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How the EU constructs Israel impunity

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | January 12, 2023

The EU could have availed itself of an opportunity to hold Israel accountable for its violations but, instead it opted for the lesser value of requesting financial reparation for the structures funded by the bloc in the Occupied West Bank and destroyed by the settler-colonial enterprise. Neither is the EU’s request a novelty, since demanding financial compensation from Israel has happened in the past, without any compliance, of course.

Recent focus on Israel’s planned forced displacement of Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta prompted 24 European Parliament members to contact the European Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarcic, regarding financial reparation. The bottom line is that, while the EU is within its rights to demand financial compensation, the issue at stake – which is the Palestinian people being forcibly displaced by Israel – is nowhere on the EU’s agenda.

Lenarcic’s response, partially quoted by Haaretz, confirms the EU’s repetitive requests for financial compensation and that “the European Union is continuing to work in this regard through a range of diplomatic and political channels”. Of little to no consequence was Lenarcic’s reminding that EU representatives often visit areas in the Occupied West Bank that are slated for demolition, ostensibly “to warn against”. Yet, besides the opportunistic exploitation, keeping tally of EU-funded destroyed dwellings is more a case in point and futile, too. As Lenarcic stated, “The list of possible steps to ensure compensation from Israel for European financing that went down the drain in demolitions has not yet come up for discussion.”

If holding Israel accountable for something as basic as a financial transaction for damages it caused prompts so much caution in the EU’s official statements, it is safe to say that human rights in the EU’s repertoire, when it comes to Israel, descends into still silence. The EU still has not addressed the fact that, without holding Israel accountable for forcibly displacing Palestinians, its humanitarian projects for Palestinians is also financing Israel’s violations. Yet it is precisely what the humanitarian project which the international community imposed upon Palestinians intended. By investing a fragment of humanitarian aid aimed at alleviating the suffering caused by Israel’s colonial existence and violence, the international community can bypass the actual violations which go against international law.

The EU is no exception to this imposed rule. Advocacy by EU representatives does not work to hold Israel accountable but to extend a permanent contract of silence which, in turn, also silences Palestinians. Despite having political means at their disposal, EU representatives prefer playing the amateur activists when it comes to Palestine. Funds for travelling to the Occupied West Bank, after all, form part of the humanitarian project which Palestinians are forced to fit into. In the same way, EU-funded dwellings play a role in the humanitarian project but fail to sustain Palestinian autonomy. The latest purported concern has nothing to do with Palestinians, and is only marginally related to the EU-funded dwellings that Israel routinely destroys. Detracting from Israel’s settler-colonial expansion and the EU’s role in maintaining it, however, is a major part of what the humanitarian paradigm constitutes.

January 12, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | 2 Comments

Where Have the Voices for Liberty Gone?

By Michael Lesher | Brownstone Institute | January 4, 2023

In early 2020, when American liberals wailed in unison that the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right of free assembly was a prescription for national suicide – and not one significant American civil rights organization protested – I should have known where we were headed.

Still, almost 3three years later, I am dumbfounded by how rapidly a nation that once boasted of its attachment to “liberty” has succumbed to the priorities of totalitarianism. Thought policing on social media, once a dystopian fantasy, is now taken for granted.

So is the massive electronic surveillance system that was hawked to Americans (and others around the world) as a “health” measure, but which actually gives Big Brother a convenient way to monitor people’s whereabouts and which has already been turned against political dissidents in Israel, India and elsewhere. Health care workers – once the heroes of the fear propaganda that rationalized illegal mass quarantines in 2020 – have now been forced from their jobs in alarming numbers for refusing to be injected with experimental drugs that demonstrably protect no one.

Mass media, far from raising questions about all this, are cheering on the juggernaut. CNN’s Michael Smerconish has confessed with chilling directness that the COVID drug experiment is essentially a lesson in Gleichschaltung:

“This is really about which people in this country are going to control virus-related behavior – the unvaccinated or the vaccinated…. [A]llowing the unvaccinated to control virus policy, that’s unjust and unhealthy.”

After all, as Congressman Jamie Raskin put it (in conversation with ex-poisoner-in-chief Deborah Birx), the most important thing for the State is to ensure “social cohesion” – even if it takes some official lying to coax the population into lockstep. Hitler could hardly have put it better.

I might readily fill this column with a catalog of the false statements about COVID-19 that have been peddled to the public over the last three years. But the chicanery of the muzzle-and-lockdown propagandists is not limited to scientific malfeasance.

I do not minimize the importance of demonstrating that we have been fed a steady diet of lies about COVID-19 since the beginning of 2020 (a task that has been ably shouldered by many other Brownstone contributors). But what’s at stake here is not just a debate about medical policy. What is happening involves nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of our body politic, a massive assault on the constitutional system of civil liberties and on the presuppositions undergirding that system.

Add to this the shameful silence of American liberal institutions as the tentacles of a police state wind ever more tightly around us all, and you will understand why my call to the incoming year is: when will I hear more voices raised in resistance?

Or, to put it more bluntly: what are you waiting for, America?

Where were your voices when the suspension of representative democracy made virtual dictators out of some four-fifths of America’s governors in 2020 – an arrangement which, according to Anthony Fauci, could be reimposed at any time?

Where were your voices when state after state discarded the Bill of Rights in favor of some version of the Emergency Health Powers Act – a bill that, when first proposed in 2001, was sharply criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, along with conservative groups like the Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, as “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness?”

Where were your voices when the President of the United States defied the Nuremberg Code by ordering 3.5 million federal employees to submit to the injection of untested drugs, while his administration did its level best to ensure that what little information was available about the safety of those drugs would be concealed from the public for as long as possible? Where were your voices when those who objected to this embrace of a repurposed Nazi war crime were purged from our government?

Where were your voices when the State shuttered your children’s schools, forced muzzles onto two-year-olds, and terrorized young people to the point that fully a quarter of them contemplated suicide? When as many as 23 million children were placed by American school systems under computerized surveillance that monitored their every keystroke and tracked their internet contacts, a 1984-ish scenario for which COVID-driven school closures served as the pretext?

If you ask me, the most important word in the preceding sentence is “pretext:” COVID-19, though in medical terms never nearly as dangerous as we were told it was, has been extremely effective as a battering ram to civil liberties. Once upon a time, government health policy was fashioned to achieve medical goals. Today, factitious medical “goals” are deployed on behalf of a policy aimed at dismantling American democracy.

So please remember: this is not about your health. It’s about your country, whose highest aspirations are under unprecedented assault. If you don’t object now, you may lose your right to object at all.

And don’t think the vaunted liberal media, or civil rights “advocates,” or high-minded academics, or self-aggrandizing “progressive” politicians will speak up for you if you don’t speak up for yourselves.

A few years ago, CNN’s Jim Acosta made his reputation posing as a champion of press freedom (supposedly under mortal threat because Donald Trump had said some unflattering things about American reporters). Yet by the summer of 2021 Acosta was out-Trumping Trump, claiming that Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis had caused the COVID-19 Delta variant and denouncing people who dared to think they had a right to breathe in public.

Have Acosta’s fellow liberals objected to his hypocrisy? On the contrary: his public media profile is a virtual hagiography, even while he’s attacking the free speech rights of press outlets like Fox News for airing commentary he doesn’t agree with. Trusting such people with defending the Bill of Rights is like leaving your wallet with Bernie Madoff.

Nor can you plead a lack of adequate knowledge. Even if you ignore the sources of genuine information about COVID policy – and several are available via internet – there have been epiphanic moments when the propagandists have actually exposed themselves, as when New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul told a megachurch audience that God had commanded Americans to take the COVID-19 “vaccines,” or when an unrepentant Colonel Birx admitted to Congress that she had misrepresented facts when ordering the public to submit to the same experimental drugs.

Do you really need any more evidence of the megalomaniac lust for power driving these democracy-haters, as they dismantle the US Constitution piece by piece?

There can be no doubt about where State power is drifting – if we do nothing to stop it. Writing as far back as 1935, Albert Jay Nock predicted the future of the accelerating centralization of authority:

What we… shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing;… the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income…. Then at some point in this progress, a collision of State interests… will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to “the rusty death of machinery”…

As we enter 2023, we don’t need to read deeply into political theory to understand the threat we face. We only have to review the record of the previous three years.

An accurate assessment of that record, it seems to me, will tell us that we are quite possibly on the cusp of the dissolution of the American republic. Maybe it is already too late to resist the authoritarian Zeitgeist. But I suggest we all ponder the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the failure of the Soviet public to resist the repression that had included his own arrest in the 1940s: “If only we had stood together against the common threat, we could easily have defeated it. So, why didn’t we? We didn’t love freedom enough.”

For us, that “common threat” is much weaker than the one Solzhenitsyn had in mind. We don’t need weapons to fight it; in fact, weapons would only get in the way. What we need are voices – lots of them – raised in protest every time a bureaucrat or a tame Ivy League “expert” or a lying “journalist” or a shyster in sheep’s clothing tries to rob us of one more bit of our human dignity, one more inch of our civil rights.

Then we need to clamor for all we’re worth. While there is still time.

Do we love freedom enough for that?

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books. He has also published op-ed pieces in such varied venues as Forward, ZNet, the New York Post and Off-Guardian.

January 6, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

The Net Zero death cult taking over ‘our’ NHS

By Stephen McMurray | TCW Defending Freedom | January 3, 2023

The climate change cult is insidious in every government department or institution it infiltrates. However, it is at its most dangerous when those people it infects are members of the medical community. When their apocalyptic hysteria starts affecting their decisions regarding patient care, urgent action is needed.

A disturbing document was recently published in the Lancet, entitled The Report of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death: bringing death back into life. It was written by numerous medical professionals in the palliative care sector. It is nothing less than a propaganda piece promoting the idea that people who are suffering from possible life-shortening illness should not be given any potential life-saving treatments but, to help reduce our carbon footprint, should be allowed to die and actively encouraged to do so.

The authors make their feelings clear when they say: ‘The commission believes it is healthy to die . . . We are embodied creatures who are ultimately no more important than lizards or potatoes.’

It soon becomes obvious that their Net Zero zeal is driving this agenda when they state: ‘Treatment at the end of life will be an important contribution to the carbon footprint of health care . . . Everything, and especially death, must be thought of in the context of the climate crisis . . . In the report we explore the many values of death.’

The article is replete with climate change apocalyptic rhetoric, saying humanity is near extinction, one of the reasons being overpopulation, so we had better change our ways and stop trying to cure patients with potentially fatal illnesses and let them die.

As is common with the climate change cult, the document is replete with extreme left-wing ideology, promulgating the idea that expecting to be treated in hospital with life-prolonging drugs is a concept founded in racism. As only rich Westerners can afford proper health care, it is an example of a colonialist mindset and to achieve equity we should abandon this idea and die willingly like poor people in less developed countries.

Throughout the report they state how important it is to die at home surrounded by friends and family rather than in a hospital bed. This is not out of compassion but out of their desire to reduce the carbon footprint of end-of-life medication. The same medical profession that ardently supported the closure of hospitals to relatives of dying patients during Covid now pretend to advocate for having loved ones at the dying patient’s bedside. Their hypocrisy is breathtaking.

The authors also have the temerity to infuse the document with references to religious practices and spirituality to convince the reader that death is nothing to fear and that, by medicalising it, we are not having our spiritual and emotional needs met. If this was coming from the head of a religious institution it would possibly be understandable, but this is from a medical establishment who vehemently adhere to the reductionist view that our bodies are mere machines of flesh and bone.

When extolling the virtues of other religions’ treatment of the dying, the report cites a ritual practised by some Indian sects, which ‘entails a person coming to the realisation that they have no responsibilities or desires left. With the consent of religious elders, the person enters a slow process of fasting, where they give up one item of food a time, so that hunger pangs are tolerable. Over a few weeks or months, the person dies, often amid chants’.

Here the commission are implying that once you have supposedly nothing left to offer society, it is perfectly reasonable to want to die. Moreover, they don’t object to the cruel method of causing death by slow starvation. One can only assume that the relatives of those who have starved to death in our own NHS hospitals would be outraged by this callousness.

The document encourages carers to implant a sense of hopelessness in their patients so they more readily accept the idea of dying. ‘There is evidence that the will to live can keep people alive. But the tyranny of “positive thinking” can lead to ambivalence, guilt, and bad decisions . . . Hope increases the likelihood that people will believe that their illness is less serious than objective data might support, allowing patients to hold on to a low possibility of a favourable outcome and disregard the much greater probability of an unfavourable outcome.’ Clinicians sometimes ‘recommend additional treatments as a way for the patient to maintain hope, despite the clinical futility’.

What if treatment is not futile? Cases where patients are wrongly diagnosed with a terminal illness do occur.  If we have learned one thing from the Covid era, it is that medical experts are far from infallible.

Their obsession with Net Zero and their disdain for human life is even focused on the patient after death: ‘While the dead consume no carbon, the disposal of bodies does. About three quarters of people in Britain are cremated after death, releasing carbon into the air. Alkaline hydrolysis, in which the body is dissolved, has about a seventh of the carbon footprint of cremation, and the resulting fluid can be used as fertiliser.’

The writers try to justify withholding treatments from patients who are potentially dying by saying the money could be better spent on treating others. This is totally disingenuous. Given vast sums of money for patient care, the NHS chose to spend it instead on pursuing the climate cult’s agenda of Net Zero.

They are going to spend £492million on changing all NHS light bulbs into LED ones. To put that into perspective, take the current outbreak of Streptococcus A infections spreading amongst children. We are being told there is not enough penicillin to go around. The cost of a 14-day course of amoxicillin is £0.18. There are approximately 12.7million under-16s in the UK. Therefore, it would cost under £2.5million to make sure there is enough antibiotics available to protect the entire childhood population.

It will come as no surprise that the report is in favour of legalising ‘assisted dying’. One of its main authors, Richard Smith, chairs the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. In 2017 he wrote an article in the British Medical Journal which began: ‘We should accept that humanity is dying and switch from cure to palliation – just as wise patients do at the end of their lives.’ Smith agrees with another palliative care physician who finds ‘acceptance of our mortality, unimportance, ephemeral nature, infinite ignorance, and futility to be very liberating’. Do we really want people who suffer from existential nihilism and think human life is unimportant and futile, treating anyone, let alone people who may be dying?

The fact that the climate hysteria with its accompanying left-wing, extremist ideology has infected the NHS could have serious consequences for people with potentially life-shortening illnesses. What criteria would the doctors use to decide which patients, if any, are worthy of receiving treatment? Would their decision be based solely on medical grounds or their ideology?

Most people who are diagnosed as being near the end of life are the older generation. It is exactly this demographic that the eco-zealots blame for the so-called climate crisis. What if the doctor or nurse was so indoctrinated by the climate crisis propaganda that their decision to withdraw treatment was based on their radical views rather than purely medical reasons?

Last April, an Extinction Rebellion activist called for the baby boomer generation to be euthanised. A sick joke, maybe, but the UK Health Alliance for Climate Change which is promoting this agenda acknowledges it works with Doctors for Extinction Rebellion.

The Lancet report highlights how deeply the Net Zero cult has infiltrated our health system. The obsession with reducing our carbon footprint is now such an integral part of many medical professionals’ mindset that they openly promote death as a healthy outcome. Do we really want anyone who thinks human life is unimportant and futile, least of all doctors in whom we are meant to put our trust, treating anyone, let alone those who may be dying? Surely such declared inhumane intent, running directly counter to the Hippocratic Oath, should automatically be grounds for being struck off by the General Medical Council.

January 3, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | , | 3 Comments

Documents reveal how ‘Russiagate’ was used for Twitter censorship

RT | January 4, 2023

Internal documents from Twitter made public on Tuesday show how the social media platform was pressured to follow the US intelligence community’s lead on censorship back in 2017. Key Democrats in the US Congress, a British university and two media outlets – Politico and BuzzFeed – played a major role in the process, which revolved around the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory, according to research by Matt Taibbi.

In a pattern established in just six weeks, from August to October 2017, Twitter went from being on nobody’s radar to agreeing to take orders from US spies as to whom to censor, Taibbi wrote on Substack.

“Threats from Congress came first, then a rush of bad headlines (inspired by leaks from congressional committees), and finally a series of moderation demands coming from the outside,” he added.

In a 30-tweet thread, Taibbi showed emails and other internal documents he obtained, thanks to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.

Democrats had accused Russia of helping Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. Their claim that Trump had ties with Moscow was a “dossier” fabricated by a British spy. From there, they insinuated that WikiLeaks publishing internal DNC documents and personal emails of Clinton’s campaign had something to do with Moscow, while “Russian bots and trolls” posted “misinformation” on social media that somehow undermined the elections.

By August 2017, Facebook was purging accounts accused of being “linked to Russia.” Unconcerned, Twitter sent over a list of 22 “possible” Russian accounts to the Senate Intelligence Committee, only to be denounced by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat.

By the end of September, Twitter VP for Public Policy Colin Crowell was warning that “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and [the] rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” Crowell also noted the Democrats were  “taking cues from Hillary Clinton,” and that only Warner and his House counterpart Congressman Adam Schiff were seeking any comments from social media companies.

Meanwhile, as Taibbi put it, “a torrent of stories sourced to the [committee] poured into the news,” while several Senators – including Warner but also John McCain, an anti-Trump Arizona Republican – proposed bills that would have cracked down on social media.

A “Russia Task Force” set up by Twitter on October 2 found “no evidence of a coordinated approach” by October 13. The final report on October 23 found “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia.” Of those, only two spent anything close to $10,000 on advertising – and one of them was RT.

Policy Director Carlos Monje admits in an October 18 memo that “our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight.” One of these changes was the October 26 ban on advertising by RT and Sputnik.

A November 22 internal email accuses the Senate Intelligence Committee of leaking Twitter’s internal report to the media. A Politico story accusing Twitter of deleting files is followed by a BuzzFeed article alleging a German-language bot network with “signs of being connected to Russia.” The committee demands a report based on the story, which Twitter’s Yoel Roth dutifully writes up.

“You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions,” Taibbi wrote.

All of this results in the internal instructions to ban anything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” It was the first step in the process that would eventually lead to the FBI and the Biden White House telling Twitter exactly whom to censor.

January 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

From Verdun to Nuremberg

By Eugenio de Dobrynne | The Postil | January 1, 2023 

With all due respect, it seems that the times we are living through, in regards to the war in Ukraine, take us back to times and moments gone by. The apparent stabilization of the front and the call to judge those responsible for this conflict bear many similarities with past historical events. Although the Western media insist on a propagandistic rather than informative narrative, largely co-responsible for the continuation of this war, and continue to maintain the superiority of the Ukrainian forces and their forthcoming victory, the reality on the ground is different.

The recent visit of President Putin to the General Staff of the Russian Army where he was informed about the development of the military operations, and his visit to his Belarusian counterpart, Lukashenko, the visits of the Minister of Defense Shoigu and his second in command, General Gerasimov, suggest that in the coming days there will be some relevant event in the evolution of the conflict. According to the statements of the presidential office spokesman, Putin visited the front line in the Donbass. If he did so, something that remains to be confirmed, he did so in the manner that corresponds to his former role in the past, with total discretion. Nothing to do with Zelensky’s propagandistic visit that has been on the front page of all the media.

General winter has already made its appearance on the Ukrainian front. The cold is hardening the ground, which has been muddy up to now due to the numerous autumn rains, and the colder temperatures are beginning to take their toll on soldiers and equipment. However, despite this, the war continues its slow progress.

The Situation on the Fronts

A front line of more than 1,200 km, from Kharkov to Kherson, in which mainly two fronts stand out: Adviika in the region of Donetsk and Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), where the fiercest fighting is taking place between the Russian troops leading the offensive and the resistance and counter-offensive of a Ukrainian army in which more and more mercenaries from many countries are trying to make up for the casualties of Ukrainian soldiers. Although both Russians and Ukrainians are used to extreme climatic conditions, the foreign mercenaries fighting with the Ukrainians are not so accustomed, and in many cases lack the appropriate equipment to face such cold temperatures.

Since the arrival of General Surovikin, the Kherson front has been fortified, creating a defensive line in which there is a vast stretch of trenches and installations that make a landing and the access of armored vehicles impossible, maintaining a large artillery deployment. Up to four defensive lines have been established in that area, on the left bank of the Dnieper, which makes a Ukrainian offensive practically impossible. The Russians have limited themselves to continue shelling, from the other bank, a city deserted of its inhabitants, where the SBU is engaged in hunting down the so-called “collaborators” of the Russians previously denounced by their fellow citizens, some of whom have been killed with impunity—without being reported in the Western press.

In that part, the front has stabilized and is calm, and for now it is unlikely that the Russians are going to launch an offensive to regain the city; and it is more feasible that if they do, they will do so by coming down from the north on the right bank, once the issue of the Donbass front has been resolved. But one thing is clear, and that is that the Russians will not give up the Kherson Oblast and Zaparoje Oblast, which are already part of the territory of the Russian Federation, either because they recovered it by arms or by an agreement. Russia will never return to the borders prior to February 24, 2022.

On the Donbass fronts, where the progression on the part of the Russian Army is proceeding slowly, once the objectives are reached, a line of defense is quickly established, taking advantage of the strongholds won from the enemy. The similarity with the Verdun front in the First World War is remarkable. Trenches and fortifications on both sides, offensives and counter-offensives in small portions of terrain, deadly artillery duels and terrible environmental conditions. Tenacity, endurance and determination on each side, but above all the immolation of many Ukrainians just because it was decided to wage a war against Russia by proxy. Suffice it to recall the words of the infamous promoters of this war—”resist to the last Ukrainian!”

The Russians are maintaining the strategy implemented by the current Commander-in-Chief, Surovikin, and cede ground in exchange for preserving soldiers. The incorporation of a part of the mobilized Russian Army, already duly formed and trained, has complemented these trench positions, allowing the operational forces to continue their offensives. Of the 150,000 mobilized troops already sent to the fronts, 80,000 are integrated in the operational units, the rest in the close defense units. There are still another 150,000 mobilized troops who are continuing their education and training and who will probably be incorporated during this month, so that it would be possible to take advantage of this to launch a larger offensive.

As the Russian commanders maintain, the greater the training, the greater the chances of survival, an aspect neglected by the Ukrainians with their mobilized troops, which is causing a terrible increase in the number of deaths and wounded among their ranks. They hardly receive basic training when they are sent to the front. By the way, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Oleskiy Reznikov, has already announced a new wave of mobilization for early 2023 to cover the casualties, and to facilitate the rotation of the troops stationed at the front; although he does not stop hunting for citizens of military age to give them the call-up, even in the most remote corners of the cities. Nor is he considering possible the demobilization of those who have already been in arms after a year of service, although he estimates that there are about one million people in arms at the moment.

No Christmas Truce

According to the latest information, Russia is not going to facilitate a Christmas truce, as it could be used by the Ukrainian Army to reinforce its troops and reorganize itself. For the Russians, it is not necessary. As the Russian President himself has recognized, the war is going to drag on and therefore cannot be stopped at the moment. The current priority is the liberation of the territory of Donbass, an objective set by the President himself in order to avoid the suffering that the citizens of Donetsk are undergoing with the indiscriminate bombings that have caused the deaths of more than 80 civilians since the beginning of the month, and which shamefully are not mentioned by the Western media. Something that has been happening since 2014.

Weapons sent by NATO countries, specifically HIMARS, are being used to kill civilians, including children, because there are no military targets in the center of the city. Just a day ago a hospital was bombed, hitting the children’s and oncological parts, killing one person without anyone commenting on it. Up to 40 missiles in less than 10 minutes were fired into the city center, where there are no military installations since before the beginning of the conflict because they are all on the front lines.

For its part, the Ukrainian Army justifies the shelling of the city of Donetsk because it is occupied by Russian troops! Nobody is appalled by this. However, when the Russians shell a strategic center and there is a civilian casualty, the news in the Western media is front page and heads all the news programs. Any death on both sides is a tragedy; but a different media treatment in each case or its concealment is unacceptable. Cowardice prevails and serves the interests of some.

It is curious, if not indecent, the information on the Russian bombing of targets that constitute strategic targets to weaken the Ukrainian Army. Most of them are power plants or fuel depots, which have collateral effects on the functioning of certain civil infrastructures, such as the supply of light and water to the population, or the functioning of heating systems. Nobody remembers that the Ukrainian government cut off water and electricity for 8 years to the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, and to the Crimean Peninsula, since the latter declared its accession to the Russian Federation. Still the city of Donetsk suffers from water cuts and many parts of the city lack heating and nobody comments on it; and yet its citizens suffer from it daily. In this case, the Russian Army seeks to weaken the Ukrainian Army and the shelling of infrastructures is a primordial element to achieve its objective, as is the shelling of military installations and command posts or centers of production and repair of military equipment.

The then comedian, now president, mocked on TV the inhabitants of Crimea because they had no water, and they had been like that until Russia built salt water treatment plants and managed to reopen the Crimean canal sabotaged by the Ukrainians.

Nobody wants to remember the words of the then NATO spokesman Jamie Shea on May 25, 1999, justifying the bombing of the power plants, depriving more than 70% of the Serbian population of water and electricity, claiming that they were military targets because they supplied electricity to the control and command systems of the Serbian Army.

Verdun or the Alamo?

Once again the media omits to provide the enormity of the casualties that are occurring in the ranks of the Ukrainian Army—about 400 dead per day and between 2,000 and 3,000 wounded according to data provided by analysts and specialists, mostly Americans, something which confirms the statements made by General Mike Miller, Chief of Staff of the American Army, when he recently said that the Ukrainians had more than 100,000 dead since the beginning of the conflict, although later, in view of the enormity of the data and criticism, he wanted to rectify it and said that they were losses which would include dead and wounded. The President of the Commission herself, Ursula Van Der Layen, also acknowledged the same figure, although she quickly withdrew the comment from social media for the same reason.

The Ukrainian commanders abandon their dead on the battlefield, giving them up as missing, and it is the Russians who, prior to their identification, have to bury them in a Christian manner as happened in Izium in summer, even if they were later accused of genocide. In this way the relatives will never receive the corresponding compensations, as they are simply listed as missing. One more aspect of the corruption that prevails in the Ukrainian government. More than 35,000 military personnel are listed as missing in the files of the Ukrainian Army who are not considered as having fallen in combat, as it has recently come to light due to the hacking of these files.

The number of dead Ukrainian troops is really important. The number of wounded is also significant. Most of them are from artillery explosions and less from direct clashes. The hospitals near the front line are overcrowded and there is no more room for the wounded. Many combatants die on the front line because they cannot be transferred to the rear due to the incessant bombardment to which they are subjected, so that in many cases the tourniquets that are made to avoid hemorrhages become a lethal instrument or they bleed to death on the spot. In some units, up to 70% of their troops have been casualties and have not been withdrawn from the front, resisting the onslaught of the Russians. To get an idea, the NATO criterion by which a unit is considered to be replaced is 10% to a maximum of 15%.

The situation in Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) according to the Ukrainian commanders themselves is Dantesque, and the area is already known among the Russians as “the meat grinder” because of the number of casualties among the Ukrainian troops as a result of the shelling they are suffering from mortar and grenade fire on the front lines and artillery when they try to approach reinforcements. However, the Western media refer in the same way to the same area, because it is there that Russian troops are sent to dislodge the Ukrainians from their trenches without mentioning that there are far fewer casualties in the Russian ranks.

It must be taken into account that while the Ukrainian artillery supplied by NATO is more precision artillery and smaller in proportion, the Russian artillery is more abundant and is used more massively, covering more land, although it is insisted that the Russians have practically exhausted their stock of ammunition.

Despite being aware of the situation they are in, Ukrainian commanders advised by NATO officers continue to send reinforcements, preventing a withdrawal that would save lives. This situation is causing the morale of the Ukrainian troops to fade little by little—but it is also beginning to take its toll on the German and Polish mercenaries (more than 15,000 Germans belonging to a private company) who refuse to carry out offensives in view of the extreme risk to which they are being subjected. The last declarations of the Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, asked for the approval of a law which would toughen the punishment of deserters even to the maximum penalty, if they are on the front line.

Soldiers of Fortune

Both in Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) and in Avdiivka the weight of the offensives is carried by the troops of the Wagner private company and the Chechen special troops, supported by the militias (today already integrated in the Russian Army). They are faced by the Ukrainian troops mostly made up at this time by mercenaries from various countries, but mainly Poles, Anglo-Americans, some Spanish-Americans and Germans. The Russian forces testify to more and more corpses of black people when they take some stronghold, as well as to radio conversations in English, Polish or German.

According to testimonies of these foreign mercenaries, appearing in the Ukrainian social networks, there is a strong dissatisfaction about the conduct of operations and complaints about the lack of artillery and aviation support, with some even refusing to carry out the firefights planned by the high command because they consider that they are being sent to be butchered. The salaries of these mercenaries are very high, between $1,000 and $2,000 a day, which is attractive for many adventurers, although the type of war they have been confronted with in Ukrainian territory differs a lot from the operation theaters where they have been rendering their services until now. They face different scenarios and different adversaries.

On the Russian side are the men of the Wagner private group, whose number is unknown but could be in the region of 10,000 men. Former professional soldiers from the special units of the Russian Army, hired with salaries higher than those paid in the Army and with additional bonuses, they are perfectly equipped and have their own armored escort vehicles, mobile artillery, helicopters and even aviation, which allows them to maneuver autonomously, although in coordination with the Russian high command. This unit, formed mostly by Russian personnel, although the existence of an American unit commanded by a former general of the American Army has been mentioned, has a strong patriotic sentiment which makes them even more combative.

Lately, about one or two hundred prisoners with sentences of more than 15 years, with the consent of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office, have also joined it, and they were offered the possibility of redeeming their sentences by obtaining their freedom at the end of the conflict if they enlisted. After intensive and hard military training, to which all members of the unit, regardless of their origin, are obliged to undergo, they were sent to the front. Some of them have already paid the price of blood and others have been distinguished for their heroic deeds.

At present the Wagnerians, as they are called, bear the burden of the conquest of the city of Bakhmut, an objective that was assigned to them at the time and which they did not manage to seize, although now it seems they are achieving it.

Artyomovsk or Bakhmut as we want to call it, is at the moment the new Mariupol. The fiercest fighting is taking place there, with the Ukrainians resisting with particular courage. The capture of the city could mean a radical change in the course of the war. Although from the Ukrainian and NATO side they will try to minimize the effects that its loss can suppose, from the Russian side it is understood that its conquest will be the key for a significant advance, taking into account that subsequent Ukrainian defense lines are at a considerable distance, and that it would allow the encirclement of a large part of the Ukrainian forces present in the area.

The Arms Market

While on the Russian side the logistical supply is assured, on the Ukrainian side it is becoming scarce due to the difficulty of getting it to the front, and to the fact that the supplying countries are already running out of stocks and are putting their own defense at risk. Regarding the latter, NATO is reactivating old Soviet-era ammunition and armament manufacturing factories in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. While the Ukrainians fire between 2,000 and 3,000 shells a day the Russians fire between 30,000 and 40,000 shells a day on all fronts. It should be remembered that the famous American M777s have a NATO standard use of 400 shells per day, so that about 30% of these pieces are damaged by the intensive use to which they are subjected, with the problems involved in their repair outside Ukrainian territory, mainly in Poland, the Baltic States or the Czech Republic.

Even in this situation in which its army finds itself, the Ukrainian Government sells weapons to African countries (there is a catalog with more than 970 pages circulating on the dark net) among them some coming from US shipments, maintaining its position in the arms trafficking market initiated at the time of its independence from the USSR in 1991. For their part, the Anglo-Americans periodically remind the Ukrainians that the arms shipments they send them come at a price and that they will have to pay back these loans: Business is business! The price to pay is very high now and in the future.

Until now HIMARS were a difficulty for the Russian defenses; but as a result of the seizure of this material during the fighting or by the sale of it by the corrupt Ukrainian military, Russian technicians have been able to examine the functioning of the system (GPS) and consequently have developed a whole series of countermeasures that have considerably diminished its effectiveness and the result of this is being seen on the battlefield.

The Art of War

The war that is developing in Ukraine, is a war of high intensity in which infantry, armored, artillery and aviation intervene jointly in great proportion, over a great extent of territory. Something that in the West had been set aside in the configuration of their armies, so they bet more on a reduced army with smaller but lighter units.

The Ukrainian army, mainly instructed by Americans, British and Canadians, has adopted in its offensives on the ground the so-called COIN (Counter Insurgency Operations) tactic, which consists of reduced units moving in light vehicles, mostly pickups, on which mortars are adapted, and which penetrate at high speed into the Russian lines, without previous artillery preparation to favor the surprise factor and neither with the support of armored vehicles initially. While the terrain has allowed this, this tactic has had a good result. When the weather conditions have changed, it has been a different story.

This tactic employed in the middle and end of the summer initially surprised the Russian forces, and which favored the Ukrainian offensives that recaptured large stretches of land, entering deep into the zone controlled by the Russians who were retreating so as not to be surrounded. This maneuver, however, left the Ukrainian forces uncovered as they were not followed by armor and artillery, and the Russians took advantage of this to reduce them with intense artillery fire, causing a considerable number of casualties. The surprise factor has disappeared and the Russians now know how to proceed when they encounter this type of operation. The Ukrainian forces trained in NATO countries, for their part, complain about the level of instruction of the foreign trainers whom in many cases they surpass in terms of combat experience, especially in urban areas.

For its part, the Russian army continues to maneuver conservatively: Artillery and air preparation in advance, assault with armored vehicles with 30mm guns and heavy armored vehicles, and an infantry that makes use of anti-tank weapons to dislodge the enemy in urban areas.

The use of observation drones is playing a fundamental role in the evolution of this war. If at the beginning of the conflict, the Ukrainians had clearly superior numbers to the Russians, the situation is now reversed. The Russian troops have a considerable number of these drones, and they use them to locate the concentration of enemy troops, to examine their defense lines, to fix their positions or the location of their artillery and consequently to beat their positions with artillery before making the assault.

On the other hand, at a time when artillery is characterized by its mobility on the ground to avoid detection, it is essential to have it located in the shortest possible time to destroy it, and that job is done by observation drones. Until now, this work was mainly carried out by aviation or infantry vanguard units with the risk that this entailed.

Similarly, the Russian army is incorporating electronic warfare equipment to neutralize Ukrainian drones with good results, although the militias still do not have them in their ranks.

The Second Stage

Russian forces have begun a second stage in their bombardment to demilitarize Ukraine. Tactical missile bombardment of power plants, fuel depots, factories and ammunition depots is being carried out quite effectively. To this end, the Russians launch low-cost [alleged] Iranian-made drones in swarms beforehand, which causes Ukrainian air defense radars to light up and they are then detected by Russian systems and immediately destroyed by tactical missiles. Once the air defense in the area has been suppressed, the latest generation strategic tactical missiles are launched.

Logistics

As for the logistical aspect, major changes have taken place. In the Russian army, the deficiencies in the supply of ammunition and materiel have been corrected, which favors the supply to the front lines in a smooth and permanent way. The same is not true on the Ukrainian side. The shelling of electric power infrastructures greatly hinders transportation from the border areas, while the destruction of factories for the production or repair of materiel prevents a rapid replenishment of the front line.

In addition to all this, the delivery by NATO allies of materiel is increasingly diminishing, both because of the depletion of their stocks inherited from the Soviet era and because of the need to maintain their own strategic reserves. The NATO allies are also unwilling to transfer state-of-the-art weapons because of the distrust that they could be sold to the Russians, given the high level of corruption in the Ukrainian armed forces, and consequently their secrets could be revealed.

Although many countries are benefiting from this situation, the main beneficiary is the American arms industry, although, curiously, South Korea is positioning itself quite well also in this.

As for the operation and use of the equipment on both sides, things are also different. Russian equipment, although less technologically advanced, is characterized by its robustness, easy maintenance and repeated use; but above all by its proven resistance to extremely cold temperatures. On the other hand, the NATO materiel suffers from the cold; its fluids clog badly and seize the mechanisms of vehicles and artillery pieces; this materiel is not ready for the intensity of use to which the Ukrainians subject it, and it often requires a very specialized handling that is difficult to master in a month of training. The stinger or javelin batteries discharge rapidly in cold temperatures, making them unusable in the winter period. Ultimately, the old RPG is more effective on the battlefield.

A Long-Term War

Whether there will be a winter offensive or several separate offensives, where and in what proportion we will probably see soon. It is significant that Putin has postponed his annual speech to the Assembly until after the New Year and has visited his General Staff and his Belarusian neighbor. Perhaps he wants to announce the purpose of the expected offensive, the start of negotiations, or simply to confirm the prolongation of the conflict with its social and economic consequences. In any case, there is little chance of a truce during these winter months.

A New Nuremberg Trial? Who Should Sit in the Dock?

A few days ago, the President of Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky, again in the media campaign after having obtained 1 billion euros from the French President Macron, asked the various Western leaders to envisage the setting up of a special international criminal court to try Russian political and military leaders for war crimes. Previously, the French President had already stated what he defined as genocide, namely the Russian bombardment of energy infrastructures, resulting in power cuts for civilians. This is nothing new, since the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) had already called for the establishment of such a court this spring. The chorus of Western politicians and institutions calling for the establishment of such a court is already more like a choir. Biden himself had already opened the floodgates right at the beginning of the conflict by saying that Putin was a murderer and that he would pay the price for it.

The level of cynicism of the leaders of NATO countries calling for this tribunal is unprecedented and astounding. Not only because of the track record of many of them for their interventions without any kind of legitimacy, but also because of the terrible consequences they have brought about, destabilizing vast areas in different continents, ruining entire economies, provoking ethnic and religious conflicts, persecutions and genocides. That they are the ones who are now demanding these tribunals is repulsive. They have lost all decency and lack morals.

The shamelessness with which Merkel admitted that there was no intention to negotiate anything but only to gain time for Ukraine to join NATO makes her an accomplice in the provocation of the conflict. Porochenko denying from the first day after the signing of the Minsk agreements and encouraging the shelling of civilians in the Donbass republics, Macron urging the cessation of hostilities without having previously read the agreements in which France was the guarantor of their fulfillment, Holande failing to keep his word to enforce the agreements signed in Minsk—all of them are responsible for this war as perpetrators or accomplices—agreements that by their non-compliance generated more than 14,000 dead, including 110 children and 80,000 wounded since 2014.

The only intention, now confessed without any remorse, was to gain time to arm the Ukrainian army, to integrate Ukraine into NATO, and thus impose its conditions on an isolated and socially and economically weakened Russia as a result of the imposition of sanctions each time more and more senseless and incoherent as we observe as time goes by.

The culprits are Zelensky himself elected because he committed himself to negotiate with the secessionist republics; Boris Jonhson for preventing the holding of peace negotiations when the war could still have been stopped; Mrs. Ursula Van del Layen totally corrupt for censoring media and using her European “credit card” to deliver millions to buy weapons that end up in mafia circles; Borrel promoting and applying sanctions to the Russian economy that we will all end up paying for. All of them are directly responsible for this war.

Not to mention the leaders of the Baltic States and Poland, whose visceral Russophobia they take advantage of to discriminate against the population of Russian origin by depriving them of all their rights and censoring their media, without questioning in any way the right to freedom of expression, or the violation of human rights when citizens of Russian origin are deprived of the most elementary rights of access to public services. Incidentally, there is no mention about this in the Western media—and Europe is supposed to be the guarantor of human rights into which they are all integrated.

The Obama, Clinton, Biden clan, promoters of orange revolutions and of the Maidan events, installing corrupt governments and promoting xenophobic groups with explicitly Nazi ideology who brought torture and genocide for the population of Eastern Ukraine and imposed a culture of hatred not only towards the Russian people but even towards other ethnic minorities, Hungarians or Romanians, deserve a special mention. Installing research laboratories for bacteriological warfare in a clandestine manner in the style of the Nazi medical murderers in the concentration camps, although later acknowledging their existence shamelessly, but without saying what kind of experiment they were engaged in. Namely, whether or not lethal experiments were carried out among the population to test their efficacy.

Others, however, have adopted a low profile; keeping silent, they have cowardly accepted and endorsed all these developments. They have not raised their voices to stop and denounce a course that has led us to the events we are witnessing, lest they lose their perks.

None of them have prevented this conflict; in the same way that none has spoken out for both parties to sit down at a negotiating table. On the contrary, they have only been heard giving ultimatums and threats of sanctions, while promoting the sending of weapons and money for their purchase in exorbitant amounts. With their position, the only thing they are causing is a prolongation of a war that is bleeding a country, causing the extermination of several generations and an economic ruin from which Ukraine will hardly ever recover, if its neighbors, today complacent allies, have not each appropriated their share.

All of them are the real culprits of this war—and they are the ones who should be put on trial for war crimes and for the deaths that are taking place. If our western societies had enough information, without censorship, and were not misinformed by the continuous media propaganda promoted by incompetent leaders, and knew what is really happening to the Ukrainian people, they would take to the streets to stop this bloodletting. So many deaths are unacceptable, so much suffering for the population is unbearable, although, of course, they are not ours. The belligerent posture in which all the progressive forces have positioned themselves is striking, who in other times demonstrated for a “No” to war.

Broken Ties

When this war will end, we don’t know. We should be aware that the Russians are not going to negotiate; they are going to impose their conditions; and the longer this conflict lasts, the harsher those conditions will be. They will not give up the territories recently annexed to the Russian Federation, and who knows if they will not give up the territories they may conquer. In any case, we will not see again the Ukraine with the borders of 1991.

A fact that has gone totally unnoticed in the Western media has been the term in which recently President Putin in his speech justifying the attacks on energy infrastructures has referred to Ukraine; he named it as “the neighboring country.” He did not say “close” or “fraternal” as up to now. It was a radical change of attitude, perhaps as a result of his weariness with the insistence of Zelensky and his NATO allies to continue a war that they will not win. However, he has returned to the terms of fraternal ties in a recent speech when referring to the ties that unite Russians and Ukrainians, blaming the West for their deterioration, resisting that centuries of common history, culture and religion be forgotten.

But despite the historical existence of these fraternal, cultural and religious ties, the reality that the Russians are discovering is that these ties are no longer so clear, and that a part of the Ukrainian population during this last decade has succumbed to the cultural and ideological indoctrination promoted by successive governments and their henchmen, the paramilitary groups of Nazi ideology; and that hatred towards Russia and the Russians has settled inside them. One more example of this persecution of everything Russian is the banning of the Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate. Monasteries and churches are being raided and their clergymen arrested for collaboration; and the situation is very reminiscent of the time of the Nazi occupation when Bandera’s followers inflicted terror on the rest of the population. It is enough to reread history to see that we are in the same situation. Nothing is said about this, either.

Although the Russians do not have the same feeling of hatred towards the Ukrainians, they no longer consider the fraternity they used to have towards the Ukrainian people. The estrangement is becoming more and more visible, and it is not at all clear whether it can ever be reversed, either by one or the other. In all likelihood, this rift will never be healed.

The Russian intelligence services made a serious mistake believing that in the Ukrainian army they would find former colleagues from the Soviet era and that they would understand each other in order to reach a quick agreement. The reality has been totally different since 2014 — it is an entirely NATO-ized army, in which there has been a symbiosis between elements of paramilitary forces of openly declared Nazi groups and the rest of the Army. Their behavior in the areas they have accessed is that of a foreign army of occupation, using the civilian population as hostages to defend their positions, by preventing their evacuation. As happened in Mariupol.

There Will be No Concessions

Perhaps, the Americans are already thinking that they have achieved their goals, to restrain Europe and maintain their economic stranglehold, although they have not defeated Russia economically, and they are thinking of sitting Zelensky at a negotiating table, although he is resisting for the time being.

If not, what are the recent trips of Mrs. Nuland to Kiev, or the insistence of Macron to talk to Putin, who by the way does not pick up his phone, or the recommendation of Xi Jinping that there should be a negotiating table. The Russians have already said that they are ready to negotiate, but indeed under the current conditions; which means that the incorporation of the territories that voted their annexation to the Russian Federation must be recognized as a premise. The conditions will be imposed by the Russians, because they no longer trust liars and thieves; nor will the Asians, Africans, South Americans or Middle Easterners who have seen how the West does not keep its word and shamelessly appropriates other people’s property. No one will want to be the next victim.

An armistice could be what is signed, although unlike the Peace of Panmunjom between the two Koreas. In this case, there will be the new borders, with the territories annexed to the Russian Federation, and the creation of a demilitarized zone of a hundred kilometers—which will have to be recognized. And of course a commitment to neutrality, without the possibility of joining supranational organizations, such as NATO or the European Union.

If a negotiation is imposed, it will be tough for Zelensky, because his Nazi cubs have promised him a bullet in the head if he gave in to negotiations as happened to the first negotiators at the beginning of the conflict—and his American mentors are not known for their unswerving loyalty. In the end, perhaps the Russians might be the only ones who could save his life, albeit probably in a penal colony in faraway Siberia.

In conclusion, who should be tried and convicted?

January 1, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

US study reveals economic cost of Covid-era school closures

RT | December 29, 2022

Covid-related school closures caused a drastic drop in test scores, and students affected could see their lifetime income prospects drop by nearly 10%, a recent Stanford University study claimed. According to the research, the shutdowns stand to cost the US $28 trillion over this century.

The study linked declining eighth-grade math and reading scores between 2019 and 2022 with students’ lifetime earning potential, concluding that these scores – which dropped in every single US state since the pandemic hit – will reduce students’ projected income by between 2% and 9% depending on their home state.

This shortfall will cost the states themselves between 0.6% and 2.9% of their gross domestic product (GDP) every year for the rest of this century, the paper continued. Oklahoma (2.9%), Delaware (2.85%), and West Virginia (2.75%) will see the greatest percentage drop in GDP, it claimed, with California suffering the greatest overall loss at $1.3 trillion.

“The pandemic has had devastating effects in many areas, but none are as potentially severe as those on education,” author Eric Hanushek wrote in the study’s conclusion. “There is overwhelming evidence that students in school during the closure period and during the subsequent adjustments to the pandemic are achieving at significantly lower levels than would have been expected without the pandemic.”

US schools from kindergarten to 12th grade closed for in-person learning in March 2020, with individual states or school boards then deciding when to reopen. Republican-run Florida ordered all school boards to open again that August, for example, while Montana schools only shut their doors for a month. In the Democratic stronghold of California, only around half of all schools had returned to in-person learning by the end of the following school year.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten supported school closures, urging teachers to strike if forced to do their jobs in person in the fall of 2020.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress found in October that students’ math and English scores nationwide suffered the greatest year-on-year decline in history in 2022, erasing steady gains since 2000.

December 29, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

Hamas criticises ‘biased’, ‘contradictory’ EU resolution on two-state solution

MEMO | December 29, 2022

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas issued a statement yesterday criticising the EU over Resolution no. 2949/2022 (RSP), on the prospects for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

In a political memorandum, Hamas said the resolution “contained several inaccuracies and contradictions about the Palestinian issue”, noting that it “is heavily biased against the Palestinians’ inherent and legitimate rights to freedom, return and self-determination.”

Among the issues raised with the resolution, the movement said it has sided with the Israeli occupation’s narrative, while ignoring the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to resistance and self-defence.

“Voting against this right is considered a great sin that Europeans have committed, once again. This vote also reflects the double standards with which the European Union deals with issues of peoples and freedoms around the world.”

“In recent months, we have seen the European position on the crisis in Ukraine, and how the Ukrainian resistance was considered legitimate and supported with money and weapons,” the statement said. The resolution, Hamas insists, has disregarded terrorism practised by the Israeli occupation on a daily basis.

The EU resolution was called out over its double standards in regards to its advocating “customised” democracy for the Palestinians and the issue of the participation of resistance factions in free and fair elections, “despite the fact that most of the candidates for the Israeli Knesset have criminal records and terrorist practices and are labeled on terrorist lists in many countries, including Israel itself.”

Hamas acknowledged the resolution’s demand to end the Israeli blockade, imposed on the people of Gaza since 2006 but concluded that the resolution is further proof of “the European bias towards the Israeli occupation and its racist policies” and the EU’s lack of seriousness in pursuing a just and fair solution to the Palestinian cause.

The movement urged the European Parliament to reconsider Resolution 2949 and to correct its position in order to achieve a just solution for the Palestinian people.

Earlier this month, a senior member of Hamas denounced the EU over its silence concerning the complicity of over 700 European financial institutions in supporting illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands.

December 29, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden pledged to end the war in Yemen, but is doing the opposite

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | December 27, 2022

Two weeks into his term, US President Joe Biden claimed that he would seek a negotiated peace in Yemen, thus shunning Saudi Arabia. Now he is performing a 180-degree pivot. With such arbitrary foreign policy positions the US is causing instability and weakening its own hand.

On December 13, US Senator Bernie Sanders decided to withdraw a War Powers Resolution on ending US support for Saudi offensive efforts in the war in Yemen. Sanders was supposed to put the resolution to a vote, believing it would have passed. However, owing to pressure mounted against him from the White House, he decided to retreat. Instead, the progressive American senator claimed that he was informed that the Biden administration would “continue working” with his office on ending the conflict.

As revealed by The Intercept, which obtained the key talking points distributed by the White House against the resolution, the Biden administration communicated its position that such a resolution would be counterproductive and further exacerbate the crisis in Yemen. However, the ‘Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’ says that Sanders’ decision to withdraw the resolution “may embolden the many members of Washington’s foreign policy elite who would like to ensure that the president’s capability to unilaterally wage war remains unchallenged by Congress’s constitutional prerogative over matters of war and peace.”

The biggest problem here for the US government is that the War Powers Resolution essentially aims to force Biden to implement most of the policies that he himself outlined in February of 2021. Despite Biden having announced that the US was halting all “relevant arms sales” to the Saudi-led coalition – which has been at war with Yemen’s Ansarallah, known commonly as the Houthis, since 2015 – this policy position has never been put into practice.

During his 2020 campaign, Biden claimed that he would make longtime American ally Saudi Arabia a global “pariah.” Yet, when it began to sink in that the powerful oil-producing state was a necessary partner in the Middle East, a realization that came months into the West’s sanctions campaign aimed at Russia, the Biden administration quickly decided to change its stance. In July, the president decided to go on a foreign visit to Saudi Arabia, while in the days prior he entered into discussions about beginning to supply the Saudis with offensive weapons again; the framing of this was a little disingenuous because the weapons sales freeze of February 2021 had effectively been ended by April of the same year anyway. Both of these moves came as a clear attempt to get Saudi Arabia to raise oil-production levels, a goal that failed as the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, refused to pander to the US president.

Since then, the US government approved a potential multibillion-dollar deal with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and in August the Biden administration granted the Saudi Crown Prince immunity from a civil lawsuit over his role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden was reportedly humiliated earlier this year after allegedly bringing up the Khashoggi killing to the Crown Prince, who fired back by citing the Israeli killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, asking why Jamal Khashoggi mattered more. Notably, the US head of state failed a number of times to even pronounce Shireen Abu Akleh’s name correctly when delivering a speech beside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas just days earlier and did not bring the killing up to Israeli representatives.

The White House insinuated, in its opposition to Senator Bernie Sanders’ resolution on Yemen, that it had a hand in the six-month long ceasefire between the two primary opposing sides in the war. The reality was that it was the United Nations that brokered the ceasefire, which ended on October 2. In the eyes of Ansarallah, the US government is the primary obstacle to peace in Yemen; Abd al-Wahhab al-Mahbashi, a senior member of Ansarallah, recently warned that “the presence of US troops in the Bab al-Mandab and off the coast of Yemen poses a serious threat to maritime navigation.” In fact, Ansarallah views the conflict as a war on behalf of the US, with Saudi Arabia acting as its proxy, a view held by millions in the region.

The day following Sanders’ withdrawal of his War Powers Resolution, two fuel shipments, carrying tons of diesel, were seized by the Saudi-led coalition and prevented from reaching Yemen. The blockade of Yemen is one of the major factors contributing to the resurgence of tensions – Ansarallah accuses Riyadh and Abu Dhabi of stealing the nation’s oil resources and depriving native Yemenis. In addition to this, when the US is clearly attempting to cozy up to Saudi Arabia, this signals to the leadership of Ansarallah that the Biden administration is favoring Riyadh in the conflict.

The Biden administration has so far proven ineffective at bringing the Saudis under its wing in the way it had hoped, indicating that its foreign policy tactics have proven ineffective at best. The reason for this failure likely comes down to the way the current government has dealt not only with Saudi Arabia, but with all the states of the Arabian Peninsula in addition to Iran. The US has shown that it cannot be trusted to keep its word, as was proven by its Iran nuclear deal blunder. More importantly, Saudi Arabia understands that, when it comes to security, Washington is not the most important player anymore. Instead of following the Biden administration into a dangerous anti-Iran coalition, the Saudis would be a lot smarter to engage diplomatically with Tehran, a step that would be especially helpful when it comes to regional security.

For Washington, meanwhile, an escalation in Yemen at this point would prove advantageous, for it could end up pushing Saudi Arabia closer to it, as the latter needs US help to maintain its war effort, although there is a chance that large-scale ballistic and cruise missile strikes against Saudi Arabia’s vital infrastructure could cause the Kingdom to go straight to the negotiating table. Regardless of how things go, it is clear that US influence in the Arabian Peninsula is rapidly declining and part of its legacy will be this brutal war that has cost upwards of 400,000 lives and that the Biden administration has refused to end.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | 4 Comments

German FM Baerbock calls Nigeria a colony of Germany

Free West Media | December 23, 2022

The fact that history and geography are not necessarily among the strengths of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) has been known at least since her last reports about tank battles in the 19th century or countries that are “hundreds of thousands of kilometers” away. The circumference of the Earth is just over 40,000km, so such countries remain an enigma.

Now Baerbock has added to fresh suspicions about her educational background in a new statement via Twitter. “Today we are taking a step that was long overdue: we are bringing twenty Benin bronzes back to their native Nigeria. That will not heal all wounds of the past. But we are showing that we are serious about coming to terms with our dark colonial history,” wrote the Foreign Minister. The problem: Nigeria was not colonized by Germany, but by Great Britain.

The Benin Bronzes are a group of several thousand metal plaques and sculptures that have adorned the Royal Palace of the Kingdom of Benin since the 16th century. In the era of the colonization of Africa, they were sold as looted art by the United Kingdom in 1897 – to Germany, among others.

Very little is known about Baerbock. The name is a very unusual one in Germany, and there are no other families with this name. Her “biography” and “family” appear to have been fabricated. In his book that has just been published, bestselling author Gerhard Wisnewski has revealed the gaps in the Foreign Minister’s story.

Baerbock herself dismissed her suspicious CV in an “interview” with a kindergarten child, calling herself a little “forgetful”.

The German Foreign Minister might have no clue what she is talking about most of the time, but she is determined to create “good optics” nonetheless. Baerbock employs a personal stylist who receives a monthly flat rate of 7,500 euros. This was first reported by the Bild newspaper. Accordingly, the make-up artist Claude Frommen has been working for the politician for four years.

“Ms. Frommen takes care of Foreign Minister Baerbock’s make-up and hairstyling for picture and television appointments,” confirmed a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. The stylist also accompanies her on her trips abroad. “I let you shine” is her professional motto.

Frommen is a renowned make-up artist from Berlin whose clients include executives from politics, the media and business. On her website, Frommen lists film productions and photo studios as well as the Green Party among her clients. “Years of traveling all over the world have shaped my thoughts and feelings.”

Previously, Baerbock’s cabinet colleague and party colleague Robert Habeck also drew attention to himself with his tax-financed vanities. The Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology employs a personal photographer for almost 100,000 euros a year.

December 23, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Olaf Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto in ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine

By Gilbert Doctorow | December 21, 2022

When I first read through Olaf Scholz’s comprehensive foreign policy essay “The Global Zeitenwende” recently published in Foreign Affairs magazine, it brought to mind another sensational manifesto from an international leader in the news published by this very same authoritative journal. That was an essay ‘written’ by then Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko for the late spring 2007 issue.

There are several things these two essays have in common aside from centrality of Ukraine and of Russian malevolence in their thinking about the world. Publication of the Tymoshenko article gave rise to accusations of plagiarism against her for lifting some well known phrases from the writings of Henry Kissinger without attribution. In the case of Scholz, there is a more subtle kind of ‘plagiarism,’ in that he, like Tymoshenko, is clearly not the sole author of the text published over his name. I will go into these matters in some detail below.

Another common feature is the extraordinary way in which these essays were crafted so as to slot into the susceptibilities and preferences of the American foreign policy establishment. The authors seem to have checked every possible box whether or not it was directly relevant to their overriding argument or to the nations they represent.

A third commonality is apt timing of the publication.  In the case of Tymoshenko, her fierce denunciation of Russia in which she deployed every calumny invented by the American Neo-Conservatives came just a few months after Vladimir Putin delivered his now famous speech on Russian claims against the US-led West at the Munich Security Conference. The sheer temerity of the Russian leader whose speech was witnessed by Senator John McCain and other American political worthies seated in the front rows left the U.S. Administration of George W. Bush infuriated and confounded over how to respond. As soon as they found their footing and their voice, they initiated what has ever since been a vast Information War directed against Russia.

Tymoshenko’s article in Foreign Affairs was the first cannon shot in this war of words. The publishers were most obliging, because such service to the State Department in disseminating a document they had to know was fake was the price they willingly paid to receive privileged access to high government officials on a regular basis and thereby provide value to their subscriber base at home and abroad numbering in the hundreds of thousands that makes FA the most widely read journal of its kind.

By giving pride of place to Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto today, when the will and strength of European solidarity with the USA over the war in Ukraine is top of mind and is being questioned by some in the mainstream media, FA continues this line of service to the powers that be.

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I dealt with the peculiarities of the Tymoshenko manifesto in an essay dated 10 November 2009 that I published on my blog and then republished as a chapter (29) in my 2010 book Stepping Out of Line. In that piece, I used close textual analysis to show that many turns of speech and lines of thinking were utterly inconsistent with supposed authorship by a native Ukrainian of her generation while they were second nature to American political commentators.

In this same essay, I emphasized that the kind of misrepresentation practiced in the publication of Tymoshenko’s text by FA was not a one-off development in America’s war of words on Russia. I pointed to an Open Letter to the Administration of President Barack Obama published in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on 16 July 2009 that was signed by Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other well known thinkers and former statesmen who were behind the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination in the late 1980s. This appeal to the American President to ensure greater U.S. attention be given to the security of their region had a number of explicitly Russophobe points, including the insistence that Russia’s policy towards their countries was revisionist and threatening. Russia was said to be using overt and covert economic warfare in pursuit of its aims.

The context for the Open Letter was Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow a couple of weeks earlier to pursue the ‘reset’ of relations and achieve a rapprochement on several issues of strategic importance to the United States. Mainstream media, including The New York Times, carried the Open Letter.

The American public took it to be a cri de coeur of freedom fighters. In reality it was concocted by a team of ghost writers under the supervision of the German Marshal Fund and its boss Ron Asmus. This later came out in an expose written by Jacob Heilbrunn for the journal The National Interest.

For all of the above reasons, my first thoughts about possible American authorship of the Scholz manifesto had to be tested. However, the verdict of two German-speaking experts who examined the texts at my request was that German, not English was the source language and that the points made here were in line with what Scholz has said in speeches he has delivered around Germany in the past few weeks. And yet, I insist, that in its particulars the manifesto was made to appeal to the American readership of FA.

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Olaf Scholz is notable for his cunning. In short order, as the days of the Merkel chancellorship faded, he leveraged his prominence as a regional politician (mayor of Hamburg) into national standing. And when the Social Democrats emerged from the last elections as the leading party, though one still without a majority in the Bundestag, he succeeded in putting together a governing coalition relying on The Greens. This fox of a man surely recognized The Greens as politically primitive and so, malleable to his purposes, whereas forging yet another Grand Coalition with the CDU/CSU, who would be peers in terms of experience in federal cabinets, would have limited his power. Indeed, the outcome has been a federal government in which the highly visible posts of Economic Affairs (Robert Habeck) and Foreign Affairs (Annalena Baerbock) were filled with utterly inexperienced and incompetent high-ranking Greens politicians whose missteps and foolish statements in public space have diminished the Greens’ weight in a government that the Chancellor dominates.

However, cunning is not the same thing as intellectuality. The author(s) of the manifesto published in Foreign Affairs magazine show a mastery of the skills required to write effective propaganda that you acquire in a political science milieu not in an administration responsible for governing one city on a day to day basis, as was the milieu of Herr Scholz for decades before he rose to the chancellorship.

Am I being unfair or pedantic in calling Scholz a plagiarist when he put his name to a paper written by a team under his direction possibly with inputs from overseas friends in the USA? Isn’t that what political leaders do regularly when they stand on the dais and read speeches that were written by their professional speech writers?

Yes, but speeches are not the same thing as contributions to a journal that is published by political scientists with academic credentials for political scientists with academic credentials.

This is plagiarism in a form that is all too widespread in German political culture. Over the past couple of decades there were a number of scandals involving high politicians there whose doctoral theses were exposed as ghost written or plagiarized in the formal sense of the word. This directly results from the high respect that Germans as a society give to the Herr Doktor moniker. Political aspirants with burning ambition are all too tempted to go for broke.

Had he wished to be more honest with his own people and with the world, Scholz could have said his manifesto was co-authored with one or more experts so that everyone could better judge where this thinking was coming from and challenges to the thinking would be less politicized. Joe Biden did as much when he published his own manifesto in 2017-2018 on “standing up to the Russians” in FA with Michael Carpenter presented as co-author.

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Now let us look at the content of the manifesto which is firstly a very carefully trimmed narrative of what over the past thirty years has brought us to the present turning point in the road, or “Global Zeitenwende,” and secondly, a road map to the future, which the author(s) say, in the subtitle to the manifesto, will enable us “to avoid a New Cold War.”

In their hands, the narrative of European and world history over the past thirty years is the story of Russian revanchism that exists in a vacuum, without context of provocations and escalations from the USA, the EU and other actors, and propelled by the animus of one man, Vladimir Putin.

The key message about Russian culpability for everything comes in a couple of paragraphs. The original sin was Putin’s evaluation of the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” From that the authors fast forward to Putin’s “aggressive speech” at the February 2007 Munich Security Conference, “deriding the rules-based international order as a mere tool of American dominance.” This was followed in short order by the war Russia launched against Georgia in 2008. And from there we are off to the races:

In 2014, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and sent its forces into parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in direct violation of international law and Moscow’s own treaty commitments. The years that followed saw the Kremlin undercut arms control treaties and expand its military capabilities, poison and murder Russian dissidents, crack down on civil society, and carry out a brutal military intervention in support of the Assad regime in Syria. Step by step, Putin’s Russia chose a path that took it further from Europe and further from a cooperative, peaceful order.

This imperial ambition imputed to the Russians culminated in the unprovoked and utterly illegal invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 to which Europe, and in particular Germany must respond by breaking entirely with past efforts at accommodation with Russia. Instead Germany must rearm and become the leading defender of Europe.

The authors walk a thin line between claiming European leadership for Germany and lauding the Americans for saving Europe presently from the Russian assault. They are giving the Americans exactly what Washington has been demanding for more than a decade: the commitment to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP.  The text even finds space to go into specific procurement items coming up, such as the “dual purpose” (meaning nuclear enabled) American F-35 warplane. Such details obviously are calculated to bring holiday cheer to the Washington establishment.

It is interesting that the manifesto speaks about avoiding a New Cold War when it is patently obvious that we are in the midst of exactly that and should count ourselves lucky that it has not yet escalated to a hot war that quickly becomes nuclear war. We may assume from the text that Scholz is holding out division into hostile blocs as the defining moment for a Cold War. And while formal declaration of anti-NATO alliances has not and may never emerge, the present reality is precisely the formation before our eyes of the Global South in confrontation with the Collective West. The Russia-Iran-China axis is there for all to see even if it is not a formally constituted military bloc. Moreover, a key constituent element of the Cold War, namely an ideological dimension, has in the past several years taken definitive shape in the notion of free democratic nations versus authoritarian nations. As for declaring a Cold War, what is there more to wait for?

Scholz’s manifesto completely distorts history to the point where it even overlooks the finding by the EU, following an investigation by then French President Sarkozy, that the Georgian War was caused by the military assault by Tbilisi on Ossetia, not by some unprovoked Russian attack on the Georgians. More importantly, it is totally blind to where his thinking would and may yet lead Germany and the world.

First, within Europe, his claim that Germany will be the leader of European defense and have the strongest military on the Continent goes directly in the face of a similar ambition of the Poles, the front-line state in the confrontation with Russia that will be receiving the greatest assistance of Washington, because the Poles, unlike the Germans, are putting their bodies on the line in the fight with the Russians over Ukraine.

The German leader’s hopes to become Washington’s closest ally by unquestioningly signing on to the American propaganda line also runs up against the ambitions of the French. It is no accident that the manifesto was issued so as to compete for attention with the visit of Emanuel Macron to Washington, in the knowledge that Macron was bringing to the overlords Europe’s complaints over unfair trading practices embedded in the latest Congressional legislation.

The biggest problem with Scholz’s road map at this Zeitenwende is that it is blind, as is Washington, to where the armed conflict on Ukrainian territory is taking us all. Ukrainian military victory is simply unattainable and sooner or later Kiev will fold. Scholz’s manifesto makes it plain that what lies ahead is what all sides are now calling a ‘long war.’

Yes, Germany will greatly expand its military spending and make amends for the pitiful forces of the present day Bundeswehr. However, the Russians will not go back to their bear caves and hibernate when the fighting stops in Ukraine. Indeed, what I now see is that progressively, over the past 300 days of warfare, Russian society has moved from consumerism and consolidated around patriotism. The ‘fifth column’ Liberals have now mostly left the country and moved to where their assets have long been kept in the West. Russian industry, under state direction, has risen to the challenge of supplying the army with equipment and munitions that are being expended at the highest daily rate since WWII. This trend will only accelerate going forward, as the Russian economy reorganizes on a war footing. Moreover, and most importantly, the small professional army that Russia built up from the start of Putin’s tenure in the presidency has been replaced conceptually by plans to develop an army scaled to offset the whole of European conventional forces. This means, as we have heard repeatedly from the host of the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show, a standing army of three million men and women. And, against that coming force, Mr. Scholz’s Bundeswehr will be as pitiful in the future as it is today when facing Russia. Meanwhile, hopes for an even partial return to normality in relations between East and West on this Continent will be in vain, to the great loss of all sides.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

December 22, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

NYT, after deciding lockdowns are authoritarian and bad when China does them, now mildly terrified as Xi Jinping reopens & infections rise

You can take the New York Times out of lockdown, but you can’t take the lockdowns out of the New York Times.

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 19, 2022

From Zero Covid to No Plan: Behind China’s Pandemic U-Turn” is the headline of the latest highly revealing Times reporting on the end of Zero Covid in China. “After micromanaging the coronavirus strategy for nearly three years,” we read, “… Xi Jinping has suddenly left the populace to improvise.”

The essence of the piece is that the Chinese have rightly regained their freedoms, but they’re now left to face a terrifying virus alone and undefended by their government, which is also very bad, and possibly worse than the lockdowns, as bad as they were.

China’s party-run media has cast the shift [from Zero Covid] as a stressful but well-considered exit, opening the way back to good economic times. Warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus have swiftly disappeared, replaced by official claims that the Omicron variant is generally mild. By holding off from easing until now, the government has saved many lives, the People’s Daily said on Thursday in a long article defending Mr. Xi’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct.”

In reality, an examination of how the shift unfolded in Chongqing and elsewhere reveals a government overtaken by a cascade of Covid outbreaks, confusion over directives, economic woes and then rare political protests. …

It’s almost like mass containment doesn’t do anything aside from wrecking the economy and ruining everyone’s lives. I’m glad the Times can finally come close to admitting this now, in the last weeks of 2022.

By changing only a handful of words, you could make key sections of the article apply to Germany, or any western nation aside from Sweden or Belarus:

Even the Chinese Communist Party, a virtuoso at controlling the narrative, is finding it difficult to sell the policy lurch to anxious residents.

[Xi] turned China’s intense top-to-bottom mobilization against the pandemic into a showcase of the party’s organizational strength. For two years, his Covid war enjoyed widespread public acceptance, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and appeared to drown out attempts to discuss, let alone devise, a measured transition.

Whereas in the West, we had totally open and honest discussions about the insane, enduring closures, that weren’t marked by massive censorship and government intimidation at all. Otherwise, Western nations were themselves locked in exactly this same international competition, eager to display the fruits of their superior pandemic planning to the world, and terrified that failure would cost them legitimacy. One of the reasons Germany locked down so hard during Fall 2020, was that the Merkel government had collected many international plaudits for their handling of the first wave — effectively taking credit for the seasonality of infections. They were unwilling to surrender the regard they had earned so easily.

Mr. Xi has no likely successor and could stay in power for at least another decade. But the scars from the abrupt change may feed distrust in his domineering style.

It’s not subjecting his whole country to absurd containment theatre over what is no more than an influenza-level risk that poses a political problem for Xi, but rather “the scars from the abrupt change” in policy.

Finally the reporters get around to discussing the protests.

In Zhengzhou in central China, thousands of workers clashed with police at an iPhone plant, angry about a delay in bonuses and the handling of an outbreak.

In Haizhu, a textile manufacturing district in southern China, laborers poured onto the streets over food shortages and hardships under lockdown. Migrant workers, who depend on daily work for their livelihoods, went weeks without jobs.

“I couldn’t make a living this year,” said Zhou Kaice, a street porter in Chongqing. “Some bosses I worked for started up for a few days but were then shut by lockdowns.”

Despite the strains, officials still insisted China must win its pandemic war. Provincial leaders throughout November declared their commitment to “zero Covid,” often citing Mr. Xi as their lodestone.

“If pandemic controls were loosened, that would inevitably create mass infections,” said a Xinhua editorial on Nov. 19. “Economic and social development and the public’s physical health and safety would be seriously hurt.”

How many times did we have to read that lockdowns were the ultimate way to grow the economy, because without them, the virus would somehow destroy all business activity?

It’s also interesting how anti-lockdown protestors in the West are thugs and stupid conspiracy-crazed Nazis, while in China they are “students, workers and homeowners.”

By [November], China’s most widespread protests since 1989 had begun. Students, workers and homeowners in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere vented against Covid controls, angered by a fire in western China that many believed, despite official denials, had killed residents trapped in their apartments by lockdowns.

“I tell you that in this world there’s only one sickness, and that’s poverty and having no freedom, and we’ve got plenty of that,” said a Chongqing man whose tirade went viral in China.

“Give me liberty or give me death,” he shouted, using the Chinese version of the American revolutionary battle cry.

Sounds like the Canadian trucker protests — you know, those guys who posed such a threat to freedom and democracy that it proved necessary to freeze their bank accounts.

At the end, the Times assures its heavily masked and vaccinated readership that “most people are staying home,” but that “if deaths rise sharply, public anger could revive” because “infections could hinder a quick economic rebound.”

Until we Decovidify the newsrooms, there will never be sane reporting on SARS-2 in any major press outlet, ever.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | 1 Comment

Qatar warns EU of consequences amid graft probe

RT | December 19, 2022

The European Parliament’s decision to suspend Qatar-linked legislation and deny the country’s officials access to the legislature could negatively affect gas supplies to EU member states, Doha has announced. The bloc’s move comes amid a Belgian probe into alleged graft by MEPs that may have involved Qatar.

The parliament’s decision is “discriminatory,” according to a statement by a diplomat with the Qatari mission to the EU on Sunday, as quoted by news agencies. It will “negatively affect regional and global security cooperation, as well as ongoing discussions around global energy poverty and security,” the diplomat added.

He stressed Qatar’s cooperation with the EU, particularly Belgium, on issues related to Covid-19 and its role as a key supplier of liquified natural gas to the country, expressing disappointment that Brussels is making “no effort to engage with our government to establish the facts once they became aware of the allegations.”

Qatari liquified natural gas plays a key role in the EU’s strategy to compensate for the loss of Russian fossils fuels, which it decided to stop purchasing over the conflict in Ukraine.

In November, Germany secured a 15-year deal for around 2 million tons annually. Berlin is leading a pan-EU effort to secure better terms from Doha, which is pressuring the bloc into signing long-term contracts that prohibit resale to other parts of the world, which would undermine the EU’s goal of phasing out fossil fuels, according to Bloomberg.

Last week, MEPs voted to suspend all work linked to Qatar and cut off “representatives of Qatari interests” from access to the legislature. The decision affects an EU-Qatar aviation agreement and an EU visa waiver for Qatari and Kuwaiti nationals. MEPs denounced “Qatar’s alleged attempts” to buy influence in the EU.

Belgian law enforcement announced earlier this month that it had charged four individuals linked to the European Parliament in an alleged corruption case. They are suspected of being influenced by lavish presents and cash originating from a foreign government.

The local press identified the unnamed Gulf nation as Qatar, which denied any involvement. The European Parliament’s now-former vice president, Eva Kaili, who was among those charged, was stripped of her senior EU office over the probe last week.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment