aletho

The Ultimate Case Against the Churchill Cult

By Keith Knight | The Libertarian Institute | September 7, 2024

According to the National WWII Museum, the Second World War resulted in 45,000,000 civilian deaths, 15,000,000 combat deaths, and 25,000,000 soldiers permanently wounded.

This is what many academics and media influencers refer to as “The Good War.”

Just as we cannot truly understand a court case hearing only the defense, we must also hear the prosecution in order to come to the most accurate conclusion on who is guilty, who is innocent, and how such a tragedy can be avoided in the future.

I want to make the case that the Second World War is in fact a tale of good vs. evil. In short, evil politicians on every side conscripting millions of people and murdering millions of others while the civilians of all countries remain good.

Since there is no shortage of people rightfully vilifying the Japanese Empire and the German National Socialists, I would like to focus primarily on the villainy of a man who Cambridge University reports is the “Greatest Briton”: Winston Churchill.

Exhibit A: Starvation Blockade

Winston Churchill wrote a book titled, The World Crisis, 1911-1918. In this book Churchill summarizes the British naval policy during World War I when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. On page 672, Churchill writes.

“The British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population – men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission.”

Notice, Churchill did not say, “This is how we will make the Kaiser suffer and prove we are the good people in this conflict by protecting innocent people. We good men must discriminate between evil Germans and innocent Germans.” The Kaiser was humiliated of course, but was never assassinated, and lived in a mansion in the Netherlands after the war was over, dying in 1941 at the age of 82.

According to historian Martin Gilbert, a man who writes Churchill in a very favorable light in his book The First World War: A Complete History, estimates of the civilian death toll from Britain’s blockade are 762,106.

Many people might have predicted that such protectionist policies would stimulate the German economy since Germany would now have to employ more people domestically, which should produce the multiplier effect of money. But of course, the opposite is true. When any state coercively stops a group of people from engaging in mutually beneficial trades, human beings suffer and frequently die as a result.

Exhibit B: Poison Gas and Biological Warfare

On May 12, 1919, Winston Churchill authored a war office memorandum in which he writes:

“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those effected.”

Would you have a friend in your life if he used poison gas against people he deemed uncivilized in order to spread a lively terror? Any one of us would be rightfully imprisoned for assault if we used poison gas against a non-aggressor. Yet, Churchill is still celebrated as a respectable statesman even though none of us would accept this behavior from any other person in our private lives.

In 1942, the United Kingdom’s War Department Experimental station conspired to infect the German civilian population with deadly anthrax by first poisoning animals, in hopes that the German food supply would turn deadly. According to the BBC in an article discussing the “island of death” off the coast of Scotland:

“The truth was that Gruinard Island had been the site of a clandestine attempt by the UK during World War Two to weaponise anthrax, a deadly bacterial infection… The project, called Operation Vegetarian, had started under Paul Fildes, then head of the biology department at Porton Down, a military facility in Wiltshire, England, that still exists today… The plan was to infect linseed cakes with Anthrax spores and drop them by plane into cattle pastures around Germany. The cows would eat the cakes and contract anthrax, as would those who ate the infected meat. Anthrax is a naturally occurring but deadly organism… The proposed plan would have decimated Germany’s meat supply, and triggered a nationwide anthrax contamination, resulting in an enormous death toll.”

Those fighting on behalf of civilization, truth, and freedom must lead the world in distinguishing themselves from the “bad guys” by explicitly discriminating between guilty and innocent parties. Churchill took no such steps to distinguish between the German civilian population, and the central figures of the national socialist state (Hitler, Hess, Goering, Eichmann, Goebbels, etc).

Exhibit C: De-Housing Policy

As the history of World War II is described in its cartoonish version with the National Socialists being hell bent on taking over planet Earth and killing all non-blue eyed, blond haired people, one can be forgiven for not knowing that it was Churchill’s government which initiated the bombing of civilians in May 1940, while the German bombing of London did not take place until the September 1940 Blitz.

The mastermind behind Winston Churchill’s policy of civilian bombing was German immigrant, physicist, and science advisor Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell. Lindemann established the S-Branch (Statistical Branch), an esoteric group of academics who regularly advised Prime Minister Churchill, and eventually was the catalyst behind Britain’s “Dehousing” policy with regard to the German civilian population.

This “Dehousing” policy was explained by Charles Percy Snow, whose position in Churchill’s cabinet was described by Britannica as “a scientific advisor to the British government” during the Second World War. In 1961, Harvard University published Snow’s Science and Government, a series of lectures Snow gave at Harvard describing the internal workings of British policy from 1939-1945. On page 48 of the lecture’s transcript, Snow claims:

“… [T]he paper on bombing went out to the top government scientists. It described, in quantitative terms, the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942-September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them, and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that—given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of bombing aircraft—it would be possible, in all larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50 per cent of all houses.”

The strategic bombing policy was also explained by Principal Assistant Secretary of Air Ministry J.M. Spaight in his 1944 book, Bombing Vindicated :

“Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany… Yet, because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May, 1940, the publicity which it deserved. That surely, was a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of ‘scorched earth’… It could have harmed us morally only if it were equivalent to an admission that we were the first to bomb towns.”

In 1979, British journalist and military historian Max Hastings (foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor in chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard ) published Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive 1939-45. On page 127-8, Hastings cites the Cherwell Memorandum (aka Lindemann Memorandum) which he delivered to Prime Minister Churchill in March of 1942. The memorandum reads as follows:

“The following seems a simple method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany. Careful analysis of the effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and elsewhere have shown that, on the average, one ton of bombs dropped on a built-up area demolishes 20-40 dwellings and turns 100-200 people out of house and home.

We know from our experience that we can count on nearly 14 operational sorties per bomber produced. The average lift of the bombers we are going to produce over the next fifteen months will be about three tons. It follows that each of these bombers will in its lifetime drop about forty tons of bombs. If these are dropped on built-up areas they will make 4,000-8,000 people homeless.

In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in fifty-eight towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy to find and hit. Our forecast output of heavy bombers (including Wellingtons) between now and the middle of 1943 is about 10,000. If even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up areas of these fifty-eight German towns, the great majority of their inhabitants (about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house and home.

Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the fifty-eight principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people.

Our calculation assumes, of course, that we really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas. On the other hand, no account is taken of the large promised American production (6,000 heavy bombers in the period in question). Nor has regard been paid to the inevitable damage to factories, communications, etc., in these towns and the damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services.” [Emphasis Added]

Exhibit D: Intentional Provocation of Bombing Britain

The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, who at the time was chairman of the French National Committee, addresses Churchill’s mindset after the British state initiated the bombing of civilians with no German state response for months. From page 104 of his memoirs, de Gaulle writes:

“Among the people many, in their desire to emerge from an almost unbearable tension, went so far as to say out loud that they wished the enemy would risk the attack. Foremost among them, Mr. Churchill found the waiting hard to bear. I can still see him at Chequers, one August day, raising his fists towards the sky as he cried, ‘So they won’t come!’ ‘Are you in such a hurry,’ I said to him, ‘to see your towns smashed to bits?’ ‘You see,’ he replied, ‘the bombing of Oxford, Coventry, Canterbury, will cause such a wave of indignation in the United States that they’ll come into the war!’”

Churchill knew the blowback his de-housing policy would create for British civilians, and he still unapologetically pursued them.

Exhibit E: France’s Pearl Harbor aka Operation Catapult

On July 3, 1940 Churchill initiated Operation Catapult, which was Britain’s intentional bombing of French naval ships off the coast of Algeria resulting in the deaths of 1,297 French soldiers.

According to the International Churchill Society:

“In the summer of 1940 Winston Churchill faced a terrible dilemma. France had just surrendered and only the English Channel stood between the Nazi’s and Britain. Germany was poised to seize the entire French fleet, one of the biggest in the world. With these ships in his hands, Hitler’s threat to invade Britain could become a reality. Churchill had to make a choice. He could either trust the promises of the new French government that they would never hand over their ships to Hitler. Or he could make sure that the ships never joined the German navy by destroying them himself.”

Exhibit F: Dresden

Arthur Harris was a British air officer whom whom Britannica credits as the person “who initiated and directed the ‘saturation bombing’ that the Royal Air Force inflicted on Germany during World War II.” In his memoir Bomber Offensive, Harris addresses the Dresden controversy, where the Allies bombed a city of 630,000 Germans, killing roughly 25,000 human beings in two days:

“An attack on the night of February 13th-14th by just over 800 aircraft, bombing in two sections in order to get the night fighters dispersed and grounded before the second attack, was almost as overwhelming in its effect as the Battle of Hamburg, though the area of devastation—1600 acres—was considerably less; there was, it appears, a fire-typhoon, and the effect on German morale, not only in Dresden but in far distant parts of the country, was extremely serious. The Americans carried out two light attacks in daylight on the next two days. I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unncessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think about the ethics of bombing as a whole… Between one and two thousand acres were devastated in Dresden, Bremen, Duisburg, Essen, Frankfurt-am-Main, Hanover, Munich, Nuremburg, Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, and Stuttgart. As an indication of what this means it may be mentioned that London had about 600, Plymouth about 400, and Coventry just over 100 acres destroyed by enemy aircraft during the war.” [Emphasis Added]

Anyone who considers themself to be pro-life must unapologetically oppose the mass murder of civilians and destruction of cities so late in the war (February 1945). Yes, I agree the fetus is a living being, and so are German civilians.

