‘They Have to Be Stopped’: Woman Says COVID Hospital Protocols Caused Husband’s Death
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 8, 2024
In June 2021, 61-year-old Jeffrey R. Smith was healthy, active and enjoying his 42nd year of marriage to Sharon Smith. That same month, they both came down with COVID-19, but their symptoms were mild and there was little cause for concern.
When Jeffrey’s symptoms lingered just a bit longer than those of his wife, he visited an urgent care center.
That visit marked the beginning of a 39-day ordeal that resulted in his hospitalization, a loss of 47 pounds, and, ultimately, his death, on Aug. 11, 2021, at Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor, Florida.
Jeffrey’s cause of death was officially listed as COVID-19. But when Sharon examined his approximately 6,000 pages of medical records, she discovered he had sustained kidney damage, likely due to repeated doses of medications including remdesivir, a drug known to stop kidney function in patients.
Sharon also discovered that doctors at the hospital did not treat her husband’s pulmonary embolism — or blood clot — which he developed during his hospitalization. Instead, she alleges doctors insisted she allow him to be placed on a ventilator and that she sign a do not resuscitate (DNR) order for him.
In an interview with The Defender, Sharon said the treatment her husband received at the hospital was incentivized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 hospital protocols — and by the fact that neither she nor her husband had received a COVID-19 vaccine.
Sharon shared extensive documentation with The Defender to corroborate her story.
‘He didn’t give his consent to anything’
On July 4, 2021, Sharon said she “just didn’t think my husband was breathing as deep as I was.” Out of concern, she recommended they visit a local urgent care center for a chest X-ray.
“When we went to urgent care and they checked his blood pressure, everything was normal,” Sharon said. However, the couple was sent to Mease Countryside Hospital for X-rays.
Sharon recalled that she could not stay at the hospital due to COVID-19 restrictions, but was told she could return in two hours to pick up her husband. However, about 30 minutes later, her husband called and said the hospital was going to keep him overnight.
“I said, why?” Sharon recalled. “He wasn’t struggling to breathe. … Blood pressure was good, temperature was good.” Despite this, Sharon was told that her husband was going to be kept “on a little oxygen.”
“What we didn’t know at the time was that they had given him two doses of remdesivir, and he didn’t give his consent to anything,” Sharon said. Doctors administered the two doses within three hours of admitting Jeffrey to the hospital.
He had a D-dimer test for pulmonary embolisms, and it was normal, Sharon said. “Everything was normal. He was so healthy going in. He took no medications, had no health issues at all. He walked three to six miles a week. We just had our checkup at the doctor. So, there was nothing there.”
Later that evening, Sharon said someone from the hospital called “in a panic, in the middle of the night … that they had to move Jeff up to the COVID ICU [intensive care unit] to just observe him a little bit more.”
The following day, Sharon said a doctor told Jeffrey that he was “probably going to have to go on the ventilator.” According to Sharon, when he asked why he had to be ventilated when he had come to the hospital for a chest X-ray — and mentioned that his wife would not agree to this — he was told “Well, your wife is going to have to like this or you’re going to die.”
“I said, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re not going to die.’ First of all, because we trusted the doctors, we trusted the hospital. We never in our wildest imaginations thought that you would go in for anything and they would try to harm you, but that’s exactly what they did,” Sharon told The Defender.
As time went on, the doctors gave him more and more oxygen, and more and more drugs, Sharon said, although she wasn’t informed about it. She only learned about the medications when she reviewed Jeffrey’s medical records after his death.
“The drugs that they were giving him … Precedex, propofol, fentanyl, midazolam … these are the drugs that they use to euthanize people,” Sharon said.
‘They stopped feeding him, giving him any kind of water, cleaning him’
Sharon said there were other examples of the hospital mistreating her husband.
“They stopped feeding him, giving him any kind of water, cleaning him,” she said, recalling that during a FaceTime conversation, he looked “awful.”
“I said, ‘Have you had a shower? Have they washed?’ He goes, ‘No, they haven’t.’ He looks awful. His hair’s a mess. He’s unshaven and he hasn’t had his bedding changed in a week. He hasn’t got any different clothes on,” Sharon recalled.
Her husband urged her not to make an issue of it, according to Sharon.
“When I would say something to the nurses, Jeff would say, ‘Sharon, don’t make waves, because they’re taking it out on me.’ And at the time, I didn’t understand. I didn’t think they were doing bad things, purposely doing bad things to him. I thought they were just being neglectful,” she said.
Sharon said it was difficult to speak to a doctor or to get authorization to visit Jeffrey.
“Every day I would say, I want the doctor to call me. The doctor would call me. Sometimes they were rude to me, sometimes they were short with me, some were OK.” She had to “plead” with a hospital administrator in one instance to be allowed a 15-minute visit.
“I got up there to see Jeff, and he was just a mess. I mean, they weren’t getting him out of the bed. He was just deteriorating in front of my eyes,” Sharon recalled.
On another occasion, Sharon said she was allowed a visit for “17 minutes, exactly” and was told she would soon be permitted daily visits. Later that day, Sharon called to check on Jeffrey and was told he was “relaxed and had some ice cream.”
A half-hour later, “I get a call from the hospital and it’s a panic … they said, ‘We’re going to put Jeff on the ventilator right now. He had a panic attack and his oxygen level dropped and he can’t get it back up, so we have to put him on the ventilator.’”
Sharon said she was offered the opportunity to speak with Jeffrey via FaceTime. “I got 20 seconds to see my husband’s face, and when I think back now, he wasn’t gasping for air or anything like that. He just looked scared.”
According to Sharon, she was told Jeffrey would be ventilated for three days “just to give his lungs a break.” Yet, “he was on the ventilator for 20 days after that” — until the day he died.
‘They yelled and screamed at me’
According to Sharon, the doctors repeatedly told her that as long as his kidneys weren’t involved, he would be OK. Yet, “as soon as he got on the ventilator, that’s when they said, ‘Oh, his kidneys are struggling.’ And that’s what remdesivir does.”
Jeffrey was placed on CRRT (continuous renal replacement therapy), a slow dialysis machine. This continued until Aug. 11, 2021, when Sharon remembered a doctor called her and said Jeffrey was “tolerating the CRRT really well” and that he would “try a couple different things” and call back.
“He called me back a couple hours later and said, ‘Jeff’s going to code out today,’” Sharon recalled. “I’m like, ‘a couple hours ago he was doing OK.’”
Sharon says she insisted on visiting her husband, but the doctor “fought” her on it, before relenting. When she did visit, hospital staff told her to “look through the glass” at her husband, before finally being allowed into the room “for two minutes.”
“When I came out, they started to pressure me to put a DNR on him, and I said, ‘I’m not putting a DNR on him.’ They kept pressuring me. I said, ‘my son and I are going to talk about it. We’ll call you back.’ We called them back and I said, ‘we’ve decided that we are not going to do that because if we do it then there is no hope,’” she said.
“They yelled and screamed at me on the phone, but I stuck to my guns,” Sharon recalled. “And a couple hours later, they called and said that Jeff had died.”
Blood clot, kidney troubles began after remdesivir administered
Sharon observed several abnormalities during her husband’s hospitalization and also when she reviewed his medical records.
“What I know now is that his D-dimer levels — and I have all the records to back this up — the evidence is that everything was in the normal range.”
She added:
“After the two doses of remdesivir in the hospital in the ER [emergency room], within three hours of being in the ER, that’s when he developed the blood clot. And they noted it. They were aware of it a couple of times. They noted it, but they didn’t do anything about it.
“The day after he had two doses of remdesivir … doctors noted that his D-dimer is now very elevated, which means you have a pulmonary embolism.”
“They did not treat it for two weeks, and they tested five times within that two-week period,” Sharon said, noting that Jeffrey “ended up having six doses of remdesivir.”
Sharon said Jeffrey was also administered a monoclonal antibody, “one dose to the tune of $27,000,” even though “it was already too late for that — you need to have that in the beginning. This was already 10 days in.”
Ultimately though, for Sharon, her husband’s fate rested on the lack of treatment for his blood clot.
“That’s where it started,” she said. “If they would have treated that blood clot on day one — because people have blood clots all the time — it’s something that you can fix … and send him home. But they didn’t choose to do that. It was like they had him and he was a cash cow for them,” she said, referring to the COVID-19 hospital protocols.
The protocols, prescribed by the CDC, are the subject of a white paper, “Follow the Money: Blood Money in U.S. Healthcare,” which found that the U.S. government incentivized hospitals under the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) to administer treatments such as remdesivir to COVID-19 patients.
According to the report, the average per-person incentive in the U.S. for a “complex COVID inpatient” is $292,566. Hospitals received money for each COVID-19 admission, for the use of remdesivir and for placing patients on ventilators.
