Baseline of a Desecrated Land VI: Awash in Sewage
By Dick Callahan | September 30, 2018
Sewage Quiz and nowhere to go
“… with clear waters and action packed beaches, each one of Tel Aviv’s 16 beaches has its own style and attracts certain personalities.” Israeli Ministry of Tourism website
“But you cannot have clean water if people are still defecating in the river.” The visionary Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization.
Okay, fellow Americans. It’s time for a pop quiz.
1) How many metric tons of raw or hardly treated sewage go straight into the Mediterranean Sea from Gaza every day?
a) 1 Mt
b) 11 Mt
c) 11,000 Mt
d) This is a trick question. Hamas wants to drive Israel into the sea.
2) Which direction does the current in front of Gaza flow?
a) north
b) south
c) in circles
d) Towards Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
3) How far from Gaza is Israel’s nearest Israeli desalination plant in Ashkelon?
a) 5 miles
b) 50 miles
c) 500 miles
d) Doesn’t matter. God gave it all to Israel.
4) How many times in 2016 did the Ashkelon desalination plant shut down because of massive sewage plumes coming from Gaza?
a) twice
b) at least four
c) never
d) Gay kaken ofn yam. (Yiddish insult, “Go shit in the ocean.”)
5) Gaza’s water and sewer infrastructure collapsed because:
a) The Israeli military destroys the sewage plant, power plant, and underground pipes every few years.
b) Israel’s blockade against Gaza is over ten years old and counting.
c) Gaza can’t make repairs because Israel won’t let supplies through the blockade.
d) Arabs hate Israel more than they love toilets
e) Israel routinely cuts fuel and power to Gaza so the plants don’t run even when they’re otherwise viable.
f) Israel is intercepting ground water that would refill the Coastal Aquifer.
g) Israel doesn’t allow West Bank Palestinians to share West Bank water with Gaza
h) all of the above except d.
6) According to the United Nations, Gaza is in a humanitarian crisis and will be uninhabitable by 2020 because what percent of the drinking water is unfit for human consumption?
a) 14 %
b) 32 %
c) over 97 %
d) The UN lies. There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
7) In 2015 Israeli authorities closed Tel-Aviv beaches when they deliberately dumped how many cubic meters of sewage while making beach upgrades?
a) 3
b) 9
c) 180,000
d) None. Israel doesn’t deliberately dump sewage.
8) How many streams flowing through the West Bank/Israel are polluted with sewage?
a) all
b) five
c) two
d) none
9) The German government funded a sewage treatment plant on Palestinian land in the West Bank village of Salfit. It didn’t work out for the Palestinians because:
a) Israel denied permits for the project for years.
b) Israel wanted to connect an illegal Jewish colony to the project.
c) The Israeli army stole the equipment.
d) Arab sewage treatment is an existential threat to the Jewish and democratic state of Israel.
e) Israel permitted the project at another site then announced a segregation wall will be built between the project and Salfit, cutting off the Palestinians but leaving the project accessible for Jewish colonies.
g) a, b, c, and e.
10) Israel has been criticized for allowing Christian baptisms in the Jordan river when coliform bacteria counts are how many times above the maximum where the Health Ministry is supposed to close Israeli beaches?
a) 6 times higher
b) 3 times higher
c) 2 times higher
d) half as high
11) Israel’s Health Ministry is supposed to close beaches when fecal coliform bacteria counts are above 400 per 100 ml of water. Tel Aviv once closed beaches to swimming, sailing and fishing after a sewage spill produced fecal coliform bacteria counts of:
a) 500/100 ml
b) 8,000/100 ml
c) unknown because fecal coliform tests exceeded the lab’s testable maximum of 20,000/100ml.
d) under 400/100 ml but beaches closed just to be on the safe side.
12) Who is responsible for dumping sewage on Palestinian land?
a) America for enabling Israel.
b) Jewish colonists.
c) Israeli cities who export their sewage sludge to the OPT.
d) Palestinians.
e) Israeli military camps.
f) all of the above more or less in that order.
Okay, pencils down. How’d you do? Answers are: 1)c, 2)a, 3)a, 4)b, 5)h, 6)c, 7)c, 8)a, 9)g, 10)a, 11)c , 12)f . If you answered ‘d’ to every question the Israel Lobby may fast-track you for a seat in Congress.
Gaza sewage to Israel: turd terrorism
Day by day a non-political northbound current calmly, quietly, carries 11,000 metric tons of what Gaza Palestinians had for dinner last night right onto Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israeli desalination plants. Here’s a free slogan for the Tourism Ministry: Come to Israel, where Hamas is in the water.
For most of history Gaza was what UNESCO has called, “One of the most important coastal wetlands in the Eastern Mediterranean.” Wadi Gaza, was one of just a few high quality migratory bird stop-over stations along the flyway between Europe/Asia and Africa. Soaring birds like cranes, flamingos, storks, and raptors that migrate using thermal updrafts along the coasts all congregated at this bird oasis. The place had a clean water supply and a naturally productive ocean fishery whereby hundreds of families made a good living.
Today Gaza’s ecosystem has devolved into a vast man-made breeding lagoon that produces two million diadromous turds a day. These foul fish migrate down the wadis, take a right when they reach the Mediterranean, and start swimming for Israel. Birds still land on wadis and wetlands, because they have to, but the shore is so contaminated that over half the water samples off Gaza contain sewage parasites and contaminants. Beaches smell bad. People regularly end up in the hospital after beach outings. A little boy died last summer from infection caused by a family trip to the beach.
During the summer of 2017, away from the coast in northeast Gaza, raw sewage was piling up and Palestinians, with no way to treat it, watched it run into Hamun stream that flows out of Gaza past an Israeli colony and west towards Ashkelon. In what can only be described as a ‘Code Brown’ the Israelis brought fleets of vacuum trucks to try sucking mess out of the stream on their side. The attempt would’ve made a great joke video on the internet. Undaunted, elite units of the most powerful military in the Middle East stormed into Gaza and attacked the little stream, trying to block it on the Palestinian side by plowing in dirt. When that also failed, the head of the nearby Israeli Jewish Council said, “What we’re seeing here is an ecological terror attack.” I kid you not. An ecological terror attack. The Councilman called on the Israeli government to resolve the crisis.
As turd terror heads north in ever increasing concentrations the Israeli technological solution is… wait for it… they want America to fix it! No really—they do. Israel blows up Gaza’s sewage treatment plant and won’t allow repair materials or fuel to run the plant through the blockade. For years they laughed at suffering Gaza. But now, as shoals of turds wash onto beaches like spawning grunion a group of Israeli mayors wrote a letter to US Special Envoy Jason Greenblatt asking the US to clean up Gaza’s sewage catastrophe—that Israel caused—because, “Without providing a fundamental and long-term solution to the crisis, it will be coming to our doorstep.” Reading between the lines, of course, what they want is for America to pay for a cleanup.
Should we do it? Sure we should, but with two provisos: 1) We take the money right off the top of the billions we give Israel every year and 2) if Israel blows up Gaza’s water and sewer infrastructure again we stop funding Israel altogether. This would benefit everybody. Gaza gets cleaned up. Israel no longer has Gaza sewage in their beaches and Bibi’s coffee; and America does a good deed in the region for a change.
West Bank sewage to Israel
Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority Environmental unit says all nine major West Bank streams are badly polluted. How bad is it? There are an estimated 178 kilometers of sewage stream flows overall. A 2007 analysis revealed sewage, salts and heavy metals leaching into the mountain aquifer below the West Bank. Contaminated streams are the Kishon, Shechem, Kana, Shilo, Soreq, Mod’in, Michmash, Kidron and Hebron. To take one example, 43 km of Hebron stream is untreated sewage water.
The West Bank produces about 56 million cubic meters of sewage per year, of which an estimated 17.5 mcm/year is excreted by Israeli colonists. In addition, tens of thousands of occupation troopers do their ‘daily duty’ while on duty in the OPT.
Jewish colonists, have taken over and built their settlements on the West Bank’s high grounds. It’s common practice—well documented—for the Jewish colonies to divert their sewage onto Palestinian fields and groves below the colonies. During the last olive harvest, for instance, Jewish colonists from the illegal colony of Elon Moreh stole the Palestinian’s olives (Palestinian farmers in that place are not allowed in their orchards except to harvest but Jews are allowed to go into those Palestinian orchards anytime), then the Jews dumped their sewage down the hill onto the olive trees. This treatment doesn’t just make the Palestinian’s lives harder. It renders the land unusable, and eventually the stuff is carried to streams by surface runoff or seeps down into everyone’s water table.
Israeli sewage impacts in Israel, the OPT, Jordan, Syria
Do you suppose a place that irrigates crops with treated wastewater; a place where sewage has tested positive for Wild-type poliovirus-1 (WPV 1), hepatitis, and other ills, would be anything less than hyper-vigilant? Or, do you imagine they’d deliberately dump massive amounts of sewage into waterways? Well, actually it’s… number two.
Israelis deliberately dumping their own sewage into their own waters is a strange but recurrent phenomenon. In 2015 Ashdod’s pumping station needed to fix a pipe so they simply diverted the main sewage line sending tens of thousands of cubic meters of sewage into Lachish stream. Nahal Kidron, which was called the most polluted stream in Israel and the West Bank in 2015, flows with a foul composition largely of untreated sewage from illegal Israeli Jewish colonies, Palestinian villages in East Jerusalem, and from villages the occupied West Bank. The gunk runs into a reservoir where part of it is treated and piped to illegal Israeli settlements to water Jewish date groves in the occupied Jordan valley. North of Jordan valley, in 2017, thousands of cubic meters of sewage killed fish and turtles in Galilee’s Betzet stream.
Nahal Sorek is a wadi that Israel made flow year round by the technological advancement of running Jerusalem’s sewage through it. The Israeli Water Authority bought into a scheme to build holding reservoirs for treated sewage which would later be pumped to irrigate Israeli crops. Things went down the drain in 2016 when Israel had to shut down the country’s largest desalination plant after sewage from the reservoirs was deliberately channeled into Soreq stream. It seems the Water Authority had decided to stop paying for holding reservoirs, filth was piling up, so someone made the decision to press the lever and flush the mess out to sea.
