The media’s Nord Stream lies just keep coming
Why do billionaires and governments scramble to control the media? Because the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
BY JONATHAN COOK | NOVEMBER 14, 2023
Want to understand why the media we consume is either owned by billionaires or under the thumb of government? The latest developments in the story about who was behind the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe provide the answer.
Although largely forgotten now, the blasts in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 had huge and lasting repercussions. The explosion was an act both of unprecedented industrial sabotage and of unparalleled environmental terrorism, releasing untold quantities of the most potent of the greenhouse gases, methane, into the atmosphere.
The blowing up of the pipelines plunged Europe into a prolonged energy crisis, tipping its economies deeper into a recession from which they are yet to recover. Europe was forced to turn to the United States and buy much more expensive liquified gas. And one of the long-term effects will be to accelerate the de-industrialisation of Europe, especially Germany.
There can be almost no one in Europe who did not suffer personal financial harm, in most cases significant harm, from the explosions.
The question that needed urgently answering at the time of the blasts was one no media organisation was in a hurry to investigate: Who did it?
In unison, the media simply recited the White House’s extraordinary claim that Russia had sabotaged its own pipelines.
That required an unprecedented suspension of disbelief. It meant that Moscow had chosen to strip itself both of the lucrative income stream the gas pipelines generated, and of the political and diplomatic leverage it enjoyed over European states from its control of their energy supplies. This was at a time, remember, when the Kremlin, embattled in its war in Ukraine, needed all the diplomatic influence it could muster.
The need to breathe credibility into the laughably improbable “Russia did it” story was so urgent at the time because there was was only one other serious culprit in the frame. No media outlet, of course, mentioned it.
The United States had both the motive and the means.
US officials from Biden down had repeatedly threatened that Washington would intervene to make sure the Nord Stream pipelines could not operate. The administration was expressly against European energy dependency on Russia. Another gain from the pipelines’ destruction was that a more economically vulnerable Europe would be forced to lean even more heavily on the US as a guarantor of its security, a useful chokehold on Europe when Washington was preparing for prolonged confrontations with both Russia and China.
As for the means, only a handful of states had the divers and technical resources enabling them to pull off the extremely difficult feat of successfully planting and detonating explosives on the sea floor undetected.
Had we known then what is gradually becoming clear now, even from establishment media reporting – that the US was, at the very least, intimately involved – there would have been uproar.
It would have been clear that the US was a rogue, terrorist state, that it was willing to burn its allies for geostrategic gain, and that there was no limit to the crimes it was prepared to commit.
Every time Europeans had to pay substantially more for their heating bills, or filling up their car, or paying for the weekly shop, they would have known that the cause was gangster-like criminality by the Biden administration.
Which is precisely why the establishment media were so very careful for the first months after the explosions not to implicate the Biden administration in any way, even if it meant ignoring the mass of evidence staring them in the face.
It is why they ignored the incendiary report by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – who has broken some of the most important stories of the last half century – detailing exactly how the US carried out the operation. When his account was occasionally referenced by the media, it was solely to ridicule it.
It is why, when it became obvious that the “Russia did it” claim was unsupportable, the media literally jumped ship: credulously reporting that a small group of “maverick” Ukrainians – unknown to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course – had rented a yacht and carried off one of the most daring and difficult deep-sea stunts ever recorded.
It is why, later, the media treated it as entirely unremarkable – and certainly not worthy of comment – that new evidence suggested the Biden administration was warned of this maverick Ukrainian operation against the whole of Europe. It apparently knew what was about to happen but did precisely nothing to stop it.
And it is why the latest reporting from the Washington Post changes the impossible-to-believe “maverick” Ukrainian operation into one that implicates the very top of the Ukrainian military. Still, the paper and the rest of the media steadfastly refuse to join the dots and follow the implications contained in their own reporting.
The central character in the new drama, Roman Chervinsky, belongs to Ukraine’s special operations forces. He supposedly oversaw the small, six-man team that rented a yacht and then carried out the James Bond-style attack.
The ingenuous Post claims that his training and operational experience meant he was “well suited to help carry out a covert mission meant to obscure Ukraine’s responsibility”. It lists his resistance activities against Russia. None indicate that he had the slightest experience allowing him to mastermind a highly challenging, extremely dangerous, technically complex attack deep in the waters of the Baltic Sea.
If the Ukrainian military really was behind the explosions – rather than the US – all the indications are that the Biden administration and Pentagon must have been intimately involved in the planning and execution.
Not least, it is extremely unlikely that the Ukrainian military had the technical capability to carry out by itself such an operation successfully and undiscovered.
And given that, even before the war, the Ukrainian military had fallen almost completely under US military operational control, the idea that Ukraine’s senior command would have been able to, or dared, execute this complex and risky venture without involving the US beggars belief.
Politically, it would have been quite extraordinary for Ukrainian leaders to imagine they could unilaterally decide to shut down energy supplies to Europe without consulting first with the US, especially when Ukraine’s entire war effort was being paid for and overseen by Washington and Europe.
And of course, Ukrainian leaders would have been only too aware that the US was bound to quickly work out who was behind the attack.
It would be telling indeed that, in such circumstances, the Biden administration would apparently choose to reward Ukraine with more money and arms for its act of industrial sabotage against Europe rather than punish it in any way.
It would be equally astonishing that the three states supposedly investigating the attack – Germany, Sweden and Denmark – would not also soon figure out for themselves that Ukraine was culpable. Why would they decide to cover up Ukraine’s attack on Europe’s economy rather than expose it – unless they were worried about upsetting the US?
And of course, there is the elephant in the room: the Washington Post’s earlier reporting indicated that the US had prior knowledge that Ukraine was planning the attack. That is even more likely if the pipeline blast was signed off by Ukrainian military commanders rather than a group of Ukrainian “mavericks”.
The Washington Post’s new story repeats the line that the Biden administration was forewarned of the attack. Now, however, the Post casually reports that, after expressing opposition, “US officials believed the attack had been called off. But it turned out only to have been postponed to three months later, using a different point of departure than originally planned”.
The Washington Post simply accepts the word of US officials that the most powerful country on the planet fell asleep at the wheel. The CIA and Biden administration apparently knew the Ukrainian military was keen to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines and plunge Europe into an energy crisis and economic recession. But US officials were blindsided when the same small Ukrainian operational team changed locations and timings.
