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To Whom Should the Right of Speech Belong?

Brownstone Institute | December 7, 2023

On Sunday, December 17, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, will debate Dr. Kate Klonick, Associate Professor of Law at St. John’s University Law School, on whether Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 injunction restricting the Biden Administration’s communications with social media platforms hindered or helped “national internet policy.”

The topic refers to the federal district court’s 155-page ruling in Missouri v. Biden, which ordered the federal government to halt its efforts to induce Big Tech to censor its political opponents. Judge Doughty wrote that if the plaintiffs’ allegations are true, the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Dr. Bhattacharya is a Plaintiff in the lawsuit, which alleges that he and his colleagues “experienced extensive censorship on social media” for their criticism of the US Government’s Covid policies. In his affidavit, Dr. Bhattacharya testifies that there was a “relentless covert campaign of social-media censorship of our dissenting view from the government’s preferred message.”

Dr. Klonick previewed her support for the Government’s ability to work with private companies to control the flow of information in a July op-ed for the New York Times, “The Future of Online Speech Shouldn’t Belong to One Trump-Appointed Judge in Louisiana.”

Klonick’s article raises factual and analytical questions that Bhattacharya should raise in their debate.

Does the Future of Online Speech Belong to Anyone?

Klonick’s headline is fundamentally at odds with the concept of free speech. Under the First Amendment, speech does not belong to any person or entity. Future speech receives heightened protections under Supreme Court precedent to curtail prior restraint.

Next Sunday, Dr. Bhattacharya should ask Klonick: who should “speech” belong to? This is not a pedantic or rhetorical point; those with control over information instinctively protect their own interests. A survey of American power structures demonstrates the corruption that power breeds.

Should the future of speech belong to CISA? The Department of Homeland Security subdivision monitored speech in the 2020 election through “switchboarding,” a process in which it flagged content for removal from social media platforms.

The US Security State censored posts related to natural immunity, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab-leak theory, and side effects of the vaccine, many of which were later proven true. In each instance, the suppression of information benefitted the country’s most powerful institutions.

Or should it belong to the Biden Administration? Every day, the White House slowly kills Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison. The President hasn’t accused the Wikileaks publisher of falsehoods; instead, Assange has spent over ten years in confinement for disrupting the preferred narrative of the American political class.

Should speech belong to unelected bureaucrats? Biden cronies like Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt have worked for years to control Americans’ access to information, including censoring “mal-information,” meaning “often-true information” that they consider “sensational.”

Should it instead belong to health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci? Fauci learned that he was complicit in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology on January 27, 2020, and orchestrated a cover-up campaign to shield himself from criticism and potential legal liability. He called for a “quick and devastating… take down (sic)” of the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Dr. Bhattacharya, because it questioned his judgment on lockdowns.

Our First Amendment demands that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. Alleged falsehood does not overturn this principle. As the Supreme Court recognized in United States v. Alvarez: “Some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation.”

Free speech is predicated on the notion that it belongs to no man or government entity. Klonick’s entire position is based on her opposition to that pillar of constitutional liberty.

The Flaws in Klonick’s Argument 

Beyond the title, each prong of Dr. Klonick’s argument relies on falsehoods. First, she described the case as “part of a wider war conservatives believe they are fighting, in which tech executives and Democratic government officials are supposedly colluding to censor conservative voices.”

Like Professor Larry Tribe, the censors use terms like believe and supposedly to imply the censorship doesn’t exist. They call it a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” while ignoring the documented suppression of Alex Berenson, Jay Bhattacharya, the Great Barrington Declaration, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and others.

Klonick never mentions that Facebook banned users who promoted the lab-leak hypothesis at the behest of the CDC, that the Biden Administration launched a campaign to censor dissent surrounding vaccines in July 2021, or that the Twitter Files demonstrated the infiltration of the US Security State in Big Tech. Acknowledging those facts would unravel her premise.

Second, Klonick argued that the injunction was “overbroad” because it “seems to prevent anyone in the Biden administration from having any kind of communication with online platforms about matters related to speech.”

Here, she either didn’t read the order or deliberately misrepresented it. The injunction does not “prevent anyone” in government from communicating with online platforms “about matters related to speech,” as she claims; to the contrary, the injunction explicitly permits the Defendants to communicate with social media companies provided it does not infringe upon “free speech [protected] by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment.”

Third, she described the Biden Administration’s demands to social media giants to remove content as “classic examples of what political scientists call jawboning: the government’s use of public appeals or private channels to induce change or compliance from businesses.”

This ignores the inter-agency and systemic nature of what Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” Recent reports have revealed military contractors’ role in establishing systems for global censorship and the Intelligence Community’s direct involvement in the operations of our information centers.

The “content moderation” demands were not mere requests that could be freely accepted or denied. As Brownstone has detailed, they were mafia-like tactics where thuggish officials used the threat of retaliation to demand compliance.

Klonick exemplifies the censors’ repeated strategy: deny, deflect, and defend. The prongs of her augment are inherently contradictory. She defends the censorship tactics that she pretends don’t exist. Further, she either remains willfully blind to the corruption behind the usurpation of First Amendment freedoms or deliberately omits any mention of it.

No matter her intentions or misunderstandings, her aim is unconstitutional.

The Pretext for Tyranny

Pro-censorship advocates like Klonick and The New York Times imply that the internet presents unique challenges that require the government to “stifle disinformation.” But “disinformation” has long been the pretext for tyrants to banish unwanted speech.

In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld the Wilson Administration’s convictions of journalists, immigrants, and presidential candidate Eugene Debs for their opposition to the Great War. Charles Schenck, a pamphleteer, argued that the military draft violated the US Constitution. Debs told his followers, “You need to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. affirmed their jail sentences, offering the now-famous slander that the First Amendment did not protect “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.”

Holmes’ metaphor was a precursor to disinformation. It dismissed the dissidents as liars and accused them of endangering those around them. In the Covid era, we saw the slanderous nature of Holmes’ glib principle return to the public square as men like Dr. Bhattacharya were accused of killing grandmothers, hating teachers, and spreading Russian propaganda.

A century after the censorship of the Great War, Dr. Klonick asserts that the future of speech should belong to someone, just not Trump-appointed judges. But history, through figures such as Holmes, warns us of the tyranny inherent in that principle.

As one Irish Senator recently demonstrated, censors justify their totalitarianism in the name of the “common good.” They march under innocuous banners like public health, anti-racism, and civility.

But the results always serve the censors’ interests, stifling dissent to augment power.

Judge Doughty’s injunction may have flaws, but on the question of whether it advances or hinders free speech in the United States, the answer is undeniable. Missouri v. Biden is a litmus test for Americans. Either the Government has a right to curate citizens’ newsfeeds by using the power of the federal government to nationalize our information centers, or we embrace the First Amendment and unshackle ourselves from the militarized system of informational warfare that has dominated our airwaves for over three years. Dr. Klonick must answer, who would she appoint to control the future of our speech, to determine whether there really is fire in the theater?

