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Rahm Emanuel’s Critique of Israel: Signs of Change or a Desperate Plea?

By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | July 11, 2026

Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s recent address at Tel Aviv University, delivering a sternly worded warning to the Israeli public, has captured a lot of attention. Although it has been interpreted otherwise, the speech was an appeal to strategic moderation and not a signal of fundamental change amongst an element of Washington’s establishment – the context behind his words will explain precisely why.

What Rahm Emanuel said to an audience in Tel Aviv has largely been consumed on social media in the form of short soundbites, thus triggering many to draw various conclusions about a decline in the Democratic Party establishment’s support for Israel. While it is undoubtedly true that the vast majority of Democratic voters do hold unfavorable views of the Israeli government, a trend that has clearly also taken hold amongst American Jews, this is not the conclusion that the likes of Emanuel have drawn.

The most viral clips from his 33-minute address feature the former White House official bluntly outlining just how isolated the Israelis are on the world stage, noting that Tel Aviv has become a global pariah and that as a result the US-Israel relationship itself is at a crossroads. Another key moment was a call for an end to US unconditional aid to Israel.

In its full context, it is blindingly obvious that Emanuel is not expressing his own negative views towards Israel, as he repeatedly makes the point of noting his Zionist credentials, including his own family’s involvement in building the Israeli State. Understanding where he is coming from and what he is getting at is the most important element of the speech, because it grants the viewer an insight into the mindset within the Democratic Party establishment.

A direct criticism of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is offered, yet it is not one that you would most likely hear expressed from the average American democrat, but rather Israeli Labor Party old-timers. He builds upon a narrative that blames Hamas for causing division between Palestinians and Israelis, arguing that the movement’s goal has been to prevent a peaceful settlement. It then goes on to claim that Netanyahu has bolstered the arguments presented by Hamas and fallen into their trap by implementing a violent solution with no day-after plan in Gaza.

This argument is not new; in fact, it is quite outdated. So too is Emanuel’s proposed solution, which involves Israel simply expanding its normalisation agreements with the Arab World in exchange for halting the Greater Israel Project. He does not, however, even call for a viable Palestinian State, something that makes his position less rational than that of Biden administration officials like Antony Blinken.

For reference, former Secretary of State Blinken made a similar call for Israeli moderation during one of his final speeches in 2024, to the Atlantic Council. The Biden Administration official, like Rahm Emanuel, espoused the typical Zionist talking points during the beginning of his speech, later to assume a more sober line that urged the Israelis to pursue diplomacy and moderation, and warned that a refusal to pursue the path of reaching a two-State settlement would mean inevitable disaster.

Emanuel’s solution is to do precisely what the Biden administration did prior to October 7, 2023, in prioritizing Israeli regional integration, while refusing to respect or hear out the calls for Palestinian sovereignty.

Some would then argue that he has assumed a more radical posture through his call for ending the unconditional military aid and not treating Israel as an interdependent, to which the answer is simple: calling for the end of foreign aid to Israel is no longer a radical position; it is simply a tactic.

The Heritage Foundation – regarded as the most influential think tank over the Trump administration – published a policy blueprint for phasing out aid to Israel over a 19-year period in order to make it fully independent. Netanyahu’s own Likud Party has even advocated this policy themselves. It has been recognized by the Israel Lobby in Washington that the dramatic shift in American public support for the Israelis will eventually make it difficult for pro-Israel bills, especially those approving billions in military aid, to pass through Congress in the future.

A solution to this problem has been a proactive push by the Israel Lobby to use its current support in Congress and the Senate to forward a merger of the US and Israeli defense industries. This, therefore, bypasses the issue of requiring favorable votes on foreign aid handouts. The House version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), under the title “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”, aims to do just this.

One way to interpret Rahm Emanuel’s speech is that the pro-Israel Democratic Party establishment is beginning to sober up to the reality facing Tel Aviv. He himself has clearly identified the issue with Israel’s aggressive pursuit of the Greater Israel Project and is arguing for strategic moderation. It is clear desperation. But even in his pursuit to save the Zionist project from itself, his deeply ingrained hatred of Palestinians blinds him from the fact that going back to the pre-October 7 status quo is not going to be Israel’s saving grace.

In other words, he is communicating a failure to recognize that the root of the problem is not Hamas, Netanyahu, or the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, as he claims; it is that the Palestinian people remain Stateless and have now been subjected to a full-scale genocide. If Emanuel was capable of seeing past his own biases, in order to truly pursue a path that could indeed ensure the Zionist project’s longevity, he would be calling for a Palestinian State in the pre-June 1967 borders. That is actually the pro-Israeli solution that could potentially take them off their current trajectory.

At the root of all of this is the US establishment’s inability to see Palestinians as equal human beings. This lies at the core of the Zionist belief system – the idea that it is never Israel’s fault; at best, the Israelis can make mistakes and, in some instances, be equally as liable as the people they are actively annihilating.

There are two competing sides of the pro-Israel Lobby in the United States: one that supports the Greater Israel Project and the other that clings to the ideas espoused by the Israeli Labor Party in the 1990s. The Democratic Party is aligned primarily with the latter, while the former has the most sway with the Republican Party establishment.

Times are changing and what the Israelis have done cannot be undone, so this requires a change. But Rahm Emanuel’s fairytale vision of Israel solving all its problems by halting further settlement expansion in the West Bank in exchange for expanding the circle of normalization is a non-starter.

He blames the Arab nations for refusing to hold the Palestinian leadership to account during the Oslo years, claiming that the solution to Israel’s problems is getting a declaration of normalisation from the Arab League. This indicates that he, and many others around him, are simply stuck in the past. Israel has committed genocide; it has failed to defeat its adversaries and must concede defeat by signing a comprehensive deal/s or keep fighting until its inevitable disintegration. We have long passed the point of no return.


Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

July 11, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Comments Off on Rahm Emanuel’s Critique of Israel: Signs of Change or a Desperate Plea?

How Germany blew the EU’s chance for information freedom

By Rachel Marsden | RT | July 5, 2026

It’s not every day that an EU member state has the opportunity to push back in favor of freedom. At least not without elections. But a German court did have that chance – and promptly blew it on behalf of European citizens everywhere.

Back in 2022 when the Ukraine war was ramping up, the European Commission made an executive order banning Russian media broadcasting in the EU. Meaning that you couldn’t – and still can’t – access RT from within the EU, either on TV or on the web, without a VPN.

So some folks running a website in Saarbrucken, Germany, near the French border, started including some RT videos in their live feed. They reportedly did this exactly four times, back in 2023. Whoop-dee-do, right?

Wrong. This is the EUSSR we’re talking about, remember?

For this, the accused ended up facing criminal prosecution in Germany for promoting some EU-sanctioned RT Germany content. But it turns out that even the German court in Saarbrucken considering this case had doubts as to whether these guys and their website actually fit the definition of an “operator” under the EU sanction’s language that “prohibits any operator from broadcasting, enabling, facilitating or otherwise contributing to broadcast, any” Russian media content. So the German court referred the question to the European Court of Justice tasked with interpreting and clarifying EU regulations and laws.

Wrong question, guys. Why didn’t you start with asking the ECJ whether the regulation itself, made unilaterally by the EU’s unelected and unaccountable executive branch, is even valid at all under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and its Article 11 protecting freedom of expression? The fact that the question wasn’t put to the European court by the German one has spawned a judgment that’s stunning in its failure to interpret the application of any free speech restrictions narrowly enough to avoid the disproportionate limiting of free expression.

The German court missed the forest for the trees and got down into the weeds and all hung up on the comparatively minor issue of whether the website could be considered an “operator” without being a commercial entity. Which the European court then used as a prelude to launch a sweeping McCarthyist “reds under the bed”-style tirade.

“The term ‘disinformation’ is a translation of the Russian word ‘дезинформация’ (dezinformatsiya), coined in the early 1920s by the Soviet intelligence services. Joseph Stalin is credited as being the originator of that term, deliberately making it sound French in order to make it seem Western in origin and thereby enhance its credibility,” wrote the EU court, self-identifying as a history professor. How about if I take that as an open invitation to self-identify as a judge in my capacity as a final-year law student?

The ECJ ultimately ruled that commercialism is irrelevant when the website solicits donations, and had raised over €60,000 within a period of a year. It basically said, look, any commercial nature of the platform risks being a false dichotomy, because who’s to say that the sanctioned entities themselves wouldn’t be paying these independent outlets through donations to promote their banned content: ”Even though, for the purposes of classification as an ‘operator’, no economic activity or income generation is necessary, the context of an appeal for donations enabling such sums to be collected warrants some comment. The fact that some websites are financed by donations rather than by a registered commercial activity justifies increased vigilance as to their possible use as a tool for propaganda purposes, in particular in the case of State-sponsored disinformation campaigns,” the European court ruled. “That lack of clarity makes it more difficult to identify financial flows and, therefore, the actors likely to influence editorial policy or content. It thus creates an environment conducive to interference by external interests, including by third countries, which may intervene directly or indirectly in the production or broadcasting of content.”