On this account, US intelligence fell for the simplest of bait and switches when the stakes were about as high as could be imagined. And the Washington Post and other media outlets report all of this with a faux-seriousness.
Either way, the US is deeply implicated in the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure and the undermining of its economy.
Even if the establishment media reporting is right and Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, the Biden administration must have given the green light, overseen the operational planning and assisted in the implementation and subsequent cover-up.
Then again, if as seems far more likely, Hersh is right, then there was no middle man – the US carried out the attack on its own. It needed a fall guy. When Russia no longer fitted the bill, Ukraine became the sacrificial offering.
A year on, these muffled implications from the media’s own reporting barely raise an eyebrow.
The establishment media has played precisely the role expected of it: neutering public outrage. Its regimented acceptance of the initial, preposterous claim of Russian responsibility. Its drip-feed, uncritical reporting of other, equally improbable possibilities. Its studious refusal to join the all-too-visible dots. Its continuing incuriousness about its own story and what Ukraine’s involvement would entail.
The media has failed by every yardstick of what journalism is supposed to be there for, what it is supposed to do. And that is because the establishment media is not there to dig out the truth, it is not there to hold power to account. Ultimately, when the stakes are high – and they get no higher than the Nord Stream attack – it is there to spin narratives convenient to those in power, because the media itself is embedded in those same networks of power.
Why do billionaires rush to own media corporations, even when the outlets are loss-making? Why are governments so keen to let billionaires take charge of the chief means by which we gain information and communicate between ourselves. Because the power to tell stories, the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
What does the WHO say about its power to enforce the Pandemic Treaty (and International Health Regulations)?
By MERYL NASS | NOVEMBER 12, 2023
Many people have insisted that the WHO could not make the US do anything. Let me remind those people that the US government under Biden is instrumental in pushing forward the WHO proposals, and so it will comply. Here is what the WHO says:
What is meant by a ‘convention, agreement or other international instrument’?
Conventions, framework agreements and treaties are all examples of international instruments, which are legal agreements made between countries that are binding.
Why did WHO’s Member States decide to create an accord for pandemic preparedness and response?
In light of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO’s 194 Member States established a process to draft and negotiate a new convention, agreement, or other international instrument (referred to in the rest of this FAQ, generally, as an “accord”) on pandemic preparedness and response. This was driven by the need to ensure communities, governments, and all sectors of society – within countries and globally – are better prepared and protected, in order to prevent and respond to future pandemics. The great loss of human life, disruption to households and societies at large, and impact on development are among the factors cited by governments to support the need for lasting action to prevent a repeat of such crises.
[Ho ho ho—Nass]
At the heart of the proposed accord is the need to ensure equity in both access to the tools needed to prevent pandemics (including technologies like vaccines, personal protective equipment, information and expertise) and access to health care for all people.
[If this were true, why do the treaty and amendments only discuss health “coverage” which means health insurance, rather than health care? The WHO knows the difference, but only demands “coverage”—a sop to the insurance industry.
Furthermore, the WHO demands censorship of information not in agreement with the WHO’s narratives, not free sharing of information—so much for information equity—and its so-called expertise was used to overdose hospitalized patients with HCQ without informed consent, when these unfortunates were enrolled in the WHO’s “SOLIDARITY” trial. Its expertise led to demanding that nations stop the use of HCQ and ivermectin for COVID and administer more shots. Who needs this expertise? —Nass]
Who else is involved in the process for the accord?
Besides WHO Member States, the process for developing a possible new accord is providing extensive opportunities for engagement with relevant stakeholders, including other United Nations system bodies, and a wide range of other non-State actors in official relations with the WHO, to ensure robust and inclusive participation in the proceedings of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body. Furthermore, WHO is seeking complementary inputs through public hearings with stakeholders including: international organizations; civil society; the private sector; philanthropic organizations; scientific, medical, public policy and academic institutions and other entities with relevant knowledge, experience and/or expertise.
[In other words, Bill Gates, who was the largest funder of the WHO the year Trump defunded the organization, gets the lion’s share of input, while we peons get none. Trump then turned around and funded Gate’s’ charity GAVI with the money, and GAVI turned around and gave it back to the WHO. That was our money, by the way.—Nass]
—There is more of this nonsense on this webpage, but you can go look it up yourself if you have the stomach for it.—Meryl
Jim Jordan Announces Investigation into DOJ For Spying on Congressional Staffers
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 7, 2023
Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, who serves as the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, has issued demands to five major tech companies. The prominent lawmaker insisted AT&T, Alphabet – the parent company for Google, Apple, Verizon, and T-Mobile, release information potentially exposing surveillance tactics endorsed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against congressional representatives and their staff.
We obtained an example of the letters for you here.
The call for transparency comes on the heels of revelations that six-year-old subpoenas had facilitated the department’s breach of personal phone and email accounts for numerous lawmakers and their official aides.
The account framing the current plight was provided by Jordan, who propounded that the DOJ’s intervention strategically targeted the very congressional individuals scrutinizing the agency’s mishandling of the Russia collusion investigation.
Jordan’s theory postulates that such actions tampered with the squarely drawn lines of both the Constitution’s principle of separated powers and Congress’s independent oversight of federal agencies.
Conveying his objections through letters to the tech CEOs, Jordan stated: “The Justice Department’s efforts to obtain the private communications of congressional staffers, including staffers conducting oversight of the Department, is wholly unacceptable and offends fundamental separation of powers principles as well as Congress’s constitutional authority to conduct oversight of the Department. This revelation also follows news that the Department issued subpoenas to obtain the private emails and records of congressional staffers on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who were conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
An additional point of contention for Jordan was the DOJ obtaining private emails and records from staffers with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who had been examining the Department’s Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. In Jordan’s view, “These revelations strongly suggest that the Justice Department weaponized its law-enforcement authority to spy on the entities seeking to hold it accountable.”
These troubling revelations expose a disturbing overreach of surveillance, a flagrant violation of privacy, and a stark shakeup of the checks-and-balances system, propelling the call for corporate accountability and congressional autonomy into the spotlight.
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.
Hamas calls for an international committee to inspect Gaza hospitals
Palestine Information Center – November 5, 2023
GAZA – The Hamas Movement called on the Secretary-General of the United Nations to form an international committee to visit Gaza hospitals and verify the Israeli false narrative about being used for resistance activities.
The Movement strongly condemned the Israeli army spokesman’s claims regarding Indonesian and Hamad hospitals in Gaza as media fabrications.
