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Israel resorts to nuclear blackmail in Gaza

By Lucas Leiroz | November 7, 2023

In addition to promoting genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the Zionist regime is resorting to nuclear blackmail against the Palestinians. In a controversial recent statement, an Israeli top official admitted that using atomic bombs in the Gaza Strip is a “possibility” for Tel Aviv. These words shocked the world and showed the level of unpredictability and irrationality in the Israeli government’s actions.

The statement was made by the Israeli Minister of Heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, during an interview with local Israeli media. Eliyahu stated that a nuclear attack against the Gaza Strip “is one of the possibilities” that Israel could use in its alleged “war on Hamas.” According to the minister, “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza”, which is why all Palestinian citizens in the region should be punished by the IDF.

Eliyahu, in addition to admitting the nuclear possibility, stated that no humanitarian aid should be given to civilians in Gaza. He compared Gaza’s inhabitants to the German Nazis who killed Jews in WWII and said that the Jewish people “wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid.”

The minister’s controversial words led the government to react sharply. Eliyahu was suspended from his post by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In this same sense, his office made a post on social media “denying” his speech, “clarifying” that “Eliyahu’s statements are not based in reality” and adding that Israel’s IDF is “operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents” – which is clearly untrue, as can be seen in the massacre of civilians in Gaza.

Also, Israel’s defense chief, Yoav Gallant, condemned Eliyahu and called his nuclear threat “baseless and irresponsible words.” Expectedly, Netanyahu’s opposition also spoke out on the case, with Yair Lapid calling Eliyahu an “extremist” and hardening his criticism of Netanyahu’s administration team, making the matter a dispute between the different wings of Israeli Zionism.

Internationally, there was also strong pressure as a result of the statement. Arab countries reacted by severely condemning the ministers’ irresponsible statements. For example, UAE spokespersons said in an official report: “These statements constitute a violation of international law, as well as incitement to commit grave violations of International Humanitarian Law, such as war crimes, and raise grave concerns of an intent to commit genocide”.

The Jordanian government did something similar, releasing a statement asserting that Eliyahu’s words are a “call for genocide and a hate crime that cannot be ignored”. In the same sense, Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit declared: “Israel possesses nuclear weapons, which is an open secret (…) [The minister’s comments] confirm the truth of the racist view Israelis hold against Palestinians (…) This is the true face of the occupation government.”

Although Eliyahu has already been “punished” for his remarks, it is impossible for there to be “normality” after such declarations. There is an atmosphere of distrust regarding Israeli actions, with a real fear that Eliyahu is not the only official in Tel Aviv thinking about this type of “possibility” for Gaza. With so many war crimes committed by Israel in recent weeks and the deliberate killing of innocent civilians in a “collective punishment” plan against Gaza, it is very likely that Eliyahu’s mentality is not uncommon among Zionist decision-makers.

It is possible that the real intention behind Eliyahu’s suspension is an attempt to silence him – not for having told a “lie”, but for having said something that should not be said. Instead of simply showing that he does not think like his minister, Netanyahu could simply be responding to the pressure of criticism by suspending him. In other words, there are no real guarantees that the Israelis will not consider the “nuclear possibility” against Gaza.

From a rational and strategic point of view, it makes no sense to talk about nuclear weapons in a regional conflict occurring within such a short territorial limit. Radioactive contamination would not be restricted to the Strip but would also reach the territory occupied by Israel. However, unfortunately, there does not seem to be much rationality in the Zionist regime’s decisions.

The very initiative to launch a brutal offensive that is killing thousands of civilians seems absolutely irrational. Israel is becoming an international pariah and is being seen as a genocidal regime by a large number of countries, in addition to more and more states cutting their relations with Tel Aviv. But none of this seems enough for Netanyahu and his advisers to change their minds regarding the supposed “need” to “invade Gaza to destroy Hamas.”

Clearly, revanchism, anti-Palestinian racism and unlimited expansionism are the true guidelines of Zionist foreign policy. The decision-making process is not based on strategic calculations, which makes the situation very unpredictable and worrying. So, in practice, regardless of whether Israel is already considering using nuclear weapons or not, it is very possible that there will soon be this “demand” on the part of the most radical Zionist militants.

Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.

You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram.

November 7, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

How big does Palestine rally need to be for honest reporting?

By Yves Engler | November 7, 2023

On Saturday over 50,000 marched in Montréal against Justin Trudeau’s role in enabling Israel’s genocidal siege and slaughter in Gaza. I say this confidently having walked from one end of the march to the other and watched overhead drone footage. This was the largest antiwar/international solidarity mobilization in Montréal since the 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq.

The largest Palestine solidarity demonstration in Canadian history concluded in front of CBC’s office to highlight pro-Israel media bias. Proving the point, Global News reported that “hundreds gathered”.

While Global’s Farah Nasser described how “hundreds gathered in Montreal” the images on the screen showed at least ten thousand rallying. The jarring juxtaposition between lived reality and the “journalism” that is supposed to report the truth puts into context why some protestors put fake blood on the building’s glass doors and wrote “call it genocide” and “justice for journalists in Gaza” on the ground in front of the CBC.

At the end of the march, I was asked to speak outside the CBC/Radio-Canada offices as part of protesting Canadian media coverage of the 10,000 Palestinians killed in recent weeks.

Below is a portion of my prepared remarks:

“The Canadian media is enabling Israel’s genocidal siege and violence in Gaza. CTV and Global both recently fired Palestinian/Arab reporters for opposing the genocide on their social media.

“The media humanizes Israelis and dehumanize Palestinians. For instance, a young Vancouverite who travelled 10,000 kilometers from their home to join the Israeli military is lauded and mourned, but any Palestinian killed fighting Israel isn’t even considered.

“On multiple occasions Canadian outlets have directly manufactured consent for Israel’s war crimes. As an example, yesterday the National Post and other Postmedia outlets published “How Hamas uses hospitals as shields during war against Israel”.

“The media have been promoting the narrative that Israel has a right to defend itself. But Israel is the occupying power that has been oppressing Palestinians for more than 75 years and it always kills many times more Palestinians during every flare up in violence.

“Two weeks ago a leftist journalist began a list of prominent commentators supporting Israel’s genocidal violence. A few days ago he began asking them how many more thousands of Palestinian children would have to be killed before they supported a ceasefire. They mostly refused to respond.

“Media bias against Palestinians is not new and there are innumerable examples to point to. CBC English has mandated its reporters not to use the word “Palestine”. In 2019 they even forced a radio host to apologize for using the word Palestine when interviewing an author who published a graphic novel titled Palestine!

“When I published Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid in 2010 a Montreal Gazette reporter told me he enjoyed the book and would’ve sought to review it if the title hadn’t included the word apartheid. When a (single) daily paper reviewed my book it prompted a counter review. In the lead-up to the London launch, University of Western Ontario professor David Heap submitted a positive review to his local paper. But two weeks later, the London Free Press published Honest Reporting Canada (HRC) head Mike Fegelman’s response claiming it was “professionally unethical for Heap to not disclose his highly partisan stance on the Mideast file” when reviewing Canada and Israel.

Of course, the HRC did not disclose it is a well-resourced ‘flack’ organization that criticizes media for not towing their pro-genocide and apartheid line. They write replies, submit complaints and instigate email campaigns to media outlets when they publish something deemed objectionable.