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Documents Show DHS Agency “Real-Time Narrative Tracking” of Social Media Posts in 2020

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 7, 2023

Judicial Watch has come forward with newly acquired evidence of an intriguing alliance during the US 2020 election. The investigative body was able to obtain, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit, a series of records demonstrating a comprehensive synergy between the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and a controversial entity, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).

These files reveal a concerted effort to execute “real-time narrative tracking” on principal social media networks during the critical days leading up to the 2020 election. Interestingly, these records illustrate instances of social media post “takedowns” and an intentional avoidance of creating public records that would be subject to the FOIA process.

These records also allow us a peek into the operations of EIP. Originally known as the Election Misinformation Partnership, it invested in monitoring online election discourse round the clock, especially prioritizing “disinformation that is going viral.”

A lawsuit launched under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gave Judicial Watch access to the records. The lawsuit was deemed necessary in response to a lack of transparency from the DHS, which did not respond to a formal request submitted by Judicial Watch on October 5, 2022.

This data was part of an extensive request by Judicial Watch that included all communication records between CISA and EIP, minute details of a meeting between DHS officials and EIP members on July 9, 2020, and all records of communication between CISA and Stanford University’s Internet Observatory or the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, specifically regarding the Election Integrity Partnership, the 2020 US election, online misinformation and disinformation, or various social media platforms.

The Election Integrity Partnership, established right before the Presidential elections in July 2020, was composed of four major entities: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and social media analytics firm Graphika.

This partnership provided a valuable service to federal bodies, such as Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), enabling them to file tickets for flagging or censoring specific social media posts and online stories. It also extended similar privileges to three liberal organizations – the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause, and the NAACP – along with the Homeland-funded Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

In 2023, a report by the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed the drastic evolution of CISA. Established in 2018 to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats, it had emerged by 2020 as the central conduit for domestic surveillance and censorship of social media by the federal government. CISA’s focus shifted to reporting supposed disinformation on social media. By the following year, they had officially formed a team specializing in misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. As criticism intensified in 2022 and 2023, CISA sought to obscure its activities, ostensibly serving a purely “informational” role despite judicious allegations of unconstitutional conduct.

“These records show the lengths to which a ‘Homeland Security’ Deep State agency went in its effort to censor and suppress Americans during and after the 2020 election,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That it took a federal lawsuit to extract these disturbing records should raise additional worries about what else this Biden administration is up to.”

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Why Is the Liberal Media Inciting Genocide?

By Kevin Barrett | December 9, 2023

In case you hadn’t noticed, the liberal media, and the liberal Establishment behind it, hates “right-wing extremists.” Since 2016, when Trump was elected on a control-the-borders platform, “right-wing extremism” has replaced “Islamic terrorism” as the new bogeyman. Don’t like mandatory vaccines and COVID lockdowns? You’re a “right-wing extremist” and deserve to be censored. Don’t like censorship? You’re defending “right-wing extremists” so you must be one yourself. Don’t like the war on Russia? You must be a “right-wing extremist” like Putin, who is the new Hitler because he doesn’t like LGBTQ indoctrination and mandatory sex change surgery for toddlers.

In the past, being antiwar, pro-free-speech, pro-civil-liberties, and pro-alternative-medicine put you on the left side of the spectrum. Now those are all signs of “right-wing extremism.”

What’s so terrible about all this “right-wing extremism”? Ultimately, it’s all about the Nazis. If you are pro-free-speech, you’re giving a platform to Nazis. If you support the COVID dissidents, you must like that one guy with the swastika tattoo at the rally where RFK Jr. spoke. And if you don’t support the war on Russia, and refuse to click your heels and sig heil for Zelensky, it must be because you are a follower of the new Hitler, Vladimir Putin.

The logic goes something like this: Right-wing extremists are Nazis. Nazis, as we all know, commit genocide. Therefore if we allow extremists to support border control, oppose war on Russia, speak their minds without censorship, and practice alternative medicine instead of masking and jabbing, one thing will lead to another and pretty soon they’ll be committing genocide.

You might say it’s the new domino theory.

What makes the whole thing even crazier is that there are really only two places on Earth where “right-wing extremist Nazis” are committing genocide: Israel under fuhrer Netanyahu, and Ukraine under fuhrer Zelenksy. But the liberal media, despite its ostensible hatred of right-wing extremist Nazis, supports both genocides! Zelinsky’s effort to murder and expel the Russian-speaking people of Eastern Ukraine, and obliterate the culture of any who remain, is a textbook case of genocide, and a direct descendant of Hitler’s lebensraum project with its planned murder and expulsion of millions of Slavs. And Netanyahu’s even bloodier attempt to murder and expel the Palestinians is orders of magnitude worse—probably worse than anything Hitler ever did.

Both Zelensky’s Ukraine and Netanyahu’s Israel are fanatical right-wing ultra-nationalist regimes, built on exaltation of a “master race” (Ukrainians/Jews in one case, and just plain Jews in the other) and the genocidal demonization of the untermenschen (Russian-speaking Christians in Ukraine, Palestinians in Palestine). These two regimes are the apotheosis of everything pro-tolerance, anti-racist, pro-multiculturalism liberals profess to hate. And yet the liberal Establishment loves them, and even runs nonstop pro-genocide propaganda on their behalf. Whatever can those liberals be thinking?

The Cosmopolitan Empire

When we peel back the veneer of increasingly threadbare liberalism, we find that the so-called liberal Establishment isn’t very liberal at all. Its real roots are in Trotskyism and illuminism, not classical Enlightenment liberalism, and its end-game is totalitarian global dictatorship. That, at least, is the argument of Peter Myers’ new book The Cosmopolitan Empire.

The way Myers tells it, since the Enlightenment exploded into the French Revolution, non-conservative forces have basically been divided into two camps. The first camp, the reformists, includes classical liberals, democratic socialists, moderate libertarians, and others seeking gradual, peaceful change. The second camp consists of nihilists, meaning those who seek a clean break with the current order via creative destruction so they can build a global dictatorship on the ruins. Myers traces this group from the Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt through Marxian communism and finally to the neo-Trotskyism that he sees as the real animating force behind today’s pseudo-liberal Establishment.

To his credit, Myers is not afraid of mentioning the elephant in the room: the Jewish connection to the nihilist camp. If Jews have traditionally scorned the goyim societies that hosted them, and occasionally sought to undermine those societies, it seems natural that some would participate in, or even lead, modern movements that sought to destroy traditional societies in service to a utopian vision not unlike the one that has long inspired the many flavors of Jewish messianic millenarianism. That utopian vision posits a Messiah who conquers the world and subjugates the goyim to the Jews, making the world a paradise for Jews, each of whom will own 2800 goyim slaves.