According to the Movement, the occupation is attempting to use the claim that Hamas constructed tunnels beneath the buildings as justification for its attacks on the Qatari and Indonesian hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip.
“This is just a lie to cover up the Israeli crimes committed against injured people and civilians.”
The Movement also confirmed that the Israeli allegation about a tunnel entrance under the Indonesian hospital is, in fact, a fuel store for the facility, while the alleged tunnel beneath Hamad Hospital is just a room for pumps and electricity generators.
Targeting more than 100 hospitals and medical centers and putting about 16 hospitals out of service refutes the Israeli army spokesman’s allegations.
Additionally, Hamas refuted Israeli claims that it is stealing fuel, an accusation that UNRWA has categorically refuted.
Taxpayer-Funded Initiative Urges Dentists to Push HPV Vaccines
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 2, 2023
The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) awarded over $685,000 to HealthPartners Institute to test strategies for getting dentists to recommend the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to children and young adults ages 11-26, documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.
The NIDCR operates under the government’s taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The HealthPartners study is being conducted three years after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added prevention of oropharyngeal cancer, a form of head and neck cancer, to a growing list of indications for the HPV vaccine — despite a lack of clinical evidence to support the claim.
Dentists remain generally reluctant to recommend or administer the vaccine to their patients, studies show.
The NIDCR funding covers the first two years of a six-year, $3.5 million proposal for the healthcare nonprofit to experiment with training dental providers to deliver scripted messages to their patients about why they should get the HPV vaccine.
HealthPartners will then run a clinical trial in 21 dental clinics to determine whether the training and messages lead more dental providers to recommend the vaccine, and more patients to take it.
The grant is one of nearly 50 identified by CHD in June — totaling more than $40 million — awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to universities, healthcare systems and public health departments to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
The NIDCR is the latest of several HHS sub-agencies to fund behavior modification research aimed at providers and patients in order to increase vaccine uptake.
Why would dentists be charged with recommending the HPV vaccine?
Dentists are uniquely positioned to promote the HPV vaccine because they tend to have more regular contact with young patients than other healthcare providers, the HealthPartners proposal states.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Dental Association and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry all recommend that dental providers promote HPV vaccination — but most dental providers don’t see vaccine promotion as part of dentistry.
HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. Most people will get the infection at some point in their lives, but more than 90% of infections clear on their own with no residual health consequences on clinical follow-up.
High-risk HPV types can cause cervical cell abnormalities that are precursors to cancer, however, HPV infection is not the sole risk factor for cervical cancer.
Regular pap screening has been found to reduce the incidence of and mortality from cervical cancer among women by at least 80%.
Merck’s Gardasil 9 — the only HPV vaccine marketed in the U.S. — is a widely used vaccine commonly administered to teens and young adults before they are sexually active to protect against nine of more than 200 strands of HPV that can be sexually transmitted later in life.
Despite Merck marketing Gardasil as a vaccine that protects against some forms of cancer, clinical trials for Gardasil did not test whether the vaccine protected against any cancer — only whether it had efficacy against the indicated strains of HPV.
Gardasil has been associated with a number of serious adverse events.
Some of the signature impacts observed following HPV vaccination include permanently disabling autoimmune and neurological conditions such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.
More than 80 lawsuits against Merck now pending in federal courts allege the drugmaker fast-tracked Gardasil through the FDA’s approval process and deceptively conducted clinical trials to mask serious side effects and exaggerate the vaccine’s effectiveness.
In June 2020, the FDA added the prevention of oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers to the list of indications for the HPV vaccine under the “accelerated approval licensure pathway.”
That pathway allows treatments to be approved before clinical data demonstrating benefit exists, based on early clinical predictions that the treatment will likely produce a benefit.
Later, if a clinical benefit is never found, the FDA “can seek withdrawal” of the drug from the market.
According to the HealthPartners grant proposal, HPV is the leading cause of oropharyngeal cancers in the U.S., However, the references cited to support that claim are from 2014 — and they don’t appear to support the claim.
The CDC estimates 70% of oropharyngeal cancers in the U.S. are “thought to be” caused by HPV, and qualifies even that claim by adding, “It is unclear if having HPV alone is enough to cause oropharyngeal cancers.”
There is no evidence that the HPV vaccine prevents oropharyngeal cancers, but some trials have found that it does have efficacy against vaccine-type oral strains of HPV.
Top NIH-funded Merck consultants in the field, like Noel Brewer, Ph.D. — who developed and promotes the “announcement approach” to increasing vaccine uptake — have long looked to expand HPV vaccination into settings outside of primary care.
On that basis, the HealthPartners study aims to change dental providers’ behavior so they consistently recommend the HPV vaccine to their patients. Dr. Brad Rindal, a dentist, and Patricia Mabry, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, are co-leading the study.
The proposal falls within HHS’ mission to understand the mechanisms of behavior change in order to develop methods of “experimental manipulation or intervention” with providers and patients that can help it meet its targets in various aspects of public health.
HHS, through the NIH, has been funding behavioral studies to assess and influence providers’ willingness to recommend and administer the HPV vaccine in order to increase rates of vaccine uptake since shortly after the vaccine was first licensed in 2006.
Study design explicitly waives informed consent for patients
In the study, a team of researchers from HealthPartners — which provides healthcare, coverage, research and education to 1.8 million plan members — will train providers, teaching them about the relationship between the HPV vaccine and the risk of oropharyngeal cancer.
Trained providers also will receive scripts for use in patient conversations tailored to “reduce fear” that such conversations will negatively impact provider-patient relationships. They also will learn how to refer their patients to a vaccine scheduler.
Researchers will then measure changes in provider behavior through direct provider reporting — they press a button in their office when they make a recommendation — and follow-up surveys.
Patients or patient parents or guardians will receive follow-up survey calls after the office visits to assess how effective the provider communication was.
Researchers will measure changes in patient behavior by assessing how many patients receive initial and follow-up doses of the HPV vaccine within 30 days of their office visit.
In the first two years of the study — funded by the initial grant — the team will develop and pilot test their training and scripts. Their control group will receive patient education brochures and untailored scripts and their intervention group will receive the training and the tailored scripts.
In the next phase, they will test the efficacy of these interventions in clinic-randomized trials, comparing the control and intervention groups. Twenty-one HealthPartners Dental Group clinics and their providers will participate.
