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Scholz pushes fake Russian threats to distract Germans from economic problems

By Ahmed Adel | January 15, 2024

Germany is preparing for a war between NATO and Russia, which, according to the scenario of the German Defence Ministry, could begin in the European summer of 2025 after the defeat of the Ukrainian Army, reported Bild with reference to a secret document of the Bundeswehr. This is evidently a desperate attempt by the German chancellor to distract citizens from their economic woes.

According to the newspaper, citing a classified German military document, the escalation could begin as early as next month with the start of an active Russian offensive against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

According to Bild, the German military considers the Suwałki Gap between Belarus and the Russian region of Kaliningrad to be the most likely site of confrontation. A situation could escalate in October if Russia deploys troops and medium-range missiles to Kaliningrad, and from December 2024, an artificially induced “border conflict” and “clashes with numerous casualties” could unfold as Russia would take advantage of political chaos in the US following the presidential election.

“The actions of Russia and the West are described precisely, indicating the location and month, and will culminate in the deployment of hundreds of thousands of NATO troops and the imminent start of war in the summer of 2025,” writes the article.

However, the article’s authors leave open the question of how this hypothetical escalation will end.

This is, of course, a ridiculous suggestion by the German Defence Ministry, especially as Moscow has repeatedly stressed that it does not want conflict with NATO or anything beyond its special military operation in Ukraine. Rather, this is an attempt by Chancellor Olaf Scholz to instil an unjustified fear in German society as his popularity continues to plummet in the context of a stuttering economy and continued failed policies.

More than 70% of Germans are dissatisfied with Scholz, according to a survey carried out by the INSA Institute for Bild. Specifically, 72% of voters do not approve of his performance, which is three percentage points more than at the beginning of December. Only one in five, 20%, think that Scholz has done a good job.

According to the researchers, 76% of those surveyed are generally dissatisfied with what the federal government does, whilst only 17% of citizens are satisfied. It is the worst indicator of the ruling coalition since it was formed in December 2021, Bild noted.

In 2023, the Scholz-led government faced numerous economic and leadership challenges that undermined public trust. Persistent inflationary pressures, exacerbated by fiscal policy, undermined household budgets, which caused widespread discontent. The lack of strategic direction and perceived indecision on critical issues, such as energy policy following the adoption of sanctions against Russia, further fuelled scepticism among voters. The leadership crisis, characterised by internal conflicts and disagreements, damaged the effectiveness and cohesion of the German government.

What especially frustrates Germans is the fact that sanctions were imposed on Russia, which has become the fifth-largest economy in the world by volume, whilst Germany is in recession. With a public budget deficit estimated at around 60 billion euros, the very model of the German economy appears to be threatened.

Germany is officially in recession and is expected to have ended 2023 with a drop in GDP of around 0.3%, according to a forecast from the European Commission. This is one of the worst economic results in the bloc, given that the growth forecast for the entire European Union in 2023 is 0.6%. Among the causes is the energy crisis that has hit Germany harder than the rest of the European bloc, mainly because the Germans slashed their supply of Russian energy after the start of the special military operation in February 2022.

Furthermore, with the increase in energy prices resulting from sanctions against Russia, Germany has also suffered an increase in general price inflation in the economy, forcing the European Central Bank to raise interest rates, thus affecting the population’s purchasing power and impacting consumption. Consequently, German companies have not only lost international competitiveness with the application of sanctions against the Russians, but now the country runs the risk of entering a process of deindustrialisation.

Under these conditions, the extreme right is experiencing a resurgence. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has hit an all-time high approval rating of 24% and has the potential to gain a few more percentile points with the immense failure of the ruling coalition.

What is undeniable is the fact that Germany is experiencing a rapid decline, all spurred on by the reckless policies of Scholz that prioritised American interests instead of German, and he is now resorting to a fake Russian threat in a desperate attempt to distract citizens from their social and economic problems that he is responsible for.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Israel’s well-oiled PR machine collapses

By Ali Choukeir | The Cradle | January 11, 2024

“Israel condemns South Africa’s decision to play advocate for the devil.”

“History will judge South Africa for its criminal complicity with the bloodiest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and it will judge it without mercy.”

With these highly emotive words, Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy lashed out at South Africa for filing a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the genocidal Israeli military assault that has killed more than 22,000 civilians in Gaza and injured tens of thousands more.

As the war in Gaza enters its fourth month, Israel faces challenges in shaping international public opinion despite its substantial Hasbara propaganda machine, and a significant budget allocated to ‘public diplomacy’ activities globally. Observers and researchers say the occupation state is losing the propaganda war, ceding its long-cultivated ‘victim’ image to one of a perpetrator of horrendous war crimes.

Hasbara is part of Israel’s ‘national security’

Following the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October aimed at targeting the occupation army’s Gaza Division and taking captives to advance a prisoner swap deal, Israel intensified its media and digital diplomacy efforts, alongside its military and security actions. Recognizing the importance of framing those events to shape public perception, Israel made every effort to construct unimpeachable narratives that cast the Palestinian resistance actions as ‘terrorism,’ both domestically and internationally. 

But faced with unprecedented levels of pro-Palestinian activism on social media and on the ground in the form of global protests, Israel and its western allies collaborated heavily on quashing those counter-narratives in order to create support for Tel Aviv’s military assault on Gaza. 