Ostensibly secular nihilist radicals, from Weishaupt to Lenin and Trotsky to H.G. Wells and George Soros, have led disproportionately secular-Jewish movements to destroy traditional religions and cultures in order to create a world state, meaning a technocratic global dictatorship ruled by a privileged elite. This one-world project, not classical liberalism, appears to be the driving force behind today’s Establishment. And that is why the “liberal” establishment supports genocidal uber-nationalists in Ukraine and Occupied Palestine. The Ukrainian Nazis (financed by Jewish oligarchs) have been weaponized against the rebirth of Russia, with its patriotism and Orthodox religion and family values; while the Zio-Nazis have been weaponized against traditional Islamicate civilization.

The faux-liberal Establishment propagandizes for such genocides and bloodbaths not because its highest value is individual freedom and dignity, as classical liberalism would have it, but because its liberal bromides are just a smokescreen for a totalitarian world domination project. In other words, it isn’t the “freedom” of two-year-olds to have their genders re-assigned that motivates them. Instead, the faux-liberals are waging war on the traditional family, the basis of organic traditional social life, because it stands in the way of their totalitarian world state. Likewise they hate Putin not because he disapproves of rainbow flags, but because he is rallying Russia to stand as a sovereign Christian-Muslim nation against impending global dictatorship.

Myers’ schema helps explain why so many atheist Jews have “transitioned” from Trotskyite to neoconservative. Max Shpak wrote:

Perhaps even more significant a factor in the origins of neoconservatism was the emergence of an independent Israeli state. While many Jewish Marxists eagerly supported the Zionist state, the more intellectually consistent Left opposed Zionism on the grounds that all nationalisms, including Jewish ones, are enemies of global proletarian revolution. Thus, Jewish leftists who once advocated internationalism for gentile nations were forced to come to terms with the implications of this ideology for their own nationalist sentiments. Thus, they needed an ideology which would let them have their cake (opposing gentile nationalism) and eat it too (by supporting Israel), and they found just such a worldview with neoconservatism.

The neocons have inherited Trotsky’s project of destroying the nations, and the religions and families on which they are based, in hopes that utopia will emerge from the rubble. By posing as liberals — as in Kagan’s veiled call for Trump’s assassination on the pretext that Trump threatens liberal democracy — the neocons have succeeded in remaking what passes for liberalism in their own image.

No wonder today’s “liberalism” is totalitarian and genocidal.

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Over 5,000 Israeli soldiers injured since Oct. 7, with 58% seriously: Israeli media

MEMO | December 9, 2023

More than 5,000 Israeli soldiers have been injured in Gaza since the conflict began on Oct. 7, with more than 2,000 officially recognized by the Ministry of Defence as disabled, an Israeli newspaper revealed on Saturday, adding that more than 58% of those injured suffered serious harm to their hands and feet, necessitating amputations.

“More than 5,000 wounded soldiers arrived in hospitals in Israel,” the daily Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported.

“More than 2,000 were officially recognized by the Ministry of Defense as disabled,” the daily added.

“We have never experienced anything similar to this. More than 58% of the wounded we receive have serious injuries to their hands and feet, including amputations,” Limor Luria, deputy director general and head of Israel’s Ministry of Defense’s Rehabilitation Department, told the newspaper.

“About 12% of injuries are internal consisting of damage to the spleen, kidneys, and rupture of internal organs,” Luria said.

“About 7% suffer from psychological distress, a number we know will rise sharply,” the official said.

The Israeli army said at least 420 soldiers have been killed since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict on Oct. 7.

Israel resumed its military offensive against the Gaza Strip on Dec. 1 after the end of a weeklong humanitarian pause with the Palestinian group, Hamas.

At least 17,487 Palestinians have been killed and more than 46,480 others injured in relentless air and ground attacks on the enclave since Oct. 7 following a cross-border attack by Hamas.

The Israeli death toll in the Hamas attack stood at 1,200, according to official figures.

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Tech investors organize to silence pro-Palestinian voices

The Cradle | December 9, 2023

A group of pro-Israeli tech investors and executives in California’s Silicon Valley are seeking to influence media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and “combat the slightest deviations from the pro-Israel script,” a new investigation by journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulsen shows.

The investors and executives have joined with pro-Israeli activists and Israeli government officials to terminate pro-Palestinian employees at multi-national corporations from their jobs, smear Palestinian journalists, cancel speaking events at US universities by Palestinian writers and politicians, remove social media posts critical of Israel, “ridicule” pro-Palestinian social media influencers and lawmakers, and send military equipment to Israeli forces.

The Following Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israeli military bases and settlements surrounding Gaza, the group formed a WhatsApp group to coordinate their activities.

The WhatsApp group, officially named the “J-Ventures Global Kibbutz Group,” is a project of J-Ventures, a US-Israeli investment fund.

The journalists obtained access to thousands of the group’s WhatsApp messages dating back to mid-October showing the group’s efforts to help Israel in its public relations war, in particular as Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza quickly reached shocking levels, resulting in harsh international condemnation.

They described how members of the group coordinated on WhatsApp to have Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, fired. Carey posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” which means, “Freedom for Palestine” on her LinkedIn page, and was terminated 24 hours later.

The group includes prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeff Epstein – a former CFO of Oracle – and Andy David, a diplomat-cum-venture capitalist who also serves as the Israeli foreign ministry’s head of innovation, entrepreneurship, and tech.

Adam Fisher, the head of the Israel office of Bessemer Venture Partners, gave a presentation to the group on how US “high-tech leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs,” such as himself, could help the Israeli army win the “information war” on social media.

The Israel-based venture capitalist spoke of how to “sow doubt” among young people in the US sympathetic to the Palestinian cause so they would not speak out or attend protests against Israel’s killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. “So it’s really about creating some kind of confusion,” Fisher said,” to make it clear to them that it’s really a lot more complicated.”

The group also petitioned Netflix to remove the award-winning Jordanian film “Farha,” claiming that its accurate portrayal of the actions of Israeli soldiers during the 1948 massacre and forced displacement of Palestinians constituted “blood libel,” while another said the film was based “antisemitism and lies.”

J-Ventures documents and affiliated WhatsApp discussions also show support for a variety of automated attempts to remove pro-Palestinian content on social media, including via DigitalDome.io, an initiative that promotes itself as an online version of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, promising that “offensive and malicious content is intercepted here.”

Digital Dome’s “recent achievements” included the censorship of Hamas’s channels on the Telegram communications platform using Android phones and the removal of pro-Palestinian content from Instagram and Twitter/X.

Members of the WhatsApp group successfully lobbied to have speaking events of Palestinian-US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Palestinian writer for the Nation Magazine, Mohamed al-Kurd, canceled.

The group circulated a push poll suggesting Representative Tlaib should resign from Congress.

Finally, the group has also attempted to provide tactical gear to Israel’s equivalent of the US Navy SEALs, known as Shayetet-13, and donated to a foundation dedicated to supporting the Israeli army’s undercover “Duvdevan” unit, which is known for assassinating Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli politician calls for captured Palestinians to be ‘buried alive’

Press TV – December 9, 2023

An Israeli politician has called for burying alive hundreds of Palestinian civilians captured by Israeli forces during the occupying entity’s war on the besieged Gaza Strip.