Patients 11-26 years old who go to HealthPartners dental clinics and whose electronic health records indicate they have not initiated or completed the HPV vaccine series will be automatically enrolled in the study without their knowledge. HealthPartners estimates there will be approximately 8,000 qualifying visits with HPV unvaccinated patients.
Verbal informed consent will be obtained for participation in the post-intervention patient/parent phone survey.
The patients will not otherwise be informed of the study.
The study requests a waiver of informed consent for patients by arguing that the dental providers will only be making recommendations already endorsed by the CDC, the American Cancer Society and the National HPV Roundtable, which is a joint venture of the CDC and the American Cancer Society.
“Therefore,” they state, “the recommendations conform to current standards of care and don’t present a risk to patients that exceed the risks that patients assume when they seek care within any healthcare system focused on disease prevention through vaccination promotion.”
They also argue that the research “would not be feasible without such a waiver” because it would bias the provider involvement and patient response.
They add that patients sign a HIPAA authorization form that allows them to opt out of using health data for research purposes and that they will be certain to check that list.
Finally, they note that “patients can elect not to pursue vaccination despite the recommendation of the dental care provider” — even though the intervention is designed to change their behavior so they don’t make such an election.
Merck, federal public health agencies, and WHO looking to grow market for HPV shots
Merck’s Gardasil was first licensed in 2006 for use in girls and women ages 9-26 to prevent four high-risk strains of HPV.
The FDA in 2009 expanded the license for use in males ages 9-26 for the prevention of genital warts and in 2011, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended it for routine use in boys.
In 2014, the FDA approved Gardasil 9, designed to protect against 9 HPV strains, for use in the prevention of HPV-related cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females and HPV-related anogenital lesions and anal cancers in males and females.
The FDA also expanded the age range of potential HPV vaccines to males and females between the ages of 9 and 45.
Early marketing strategies focused on promoting the drug as guarding against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease. But in 2016, as vaccination rates lagged, the CDC recommended that doctors stress the HPV vaccine’s cancer-prevention benefits, rather than talking about STDs as a way to get more parents to vaccinate younger kids.
And in 2020, it added oropharyngeal and other head and neck cancers to the list.
Over the last several years, HHS has invested tens of millions of dollars in research to get U.S. HPV vaccine uptake numbers to HHS’ “healthy people” target rates of 80% of children and teens vaccinated by 2030.
Meanwhile, Merck has expanded its ad campaigns beyond teenagers to target parents of young children and adults.
In 2020, the WHO set a goal of vaccinating 90% of teenage girls by 2030. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is currently launching a series of campaigns to vaccinate tens of millions of girls in Africa, following similar campaigns in India and Indonesia.
Last week Merck announced its third-quarter earnings from Gardasil were up 13% to $2.9 billion. Allied Market Research predicts the global HPV vaccine market — in which Merck is the primary player, although GSK also markets its Cervarix outside of the U.S. — will grow to $10.8 billion.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Grooming our children, Part 1: Getting parents out of the picture
By Belinda Brown | TCW Defending Freedom | November 2, 2023
Are parents aware of what children from four years old are being taught about sex in our schools? Belinda Brown thinks not. In a series of articles she makes the case that, with the agreement of the Department for Education, our children are being exposed to what is tantamount to a national grooming programme. The first step of this successful sex educators’ coup, she explains today, was to get parents out of the picture, to take over their role, and then deny them any access to lessons. Miriam Cates is one MP who is fighting back.
IN JUNE Conservative MP Miriam Cates introduced the ‘sex education transparency’ Private Members’ Bill, putting Rishi Sunak under pressure to give schools a legal duty to publish materials used in sex education lessons. Backed by 70 Conservative MPs, the aim of the Bill is to secure parents’ rights to see their children’s Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) lesson plans: rights which parents thought they had, only to find them being denied.
Cates had already called for an urgent Government review into what was being taught in RSE since this programme was rolled out in September 2020, of such concern were the materials and lessons parents gleaned from their children. RSE, it emerged, was the brainchild of the ‘progressive’ independent Sex Education Forum, a busy organisation with a stipend of £200,000 a year and a clear ‘beyond biology’ agenda. The Prime Minister responded to Cates’s call and ordered the review last March. Unaccountably, his Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, refused to publish the findings and has no plans to do so. Why, we do not know. MPs had claimed the Department for Education’s (DfE) most recent relationships and sex education guidance, produced in 2019 in consultation with the LGBT+ charity Stonewall, had allowed ‘activist groups’ to overly influence teaching materials. The guidance does not set age limits on what can be taught.
In the meanwhile, the position of parents has not changed. One story catalysed Cates’s most recent initiative. Two years ago, Clare Page found out that her daughter had been taught at school that ‘heteronormativity’ (preferring the opposite sex) was a bad thing and had been told that she should be ‘sex positive’. Like any decent mother, she wanted to know more. Her request to see the material used in her daughter’s classroom was turned down, first by the Information Commissioner’s Office and then by a first-tier tribunal. She was not even allowed to find out whether her daughter had been taught by the ‘master fetish trainer’ who worked for the School of Sexuality Education (SSE) employed by her daughter’s school.
Page’s case marks another step in the long march through the institutions whereby parents are being excluded from once personal and family-based aspects of their children’s upbringing, now inappropriately and dangerously taken over by schools.
Her experience is far from exceptional. In Wales, where children are being exposed to a mandatory diet of explicit and highly ideological sex education, parents are not allowed to remove their children from these classes. Attempts to do so are repeatedly turned down.
Likewise, parents such as those trying to protect their children from sexual extremism in the London Borough of Redbridge are portrayed as religious fundamentalists and radical homophobic Islamists.
Some schools and local authorities even have a policy of not informing parents when a child expresses what the school categorises as ‘feelings of gender distress,’ a study found, though this flies in the face of safeguarding rules. More recent research indicates that it could be that the school’s teaching that is the source of distress.
In theory, parents do have rights in law. Under the European Convention of Human Rights, ‘the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’. The 2002 Education Act Guidance repeatedly emphasises the role of parents. ‘Teaching must be done with respect to the backgrounds and beliefs of pupils and parents . . . All schools should work closely with parents when planning and delivering these subjects. Schools should ensure that parents know what will be taught and when, and clearly communicate the fact.’
Yet this is not happening. Any criticism that teaching places insufficient emphasis on the value of traditional marriage between a man and a woman, for example, is ignored.