Anyone who claims to oppose ‘inequality’ must recognize there is no greater inequality than a living person murdering another person. Yes, paying a person a low wage is unequal to those with high wages, but the ultimate inequality occurs in the mass murder of civilians in wartime.

Colonel Carla Coulson’s research at Canadian Forces College estimates that:

“600,000 German men, women and children died as a result of the direct bombing of German cities during the war (1939-1945); many thousands more were wounded and mutilated. Millions more were left homeless. In the prosecution of the bombing campaign the British Commonwealth lost 55,573 aircrew, 18% of which were Canadian, and only one man in three could be expected to survive his tour of duty, which equated to 30 missions, with Bomber Command.”

Exhibit G: Undemocratic and Allied with Tyrants

In May 1940, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped down after the “Narvik debacle,” and Winston Churchill was appointed, not by popular vote, but an act of oligarchs in Parliament.

For all we hear about “threats to democracy” from academics and the corporate press, you’d think Churchill’s rule would be met with a little more skepticism.

To recap, the “good side in the good war” was lead by unelected Joseph Stalin, unelected Winston Churchill, unelected Charles de Gaulle, and Franklin Roosevelt, who while elected kidnapped and sent 117,000 people of Japanese ancestry to interment camps and confiscated the nations gold via executive order.

Roosevelt and Harry Truman, frequent heroes of those who proudly boast of supporting democracy, also partook in a mass murder campaign of their own in Japan. According to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in his documentary The Fog of War,

“Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50 percent to 90 percent of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.”

To be clear, I’m a libertarian who believes democracy is mob rule by the ignorant. The reason we have good computers, TVs, refrigerators, and NBA players is not because there was a nation-wide referendum on these issues. The reason we have civilization is because people engaged in voluntary contracts, voluntary profit incentives, and the Iron Law of Oligarchy within the division of labor.

The point is, those who center their world view on democracy (neoconservatives and Democrats) being a good in and of itself idolize Winston Churchill.

Exhibit H: Intention of Continental Monopoly

There is good reason courts take intent into account. The mindset of the person in question matters, for example: Did a person accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian with their car (involuntary manslaughter), or did they plan for months to murder someone by hitting them with their car (intentional homicide)?

What were Churchill’s intentions during this war? To save civilization from barbarism (by allying with Joseph Stalin, who killed millions in the 1930s Ukrainian Holodomor) or to increase his own institutional power?

In a book titled Churchill: A Life by historian Martin Gilbert, the author quotes Churchill in an exchange with Lord Londonderry—Leader of the House of Lords—on May 4, 1935:

Londonderry: “I should like to get out of your mind what appears to be a strong anti-german obsession.”

Churchill: “[You are] mistaken in supposing that I have an anti-German obsession… British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes Germany. I have no doubt who it is now. But if France set up to claim the over-lordship of Europe, I should equally endeavor to oppose them. It is thus through the centuries we have kept our liberties and maintained our life and power.”

Churchill’s private position was not that the National Socialists were a unique evil, but that he would wage war on any competitor to British power, even if it comes at the cost of millions of innocent people being conscripted and killed. Churchill embraced real world tyranny in order to fight a hypothetical tyranny. Churchill was the crazy ex-boyfriend who would rather kill his ex-girlfriend than see her with another man.

Exhibit I: Results

On September 1, 1939, the National Socialist regime invaded Poland after a dispute over the city of Danzig which had been stripped from Germany twenty years prior at Versailles. The population of that coastal city was 95% German, and we have every reason to believe those people would have prefered to be reunified with Germany as opposed to remaining a minority in Poland.

Here is the text of Neville Chamberlain’s September 3, 1939 declaration of war against Germany two days afterwards:

“This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

The war waged on behalf of Polish independence ended with 7.1 million dead Poles, and Poland under Soviet occupation.

There was never a true war guarantee for Poland, since the Bolshevik regime invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, and Britain didn’t declare war against Moscow. It was a promise to wage war against only Germany, the biggest rival of Churchill’s empire.

Many will claim, “The lesson from World War II is never appease! That’s what Chamberlain did at Munich when he refused to declare war against National Socialism for invading the Sudetenland.”

The Sudetenland was roughly one fifth of the area in the newly created country of Czechoslovakia, mostly consisting of Germanic peoples. After the Second World War, all of Czechoslovakia was under Soviet occupation. We must declare war if one fifth of a country’s independence has been violated, but when the entire country’s independence is violated, we can apparently appease.

There are multiple lessons one can draw from the example of World War II, ones which organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will never acknowledge. They include:

War guarantees incentivize small groups of people to provoke wars since a few oligarchs can benefit from war at the expense of the population they claim to be protecting. Consider how the power, prestige, and social status of Volodymyr Zelensky has risen drastically while hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have had to suffer. The very people you claim to help (like Poles) can suffer most as a result.
The ultimate check and balance in a civilized society is the freedom to disassociate with bad actors. The governments of every combat zone did not face such a constraint. They used enslaved soldiers (conscripts) and funded their operations with taxation and money printed by a central bank. This means that people who opposed the mass murder conflicts provoked by government had to serve by law, and had to fund the operations lest they be jailed. If governments truly represent us, they should gladly allow our financing of them to be as voluntary like our funding of Amazon or the Catholic Church.
Empires fall from expansion. The world wars saw the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Czarist Empire, two German empires (Kaiser and Hitler), Hirohito’s Japanese Empire, and the British Empire. As empires expand their reach, their obligations expand, and they must tax more or print more to sustain themselves. They become “spread too thin,” so to speak, misallocate military personnel, lose support via public opinion, and cease to exist.
We can talk to the bad guys. The Allies shook hands with the Bolshevik leader Joesph Stalin at Yalta and Richard Nixon shook hands with Mao Zedong in China, but people say with a straight face that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping cannot be spoken with to reach détente. Notice how whenever the government of the United States violates the freedoms of the American people, we must always stay calm and not get riled up. But when an alleged foreign government potentially violates our freedoms we must advocate mass conscription and mass bombings of civilians to protect our way of life.
We are always told about the cost of “appeasement” or not engaging in mass murder of innocent life. But consider all the downsides of war: mass death, enslavement (conscription), dismemberment, PTSD, military occupation, and property damage on an unimaginable scale.
Wars are naturally chaotic and their results cannot often be predicted. Few soldiers and civilians could have foreseen an outcome where half of Europe would be occupied by the Bolshevik regime for forty-five years, initiating a Cold War where people walked on eggshells terrified of a nuclear exchange and fighting mass death proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Central America.

A Gift

Psychology Today defines a cult leader as “A charismatic leader who becomes an object of worship beyond any meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group as its source of truth, power, and authority.”

If a guy in a cabin orders you to murder an innocent person on his behalf, he is rightfully seen as a psychopathic lunatic. But for some reason—maybe the fact that governments monopolize compulsory education—when military commanders order their underlings to go commit mass murder of innocent people it is seldom met with skepticism, and even often admired.

The unwillingness or inability for people to see Winston Churchill as a cult leader who committed horrific crimes qualifies him as a cult leader if there ever was one. We seldom even get an intellectual defense by Churchill supporters addressing my above points. Instead we’re treated to typical cult-like emotional responses like “You must love Hitler,” or “Churchill saved the West, yes one man!” or the classic, “We’d all be speaking German if you were in charge.”

For the Churchill supporters, I give the gift which they so often yearn for: a disavowal of National Socialism:

National Socialism involves institutionalized aggression against private property and contracts between consenting adults while judging people on arbitrary characteristics and is thus evil down to its foundational principles.

In practice, the National Socialists bombed civilians in Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London, then declared war on America on December 11, 1941. Here is how evil one of their leading figures was. On March 26, 1942, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary:

“Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.”

National Socialists justified the mass murder and enslavement of innocent people while bombing cities which took centuries to build, thus violating the non-aggression principle. They are indisputably villains of history.

A Way Forward

While I am very pleased to hear people disavow Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces for their killing of innocent people, we inheritors of Western civilization must reject double standards and equally oppose the mass indiscriminate murder of civilians. Yes, the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were unjustifiable and destructive, but nothing compares to the crimes of states with militaries which have a legally recognized monopoly on violence.

Every crime of the West (slavery, Native American massacres, segregation, etc) is immoral because it involves one person or group of people initiating violence against non-aggressors. Too often the focus of these atrocities is the race or nationality of the victim or perpetrator as opposed to the actions being immoral insofar as they initiate violence against non-aggressors.