‘They were making an example’ of the unvaccinated
Sharon said she believes that Jeffrey’s treatment at the hospital was connected to his unvaccinated status.
“The first day that Jeff was there … the doctor called me and the first question she asked [was], ‘Why weren’t you guys vaccinated?’” Sharon recalled. “I said, ‘Well, because we chose not to be. We are healthy. And this vaccine came out awful fast and we didn’t have a good feeling about it.’”
“That is noted in Jeff’s records over and over and over, that he was not vaccinated or I wasn’t. And at the time that he was in the hospital, it was really when the vaccine was really being pushed out. Basically, they were making an example of the people that came in there that were not vaccinated,” Sharon said.
Sharon also noted that, at Mease Countryside Hospital, patients were being admitted with either an “unvaccinated” or “unknown” vaccination status, perhaps to conceal the number of COVID-19 cases among the vaccinated.
“I know that from a number of nurses that are whistleblowers, that have come out and said that there wasn’t a place to put if you were vaccinated,” Sharon said.
Sharon has since become involved with activist groups who have spoken out on behalf of hospital protocol victims, including the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation and the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project (CHBMP), which developed a list of the 25 commonalities shared by most hospital protocol victims.
According to Sharon, “Of those 25, I think there’s two that didn’t happen” to Jeffrey, noting that her requests that ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and vitamin D were refused, while vitamin C was administered only on the day of Jeffrey’s death.
“When you look through the drug list, you’ll see that that increased intensely as we got right to the end. He didn’t have a fighting chance,” Sharon said.
Sharon encouraged others who have lost a loved one at a hospital to a COVID-19 diagnosis to carefully check their medical records.
“People need to look at the death certificate. If it says ‘COVID,’ you need to get your medical records and have a doctor, have somebody that’s qualified to look at those records and go through them, just like I did. And they’re going to find that it’s probably not what they think. It’s much worse,” Sharon said.
She also encouraged victims and their families to speak out, noting that even a mere conversation with others can make a difference.
“There’s been many people that once you start to talk about it, then they go, ‘wait a minute.’ So, they start to connect the dots that this could have happened to their person,” Sharon said.
She added:
“There’s a couple of reasons why I fight this so much. One, because they took my husband away from me, and he wasn’t sick and he should never have died. But I’m thinking ahead for my children and my grandchildren. If we don’t stand up and fight for this right now and stop this, it’s going to continue, and we can’t have that. They have to be stopped.”
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.
Hunter Biden Received ‘Millions’ of Dollars From Romania to Influence US Government – Court
Sputnik – 08.08.2024
Hunter Biden, the son of US President Joe Biden, has received millions of dollars from a Romanian entrepreneur in order to influence the US government during his father’s vice presidency, court filings have revealed.
US Department of Justice Special Counsel David Weiss’s office found that Biden received “substantial” sums of money from foreign firms and individuals in exchange for acting as a lobbyist, consultant, or legal adviser.
“With respect to his first topic, ‘allegations that Mr. Biden (1) acted on behalf of a foreign principal to influence U.S. policy and public opinion,’ the defendant did receive compensation from a foreign principal to attempt to influence U.S. policy and public opinion, as alleged in the indictment, and this evidence is relevant and not unfairly prejudicial,” the Wednesday filing read.
Hunter Biden worked for Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu (referred to as G.P. in the document) to help him escape bribery charges in Romania, Weiss’s office also revealed.
“The evidence of what the defendant agreed to do and did do for G.P. demonstrates the defendant’s state of mind and intent during the relevant tax years charged in the indictment. It is also evidence that the defendants actions do not reflect someone with a diminished capacity, given that he agreed to attempt to influence U.S. public policy and receive millions of dollars,” the document said.
In November 2023, House Republicans subpoenaed the president’s brother James Biden and Hunter Biden to appear for a deposition before lawmakers. In May, Smith said that Hunter Biden had repeatedly lied to Congress in his February deposition to distance his involvement in what should be considered a “clear scheme to enrich the Biden family.”
The House of Representatives is investigating the Biden family for alleged criminal activity, including foreign influence peddling and bribery.
Political and Media Elites ‘Turned UK Into Tinderbox’
Sputnik – 06.08.2024
Britain’s cities have been engulfed in riots triggered by a deadly stabbing attack which killed three children and injured ten others in the seaside town of Southport, England. British political analyst and former MEP Nick Griffin told Sputnik what role government policy, and the US Deep State, played in setting the stage for the explosion.
Hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens injured in the ongoing riots across England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the wake of the July 29 stabbing rampage in Southport.
British authorities and media have cast the riots as a misinformation-fueled act of far-right subversion and violence. But while high profile right-wing figures “confrontational” social media posts and messaging have certainly played a role in sparking the disorder, its cause is related to decades of ignoring the will and wishes of ordinary Britons by the country’s political and media class, former MEP Nick Griffin told Sputnik.
“The British people have been extremely patient with successive governments which have imposed a swamping tide of mass immigration on the country, without the slightest democratic mandate or any good or properly explained reason,” Griffin said.
“17.4 million people – the largest democratic mandate in UK electoral history – voted for Brexit, which was a very clear instruction to the political elite to get a grip on our borders and to halt the uninvited transformation of the country into a foreign place,” Griffin said.
“If the political class had listened to that warning and accepted the verdict of the people, the killings in Southport either would not have happened at all (because the killer and his family would have been sent back to now entirely peaceful and safe Rwanda) or would have been seen as a terrible crime which the police and courts alone should deal with,” the ex-lawmaker believes.
“But the political and media elite refused to accept the vote, failed to deliver the secured borders and only increased the contempt they showed for ordinary Brits – especially the white working class. It is this, together with an endless litany of two-tier policing and criminal justice, which make indigenous Brits, and especially the English, feel like second-class citizens in their own country. Frustration and anger over this had turned large parts of the country into a tinderbox, just waiting for a spark,” Griffin said.
The observer, who is the former leader and MEP lawmaker from the right-wing British National Party, says he doesn’t rule out the presence of foreign money and influence in the unrest overwhelming the UK, recalling how in 2008, he was approached by a man “with very good connections in the UK broadcasting media and press” who offered the party “limitless support” if it attacked Islam but dropped its opposition to neocon warmongering overseas, and the BNP’s “hostile position to the international banking cartel.”
“The money offer was repeated a few years ago, with literally a blank check available if the Christian nationalist social media network with which I became involved after leaving the BNP dropped any criticism of Zionism and Israel, stopped criticizing the banking cartel, abortion and the LGBTQ agenda, and concentrated on condemning Muslims and Islam,” Griffin said, emphasizing that that both offers were refused.
The observer believes the offers came from “very wealthy members of the pro-Likud Zionist lobby in America,” and estimates “that the US Deep State finds the highly motivated Zionist lobby to be very useful front for moves which fit its own agenda.”
“It’s similar,” Griffin said, “to the way that George Soros for so long funded all sorts of radical [liberal] leftist causes, leading many critics to focus on his far-left sympathies and even his Jewish heritage. This provided camouflage for the fact that his Open Society Foundation worked extremely closely with the National Endowment for Democracy, which is of course a CIA front. People have been so busy (rightly) condemning Soros that they missed the Deep State involvement altogether.”
In the wake of the mass migration crisis affecting many European countries, Griffin believes the US Deep State may have deliberately helped to create the crisis, “and is now stoking it,” to destabilize its “supposed allies,” just as the US sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline network ostensibly targeted Russia, but really struck the German economy and the euro, damage to which set back the looming end to the dollar’s hegemony.
“Likewise, destabilizing Britain and EU states with artificially imported and provoked racial conflict is a typical US Deep State trick. It’s using the same CIA playbook as was applied to destroy the former Yugoslavia. As with their coups and other interference, they never care about how many innocent people get hurt,” Griffin summed up.
AIPAC, the leading Israeli lobby group, and its role in subversion of US democracy
By David Miller | Press TV | July 23, 2024
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most famous and equally notorious Israeli lobby group in the world. But how important is it really?
Some argue that its influence has been exaggerated and it can at best influence American policies at the margins, while others say it wields considerable clout in US power corridors.
Many of these arguments come from the political left like the one published in Mother Jones, the US leftist magazine, or the one from the former stalwart of the Palestinian cause, Christopher Hitchens, or even the one by Novara Media, a British “leftist” website.
In it, David Wearing presents his argument in these words:
AIPAC may best be seen as performing a disciplinary function within US politics. One can certainly argue that US support for Israel is made somewhat firmer given AIPAC’s role, and these marginal factors matter. But they are still marginal.