When the School of Sexuality Education complained that the Department of Education’s guidance gave ‘problematic credence’ to long-term relationships and marriage, they had the government’s ear (p10). These sex education activists ‘provide in-school workshops on consent, sexual health, porn and positive relationships’. Their approach, they say, is rights-based – whose rights they do not say. They proclaim themselves as ‘sex-positive, non-binary and trauma informed’.
When they criticised the guidance section that suggested that primary schools should only teach pupils about LGBT when it was ‘age appropriate’ rather than from reception, these phrases were obligingly removed by the DfE.
Gillian Keegan should ask herself who these sex education providers are and why they want the material they are pushing at our children to be unrestricted by age.
This contempt for parents was expressed early on in an ‘Educate and Celebrate’ guidebook foisted on schools. Their proposal was that rather than get parents’ permission for children to attend LGBT events, they would organise LGBT events in the school (p24). When parents tried to protect their children from all this, they were told they were breaking the law.
The result of the government’s inadequate guidance, Cates says, is ‘a permission slip for teaching almost anything that is loosely associated with gender, sexuality or sexual practice – often with an assumption of the earlier, the better’ (p71).
Without providing any apparent curriculum, and without parents able to monitor what was being taught, these so-called specialist sex ‘educators’, heavily funded by the government, with clearly articulated curricula and political agendas, have zealously filled the gap.
Foremost of these is the ideology of queer theory that asserts that ‘heteronormativity’ – the natural biological sex preference for the opposite sex, should be ‘smashed’. It rejects all ‘binaries’ including distinctions between homosexuality and heterosexuality, male and female, and even more disturbingly, between adult and child.
This is the ideology that’s the foundation of the RSE curriculum that a Conservative government has sanctioned. It will be explored in greater depth in the rest of the series. Parents have a right to know, reject it and protest.
To be continued.
How Long Has Netanyahu Got Left?
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 2, 2023
Is Israel really losing the media war? In a conflict where the truth seems to be the first and most predominant casualty, this might be the only truth, certainly when we look at recent events. The war in Gaza is not an irony-free zone though. Recently, Israel stormed social media with claims that the Palestinians were faking videos and they took one of a medic giving resuscitation to a victim, claiming that the technique was erroneous, and so, therefore, the video must have been faked. How are we to take this? Given that Israel is the expert on faking videos to support its heinous war crimes, was the logic behind the claims “trust us, we know what we’re talking about when we talk about faked videos”? In either case it failed. The mob justice of social media didn’t give any gravitas to the claims and soon enough the Red Cross said that the health worker was using the right technique.
But how interesting that Israel is now resorting to this level, to stoop so low makes many wonder if they are even close to winning the war. It doesn’t smack of a victorious side to do this and there are other examples, even, previously. When the Baptist hospital was bombed, the IDF didn’t seem bothered that there was documented evidence to prove that it had actually warned the bosses of it, that they, the IDF, were about to bomb it. Almost as soon as it was bombed and Israel fed the revolting swine of western journalists feeding from the teat of mother Israel for all of their information with the assertion that the Palestinians actually blew it up themselves by a faulty rocket which Hamas had just recently fired close to the hospital. The IDF even produced audio of a conversation which apparently confirmed this. The problem with this though was that the audio was faked. There is actually a history of the IDF faking audio conversations. Some will remember the 2010 storming of the Turkish aid boat where the IDF murdered in cold blood ten activists at point blank range. Audio tape of the activists insulting Israel’s special forces soldiers turned out to be fake.
Western media are playing a role in helping Israel though simply by accepting the carefully arranged circus that they have been invited into. No western journalists that I can see are working within Gaza as it’s simply too dangerous so they are forced to lap up the information which is handed to them on a plate standing on the touchlines and being really nothing more than a spectator to a secret war which they can’t and won’t understand. The holocaust which is taking place is about the annihilation of the Palestinians in Gaza. We can’t really call it a war as this would suggest that both sides have a fair chance to compete on a level playing field. In Gaza, the Israelis are starving the Palestinians so that even if they survive, they will be too weak to fight when, or if, the IDF finally go in with their tank divisions.
The story which isn’t being reported by western journalists is how Hamas is already having some victories in hitting tanks with RPGs and how phosphorous is being dropped on civilians. Of course Netanyahu has been promised by the Biden administration that he can break every war crime ever recorded with the knowledge that he and his people will never face any legal action. And this is really a big part of America’s support to Netanyahu as what we are witnessing – but are unable to film due to Israel cutting off electricity and internet – are war crimes which we have never really seen before in the last 100 years except with the holocaust itself during WWII.
The total ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians which will never be reported as such by British journalists, which citizens of the free world cannot actually see, so it will continue until only a few hundred thousand Palestinians remain, who then will be convinced by Israel and the West to move onto another location. In fact, there is documentation to prove that the Israelis were planning all along to move out Palestinian citizens out of Gaza all together with the assistance of Egypt.
The big question is time. Time is really an important component in this war. It is only a matter of time before Biden messes up and is drawn into a war with Israel against Iran. Biden doesn’t want this but he is unfortunately stupid and weak and Netanyahu likes American presidents this way. A looming speech from Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah is expected to give an ultimatum to Israel to stop the mass murder of Palestinians, we will soon be reminded who are the most important players: Iran and Turkey.
Both these countries, although from different Muslim faiths who, in other parts of the Middle East are killing each other, seem to be united in their defiance of Israel. It is no longer a question of if they will react to the Gaza holocaust but when. Biden is out of his depth and the Iranians know this. He has only one real ace to play, which is to get rid of Netanyahu which if he was any other U.S. president, he could probably pull this off. But this is Biden we’re talking about whose foreign policy sheet includes the hugely embarrassing exit from Afghanistan and the 130 billion dollar colossal waste of sending cash to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in the world, which most Americans can’t even find on a map of Europe.
The rumours are that Biden is thinking in the longer term than Israel and that he believes that Netanyahu doesn’t have long in office as many Israelis don’t support his war crimes strategy, a point made by Haaretz recently which pointed out his demise was not long off. Something’s got to give. The servile, revolting, passive international press pack might be all that Netanyahu has left.
“Shedding” of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components and Products From The Vaccinated to the Unvaccinated – Part 1
It’s happening. The manufacturers and regulators knew it was a risk, yet, like numerous aspects of the Covid vaccine mRNA technology, did not test for excretion potential of spike proteins or LNP’s.
Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings | November 1, 2023
Awareness of the Federal Regulators and Vaccine Manufacturers
The data showing the toxicity and lethality of the vaccines started within weeks of the roll-out with hundreds of thousands of adverse events and hundreds of deaths reported to VAERS in January of 2021, far exceeding previous stopping points of any new medical product or vaccine.
Although ignored (to this day), anyone paying unbiased attention could see a further mountain of evidence develop, including a skyrocketing number of newspaper and television reports of healthy athletes and young people arresting and dying while doing normal everyday activities or sports (countered by corporate/government controlled media with a plethora of fact checking articles using cherry picked data to inform the world that what they are seeing is not factually true).
Then life insurance industry data emerged showing historically unprecedented rises in death claims being paid out amongst the healthiest sectors of society temporally associated with the proliferation of Covid mRNA vaccine mandates within schools, corporations, universities, health care institutions, federal contractors etc. Most telling of the deathly impact of mandates was the fact that the largest increases among the sudden, rapid rises in excess deaths occurred among employed white collar workers.
The reality is that these data are still ignored by media and public health agencies across the world. Even more worrying are the more recent reports finding universal contamination of every studied vaccine vial with large magnitude, excess levels of DNA fragments and DNA plasmids. Then the discovery that the DNA plasmids used in the manufacturing process contained genetic sequences that both promote DNA integration into the human genome as well as promote the development of cancer.
It truly is unimaginable that we now must consider the risks (and reality) of “shedding” of the vaccine products from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated. This now has implications for nearly every human being walking the earth, vaccinated or unvaccinated (including me).
This series will explore the regulatory, scientific, epidemiological, and clinical data indicating that shedding is occurring. The health of who knows how many is now being threatened, with the extent of the risks likely both highly variable and difficult to predict, both in the short term and long term. That is unless we start to seriously study the phenomenon further. So, let’s review what is known.
Within 3 months of the rollout of the global Covid mRNA vaccination campaign, I was consulted by two different unvaccinated women in their late 30’s and early 40’s respectively, who reported that they were suffering acute menstrual abnormalities in the days following close exposure to a recently vaccinated practitioner (one visited a massage therapist and another an acupuncturist). Both had a history of highly regular, uncomplicated menstrual cycles over decades.
Since that time, at least twenty other unvaccinated and vaccinated people, both men and women, have reported to me compelling histories of typical post-mRNA vaccine adverse effects subsequent to close exposure to vaccinated family members, contacts, or friends.
Further, my partner Scott Marsland at our Leading Edge Clinic, who also specializes in treating Long Covid/Long Vax syndromes, has a growing series of detailed case histories of similar “shedding” events occurring. I will revisit this in a later post in this series, but I will briefly say here that our clinical observations conclude that symptomatic shedding events do occur. However, we have little idea of exactly how common it is occurring among the general population.
This is further complicated by the fact that even if it were occurring frequently, the vast majority of people suddenly developing typical vaccine side effects symptoms after exposure to a vaccinated person would never think to relate it to exposure to shed vaccine products. It is my belief that very few people in the general public are aware of the possibility it could occur. You know, because the regulators have assured the country that mRNA technology is “safe and effective.”
However, my general sense is that it occurs largely in people who have increased physiologic sensitivity to environmental exposures, toxins, or pharmaceuticals and that it is generally transmitted by someone recently vaccinated or someone who is producing a lot of spike protein. Note that is my “general sense.” More studies are required to fully understand both the frequency of and physiologic impacts from such events.
My ignorance as to the frequency of symptomatic shedding events is due to the fact that the concept of transmitting spike proteins (or lipid nanoparticles) from a Covid mRNA vaccinated person to another is one of the least studied and published-on aspect of the mRNA vaccine technology.
What is so shocking about that lack of research (actually nothing is shocking anymore) is that shedding has major global implications. Apparently it is not just me who thinks this because, as an expert on several aspects of Covid, I have been lecturing across the U.S, Europe, and South America in conferences, Parliamentary hearings, or invited lectures. Questions about shedding appear everywhere (in the dozens of Q & A’s that I have participated in, it is nearly always the first question. It is also a very common topic in the chat of our FLCCC weekly webinar.
Know that in this tonight’s FLCCC webinar, I will present a 15-20 minute overview of this series along with my private practice partner Scott Marsland. We expect to be deluged with questions after.
Anyway, I believe that by the end of this series on the science, epidemiology, and clinical observations of shedding, you will be convinced that it can and does occur.
From our Federal government, in this FDA document, the term “shedding” is defined as:
“The release of viral or bacterial gene therapy products from the patient by any or all of the following routes: feces (feces); secretions (urine, saliva, nasopharyngeal fluids, etc.); or through the skin (pustules, lesions, sores).”
They forgot to mention “exhaled breath.” More on that later. The “products” they refer to that can be transmitted from a Covid vaccinated person to another include not only the genetically programmed spike protein product, but also the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) containing the mRNA that is in the injections as well as naked mRNA that can be released from the LNP. Even more worrying is the recent shocking discovery that every single Moderna and Pfizer vaccine vial is contaminated with high levels of DNA plasmids potentially capable of integrating into the human genome. Contemplating that last one is disturbing, the implications of which we will not know for some time.
First off, let’s be clear that the Covid mRNA and DNA vaccines are gene therapy medicinal products (GMTPs or GTP’s) as stated in the FDA’s 2015 document on Gene Product Shedding Studies.
“Gene therapy products are all products that mediate their effects by transcription and/or translation of transferred genetic material and/or by integrating into the host genome and that are administered as nucleic acids, viruses, or genetically engineered microorganisms.
Also note that in this European Medicines Agency (EMA) document, the mRNA vaccines also meet their definition of gene therapy medicinal products (GMTP’s).
Ok, now that we know what a gene therapy product is and that the Covid mRNA injection is actually a form of gene therapy (marketed to the public as a “vaccine”), what does that have to do with “shedding?” Again from the FDA document regarding the evaluation of the safety of gene therapy products, they emphasize the importance of studying shedding:
Shedding is distinct from biodistribution because the latter describes how a product is spread within the patient’s body from the site of administration while the former describes how it is excreted or released from the patient’s body. Shedding raises the possibility of transmission of virus or bacteria based gene therapy products (VBGT) from treated to untreated individuals (e.g., close contacts and health care professionals).
