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My sister was the 166th doctor to be murdered in Gaza

Dr Soma Baroud, was killed on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans near Bani Suhaila roundabout, Khan Yunis.
By Dr Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | October 15, 2024

“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”

These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.

Dr Soma Baroud was murdered on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

I still don’t know whether she was on her way to the hospital where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?

The news of her assassination — which was a political murder; Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 166 doctors — arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page: “Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area…” It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, number 42,010 on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.

I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis air strike.

I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never answered the call.

I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity.

“Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘We are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.

But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, although never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favourite novels, and so on.

“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she told me on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes… totally… I agree… one hundred per cent.”

For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, although grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.

I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.

The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us. She was just a child when my eldest brother, Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a US-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.

Two years after the death of Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy could carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.

My father began his life as a child labourer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again, a labourer, because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the 1967 Naksa (the Six Day War).

A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way. When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Although her skin healed, cuts on her fingers due to wrapping thousands of razors individually, remained as a testament to the difficult life she lived.

“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, eventually five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.

Years later, my parents sent her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, although never her own.

She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital and Nasser Hospital among other medical centres. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, and opened a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor, and did all she could to heal those victimised by war.

Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza who truly changed the face of medicine.

Collectively, they put great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality as well as the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.

When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the ongoing war, she told me that, “When aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women — doctors, nurses and other medical staff — would surround her in total adoration.”

At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, a professor of law and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.

Even under siege, life — at least for Soma and her family — seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, hence her love affair with and constant citation of García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope. And then…

“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband had been executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis. Because his body was missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.

To maximise their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza. This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, travelling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.

“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for cosy new pyjamas, my favourite book, and a comfortable bed.”

These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month. “My heart aches,” she wrote. “Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble.”

She pointed out that this is not a story about stones and concrete. “It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I write or speak. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarrelled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family.”

A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbours in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.

There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate…

My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I would do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Turkiye, and that we would shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “Let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.

Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded.

Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance did I think that maybe my sister was indeed gone.

Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that have accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.

Then, another bag, with “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” written across the thick white plastic.

Her colleagues carried her body and laid it gently on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to confirm her identity. I looked away.

I refuse to see her in any way but the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom; someone whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”

But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?

My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.

No more messages from her.

October 15, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran Halts Flights to Europe Over Sanctions Slapped on Iran Air – Association

Sputnik – 15.10.2024

TEHRAN – Iran has suspended all flights to Europe after the European Union imposed sanctions against the Iran Air national carrier, the Association of Iranian Airlines (AIRA) said on Tuesday.

“Iran Air was the only airline that operated flights to Europe in our country. After new EU sanctions were imposed on Iran Air, no Iranian aircraft will fly to Europe,” AIRA Secretary General Maqsoud Asadi Samani was quoted as saying by the Ilna news agency.

Brussels accused the persons and entities under the latest package of sanctions of being involved in ballistic missile supplies to Russia. Iran rejected the accusations.

On Monday, the Council of the EU adopted sanctions against seven Iranian individuals and seven organizations, including Iran Air, for alleged military cooperation with Russia.

October 15, 2024 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Druzhba: Oil Mega-Pipeline That Evaded US Sabotage to Power Eastern Europe’s Economic Boom

A section of the Druzhba pipeline being erected in Carpathia over a local waterway. September 1962. © Sputnik / I. Arons
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 15.10.2024

Tuesday is the anniversary of the creation of Druzbha – the world’s longest oil pipeline, and one of the most technically sophisticated pieces of man-made engineering every created. Here’s what’s important to know about the project, why it was conceived, and why the US and its allies tried, but failed, to stop it.

October 15 marks the 60th anniversary of the inauguration of the Druzhba (‘Friendship’) oil pipeline. Conceived in 1958 at a meeting of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance – the Soviet-led analogue to Western European integration, Druzhba helped forge closer economic links between the USSR and its Eastern European allies, and eventually, between Russia and the whole of Europe.

Drawn up to aid an economic boom being experienced by Eastern Europe, Druzhba was built to replace more costly and infrastructure-intensive rail-based oil deliveries.

Sourcing oil from the Volga-Ural oil and gas basin and starting off in Almetyevsk, modern-day Tatarstan, Druzhba runs west to Mozyr in Belarus, where it splits into two routes – one to eastern Germany via Poland, and another through Ukraine toward Bratislava in Slovakia, Prague in the Czech Republic and Budapest in Hungary.

Members of the Soviet-led economic alliance, namely Albania, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, contributed equipment and know-how, with the USSR and Poland delivering 730,000 tons of 420-1,220 mm pipes, East Germany pumps for pumping stations, Hungary automation equipment and communications gear, and Czechoslovakia valves and fittings.