Certainly, the Zionist movement is keen to downplay its influence. A report in the Tablet: “How Influential Is AIPAC? Less Than Beer Sellers, Public Accountants, and Toyota” states:
The way AIPAC is talked about, you’d think they’d be a lobbying juggernaut, surely one of the largest in the nation’s capital. Wrong…:
Between 1998 and 2018, AIPAC didn’t make a dent in the Center for Responsive Politics list of the top-spending lobbying groups. In 2018, total pro-Israel lobbying spending was around $5 million, of which AIPAC accounted for $3.5 million.
In contrast, Native American casinos spent around $22 million that year. By Tablet’s count, AIPAC was the 147th highest-ranked entity in terms of lobbying spending in 2018.
This is an attempt to pretend that the influence of the Zionist movement is much less than suggested by observers.
However, based on our findings, we can present these facts:
- Taking the figure disclosed to the lobbying regulator as if that was all AIPAC spends on lobbying is profoundly mistaken. Though it disclosed only $2.7 million lobby expenditure in 2022, its actual total expenditure was £79.1 million.
- In addition, AIPAC controls another nonprofit, the American Israel Education Foundation. It discloses nothing to the regulator, yet had a 2022 expenditure of a further $44.6 million.
- When we add campaign contributions the figures rise significantly. Donations by AIPAC’s Political Action Committee (PAC for short) and its new Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, in the most recent period (2024) total $17.4 million and $31.5 million respectively. It’s worth noting that none of this was donated by AIPAC itself. This adds to donations it has raised from others. The United Democracy Project is the third largest Superpac in the US in terms of 2024 expenditure, according to Open Secrets, the US lobby watchdog. This easily outstrips all corporate-related Superpacs.
- Looking more widely at the Israel lobby in general declared lobbying expenditure by the lobby in 2018 was $7 million not “around $5 million” as stated by the Tablet. The figure for 2022 was $5.4 million, with the following groups making significant declarations: Anti-Defamation League ($340,000), Christians United for Israel ($240,000), Foundation for Defense of Democracies ($180,000), J Street ($640,000), Jewish Federations of North America ($893,000), Republican Jewish Coalition ($320,000), Zionist Organisation of America ($160,000). But of course, their actual budget/expenditure is much higher than the narrow specific lobbying disclosure data.
However, taking figures the lobby narrowly conceives are woefully inadequate as it does not include money spent by Israeli firms or by foreign agents registered with the US Federal government’s Foreign Agents Registration Act office.
- $6.3 million was spent in 2022 by Israeli firms including arms firms Elbit ($770,000), Rafael ($680,000), Israel Aerospace Industries ($446,000), and phone hacking firm Cellebrite ($440,000).
- $16 million in the same year was spent by registered foreign agents of Israel including the regime itself, the World Zionist Organisation ($4.2 million), the Jewish Agency ($9.5 million), and the phone hacking firm NSO Group ($1.5 million).
But even that pales in comparison to data compiled by the Israellobby.org website.
It collates data on Zionist groups providing subsidies to the Zionist entity (including illegal settlements and the occupation forces) and lobbying and education.
It shows a total annual budget of £3.6 billion as long ago as 2012, rising to an estimated £6.3 billion in 2020. These figures do not include the data above on Israeli firms or foreign agents.
However extensive this data is (the best available source on the extent of the economic basis of the Zionist movement), it does not include the following:
- The American Zionist Movement is the official US affiliate of the World Zionist Organisation. It has 46 members. Of these, only 13 are included in the Israellobby.org data.
- The many branches of Chabad-Lubavitch in the US. Chabad is an extreme, genocidal ultra Zionist Hasidic sect. Two Chabad-Lubavitch foundations are included in the data, but according to Lubavitch official figures, which almost certainly underestimate its full reach there are some 1,274 Chabad-Lubavitch groups in the US, (by far the largest number anywhere in the world). Internal Revenue Service data on Chabad-Lubavitch lists 1,313 separate groups in the US.
- Virtually none of the other Hasidic and Haredi groups in the US are included in the data. These groups are overwhelmingly ultra-Zionist, though some refuse to allow their young men to serve in the occupation forces and the Satmar appears to remain anti-Zionist.
- Lastly and perhaps of most significance, the non-profit Foundations which funds many of the groups above, of which there are many hundreds, are excluded. These are Zionist family foundations or Zionist community foundations, including the following well-known examples: Adelson Family Foundation, Allegheny Foundation, Anchorage Charitable Fund, Castle Rock Foundation, Earhart Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Klarman Family Foundation, Paul E. Singer Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Scaife Family Foundation, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, William Rosenwald Family Fund.
There is hardly any research on the depth and extent of the Zionist penetration of US society which is cognizant of this data.
It’s time to dig deeper and reveal the actual spending power and reach of the lobby.
Turning back to AIPAC, it has a deserved reputation as the most powerful Israeli lobby group in the US. However, a key Zionist talking point is the claim that it is not so powerful.
AIPAC was created by Isiah Kenen a contractor for the Zionist regime in 1963. It was initially called the American Zionist Council. Two months after the American Zionist Council was ordered to register as a foreign agent, Kenen incorporated AIPAC which did not register as a foreign agent, though it is.
One element of AIPAC activities not well understood is its role in spending millions every year ferrying Israeli settlers for eight-day junkets.
The trips are organized through a cutout called the American Israel Education Fund, a charitable organization founded by AIPAC, from which it borrows its offices, board members, and even part of its logo. Like other tax-exempt nonprofits, AIEF must file a Form 990 every year with the Internal Revenue Service, but donors are redacted from the public version.
Recently, an unredacted tax filing for 2019 was obtained by The Intercept. It revealed that the financiers are a clutch of large foundations and nonprofits, some of which are family-run, which also offer funds to other genocidal Zionist groups.
They include foundations associated with the following families, Koret, Swartz, Schusterman and Singer.
The role of AIPAC in campaign contributions is also poorly understood. In November 2023, it was reported that AIPAC was “airing attack ads and beginning to back primary opponents to challenge Congress members who are not voting for or supporting Israel’s war on Gaza.”
According to the report in the Guardian :
Although AIPAC’s roots trace back to the 1950s, the group spent decades focusing most of its attention on lobbying members of Congress – only getting directly involved in races in the past few years. In late 2021, AIPAC announced the formation of a political action committee, known as AIPAC Pac, and a Super Pac, the United Democracy Project, to get more directly involved in congressional campaigns.
The groups hit the ground running in the 2022 midterms, spending nearly $50m across the election cycle. Aipac Pac boasts that it supported 365 pro-Israel candidates from both parties in 2022, while critics condemned the group’s endorsement of dozens of Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The Guardian reported that A group of Super Pacs and dark-money non-profits – most notably groups such as the United Democracy Project ($31,679,020) and the Democratic Majority for Israel ($35,000) – as well as other PACs (AIPAC PAC ($1,491,025) tied to Israeli interests contributed about significantly to US campaigns during the last cycle, according to Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog.
Open Secrets data show that this amounts to some $58.4 million in the past year.
In the spring of this year, it was revealed that AIPAC had a $100 million war chest for the upcoming election cycle.
AIPAC’s Super Pac is amusingly named the United Democracy Project. It spends targeted funds on lawmakers who challenge any pro-Israel policy including the mildly critical Squad of Democrat representatives and also Libertarian Republicans such as Thomas Massie who has voted against military aid to Israel.
It was Massie who revealed in an interview with Tucker Carlson that AIPAC appoints handlers for each Congress person.
Here is his description: ”It’s like your babysitter. Your AIPAC babysitter who is always talking to you for AIPAC. They’re probably a constituent in your district, but they are, you know, firmly embedded in AIPAC.
In November 2022, AIPAC claimed that “more than 95% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their election last night! Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”
In July 2024, AIPAC claimed “So far this cycle, all 90 AIPAC-endorsed Democrats have won their primary election”
When all of this data and activity is considered we can see that AIPAC is much more of a player than is admitted in those views from the right and left who minimize its importance.
AIPAC is part of a complex network of lobby groups which collectively can be described as the “Israel lobby”. Further, the lobby is itself only a smallish part of the much larger Zionist movement. It is this which needs to be assessed in all its complexity.
When we do that a more rounded and complex account emerges. The role of AIPAC cannot be considered outside its role in the wonder movement because its activities including raising funds and deploying them through other groups and organizations are a core element of its strategy.
Reducing AIPAC to its lobbying disclosure expenditure or its total budget cannot capture its significance in the movement, let alone the significance of the Zionist movement in total.
Hence, AIPAC, and the rest of the Zionist movement, must be stopped.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
EU Commission Hid Vaccine Contract Details From Public, Court Rules
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | July 17, 2024
The European Union‘s (EU) top court today ruled that the European Commission’s decision to heavily redact key portions of COVID-19 vaccine contracts with pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic violated the commission’s transparency obligations.