Isn’t it the prosecution’s job to present actual evidence and proof of influence through the powerful state-backed legal instruments at its disposal? Shouldn’t the ECJ’s definition of “operator,” if it leans so heavily on the risk of foreign corruption, therefore hinge on whether actual collusion has first been established beyond any reasonable doubt? The ECJ sounds shockingly blasé here about the basic burden of proof for criminal conviction.

This court case had been stayed, or suspended, in Germany pending the ruling by this European Court of Justice. But now it’s free to convict these guys of promoting banned Russian content, under the pretext that just maybe they’re not-so-independent media that schemed on the down-low to distribute Russian media content – something that a lot of people have been doing all over social media of their own volition.

Ultimately, what the buzz around this case effectively does is put a chilling effect on that sharing, and it also risks making people self-censor out of fear of being dragged into court for a judicial proctology exam and having their lives potentially ruined in the press over accusations of Russian collusion. What if these guys (and others) just happen to agree with some of the views expressed on banned Russian media? Who’s going to protect their honestly-held views from establishment authoritarianism?

Hang on, here’s a volunteer for the task.

“Freedom of the press is one of the cornerstones of democracy. And the EU protects what matters, including the right to receive independent, reliable information. The European Media Freedom Act helps keep journalists and sources safe, strengthens editorial independence and protects media organizations from undue interference or legal intimidation. Today, on World Press Freedom Day, we reaffirm our duty to support and protect journalists so they can do their work free from pressure, intimidation, or harm,” says unelected European Commission President and de facto Queen Ursula von der Leyen.

Oh, great. So the same people who censor speech are also its self-appointed defenders. Like an arsonist who goes running around setting fires but also works as a firefighter as their day job.

What’s clear from all this is that EU regulation may look precise on paper, but enforcement isn’t so straightforward. When even member state courts require an official interpretation, then how is the average person supposed to avoid running afoul of the law? The result ends up being less about what’s actually banned and more about what merely feels safe to touch. Not exactly the kind of vibe that one tends to aim for in a democracy.


Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.

July 5, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , | Comments Off on How Germany blew the EU’s chance for information freedom

The Machine

An Essay on the American Vaccine Program from License to Prosecution

Lies are Unbekoming | July 3, 2026

On November 14, 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act into law.¹ The legislation ended more than a decade of tort litigation against vaccine manufacturers by transferring civil liability for injury and death from the companies producing the products to the American taxpayer. The pharmaceutical industry had threatened to leave the childhood vaccine market. Reagan’s signature ensured they would stay, at a price paid by parents who would never be told what had been arranged on their behalf.

Twenty-five years later, in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, the Supreme Court closed the last remaining exit. The 2011 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, held that federal law preempts all design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers in state courts.² Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justice Ginsburg, identified the practical effect: no federal agency, no state court, no jury of citizens would henceforth ensure that vaccine manufacturers accounted for scientific advances when designing their products. The manufacturers had been placed outside the accountability structure that governs every other industry in the United States.

The 1986 Act and the 2011 ruling together defined the shape of what now exists. Every function of the vaccine program — licensing, recommendation, purchase, safety monitoring, patent holding, research funding, injury adjudication, and courtroom defense — resides in the federal government. When the products kill a child, the state prosecutes the parents.

Leslie Manookian, founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, mapped this architecture in a twelve-point summary published to her readers.³ What follows walks through the machine she described, in five stages. Each stage encloses the next. By the fifth, the shape of the trap around the American parent becomes fully visible.

1. The License

The Food and Drug Administration licenses vaccines on the basis of clinical trials that do not use inert placebo controls. This fact is documented in the FDA’s own package inserts and in sworn testimony by the industry’s most senior figures.

In January 2018, attorney Aaron Siri deposed Dr. Stanley Plotkin in New Hope, Pennsylvania — the vaccinologist widely regarded as the industry’s founding figure and co-editor of the standard reference textbook Plotkin’s Vaccines.⁴ Under oath, Siri walked Plotkin through the pre-licensure clinical trials for each product on the recommended childhood schedule. The pattern that emerged was uniform.

The safety review period following each dose was 48 hours for the IPOL polio vaccine. 48 hours for ActHIB. Four days for Engerix-B, the hepatitis B vaccine administered to newborns on their first day of life. Five days for Recombivax HB, the other hepatitis B product. Siri produced, for comparison, the package insert for Enbrel — a drug given to adults with rheumatoid arthritis — and asked Plotkin to confirm that its pre-licensure clinical trials monitored patients for up to 80 months. Plotkin confirmed. A drug given to sick adults was studied for six and a half years. Vaccines given to healthy newborns were studied for 48 hours to five days.

Plotkin then confirmed, product by product, that these trials had no saline placebo control group. Not Recombivax HB. Not Engerix-B. Not IPOL, whose trial subjects received the polio vaccine concurrently with DTP, making it impossible to attribute any reaction to either product. Not ActHIB. The MMR II vaccine, which Plotkin himself was present for the licensure of, had, in his own words, no control group “for the studies that I’m recalling.” When the Hiberix Hib vaccine was later licensed, the manufacturer used ActHIB itself as the “placebo” — testing one Hib vaccine against another.

On the necessity of a saline control, Plotkin was direct: “Without a control group, if you’re looking for a phenomenon occurring in the vaccine group, you cannot judge that phenomenon without having a control group.” That is the industry’s founding figure, testifying under oath, describing the epistemic condition of the products his industry markets.

The pattern in the trials produces a specific consequence. When a new vaccine is tested against an existing licensed vaccine as its control, any injury rate common to both groups becomes invisible. The comparison measures relative difference, not absolute harm. If the existing vaccine produces seizures at a rate of 1 in 500, and the new vaccine produces seizures at a rate of 1 in 500, the trial reports no significant difference — and both products remain on the market.

The Gardasil trial illustrates what happens when a saline group is included but the result is inconvenient. Merck’s pre-licensure clinical trial for its HPV vaccine assigned 9,412 subjects to a “placebo” arm. Of these, only 594 received actual saline. The remaining approximately 8,800 received AAHS — the aluminum-containing adjuvant used in the Gardasil formulation itself. Merck reported the two groups combined, showing 2.3% of the “placebo” arm developing what the trial recorded as systemic autoimmune events, matched by 2.3% in the Gardasil arm. The vaccine was declared safe on the strength of no difference.

Siri produced the underlying trial data. Broken out separately, the saline placebo group of 594 girls and women showed zero such events. The aluminum group showed approximately 2.5%. Merck had recorded the difference and reported the combination.

Plotkin was asked why the two groups had been combined for that analysis when they were broken out separately for local reaction analysis on the preceding pages. His response, verbatim: “So going into the study, they just assumed aluminum wouldn’t cause autoimmunity and so that’s how they proceed in designing it.” A pre-licensure trial for a product administered to schoolgirls declared the vaccine safe by defining the aluminum adjuvant as inert, then combining subjects receiving that adjuvant with subjects receiving nothing.

Once a vaccine reaches the schedule, the failure to test it against saline becomes permanent. For each product Siri walked Plotkin through, he asked whether a proper placebo-controlled study could now be conducted. Plotkin confirmed, product by product, that it could not — running such a trial would be “unethical” in children whose vaccines are already recommended. The absence of a control group at the point of licensure becomes the reason no control group can ever be introduced. The regulatory record is locked at the point of the initial deception.

When a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Informed Consent Action Network in 2018 asked the Department of Health and Human Services to produce the biennial vaccine safety reports required by Section 300aa-27 of the 1986 Act, HHS was forced to respond that it had not produced a single such report in the thirty-two years since Reagan signed the law.⁵ The statutory obligation to review safety had been ignored for the entire life of the program.

The FDA license then triggers the second function. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convenes the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which votes on whether to add the newly licensed vaccine to the recommended childhood schedule. ACIP members are drawn from the same institutional networks that developed and defended the products. Once added, the vaccine appears on the schedule that is distributed to every state health department in the country. The recommendation is not a mandate. It becomes one at the next stage.

Under oath in the same deposition, Plotkin acknowledged that he had served as medical and scientific director of Sanofi Pasteur in the 1990s, that he operated a personal consulting entity called Vaxconsult, and that he had received payments over the preceding two decades from Merck, GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, and, in his own phrasing, “essentially all of the major manufacturers.” He had also consulted for the FDA. The industry’s founding figure had confirmed the case against the products his industry markets. He was also paid by every major manufacturer of those products.

Plotkin Under Oath: Nine Hours That Exposed the Vaccine Industry

2. The Mandate

The federal government does not directly mandate childhood vaccines. That function is delegated to the states.

Every state in the union has passed legislation requiring specified vaccines for school attendance. The specific list varies. The mechanism is uniform. Parents who wish to enroll their children in public school — and in many states private school — must produce documentation that their children have received the vaccines on the state’s list. The state list is drawn from the CDC schedule; the CDC schedule from the ACIP recommendation; the ACIP recommendation from the FDA license. The FDA license rests on trials that were never controlled against a genuine placebo.

The chain is complete before the parent enters the pediatrician’s office.

Under the Vaccines for Children program, established in 1993, the federal government purchases half of all childhood vaccines administered in the United States. Recent VFC spending has exceeded $5 billion annually.⁶ The federal government is the largest single purchaser of the products it licenses, the products it recommends, and the products the states mandate.

This creates a market structure without parallel elsewhere in American pharmaceutical policy. The maker of a blood pressure medication faces market discipline. Doctors may prescribe it or not, patients may fill the prescription or not, insurance may cover it or not. The maker of a childhood vaccine faces no equivalent constraint. The state compels administration; the federal government guarantees a buyer; demand is legislated. Revenue is secured before a single dose is delivered.

The mandate has hardened as it has aged. Every state at some point permitted medical, religious, and in some cases philosophical exemptions from the vaccine schedule. Over the past decade, state legislatures have moved to close them. California eliminated its personal belief exemption in 2015 through SB 277 following the Disneyland measles cluster. In 2019, New York eliminated its religious exemption; Maine followed the same year. Connecticut eliminated its religious exemption in 2021. The pattern has been consistent: a highly publicised incident, a legislative response drafted with industry input, and the removal of the exit ramp. The federal government does not need to mandate. The state legislatures have been prevailed upon to do it, and to progressively narrow the terms under which the mandate can be refused.

Leslie Manookian, in the interview she gave me,¹⁹ described the shape of what has been built here. “When we succeed and thrive outside the extant medical paradigm, we pose an existential threat to the medical complex which is why the main actors fight our information, experiences, and independence so fervently.” The compelled purchase is what makes the mandate machinery operate. Without it, the products would compete on their merits. With it, they do not compete at all.

Interview with Leslie Manookian

3. The Shield

The 1986 Act shielded manufacturers from every category of liability that governs other industries. The immunity covered injuries caused by design choices themselves — the composition of the product, the adjuvants used, the decisions about testing. A safer alternative product could exist and the manufacturer could refuse to adopt it, and the injured child’s family could not sue.

Justice Scalia’s opinion in Bruesewitz addressed a case brought by Robalee Bruesewitz on behalf of her daughter Hannah, who had suffered residual seizure disorder and developmental delay after receiving the DPT vaccine manufactured by Wyeth. The Bruesewitz family had exhausted the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. They then attempted to sue Wyeth in state court, arguing that a safer alternative vaccine design existed and Wyeth had refused to adopt it. The Supreme Court held that federal law preempts such claims. The manufacturer’s choice to continue producing a design that injured children could not be litigated.

Sotomayor’s dissent identified the consequence. Vaccine manufacturers now occupy a regulatory space in which no external mechanism — regulatory agency, court, or jury — holds them accountable for design decisions. This is not an inference. It is a description of the legal structure the majority created.

Behind the shield sits a further conflict. The Department of Health and Human Services — the parent agency of the FDA, the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the Health Resources and Services Administration that runs the injury compensation program — holds patents on multiple childhood vaccines. HHS scientists Douglas Lowy and John Schiller developed the recombinant protein technology underlying Merck’s Gardasil and receive royalties on its sale.⁷ Similar patent and royalty arrangements extend to other products in the childhood schedule. The regulator collects revenue on the products it approves.

The research infrastructure that would produce independent safety findings is subject to a parallel capture. Studies funded by the CDC, the NIH, or by the manufacturers themselves consistently produce findings favorable to the schedule. The vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparison studies that would settle the fundamental question about long-term outcomes have not been funded. When independent researchers attempt them — Anthony Mawson’s 2017 study of homeschooled populations,⁸ Paul Thomas’s cohort analysis of his own pediatric practice⁹ — the results are attacked, retracted, or ignored, and the researchers face professional consequences.

The capture extends inside the agencies themselves. In August 2014, Dr. William Thompson, a senior epidemiologist at the CDC and co-author of the 2004 DeStefano study widely cited to reject any link between the MMR product and neurodevelopmental injury, submitted a statement through his attorney acknowledging that he and his co-authors had “omitted statistically significant information” from the published paper and had disposed of documents to conceal the omission.¹⁰ The withheld data showed an elevated risk of neurodevelopmental injury among African American boys who received the injection before thirty-six months of age. Thompson’s disclosure was made under whistleblower protection. Congress has never subpoenaed him to testify. The DeStefano paper remains uncorrected.

Merck faced a parallel qui tam action from two of its own virologists, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, who alleged in a federal filing that Merck had falsified mumps vaccine efficacy data submitted to the FDA over the course of a decade.¹¹ The case, filed in 2010, moved slowly through the courts. The Department of Justice declined to intervene. Merck retained its exclusive contract to supply mumps vaccine to the U.S. government. The plaintiffs’ allegations of test manipulation entered the public record and produced no regulatory action.

The shield is a network. Liability preemption from Congress protects the manufacturer. Patent revenue aligns the regulator with the products it approves. Captured research funding directs the studies that might identify harm away from the questions that would find it. Judicial preemption then blocks any citizen who attempts to litigate the design decisions the products embody. Each layer supports the others. The whole structure is invisible to the parent standing in a pediatrician’s office being told the shot is safe.

No Liability, No Studies, No Accountability: The Vaccine System Aaron Siri Exposed in Federal Court

4. The Monitor Becomes the Promoter

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention operates the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It also runs the promotional campaigns that place vaccination on the pediatric schedule. The agency responsible for detecting harm from the products is the same agency responsible for driving their uptake.

The conflict is not theoretical. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, under a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality within HHS, conducted an internal study of VAERS reporting rates in a Massachusetts patient population between 2007 and 2010. The study found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events were being captured by the reporting system.¹² When the researchers attempted to communicate their findings to the CDC in order to develop improved reporting mechanisms, the agency stopped responding to their emails. The grant ended. The improved reporting system was never built.

The passive reporting infrastructure that captures under 1% of injuries then becomes the basis for the CDC’s public assurances that adverse events are rare.

The injury table itself has been subject to steady contraction. When the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program began in 1988, the injury table included a broader range of conditions presumed to be caused by vaccination, with corresponding timelines within which onset would qualify a case for compensation.¹³ Over the following decades, categories were removed or narrowed. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, initially compensable when it followed vaccination within a specified window, was removed. Neurodevelopmental injury, briefly acknowledged as a category during the 1990s when concerns about the MMR product and other injections emerged, was removed. The seizure timelines were narrowed. Encephalopathy definitions were tightened.

The 1995 amendment illustrates the pattern. Residual seizure disorder — a category under which many families of children who had suffered seizures after DPT vaccination had successfully claimed compensation — was removed. Encephalopathy criteria were revised in ways that made the diagnosis nearly impossible to satisfy. The Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines, which recommended the changes, drew a majority of its membership from the same medical-institutional networks that administered and defended the vaccine schedule. Petitioners whose cases had been filed under the earlier table found themselves adjudicated under the new one. Cases that would have succeeded were denied.

Each removal reduced the number of compensable claims. The fund benefited. So did the manufacturers whose products would otherwise be more clearly implicated in the injury pattern.

The Institute of Medicine, tasked periodically with reviewing whether specific vaccines cause specific injuries, has repeatedly concluded that the evidence is insufficient to accept or reject a causal relationship for a majority of the injury-outcome pairs it examines.¹⁴ This finding — insufficient evidence — is then used in the injury compensation courtroom to deny claims. The absence of evidence functions as evidence of absence, produced by the very research infrastructure that would have to fund the studies to end the insufficiency.

The industry’s founding figure confirmed the position under oath in the same deposition. Asked directly whether he could make the scientific statement that childhood vaccines do not cause autism, Plotkin answered: “As a scientist, I would say that I do not have evidence one way or the other.” The IOM had found no study establishing that the DTaP or Tdap products do not cause autism. Plotkin acknowledged that no such study existed and that he personally held no evidence to support the claim his industry has spent three decades making.

The parent whose child seized within twelve hours of vaccination, developed encephalopathy, and never recovered enters a system that was prepared for her arrival. The injury table’s timeline for seizure onset has been shortened past the point where her child’s case qualifies. The IOM has declared the evidence insufficient. VAERS captured her report and did nothing with it. The monitor was never separate from the promoter.

5. The Court and the Blame

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is administered by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. It is not a court in the ordinary sense. The proceedings involve no juries, no meaningful discovery, and no Article III judges — no judges appointed for life under the constitutional protections designed to insulate the judiciary from executive influence.

Cases are heard by “Special Masters,” Article I officers appointed by the Chief Judge of the Court of Federal Claims to seven-year terms. The Special Masters are drawn from a pool of attorneys with prior government experience. The Department of Justice provides the attorneys who defend against injury claims. HRSA administers the fund. The petitioner’s attorneys are paid from the same fund out of which awards are made.

Every party in the courtroom — the judge, the government’s defense attorneys, the fund itself, and the petitioner’s legal counsel — is paid by the federal government. The injured child’s family stands before a tribunal in which no independent party has an interest in a finding of injury.

The statistics reflect the structure. The majority of petitions filed with the VICP have been dismissed rather than compensated over the life of the program.¹⁵ Of the cases that succeed, the majority are settled rather than adjudicated on the merits, with no admission that the vaccine caused the injury. The compensation cap for a vaccine-caused death — $250,000 — has not been raised since the statute was passed in 1986.

The excise tax that funds the program is $0.75 per antigen per dose. The fund now holds over $4 billion.¹⁶ The families whose children were injured cannot access it through the ordinary legal system because the ordinary legal system has been closed to them.

This is the structure Leslie Manookian described in her twelve-point summary. Her exact phrasing on the final function is worth returning to: “So, parents who’ve already suffered an unimaginable tragedy are up against a govt court staffed by govt paid special masters and attorneys with no due process defending a govt licensed and govt mandated product for which they blame the victims for harm.”

The final phrase — “they blame the victims for harm” — describes the twelfth function of the machine. When a child collapses after vaccination with the sudden onset of retinal hemorrhages, subdural hematoma, and cerebral edema — the triad — the diagnosis assigned in emergency departments and coroner’s offices is “shaken baby syndrome” or its rebranded successor, “abusive head trauma.” The triad is presumed diagnostic of parental abuse. The parents are arrested.

The vaccine reaction that produces the identical triad — through encephalopathy, elevated intracranial pressure, and hemorrhagic events following injection — is not considered in the differential diagnosis.¹⁷ The diagnostic criteria for “shaken baby syndrome” were developed without accounting for it. The emergency physician, the coroner, and the child protective services investigator have all been trained within an institutional framework in which vaccine injury of this magnitude does not exist.

Alan Yurko’s ten-week-old son died in November 1997 shortly after receiving a round of childhood vaccinations. Yurko was convicted of first-degree murder in 1999 on the basis of the triad diagnosis and sentenced to life plus ten years in Florida state prison. He was released in 2004 after independent medical review of the case demonstrated that the shaking diagnosis could not be sustained and post-conviction proceedings established alternative medical explanations for the child’s injuries.¹⁸ Yurko is one documented case. There are others. The precise number is unknown because the diagnostic framework prevents the question from being asked.

A parent whose child dies after vaccination faces a compound structure. The vaccine that caused the death is licensed by the federal government, recommended by the federal government, purchased by the federal government, and defended in the injury court by the federal government. The manufacturer is shielded from civil liability by federal statute and Supreme Court precedent. The injury table does not recognize the death as vaccine-caused. The state, meanwhile, has assigned the triad diagnosis and turned the case over to the district attorney. The parent must now prove — in a criminal court, against the state — that the child was not shaken.

The Vaccine Court (2014)

The Position

Robalee Bruesewitz spent nearly two decades in litigation on behalf of her daughter. The Supreme Court’s ruling denied her family relief and closed the door behind them for every family that would come after. The 1986 Act had shifted liability from the manufacturer to the taxpayer. Bruesewitz confirmed that the shift was permanent and that no design decision made by the manufacturer could be challenged in any court open to ordinary Americans.

This is the position in which the American parent now stands. Her child’s pediatric visit will produce a recommendation to administer products licensed on the basis of trials that were never controlled against saline. The state will require their administration for school attendance. When injury results, over 99% of adverse events never reach VAERS at all, and the reports that do reach it change nothing. A family that attempts compensation will petition a court in which every party is paid by the federal government to defend the products or administer the fund. And when death occurs with the triad present, the emergency department’s diagnostic framework will not include vaccine reaction in the differential, and the parent enters the criminal jurisdiction as the presumed cause of the child’s death.

There is no exemption from this structure that carries no cost. State legislatures have progressively narrowed medical and religious exemptions; declining vaccines removes a child from school; injury bars a family from ordinary civil courts. And when death is accompanied by the triad, the state prosecutes the parent for the death.

Leslie Manookian described this arrangement, at the close of her twelve-point post, as “crony capitalism at best and pure evil fascism at worst.” The characterization is precise. A private industry produces the product. The state compels its administration, indemnifies the manufacturer against claims of harm, and prosecutes the parent when the harm arrives.

The machine’s design serves the flow of money and the concentration of power. Every safeguard the ordinary citizen might rely on — informed consent, product liability, judicial review, jury trial, prosecutorial restraint — has been removed at the point where the childhood vaccine schedule intersects with the American family. The parent who accepts the recommendation and whose child is injured has no meaningful path to redress. Refusal costs school access. Death with the triad opens the parent to criminal prosecution for a killing they did not commit.

This is the environment in which every American child is now born. The machine was assembled piece by piece across four decades, ratified by every institution that could have prevented it, and defended by the same institutions today. What Leslie Manookian named as crony capitalism at best and fascism at worst describes a working system, operating as designed, in a country that once organised its politics around the presumption that no such system could be permitted to form.

For a Six-Year-Old

There is a big company that makes shots.

The government helps the company make the shots and sell them. The government tells your school that you have to get the shots before you can come to school.

Nobody checks the shots very well. The people who are supposed to check work with the company. So the shots go out into the world before anyone really knows if they are safe.

When a child is hurt by a shot, the family cannot go to a normal judge. There is a special room where a different kind of judge decides. That judge is paid by the government. The lawyers on the other side are paid by the government. The government made the shot rules. The government bought the shots. And the government decides whether the shot hurt you.

Most families are told the shot did not hurt their child, even when it did.

When a shot makes a baby die, the doctors sometimes think the mother or father shook the baby. The parents can be arrested. They can go to prison. For what the shot did.

The company that made the shot never gets in trouble. The company keeps making the shots. Your school keeps requiring them. The next family goes through the same door.

That is the machine.


References

¹ National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, Public Law 99-660, 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-1 et seq.

² Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC, 562 U.S. 223 (2011).

³ Leslie Manookian, twelve-point summary post, X (@LeslieManookian), July 3, 2026, status/2072712451800625369.

⁴ Deposition of Stanley A. Plotkin, M.D., taken January 11, 2018, in Matheson v. Schmitt, State of Michigan, Circuit Court for the County of Oakland, Family Division, Case No. 2015-831539-DM; transcript published via Informed Consent Action Network.

⁵ ICAN v. HHS, correspondence dated July 9, 2018, in response to FOIA request; HHS acknowledged no biennial reports produced under 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-27(c).

⁶ Vaccines for Children Program expenditure data, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; annual VFC purchasing figures.

⁷ U.S. Patents 5,437,951 and related — Lowy, Schiller et al., “Self-Assembling Recombinant Papillomavirus Capsid Proteins,” assigned to the United States Department of Health and Human Services; licensed to Merck & Co. for Gardasil.

⁸ Mawson AR et al., “Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children,” Journal of Translational Science, 2017.

⁹ Thomas JL, Lyons-Weiler J, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020.

¹⁰ Statement of William W. Thompson, Ph.D., through counsel Rick Morgan, August 27, 2014; documentation regarding DeStefano DA et al., “Age at first measles-mumps-rubella vaccination in children with autism and school-matched control subjects: a population-based study in metropolitan Atlanta,” Pediatrics, 2004.

¹¹ United States ex rel. Krahling and Wlochowski v. Merck & Co., Inc., No. 2:10-cv-04374, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, complaint filed 2010.

¹² Lazarus R et al., “Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS),” Grant Final Report, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., 2011 (AHRQ Grant ID R18 HS 017045).

¹³ Vaccine Injury Table history, Health Resources and Services Administration; successive amendments to 42 C.F.R. § 100.3.

¹⁴ Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality (2011) and predecessor reports.

¹⁵ Health Resources and Services Administration, VICP claim adjudication statistics.

¹⁶ Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund monthly balance report, U.S. Department of the Treasury.

¹⁷ Michael Innis, “Vaccines, Apparent Life-Threatening Events, Barlow’s Disease, and Questions about ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome,’” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 2006; Harold Buttram and Alan R. Yurko, “Shaken Baby Syndrome or Vaccine-Induced Encephalitis?” Medical Sentinel, subsequent case documentation.

¹⁸ State of Florida v. Alan R. Yurko, Ninth Judicial Circuit, 1999; post-conviction proceedings and release 2004; contemporaneous medical review including Harold E. Buttram, M.D.

¹⁹ Unbekoming, “Interview with Leslie Manookian, Health Freedom Defense Fund,” Lies are Unbekoming, Substack, April 13, 2024.

July 4, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Comments Off on The Machine

West African states begin withdrawal from ICC

MEMO | July 3, 2026

Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have officially begun a one-year process to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), the court has announced.

The three West African countries previously said they would leave the ICC, describing it as “a tool of new colonial oppression,” according to Reuters.

The presidency of the ICC’s governing body confirmed that Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger had submitted formal notices of withdrawal, triggering a one-year process to leave the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court.

In a statement, the presidency said the move could weaken global efforts to end impunity and undermine the pursuit of justice. It urged the three countries to remain committed to the Rome Statute.

The statement also stressed that withdrawal does not release a state from any obligations arising during its membership of the Rome Statute.

July 4, 2026 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Comments Off on West African states begin withdrawal from ICC

The Committee To Protect Journalists Continues To Become The Committee To Protect Israel

By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | June 30, 2026

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) continues to do a disservice to its stated mission and is now actively aiding Israel in killing Palestinian journalists instead of protecting them.

The CPJ has removed eight names from its list of slain Palestinian journalists because “Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries identifying them as members of their armed groups” and over baseless claims that they “had participated in combat”.

But as Quds News Network noted , “CPJ has not disputed that these individuals were doing journalism work at the time they were killed. What CPJ cites instead is their prior affiliation with the media departments of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, known in Arabic as al-i’lam al-harbi, or military media, a distinction between media relations work and combat that the organization’s own new criteria appears to collapse.”

It added that “Under the Fourth Geneva Convention and Additional Protocol I, specifically Article 79, journalists conducting dangerous professional missions in armed conflict are protected as civilians. The legal threshold for losing that protection is direct participation in hostilities at the moment of the attack, not past employment, political affiliation, or membership in a media relations unit. Working in a media department for a political or armed movement is not equivalent to bearing arms or planning attacks. None of the individuals removed from CPJ’s count have been shown by Israel or by CPJ to have been carrying weapons or engaged in combat operations at the time they were killed. To date, Israel has never produced verified evidence proving it killed a single Palestinian journalist while that journalist was carrying arms.”

In other words, the CPJ seems to be suggesting that any Palestinian journalist who at any time was affiliated with armed resistance groups, even in the media department, will now be labeled as a combatant.

Furthermore, as journalist Tareq S. Hajjaj noted, this same standard is not applied by the CPJ to Israeli journalists.

As he noted:

But if these standards are to be applied, do they apply only to Palestinian and Lebanese journalists? What about Israeli journalists, all of whom served in the Israeli military? Does military service in an army carrying out a genocide raise no comparable questions? These journalists continue their work after receiving military training alongside other soldiers. And as journalists, they actively incited genocide against Palestinians around the clock.

And there’s more. Some Israeli journalists even participated in war crimes while they were covering them. In October 2024, Israeli journalist Danny Kushmaro participated in the demolition of a home in a village in Southern Lebanon while filming himself doing it for a Channel 12 report. After pressing the button that blew up the house, he signed off by saying, “Don’t mess with the Jews.”

Palestinian journalists documenting the suffering of an occupied people are portrayed as suspects, while the perpetrators escape meaningful scrutiny.

This stunt by the CPJ to appease Israel and its lobbyists was used by Israel to justify its mass slaughter of Palestinian journalists.

The official account of the IDF posted a message to the CPJ saying “We hate to be the ones to say ‘we told you so’”, above a meme saying “The CPJ after finding out that the ‘journalists’ on their list are actually terrorists”.

As Quds News Network noted, “Israel has never proven that it killed a single Palestinian journalist while that journalist was armed or engaged in combat. What the latest CPJ decision does is hand Israel a tool to claim retroactive legitimacy over killings it was never required to justify in the first place, while the broader, undisputed, and overwhelming record of journalists killed simply for doing their jobs remains unanswered.”

In reality, Israel has repeatedly lied about journalists being engaged in combat to justify slaughtering them.

In the most high-profile case, Israel released fabricated documents to portray the well-known Palestinian journalist Anas Al Sharif as a combatant to justify his murder, but a closer look at the documents shows they were badly fabricated by Israeli intelligence.

Journalist Muhammad Shehada noted :

In the case of Al-Sharif, Israel released three documents that contradict each other. One, dated 2023, lists him as a “combatant” with his status described as “suspended” and “unassigned.” It highlights that he suffered incapacitating injuries in a training explosion that left him with “extremely weak hearing in the left ear, weak eyesight” and constant migraines and headaches.

Another from 2019 describes Al-Sharif as a “group leader” but lists his 17th birthday as the day he joined Hamas, despite the minimum age for membership being 18. And a third undated document suggests Al-Sharif was a member of Hamas’ Nukhba unit, the most elite combat division of the Al-Qassam brigades. But it is nearly impossible that someone with incapacitating injuries could join this unit, or would have previously been a member and then demoted to a foot soldier.

If Al-Sharif was part of Hamas, why did Israel release him after detaining and interrogating him in al-Shifa hospital, per Israeli journalist Amit Segal? Or why wasn’t he taken out earlier? For 22 months, Al-Sharif lived in the open, reported from the streets of Gaza, slept in tents in public spaces, and had his phone on him at all times — a far cry from the behavior of a dangerous militant, who would be under strict orders to operate under the radar.

As Shehada noted, the Likud-friendly journalist Amit Segal admitted that Anas Al Sharif “was also detained by the IDF during the takeover of Shifa Hospital, but was later released,” disproving any notion that he was a combatant.

In reality, Israel killed Anas Al Sharif to silence his factual reporting on Israel’s crimes. After his murder, his brother revealed that “Days before being killed in a targeted attack by Israeli forces, Anas al-Sharif was offered a deal: stop covering Gaza, and he and his family could leave safely.”

Israel ran similar deception campaigns against countless journalists in Gaza to justify slaughtering them.

All of these deceptions came out of the Mossad’s “Legitimization Cell,” which the Israeli magazine 972 reported was tasked to “identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel’s killing of reporters”.

One inside source said, “The team regularly collected intelligence that could be used for hasbara … The idea was to [allow the military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons” and another admitted, ““the Legitimization Cell misrepresented intelligence in a way that allowed for the false portrayal of a journalist as a member of Hamas’s military wing”.

The Gaza Government Media Office has documented that Israel has killed 262 journalists and wounded 420 since the start of the genocide in Gaza.

These murders often included intentionally killing family members of the journalists, including children.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate documented that , “the targeting of the Palestinian journalistic situation by the Israeli occupation army was not limited to direct killing, injury, arrest or preventing coverage, but developed to take a more dangerous and brutal dimension represented by targeting the families of journalists and their relatives, in a clear attempt to turn journalistic work into an existential burden paid for by children, wives and parents”.

It added that, “Based on the monitoring and documentation of the Freedoms Committee in the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, the targeting of journalists’ families has become a systematic and repeated pattern during 2023, 2024 and 2025, killing about 706 families of journalists in the Gaza Strip. All indicators prove that the targeting is not accidental incidents resulting from the conditions of war”.

This was as attempt to scare Palestinian journalist into silence, the organization noted, writing, “The effects of these crimes are not limited to human losses, but extend to deep psychological traumas among journalists who lost their children, wives or parents, the disintegration of families and the loss of a sense of security, the forcing of journalists to flee or temporarily stop working, the journalist with a harsh sense of guilt, within the framework of an organized psychological war, and the Freedoms Committee confirms that this psychological dimension is an integral part of the system of repression”.

To help cover up this genocidal campaign, Israel no longer needs to solely rely on the Legitimization Cell; it now has the CPJ as well.

July 1, 2026 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , | Comments Off on The Committee To Protect Journalists Continues To Become The Committee To Protect Israel

Iran mocks US for ‘solving’ domestic hunger problem, lecturing others on issue

Press TV – June 26, 2026

Iran has mocked the United States for “solving” its domestic hunger problem by simply stopping reports while lecturing other countries on the issue.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei made the remarks in an X post on Friday after US President Donald Trump claimed that Iran has “a hunger problem” and his deputy JD Vance alleged that the country’s unfrozen assets could help “feed” its people.

Baghaei cited a report by the World Hunger Education Service that found more than 47 million people in the United States, including 1 in 5 children, cannot consistently access or afford enough nutritious food to live healthy lives.

He further referred to another report by the NGO Feeding America that said 47 million Americans struggle daily with hunger.

“The ‘solution’ from US authorities? In September 2024, the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) quietly terminated its 30-year-old annual report on household food insecurity — effectively ending the official tracking and acknowledgment of hunger in America,” the spokesman said.

“So, after ‘solving’ domestic hunger by simply stopping the reports, Washington now feels qualified to lecture the world about hunger elsewhere.”

Baghaei added, “Charity begins at home — and it is desperately needed there.”

The latest Household Food Security report released by the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service for 2024 revealed that 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households last year.

One in seven households (13.7 percent) in America experienced food insecurity, or lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet, in 2024, according to the report. About 14.1 million American children lived in households that experienced food insecurity in 2024, a slight increase from the 13.8 million children reported in 2023.

The findings highlighted a deepening crisis in the US amid cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which enables low-income households to afford more healthy foods and boosts families’ food purchases.

Because the USDA’s 2025 survey data which would have been released in 2026 was canceled, no official government data on hunger for 2026 is available.

However, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has stepped in to fill the gap. In a report released in May 2026, the New York Fed presented new findings on food insecurity based on its Survey of Consumer Expectations.

The New York Fed survey found a “remarkable increase in food insecurity,” particularly among lower-income, lower-educated households, and households with young children.

The survey noted that between late 2025 and early 2026, the share of households reporting they had to skip meals or had insufficient food rose.

For households earning under $50,000 a year, the rate of those reporting not having enough food or kids missing meals reached 19.7% in early 2026, up from 16% in late 2025.

Nationwide, the share of households with limited or uncertain access to adequate food more than doubled from 4% in June 2020 to 10% in early 2026.

June 26, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Comments Off on Iran mocks US for ‘solving’ domestic hunger problem, lecturing others on issue

The Illusions of Western Virtue: Ursula von der Leyen and Europe’s Moral Bankruptcy

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | June 24, 2026

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has every right to condition European relations with any other country or bloc on respect for human rights. That, of course, would hold true if she genuinely cared about such values herself.

In response to the June 19 signing of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran—intended to bring an end to a destructive war—von der Leyen declared that the European Union does not intend to lift its sanctions on Tehran.

Speaking on June 15, ahead of the G7 summit, she firmly conditioned any diplomatic thawing on domestic changes within the Islamic Republic.

“The principle of sanctions is that we need real change on the ground before we can think about lifting them,” she stated, adding: “As long as there is no behavioral change, you cannot lift the sanctions because of human rights violations.”

Viewed in isolation, the European position might appear principled, even commendable. In its broader geopolitical context, however, it exposes a staggering level of hypocrisy.

On that very same day, the European Union’s duplicity was laid bare. During a Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg, Europe effectively refused to take a unified stand on imposing trade sanctions on Israel, despite its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and unchecked colonial violence and expansionist policies in the occupied West Bank.

The discussion itself would not have taken place had it not been for the persistent efforts of Spain and Ireland, which have repeatedly urged the bloc to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement over Israel’s flagrant violations of international law.

The initiative failed because the EU remains deeply divided, constrained by the requirement of unanimity on foreign policy and repeatedly blocked by pro-Israel governments.

While Europe continues to engage Israel—providing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition with desperately needed political and economic lifelines—the European public has increasingly moved in the opposite direction.

Recent polling across numerous countries has revealed growing opposition to Israel’s war and genocide in Gaza and increasing support for Palestinian rights. Across Europe, mass demonstrations, consumer boycotts, campus mobilizations, and divestment campaigns have reflected a widening gap between public opinion and official policy.

This reality appears entirely irrelevant to von der Leyen, who remains preoccupied with the human rights records of states viewed as Western adversaries. Such concern is not motivated by solidarity with victims, but by the desire to maintain political leverage that can be invoked when convenient and ignored when necessary.

Lest we forget, von der Leyen was among the first Western leaders to visit Israel following the events of October 7, arriving in Tel Aviv on October 13, 2023. Standing alongside Israeli leaders, she offered unconditional backing, declaring that “Europe stands with Israel.” She did so as Palestinians in Gaza were already being subjected to a devastating military assault that would soon claim tens of thousands of lives.

Although her rhetoric became somewhat more cautious as international legal institutions began investigating Israel for genocide and pursuing war crimes cases against its leaders, her fundamental political alignment never truly changed.

For anyone to believe that von der Leyen has suddenly discovered that human rights should occupy center stage in any responsible foreign policy is simply delusional. This is especially true given how restrained she remained, both in language and action, as the US-Israeli war on Iran expanded into a regional catastrophe that should never have been allowed to unfold.

None of that matters to von der Leyen, of course, since such immense human suffering does not neatly fit within her geopolitical priorities.

It is tempting to conclude that, for von der Leyen and many Western leaders, some human rights matter more than others. Yet even that assessment grants too much credibility to their position, because it assumes that human rights are the actual basis of policy. More often than not, they are merely invoked when politically convenient.

Even the Catholic Church appears to be moving away from this selective moral framework. Since his election in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly emphasized a vision of “just peace” over the traditional doctrine of “just war,” warning against the use of moral and religious language to legitimize military aggression. During his Palm Sunday homily earlier this 2026, he stressed that “God rejects the prayers of those who wage war,” a direct challenge to the normalization of violence by political leaders.

But von der Leyen cannot help herself. The instrumentalization of human rights has long been a staple of Western foreign policy, despite mounting evidence that such commitments are rarely applied consistently. In that sense, Europe appears increasingly bankrupt—not only morally, but politically as well.

The war involving Iran, the subsequent US-Iran agreement, and the major geopolitical shifts surrounding both unfolded largely without meaningful European involvement. Reduced to the role of spectator—or occasional cheerleader—the EU exerted little influence over events, underscoring its diminishing relevance in Middle Eastern and global affairs.

This helps explain why von der Leyen resorted to familiar rhetoric about human rights in Iran while remaining largely silent on Israel’s devastating actions in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere in the region. With Europe’s influence steadily shrinking, moral posturing has become a substitute for meaningful diplomacy.

Will the EU continue along this path of growing irrelevance, or will it finally heed the views of its own citizens, challenge Israel’s impunity, and pursue a foreign policy genuinely independent of Washington? The answer may determine whether Europe can reclaim political relevance—or continue its slide into long-term decline.

June 24, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , | Comments Off on The Illusions of Western Virtue: Ursula von der Leyen and Europe’s Moral Bankruptcy

The West’s Post-Soviet ‘Democracy’ Playbook

By Patrick Pillow | The Libertarian | June 24, 2026

Envision the following scenario: it is the 2008 U.S. presidential election between Senator John McCain (R-AR) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL). As the results begin pouring in, a senator from another country writes to The New York Times and warns that if the elections don’t go a certain way, there could be “profound implications.” 

We don’t have to imagine this scenario for long, because something very similar actually happened during Ukraine’s 2004 election. After the first round of voting, McCain released a statement to The Ukrainian Weekly, describing the election as “marred by widespread balloting irregularities.” He argued Ukraine’s November 21 run-off represented “a final opportunity to choose democracy,” that the world was watching closely, and that the outcome could carry “profound implications.” 

This publication alone highlighted a running theme during regime changes during the 2000s. American politicians, NGOs, and media organizations consistently played an active role in the domestic politics of countries thousands of miles from the Mainland.  

Ukraine provided an early example. Through the International Renaissance Foundation, approximately $300,000 was secured to fund Ukraine’s first independent radio station focused on social and political issues. The foundation also supported journalists connected to former Soviet-Georgia’s opposition press. This included reporters from 24 Hours and Rezonance, who produced articles ahead of Ukraine’s elections. 

Grants to journalists and independent media outlets don’t, on their own, stand out as especially significant. But in the early 2000s, these were rarely isolated acts, and perhaps no example illustrates this better than Kyrgyzstan. 

 In a 2005 Wall Street Journal article, as well as the documentary from Manon Loizeau entitled USA: The Conquest of the East, Freedom House official Mike Stone voiced his support for opposition media. During this time, Stone had provided assistance for the opposition newspaper Moya Stolitsa Novosti (MSN) and had distributed copies of Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, a handbook on nonviolent resistance that became influential among Twenty First Century protest movements starting in Serbia during the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution. 

The effort extended beyond newspapers themselves. Freedom House established an independent printing press designed to provide opposition and independent publications with an alternative to state-controlled printing facilities. Not everyone welcomed the project. Some newspaper managers complained about the high costs and poor print quality, with one editor describing the bill as “astounding” and the printing as “very mediocre.” Stone dismissed the criticism, arguing that editors were merely attempting to negotiate lower rates. 

Loizeau’s documentary details the level of American power behind Freedom House and Mike Stone’s activities. Days before Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections in 2005, the state cut off power to the biggest independent (and Freedom House-funded) printing press. Subsequently, Stone hosted a meeting with Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Askar Aitmatov. During that discussion, McCain phoned in to express outrage over the shutdown, and Aitmatov apologized for the situation. 

Kyrgyzstan was also subjected to the propaganda cartoon Beshtentek. Broadcast weekly on national television, the show placed a heavy focus on corruption and political accountability. Promotional material shared by the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek prominently featured USAID branding alongside the program. 

Former Soviet Georgia received similar treatment. Throughout the 2000s, organizations such as the International Research & Exchanges Board funded investigative journalism and local reporting. The Soros Foundation supported media outlets such as the independent weekly Liberali. During its early years, the television station Rustavi-2 received assistance from the Open Society Foundations, which later described the station as having received “significant financial and moral support from international donors including OSF and the U.S. government.” 

Rustavi-2 would become one of the country’s most influential stations. Widely viewed as favorable to Mikheil Saakashvili, the channel repeatedly aired Bringing Down a Dictator, a documentary about the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević during Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution. It also broadcast exit polling data during Georgia’s disputed 2003 election, helping shape public perceptions during an escalating political crisis. 

None of this is to suggest that the political grievances in Ukraine, Georgia, or Kyrgyzstan weren’t real. Accusations of corruption, contested elections, economic instability, and frustration with ruling elites all played a major role in driving events on the ground. But as Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton would put it, the people had more than agency. They had The Agency; America’s CIA. 

Likewise, opposition media in itself is not an issue. The question is what it means when foreign governments and organizations begin to play a significant role in the media environment during moments of political turmoil—through funding, infrastructure, and messaging? 

As McCain put it at the time, there remained “a final opportunity to choose democracy”—a line directed abroad but rarely reflected toward U.S. foreign policy itself. 

June 24, 2026 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Comments Off on The West’s Post-Soviet ‘Democracy’ Playbook

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.[2]

The message BidenWorld sent early on was that heterodox voices, even tepid ones, were not welcome. Consider the case of a respected expert on Russian affairs, Dr. Matthew Rojansky, who was then serving as the director of the Kennan Institute at the Congressionally-funded Woodrow Wilson Center. Rojansky had been denied a position on the Biden NSC because he was viewed as “soft” on Russia. Administration officials feared that appointing Rojansky would, as a contemporaneous report by Politico put it, “signal a conciliatory U.S. policy toward Moscow.”[3] The incident had echoes of the 2009 Freeman affair, when a foreign lobby (Israel’s) mobilized its allies in the media and on Capitol Hill to block an appointment it deemed threatening to its agenda. This time around, another foreign lobby (Ukraine’s) slammed the door on Rojansky. From the start, Biden’s White House was a closed circle—new names, new faces, and new thinking were not welcome.

The parallel one reaches for to best describe the inner workings of the Biden White House is that of the Reagan White House. Back then, a chief executive of questionable sentience relied on a tight circle of political operatives to run the day-to-day operations of the White House. During Reagan’s first term, that job fell to a “Troika” consisting of Chief of Staff James Baker, Counselor to the President Ed Meese, and Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver. Meese did policy, Deaver was the image-maker. Baker was in charge of everything else. Joe Biden had a Troika of his own: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, and Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed. Klain and Ricchetti were longtime centrist Democratic operatives. Reed was the policy wonk. No friend of progressives, Reed came up through the ranks as a centrist policy adviser to Senator Al Gore in the 1980s. He later served as a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.

On the foreign policy side of the ledger, what was old was new again. Like Presidents Carter and Clinton—and his erstwhile Democratic rivals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—Biden embraced a vision of the world divided between democracy and authoritarianism. While the script had been slightly updated since the end of the Cold War, the story was a familiar one: The US and its NATO allies were now said to be threatened by an “authoritarian axis” led by Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The axis is also said to include Iran, North Korea and other revisionist powers. Discussions regarding our putative “friends” and “allies” that also happen to be authoritarian (Saudi Arabia, Turkey) or ethno-nationalist (Israel, Ukraine) are usually excluded from the schema. In December 2021, Biden hosted a ‘Summit for Democracy’ that brought together leaders from over 100 countries in support of a rather amorphous strategy to “defend” democracy—a cause that Biden claimed was “the defining challenge of our time.”

More thoughtful men than Biden saw things rather differently. George Kennan, for one, felt that there was nothing “more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” The problem, as Kennan correctly foresaw, was that an embattled democracy will tend “to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision to everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the center of all value.”[4] While Kennan wrote those words in 1961, it would be hard to find a better description of the politics of the New Cold War. The main deliverable of Biden’s “democracy” conference was the creation of a Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, which, at a cost of nearly half-a-billion dollars to US taxpayers, would seek to promote “democracy, fight corruption, and defend human rights worldwide.”[5]

As with so many of the ideas and programs championed by the Democratic establishment since the end of the Cold War, the “autocracy vs. democracy” paradigm borrowed liberally from the neocon playbook. Biden’s old friend, the late Senator John McCain, had long called for the creation of a global “League of Democracies.” Speaking at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in 2007, McCain said the new league would, “form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom.” It would be able to “bring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow’s and Beijing’s approval.[6] McCain’s proposal might just as easily have come from the pen of Samantha Power. As with the men and pigs at the conclusion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it comes to the neocons and the Democratic elite, it is now impossible to say which is which.

***

The Great Betrayal: How The Democrats Became The Party of War, hailed by Professor Richard Sakwa as “a brilliant, timely, and important achievement,” is available now from OR x Nation Books.

NOTES:

[1] For example, no dissent on matters relating to Israel was welcome; see: https://www.commondreams.org/news/biden-silencing-dissent-gaza. For reporting on Biden’s tyrannical streak, see, for example, https://thebrunswicknews.com/president-biden-has-notorious-temper-yells-curses-frequently-in-private-report/article_107fcc8f-b3f8-5dad-a447-083dbde1eaa1.html

[2] Including The Brookings Institution, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The German Marshall Fund, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Center for American Progress, The Center for a New American Security, and The Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/19/biden-russia-expert-483000

[4] For Kennan, see: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/17/hang-up-the-magical-thinking-and-try-strategic-empathy-on-for-size/

[5] On the Democracy Summit and Biden’s remarks, see: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/12/23/summit-for-democracy-summary-of-proceedings/

[6] For McCain’s remarks, see: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/inline/docs/McCain_05-01-07.pdf

June 16, 2026 Posted by | Book Review, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | | Comments Off on Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia

Iran is not the one using Lebanon as its bargaining chip

By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | June 12, 2026

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has claimed that Iran is “using Lebanon as its bargaining chip.” Not only is this blatantly false, but it also implies that Tehran has something material to gain from including Lebanon in its ceasefire agreement.

Several inflammatory statements have recently been issued by the Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, blaming Iran for “Israel’s” mass murder of Lebanese civilians and its illegal invasion of southern Lebanese lands.

These allegations against Iran are not new. For decades, they have been fabricated by Israeli politicians and Zionist think-tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). There is, however, a significant difference when such claims are echoed by a Lebanese president and whose government has been instructed to engage in direct talks with an enemy that, within a matter of months, has killed around 3,600 of his country’s citizens and continues to occupy Lebanese territory.

The mere concept of Lebanon’s “bargaining chip” is factually incorrect in Iran’s case. A “bargaining chip” means that Tehran would use Lebanon to its own benefit, which is patently false. If anything, Iran’s demands that “Israel” withdraw from Lebanese territory and cease its bombing campaign are making the prospect of reaching any deal more difficult.

If we focus solely on what would materially benefit Iran, the other demands it has listed – namely guarantees against future aggression, the withdrawal of US forces from the region, the lifting of sanctions, recognition of its control over the Strait of Hormuz, the unfreezing of assets, and compensation – are tangible gains. By contrast, the demand that any ceasefire apply across all fronts, especially the stipulation of a complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory, offers Iran no direct material benefit. This is a matter of principle rather than self-interest.

One could argue that by insisting on Lebanon’s inclusion in the ceasefire agreement, Iran was seeking to strengthen its standing while demonstrating loyalty to its allies. Yet if this were primarily a strategic or symbolic demand, Tehran could simply have accepted a return to the status quo that “Israel” had imposed on southern Lebanon prior to March 2.

Instead, the demand is that “Israel” no longer be permitted to do what it did following the announcement of the November 27, 2024 ceasefire agreement, which, according to UNIFIL, it violated at least 15,400 times. Iran has been clear that it is not interested in a merely symbolic agreement; it wants credible assurances that “Israel” will cease its bombing and retreat from Lebanese territory.

In reality, there are two reasons these kinds of statements are made – The first being that in the event of an Iranian comprehensive deal that forces the Zionist regime to retreat fully, the Lebanese leadership will lose all its remaining legitimacy. The second reason is that this argument closely mirrors a talking point promoted by US officials.

In 2021, Hezbollah facilitated the transfer of Iranian fuel shipments to Lebanon at a time when the country was experiencing a severe energy crisis. The following year, Tehran also offered additional fuel supplies to Lebanon on a free-of-charge basis. More broadly, Iran has historically provided financial support for a range of Lebanese social initiatives, including welfare programs, assistance to low-income communities, and reconstruction efforts.

Despite the Lebanese leadership that took power in February 2025 adopting a generally adversarial stance toward Hezbollah and Iran, Tehran did not seek to obstruct the formation of the government. In fact, Nawaf Salam and Joseph Aoun came to power in a political context in which Hezbollah and the Amal Movement ultimately chose not to block the process, reportedly in the interest of preserving domestic stability.

Allegations that Iran is responsible for the war are simply outlandish. Iran’s ambassador was declared “persona non-grata”, yet the Lebanese government is now sitting down for direct negotiations with the Israelis. All of the accusations made against Iran are simply nonsensical.

If Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam truly believed in Lebanese sovereignty, then they would also expel the US ambassador who represents a government that quite literally greenlights Israeli airstrikes against Lebanon. In this sense, the argument against Iran is not new; it draws on longstanding narratives that have circulated for decades and often lack substantive grounding.

It is often argued that a basic requirement of any ceasefire should be the cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of forces from occupied territory. In this context, Iranian warnings that further Israeli strikes on Beirut would trigger retaliation came amid heightened tensions ahead of the third round of direct Lebanon–”Israel” negotiations, during which a planned Israeli escalation did not proceed.

For 15 months, diplomacy was given a chance. The result: Israelis are still occupying southern Lebanon, and they continue bombing Lebanese territory, while the US has developed a plan for disarming the Resistance instead.

June 12, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Comments Off on Iran is not the one using Lebanon as its bargaining chip

Settlers, sanctions and impunity

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | June 10, 2026

From 1st January 2008 to 31st December 2025, Israeli settlers killed 61 Palestinians and injured 3,778. The findings of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, which partly discusses settler violence, note that “Israeli authorities have consistently acknowledged settler violence as a problem, while promoting structural conditions that enable it.”

The recently published report details the overt nature of Israeli settler violence – the claiming of responsibility for settler attacks on Palestinians as part of the process to ‘Greater Israel’, the unequivocal assertion that attacks are unprovoked, and the indoctrination of settler children by family members and settler organisations. Supporting the entire spectrum of settler-colonial violence is the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu downplaying the attacks against Palestinians as attributed to “a small group of unruly youth”. The report notes how government settlement expansion policy contributes to settler violence, and provides the framework for settler impunity. Mentioning prominent Israeli ministers and settler leaders, the report states, “They [the officials] have explicitly permitted or condoned settler violence as an instrument to achieve a broader agenda.”

As the UK, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway imposed sanctions on networks that collaborate with settler violence in the occupied West Bank, the Commission of Inquiry’s report details the structure that supports settler violence against Palestinians. Reacting to the sanctions, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman Oren Marmorstein declared, “The real essence of these steps is the attempt to impose a political stance regarding  the right of Jews to settle in the Land of Israel and concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – camouflaged as measures against violence.”

Of course the decision is political. However, as the report shows, the six countries’ decision to impose sanctions does not even scratch the surface of the politics and policies that support Israel’s settler-colonial expansion. Israel and its institutions have created a protective structure for settler violence, and Marmorstein’s statement illustrates how central settler violence is to completing the process of Greater Israel.

Without settler violence contributing to the forced displacement of the Palestinian people, Israel would have a difficult time maintaining its structure.

The discrepancy, however lies in world leaders’ decision to target entities and individuals rather than Israel itself. For example, the report highlights that the line between settlers and soldiers has blurred since regional brigades were formed and gun licenses were handed out by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Settlers are being given power by Israel’s colonial structure, therefore sanctioning settlers is unlikely to make a difference in halting colonial expansion.

International diplomacy is still viewing Israeli settler-colonialism in manageable sections, and detached from Israel’s expansionist policies.

Targeting settlers with sanctions simply encourages Israel to provide more impunity for those doing its work on the ground, while the Israeli government continues with settlement construction.

As the Commission of Inquiry’s report shows, Israel cannot be discussed separately from settler violence. Sanctions, therefore, need to appropriately target the colonial framework itself, which would then have an impact on the settler-colonial society in its entirety.

June 10, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Settlers, sanctions and impunity

New IAEA draft resolution recycles Iran ‘non-compliance’ myth while ignoring two imposed wars

Press TV | June 8, 2026

A draft resolution set to be tabled at the June 2026 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Board of Governors – a copy of which is in the possession of the Press TV website – is another calculated attempt to weaponize the UN nuclear watchdog against Iran and its peaceful nuclear program.

The new resolution – like many other IAEA resolutions in the past – seeks to mount political pressure on Tehran over the unsubstantiated and long-discredited claim of “non-compliance” with ITS nuclear safeguards obligations.

The proposed resolution, titled “Implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of UNSC resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” does nothing more than recycle the same old accusations.

It alleges that Iran has failed to provide the IAEA with full and timely cooperation regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple locations, ignoring the fact that three important Iranian nuclear sites were bombed by the United States and Israel.

Significantly, the draft text refers back to a June 2025 resolution that – without presenting any tangible evidence whatsoever – found Iran in non-compliance with its safeguards obligations under Article XII.C of the IAEA Statute.

That politically driven resolution, history now records, paved the ground for direct and unprovoked Israeli military aggression against Iran days later. The IAEA, by pushing that resolution, effectively became complicit in aggression against a sovereign NPT signatory.

According to the current draft, Iran has failed over the past year to remedy those alleged concerns or provide the access and information requested by the agency. This is a claim Tehran categorically dismisses, pointing out – correctly – that the agency’s demands frequently exceed Iran’s legal obligations under the NPT.

The IAEA, under Western pressure, keeps moving the goalposts – demanding more than the law requires, encouraging Iran’s enemies to impose sanctions and wage wars, refusing to condemn attacks on nuclear facilities, and then dishing out new reports against Iran.

The latest resolution further cites the IAEA’s 2025 Safeguards Implementation Report and a subsequent report by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, which claimed that the agency remains unable to verify previously declared nuclear material in Iran, including a large quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU).

What the resolution conveniently omits is the context: much of the IAEA’s so-called “lack of access” stems directly from the damage inflicted by US-Israeli military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities – strikes that Grossi-led agency has never once condemned.

The draft further expresses “grave concern” that the agency has lacked access for nearly a year to verify previously declared stocks of both highly enriched and low-enriched uranium, describing the delay as “long overdue according to standard safeguards practice” and warning that it constitutes both a proliferation concern and a compliance issue.

But here is what the resolution does not say: Iran lost access to its own facilities because those facilities were bombed by the same entities that dictate terms to Grossi and his team.

The text further reiterates that the IAEA is currently unable to verify that no safeguarded nuclear material in Iran has been diverted toward nuclear weapons or other explosive devices, invoking Article 19 of Iran’s safeguards agreement. This is an assertion Tehran has consistently rejected as factually incorrect and politically motivated.

In one of its strongest passages, the draft stresses that Iran’s safeguards obligations “cannot be unilaterally amended or suspended,” while reaffirming Tehran’s legal obligation to implement modified Code 3.1 of its subsidiary arrangements with the agency. That provision requires early notification and disclosure of nuclear facility design information.

Iran’s response is straightforward: Such demands must be viewed against the backdrop of two unprovoked wars of aggression on its territory, including direct attacks on nuclear sites.

No other NPT signatory has ever endured two full-scale military attacks while simultaneously being accused of non-compliance with its commitments. No other country has been bombed and then blamed for the consequences of those bombings.

The resolution also references earlier UN Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1737 adopted in 2006, which – very illogically and unreasonably – demanded that Iran suspend all peaceful enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development work, as well as heavy water-related projects.

The text calls on Grossi to provide another report on Iran’s implementation of the resolution ahead of the Board’s next regular session. Quite interestingly, the draft warns that the Board remains prepared to take “further action,” including steps related to reporting Iran’s case again to the United Nations Security Council under Article XII.C of the IAEA Statute.

What is absurd is that the IAEA wants to report Iran to the Security Council, the very same Security Council whose permanent members were involved in the aggression against Iran.

This new and another politically-motivated draft resolution comes despite the fact that Iran has adhered to all its commitments under the NPT, despite being subjected to illegal sanctions and two unprovoked wars in less than a year.

The first act of unprovoked and illegal military aggression in June 2025 came merely days after the IAEA passed its previous resolution against Iran. Israeli fighter jets struck Iran’s central uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Days later, the Arak nuclear reactor was also attacked. So, it was an IAEA resolution, followed by bombs.

Behrooz Kamalvandi, spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, at the time condemned the IAEA for its “dangerous and deliberate silence” regarding the aggression.

“We wrote multiple letters to Director-General Rafael Grossi warning of these threats, but they remained unanswered,” Kamalvandi said. The agency was forewarned, but it didn’t act.

In the subsequent days, Israel’s aggression intensified further, in flagrant violation of international law. On June 19, Israel carried out more strikes on multiple other sites, including the Natanz facility and the Khondab (Arak) heavy water reactor.

Just three days later, on June 22, American B-2 bombers breached Iranian airspace, targeting critical nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in a coordinated US-Israeli assault.

In response to this aggression against peaceful nuclear facilities and the IAEA’s complicit silence, Iran’s parliament approved a bill in June last year to suspend Tehran’s cooperation with the agency. Lawmakers described the IAEA’s actions as a betrayal of its own charter and a direct enabler of aggression against a sovereign member of the NPT.

Iran still kept the window open for the UN nuclear agency, like a responsible state, allowing it to make amends, but the politicization of the agency continued.

Far from acting as a neutral arbiter, the UN atomic agency has repeatedly allowed itself to be wielded as a political instrument by the United States and the Israeli regime. Even as Iran continues to cooperate with the agency, it has remained utterly mute regarding Israel’s serial violations of international law, an illegitimate entity that has not even signed the NPT.

Its silence over the regime’s aerial and cyber attacks against Iran’s safeguarded nuclear facilities is nothing less than collusion by an international body sworn to impartiality.

Experts have long warned that this one-sided scrutiny has inflicted serious damage on the credibility of the international non-proliferation regime. It has created a two-tier system: one tier for Western-backed nuclear actors like Israel, which act with complete impunity, and another tier for sovereign and responsible non-nuclear states like Iran.

More recently, the US-Israeli war machine carried out yet another unprovoked military aggression against the Islamic Republic, and once again, the IAEA stood as a mute spectator.

June 8, 2026 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Comments Off on New IAEA draft resolution recycles Iran ‘non-compliance’ myth while ignoring two imposed wars