Ukraine abandoned a draft peace treaty with Russia in 2022 under British pressure, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
The deal, which could have ended the Ukraine conflict weeks after it started, was approved by negotiators in Istanbul, but Kiev later pulled out of the talks.
The German newspaper Welt reported on Friday that Moscow had issued additional demands after a deal had already been outlined, such as making Russian the second official language in Ukraine, implying that this had ended any hopes of an agreement.
Peskov denied those claims on Saturday, citing remarks made by Ukrainian MP David Arakhamia, who led Kiev’s delegation at the talks.
In an interview to domestic media last November, Arakhamia said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had intervened in the peace process and had urged the Ukrainians to “just fight” Russia.
Kiev effectively discarded the deal under “direct pressure by London,” Peskov stressed. “The rest is speculation. I suggest we learn from the source.”
Asked whether the draft treaty could serve as a basis for further peace talks, Peskov said Kiev’s public position was to reject talks with Russia. The idea of reviving the failed agreement was floated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko when he met Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin earlier this month.
Johnson has denied derailing the peace talks, but has also bragged on multiple occasions about his policy of nudging Kiev into continuing hostilities with Russia, which the British politician claims to be a fight for global democracy.
“There could be no more effective way of investing in Western security than investing in Ukraine, because those guys without a single pair of American boots on the ground are fighting for the West,” Johnson told students at Georgetown University during a visit to the US this month. The Ukrainians “are effectively fighting our own fight, fighting for our own interests,” he added.
Russian officials have described the Ukraine conflict as a Western proxy war against Moscow, which the US and its allies allegedly intend to wage “to the last Ukrainian.” Their goal, according to Moscow, is to contain Russia and stall its development, rather than protect the interests of the Ukrainian people.
On Sunday, the BBC did something unusual. It invited Luke Johnson, a climate contrarian, to join a panel with Laura Kuenssberg to discuss net zero. As followers of this debate will know, the BBC’s editorial policy unit issued guidance to staff in 2018 saying: ‘As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a “denier” to balance the debate.’ Although it did allow for exceptions to this rule: ‘There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates.’ Presumably this was one such occasion.
The other two people on the panel – Chris Packham and Layla Moran – are members of the climate emergency camp, so there was no pretence of ‘balance’. At one point, the exchange between Johnson and Packham became heated and when the latter invoked the recent downpour in Dubai as well as extensive wildfires in the ‘global south’, as evidence of the effect of anthropogenic global warming, Johnson challenged him to come up with evidence that extreme weather was caused by carbon emissions.
‘It doesn’t come from Toby Young’s Daily Septic [sic], which is basically put together by a bunch of professionals with close affiliations to the fossil fuel industry,’ replied Packham. ‘It comes from something called science.’ This was hailed by Packham’s side as a slam-dunk rebuttal of Johnson’s argument. The Canary wrote up the exchange under the following headline: ‘Chris Packham just humiliated Kuenssberg’s preposterous climate-denying guest.’ The London Economic, which describes itself as ‘a digital newspaper with a metropolitan mindset’, summarised it as follows: ‘With science on his side, Chris Packham was able to deliver a devastating put-down when challenged on the evidence of climate change.’
I can’t help thinking Packham’s ‘devastating put-down’ would have been more effective if it had been true. The people who put together the Daily Sceptic, a news publishing site I’ve edited since 2020, have no connections to the fossil fuel industry. If Packham and his allies are so convinced of the rightness of their cause, why invent reasons to discredit their opponents? A clip from the show including this claim was posted on Twitter by BBC Politics and retweeted by Laura Kuenssberg, getting, at last count, 845,000 views. And to think the BBC launched a multi-million-pound department last year to ‘address the growing threat of disinformation’.
What about Packham’s claim that ‘something called science’ provides all the evidence we need that extreme weather events are caused by burning fossil fuels? There’s really no such thing as ‘the science’, as in a consensus viewpoint among scientists that’s so incontrovertible no serious debate is possible. All scientific theories are just hypotheses and, as such, subject to challenge. Indeed, if it were illegitimate to challenge these theories, progress in science wouldn’t be possible. To pretend that the science of what causes extreme weather is ‘settled’ when it’s the subject of ongoing dispute suggests that Packham and his pals aren’t capable of having a proper grown-up discussion.
Toby Young actually understates his complaint, as there is no evidence that weather is actually becoming more extreme – something the IPCC admit.
It is very easy for these conmen to claim it is, and simply justify it with a statement that “scientists say”. But as Toby points out, they are unable to back it up with actual data and evidence.
The idea, fraudulently circulated by grant funded climate scientists, that global warming means extreme weather has always been by definition absurd. After all, does this mean that the Earth’s climate was ideal during the Ice Age, which would be the logical conclusion?
The simple fact is that there has always been unpleasant weather, storms, floods, droughts, and glaciation. If Chris Packham can provide evidence that these have all gotten worse in recent times, then let him present it.
If he can’t, the BBC should apologise for broadcasting false statements, exclude him from all future debates on climate change, and ban him from making any further such political comments if he wishes to remain as an employee.
On April 11th, US General Christopher Gerard Cavoli, chief of Washington’s European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, addressed US lawmakers on Ukraine’s dire battlefield situation, warning Kiev “could lose” without further Wunderwaffe. Along the way, he made a number of startling disclosures about the size of Russia’s military, and losses, which detonated numerous narratives universally and unquestioningly perpetuated by the mainstream media from the very start of the proxy war to this day.
“We do not see significant losses in the air domain, especially their (Russian) long-range and strategic aviation fleets…Russia’s strategic forces, long-range aviation, cyber capabilities, space capabilities, and capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum have lost no capacity at all,” Cavoli said. In all, while the Russian air force had lost “some aircraft”, this represented “only about 10% of their fleet”:
“The overall message I would give you is [Russia’s military has] grown back to what they were before… their overall capacity is very significant still, and they intend to make it go higher… Russia is reconstituting [its forces] far faster than our initial estimates suggested. The army is actually now larger — by 15% — than it was when it invaded Ukraine… Russia launches very large-scale attacks every few days keeping with their production rate… They produce, they save up, they launch a big attack.”
Such is the pace at which events move these days, many may have forgotten that in December 2023 a US intelligence report, conveniently declassified right when Volodymyr Zelensky was touring Washington desperately attempting to drum up support for yet more “aid”, suggested Russia had lost 90% of its prewar army, with combat deaths in excess of 300,000. The report claimed Moscow’s personnel and vehicle losses were so severe, it would take 18 years to replenish what was hemorrhaged over the invasion to date.
Independent analyst Will Schryver has coined the term “Imaginary War” in respect of the proxy conflict. It is a battle primarily concerned with convincing Western citizens that free, democratic Kiev is making a heroic stand against Russian barbarism, which it can and will win. Ukraine, with NATO’s backing, was until recently excelling in this effort. Every step of the way though, they’ve been losing the real war – and badly.
‘Intelligence Updates’
Social media is a core component of the Imaginary War. Academic research shows Twitter is home to a massive pro-Ukraine bot army, endlessly pumping out pro-Kiev, anti-Russian messaging. The same is no doubt true of every social media platform. This helps create the illusion of nigh-universal support for Ukraine globally, when outside the West, populations and governments are either neutral, or outright supportive of Russia, perceiving the conflict to be a strike against NATO, and Western imperialism.
Furthermore, over the first 18 months of the conflict, mainstream journalists, pundits, and politicians heavily depended on the unsubstantiated pronouncements of “Oryx”, an anonymous Twitter account analysing on-the-ground imagery, for loss figures on both sides. Its posts suggested from day one, destruction of Russian tanks, jets, armoured vehicles and more was many orders of magnitude higher than that suffered by Ukraine, indicative generally of the war being an unmitigated disaster for the invaders.
A representative March 17th 2022Washington Post investigation boldly declared Russia had to date “lost thousands of soldiers and thousands of vehicles while failing to make significant progress,” based almost entirely on Oryx’s findings. Similarly, aBBC article the next month prominently touted figures produced by Oryx suggesting Ukraine had “destroyed, damaged or captured at least 82 Russian aircraft, including jets, helicopters and drones,” while only sacrificing 33 of its own.
A nameless Western intelligence official told the BBC Kiev desperately required “long and mid-range air defences”, in “large quantities.” UAF Captain Vasyl Kravchuk, reportedly possessed of a “surprisingly ready smile” when he spoke to Britain’s state broadcaster, signed off by stating, “past wars have shown, whoever dominates the air wins the war.” The underlying propaganda message, that Ukraine was so far comfortably prevailing in the skies, but needed Western help to keep it up – and therefore emerge victorious overall – couldn’t have been clearer.
Oryx’s findings were even routinely cited by Britain’s Ministry of Defence in daily Twitter “intelligence updates”, which were widely shared, and subsequently featured in and informed the content and headlines of many news reports. For example, in April 2023 an update asserted, “Russia has lost 10,000+ military vehicles since its illegal invasion of Ukraine began, according to tracker Oryx.” The post was viewed over one million times. Parliament’s 2023 Intelligence and Security Committee report boasted that “the impact” of these “unprecedented” updates was “substantial”.
The report went on to note how the Ministry of Defence intelligence estimates “informed decisions made by [government] ministers and Armed Forces chiefs” on London’s “posture towards Russia.” One can only hope Oryx’s output did not formally influence Britain’s proxy war strategy in Ukraine. Audits by eagle-eyed internet sleuths have demonstrated the account consistently perpetuated wildly inaccurate, inflated figures, by counting photos and footage of the same damaged vehicles shot from different angles as individual, separate Russian losses, while misrepresenting Ukraine’s destroyed Soviet-era vehicles as Russian.