In a post on X on Friday, Aryeh Yitzhak King, the deputy mayor of the occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem), called on the Israeli military to “bury alive” hundreds of Palestinian civilians captured in the war-torn Palestinian enclave.

In his post, which made specific reference to recently-published footage by the Israeli army showing captured Palestinians stripped to their underwear, King stressed that the army was eliminating what he called “Muslim Nazis” in Gaza, suggesting it needed to pick up the pace.

The footage, confirmed by the Israeli military after it emerged on Thursday, shows the stripped Palestinian men sitting on the street somewhere in northern Gaza as they are watched over by several troops.

These Palestinians are thought to have been arrested in Beit Lahia, in the far north of the impoverished coastal sliver. Tel Aviv claims that these Palestinians were members of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.

“If it were up to me, I would have dispatched D-9 bulldozers and put them behind the mounds of dirt and would have given the order to cover all these hundreds of ants, while they’re still alive,” King further said in his post, which has since been deleted for violating rules on X.

“They aren’t human beings and not human animals. They’re subhuman and that’s how they should be treated,” King further said, adding “Eradicate the memory of Amalek, and never forget.”

He used “Amalek” to refer to the arch-foe of Israelites in ancient times. The biblical reference has also been used by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meaning that every man, woman and child, and their livestock, belonging to this ancient enemy of the Jewish people must be eliminated.

“They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world. You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew in early November.

Israel waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s atrocities against Palestinians.

More than 17,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children, and at least 46,000 others injured since the onset of the current US-backed war on Gaza.

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

If The Pro-Israel Position Was Based On Truth And Morality, It Wouldn’t Depend On Lies And Slander

By Caitlin Johnstone | December 8, 2023

If your position is based on truth and morality, you don’t need to make up lies to defend it, and you don’t need to hurl false accusations at those who disagree with it.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to circulate bogus atrocity propaganda about decapitated babies, babies cooked in ovens, and murdered pregnant women.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate lies claiming actual dead Palestinian babies in Gaza are plastic dolls.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to falsely present phony audio clips as intercepted Hamas communications and claim they exonerate you of war crime allegations.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate lies and propaganda about the hospitals you plan to attack being secret Hamas headquarters.

If your position was based on truth and morality, your official government social media accounts wouldn’t have to keep deleting posts after getting caught circulating lie after lie.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate amazingly cringey propaganda videos like Israeli children singing about how great it will be to destroy Gaza and Israeli women doing yoga over the pictures of Israeli hostages.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t find yourself engaged in bizarre mental contortions trying to pretend history began on October 7 while sweeping all the mountains of murder and abuse which led up to it under the carpet.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to keep pointing at something that happened months ago to defend what you’ve been doing in the present moment in all the days since.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to resort to hurling false accusations of anti-semitism at those who criticize your side instead of producing robust counter-arguments.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to resort to accusing those who disagree with you of supporting terrorism and serving Hamas instead of defending your position like a normal adult.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to lie and claim that longstanding pro-Palestine slogans are actually calls for the genocide of Jews to try and get them silenced.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t feel the need to censor and silence everyone who disagrees with you online, on college campuses, and on all platforms of major influence.

If your position was based on truth and morality, you would get curious and do some self-examination when young people overwhelmingly reject that position instead of insisting that the young people are the problem and trying to kill TikTok and outlaw demonstrations.

If your position was based on truth and morality you would be defending it with facts, logic and rational argumentation instead of vitriol, online troll mobs and incendiary false accusations.

If your position is based in truth and morality, you can defend it in a truthful and moral way, instead of the exact opposite.

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s Military-Settler State: There are no Jewish ‘civilians’ in the West Bank

By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | July 14, 2023

Israeli settler terrorism is a strategy employed by Israel to advance its territorial gains and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

US President Joe Biden recently called out Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as being the “most extreme” he’s seen, and pointed to members of the Israeli Prime Minister’s coalition as being “part of the problem.”

His comments immediately drew attention to Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, along with Israeli security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, and illegal West Bank settlers in general.

But Israeli settler extremism is not isolated to the West Bank, nor to Israel’s current far-right government’s ministers like Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Israeli settlers occupy the highest positions in the military and government, while extremists are operating special militias inside the Israeli army – with its approval – and additionally receiving funds from US charitable organizations.

Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians have been steadily on the rise over the past years, with an average of three violent incidents occurring per day in 2023, compared to two in 2022 and one in 2021, according to the United Nations.

One of the worst recorded attacks this year came on February 26, when a settler militia force, at least 400 strong, descended upon several villages surrounding the Palestinian city of Nablus, including the town of Huwara.

The settler attack, even described as a pogrom by top Israeli general Yehuda Fuchs, resulted in the murder of a Palestinian man, in addition to the burning down of at least 30 homes and 100 cars.

In support of the settler assault, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly proclaimed that he thought “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it.”

In mid-June, another 400 armed Israeli settlers attacked Turmusaya and surrounding villages, torching 30 homes and around 60 cars, additionally resulting in over 100 injuries and the murder of another Palestinian man; while he was attempting to save children.

The two most notorious far-right members of Israel’s current coalition government are ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir, both of whom live in illegal settlements and were longtime activists as part of the settler movement.

Ben Gvir, who has faced a laundry list of criminal charges ranging from terror group affiliations to incitement of racism, resides in the extremist settlement of al-Khalil (Hebron). Smotrich currently resides in Kedumim, a settlement located just a short drive from Yitzhar – the other infamous settler community.

Their unified list, running under the name Religious Zionism, secured the third-highest number of votes from the Israeli public and now holds the position of the second-largest party in the current coalition government.

Not ‘a few bad apples’

Dror Sadot, spokesperson for B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, emphasizes that we cannot downplay the broader support and backing that enables such actions. She tells The Cradle that: “Even if it wasn’t this current Ben Gvir-Smotrich government, it would still be Apartheid.”

“When the Huwara pogrom happened, we should’ve paid attention to what sort of backup the settlers got from those politicians. What they are saying reveals the truth, it reveals the mechanisms in place that were always there under previous governments.”

Sadot continues: “We shouldn’t talk about settler violence as if it is a few bad apples, or extremists, or anything like this, because, at the end of the day, Israel is backing everything.”

While attention has been drawn to figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich, the truth is that radical right-wing settlers occupy significant positions within the Israeli government and military.

The recent decision to launch an invasion of Jenin, for example, was heavily influenced by pressure from settler communities. Yossi Dagan, head of the regional settlement council in the Northern West Bank, played a prominent role in encouraging the violent attack on Jenin, which experts at the UN have labeled a war crime.

Yet, Dagan’s ambitions did not stop there. He called on the government to “order the IDF to immediately launch a larger, broader, more thorough and in-depth operation.”

