Israel Campaigns Against Global Free Speech
The Bilzerian Report | February 20, 2014
Alarmed at the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiments on the internet, Israeli politicians recently called for nations around the world to enact legislation prohibiting criticism of Jews and Israel. Lobbying to outlaw global free speech is nothing new for Israel, however; it has been in the business of criminalizing speech for decades.
Israel is in the precarious position of receiving tens of billions of dollars in aid every year from nations that purport to support democracy, while simultaneously oppressing the Palestinian people and perpetrating what Nobel Peace Prize winners Bishop Desmond Tutu and President Jimmy Carter deem an apartheid. If the American or European people ever knew that their tax dollars where being used in such a way they would surely cut Israel off. In order to conceal this truth and stifle any criticism, Israel and its lobbyists rely on sympathy from the Holocaust and labels of anti-Semitism to discredit critics. Even US Secretary of State John Kerry was recently called an anti-Semite for supporting a peaceful resolution to the Jewish/Palestinian conflict. Kerry is not alone however, President Obama, and just about anyone who has ever opposed an Israeli policy has been labeled anti-Semitic by his enemies. In order to add teeth to these labels, Israel lobbyists around the world lobby endlessly to criminalize anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
Israel’s threat of forcing world governments to enact new laws against free speech should not be taken lightly. Israel and its lobbyists have already succeeded in enacting stiff anti-racist laws in most Western countries. These laws have been used on numerous occasions to jail academics, pro-Palestinian activists, and also individuals who have spoken provable facts that are deemed anti-Semitic “canards.”
In Australia, Jewish groups lobbied successfully to outlaw holocaust study and “hate speech.” As with most laws regulating speech and academic study, it has been routinely abused, and is now on the list for repeal. In fact, the law is so tied to Jewish lobbying, that the Jewish newspaper Haaretz published an article: Australian Jews brace for a fight against the repeal of hate laws.
In Canada, Jewish groups lobbied for the enactment of hate speech regulation, and defend its use today. In 1983, Israel lobbyists filed a complaint against Ernst Zundal over a book he had written. He was tried several times, his citizenship application in Canada denied (even though he had resided there for decades), he was detained for two years without trial, and eventually deported to Germany where he was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment.
In France, Israel lobbyists publicly complained about comedian Dieudonne’s parodies of Israel and the holocaust. His home was raided, his shows banned, and hefty fines were imposed. England also followed suit and barred Dieudonne’s entrance into the country. In 2003, the French legislator and Israel lobbyist Pierre Lellouche managed to push through a law which extends the definition of discrimination to include nationalities so anti-Israel activists could be jailed. In 2009, the Lellouche law was used to convict 20 anti-Israel activists.
In England, Jewish lobbying efforts successfully enacted strict hate speech laws, and in Austria, acclaimed historian David Irving was incarcerated after Israel lobbyists complained about his academic work. The European Jewish Parliament and the chief Israel lobbyist in Belgium recently called for similar laws to stifle criticism of Israel. According to the Canadian Jewish News article French Vigilance on anti-Israel speech provoking backlash, Israel lobbyists are also attempting to enact similar legislation in the Netherlands.
In America, the Israel lobby has been fighting mightily for years to prohibit hate speech. Those efforts have been unsuccessful thus far, but they have managed to enact hate crime legislation. As Abe Foxman of the ADL noted, the social consequences in America for bigotry against Jews are so severe, (given disproportionate Jewish influence in government, media, finance, higher education, professional sports, etc…) that anti-Israel speakers often see graver consequences than the criminal sanctions they would face in Europe. For example, if one were to be labeled an “anti-Semite,” even if the allegations were wholly unsubstantiated, he would most likely be fired and ostracized from society.