The US sought to sanction the project into submission, slapping restrictions on Western European sales of large-diameter pipes to the Eastern Bloc after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Russian Chelyabinsk’s industrialists saved the day, creating pipes of the necessary diameter.

The success of the project led to the construction of a second line – known as Druzhba-2 and running along the same route, in 1974.

With Moscow selling oil to allies via long-term contracts, Eastern Europe was largely insulated from the oil shocks suffered by the West in the 1970s and early 1980s. Between 1971 and 1980, Hungary’s material national income rose by 62%, East Germany’s by 59%, Poland’s by 73%, Czechoslovakia’s by 57%, and capital construction in these countries grew 1.9, 1.7, 2.2, and 1.8 times, respectively.

This allowed the region to build tens of millions of new apartments, industrial goods and finished products ranging from cars and electronics to household goods.

After the USSR’s collapse, Germany’s reunification and the European Union’s expansion, Druzhba became a key source of fuel for Europe’s economic prosperity, helping Eastern Europe with its difficult transition to the market, and Germany in its effort to build on its status as an industrial powerhouse.

Accounting for expansions (including extensions to deliver oil to southern Germany and Austria), Druzhba holds the record as the longest oil pipeline network in the world, consisting of a whopping 8,900 km of pipe, 46 pumping stations, 38 intermediate pumping stations, and reservoirs that can hold up to 1.5 million cubic meters of oil.

Druzhba is also one of the most technically-sophisticated manmade engineering projects in history, crossing the Volga, Oka, Don, Dnepr, Dniestr, Vistula and Dunabe rivers and hundreds of smaller waterways, thousands of roads and railways, the Pinsk Marshes and the mountains of Carpathia.

The pipeline has an estimated capacity to pump up to 2 million barrels per day, or nearly a fifth of Russia’s total oil output. Until recently, it accounted for up to half of all Russian oil exports.

Killing Druzhba?

The US, the Eu and Ukraine have taken a series of steps to try and effectively kill the Druzhba-based energy partnership between Russia and Europe, with the EU banning deliveries of Russian oil through the northern portion of the pipeline in the summer of 2024, and Ukraine raising transit costs by more than 75%, and in July 2024 prohibiting supplies of Lukoil oil through the pipeline’s southern line to Hungary and Slovakia.

While Russia has proven able to replace its dependence on Druzhba by forging new energy ties with countries in the Global South, including India and China, Europe has been trapped by its own restrictions into buying more expensive and less dependable energy sourced in the US, leaving economic growth stagnant and industrial competitiveness in jeopardy.

October 15, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

US says can’t continue supplying Ukraine, Israel together as Tel Aviv faces munitions shortage

Press TV – October 15, 2024

Israel is scrambling to supply interceptor missiles amid a looming shortage as the regime is bracing for more retaliatory attacks from the regional resistance, more than a year after it launched the genocidal war on Gaza, a report says.

The report by the the Financial Times came as the United States on Sunday confirmed that its military is sending an anti-missile system operated by American troops to aid the Israeli forces following the Tel Aviv regime’s failure to defend itself against Iran and as Tel Aviv has threatened it will attack Iranian sites.

“Israel’s munitions issue is serious,” the Financial Times cited Dana Stroul, a former senior Pentagon official with responsibility for the West Asia, as saying on Tuesday.

“If Iran responds to an Israel attack [with a massive air strike campaign], and [Lebanon’s] Hezbollah joins in too, Israel air defenses will be stretched,” she said, noting that US stockpiles were not limitless.

“The US can’t continue supplying Ukraine and Israel at the same pace. We are reaching a tipping point.”

Boaz Levy, chief executive of Israel Aerospace Industries, which makes the Arrow interceptors used to down ballistic missiles, said he was running triple shifts to keep production lines running.

“Some of our lines are working 24 hours, seven days a week. Our goal is to meet all our obligations,” Levy said.

While Israel does not disclose the size of its stockpiles, he said “it is no secret that we need to replenish stocks.”

Since early October 2023, Israel has been waging brutal two-front aggression that has killed more than 42,000 people in the Gaza Strip and at least 2,306 others in Lebanon so far.

Over the same period, the usurping regime has also assassinated several resistance leaders, including Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

In support of Palestinians in Gaza, resistance groups have launched retaliatory attacks on Israeli targets and vowed to keep fighting until the Gaza onslaught ends.

In response to Israel’s barbaric acts of assassination against the resistance front’s top leaders, Iran carried out Operation True Promise 2 earlier this month.