But the HRC does nothing more than reinforce the dominant media’s broader structural bias towards power. On Palestine they largely echo the position of the Israel lobby, Canadian government and US empire.

Still, it was shocking to witness the media crassly downplay such a large demonstration. As thousands chanted in front of CBC “every time the media lies another family in Gaza dies”.

November 7, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

The Gospel of Gaza

What we must learn from Netanyahu’s Bible lessons

BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 6, 2023

In a speech in Hebrew on October 28, Netanyahu justified the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza with a biblical reference to Amalek.

You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember. And we fight. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza and in all other regions in Israel, are joining the chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3,000 years ago, from Joshua ben Nun, until the heroes of 1948, the Six-Day War, the October 73 War, and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy, and to guarantee our existence in this country.

In Netanyahu’s Holy Bible, God gives his chosen people Palestine, and the same God commands them to exterminate the Amalekites, an Arab people that stands in their way. Yahweh asks Moses to not only exterminate the Amalekites, but to “blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19).

It was left to Saul to finish them up: “kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” Yahweh instructs him (1Samuel 15:8). Because Saul spared the Amalekite king Agag, Yahweh withdrew the kingship from him and drove him mad: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has broken his allegiance to me and not carried out my orders” (15:11). The holy prophet Samuel, who had a direct line of communication with Yahweh, had to butcher Agag himself (“hewed Agag in pieces,” in the Revised Standard Version). Yahweh then gave the kingship to David, who proved a more obedient exterminator, for example when he put the people of Rabba “under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2 Samuel 12:31).

Despite their complete genocide in the Bible, the Amalekites remain the eternal nightmare of Israel. Amalek came to be associated, like his grandfather Esau, with Rome and Christianity, but also with Iran, because the villain of the Book of Esther, Haman, is referred to as an Agagite, that is, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag. That is why the hanging of Haman with his ten sons and the massacre of 75,000 Persians are often conflated in Jewish tradition with the extermination of the Amalekites and the brutal execution of their king. The Torah reading on the morning of Purim is taken from the account of the battle against the Amalekites, which ends with the conclusion that “Yahweh will be at war with Amalek generation after generation” (Exodus 17:16).[1]

In a 2009 New York Times piece called “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” Jeffrey Goldberg reports that, when he asked one of Netanyahu’s adviser’s “to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran,” the answer he received was: “Think Amalek.”[2] Now Netanyahu is calling on Israelis to remember Amalek while their army shells Gaza, men, women, children, infants and livestock included.

Netanyahu has not gone insane, as I explained earlier. He is simply possessed by the Bible, because Israel and the Bible are one. Netanyahu’s insanity is rooted in the Bible. His obsession with Amalek is a collective one, shared by Zionist religious Jews around the world. Let us, for example, listen to this lecture by Rabbi Eliyahu Kin, delivered in 2009, on the question: “Why must Jews destroy Amalek?” Let me summarize it for you. The Amalekites deserved their fate because they opposed the will of God. The will of God is good, and opposing the will of God is evil. So exterminating Amalek is good, while saving just one Amalekite, as Saul did, is evil. In fact, since God is good, exterminating Amalek is the expression of his goodness. And since “the best way to love what Hashem (God) loves is to hate what Hashem hates,” hating Amalek is loving God. The reason why the Amalekites hate the Jews is not because the Jews want to exterminate them. “What bothers Amalek is that the Jew believes in mussar, morality, ethics, being good, being nice.” The Amalekites are also evil because they oppose the Torah — in which God orders them to be exterminated. Ultimately, Rabbi Kin summarizes, “we are cruel to Amalek because we need to be. Because that is exactly what they would do to us if they had the chance.” Why? Because Amalek “is a concentration of hatred.” And Jews must hate hatred — except the hatred of God for Amalek, which they must love as an expression of God’s love. How do you deal with such collective madness?

More to the point: what’s wrong with Netanyahu quoting the Bible? It is the Holy Bible, isn’t it? The Word of God! We, Christianized peoples, have been taught too that in ancient times God chose the Jews, gave them Palestine, and commanded them to exterminate the Amalekites (and the Midianites, and many other peoples, seven nations in all). What can Christians possibly object to the rabbi? That God was hot-blooded in those days, but has now cooled down? That the Amalekites are no longer around, or now have the right to oppose the biblical project? (Because, you know, we are Israel now). Enough with all this hand-wringing! After all, God, the creator of the universe, does order, in our Christian Bible, to exterminate Amalek, men, women, children and babies (and cattle, for Yahweh makes no difference). It is undeniable, indisputable, irrefutable.

Let us face it: the God of the Old Testament is a bloodthirsty devil. Some people have known that for a long time, and tried to warn us. Bakunin, for example, who saw the Jewishness in Marxism, stated in God and the State that of all the gods adored by men, Yahweh “was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.” To quote from John Kaminski, “Yahweh gave the Jews the right to steal the lands of others (Deuteronomy 6:10-13, 6:18-19, 7:1-2). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to commit genocide, to totally annihilate the peoples whose lands they had the God-given right to take as their own (Deuteronomy 7:16). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to ‘destroy them (other peoples) with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed’ (Deuteronomy 7:23). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to murder and plunder other races of their property (Exodus 3:20-22). Yahweh has made the Israelites a ‘holy’ people, a master race among other races (Deuteronomy 7:6).”

Bakunin was among those insightful intellectuals who, in the nineteenth century, woke up to the realization that Israel had been the creation of the most evil deity from the beginning. But most people didn’t hear them, because Israel was, for Christians, an abstraction, a story, a holy legend from mythological times. But today, Israel is real, and its hellish character is plainly manifested for everyone to see. Never before has the realization of Israel’s evil soul been so accessible. We are living in a time of revelation, and we’d better not miss it.

“The Palestinians have unwittingly sacrificed themselves for the purposes of enlightening the entire planetary civilization to the profound evil and satanic nature of the Zionist State of Israel,” wrote the Armchair Prophet.[3] A profound statement. Gaza is Christ, and Israel is Israel.[4] But Gaza is also Amalek. Amalek was Christ from the beginning, but we didn’t see it, because we were told that Christ was Yahweh’s son, and one with him. Now we can begin to see our tragic mistake. This is our wake up call. Let us face the truth about Yahweh and the chosen people he created in his image (or the other way around).

Why have Christians never noticed that, when he promised Israel domination over the nations on the condition of exclusive worship, Yahweh was the very same devil that later appeared to Jesus and “showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor [and] said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage’” (Matthew 4:8-10). After all, Satan is just an “angel of Yahweh” in the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 22 and 32), indistinguishable from Yahweh himself in 1Chronicles 21.

Netanyahu is opening our eyes, and I am eagerly awaiting his next Bible lesson. After mentioning Amalek, he referred to the biblical Joshua as a “Jewish hero”. Please read the Book of Joshua to understand what he means, and what all Israelis who applaud him mean. Joshua committed genocide after genocide on the order of Yahweh, killing “men and women, young and old” (6:21) In the whole land, he “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40).