One has to realize that Israel’s efforts having nothing to do with hate speech, anti-Semitism or holocaust denial, but are rather about stifling critical speech that affects Israel and its lobbyists. For example, we know that Israel and its lobbyists are not offended by holocaust denial because Israel and its lobbyists are the leading proponents of Armenian holocaust denial in the world today. Israel should also not be particularly offended by anti-Semitism, because Israel is actually one of the most racist and anti-Semitic nations on the planet.
Today, Israel is furiously enacting anti-free speech laws, hiring internet trolls to spread propaganda and disinformation, and even asking the Jewish owners of social media websites Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, and Youtube to remove material Israel does not like, regardless of its truth or merit. Israel has also campaigned against political parties it does not like in Greece, Hungary, and Ukraine. In Greece, the anti-Israel Golden Dawn Party was disbanded and its leaders arrested for no legal reason. This is a dangerous precedent that threatens world wide freedom and must be combated immediately, before speaking out against such Israeli efforts is also illegal.
Laws protecting free speech are put in place specifically to protect speech that powerful groups find objectionable. Otherwise, there is no free speech and it is just a matter of time before the list of prohibited phrases grows to include everything the powerful oppose. If it’s illegal to speak about certain races, the disabled or elderly, then why not government employees, and then the rich, or poor, and so on? Either speech is totally protected or it is not protected at all. The point of speech protection is to protect the most unpopular forms of speech. Popular forms of speech obviously need no protection.
ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption
By Jacob Hoffman-Andrews | EFF | November 11, 2014
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1
By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco’s PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.
This type of STARTTLS stripping attack has mostly gone unnoticed because it tends to be applied to residential networks, where it is uncommon to run an email server2. STARTTLS was also relatively uncommon until late 2013, when EFF started rating companies on whether they used it. Since then, many of the biggest email providers implemented STARTTLS to protect their customers. We continue to strongly encourage all providers to implement STARTTLS for both outbound and inbound email. Google’s Safer email transparency report and starttls.info are good resources for checking whether a particular provider does.
Several Standards for Email Encryption
The SMTP protocol, the underpinning of email, was not originally designed with security in mind. But people quickly started using it for everything from shopping lists and love letters to medical advice and investigative reporting, and soon realized their mail needed to be protected from prying eyes. In 1991, Phil Zimmerman implemented PGP, an end-to-end email encryption protocol that is still in use today. Adoption of PGP has been slow because of its highly technical interface and difficult key management. S/MIME, with similar properties as PGP, was developed in 1995. And in 2002, STARTTLS for email was defined by RFC 3207.
While PGP and S/MIME are end-to-end encryption, STARTTLS is server-to-server. That means that the body of an email protected with, e.g. PGP, can only be read by its intended recipient, while email protected with STARTTLS can be read by the owners of the sending server and the recipient server, plus anyone else who hacks or subpoenas access to those servers. However, STARTTLS has three big advantages: First, it protects important metadata (subject lines and To:/From/CC: fields) that PGP and S/MIME do not. Second, mail server operators can implement STARTTLS without requiring users to change their behavior at all. And third, a well-configured email server with STARTTLS can provide Forward Secrecy for emails. The two technologies are entirely compatible and reinforce each other. The most secure and private approach is to use PGP or S/MIME with a mail service that uses STARTTLS for server-to-server communication.
There are several weak points in the STARTTLS protocol, however. The first weakness is that the flag indicating that a server supports STARTTLS is not itself encrypted, and is therefore subject to tampering, which can prevent that server from establishing an encrypted connection. That type of tampering is exactly what we see today. EFF is working on a set of improvements to STARTTLS, called STARTTLS Everywhere, that will make server-to-server encryption more robust by requiring encryption for servers that are already known to support it.
It is important that ISPs immediately stop this unauthorized removal of their customers’ security measures. ISPs act as trusted gateways to the global Internet and it is a violation of that trust to intercept or modify client traffic, regardless of what protocol their customers are using. It is a double violation when such modification disables security measures their customers use to protect themselves.
- 1. If you have netcat (nc) installed, you can test your connection for STARTTLS downgrades using the commands shown here.