Greg Shupack’s book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, highlights three central frameworks that form the foundations of Israel’s narrative to the west: 

  1. Creating equal blame between both parties to the conflict.
  2. Framing ‘extremists’ as the main obstacle to peace efforts and undermining moderate voices.
  3. Emphasizing Israel’s right to ‘self-defense’ even in the face of unarmed protests, with little regard for Palestinian rights.

These frameworks essentially guide western mainstream media coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Though, additionally, Israel leverages historical claims to Palestinian land and anti-Semitism accusations to shape its narrative and appeal to western sympathy.

Several key Hasbara strategies were employed to impact the western media narrative following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood:

First, the tapping into the western conscience: Both at official and popular levels, this involves associating Hamas with ISIS (“The world defeated ISIS. The world will defeat Hamas”) and framing 7 October as Israel’s 9/11. This tactic aims to create an emotional connection by reducing what can be termed the ‘emotional gap.’ 

Second, falsifying facts and fabricating lies: This tactic plays a significant role, taking advantage of the ‘anchoring bias,’ which involves presenting a version of events that influences how subsequent information is perceived, such as the notorious allegation, now debunked, of 40 beheaded babies. Utilizing this strategy, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, for example, claimed that Hamas fighters have instructions on how to make chemical weapons.

Third, paid advertising and utilizing influencers: High profile social media figures like Elon Musk were flown into Israel for PR stunts while in a little over a week, Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry ran 30 ads that have been seen over four million times on his platform X. 

Fourth, establishing the idea of cultural difference: By dehumanizing and ‘othering’ the Palestinians, Israel seeks to emphasize its unique connection to western civilization in West Asia. Statements by Israeli officials, such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s use of the words “fighting human animals” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for the civilized world to combat “barbarians,” contribute to this narrative. 

The information war shifts dramatically

It can be argued that Operation Al Aqsa Flood constituted a qualitative leap for the Palestinian cause in the media realm, based on the results reaped from massive global public interaction, inputs from global influencers, large demonstrations in many countries – all of which have slowly seeped into the corporate media coverage.

Despite the vast disparities between Palestinians and Israelis in terms of capabilities, technologies, material resources, and major media reach, social media became the great equalizer in this information war, making it increasingly difficult for establishment outlets to ignore the new global discourse on Palestinian developments and events. 

Equally important to Hasbara’s failings is the recognition of Palestinian performance and narrative in the information war:

Israelis are now forced to chase down their top allies to help salvage their narrative shortcomings, as in when President Herzog complained to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak about defining Hamas as a terrorist organization. UPDAY, Europe’s largest news group, was revealed to have instructed its staff to prioritize the Israeli point of view, minimize coverage of Palestinian deaths, avoid pro-Palestinian headlines, and formulate comments by Israeli politicians in a way that dehumanizes their adversaries. These kinds of revelations have prompted audiences everywhere to read their media with a pinch of salt.

More instructive is the growing numbers of journalists and political figures who have left their organizations in protest of the enforced pro-Israel discourse, with prominent celebrities being sacked for public stances that favor the Palestinian perspective.

Western and Israeli media performances have diminished public trust in the Israeli and western narrative globally, particularly over wild, unsubstantiated allegations, all now proven false, that Hamas “beheaded 40 babies,” ran its operations from a command center under Shifa Hospital, and was in active pursuit of chemical weapons capabilities. US President Joe Biden’s quickly debunked endorsement of the claim that babies had been beheaded based on “photos he has seen,” also played a role in this shift.

Media professionals and politicians are also increasingly undermining the Israeli narrative by employing the term ‘genocide’ rather than ‘self-defense’ – largely because international organizations have now weighed in to provide facts and figures showing that Tel Aviv indiscriminately kills civilians, in greater numbers and with greater firepower than in any other conflict this century. 

They have even begun to undermine their own tired argument that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” as western political leaders rush to differentiate Netanyahu’s jingoistic right-wing coalition with the rest of Israel’s body politic, though that is mainly because they need to unseat the former in order to rehabilitate Israel’s post-war image.

In the meantime, the Palestinian narrative emphasizes resistance to Israel’s ongoing oppression, and has succeeded in contextualizing the events of 7 October as a justifiable resistance by Gaza, “the largest open-air prison in the world,” against 75 uninterrupted years of inhumane oppression – an oppression the world has come to intimately understand through three harrowing months of genocide on their X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook platforms. 

Because the mainstream media has had to – at least gratuitously – provide some balance to the biggest news story of the day, Palestinian historical context has seeped into the news, as seen in myriad interviews, such as with Palestine’s ambassador to Britain Husam Zomlot, which helped to extend public understanding beyond recent events.

Despite ferocious Israeli efforts to restrict the Palestinian narrative in western nations, pro-Palestine protests have grown unchecked, and hashtags like #StandWithPalestine continue to dominate social media platforms. The hashtag reached over 4.8 billion views, outpacing #StandWithIsrael on TikTok, even amid the many restrictions in play.

In attempting to gain and maintain global sympathy on the back of 7 October events, Israel’s disinformation and deceptive tactics through its global Hasbara apparatus has faced significant setbacks and backlashes, which may have been entirely avoided had it not chosen to blow Gaza to bits. 