Three days before that speech, Netanyahu declared to his people: “We shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah.” You may recall from your Sunday school that Isaiah prophesied a time when all nations “will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles” (Isaiah 2:4). But go back to your Bible, and read the full prophecy to understand what Netanyahu means. Isaiah is about a time when “the Law will issue from Zion” and Israel “will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples” (2:3-4). Here is more from Isaiah: “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). “Yahweh’s sword is gorged with blood, it is greasy with fat,” says Isaiah on the occasion of “a great slaughter in the land of Edom [Amalek’s grandfather]” (34:6).

One man, in the second century AD, saw clearly that Jesus could not possibly be the son of Yahweh, that he was instead his archenemy. His name was Marcion. Scholars call him a Gnostic, because he taught that Yahweh was an evil demiurge, and Christ the good god coming down from Heaven to save us from Yahweh. Most texts we call Gnostics promoted this view, in one form or another. In the Apocryphon of John, also from the second century, Yahweh (or Yaltabaoth) is the first of a series of demonic entities called archons, who usurps the position of God by proclaiming: “I am a jealous god, there is none other than me.” Yaltabaoth and the other archons attempt to imprison Adam in the Garden of Eden, a false paradise. But Christ, who is the first aeon, sends Eve to Adam to release the light trapped in him, and lead him to eat the liberating fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Modern scholarship has established that Gnosticism arose within Judaism, probably in Samaria. In the highly regarded opinion of Gilles Quispel, Gnosticism was a Jewish heresy before it was a Christian heresy. During the first three centuries there were Christian Gnostics and anti-Christian Gnostics, but all are Jews.[5] As a Jewish heresy, Gnosticism can be seen as a rejection by spiritual Jews of the materialistic and sadistic nature of Yahweh. Gnostics, however, still took their Torah too seriously and accepted the premise that, before becoming the god of Israel, Yahweh had been “God”, the creator of the world. In that sense, they were still under a biblical delusion.

In the Jewish infancy of Christianity, there was a struggle between Gnostic Christians and anti-Gnostics Christians. Marcion wrote the first evangelium and established the first organized ekklesia. It was still very strong in the early third century, according to Tertullian, who also tells us that the Gnostic teacher Valentinus almost became bishop of Rome (Against Marcion). Gnostics, relying on Paul’s teaching, believed that Jesus’s new covenant freed them from Moses’s covenant, but their enemies insisted on continuity, and claimed that the New Covenant (or Testament) fulfilled rather than contradicted the Old one. The anti-Gnostics ultimately prevailed, and the Jewish Tanakh became part of the Christian canon. That might have been a wise political move as long as the purpose was to convert Jews. But as Christianity became a Gentile religion, it resulted in Gentiles worshipping Yahweh along with Christ.

Christianity has given us the powerful story of Christ, the man who wanted to free Jews from their evil, ethnocentric god, and was martyred for it. But Christianity also became Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into Gentile civilization. The spirit and the teaching of Christ came to us mixed with the spirit and the teaching of Yahweh. The spirit of Yahweh is the spirit of mass murder: “The spirit of Yahweh came upon him (Samson), and he went down to Ashkelon, where he killed thirty of their men and despoiled them” (Judges 14:19). The spirit of Yahweh is in all Israel, now, stronger than ever before, fed by a century of bloodbaths orchestrated by Zionists.

In a book written under the pen-name Seymour Light, The Marcion Thesis, Revisited, which I recommend, Nick Kollerstrom (also author of the memorable Terror on the Tube) points out that, if we had to draw Yahweh’s portrait, he would have to be a dragon: he “rides through the heavens” (Deuteronomy 33:22) with his wings (Psalm 17:8, 36:8, 91:4), while “smoke rises from his nostrils, and from his mouth devouring fire” (Psalms 18:8 and Samuel 22:9). Yahweh also shares with the evil dragons of lore his lust for gold which he hoards in his dwelling place: “Mine is the silver, mine the gold!” (Haggai 2:8). (According to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was “666 talents of gold”). Like dragons, Yahweh is also a consumer of young virgins: thirty-two of them were offered to him after the slaughter of the Midianites, presumably burnt as holocausts together with the oxen, donkeys and sheep that were also part of Yahweh’s share (Numbers 31).

In the episode of Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal, Yahweh’s devouring fire is given as the definite proof that he is God: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed” (1Kings 18:24). How spiritual! It is Yahweh’s devouring fire that is now unleashed on Gaza.

You better realize it now: Yahweh, the god of Israel, is Satan.

For more evidence, read my other Unz Review articles:

Notes

[1] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 122-125, 4.

[2] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” New York Times, May 16, 2009, on www.nytimes.com

[3] The Armchair Prophet, “What’s happening in Gaza right now is beyond biblical…beyond apocalyptic,” State of the Nation, November 2, 2023, on https://stateofthenation.co/?p=193985

[4] Watch Abby Martin’s 2019 documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom.

[5] Gilles Quispel, Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica. Collected Essays of Gilles Quispel, edited by Johannes Van Oort, Brill, 2008. Also Attilio Mastrocinque, From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism, Mohr Siebeck, 2005.

November 7, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

US House Panel Says Disinformation ‘Pseudo-Experts’ Targeted Political Speech Online

Sputnik – 07.11.2023

WASHINGTON – US government officials used a government-linked group of disinformation pseudo-experts to launder the censorship of political speech online, the US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government said in an interim report.

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – a group of purported disinformation academics led by the Stanford Internet Observatory – worked with US government officials to monitor and censor online speech ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the report, released Monday, said.

“This interim staff report details the federal government’s heavy-handed involvement in the creation and operation of the EIP, which facilitated the censorship of Americans’ political speech in the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 election,” the report said. “This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefited one side of the political aisle: true information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors.”

The House Weaponization Subcommittee released the report in conjunction with the House Judiciary Committee.

The EIP worked with the US Department of Homeland Security and other US government agencies to bypass First Amendment protections for speech through the consortium of disinformation “pseudo-experts,” the report said.

The EIP was created at the request of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the report said. US government officials would submit misinformation reports to EIP analysts, who would then recommend censorship actions to tech companies, the report added.

An “untold number” of US citizens across the political spectrum were impacted by the censorship of true information, jokes and opinions, the report said.

The House committees’ investigations into the weaponization of the federal government and violations of civil liberties remain ongoing, the report said. There is “more to come,” Judiciary and Weaponization panel chair Jim Jordan also said in a statement via social media platform X.

The American people deserve to know whether they were targeted by the US government and affiliated disinformation pseudo-experts, Jordan added.

November 7, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

US plans $320-mn transfer of precision bombs to Israel amid regime’s genocide in Gaza

Press TV – November 6, 2023

The United States is planning transfer of 320 million dollars worth of precision bombs to Israel amid the regime’s relentless genocidal war against the besieged Gaza Strip.

The Wall Street Journal revealed the information in a Monday report, citing a source familiar with the plan.

The report said US President Joe Biden’s administration has informed Congress of the planned transfer of Spice Family Gliding Bomb Assemblies through a formal notification sent to congressional leaders on October 31.

Spice Family Gliding Bomb Assemblies constitute a special type of precision-guided weapon, which is fired by warplanes.

Citing correspondence it had viewed, the report added that weapons manufacturer Rafael USA would transfer the bombs to its Israeli parent company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for deployment by the Israeli military.