Radicals in the corridors of power 

Israeli Member of Knesset for the ruling Likud Party, Avichai Boaron, has also made alarming statements. Following the military operation in Jenin, Boaron suggested that “we must expand the military operation to include Nablus and Ramallah as well.”

Notably, Boaron himself is a settler activist who has come under fire for using euphemisms to refer to Palestinians while proposing extermination camps as a solution.

In 2018, Netanyahu posted on social media to celebrate Avichai Boaron’s success with the Amihai settlement, which was built in 2017 as an alternative to the evacuated settler outpost of Amona – illegally developed on Palestinian land – that had turned into a “crisis” for the Israeli public.

The Amihai settlement was added to the illegal settlement of Shiloh, accompanied by the settler outposts of Adei Ad, Geulat Zion, and others, which happen to surround Turmusaya, along with other Palestinian villages which have recently been targets of large-scale settler-militia attacks.

Boaron recently secured a position in the Likud Party to replace David Amsalem, who Netanyahu promoted to be the Israeli Regional Cooperation Minister. Amsalem is also a West Bank settler, from the illegal colony of Ma’alei Adumim, and is currently in charge of  “advancing partnerships with states in the region (the Mediterranean basin) and the Palestinian Authority.”

Moreover, the leadership of the Israeli military itself is not immune to this influence. Herzi Halevi, the current Chief of Staff, is a resident of the illegal colony of Kfar Ha-Oranim in the West Bank. His appointment to this key role was approved last year under the government of Yair Lapid, with no major objections.

Avi Moaz, the deputy minister and head of the national Jewish identity department in the Prime Minister’s Office, resides in an illegal settlement stronghold located in the Silwan area of occupied East Jerusalem. His position holds significant weight, and he is a leading figure in the Noam Party.

Speaking to The Cradle, the Executive Director of Bisan Center for Research and Development, Ubai al-Aboudi, says that “the settlers are a militia, these are not civilian groups, most of them are ideologues, they see themselves as tasked with replacing Palestinian villagers, their houses, and they call for this openly.”

The two strongholds of the settler terror groups are situated around the Palestinian cities of Al-Khalil and Nablus. Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva, in Yitzhar settlement, is the indoctrination center for many of the most extreme settler terrorists, where they are taught ideas, such as, that Arabs are a “cancer” and that killing non-Jewish babies is permissible.

The army colludes with settlers

According to the conclusions of a 2022 report published by B’Tselem on settler violence, the attacks “are not perpetrated by “bands of outlaws” or “bad seeds,” nor are they simply “violent outbursts” or “unusual incidents,” but rather they are a “strategy employed by the Israeli apartheid regime.”

A 2021 investigation conducted jointly between The Intercept and Local Call found that at least four of the 11 Palestinians who were killed in the West Bank on 14 May of that year, were due to deliberate joint attacks carried out by Israeli settlers and soldiers.

In the May 2021 joint settler-soldier attack on Palestinians in the village of Urif, the Israeli military confirmed in a statement that one of the masked settlers caught on film firing at Palestinians, alongside soldiers, was, in fact, from the settlement of Yitzhar and himself an active Israeli soldier.

Zvi Sukot, who was a spokesperson for the settlement of Yitzhar and part of the ‘Hilltop Youth,’ applauded the Israeli army for the joint attacks on Palestinians at the time. Sukot, who is now a member of the Israeli Knesset as part of the current government, made his name campaigning for the release of a group of settlers who burned a Palestinian baby to death in 2015.

Israeli settlers were caught on a leaked video dancing at a wedding, celebrating the murder of the 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh, and stabbing at pictures of the Palestinian family they had killed alongside him. Present also at the wedding was the legal representative for the terrorist settlers, Itamar Ben Gvir.

As recently as June 24, Israeli settlers were documented to have used Israeli army-issued assault rifles – Colt M4’s manufactured in the US – to shoot at Palestinians in the village of Umm Safa.

The settler extremists, despite not having known structured armed organizations, were revealed in May to have been integrated into a special Israeli military unit. The extremist settlers belonging to the Hilltop Youth have allegedly been inducted into the newly created ‘Desert Frontier’ army unit, where they represent a majority of the Unit and are carrying out severe abuses across the West Bank.

B’Tselem spokeswoman, Dror Sadot, says that her organization has “documented hundreds of cases of settler violence, during many of which the soldiers were there, and in the “best cases” you will see they won’t do anything, but in the worst cases they will join the settlers against the Palestinians.”

In a frightening development, Israeli Security Minister Ben Gvir has been granted permission to build Israel’s new “national guard,” which is shaping up to be a publicly funded ultra-nationalist militia force to serve the extremist goals of the Israeli settler movement. One of the Israeli colonel’s that is helping Ben Gvir form the national guard is Efraim Laor, who made the following comment during a lecture in 2019:

“An enemy needs to be killed, you don’t shoot at [terror] cells, you shoot between the eyes – whoever can’t do that, 15 cm lower. Including those who are there and are not attacking. But you see an enemy – you do not find out whether he is involved or not — he’s involved — he needs to be eliminated.”

US charities fueling illegal settlements

The Hilltop Youth settler group, often portrayed as “bands of outlaws,” have direct links to the Israeli government and even charitable donations from the US. In 2008, the Hilltop Youth ushered in a new era of what was called “Price-Tag” violence, where settlers would attack Palestinian civilians, along with their mosques, schools, crops, and homes.

One such figure within this context is Itay Zar, known as the first Hilltop Youth, who established the settler outpost of Havat Gilad in 2002. It is important to note that settlement outposts, including settler “farms,” are considered illegal under Israeli law.

However, many are eventually recognized by Israeli authorities, as was the case with Havat Gilad in 2018. The proximity of Havat Gilad to the Yitzhar settlement, which houses a notoriously radical Yeshiva (Jewish religious school), illustrates how extremist belief systems are transmitted within these religious educational institutions.

One US-based charity named the Central Fund of Israel (CFI) was found to have funded an extremist Yeshiva, along with the Honenu group that provides legal funds and financial support for settler terrorists. CFI still operates as a charity in the US, despite having funneled tens of millions of dollars to far-right extremist groups in occupied territory.

Worryingly, the settler extremists, despite not having known structured armed organizations, were revealed in May to have been integrated into a special Israeli military unit. The extremist settlers belonging to the Hilltop Youth have allegedly been inducted into the newly created Desert Frontier army unit, where they represent a majority of the unit and are carrying out severe crimes across the West Bank.

A concerning web of US-based and registered charities exists, providing direct financial support to organizations guiding the settlement movement, according to Ubai al-Aboudi. This ongoing financial backing allows these organizations to receive funds, perpetuating the expansion of Israeli settlements.

The Israel Land Fund (ILF), for instance, supports the acquisition of real estate for Israeli settlers, providing legal assistance for them, and advertises properties in the occupied territories. The ILF’s fiscal sponsor is the aforementioned CFI, which is a registered charity in New York, it is also the fiscal sponsor for Regavim, which works to expand Israeli control over Palestinian land through applying pressure on the relevant Israeli authorities.