The vicious murder and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, mostly women, children and refugees, in Tel Aviv’s almost gleeful rage-fest that followed Hamas’ operation, has permanently flipped Israel’s David vs Goliath narrative. And its collaborating western allies have suffered an equal blow in the social media realm, as all of Israel’s debunked storylines were parroted verbatim in major western capitals.

Gaza has undoubtedly thrust the Palestinian cause back into the global spotlight, gaining support at popular levels rarely seen globally, and increasing pressure on governments, NGOs, and media outlets to both acknowledge and address Israel’s ongoing genocide. 

Given the now obvious challenges Tel Aviv faces in achieving its stated military goals, even a nominal field victory for Netanyahu can no longer make up for the country’s Hasbara collapse. It is a national security disaster that more than matches a military loss. For Israel, this war was lost from the moment it dropped bombs on homes in the Gaza Strip.

January 12, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

What Really Happened in Maui?

John Leake appears in documentary about Lahaina disaster

JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | JANUARY 11, 2024

Last fall I was invited by Blaze Media to give an interview about my findings for my forthcoming book, Goodbye, Lahaina: The Perfect Firestorm, which will be released on August 9, 2024, the one-year anniversary of the disaster.

I combined the on-location interview with another extended research trip to Maui. My initial intuition about the Lahaina disaster has been confirmed beyond my worst suspicions. The story is a perfect expression of the following themes:

  • Federal and state governments consistently fail to do daily managerial work because such work does NOT benefit the special interests that drive policy.
  • With unlimited debt financing always (eventually) made available for state-contracted emergency response and/or cleanup, emergencies always turn out to be bonanzas for players and stakeholders who are well-positioned to exploit them.
  • Federal and state agencies are now a striking mixture of corruption and incompetence in equal measure. In a corrupt system, incompetence that amplifies disasters is rewarded by the greater sums of state funds allocated for the response. In the case of the Lahaina fire, the cleanup is proving to be a bonanza, with billions being shoveled to contractors who are excavating, testing, and hauling away the ash and soil.
  • Similar perverse incentives are at play in state responses to financial crises, emerging infectious diseases, and wars. Proper management of public affairs requires skill and diligence, but there is no money in conscientious management for special interests and industries. The payoff—i.e., bailouts, pandemic countermeasures, weapons, and billions of “aid”—comes with the catastrophe.

Please watch Blaze’s brief documentary (no longer behind paywall) and share it with your friends.

January 12, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video | | Leave a comment

Hamas denies Qatari initiative including departure of its leaders from Gaza

MEMO | January 11, 2024

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement has denied that a Qatari initiative will include the departure of Hamas leaders from the Gaza Strip. This was confirmed by senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan during a press conference in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, on Wednesday.

According to Israel’s Channel 13, “A new proposal has been delivered to Israel from Qatar, to release all the captured individuals [Israeli hostages in Gaza] in several stages, most of which will come near the end of the deal and after the Israeli army withdraws from the Strip.” The channel added that the proposal includes the departure of Hamas leaders from the Gaza Strip, although this has not been confirmed officially by either Israel or Qatar.

“There is no initiative of this nature,” insisted Hamdan. “The people did not leave their land, so how will the resistance that defends the people do so? Talk about the resistance leaving the land is a delusion, as is the idea of disarming the resistance, which is naive and does not reflect an understanding of the facts of the matter.”

He described the talk by the Israeli media about this initiative as “a deception and misinformation” to calm angry Israeli citizens, “especially the families of the hostages who are watching them being killed at the hands of the occupation forces without [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu caring about them.”

Hamdan reiterated his movement’s assertion that it will not accept any prisoner exchange initiative unless it is based on a complete end to Israel’s “aggression” against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“So far, there is no talk about any initiatives,” he added. “We are committed to our position and presented a clear vision to the mediators, and this vision is the basis for any ideas or initiatives in this context.”

Channel 13 said that the Qatari proposal will be presented to the Israeli War Cabinet and the Political and Security Ministerial Council, which will meet tonight to discuss the “day after” the war ends in Gaza.

Qatar’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Bin Abdul Rahman Al-Thani said on Sunday that the ceasefire negotiations in Gaza “are ongoing and are going through challenges… and the killing of a senior leader of the Palestinian Hamas movement [Saleh Al-Arouri] could affect them.”

He pointed out that discussion “with all parties” are ongoing. “We are trying to reach an agreement as soon as possible that leads to a ceasefire in Gaza, an increase in aid and the release of hostages and [Palestinian] prisoners.”

Egypt and Qatar, along with the US, are sponsoring efforts to reach a second temporary truce in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October against Israeli military bases and settlements in the vicinity of Gaza, during which 1,139 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed, many of them by the Israel Defence Forces, it has since been revealed. The operation was in response to “daily Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people and their sanctities,” said Hamas, notably Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem. Around 240 Israelis were captured during the operation, 110 of whom have already been exchanged for some of the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel.

Almost 23,500 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes since 7 October, most of them children and women. Just under 60,000 have been wounded. Israeli bombs have laid much of the occupied Palestinian territory to waste. Thousands more Palestinians are buried under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and places of worship. Nearly all of the enclave’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes, many several times, and they are engulfed by a humanitarian catastrophe with acute shortages of food, water and medical supplies.

January 11, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Conduct of British TV host exposes West’s ‘bias’ towards Israel: Palestinian MP

MEMO | January 11, 2024

A Palestinian parliamentarian said the conduct of a British TV host has exposed the Western “bias” towards Israel amid its deadly offensive on the Gaza Strip, Anadolu Agency reports.