During the operation, Iran launched some 200 high-speed ballistic missiles at the Zionist entity’s military, espionage and intelligence bases, sending almost 10 million settlers into bomb shelters. Ninety percent of the fired Iranian missiles hit their targets.

Despite Israel’s intensified strikes on Lebanon, Hezbollah managed to conduct the deadliest strikes on the occupied territories in the past year over the weekend.

“We are not seeing Hezbollah’s full capability yet. It has only been firing at around a tenth of its estimated prewar launching capacity, a few hundred rockets a day instead of as many as 2,000,” Assaf Orion, a former Israeli brigadier general and head of strategy at the Israeli military, said.

“Some of that gap is a choice by Hezbollah not to go full out, and some of it is due to degradation by the IDF [Israeli military]. . . But Hezbollah has enough left to mount a strong operation,” Orion added.

“Haifa and northern Israel are still on the receiving end of rocket and drone attacks almost every day.”

Amid the rising retaliatory operations, the report cited analysts as saying “defense planners and Israel’s AI-powered air defenses were having to choose which areas to protect over others.”

“It’s only a matter of time before Israel starts to run out of interceptors and has to prioritize how they are deployed,” said Ehud Eilam, a former researcher at Israel’s ministry of military affairs.

October 15, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran’s Missiles: Ted Postol sets the record straight

Daniel Davis | Deep Dive | October 11, 2024

October 15, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

Florida Major Hurricanes, 1900-2024: What Do the Statistics Show?

By Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. | October 7, 2024

Florida residents must feel like they have been taking a beating from major hurricanes in recent years, but what do the data show?

The problem with human perception of such things is that the time scale of hurricane activity fluctuations is often longer than human experience. For example, a person born in the 1950s would have no memory of the beating Florida took in the 1940s from major hurricanes (a total of 5). But they would have many memories of the hurricane lull period of the 1970s and 1980s, each decade having only one major hurricane strike in Florida. Then, when an upswing in hurricane strikes occurs, it seems very unusual to them, and they assume that “hurricanes are getting worse”.

Another problem is that any statistics for an area as small as Florida, even over 100+ years, will be pretty noisy. Landfalling hurricanes for the eastern U.S. would be a better metric. And statistics for the entire Atlantic basin would be even better, except that satellite coverage didn’t start until the 1970s and hurricane intensity in remote areas before then would be poorly measured (or not measured at all).

Finally, tropical cyclone statistics for the entire tropics would be the best (if one was trying to determine if climate change is impacting cyclone intensity or frequency). But satellite data for the global tropics is, again, limited to the period since the 1970s. Global tropical cyclone data before the 1970s is sketchy, at best.

So, keeping in mind that any trends we see for Florida are going to be strongly influenced by the “luck of the draw” and the quasi-random nature of hurricane tracks (hurricanes are steered by the large-scale flow of air in the mid-troposphere, say around 20,000 ft altitude or so), what are the statistics of Florida major hurricane intensity and frequency since 1900?

Florida Major Hurricane Intensity & Number

The following plot shows the intensity of major hurricanes (100 knots or greater maximum sustained wind speed) striking Florida since 1900, updated through recent (2024) Hurricane Helene:

As can be seen from the linear trend line, there has been no significant trend in the intensity of major hurricanes striking Florida since 1900.

But what about the number of hurricanes? The next plot shows there has been a weak upward trend in the decadal totals of major hurricanes striking Florida since 1900:

Note that the 2020s number might well increase, since the end of the current (2024) hurricane season will be only half-way through the 2020s. While Hurricane Milton has just been classified as a major hurricane, in 2 days time it is expected to be under increasing wind shear, so it is not obvious it will strike Florida as a major hurricane, and so I did not include it in the above charts.

Another feature of the second chart above shows that a native Floridian born in the 1960s or 1970s would indeed have experienced an increase in major hurricanes striking Florida during their lifetime. But their first couple of decades of personal experience would have occurred during a historic lull in hurricane activity.

Why Start In 1900?

There is reason to believe that the number and/or intensity of major hurricanes striking Florida in the early 1900s has been underestimated, which would bias the trends in the above plots in the upward direction, spuriously suggesting a long-term increase in activity. First of all, there were virtually no people living in Florida in 1900. The population of Miami in 1896 was 444 persons. The intensity of a hurricane is based upon its maximum sustained 1 minute windspeed, which usually covers a very small area. Even with people now inhabiting much of the Florida coastline, it is rare for a coastal anemometer to measure the intensity that the National Hurricane Center gives to a hurricane, because those winds cover such a small area. So, how could it ever be known how intense some hurricanes were in the early 1900s?