This guidance represents FDA’s current thinking on how and when shedding data should be collected for VBGT and oncolytic products during preclinical and clinical development and how shedding data can be used to assess the potential for transmission to untreated individuals.
So, with these findings in mind, it may be no wonder why the FDA insists on shedding studies:
Further on in the document, the FDA again emphasizes the importance of shedding studies:
Note that the FDA emphasizes the importance of doing human shedding studies and not just relying on animal studies:
To inform the design of human shedding studies, shedding data may be collected in animals following administration of the VBGT or oncolytic product. These data can help estimate the likelihood and potential shedding profile in humans, particularly when there is concern about transmission to untreated individuals. However, such data cannot substitute for human shedding studies for several reasons.
But again, no studies testing whether excretion of mRNA-containing LNPs, modified spike-encoding mRNA, or spike produced by vaccinated people have been done. Well, I shouldn’t say none, because in this paper the author cites a Pfizer document obtained by FOIA which apparently revealed that shedding was studied in the urine and feces of intra-muscular injected rats. Unfortunately, that document is no longer at the website referenced.
To summarize from the above, the FDA’s position is that:
- the mRNA vaccines are gene therapy products
- Gene therapy products require shedding studies in both animals and humans
- Gene therapy product shedding raises the possibility of transmission from treated to untreated individuals
Note that much of the rest of this series of posts on shedding is guided by a masterful comprehensive review of the topic of gene therapy product shedding by independent researcher (by definition) Helene Banoun in Infectious Diseases Research. Hers is one of the only papers I could find that attempted to meticulously explore what is known about shedding of the mRNA gene therapy vaccines.
As already stated, an important point Banoun makes is:
There was no regulation of mRNA clinical trials prior to RNA vaccines, yet there is strict regulation of gene therapy products. It is difficult to justify that mRNA vaccines are not considered in the same way as gene therapies regarding this regulation; indeed the only difference is that they are (historically) supposed to protect against a disease and not cure it. Gene therapies are intended for a small number of people in poor health, whereas vaccines are used on a large scale on healthy people: it would therefore be wise to apply stricter rules to them.
She further points out another omission of the regulatory process:
Any experiment involving the deliberate transfer of a nucleic acid to a human must be preceded by Institutional Biosafety Committee approval (document on the regulatory standards is here), but approval was not given because of the emergency clearance given to mRNA vaccines.
Therefore, according to both the American and European agencies, mRNA vaccines are gene therapy products and should have been subjected to excretion studies of all secreted fluids (urine, exhaled droplets, saliva, sputum, nasopharyngeal fluids, semen, breast milk, feces, and sweat). Again, these studies were not done for mRNA vaccines nor for the DNA adenovirus vaccine (J&J).
So, where are the clinical human shedding studies? Well, I just learned of one that is about to be published (next ten days?) where the research team exposed a population of unvaccinated women to vaccinated individuals and their assessment outcome was the development of menstrual abnormalities. I know the results but want to respect the research teams right to present their original work. They have promised to share their manuscript with me and Paul Marik as soon as the peer-review and acceptance process is complete. I have no idea what journal they submitted to but I can be highly confident it is not the New England Journal of Medicine.
The entire reason why I did a “deep dive” into shedding science is because shedding was not studied when it absolutely should have been and I believe with near certainty that it occurs. Note my use of “near certain” is only to seem objective but it really is too late for that – both my partner Scott and I have diagnosed and successfully treated a number of shedding “victims.”
The lack of shedding studies prior to the mRNA rollout was, in my opinion, an insanely reckless and irresponsible omission (or willfully criminal, take your pick). As an evolving expert in the evaluation and treatment of Covid mRNA vaccine injury syndromes, I and others have identified the spike protein as the main component responsible for not only the pathogenicity of Covid but also of the vaccines, with this review paper proposing a new field named “spikeopathy” (study of the disease processes triggered by the spike protein).
If vaccine transcribed spike protein can be transmitted in sufficient quantity from vaccinated folks to unvaccinated ones, it stands to reason that adverse effects of the vaccine can develop in some unvaccinated people who came into contact (or close proximity) with vaccinated people. How did they get away with not studying this possibility?
An easy answer is they were doing science at “warp speed.” The more uncomfortable answer is that the “vaccines”, although meeting the definition of a gene therapy product, were actually not even legally considered a medical product at all and thus did not require a diverse range of safety studies (like on genotoxicity, reproductive risks, excretion potential etc). What? Why? How?
The reality is that the Covid vaccines, as a result of successive federal legislative actions which evolved over decades, was legally categorized as a “countermeasure” under a “public health emergency.” Such “countermeasures” require no specific regulatory approval process prior to dissemination. All a countermeasure needs is the recommendation of the Secretary of Health and Human Services that “it may be effective.”
This is the conclusion derived from the legal investigatory work of various independent and legal experts and researchers like Catherine Watts, Todd Callender, and Sasha Latypova. If interested in learning more, I would watch this lecture by Sasha Latypova (scroll down the page to find her lecture). As they have uncovered, “countermeasures” (even gene therapy ones) do not legally require studies of excretion potential, bio-distribution, pharmacokinetics, genotoxicity, insertional mutagenesis etc.
They don’t even require FDA regulated clinical trials of efficacy or safety.
So why did Pfizer and Moderna even do the efficacy trials? Latypova maintains that they did this not only to satisfy the public’s confidence to increase vaccine uptake, but also to “fool” the public into thinking these vaccines were medical products subject to standard (albeit accelerated) pharmaceutical product regulatory processes.
This obscured the reality that they were instead classified as military “countermeasures” against a perceived (if not actual) bioweapon. To wit, the COO of Operation Warp Speed was a General from the Department of Defense (DOD) and the vaccine manufacturers were under contract with the DOD to produce the countermeasure, sometimes referred to as a “demonstration (demo)” and/or a “prototype” in numerous legal documents they uncovered.
Anyway, as a result of this lack of a legal requirement to fully study these products in a public health emergency, the list and types of studies that should have been conducted (but were not) is long. Researchers and clinicians have been screaming about this since they were rolled out. These cries were met with a deafening silence by governmental health agencies across the world.
I know, it is a lot to take in.
But the latest “word on the street” is that the finance and insurance industries may finally be waking up to this fraud and its devastating impacts on U.S disability and death rates. Knowledge of these society-wide impacts largely results from the work of two different research teams led by former Blackrock portfolio manager Ed Dowd and insurance industry consultant Josh Stirling).
This article describes the reasons why Pfizer and Moderna stock are crashing of late. Put more succinctly, from what I hear it is due to the hedge fund guys shorting their stock. I believe Pfizer is in even deeper trouble now that this “forensic” paper just got published finding that they hid vaccine trial deaths which obscured a 3.7 fold increased risk of cardiac death in the vaccinated arm of their trial.
“Shedding” Part 1– Shedding of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components and Products From The Vaccinated to the Unvaccinated – Part 1
“Shedding” Part 2 – The Bio-Distribution and Excretion Potential of Covid mRNA Vaccine Products
“Shedding” Part 3 – Can You Absorb Lipid Nanoparticles From Being Exposed To a Vaccinated Person?
“Shedding” Part 4 – Evidence of Placental and Breast Milk Transmission of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components
“Shedding” Part 5 – Evidence of Shedding Causing Illness In Others
“Shedding Part 6– Clinical Case Notes Describing Shedding Phenomena Among Leading Edge Clinic Patients
“Shedding” Part 7 – Shedding Via Sexual Intercourse – Clinical Reports
Why a global anti-Hamas coalition pushed by Macron is a bad idea
By Rachel Marsden | RT | November 2, 2023
Last week, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Jerusalem, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested recycling the global coalition of 86 nations against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) to focus on Hamas.
“Hamas is a terrorist group, whose objective is the destruction of the state of Israel. This is also the case of ISIS, of Al-Qaeda, of all those associated with them, either by actions or by intentions,” Macron said, betraying a short and selective memory. The stated goal of IS wasn’t to eradicate Israel – it was to establish a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, then broaden it into Arab countries. IS was first and foremost a threat to the stability of Syria – the same country whose government the US and its Western allies actively hindered in its fight against terrorism by making a failed attempt at overthrowing President Bashar Assad through Pentagon and CIA-backed training and equipping of “Syrian rebel” jihadists. As for Al-Qaeda, Israel was even reportedly at one point helping treat wounded militants from the group who were fighting their common enemy, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, in Syria – in turn effectively hindering the fight against IS, as Syria and Hezbollah worked to destroy it.
The Global Coalition against Daesh (another name for IS), founded in 2014, explicitly excluded Russia, whose invitation by Damascus to help it eradicate the terrorist threat can be largely credited for Syria’s stabilization, and the fact that it’s rare to even hear any talk of IS anymore. Russia’s involvement in neutralizing the terrorist group, coupled with former US President Donald Trump’s refusal to continue funding Washington’s incursion into Syria, beyond hunkering down in the oil-rich Kurdish part, was the ultimate key to IS’ defeat. So with apparently little left for it to do now, Macron recommends that the coalition that mostly sat and watched – while Russia, Iran, and Syria did the heavy lifting – take on Hamas. Who does he think is going to do the work this time? Russia, which is still excluded from the coalition? Syria, which has recently taken incoming missile fire from Israel? Iran’s Hezbollah allies, who lost 1,000 men fighting IS in Syria – and whom Netanyahu has placed in the same basket as Hamas as an enemy of Israel? Good luck with that.
So with the most effective anti-IS fighters excluded from fighting Hamas, who’s left in Macron’s proposed coalition? There’s the Global South, including some African countries that just kicked out French troops for their own failed counterterrorism missions which had led to multiple coups and the flourishing of jihadism. It’s doubtful these nations will now be keen to embark on yet another counterterrorism mission alongside the same forces that they just expelled.
Then there are all those members of the international community who are quietly thinking what United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres dared to say aloud last week – that Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7, which left close to a thousand civilians and hundreds of military and security personnel dead, “did not happen in a vacuum.” He was, of course, hinting at Israel’s longstanding, UN-recognized oppression of civilians in Gaza. His statement begs yet another question: Is Hamas really a global threat? Or is it just Israel’s problem?
Anti-Israel unrest has reverberated outside of the immediate conflict zone, including in Western Europe and the US, but these protests have nothing to do with Hamas. Instead, citizens elsewhere in the world are merely reacting to perceived injustices, particularly in light of what they consider to be an overwhelmingly pro-Israel bias on the part of the Western establishment, which initially and drastically minimized concerns over the protection of Palestinian civilians. So any global action against Hamas seems futile.
The anti-IS coalition targeted the terror group’s propaganda, with its website stating that IS’ “use of social media tied to acts of terrorism is well-documented. In response, Coalition partners are working together to expose the falsehoods that lie at the heart” of its ideology. They’re free to do that, but why bother when there’s already open debate among those who have the opportunity to see reports from the ground and assess the situation for themselves? Governments can’t be trusted not to promote their own propaganda under the guise of combating it – all to secure an advantage for their preferred narrative.
Just consider the recent example of propaganda emitted by one of the self-styled gatekeepers of truth: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “Russia and Hamas are alike… their essence is the same,” she said. Nah, actually they aren’t the same at all. And not even Israel has been saying that, but still, “Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine from the map. Hamas, supported by Iran, wants to wipe Israel from the map,” von der Leyen explained. Besides the hot take on Putin’s intentions regarding Ukraine, that’s like saying that since Warren Buffet has a bank account, and I have a bank account, then I’m also a billionaire. This is exactly the kind of nonsense that Western anti-propaganda campaigns end up spewing.
The anti-IS coalition was made to tackle IS. If that’s no longer an issue, then just toss it in the trash. How many interventionist entities does the West need to spearhead, anyway? There are already more than enough vehicles and coordination mechanisms for intelligence sharing, propagandizing, and security operations. Besides, there’s no proof that better intelligence could have helped Israel when Egyptian and American officials have claimed that Netanyahu had warning of the impending Hamas attack. About the only thing that more useless Western-led bureaucracy would help is the West’s own hunger for more of it.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
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Book Review
The Zeolite Book — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Wrong, AP and NPR: Europe’s 50,000 Heat Deaths Are a Computer-Model Estimate, Not a Real Body Count
- Questioning Your Doctor Is Now Considered A Psychological Problem (Seriously)
- London tourism expo promotes Israeli agency linked to theft of Palestinian land
- Dockworkers launch global strike against Israeli and US military shipments
- Europe facing gas price shock – Gazprom chief
- Ukraine continues recruiting people with disabilities
- Weaponized Journalism: 2021 Sayer Ji Interview with NPR
- Beyond Netanyahu: what Israel’s election means for Palestinians
- Lithuania plans universal conscription
- Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
