Moscow rejects US narrative on aid for Kiev
RT | December 7, 2023
Claims in Washington that Russian President Vladimir Putin may attack NATO, unless Congress allocates tens of billions of dollars in additional Ukraine funding are “bogeyman stories,” Moscow’s ambassador in the US capital Anatoly Antonov said on Wednesday.
White House officials, including President Joe Biden, have claimed that by withholding aid from Kiev, American lawmakers were increasing the risk of a direct US-Russia war.
“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden said in an address on Wednesday, in which he made a last-ditch appeal to lawmakers to appropriate over $110 billion in assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Touting the scenario of a Russian attack on NATO, Biden stressed that then American troops will have to get involved directly. The Russian leadership has not expressed an intention to “take Ukraine,” let alone invade any NATO member.
Antonov dismissed the narrative, accusing those who repeat it of “myth-making and [the] propagation of dangerous lies” about his nation.
“In an attempt to ‘add fuel’ to the fire of the Ukrainian proxy war, [US] authorities have finally lost touch with reality,” he claimed in remarks posted by the embassy.
“Washington and [the] insatiable US military-industrial complex are direct beneficiaries of the bloodshed in Ukraine,” Antonov added.
In his pitch to Congress, Biden claimed that the Russian leader’s ambition was to “dominate Ukraine” and warned that “the entire world is watching” Washington’s actions. America is “the reason Putin has not totally overrun Ukraine and moved beyond that,” he claimed.
Moscow has cited NATO’s expansion in Europe and the pledge that Ukraine will eventually join the US-led military bloc among the causes of the crisis. It was willing to seal a truce with Kiev in the early phase of the conflict in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality.
However, Russia’s opponent ditched a proposed peace agreement and opted for continued hostilities, after then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the country to “just make war,” according to David Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation at the Türkiye-mediated negotiations.
Biden accused Republican opponents of his request of being willing to “literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield” and “give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership not just to Ukraine.”
Nevertheless, Republican senators voted unanimously against the aid, which was bundled in a spending package, later in the day. The GOP legislators insisted that the White House and Democratic lawmakers make concessions on immigration reform and border security before they were willing to approve additional tens of billions of aid to Kiev.
Comparing Coverage: Dublin riots vs Black Lives Matter
By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | November 30, 2023
Last Thursday afternoon, news would spread throughout Ireland of a horrific knife attack on three young schoolchildren and their teacher outside a Gaelscoil (Irish-language school) in Dublin city centre. At the time of writing, the youngest of the victims, a five year old girl, remains gravely ill in hospital.
With it soon emerging that the suspect was an immigrant who had previously been served a deportation order in 2003, tensions that had been building across the country over the past year in response to the immigration policy of Leinster House, which has seen large amounts of male migrants placed into wildly unsuitable locations such as an inner city office block and a children’s school, would come to a head. Calls for a protest in Dublin later that night would rapidly spread throughout social media.
Such protests have become a mainstay across Ireland over the past year, with the government of WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Leo Varadkar labelling protesters as ‘’far-right’’ and carrying out surveillance of organisers in response, a strategy that has served only to exacerbate tensions even further.
Last year in Canada, under the rule of fellow WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Justin Trudeau, a similar response would take place to the Freedom Convoy, a protest movement launched by Canadian truckers following the decision to mandate jab passports for drivers returning from the US, the largest land-border in the world and a key component of the Canadian economy.
Just as open borders policies serve the interests of the global elites that the WEF represents, via the undermining of national sovereignty and the devaluing of labour, jab passports served their interests by acting as conditioning for the introduction of an eventual mandatory digital ID, which in line with the Great Reset initiative would allow the government-corporate alliance to have an unprecedented level of control over its citizens’ finances in a cashless society.
The fraught tensions that had spurred on Thursday’s planned protest however, would seemingly attract an opportunistic element, one that had engaged in looting and the burning of vehicles in Dublin on the night.
Unsavoury scenes, though it cannot be understated that, in terms of magnitude, they are a universe apart from the stabbing of children.
The establishment media however, did not hold the same view; with the unrest that swept Dublin dominating newspaper headlines alongside accusations that it had been “organised by the far-right”, the brutal attack on the children and their teacher being consigned to a mere afterthought.
Security Minister for the southern Irish state, Helen McEntee announced that legislation would be fast tracked to introduce Facial Recognition Technology – another key component of the Great Reset – in response to the riots, and it was announced that MMA star Conor McGregor was being investigated for ‘’inciting hate’’ over a post on X that he had sent the night BEFORE the stabbings.
A lockstep response of condemnation, though one that lies in stark contrast to the response towards the riots that swept the United States following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, for which a minutes silence was held in the southern Irish Parliament, something that has so far not occurred for the victims of last Thursday’s mass-stabbing.
To understand why, one must look at the wider political context at the time of George Floyd’s death.
Four days prior to the footage of Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck going viral, Joe Biden, the then-Democrat candidate for that years US Presidential election, infamously declared that whoever voted for the incumbent Donald Trump over him ‘’Ain’t black’’ in an attempt to garner support amongst the black community of the United States for his Presidential campaign. A PR disaster, and one that confirmed he was in need of the black vote in order to guarantee an electoral victory.
Thus, the death of George Floyd was weaponised to guarantee such a result, with violent riots sweeping the United States in the aftermath. In contrast to the one night of looting and arson that took place in Dublin however, the mainstream media would provide cover for the months-long unrest in the US, with corporate outlet CNN notoriously describing it as ‘’fiery but mostly peaceful’’ at one stage.
Key to this was the involvement of George Soros, a significant donor to both the Democrat Party and the Black Lives Matter organisation via his Open Society Foundations, a globalist support-network that has sponsored colour revolutions from as far afield as Ukraine and China.
It is also why last week’s night of unrest in Dublin, carried out amidst a wider political context of opposition to globalist policies in Ireland, came in for far more media condemnation than the months of BLM-led riots that took place in the United States in 2020.
Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.
First, Do Harm: A Sorry Tale in the Daily Mail
Dissenting Doctors Dishonourably Disparaged
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 29, 2023
The sordid state of the medical system here in the UK is laid bare in excruciating detail in a recent Daily Mail article which chooses to perpetuate myths and disinformation rather than engage in genuine reporting.
The story so far
Dr Sarah Myhill – a doctor now working as a naturopath – is being hounded by the General Medical Council (GMC) who have referred her to various hearings at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS). Myhill’s alleged transgressions are outlined in great detail on the MPTS website, but the gist of the complaint seems to be that Myhill has had the temerity to highlight the benefits of low-cost treatments (such as Vitamin D) over expensive – and possibly harmful – pharmaceuticals.
This matter should hardly be controversial, even to the mainstream – after all, many will have heard or watched the various TV series such as ‘Dopesick’, ‘Painkiller’ or even the BBC recent Panorama expose ‘The Antidepressant Story’. In contrast to these expensive chemical compounds that have multiple adverse effects – both on individuals and society as a whole – stand inexpensive treatments and lifestyles that are as cheap as (and substantially healthier than) chips.
Consider the benefits of Vitamin D – the ‘sunshine vitamin’ – extolled in no lesser organ of public opinion than the Daily Mail itself, Mark Solomons reporting only a few weeks ago that “a third of Britons have Vitamin D deficiency due to spending too much time indoors, poor diet and failing to take supplements”.
What an opportunity to follow this excellent educational reporting with an additional piece that promotes healthy living and the perils of the over-promotion of ‘pill popping’.
Alas… ‘achievement not unlocked’. The headline alone is a classic of the disinformation genre, a masterclass in deceptive propagandisation comprising just 23 words (and a number):
Precisely why all Welsh doctors approaching retirement are deemed worthy of this drive-by assassination by headline is not fully clear – perhaps that is just the Daily Mail’s house style. That aside, the following twin headline double-barrelled untruths deserve greater scrutiny:
- Vitamins C & D are branded “other ‘potentially harmful’ substances”, which is of course entirely correct… but only in the sense that too much of almost anything is not only possibly harmful, but potentially lethal. Water – that elixir of life, the molecule that makes up almost 60% of your bodyweight – can cause death not only by drowning, but also by overhydration: “After downing some six liters of water in three hours in the “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest, Jennifer Strange vomited, went home with a splitting headache, and died from so-called water intoxication”. If Vitamins C & D are now ‘potentially harmful’ and result in witch-hunt reporting, can we expect the Daily Mail to refer itself for censure for calling for its readers to “drink plenty of fluids” without suitable caveats? In comparison to this – potentially lethal – advice from the Daily Mail, Dr Myhill has advocated taking a high dosage of Vitamin D but at a level no greater than a level that recent research has determined to be safe.
- The ‘livestock dewormer’ in question is in fact Ivermectin, a very cheap and Nobel prize-winning antiviral drug. After a history of veterinary use, it was approved by the FDA for human use in 1996, has been on the World Health Organisation’s list of essential medicines since at least 2015 and was described in the Journal of Antibiotics in 2020 as an antiviral “wonder drug” that “is continuing to surprise and excite scientists, offering more and more promise to help improve global public health by treating a diverse range of diseases, with its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent being particularly extraordinary… perhaps more than any other drug, ivermectin is a drug for the world’s poor. For most of this century, some 250 million people have been taking it annually to combat two of the world’s most devastating, disfiguring, debilitating and stigma-inducing diseases, Onchocerciasis [river blindness] and Lymphatic filariasis. Most of the recipients live in remote, rural, desperately under-resourced communities in developing countries and have virtually no access to even the most rudimentary of medical interventions. Moreover, all the treatments have been made available free of charge thanks to the unprecedented drug donation program”.
What a heart-warming story! If only the Daily Mail had chosen to share this feel-good blockbuster with its readers. Many doctors chose to prescribe Ivermectin off-label, which is entirely normal behaviour (after all, repurposing a drug that already has a defined safety record is far less risky than rushing a new medicine – which by definition will not have a long track record – to market):
“There are clinical situations when the use of unlicensed medicines or use of medicines outside the terms of the licence (i.e. ‘off-label’) may be judged by the prescriber to be in the best interest of the patient on the basis of available evidence. Such practice is particularly common in certain areas of medicine: for instance, in paediatrics where difficulties in the development of age-appropriate formulations means that many medicines used in children are used off-label or are unlicensed“.
Who better to make these kinds of decisions than a patient’s doctor?
Many people will be aware of what happened next. Various shenanigans ensued resulting in Ivermectin being discredited. One of the most Kafkaesque situations was an FDA-orchestrated smear campaign that branded Ivermectin as ‘horse-paste’ and informed people that “you are not a horse”. Quite an eyebrow-raising stunt when you consider that Ivermectin is safe enough to feature on the CDC website with an oral dosage level that is declared safe for use in children over the weight of 15kg. The FDA was – quite rightly – subsequently eviscerated in a recent Fifth District court ruling:
“The Food and Drug Administration is not a physician, so it had no business cautioning people not to take Ivermectin”.
The ruling is worth reading in full.
Returning to the Daily Mail headline, we can summarise the situation as follows: authorities have censured a doctor who promoted (within their known safe usage parameters!) certain vitamins and antiviral treatments. Whether or not these treatments are effective or not is essentially irrelevant – they are safe, which is more can be said for any newly introduced pharmaceutical product with no long-term safety data attached.
Contrast the prescription of these safe treatments with said authorities’ recent (well, since late 2020) enthusiastic one-size-fits-all promotion of various injectable products that were claimed to be both ‘safe’ and ‘effective’.
There is, of course, a rational (if somewhat chilling) explanation as to why we find ourselves in this bizarre and counter-intuitive situation.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider what twisted circumstances can have arisen for the medical establishment to weaponise its disciplinary procedures, especially in the case of a doctor that has already attempted to take herself off the register. The GMC and the MPTS are only too aware that:
“suspension has a deterrent effect and can be used to send out a signal to the doctor, the profession and public about what is regarded as behaviour unbefitting a registered doctor.”
The action against Myhill seems overly vindictive and a waste of time, money and resources. The absurdity of proceedings has been inadvertently – and succinctly – summarised by the GMC’s KC, Tom Kark:
“The problem with the Myhill cases is that all the patients are improved and all refuse to give witness statements.”
But perhaps the intention is to come after other doctors that dare to speak out, and also to deter others from joining them in speaking truth to power.
The promotion of one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical interventions is clearly a profitable endeavour for various pharmaceutical companies and associated vested interests, but it is clearly not in the best interests of patients. Doctors promise to “first, do no harm”, and they – and all associated establishment regulators and other authorities – pay appropriate lip-service regarding patient autonomy, choice and informed consent as encapsulated in any (and one would hope all?) documented formulations of the Doctor-Patient relationship.
But the truth is starkly different. There are good doctors who are willing to put patients first, resist groupthink and stand up to bullying regulators. The hounding and demonisation of these doctors is an appalling and sinister crime. It happened before covid, it happened during covid, and it is happening now. It is sad to see spineless reporting by those in the mainstream media who (1) should know better and (2) have the resources to stand up to the drug pushers.
Perhaps the only answer is bottom-up resistance. If enough people resolve to ensure that justice is done, then complaining to the GMC might make a difference.
Main National TV Station Pumps INSANE Propaganda
Ivor Cummins | November 20, 2023
Our National main TV station just aired an INSANE piece of WEF/UN-style propaganda – it’s a parody of itself! Nonetheless I have a great time taking it down hardcore ;-) Please share widely – you can download vid here too, to share elsewhere:
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Curious Admission Surfaces Concerning MHRA Blackmailing Mainstream Media Outlet Over Adverse Event Reporting
And no one really picked up on it…
BY JJ STARKY | NOVEMBER 25, 2023
Mass consumers of news – me included – are often exposed to so much information that some of that information can be lost in all the noise.
There’s little explanation why such a bombshell revelation featured in a recent Telegraph article gained next to no attention.
On 8th November, journalist Sarah Knapton published an article, entitled, ‘In the end, the AstraZeneca vaccine just wasn’t as good as its rivals’. Knapton broke down how AstraZeneca’s (AZ) purported efficacy could not stand up to the purported efficacy of the other vaccines. The consequences of which led to its eventual abandonment.
Curiously, however, buried in the 14th paragraph, was a confession that back in March 2021 – when the Telegraph first reported on AZ’s blood clot risks – Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) officials effectively blackmailed them.
Knapton writes:
“On the day we published the story we received a threatening phone call from a senior official at the MHRA warning that The Telegraph would be banned from future briefings and press notices if we did not soften the news.
Another well-known Cambridge academic got in touch to complain about our “disgraceful fear-mongering headline” on the story, claiming that it would discourage vaccine uptake and cost lives.”
This was the headline of that 17th March 2021 article:
Considering the title includes a subjective opinion from a foreign medical regulator that softens the news, I’m not sure how it constitutes “disgraceful fear-mongering”.
Perhaps this remark is more reflective of the contagious petulance we witness with medical regulators. For them, negative news is not just negative news. It’s analogous to physical assault.
What seems far more “disgraceful” is how a supposedly impartial medical regulator – tasked with safeguarding citizens from potentially lethal treatments – allegedly threatened to strip away a news organisation’s access. Leaving them out in the cold as competitors would stand to benefit from their potential exclusion.
And the curious thing is, no one has seemed to pick up on the news bar The Conservative Woman and the Health Advisory & Recovery Team (HART).
A report from HART earlier in August further revealed that MHRA officials have been blocking journalists, scientists, and vaccine injured victims on social media. HART asked them why and they responded:
“Thank you for flagging your issue about Twitter. We’ve reviewed recent action taken on that platform and have identified accounts which have been blocked in error, these have now been unblocked and you should be free to interact with our content again. Please let us know if you have any further issues so we can investigate and rectify, if necessary”.
“Sorry folks, it was error. And a complete ‘coincidence’ that we primarily blocked commentators who were critical of us…”
These are the same officials who refused to answer a routine Freedom of Information Request concerning data AstraZeneca submitted in their application to licence their Covid-19 vaccine. The reason they refused? It was “vexatious”.
They wrote in their response:
“this request falls to be considered “vexatious” due to the scope of the request and the disproportionate burden that compliance would create. S14(1) of the FOIA states that “Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the request is vexatious.
Downloading the dossier of the vaccine is a relatively straightforward task, although it does require time. Due to the voluminous size of the file packages, when downloading the full package of data, the database software may be more prone to freeze. However, the time required to read through the dossiers, to identify exempt information and to consider and make redactions we expect would take many weeks, if not months to complete, as the dossier encompasses gigabytes of data. To meet the request our staff: Would need to read the dossier in full, in order to identify where redactions need to be made.
We appreciate that there remains a strong public interest in COVID-19 vaccines, however, we do not feel that the public interest outweighs the resource burden required to meet your request.”
Sometimes the actions of government officials are laced with so much arrogance, incompetence, and just frank laziness that it makes one question if they’re genuinely true.
If I sat across the table from an uninitiated countryman and told him of the above, it would come as no surprise to see him raise his eyebrows in astonishment. But not because of what I was telling him, but at me, as if I was about to descend into prophetic trance about how judgement day is coming and there’s going to be some epic battle between us and the lizard people outside Matt Hancock’s house.
Put differently, the extent to which the medical regulators’ actions are so unbelievable actually benefits them. It is easier for people to dismiss it as false. Of course, if the media actually did their job, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Naturally, when MHRA threatened the Telegraph, the outlet hesitated to revisit the subject for months. The blackmail paid off.
ANALYSIS: HOW THE UK AND US MEDIA DEHUMANISE PALESTINIANS
BY CLAIRE LAUTERBACH AND NAMIR SHABIBI | DECLASSIFIED UK | NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Nazis. Beneath animals.
This is a small sample of what Palestinians have been called by commentators speaking to Western media outlets in the last month of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – examples of the bestiary of zoological terms natural to a coloniser’s view of the colonised.
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote during France’s colonial war in Algeria of “hordes of vital statistics”, “hysterical masses”, “faces bereft of all humanity”, and “children who seem to belong to nobody”.
These are all terms that could describe how western media covers the suffering of Palestinians — “a tide of humanity… a teeming mass of Gazans”, as the BBC put it (15 October). This is all sharply in focus since Hamas’ October offensive, and Israel’s genocidal razing of the Gaza strip.
We analysed the front page coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza by five major US and UK news media — the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, and the BBC (the news landing page at 7am daily) between 7-26 October.
Over these three weeks following Hamas’ offensive, the mechanics of the Western press’ dehumanisation of Palestinians in death and life are revealed as clinical and routine.
Israelis are murdered, Palestinians die
The dehumanisation process begins (or ends) with questioning who counts in death, and how the killer and the victim are portrayed.
In the UK-US mainstream media, Israelis die actively. They are either killed or murdered by Hamas, or “after a surprise Palestinian attack”. “The Palestinians” stands in for “Hamas” for sloppy or ideological editors, for example in the Guardian on 8 October.
Palestinian civilians, by contrast, die passively – and yet it is they who have done most of the dying since 7 October; over ten times the number of Israelis killed.
Gazans aren’t killed by Israeli forces or Israeli government policies. They “dehydrate to death as clean water runs out” (Guardian, 18 October) while Israeli airstrikes “continue to pound the Palestinian territory”.
On 9 October, the BBC ran with “700 people have been killed on the Israeli side with more than 400 also dead in Gaza”, presumably succumbing to shock or an act of God.
On 8 November, the Times of London noted: “Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died”, which is of course qualified.
Palestinian deaths are natural, undifferentiated. This is only possible because the media treat Israel’s blockade of Gaza as wholly logical, proportionate and even restrained.
Violations of international law
Collective punishment, which is essentially what Israel is doing by striking civilian “targets” and totally blockading the “open prison” (in former prime minister David Cameron’s words), is also illegal. This is the view of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, UN human rights chief Volker Türk and Human Rights Watch, among others.
When UN chief António Guterres noted Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and called for an end to the siege, Israel’s UN representative demanded he resign. At least one of Guterres’ colleagues, the head of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, Craig Mokhiber, resigned of his own accord, protesting Israel’s “genocide unfolding before our eyes” in Palestine.
However, in none of the three weeks’ of front-page headlines and lead paragraphs for the five UK-US media analysed for this article are Israel’s serial violations of international law mentioned.
The exclusion of this important context on Israel’s crimes is important. As journalists we’re trained to account for the fact that most people don’t read beyond the headlines or first paragraphs.
Off the front page, some media published separate analysis pieces, such as the New York Times’ “Israel, Gaza and the laws of war” (12 October). This unsurprisingly goes nowhere near calling Israel’s crimes what they are: crimes.
Despite discussing at length how civilians cannot be targeted or disproportionately harmed for military purposes, the closest the New York Times gets to criticising the action of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is quoting the opinion of an expert on siege law.
This was that Israel’s siege is “an unusually clear-cut example of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, which is considered a violation of international humanitarian law, a crime against humanity and a war crime” (emphasis added).
A swift qualifier follows: “Jurisdiction over some war crimes would depend on whether the conflict is considered inter-state.” So some crimes are not a crime as long as Palestine or Palestinians don’t exist, as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir asserted over 50 years ago, repeated by current Israeli politicians.
By contrast, Hamas’ actions are, to the same cited expert, “not close calls”.
Preventable deaths
Moving on from, or ignoring completely, both the illegality of Israel’s total siege of Gaza, the UK-US media portray the starvation and preventable deaths resulting directly from it in almost entirely passive, naturalistic language.
For example, the Washington Post’s print version front page: “Civilian harm in Gaza looms over Biden’s visit; Rising human toll from attacks could threaten Israel’s global backing” (harm arising of course from Israel’s battering).
On 13 October, from the New York Times : “300,000 homeless in battered Gaza as food runs low” (because Israel is blocking food from entering Gaza). It continues: “Hospitals overwhelmed and fuel scarce” (because Israel is blocking medical supplies and fuel from reaching Gaza) “as Israel strikes back at Hamas.”
That’s fine then – the reader should feel at ease since Israel’s crushing of hospitals is merely an act of “self-defence”.
The Israeli military is not much a fan of Gazan hospitals – it regularly bombs them. It ordered 23 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate on 13 October, and seems to have been picking them off, with patients inside, ever since.
When Israel might have gone too far, as it did in almost certainly bombing Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October, most outlets covered the strike by repeating both Israel’s and Hamas’ “he said-she said” accusations against the other.
Nevertheless, the New York Times gave the IDF’s denial more weight with “Hamas fails to make case that Israel struck hospital” (23 October, emphasis added), which is a catchier headline than “We don’t know, and don’t want to work it out ourselves”.
Meanwhile, the Times ran with “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”, swiftly adding that “Israel denies responsibility and blames jihadis”, with no comment from a Palestinian voice.
Mirroring the discrepancy between how Palestinians have died (passively, often with no mention of Israeli actions) and Israelis have died (actively, directly attributed to Hamas or “Palestinian” actions) is how the media describes child victims of both sides.
Discussing a prisoner exchange, a Washington Post columnist described Israel’s “children hostages” while referring to Palestinian children as “young people”. Under Military Order 1591, the Israeli government can hold minors as young as 12 without trial and potentially indefinitely in “administrative detention”, UNICEF reports.
When Gazan civilian deaths from siege and strikes against civilian infrastructure are shown as authorless natural disasters rather than as war crimes, any access Gazans get to essential goods becomes “aid” or “relief”, and every tiny amount allowed to reach them is an act of Israeli mercy.
For example, the New York Times (19 October): “Deal lays groundwork for aid to reach desperate Gazans”. Or the Washington Post (12 October): “Closed borders, falling bombs choke Gaza; thousands injured as supplies wane”, adding “humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens” (due to Israeli siege, let’s not forget).
Also in the Washington Post is the incredible headline (16 October) “As Palestinian death toll rises, aid stuck in Egypt”, as if it couldn’t physically fit through the door, which ignores the fact that Israel prevented aid from entering Israel via Rafah, demanding proof it would not be diverted to Hamas.
The numbers
Having reduced Palestinians to numbers, the work then becomes to cast doubt on these numbers.
When Israel’s flattening of Gaza began raising international alarm, Biden said he didn’t trust that “Palestinians” (or the Hamas government, since to him the distinction is irrelevant) “are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
His statement was the latest in a time-honoured tradition of US administrations disputing the number of deaths wreaked by their allies abroad, from Suharto’s Indonesia, to Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and Saudi Arabia today, as historian Bradely Simpson notes.
No one seriously disputes the Gazan Ministry of Health’s numbers as too high. If anything, they are likely a serious undercount given how many bodies are trapped under rubble.
Nevertheless, the attribution of figures to the “Gaza Ministry of Health” is now almost always prefaced by “Hamas-government” or followed by “controlled by Hamas”. This would seem an odd waste of words, considering that everyone from the UN to the US State Department cites Gazan health ministry casualty data, and Gaza’s government is run by Hamas.
Dead Palestinians are simply irrelevant for some media. The first mention of Palestinian deaths in Times headlines occurred 11 days after Hamas’ assault: “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”. It had by then run several front page pieces about specific, named Israeli victims, including an in-depth profile (with portrait) of a kibbutz family horrifically killed by the Hamas-led offensive [or not].
Unsurprisingly, on 12 October, the Telegraph published the number of Israelis killed in factors of “9/11s” in a striking infographic which didn’t even bother to include an estimate of Palestinian deaths.
Double standards
Once a people are truly dehumanised, it becomes logical – necessary, even – to apply a wholly different standard of (in)decency to them.
UK-US media report Palestinian deaths passively, as if through apparent acts of God, often couching the deaths in language suggesting that they were mostly Hamas or Hamas-adjacent, or at least that they inconveniently stood in missiles’ way.
For still-breathing Palestinians, it is not enough to have somehow escaped being killed by the almost 6,000 bombs Israel launched in its first six days punishing the densely populated territory. This is more than the US, not usually known for its restraint, deployed in any single year of its war in Afghanistan.
A living Palestinian must justify his or her continued aliveness by disavowing Hamas. A viral example of this can be seen in BBC Newsnight’s interview of the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot.
Presenter Kirsty Wark barely flinched upon hearing Zomlot describe in detail how members of his family had been killed by Israeli strikes in the previous days before repeatedly demanding Zomlot condemn Hamas’ actions.
To reverse this, in other words, to ask every Israeli who had lost a family member in this conflict to first begin by condemning Israel’s murders and collective punishment of civilian Gazans would be rightly seen as outrageous. Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any examples of such in the Western press.
The UK-US press also tells us that to support Palestinians is to support Hamas, in case anyone doubted the conflation.
The BBC declared London’s peaceful pro-Palestine protesters as providing “backing for Hamas.” It later retracted its “poorly phrased” comments.
Sky News did no better in using images of peaceful protesters bearing Palestinian flags to accompany its discussion of efforts by the London Metropolitan Police to “tackle extremism”.
These “slips” pale in comparison with the virulently offensive terms guests on BBC programmes have called Palestinians, completely unchallenged by their hosts.
For example, BBC Arabic hosted former Israeli intelligence veteran-turned academic, Mordechai Kedar who refused to recognise popular Israeli racism towards Palestinians, claiming that bestial comparisons of Palestinians are “denigrating to animals.”
Tellingly, the BBC Arabic host neither ejected Kedar from the interview, nor did she admonish him and demand an apology. Instead, the host pivoted away from Kedar’s genocidal language with the comment “that’s your opinion”.
Platforming Israeli justifications
UK-US media have also taken to running pieces platforming Israeli justifications for the IDF’s actions when the staggering number of dead Gazan civilians was becoming harder to write around.
“How Israelis justify scale of airstrikes” ran the New York version front page of the New York Times on 26 October. It was later rewritten as “Israel’s strikes on Gaza are some of the most intense this century”.
It is unthinkable that a Western newspaper would carry a piece platforming in the same benign-to-neutral terms Palestinian rage, or worse, justifications for Hamas’ crimes.
Another trend is to normalise Israel’s actions by focusing not on its costs in Gazan lives, but its intentions which, of course, are shown as benign. (Note: intentions don’t matter in the laws of war.)
Three days into Israel’s illegal total blockade of Gaza, the BBC asked: “Could an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza meet its aims?” (14 October). Charitably characterising Netanyahu as “risk-averse” (for Israelis, not Palestinians), the New York Times ran with “All-out war is untried ground”, comforting readers that “limited strikes in past were safe politically”.
Dissenting voices: harder to hear
Journalists at the BBC and Agence France Presse (AFP) who have been critical of their agencies’ bias against Palestinian lives and minimisation of Israeli war crimes told Declassified that there is no space to discuss editorial concerns.
Palestinian commentators have seen their segments edited out of mainstream news programmes. Palestinian Americans report their events are being cancelled while they’re called Hamas supporters.
Meanwhile, a senior editor at US publication Newsweek called for Gaza to be flattened to resemble a parking lot, apparently without censure.
Elsewhere in the media ecosystem, an official of the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM, Fadzai Madzingira, was suspended for a social media post criticising UK support for “ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians” and “this vile colonial alliance”.
None of these points – that Israel may be committing genocide, that it continues to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land or that Israel was founded as a colonial project which still uses settler outposts to consolidate territorial control – is outside of reasonable analysis of historical facts.
It’s looking an awful lot like the beginning (or end, depending on your starting point) of a genocide.
The IDF has instructed all Palestinians to flee south of the Wadi Gaza area “for their safety” from Israeli strikes. Some were struck as they were evacuating, and Palestinians are still being shelled by the IDF in southern refuge areas.
Soldiers plant Israeli flags on Gazan beaches, while Israel’s intelligence agency floats the idea of permanently expelling Gazans to Egyptian Sinai as a preferred solution. Netanyahu invokes a Bible passage where God orders the Israelites “to put to death men and women, children and infants” of a rival kingdom.
Still, the New York Times uncritically presents Netanyahu as “seeking [a] permanent end to threat but not a reoccupation” (13 October).
That last bastion of dissent, gallows humour, is also at grave risk. Michael Eisen, editor of science journal eLife, was sacked for posting on Twitter an article from humour site the Onion, with the headline “Dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas”.
The Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell’s contract was not renewed after his sketch of Netanyahu preparing to operate on his own stomach with an outline of Gaza was deemed too reminiscent of the “pound of flesh” anti-semitic trope.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a cartoon of a Hamas official with Gazan children and women strapped to him saying “How dare Israel attack civilians”. It’s since been deleted following racism complaints.
Yet the cartoonist is still drawing for mainstream media. Last week he published another cartoon in the Las Vegas Review showing a (fat, black) woman with a Black Lives Matter t-shirt holding up a sign saying “Terrorist Lives Matter: Blame Israel, Support Hamas”.
How dare Israel attack civilians indeed.
Claire Lauterbach is an independent investigative journalist and producer. She is the former Head of Investigations at Privacy International where she investigated the use and abuse of surveillance and military technologies, and a former Senior Investigator at Global Witness. Claire previously investigated war crimes in Goma, DR Congo for Human Rights Watch.
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist, visiting lecturer in Geopolitics at the University of Westminster, and PhD candidate researching covert paramilitary action in the ‘War on Terror’. He is a former International Committee of the Red Cross delegate investigating breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Darfur and Guantanamo Bay.
Why China’s ‘repressed’ Muslims suddenly got dragged back into the light
By Timur Fomenko | RT | November 24, 2023
At the beginning of this week, foreign ministers from a group of Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian National Authority, and Indonesia travelled to China in order to seek support for a ceasefire in the ongoing Gaza war.
The unconditional backing of Israel by the United States and its allies has tanked their credibility across the Islamic world, and Beijing has positioned itself as an advocate of peace when others are not willing to take up that role.
It is curious that within the following few days, a report was released by Human Rights Watch, accusing China of expanding its alleged campaign of closing down and repurposing mosques into regions other than Xinjiang – which had so far been the focus of accusations that Beijing is cracking down on the predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority. Even those allegations had been somewhat on the backburner in the establishment media lately, but the HRW report was quickly picked up and amplified.
Although relations between the US and China have somewhat calmed down, it is obvious that Washington does not want to see Beijing increase its influence in the Muslim world, as that would inevitably come at the expense of American clout. The attempt to draw attention back to China’s alleged repression of its Muslim population, while underreporting Israel’s devastating attack on the (also Muslim) population of Gaza, is an exercise in deflection and part of the ongoing narrative war between China and the US. Be it about Muslims or not, the Xinjiang issue has long been a key component of that struggle for influence.
The Uyghur minority has, since 2018, been a tool of “atrocity propaganda” used to wage public relations offensives against China. It is a means to an end, which often disappears and resurfaces in the media, coinciding with the ebb and flow of anti-Beijing rhetoric coming from the US administration or the State Department. This includes using it to turn public opinion against Beijing in selected countries, including allies, or to manufacture consent for policies aimed at supply chain shifts or “decoupling,” through the accusation of forced labor, especially in the fields of key agricultural goods, polysilicon and solar panels, or to attempt to embarrass China diplomatically at the UN, or to push for boycotting events such as the Winter Olympics.
This is an incredibly opportunistic attitude to something Beijing’s detractors claim is a “genocide.” Since late 2021, the Biden administration has largely ignored the issue and it has fallen off the international agenda, precisely because Washington had gotten the sanctions they wanted from it at the time. However, the Israel-Gaza conflict introduces a new dynamic whereby the US and its allies are dramatically losing face and credibility among Muslim nations because they are backing Israel unconditionally in the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. From a geopolitical point of view, such a policy pathway is actually strategically disastrous because it alienates the entire Global South, serves as a beacon in projecting US hypocrisy and worse still, directly empowers China as a competitor.
So when you are faced with a situation whereby Beijing is gaining diplomatic capital over your own failures, what do you do? You desperately aim to deflect by trying to draw attention to another issue in the attempt to smear Beijing: Xinjiang and the Uyghurs. Now as it happens, Muslim countries mostly ignore US-led propaganda over the Xinjiang issue, because they see it for what it is and also share a common norm of respect for national sovereignty with Beijing, which is politically beneficial for them. The only Muslim nation who has ever made public comment about it is Türkiye, because Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group and the issues is viewed through the lens of Ankara’s Pan-Turk ideology. However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still likely to ignore the issue, or only involve himself in it based on what he can gain.
On the other hand, the Gulf States, the key US allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, support China’s position, and the Gaza issue is putting them under pressure regarding their relations with the US and the decision to normalize relations with Israel. So suddenly we are seeing a resurgence of Xinjiang material because the US, even if it cannot sway their governments, wants to kindle the anger of Muslim populations about another issue instead and diminish China’s credibility. Although this is less likely in Arab States, it could cause public opinion ruptures in key Asian Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, where significant resources were placed by organizations such as the BBC in relaying Xinjiang-related content in their respective languages.
But the question is, will this campaign succeed? It might be worth remembering that Xinjiang is an artificially imposed issue pushed “top-down” by governments and the media, whereas Palestine is a grassroots issue pushing from the bottom up, aspects of which media and politicians endeavor to selectively ignore. China’s heavy-handed management of Uyghurs in Xinjiang is not really a genocide, and it will never rank on the same level of severity as the outright bombardment and mass killing of Palestinians, no matter how hard you try.
BBC journalists accuse organization of pro-Israel bias
The Cradle | November 23, 2023
BBC journalists wrote a letter to Al-Jazeera to express their dissatisfaction with the British broadcaster over its coverage of Gaza, the Qatari news organization revealed on 23 November.
“The BBC has failed to accurately tell this story – through omission and lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims – and it has therefore failed to help the public engage with and understand the human rights abuses unfolding in Gaza,” the letter reads.
“Thousands of Palestinians have been killed since October 7. When will the number be high enough for our editorial stance to change?”
The journalists accused the BBC of repeatedly humanizing Israeli victims over Palestinians, abandoning vital historical context in their coverage.
BBC journalists continued to slam the UK public broadcaster by saying that terms such as “massacre” and “atrocities” have been exclusively used “only for [the actions of] Hamas, framing the group as the only instigator and perpetrator of violence in the region. This is inaccurate but aligns with the BBC’s overall coverage.”
“In comparison, humanizing coverage of Palestinian civilians has been lacking. It is a poor excuse to say that the BBC could not better cover stories in Gaza because of difficulties gaining access to the [Gaza] Strip … This is achieved, for example, by telling and following individual stories across weeks. Little attempt has also been made to fully utilize the abundance of social media content from brave journalists in Gaza and the West Bank,” the journalists wrote.
On 10 October, Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, spoke to presenter Kirsty Wark about his familial losses due to Israeli bombings of Gaza; Wark responded, “I am sorry for your own personal loss. I mean, can I just be clear, though? You cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel, can you?”
Al-Jazeera spoke to one of the letter’s co-authors, who said, “For me, and definitely for other people of color, we can see blatantly that certain civilian lives are considered more worthy than others – that there is some sort of hierarchy at play. That is deeply, deeply hurtful because actually, none of us struggle to empathize with Palestinian civilians.”
Other BBC journalists have been critical of the broadcaster’s coverage since start of the war. Rami Ruhayem, Beirut correspondent for the BBC, wrote to the news organization’s director-general, saying there are “indications that the BBC is – implicitly at least – treating Israeli lives as more worthy than Palestinian lives and reinforcing Israeli war propaganda.”
The BBC has shown bias in other cases; during the early days of the war, the London-based organization suspended and investigated several of their West Asia journalists for social media activity that they claimed to be “pro-Palestinian.”
Joe Biden’s Washington Post op-ed shows the US never learns its lessons
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | November 20, 2023
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has recently published an op-ed. Appropriately released through the Washington Post, it is, of course, really the equivalent of a regime policy declaration – a laying down of the party line, if you wish. As such, the text deserves attention, never mind that it is impossible that America’s leader, clearly challenged by worsening senescence, has written it himself. This is, to borrow a phrase from the Russia-watching crowd, America’s “collective Biden” speaking.
Translated from official jargon and scrubbed of empty rhetoric and euphemisms, the long proclamation makes only two substantial points about what the US and its “allies” (really clients and vassals) must do: Continue waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and continue backing Israel in its genocidal war against the Palestinians (no, it is not a “war against Hamas,” that’s a side effect).
In that sense, there is nothing surprising, or hopeful, in collective Biden’s announcement: It took them more words this time, but this Democratic administration of neocons is simply repeating the equally tone-deaf slogan of a former Republican president representing a past gaggle of neocons: Stay the course, as George W. Bush put it succinctly during the Iraq disaster. Deja Vue all over again, in the words of America’s greatest philosopher.
But the details of the text still merit scrutiny. Let’s pick out a few highlights:
Hamas is repeatedly denounced as carrying out “pure, unadulterated evil” and such. Every fair observer would reserve such terms by now for what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. But let’s set that aside for now and let’s also set aside that we now know that substantial numbers of Israelis were killed by Israeli forces. Let’s instead focus on Hamas. Is such language factual? The rational answer to that question is not a matter of opinion, and it has to be “no”: In reality, the empirical record shows that Hamas is a resistance organization engaged in a legally and ethically justified struggle against massive national oppression. It has attacked military targets, which is legitimate, as well as committed terrorist crimes. But if any political and armed organization that does both engage in legitimate violence and terrorist crimes is carrying out “pure evil,” then almost every halfway powerful state in this world has done just that or is doing it even now. Clearly, we are dealing with an absurd statement here.
Usually, the cause of such absurdities is strategic dishonesty. That holds here as well. For the Biden administration is transparently pursuing two aims with this Orwellian abuse of terminology: First, make Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians appear, if not justified, then at least so “understandable” or “inevitable” that we stop objecting to them (and, if we are Americans, vote for Democrats, even while they support these perfectly avoidable crimes).
Secondly, prepare the ground for the proposal, following further down in the proclamation, to entirely eliminate Hamas from any post-assault settlement and, instead, “ultimately” make a “revived Palestinian Authority” rule both the West Bank and Gaza, while work on some lasting settlement continues.
This proposal is wrapped in deceptive and revoltingly cynical rhetoric: If Joe Biden has a broken heart over the slaughtered children of Gaza, then Andrew Jackson must have cried while signing the Indian Removal Act. If Biden wants a two-state solution, then why is he allowing and helping one of the “two states” to wipe out the other? If he has “counselled” Israeli leaders to refrain from excessive violence, then why has he not backed up his kind words with using his massive leverage and stopping the flow of arms, money, information, and diplomatic cover to help their genocidal attack? If Biden is worried about antisemitism spreading, why does he allow far-right Zionists to claim that their policies, which lead to deaths of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children, are somehow “Jewish”?
Hypocrisy like that may still fool some Americans, namely those who really believe that the adequate answer to the umpteenth mass shooting at home is “thoughts and prayers.” But a US president and those writing and thinking for him would be well-advised not to embarrass themselves further before everyone else, at home and abroad.
The real policy proposal, meanwhile, is nothing else but an attempt to return to the post-Oslo Accords system on even worse terms. That means, creating a situation in which urgent, vital Palestinian needs and crystal-clear Palestinian rights will, once again, be de facto suspended in an endless dishonest “process,” which really only serves as a screen and stalling device for Israel, while the latter settles occupied land, practices the internationally recognized crime of apartheid, and conducts the occasional massacre.
But the proclamation addresses more than the Middle East. Turning on Russia, the collective Biden personalizes the issue, in bad old neocon style. Instead of any attempt at a rational – albeit critical, even hostile – approach to Moscow’s actions and interests, we find the usual daft insults: Russian President Vladimir Putin is juxtaposed with Hamas, as if he were a one-man “terrorist organization.” (Never mind that Hamas is not, actually, a terrorist organization, although it also engages in terrorist acts; see above.)
The war in Ukraine is reduced to Putin’s personal “drive for conquest,” as if there has been no history of two decades of American provocations by reckless over-expansion, bad faith, and refusal to negotiate serious issues of international security in earnest and constructively. In that regard, Russia is receiving the same rhetorical treatment as the Palestinians: When it fights, we are forbidden to notice all the very real reasons it was given to do so.
And finally, both “Putin” – read: Russia – and Hamas stand accused of two things: Wanting to “wipe a neighboring democracy off the map” and taking us to a new, vile international order, where the strong abuse the weak and might makes right.
Newsflash: Actually, neither Israel nor Ukraine are democracies. In Israel’s case, the claim is vitiated by the simple fact that its government exerts de facto control over millions of Palestinians, all of whom face discrimination and the vast majority of whom do not have a vote, or, for that matter any ordinary civil and human rights. Ukraine, meanwhile, has Vladimir Zelensky, Washington’s darling in decline, who started dismantling the country’s brittle democratic structures – for what they were worth – in 2021, well before the war, and clings to power by cooperating with a violent far-right, eliminating the political opposition, streamlining the media, and delaying elections. Again, these are not matters of opinion but facts.
Secondly, Hamas is not trying to wipe out Israel, despite endless claims to the contrary. In the past, it has repeatedly signaled a willingness to compromise and accept a two-state solution. Claiming Hamas wants the total destruction of Israel is akin to using one idiotic quote from former US President Ronald Reagan to “prove” that he wanted to erase the whole Soviet Union. Hamas also simply does not have the capacity – not by a very far stretch – to do so.
Likewise, Russia is not trying to abolish Ukraine. As its compromise proposals of late 2021 clearly showed, its key aim is a neutral Ukraine that is not used as a proxy by the West. It is true that Russia, by now, claims some Ukrainian territory. Depending on how long the war continues, it may end up claiming and taking even more. You may very well object to that. Yet it is not the same as a will to exterminate a whole state or, for that matter, its population.
Finally, regarding the warning that Hamas, Russia, and who knows who else (China? India? Brazil? Simply everyone who won’t do as told by Washington?) are hellbent on dragging us all into new dark ages of ultra-cynical realpolitik and brute force, guess what: That is precisely where we are now. And have been for the last quarter of a century, under the benevolent aegis of the USA. Don’t believe it? Ask Gaza.
In sum, all we can really learn from this letter from on-high is that the Biden administration has understood nothing and is determined to learn even less. If, in the words of the declaration, the world is ever supposed to have even a slight chance of seeing “more hope, more freedom, less rage, less grievance, and less war,” then we first need to see much less of Joe Biden and everything and everyone he stands for.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
Stop Misinforming about Malaria’s Spread, Washington Post
By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | October 24, 2023
A recent Washington Post (The Post) story, “Where Malaria is Spreading,” claims that climate change could put over 5 billion people at risk of malaria by 2040, primarily due to expanding seasons where mosquitoes can spread the disease, migrating mosquitoes, and increased populations and stagnant water caused by unusual flooding. This is false. Malaria already has a wide distribution, with many areas only avoiding it being endemic due to past suppression efforts. Population growth in areas where the disease remains common may lead to more instances of the disease unless available preventative and prophylactic measures are taken. However, there is no evidence malaria will spread geographically, due to either modestly rising temperatures or increased moisture.
The Post’s article, written by authors Rachel Chason, Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens, and Jahi Chikwendiu, mainly focuses on malaria’s increase in Mozambique. It has seen a 10 percent increase in malaria cases over the past six years. The Post than ties Mozambique’s malaria increase to claims made in a Lancet study, “Projecting the risk of mosquito-borne diseases in a warmer and more populated world: a multi-model, multi-scenario intercomparison modelling study,” which used climate and mosquito-borne disease models to estimate how the transmission seasons and population densities might change with global warming.
The study’s authors say their modelling shows malaria suitability may increase by 1-6 months in tropical highlands in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Americas. Dengue sees similar results, with suitability increasing in lowlands in the Western Pacific and the Eastern Mediterranean by 4 months.
Shamefully, like many studies making misleading and alarming claims attributed to climate change, the Lancet study uses the climate modelling scenario RCP8.5 (RCP meaning representative concentration pathway), which climate scientists admit runs way too hot. Any research that built upon that scenario is going to produce extremely skewed results, because RCP8.5 involves an amount of released carbon dioxide that is actually impossible, even if all the fossil fuels on the planet were burned.
While the Lancet study is suspect, it may still seem logical to assume that the modest warming of the past hundred or so years has and will continue to expand the range of mosquitoes, as well as the number of days during the year in which they are active and biting. However, a large body of research refutes this assumption.
A chapter in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, discusses the results of more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies which demonstrate that temperature alone is not enough to guarantee migration or longer survival of mosquitoes or mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria. There are far more factors that come into play, including human interventions, that outweigh temperature alone.
The report explains:
Gething et al. (2010), writing specifically about malaria, may have put it best when they said there has been “a decoupling of the geographical climate malaria relationship over the twentieth century, indicating that non-climatic factors have profoundly confounded this relationship over time.
More examples from Climate Change Reconsidered are discussed in a Climate Realism post, “Environment Journal Wrong About Climate Change Increasing Malaria,” including papers by a vector-borne disease expert, Paul Reiter, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which explain that while reemergence of malaria and similar diseases in some regions is concerning, “it is facile to attribute this resurgence to climate change.”
The Post admits that endemic malaria “was eliminated in North America and Europe in the mid-1900s, with a better understanding of how to control it.” This is true, and what’s more, a 2010 Nature study (Gething et al.) found that malaria was probably endemic on 58 percent of the world’s surface in 1900, before the period of modern warming, and only 30 percent by 2007, after decades of modest warming.
Almost every credible study, not based on biased computer models, rejects the myopic causal view of the relationship between climate and malaria.
Extreme weather, The Post claims, like flooding are causing cases to rise in places like Mozambique, with “experts” telling them that the frightening trend is likely to continue. While The Post suggests the trends are mostly due to climate change, they also admit that other factors like “increased resistance of mosquitoes to insecticides and of the parasite to drugs” and improved disease reporting and tracking have played a role in the reported increase.
Flooding is unlikely to cause an increase in mosquito-borne illness, because even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports only low confidence that there is even any sign climate change has impacted flooding. Mozambique, a South-East African nation, has suffered some flooding in recent years, but as discussed in Climate Realism, here, any link to long-term climate change lacks evidence. Flooding is a regular occurrence in many parts of southern Africa, and population increases means that during the rainy season more people are living near mosquito-friendly standing water.
Before running this alarming story, The Washington Post should have examined the wider body of research available concerning mosquito-borne illnesses. There is no evidence that warming is currently causing, or will lead to, an increase in malaria cases or deaths. Facts, not fearmongering, should guide The Post’s and other legitimate news outlets’ coverage of climate and disease issues.
Israeli Deceit & the Ongoing Battle of Shifa Hospital
By Gareth Porter | Ron Paul Institute | November 17, 2023
The Israeli military has attacked and is occupying parts of al-Shifa hospital in an ongoing operation in northern Gaza. It is the biggest and most modern hospital in Gaza, which has ceased to function normally because of a lack of power, while tens of thousands of displaced Gazans take shelter in it.
An attack on a hospital is normally considered a clear violation of the rules of war. The Israeli Defense Forces is justifying it by claiming that Shifa has long served as civilian medical cover for the command center of the entire Hamas war operations and weapons storage.
That IDF claim has been cited constantly in Israeli propaganda as an argument that Shifa — and other hospitals in Gaza — should not be accorded the normal legal hospital immunity from attack.
Israeli forces closed in on Shifa while demanding for the last few days that the staff and patients remaining in the hospital be evacuated immediately. CNN reported Monday night that “the Biden administration has now signaled that it supports the Israeli position, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday: ‘You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.’”
Those Sullivan remarks were an obvious green light for the IDF to press on for complete evacuation of the hospital.
The problem with that “open source reporting” is that it is never anything more than unsupported claims based on mere supposition. In fact, when the history of supposedly damning revelations about Shifa hospital providing cover for Hamas military activities are examined more carefully it becomes clear that it has been no more than a thinly veiled excuse for the IDF to attack and close down Gaza’s most important provider of medical care for the population of Gaza.
A History of Deception
The Israeli claim that Shifa hospital was providing such a cover for an Hamas military presence there is in fact the longest running theme in Israeli war propaganda on Gaza, dating back nearly 15 years to the first days of the Gaza war of January 2009.
That was when Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, told Amos Harel of Haaretz newspaper that “many” senior Hamas officials were “believed” to be hiding in the “basements” of Shifa hospital, and that the Israelis knew all about those underground levels of the hospital, because they had originally been been built by the Egyptians before 1967 and extensively refurbished by the Israelis themselves in the mid-1980s.
Diskin also explained to Harel that Hamas was confident that it wouldn’t be attacked, because of the patients on the upper floors.
Apart from the fact that Israel’s intelligence service had admitted that it only suspected Hamas’ military presence under the hospital rather than having actual knowledge, Harel was, however, honest enough to report that his Palestinian contacts were telling him senior Hamas leaders never stayed in the same location but constantly moved from one location to another — a revelation that obviously made far more sense than the claim that those same senior Hamas officials were hanging out in a basement that was obviously well known to the Israelis.
Harel’s report also included a revelation — apparently from a Palestinian source — that raised problems for the nascent official Israeli propaganda line: “Some of the bunkers they are using,” Harel wrote, “were linked by tunnels Hamas built in recent years.”
The existence of numerous bunkers that could be used for command were thus independent of Shifa hospital, which the Israelis would always be able to invade. That reality clearly implied that it would make no sense for Hamas to depend on Shifa hospital for that purpose.
IDF Tale Resurfaces in Washington Post
Nevertheless, during the next Israeli-Palestinian war in July 2014, the IDF tale of the Hamas leaders’ secret hideaway in the basement of Shifa hospital re-emerged as if it were an unassailable fact that justified IDF threats to attack the hospital.
In a story published July 15, The Washington Post reported as unassailable fact that Shifa “has become the de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”
Post reporter William Booth clearly did not see Hamas leaders in Al Shifa himself. Had he done so, he would have described the scene and identified one or two Hamas figures who had been pointed out to him at the hospital. So he was apparently passing on the self-interested claim of his Israeli interlocutors without informing Post readers that the information in question was far less reliable than it was made to appear.
The IDF became fixated on closing up another Gaza hospital in July 2014 Just two days after that initial appearance of the Shifa-Hamas theme in the 2014 war, Israeli airstrikes bombed Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City and forced its closure.
The IDF specialists created a video distributed three weeks later aimed at defending the destruction of Wafa hospital as a necessary response to Hamas using the hospital for military operations. But they had resorted to multiple levels of trickery to make their political point, as this writer discovered in investigating the video.
The IDF propagandists had spliced together videos from five years earlier and from different times of day so as to suggest that firing from an unused building more than 100 yards away from the hospital was a recent Hamas rocket attack on IDF forces. Then they spliced in an audio clip from an entirely different incident in which the IDF returned fire to try to show that the IDF bombing of Wafa hospital was justified.
At the end of July 2014, the Post reaffirmed its support for Israel’s primary propaganda theme in that six-week war. Terrence McCoy reported from Washington that Shifa Hospital had “become a de facto headquarters” of Hamas. That reporting reflected in turn the general readiness of much of the national press in Washington to accept the word of the Israelis as all they needed to know on that pivotal issue.
Eight years later, the same Israeli propaganda line immediately resurfaced after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, as the Israelis mounted a new propaganda offensive. On Oct. 27, IDF Spokesman Adm. Daniel Hagari, briefed the International press on the main lines of Israel’s position regarding Shifa hospital and Hamas operations: He repeated the line that a bunker underneath Shifa is Hamas’ main base of operation, and that Hamas operates “several tunnels inside and under” the hospital.
Maximum Suffering
But Hamas’ tunnels outside Shifa could obviously be used for the same function of command of military operations without having to bother with Shifa hospital.
So the drumbeat of Israeli concern about the alleged Hamas command bunker underneath Shifa appears to have been a phony issue from the start, aimed merely at bringing pressure to bear on the medical system, namely to close down Shifa as the largest, most modern and most effective hospital in Gaza to create the maximum amount of suffering to the people of Gaza.
As of Tuesday, Shifa Hospital had ceased to function, as it had no electricity, having run out of fuel. The Israelis gallantly offered the hospital 300 liters of fuel — enough to function for about six minutes according to the hospital’s calculation.
They thus failed to take any emergency action to save 36 babies facing possible death from the non-functioning incubators after three had already died.
The scene at Shifa hospital early on Wednesday was eerie, as Israel tanks rumbled into the hospital grounds and Israeli troops entered the darkened main hospital building.
IDF spokesman Hagari would say only that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation “based on intelligence information and an operational necessity” and that it was in a “specified area in Shifa hospital”.
Later Wednesday the IDF’s Peter Lerner told CNN that the operation at al-Shifa hospital was “ongoing” and would say only that it had not found any sign of hostages in the hospital.
The Gazans who have been staying in Shifa have been afraid to take the approved routes away from the hospital because of relentless Israeli attacks on civilians trying to do so. The IDF will no doubt continue to use force against the hundreds of thousands huddled there to make them leave.
And now that Israel has control over many thousands of military age males in the hospital, it is doubtful that they will be allowed to go free, since they are considered as potential Hamas fighters.
The time has come for a reckoning on the long-running IDF propaganda ploy of claiming that Shifa has been used to hide Hamas’s command center.
Unless the IDF can show journalists convincing evidence of that long-claimed Hamas command presence under the hospital, they should stand for the truth and denounce that massive Israeli deception about Gaza.
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Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
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