The European Court of Justice found that the commission failed to provide sufficient public access to COVID-19 vaccine purchase agreements, in a ruling that could deal a blow to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the eve of her re-election bid, according to The Associated Press (AP).
The ruling came in response to legal challenges brought by EU lawmakers and private citizens seeking fuller disclosure of the multibillion-euro vaccine deals.
It highlights ongoing concerns about the secrecy surrounding the EU’s vaccine procurement process, a contentious issue since the early days of the pandemic.
“The Commission did not give the public wide enough access to the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines,” the court said in its judgment, pointing to several areas where the executive body fell short in being sufficiently transparent.
In response to the ruling, the commission wrote, “The Commission needed to strike a difficult balance between the right of the public, including MEPs [Members of the European Parliament], to information, and the legal requirements emanating from the COVID-19 contracts themselves, which could result in claims for damages at the cost of taxpayers’ money.”
Green MEP Tilly Metz, one of the deputies who submitted the original request, said, “This ruling is significant for the future, as the EU Commission is expected to undertake more joint procurements in areas like health and potentially defence,” Euractiv reported.
“The new European Commission will have to adapt their handling of access to documents requests to be in line with today’s ruling,” Metz said.
However, Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender that the court ruling is not the victory it seems. She argued that the EU court has given the commission a “giant loophole” to keep parts of the contracts secret “to protect ‘business interests.’”
“It is not possible to both protect public health and full transparency and at the same time protect the business interests of the supplier,” Terhorst said. “We, the public, will not get the access to the information we need. The cat and mouse play continues.”
The commission, which has two months to appeal the decision, said it would “carefully study the Court’s judgments and their implications” and that it “reserves its legal options.”
Scale and speed of purchases unprecedented
In 2020 and 2021, von der Leyen negotiated purchase agreements for COVID-19 vaccines with several pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, according to the AP.
EU member states mandated the European Commission organize the joint procurement of vaccines and lead negotiations with manufacturers.
The scale and speed of these purchases were unprecedented. According to the court, approximately 2.7 billion euros ($2.95 billion) was quickly mobilized to place firm orders for more than 1 billion doses of vaccines. This joint procurement approach allowed for the rapid acquisition of vaccines for all 27 EU member states.
Initially, von der Leyen received praise for her leadership during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly for her role in securing collective vaccine access for EU citizens. However, the spotlight quickly shifted to concerns about the negotiations’ lack of transparency.
In 2021, several members of the European Parliament requested full details of the agreements. The commission, citing confidentiality reasons, agreed to provide only partial access to certain contracts and documents, which were placed online in redacted versions.
The commission also refused to disclose how much it paid for the billions of doses it secured.
Concerns over secret deals with Pfizer
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla twice in 2022 refused to testify before the European Parliament’s special committee on COVID-19. Bourla was expected to face tough questions about secretive vaccine deals and negotiations between Pfizer and the European Commission.
Of particular interest were text messages between Bourla and von der Leyen that preceded a multibillion-euro vaccine contract. In January 2023, The New York Times sued the European Commission over its failure to release the messages.
That suit followed a January 2022 inquiry by the EU ombudsman charging the commission with maladministration over its handling of a previous request for the messages.
In June, a Belgian court took up the issue of the secret negotiations between Bourla and von der Leyen, with a former lobbyist for the EU Parliament claiming “destruction of public documents” and alleging von der Leyen violated the commission’s code of conduct.
Commission officials argued the messages didn’t contain any important information and have thus far refused to provide them, according to the AP.
European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) in 2022 opened an investigation into the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines in the EU during the pandemic. This investigation stems from a criminal complaint filed by an individual, with the governments of Hungary and Poland later joining the lawsuit, euronews reported. EPPO adjourned the case until December.
Implications for the European Commission and von der Leyen
The court’s ruling comes at a critical time for von der Leyen, just one day before the European Parliament is set to vote on her reappointment as commission president.
Von der Leyen had previously won backing from a majority of EU leaders in June. To secure her position, she now needs to garner support from at least 361 MEPs in the 720-seat European Parliament, WIONews reported.
This ruling presents a dilemma for the Greens, who initiated the legal challenge against the commission’s redactions. In recent days, von der Leyen has been courting the Greens to shore up support for her nomination ahead of the vote.
During a press conference in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Manon Aubry, a French MEP from the Left group, expressed strong concerns about the European Commission’s “lack of transparency.”
On the heels of the EU court ruling, German MEP Christine Anderson today said she would call for the removal of von der Leyen and the continuation of the criminal investigation of her actions.
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.
US Senator Menendez convicted in corruption trial
RT | July 16, 2024
US Senator Bob Menendez has been convicted of bribery, fraud, and of acting as a foreign agent, in a ruling that will see the New Jersey Democrat potentially serve decades behind bars.
A jury in New York on Tuesday found Menendez guilty on all 16 counts of bribery, wire fraud, extortion, acting as a foreign agent, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. Two New Jersey businessmen – Wael Hana and Fred Daibes –were also convicted on multiple charges, while a third – Jose Uribe – already pleaded guilty and testified against the Senator during the trial.
Menendez’ wife, Nadine Menendez, was indicted alongside her husband last year, and will be tried once she finishes breast cancer treatment.
Prosecutors accused Menendez and his wife of accepting “hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for using Menendez’s power and influence as Senator to serve the interests of a foreign state actor (Egypt) from at least 2018 to 2022.” In a deal brokered by the New Jersey businessmen, the couple received envelopes of cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and a no-show job for Nadine.
In exchange, Menendez used his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to end a “hold” on US military aid to Egypt, to pass sensitive government information to Daibes, and to pressure prosecutors into investigating several of Hana’s competitors in the Halal meat business.
“It wasn’t enough for him to be one of the most powerful people in Washington,” federal prosecutor Paul Monteleoni said during his closing argument earlier this month. “Robert Menendez wanted all that power and he also wanted to use it to pile up riches for himself and his wife.”
Menendez did not testify in his own defense. His lawyers argued that the government could not prove that the Senator aided Egypt as a direct result of receiving the cash, gold, and gifts, and that he was acting in the interests of his constituents by aiding Hana and Daibes.
Menendez is the first sitting member of Congress to be charged with acting as a foreign agent. After his verdict was read out, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on his fellow Democrat to “do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign.”
Menendez has represented New Jersey since 2006, and is up for reelection this November. However, he announced in June that he would not seek the Democratic Party’s support, and would run as an independent.
His political future hinges on the outcome of a sentencing hearing in October. Menendez faces a potential prison term of 20 years for each charge of extortion and wire fraud, and a total of 222 years in the unlikely event that the maximum sentence for all 16 counts is applied consecutively.
EU suspends accession process of ex-Soviet republic
RT | July 8, 2024
The European Union has suspended the process of Georgia’s accession to the bloc, the EU’s ambassador to the former Soviet republic, Pavel Gerchinsky, told the Russian media on Tuesday. A €30 million ($32.5 million) payment allocated to the Georgian Defense Ministry has also reportedly been frozen.
The envoy cited Tbilisi’s controversial ‘foreign agent’ law as the reason behind the move. After the legislation was adopted last month, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned Georgia that its potential accession to the bloc was in jeopardy.
Formally titled the Transparency of Foreign Influence Act, the new law requires NGOs, media outlets, and individuals who receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as entities “promoting the interests of a foreign power” and to disclose their donors. Those who fail to comply will face fines of up to $9,500. The bill came into force despite opposition protests and a veto by Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili.
“The intentions of the current Georgian government are unclear to EU leaders. The Transparency of Foreign Influence Act is clearly a step backwards. […] Also, the anti-Western, anti-European rhetoric is completely incompatible with the declared goal of joining the European Union. Unfortunately, as of now Georgia’s accession to the European Union has been suspended,” Gerchinsky said, as quoted by RIA Novosti.
While opponents of the law have described it as at attack on democracy and “Russian” because Moscow has similar legislation, its supporters have noted it is similar to what numerous Western nations, including the US, have in place.
Borrell said last month that Georgia will not progress with its EU accession unless its government changes its policies.
Georgia will hold parliamentary elections in October, and Gerchinsky expressed hope that a new government in Tbilisi, “whatever it may be,” will again “begin serious work” toward EU integration.
The former Soviet republic applied for EU membership in March 2022, shortly after the start of the Ukraine conflict. In May of last year, the European Council agreed to allocate €30 million to boost Georgia’s defense sector. The European Council granted Tbilisi candidate status last December.
US Provides $2 Billion Military Aid Package to Warsaw
By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | July 8, 2024
Washington is providing its NATO ally Poland with a second $2 billion foreign military financing (FMF) package in less than a year, Breaking Defense reports. In recent weeks, Warsaw has given Kiev a green light to use Polish-provided weapons to strike the Russian mainland as well as signed a bilateral military pact with Ukraine, agreeing to shoot down some Russian missiles.
A State Department official boasted to the outlet of how the two FMF loans are benefiting the US arms industry as well as strengthening the Washington-led bloc embroiled in its Ukraine proxy war with Moscow. “It’s impressive that it hasn’t even been a year and they [Poland] are moving out pretty quickly… We’re happy with the process. We see it as a success. We’re happy that they’ve been able to move out quickly — not only does it help NATO, it helps the US defense industry as well, the US economy. So, we’re definitely happy with the process.”
As with typical FMF loans, the funds furnished by the State Department to a foreign government must be spent on American-made weaponry and equipment. What makes this loan unique, however, is instead of a grant to purchase arms, this loan includes interest which Warsaw must repay. The US is putting up $60 million to guarantee the loan and cover initial fees. The official said details regarding how the funds will be spent, on what kinds of weapons, will not be shared during this week’s NATO summit. Instead, he insisted the Poles “[have] a list of things they want to achieve” and said to expect future announcements.
The official noted the previous FMF loan, issued last September, has either been totally spent or is earmarked for purchases including four aerostat-based early warning systems which accounts for approximately half the first loan. The unusual loan-based structure allows “the interagency to get FMF funding to foreign allies without needing to wait on the appropriations process,” the outlet notes, adding Congress extended the authority to issue these loans through the end of the 2025 fiscal year.
Asked if other countries will receive such loans, the official answered “We are looking at it, and there are other countries that remain competitive… The reason you’re seeing Poland is, of course, the situation with the ongoing war in Ukraine. They’re ready to move out.” The official emphasized that talks with multiple countries are ongoing, while repeatedly praising Warsaw’s high military spending and deeming Poland “the tip of the spear on this for us right now.”
The State Department stated “Poland is a leader in NATO, currently spending four percent of GDP on defense, the highest in the Alliance. Poland hosts thousands of U.S. and Allied forces, including U.S. V Corps Headquarters (Forward) in Poznan.” The US has roughly 10,000 troops stationed in Poland. Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Warsaw has announced plans to buy a myriad of American arms including Abrams tanks, Black Hawk and Apache helicopters, HIMARS rocket launchers. Poland is seeking more Patriot air defense batteries as well.
This latest financial and military infusion comes after Ukraine and Poland signed a bilateral military pact this week which includes a mechanism for Warsaw to shoot down Russian missiles and drones. This provision entails the potential to provoke a NATO-Russia war, something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has long sought.
During a joint presser with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Monday, Zelensky declared “We are especially grateful for the special arrangements, and this is reflected in the security agreement. It provides for the development of a mechanism to shoot down [by Poland] Russian missiles and drones fired in the airspace of Ukraine in the direction of Poland.”
In November 2022, after a Ukrainian air defense missile killed two people in Poland, Zelensky and his top advisors said it was a Russian strike and demanded NATO take action. “Hitting NATO territory with missiles. … This is a Russian missile attack on collective security! This is a really significant escalation. Action is needed,” Zelensky railed in a video address.
This assessment was completely at odds with those made by the US, Poland, and NATO which determined the Polish casualties were not the result of a Russian missile strike. At the time, a diplomat from a NATO member state told Financial Times “The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”
Parody of a Statesman: Antony Blinken, Secretary of War
By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | July 8, 2024
For Halloween last year, the United States’ highest ranked diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, dressed his son and daughter up as Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian flag, respectively. At a White House event on that day, Blinken’s children were photographed soliciting candy from President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Zelensky himself had been doing his usual media circuit, appearing progressively more desperate to extract a fresh supply of “candy” from U.S. taxpayers by way of their nonrepresentative elected officials, most of whom, it would seem, have little if any interest in what their voting constituents have to say. In one poignant performance, the embattled Ukrainian commander-in-chief and former professional dancer lamented that the crisis in Israel was drawing attention away from Ukraine. In another widely disseminated video clip, Zelensky implored the audience that, if they could not give him more money, then they should at least extend him some credit, which he promised Ukraine would pay back.
It seemed as though the end was nigh for Zelensky, who was looking more and more like would-have-been Venezuelan “president” Juan Guaidó. When, during one of the primary debates, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy characterized Zelensky as a “Nazi” and a “comedian in cargo pants,” he boldly articulated an impolite sentiment shared by at least some of the people who have grown weary of seeing the Ukrainian president parade around in mud-green garb and hobnobbing with the likes of Sean Penn, Greta Thunberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and every politician under the sun on the military-industrial complex gravy train. And yet, Zelensky clings on to power, having canceled what was supposed to be the 2024 presidential election with the full blessing of both halves of the War Party duopoly.
In a more recent performance, on May 14, 2024, Secretary Blinken belted out Neil Young’s ballad, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” at a basement bar in Kiev. Blinken displayed his prowess on the electric guitar while doing his best to demonstrate that he personally relates to the people of Ukraine, who have endured uncertainty regarding their future and prospects for a return to any semblance of normal life since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. Dead people have obviously lost all of their freedom, so Blinken’s audience comprised a select group among the survivors savoring their tenuous existence, and the fact that they are not currently being pursued, as many unfortunate draft dodgers are, by the conscription police—at least not for now. The government of Ukraine has lowered the requirements for and lifted restrictions on the military conscription of unwilling citizens, while postponing the presidential election indefinitely, on the grounds that “We are at war.” Martial law remains in place, with Ukrainians living in what is tantamount to a dictatorship under Zelensky, notwithstanding Blinken’s heartfelt crooning about freedom and democracy.
Before becoming secretary of state, while an advisor to Biden’s campaign, Antony Blinken appears to have earned the esteem of whoever would come to run the Biden administration by setting in motion the composition of the now-discredited letter signed by fifty-one members of the “intelligence community” expressing doubts about the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop. The computer in question, discovered before the 2020 election, contained a surprising array of photos of Hunter and, more importantly, what looked to be texts documenting shady backroom deals between foreign governments—Ukraine and China—and the Biden family. The FBI eventually acknowledged that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop were genuine, not a “Trump campaign product,” as Nina Jankowicz, later slated to be Biden’s czarina of the Disinformation Governance Board, had so colorfully characterized it prior to the 2020 election. Ironically, the Steele dossier which served as the basis for allegations of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign had itself been a Clinton campaign product.
In the light of this history, Blinken’s appointment as secretary of state can be viewed as his reward for helping to maintain the markedly anti-Russia bias of U.S. citizens, including politicians, stoked for years by the media through the now-debunked Russiagate narrative, and which inclines self-styled liberals to support the prolongation rather than the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine.
Under ordinary circumstances, when two nation states are in conflict, the less powerful of the two tends to be more receptive to attempts to resolve the matter through peaceful negotiation, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent proposal, which was immediately and categorically rejected in a knee-jerk response by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, of all people. In the case of Ukraine, which has been artificially bolstered through a seemingly endless infusion of arms by the U.S. military behemoth, the war has no foreseeable limit—beyond the sacrifice of every able-bodied person in the land. (The case bears similarities to the artificial maintenance of the current U.S. president as head of state through the infusion of pharmaceutical products, even as rigor mortis appears to be setting in.) Reality in fact imposes limits, and they will be reached, sooner or later.
Those Ukrainians who comprehend the qualitative power disparity between nations in possession of nuclear warheads and those devoid of such means, have declined to volunteer to serve in the U.S.-maintained meatgrinder war, which is precisely why a policy of forced conscription was imposed. What good is a quasi-infinite supply of weapons, if no one is willing to fire them? Alas, any Ukrainian who has had enough of media-darling Zelensky’s panhandling from every wealthy nation on the planet is out of luck, for he remains in power, martial law firmly in place, and has indicated that he will stay there for so long as “it” takes, whatever his overlords construe that to mean.
It’s not just the U.S. government funding the war in which Ukrainian citizens are being chewed up and spit out by the insatiable war machine as military industry profits soar. NATO officials have naturally seized the opportunity to justify the existence of their institution, the source of their gainful employment, just as they have been scrambling to do since the fall of the Berlin Wall: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine—there’s always something for NATO to destroy! That the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established to counteract the danger of a communist takeover of the world by the now non-existent USSR is brushed aside as somehow irrelevant by its ardent supporters and beneficiaries alike.