Conspicuously, Oryx abruptly ceased its work when Ukraine’s much-vaunted, long-delayed “Spring” counteroffensive began in June 2023. A cynic might suggest, given Kiev was equipped with heavily hyped Western Wunderwaffe for the effort, whoever was running the operation – and/or the individuals and entities ultimately managing them – concluded the same dishonest tactics couldn’t work this time round. In October 2023, the account was deleted outright without warning or explanation, meaning its bogus archive can no longer be critically scrutinised at all.
‘Classic Hero’
Coincidentally, that same month, a number of anonymous, high profile “OSINT” accounts similarly focused on Ukraine likewise abruptly shuttered, or announced their intention to do so. This included Calibre Obscura. Beloved by NAFO, the account similarly emphasised Russian embarrassment and failure. A video Calibre Obscura published in September 2022 of a fleeing Russian tank crashing into a tree set to farcical music went viral, generated much mainstream coverage, and was presented by Zelensky at a press conference celebrating that month’s successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv.
With the Imaginary War nearing over, and the Zionist genocide in Gaza beginning, it was of course necessary to wind down “OSINT” operations entirely, or focus them elsewhere. The silence of Bellingcat, a British and US government-funded validator of NATO narratives, on Israel’s crimes, despite a wealth of photo and video footage attesting to the monstrousness, is palpable, and illuminating.
In December 2023, novelist Lionel Shriver authored a lament for The Spectator, on how she “got caught up” in the proxy conflict’s “story”, which “had a spectacular opening chapter, a classic hero… and as wicked a villain as Shakespeare could have contrived.” However, Kiev’s catastrophic counteroffensive – which saw over 100,000 Ukrainians die to recover 0.25% of lost territory – meant she was now “quietly losing interest in this conflict,” along with many others in Europe and the US:
“This is supposed to be a David and Goliath story. But David and Goliath is a crap story if the giant wins… Predictable, a bit disheartening and not really a story at all, just the way the world works. Besides, a Western audience wants to see the good guy win, both to mete out justice and to enjoy victory by proxy. Ukraine’s anguishing self-defence is not a novel. But it’s not satisfying our fictional appetites.”
Shriver concluded that it was “time to urge the Zelensky government to enter talks to bring this depressing war to its depressing conclusion,” as “dragging out an entrenched stalemate merely racks up a higher body count and destroys more Ukrainian homes and infrastructure to no purpose.” She added, “sitting back and giving Ukrainians just enough weaponry to keep fighting to the last man and woman, only for the country to finally end up where we always knew it would, is not just immoral. It’s murder.”
It is indeed immoral, and murder, to keep the unwinnable, real war Ukraine has been fighting since February 2022 grinding on, as anti-imperialist, anti-war activists and journalists have been intoning every step of the way. That confirming this self-evident fact came at the expense of so many lives, marking it as a criminal tragedy. Unhappily for Shriver and many others, with the total collapse of the frontline impending any day now, and Russia seeking Kiev’s “unconditional surrender”, the “story” may not end with Ukraine electively entering talks.
Promoted to national prominence by a coterie of reporters tackling pandemic misinformation, physician Allison Neitzel took a hard fall last week when she was forced to atone for promoting misinformation and defaming medical experts—by posting an apology on her website, and pinning the same to the top of her social media X account. But unless you hang on every word of Democratic Party aligned reporters with a knack for labeling everyone they don’t like a “conspiracy theorist,” you likely don’t know physician Allison Neitzel.
If you haven’t heard of her, you should know her name and story.
Allison Neitzel’s story encapsulates everything that went wrong during COVID when self-defined “disinformation reporters” glommed onto anyone they tripped over on social media as an “expert” they could deploy to castigate those refusing to bend the knee to Big Pharma.
“I know of Allison because of the way she has targeted me,” says Tracey Beth Høeg, a physician researcher and associate professor of clinical research at the university of Southern Denmark. Neitzel has deleted many of her social media posts denigrating Hoeg, including one in which she labeled her “Hoeg hag.”
“The fact she has not nearly completed her training but has appointed herself as an expert physician in pointing out misinformation strikes me as both odd and ironic,” Hoeg continued. “For example, as you can see, she is really attacking me rather than anything substantive about what I have done or said.”
Allison Neitzel rocketed to national fame on CNN after graduating from the Medical College of Wisconsin and posting a letter on social media that accused Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers of spreading COVID misinformation. Rodgers said he was allergic to one of the vaccine ingredients and didn’t need to be vaccinated because he had already been sick with COVID, however, this was almost a year before the CDC stated that prior infection was no different than being vaccinated.
Despite spreading false information about Rodgers, Neitzel’s letter and purported medical bona fides proved catnip to reporters at MedPage Today, Mother Jones, and NBC, who quoted her as a physician exposing medical misinformation. Columns Neitzel has written for websites WhoWhatWhy and Science-Based Medicine also claim she is a physician focusing on disinformation.
And this is where the circus fun begins, because famed medical misinformation expert Allison Neitzel is not now, nor has she ever been, a physician.
Allison Neitzel did not respond to multiple requests for comment to explain.
COVID clown show
I began unraveling Allson Neitzel’s COVID circus act shortly after she posted the apology to her website with the ironic name “MisinformationKills” and pinned it to the top of her @AliNeitzelMD X account.
Neitzel’s apology details a long list of false statements she made against multiple physicians accusing them of a fraud and grift, along with weasel words that make clear this is a non-apology apology, in the vein of “I am sorry if you feel bad.”
“I regret if anyone understood the statements as accusations that any of them had engaged in fraudulent professional or business practices,” Neitzel writes.
You can read her apology, but the depth and particulars of Neitzel’s defamation of real medical experts is impossible to know because she has deleted many of her posts on social media and on MisinformationKills.
But particulars don’t matter.
Neitzel is one in a legion of medical clowns the media launched into prominence during the pandemic because they served as useful idiots for “disinformation journalists” needing a quotable “expert” to bash people who dared question conventional COVID wisdom, or who charged that the government made phony claims about a lab accident in Wuhan, overstated the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, or lied about the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines.
What makes Allison Neitzel unique from the COVID clown posse is that she was forced to retract and apologize for her lies and fake claims.
Interested, I dug into her background and discovered that all the outlets claiming Neitzel was a physician hadn’t bothered to do a modicum of due diligence before platforming her, because guess what? Allison Neitzel isn’t a physician.
Donning clown costume
The first social media trace I could find for Allison Neitzel is a 2019 Facebook post by the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Third-year med student Allison Neitzel helped teach young students how to use blood pressure cuffs, listen to heart and lung sounds through the use of a stethoscope, how to perform CPR and more.”
But when Neitzel jumped into the national conscience in 2021, she began claiming she was a “physician.” A group called the National Association of Medical Doctors (NAMD) posted Neitzel’s letter criticizing Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers in their Journal of Medicine, where she signed as “Allison Neitzel is a physician.” (Stay tuned: While researching the NAMD, I learned even more about COVID grift, which I will report in a future investigation.)
But when you look into Wisconsin law, you find the state defines a physician as “an individual possessing the degree of doctor of medicine or doctor of osteopathy or an equivalent degree as determined by the medical examining board, and holding a license granted by the medical examining board.”
Of course, her false claims of being a physician didn’t stop multiple media outlets from promoting Neitzel as a “physician” and misinformation expert. Let’s take a look.
COVID clown circus
Neitzel made two appearances as a “physician” in 2023 stories written by Kiera Butler at Mother Jones. Butler specializes in “COVID disinformation” stories that uncover “anti-vaxxers” and “right-wing” forces peeking out from every corner of America to harm the public with “misinformation.”
In one of her more amusing reporting incidents, Butler penned an article that claimed natural immunity from prior COVID infection was a “dangerous theory” spread by anti-vaxxers.
After California passed a law to discipline doctors for sharing “false COVID information” with patients that differs from the “scientific consensus” (whatever that is), Butler began attacking physicians who sued to stop the censorship, claiming that they were spreading medical lies. Linking to a tweet by Neitzel, who she labeled a “physician and disinformation researcher” Butler reported that “far-right rhetoric” and Nazi propaganda were supporting the lawsuits.
Neitzel was also featured in a story by NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, another “disinformation reporter” who specializes in “extremism”—code in the disinformation world for “conservative” as people like Zadrozny never seem to find extremism among liberals.
Online harassment has become increasingly common for doctors during the pandemic, according to Dr. Ali Neitzel, a physician researcher who studies misinformation.
“The targeting of individual physicians is a well-worn tactic,” Neitzel said. “But this cheaply done fake — trying to frame a doctor who is doing unpaid advocacy work — that’s a new low.”
Forget that Neitzel is not even a physician. The absurdity is that Zadrozny quoted Neitzel—forced to post an apology last week for fomenting years of misinformation, and years of harassing physicians—as an expert commentator on misinformation and harassment of physicians.
It’s that ludicrous.
Trying to understand Zadrozny’s reporting, I emailed her questions pointing out that Neitzel was never a physician, and asking if she had bothered to check into Neitzel’s credentials.
“Do you plan to correct your article?” I asked.
True to the disinformation journalism game, in which reporting errors are never admitted nor corrected, Zadrozny never responded.
Neitzel’s online persona as a misinformation expert also gained her entrée into three different articles at MedPage Today.
“Can you explain why MedPage Today ran so many stories featuring Allison Neitzel who falsely claimed to be a physician and has been forced to post an apology for defaming physicians?” I emailed MedPage Today’s editor-in chief Jeremy Faust, an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
“I’m trying to understand if such reporting meets the standards at MedPage Today and if you plan to run any corrections or clarifications.”
Faust refused to respond to questions sent to his Harvard email.
Neitzel’s claims of being a physician also garnered her a column at the nonprofit news organization WhoWhatWhy. “Allison Neitzel, MD, is physician-researcher and founder of the independent research group MisinformationKills, which has investigated the dark money and politics behind public health disinformation with a focus on the pandemic,” reads her author bio page.