A dangerous modern component of sewage is prescription drugs that people either pass through their digestive systems or flush down the toilet without using. Sewage samples turn up estrogen from birth control pills, heart medications, ketamine, hydrocodone, barium enemas and, especially in Israel, the central nervous system stimulant Ritalin. 904,453 Israelis, over 10 ½ percent of everyone in the country, are on Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) or Ritalin-type drugs. Side effects of this drug may include psychosis, aggressive behavior, anxiety, nervousness, confusion, agitation, and… Hey! This might explain some things… Drugs end up concentrating in and around the waterways, where they can mix and synthesize with other prescriptions and a variety of petro chemicals, industrial solvents and fertilizers. Most sewage treatment plants don’t filter out even half of the drugs that go through them.
Israel’s poor performance with sewage is made worse by politics as the country has notoriously used money it owes the Palestinians to build sewage treatment plants on the Israeli side of the Green line. It works this way: decades ago, as part of the Oslo accords, Palestinians agreed to a five-year interim plan, part which included a scheme where Israel would collect tax money on behalf of the Occupied Territories then turn what was collected over to the Palestinian Authority. Israel is still collecting that money all these years later and, instead of turning the money over so the PA can treat Palestinian and Jewish colonist sewage at the source, Israel lets it contaminate the OPT and tries to clean it up when it reaches the Jewish state.
Israeli Beach Sewage
In the winter of 2016-7 various Israeli beaches were closed for a total of 310 days. On a beach where people were swimming and surfing, the Israeli environmental group Zalul, found fecal coliform to be 69,000 per 100 ml of sea water. That’s over 170 times the level where authorities are supposed to close the beach. Also in 2017 an Israeli main sewage pipe collapsed closing seven beaches near Tel Aviv.
In 2015 six Tel Aviv and Herzliya area beaches were closed until further notice after the authorities decided to deliberately pump 180,000 cubic meters of sewage runoff into the sea while the Israelis were making beach ‘upgrades.’ The following year sewage samples taken around Tel Aviv between December, 2016 and June, 2017, showed 7 of 15 were positive for hepatitis A virus. Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach has closed multiple times because of fecal contamination. The technological solution in 2011 was to run a sewage pipe to a marina where nobody swims and discharge the stuff there.
In 2010 Israel’s Health Ministry shut down fifteen public beaches in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Herzliya, and Ashdod because of sewage contamination. Apparently the technological solution to Israel’s aging sewage system is to pump the stuff out to sea when the system becomes overwhelmed. Environmentalists also accuse industrial plants of regularly pumping chemical waste into the sea.
In 2017, years of clean-up work were undone in a few days by a massive deliberate raw sewage discharge into the Yarkon from a treatment plant that, its operators claim, was being inundated by four times more sewage than the plant was designed to treat.
Countries promoting themselves as a tourist destination, find protracted beach closures are terrible for the image. After hearing that surfers at an Israeli beach had burning throats and other symptoms from contaminated seas, Maya Jacobs, Executive Director of the Israeli environmental NGO Zalul developed a Smart phone app, with help from the public, the road-navigation app developer Waze, and the Health Ministry, that sends users a pop-up alert on pollution conditions when they get within 12 miles of a waterway.
“Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe.
That all was lost.” John Milton 1608-1674, Paradise Lost
Recognition 6: Sewage: Selected Sources
07.17.2013 Sanitation recognized as a basic human right United Nations Israel signed on with 122 other countries to recognize Sanitation for All, as a basic human right.
07.30.2017 Watch: thousands of fish found floating in Yarkon river Jerusalem online by Becca Noy. Fish killed by sewage iand pollution n the river.
5.19.2017 Israel launches criminal investigation into water treatment execs over sewage spill Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat “ongoing illegal pumping of raw sewage into the Yarkon River Basin.”
06.09.2017 Swimming in sewage. World ignores Gaza’s waste water crisis Middle East Eye. Because of the Israeli siege there’s no fuel, because of no fuel the power plants can’t operate, because the power plants can’t operate the sewage treatment plants can’t operate, because the sewage treatment plants can’t operate 11 million liters of sewage runs out of Gaza every day, because 11 million liters of sewage goes into the Mediterranean from Gaza the tide carries it north to foul Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israel’s desalination plants. Gaza has the 13th highest growth rate in the world (4.2%/yr). with a fertility rate of 4.4 children per woman. In 1997 there were 300,000 in Gaza. Today there are 2 million. 75% of the population is under 25 years old.02.28.2011 Sewage without borders Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
11.13.2017 Sewage pours into northern Betzet stream, kills fish and turtles. Jerusalem Post by Max Schindler. Thousands of cubic meters of sewage into Betzet stream.
06.09.2017 Swimming in sewage. World ignores Gaza’s waste water crisis Middle East Eye. Because of the Israeli siege there’s no fuel, because of no fuel the power plants can’t operate, because the power plants can’t operate the sewage treatment plants can’t operate, because the sewage treatment plants can’t operate 11 million liters of sewage runs out of Gaza every day, because 11 million liters of sewage goes into the Mediterranean from Gaza the tide carries it north to foul Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israel’s desalination plants. Gaza has the 13th highest growth rate in the world (4.2%/yr). with a fertility rate of 4.4 children per woman. In 1997 there were 300,000 in Gaza. Today there are 2 million. 75% of the population is under 25 years old.
10.24.2018 Israeli colonists flood dozens of Palestinian olive trees with sewage International Middle East Media Center. Jews from illegal colony of Elon Moreh flooded Palestinian olive trees with Jewish sewage. The Palestinians are only allowed onto their own land twice a year to harvest olives and prune trees. That’s when they discovered the sewage and that Jewish colonists had stolen the crop from many of the trees because the Jews can go on the land at any time.
10.11.2017 Pollution kills thousands of fish in Lachish River. Ynet news. by Ilana Curiel. A local diver reports that this, “happens almost every year.” Authorities diverted river to Mel Ami beach supposedly to make an escape route to the sea for fish that were still alive. Unsure exactly what is killing the fish, authorities warned people to stay away from that beach.
03.17.2016 Gaza Sewage Crisis is a ticking time bomb for Israel The Jerusalem Post by Michelle Maealha Grossman. [nothing could be more Israeli than this headline.]
07.06.2017 Gaza sewage forces shutdown of Israeli beach The Jerusalem Post by Sharon Udasin and Tovah Lazaroff
08.31.2017 Israeli mayors call on U.S. to solve Gaza electricity crisis CNN by Oren Liebermann and Baeer Salman. ‘Electricity crisis’ is the sanitized-for-US-viewers euphemism to describe Gaza’s sewage treatment collapse.
08.20.2017 Al Mezan: Suspected cause of death of child is sea pollution and delayed medical referral International Middle East Media Center A little five-year-old boy, Mohammed Salim Al-Sais, died in Gaza City. Because of extreme heat, and no air conditioning due to the Israeli siege cutting off fuel, the boy’s parents took their kids to the beach, which is rank with sewage, also courtesy of the Israeli siege. The kids got sick. Next morning when the boy wouldn’t rouse his parents took him to hospital. Diagnosis was Ekiri Syndrome—a lethal toxic encephalopathy (brain swelling) from swimming in the water. Doctors didn’t have what they needed to treat the boy—also because of the siege. Parent’s couldn’t get permission cross the Israeli check points to get him to Palestinian hospital in Ramallah. After a week, in intensive care he slipped away, and died.
08.07.2017 Reign of sewage in biblical valley may be coming to an end Reuters. Ari Rabinovich. 12 million cubic meters of sewage per year, [33,000 cubic meters per day], flow down from Jerusalem and West Bank. Some is collected in a large pool that is used to water sewage resistant date trees. [yuk]
0.7.20.2017 Ongoing hepatitis A among men who have sex with men (MSM) linked to outbreaks in Europe and Tel Aviv area, Israel, December 2016-June, 2017 Europsurveillance, Yael Gozlan, et al. of 19cases of hepatitis A virus (HAV), 17 were identified in Tel Aviv area. 7 of 15 sewage samples were HAV positive.
07.03.2017 Israel shuts down beaches along central coastal city over sewage spill Haaretz by Ido Efrati sewage pipe collapse closes eight beaches.
06.25.2017 How safe are Israel’s beaches? The Jerusalem Post by Sigal Ben David.
04.21.2017 Israel pumps sewage water onto lands in Bethlehem. Eye on Palestine. Jewish military camps have been pumping sewage onto Palestinian lands. Landowners have been filing complaints to Jewish authorities since 2002, to no avail. Farmers don’t plant there so as not to contaminate their crops. The sewage harms local plants and animals but encourages rats and flies which spread disease.
05.06.2017 UN envoy warns of dire crisis as Gaza faces power cuts, gallons of raw sewage pouring into the sea. “An environmental disaster for Israel, Egypt, and Gaza is in the making.” Nicolay Mladenov, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.
05.11.2017 Gordon beach closed after sewage discharge Ynet news Gordon Beach closed again from sewage because of pumping station failure. Article notes the same thing happened last year.
08.25.2016 Gaza is sick of sewage and time is running out to contain it the Middle East Eye by Kiernan Cooke. Ashkelon desalination plant shut down at least four times because of Gaza Sewage this summer.
11.29.2015 Deliberate sewage dump closes 6 Tel Aviv beaches Times of Israel Staff report. Beaches closed because authorities decided to release some 180,000 metric ton’s of sewage while they are making beachfront ‘upgrades.’
09.30.2015 Sewage leak kills thousands of fish near Ashod Haaretz by Ben Zikri. Raw sewage deliberately diverted to stream for 10 hours while workers repaired a pipe. Thousands of cubic meters of sewage killed thousands of fish, stream organisms and animals that drink from the stream.06.18.2015 Baptism by mire? In lower Jordan river sewage mucks up Christian rite.Times of Israel by Melanie Lidman. Christians are being baptized in effluent soup of ‘treated and partially treated sewage, agricultural runoff, fish and pond waste, and saline waters from springs to reduce salinity of the Sea of Galilee.’
