to protect itself through arrangements Washington cannot supervise.
The reactor, then, is the bait. Israel is the condition. Pakistan is the warning. China and Russia are the targets.
And the leash, freshly polished and marketed as partnership, remains unmistakably American.
The drug-induced nipple secretions of trans women are as good as mothers’ breast milk for babies, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust claimed in a letter to campaigners made public in a report by British think tank the Policy Exchange on Sunday.
The healthcare trust’s medical director, Rachel James, argued that the off-label prescription drug cocktail men transitioning to female take in order to produce milk was “similar to the natural hormones which encourage lactation to develop when the baby is newly born.”
“The evidence which is available demonstrates that the milk is comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby,” James wrote in the letter, sent to Children of Transitioners last August.
Biological men who wish to lactate must first take hormones to grow milk glands and then take high doses of either domperidone or metoclopramide to stimulate milk production. Neither drug is approved for this use, though they are occasionally prescribed off-label to biological women who have trouble lactating.
However, domperidone’s own manufacturer, Janssen, warns patients the drug “may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart in a breastfed baby” and “should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary.” … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 