“Why have you claimed Allison Neitzel is a physician?” I emailed WhoWhatWhy’s editor-in-chief, Russ Baker. “And do you plan to continue claiming Neitzel is a physician?”
Baker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Neitzel also wrote a column for the site “Science-Based Medicine” where her bio states she is a physician. Science-Based Medicine is a marketing site for the biopharmaceutical industry run by David Gorski, a Wayne State University surgeon, self-described “misinformation debunker,” and ardent vaccine cheerleader.
In an email to Gorski, I asked why he lists Neitzel as a physician when she doesn’t meet the legal requirements for a physician in Wisconsin where Neitzel resides.
Gorski called the question “pedantic” and said he will ignore Wisconsin law in favor of a definition for “physician” that he found on the website for the American Medical Association.
“In general, ‘misinformation’ reporting seems to have certain ideas they are told are true/false and it’s about finding evidence to support what they have been told,” says Hoeg. “Also the ‘misinformation’ reporters often seem less qualified in terms of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific studies and domains than the people/scientists they are accusing of spreading ‘misinformation.’”
Cases of pertussis — or whooping cough — in the U.S. dropped during the pandemic and today continue to be lower than pre-pandemic levels, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
“We are not seeing anything unusual,” Jasmine Reed, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson, told the news outlet.
However, in the same article — “Whooping Cough Rising in Some Countries. Why You May Need a Booster” — NBC contributor Kaitlin Sullivan reported that “outbreaks in Europe, Asia and parts of the U.S. should be a reminder to get vaccinated, experts say.”
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told NBC the current situation “won’t turn into a pandemic because we have a highly vaccinated population.”
Schaffner added: “However, let’s make sure that pregnant people get vaccinated, that babies are vaccinated on schedule, and the rest of us take the Tdap vaccine every 10 years.”
This is especially necessary to protect infants, who are especially vulnerable to the otherwise typically mild illness, NBC reported.
Experts told The Defender they thought the NBC report was unnecessarily alarming, cited outdated methods for protecting babies, and failed to consider serious and well-known concerns with the safety and efficacy of DTaP and Tdap vaccines.
“There’s no medical or scientific reason to advise giving the vaccine to any group of people for the purpose of preventing transmission to others,” Sears said.
He added:
“We have whooping cough in our society simply because this is one of several vaccines that doesn’t reduce the spread of its disease. The vaccine simply doesn’t work that way, and no amount of scientific hope or wishful thinking will change that.”
The United Kingdom saw an increase in whooping cough cases in January. According to The BMJ, the spike seen there also occurred in other European countries, but the outbreak primarily affected people ages 15 and older, who are not at high risk from the illness. Only 4% of cases in the recent spike were in infants.
NBC also reported that China had a 15-fold increase in cases in January, part of a variable epidemiology of the disease seen over the last 10 years. That increase amounted to 15,275 cases among a population of over 1.4 billion people.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told NBC that the outbreaks and mild isolated cases the agency reported in the San Francisco Bay area, Hawaii and New York are normal and something “we expect to see every year.”
Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory illness that manifests as a cold in most people, but it can be serious for newborns who have a very narrow trachea, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internal medicine physician, told The Defender.
Deaths from pertussis are extremely rare, averaging about 10 per year. About 85% of deaths happen in children under two months of age — before babies are even eligible to begin the pertussis vaccination.
Nass said pertussis is extremely common and endemic in the U.S. It tends to be misdiagnosed as cold or flu and medical attention is rarely sought, except for babies.
Current formula needs to be ‘scrapped or reworked’
Dr. Paul Thomas said the NBC article “completely ignores the risk of death from the vaccine, which is documented to be greater than the number of deaths prevented — even before you consider that 50-90% of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome occurs in the week after infant vaccines, of which the DTaP is the most concerning.”
Maternal-fetal medicine expert Dr. James Thorp told The Defender the pertussis vaccine has never been proven to be safe or effective in a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.
And there have been no long-term studies examining all health outcomes related to the vaccine, Thorp said.
Babies and children currently receive the DTaP vaccine, designed to protect against pertussis, diphtheria and tetanus. People ages 7 and older receive the Tdap booster, designed to protect against diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis.
Thomas, author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years,” said that both DTap and Tdap are old vaccines that rely on recognizing the pertactin protein to develop immunity.
About 85% of pertussis circulating in the U.S. is pertactin-negative making the vaccine at best 15% effective, he said.
The CDC has been tracking changes in the prevalence of bacteria causing whooping cough for years. The most recent CDC data, reported this month, found that the Bordetella parapertussis type of whooping cough has significantly overtaken B. pertussis in prevalence — and research published in Vaccines in March shows the existing vaccines “scarcely provide protection” against this strain.
“This pertussis vaccine needs to either be scrapped or reworked to provide one that is effective,” Thomas said.
“Those vaccinated are now getting pertussis at a much higher rate than those with natural immunity and not vaccinated for pertussis,” he added. “It is the vaccinated who are also most likely to bring pertussis to newborns and put them at risk.”
Vaccinated — not unvaccinated — more likely to give infants pertussis
NBC reported that although the disease poses no serious threat to most adults, adults ought to get vaccinated to protect infants.
The article quotes Schaffner as saying, “Anyone who comes to see the new baby should have had a recent inoculation with Tdap vaccine, to provide a cocoon of protection around that baby.”
But Thomas said the concept of cocooning, “where you vaccinate the adults and children and caregivers in the infant world to provide a cocoon of protection, has been long abandoned as it has failed to protect infants.”
“It turns out those vaccinated still get pertussis and because sometimes it is a less severe infection (a minor vaccine benefit) they are more likely to be around infants and put them at risk for pertussis.”
Nass noted that antibiotics provide some protection against whooping cough transmission, but not against symptoms. And because the disease is misdiagnosed in adults and very mild, few take them.
Thomas said the best approach for parents with an infant — because the disease is relatively harmless after one year — is to avoid indoor crowds and sick visitors.
“Even family and visitors who are not sick should wash their hands with soap and water before touching the baby and not kiss the baby on the face, hands or feet,” he said. “It is worth noting that the worst of the pertussis dangers was largely gone even before the vaccine was introduced to the masses.”
‘No vaccine should be given during pregnancy’
Nass told The Defender that another problem with pertussis vaccine efficacy is that it takes multiple shots — given at ages 2, 4, 6 and 15-18 months — for a child to develop some immunity.
However, children are only really at risk of death from the illness very early in life, before the shots provide any protection.
Thorp said that because the original goal of protecting infants with the vaccine in the first year of life was “a miserable failure” pharmaceutical companies began advocating to give the shots to pregnant women.
In 2012, the CDC first began recommending the TDap vaccine for pregnant women to protect newborn infants, despite the fact that they largely don’t need the diphtheria or tetanus components, Nass said.
“The CDC could have recommended manufacturers make just a pertussis vaccine for this purpose, but chose not to,” she added.
This was another example, Thorp said, “where this fable that the vaccine would provide immunity was forced down the throats of pregnant women with the backing of the medical-industrial-complex without a randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.”
No vaccine should be given during pregnancy, Thorp said. “But now the pharmaceutical industrial complex is pushing six vaccines including for influenza, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, RSV, and COVID-19.”
“From the fetus to the infant at 12 months of life, there are about 42 vaccines administered in 2024, compared with about 11 in 1986,” he added. “This is absurd and an abomination of science.”
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden recently sued the FDA for stepping beyond their charter, defaming Ivermectin prescribers, and, thereby, interfering with the doctor-patient relationship. Last month, Dr. Bowden resolved her suit, receiving a substantial undisclosed settlement from the government agency.
Dr. Pierre Kory has been an early and staunch defender of the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 in humans. Kory believes the FDA settled this case with Bowden because they had likely hired the PR firm Weber Shandwick to create the now infamous “horse dewormer” campaign (detailed below) to smear Ivermectin and its proponents. If true, once Bowden’s lawsuit went into the phase of discovery then this information would have been revealed, but we will never know since the case is now settled. Weber Shandwick lists the CDC, Pfizer, and Moderna as their clients.
Honest Media covered Ivermectin and the “horse dewormer” controversy in a letter sent to the Associated Press documenting the lies the AP published about the drug. We have also recently received a trove of emails between Dr. Bowden and the Arizona Mirror, an outlet that smeared Dr. Bowden and her colleague, Dr. Peter McCullough. After reviewing them, we can say that these documents illustrate the media’s contempt for medical dissidents.
But why this fear of letting dissenting doctors speak? There has been virtually no coverage of Dr. Bowden’s case. Where there is documentation, like with Jen Christensen’s reporting for CNN, nobody gives voice to the victor and victim, Dr. Bowden. Why?
Dr. Bowden, a Stanford-trained ear, nose, and throat doctor from Houston, has treated more than 6,000 patients suffering from COVID. She is a strong and intelligent woman of science speaking truth to power. Here, in Dr. Bowden, is that “gutsy woman” who Americans were told to admire by leaders like Hillary Clinton. But there’s an implicit caveat in the cult of Clinton’s “gutsy woman:” Such women are to be ignored (and even pilloried and censored) if they challenge the orthodoxies of the Democratic Party or the DNC-aligned Big Pharma industry.
For prescribing Ivermectin and dissenting against the dominant COVID narratives, Dr. Bowden was forced to resign from Houston Methodist Hospital. And she wasn’t the only doctor to face such consequences. Dr. Robert Apter and Dr. Paul Marik, two other Ivermectin physician-advocates, joined Dr. Bowden in her suit against the FDA. Marik, for his part, was forced to resign from Eastern Virginia Medical School as well as Sentara Norfolk General.