Evidence for Long-Term Hurricane Fluctuations Unrelated to Water Temperature

Modern concern centers on the possibility that warm sea surface temperatures from global warming caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions is making hurricanes stronger or more frequent. But studies of coastal lagoon sediments along the Gulf coast and Caribbean deposited by catastrophic hurricane landfalls show large fluctuations in activity on centennial to millennial time scales, even in the absence of the unusually warm sea surface temperatures measured today. (Example here.)

It should also be remembered that not long ago the U.S. experienced an “unprecedented” 11-year drought in major hurricane strikes. That significantly impacts our perception of what is “normal”. When the lull had reached 9 years, a NASA study found such an event was a 1-in-177-years occurrence. As I recall, that was increased to 1-in-250 years when the lull reached 11 years.

The point is that there is a huge amount of natural decadal- to centennial-time scale variability in hurricane activity in Florida (or any other hurricane-prone state). But with increasing numbers of people thinking that the government is somehow influencing hurricane activity (I’m seeing a lot of this on Twitter), I doubt that actual data will have much influence on those people, and as I approach 70 years on this Earth I have noticed a long-term decline in critical thinking regarding weather, climate, and causation. I doubt that trend will change any time soon.

October 14, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Tim Walz Ducks Free Speech Debate in Evasive Interview Over Misinformation Crackdown

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 14, 2024

In an interview with Fox News Sunday’s Shannon Bream, Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Tim Walz found himself in the hot seat over his stance on free speech, particularly regarding so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Walz, who has previously expressed a desire to limit certain forms of expression, gave an evasive and meandering response when asked to clarify his position.

Walz’s comments have been the subject of concern, especially following his assertion that “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech” if he and Kamala Harris win the upcoming election.

When Bream pressed him on who would ultimately have the power to define “misinformation,” Walz sidestepped the question. Instead, he launched into a lengthy discussion about book bans and violent threats, avoiding the central issue of free speech restrictions.

Bream’s attempt to distinguish between threats and misinformation resulted in yet another detour from Walz, who again brought up book banning without offering any substantive answer on misinformation. His unwillingness to engage directly on the topic of free speech raised further concerns that under a Harris-Walz administration, the government itself could become the arbiter of what constitutes “misinformation.”

The implications of Walz’s remarks are troubling for advocates of free speech. In his convoluted responses, Walz seemed to blur the lines between genuine threats and dissenting opinions, a tactic that has left many questioning the true intent behind his push to regulate speech. By conflating hate speech with misinformation, Walz opens the door to potential government overreach that could infringe on the First Amendment rights of Americans.

While Walz insists that he supports the First Amendment, his reluctance to differentiate between dangerous threats and controversial speech raises red flags about the future of open discourse in America.

Related: Walz’s War on Words: A Blatant Distortion of the First Amendment

October 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Hungary accuses US of election interference

RT | October 14, 2024

The US has “invested heavily” in attempting to remove the current Hungarian government, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has claimed. According to the diplomat, US interference involved funding the opposition in a bid to defeat the Fidesz-Christian Democratic People’s Party (Fidesz-KDNP) alliance, led by Prime Minister Victor Orban, in the country’s 2022 election.

In an interview with RIA Novosti published on Monday, Szijjarto alleged that “there were very serious attempts to interfere in our elections [in 2022]… Very heavy interference, many millions of dollars spent to throw the government out.”

“Millions of dollars have been spent by American entities during the Hungarian elections, invested in our opposition, invested in opposition media. This is still going on,” Szijjarto said. Despite this, the political opposition lost the elections, the diplomat noted, expressing hope that future attempts to interfere in Hungarian policies would be similarly unsuccessful.

The Fidesz-KDNP alliance won 135 seats out of 199 in the Hungarian National Assembly in 2022, maintaining a constitutional majority for the third election in a row. The coalition of six opposition parties led by Peter Marki-Zay secured only 57 seats. After the vote, the Hungarian parliament reelected Orban as prime minister for a fifth term.

Hungarian media first reported on illicit foreign funding of opposition party campaigns in late 2022. Citing an intelligence report prepared by Hungarian secret services, reports claimed that the opposition had received as much as $8 million from foreign entities. Marki-Zay later publicly admitted to receiving funding from the US-based ‘Action for Democracy’ NGO in a podcast for the Magyar Hang newspaper.

The US government has denied claims it attempted to interfere in the Hungarian electoral process. In a speech in Budapest earlier this year, US Ambassador David Pressman attempted to deflect attention from alleged meddling, insisting that Hungary has no right to “decry foreign interference” when it “advocates for electoral candidates around the world from Poland to Brazil.”