The Hebron Fund, directly registered in New York, plays a role in funding the illegal settlement project in al-Khalil (Hebron). The fiscal sponsor for the Ir David Foundation, which utilizes archaeological claims to displace Palestinians from East Jerusalem, is called the Friends of Ir David and is also registered in New York.

Similarly, Ateret Cohanim, working to establish a Jewish demographic majority in occupied East Jerusalem by replacing Palestinian families with Israeli settlers, has its fiscal sponsor named the Friends of Ateret Cohanim, registered in New York as well.

Two sides of the same coin 

Israeli settlers have recently attacked the properties of Palestinians who are US citizens, which according to the US’s stringent property laws, should force them to intervene and protect their own nationals. According to US law, since 1854 it has been seen as an obligation for sitting President’s to intervene in order to protect the lives and properties of citizens threatened by foreign powers.

Even in the cases of murdered US citizens, there is no protection or significant pressure applied on the Israeli government. In the cases of Shireen Abu Akleh, Omar Asad, Ourwa Hamad, and Mahmoud Shalan, all US citizens, no one was charged for their murders by the Israeli authorities.

The Biden administration’s allowance of such financing, coupled with its failure to safeguard its own citizens, creates a contradiction as it condemns the settlement movement while inadvertently encouraging it.

Meanwhile, his government continues to allow US dollars to finance Israeli settler extremism, and the settlement movement, does nothing to protect its own citizens from Israeli criminality.

Never mind the White House’s public criticism of Israeli extremism. In reality, there are few punitive measures Washington is prepared to take against Israel’s ferocious aggressions. This, despite the mounting evidence that there is no separation between the Israeli government and the settler movement today.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and has worked with RT, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, MEMO, Mint Press News, Al-Mayadeen English, TRT World, and various other media outlets. He has worked as a news correspondent, political analyst, and produced a number of documentary films. https://twitter.com/falasteen47

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Gaza Poet, Writer, Refaat Alareer Killed In Targeted Strike With 6 Family Members

By Celia Farber | The Truth Barrier | December 8, 2023

Beloved Palestinian writer, poet, and teacher Refaat Alareer, founder of the Gaza based organization “We Are Not Numbers,” has been killed in an Israeli airstrike along with six members of his family. He was known for his lifelong devotion to encouraging story telling and writing, including the book Gaza Writes Back, featuring writing from young Palestinians.

According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Alareer had gotten direct death threats from an Israeli officer, knew he was a target, and had re-located to his sister’s home, and killed there by a surgical strike.

Max Blumenthal wrote a blistering account, here:

And here is his tribute to Akareer, published in The Grayzone.

[As for mockery, (see Blumenthal’s Tweet,) there have been waves of Tik Tok trends with Israelis, including children, grotesquely mocking Palestinians, so let’s BE FAIR.]

There had been many calls for Alareer’s death, according to his friend and one time student, interviewed here, and the BBC, in its headline about his murder, icily called him “controversial.”

In his last interview, he spoke very openly about the near certainty of being killed. “There is no way out,” he said.

…

This was Alareer’s most well known poem, “If I Must Die:”

And here is a TED talk he gave about story telling, and family.

Voices of Gaza’s children.

One country voted against a ceasefire in Gaza.

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

US blocks UN Security Council demand for ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war

Press TV – December 8, 2023

The United States has vetoed a United Nations Security Council demand for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip despite mounting calls to stop the regime’s atrocities.

On Friday, 13 Security Council members voted in favor of a draft resolution, put forward by the United Arab Emirates, while Britain abstained and the US vetoed it, isolating itself while sheilding Israel’s aggression.

“Tonight, the UK refused to back a UN resolution for a ceasefire,” said former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

“We mourn those who will die because their lives were deemed unworthy of protection. And we vow to keep demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinian people to end the bombings, blockades and occupation,” Corbyn added.

The vote came after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres formally warned the 15-member council on Wednesday of a global threat from the two-month-long Israeli war against the defenseless people of Gaza.

“What is the message we are sending Palestinians if we cannot unite behind a call to halt the relentless bombardment of Gaza?” Deputy UAE UN Ambassador Mohamed Abushahab asked the council.

Deputy US Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood called the draft resolution an imbalanced text “that was divorced from reality.”

“Although the United States strongly supports a durable peace in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, we do not support this resolution’s call for an unsustainable ceasefire that will only plant the seeds for the next war,” Wood claimed.

Washinton’s ally London abstained. Britain’s UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward said her country abstained because there was no condemnation of Hamas.

“Israel needs to be able to address the threat posed by Hamas and it needs to do so in a manner that abides by international humanitarian law so that such attack can never be carried out again,” she told the council.

Guterres convened the meeting on the “humanitarian catastrophe” in the besieged Palestinian territory, two months after Israel launched its air and ground strikes on the besieged territory.

The brutal war has so far killed more than 17,487 people and left the territory in ruins.

Wood told the meeting that Washington does not support a ceasefire.

The General Assembly, where the US has no veto power, overwhelmingly supported a humanitarian ceasefire. On Oct. 26, the assembly approved the cease-fire with 120 votes in favor and only 14 against the non-binding resolution.

UN inaction makes it complicit in Gaza slaughter: MSF

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Friday that the council is “complicit in the ongoing slaughter” in the Gaza Strip through inaction and vetoes.

The charity said that “the inaction of the United Nations Security Council and vetoes from member states, particularly the United States, make them complicit in the ongoing slaughter; this inaction has given license to the mass killing of men, women and children.”

The meeting was convened after Guterres activated Article 99 — a step no one in his post has taken for decades.

The article allows the secretary general to bring to the council’s attention “any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, also rejected calls for a ceasefire as he addressed the Security Council.

Erdan once again threatened that the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has to be “eliminated.”

Israel waged its war on Gaza on October 7, after Hamas carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories in response to Tel Aviv’s intensified crimes against the Palestinian people.

In the event, the regime’s leaders ordered Israeli military forces to attack the besieged Gaza Strip with a force “like never before.”

End ‘decimation’ of Palestinian lives in Gaza

The head of the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) called on Friday for an end to the “decimation” of Palestinian lives in the territory.

Philippe Lazzarini urged all UN member states to “take immediate actions to implement an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”

Diplomats from Arab countries call for immediate ceasefire

In a related development, chief diplomats from a grouping of Arab and Islamic nations, on a visit to Washington, called for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan on behalf of the group, called on the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution calling for a ceasefire.

“Our message is we believe it is absolutely necessary to end the fighting immediately.”

He was in Washington as part of a visit of the Arab-Islamic Ministerial Committee.

Earlier this week, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) condemned Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians and called for a ceasefire, in remarks at the summit of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council in Qatar.

He said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is pushing the entire region into danger for the sake of his political future.”

December 8, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Global PR Giant Launches Provocative HPV Vaccine Ads Targeting Gen Zers

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 7, 2023

A multinational public relations firm last week launched a provocative advertising campaign — under the slogan “HPV Fucks Everybody” — designed to persuade Gen Zers to get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.