11.19.2012 Check this app before you swim in Israel Israel 21c by Karin Kloosterman.
06.05.2012 Sewer runs through river at heart of Israel’s most important Nature reserve. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
07.12.2011 Sewage shuts Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach again Haaretz by IIan Lior Beach closed for third time since May because of high coliform bacteria counts. The city diverted the suspect pipe flow to a marina where nobody swims and reopened the beach.
08.12.2010 Sewage row on Tel Aviv’s beaches The JC by Anshel Pfeffer. Israeli Health ministry closed 15 beaches so far this summer because of excessive sewage. Cities were beaches closed were Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ashdod, and Herzliya.
09.22.2008 ‘Polluted West Bank streams pose threat to a third of Israel’s drinking water’ Jerusalem Post by Ehud Zion Waldoks.
05.11.2017 Gordon beach closed after sewage discharge.YNet News
07.30.2017 The “apolitical” approach to Palestine’s water crisis al-Shabaka by Muna Dajani.
Gist of the article is that well-meaning donors are helping Israel pull the focus off Palestinian water rights.
09.18.2016 Drowning in the waste of Israeli settlers Al Jazeera by Jaclynn Ashly. Jewish colony of Ariel has fouled al-Matua spring and stream with sewage. Ariel, Ariel West and Barkum colonies’ treatment works break down, or over flow often and when they do the Jews aim their sewage down hill at Palestinian villages and streams.The smell keeps people awake at night, mosquitoes are rampant, children get sick from the sewage, sheep die from drinking the water. Local rabbits, deer, foxes and other species that used to live there and come to the spring are gone.
Abu Dis, at Wadi Abu Hurdi, the Jews built a toxic waste dump on Palestinian land. It’s the largest dump on the WB. Chemical smells make people sick. Liquid waste pools kill sheep.Israel closed the dump in 2015 as part of a plan to forcibly evict local residents.The local Bedouins were forcibly relocated to live near the dump in the 1990’s. Now Israel wants to remove them altogether or, alternatively to flatten out the dump, put dirt on it, and make the Bedouins live on top of the dump itself. Finally, Jewish colonists from Qedar dump their swimming pool water into the valley where Palestinian sheep get sick from the chlorine.
Altogether about 19 mcm/yr of the West Bank’s 83 mcm/yr of waste water/sewage is from the illegal colonies (Knesset Research Institute). About 12% of Jewish colony sewage is dumped untreated into Palestinian streams. In 1967 Israel declared that uncultivated land, hilltops where it’s hard to grow things for example, was state of Israel land. Taking over the hilltops also made it easier for Jews to oversee and control the area. As the Jews built settlements they forced the Arabs further down the hills.
06.09.2017 Swimming in sewage. World ignores Gaza’s waste water crisis Middle East Eye. Because of the Israeli siege there’s no fuel, because of no fuel the power plants can’t operate, because the power plants can’t operate the sewage treatment plants can’t operate, because the sewage treatment plants can’t operate 11 million liters of sewage runs out of Gaza every day, because 11 million liters of sewage goes into the Mediterranean from Gaza the tide carries it north to foul Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israel’s desalination plants. Gaza has the 13th highest growth rate in the world (4.2%/yr). with a fertility rate of 4.4 children per woman. In 1997 there were 300,000 in Gaza. Today there are 2 million. 75% of the population is under 25 years old.09.02.2015 Most polluted river in Israel and West Bank to stay filthy because of government vacillation Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat. ‘Nahal Kidron the most polluted water way in either Israel of the West Bank…’ The river is an open sewer for untreated sewage from illegal Israeli Jewish settlements and Palestinian villages in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. The sewage flows into a reservoir where part of it is treated and piped to illegal Israeli settlements to water date groves in the occupied Jordan valley.
07.21.2015 Gaza-Cholera Outbreak AP Video Riyad al-Zaanoun, Chief Palestinian health official, confirmed that 20 cholera cases are in hospital. This is the first cholera outbreak in Gaza for 20 years. Officials are worried that the disease could spread rapidly in Gaza’s overcrowded slums and refugee camps.
06.18.2015 Baptism by mire? In lower Jordan river sewage mucks up Christian rite.Times of Israel by Melanie Lidman. Christians are being baptized in effluent soup of ‘treated and partially treated sewage, agricultural runoff, fish and pond waste, and saline waters from springs to reduce salinity of the Sea of Galilee.’
04.18.2015 Parting the brown sea: Sewage crisis threatens Gaza’s access to water Al Jazeera by Jen Marlowe. [Very well done article] Because of the Israeli siege, Israel destroying infrastructure, and choking electrical and fuel supplies, every single day 24 million gallons of raw or partially treated sewage goes into the Mediterranean off Gaza through seven pipes. It has created massive sewage lagoons, destroyed wetlands, plankton, fish and fisheries. Over pumping Gaza’s only aquifer is resulting in sewage laced seawater intrusion of the aquifer. This is a crisis that the UN says could make Gaza 100% of water undrinkable by 2016 (96% is unfit for human consumption now) and Gaza uninhabitable by 2020. [Article doesn’t mention that prevailing currents flow from south to north up the coast. Meaning that what is coming out a Palestinian’s ass goes right upstream to Israeli desalination plants and into an Israeli’s mouth every time he or she drinks water.]
06.05.2012 Sewer runs through river at heart of Israel’s most important Nature reserve. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat. Nahal Sorek is a Wadi that Israel made flow year round with the technological advancement of running Jerusalem’s sewage through it. The Israeli Water Authority came up with a scheme to build reservoirs that would hold treated sewage which would be later be pumped to irrigate Israeli crops.
09.22.2008 ‘Polluted West Bank streams pose threat to a third of Israel’s drinking water’ Jerusalem Post by Ehud Zion Waldoks. Most West Bank sewage from Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages is untreated. Ariel Cohen of Nature and Parks Authority Environmental unit says all nine major West Bank streams are badly polluted. 2007 analysis revealed sewage, salts and heavy metals leaching into the mountain aquifer below the West Bank. Streams are Kishon, Shechem, Kana, Shilo, Soreq, Mod’in, Michmash, Kidron and Hebron. Palestinians produce estimated 56 million cubic meters of sewage per year, Israeli occupiers produce and estimated 17.5 mcm/year of which 31.5% isn’t treated. 43 km. of Hebron stream is untreated sewage water. There are 178 kilometers of sewage stream flows overall.
Baseline of a Desecrated Land I: Food Supply
Part 1 of a 12 part series examining the ecological impacts of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
How Israel’s water and agricultural technologies don’t even work for Israel
By Dick Callahan | September 30, 2018
“California I hear has a big water problem. We in Israel don’t have a water problem. We use technology to solve it…” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to California Governor Jerry Brown in March 2014.
“If you were planning to grow a new strain of tomato—don’t do it, because there is no water. Stop planting. Stop sowing new seedlings. There’s no water.” Giora Shacham, Chairman of the Israeli Water Authority, to Jewish farmers at a December, 27, 2017 Israeli agriculture conference.
Introduction
A new mythology has it that Israel can save American agriculture and cities from drought. To accept this is to ignore the wilderness instructor’s maxim: “In a survival situation the first thing you need is recognition.”
Our situation is that we in America have 324 million people and our country exports more food every year than any country in the history of the planet. Israel has eight and a half million people, exports almost no food, is entirely dependent on imported food, and every indicator is screaming that the Jewish state ecosystem is a dying patient on the gurney.
We will mostly bypass what suffering Israeli water colonization has caused Palestinians. Instead, this piece looks at what fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly calls ‘Shifting Baselines,’ where some good thing is degraded over time and each successive generation adopts what is in front of them as their baseline reality. At some point an environment emerges that would terrify our ancestors. We Americans should look hard and honestly at Mother Earth groaning under Zionism in today’s Israel and ask, ‘Does America, or any country desiring a good future, want to follow that road?’
Before we start, it helps to know that Israel is 1,600 square miles smaller than the state of Vermont, the West Bank is smaller than St. Lawrence county in New York state, and the entire Gaza Strip is about the size of Bakersfield, California.
To evaluate Israeli land and water use technologies, these twelve recognitions might serve as jumping off points for discussion.
1) Israel cannot feed itself.
2) Israel pretends desalination impacts don’t exist.
3) Israel takes Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian water.
4) Israel’s one and only large, natural water body may be gone within twenty years.
5) Over half of the Jordan river valley’s biodiversity is already gone.
6) Israel and the Occupied Territories are awash in human sewage.
7) West Bank/Israeli streams and groundwater are over exploited and drying up so completely that centuries old trees in the nature reserves are dying of thirst.
8) Israel’s water, forestry, agricultural and military technologies have compromised agricultural land to the point where half of it is depleted and at risk, pesticide use is highest in the OECD, the land is absorbing more heat, and, in the long run, drip irrigation may do more harm than good.
9) Israel is the Flint, Michigan of the Middle East with a history of spectacular toxic spills, dumped military/industrial carcinogens, hundreds of contaminated wells, hundreds of millions of tons of contaminated ground water, millions of tons of oil stored right on the beach, massive unregulated hazardous waste sites built above aquifers, and the world’s oldest nuclear reactor, sitting 18 miles from the Syria-African fault line—with 1,537 documented defects in its aluminum core.
10) Wine, war, industrial tourism, and an unwinnable competition with the faster growing Arab population are the water marks on Israel’s self-portrait.
11) Israel is stuck with being the love-child of 1950’s American water engineers and 1800’s ‘make the desert bloom’ fundamentalism.
12) Israel is a cautionary tale.