The report came on the 31st day of Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip, which started after the territory’s resistance movements waged a surprise attack against the occupying entity, dubbed Operation al-Aqsa Storm, in response to its decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

On Monday, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza announced that the death toll from indiscriminate Israeli bombardments has reached 10,022 people, including 4,104 children and 2,641 women. It added that the number of those who have been wounded over the past 31 days has risen to 25,408.

The United States, Israel’s biggest and oldest ally, has provided the regime with thousands of arms consignments since the initiation of the war.

On Thursday, the US House of Representatives passed a standalone $14.3-billion military assistance package for Israel. The legislation, however, is yet to clear the Senate.

Washington, which has backed Tel Aviv’s ferocious attacks on Gaza as a means of “self-defense,” has also been casting its veto against the United Nations Security Council resolutions that called on the occupying regime to cease its aggression.

November 6, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

“Game Changer for Vitamin D” – Supplementation Found To Improve Cancer Survival

BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE | OCTOBER 30, 2023

For more than 100 years, it has been believed that sunlight and vitamin D deficiency were associated with the risk for many deadly cancers including colorectal, prostate, and breast. Despite this, some scientists have remained doubtful about whether this nutrient indeed has any benefit in reducing cancer risk, morbidity, and mortality. This skepticism is bolstered by several randomized controlled trials casting doubt on the nutrient’s effectiveness.

Commentary on Vitamin D’s Effect on Cancer

However, in a new commentary published in the journal JAMA Network Open, Michael F. Holick, Ph.D., MD, professor of medicine, pharmacology, physiology & biophysics, and molecular medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, explores the controversy as to whether improving vitamin D status has any benefit for reducing the risk of developing cancer as well as improving relapse-free and mortality outcomes.

He believes the results of the Kanno et al. study support the significant body of associated evidence and clinical studies concluding that improvement in vitamin D status through vitamin D supplementation can be an effective strategy for improving survival outcomes of cancers, especially of the digestive tract including colorectal cancer.

Factors Influencing Vitamin D’s Effect on Cancer

“We now recognize that there are a variety of variables that can influence how vitamin D prevents and responds to cancer. For example, being at a normal weight and taking vitamin D improves your ability to survive cancer. Other factors include the patient’s genetic makeup and how the patient utilizes and breaks down vitamin D,” explains Holick, corresponding author of the piece.

The study by Kanno et. al. provides further insight. The p53 gene produces the p53 protein to prevent cells from becoming malignant. Cancer cleverly mutates this gene and the mutated p53 protein helps the cancer to grow and become immune to cancer therapy. Kanno et. al. found that patients whose immune system is on high alert and produces antibodies to control the production and release of this mutated p53 protein were more likely, by more than 2.5 fold, to improve their chances of surviving the cancer if they also took daily 2000 IUs vitamin D3 compared to patients who had the antibodies but did not take vitamin D supplementation. Those patients who did not produce the antibodies received no survival benefit by taking the vitamin D supplement.”

Future Directions in Research

Holick believes it would be worthwhile to conduct a retrospective analysis for serum p53 antibodies and the immunohistochemical presence for p53 in histologic cancer samples of breast, prostate, and other cancer studies that found no benefit when they evaluated the potential impact of vitamin D supplementation on improving cancer survival.

More importantly, Holick believes future studies evaluating vitamin D supplementation for the prevention and improvement of cancer outcomes should now include not only many of the variables mentioned above, but also include a measurement for p53 antibodies in the blood and immunohistochemical presence of p53 in cancer tissue samples.

Dosage and Implications

According to Holick, it is important to recognize that most of the studies that have shown that vitamin D3 supplementation improves cancer survival provided patients with at least 2000 IUs vitamin D3. This amount of vitamin D3 substantially improves the vitamin D status (serum concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D) to a concentration above 30 ng/mL. This amount of vitamin D3 was not reported to cause any toxicity

“It is well-documented that in order to achieve a circulating concentration of 25(OH)D above 30 ng/mL requires a vitamin D intake of at least 2000 IUs daily, an amount that cannot be achieved from diet alone but requires vitamin D supplementation. Although vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin you cannot get enough vitamin D from sun exposure unless you expose more than 20% of your body surface to sunlight almost daily like the Maasai and Hazda do in equatorial Africa,” said Holick.

Reference: “The Death D-Fying Vitamin D3 for Digestive Tract Cancers—The p53 Antibody Connection” by Michael F. Holick, 22 August 2023, JAMA Network Open.
DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.28883

November 6, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

The Covid ventilator disaster: Was the US to blame?

By Professor Martin Neil | TCW Defending Freedom | November 6, 2023

The lethal role of ventilation in treating Covid-19 is a hot topic again after Elon Musk raised it in conversation with Joe Rogan on his recent Spotify podcast:

‘Well, 80 per cent of the people they put on ventilators died . . . what I’m hearing from Wuhan is that they made a big mistake in putting people on intubated ventilators for an extended period . . . this is actually what is damaging the lungs, not Covid. The cure is worse than the disease.’

There is a deeper, more disturbing, story about the origins of ventilation as a policy response to the ‘pandemic’ that we are not being told. Likewise, the known risks involved with ventilation (reported here in TCW), as well as the legal and ethical violations associated with such a response, are largely undebated.

Was China responsible for US ventilation policy?

In this article, lawyer and writer Michael Senger says that tens of thousands of Americans died after being placed on mechanical ventilators in 2020. He points out that early data from China had suggested that ventilators would need to be used widely in the treatment of covid-19 patients and this led to a major rush to procure ventilators worldwide. Further, he laid the blame for ventilation policy at China’s door: ‘This practice of extended intubation was apparently consistent with early guidance coming from China.’

Is this true? Can we really blame China for this policy? If not, then where did it originate?

It may come as a surprise that despite China being the first to make widespread use of ventilators, evidence suggests that the Chinese may have been following US policy.

Mass ventilation for respiratory distress is a key component in the US, and international, repertoire of what is known as ‘disaster medicine’, which covers pandemics as well as bioterrorism events.

Disaster medicine’s history goes back to at least 1991 when Heller et al use the example of the first Gulf War chemical attacks on Israel to argue that in the event of a chemical attack, hospitals will need to quickly deploy mechanical ventilation systems to deal with mass casualty events.

By 2005 the infrastructure was in place with Rubinson et al reporting on the ‘Working Group on Emergency Mass Critical Care’. On ventilators they say: ‘The Working Group believes that provision of a basic mode of mechanical ventilation (e.g., assist-controlled or pressure-controlled ventilation) for large numbers of patients should be a priority in these conditions. Mechanical ventilators in this setting need not be state of the art but should be rapidly available and portable, should provide adequate gas exchange for a range of clinical conditions that warrant mechanical ventilation, should be safe for patients (disconnect alarm capabilities), should be safe for staff (reduce staff time in patients’ rooms if disease is contagious) and should allow for efficient use of staff.’

Notice that one of the supposed benefits of ventilation is that it reduces the time staff spend in patient’s rooms if the disease is contagious (as we know during covid-19 staff were made highly anxious and fearful of catching the supposedly novel and deadly virus).

Modelling and planning for pandemics was in full swing by 2006, and that included tracking and managing ventilator stockpiles.

Risk, ethical and legal issues

Disaster medicine is primarily focused on treating patients in pandemics and bio-terror events, but it also covers ethical standards of care and legal liability of those operating ICUs.