Mustafa Barghouti appeared in a 3 January interview with TalkTV host, Julia Hartley-Brewer, to discuss the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip.

A clip of the interview showed the TV host shouting over the top of her guest and accusing him of being uncomfortable listening to women speak.

“The conduct of the British host exposes the bias of some media outlets in the West towards Israel by repeating the Israeli narrative without the slightest degree of professional examination” Barghouti told Anadolu.

“I believe the interview served the Palestinian people by exposing the war crimes being committed by Israel, despite the host’s interruptions and attempts to silence me,” he said.

“The TV host sought to silence the Palestinian voice, but I succeeded in conveying our message.  Her behaviour reflects racism as she behaved in a racist manner.”

The conduct of the British host has sparked outrage with more than 15,000 complaints sent to the Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom.

The Palestinian lawmaker termed the TV host’s comments as “racist, absurd and meaningless”.

“Her comments reflected ingrained racism against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims,” he said, stressing that the British host acted unprofessionally.

Israeli failure

Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, which describes itself as a democratic movement of non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation, said Israel has failed to achieve any of its declared goals in the Gaza Strip.

“After 100 days of aggression and massacres, Israel has failed to achieve any of its goals in Gaza,” he said.

“It failed to achieve the main goal of ethnic cleansing and forcefully displacing Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.”

The Palestinian MP said Israel has also failed to uproot the Palestinian Resistance in the Gaza Strip.

“It also failed to exert control over the areas its tanks invaded,” he added.

“Israel also failed to free its hostages held in Gaza,” Barghouti said. “Hostages will not be set free until Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are released.”

Israel has launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Hamas which Tel Aviv says killed around 1,200 people.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

At least 23,357 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and 59,410 others injured, according to Palestinian health authorities.

About 85 per cent of Gazans have been displaced, while all of the population is food insecure, according to the UN. Hundreds of thousands of people are living without shelter, and less than half of the aid trucks are entering the Territory before the start of the conflict.

“The world now realises that the Palestinian cause is a just issue and that Israel is committing massacres,” Barghouti said. “The only thing Israel has achieved in Gaza is killing, crimes and destruction.”

Gaza’s future

Barghouti termed the Arab reaction to the Israeli onslaught and siege on the Gaza Strip as “weak”.

“Israel maintains control over everything in Gaza and the humanitarian aid entering the enclave falls far short of its actual needs,” he said.

“Since the outbreak of the war, we have urged Arab and Islamic nations to send a humanitarian convoy comprising representatives from the 57 member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation,” the MP said.

“Would Israel target a 57-track convoy? I don’t think so, but unfortunately, nothing has happened,” he lamented.

Barghouti said the Palestinian issue is now at the forefront of international attention.

“There is a change that will have an impact in the next stage on the quest of the Palestinian people to win their freedom.”

Barghouti termed talks about the post-war phase in Gaza as an Israeli attempt to draw attention away from its deadly onslaught on the enclave.

“The issue of who governs Gaza is a Palestinian matter, and does not concern the US, Israel or any other country,” he said.

January 11, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

CDC study concludes most young children hospitalized for COVID were unvaccinated — after enrolling 7 times as many unvaxed kids in study

By Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. and Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 9, 2024

A U.S. government-sponsored study published late last month in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal reported that most young children hospitalized for acute COVID-19 had not received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and were sicker to begin with than vaccinated children.

The authors’ conclusions are true on the surface, but their analysis ignored that more than 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated children were enrolled in their study.

Only 4.5% of trial subjects completed primary COVID series

Investigators led by Laura Zambrano, Ph.D., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist, recruited 597 children ages 8 months through under age 5 hospitalized for COVID-19 at 28 U.S. pediatric hospitals between Sept. 20, 2022, and May 31, 2023.

Unvaccinated subjects outnumbered subjects who had received at least one COVID-19 shot by 528 to 69, a more than 7-fold difference.

Children were grouped by demographic factors such as race, sex and geographic location, vaccination status (no vaccine, incomplete vaccine series or fully vaccinated) and underlying non-COVID-19 illnesses, or comorbidities.

Only 4.5% of the subjects had completed their primary COVID-19 vaccination series and 7% had received at least one dose.

Cases varied widely in severity, with 174 (29.1% of all subjects) admitted to intensive care and 75 progressing to life-threatening illness.

Fifty-one (8.5% of all subjects) required life support via invasive mechanical ventilation, and three required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a life-support treatment involving a heart-lung machine.

Based on results from both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, infants 8 months to under age 2 were more vulnerable to serious outcomes than children ages 2 to 4 years.

For example, the youngest subjects had more life-threatening illnesses and the greatest need for high-level respiratory support involving vasoactive infusions — intravenous treatments to maintain normal blood pressure and heart rate. Yet they also had shorter hospital stays.

Investigators concluded that most children hospitalized for COVID-19, including most children with underlying medical conditions, were unvaccinated. On that basis, they called for “strategies to reduce barriers to vaccine access among young children.”

Researchers tested kids for COVID but not other respiratory infections

Zambrano et al. also compared the Pfizer mRNA shot to the Moderna product. They found that children who took the Moderna product were somewhat more likely to experience a serious outcome, however, the numbers from both groups were small and the authors did not subject them to statistical analysis.

Based on their analysis they also calculated and reported, in their “results” section, that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were 40% effective in reducing serious outcomes. However, in their discussion (several sections later), they admitted that “vaccine coverage in this population was too low to evaluate vaccine effectiveness.”

There were two notable limitations to the Zambrano study. Even though the researchers recruited children who were only partially vaccinated the study’s design excluded children who had received any vaccination fewer than 14 days before hospital admission. Therefore no short-term post-vaccination adverse events were included.

Another limitation was that children were tested for COVID-19 but not for all possible respiratory infections, meaning “it is possible that RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], human metapneumovirus or other respiratory viral co-detections influenced disease severity.”

Media parroted authors’ conclusions

U.S. media (for example here and here) picked up on the Zambrano paper and repeated its conclusion that most hospitalized COVID-19 pediatric patients were unvaccinated — ignoring that the study included more than 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated subjects.

A deeper dive into the data reveals the extent of this error and the discrepancies between what Zambrano et al. reported and what they saw.

Tables 1 and 2 illustrate what the authors got wrong.

These calculations say nothing about the relative outcomes for vaccinated and unvaccinated children because Zambrano et al. either did not perform the relevant calculation — number of cases in each group divided by the number of subjects — or chose not to report the results it generated.

Instead of presenting the number of subjects experiencing the indicated outcome as a percentage of vaccinated or unvaccinated groups, they reported them as a percentage of all subjects experiencing that outcome. Since there were 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated subjects, this approach all but guaranteed the numbers among the unvaxed would be higher.

Here’s an analogy: In a hypothetical study comparing 10 coffee drinkers to 100 abstainers, five drinkers and 10 abstainers reported feeling nervous. Using Zambrano’s logic, 67% of people feeling nervous were abstainers, and just 33% drank coffee. This “proves,” according to Zambrano’s logic, that not drinking coffee doubles (67% vs. 33%) the risk of getting the jitters.

The correct way to view this data is that 10 in 100 abstainers, or 10%, felt jittery but 5 in 10 (50%) of coffee drinkers felt jittery, and that drinking coffee raises the risk of nervousness fivefold (50% vs. 10%).

Table 2 uses the same raw data as Table 1. But instead of reporting vaccinated and unvaccinated data as a percentage of all data, it first calculates the occurrence of these conditions or outcomes in each group and compares the inter-group differences.

Hospital stays were also on average one day shorter for the unvaccinated. The only area where unvaccinated children faired slightly worse was in underlying cardiac issues, but the authors did not address this small difference in their discussion.

Previous study used same tactic

A study preceding the Zambrano paper by three weeks used the same tactic to arrive at the same conclusion.

Tannis et al. compared many of the same outcomes as Zambrano in 6,337 unvaccinated and 281 vaccinated children ages 6 months to under 5 years.

All subjects had visited emergency departments for acute respiratory illness from July 2022 to September 2023.

By coincidence, Tannis also calculated vaccine effectiveness to be 40%.

Table 3 presents data from Tannis et al. with percentages reported by Tannis (Tannis %) and the actual values (Actual %).

Vaccinated children were also 68.3% more likely to harbor HCoV, an endemic coronavirus, than the unvaccinated. Similar to SARS-CoV-2 (the COVID-19 virus), HCoV can cause serious illness in immunocompromised individuals and the elderly.

Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., holds a master’s degree in computer science and a doctorate in biomedical and health informatics. He practices data science by asking questions of databases that can reveal population-based adverse outcomes of medical interventions.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Wall Street Journal Sets Standard for Irresponsible Journalism in Ukraine

By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | January 10, 2024

Recently, The Wall Street Journal joined the flood of American mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, Politico and several others, in preparing the American public for a Russian victory.

After nearly two years, over $113 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money spent at horrendous cost in life and limb has put Ukraine in a worse bargaining position than they were at the start of the war. As many as 50,000 Ukrainians are now amputees. And though statistics on Ukrainian casualties are a tightly sealed state secret, the most plausible sources suggest casualties and fatalities as staggering as 400,000-500,000. These numbers fit with internal Ukrainian communications that suggest that maintaining their numbers on the field would require replacing 20,000 soldiers a month. The same figure has been given in a New York Times article that quoted a former battalion commander who “estimated that Ukraine will need to enlist 20,000 soldiers a month through next year to sustain its army, both replacing the dead and wounded.” 20,000 over an approximately two year war puts the figure well over 400,000. Most recently, Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general and ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, has said that 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded. Interestingly, it is Moscow that provides the most conservative figures. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu recently said that Ukraine has lost over 215,000 soldiers in 2023 with over 383,000 killed or wounded since the war began.

The 400,000-500,000 figure for Ukrainian soldiers lost to the battlefield by casualties and deaths also matches the 450,000-500,000 number that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says the military has requested in a new mobilization. In another sign of a battle between Zelensky and Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny, after Zelensky assigned responsibility to the military for requesting the unpopular draft, Zaluzhny placed the responsibility back on the government, denying that the military had ever formally requested the mobilization or provided the number.

The Wall Street Journal laid the psychological groundwork preparing the American public for defeat in Ukraine, despite the loss of Ukrainian lives and American dollars, with the line “Even if aid for Ukraine is renewed, it is essential to consider a realistic ending for the war.” It goes on to say that, though “Ukraine’s insistence on regaining all the territory Russia has seized since 2014 is understandable…events over the past year have made it clear that this goal can’t be achieved anytime soon.” The article concludes with the prescription that “Western leaders should explore” negotiations to end the fighting, calling it “a bitter pill” but “the only realistic path to a lasting peace in Europe.”

But it is in two short paragraphs near the end of the article that The Wall Street Journal does its readers a disservice by leaving out more information than it gives them, challenging the standards for responsible journalism.

The first of the two paragraphs state, “Recent reports, which Mr. Putin hasn’t denied, suggest that he is ready to agree to a cease-fire along the current battle lines. Although he is unwilling to retreat, these reports indicate that he had shelved his aim to dominate all of Ukraine.”

Though The Wall Street Journal is free to speculate that Vladimir Putin aimed to “dominate all of Ukraine,” it is also obliged to clarify that there is nothing on the documented historical record to indicate that Putin ever had dominating all of Ukraine as an objective. Scholar John Mearsheimer has pointed out, “There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state and make it part of greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24th.” That has also never been one of Putin’s stated goals of the military operation. His list of goals has consistently been that Ukraine cannot join NATO, that NATO won’t turn Ukraine into a heavily armed anti-Russian country on its border, and that the rights of ethnic Russian Ukrainians be protected. Russia has clearly stated that it “support[s] Ukraine’s territorial integrity” if Ukraine returns to the promise of permanent neutrality upon which Russia first recognized Ukrainian independence in 1991.

In the next paragraph, the article insists that “there are good reasons to be skeptical” that Putin is serious about negotiating a peace that would abandon his ambition to dominate Ukraine. But, though the author has the right to be skeptical, he needs to set out what those “good reasons” are because, once again, they ignore the historical record.

An overwhelming host of people who were present at the Istanbul talks have testified to just how close Russia and Ukraine came to a negotiated peace in the early days of the war. But in questioning Putin’s seriousness about negotiating a peace, The Wall Street Journal ignores reporting that came out several days before its own reporting that former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Oleksandr Chalyi, who was a member of the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, says that Putin was very serious about negotiating.

After reminding his audience at a debate in Geneva that he was actually there, Chalyi says that during the Istanbul talks “in March and April,” they “concluded [the] so called Istanbul Communique. And we were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.” Chalyi reports that Putin personally decided to accept the text of the Communique and that Putin “demonstrated a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.”

The Journal article then goes to claim that Putin’s Ukraine ambitions are merely part of a larger “plan to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” As evidence, the writer cites Putin’s 2005 statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Putin did say that. But like other quotations made by Putin, it is employed misleadingly by omitting its context. First of all, he did not call it “the greatest” catastrophe but “a major” disaster. But the catastrophe after the fall he is referring to is not the absence of the Soviet Union but, primarily, the economic hardship that followed in the wake of its break up. He bemoaned that “individual savings were depreciated” and oligarchs “served exclusively their own corporate interests.” He remembered that “mass poverty began to be seen as the norm.”

The misleading strategy employed here is similar to the one frequently employed when Putin is quoted as having said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart,” without adding that his next words were, “Whoever wants it back has no brain.” The first part refers to the same events Putin bemoans in the statement quoted in the Journal article; the second part entirely changes the claimed meaning by restoring the first to its context.

The Wall Street Journal article seems to be part of a media psychological campaign to prepare Americans for a Russian victory in Ukraine despite the massive expense in American aid, American weapons, and Ukrainian lives. But it could better prepare them for the inevitable negotiations that it predicts by honestly preparing them with the truth about the causes of the war and about the demonstrated possibility of negotiations, an understanding of which will be necessary if those negotiations are to succeed.

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Takedown of Israel’s bogus atrocity propaganda

January 9, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

Rwanda, Congo deny claims of talking with Israel to take in displaced Gazans

Press TV – January 6, 2024

Rwanda, Congo and Chad have refuted claims that they have engaged in any discussions with Israel concerning the potential acceptance of Palestinians displaced from the war-torn Gaza Strip.

Citing the latest fake news campaign from Israel, the Rwanda foreign ministry circulated a “disinformation alert” against the Zman Yisrael, an Israeli news outlet and The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister site, that had claimed on Friday that “Israel is in talks with Chad and Rwanda to accept thousands of Palestinians from Gaza.”

“No such discussion has taken place either now or in the past, and the disinformation should be ignored,” the statement from the Rwanda foreign ministry read on X, formerly Twitter.

Earlier, Congo and Chad also denied holding talks with Israel about the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.

Contrary to what is reported in some media, there has “never been any form of negotiation, discussion or initiative” between Kinshasa and Israel on the alleged reception of Palestinian migrants on Congolese soil, the Congolese government spokesperson, Patrick Muyaya, said in a statement late Thursday.

In its report, The Times of Israel asserted that Congo is willing to take in Palestinians. Quoting from a senior source in the security cabinet, it claimed that Congo “will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others.”

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is conducting secret contacts for accepting thousands of immigrants from Gaza with Congo, in addition to other nations,” the report read.

Meanwhile, The Times of Israel published another report on Thursday, stating that Israel has denied that it is in talks with other countries about absorbing Gazan immigrants, and that the senior official pushed back on Zman Yisrael’s report.

“It’s a baseless illusion in my opinion. No country will absorb 2 million people, or 1 million, or 100,000, or 5,000. I don’t know where that idea came from,” said the official in a briefing to Israeli journalists, on condition of anonymity, as the report stated.

According to reports, the Israeli regime is adopting the “voluntary” resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza as an official policy.

Earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu said he supports the idea but needs to find countries that are willing to “absorb” Gazans. “We are working on it,” he said.

While quoting a senior Israeli official, the report from Zman Yisrael also stated that whoever volunteers for migration would be handed over a “generous financial grant” and “extensive aid” to the receiving country.

“The principle is to give a generous financial grant to any Palestinian who expresses a desire to emigrate from Gaza, along with extensive aid to the receiving country, including military aid,” the report read.

On Wednesday, despite criticisms from the United States, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism Party, doubled down on a call for “voluntary emigration” from Gaza once the current war on Gaza ends.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the so-called national security minister, this week issued a call “to encourage the migration of Gaza residents” as a “solution” to the humanitarian crisis.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s top foreign policy official, condemned both Smotrich and Ben Gvir for their calls to resettle Palestinians living in Gaza as “inflammatory and irresponsible” on Wednesday.

“Forced displacements are strictly prohibited as a grave violation of [international humanitarian law] and words matter,” Borrell said on X.

A spokesperson for the United Kingdom foreign office said: “Gaza is Occupied Palestinian Territory and will be part of a future Palestinian state. The UK firmly rejects any suggestion of the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza.”

Furthermore, the Spanish government also offered its own rebuke Wednesday, saying the administration rejects recent statements by Israeli authorities evoking population movements in Gaza that would be contrary to international law.

Israel has launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas on Oct. 7.

Since the beginning of the war, at least 22,600 Palestinians have since been killed and 57,910 others injured, according to Gaza’s health authorities.

The relentless attacks have caused extensive devastation in Gaza, resulting in 60% of the region’s infrastructure being either damaged or completely destroyed.

This has led to the displacement of nearly 2 million residents, who now face severe shortages of essential resources such as food, clean water, and medicine.

January 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

How Israeli Military Censors Shape One US Network’s Gaza Coverage

“CNN has agreed not to be an independent news outlet”

Sputnik – 05.01.2024

It’s long been observed that mainstream media in America tends to favor Israel in their ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. But one outlet in particular makes an unusual effort to make sure Israeli authorities are satisfied with their reporting.

Analysis published Thursday documented how the television channel CNN treats their coverage of the Palestine-Israel conflict unlike any other journalism the network produces, ensuring Israeli military censors are able to exercise control over its content.

As a US-based outlet, CNN isn’t legally obliged to abide by the instructions of the Israel Defense Force’s military censor, which has operated in the country for over 70 years.

However, the channel has a long-standing practice of routing all relevant coverage through the network’s Jerusalem bureau anyway, ostensibly in order for it to be reviewed by people on the ground there. The practice means all coverage relating to Israel is overseen by journalists operating under the IDF’s censors.

“Every single Israel-Palestine-related line for reporting must seek approval from the bureau,” said one CNN employee who spoke anonymously about the policy.

“Or, when the bureau is not staffed, from a select few handpicked by the bureau and senior management – from which lines are most often edited with a very specific nuance.”

Jim Naureckas of the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting slammed the policy. “When you have a protocol that routes all stories through one checkpoint, you’re interested in control, and the question is who is controlling the story?” he said.

“In a situation where a government has been credibly accused of singling out journalists for violent attacks in order to suppress information, to give that government a heightened role in deciding what is news and what isn’t news is really disturbing.”

When reached for comment, a representative for CNN defended the practice. “The policy of running stories about Israel or the Palestinians past the Jerusalem bureau has been in place for years,” the spokesperson claimed. “It is simply down to the fact that there are many unique and complex local nuances that warrant extra scrutiny to make sure our reporting is as precise and accurate as possible.”

But the policy imbues Israeli reporters and government officials with an air of legitimacy not granted to their Palestinian counterparts. In October, the network’s News Standards and Practices division sent an email to employees instructing them how to cover Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza.

“Hamas controls the government in Gaza and we should describe the Ministry of Health as ‘Hamas-controlled’ whenever we are referring to casualty statistics or other claims related to the present conflict,” read the message.

Death counts released by Gaza’s health ministry have repeatedly been determined to be accurate by international experts. If anything, the 22,438 reported deaths in the enclave are likely to represent a low estimate, with thousands more trapped under rubble from Israeli airstrikes.

Civilians make up a large majority of the casualties, with women and children representing about 70%.

“Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed,” confirmed the CNN spokesperson.

The control exercised by Israeli journalists in the Jerusalem bureau is reportedly stringent at times, with people there even determining specific terms and language that can be used. The bureau isn’t obligated to submit content to the IDF before publishing, but censors in the military have intervened against reporting found to be unacceptable in the past. People working there would likely be well aware of the government’s preferred line.

In another voluntary act of cooperation with Israeli officials, CNN recently agreed to send all footage shot in the Gaza strip to the IDF for approval before its release. The agreement was reached in exchange for IDF protection in the besieged enclave. Executive vice president of the Quincy Institute Trita Parsi slammed the move, saying, “In other words, CNN has agreed not to be an independent news outlet.” Writer Shailja Patel called the network, “officially an IDF propaganda outlet.”

The practice of “embedding” journalists with members of the military has become a common practice since the days of the Vietnam War, when adversarial reporting on the conflict is thought to have played a major role in its unpopularity.

The practice provides the military with ultimate control over what journalists are allowed to witness and report on.

Several prominent personalities at CNN like anchor Jake Tapper are strong public supporters of Israel. Wolf Blitzer, perhaps the channel’s most prominent on-air figure, is a self-avowed Zionist who formerly worked for the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Analyst John McEvoy recently documented how government agencies covertly shape news coverage of Israel on CNN and other media outlets. After the bombing of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital in October sparked massive controversy, think tanks with ties to Western and Israeli intelligence served as sources for analysis in British state media that absolved the IDF of responsibility for the atrocity. The incident reveals one way US-aligned state actors are able to mold reporting even when it’s presented by more ostensibly neutral journalists.

January 5, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli police unable to verify ‘Hamas rape’ stories

The Cradle | January 5, 2024

Israeli police are unable to verify accounts of sexual assault allegedly committed by Palestinian fighters on 7 October, Haaretz reported on 4 January.

“The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault from the Hamas attack, or people who witnessed such attacks, and decided to appeal to the public to encourage those who have information on the matter to come forward,” the newspaper reported.

“Even in the few cases in which testimonies were collected about sexual offenses committed on October 7, police failed to connect the acts with the victims who were harmed by them.”

Adi Edri, a police investigator tasked with probing alleged sexual crimes committed during the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, told Haaretz there are “circumstantial indications” that there are survivors of the 7 October attack who police have yet to contact.

“We’re looking for more than a single witness. For each scene, we’re looking for support for what happened there.”

Israeli police claim to have collected a small number of eyewitness testimonies. These testimonies include those of military personnel and of the Israeli search and rescue team, Zaka – which was behind some of the debunked stories of atrocities committed by Hamas, among them the claim of 40 beheaded babies.

“Despite having no expertise in forensic investigations or documenting crime scenes, these volunteers were given access to the various kibbutzim and Nova party sites to collect the bodies,” says The Cradle’s William Van Wagenen, US investigative journalist who has conducted extensive research into the events of 7 October.

Van Wagenen raises further questions about Zaka’s credibility, detailing how it “was suspected of using shadow organizations to funnel millions of dollars of donations for private use, even as the organization faced bankruptcy,” citing a 2019 report by Hebrew media.

Additionally, Zaka’s founder Yehuda Meshi-Zahav has been implicated in the sexual assault and molestation of women and children, according to a 2021 Haaretz investigation.

Haaretz reported in November 2023 that a significant lack of forensic evidence made it difficult to determine what happened on October 7. The November report also found that many of the allegations by volunteer workers, officials, and military personnel did not add up.

The latest Haaretz report comes one week after the New York Times (NYT) published a report detailing what it called the “weaponization” of sexual violence on 7 October.

The report centered around the case of Gal Abdush, who was killed on 7 October. NYT identified Abdush as “the woman in the black dress” whose corpse was seen in a video filmed after the attack – which was said to show evidence that she had been raped.

However, some of Abdush’s family members denied that she was sexually assaulted and claimed that NYT took advantage of them by interviewing them under “false pretenses.”

Questions continue to be raised over the veracity of many of the alleged atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October, particularly with the growing amount of information that has surfaced regarding Tel Aviv’s role in the death of Israeli civilians that day.

January 5, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli family of key case in NY Times report refutes story of alleged rape by Hamas fighters

Press TV – January 4, 2024

The Israeli family of a key case in the New York Times report on alleged sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 renounces the published story, saying reporters have manipulated them.

On December 28, the New York Times published a story, claiming that fighters of the Palestinian Hamas resistance group allegedly committed a pattern of gender-based violence against Israeli women when the group carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity on October 7.

Authors of the report – Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, along with Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella – claimed that they had compiled the story based on over 150 interviews they conducted with purported victims or their families, mainly repeating October 7 testimonies that have been previously published and already debunked and discredited.

A third of the report, however, was devoted to the Abdush family, a working-class Mizrahi Jewish family who lost their daughter, Gal, known as “the woman in the black dress”, back then and how she was allegedly raped during the Hamas attack.

The report focused on footage that was captured on October 8 by a woman called Eden Wessely, who published it on her social media accounts. According to the report by the New York Times, “The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.”

A day after the report was published, the Israeli Ynet news site conducted an interview with Gal’s parents, who stressed that there is no proof she was raped, and that the paper’s reporters interviewed them under false pretenses, saying that they knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece in the American daily was published. Furthermore, Gal’s sisters also strongly denied allegations of rape.

On January 1, Nissim Abdush, Nagi’s brother-in-law, repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped in an interview with Israeli Channel 13.

Hamas has strongly rejected Israel’s allegations of rape and sexual assaults against its fighters, saying the regime is striving to demonize the resistance by such fabricated stories.

“We reject the Israeli lies about raping, which aim to distort the resistance and tarnish our humane and moral treatment of captives,” Hamas said in a statement in early December.

The Israeli regime waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas launched its operation against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s atrocities against Palestinians.

Since the start of the US-backed offensive, the Israeli regime has killed at least 22,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured over 57,000 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble.

January 4, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

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