The heroes of history are not politicians who claim the right to rule millions of strangers, but entrepreneurs and workers who used the voluntary sector to improve the lives of everyday people. Cornelius Vanderbilt drastically lowered the price of travel by steamship from $7 to six cents, giving the average person access his ancestors never could have fathomed. Steve Jobs and Apple employees played a central role in giving the average person access to more freely available communication with people across the globe while empowering people to educate themselves using this easy to grasp technology. The Wright Brothers gave the average person the ability to see parts of the world kings and queens of the past never could have imagined visiting.

Let us not be primitive moral relativists, only using morality when it suits us. Let us reject double standards on violence and embrace a genuine pro-life and antiwar position unapologetically.

September 7, 2024 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Germany, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

US War on China is a War on the Entire World

By Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook – 07.09.2024

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has recently claimed the US is not “looking for a crisis.” This is said, of course, with an important caveat – no crisis is sought as long as China subordinates itself to the United States.

Because China, like any other sovereign nation, based on international law, is obligated to resist foreign subordination, the US continues speeding toward inevitable war with China. Although China has formidable military capabilities, causing doubt among many that the US will actually ever trigger war with China, the US has spent decades attempting to create and exploit a potential weakness China’s current military might may be incapable of defending against.

Washington’s Long-Running Policy of Containing China

Far from a recent policy shift by the Biden Administration, US ambitions to encircle and contain China stretch back to the end of World War 2. Even as far back as 1965 as the US waged war against Vietnam, US documents referred to a policy “to contain Communist China,” as “long-running,” and identified the fighting in Southeast Asia as necessary toward achieving this policy.

For decades the US has waged wars of aggression along China’s periphery, engaged in political interference to destabilize China’s partners as well as attempt to destabilize China itself, as well as pursued likewise long-running policies to undermine China’s economic growth and its trade with the rest of the world.

More recently, the US has begun reorganizing its entire military for inevitable war with China.

Cutting Chinese Economic Lines of Communication

In addition to fighting Chinese forces in the Asia-Pacific region, the US also has long-running plans to cut off Chinese trade around the globe.

In 2006, the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) published “String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asia Littoral,” identifying China’s essential “sea lines of communication” (SLOC) from the Middle East to the Strait of Malacca as particularly vulnerable and subject to US primacy over Asia.

The paper argues that US primacy, and in particular, its military presence across the region, could be used as leverage for “drawing China into the community of nations as a responsible stakeholder,” a euphemism for subordinating China to US primacy. This, in turn, is in line with a wider global policy seeking to “deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”

Under a section titled, “Leveraging U.S. Military Power,” the paper argues for an expanded US military presence across the entire region, including along China’s SLOC, augmenting its existing presence in East Asia (South Korea and Japan), but also extending it to Southeast Asia and South Asia, recruiting nations like Indonesia and Bangladesh to bolster US military power over the region and thus over China.

It notes Chinese efforts to secure its SLOC, including with a mutually beneficial port project in Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, part of the larger China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the construction of a port in Sittwe, Myanmar, part of the larger China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Both projects seek to create alternative economic lines of communication for China, circumventing the long and vulnerable sea route through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.

Both projects have since come under attack by US-backed militancy with regular attacks still taking place against Chinese engineers across Pakistan and a large-scale armed conflict backed by the US currently unfolding in Myanmar which regularly sees opposition forces target Chinese-built infrastructure.

Thus, US policy has sought and has since achieved the region-wide disruption of China’s SLOC as well as efforts to circumvent choke points (CPEC/CMEC). Other potential corridors, including through the heart of Southeast Asia, have also been targeted by US interference. The Thai section of China’s high-speed railway to connect Southeast Asia to China has been significantly delayed by the US-backed political opposition openly trying to cancel the project.

In many ways, the US has already created a crisis for China, albeit through proxies.

Targeting Chinese Maritime Shipping

Under the guise of protecting “freedom of navigation,” the US Navy has positioned its warships and military aviation around the world’s most important maritime passages including the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East and the South China Sea – the east approach to the Strait of Malacca – along with plans to establish a significant naval presence on the Strait’s west approach.

The US realizes that Chinese military power is extensive enough to significantly complicate, if not outright defeat, US military aggression along Chinese coasts. The US instead imagines targeting China far beyond the reach of its warplanes and missile forces.

The US Naval Institute published, “Prize Law Can Help the United States Win the War of 2026,” the third place entry in the “Future of Naval Warfare Essay Contest.” It warns that a “close naval blockage” is infeasible due to China’s formidable anti-access area-denial (A2AD) capabilities.

It instead argues for:

… a distant blockade—“intercept[ing] Chinese merchant shipping at key maritime chokepoints” outside China’s A2/AD reach—would be generally sustainable; flexible in tempo and location; pose manageable risks of escalation; and impede China’s resource-hungry, import-dependent war effort.

Part of this “distant blockade” would be a campaign of targeting, seizing, and repurposing Chinese shipping vessels to augment the US’ lagging shipbuilding capabilities and the dearth of maritime resources it has created.

Far from a random essay representing a purely speculative strategy, the US has already taken steps to implement its “distant blockade.” The entire US Marine Corps has been tailored solely to wage war against Chinese shipping across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

The BBC in its 2023 article, “How US Marines are being reshaped for China threat,” would report:

The new plan sees the Marines as fighting dispersed operations across chains of islands. Units will be smaller, more spread out, but packing a much bigger punch through a variety of new weapons systems.

The “new weapons systems” are primarily anti-shipping missiles. Operating on islands and in littoral regions, the US Marines have been transformed into a force almost solely for disrupting Chinese shipping.

Together with plans to seize Chinese vessels, the US has positioned itself not as a global protector of “freedom of navigation,” but the greatest threat to it. Considering China’s status as the largest trade partner of nations around the globe, US plans to target Chinese shipping isn’t a threat to only China, but to global economic prosperity as a whole.

US War with China is War with the World

The danger of Washington’s desire for war with China and implementing its “distant blockade” to strangle China’s economy into ruins is a danger for the entire world. While preventing the global economic damage this strategy will cause after it is put into motion may be impossible, targeting the various components the US is using to encircle and contain China ahead of this conflict is possible.

US political interference and the political as well as armed opposition it has created and is using to cut China’s various economic lines of communication, can be exposed and uprooted by national and regional security initiatives.

Securing national and regional information space is the simplest and most effective way to cut the US off from the populations it seeks to influence and turn against targeted nations to achieve the political and security crises it uses to threaten trade between China and its partners. Passing and enforcing laws targeting, exposing, and uprooting US interference, including the funding of opposition parties, organizations, and media platforms by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is also essential.

Recent moves by the US to target foreign media organizations and their alleged cooperation with American citizens has created a convenient pretext for other nations to cite when targeting and uprooting NED-funded activity.

While taking these steps will have their own consequences, including retaliation from the US itself, the alternative – allowing the US to prepare and eventually carry out its “distant blockade” against China and its global trade partners – will be even more consequential.

Only time will tell if the emerging multipolar world is capable of seeing and solving this future crisis the US has spent decades preparing to create, or if the political leadership in Southeast and South Asia will fear short-term consequences at the expense of allowing and thus suffering catastrophic consequences in the intermediate future.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

September 7, 2024 Posted by aletho | Militarism | China, United States | Leave a comment

US Seizes Venezuelan Jet Plane Confirming who is the Rogue Nation

By Rick Sterling | Dissident Voice | September 7, 2024

The Biden/Harris administration is renewing its attacks on Venezuela. On Monday, September 2, US officials seized a jet plane belonging to the Venezuelan government when it was in the Dominican Republic for servicing, then flew it to Florida.

Contrary to a false report in the NY Times, the plane was not “owned by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro”. It is owned by the Venezuelan government and used for travel by various Venezuelan officials in addition to the president.

The NYT article claims, “The Biden administration is trying to put more pressure on Mr. Maduro because of his attempts to undermine the results of the recent presidential election.” This is another inversion of reality. The US government is trying to undermine the results determined by the Venezuelan National Election Council (CNE) and ratified by their Supreme Court.

Contrary to Western claims, the Supreme Court and Election Council are not synonymous with the government. They are approved by Venezuela’s elected national assembly. While one opposition member of the Election Council criticized the results, he did not attend the count or meetings. He does not ordinarily live in Venezuela and has returned to his home in the USA. Meanwhile, another opposition member of the Election Council, Aime Nogal, participated and approved the council’s decision.

Before the election, polls showed vastly different predictions. The US-funded polling company, Edison Research, showed the Gonzalez/ Machado opposition winning. Other polls showed the opposite. Polls are notoriously unreliable, especially when the poll is funded by an interested party. A better indication was the street demonstrations where the crowd in support of the coalition led by Maduro was near one million people. In contrast, the crowd for Gonzalez was a small fraction of that.

Increasingly, countries throughout the Global South are rejecting and criticizing Washington’s intervention in other nations’ internal affairs. On August 28, the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro Zelaya, terminated the long standing extradition treaty with the United States and denounced US meddling after the US Ambassador commented negatively on Honduran – Venezuelan discussions. Along with many other Latin American countries but to the dismay of the US, Honduras recognized the results of the Venezuelan election.