Baseline Recognitions
Recognition I: Israel can’t feed itself
“Israel is almost completely dependent on imports to meet its grain and feed needs… Total grain, feedstuff and soybean supply will total about 5.06 million tons.” USDA Foreign Agricultural Service Report, Israel Grain and Feed Annual 02.18.2015 by Gilad Shachar & Orestes Vasquez
Humanity uses most of its fresh water to grow food. Current estimates for Israel’s total annual water consumption run between 2¼ and 2½ billion cubic meters per year. An item missing from that buoyant assessment is the fact that life in the Jewish state depends on importing four times as much, over ten billion metric tons, of virtual water every year via container ships. Virtual water is J.A. Allen’s elegant concept that, instead of trying to understand the value of agricultural commodities in terms of carrots, steaks, bushels of wheat, or how much money those bring in, we should view farm products as compact, transportable carriers embedded with all of the water it took to grow them.
If we include the embedded water footprint of millions of tons of grains/feed/soybeans (GFS) as well as meat, dairy, fruit and other commodities to the equation, Israel’s total annual water requirement quintuples.
The agricultural water footprint for a given commodity includes green water (rainfall that ends up in the root zone), blue water (irrigation from surface and ground water), and grey water (water it takes to dilute agricultural runoff). Below are water footprints of some mainstay Israeli food imports for Market Year 2016.
(commodity in 1,000’s metric tons-Mt) X (tons water to grow a ton)=Water footprint
Corn 1,515 1,222 1,851,330
Wheat 1,758 1,827 3,211,866
Barley 376 1,977 743,352
Soybean Meal 135 2,145 289,575
Rice, milled 115 2,172 249,780
Sorghum 30 3,048 91,440
Rye 4 1,544 6,176
Rape seed meal 140 1,115 156,100
Sunflower meal 240 3,366 807,840
oil, rape seed 44 4,301 189,244
oil, soy bean 374 4,190 1,567,060
sugar, centrifugal 518 865 448,070
total 9,611,833
sources: USDA Foreign Agriculture Service Database. and The Green, Blue and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products. UNESCO-IHE, Institute of water education, Volume 1: Main Report. Value of Water Research Report Series No. 47.
- This 9,701,833 Mt water footprint of foodstuffs multiplied by 1,000 tons—because the commodities in the first column are in units of one thousand tons—gives 9,701,833,000 Mt of water.
Now add Israeli beef imports which average over 75,000 metric tons/year. This is in carcass weight equivalent (CWE) which means the cow after it has been gutted and skinned, with the head, tail, hooves removed. About 70 percent of the CWE is red meat. To find the amount of water in 75,000 Mt of red meat we multiply CWE by 0.7, which gives 52,500 Mt of meat. Global average to raise one Mt of red meat is 15,400 Mt of water. Multiplying 52,500 Mt of meat by the 15,400 Mt of water it took to grow them, we get 808,500,000 metric tons of water sent to Israel every year in the form of red meat. That by itself is a third above Israel’s entire annual desalination production.
Add other agricultural imports like 46,000 tons of various protein powders, soup stock, cheese, fresh fruits, 80 million eggs per year, etc and we’re looking at a total virtual reservoir of over 10.5 billion tons of water that Israel does not have to draw from its own resources.
How much is 10.5 billion metric tons of water?
*It’s enough to drain the Sea of Galilee dry more than 2½ times. (when the SoG is full—which it isn’t and hasn’t been for years.)
* It’s around 4 times larger than the entire annual national water consumption of Israel: the whole enchilada including domestic, industrial, meeting Israel’s agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians, etc.
* It’s enough to flood the entire Gaza Strip 28.8 meters (94.5 feet) deep. — [given that Gaza Strip is 365 square km and each square km = one million square meters] 10,500,000,000 cubic meters of water divided by 365,000,000 square meters] = 28.8 meters. 28.8 meters rounds to 94.5 feet.
*And it’s not enough. Israel’s population is growing at a rate of 1.58 percent per year. Grain imports are growing accordingly. By 2021 the country is predicted to require about 5.5 million tons of GFS alone. As the Mideast droughts continue import numbers will only increase.
The Food Security Index
At this juncture the alert Israel supporter might point with satisfaction to the Economist’s 2017 Global Food Security Index which placed Israel at 19th highest of 113 countries. Future factors, like global warming impacts, dropped Israel down to 24th place in the same report, but still, if the index is correct, either 19th or 24th would imply Israel is doing pretty well, wouldn’t it?
Or maybe not counting millions of Palestinians living there shifts the tally. A follow-up 2017 Economist report written with Italy’s Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, on the Food Security Index, gives an Israeli population of 8.5 million. That number implies Israeli Jewish colonists in the occupied territories (where Israel gets a third of its water and grows a lot of food) are included but the report doesn’t count 2.5 million food-insecure Palestinians who live on that same parcel of land, and also doesn’t include 2 million extremely food-insecure Palestinians in Gaza.
Alternatively, Israel’s place on the index may be artificially high because the index doesn’t adequately survey factors in the Jewish state like the scale of water pollution, erosion, and exhausted agricultural lands.
Then again, the list may just reflect the catastrophic condition of the rest of the world’s food supply. Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, Hungary, Germany, Brazil and the United States supply most of Israel’s food imports. The index places four of these lower in food security than Israel, raising the question, ‘When your food security depends on distant places that are less food secure than you are, how secure is that?’
Israel’s food suppliers have weathered record breaking droughts on multiple years during the past decade. Their aquifers are dropping. Population stress, economic and political upheavals, and armed conflicts like those between Russia and Ukraine, can be expected to adversely impact grain production and distribution.
Another threat, peculiar to Israeli food security, is the growing worldwide boycott (BDS) of the country because of Israel’s 50+ years-long occupation of the Palestinian territories. If one or more of Israel’s food suppliers joins the boycott it will be a serious loss of calories with few, if any, other nations willing or able to take up the slack.
Before leaving this section, it’s fair to say that America imports agricultural products too, a lot of them, but according the USDA, they’re mostly from nearby Canada and Mexico, and mostly things we could get along without like coffee, spices, cut flowers, nursery stock, etc. rather than food we need to keep from starving.
Whatever happened to the early 1900’s Zionist agricultural model?
A good, simple measure of how well a country’s farming methods work is how well the farmers are doing. How many citizens work in agriculture? Do they earn a decent living? Are they viable? Are they happy with their choice of livelihood?
A hundred-twenty years ago when European Zionists began moving enmasse to Palestine to build their dream of a Jewish cooperative agricultural utopia, optimism was in the air. Most people, young to old, worked on the land. Their collaborative farms, kibbutsim and moshavim, were Jews-only community collectives. Other than the racist aspect it was a progressive experiment in many ways.
That social landscape has changed. In 2016 Yaron Solomon, Agricultural Union Settlement Department Director, pointed out that only 15,000 Israelis still live by farming and 20 percent of those are part-time.
That’s less than a third as many farmers as there were in the 1980’s. The average Israeli farmer now is 62-years-old. Young people are leaving the land for better prospects. Says Solomon, “While the Israeli government is crowing about Israeli farmers in order to attract foreign investment, so that doors will be opened to them overseas, in Israel they are being trampled. Israel is using agricultural knowledge to promote its diplomatic relations and foreign relations, but its policy in recent years has a price, and in the future, Israel will have nothing to offer the world… The Government’s policy is slowly eliminating the small growers, and when there is no renewal of fields, there is a shortage of produce and the land becomes arid.”
Israeli farmers hold lively (for farmers) protests where they do things like smash tomatoes on the road out in front of the Knesset (Israeli parliament). Or, a bunch of them drive tractors through the streets of Jerusalem. Or, they hold up traffic at intersections. Their main complaints are inevitably water costs and water allotments.
Israel depends on other countries to grow its food even on farms inside Israel
If most Israelis are getting out of farming, who is working the remaining farms? Heavy, dangerous agricultural grunt labor, like planting, weeding, spraying pesticides, herbicides (commonly with no protective gear), setting up irrigation equipment, harvesting, and loading trucks, is accomplished by some 25,000 ‘guest workers’ from Thailand, who come to Israel on five-year contracts.
They work through extreme summer heat—greenhouses can be over 120 degrees Fahrenheit—and winter cold, especially at night, which the Thais aren’t adapted to. One hundred twenty-two Thai workers died in the five years between 2008 and 2013. Of those, 22 died for unknown causes because no autopsy was done. Five committed suicide. Forty-three formerly healthy, young Thai males died from something Israelis call, “sudden nocturnal death syndrome.” During the same period only 32 Israeli occupation troops died in military conflicts. Chances of dying at work, then, were about four times higher for Thai farm workers than Israeli soldiers.
Noa Shuer from the worker’s rights group Kav LaOved, said her organization did a survey of 500 Thai workers. None of them was being paid minimum wage. Instead Thai workers are told to sign a time sheet they can’t read because it’s in Hebrew. Almost none of them get a copy. They work up to seventeen hours a day, seven days a week with four days a year off. Workers have to pay a fee, sometimes over $10,000, to brokers to work in Israel. Room, board, income taxes, and national health care fees come out of their wages. Living conditions are often squalid with workers being packed into former animal sheds or sheds where farmers keep pesticides and other chemicals.
Jewish farm owners have tremendous power over Thai workers because they know the workers have to pay back broker fees and don’t want to go home with no money. Someone who makes trouble, like asking to be paid what he or she is supposed to get, can be sent packing back to Thailand with no way to collect what they’re owed. Workers might be assigned other duties besides farming. There are many allegations of dangerous living situations and abuse, including sexual abuse. Some workers had no toilet and were told to use the field out back. In one case there was a single female living among forty male workers with a shared shower. Another woman was awarded $53,000 after she proved the farmer she worked for used her as a sex slave.
Clearly the Thais aren’t counted in the 15,000 Israeli farm workers statistic. Neither are thousands of Palestinian workers who, bereft of their own lands, are forced by economic necessity to work on farms in Israel and the occupied territories. The Palestinians also work under bad conditions for lower pay, plus they have to wait at Israeli checkpoints, both going to the fields and returning home, some rise at 3 in the morning to get in line. Palestinians working for Israelis are supposed to have Israeli-issued permits. Those without permits can be paid less money and they can’t complain because they’re working illegally and they might get carted off to jail. For the most part the Israeli government looks the other way.