- 2. Desktop email clients like Thunderbird generally send outbound email on a TLS-wrapped port, like 587, and do not rely on STARTTLS. But there are some exceptions, like the software used by the Golden Frog engineer who spotted an issue on AIO Wireless.
British Spying Is Our Problem, Too
By Alex Sinha | ACLU | November 10, 2014
The chilling effect of surveillance may be spreading across the Atlantic.
We learned last week that GCHQ – the U.K. equivalent of the NSA – permits its employees to target the communications of journalists and lawyers. That revelation has serious implications for the work of both groups.
American surveillance is already impacting the work of U.S.-based journalists and lawyers. As the ACLU and Human Rights Watch documented in a recent report, the effects are not pretty. National security and intelligence journalists have been struggling to develop and maintain relationships with increasingly skittish sources, and lawyers are losing the freedom to communicate with clients, co-counsel, and witnesses without exposing confidential information to the government.
We depend on the press to keep us informed, helping ensure the government’s accountability to the governed. But when journalists are vulnerable to surveillance, that accountability suffers.
Attorneys are also indispensable, and their right to communicate privately with clients has long been recognized both in domestic and international law. When attorneys can’t communicate freely with clients, they can’t build trust or develop strategy. That weakens important due process rights and diminishes our confidence in the verdicts issued by our justice system.
Like the United States, the U.K. conducts significant surveillance, including tapping fiber-optic cables to gain access to enormous volumes of Internet traffic. The revelations from last week show not only that the communications of journalists and lawyers get caught up in the U.K.’s dragnet, but also that this may happen by design.
The breadth and poor regulation of the U.K.’s surveillance practices are a problem for everyone – including Americans. Here’s why.
The United States has extensive intelligence-sharing arrangements with key allies like the U.K., and through them has access to information that it can’t legally collect on its own. Sharing flows both ways, so the U.K. also has unfettered access to much “raw” or unfiltered U.S. surveillance data.
As far as we know, nothing stops the United States from accessing information from GCHQ that is derived from targeting journalists or lawyers. In fact, we’ve seen this movie before. Last February, we learned that an Australian intelligence agency gave the NSA privileged communications between a U.S.-based law firm and its clients. We’d be foolish to assume anything different happens between the United States and the U.K. – which, like Australia, is one of the NSA’s “Five Eyes” surveillance partners.
What happens in Britain reaches us, too, and U.K. surveillance programs almost certainly collect many Americans’ communications. But we also don’t want our government targeting U.K. journalists and lawyers by proxy.
Considering the extensive intelligence cooperation between our two countries, we should all be concerned about the United States outsourcing practices we would reject at home.
Millions of Cell Phone Users’ Internet Activity Secretly Tracked for Years by Verizon and AT&T
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | November 6, 2014
Verizon and AT&T have been snooping on millions of Americans’ online browsing habits for years, all without users’ knowledge or approval.
The activity involves the use of “supercookies” placed on unencrypted web pages by the telecommunications companies that can’t be turned off by cell phone users, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Even customers who don’t use either provider can have their browsing monitored. If a user connects through a Verizon tower, their web use habits are subject to scrutiny as well. As many as 100 million people have had their internet browsing tracked by the two providers.
EFF contends that the use of the supercookies, or Unique Identifier Headers (X-UIDH), violates the federal Communications Act. X-UIDH allows Verizon and AT&T to “monitor their customers’ browsing history and create permanent identification profiles of their habits, likes, and interests. Once installed, the supercookies cannot be deleted nor evaded, even if customers clear their cookies, use private browsing modes, disable third-party cookies, or select ‘Do Not Track’ in their settings,” according to Nadia Prupis at Common Dreams.
Verizon customers can opt-out of the program, but the company still collects data on their browsing history. Verizon does not include government or corporate clients in the program, so it apparently has a way to let personal use customers avoid being tracked as well.