As the world becomes progressively more bellicose, following the infelicitous example of the U.S. military state, stentorian calls to shore up and consolidate military capacities have been heard from figures such as European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyden, with similar jingoistic rhetoric issued also by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron. On its face, this is a puzzling development, given the twenty-year catastrophe better known as the Global War on Terror, which in no way served democracy or freedom, but instead destroyed and/or severely degraded the lives of millions of human beings. In keeping with the United States’ muscular but myopic and amnesiac approach to foreign policy, leaders of the European Union agreed in February 2024 to provide yet another $54 billion of “aid” to Ukraine, with NATO throwing in another $40 billion more recently. There’s a lot of profit at stake, and all of the usual suspects want their piece of the pie, no matter how many hapless Ukrainians will have to die. That European, British and American leaders have no interest in resolving the conflict is nowhere better illustrated than by the “Summit on Peace in Ukraine,” held in Switzerland, in June 2024, to which Russia, one of the two parties to the dispute, was not invited.
Barring nuclear holocaust, the dispute between Ukraine and Russia can only end at a negotiation table, an outcome which any competent diplomat would have worked relentlessly from the beginning to realize rather than frustrate. Instead, Antony Blinken spends his time making public appearances and issuing one-sentence slogans for spam distribution across social media platforms in an effort to appease the citizens footing the bill for the human misery and massacre to which his failure as a diplomat has led. Unable or unwilling to process the obvious implications of a war between a nuclear power and a nonnuclear power (spoiler alert: the former will win, if only through a Pyrrhic victory), Blinken daftly persists in pretending that democracy is at stake, even as Ukrainians are enslaved to fight the U.S. proxy war. The thousands of young Ukrainian men being sacrificed are just the price that must be paid. Freedom is free, but weapons are not.
It should come as no surprise that the same “diplomat” talks out of both sides of his mouth in claiming to sympathize with both the Israeli government and the Palestinians, as though furnishing some of the very weapons being used to murder thousands of civilians is easily counterbalanced with promoting the “humanitarian” treatment of those being incessantly terrorized, so long as the survivors of razed neighborhoods are provided with a bit of food and water now and then. The Blinken-Biden approach to this vexed conflict can be summed up in a piece of commonsense folk wisdom: “If you try to be all things to everyone, you’ll end by being nothing to anyone.”
Notwithstanding the frankly frightening recent public appearances of “the leader of the free world” (at the G7 meetings and elsewhere, including the disastrous debate), President Biden’s progressively deteriorating poll numbers over the course of the past several months have probably had something to do with his repeated assertion that there would be no “pause” or “ceasefire” in Israel. From the protests on campuses all over the United States, it has become clear that the antiwar left has reawakened, after eight years of slumber under Barack Obama, to abandon Biden. From the beginning, Biden materially supported Israel’s modus operandi of firing missiles at schools and mosques, homes, hospitals, and refugee camps, in an ardent quest to “Finish Hamas,” even as they embedded themselves among nonviolent civilians. When four Israeli hostages were rescued on June 8, 2024, Biden & Co. celebrated the news while downplaying, when not entirely omitting, the unsavory truth that two hundred Palestinians were killed in the process. Some people are more equal than others.
Antony Blinken has appeared occasionally to issue sincere acknowledgments of the humanity of the Palestinian people from one side of his mouth, while insisting on the right of Israel to self-defense from the other, as though slaughtering thousands of children has made anyone safe. The circus acts of such pseudo-diplomats would be amusing, if they were not so pathetic—and if the consequences for real, live, sentient human beings were not so devastating. All of foreign policy is not, as figures such as Blinken appear to believe, merely a matter of theater. No, the worst part of all of the shameless performances and photo-ops is that they entirely ignore the human reality of the wars being prolonged and provoked by the U.S. military state, as though bombing victims were mere fictions, and the soldiers coerced to fight were the currency of elites to expend.
The peace plan for Gaza recently drawn up by the Biden administration (certainly not Biden himself, who often appears to be unaware of where he is) could have been proposed back in October 2023, and, conjoined with a firm refusal to arm the killers, might well have saved the lives of some 40,000 persons—nearly half of which have been children—and prevented the wounding of many times more Palestinians. The U.S. government instead continues to condone Israel’s decision to follow the post-9/11 template of annihilating multiple times the number of the criminals sought, dismissing all of the innocent victims as “collateral damage.”
Blinken’s atrocious failures in the Ukraine and Israel conflicts notwithstanding, I confess to have experienced a tinge of sympathy for him the day he was caught on film wincing as President Biden answered a reporter’s question about his previous characterization of Chinese president Xi Jinping. Biden replied, in an unedited and brash—dare I say?—Trump-like fashion, “Look, he is. He is a dictator…” Mind you, this proclamation occurred immediately subsequent to what had been billed Biden’s “historic” White House meeting with the Chinese leader, supposedly intended to ease tensions between the two nations.
Surely, given the diminished mental acuity of his boss, Blinken’s job is extraordinarily difficult to execute, as is that of Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who is constantly in the position of concocting extemporaneous word salad responses to incisive questions posed by White House journalists. (The press secretary dismissed some of the recent videoclips showcasing a zombie-like Biden on the world’s stage as “cheap fakes”.) But Blinken’s willingness to serve not as a diplomat but as a promoter of endless war, his refusal to work diligently toward peaceful solutions to conflict, is inexcusable.
Blinken apologists may counter that every previous secretary of state during his lifetime, too, served not the cause of diplomacy and peace but the war machine. In other words, Blinken has dutifully adopted some of his most prominent predecessors as mentors.
While serving as the CIA director under President Trump, Mike Pompeo reportedly went so far as to pursue the murder of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, denounced as a traitor and a spy, for exposing the ignoble comportment, including war crimes, of the U.S. government. Pompeo’s reward? Appointment as secretary of state, in which position Pompeo aggressively pushed for war with Iran.
Under President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton persuaded her boss to bomb Libya, chanting, “Gaddafi must go!” beforehand, and later cackling “We came, we saw, he died!” when the Libyan president was sodomized with a bayonet and murdered by an angry mob. Libya, which once boasted the best education and healthcare systems in Africa, is today a failed state, a place where people have been literally enslaved. With regard to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Secretary Clinton reportedly inquired during a November 23, 2010, meeting over which she presided, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
Moving a bit further back, Condoleezza Rice had already served in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who initiated the forever wars in the Middle East with his Operation Desert Storm. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Bush Sr. bragged that he had “kicked” the “Vietnam syndrome”; that is, the disinclination of Americans to become embroiled in foreign wars in the years following the U.S. military’s retreat from Saigon. Rice came later to serve as national security advisor to President George W. Bush, during which tenure she went on a war-marketing blitz media circuit in which she repeatedly intoned, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Rice was rewarded for her war promotion efforts with an appointment as secretary of state.
Under President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright rallied to make the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo happen. In a conversation with General Colin Powell (relayed in his memoir), Albright once asked, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?”
Under President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed caution about invading Iraq when the idea was first proposed by Cheney & Co. But Powell abruptly changed his tune (for reasons which remain unclear to this day) and ended up being one of the most vocal supporters of the ill-fated 2003 invasion. Powell’s most notorious moment, and for which he has earned a place in the annals of history, was his attempt to persuade the UN General Assembly to support the second U.S. war on Iraq. In his presentation, Powell laid out all of the pretexts later debunked as bogus: the imminent threats of Saddam Hussein’s “mobile chemical labs” and the purchase of “yellow cake” from Niger, supposedly demonstrating the existence of a robust WMD program, among other ersatz evidence buttressing the claim that war had become a last resort. When it became clear that the United Nations would not support the invasion, Powell withdrew his resolution, and the war proceeded unimpeded, at which point Powell and others pivoted to insist that the war was permitted under previous U.N. resolutions allegedly violated by Saddam Hussein.
Last, but certainly not least, we would be remiss to omit the case of Henry Kissinger, the godfather of all warmongering secretaries of state, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, first as national security advisor and then as secretary of state. Kissinger’s savage foreign policies for southeast Asia culminated in the deaths of millions of human beings, not only in Vietnam, but also in Laos and Cambodia, the societies of which have not to this day recovered from what was done to them by the United States government in the name of democracy. Among those sacrificed were some 57,000 U.S. soldiers and the many veterans who returned home but whose lives were wrecked by their harrowing experiences in Vietnam.
Never one to insist on causation where correlation will suffice, I nonetheless feel compelled to observe that nearly all of these secretaries of state have derived a good part, if not all, of their personal wealth from having served on the boards of, or even established, defense-contracting and consulting firms. In Blinken’s case, in 2017, after a stint as deputy secretary of state (having previously served as deputy national security advisor, also under Obama), he and Michèle Flournoy, among other former employees of the federal government, launched WestExec Advisors, from which he derived $1.2 million. Blinken (along with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin) has also been a partner of private equity firm Pine Islands, which has invested heavily in military industries. When The New York Times, in an ever-more rare moment of critical journalism, dared to publish an editorial questioning Blinken’s seeming conflicts of interest, this was brushed aside by members of the War Party, who proceeded to approve his appointment as secretary of state.