Last month, Dr. Bowden traveled to the Supreme Court to stand in solidarity with activists as SCOTUS listened to Murthy v. Missouri. The Murthy case concerns the suppression of medical dissidents, specifically, and online censorship, more broadly. Dr. Bowden addressed the crowd of protesters about her four-year battle with the captured government agency:
How many COVID patients did they examine? How many histories did they take? How many prescriptions did they write? Zero. None of them have cared for a single COVID patient, but because they had the full support of Big Pharma, the government, and, most importantly, the media, they became the scientific authority on a novel disease they had zero first-hand experience in treating.
Bowden has a point. The FDA’s campaign against doctors such as herself gained purchase with the public, in part, because the agency’s claims were amplified by a mainstream media that is shaped and funded – captured – by Big Pharma. Due to the massive influx of advertising dollars and the perfect storm of misinformation and disinformation summoned by Russiagate, the 2020 election, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the American public’s trust in the mainstream media has reached record lows. Bowden’s case reveals another example of why the public is justified in its skepticism.
Let the Doctors Speak
I recently spoke with Dr. Bowden about her fight with the government.
“This was a war on Ivermectin,” she said. “But it was also a war on the doctor-patient relationship.”
I asked her what precipitated the suit against the FDA. Dr. Bowden told me that never before in her career had she witnessed interference with the doctor-patient relationship from the FDA or her local pharmacies. When I asked about prescribing a drug that wasn’t FDA-approved, she told me that she’d often prescribed off-label in the past, with no problems, and that she approached Ivermectin, initially, with hesitancy and skepticism. She said she preferred prescribing monoclonal antibodies at the beginning of the pandemic, but sought new options when access to these treatments became restricted.
“I was nervous to start using it,” she said. “Before I started, I looked at the FDA’s website and the toxicity data. Once I was assured that it worked (maybe not as quickly as monoclonal antibodies), I started offering it to patients.”
Not only did Dr. Bowden prescribe Ivermectin to her patients and witness positive results, but she used it herself. She’s had COVID three times. And in every instance of Ivermectin treatment, both with herself and her patients, she observed either efficacy or minimal side effects.
“I haven’t lost one patient due to Ivermectin,” she said.
In 2015, the Nobel Committee for Physiology honored the discovery of Ivermectin with a Nobel Prize. The NIH lauded this “multifaceted drug,” which was largely unknown in American public discourse prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then, suddenly everyone and their grandmother was an expert on the dangers of Ivermectin. Seemingly overnight, the American people absorbed a viral propaganda campaign from the very government agency (the FDA) that they supported with tax dollars. And if you were a doctor or patient seeking this low-cost, award-winning therapeutic treatment, you were suddenly in the crosshairs of the “war on Ivermectin.” This policing of the poor and the independent all started, according to Dr. Bowden, “with the horse tweet.”
On August 8, 2021, the FDA weaponized its social media account to stigmatize physicians like Dr. Bowden and skeptical and underprivileged patients seeking affordable alternative care. The agency issued a tweet with two images: a veterinarian outdoors caring for a horse, coupled with a physician in an office caring for a masked human. The text for the tweet reads: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This tweet, with its careful use of the colloquial and the second person, supplemented with a juvenile binary logic, became the most popular tweet in FDA history.
Hate wins clicks. Fear creates fog. Shortly after the tweet’s publication and viral propagation, Dr. Bowden’s life came undone.
“I never had a pharmacy deny a prescription before,” she said.
Dr. Bowden’s struggle with the pharmacy was just the tip of the iceberg, revealing the stranglehold Big Pharma now has on health care in America. Dr. Bowden suffered (and still suffers) from vicious attacks online, as well as alienation from her peers. She was forced to resign from her workplace, Houston Methodist Hospital. She explained to me that the “war on Ivermectin” was more vitriolic than anything she’d ever seen before in the discourse on public health. And whereas most doctors bent the knee, stayed silent, and complied with government mandates, Dr. Bowden (and others) fought back. Her case represents what one might call a scientific profile in courage.
What does fighting back look like? Well, for starters, perhaps it begins with telling the truth in public and revealing the whole story of Dr. Bowden’s struggle, along with that of fellow medical dissidents like Dr. Kory, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration), and Dr. Peter McCullough.
In Dr. Bowden’s and Dr. McCullough’s recent email exchanges with the Arizona Mirror, one can see, firsthand, a publication that ignores the opportunity to correct factual errors. The Mirror instead willfully litters its reporting on Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough with misinformation, ad hominem attacks, bizarre references to Qanon, constant allusions to shadowy conspiracy theories, and the slanderous insinuation that Dr. McCullough is antisemitic.
The Association Fallacy
One of the most recurrent disinformation patterns we have witnessed in studying the defamation of populist voices, broadly, and Dr. Bowden’s case, specifically, is what scholars of rhetoric call the association fallacy. In short, the association fallacy describes claims where even oblique social connection to a stigmatized individual or organization (like QAnon) is used to poison the claims of the targeted speaker. Simply associating the terrifying name of the poisonous organization with the speaker scares the reader and creates an irrational – fallacious – connection.
What’s troubling, in the case of the Arizona Mirror reporting, is that Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough have no ties to QAnon. Furthermore, Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough both reached out to Jim Small, the paper’s editor, and politely asked that these fallacies be removed from the Mirror’s articles.
For example, Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough called attention to the Mirror’s repeated use of the ad hominem “anti-vaxxer” to label Dr. McCullough and associate the doctor with the world of “anti-vaxxers.” In their email exchange, Dr. McCullough confides in Small that he has “accepted dozens of vaccines during the course of my life.”
But the Mirror refused to mirror the truth and remove the slur. The Mirror refused to interview these doctors, refused to correct their reporter’s mistakes when alerted by the victims, and, furthermore, sought to defame the doctors through ad hominem attacks and the association fallacy.
To witness how the association fallacy works, consider the following sentence about Dr. Bowden’s colleague, Dr. McCullough, from the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod Macdonald-Evoy: “McCullough has become a darling to those in both Qanon and the broader conspiracy world, appearing regularly on shows like the one hosted by antisemite Stew Peters, who said the COVID vaccine is a bioweapon.”
In one sentence, the reporter has accused the doctor (without directly accusing him) of antisemitism and conspiracy theory simply by virtue of association with other human beings, mostly unnamed, who populate “the broader conspiracy world.”
What is happening to people like Dr. McCullough and Dr. Bowden rarely happens to those in power. It happens to those who challenge power.
The Arizona Mirror and CNN should be ashamed. They punished informed dissent. They refused to contextualize Dr. Bowden’s struggle as part of a subculture of dignified scientists and physicians. They erased and defamed Dr. Bowden and her colleagues. They published fear porn and called it journalism. They left out this gutsy woman’s voice. Honest Media has chosen a different path. We let the doctor speak.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) dismisses reports of affliction of damage to the Israeli regime’s Dimona nuclear reactor during the Islamic Republic’s recent Operation True Promise against the occupying regime.
“The Dimona reactor has not been among the bank of targets of the Islamic Republic’s recent punitive measure against the Zionist regime,” IRGC spokesman Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif said on Thursday.
“Publication of this news is a big lie and a malignant effort in line with the enemy’s psychological operation towards deception of the public opinion,” he added.
The remarks came after the Israeli regime’s Ma’ariv newspaper claimed satellite images had allegedly shown that one of the reactor’s buildings had been struck at least once during the Iranian operation, adding that up to two hits had also taken place in its vicinity.
The Corps launched the operation late on Saturday in response to a deadly attack by the regime against the Islamic Republic’s diplomatic premises in the Syrian capital Damascus on April 1.
The Israeli attack had resulted in the martyrdom of Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, his deputy, General Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, and five of their accompanying officers.
In retaliation, the IRGC targeted the occupied territories with a barrage of drones and missiles. The retaliatory strikes inflicted damage on Israeli military bases across the occupied territories.
Amid speculation about fresh potential Israeli aggression, senior Iranian political and military leaders, including President Ebrahim Raeisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, have warned of a stronger and more severe response.
The Russians are coming — or coming back, better put.
As the November elections draw near, let us brace for another barrage of preposterous propaganda to the effect Russians are poisoning our minds with “disinformation,” “false narratives,” and all the other misnomers deployed when facts contradict liberal authoritarian orthodoxies.
We had a rich taste of this new round of lies and innuendo in late January, when Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who served as House speaker for far too long, asserted that the F.B.I. should investigate demonstrators demanding a ceasefire in Gaza for their ties, yes indeedy, to the Kremlin.
Here is Pelosi on CNN’s State of the Union program Jan. 28:
“For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine… I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the F.B.I. to investigate that.”
O.K., we have the template: If you say something that coincides with the Russian position, you will be accused of hiding your “ties to Russia,” as the common phrase has it.
Be careful not to mention some spring day that the sky is pleasantly blue: I am here to warn you—“make no mistake” — this is exactly what “Putin,” now stripped of a first name and a title, “would like to see.”
There is invariably an ulterior point when those in power try on tomfoolery of this kind. In each case they have something they need to explain away.
In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the polls, so we suffered four years of Russiagate. Pelosi felt called upon to discredit those objecting to the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza.
Protest against Israeli genocide in Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Now we have a new ruse. Desperate to get Congress to authorize $60.1 billion in new aid to Ukraine, Capitol Hill warmongers charge that those objecting to this bad-money-after-bad allocation are… do I have to finish the sentence?
Two weeks ago Michael McCaul, a Republican representative who wants to see the long-blocked aid bill passed, asserted in an interview with Puck News that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” Here is the stupid-sounding congressman from Texas, as quoted in The Washington Post, elaborating on our now-familiar theme:
“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical on our airwaves. These people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”
I read in the Post that McCaul’s staff abruptly cut short the interview when Julia Ioffe, a professional Russophobe who has bounced around from one publication to another for years, asked him to name a few names.