Mobile users who want to see if they’re being spied upon can go to AmIBeingTracked.com or lessonslearned.org/sniff.
To Learn More:
Verizon and AT&T Using Undeletable ‘Supercookies’ to Track Customers (by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams )
Verizon Injecting Perma-Cookies to Track Mobile Customers, Bypassing Privacy Controls (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
AT&T Says It’s ‘Testing’ Unique Tracker On Customers’ Smartphones (by Kashmir Hill, Forbes )
Verizon is the Only Telecom that Retains Text Message Content (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Yep, Uncle Sam Still Wants to Log Your Calls
By Rachel Nusbaum | ACLU | November 4, 2014
Today, in a hushed courtroom in Washington, D.C., not far from the now-empty halls of Congress, a federal appeals court heard arguments in Klayman v. Obama, a challenge to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata first revealed by Edward Snowden. If you have ever made a phone call, or received a phone call, this case has implications for your personal privacy and you should pay close attention to what happens next.
The appeal follows a December win for Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer and activist and the plaintiff in the case, where a district court judge ruled the program was likely unconstitutional. Today, government lawyers attempted to argue that this program should be allowed to continue.
The arguments hinged on a central question: Is the warrantless, non-targeted surveillance currently being conducted by the NSA, which is scooping up data on all (or almost all) calls made or received on U.S. telephone networks, a violation of the Fourth Amendment?
The government tried to argue that it is not. They claim that their searches of this massive call record database are reasonable, and that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers one dials.
But, as EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn argued on behalf of both EFF and the ACLU as friends of the court, the government has no right to scoop up such a massive amount of personal information about Americans in the first place.
The truth is, the NSA’s bulk collection of the phone records of all Americans is fundamentally different than putting a trace on the phone of an individual suspected of wrongdoing. The sheer scale of this program means that we are all suspects, or at least potential suspects, in the eyes of our government.
Think about the impact of knowing that your every phone interaction is being logged by the government. This kind of surveillance has even greater implications for lawyers and journalists, who have to worry about protecting the confidentiality of clients and sources. The phrase “chilling effect” seems insufficient to describe the potential loss to our society, to our whole way of life, as we slowly begin to censor ourselves because we know that the government is always monitoring our communications.
This is contrary to the very nature of a democracy, where people are supposed to hold their government to account. Who will be willing to speak out against an abusive government when that government knows all our deepest, darkest secrets?
Governments are by nature interested in acquiring more power, and today, more than ever, information is power. We should not be surprised that the government wants to know who Americans are speaking with, and for how long, and how often. We rely on the Constitution, and on the other branches of government, to provide a check on that desire.
Today, we asked the court to provide that check and to declare bulk collection of American’s telephone metadata unconstitutional.
(To read the ACLU and EFF’s amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, click here.)
Haiti: Protest Leaders Arrested After Marches
Weekly News Update on the Americas | November 3, 2014
Two Haitian human rights groups, the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) and the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), issued a joint statement on Oct. 27 demanding “the release of the political prisoners and the demonstrators arrested illegally” by the government of President Michel Martelly in recent weeks. Police agents arrested 18 demonstrators in Port-au-Prince on Oct. 17 during a march protesting government policies and marking the 208th anniversary of revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ assassination; the police dispersed the demonstration with tear gas and gunshots. After an Oct. 26 march protesting the government’s failure to hold partial legislative elections on that date, the authorities arrested Rony Timothée and Byron Odigé, two leaders in the Patriotic Force for Respect for the Constitution (FOPARC), which backs the Family Lavalas (FL) party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004). In addition to the 20 arrests in Port-au-Prince, police detained three demonstrators in the city of Les Cayes, South department, on Oct. 12 during a protest demanding electricity.
The two human rights groups indicated that the detainees were arrested for their political positions. The government failed to meet the requirement to question the detainees within 24 hours, the groups said, and they expressed astonishment that “accusations of incitation to violence and destruction could be made against demonstrators and opposition activists when no flagrant crime had taken place.” Timothée and Odigé were also arrested in May, on similar charges, but a judge ordered their release a few weeks later [see Update #1224]. On Oct. 30 demonstrators protested the arrests with a march to the prison in Carrefour, on Port-au-Prince’s southwest outskirts, where Timothée and Odigé were thought to be held. A large police group was on hand, backed up by a truck equipped with a water cannon; stores quickly closed, and mothers reportedly snatched children from schools so that they wouldn’t be exposed to tear gas, but the protest ended without any major confrontations. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 10/29/14, 10/31/14)
Revealed: Ferguson no-fly zone was meant to keep media away
RT | November 3, 2014
The 37-mile no-fly zone around Ferguson, implemented after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in August, was designed to keep the press out, phone recordings obtained by AP via the Freedom of Information Act reveal.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a 12-day no-fly zone in compliance with requests from local police after protests erupted in response to the August 9th police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen. At the time, the official reason given for the restriction was safety precautions. However, in audio recordings, officials are heard admitting that the real reason for the flight restriction was to keep news helicopters from flying over the St. Louis suburb.
The St. Louis Police department maintained that the restricted fly zone was instituted in response to shots fired at a police helicopter, although they were not able to provide an incident report on the shooting, according to AP.
FAA air traffic controllers attempted to reword the flight ban, which had initially banned all air traffic in the 37-mile radius, to let commercial flights operate at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, but prohibit other flights, on August 12th, the day after the restriction was first established.
Effectively putting an end to media presence in the skies, the amended restriction read, “Only relief aircraft operations under direction of St. Louis County Police Department are authorized in the airspace. Aircraft landing and departing St. Louis Lambert Airport are exempt.”
An FAA manger was recorded saying that the police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”
Police wanted to extend the ban following the release of the shooting officer’s identity, which was lifted on August 22nd, reports AP.
Police response to the civic unrest in Ferguson has been widely criticized. Use of tear gas, accusations of excessive force, and journalist arrests were reported.
The recordings raise further concern about police conduct and the compliance of the federal government in suppressing the constitutional rights of journalists.
One FAA official is heard asking a manager about the purpose of the ban, acknowledging the problematic nature of a media specific restriction.
“So are [the police] protecting aircraft from small-arms fire or something?” he asked. “Or do they think they’re just going to keep the press out of there, which they can’t do.”
Michael Huerta, an FAA administrator, denied the national agency was compliant in banning media from Ferguson airspace.
“FAA cannot and will never exclusively ban media from covering an event of national significance, and media was never banned from covering the ongoing events in Ferguson in this case,” he said in statement on Sunday.
READ MORE Top 10 ways Barack Obama has muzzled American media
ISM activist shot in the head with rubber-coated steel bullet
International Solidarity Movement | November 2, 2014
Ramallah, Occupied Palestine – Today during a protest at Qalandia checkpoint, an Italian ISM volunteer was shot in the head with a rubber-coated steel bullet.
The injury is just two centimetres above her left eye.
Photo by IWPS
Giulia, the ISMer, stated, “I was just standing on the side of a street, and the military was firing tear gas at the protesters. I was photographing the army when I felt the bullets strike me, one in the head, and another in my leg, and then all I could see was blood.”
At least one other Palestinian teen was hospitalized after being shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet.
Giulia was immediately transferred to Ramallah Hospital for medical treatment, requiring stitches for her injury.
Approximately 100 people attended the demonstration, where Israeli forces fired stun grenades, tear gas canisters, and rubber-coated steel bullets.
The protest was called today to commemorate the 97th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
FBI pushing for new domestic and global internet hacking powers
By Robert Bridge | RT | October 31, 2014
In a move that watchdog groups are calling an unconstitutional power grab, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly looking to rewrite the espionage rulebook, giving it the authority to hack into computers at home and abroad.
With little public debate and congressional oversight on the issue, the FBI appears set to make the fourth amendment to the Constitution wholly redundant, which protects Americans against “illegal searches and seizures,” The Guardian reported.
The Department of Justice will present its case on November 5 to the Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules.
“This is a giant step forward for the FBI’s operational capabilities, without any consideration of the policy implications. To be seeking these powers at a time of heightened international concern about US surveillance is an especially brazen and potentially dangerous move,” Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in computer law at the University of California, who will participate in next week’s meeting, told the Guardian.
Ghappour warned the passage of the new legislation would represent the greatest expansion of “extraterritorial surveillance abilities since the FBI’s inception.” He told the British daily that “for the first time the courts will be asked to issue warrants allowing searches outside the country.”
Concerning the threat of damaging America’s diplomatic relations, already wobbly following the Snowden revelations, Ghappour went on to add that in “the age of cyber attacks, this sort of thing can scale up pretty quickly.”
Presently, the FBI is reasonably restricted in its power to hack into domestic computers, requiring it to be granted court approval by judges working in the region where the surveillance will occur. The amendments that the domestic spy agency is seeking, however, would give judge’s the legal authority to issue a warrant to the FBI in a “district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means.”
Moreover, the amendments – something internet watchdog groups have been warning might eventually happen – would apply to all criminal cases, not just those related to “terrorists.”
In euphemistic terms, the new surveillance powers the FBI is seeking are known as “network investigative techniques,” which allows malware to be exported to a targeted computer, thereby giving agents nearly full control over the machine – even allowing it to conduct surveillance on any other computers within the user’s social group.
“This is an extremely invasive technique,” Chris Soghoian, principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Guardian. “We are talking here about giving the FBI the green light to hack into any computer in the country or around the world.”
Just this week, Soghoian obtained documents from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that in 2007 the FBI had planted a bogus Seattle Times/Associated Press story on a criminal suspect’s computer as a ploy to export the spyware onto the computer.
Soghoian underscored the feelings of many watchdog groups when he emphasized that next week’s hearing “should not be the first public forum for discussion of an issue of this magnitude.”
READ MORE:
FBI pretended to be Seattle newspaper in order to hack suspect’s computer
FBI impersonates repairmen in Las Vegas hotel to bust gambling ring
NYPD arrests, ‘brutalizes’ peace activist McGovern ahead of Petraeus speech
RT | October 31, 2014
The New York Police Department has detained prominent peace activist and former CIA agent Ray McGovern, with witnesses saying he was “yelling in pain” during arrest. McGovern was detained ahead of a David Petraeus speech that he planned to attend.
McGovern was detained before the start of a talk between former CIA director David Petraeus, retired US Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, and author Max Boot on American Foreign Policy at the 92nd St Y., an Upper East Side cultural community center.
Anti-war group ‘The World Can’t Wait’ said the activist was arrested “at protest of speech.” He was reportedly prevented by security from entering, charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct, and will not be arraigned until Friday. The group has called for McGovern’s release on Twitter and Facebook.
The World Can’t Wait alleged on Twitter that McGovern was “brutalized” by the NYPD and later reported “screams coming from backroom” where the activist was being held. RT has contacted the NYPD who have yet to respond to allegations.
It appeared that the activist was detained even before entering the venue, despite having a ticket for the event.
Independent journalist and filmmaker Cat Watters was due to film McGovern during the talk, asking a question of Petraeus, but as she arrived she saw McGovern being arrested by police, telling them “I have a ticket!” Watters told RT that McGovern has a shoulder injury and was apparently yelling in pain during the arrest.
According to Watters, two members of World Can’t Wait, which asked her to film, were to hang a banner from balcony written with the words “War Criminal Iraq Afghanistan” and covered with handprints in red ink – however, McGovern was not going to take part in this action.
“He [Ray] doesn’t cause a ruckus. He asks questions. He stands up and turns his back,” Watters described the protesters’ plan.
McGovern is a former CIA officer turned political activist. He worked with the agency for just under three decades, retiring in 1990. He was highly critical and public about President George W. Bush’s use of government intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war. In 2006, he returned his Intelligence Commendation Medal in protest against the CIA’s involvement in torture.
Two journalists hit by Israeli rubber bullets while covering protest (VIDEO)
RT | October 28, 2014
An AP photographer and his Swiss colleague were hurt after Israeli border police fired a crowd control grenade at a group of journalists covering Palestinian protests in the West Bank.
The news agency’s Majdi Mohammed and Swiss freelance journalist Lazar Simeonov were injured during the Israeli forces’ suppression of protests, where they deployed rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas.
The photographers were working in the West Bank town of Silwad, where Palestinians were protesting after the funeral of a 14-year-old boy, who was killed in an earlier clash with Israeli soldiers.
Mohammed told the Agency that as he was taking pictures, an armored car pulled up behind him and a border policeman stepped out and fired directly at him from a distance of 10 to 20 meters.
The officer fired a round that discharges a number of rubber-coated steel projectiles, which is basically a grenade designed to hurt small groups of people. Simeonov was injured by the same round.
“The impact was so strong that it made me fall to the ground,” Mohammed said. “The policeman aimed straight at us … even though we were clearly a group of media people and there were no protesters at all around us.”
Both journalists reported minor injuries and Simeonov’s camera was also damaged.
AP said it would lodge a protest with the Israeli government. John Daniszewski, AP’s senior managing editor for international news, said the incident showed “outrageous disregard for the safety of journalists” lawfully doing their jobs.
Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said it was not immediately clear why the border patrol policeman had opened fire on the journalists. He added the police “dispersed hundreds of rioters,” some of whom threw firebombs and stones at the Israeli forces.
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Book Review
Shattered Dreams: The HPV Vaccine Exposed (2019)
By Christina England – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | September 4, 2026
… Gardasil received FDA fast-track approval in 2006, Cervarix followed in 2009, and Gardasil 9 was approved in December 2014 with more than double the aluminium adjuvant content of the original. The commercial context is specific. Merck was about to lose patent protection on Zocor and faced $18 billion in Vioxx injury claims from a cardiovascular drug the company had marketed while suppressing its own data showing a five-times increase in heart attacks. Analysts projected the global HPV vaccine market at $4 billion by 2011, contingent on government-funded national programs for teenage girls. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act had already granted manufacturers complete liability immunity. By 2013, Japan had withdrawn its HPV vaccine recommendation after cataloguing severe adverse reactions in hundreds of girls. No Western government followed. The establishment position across the UK, US, Australia, and most of Europe held, and still holds, that the vaccines are safe and effective, that reported injuries are coincidental, and that cervical cancer prevention justifies the program. The book was published into this position, not against a vacuum.
Shattered Dreams sits alongside Mary Holland’s The HPV Vaccine On Trial and Viera Scheibner’s foundational vaccination work as part of the documented record on what has been done to a generation of teenage girls under the banner of cancer prevention. The full summary unpacks three specific findings: that Merck used the aluminium adjuvant itself as the “placebo” control in 92.5% of trial subjects, making it structurally impossible to detect excess reactions from the adjuvant; that Dr. Sin Hang Lee found HPV DNA fragments bound to aluminium in every one of sixteen Gardasil samples tested, and in the blood and spleen of a New Zealand girl six months after her third dose; and that in every country with high vaccination coverage, including Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden, cervical cancer rates have stopped declining and started rising specifically in the vaccinated cohort. Martínez-Lavín’s 2017 calculation puts the number needed to seriously harm with Gardasil 9 at 140, and the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one case at 1,757. Thirteen young women are seriously harmed for every one who benefits. The vaccine was approved on the basis of trials that could not detect what the trials were supposed to detect, and it is still being given to twelve-year-olds today. … Read full review
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- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