Perhaps, then, in view of the long series of war promoters who have served as “top diplomat” for the United States, rather than take Antony Blinken to task, singling him out for criticism, the official title of his position should simply be emended from secretary of state to secretary of war, so as to reflect the reality of what such persons actually do.
How the Israeli Army Benefits from US Tax Law
Tax exemptions that support war crimes are not “charitable”
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 5, 2024
The United States tax code allows exemptions from federal taxes for certain categories of nonprofit organizations or groups that frequently serve either an educational or charitable purpose. Such organizations are categorized as 501(c)(3) and exempt from Federal income taxes while the donors who contribute to their support can deduct the total donations up to the limits imposed by their own overall tax liability. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recognizes more than 30 types of nonprofit organizations but only those that qualify for 501(c)(3) status can say that donations made to them are tax deductible.
Most of the organizations that may be eligible for 501(c)(3) designation “fall into one of three categories: charitable organizations, churches and religious organizations, and private foundations. A group must operate exclusively for one of certain purposes to be considered a charitable organization by the IRS: charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, or preventing cruelty to children or animals.” The IRS further defines “charitable” activities as “relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.”
A 501(c)(3) organization is also “forbidden from using its activities to influence legislation in a substantial way, including participating in any campaign activities to support or deny any particular political candidate. It’s also typically not permitted to engage in political lobbying.” A private foundation is typically “held by an individual, a family, or a corporation and it obtains most of its income from a relatively small group of donors. Private foundations are subject to stricter rules and regulations than public charities. A public charity is a nonprofit organization that receives a substantial portion of its income or revenue from the general public or the government.”
It is worth considering how a 501(c)(3) is supposed to work when one examines how the numerous organizations that constitute the Israel Lobby in the United States have attained that status, which enables them to avoid US taxes while also attracting donors through tax deductions in spite of the fact that they lobby heavily, which ignores US laws, and exist to support and empower a foreign government that is engaged in a genocide. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), regarded as the wealthiest and most politically powerful of the Lobby groups, even boasts about its lobbying ability as well as the amazing success of its associated PAC in endorsing favorable to Israel political candidates. The heavily politically engaged Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the pro-Iran war Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) are likewise 501(c)(3). Smaller foundations such as the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation, founded by the father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, are likewise 501(c)(3) and engaged in supporting illegal settlement development in Israeli occupied Palestine.
The 501(c)(3) status enables many Jewish and Israel-oriented groups to obtain large sums of money which are then used politically to enabled the corruption of the political process in the United States to the benefit of both Israel and domestic Jewish-favored issues. And being non-profit most definitely does not mean that anyone is going broke or working out of shabby offices in some dank suburb. AIPAC reported in excess of $90 million in earnings since Israel has been at war in Gaza, plus ADL $105 million in 1922, and FDD $18 million in earnings in the same year. The chief executives of the three organizations are, respectively Howard Kohr, Jonathan Greenblatt, and Mark Dubowitz. They earned $1,055,000, $993,000, and $771,000 respectively in 2021-2022.
This all means in practice that there is a steady cash flow from the United States to Israel that far exceeds the $3.8 billion plus special appropriations annually that President Barack Obama foolishly guaranteed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016 in a bid to maintain Jewish donor and media support for Hillary Clinton’s election. Grant Smith, who heads the “Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP)”, has estimated that the annual total going to Israel far exceeds $10 billion and, which does not include other freebies like US government co-development and production projects and disbursements like the $14 billion gift from President Joe Biden to Israel in April to help pay for and arm that nation’s extermination of the Gazans.
Israel and the Jewish community also get an enormous free ride from some state governments. Smith has described how one such board that he has identified in Virginia is a unique example of a state’s economic policies being manipulated by a dedicated Israeli fifth column in government. It is named the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB).
The VIAB is actually part of the Virginia state government. It is funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia and is able to access funds from other government agencies to support Israeli businesses. It is staffed by Israelis and American Jews drawn from what has been described as the “Israel advocacy ecosystem” and is self-administered, appointing its own members and officers. Only Virginia has such a group actually sitting within the government itself though other states have similar advisory or “trade” commissions. VIAB is able to make secret preferential agreements, to arrange special concessions on taxes and to establish start-up subsidies for Israeli businesses. Israeli business projects have been, as a result, regularly funded using Virginia state resources with little accountability. It has been estimated that the cash flow in favor of Israel from Virginia alone has exceeded $500 million annually.
Smith has reported how VIAB is not just an economic mechanism. Its charter states that it was “created to foster closer economic integration between the United States and Israel while supporting the Israeli government’s policy agenda.” Smith also has observed that “VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that advance Israel from within key state governments.” The board grew significantly under Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe’s administration (2014-2018). McAuliffe, regarded by many as the Clintons’ “bag man,” has received what are regarded as generous out-of-state campaign contributions from actively pro-Israeli billionaires Haim Saban and J.B. Pritzker, who are both affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Terry McAuliffe as governor met regularly in off-the-record “no press allowed” sessions with several Israel advocacy groups and spoke frequently about “the Virginia Advisory Board and its successes.” That was, of course, a self-serving lie by one of the slimiest of the Clinton unindicted criminals. In short, the VIAB is little more than a mechanism set up to carry out licensed robbery of Virginia state resources to benefit Israel. As a side benefit to us Virginians, its reckless activities have led to numerous zoning and environmental violations.
Judging by all of the above, one would reasonably have to accept that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, that there are many “non-profit” federal tax-exempt foundations and other boards and organizations that exist in the United States to benefit Israel. That said, however, there are a couple of pro-Israel 501(c)(3) “charitable” foundations that boggle the mind for their openly stated mission. They consist of several organizations that have been established and exploited to support the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which, as noted above, are currently engaged in carrying out what is widely recognized to be a genocide in Gaza as well as persecution of Palestinians on parts of the illegally occupied West Bank. They are perhaps deserving of some special attention.
The best known and largest of the Israeli army focused “charities” is the “Friends of the Israel Defense Forces” (FIDF) which stages annual rallies and gatherings both in Los Angeles and New York to raise money for those brave warriors who are nearly every day bombing hospitals and schools and killing many thousands of children. The gatherings are well attended by the usual celebrities and politicians and widely reported in the accommodating media. The group, based in New York City, boasts of how it works directly with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Friends of IDF raised a record $60 million at a Los Angeles gala in 2018. Major Donald Trump financial supporters Miriam and Sheldon Adelson donated $10 million, matched by Israeli-American Hollywood figure Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl.
FIDF claims to be the only 501(c)(3) certified IDF fund raiser in the US, but there is at least one other organization that has been in the news recently. It is “The Association for Israel’s Soldiers” which also goes by “The Friends of LIBI” and “LIBI USA”, which is a volunteer outfit based in Brighton, Massachusetts. It actually also claims to be part of Israel’s Ministry of Defense and its job is to cover expenses that are not part of the Israeli government budget. As money is fungible, that frees up money for more warlike purposes. But that description inevitably makes one wonder how an element of the Israeli government is able to collect tax exempt money that is also deductible as federal income taxes donations which are apparently repatriated from the US to Israel without any “charitable” or “educational” function intruding in America?
It does not require any particular brilliance to realize that both politically and economically Israel is not treated like everyone else by governments at various levels in the United States. At risk of being repetitive, how is it possible that organizations that are committed to supporting war crimes and even genocide by a foreign nation are allowed to have tax breaks that enable them to collect more money to corrupt the system that feeds them? How is it possible that the foreign army carrying out the war crimes is also allowed to benefit directly from the exemption from taxation? Those are questions that need to be answered!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The Bankers War in Ukraine – Part Seventeen of The Anglo-American War on Russia
Tales of the American Empire | July 4, 2024
Western corporate media and our corporate sponsored political leaders proclaim the war in Ukraine is about stopping Russian aggression. As this series has explained, this war was an American neocon effort to ignite a proxy war in Ukraine to destabilize and fragment Russia into smaller states that western corporations can control. This has failed horribly as Russia became stronger and more united than before war began. Even worse, the effort backfired after Russian efforts to make peace were rejected. Russia determined that it must conquer all of Ukraine to expel foreign troublemakers and protect itself, so its armies are slowly conquering all of Ukraine.
This has caused panic in the west since it had already taken control of Ukraine and began to exploit its vast resources. When war began, more farmland and factories were snatched up by western vulture capitalists at deep discounts as Ukrainian’s economy shut down and millions of Ukrainians fled aboard. Ukraine owes the west $300 billion that it can never repay unless it sells state assets, which is what the west wants. If Russia wins, none of this may be repaid and banks and governments will be forced to write off massive loans.
This explains the panic among western leaders who declare that Ukraine cannot be allowed to lose the war. Some now proclaim that NATO troops must be sent. Most citizens say that Ukraine is not worth World War III nor the death of hundreds of thousands of NATO soldiers, but their lords will lose billions of dollars!