So was this latest ball of baloney set in motion.
A week after McCaul’s Puck News interview, Michael Turner, an Ohio Republican who, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, swings a bigger stick, escalated matters when, reacting to McCaul’s statements, reported that this grave Russian penetration was evident in the upper reaches of the American government, as again reported in The Washington Post :
“Oh, it is absolutely true. We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti–Ukraine and pro–Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”
Masked communications uttered on the House floor: Hold the thought, as I will shortly return to it.
The VOA Rendition
The taker of the cake — so far, anyway — arrived last week from Voice of America, the Central Intelligence Agency front posing as a radio broadcaster, under the headline, “How Russia’s disinformation campaign seeps into U.S. views.” Same theme: The Rrrrrussians are poisoning America’s otherwise pristine discourse in an effort to block authorization of the assistance bill, which also includes aid to Israel ($14.1 billion) and Taiwan ($4 billion).
To drive home its point, VOA quotes a lobbyist named Scott Cullinane, who works for something called Razom, which means “together” in the Ukrainian language. Razom is a non-governmental organization “formed in 2014 to support Ukrainians in their quest for freedom.” That is, Razom’s founding coincided with the coup in Kiev the U.S. orchestrated in February 2014.
Razom works with a variety of Ukrainian NGOs to advance this cause and sounds to me like a player in the old civil-society-subterfuge game, though one cannot be sure because, on its website and in its annual reports, it does not say, per usual in these sorts of cases, who funds it.
Here is a little of VOA’s report on Cullinane’s recent doings on Capitol Hill:
“On a near daily basis, Scott Cullinane talks with members of Congress about Russia’s war in Ukraine. As a lobbyist for the nonprofit Razom, part of his job is to convince them of Ukraine’s need for greater U.S. support to survive.
But as lawmakers debated a $95 billion package that includes about $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, Cullinane noticed an increase in narratives alleging Ukrainian corruption. What stood out is that these were the same talking points promoted by Russian disinformation.
So, when The Washington Post published an investigation into an extensive and coordinated Russian campaign to influence U.S. public opinion to deny Ukraine the aid, Cullinane says he was not surprised.
‘This problem has been festering and growing for years,’ he told VOA. ‘I believe that Russia’s best chance for victory is not on the battlefield, but through information operations targeted on Western capitals, including Washington.’”
Straight off the top, there has been no Washington Post “investigation.” The Post simply quoted two paranoid congressmen without bothering to question, never mind investigate, the veracity of their assertions.
Beyond this, the question of Ukrainian corruption is another case of the sky being blue. There is no “alleging” the Kiev regime’s corruption: It is thoroughly documented by, among other authorities, Transparency International, which ranks Ukraine among the world’s most corrupt nations.
You see what is going on here? This is an echo chamber, ever treasured by the propagandists.
Puck News, a web publication of no great account, puts out a warmongering reporter’s interview with a warmongering congressman, The Washington Post reports it, another congressman seconds the assertions of the first, the Post reports that, and then VOA joins the proceedings to report that well-established, beyond-dispute facts are Russian disinformation.
And the echoes multiply, like the circles in a pond when a rock is tossed in. Here is how Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily whose Russophobia dates to its founding during the U.S. occupation after World War II, reported on the assistance bill immediately after the VOA report:
“The controversy about the aid, which has already passed the U.S. Senate, is reflected in numerous posts on social media and articles on news sites. As The Washington Post reports, one actor has played a decisive role in this: the Russian government.”
When propaganda is king, you have to conclude, what goes around keeps going around.
It is well enough to laugh at this silly business, transparently calculated as it is. Except that this kind of chicanery has a long history, and we learn from it that the Russians have been coming, off and on, for seven-plus decades. The consequences of these conjured imaginings, we also learn, are very other than funny.
When I decided to write the book that came out last autumn as Journalists and Their Shadows, exploring the past was essential to the project. If we want to understand our “press mess,” as I call the current crisis in our media, we had better understand how it got this way.
In the course of my researches into the exuberant anti–Communism of the early Cold War years, I came upon a lengthy takeout Look magazine published on Aug. 3, 1948, under the headline, “Could the Reds Seize Detroit?” This piece was exemplary of its time.
“Detroit is the industrial heart of America,” the writer began. “Today, a sickle is being sharpened to plunge into that heart… The Reds are going boldly about their business.”
Before he finishes, James Metcalfe — let this byline be recorded — has Motor City besieged in “an all-out initial blow in the best blitzkrieg fashion.” The presentation featured masked Communists murdering police officers and telephone operators, seizing airports, blowing up bridges, power grids, rail lines, and highways.
“Caught in the madness of the moment, emboldened by the darkness, intoxicated by an unbridled license to kill and loot, mobs would swarm the streets.” Communist mobs, naturally.
It is easy to read this now with some combination of derision and contempt. Do we have any grounds to do so? Are we doing things so differently now?
There were dangers implicit in the Look piece. It published Metcalfe’s paranoic fantasy a year and a few months after President Harry Truman gave his famous “scare hell out of the American people” speech to Congress in March 1947. Look was in essence recruiting the public as the Truman administration launched the Cold War crusade.
Representatives McCaul and Turner are on a recruitment drive of the very same kind. They are not lying to one another in any kind of effort to clean up Congress. Do not wait for them to lift a finger on that score. They are lying to you and me in what amounts to a scare-hell operation.
And the danger this time is the same as the danger last time. It is the cultivation of a climate of fear wherein the American public is to acquiesce as the new Cold War proceeds and all manner of laws and constitutional rights are abused.
Last Friday the House reauthorized, for two more years, the law known as Section 702, which allows the intelligence cabal to surveille Americans’ digital communications — without warrants and on U.S. soil — if they claim to be targeting foreigners suspected of subversive activities.
What does this have to do with the way the paranoids on Capitol Hill, reporters at The Washington Post, and professional propagandists at VOA are currently carrying on about assistance to Ukraine?
Nothing. And everything.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
Most news outlets rely on The Associated Press style guide—officially known as the AP Stylebook—as the arbiter for grammar, spelling, and terminology in news coverage. While AP puts forth its style guide as an impartial rubric for fair coverage, its rules often exclude conservative views from the outset.
Take AP’s latest round of updates, released Friday. The updates include guidance on how to avoid “stigmatizing” obese people, admonitions to avoid calling people “homeless” as it might be “dehumanizing,” and warnings to avoid the term “female” since “some people object to its use as a descriptor for women because it can be seen as emphasizing biology and reproductive capacity over gender identity.”
AP’s style guide prefers “anti-abortion” and “abortion-rights” as adjectives, urging journalists to avoid “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” and “pro-abortion.”
Yet one of the largest sections of the updated style guide involves “climate change,” a term that AP says “can be used interchangeably” with the term “climate crisis.”
“Climate change, resulting in the climate crisis, is largely caused by human activities that emit carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies, science organizations and climate scientists,” the AP style guide intones. “This happens from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, and other activities.”
“Greenhouse gases are the main driver of climate change,” the guide adds.
AP insists that this is true, with a capital T. When “telling the climate story,” the style guide urges journalists to “avoid false balance—giving a platform to unfounded claims or unqualified sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views. For example, coverage of a study describing effects of climate change need not seek ‘other side’ comment that humans have no influence on the climate.”
Naturally, this is a red herring. Those who doubt the climate-alarmist narrative don’t maintain that “humans have no influence on the climate.” Rather, we say that the direct impact of human activities—including the burning of fossil fuels—is poorly understood and that efforts to predict future events based on various climate alarmist models have repeatedly failed.
In the 1970s, alarmists warned of a coming ice age. In the 1990s, the form of the destroyer would be global warming. Now, the alarmists have adopted the catch-all term “climate change,” so they can retroactively assign human agency to any disaster that strikes us at the moment.
It’s quite clever, if you want a perpetual fear-mongering tactic. Of course, the narrative is rather inconvenient for the rest of us who want cheaper energy and wish to solve the humanitarian crisis of extreme poverty in other parts of the world.
In fact, The Associated Press tacitly admits that the climate alarmists have no smoking-gun evidence that human activities are bringing about Armageddon.
“Avoid attributing single occurrences to climate change unless scientists have established a connection,” the style guide advises. “At the same time, stories about individual events should make it clear that they occur in a larger context.”
AP’s willingness to completely write off the “other side” proves particularly instructive, considering the style guide’s claim that climate change affects many other issues.
“The climate story goes beyond extreme weather and science,” the Stylebook notes. “It also is about politics, human rights, inequality, international law, biodiversity, society and culture, and many other issues. Successful climate and environment stories show how the climate crisis is affecting many areas of life.”
If journalists can throw out any pretense of objectivity on climate, and insist that climate change impacts all other social issues, can they also safely dismiss the obligation to cover “both sides” on politics, inequality, society, and culture? How does AP aim to prevent this rot from spreading across other topics and preventing fair coverage entirely?
The prognosis is not good. AP has repeatedly put its thumb on the scale to silence criticism of abortion and gender ideology — even going so far as telling journalists to avoid the term “transgenderism” because it “frames transgender identity as an ideology.”
Even while urging journalists to avoid using the terms “climate change deniers” and “climate change skeptics,” the AP style guide suggests a more “specific” alternative, such as “people who do not agree with mainstream science that says the climate is changing” or “people who disagree with the severity of climate change projected by scientists.” Talk about “stigmatizing.”
AP doesn’t admit that the supposed unanimity of scientists on man-made catastrophic climate change is based on a lie—that 97% of scientists don’t actually believe the world is going to end because we burn fossil fuels.