Relations between the US and Hungary have soured significantly in recent years, including over the Ukraine conflict. Washington has supported Kiev with financial and military aid, while Budapest has called for a diplomatic solution. Hungary has also refused to cut ties with Russia and has blocked numerous sanctions initiatives proposed by the West to pressure Moscow agree to Ukraine’s peace terms.

October 14, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Placing THAAD in Israel is High-Stakes Poker Game the US Risks Losing: Here’s Why

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 14.10.2024

Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder confirmed on Sunday that President Biden and Pentagon chief Austin had signed off on the deployment of a US Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery and associated crew in Israel. The decision is fraught with a broad spectrum of risks for Washington. Here’s why.

THAAD’s deployment in Israel “underscores the United States’ ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel, and to defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks by Iran. It is part of the broader adjustments the US military has made in recent months, to support the defense of Israel and protect Americans from attacks by Iran and Iranian-aligned militias,” Ryder assured in Sunday’s press release.

Tehran has made clear that it has no illusions about the deployment’s purpose. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi emphasized Sunday that along with its delivery of record quantities of weaponry to Israel, Washington is “now also putting the lives of its troops at risk by deploying them to operate US missile systems.”

“While we have made tremendous efforts in recent days to contain an all-out war in our region, I say it clearly that we have no red lines in defending our people and interests,” Araghchi warned, referencing Tehran’s commitment to respond to any further aggression by Tel Aviv following the retaliatory Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israeli military and intelligence sites on October 1.

Iranian media, meanwhile, have warned that the presence of the THAAD in Israel will make no difference in Tehran’s military strategy – with Iranian missiles proving capable of puncturing Israel’s sophisticated, mulitlayered air and missile defense shield, and able to do so again if necessary if and when the US missile defense system is deployed.

A PressTV explainer published Monday pointed to footage released late last week purportedly showing a Raytheon X-band radar like the one that’s part of the THAAD system being knocked out in an Iranian precision strike ahead of the broader missile barrage on October 1. If authenticated, the footage would help explain why – as footage posted to social media and satellite images appear to show – dozens of Iranian missiles managed to reach their target without interference from Israeli air defenses.

The explainer pointed out that Iran’s Kheibar Shekan (lit. ‘Castle Buster’ or ‘Fortress Buster’) series missiles “easily penetrated Israel’s much-touted air defenses,” including the David’s Sling and Arrow-3 interceptors, on October 1, and offered details on how they could pull off a similar triumph against THAAD.

“The Kheibar Shekan-1 evaded the Arrow-3 system, which operates only outside the atmosphere, by flying below its engagement envelope. By the time it came within range of the Arrow-2 system, it was already flying too low to be effectively intercepted,” the analysis indicated. Evasive maneuvering “allowed it to easily defeat David’s Sling,” the outlet added.

And while THAAD’s ability to engage targets at lower altitudes may potentially make it more effective against the Kheibar Shekan-1, the Kheibar Shekan-2’s longer range (1,800 km vs 1,450 km, respectively) and “more aerodynamic glide vehicle allows it to ‘trade’ its extended range for low-altitude gliding, keeping it below the THAAD system’s engagement envelope, particularly at altitudes below 35 km. This enables the missile to bypass THAAD entirely and effectively and reach its target,” the PressTV report noted.

The explainer pointed out that even the Kheibar Shekan-1 stands a chance of defeating THAAD if it targets sites “near the edge” of the American system’s range. That’s not to mention the fact that THAAD, while advanced, is also extremely costly, which means “limits [to] the number of available interceptors, especially compared to the sheer volume and size of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal,” which could theoretically just saturate Israeli/US defenses.

Losing prestige associated with the THAAD would pose serious military and geopolitical risks for Washington, not only given the dangers associated with the loss of American troops’ lives if Iran struck the missile defense system itself, but the loss of prestige associated with the $1 billion piece of American military equipment proving helpless against an adversary. The US and its allies have already faced a reality check regarding the much-touted ‘superiority’ of their weapons in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. An Iranian strike overwhelming America’s most sophisticated and pricey missile defense system could drive the final nail into the coffin of global attitudes about the supremacy of Western arms, including among its allies.

Geopolitical Risks, Domestic Risks

Then there are risks to the Biden administration’s foreign and domestic policy.

“The Americans deployed THAAD as part of preparation for an Iranian response to an upcoming Israeli attack,” Yeghia Tashjian, political analyst, regional and international affairs cluster coordinator at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, American University of Beirut, told Sputnik.

The THAAD plans signal that the US is now firmly “stuck” in the war in the Middle East, even though this is “something that most probably the Biden administration doesn’t want,” Tashjian explained, saying he wouldn’t be surprised if the US military deployment in Israel now expands further.