In 2008 Branson et al at the University of Cincinnati did a literature review covering respiratory failure, disaster preparedness, pandemic influenza and mass casualty care. They cite a number of events where manual ventilation was necessary, but they reported that during hurricane Katrina, the Copenhagen polio epidemic of 1952 and the sarin gas attacks in Japan, there was a lack of available equipment.

In a crucial warning they note that: ‘There is little historical or empirical evidence upon which to base decisions regarding mass casualty respiratory failure and augmenting positive-pressure ventilation capacity.’

Ventilation was therefore being recommended with NO consideration of the risks, and with little to no real evidence to support it.

In an editorial for the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness by Rubinson and Christian, published in 2013, they report on the allocation of mechanical ventilators during medical catastrophes:

‘To best use scarce resources, managing medical catastrophes requires deliberate transition from individual-centered to population-focused critical care. In the United States, the federal government provides neither permission nor definitive guidance for such modifications in care delivery. Although the federal government has oversight for practices related to health care, relevant federal statutes  . . . and civil rights protections, most health professionals’ clinical activities are overseen by states. In recognition of the states’ role, the New York State Workgroup developed a process to fairly and justly transition to population-focused care.’

A number of hugely contentious legal and ethical red flags are being raised here, including the suspension of individual rights with priority being placed on collective protection via population-focused care.

Furthermore, they add that their efforts have been influenced by the legal aftermath from hurricane Katrina:

‘In the wake of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the post-event lawsuits and prosecutions have become a significant concern for health care professionals for future disasters. A major advantage of a statewide effort rather than isolated local planning is the greater possibility for protection from criminal and civil liability for health professionals and institutions that implement the guidance.’

(For context the events they are referring to occurred at the Memorial Hospital Center in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Hospital and toxicology tests were performed on 41 bodies, and 23 tested positive for one or both of morphine and the fast-acting benzodiazepine sedative midazolam. Following an investigation into these deaths, the local district attorney decided there was sufficient evidence to charge three medical staff with four counts of second-degree murder. Charges against two were dropped in exchange for testimony.)

In 2015 New York State issued its policy on ventilator allocation, strongly suggesting that they expected a shortage of ventilators. The accompanying detailed guidelines run to 266 pages showing there was a well thought out and extremely detailed plan for the use of ventilators including a ‘solid’ ethical and legal basis for their use.

However, Michael Senger believes that, even though the public health authorities were obviously well aware of the legal and ethical risks, the information coming from China might excuse them from responsibility or blame: ‘Regardless of how much harm was done, it’s simply too difficult to prove that the procedure violated the emergency standard of care given the information coming from China at the time.’

Disaster Medicine (literally)

There can be no doubt that the well-established US disaster medicine plans were implemented in the ‘pandemic’ despite the known very high risks presented by ventilation and the acknowledged profound legal and ethical issues in enforcing a ‘collectivist’ approach in the form of ‘population-focused’ care.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the assertion that ventilation use was reactive and adopted in a panic, or mis-applied en masse. On the contrary, the expectation was that ventilation was the default, and sole, reaction to a respiratory medical emergency, be it from a natural virus or a bioweapon.

Mass ventilation formed a central plank of the US’s planned response to the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. It was built into the protocols, procedures and plans, from national to state level. Likewise, given the technological leadership exerted by the US, it would not be surprising that other countries, such as the Nato, EU and Five Eyes nations, would follow their lead.

It is therefore not too much of a stretch to assume that, to demonstrate the technological power of the party, that the CCP and China would adopt the same approach. In fact, evidence strongly suggests that the Chinese may have been following – rather than leading – US policy in this critical matter.

Co-authored with 𝗗𝗿 𝗝𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗛𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘁 and 𝗗𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗿 

November 6, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Outcomes after Early Treatment with Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin: An Analysis of 30,423 COVID-19 patients

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH |  Courageous Discourse  | November 6, 2023

We perform prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials to test drugs, vaccines, devices, and other products for safety and efficacy. Randomization is important since it handles: 1) selection bias, 2) all known and unknown confounders. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent during the pandemic, we did not have an investment in large, multidrug prospective, randomized, placebo controlled trials or comparative studies to test the best drug regimens.

In the end, what patients care about is how they feel, function, and survive. When it came to COVID-19, whether randomized or not, if patients survived if they were in the optimally treated group. The only way to assess how a high-risk population fared in the pandemic is to report on a large sample of patients sick with COVID-19 with a large number of the outcome of of interest—death.

Brouqui et al reported from a French database of 30,423 COVID-19 patients of whom 535 succumbed to the illness. In great detail, the investigators report mortality according to ambulatory treatment received, hospitalization, and the course over the following six weeks.

November 6, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Insurance Industry Execs ‘Alarmed’ by Surge in Deaths Among Young People — But Stop Short of Blaming COVID Shots

By Mike Capuzzo | The Defender | November 6, 2023

Executives at the largest insurance companies in the United States are alarmed that teenagers, young and white-collar Americans in the prime of life are inexplicably dying at a record pace, causing a “monumental outflow” of death claims and drag on profits that is shaking the industry and causing some to take a fresh look at the problem.

According to an Oct. 26 report in InsuranceNewsNet, U.S. insurance companies expected higher-than-normal payouts from excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Insurers saw death benefits rise 15.4% in 2020, the biggest one-year increase since the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, followed by a record $100.28 billion — nearly double the historic norm — in total death benefits paid out by the industry in 2021.

“The numbers were naturally forecasted to climb during the pandemic, but some industry and health authorities are concerned the rates haven’t greatly diminished as COVID infection rates have declined,” InsuranceNewsNet reported.

According to InsuranceNewsNet, insurers are especially concerned by data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that show “mortality rates alarmingly rising for different categories,” including younger adult mortality rates that are up more than 20% above historic norms in 2023.

The CDC numbers reported in August show the death rate for Americans ages 15-45 rose 20-24% above normal in 2020, and soared in 2021, to a nearly 30% death increase for 15-year-olds and a more than 45% increase for 45-year-olds.

Surge in excess deaths ‘caught carriers off guard’

Most troubling to insurers, CDC data reported in August showed that Americans in the period January-May 2023 were still dying at abnormally high rates with the pandemic long over. Mortality rates were 25% higher than normal among 15- to 19-year-olds and 20% higher among 45-year-olds considered in the prime of life.

Even twenty-somethings were dying at a rate nearly 15% above normal and thirty-somethings at a pace 20% higher than usual, the CDC data show.

Samantha Chow, global leader for Life, Annuity and Benefits Sector at Capgemini, a large, multinational Paris-based consulting company, told InsuranceNewsNet, “The surge in excess deaths caught carriers off guard” and the issue demands urgent attention by the industry.

The issue is, “Can the industry handle a sudden spike in claims?” She added, “The real concern for life insurers lies in preparing for an unexpected wave of death claims and the impact on their assets under management.”

“Do they have enough reserves to weather these outflows, given the excess deaths? It’s not just about death or health,” Chow said. “It is about the industry’s ability and readiness to manage this monumental outflow.”

The excess deaths and the record drag on insurance company revenue and the predictive chaos in actuarial tables they represent, alarmed the Society of Actuaries (SOA), the world’s largest professional actuarial organization.