The study claiming to reach that conclusion merely analyzed peer-reviewed research papers, put them in seven categories, and then artificially claimed that the vast majority of the papers making any claim favored the alarmist view. Many scientists have said the study mischaracterized their research.
It remains unclear exactly how greenhouse gases are affecting the planet, mainly because the global atmosphere is extremely complicated. Most climate models fail to predict exactly what will happen. Perhaps decreasing carbon emissions will help the climate, but the science is far less settled than AP would have journalists believe.
If news coverage dismisses all skepticism of an alarmist narrative, it will skew the information ecosystem and disincentivize the very research that helps determine what precise impacts greenhouse gases have on the environment. It may also lead skeptical Americans to dismiss climate science altogether, in the same way that the medical establishment squandered much of its public credibility by suppressing concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So why does The Associated Press put its thumb on the scale? The creators of the style guide may legitimately believe there is only one perspective, but they also have a hefty economic incentive to act like it.
AP has received large grants from left-wing foundations, particularly for its climate reporting.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation spent $2.5 million on AP’s climate and education reporting, the Washington Free Beacon reported. That foundation also funds Planned Parenthood.
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded AP a $750,000 grant in 2021 for a climate change initiative to report on “the increased and urgent need for reliable, renewable electricity in underserved communities worldwide.”
The KR Foundation, a Danish nonprofit that seeks the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” gave approximately $300,000 to The Associated Press in December 2022, but APappeared to hide that donation until late last year.
AP may push climate alarmism even without these funds—the latest style guide appears to feature left-wing groupthink on a host of issues—but the money still provides extra incentive.
The AP’s increasingly leftward tilt—and its attempt to force its groupthink through its style guide—creates a rather hostile climate for actual journalism, let alone good science.
It’s often a marvel to see the Western media’s capability to fabricate lies and hurl mud at China. Bloomberg, citing anonymous officials, recently accused China of “providing Russia with significant quantities of components to build cruise missiles and drones as well as optical parts for tanks and armored vehicles.”
The report, published on Saturday, claimed that “while there is no evidence China is providing lethal assistance, people familiar with the US intelligence assessment characterized the aid as just as significant, saying that without the imports, Russia’s military industrial base would struggle.”
The theory of “Chinese components found in Russian weapons,” or “China secretly sends [military] gear to Russia” has been repeatedly hyped up by Western media outlets since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, upon closer examination of all the stories and quotes, no solid evidence can be found to support these claims.
Ignoring the fact that the components they normally talk about are typically civilian products circulating in the international market, American media outlets fail to specify the exact equipment models that are allegedly exported from China to Russia, or how they are utilized by the Russian military in combat situations. Instead, they continue to assert that Russia is receiving military support from China without providing concrete evidence to support this assertion.
Take a look at the enterprises Bloomberg listed this time, such as Wuhan Global Sensor Technology Co. and Hikvision. Their products are mostly used in the fields of thermography, firefighting and rescue, intelligent driving, road traffic, network and data processing, and video monitoring. Without proof, US media insists those products, which are widely used in civilian, traffic and medical sectors, are exported for missiles and tanks. This is like alleging that a frozen carrot can be used as a deadly weapon.
The logic reminds us of other US claims, such as Chinese garlic posing a threat to US national security, the “Washing powder” excuse being a prelude to US-led Iraq War, as well as US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s rhetoric about the Russian military taking chips from dishwashers and refrigerators to fix their military hardware.
Given such a cognitive level, how can the US come up with anything serious? When the US smears China about providing military components to Russia, its aim is quite obvious. First, blame China for the failure to defeat Russia on the battlefield, finding excuses for the prolonged conflict. It believes Russia should have been brought to its knees long ago, but why not? It must be China’s fault. Second, as long as the US wants to sanction Chinese companies, it can choreograph whatever convenient excuse it needs. When Chinese electric vehicles were the target, the US made up the excuse “overcapacity.” When Washington wants to target certain Chinese high-tech companies, it can conveniently come up with the label of helping Russia to ramp up military production, Shen Yi, a professor at Fudan University, told the Global Times.
The words and actions of the US have shown that it is completely unreasonable and will resort to any means, with any excuses, to contain China.
When Western media target China and pressure China not to provide lethal military assistance to Russia, they are trying to push the “China’s special responsibility theory” in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, China’s “active neutrality” stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict will stand the test of history.
The practices of China and the US are qualitatively different. When facing regional conflicts, China will never proactively provide weapons to any parties concerned. In contrast, the US constantly sends heavy weapons to the Ukrainian battlefield but still cannot win the proxy war. Instead of reflecting on its own issues, all it does is look for someone to blame. This only proves incompetence.
In a scathing account from within National Public Radio (NPR), Senior Editor Uri Berliner blasted the company for open political bias and activism. Berliner, who says that he is liberal politically, wrote about how NPR went from a left-leaning media outlet to a virtual Democratic operation echoing narratives from figures like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.). The objections have long been voiced, including on this blog, but this account is coming from a long-standing and respected editor from within the company.
Berliner details how NPR, like many media outlets, became openly activist after the election of Donald Trump to the point that the company now employs 87 registered Democrats in editorial positions but not a single Republican in its Washington, DC, headquarters.
In his essay for The Free Press, Berliner notes that after Trump’s election in 2016, the most notable change was shutting down any skepticism or even curiosity about the truth of Democratic talking points in scandals like Russiagate. Berliner said that NPR “hitched our wagon” to Schiff and his now debunked claims.
Berliner says that he was rebuffed in seeking a modicum of balance in the coverage about the coronavirus “lab leak theory,” the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the 2016 Russia hoax.
As discussed on this blog, NPR repeated false stories like the claims from the Lafayette Park riot. Berliner gives an account that is strikingly familiar for many of us who have raised the purging of conservative or libertarian voices from our faculties in higher education:
“So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.
In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thoughtwhen she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”
For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations”
Former NPR analyst Juan Williams stated in an interview this week that, as a strong liberal voice (now at Fox), he found the same bias at NPR. Williams was fired by NPR as this shift seemed to go into high gear toward greater intolerance for opposing views.
Despite these criticisms, NPR has doubled down on its activism. For example, when it came time to select a new CEO, NPR could have tacked to the center to address the growing criticism. Instead, the new CEO became instant news over social media postings that she deleted before the recent announcement of her selection. Katherine Maher is the former CEO of Wikipedia and sought to remove controversial postings on subjects ranging from looters to Trump. Those deleted postings included a 2018 declaration that “Donald Trump is a racist” and a variety of race-based commentary. They also included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.
NPR has abandoned core policies on neutrality as its newsroom has become more activist and strident. For example, NPR declared that it would allow employees to participate in political protests when the editors believe the causes advance the “freedom and dignity of human beings.”
The rule itself shows how impressionistic and unprofessional media has become in the woke era. NPR does not try to define what causes constitute advocacy for the “freedom and dignity of human beings.” How about climate change and environmental protection? Would it be prohibited to protest for a forest but okay if it is framed as “environmental justice”?
NPR seems to intentionally keep such questions vague while only citing such good causes as Black Lives Matter and gay rights:
“Is it OK to march in a demonstration and say, ‘Black lives matter’? What about a Pride parade? In theory, the answer today is, “Yes.” But in practice, NPR journalists will have to discuss specific decisions with their bosses, who in turn will have to ask a lot of questions.”
So the editors will have the power to choose between acceptable and unacceptable causes.
The bias seemed to snowball into a type of willful blindness in the coverage of the outlet, which is supported by federal funds.
After the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, NPR declared that it would not cover the story. It actually issued a statement that seemed to proudly refuse to pursue the story, which was found to be legitimate:
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
Berliner’s account is reminiscent of the recent disclosures from within the New York Times. Former editors have described that same open intolerance for opposing views and a refusal to balance coverage.
Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet has finally spoken publicly about his role in one of the most disgraceful chapters in American journalism: the Times’ cringing apology for running a 2020 column by Sen. Tom Cotton. Bennet said publisher AG Sulzberger “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage” to appease the mob.
Former New York Times editor Adam Rubenstein also wrote a lengthy essay at The Atlantic that pulled back the curtain on the newspaper and its alleged bias in its coverage. The essay follows similar pieces from former editors and writers that range from Bari Weiss to his former colleague James Bennet. The essay describes a similar work environment where even his passing reference to liking Chick-Fil-A sandwiches led to a condemnation of shocked colleagues.
None of this is likely to change the culture at NPR any more than such discussions have changed faculties in higher education. Raising the virtual elimination of conservative or Republican voices on faculties is met by the same forced expressions of disbelief. While mild concern is expressed, it is often over the “perception” of those of us who view universities as intolerant or orthodox.
Of course, there remains the question of why the public should give huge amounts of money to a media outlet that is so politically biased. News outlets have every right to pursue such political agendas, but none but NPR claim public support, including from half of the country that embraces the viewpoints that it routinely omits from its airways.
“We Israelis are the biggest Holocaust deniers – The Jewish state learned that it can commit its own Holocaust in Gaza and deny that it exists” – Jonathan Ofir for Mondoweiss.
Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa reports from her visit to Gaza:
The reality on the ground is infinitely worse than the worst videos and photos that we’re seeing in the West.
People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses,” Abulhawa writes. “Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.”
“What I see is a holocaust.” she summarizes. “The incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.”
What has underpinned this wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians and children in Gaza – the 7th October Hamas “atrocities” that include the media-amplified claims of “mass rape”?
Claims led by the discredited ZAKA organisation whose founder has a history of rape and pedophilia. ZAKA is reminiscent of the CIA/MI6 White Helmet propaganda productions in Syria from 2013 onwards, designed to criminalise the Syrian government. You can read my archive of investigative work exposing this organisation here.