For over twenty years, the US has been trying to overturn the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002, the US government and elite media supported a coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez. To their chagrin, the attempt collapsed due to popular outrage. Since then, there have been repeated efforts with the US supporting street violence, assassination attempts, and invasions. Under Obama, Venezuela was absurdly declared to be a “threat to US national security”. This was the bogus rationale for the economic warfare which the US has waged ever since. Multiple reports confirm that tens of thousands of Venezuelans have died as a result of hunger and sickness due to US strangulation of the economy. Again, the truth is the opposite of what Washington claims: the US is a threat to Venezuela’s national security.

Unknown to most U.S. residents, in December 2020 the U.N. General Assembly declared US unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) are “contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the United Nations and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States.”

Illegal U.S. measures were used to justify the kidnapping and imprisonment of Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab. They have now been used to justify the theft of a jet plane needed by Venezuelan officials.

Previously, sanctions were used to justify the seizure of Venezuela’s CITGO gas stations and freezing gold reserves in London. It comes after the U.S. and allies pretended for several years that an almost unknown politician, Juan Guaido, was the president of Venezuela.

The reasons for Washington’s repeated efforts to overturn the Bolivarian revolution are clear: Venezuela has huge oil reserves and insists on its sovereignty. Under Chavez and Maduro, the Bolivarian revolution has sought to benefit the vast majority of Venezuela’s people instead of a small elite of Venezuelans and foreigners. Washington cannot tolerate the idea that those resources are used to benefit the Venezuelan people instead of billionaires like the Rockefeller clan, which made much of its wealth from Venezuela.

Under the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela insists on having its own foreign policy. In 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced the U.S. invasion of Iraq and compared U.S. President Bush to the devil. In May this year, Venezuelan President Maduro denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza and accused the West of being “accomplices.”

The cost of seizing Venezuela’s plane on foreign soil was probably greater than the $13 million value of the plane. So why did the Biden administration do this now? Perhaps it is to garner the votes of right-wing Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida. Perhaps it is to distract from their foreign policy failures in Gaza and Ukraine.

Whatever the reason, the theft of the Venezuelan jet plane is an example of U.S. foreign policy based on self-serving “rules” in violation of international law. It shows who is the rogue state.

President Xiomara Castro of Honduras is representative of the wave of disgust with US interference, crimes, and arrogance. In the past, Honduras was called a “banana republic” and known as “USS Honduras”. Now its president says, “The interference and interventionism of the United States … is intolerable. They attack, disregard and violate with impunity the principles and practices of international law, which promote respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples, non-intervention and universal peace. Enough.”

September 7, 2024 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Honduras, Latin America, Obama, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Iran’s UN mission rejects Western allegations of supplying ballistic missiles to Russia

Press TV – September 7, 2024

Iran has rejected allegations of supplying ballistic missiles to Russia as baseless and misleading. The allegations are leveled against Tehran by the US and its Western allies.

The mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations said on Friday that the country regards as inhuman any military assistance to parties of the Ukraine conflict that would increase damage to lives and infrastructure in Ukraine.

Therefore, not only does it not do so, but also invites other countries to stop sending weapons to the parties involved in the conflict, the mission said.

“The position of the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding the conflict in Ukraine has not changed,” the mission said after American, British and French envoys leveled coordinated accusations at Tehran concerning the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict during a UN Security Council meeting on August 30

The mission also called on other countries to follow suit and end the supply of weapons to the warring sides.

Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani previously also rejected the “baseless and misleading” accusations of the United States, England and France regarding Tehran’s role in Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.

“The United States and its allies cannot deny the undeniable fact that sending advanced Western weapons, especially from the United States, has prolonged the war in Ukraine and harmed civilians and civilian infrastructure,” Iravani said.

He made the remarks in a letter sent to the UN chief and the Security Council’s president on Wednesday.

He said Iran “categorically rejects” any allegations suggesting its involvement in the sale, export, or transfer of arms in violation of its international commitments to Russia as “misleading, completely unfounded.”

Tehran has repeatedly dismissed Western allegations of its involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Iran has called for a ceasefire, blaming the lingering conflict on Western arms supplies to Kiev.

Russia launched what it called a special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022 partly to prevent NATO’s eastward expansion after warning that the US-led military alliance was following an “aggressive line” against Moscow.

Russia has repeatedly warned against the flow of Western weapons to Ukraine, saying it prolongs the conflict.

September 7, 2024 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | France, Iran, Russia, UK, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

EU nations to give Ukraine more tanks

RT | September 6, 2024

Germany, along with Denmark and the Netherlands, will supply 77 more Cold-War-era Leopard 1A5 tanks to Ukraine, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has announced. In addition, Berlin intends to provide an additional twelve PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers, he said.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz approved the delivery of German-made tanks to Ukraine back in January 2023. Kiev has since lost an unknown number of these tanks. The Russian military has released numerous videos showing the destruction of such hardware.

Speaking during a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group at US Ramstein military base in Germany on Friday, Pistorius met with Vladimir Zelensky, who attended personally in a bid to drum up more defense aid. The German minister assured the Ukrainian leader that Berlin “remains in a continuous delivery process for Ukraine.”

Pistorius estimated that Germany, together with Denmark, had already delivered 58 Leopard 1A5 tanks to Ukraine, with 77 more pieces of this hardware to be supplied in the near future.

“We will deliver twelve modern PzH 2000 howitzers to Ukraine, with six expected to arrive in the country by the end of this year,” Pistorius added.

He went on to say that air defense remains a crucial area for Kiev and that more hardware is needed to better fend off Russian missile strikes. According to the minister, Germany is funding the procurement of twelve IRIS-T air defense systems to be shipped to Ukraine. Moreover, Berlin has pledged more medium- and close-range systems, including more than 60 self-propelled Gepard anti-aircraft guns.

Pistorius also stressed that since November 2022, more than 16,000 Ukrainian service members have been trained on German soil.

In mid-July, the Bavarian daily Munchner Merkur, citing government data, claimed that Germany had secretly delivered a “huge” defense aid package to Ukraine between late June and early July. The package reportedly included ten Leopard 1A5 tanks, among other hardware.

The media outlet also alleged at the time that Berlin planned to send by an unspecified date 85 more tanks of this type to Ukraine as part of a joint project with Denmark.

Moscow has consistently warned that deliveries of Western weapons to Ukraine only serve to prolong the bloodshed, without changing the course of the conflict.

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment

UK announces new missiles package for Ukraine

RT | September 6, 2024

London will supply Kiev with £162 million ($213 million) worth of Martlet multirole missiles, with the first shipment set to arrive by the end of the year, the UK Defense Ministry said in a press release on Friday.

This comes after two weeks of Russian strikes on the Ukrainian military industrial and energy sector, as Russia advances in Donbass.

The announcement also comes after a bilateral meeting between UK Defense Secretary John Healey and his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov, earlier this week, the press statement said. The UK will begin to deliver £300 million worth of artillery ammunition, as well as 650 Lightweight Multirole Missile (LMM) systems, with the first shipments expected by the end of 2024, according to the press release.

The UK, which is among Ukraine’s biggest war sponsors, has provided Kiev with more than €8.92 billion in military aid since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, according to Germany’s Kiel institute.

Last month, however, Zelensky criticized the UK for its “slowed down” pace in providing weaponry. “We will insist on the need for bold steps, bold decisions,” he said in an address.

The delivery of LMM missiles is meant to boost Kiev’s air defenses against attacks like this week’s Russian strike on Poltava, Healey said.

Moscow struck “the 179th Joint Training Center of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” with two Iskander ballistic missiles in the deadliest attack this year, the Defense Ministry reported on Wednesday. Foreign instructors were preparing Ukrainian communications and electronic warfare specialists, as well as drone operators at the facility, the ministry added. According to Ukrainian officials, the strike killed at least 55 and wounded 328 more.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, speaking on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, stressed that the Russian Army only strikes military targets, while Ukraine uses cluster munitions against civilians. Russia is getting better at hitting foreign military instructors and mercenaries in Ukraine, he said, adding that “the direct involvement of foreign states in the conflict is evident.”

Moscow has warned that deliveries of Western weapons to Ukraine, as well as the training of Ukrainian troops by foreign military instructors, makes Kiev’s sponsors direct participants in the conflict. The supplies of weapons, however, will not alter the course of the conflict, but only result in more deaths, Russia has said.

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Russia, UK, Ukraine | Leave a comment

HOUSING AID AND LOANS FOR NON-CITIZENS: WHO’S PROTECTING THE MIDDLE CLASS?

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | August 29, 2024

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Video | United States | Leave a comment

The Militarisation of Scandinavia & the Coming Wars

How a Region of Peace Became an American Frontline

By Glenn Diesen | September 6, 2024

The militarisation of Scandinavia will drastically undermine the security of the region and invite new conflicts as Russia will be compelled to respond to what could become an existential threat. Norway has decided to host at least 12 US military bases on its soil, while Finland and Sweden follow suit by transferring sovereign control over parts of their territory after they recently became NATO members. Infrastructure will be built to bring US troops faster to Russian borders, while the Baltic Sea and the Arctic will be converted into NATO seas.