Hydro diplomacy
Israel’s water technology media stream flows across the digital landscape like the Amazon River. Its headwaters are a combination of hyperbole, wishful thinking, and putting a new hat on old technologies. Headlines like, “… Israel overcomes an old foe, drought’, ‘Israeli innovation could feed the world…’ ‘12 top ways Israel feeds the world’ are the sort of nonsense Americans expected from the National Enquirer back in the 1970’s but people still buy it. So much so that it would be no surprise to read, “Israeli scientists invent fish that can breathe underwater.” or “Israeli scientists discover a plant that makes its own food from sunshine.” AIPAC leader, turned pro-Israel water author, Seth Siegel provides a simple explanation for the media stream. An interviewer asked Mr. Siegel,
Q: “Do you think Israel’s use of water saving technology can help its relationship to the outside world?”
Siegel replied: “Absolutely. I make that point in the book. There are countries that vote against Israel in the UN but when it comes to water, they invite Israel in. It is hydro-diplomacy.”
This is pretty much what the Agricultural Union’s Yaron Solomon quoted Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel saying, “Israeli agriculture is among the most advanced in the world, and we are taking steps to leverage this, both economically and politically…”
How realistic are claims that Israel has solved its water problems with technology? We need look no further than Israeli Agricultural Minister Uri Arial in December, 2017, when he called on the Israeli public to assemble at the Western Wall to PRAY FOR RAIN! Yes, as the fifth straight year of drought came knocking at the Damascus Gate, the country’s agricultural front-man was out there channeling Steve Martin in Leap of Faith. Nothing wrong with a good prayer, but ten thousand years of agriculture has shown we don’t want to bet the farm on it.
And yet here comes undaunted Israel with the audacity, the chutzpah, to claim that they can bail us out of water shortage at the very same time we are shipping them billions of tons of embedded water. American water infrastructure, especially in the West, is heavily subsidized by American taxpayers. The time approaches when we’ll have to evaluate the growing harm of sending Colorado River water, what’s left of the Ogallala Aquifer, and other precious dwindling water resources overseas.
Baseline 1 Selected Sources:
10.2018 Tony Allen. Bio. King’s College, London, website. Good thumbnail description of the virtual water concept and the good Professor, who was awarded the Stockholm World Water Prize (2008), the Florence Monito Water Prize (2013), and the Monaco Water Prize (2013).
03/05/2014 Netanyahu Offers to Help Brown Manage California Drought Bloomberg News by JonathanFerziger https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-05/netanyahu-offers-to-help-brown-manage-california-drought
02.18.2015 USDA Foreign Agricultural Service: Israel Grain and Feed Annual: Prepared by Gilad Shachar & Orestes Vasquez. Approved by Ron Verdonk, Minister-Counselor [From the Executive Summary: “Israel is almost completely dependent on imports to meet its grain and feed needs…Total grain, feedstuff and soybean supply will total about 5.06 million tons.”] *Note that Gilad Shachar did excellent work and his graphs and charts were clear and concise. After 2015 another author took over. [I found subsequent reports are not as clear or complete on imports and, in 2016, contain odd biblical references that I’ve never seen in technical writing.] As a work-around, you can access import/export data for most commodities from any country at USDA Foreign Agricultural Service’s amazing database here: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/app/index.html#/app/home There’s a row of blue bars across the screen. Choose ‘Custom Query’. There are four boxes on the new screen: Commodities, Attributes, Countries, Market Years. Click on the commodity you want to see in the first box, that brings up the Attributes menu in the next box over. Click on ‘Imports’, for Country click on ‘Israel, then select the year you want. Click the green Run Query button on lower right of screen. When you want to search for other commodities, there is a red Back to Query button to click on the upper right screen.
02.12.2016 Will beef export volume increase in 2016? Beef Magazine, by Joe Schuele,(75,000 tonnes beef.)
The National Water Carrier (Ha’ Movil Ha’ Artsi) Shmeil Kantor Formern Chief Engineer and Head of Planning Dep. Mekorot Water Co.
http://research.haifa.ac.il/~eshkol/kantorb.html
Also see: Fanak water: Israel Dr. Clive Lipchin, Director of Transboundry Water Management, Arava Institute for Environmental studies, Israel.
The Green, Blue and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products. UNESCO-IHE, Institute of water education, Volume 1: Main Report. Value of Water Research Report Series No. 47.wfn.project-platforms.com/Reports/Report47-WaterFootprintCrops-Vol1.pdf
2017 Global Security Index: Measuring food security and the impact of resource risk The Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Dupont. Countries lower on the list than Israel, that supply food to Israel: Hungary-30, Brazil-38, Russia-41, Ukraine-63.
2017 Fixing Food: The Mediterranean Region The Economist/Intelligence Unit with Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition.
11.20.2014 Exporter Guide USDA Foreign Agricultural Service—GAIN Report. Prepared by Gilad Shachar, Approved by Orestes Vasquez, Sr. Agricultural Attaché’. damage to Israeli crops from Protective Edge.
2015 data from USDA Economic Research Service Agricultural Trade page https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/agricultural-trade/
10.18.2012 Israel to label all egg imports Green Prophet: sustainable news from the Middle East Israel imports around 80 million eggs/year from Turkey.
12.24.2017 Israeli Agriculture Minister’s solution to drought: mass western wall prayers for rain. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
01.21.2015 A raw deal: abuse of Thai workers in Israel’s agricultural sector. Human Rights Watch Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division.
Israeli Casualties of War Wikipedia is the source of 32 combat casualties.
11.22.2016 Israel’s farmers: an endangered species Globes: Israel’s Business Arena. by Yaron Solomon, Agricultural Union Settlement Department Director. Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel quote, “Israeli agriculture is among the most advanced in the world, and we are taking steps to leverage this, both economically and politically…”
08.12.2015 How Israel will save the world: (sic) an interview with Seth Siegel. Orthodox Union by OR staff. Hydro-diplomacy quote and assertions about drip irrigation.
01.19.2018 Dry, dry, again: After several wet years, big drought is back again in Israel Haaretz by Hagal Amit. This article has the Gioria Shacham quote about don’t grow new tomatoes.
When Government Lies to You
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | April 3, 2019
Fake news is everywhere, and governments can be a rich source. For example, a flyer distributed in the mail last week by Canada’s Revenue Agency – aka the taxman – tells us a pack of lies.
Against the will of elected leaders in four provinces, our federal government has just imposed a carbon tax. The price of gasoline has jumped at the pumps. Home heating costs have risen. This is just stage one, since the tax bite will increase every year.
The flyer begins by declaring:
Pollution has a cost. It impacts the air we breathe, our children’s health, and our economy. That’s why the Government of Canada has put a price on carbon pollution.
What nonsense. Carbon taxes are supposed to discourage people from burning fossil fuels not because of dirty black soot (sophisticated, anti-pollution technologies already exist), but because an invisible, odourless gas gets emitted whenever fossil fuels are used.
The entire climate scare rests on the idea that humanity is adding too much carbon dioxide – CO2 – to the atmosphere, and that this will hypothetically destabilize the climate.
Now is a good time to point out that the Canadian government admits this country is responsible for a mere 1.6 percent of global CO2 emissions. Between them, China (26 percent), America (14 percent), and India (6.4) are responsible for nearly half of all human-produced CO2 (46 percent).
It’s also a good time to remember that, over the past 50 years, experts have predicted one environmental catastrophe after another, none of which materialized. Even smart scientists with powerful computers are terrible at forecasting the future.
The flyer says this measure is all about fighting pollution. But CO2 wasn’t pollution when Al Gore called it that. It wasn’t pollution when Barack Obama called it that. And it isn’t pollution now.
As we all learned in Biology 101, bears, bunnies, and humans all exhale CO2 – which is then absorbed by grass, flowers, and trees. Without CO2, there would be no plants. Without plants, there would be no oxygen for wildlife or humanity to breathe.
CO2 is therefore an integral part of the natural, virtuous circle of life. It does no harm to our air quality. It does no harm to our children’s health.
And whatever harm a climate crisis might one day inflict on Canada’s economy must surely be balanced against the genuine hardship being experienced right now.
Every time people near the bottom of the economic ladder fill up their car in order to get to work, they’re being punished. Every time they pay their heating bill they’re being penalized by their own government. That’s what carbon taxes do.
We can argue endlessly about whether more CO2 in the atmosphere will be perilous over the long term. But the ‘pollution’ angle is total hogwash, dreamed up by political sleazeballs.
A planet without CO2 would be a wasteland, bereft of both plants and animals. Calling CO2 pollution is therefore abjectly dishonest.
Let me say this one more time: If CO2 is pollution, every human being is a non-stop pollution factory. Your neighbour’s newborn. Your grandmother. That blind child.
What a sick, dangerous perspective on the world.
Deadly Dust: US Spreading Radiation and No One Wants to Raise the Issue – Author
Sputnik – April 3, 2019
In a new book named “Deadly Dust – Made in the USA: Uranium Weapons Contaminating the World” German author Frieder Wagner gives a detailed account of how the US has contaminated vast territories using depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and the cover-up strategy of the military, industry and governments, as well as those in the media and politics.
Sputnik: Mr Wagner, in your book “Deadly Dust — Made in the USA: Uranium Weapons Contaminating the World” you talk about the use of uranium ammunition. What is especially dangerous about these weapons?
Frieder Wagner: Weapons containing uranium are produced from nuclear industry’s waste (byproducts of uranium enrichment). If, for example, you want to produce a ton of natural uranium fuel rods for nuclear power plants, you get about eight tons of depleted uranium. It is a source of alpha radiation — radioactive and, moreover, very poisonous. It needs to be stored somewhere, and it is not very cheap.
Sputnik: How can it be used in weapons?