I am not going to focus on the debunked claims made by the Zionist Hasbara industry. You can read and watch the multiple investigative reports that have dismantled the genocide-justifications here – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
Twoleading Palestinian media organizations, The Palestine Chronicle and Friends of Palestine Network, conducted a joint investigation, based on media reports, in addition to historical and political analyses.
I recommend following this X account to also have real-time updates on the collapse of the Zionist propaganda mill.
Journalist and researcher, William Van Wagenen, has also covered much of what actually took place on October 7th. Van Wagenen includes the “baked baby” narratives that were circulating shortly after the 7th October Resistance operations.
Eli Beer, founder and president of another rescue organization, United Hatzalah, made similar false claims.
While attending the Republican Jewish Coalitions’ Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas on 28 October, he claimed that “A little baby in the oven – These bastards put these babies in the oven and put on the oven … We found the kid a few hours later.”
Like all the other atrocity tales, this was also walked back and mocked on social media by the majority of independent media outlets who saw through the fabrication immediately.
2013 in Adra Industrial City, north of Damascus, Syria – extremist factions including Al Qaeda (Nusra Front) burned civilians alive in a bread furnace. The same extremist factions supported by Israel to overthrow a pro-Palestine Syrian government.
In 2014, a frail 16 year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was burned alive by Israeli extremist settlers amidst a number of Zionist settler kidnappings of young Palestinian boys.
… the preliminary autopsy report states that the remnants of a burned substance (soot) was present in Muhammad’s respiratory passages and lungs, indicating he had inhaled the substance while being burned alive.
Hussein Dawabshe with grandson Ahmad in 2016
In 2015 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four, only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.
At the preliminary court hearing in Lod, terrorist Zionist settlers chanted:
“Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill”
In December 2015, a video showing dozens of wedding guests celebrating the arson went public via Channel 10. The guests are seen dancing with Molotov cocktails, knives and guns, and stabbing a photo of baby Ali Dawabsheh.
Literally 24 hours after the October 7th Resistance operation, on various interviews I recommended avoiding the rush to judgement being rammed down our throats by a Zionist-partisan media crush. I was absolutely correct to have cautioned thus and consider myself vindicated by the last six months of investigation into the Zionist hysterical claims.
Claims that only the Palestinian Resistance was responsible for all deaths on the day that unleashed genocide upon Palestine – or rather the intensification of a genocide that began 100 years ago under a malign British Mandate.
The reality of thousands of children horrifically burned, eviscerated, incinerated, executed, abused and tortured by the sadistic IOF forces since October 7th is something that cannot be eclipsed by the lies peddled by the genocidal maniacs intent on the extinction of Palestinians.
Euromed Monitor – Euro-Med Monitor’s field team documented the Israeli army’s field execution of 13 children near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The majority of them were with their families, following the Israeli military’s instructions to evacuate their areas, when they were shot dead.
Israel’s Rape Culture
In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the goal of acquiring land led to the use of brutal tactics aimed at the dispossession and elimination of the indigenous population. Colonizers embraced sexual terrorization as an instrument for achieving this strategy. – Tamam Mohsen
The “only Democracy in the Middle East” is reported to be a hub of sexual abuse, rape and ritual pedophilia cases. According to the Berghahn Journals:
Sexual violence is a common phenomenon in Israeli society. Despite its frequency, it is still kept silent in the public sphere. The last few years have seen a rise in awareness on the topic of sexual abuse and harassment; however it is a crime with a very low percentage of incident reports. This is for a variety of reasons, the main reason being that we live in a society that tends to blame the victim, which causes them feelings of shame and humiliation preventing them from reporting the incident.
Israel is a Pedophile Haven
Israel is a haven for pedophiles escaping prosecution in other countries. Perhaps the best known case is that of Malka Leifer. A former ultra-Orthodox Jewish school Principal sentenced to fifteen years for child sex abuse.
Israeli author and public speaker Alon Mizrahi went on X to point out Israel’s harbouring of this criminal serial abuser of children:
This lovely lady, from a prestigious Hasidic family, was the principal of an ultra-orthodox Hewish school in Melbourne, Australia who in 2008 “faced trial on 70 sex offense charges laid by Victoria Police, with accusations from at least eight alleged victims” (from Wikipedia).
All victims were her former underage pupils.
To cut a long story short, lovely Malka fled to Israel in 2008, where she comfortably lived, thanks to generous help from senior politicians, psychiatrists, and extremely helpful judges, until 2021, when the scandal was making international news, with high-ranking Australian politicians intervening on behalf of the victims.
In March of 2023 Leifer was found guilty of 18 counts of sexual abuse, including rape, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
But for 13 years, Israel refused to extradite Leifer to Australia, and she was allowed to lead her normal life in a West Bank settlement. And that’s how much Israel cares for (Jewish!) victims of sexual abuse.
In 2020 Jerusalem Post ran the headline – Tens of Thousands of Pedophiles Operate in Israel every year.
Annually there are 100,000 victims of pedophilia in Israel according to one monitoring organisation.
While indigenous Palestinians are denied the right to return to their homeland, a number of pedophiles in Israel are “Jewish” immigrants who have exploited the law of return (whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship) to seek refuge from prosecution for their heinous crimes.
Mainstream media in the US is reporting on the Jewish American pedophiles who “hide from justice” in Israel after subjecting children to abuse and rape. Jewish Community Watch says the majority of its cases originate from modern Orthodox to Ultra-orthodox Jewish enclaves in the U.S., but that it happens across the wider Jewish community.
Even Hollywood’s accused sexual predators are seeking refuge in Israel. Hollywood filmmaker Brett Ratner fled to Israel after six women accused Ratner of sexual assault and sexual harassment in 2017. A report in Haaretz describes Israel as a “hot spot for foreign Jewish sexual predators”.
Another Haaretzreport in 2016 cites Manny Waks, the chief executive officer of Kol v’Oz, a newly formed nonprofit that aims to prevent child sexual abuse in the global Jewish community:
“Sex offenders tend to move from country to country to avoid jail, but what makes Israel unique is the Law of Return, which essentially grants unhindered access to anyone who is Jewish to come here without any real screening,”
The same story was covered by the UK’s Independent. This phenomenon cannot be dismissed as “conspiracy theory”, it is fact.
More Haaretz investigations can be found at these links – 1, 2,
This study explores thought patterns of Jewish Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox pedophiles in Israel and how they resolve the contradiction between their commitment to Jewish Law and having committed sexual offenses against minors.
In 2022 Haaretzreported that 100 rabbis, teachers and other figures who have been accused, charged or convicted of sexual abuse overseas have already found refuge in Israel.
Also in 2022 The Jerusalem Post reported that the rate of sexual abuse of kids is highest among religious Zionist sector. “A new study by the Ne’emanei Torah Va’avodah movement reveals dramatic data on sexual abuse victims from the religious Zionist (Tzioni Dati) sector.” The abused often become abusers. How many of these abused children (majority male) are the IOF forces of tomorrow?
More Jerusalem Post investigations (one Times of Israel ) can be found at these links – 1, 2, 3, 4.
A Haifa psychologist was arrested in 2021 for ‘indecent acts on children in his care’.
In March 2024 almost 6 months after October 7th, an Israeli male nurse, Oren Hananaiev, had his medical licence revoked after being ‘convicted of severe indecent acts without consent and possessing and publishing inappropriate content featuring underage children.’
From the analysis of Hananaiev’s correspondence, many conversations were found with Yaakov, in which he advised him to use sedatives to “prevent resistance” during sexual assault. Furthermore, the investigators found correspondence between the two where Hananaiev suggests certain children’s games where one might sexually exploit kids while they still think that it is part of the game.
The number of incarcerated sex offenders in Israeli prisons, which may be related to the total number of sex offenders, has been steadily increasing, from 350 offenders in 1997, to 1300 in 2009.
About 60 percent of convicted sex offenders in Israel have committed offenses against children under the age of 13.
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is rife with accusations of sexual offences against minors. Pedophiles seek refuge in Israel for a good reason. They are in “good” company.
How many of the Brooklyn, New York, Haredi cult accused of sexual abuse have sought refuge from exposure and justice, in Israel?
A far-right Israeli lawmaker accused Israel of trying to normalise pedophilia as recently as May 2023, only a few months before Israel was accusing the Palestinian Resistance of “mass rape”. As many have stated on social media “an accusation is a confession”.
Israel has failed in almost every way in treating sexually abused children, says a report by a committee of experts aiming to change social norms, treatment and government policy on the issue. – Haaretz
Jerusalem Post reports that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, around 56,000 Israelis have been forced to flee their homes and live in hotels throughout the country.
These hotels are allegedly a “ticking time bomb of crime” – Cases included indecent exposure, crimes against children, and rape amongst other violent incidents. Even Israeli settlers are prey to the overt sexual predation that pervades their society.
Zion Vanuno, 64, is suspected of committing indecent acts against children in a hotel with evacuees in the center of the country. According to the suspicion, Vanuno lured the children with candies to go to different places in the hotel, where he committed indecent acts on them.
Israel – a history of rape as a weapon of terror
In his article “Israel and Rape” journalist Robert Inlakesh goes into some detail about the cases of rape and sexual harassment within the IOF armed forces.
Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israel’s armed forces. According to a Haaretzreport, “a third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].”
In 2020, the Israeli army’s sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.
It has been reported that a growing sector of Israeli society rape Israelis, they rape tourists, they abuse and rape children, they rape their own evacuees. How these predators (especially in the IOF) react to Palestinians that have routinely been dehumanised and reduced to legitimate targets for an inherent predatory sadism is naturally expected to be a hundred times worse. And it is.
On the night of 22-23 May 1948, a week after the declaration of the State of Israel, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura (population 1,500) was attacked and occupied by units of the Israeli army’s Alexandroni Brigade. During the Nakba or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 some 400 villages were razed and occupied by Zionist forces.
Tantura was one of the tens of Palestinian villages and towns inside and outside the boundaries of the UN-envisaged Jewish state specifically targeted for capture under the notorious Plan Dalet, the Haganah master plan for the military establishment of Israel on the largest area possible of Palestine.
Palestinians were caged in makeshift cages and mowed down by machine-gun fire. Schoolchildren were ruthlessly shot even if they had raised their hands in surrender. Civilians were burned alive, buried in communal graves. Young girls were raped.
How different is this to what the IOF are doing in Gaza for the last six months but on an unprecedented scale.
Sabra and Shatila in 1982 witnessed the massacre of an estimated 3,500 Palestinians by Christian militiamen enabled and presided over by the Zionist forces. As journalist Robert Fisk said:
They (Israel) had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance – the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila – and they had established military liason with the murderers in the camps
According to multiple reports rape was also a feature of the Phalange militia on their genocidal rampage through the Palestinian community.
Fisk’s horrifying description of what he saw is haunting – here were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.
No different to the descriptions of decomposing bodies in and around Al Shifa Hospital or the corpses crushed beneath the tracks of a Zionist tank or bulldozer, children shot, their bodies left next to the white flag they were carrying. The terrified elderly man shot dead because he was dehydrated and couldn’t keep moving.
The merciless Zionist bloodlust has only grown in strength since the first days of dispossessing Palestinians of their lands and their lives.
Rape and the threat of rape is systematically used in Israeli prisons for Palestinian women, children and men. A web search will reveal countless reports on the degrading and inhumane treatment of female prisoners forced to endure humiliating body searches and threatened with rape if they do not comply.
The crimes committed by the IOF in Gaza since October 7th replicate the crimes committed during the Nakba and in the 75 years of Zionist occupation of Palestinian territory.
Female detainees were submitted to sexual violence, torture, inhuman treatment, strip searches, sexual harassment, and rape threats while being arrested and held by Israeli army forces according to testimonies collated by Euromed Monitor.
A UN report published in February 2024 said experts were appalled by reported (Israeli) human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls.
“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,”
Palestinian prisoners that had been stripped naked and were tortured allegedly became entertainment for the Israeli spectators that were brought in by the IOF to watch the sadistic process. They were given permission to film the torture on their mobile phones.
In 2010 a report was submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. It involved the Zionist sexual assault or threatened sexual assault of Palestinian children aged between 13 and 16. The torture was used to obtain confessions from the children, admitting to stone throwing. Read more here, here and here.
The depositions sent to the UN report direct attacks, including squeezing boys’ testicles, pushing a blunt object (a club or rifle stock) between the chair and a child’s buttocks, and repeated threats of “I’ll screw you if you don’t confess you threw stones.”
Of course the Zionist censorship machine moved to shut down the NGO, Defence for Children Palestine, that dared to expose the sexual abuse of minors by Israeli forces and security sectors. In October 2021, the DCIP was designated a terrorist organisation by Israeli authorities along with five other Palestinian NGOs.
Khan Younis in Gaza – History repeating itself?
An account (described by Zionists as fiction) from 1956 describes the slaughter and rape carried out by the Zionist forces in Gaza, in particular in Khan Younis.
According to the accepted Palestinian narrative, about 275 Palestinians were killed in the Khan Yunis massacre, while some 111 people were killed in Rafah. Rape was allegedly permitted to control the rebellious Palestinians.
The following letter was sent by a Golani Brigade soldier to his girlfriend on November 6, the day after the Sinai Campaign concluded, which is kept in the IDF archive. It is no different to the rhetoric we hear from IOF savages now inside Gaza or from the extremist Zionist settlers in West Bank:
Only the Arabs are to blame for all this and at every opportunity I take revenge on them,” he wrote. “I am not satisfied with the amount [of people] I have already killed; we killed hundreds but for me it is not enough. At every opportunity I take revenge on them, and opportunities are not lacking, especially these days when I am among thousands of Arabs. They are under curfew, and this is a great opportunity to do anything we want to them. And I’m doing just that, and I won’t stop until I am on my way home, I swear.
The Nakba was in 1948, the Naksa in 1967, Sabra and Shatila September 1982, the Intifada ‘87. November 3, 1956, however, does not live in infamy. Despite being one of the greatest massacres of Palestinians, the Khan Yunis massacre that brutally took the lives of hundreds of Palestinian men and boys, has only received a footnote in history- a mere few lines in a UN report. (Article in Palestine Chronicle)
The massacre of Khan Yunis in 1956 reached twice the number of the Dier Yassin massacre and lasted longer than the massacre that took place at Sabra and Shatila. Read more here.
Rape is a weapon of terrorists
In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has always been carried out with maximum brutality. The colonizers trained by the British relished sexual terrorism as one of their most potent instruments of power and subjugation of an unruly, justifiably resistant population.
It can be argued that rape or the threat of rape was a primary reason that many communities fled their villages and homes in 1948. The present day oppression of Palestinian women in the Resistance or political movements challenging the Zionist entity is dependent upon rape and sexual abuse to coerce female prisoners into confessions, sometimes even into collaboration.
The freed Palestinian prisoner, Rasmea Odeh, publicly spoke in an American court about how she was raped by Israeli intelligence interrogators. Odeh, who was arrested in 1969 at the age of 19, reported that during her interrogation, she was beaten with wooden sticks and metal bars, and was left naked in a blatant violation of her sexuality.
Odeh was sexually tortured with electric shocks. Wires were attached to her genitals, breasts, abdomen, arms, and legs, and in that disoriented state, she was raped with a stick while her father was forced to watch. (Mondoweiss)
Prominent Israeli Rabbis like Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu have advocated for rape in wartime. A leading Israeli professor, Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, explicitly called for the rape of Palestinian women to deter the Palestinian resistance during the unrest of the summer of 2014.
Later, in 2016, Rabbi Colonel Eyal Qarim of the Israeli Military Rabbinate also echoed the same notion, making allowances for the rape of Palestinian women by Jewish Israeli soldiers “out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors.” (Mondoweiss)
The apartheid Zionist state passed a sexual terrorism law in July 2023. The law was condemned for allowing Jewish Israelis to have a far lesser punishment for rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment than Palestinian citizens.
The law directly targets Palestinian citizens of Israel who are accused of sexually assaulting or harassing Jewish women if authorities deem the motive as “nationalistic”.
The irony should not be lost on you.
Rape by the Zionist military, intelligence or police forces is not restricted to children and women. Men are also submitted to horrific torture practices including rape.
Mustafa Dirani was abducted by an Israeli “elite force” from inside Lebanon in 1994. He was finally released in 2004. Dirani claimed compensation for alleged rape by a Shin Bet interrogation expert.
The ritual humiliation of women is also not confined to within prison walls. Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada on September 28 2000 until July 2006, 68 pregnant women had to give birth at checkpoints, 34 infants and 4 pregnant women died on these checkpoints.
Israel and Abu Ghraib
When the images of prisoners taken by the IOF in Gaza emerged, men stripped down to their underwear in winter, beaten by metal pipes or guns, urinated on by their monstrous captors – it was likened to scenes from Abu Ghraib. As the inhumane abuse expanded across Gaza and included women, the comparisons increased.
Journalist W Van Wagenen wrote about the Israeli involvement in Abu Ghraib, in particular at Facility 1391:
But the “creative” torture techniques focusing on sexual humiliation and rape have a clear origin.
Israeli interrogators were teaching US contractors and MPs torture techniques that Israel has long used against Palestinians and other Arabs.
In November 2003, as Cambone was lauding Israel for its assistance in Iraq, the Guardian published a report detailing the torture Israel subjected prisoners to at a secret prison known as ‘Facility 1391.’
“I was barefoot in my pajamas when they arrested me, and it was really cold,” says Sameer Jadala, a Palestinian school bus driver. “When I got to that place, they told me to strip and gave me a blue uniform. Then they gave me a black sack,” for his head.
Other former prisoners at Facility 1391 have described how they were stripped naked for interrogation, blindfolded, handcuffed, and threatened with rape. (emphasis added)
There can be no denying that Israel has a culture of rape and abuse of those it considers ‘untermensch’. It is engrained in their psyche and has been for almost a century because they believe they are not only “chosen” but “untouchable”. The British spawned a Frankenstein’s monster and they have lost control of the rapacious entity that is committing crime after crime against Humanity, not only in Palestine.
Britain forced Zionism on the population by allowing mass ‘immigration’, by arming the zionists while disarming the Palestinians, and by using all other weapons available to an occupying power to crush resistance. Thousands of Palestinians were killed when they rebelled in the 1930s, all attempts to reason with the British having failed.
Executions and the collective punishment of whole villages were part of how Britain lived up to its ‘sacred trust of civilization.’ The leadership needed for the coming stages of confrontation with the zionists was largely decapitated. The British did their dirty work for them. (Jeremy Salt)
“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence [them] absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.” Judith Lewis Herman – Trauma and Recovery: the aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror.
An illegal settler colonial entity built on genocide, rape, torture, apartheid and oppression will always fail eventually. It is only a matter of time before the truly depraved and rotten Zionist core will surrender to its own internal moral decay and implode.
By Irfan Chowdhury | Palestine Chronicle | July 18, 2020
… Israel has been carrying out the longest-running military occupation in modern history and the longest-running siege in modern history. These two facts alone render Israel unique in terms of the scope of its brutality and criminality.
There are other respects in which Israel stands out from other countries in its use of terror and violence; for example, it is one of the most aggressive countries in the world, having waged wars of aggression against Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006, and against Gaza in 2004, 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, killing huge numbers of civilians in the process (all while issuing threats and carrying out various covert attacks against Iran, which are all in violation of the UN Charter). … continue
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