The White House has every reason to want to avoid further involvement, the observer stressed, pointing to the upcoming presidential elections and the power of the Arab voting bloc, crucial for Democrats in the swing state of Michigan, not to mention the general lack of public interest in US involvement in a new misadventure in the Middle East.

As far as US foreign policy goals are concerned, an escalation of the Mideast crisis could delay further US and NATO arms deliveries to Ukraine, Tashjian pointed out, highlighting the recent cancelation of a planned Ramstein Format meeting on Ukraine aid.

“The West cannot fight on multiple fronts,” the observer emphasized, pointing out that besides Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, the US may soon have its hands full against a rising China, and see a new escalation in long-standing tensions in the Korean Peninsula.

A War Not Meant to Be Won?

The US would prefer a “managed conflict” between Israel and Hezbollah or Israel and Iran, Tashjian believes. Washington’s ability to achieve this goal is another matter, since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is not in favor of managing this war or even engaging in a ceasefire,” but prolonging it and getting the US directly involved, the observer said.

“The main intention of Israel is to involve the Americans directly into this war, because Netanyahu has made it clear that he wants to change and establish a ‘new Middle East’. And in this attempt, he needs American, British and other European help because he cannot fight on multiple fronts and especially against Iran,” which proved on October 1 that it “has capabilities to attack and inflict some damage against Israel. Israel does not want to feel vulnerable or alone in its fight against Iran,” Tashjian summed up.

October 14, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Americans Must End Israel’s Serial Slaughter of Gaza’s Children

By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | October 14, 2024

It’s time for the American people to stand up to Washington and demand an immediate end to the endless support the United States has provided to apartheid Israel for its killing spree during the past year.

For fifty-seven years, Israel has subjected millions of Palestinian Muslims and Christians to a totalitarian, foreign military occupation. The Palestinian people have been systematically deprived of the ability to vote as well as their natural rights to life, liberty, freedom of movement, and property. With Israeli army protection and participation, for decades, the illegal Jewish settler movement has been stealing Palestinian property, demolishing homes, seizing agricultural land, terrorizing towns, villages, and refugee camps. This process has been mercilessly accelerated in the occupied West Bank during the last two years.

Concurrently, with full backing from the U.S. government, the Israeli military has now seized at least 26% of Gaza, comprehensively demolishing the Strip’s infrastructure, slaughtering Palestinians en masse, and making the enclave uninhabitable. It is no longer in doubt that under the rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his radical Jewish supremacist ministers, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Occupation Governor Bezalel Smotrich, of the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism parties respectively, Tel Aviv is implementing its final solution regarding historic Palestine’s indigenous population.

In the besieged Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv has murdered, mutilated, and maimed roughly 215,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. Those figures do not include countless thousands of Palestinians missing or presumed dead beneath the 40 million tons of rubble Israel’s war has generated.

With Washington’s support—including over 50,000 tons of weapons and artificial intelligence platforms reportedly furnished by military-industrial complex giants like Palantir—Israel is openly exterminating an entire nation.

Last month, the Gaza Health Ministry published a 649-page document providing information regarding 34,344 murdered Palestinians identified thus far.

Antiwar.com news editor Dave DeCamp reported that, “The document lists 11,355 children, including 710 infants under the age of one, as Palestinian babies have been killed throughout the genocidal campaign. The infants are listed on the first 14 pages of the document…Out of the 34,344 people who have been identified, 60% are children, women, and elderly. The remaining 40% are men ranging in age from 18 to 59.” Currently, the total number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza is approximately 16,800.

Vice president of the International College of Surgeons, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon based in North Carolina, volunteered his services in Gaza between April and May this year. In July, he lamented to CBS News unequivocally that “[of] all of the disasters I’ve seen, combined—40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined—doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.”

He bluntly described Tel Aviv killing children on an unprecedented scale, warning Israeli military snipers were deliberately shooting children and murdering toddlers:

“I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week…missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.”

After being asked to clarify his statement, Perlmutter said, “I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”

CBS noted that over twenty doctors had recounted similar child slayings. One American doctor reportedly felt compelled to review CT scans to confirm what he saw with his own eyes because he “didn’t believe that this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.”

In April, Dr. Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician, described her experience treating two children shot in the brain by Israeli snipers during her last day volunteering at southern Gaza’s European hospital. Alvi told The Guardian, “I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old.”

She elaborated, “They were not able to talk, paraplegic. They were literally lying down as vegetables on those beds. They were not the only ones. I saw even small children with direct sniper shot wounds to the head as well as in the chest. They were not combatants, they were small children.”

Scores of American doctors, surgeons, nurses, and emergency room physicians have confirmed these accounts, writing multiple open letters to the White House urging the Joe Biden administration to cease support for the Israeli genocide and warning that the true death toll already includes more than 118,000 Palestinians, vastly exceeding Palestinian Health Ministry estimates.

One July letter features Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner based in Oregon, describing the nightmare of living as a pregnant mother, newborn infant, or fetus trapped and under siege in the Gaza death camp. “Every day I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved,” she wrote.

Another open letter sent to the White House was signed this month by ninety-nine American physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, surgeons, and midwives who’ve spent a combined 254 weeks volunteering in Gaza. “This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” it reads.

The medics continue, describing the devastating toll that the genocidal campaign has taken on the entire civilian population:

“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”

Israel’s brutal siege warfare, combined with constant bombing of civilian infrastructure including water systems, is designed to spread diseases by systematically liquidating and infecting Palestinian children, newborns, and babies.

As the American medical volunteers have thoroughly detailed:

“Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.

“Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies…

We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas without running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. It was and remains guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. Indeed, even the dreaded polio virus has reemerged in Gaza due to a combination of systematic destruction of the sanitation infrastructure, widespread malnutrition weakening immune systems, and young children having missed routine vaccinations for nearly an entire year. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”

These doctors reaffirmed the claims from the previous letters and testimonies from medical volunteers that Israeli snipers are relentlessly targeting children as young as toddlers with head shots:

“Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,” the letter states. The American medical professionals insist, “It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”

Perlmutter is quoted again, emphasizing, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”

It is absolutely clear that supporting Israel, quite literally, means mass murdering children every day in our name and on our dime. Since October 2023, the AIPAC-owned Congress has robbed over $22 billion of Americans’ hard-earned money, amidst crippling inflation, to facilitate and underwrite this genocide. Now, Tel Aviv wants to take our kids to war with Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine simultaneously.

Americans are lectured incessantly, including by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that this is all obligatory and essential. We are told Americans must fight and die on the side of Israeli “civilization” against Middle Eastern “barbarism.” This author defies anyone to try to make a case for our “shared values” with the Israelis after reading these American doctors’ testimonies.

October 14, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

CIA personnel land in Lebanon, ramp up intel gathering to support Israel’s war

Photo credit: US Embassy Beirut
The Cradle | October 14, 2024

The CIA has sent additional agents to Lebanon and has increased its communications with Lebanese military, security, and political officials in an effort to obtain information about Hezbollah, and may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Al-Akhbar reported on 14 October.

Three senior officials in the official security services acknowledged that Western parties, primarily the US, have initiated intensive daily communication with all Lebanese military and security forces since the outbreak of the open war between Lebanon and Israel, Al-Akhbar editor Ibrahim al-Amin wrote.

The officials told Amin that the content of the communications had nothing to do with obtaining information about threats to western interests. Instead, they wish to obtain information about changes in Hezbollah’s political and military leadership structure after the recent assassination of the party’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah.

US intelligence officials were very interested in whether Hezbollah leaders are “still communicating with the military, security and executive forces in Lebanon after the war, with questions about the form and content of the communication,” one official told Amin.

The same official revealed that a security team of 15 CIA officers arrived at Beirut airport last Thursday, 10 October, and moved in a convoy of armored cars without license plates to the headquarters of the American embassy in Awkar.

He explained that the team “joined the work cell based in one of the embassy wings in Beirut, to help manage the Beirut station, which includes 12 main officers, in addition to others with different specialties, including recruiting and managing agents, collecting information through technical means, and analyzing data.”

Another official told Amin that a new director for the CIA’s Beirut station, Sherry Baker, had been appointed and that Baker had previously participated in meetings with Lebanese security officials during visits to Washington.

The official said he knew of “five working visits by Lebanese officers of various levels to the United States, who held meetings with American intelligence officials at their headquarters in Langley.”

In this context, Amin reports that these contacts between the CIA and Lebanese security officials may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Wafiq Safa.

On 10 October, Israeli airstrikes leveled a residential building in central Beirut, killing 22 people. Israel stated that Safa was the target of the attack. However, they were unsuccessful in killing him.

One of the three officials revealed to Amin that just prior to the assassination attempt, the leadership of Hezbollah had asked Safa, in his capacity as head of the resistance movement’s Liaison and Coordination Committee, to communicate with a number of Lebanese security officials on matters related to the ongoing war.

The official explained that “the contacts took place despite the fact that the resistance knew that the mere occurrence of the phone call would constitute a security threat to Safa.”

These fears were confirmed when Israel carried out the bombing in Beirut and leaked news that the target was Safa.

The same official said that Hezbollah “estimates that American intelligence had a direct role in the attempt to assassinate Safa” and that “the operation was carried out based on information provided by the Americans.”

The official stated that the US wanted to kill Safa, who has no military role in Hezbollah, as part of a campaign launched by the US Ambassador to Beirut, Lisa Johnson, who recently “called on Lebanese political and non-political forces to begin working to establish the stage of “post-Hezbollah Lebanon.”

October 14, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Do They Want American Troops to Die?

By Dan McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | October 14, 2024

Biden administration mismanagement—or worse—from day one of the latest Israeli multi-front war in the Middle East has led us to where we are today, at the brink of an all-out regional war with some 40,000 U.S. troops and multiple U.S. military bases in the region with targets on their back.

Biden’s blank check to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to launch multiple wars against its neighbors and carry out the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has drawn the U.S. right into the middle of a bubbling cauldron of [World War III]. And rather than take a sober look at actual U.S. national security interests, Biden and his neocon incompetents are busy adding fuel to the fire hanging on to the pipe dream that they could do what they failed to do so many times before: remake the Middle East in their neocon image.

According to an article in Politico this past week, while Biden administration officials publicly urged restraint and a reduction in violence, they privately were working with the Israeli government to encourage a widening of Israel’s military operations to include its northern neighbor, Lebanon. Two top Biden administration officials, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift Israel’s military focus from the already-flattened Gaza northward to Lebanon.

As Politico reports:

“Behind the scenes, Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment—one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.”

Where have we heard this kind of “let’s do war to re-shape the Middle East” argument before? As Wikileaks reminds us, appearing before the U.S. Congress in 2002 and urging the U.S. to attack Iraq, Netanyahu himself promised that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

Yeah, Bibi. How’d that work out for us?

So why is it that 22 years later senior U.S. officials are echoing Netanyahu’s bogus 2002 lies to draw the U.S. into another “history-defining” catastrophe in the Middle East? For Hochstein it might be that he is not the unbiased “honest broker” we need to keep us out of unnecessary war. After all, as The New York Times reminds us, Hochstein was born in Israel, had/has Israeli citizenship, and even served in the Israeli Defense Forces!

Now he is serving as President Biden’s top advisor for the Middle East—a position where it is critical to bring no personal biases to the table.

This should not automatically disqualify him from the position, of course, but just as with concerns over Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken’s Ukrainian background, neocons pushing for war in the “old country” from which they should have left old allegiances behind should raise a few eyebrows.

McGurk is similarly compromised, as he is another Victoria Nuland/Zelig-like character [creature] who has spent his career weaseling into Republican and Democratic administrations as an “expert,” while his actual expertise comprises solely his adherence to the neocon ideology of all war all the time. He was on board for [George W.] Bush’s “remaking of the Middle East” to [Barack] Obama’s fake “Arab Spring to remake the Middle East” to [Donald] Trump’s “trash the Iran deal to remake the Middle East.”

The guy is a loser who has been wrong his whole career, with a trail of failures that would sink a normal person. But like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps on ticking and ticking toward yet another disaster.

As Politico goes on to note, the Hochstein/McGurk plan to urge Israeli attacks on Lebanon was not widely accepted among actual experts in the administration:

“The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.”

Of course there is built into the Politico article the assumption that Hochstein and McGurk were at all concerned about “dragging American forces” into Israel’s regional war. In fact, their intent was the opposite. They no doubt yearned to draw the U.S. government into Israel’s regional war.

Which brings us to where we are today, with the Biden Administration committing more U.S. weapons systems and more U.S. military personnel to serve on the ground in Israel in its war against Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. All at once. How’s that for neocon ambition?

As Pentagon Press Secretary Patrick Ryder announced [yesterday]: “At the direction of the President, @SecDef authorized the deployment of a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery and associated crew of U.S. military personnel to Israel to help bolster Israel’s air defenses.”

With today’s [October 13] news that Lebanon successfully counter-attacked Israel—hitting an Israeli military base and taking out dozens of IDF soldiers—it appears certain that President Biden and his neocon-dominated foreign policy team are setting up U.S. military members to be killed in Israel to manufacture consent for a full-on US war against all of Israel’s enemies in the region.

They want American soldiers killed in Israel because they know the enormous propaganda value, particularly among a U.S. population that is increasingly against U.S. involvement in Israel’s wars and in favor of ending them instead.

With Kamala tanking in the eyes of a voting public increasingly unappetized by wilted word salads, an old-fashioned war might be just what the Biden brigades are cooking up to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

With their track record of failure, it is time for those of us who are sane to be very, very worried.

This is going to get really bad really fast if we cannot get the attention of a slumbering—or worse—Congress.

October 14, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

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