Frieder Wagner: About 30-40 years ago, military scientists made a discovery: uranium is almost twice as dense as lead. If you turn depleted uranium into a projectile and give it proper acceleration, then within a fraction of a second it will pierce through tank armor, concrete or cement.This, of course, was an important discovery. Furthermore, when a shell hits an armored tank the impact produces dust caused by the detonation and the subsequent release of heat energy causes it to ignite and it explodes at a temperature of 3000 to 5000 degrees — incinerating the tank’s interior and destroying it.
Sputnik: But what happens afterwards is also a problem — after the use of DU ammunition, isn’t it?
Frieder Wagner: Yes! After its use depleted uranium, which, as I have already said, is a source of alpha radiation (that is, a radioactive and very toxic substance), burns down to nano-particles that are a hundred times smaller than a red blood cell.
This way, I would say, a sort of metallic gas forms that people can inhale, and which is released in the atmosphere and can be carried anywhere by wind. People who inhale it are at risk for developing cancer.These nano-particles can also penetrate the body of a pregnant woman, overcoming the barrier between a child and a mother, and affect the health of an unborn baby, can infiltrate the brain and by travelling through the bloodstream end up in any human or animal organ. Everything that goes around the planet, sooner or later settles and, of course, contaminates, in particular, drinking water and everything else.
Sputnik: In what wars have DU weapons been used so far?
Frieder Wagner: It was actively used during the first Gulf war in 1991 against Iraq. The military has admitted that about 320 tons were used. Then in the second war in Iraq in 2003 over 2,000 tons were used. In between, it was used during the war in Kosovo, in Yugoslavia (1999), and in Bosnia in 1995, and after 2001 in Afghanistan, where it still used today.
Sputnik: Your book title says Made in the USA, were these weapons only used by the United States?
Frieder Wagner: They were being developed in several countries at the same time. In Germany, they were also working on these weapons, as, of course, in Russia. However, it was used and on such a large scale, only by the US. They were reckless and they did not pay attention to any possible side effects — just as it was back when the first atomic bombs were used. That’s why I called the book: “Deadly Dust — Made in the USA”.
Sputnik: How did you manage to prove the use of this ammunition in the course of your research?
Frieder Wagner: For example, the Serbs gave us maps where they showed the locations where depleted uranium was used. When we were in Iraq, we talked to the locals. We traveled to places where large tank battles took place and took soil samples there, as well as dust samples from tanks. Looking at the tank, you can see whether it was hit by an ordinary projectile or a uranium munition.
Uranium munition leaves dust that burns everything around the hole made by the projectile. So you can determine the use of uranium ammunition. In all soil samples, we found depleted uranium. Unfortunately, uranium-236 was also found in most of the soil and dust samples — it is even more intense and poisonous. Its radiation is even stronger and does not occur in nature. It can only be produced artificially during reprocessing of fuel rods. This means that we were able to prove that the military, the United States and its coalition allies used uranium munitions made from spent uranium fuel rods.
Sputnik: Your book is based on the films The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children of Basra (Der Arzt und die verstrahlten Kinder von Basra, 2004) and Deadly Dust (Todesstaub, 2007). What did you see in Basra during your work on the documentary?
Frieder Wagner: It was horrific and still sometimes haunts me in my dreams. These were children with deformities, which we saw in orphanages in Basra and Baghdad. Some of them had such deformities that they had almost nothing human anymore.
There were children without a head or a nose, either with one eye or without eyes at all, with internal organs in a kind of “sack” outside their body. These ‘creatures’ can live only for a few hours, experiencing terrible pain, and then die.
Sputnik: The film “Deadly Dust” is linked to the book, but it is no longer distributed. WDR channel after this film did not make any more orders? Why is that?
Frieder Wagner: My exposes which I sent to WDR, as well as to the ZDF channels were rejected. Then I contacted an editor at WDR, for which I always made good films and with which I always had good relations with, because these films had doubled or trippled their ratings, and asked him: “What’s going on here?”” And after some hesitation he said: “Yes, Frieder Wagner, someone must tell you this. WDR considers you a ‘difficult’ person. And most importantly, the topics you suggest are especially hard. Right now I’ve got nothing more to tell you.” And that’s when I understood everything. It was in 2005.
I can also tell you the story of how, for example, a female editor at ZDF offered the TV channel a story on the use of these weapons during the war in Yugoslavia and also in Croatia. She wanted to talk about it with me prior so I could share my experiences. But when her boss found out that she wanted to talk to Frieder Wagner, he refused to pay for her trip — without any further explanation.
Sputnik: The so-called “deadly dust” is, as you have already described it, is spread by the wind. So should the use of uranium ammunition, in fact, be considered a war crime and banned?
Frieder Wagner: This is definitely a war crime. The dust from southern Iraq is carried to the north by the constant storms, the so-called desert storms — for example, to Erbil, where it meets the mountains and can’t travel further as the mountains make it difficult for it to go past towards Turkey. So this huge mass of dust settles in Erbil.We, for example, took samples of beef from around Erbil, and this is what we found out: depleted uranium used in ammunition has a characteristic atomic “fingerprint”. In northern Iraq we found the same “uranium fingerprint” as in the south. This means that the uranium dust that had originally settled in the south of Iraq is now also in the north, and children are now getting sick there and are born with deformities. It is now spreading all over the world.
Sputnik: Have the victims of uranium munition use in Kosovo or, for example, in Iraq, tried to go to court?
Frieder Wagner: So far no such attempts have been made in Kosovo or Iraq. Now in Kosovo, a whole group of lawyers are working on a lawsuit against NATO, because after the war they unleashed, people were injured, fell ill and died. The morbidity rate has increased by 20 to 30 percent, and there are more effected each year. So there will be an attempt to file a lawsuit.
Out of the approximately two thousand Italian soldiers stationed in Iraq and Kosovo, 109 have later developed cancer and died — this is proven information. 16 families, out of the 109 dead, filed lawsuits and won their cases. The courts ordered the Italian state or the country’s Ministry of Defence to pay them compensation. Since each cancer was of a different type, the payout amounts differed. But they ranged between 200,000 and 1,4 million euros.
Sputnik: How are things in Germany? Have there been lawsuits filed by the soldiers of the Bundeswehr?
Frieder Wagner: The German Ministry of Defense constantly denies any connection to this. Our soldiers are stationed in Afghanistan and Kosovo. About 100,000 soldiers served in Afghanistan, and we found out that about 30% of those who returned got sick, although at first, of course, they do not notice this. If they subsequently marry and have children, then there’s a great risk that their children will have disabilities.These children will have the same toxic substances in their DNA as their parents. And this will be passed on for several generations — from children to grandchildren and to great-grandchildren.
Sputnik: But none of these people ever filed a lawsuit?
Frieder Wagner: In Germany there were no such precedents. About 600 servicemen went to court in the United States who could not appeal on their own behalf, but they filed lawsuits on behalf of their children who were born with developmental disabilities. And we’re not talking about a mere 90 or even 900 million pay out, but about billions of dollars now. The United States, of course, will try to delay the adoption of a ruling as much as it is possible and hope for a “biological” resolution of the situation — that is, that the plaintiffs will simply die.
US Atomic Plants ‘Dodging Radioactive Bullets’ as Floodwaters Submerge Midwest
Sputnik – March 21, 2019
With heavy rainfall inundating the US Midwest, nuclear power plants risk being flooded. However, the plants continue to operate at full power, resulting in the potential for “unnecessary, extremely high risk” accidents, according to Kevin Kamps, the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at the organization Beyond Nuclear.
“In Nebraska alone, you’ve got the Offutt Air Force Base, which is the home of the [US] Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear arsenal of the US, and it’s largely flooded,” Kamps told Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear hosts Brian Becker and Nicole Roussell.
According to Offutt Tech. Sgt. Rachelle Blake, around 60 buildings on the south end of the base, including the 55th Wing headquarters and two aircraft maintenance hangars, were flooded over the weekend by as much as eight feet of water. The 55th Wing is a US Air Force unit assigned to Air Combat Command.
“You’ve also got two nuclear power plants in Nebraska. You’ve got Fort Calhoun, north of Omaha on the Missouri [River], which thankfully shut down in 2016. And the reason it shut down was the previous historic floods on the Missouri in 2011 damaged the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant, [so] that it never recovered. But you’ve also got the Cooper atomic reactor south of Omaha on the Missouri River, and yet again, for the second time, in 2011 and [now in] 2019, Cooper — which is being run by Entergy Nuclear of New Orleans on behalf of a public utility in Nebraska — ran at 100 percent power levels through these historic floods. For the industry, that’s the bragging point: ‘Look at what we can do,'” Kamp noted.
“It’s a Fukushima-like situation, where you’re dealing with a natural disaster and insisting upon operating at 100 percent power levels with your atomic reactor. Granted, Japan didn’t know that natural disaster was coming. And so, the danger is, if you lose power from the grid, and then your emergency diesel backup generators fail, you can’t control the cooling on those hellishly hot atomic reactor cores,” Kamp explained.
“In addition to the reactor risks, there are radioactive risks, which are still present at the shut-down Fort Calhoun but also at Cooper, both in the storage pools, which can go up in flames, but also in the dry casks that could be impacted by the floods. They [Omaha Public Power District, Entergy Nuclear] might have dodged a bullet again in 2019, but they keep taking these unnecessary, extremely high risks with their operations,” he added.
In March 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan’s Ōkuma, Fukushima prefecture, was hit by a 46-foot tsunami triggered by a 9.0-magnitude offshore earthquake. The natural disaster crippled the facility’s cooling system and resulted in the leakage of radioactive materials, hydrogen-air explosions and eventually the plant’s shutdown, Sputnik previously reported.
On Monday, the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) announced that the Cooper Nuclear Plant was continuing to operate safely.
“We are operating at full power, and the water is receding… and we expect the water level to continue dropping,” NPPD spokesman Mark Becker said, according to Reuters. In addition, he noted that the plant was 899.75 feet above sea level Monday morning, below the 901.5 feet that would require the nuclear reactor to shut down.