The PR firm, Publicis Groupe, launched the campaign in collaboration with the nonprofit Fuck Cancer. The campaign doesn’t name a specific HPV vaccine brand name. However, Merck’s Gardasil vaccine is the only HPV vaccine brand distributed in the U.S., and Merck is a client of Publicis Groupe.

When asked if Merck was funding the campaign, a spokesperson for Fuck Cancer told The Defender, “This campaign has no connection with Merck and is a collaboration between Publicis Health Media and Fuck Cancer (a non profit). Please note that we are promoting a vaccine that is safe and saves lives.”

There are currently 80 cases pending in federal court against Merck alleging Gardasil caused injuries and the federal Vaccine Court has paid out more than $70 million to people making claims regarding Gardasil.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), also a Publicis client, developed the HPV vaccine technology, which it licenses, in the U.S., exclusively to Merck.

In addition to Merck and the NIH, other Publicis Groupe clients include the World Economic Forum (WEF), pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma and several pharmacy chains that administer the HPV vaccines, including Walmart, Rite Aid and CVS Health (owners of Target pharmacies and clinics).

Campaign ‘uses sex to sell its case’

The new campaign targets young adults directly through a series of ads featuring “diverse, sexy images” and edgy music, accompanying the message that it doesn’t matter who you are, you are at risk because “HPV Fucks Everybody.”

Photos of a black couple, a white couple and a furry couple kissing, and a multiracial group of young people partying are featured on the website and will be featured in the ads.

The images are accompanied by lines like, “Stop the spread. Get the shot. Keep doing you,” according to “Pharma & Health Insider” — a PR site that publishes promotional stories with a news-like appearance.

HPV transmission is likely to occur via sex, the PR story said, so the campaign “uses sex to sell its case.”

“Targeting all 18–26-year-olds who are sexually active (or who want to be), the campaign behaves just like its audience: honest, bold and unbounded by tradition,” said Alison McConnell, chief marketing officer at Publicis Health Media — one of Publicis’ “solution hubs.”

Michelle Stiles, author of “One Idea To Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda,” told The Defender that campaigns run by elite global PR firms may appear absurd to a skeptical observer, but they have tremendous power to shape global public health agendas.

She said:

“The trendy and provocative messaging targeting sexually active youth for yet another vaccination campaign should hopefully be met with ample amounts of skepticism or outright laughter for those who paid attention during the previous rollout of the COVID-19 shots.

“Unfortunately, these million-dollar campaigns are extremely dangerous because they are so effective.”

Ben Mallory, executive vice president/creative director for Digitas Health, another Publicis subsidiary collaborating on the campaign, said the campaign is designed to inform young people that they will be infected with HPV, that such infection will be risky and that vaccination is the answer.

“For a generation that doesn’t discriminate, it’s important they realize that HPV doesn’t either,” he said. “That’s what the campaign communications [sic]: It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re into, if you’re not vaccinated, you’re at risk.”

Trying to reach ‘largest and most influential generation’

The campaign will air 30-second and one-minute ads on 150 college campuses and in 150 malls in major markets, and also post on lifestyle websites like Thrillist, PopSugar, the dating site Grindr.

An audio campaign will follow, along with advertising in “points-of-care,” which can include clinics or pharmacies.

On the campaign’s website, people can also sign up to “get the shot” at major retail pharmacies including Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, Target and Kroger — companies Publicis Groupe also represents.

McConnell, Publicis’ marketing director for the campaign, said they are trying to reach Gen Z because it is “the largest and most influential generation.”

That makes this campaign different from most previous HPV vaccination PR campaigns that targeted parents.

This shift in focus reflects recent shifts in direct advertising by Gardasil maker Merck.

Merck’s early ads targeted parents of adolescents, but in 2022 they shifted gears and started targeting parents of young children with ads like this one, which appeals to parents of the older elementary school children.

These ads focused on marketing the vaccine as “cancer prevention” rather than as acting on a sexually transmitted disease, a strategy the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) promoted to encourage more young people to get vaccinated.

Last year, Merck expanded its advertising campaign to target adults through age 45, in commercials like this one, marketing the vaccine as protecting against a long list of cancers.

Merck has invested heavily in shaping the market since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug in 2006. In October, it announced that its 2023 third-quarter Gardasil sales grew 13% to $2.6 billion.

Fact-checking the campaign’s claims

The campaign sample ad and its website, which provide no citations, make many misleading or erroneous claims.

The campaign’s approach appears to be rooted in the “fear-based” or “fear-appealing” messaging designed to “nudge” people into getting vaccinated, commonly utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic and in global public health more generally.

According to the CDC, HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. and the majority of sexually active people will get it at some point in their lives, even if they have only one or very few sexual partners.

But the vast majority of HPV infections are cleared by the immune system and less than 10% of infections are linked to any clinical symptoms. Clinical symptoms can include a variety of warts and cervical dysplasia, which may be benign or precancerous.

Yet the campaign website claims, “HPV turns into cancer about 10% of the time,” a claim public health agencies don’t make.

There are over 200 strains of the HPV virus, a subset of which are deemed “high-risk.” HPV can cause genital warts and some strains have been associated with some types of cancer. However, HPV is not the sole risk factor for any cancer, and cancers associated with HPV can also sometimes develop without the presence of the virus.

Methods like regular pap screening are highly effective and have been found to reduce the incidence and mortality of cervical cancer among women by at least 80%.

But the sample ad on the site presents HPV as something always scary and dangerous.

It says:

“HPV Fucks Everybody. In fact, there are more than 14 million new HPV infections in the US each year, because HPV doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care who you are, what you look like who you love or what you’re into. HPV will infect more than 85% of sexually active people of all races, ethnicities and genders. It can lead to genital warts, or worse, over ten types of cancer. So it doesn’t matter if your status is single, committed, or complicated. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not currently sexually active.”

The website also claims the HPV vaccine can prevent a whopping 33,700 types of HPV-related cancers. Even Gardasil 9’s package insert and the CDC website only indicate the HPV vaccine for some cancers of the cervix, vagina, vulva, penis, anus and back of the throat with the HPV virus.

The campaign also repeats Merck’s claims that the vaccine is “safe and effective” and that the side effects are “mild.”

But a series of ongoing lawsuits against Merck allege the drugmaker fast-tracked Gardasil through the FDA’s approval process and deceptively conducted clinical trials to mask serious side effects and exaggerate the vaccine’s effectiveness.

Some of the signature impacts observed following HPV vaccination in thousands of adverse events reports worldwide include permanently disabling autoimmune and neurological conditions such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.

To date, there are no valid studies showing the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer. However, there are studies suggesting the vaccine could increase the risk of cancer.

Finally, the campaign promises that getting vaccinated can “put an end to HPV. For you, for us, for them. For everyone.”

However, the Gardasil 9 vaccine is designed only to suppress nine of the over 200 strains of HPV, and recent research has shown that when the HPV vaccine suppresses certain types of “high-risk” HPV strains, those strains are replaced with other strains associated with some cancers.

While the World Health Organization has launched a global campaign to eradicate cervical cancer as a public health threat, it has not indicated a similar project for HPV.

Publicis is part of ‘the propaganda arm of the global elite’

The campaign is spearheaded by Publicis Health Media and Digitas Health, which are both part of Publicis, along with Fuck Cancer.

According to the campaign publicity, Publicis Health Media is particularly concerned with HPV because the company CEO Arthur Sadoun was diagnosed and treated for HPV-associated cancer.

Last year, the company published a holiday video where board chair Maurice Lévy and Sadoun were joined by actor Michael Douglas, who was diagnosed and treated with throat cancer a decade ago, to promote the HPV vaccine and the Publicis Groupe.

As part of its cancer marketing focus, Publicis Groupe launched its Working with Cancer initiative, at the WEF. In partnership with 30 of the largest global companies, including Pfizer, Sanofi, PepsiCola, Meta and others, the campaign seeks to “abolish the stigma and insecurity that exist for people with cancer in the workplace,” according to the campaign website.

During Super Bowl LVII in February, it ran a commercial about the campaign that won a Gold Lion from the Health & Wellness jury at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June.

Publicis Groupe is an ad holding company, which recently rebranded “for the connected age” itself as a “platform,” according to its website.

As Stiles details in her book, just a few such companies — including Publicis, Omnicom, WPP and Interpublic Group — dominate the global media landscape.

Each ad-holding company has billions of dollars in revenue and serves thousands of corporate clients along with universities, nonprofits and governmental and nongovernmental organizations.

As public relations firms, they design ad campaigns and they develop and strategically place print and broadcast media content in mainstream news and PR publications for their clients. They also create public relations campaigns like those described here to develop, promote and defend the reputations of their clients.

They design their strategies in part by collecting data “on virtually every U.S. consumer” and on journalists, politicians and scientists.

Other tactics include flooding the media landscape with spin, developing talking points for “experts” to use in public appearances and generally “using underhanded tactics to promote and defend their clients,” Ecowatch reported.

According to Stiles, an estimated two-thirds to 80% of the content broadcast and published by corporate media comes from public relations firms.

She said:

“There is no doubt that the top three PR holding firms WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis, whose collective revenue is over 44 billion, function and should be thought of as the propaganda arm of the global elite.

“The finely-tuned, targeted messages not only create revenue for the transnational capitalist class but just as importantly define the global problems to be solved and the way in which they should be solved, leaving very little room for other creative options.”

Each agency has smaller subsidiaries and PR affiliates under the same corporate ownership, creating the appearance that there are more players in the media field than there actually are. More recently, they have also begun to “gobble up” data companies.

For example, in this campaign, two of three collaborators are part of the Publicis Groupe.

The public relations site Pharma & Health, where one of the “stories” about the “HPV Fucks Everybody” campaign was posted by MediaPost Inc., a marketing company that posts up to 50 different industry blogs.

“Adding together the global revenue of the top 250 independent PR firms ($17 billion) with the PR holding companies ($44 billion) and we are literally swimming in marketing messages intended to consolidate capital for the mega-corporations,” Stiles said.

“The medical messaging repeatedly advises us to outsource health and wellness to drugs or vaccines, poor choices indeed,” she added.

A Defender investigation into Publicis’ clients last year, found it serves a wide range of corporate, governmental and supra-governmental agencies including the WEF and U.S. government agencies like the National Security Agency, tech giants like Google, Amazon, Disney, Microsoft and Meta, and corporate clients PepsiCo, Phillip Morris and Saudi Aramco.

Publicis Groupe was implicated in the “Monsanto File” scandal, where the company was found to be using Publicis Consultants and FleishmanHillard, an Omnicom subsidiary, to launch a PR offensive to rehabilitate the image of genetically modified organisms and pesticides.

Newsguard, a for-profit fact-checking organization backed by Big Pharma, Big Tech, the U.S. government and the American Federation of Teachers — a staunch advocate of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination and masks for schoolchildren — is also a client.

So is the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a politically driven service consistently attacking anyone who raises questions about vaccine efficacy or safety, and the organization responsible for creating the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” list.

In her book, Stiles also explains that asset management firms Vanguard and BlackRock are among the top 10 shareholders in the top four ad agency holding companies.

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

December 8, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Germany: AfD ban proposal struggles to gain traction in parliament, but next year could be different

BY JOHN CODY | REMIX NEWS | December 7, 2023

A Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician who lost to an Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician in his local elections is on a one-man mission to ban the party, but is struggling to gather the required signatures from fellow MPs. However, after a court ruling in February next year, efforts to ban the party may pick up steam.

The 48-year-old Marco Wanderwitz has so far failed to make progress with his signature campaign, which requires 37 MPs, 5 percent of all MPs, to introduce a motion in parliament. He is aiming to gather the required number of signatures by the end of the year.

“I’m having a lot of good conversations, I’m getting a lot of encouragement,” Wanderwitz told taz newspaper. “I am optimistic.” However, he will not divulge how many MPs have so far said they were willing to sign his motion.

Wanderwitz, who hails from Chemnitz in the east of Germany, lost his constituency to AfD’s Mike Moncsek, but has been able to stay in the German parliament because the CDU kept him on its list of candidates for Saxony. Ever since his loss to an AfD candidate, he has been one of the most vocal politicians in all of parliament about banning the party.

Remix News reported on his efforts earlier in the year, where he appeared on the Panorama state-run television program from ARD, where he said democracy needs to be saved by banning the party. The AfD is not only the second most popular party in Germany, but in Wanderwitz’s home state of Saxony, it is the single most popular party. Furthermore, nearly half of Germans say they could imagine a coalition government that includes the AfD.

AfD party officials have branded the move by Germany’s intelligence agency as “transparent and a pitiful attempt at denunciation”

“We are dealing with a party that seriously endangers our free democratic basic order and the state as a whole,” which is why “it is high time to ban them,” said Wanderwitz on the ARD program.

Wanderwitz not only wants the party banned, but says he wants everyone involved in the AfD to be jobless following a ban.

“All people who work for the party would immediately lose their jobs. All mandates, from honorary local councilors to seats in the European Parliament, would be forfeited immediately. All employees of MPs and parliamentary groups at all levels would immediately lose their jobs. We would reduce the structure of the AfD to zero,” he said. After the ban, he claims that people would vote for “democratic parties” again.

This may be the most important poll yet for the AfD and its future chances to wield real political power

Although Wanderwitz’s efforts have so far fallen short, the CDU MP says he is waiting for a Feb. 27 Higher Administrative Court decision from Münster, which will rule on a complaint filed by the AfD against the domestic intelligence agency the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).

Wanderwitz says he hopes the judges there will confirm that AfD is a “suspected right-wing extreme organization,” at which time, his efforts to ban the party might gain steam.

December 8, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

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