Scandinavia as a Key Region for Russian Security

Ever since Kievan Rus disintegrated in the 13^th century and the Russians lost their presence on the Dnieper River, a key security challenge for Russia has been its lack of reliable access to the world seas. Furthermore, economic development is also dependent on reliable access to the seas as they are the arteries of international trade. Similarly, hegemonic powers have always been required to dominate the seas, while Russia can be contained, weakened and defeated by restricting its access.

Sweden was initially such a great power. In the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries, Sweden sought to restrict the access of Russia in the Baltic Sea, while also attempting to encroach upon its Arctic port in Arkhangelsk. During the “The Time of Trouble” that involved the Swedish occupation of Russia, approximately 1/3 of Russia’s entire population died. The conflict ended with the Treaty of Stolbova in 1617, which involved territorial concessions that cut off Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea. This lasted until the time of Peter the Great, who eventually defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War in 1721. The war ended Sweden’s era as a great power, while Russia became a great power due to its access to the Baltic Sea.

The dominant maritime powers, Britain and then the US, pursued similar attempts to limit Russia’s access to the world’s oceans for the next three centuries. During the Crimean War (1853-56), European diplomats had been explicit that the objective had been to push Russia back into Asia and exclude it from European affairs.[1] This explains Russia’s fierce response to the Western-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 as Russia responded by seizing Crimea in fear of losing its strategic Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol to NATO. The US sabotage of the Minsk agreement (2015-2022) and the Istanbul peace agreement (2022) was similarly motivated by the goal of arming Ukraine to take back Crimea and make Sevastopol a NATO naval base.

The militarisation and vassalisation of Scandinavia are important to challenge Russia’s access to the two other seas on Russia’s Western borders – the Baltic Sea and the Arctic. Former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen optimistically announced that NATO expansion in Scandinavia would enable NATO to block Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea in a conflict: “After the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, the Baltic Sea will now be a NATO sea… if we wish, we can block all entry and exit to Russia through St. Petersburg”.[2] Poland and the Baltic States have also begun to casually refer to the Baltic Sea as a “NATO sea”. The Financial Times argues that “Denmark could block Russian oil tankers from reaching markets” as part of sanctions.[3] A NATO Colonel also argued that the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad would come under much greater pressure and become a “problem” for Russia: “The ascension of Finland and the upcoming ascension of Sweden will totally change the setup in the Baltic Sea region. Russia will experience Kaliningrad being surrounded”.[4]

Sweden’s NATO membership now threatens to reverse the outcome of the Great Northern War in 1721, which by implication would diminish the basic foundations of Russian security. The Battle of Poltova is recognised to have been the largest and most decisive battle of the Great Northern War that resulted in Sweden’s defeat. The videos emerging of Swedish casualties in the recent Russian missile strike on Poltova is very symbolic of the militarisation of Scandinavia.

America’s attack on Nord Stream demonstrated how control over the Baltic Sea is important to cut Russian-German economic connectivity. The US has attempted to blame the Ukrainians for the attack, suggesting that “the CIA warned Zelensky’s office to stop the operation”.[5] The admission of knowing about the attack before it happened is nonetheless interesting as the US and NATO blamed Russia for the attack and used it as a reason to intensify the naval control over the Baltic Sea and escalate the Ukraine War. This is an admission that the US lied to their own public and the world, and used the lie to escalate their wider war on Russia. The attack also demonstrates that the Americans will treat the Europeans as proxies just like they used the Ukrainians, while the Europeans would not stand up for their interests but silently accept an ally destroying their own vital energy infrastructure. The revelation also demonstrated that the people we generously refer to as journalists will not ask any critical questions or discuss objective reality if it challenges the war narrative.

Finland was perhaps the greatest success story of neutrality, yet it was converted into NATO’s longest frontline against Russia. There was no threat to Finland, yet expansion was framed as being a blow to Putin as an objective on its own. Foreign military deployments will predictably soon emerge in the north of Finland to threaten Russia’s Northern Fleet in Arkhangelsk. The pretext will most likely be the concern that Russia will want to seize part of Lapland in the north of Finland. It will make no sense whatsoever, but obedient media will drum up the required fear.

The militarisation of Norway has followed a gradual incrementalism. Initially, US troops were stationed in Norway on a rotating basis, which enabled the government to claim they were not permanently deployed. In 2021, Norway and the US agreed on a few military bases but called them “dedicated areas” as Norway officially does not allow foreign bases on its soil. The US has full control and jurisdiction over these territories and the US media refers to them as military bases that will enable the US to confront Russia in the Arctic, but the Norwegian political-media elites must still refer to them as “dedicated areas” and dismiss that they have any offensive purposes. The frog is slowly boiling, believing it has identical interests to its masters in Washington.

Ignoring the Security Competition when Interpreting the Ukraine War

As Scandinavia is converted from a region of peace to a US frontline, one would expect more debate about this historical shift. Yet, the political-media elites have already reached the consensus that expanding NATO enhances our security due to greater military force and deterrence. More weapons rarely result in more peace, although this is the logic of hegemonic peace that this generation of politicians has committed themselves to.

The point of departure in security politics is the security competition. If increasing the security of country A decreases the security of country B, then country B will likely be compelled to enhance its security in a manner that reduces security for country A. The security competition can be mitigated by deterring the adversary without provoking a response, which is ideally organised through an inclusive security architecture.

Scandinavia’s ability to be a region of peace relied on mastering the deterrence/reassurance balance. Finland and Sweden were neutral states and were an important part of the belt of neutral states from the north to the south of Europe during the Cold War, which contributed to reducing tensions. Norway was a NATO member but imposed restrictions on itself by not hosting foreign military bases on its soil and limiting the military activities of allies in the Arctic region. It was common sense that security derived from deterring the Soviets without provoking them, this common sense is now long gone.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is cited as the main reason why Finland and Sweden had to abandon their neutrality and join NATO. This logic makes sense when ignoring security competition as Russia’s actions then occur in a vacuum. Acceptable discussions about the Ukraine War are limited by the premise that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”, and any efforts to widen the debate by addressing NATO’s role can be shut down with accusations of “legitimising” Russia’s invasion.

NATO expansion caused the Ukraine War, and the response to this war was NATO expansion to Finland and Sweden. This twisted logic prevails as the narrative of an “unprovoked” invasion has become immune to facts. German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, explained that she had opposed offering Ukraine the Membership Action Plan to join NATO in 2008 as it would have been interpreted by Moscow as “a declaration of war”.[6] Wikileaks also revealed that Germans believed that pushing NATO expansionism could “break up the country”.[7] William Burns, the US Ambassador to Moscow and now the current Director of the CIA, warned that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite”.[8] Burns warned of the consequences:

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests… Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”.[9]

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s Secretary General in 2008, recognised that NATO should have respected Russia’s red lines and should therefore not have pledged membership to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008.[10] Former US Secretary of Defence and CIA Director Robert Gates also acknowledged the mistake as “Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching”.[11] Even the support for bringing Ukraine into NATO had dubious intensions. In late March 2008, one week before the NATO Summit in Bucharest where Ukraine was promised future membership, Tony Blair told American political leaders how they should manage Russia. Blair argued the strategy “should be to make Russia a ‘little desperate’ with our activities in areas bordering on what Russia considers its sphere of interest and along its actual borders. Russia had to be shown firmness and sown with seeds of confusion”.[12]

In September 2023, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg gleefully argued that Russia’s actions to prevent NATO expansion would now result in more NATO expansion.

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And [it] was a pre-condition for not invading Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that. The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO… We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite. He has got more NATO presence in eastern part of the Alliance and he has also seen that Finland has already joined the Alliance and Sweden will soon be a full member”.[13]

Stoltenberg did not specify why he thought more NATO expansion would increase security if NATO expansion was the cause of the war. However, NATO also insists that Ukraine must become part of NATO as Russia would not dare to attack a NATO country, while NATO also argues that Russia must be stopped in Ukraine as Russia will thereafter attack NATO countries. Much like the recognition of security competition, the logic is also absent.