“Back in 2011… there are about a half dozen major dams upstream of Fort Calhoun on the Missouri River, any one of which failing could have have created a domino effect of failures with the other dams, and it could have sent a very deep wall of water coming down the Missouri River. And the Fort Calhoun power plant could have been inundated under very deep water,” Kamp explained.
“It happened at Fukushima. All of a sudden, an hour after that earthquake in Japan, that wall of water — 45 feet deep — hit the nuclear plant and hit the last remaining power sources, which were the emergency diesel generators. So, here in Nebraska, there is renewed potential for those upstream major upstream dams to fail, [to] send a wall of water down. Another danger at both Fort Calhoun, with the stored waste, but also at Cooper with the operating reactor and the stored waste: if local levees were to fail and allow flood waters to inundate the sites even deeper,” Kamp noted.
“At Fort Calhoun, just now, they came within one foot, nine inches of having to shut down under their own very loose and weak protocols. That’s how close it came. So, it’s incredible the risks that they [NPPD, Entergy] take. If they had any responsibility, they would shut down.”
According to Becker, the US Army Corps of Engineers has reduced water releases from the Gavins Point Dam to decrease the risk of flooding downriver.
“And to give some credit, Fort Calhoun in 2011 did shut down months ahead of time — in April — because they saw what was coming with the snow melts; they had enough predictions. They [NPPD] shut down months ahead of time, and even though they did, they were so damaged by the floods, and they still screwed up and had a fire burning within the turbine building that nobody dealt with. That final straw of the fire not being dealt with days on end, that’s what led to the final shutdown several years later. Dodging radioactive bullets is not fun stuff, but it’s kind of what they do for a living,” Kemp noted.
The Media & the WWF Torture Scandal
News organizations have turned their own journalists into WWF cheerleaders
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | March 20, 2019
Click for source
Earlier this month, BuzzFeed published a three-part exposé about violent goons, funded and equipped by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who persecute indigenous communities. In the words of the BuzzFeed journalists, the WWF
works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. As recently as 2017, forest rangers at a WWF-funded park in Cameroon tortured an 11-year-old boy in front of his parents…
UK politicians have called on the government to respond to these “appalling and deeply disturbing” allegations. US senator Patrick Leahy has likewise demanded an “immediate and thorough review” of the support the WWF receives from American authorities.
BuzzFeed reports that the UK Charity Commission will be asking the WWF “serious questions.” Also in the UK, explorer Ben Fogle has stepped away from his public relationship with this organization, due to these “very serious human rights allegations.”
Longtime WWF supporter, actress Susan Sarandon, says she expects an “in-depth investigation” to take place.
Likewise, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has called on the WWF to “provide the public with a full and transparent accounting of their findings.” (In 2016, DiCaprio – who sits on the WWF’s Board of Directors in the United States, symbolically ‘shared‘ his 2016 Golden Globe award “with all the First Nations peoples represented in this film and all the indigenous communities around the world.”)
Despite the celebrities, the prominence of the WWF brand, and the serious nature of these allegations, much of the media has chosen to ignore this story. Could that have anything to do with the fact that news organizations have spent the past decade turning their own journalists into WWF cheerleaders?
Here in Canada, our largest circulation newspaper, The Toronto Star, has served as an official sponsor of the WWF’s annual Earth Hour (see this 2008 discussion, and this from 2012).
Think about that cozy, inappropriate relationship – and then ask yourself why The Star has yet to tell its readers about the WWF torture scandal.
Since its Australian beginnings, Earth Hour was a deliberate media creation. Rather than reporting neutrally on current affairs, rather than applying an equally skeptical eye to all large multinational entities (WWF, come on down), news organizations instead promote certain events, certain entities, and certain environmental perspectives.
The flip side of that pathological arrangement is that these same news organizations also have the power to decide what isn’t news. Every single day, they decide what not to tell the public.
Militarised Conservation: Paramilitary Rangers and the WWF
By Binoy Kampmark | Dissident Voice | March 6, 2019
Think charity, think vulnerability and its endless well of opportunistic exploitation. Over the years, international charity organisations have been found with employees keen to take advantage of their station. That advantage has been sexual, financial and, in the case of allegations being made about the World Wild Life Fund for Nature, in the nature of inflicting torture on those accused of poaching.
BuzzFeed, via reporters Tom Warren and Katie J.M. Baker, began the fuss with an investigative report claiming instances of torture and gross violence on the part of rangers assisted by the charity to combat poaching. It starts with a description of a dying man’s last days, one Shikharam Chaudhary, a farmer who was brutally beaten and tortured by forest rangers patrolling Chitwan National Park in Nepal. Shikharam, it seems, had been singled out for burying a rhinoceros horn in his backyard. The horn proved elusive, but not the unfortunate farmer, who was detained in prison. After nine days, he was dead.
Three park officials including the chief warden were subsequently charged with murder. WWF found itself in a spot, given its long standing role in sponsoring operations by the Chitwan forest rangers. As the BuzzFeed report goes on to note, “WWF’s staff on the ground in Nepal leaped into action – not to demand justice, but to lobby for the charges to disappear. When the Nepalese government dropped the case months later, the charity declared its victory in the fight against poaching. Then WWF Nepal continued to work closely with the rangers and fund the park as if nothing had happened.”
The report does not hold back, insisting that the alleged murder of the unfortunate Shikharam in 2006 was no aberration. “It was part of a pattern that persists to this day. In national parks across Asia and Africa, the beloved non-profit with the cuddly panda logo funds, equips, and works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people.”
The poach wars are a savage business, throwing up confected images of heroes and villains. They do not merely involve the actions of protecting animals, but military-styled engagements where fatalities are not uncommon. Anti-poaching has become a mission heralded by the romantically inclined as indispensable, its agents to be celebrated. Desperate local conditions are conveniently scrubbed out in any descriptions: there are only the noble rangers battling animal murderers.
The Akashinga, for instance, are an anti-poaching enterprise of 39 women operating in Zimbabwe who featured with high praise in a report from the ABC in October last year. Who are the victims, apart from the animals they protect? There is little doubt in the minds of the reporters: the women themselves, victims of assault, many single mothers from Nyamakate. Laud them, respect their mission.
It is clear that these women are feted warriors, armed and given appropriate training. They “undergo military-style training in unarmed combat, camouflage and concealment, search and arrest, as well as leadership and conservation ethics.” Their source of encouragement and support is Damien Mander, formerly a military sniper and founder of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation.
Mander’s own laundry list for being a “good anti-poaching ranger”, as featured in an interview to the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre in 2015, is unvarnished: “A passion for nature, strong paramilitary base, and ability and willingness to work in hostile environments for extended periods of time as part of a team.”
The line between the mission of charity and its mutation into one of abuse is tooth fine. In February 2018, The Times, assisted by information supplied by whistleblowers, sprung the lid off Oxfam GB workers in Haiti, suggesting that charity workers had received sexual favours for payment in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. (Nothing like a crisis that breeds opportunity.) It was duly revealed that the organisation had done its level best to conceal the fact. The UK International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt’s statement to Parliament in February took most issue with the latter. “In such circumstances we must be able to trust organisations not only to do all they can to prevent harm, but to report and follow up incidents of wrongdoing when they do occur.”
In the course of its conduct, Oxfam did not, according to Mordaunt, furnish the Charity Commission with a report on the incidents. Nor did the donors receive one. The protecting authorities were also left in the dark on the subject.
Defences have been mounted by those working in the aid sector. Mike Aaronson, writing in August last year, pleaded the case that aid organisations were being unduly singled out, the scape goats of moral outrage and privileged ethics. “Aid organisations carry a lot of risk, operating in chaotic and stressful environments where in trying to do good they can end up doing harm.” In condemning them, it was easy to ignore the fact that they had “done most to address the issue”.
The WWF situation, which has moved the matter into the dimension of animal protection and conservation, has hallmarks that are similarly problematic with the humanitarian sector in general. And the reaction of the organisation has also been fairly typical, laden with weasel-worded aspirations. “At the heart of WWF’s work are places and people who live with them,” an organisation spokesman for WWF UK asserted in response to the allegations. “Respect for human rights is at the core of our mission.” There were “stringent policies” in place to safeguard “the rights and wellbeing of indigenous people and local communities in the places we work.”
Students of the broad field of humanitarian ventures suggest four instances where militarisation takes place. Charities and relief organisations have become proxy extensions in armed conflict (consider Nicaragua and Afghanistan during the 1980s); creatures of embedment (the Red Cross in the World Wars); agents of “self-defence” – consider the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in the twelfth century; and engaged in direct conflict (the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War).
The WWF case suggests a direct connection between the mission of a charitable organisation and its captivation by a dangerous militancy. It has become a sponsor, and concealer, of vigilante action, obviously unabashed in cracking a few skulls in the name of shielding protected species. Along came the networks of informants, surveillance and exploiting local issues. No longer can this be regarded a matter of altruistic engagement in the name of animal conservation; it is a full-fledged sponsorship of a paramilitary operation with all the incidental nastiness such an effort entails.
Japanese PM Abe set to ignore local referendum on US Okinawa military base relocation
RT | February 23, 2019
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said his government will press ahead with the controversial relocation of a US military base on the island of Okinawa, despite local objection.
Okinawa is home to two-thirds of the US’ Japanese bases. Tokyo wants to relocate one of these – US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, located in a densely populated area – to the more remote coastal area of Henoko. While residents near the base have been angered by a series of aircraft accidents, they also oppose the relocation to Henoko, claiming that planned land-reclamation works there will devastate the coral-rich coastal environment.
Okinawans will vote on the relocation on Sunday in a non-binding referendum, with nearly 70 percent expected to vote ‘No,’ according to a poll by Kyodo News. Okinawa’s Governor Denny Tamaki, who campaigned on an anti-base platform last year, has also traveled to Washington DC to lobby against the move.
The Japanese government intends to go ahead with the relocation “without being swayed by referendum results,” Abe told parliament on Wednesday.