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“All Wars are Bankers Wars”; YouTube; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfEB…
Related Tale: “The Genocide Called World War I”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psXYM…
“Disaster Capitalists Ready to Descend on Ukraine”; Jeremy Kuzmarov; Covert Action; January 31, 2024; https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024…
“Zelensky to sell Ukraine off to BlackRock, Goldman Sachs”; The Grayzone; January 30, 2023; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y32lO…
Related Tales: “The Anglo-American War on Russia”; https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Trump Goes Full RFK Jr., Targets Chronic Childhood Illness, Big Pharma As Campaign Pledge
By Jefferey Jaxen | July 3, 2024
In a recent video, former President Donald Trump signaled he would establish a “special presidential commission of independent minds” to determine what is causing the increase in chronic illness.
“This conversation is long overdue… it’s time to ask what’s going on” stated Trump.
Many involved in this space demanding investigation and justice for years, and even decades, have seen several opportunities pass by to ask ‘what’s going on’ with little change ever occurring.
Meanwhile, one of the major pillars of RFK Jr.’s 2024 campaign is to investigate chronic illness in children – a message that he has been consistent on through his career.
With the Democratic party currently engulfed in uncertainty, the unofficial RFK Jr. – Trump alliance found on this topic is hopeful for several reasons. It increases the percentage that something will actually get changed as more attention begins to focus on this topic. It puts Big Pharma on notice while upping the chances whoever is the next president is will carve out a space to aggressively approach chronic childhood illness by any means necessary.
Despite presidential candidates dipping their toes into this conversation, it has been parents who have carried the torch for decades seeking answers and raising awareness to the increasing chronic illness and disease that have plagued their children.
Ten days before Trump took office in 2017, he met with RFK Jr. to discuss forming a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity to which he would lead.
“The President-elect is exploring the possibility of forming a committee on Autism, which affects so many families; however no decision have been made at this time,” his transition team said in a statement provided to The New York Times. “The President-elect looks forward to continuing the discussion about all aspects of Autism with many groups and individuals.”
For reasons still unknown to this day, the Trump team decided not to green-light the commission which may have proven useful going into the early stages of COVID vaccine development.
Why look at vaccine safety and it’s link to chronic illness?
A formal exchange between attorneys at the Informed Consent Action Network and US Health and Human Services in 2018 states:
“… the increase in HHS’s childhood vaccine schedule over the last 30 years from 8 vaccine injections to 50 vaccine injections (plus 2 injections during pregnancy) has occurred in lockstep with the increase in the rate of autoimmune, developmental and neurological disorders in children from 12.8% to 54%. HHS has no explanation for why U.S. children today are plagued with a chronic disease and disability epidemic.”
Meanwhile, safety review periods in clinical trials for vaccines are too short, often days or weeks, to detect most chronic health conditions further hamstringing an entire body of health and research.
Why is this a campaign issue?
The economic burden of America’s chronic illness problem began to get much-needed attention with a 2018 report from the Milken Institute estimating $1.1T in direct costs and $3.7T [in indirect costs].
The COVID response torpedoed the mainstreaming and critical mobilization of the medical and research communities into the burden of chronic disease, especially among children. Closed off was this investigative avenue to the funding and national effort needed to address this problem.
One only needs to look at how the dominant culture went to war with the benefits of vitamin D, sunlight, and fresh air during the COVID response to see the lengths those from corporate media to heads of regulatory agencies will go to silence simple, lifesaving information when it protects power, control and pharmaceutical product lines.
Yet it’s not all about the shots.
An article from Politico titled, How Washington Keeps America Sick and Fat states, “the federal government has devoted only a tiny fraction of its research dollars to nutrition… Studying the relationship between diet and health is such an afterthought that Washington doesn’t even bother tracking the total amount spent each year.“
After reviewing the federal budget documents, Politico found, “the National Institutes of Health and the Agriculture Department — the two agencies that fund the majority of government-backed nutrition science — share of research dollars devoted to nutrition has stayed largely flat for at least three decades, and pales in comparison to many other areas of research.“
Pharma outspends all other industries in lobbying. Meanwhile, there is no major lobbying force behind boosting nutritional research funding. America’s sick-care, pharmaceutical product-based ‘health’ paradigm appears rooted, driven, and amplified by the lobbying efforts of corporate interests.
Profit-driven industry is happy to let accurate and beneficial information about nutrition and the harms of their products die on the vine of public awareness. Channeling their efforts more into protecting their products from much-deserved bad press and the outing of known harms into the public conversation.
For American children to thrive, these malevolent, corporate-influence cartel networks, wherever they operate within the medical, nutrition, agriculture, or environmental sectors must be splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. Political alliances in efforts to better this situation is a much needed step forward.
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U.S. General Caine Warns: STRIKING IRAN is a HUGE RISK
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From the Archives
Stealth Bombers and Bunker Busters
Analysis of the so-called 12-Day War, and the triumphantly celebrated Operation Midnight Thunder
By William Schryver | imetatronink | November 28, 2025
The GBU-57 is a big fat gravity bomb with fins. To achieve effective precision, a B-2 bomber must drop it on its intended target from no further than about five nautical miles — essentially right on top of the target.
Its penetration depth is claimed to be 200 feet. But that capability has NEVER been tested against a seriously hardened deep-underground target encased in layers of high-performance concrete, and topped with a few dozen meters of solid rock. In that sort of real-world scenario, the GBU-57 would be lucky to drill down 50 feet, if that.
It was always ridiculous silly talk to suggest the GBU-57 was the wonder weapon it was made out to be. There is a good reason the US only produced a couple dozen of them and then stopped: they understood its acute limitations in a non-permissive combat environment.
And, notwithstanding the hyperbolic Israeli propaganda, there was never any credible evidence that Iranian medium- and long-range air defenses against fixed-wing aircraft were attrited to any significant degree. And Iranian short-range air defenses were increasingly effective against long-range Israeli drones with each passing day.
As for the B-2: it is a big fat subsonic aircraft. It flies at airliner speeds. A strike on Fordow would entail flying at least 500 miles in and out of Iran. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Drug traffickers trained in Ukraine attack state forces in Mexico
- The tragic reality of Brazilian mercenaries in the Ukrainian conflict
- Zelensky Refused to Discuss Druzhba Pipeline Issue – Fico
- U.S. General Caine Warns: STRIKING IRAN is a HUGE RISK /Glenn Diesen & Lt Col Daniel Davis
- Israel designates five Palestinian media outlets as ‘terrorist organizations’
- Israel, not America, first: Carlson’s Huckabee interview lays bare US foreign policy priorities
- Israeli troops executed Palestinian aid workers at ‘point blank range’: Report
- Iran war What if today’s Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?
- Why Israel Is Escalating Its War Crimes Against Lebanon
- Iran in the face of the armed diplomacy of imperialism
- If Americans Knew
- The NY Times on the “MAGA” Split Over Israel & USS Liberty
- In Gaza, Ramadan without mosques, imams – Not a ceasefire Day 137
- Footage Shows Israeli Troops Waiting in Ambush, Then Opening Fire on a Palestinian Teen
- The US is on the brink of a major new war that Trump has not even bothered explaining
- Latest Epstein document dump is one more cover-up
- No Protection, No Justice: US Citizens Killed with Impunity by Israel
- Maria Farmer: Epstein Victim Reveals Explosive Information Covered Up by Media
- Average of five Palestinians killed by Israel every day in Gaza since ceasefire – Not a ceasefire Day 136
- Palestinian church leaders admonish Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee – Not a ceasefire Day 135
- Ominous messaging from Trump’s “Board of Peace” – Not a ceasefire Day 134
- No Tricks Zone
- Surprising Discovery: Sahara Is Greening…Billions Of Trees Where Once Thought To Be Barren
- New Research Reaffirms Clouds, Aerosols, And Surface Solar Radiation Are ‘Driving The Climate System’
- Germany: Electric Car Catches Fire At Charging Station, Sets Off Local “Inferno”, Widespread Damage
- New Study: Canada’s New Brunswick Was 1°C Warmer Than Today During The Medieval Warm Period
- Coal Power Back In Trend As Globe Tries To Keep Pace With Growing Demand For Power
- New Study: A 4°C Warmer Beaufort Sea Had ‘No Sea Ice’ 11,700 – 8200 Years Ago
- Unfudging The Data: Dutch Meteorological Institute Reinstates Early 20th Centruy Heat Waves It Had Erased Earlier
- German Gas Crisis…Chancellor Merz Allegedly Bans Gas Debate Ahead of Elections!
- Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern
- Germany’s Natural Gas Storage Level Dwindles To Just 28%… Increasingly Critical
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