Blinded by Ideological Fundamentalism

Scandinavia’s recognition of security competition has suffered from what is referred to in the literature as “ideological fundamentalism”. Actors are seen as either good or bad based on political identities that have been assigned by ideology. Ideological fundamentalism reduces the ability to recognise that one’s own policies and actions may constitute a threat to others, because one’s own political identity is held to be indisputably positive and dissociated from any threatening behaviour. There is a lack of understanding for why Russia would feel threatened by NATO expansion even after Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the proxy war in Ukraine. NATO is merely a “defensive alliance”, even as it bombs countries that never threatened it. Ideological fundamentalism can best be explained by President Reagan’s reaction to how Able Archer, a NATO military exercise in 1983 that almost triggered a nuclear war. Convinced that the US was a force for good that was fighting an evil empire, he was bewildered that the Soviets did not see it the same way:

“Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans… I’d always felt that from our deeds it must be clear to anyone that Americans were a moral people who starting at the birth of our nation had always used our power only as a force of good in the world”.[14]

Trapped in the tribal mindset of “us” versus “them”, the Scandinavians exaggerate what “we” have in common, and dismiss any commonality with “them”. It is assumed that the US shares the interests of Scandinavia, and is primarily building a military presence there to provide security. The US has a security strategy based on hegemony, which is dependent on weakening all emerging rivals. The US Security Strategy of 2002 explicitly linked national security to global dominance as the objective to “dissuade future military competition” should be achieved by advancing “the unparalleled strength of the United States armed forces, and their forward presence”.[15] While Scandinavia has an interest in maintaining peaceful borders with Russia, the US has defined its interests in destabilising Russian borders.[16] Peacetime alliances are reliant on perpetuating conflicts rather than solving them as conflict ensures loyalty from the protectorate and the containment of the adversary. In his famous work on how to advance and perpetuate US global hegemony, Brzezinski wrote the US must “prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together”.[17]

A Lack of Political Imagination to Move Beyond Bloc Politics

The Scandinavians recognise that their security has been reliant on the US since the end of the Second World War, and they simply do not have the political imagination for other security arrangements. If it worked then, why should it not work now? As security competition is no longer a consideration, the Scandinavians conveniently neglect that NATO was a status quo actor during the Cold War, while after the Cold War it became a revisionist actor by expanding and attacking other countries in what NATO refers to as “out-of-area” operations.

The lack of alternatives to NATO enables the US to simply demand “alliance solidarity” as a code word for bloc discipline. Case in point, in the 2000s Norway was criticising the US missile defence system that threatened the nuclear balance as it could enable a US first strike. Wikileaks revealed that the US Ambassador reported that the US was pressuring the Norwegian government, political figures, journalists, and think tank researchers to overcome Norway’s firm opposition to missile defence, or at least “to a minimum counter Russian misstatements and distinguish Norway’s position from Russia’s to avoid damaging alliance solidarity”.[18] It was argued that “thanks to our high-level visitors”, Norway had begun to “quietly continue work in NATO on missile defence and to publicly criticise Russia for provocative statements” (Wikileaks, 2007b).[19] In the words of US Ambassador Whitney, Norway had to “adjust to current realities” since it would have a “hard time defending its position if the issue shifts to one of alliance solidarity”.[20] Following the Norwegian U-turn on missile defence, it was declared in the Norwegian Parliament that “it is important for the political cohesion of the alliance not to let the opposition, perhaps especially from Russia, hinder progress and feasible solutions”.[21]

The world is yet again undergoing dramatic change as it changes from a unipolar to a multipolar world order. The US will increasingly shift its focus and resources to Asia, which will change the trans-Atlantic relationship. The US will be able to offer less to the Europeans, but it will demand more loyalty in terms of economics and security. The Europeans will have to sever their economic ties to American rivals which will result in less prosperity and more dependence. The US will also expect the Europeans to militarise the economic competition with China, and NATO has already become the most obvious vehicle for this purpose. Instead of adjusting to multipolarity by diversifying their ties and pursuing opportunities from the rise of Asia, the Europeans are doing the opposite by subordinating themselves further to the US in the hope that it will increase the value of NATO.

Scandinavia was a region of peace as it attempted to mitigate the security competition. As Scandinavia surrenders its sovereignty to the US for protection against an imaginary threat, the region will be converted into a frontline that will unavoidably trigger new conflicts. The only certainty is that when Russia reacts to these provocations, we will all chant “unprovoked” in unison and make some obscure reference to democracy.

[1] J.W. Kipp and W.B. Lincoln, ‘Autocracy and Reform Bureaucratic Absolutism and Political Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Russian History, vol.6, no.1, 1979, p.4.

[2] Lrt, ‘Putin’s plan includes Baltics, says former NATO chief’, Lrt, 19 July 2022.

[3] H. Foy, R. Milne and D. Sheppard, Denmark could block Russian oil tankers from reaching markets, Financial Times, 15 November 2023.

[4] E. Zubriūtė, Kaliningrad is no longer our problem, but Russia’s’ – interview with NATO colonel, LRT, 13 November 2023.

[5] B. Pancevski, A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage, The Wall Street Jounral, 14 August 2024.

[6] A. Walsh, ‘Angela Merkel opens up on Ukraine, Putin and her legacy’, Deutsche Welle, 7 June 2022.

[7] Wikileaks, ‘Germany/Russia: Chancellery views on MAP for Ukraine and Georgia’, Wikileaks, 6 June 2008.

[8] W.J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal, New York, Random House, 2019, p.233.

[9] W.J. Burns, ‘Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’, Wikileaks, 1 February 2008.

[10] G.J. Dennekamp, De Hoop Scheffer: Poetin werd radicaler door NAVO’ [De Hoop Scheffer: Putin became more radical because of NATO], NOS, 7 January 2018.

[11] R.M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

[12] Telegraph, ‘Tony Blair and John McCain talk about Israel/Palestine and Russia handling’, The Telegraph, 27 March 2008.

[13] J. Stoltenberg, ‘Opening remarks’, NATO, 7 September 2023.

[14] Reagan, R., 1990. An American Life: The Autobiography. Simon and Schuster, New York, p.74.

[15] NSS, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, The White House, June 2002.

[16] RAND, ‘Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground’, RAND Corporation, 24 April 2019.

[17] Z. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geopolitical Imperatives, New York, Basic Books, 1997, p.40.

[18] Wikileaks, 2007. Norway: Missile defense public diplomacy and outreach, OSLO 000248, US Embassy, Oslo, 13 March

[19] Wikileaks, 2007. Positive movements in the missile defence debate in Norway but no breakthrough, OSLO 000614, US Embassy, Oslo, 8 June

[20] Wikileaks, 2008. Norway standing alone against missile defense, OSLO 000072, US Embassy, Oslo, 12 February.

[21] Stortinget, 2012. Norwegian Parliamentary meeting, Sak 2, 15 May 2012.

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Finland, NATO, Norway, Russia, Sweden, United States | Leave a comment

Washington, Baghdad clinch deal on US troop withdrawal from Iraq: Report

Press TV – September 6, 2024

The US and Iraq have reached an agreement for the withdrawal of US-led coalition forces from Iraq, which would see hundreds of troops leave by September 2025 and the remainder by the end of 2026, according to a Western media report.

The Reuters news agency, quoting multiple unnamed sources within the governments of the US, Iraq, and other countries, said the withdrawal plan “has been broadly agreed but requires a final go-ahead from both capitals and an announcement date.”

“We have an agreement, it’s now just a question of when to announce it,” Reuters quoted a senior US official.

An official announcement was initially scheduled for weeks ago but was postponed due to regional escalation related to Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza and to iron out some remaining details, the report quoted the sources as saying.

Farhad Alaaldin, foreign affairs adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, told the news agency that technical talks with Washington on the coalition drawdown had concluded.

“We are now on the brink of transitioning the relationship between Iraq and members of the international coalition to a new level, focusing on bilateral relations in military, security, economic, and cultural areas,” he said.

According to the agency, the US and Iraq are also seeking to establish a new advisory relationship that could see some US troops remain in Iraq after the drawdown.

The agreement comes six months after Baghdad initiated talks with Washington on the withdrawal of US forces stationed at Iraqi bases.

Those talks began after a wave of rocket and drone attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for Washington’s support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its atrocities against the Iraqi people.

The Iraqi resistance groups have been pressing for an end to the presence of foreign forces in Iraq for more than a decade after a US-led coalition invaded the country in violation of international law based on false claims of it owning weapons of mass destruction.

There are nearly 2,500 American troops in Iraq and some 900 in Syria as part of what Washington claims to be a fighting force against Daesh.

The US has maintained its presence even after the Arab country and its allies, including Iran, vanquished the Takfiri terrorist group in late 2017.

In 2020, the Iraqi parliament voted for the expulsion of US forces. The vote came after Iran’s top anti-terror commander, martyr General Qassem Soleimani, and deputy PMU commander Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis were assassinated in a cowardly drone strike ordered by then-US president Donald Trump outside of the Baghdad airport.

On January 8, 2020, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) targeted the US-run Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq after launching a wave of attacks to retaliate for the assassination of the two top anti-terror commanders.

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Wars for Israel | Iraq, Middle East, United States | Leave a comment

Is ‘Israel’ using small nuclear weapons in Gaza and South Lebanon?

Dr. Christopher Busby is part a mixed crew of investigative reporters and commentators from Lebanon and some film-makers investigating “Israel’s” use of enriched uranium in strikes on Gaza on Lebanon, and aim to follow up on the strange illnesses that are appearing on the battlefield.

By Robert Daly and Christopher Busby | Al Mayadeen | September 6, 2024

The American Peace Information Council (APIC) and Green Audit (UK) are conducting an investigation of “Israel’s” possible use of small nuclear weapons in Gaza and South Lebanon. Dr. Christopher Busby—Scientific Secretary, European Committee on Radiation Risk; once Member, UK Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters; once Member, UK Ministry of Defence Depleted Uranium Oversight Board—presents the scientific and social background of the case below.

APIC and Green Audit ask people who drive ambulances down in the South, or live there, to come forward with engine air filters from ambulances driven in bombed areas, samples of long hair (at least 10 cm in length) if they live in bombed areas, and Geiger counter readings and soil samples from bomb craters. Please send these samples and evidence to Al Mayadeen who will forward them to us. One would think that the easiest way to obtain ambulance air filters would be from the Lebanese Red Cross, but its General Secretary, Mr. Georges Kitanneh, refuses to assist this investigation.

Dr. Robert Daly

‘Israel’ in Gaza: Red Mercury

Dr. Christopher Busby

In 2021, a scientific report in the prestigious journal Nature confirmed what I had been saying since 2006. “Israel” has, since its attacks on Lebanon in 2006 and those on Gaza in 2008 and 2014, used a new nuclear weapon, one which kills with a high temperature radiation flash and with neutrons. This weapon, which leaves an identification footprint, but no fission products like Caesium-137, we now know was also employed by the USA in Fallujah, Iraq in 2003, and previously in Kosovo also.

The residues, inhalable Uranium aerosol dust, together with the neutron damage to tissues, cause a range of serious and often fatal health effects that puzzle doctors and defy treatment. Without knowing what caused such effects, which often mimic other illnesses or result in fungal infections that kill, doctors are powerless to help and just watch the exposed individuals die.

In the cases of direct exposures to the flash, parts of the body, arms, legs, places that were not behind significant shielding are burned to blackened sticks. The aerosol Uranium dust is inhaled, destroys the lungs through fibrosis, is translocated to the lymphatic system, and later causes cancers, not only lymphomas and leukemias, but pretty much any cancer as a result of localisation of the Uranium particle in the organ, for example the breast, which has extensive lymphatic vessels. If the particle is coughed up and swallowed, it can end up immobilised in the colon and cause cancer there.

Downstream results in exposed populations include genetic effects, unexplained infant mortality, congenital malformations, miscarriages, sex ratio perturbations at birth, and fertility loss, all of which were found in epidemiological studies I helped carry out in Fallujah from 2010-2011.

This is not science fiction or arm-waving. I have acted as an expert witness in two successful legal cases, one in England and one in Australia, where the judge and coroner court concluded that the particles caused colon cancer. I am helping a US DU veteran at the moment in his case against the military. He has a pituitary tumour (the small gland is located behind the nose where the particles lodge).

I began this investigation in 2006 when an article appeared in a Lebanese newspaper reporting that an Israeli bomb crater in Khiam was radioactive. A Dr. Ali Khobeisi had taken a Geiger counter to the crater and found a 20-times background radiation level in the crater relative to nearby. By 2006, I had become something of an alternative authority on Depleted Uranium weapons (DU). I had given evidence to the US Congressional Committee on Veterans Affairs on the effects of DU and Gulf War syndrome, I had visited Iraq and also Kosovo, and I was a member of the UK government Depleted Uranium Oversight Board (DUOB); I had written articles, including for the United Nations, I had given evidence to the Royal Society.

Dr Ali Khobeisi (right) taking Geiger counter readings at a bomb crater in Khiam, Lebanon 2006

I asked a colleague to go to Lebanon and get samples from the crater, and also an ambulance air filter. When they were analysed, using two separate methods, they showed the presence not of Depleted Uranium, but of Enriched Uranium (EU). Now this is impossible, unless the weapon was made from EU or created EU from neutron irradiation of U-234 and U-238.

Ambulance that provided air filter for 2006 investigation

To follow the explanation of the problem, you need some science. Natural Uranium, as mined, has three isotopes, U-238 U-234 and U-235. Most of this Uranium by mass is U-238 (99.7%). The 0.3% of U-235 is important for nuclear bombs and nuclear energy and is extracted in various ways to make EU. What is left behind is less radioactive U-238, and this is what is termed Depleted Uranium (DU).

When U-238 decays, it changes into Thorium-234, which rapidly changes into Protoactinium-234 and this turns into Uranium-234. Then you get a long list of progeny, but these do not concern us. All this happens quite quickly, and the process releases some gamma rays which make DU a gamma radiation hazard, contrary to the statements of the military that DU is not a handling hazard. It is. But this is not important in this story.

The main issue here is this. Was the enriched Uranium in the Lebanon bomb a real finding? Could it have been a laboratory error? The answer is No. We used two different laboratories and two different Uranium analysis methods, ICPMS and alpha spectrometry.

What we found was picked up by the reporter Robert Fisk, who put the story into The Independent in October 2006: The Mystery of “Israel’s” Secret Uranium Bomb.

Until we found EU, I had focused on the health effects of DU. Everyone did. But in 2006 I was contacted by an eminent Italian nuclear physicist, Emilio Del Guidice. I met him in London, where he told me that the source of the EU was a new weapon which used Hydrogen or heavy hydrogen, Deuterium dissolved in Uranium and when this warhead, as small as a baseball, was fired at a solid object, the hydrogen suffered Cold Fusion to form Helium with the emission of a powerful gamma ray which cause the U238 to convert to an unstable U-239 which decayed to U-235 and a neutron.

I am not a nuclear physicist, though I have my own ideas about this explanation but at that time I accepted that he knew what he was talking about. At least it explained the source of the enrichment.

In 2008 I was approached by some doctors in Egypt who wondered if the Israelis were bombing Gaza with DU. With some difficulty, I obtained samples from Gaza, again soil samples and an air filter, and analysis showed the presence of EU. In 2010, as part of our study of the congenital malformations in Fallujah, we analysed the hair of the mothers for 52 elements to try and identify the cause of the birth defects. We found EU in the mothers’ hair.

Further support for the existence of an EU-containing or EU-producing weapon came from a study of a Kosovo war Veteran whose mysterious illnesses were investigated thoroughly by some doctors in Liverpool and Manchester. The man’s kidneys contained Enriched Uranium.

Emilio del Guidice had not stood still in this Sherlock Holmes investigation. Together with reporters from Italian TV (Rai News) he had visited the father of Cold Fusion, Prof Martin Fleischmann, whom I had also previously worked with when I was at the University of Kent in 1980. Fleishmann added to the intriguing scientific puzzle, but was unwilling to get involved. It seemed that scientists looking at cold fusion were dying under suspicious circumstances. Fleischmann himself had seemingly been poisoned with something that caused multi-site cancer and passed away on August 3, 2012. A cold fusion colleague developed the same multi-site cancer and didn’t survive.

Del Guidice and the Rai News producer following up the story wrote a book: The Secret of the Three Bullets, published in 2014. It is still in print and contains their side of the story. I am in the book under various names. But a few months before its publication, del Guidice unexpectedly died when alone in his house. I am told that the Rai News co-author editor of the book, Maurizio Torrealta has gone into hiding after having been posted three real bullets in an envelope.

Fast forward to 2021. The Nature paper gave the results of analyses of 65 samples of soil, sand, cement, and building materials from Gaza. Using gamma spectrometry (where you use the whole sample and look at the identifiable peaks from U-235 and Th-234 = U238) the authors identified some significantly high levels of Enriched Uranium in all the samples, but mostly in the soil samples. The levels of enrichment had become greater than those that we found in our earlier studies. The natural isotope mass ratio in nature (U238/U235) is 138. In Lebanon we found 116. In Gaza 108. The 2021 paper found about 85. Since this was before the recent bombing, this contamination must date to the 2014 Israeli bombing. What should we expect to find now?

In March of this year, I wrote to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the official UN watchdogs for the use of nuclear weapons. My colleague from Fallujah, Dr. Mohamad Al-Darraji also sent my letter under his name. Nothing happened. No reply. He was to organise a Press Conference in Vienna to draw attention to the use of this weapon in Fallujah, and the cover up of the residual high levels of radiation by the Iraqi Ministry of Science. I made a video to be presented at this conference (it is online). But he couldn’t get a venue.

I followed the letter up with a second version in July, demanding that the IAEA respond. I wrote a paper about the issue and submitted it to two journals, putting the pre-print online. It was rejected on the basis that the reviewers didn’t believe the Nature analysis results. Eventually, Al-Darraji got a reply from the IAEA (naturally, I didn’t). The IAEA didn’t believe the Nature results. Nothing to investigate. No problem.

The UK Green Party House of Lords member, Baroness Jenny Jones (who I know) asked a question in UK Parliament. The government said they didn’t have anything to say about it. About the high level of Enriched Uranium in Gaza.

So that’s it. What can we do? “Israel” and the USA (at least) have developed what is almost certainly a mini-neutron bomb. “Israel” is using it in Gaza. And may be using it in Lebanon (again). In fact, there is evidence for the development of such a bomb having been tested as long ago as October 1962, in the final US atmospheric test in the Dominic series in the Pacific. This was the test named “Housatonic” which achieved 9.96Mt yield but reportedly had zero fallout. That means it had no fission primer in the first stage, a necessary requirement for all the hydrogen bombs before it.

The significance of this appears to have been overlooked, but, astonishingly, you can find details on Wikipedia. The UK government put all that stuff under the Official Secrets Act and when I was representing the Test Veterans in the Royal Courts of Justice from 2010 to 2016, I was refused access to these details. The new bomb was successfully detonated just before the Kennedy Kruschev test ban, and just before Kennedy was assassinated. Could there be a link?

I have joined a mixed crew of investigative reporters and commentators from Lebanon and some film-makers to seek out the solution to this conundrum. We aim to follow up on the strange illnesses that are appearing on the battlefield. We aim to look for Enriched Uranium and also neutron activation products like Cobalt-60, Tritium and Carbon-14. In a new development, the laboratories that I used to examine the earlier samples have all suddenly closed their doors. One of them was shut down altogether after the first Gaza analysis. One of them was threatened. But we can do a lot with what we have.

What we want is for people to obtain Geiger Counters to check out the impact sites soon after the explosion, and if it is radioactive to get us samples of dust and dirt. We want women’s hair samples, especially long hair, cut from the nape of the neck, from women who were near or lived in areas that were bombed. You can buy a simple Geiger Counter now for about 60 euros. You can even get a low-resolution portable gamma spectrometer for about 350 euros.

We would like anyone with comments or information to contact us. This is a big deal.

The weapon will certainly be used in future exchanges, and will make local nuclear war possible, since the scary scenarios involving fallout may not materialise. I have named the device Red Mercury because that is what it probably is (remember the red mercury story: written off officially by science (haha) as a fraud, as a phony). Red Mercury was Stalin’s code for Enriched Uranium. Clearly, from the Dominic Housatonic test, the USA also developed the weapon. Since it kills without leaving fission products, it is invisible to the global nuclear explosion detection systems and the IAEA watchdogs.

But there is no doubt the IAEA know about it. Their latest report on Uranium in the Environment completely ignores Enriched Uranium. When I asked one of the report authors why, I was told they were short of money. They only had enough to look at Depleted Uranium. Can you believe this stuff?

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

France arrests nurse who volunteered in Gaza

Imane Maarifi

MEMO | September 6, 2024

France yesterday arrested then released nurse Imane Maarifi who spent 15 days volunteering as a medic in the Gaza Strip.

Lawyer Rafik Chekkat, founder of the Islamophobia platform, said Maarifi was arrested in the morning at her home and taken into custody.

He criticised the arrest and said it took place at a time when French soldiers who fought in Gaza “enjoy total impunity.”

Thomas Portes, a lawmaker from the La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed (LFI) party, wrote that Maarifi has been released from custody.

“The search of the home in front of the family leaves no doubt about the desire to intimidate the voices that are raised to support the Palestinian people and demand an immediate ceasefire,” he wrote on X.

Maarifi attended pro-Palestinian rallies in France to share her testimony about the crippling situation in Gaza.

She has also expressed her demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and a boycott of companies supporting Israel.

Maarifi spent 15 days volunteering as a medic at the European hospital in Khan Yunis.

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | France, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israeli army kills US citizen during demonstration in Beita, Nablus

International Solidarity Movement | September 6, 2024

During the weekly demonstration in Beita, Palestine, on the morning of September 6th, 2024, the Israeli army shot and killed an International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer. The demonstration, which primarily involved men and children praying, was met with force from the Israeli army stationed on a hill. Initially, the army fired a large amount of tear gas and then began using live ammunition. The volunteer, who we consider a martyr in the struggle, was the 18th demonstrator to be killed in Beita since 2020. She was an American citizen of Turkish descent.

The Israeli forces intentionally fired two live rounds. One hit a Palestinian man in the leg, injuring him. The other round was fired at international volunteers who were observing the demonstration, striking a human rights activist in the head. The volunteer died shortly after being transported to a local hospital in Nablus.

Fellow ISM volunteer Mariam Dag (a pseudonymn) was on the scene, and witnessed the fatal injury of her comrade. She said:

“We were peacefully demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the colonisation of their land, and the illegal settlement of Evyatar. The situation escalated when the Israeli army began to fire tear gas and live ammunition, forcing us to retreat. We were standing on the road, about 200 meters from the soldiers, with a sniper clearly visible on the roof. Our fellow volunteer was standing a bit further back, near an olive tree with some other activists. Despite this, the army intentionally shot her in the head.

This is just another example of the decades of impunity granted to the Israeli government and army, bolstered by the support of the US and European governments, who are complicit in enabling genocide in Gaza. Palestinians have suffered far too long under the weight of colonization. We will continue to stand in solidarity and honor the martyrs until Palestine is free.”

E.N, who is a friend of the slain activist and fellow volunteer with the ISM said:

“I don’t know how to say this. There’s no easy way. I wish I could [say] something eloquent, but I can’t through my sobbing tears…. my friend, comrade and travel partner to Palestine, was just shot in the head and murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces. May she rest in power. She is now one of many martyrs in this struggle.”

Beita, is a village in the West Bank where just weeks ago Amado Sison, another American volunteer, was struck by live ammunition in the back of the leg. Beita has a long history of resistance against Israeli occupation and has been a focal point of violence directed towards Palestinian residents by Israeli forces. Located near several illegal Israeli settlements, the village holds regular demonstrations. Due to escalating aggression by the Israeli forces, residents are currently refraining from marching or chanting, instead gathering together on the land and praying.

In recent years, Beita has seen ongoing demonstrations, particularly against the construction of new illegal Israeli outposts on the lands of the village. For example Evyatar outpost, on Sabih Mountain, has been established on Palestinian land. In June, the Israeli security cabinet approved the ‘legalization’ of Evyatar, causing the people of Beita to strengthen their popular resistance.

Residents of Beita recently restarted weekly Friday demonstrations to resist the further theft of their land. While protests had nearly ceased since October 7th 2023, due to escalating violence from Israeli occupation forces, there was a renewed push on July 5th 2024, when dozens of Palestinians, accompanied by international and Israeli activists, marched from the adjacent mountain, through the valley, and towards the outpost.

In recent months, international activists have experienced a sharp increase in violence from Israeli forces and the occupation must be held accountable for this. The woman martyred today was an activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization that provides protective presence and solidarity in the West Bank. The ISM was founded in 2002, and has maintained a steady presence in Palestine ever since, supporting the Palestinian popular struggle against the occupation.

Our comrade is added to the 17 Palestinian protesters already slain in Beita:

Palestinians martyred at demonstrations in Beita:
– Mohammed Hamayyel, 15 (March 11, 2020)
– Islam Dwikat, 22 (April 9, 2020)
– Karam Amin Dwikat, 17 (October 15, 2023)
– Issa Sliman Barham, 40 (May 14, 2021)
– Tareq Ommar Snobar, 27 (May 16, 2021)
– Zakaria Maher Hamayyel, 25 (May 28, 2021)
– Mohammed Said Hamayyel, 15 (June 11, 2021)
– Ahmad Zahi Bani Shamsa, 15 (June 16, 2021)
– Shadi Ommar Sharafa, 41 (July 27, 2021)
– Imad Ali Dwikat, 38 (August 6, 2021)
– Mohammed Ali Khbeissa, 27 (September 24, 2021)
– Jamil Jamal Abu Ayyash, 32 (December 1, 2021)
– Fawaz Ahmad Hamayyel, 47 (April 13, 2022)
– Immad Jareh Bani Shamsa, 16 (October 9, 2023)
– Mohammed Ibrahim Adili, 13 (November 23, 2023)
– Maath Ashraf Bani Shamsa, 17 (February 9, 2024)
– Ameed Ghaleb Said al-Jaroub, 34 (March 22, 2024, died of a bullet wound injury to the head sustained on August 21, 2023)

At this time, the family is not granting any interviews. Please contact ISM for media requests.

September 6, 2024 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Israeli settlement, Palestine, Turkiye, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

Subscribe to Aletho News

Enter your email address to receive new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 2,352 other subscribers
Visits Since December 2009
- 7,758,352 hits
Looking for something?

Search for:
Archives
Archives
Calendar

October 2026

M T W T F S S

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

« Sep
Categories

Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity Militarism Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for Israel
Tags
Afghanistan Africa AIPAC al-Qaeda Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Brazil Canada CDC Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Covid-19 COVID-19 Vaccine Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI FDA France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights Hungary India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem Joe Biden Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Poland Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkiye Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank WHO Yemen Zionism

October 2026
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Aletho News
If Americans Knew
No Tricks Zone
Contact:

atheonews (at) gmail.com
Disclaimer

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.

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Dr. Christopher Busby is part a mixed crew of investigative reporters and commentators from Lebanon and some film-makers investigating “Israel’s” use of enriched uranium in strikes on Gaza on Lebanon, and aim to follow up on the strange illnesses that are appearing on the battlefield.

‘Israel’ in Gaza: Red Mercury

Dr Ali Khobeisi (right) taking Geiger counter readings at a bomb crater in Khiam, Lebanon 2006

Ambulance that provided air filter for 2006 investigation

Imane Maarifi

Featured Video

From the Archives

Blog Roll

Subscribe to Aletho News

Visits Since December 2009

Looking for something?

Archives

Calendar

Categories

Tags

Contact:

Disclaimer

Site info