Many Okinawans are unhappy with the base’s current location, as well as the planned relocation. They hope a ‘No’ vote will force the government to move the base off the island altogether.
The behavior of US troops stationed on Okinawa has also incensed locals, with the 1995 kidnap and gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl by three US soldiers triggering mass protests on the island. Two cases of rape and murder by US troops again caused protests in 2016. One year later, Okinawa was back in the news after a drunk Marine plowed his truck into another vehicle while running a red light, killing an elderly Japanese man.
Germany Pulls Rank on Macron and American Energy Blackmail
By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | 13.02.2019
It was billed politely as a Franco-German “compromise” when the EU balked at adopting a Gas Directive which would have undermined the Nord Stream 2 project with Russia.
Nevertheless, diplomatic rhetoric aside, Berlin’s blocking last week of a bid by French President Emmanuel Macron to impose tougher regulations on the Nord Stream 2 gas project was without doubt a firm rebuff to Paris.
Macron wanted to give the EU administration in Brussels greater control over the new pipeline running from Russia to Germany. But in the end the so-called “compromise” was a rejection of Macron’s proposal, reaffirming Germany in the lead role of implementing the Nord Stream 2 route, along with Russia.
The $11-billion, 1,200 kilometer pipeline is due to become operational at the end of this year. Stretching from Russian mainland under the Baltic Sea, it will double the natural gas supply from Russia to Germany. The Berlin government and German industry view the project as a vital boost to the country’s ever-robust economy. Gas supplies will also be distributed from Germany to other European states. Consumers stand to gain from lower prices for heating homes and businesses.
Thus Macron’s belated bizarre meddling was rebuffed by Berlin. A rebuff was given too to the stepped-up pressure from Washington for the Nord Stream 2 project to be cancelled. Last week, US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell and two other American envoys wrote an op-ed for Deutsche Welle in which they accused Russia of trying to use “energy blackmail” over Europe’s geopolitics.
Why France’s Macron, at the last minute, attempted to undermine the project by placing stiffer regulations is a curious question. Those extra regulations if they had been imposed would have potentially made the Russian gas supply more expensive. As it turns out, the project will now go-ahead without onerous restrictions.
In short, Macron and the spoiling tactics of Washington, along with EU states hostile to Russia, Poland and the Baltic countries, have been put in their place by Germany and its assertion of national interests of securing economical and abundant gas supply from Russia. Other EU member states that backed Berlin over Nord Stream 2 were Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece and the Netherlands.
Washington’s claims that Nord Stream 2 would give Russia leverage of Europe’s security have been echoed by Poland and the Baltic states. Poland, and non-EU Ukraine, stand to lose out billions of dollars-worth of transit fees. Such a move, however, is the prerogative of Germany and Russia to find a more economical mode of supply. Besides, what right has Ukraine to make demands on a bilateral matter that is none of its business? Kiev’s previous bad faith over not paying gas bills to Russia disbars it from reasonable opinion.
Another factor is the inherent Russophobia of Polish and Baltic politicians who view everything concerning Russia through a prism of paranoia.
For the Americans, it is obviously a blatant case of seeking to sell their own much more expensive natural gas to Europe’s giant energy market – in place of Russia’s product. Based on objective market figures, Russia is the most competitive supplier to Europe. The Americans are therefore trying to snatch a strategic business through foul means of propaganda and political pressure. Ironically, the US German ambassador Richard Grenell and the other American envoys wrote in their recent oped: “Europe must retain control of its energy security.”
Last month, Grenell threatened German and European firms involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2 that they could face punitive American sanctions in the future. Evidently, it is the US side that is using “blackmail” to coerce others into submission, not Russia.
Back to Macron. What was he up to in his belated spoiling tactics over Nord Stream 2 and in particular the attempted problems being leveled for Germany if the extra regulations had been imposed?
It seems implausible that Macron was suddenly finding a concern for Poland and the Baltic states in their paranoia over alleged Russian invasion.
Was Macron trying to garner favors from the Trump administration? His initial obsequious rapport with Trump has since faded from the early days of Macron’s presidency in 2017. By doing Washington’s bidding to undermine the Nord Stream 2 project was Macron trying to ingratiate himself again?
The contradictions regarding Macron are replete. He is supposed to be a champion of “ecological causes”. A major factor in Germany’s desire for the Nord Stream 2 project is that the increased gas supply will reduce the European powerhouse’s dependence on dirty fuels of coal, oil and nuclear power. By throwing up regulatory barriers, Macron is making it harder for Germany and Europe to move to cleaner sources of energy that the Russian natural gas represents.
Also, if Macron had succeeded in imposing tougher regulations on the Nord Stream 2 project it would have inevitably increased the costs to consumers for gas bills. This is at a time when his government is being assailed by nationwide Yellow Vest protests over soaring living costs, in particular fuel-price hikes.
A possible factor in Macron’s sabotage bid in Germany’s Nord Stream 2 plans was his chagrin over Berlin’s rejection of his much-vaunted reform agenda for the Eurozone bloc within the EU. Despite Macron’s very public amity with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Berlin has continually knocked back the French leader’s ambitions for reform.
It’s hard to discern what are the real objectives of Macron’s reforms. But they seem to constitute a “banker’s charter”. Many eminent German economists have lambasted his plans, which they say will give more taxpayer-funded bailouts to insolvent banks. They say Macron is trying to move the EU further away from the social-market economy than the bloc already has moved.
What Macron, an ex-Rothschild banker, appears to be striving for is a replication of his pro-rich, anti-worker policies that he is imposing on France, and for these policies to be extended across the Eurozone. Berlin is not buying it, realizing such policies will further erode the social fabric. This could be the main reason why Macron tried to use the Nord Stream 2 project as leverage over Berlin.
In the end, Macron and Washington – albeit working for different objectives – were defeated in their attempts to sabotage the emerging energy trade between Germany, Europe and Russia. Nord Stream 2, as with Russia’s Turk Stream to the south of Europe, seems inevitable by sheer force of natural partnership.
On this note, the Hungarian government’s comments this week were apt. Budapest accused some European leaders and the US of “huge hypocrisy” in decrying association with Russia over energy trade. Macron has previously attended an economics forum in St Petersburg, and yet lately has sought to “blackmail” and disrupt Germany over its trade plans with Russia.
As for the Americans, their arrant hypocrisy is beyond words. As well as trying to dictate to Europe about “market principles” and “energy security”, it was reported this week that Washington is similarly demanding Iraq to end its import of natural gas from neighboring Iran.
Iraq is crippled by electricity and power shortages because of the criminal war that the US waged on that country from 2003-2011 which destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. Iraq critically needs Iranian gas supplies to keep the lights and fans running. Yet, here we have the US now dictating to Iraq to end its lifeline import of Iranian fuel in order to comply with the Trump administration’s sanctions against Tehran. Iraq is furious at the latest bullying interference by Washington in its sovereign affairs.
The hypocrisy of Washington and elitist politicians like Emmanuel Macron has become too much to stomach. Maybe Germany and others are finally realizing who the charlatans are.
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Book Review
“Davos Can Really Replace the UN”
Inside the book that maps the architecture behind global governance — from the Epstein files to the Pact for the Future
Lies are Unbekoming | April 1, 2026
On June 13, 2019, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum signed a partnership deal to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” That same evening, WEF president Börge Brende — Norway’s former Foreign Minister — had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The Epstein files, released January 2026, contain an exchange between the two from the previous year. Epstein to Brende: “Davos can really replace the UN. C21, cyber, crypto . genetics… intl coordination.” Brende back to Epstein: “Exactly — we need a new global architecture. World Economic Forum (Davos) is uniquely positioned — public private.”
The next day, the UN General Assembly adopted the framework for restructuring global governance.
That sequence — the partnership signing, the Epstein dinner, the candid admission about replacing the UN with a public-private architecture, and then the formal adoption — opens Jacob Nordangård’s The Digital World Brain. Pages two and three. Footnoted to the UN resolution number, the Epstein files, and the General Assembly record.
I keep coming back to it because it captures what this book does that almost nothing else in the independent research space manages. I’ve followed Jacob’s work for years now and interviewed him about his research. Each book peels back another layer of the same institutional architecture, and each time I think he’s reached the limit of what can be documented, the next one goes further. Nordangård doesn’t speculate. He doesn’t editorialize much. He lays institutional actions next to each other in chronological order and lets the pattern announce itself. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- The End of NATO
- 37 days of war on Iran cost US staggering $42bln, tracker shows
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- Under fire, Moscow and Tehran close ranks
- Iran, US receive Pakistan-mediated plan for ceasefire then final deal
- Iran submits demands for end to war as mediators scramble ahead of Trump deadline
- Iran Threatens Retaliatory Strike on Stargate AI Project in UAE
- US sent ‘a lot’ of arms to Iranian protesters – Trump
- Barak Ravid Launders Deception To Allow Trump To Back Off Of His Power Plant Threat – Again
- REWRITING THE RISK? INSIDE THE GOVERNMENT’S VACCINE SAFETY MESSAGING
- If Americans Knew
- Trump poised to “blow everything up” (ie. commit war crimes) in Iran – Daily Update
- In Iran, Israel-US take aim at “reason, research, and freedom of thought” – Daily Update
- US loses planes over Iran, Israel downgrades Lebanon war goals – Daily Update
- Israel Is Blocking Palestinians from Easter at Church Where Jesus Resurrected
- Plot to assassinate Palestinian activist follows harassment campaign promoted by Zionist groups and elected officials
- Prominent New York synagogue hosts presentation on why U.S. Jews should support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza
- Tapper vs. Piker: Is the CNN Anchor Auditioning for David Ellison?
- Shouldn’t Democrats Be Able to Condemn Genocide?
- Israel-US kill negotiators, destroy civilian structures, but Iran’s military capabilities still largely intact – Daily Update
- ‘War crime’: Global condemnation as Israeli ministers celebrate death penalty law targeting Palestinian prisoners
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
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