Excess mortality is defined as excess deaths in a given population and time period above the expected number.

The SOA has conducted ongoing research since 2021 to gather “a high-level view of U.S. Group Term Life Insurance mortality results during the COVID-19 pandemic” compared to prior baseline results.

The SOA Research Institute studied more than 2.7 million claims and over $120 billion in earned premiums reported by “20 of the top 21 U.S. group term life insurers” in the U.S., representing approximately 90% of the employer-based group term life insurance industry.

In an August 2022 poll among its more than 30,000 members worldwide, the SOA found that 85% of members thought excess mortality rates would continue to 2025. In August this year, the same poll found 79% believed excess mortality rates will continue through 2026.

Life insurance executives and actuaries told InsuranceNewsNet, “The numbers are alarming and could continue to drag earnings and surge death claims for years to come.”

Society of Actuaries: no connection between historic death rates and COVID shots

Yet in its latest report issued in May, the SOA Research Institute found no connection between the historic U.S. death rates and insurance payouts starting in 2021 and COVID-19 vaccine mandates that rolled out the same year.

Chow blamed the excess deaths and claims on “the ripples of COVID-19 and its varying impacts, leading to higher rates of depression, suicide, and increased substance abuse.”

Other insurance executives told The Wall Street Journal they blamed “delays in medical care as a result of lockdowns in 2020, and then, later, people’s fears of seeking out treatment and trouble lining up appointments” for a surprising surge in non-COVID-19 death claims, especially heart and circulatory issues and neurological disorders.

But Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), who treats long COVID and vaccine-injured patients in his practice, called on insurance companies to work with media and governments and investigate the powerful evidence that countless deaths and disabilities are temporally linked to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and read the exploding science that pinpoints mRNA technology lethality.

In an interview with The Defender, Kory cited the more than 1 million COVID-19 vaccine-linked injuries, disabilities and more than 30,000 deaths reported by doctors, nurses and others to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

VAERS, run by the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is the government’s “early warning system” to detect vaccine harms.

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most highly published cardiologists in the world, pointed to a study of deaths after vaccination with detailed autopsies in Heidelberg, Germany. “Of 35 fatalities within 20 days of injection, 10 were ruled out as clearly not due to the vaccine (eg drug overdose). The remaining 25 (71%) had final diagnoses consistent with a vaccine injury syndrome including myocardial infarction, worsening heart failure, vascular aneurysm, pulmonary embolism, fatal stroke, and vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia,” McCullough wrote.

He also cited his own systematic review of “all autopsy studies that include COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis as a possible cause of death” that found that “all 28 deaths were causally linked to COVID-19 vaccination by independent adjudication.”

Kory said a large and expanding volume of scientific literature has described the pathogenicity of the artificial spike protein, unleashed by the mRNA injection into the body.

“We know from research on autopsy series that among those who died from the vaccine, spike protein was disseminated to all organs and vessels of the body,” he told The Defender.

“Spike-induced damage occurs by numerous mechanisms, including necrosis of vessel walls leading to things like aortic dissection, inflammation of important organs, including the heart and brain causing myocarditis and cognitive deficits respectively,” Kory said.

He also also cited “fibrinoid aggregates circulating in the blood causing poor perfusion in the microcirculation as well as hypercoagulability in the blood causing strokes and heart attacks, immunosuppression causing increased risk of infectious illnesses, and/or reactivation of latent viruses.”

Edward Dowd, the former BlackRock fund manager who oversaw $14 billion in assets on Wall Street for the largest asset manager in the world, exposed the excess-death crisis in insurance-industry data in his December 2022 book, “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022.”

Dowd told The Defender that according to insiders at one of the biggest insurance companies in the U.S., “People in the industry know what’s going on but nobody at the top” is yet prepared to recognize it. “The CEOs and CFOs don’t believe it’s the vaccine. It’s not that these people are evil. They’re not separating facts from emotion.”

Dowd added:

“It’s not just that there’s a vast conspiracy. There was this fear that generated a destruction of critical thinking. My ethics professor at Indiana University said you can’t rationalize facts with someone whose position is based on emotion and ego.”

‘We don’t have proof’ yet — but data are ‘persuasive’

In his book, Dowd reported on insurance industry research in 2016, which found that group life policyholders, whose health insurance is covered by Fortune 500 companies and tend to be younger and well-educated, were the healthiest Americans, dying at one-third the rate of the general U.S. population. The trend of greater white-collar health continued through 2020.

But in 2021, after the COVID-19 jabs were mandated across the Fortune 500, the trend flipped. Ages 25-64 of the group life policyholders suddenly experienced 40% excess mortality, compared to 32% in the general population.

Disabilities also soared after the COVID-19 shots, from an annual U.S. baseline of 29-30 million disabled to 33.2 million.

Dowd, who continues to research excess deaths and disabilities for his Humanity Projects, told The Defender his new research, drawn from U.K. government statistics, shows deaths of schoolchildren went down in the U.K. in 2020 during the pandemic because the leading cause of death for children ages 1-14 is accidents.

With lockdowns and school closures, “Deaths went down. But then they started to go up again in 2021, and they’ve reached a new high in 2023 of 20%” above normal, he said.

Dowd told Russel Brand that such a huge jump in childhood deaths is “a six-standard deviation from the norm. A standard deviation is basically a probability from normal. It’s very unlikely.”

A five-standard statistical deviation is so remarkably far outside the norm it “would be the equivalent of a 7-foot giant being born, or many of them,” he said. “This is a six-standard deviation.”

Down said he believes the COVID-19 vaccines are causing widespread, otherwise inexplicable, excess deaths. “We don’t have proof. It’s our thesis,” he said. But “if you have a brain in your head,” the data are persuasive, he said. “Obviously I think it’s the vaccines.”

Mathew Crawford, a Texas-based statistician and finance specialist who spent years analyzing COVID-19 data for his Substack newsletter, told The Defender the insurance industry has been in denial over growing evidence for vaccine-induced excess deaths for more than a year.

In March 2022, he said, the CEO of German health insurance giant BKK ProVita presented evidence that the vaccines had already killed tens of thousands of Germans. He was fired the next day, as the story vanished from the news.

In June 2022, Lincoln National reported a 163% increase in death benefits paid out under its group life insurance policies in 2021.

In August 2022, Reinsurance Group of America’s (RGA’s) financial reports showed massive 2021 losses downplayed by the report authors, “plus plans for new accounting methods that we should all be worried are designed to sweep iatrogenocide under the rug,” Crawford said.

The SOA Research Institute report that claims to exonerate the COVID-19 vaccines in excess deaths actually does the opposite, Crawford said. Among other evidence, he said, it “shows group life insureds — particularly of working age — are seeing even more excess mortality than the larger U.S. population,” and “the sharp numbers during Q3 2021 coincide with vaccine mandates for working age individuals.”

The ‘worm is turning’

But Dowd said he believes “the worm is turning” on denial of vaccine harms.

He said he was optimistic that the work of Josh Stirling, founder of the Insurance Collaboration to Save Lives, a nonprofit that aims to reduce mortality by providing life insurers with tests to screen policyholders for health problems, shows a “big tent” is forming in the industry to tackle the problem.

“I think the truth is coming out,” Dowd said. “The stocks of Pfizer and Moderna continue to go lower. More and more people are getting disabled and injured over time.”

He cited the Rasmussen poll released Nov. 2 that found 24% of Americans “believe someone they know died from COVID-19 vaccine side effects, and even more say they might be willing to become plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against vaccine makers.”

The poll also found “There are almost no political differences on these questions,” said Dr. Robert Malone. “For example, 25% of Republicans say they know someone personally who died from side effects of COVID-19 vaccine, as do 24% of Democrats and those not affiliated with either major party. This is important – because this shows it is not a ‘tribal’ response. People from all walks of life are waking up.”

Kory said insurance executives need to ask themselves, What explains “the sudden, unprecedented rise in life insurance claims in the 3rd quarter of 2021 among the healthiest sector of society?”

Why were “working age, white collar Americans with group life insurance policies (i.e. largely Fortune 500 corporate employees)” suddenly dying at rates significantly higher than before?

“What happened in the white-collar workplace at that time?” he asked.

Kory said the answer is clear:

“I will give you the only possibilities that could explain such a sudden rise: a series of terrorist attacks, wartime mobilization, or the proliferation of corporate vaccine mandates. As far as I can remember, only one of those events actually took place.”

Kory and investigative reporter Mary Beth Pfeiffer in October published an op-ed in The Washington Examiner, “What’s behind the spike in deaths among younger, working people?” and another, in August, in USA Today titled, “More young Americans are dying — and it’s not COVID. Why aren’t we searching for answers?”

“Deaths among young Americans documented in employee life insurance claims should alone set off alarms,” they wrote in USA Today. “Week in, week out, this unnatural loss of life is on the scale of a war or terrorist event.”

“Life insurance data show a massive spike in excess deaths among younger, working-age people that began in 2021, even as COVID-19 deaths decreased, and continues today,” they wrote in The Examiner. “So far, good explanations are elusive. A concerted, bipartisan investigation should explore this threat to America’s economic future and recommend a course of action.

5 takeaways from mortality report

If the worm is turning, it’s not evident in major media or government policy.

Associated Press fact-checkers rated as “false” Kory’s claim that “an increase in death benefits paid out by life insurance providers in the third quarter of 2021 in the U.S. provides evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines, which became widely available in 2021, led to a spike in deaths.”

The AP said the vaccines are proven safe and effective and “insurance industry leaders say the delta variant of the coronavirus and deferred medical care during the pandemic likely contributed to the increase in deaths.”

The CDC says there is no evidence that excess deaths are linked to vaccines. “These vaccines are safe and effective and have undergone the most extensive safety monitoring in U.S. history,” a CDC public affairs specialist said.

The AP reported that death after vaccination remains extremely rare, dismissing as not causally linked to the vaccines the unprecedented toll of deaths and injuries reported to VAERS.

Kory cited five takeaways that challenge that assumption from the mortality report on excess U.S. deaths by the SOA Research Institute:

  1. Among working people 35-44 years old, “a stunning 34% more died than expected in the last quarter of 2022, with above-average rates in other working-age groups, too,” Kory said, quoting data from the SOA Research Institute report. “COVID-19 claims do not fully explain the increase,” the SOA report noted.
  2. From 2020 through 2022, there were more excess deaths proportionally among white-collar than blue-collar workers: 19% versus 14% above normal. The disparity nearly doubled in the fourth quarter of 2022, U.S. actuaries reported.
  3. The executive of a large Indiana life insurance company was clearly troubled by what he said was a 40% increase in the third quarter of 2021 in those ages 18-64. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business — not just at OneAmerica,” CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference in January 2022. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
  4. Excess deaths are a global phenomenon. The U.K. also saw “more excess deaths in the second half of 2022 than in the second half of any year since 2010,” according to the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. In the first quarter of 2023, deaths among people 20-44 years old were akin to “the same period in 2021, the worst pandemic year for that age group, U.K. actuaries reported. In Australia, 12% more people died than expected in 2022, according to that nation’s Actuaries Institute. A third of the excess was non-COVID deaths, a figure the institute called “extraordinarily high.”
  5. Death rates are lower than in 2020 and 2021, but they are far from normal. In the year ending April 30, 2023 — 14 months after the last of several pandemic waves in the U.S. — at least 104,000 more Americans died than expected, according to Our World in Data. In that period, 52,427 excess deaths were reported in the U.K., 81,028 in Germany, 17,731 in France, 10,418 in the Netherlands, and 2,640 in Ireland.

Kory said the major media silence on the issue and the SOA’s “strong desire to not be drawn into any debates regarding” COVID vaccine lethality,” despite evidence unearthed by the society’s research, is why he and Pfeiffer wrote the USA Today op-ed in the first place.

“Unsurprisingly,” Kory said, “the SOA does not attempt to interpret or even specifically mention the timing, suddenness, and magnitude of the rises in death claims of young, white-collar workers.”

“I would agree that it is not their job to do this, so the rest of us will,” he said. The way forward is “simply to ask if there were any other events preceding and during those massive spikes that could explain the rises. I can find no other rational explanation than the roll-out of vaccine mandates as the cause.”


Mike Capuzzo is the managing editor of The Defender. He is a former prize-winning reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, a science writer, and a regional magazine founding editor and publisher who has won more than 200 journalism awards as a writer, editor and publisher.

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.

November 6, 2023 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

US, Israel to open second front in Lebanon

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | NOVEMBER 6, 2023

The announcement late Sunday night by the US Central Command [CENTCOM] headquartered in Doha about the arrival of an Ohio-class American nuclear submarine in its “area of responsibility” presages a significant escalation of the situation around the Palestine-Israel conflict.

It is very rare that the use of these submarines is publicised. CENTCOM provided no additional details but it posted an image that showed an Ohio-class submarine in Egypt’s Suez Canal. Interestingly, CENTCOM also separately shared an image of a nuclear-capable B-1 bomber operating in the Middle East. 

Taken together, these US deployments, coming on top of the formidable presence of two aircraft carriers and warships hundreds of advanced jet fighters, are with an eye on “the other side of the equation,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken quaintly described Hamas, Hezbullah, and Iran during his latest visit to Tel Aviv on Friday.

In a related development, perhaps, the CIA director, William Burns arrived in Israel on Sunday for urgent consultations. The New York Times reported that the US is “looking to expand its intelligence sharing with Israel.” 

Arguably, the most charitable explanation for the deployment of a US nuclear submarine, which form part of the Pentagon’s “nuclear triad”, near the war zone is that the Biden Administration is preparing for an Israeli escalation into Lebanon to draw out Hezbollah, which may in turn trigger an Iranian reaction. 

In his speech on Friday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrullah seemed to anticipate precisely such a turn of events when he warned the US explicitly of consequences that couldn’t be any different from the catastrophic American involvement in Lebanon’s civil war in the early 1980s. Ironically, this is also the 40th anniversary year of the suicide bombing of the barracks housing US forces in Beirut International Airport in October 1983 in which 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers were killed forcing a US withdrawal from Lebanon. 

Clearly, the locus of the US strategy in the present Middle situation may be shifting from diplomacy, which has lost traction. Blinken’s desperate attempts to address the mounting international criticism of Israel’s horrific war crimes by diverting attention to a “humanitarian pause” in the fighting has been unceremoniously shot down by Netanyahu. 

The point is, after bombarding Gaza and its people with artillery and bombs, the Israeli army moved in on Friday. So far, it has reportedly advanced to the outskirts of Gaza City but not entered the Hamas stronghold. Fierce urban fighting is expected when it does. 

Equally, the Biden administration’s clumsy attempt to promote a vague outline for a post-war Gaza that might include a combination of a revitalised Palestinian Authority, a peacekeeping force, etc. has been met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm at Blinken’s meeting in the weekend in Amman with the Arab foreign ministers – from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – who instead demanded an immediate ceasefire, while Blinken said the US would not push for one. 

Blinken travelled to Ramallah from Amman where the head of the Palestine Authority Mahmoud Abbas apparently gave him short shrift saying that the PA would only be ready to shoulder full responsibility for the Gaza Strip in the framework of a “comprehensive political solution” that would include the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza — and, furthermore, that security and peace can only be achieved by ending the occupation of the territories of the “State of Palestine,” and by recognising East Jerusalem as its capital. The meeting lasted for less than an hour and ended without public statements. 

Meanwhile, China and the UAE (by the way, Israel’s Abraham Accords partner) have since called for a closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council in another attempt to seek an immediate ceasefire, which the Biden Administration will certainly oppose. Suffice to say, the Biden Administration feels boxed in and the only way out is for something to give way through the exercise of coercive means.

The US is watching with frustration as new regional equations are appearing among Muslim nations. The foreign ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia held another phone conversation today. The OIC later announced that an extraordinary summit will be held in Riyadh on November 12 at the request of the current chairman, Saudi Arabia, to discuss Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian people. 

As the death toll in Gaza crosses 10,000, feelings are indeed running high in the Muslim world. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said today that “all the evidence and indications show the direct involvement of the Americans in running the war” in Gaza. Khamenei added that as the war goes on, the reasons behind the US’s direct role would become more explicit.

The Fars News Agency, which is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, also disclosed that Khamenei held a “recent meeting in Tehran” with the Head of Hamas political bureau Ismail Haniyeh where he told the latter that Tehran’s support for the resistance groups is its “permanent policy.”   

Evidently, Tehran no longer sees a problem in acknowledging its dealings with the resistance groups. This is a paradigm shift indicative of the shift in the power dynamic, which the US and Israel seem to have decided to counter through use of force where diplomacy failed to make headway to isolate Iran. 

The Chief of the Israeli General Staff, Herzi Halevi, said on Sunday during a meeting in the Northern Command, “We are ready to strike in the north at any moment. We understand that it can happen… We have a clear goal of restoring a significantly better security situation at the borders [with Lebanon], not only in the Gaza Strip.” 

No power on earth can stop Israel in its tracks now. Its existence is inextricably linked to this war which will ensure abiding US commitment to its security as a key template of American global strategies for the foreseeable future. Therefore, Israel’s best chance of survival lies in expanding the scope of the war in Gaza into Lebanon — and possibly even into Syria — shoulder to shoulder with the Americans. 

There is no question that the location of the US nuclear submarine to the east of Suez is an attempt to intimidate Iran from intervening, as Israel, with US backing, proceed to open a second front. The Israeli authorities have announced evacuation of people from settlements located in a zone up to five kms from the border with Lebanon. 

A prolonged war of indeterminate timeline is set to begin in the Middle East. The Middle East that emerged after World War II is breaking loose and drifting away into the chronicles of history. As the call of the jihad begins, there is no knowing how the 80-year old American president will respond. 

No, this won’t turn into a world war. It will be fought in the Middle East itself, but its outcome will decisively impact the making of a new world order.

November 6, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli Finance Minister calls for ban on Palestinians harvesting olives in occupied West Bank

MEMO | November 6, 2023

Israel’s extreme far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Galant to prohibit Palestinians in the West Bank from harvesting their olive crop. According to Smotrich, Israel needs to establish “sterile security zones” with no Palestinian presence around settlements and settler-only roads. The aim is to prevent Palestinian farmers from having access to their olive groves in the occupied territory.

The Zionist fanatic also criticised what he called, without a hint of irony, “the continued neglect of the security of the settlers in Judea and Samaria” and claimed that security has been undermined severely since the 7 October attack in the south of the occupation state.

“The concept of security must be shaken, emphasising the need to create sterile security zones around the settlements and roads and to prevent Arabs [sic] from entering them, including for harvesting,” said Smotrich. “The writing is on the wall and I am not ready to be a part of it. I will not agree to additional blood under my watch due to insistence on maintaining distorted perceptions.”

While the world’s attention has focused on the Israeli bombardment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, illegal Jewish settlers have been attacking Palestinians and their properties in the occupied West Bank. Most attacks take place while the armed settlers are protected by the Israeli army. All of Israel’s settlements and the settlers who live in them are illegal under international law.

According to the Palestinian Authority-affiliated Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, since 7 October settlers have carried out at least 280 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, utilising terrorist tactics against the indigenous population and their farms and properties.

The Israeli army has also killed 151 Palestinians in the occupied territory in the same period, and arrested 2,080 others. The death toll in Gaza has now passed the 10,000 mark. Most of those killed were children and women.

November 6, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli attack on south Lebanon kills three children, Hezbollah hits back

The Cradle | November 6, 2023

An Israeli drone strike on a civilian car in the village of Ainata in southern Lebanon on the evening of 5 November left four civilians dead – three of them children.

The precision munition strike was launched from a drone towards the car, reported Al-Mayadeen’s correspondent.

A woman and her three grandchildren were killed in the attack, and the mother of the children was seriously injured and is currently in critical condition.

The three girls, aged 10, 12, and 14, were killed instantly.

Earlier the same day, Israeli forces targeted two ambulances in Wadi al-Dabaa, resulting in the injury of four paramedics.

A spokesman for the Israeli army claimed in a statement that the targeted vehicle was “identified as a suspicious vehicle containing several terrorists” and that the event is currently “under review.”

In response to the targeting of civilians, Hezbollah launched grad rockets (Katyusha rockets) at the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, dealing direct damage in several areas and setting a car ablaze.

In a statement, the Lebanese resistance movement said that it “will never tolerate harm and assault on civilians, and its response will be firm and strong.”

Hezbollah lawmaker and parliament member Hassan Fadlallah clarified that “the enemy will pay for its crimes against civilians.”

According to the Kiryat Shmona spokesperson, the first wave launched from Lebanon consisted of 6 rockets, one of which caused damage to property.

The second wave also saw six rockets launched, all falling inside Kiryat Shmona. Three impacted houses, and the other three fell in the surrounding areas, also causing damage.

He added that electricity lines were also damaged.

This exchange comes two days after Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s speech addressing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, during which he warned that if Israel targets civilians on Lebanese soil, the resistance movement will reciprocate the attacks against Israeli civilians.

Hezbollah and the Israeli army have been engaged in an ongoing exchange of fire on their shared border since 8 October – one day after the Palestinian resistance, led by Hamas, launched its offensive on the Israeli settlements of the Gaza Envelope.

These clashes have gradually increased in intensity as the Israeli army continues with its ground incursion into the Gaza Strip as well as its incessant bombing of the besieged enclave – which has killed nearly 10,000 Palestinians.

November 6, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment