When it comes to vaccines, suddenly “from vs with” matters again
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | March 15, 2021
In the last few weeks the media has demonstrated one of the clearest, most concise displays of true-life doublethink I’ve ever seen. It truly is the perfect exemplar.
The dichotomy is in “covid deaths” vs “vaccine related injuries”.
As we all know by now, countries all around the world define “Covid deaths” as “people who die, of any cause, within 30 days of a positive test result” (the number of days changes by country, it’s usually between 28 and 60). This trend was started in Italy last spring, and spread all around the world.
Globally, with a few notable exceptions, a “covid death” is a death “from any cause” following a positive test.
And when they say “any cause”, they mean it. Up to, and including, shooting yourself in the head.
In one blackly hilarious case, a man “died of coronavirus” after being shot by the police, with his 7 gunshot wounds being listed as “complications”.
That’s how loosely defined “covid death” has become, it is more or less meaningless. However, Covid “vaccines”, and possible related injuries or deaths, are a very different matter.
The establishment is going out of its way to make sure everyone understands that anybody who gets ill, or dies, after being vaccinated, is absolutely NOT a “vaccine death”.
What’s hilarious is those same journalists and “experts” preaching against “Covid denial”, are now literally employing our own arguments against us in the name of defending the vaccines.
Check out this article from ABC a few weeks ago, quoting one doctor:
We have to be very careful about causality. There are going to be spurious relationships, especially as the vaccine is targeting elderly or those with chronic conditions. Just because these events happen in proximity to the vaccine does not mean the vaccine caused these events. Nursing home centers and hospices are of particular concern, because they are homes to incredibly frail populations, and you have to look at the background rate of these events within those populations.”
You see, it’s important not take deaths out of context. After all, many of the people who die after being vaccinated are old and frail and already seriously ill. We need to be “careful about causation”, just because event B happened after event A, does not mean A caused B to happen.
In other words: There is a difference between with and from.
Hmmm. Does that argument sound familiar to anyone else?
The article continues:
In fact, an average of 8,000 people die each day in the United States. Some of them may have just received a coronavirus vaccine.
Fascinating. Apparently 8000 people die each and every day in the United States – translating to roughly 3 million people per year – and falsely attributing natural human mortality to a potentially totally unconnected event might cause panic.
I really feel like I might have read a similar sentiment somewhere else, too. Don’t you?
The Reuters “fact check” on vaccine injury says exactly the same thing:
Reports of death following vaccination do not necessarily mean the vaccine caused the death,”
The sheer desperation of the PR in the press is apparent in all the headlines. Such as:
Pfizer Covid vaccine probably didn’t kill woman, 78, who died shortly after having it
Or:
Woman dies from brain haemorrhage in Japan days after vaccine, but link uncertain
Or:
Macomb County man, 90, dies after COVID-19 vaccine — but doctors say shots are safe
Essentially, if you die within two months of testing positive for Sars-Cov-2, you’re a “Covid death”, and if you die within two minutes of getting the vaccine, you’re a coincidence.
Now, that’s not to say the vaccine definitely did kill those unfortunate people, I don’t know the details of the cases. The point is the equivocation. The soft use of language which is totally at odds with the apocalyptic prose discussing “Covid deaths”.
Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the UK right now, following the AstraZeneca situation.
A quick recap, for those who haven’t heard: Recently, the Norwegian government suspended use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, following it being linked to increased risk of blood clots. Several other countries soon followed suit.
This has prompted a UK-wide defence of the AstraZeneca jab. Including this piece from David Spiegelhalter, in the Guardian just today, in which he uses the same exact argument as the ABC article, almost word for word:
It’s human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may exist
After 12 months of ignoring the conversation on “with” vs “from”, suddenly all the vaccine pushers have rediscovered the difference. None of them seem in any way aware of their self-contradiction.
But this ludicrous double standard doesn’t just apply to death, but also the concept of acceptable risk.
Appearing on Good Morning Britain today, UK Dr Nighat Arif encouraged the continued use of the AstraZeneca shot, by explaining that technically there’s always a small chance you’ll get a blood clot, but you can’t let that stop you doing what needs to be done:
As a GP I see clots a lot, unfortunately our background risk of getting a clot is about 1/1000 people. If you’re on a flight, your risk of clot increases. If women are on the contraceptive pill, their risk of clot increases. People going to hospital for surgery. However, we don’t stop doing any of those things.
The doctor is actually arguing that refusing to live your life based on a 0.1% risk of death is foolish, and that nobody should be expected to do that.
It is, literally, word for word a “Covid sceptic” argument, reproduced in the mainstream, without even the tiniest hint of irony or self-awareness. The very attitude they are taking towards “vaccine injury” is the same one they have condemned in “covid deniers” for over a year. By their hypocrisy they prove their own mendacity.
If they want to define a “Covid death” as dying within 60 days of a positive test, fine. But then anyone who dies within two months of getting vaccinated is a “vaccine death”. And they should have those two big red numbers counting up, right next to each other, on the front page of every news website in the world.
And if they don’t do that – which they obviously won’t – then you have a deliberately employed double standard, and that is a tacit admission of intentional deception.
It really is just that simple.
US is an ‘out-and-out eavesdropping empire,’ says Beijing, as Washington lists Chinese companies as security threat
RT | March 15, 2021
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has taken aim at Washington, labeling it ‘hypocritical’ and claiming it spies on its own allies, after the US designated five Chinese companies as posing a threat to national security under a 2019 law.
“The US government has generalized the concept of national security, abused national power and unscrupulously suppressed Chinese high-tech enterprises,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters on Monday.
These US practices are a complete contradiction of the market economy principles that America has always advertised, Zhao added, blasting Washington for its “groundless” and “hypocritical” move against Chinese firms.
The spokesman said other nations should not be wary of China, but the US, which is guilty of spying on everyone, including its own partners. “The United States has used its technological advantages and installed backdoors to carry out large-scale indiscriminate eavesdropping on other countries in the world, including its allies.”
“The United States is an out-and-out eavesdropping empire… The actions of the US have seriously harmed and threatened the security of other countries.”
On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) designated five Chinese companies, Huawei Technologies Co., ZTE Corp., Hytera Communications Corp., Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co. as posing a threat to national security under a 2019 law aimed at protecting the US’s communications networks.
Acting FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement: “This list provides meaningful guidance that will ensure that as next-generation networks are built across the country, they do not repeat the mistakes of the past or use equipment or services that will pose a threat to US national security or the security and safety of Americans.”
Last week, Beijing criticized Washington after it was reported that President Joe Biden’s administration had tightened rules on dealing with Chinese tech giant Huawei, restricting US companies from supplying Huawei with products that can be used in 5G devices.
Scott Atlas: The Last Word
The Stanford Review | March 7, 2021
Editor’s Note: Scott W. Atlas, MD, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, served from August through November 2020 as Special Adviser to the President and was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Atlas delivered the following remarks in a virtual lecture hosted by the College Republicans. They have been lightly adapted to appear in print.
It is always a great pleasure, and an important part of my job, to speak to students. It is essential for students to hear ideas from many sources, especially ideas they may not agree with. That is a key part of learning how to think critically – and critical thinking is the most important lesson to learn in college, in my opinion.
The coronavirus pandemic has been a great tragedy, there can be no doubt about that. But it has also exposed profound issues in America that now threaten the very principles of freedom and order that we Americans often take for granted.
First, I have been shocked at the enormous power of the government, to unilaterally decree, to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movement, mandate behavior, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any end and little accountability.
Second, I remain surprised at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific.
This crisis has also exposed what we all have known existed, but we have tolerated for years: the overt bias of the media, the lack of diverse viewpoints on campuses, the absence of neutrality in big tech controlling social media, and now more visibly than ever, the intrusion of politics into science. Ultimately, the freedom to seek and state the truth is at risk here in the United States.
First, we all acknowledge that the consequences of the SARS2 coronavirus pandemic and its management have been enormous. Over half million American deaths have been attributed to the virus; more will certainly follow. Even after almost a year, the pandemic still paralyzes much of our country. And despite all efforts, there was an undeniable failure to stop cases from rapidly escalating and prevent hospitalizations and death.
Here’s the unacknowledged reality: almost all states and major cities, with a handful of exceptions, have implemented severe restrictions for many months, including closures of businesses and in-person school, mobility restrictions and curfews, quarantines, limits on group gatherings, and mask mandates dating back to at least the summer.
And let’s clear up the myths about the behavior of Americans – social mobility tracking of Americans and data from Gallup, YouGov, the COVID-19 Consortium, and the CDC have shown significant reductions of movement as well as a consistently high percentage of mask wearing since the late summer, similar to Western European countries and approaching those in Asia.
All legitimate policy scholars should, today, be openly reexamining policies that severely harmed America’s families and children, while failing to save the elderly. Studies, including one in January from Stanford University’s infectious disease scientists and epidemiologists Bendavid, Oh, Bhattacharya, and Ioannidis, have shown the mitigating impact of the extraordinary measures was small at best and according to the study’s senior author Ioannidis, “usually harmful” – in his words, “pro-contagion.” President Biden openly admitted their lack of efficacy in his speech to the nation on January 22, when he said, “there is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
Bizarrely, though, many want to blame those who opposed lockdowns and mandates for the failure of the very lockdowns and mandates that were widely implemented.
Separate from their limited value in containing the virus — efficacy that has often been “grossly exaggerated” in scientific journals, as documented by epidemiologists and biostatisticians Chin, Ioannidis, Tanner, and Cripps – lockdown policies have been extraordinarily harmful. The harms to children of closing in-person schooling are dramatic, including poor learning, increased school dropouts, and social isolation, most of which are far worse for lower income groups.
A recent study confirms that up to 78% of cancers were never detected due to missed screening over three months. If one extrapolates to the entire country, up to a million new cases or more over nine months will have gone undetected. That health disaster adds to missed critical surgeries, chemotherapy, organ transplants, presentations of pediatric illnesses, heart attack and stroke patients too afraid to call emergency services, and others, all well documented.
Beyond hospital care, CDC reported four-fold increases in depression, three-fold increases in anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of suicidal ideation, particularly among young adults – college age – after the first few months of lockdowns, echoing the AMA reports of drug overdoses and suicides. An explosion of insurance claims for these psychological harms in children just verified this, doubling nationally since last year; and in the strictly locked down Northeast, there was a more than 300% increase of teenagers visiting doctors for self-harm.
Domestic abuse and child abuse have been skyrocketing due to the isolation and specifically to the loss of jobs, particularly in the strictest lockdowns. Given that many in-person schools have been closed, hundreds of thousands of abuse cases are never reported, since schools are the number one agency where abuse is noticed. Finally, the unemployment “shock” from lockdowns, according to a recent NBER study, translates into what they called a “staggering” 890,000 additional U.S. deaths over the next 15 years from the lockdowns, disproportionately affecting minorities and women.
We know we have not yet seen the full extent of the damage from lockdowns, because it will last for years, even decades. Perhaps that is why lockdowns were not recommended in previous pandemic analyses, even for infections with far higher lethality.
To manage such a crisis, shouldn’t policymakers objectively consider both the virus harms and the totality of impact of policies? That’s the importance of health policy experts – my field – with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists. And that’s exactly why I was called to the White House – there were zero health policy scholars on the Task Force; no one with a medical background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House.
To determine the best path forward necessarily means admitting that social lockdowns and significant restrictions on individuals are deadly and extraordinarily harmful, especially on the working class, minorities, and the poor.
In his book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” Charles Mackay wrote: “of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder’s welcome.”
Optimistically, we should be seeing the light at the end of the long tunnel with the rollout of vaccines. I believe that we are. But, using logic that would put the Mad Hatter to shame, we now hear some claim that all children must be tested and vaccinated, even though they have extremely low risk from this infection and are proven to not be significant spreaders to adults? Or that all teachers must be vaccinated before they teach in-person, even though schools are one of the lowest risk environments and the vast majority of teachers are not high risk?
Worse, we hear the same faces on TV once again stressing uncertainty, and issuing new warnings – that social distancing, masks, and other restrictions will still be necessary after vaccination and until 2022. Is there no intention of those who control the narrative – the often proclaimed “consensus” – to allow Americans to live normally, to live freely, without fear, again?
Just as in Galileo’s time, one real problem is the experts and “vested academic interests.” Faculty members of many universities, America’s centers for critical thinking, have overtly intimidated views contrary to their own, likely out of political reasons, leaving many afraid to speak up. That intimidation has been effective – I know, I have received hundreds of emails from scientists and policy scholars all over the country, all over the world, telling me to never give up, but they are afraid to come forward. And yes, even a number of infectious disease experts right here at Stanford are afraid to step forward publicly and say the truth.
It is commendable that Stanford’s President and Provost, former Provost Etchemendy, and a few other distinguished members of the academic community here spoke in defense of academic freedom at a recent Faculty Senate meeting. But it is not only the matter of academic freedom that needs comment.
Instead of rethinking failed policies and admitting their errors, some have chosen to employ smears in opinion pieces and through organized rebukes against those of us who disagreed with what was implemented and who dared to help the country under a President they despised – apparently, the ultimate transgression.
Straw-man arguments and out-of-context distortions to defame people are not acceptable in civilized society, let alone in our great universities. There has been an attempt to silence and delegitimize me using falsifications and misrepresentations. This dishonors Stanford’s code of conduct, damages the Stanford name, and most importantly, it abuses the trust parents and society place in them to influence America’s children, our next generation of leaders.
It is understandable that most Stanford professors are not experts in health policy – that is my field, my lane – and understandable that most Stanford professors are ignorant of the data about the pandemic. But it is not acceptable to claim that I made recommendations that were “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.” That is a lie. No matter how often a lie is repeated, and regardless of how often those lies are echoed in biased media, lies do not transform into truths.
We should all remember the phrase attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels – “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth” – and pray to God that it never becomes true in these United States of America.
All policy considerations I recommended to the President were designed to reduce both the spread of the virus to the most vulnerable and the structural harms of the policies to those impacted the most – the poor and working class of America. I was one of the first to push for increasing protections to those most at risk, particularly the elderly, because they were dying by the tens of thousands because the chosen policies implemented by states, recommended by other Task Force members, were failing to protect them. Almost a year ago, I recognized that we must also consider the enormous harms to physical health, mental health, and lives lost coming directly from the draconian policies that attempted to contain the infection. That is the most appropriate goal of public health policy: to minimize all harms, not simply to stop Covid-19 at all costs.
The claim in a recent JAMA opinion piece by three Stanford professors that “nearly all public health experts were concerned that [Atlas’s] recommendations could lead to tens of thousands (or more) of unnecessary deaths in the US alone” is patently false, absurd on its face. As pointed out on February 10 by Zinberg, the proposal called the Great Barrington Declaration, is “far closer to the one condemned in the JAMA article than anything [Atlas] said”. Yet, that policy declaration was co-authored by medical scientists and epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, and it has already been signed by over 50,000 medical and public-health practitioners.
When critics display such ignorance about the scope of views held by experts, it exposes their bias and wholly disqualifies their authority on these issues. Indeed, it is beyond parody that these same critics wrote “professionalism demands honesty about what they know and do not know.”
I have indeed explained the fact that younger people have little risk from this infection, and I explained the biological concept of herd immunity – protection arising when a large percentage of people acquire immunity – just like Harvard epidemiologists Katherine Yih and Martin Kulldorff, and some of the top scientists at Stanford, have explained. That is very different from proposing that people be deliberately exposed and infected by “allowing the virus to spread naturally” without mitigation efforts. I have not advised that.
And how timely it is that Professor Makary of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health just did the same, acknowledging in the Wall Street Journal on February 18, 2021 that “herd immunity is the inevitable result of viral spread and vaccination.” Makary went on to celebrate what he called “the good news” – that “the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in.”
Those are Makary’s words. Will Dr. Makary now be linked with doctors who promoted eugenics and those who conducted the racist Tuskegee syphilis experiments, as in the piece in JAMA ? Will professors also call for his medical license to be stripped, or that he be formally censured for explaining the benefit of naturally-acquired immunity?
In fact, directly contrary to advocating that the infection spread, I have repeatedly called for mitigation measures, including extra sanitization, social distancing, masks, group limits, testing, and other increased protections to limit the spread and damage from the coronavirus. I also explicitly called for augmenting protection of those at risk in dozens of on-the-record presentations, interviews, and written pieces, including:
Written pieces in The Hill– May 3, The Hill-September 3, New York Post– September 15, New York Post– April 26; presentations to: Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Parliamentary Intelligence Security Forum, Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, YPO retreat in Sea Island, Georgia; and interviews with: Ben Shapiro podcast, John Bachelor radio, Steve Deace Blaze TV, Tucker Carlson Fox News TV, Florida televised press conference, WAML Radio, and numerous others.
One must ask the question: why would accusers also ignore my explicit, emphatic public denials about supporting the spread of the infection unchecked to achieve herd immunity – denials quoted widely in the media. Are not my own statements the object of their criticism in the first place? Or is it due to a desire to “cancel” anyone who accepted the call, who had the audacity to help this country under President Trump?
I have been accused of claiming that “young people are not harmed by the virus and cannot spread the disease.” To the contrary, I have frequently cited detailed data explicitly stating that children do get the infection, that children can have serious consequences from the infection, and that some children die from the disease. When I said in a 5/20/2020 interview with Congressman Andy Biggs that there was “an extremely low risk for children that Covid-19 poses” and that the risk of dying if you’re under 18 from this disease is “nearly zero,” that matches the data, including CDC, and is almost verbatim what John Ioannidis, renowned Stanford epidemiologist, summed up about the entire world’s data. The risk of dying from Covid-19 is “almost zero” for young people.
For many months, I was maligned after calling for opening in-person schools. The compelling case to open schools is now admitted to be longstanding truth, even in lay publications like the Atlantic. They acknowledged that “Research from around the world has, since the beginning of the pandemic, indicated that people under 18, and especially younger kids, are less susceptible to infection, less likely to experience severe symptoms, and far less likely to be hospitalized or die.” Further, that “We’ve known for months that young children are less susceptible to serious infection and less likely to transmit the coronavirus. Let’s act like it.”
The accusers who wrote the opinion piece in JAMA stated: “Atlas disputed the need for masks”. That is misrepresenting my words. To the contrary, my advice on mask usage has been consistent and explicit – “wear a mask when you cannot socially distance” – and it matched the published recommendations of the World Health Organization in June: “When outside, wear a mask if you cannot maintain physical distance from others.”
In December, the WHO modified that to “(In areas of known or suspected community or cluster SARS-CoV-2 transmission), WHO advises that the general public should wear a non-medical mask in … settings where physical distancing of at least 1 metre cannot be maintained”, i.e. not at all times, not by everyone. That also matches the NIH document dated February 2021 “Prevention and prophylaxis of SARS-COV-2 infection”: “When consistent distancing is not possible, face coverings may further reduce the spread of infectious droplets from individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection to others.”
Regarding universal masks: 38 states have implemented general-population mask mandates, most since at least the summer, with almost all the rest having mandates in their major cities. Widespread, general-population mask usage has shown little empirical utility for stopping cases, even though that evidence has been censored by Twitter and Amazon. Widespread mask usage showed only minimal impact in Denmark’s randomized controlled study. Those are facts. And facts matter.
Here’s the reality: those who insist that universal mask usage is absolutely proven to be effective at controlling the spread of this virus and is universally recommended by “the science” are ignoring the published evidence to the contrary. One could say they are propagating false and misleading information; some might even call that, using a phrase from the JAMA opinion, “subverting science.”
I posted a list where mask mandates empirically failed to stop cases, along with direct quotes, without any edit, from WHO, CDC, and Oxford University. That was censored by Twitter. And I stated numerous times that it would be irrational to wear a mask “when alone riding a bicycle outside, when driving your own car alone, or when walking in the desert alone.” I stand by those words.
Those who charge that it is unethical, even dangerous, to question broad population mask mandates must not realize that several of the world’s top infectious disease scientists and major public health organizations explicitly question the efficacy of general population masks. The public needs to know the truth.
For instance, Jefferson and Heneghan of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine wrote: “It would appear that despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.” Oxford’s renowned epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta said there is no need for masks unless one is elderly or high risk. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya stated “mask mandates are not supported by the scientific data … there is no scientific evidence that mask mandates work to slow the spread of the disease.”
Throughout this pandemic until December, the WHO’s “Advice on the use of masks in the context of COVID-19” stated: “At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.” In December, the WHO changed their wording to today’s “At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.”
The CDC, in a review of influenza pandemics, “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.” And until the WHO removed it on October 21, 2020 (almost immediately after Twitter censored my tweet highlighting the WHO quote), the WHO had written “At the present time, the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.”
My advice on masks has always been based on scientific data, and it matches the advice of many of the top scientists and public health organizations throughout the world.
One final false accusation must be addressed: that I “made unsupported claims about the immunity conferred by surviving infection“.
To the contrary, I was correct in accurately citing the scientific literature, when I explained that biological protection from this infection is not fully shown by antibody tests, since antibody prevalence changes in people over time (September 2020, Japan), and protection is also derived from other parts of the immune system (January 2021, Germany), including T-cells (January 2021, Minnesota), even in asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients, according to the Karolinska Institute.
Professor Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health acknowledged this on February 18, 2021, explaining that “Antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity. Antibody testing doesn’t capture antigen-specific T-cells.”
I was also correctly citing data that demonstrated some individuals could have cross-protection from previous coronavirus infections, shown by Singapore researchers and explicitly supported by the NIH itself on December 15, 2020. “The evidence that a subset of people has a cross-reactive T cell repertoire through exposure to related coronaviruses is strong.”
At this point, one could make a reasonable case that those who continue to push significant societal restrictions without acknowledging their failures and serious harms are themselves putting forth dangerous misinformation. As Stanford’s Ioannidis stated on February 20, 2021, “most of the estimates show the draconian lockdowns increased the problems, it was pro-contagion.” Those restrictions have plainly “damaged the public health,” as my Stanford accusers might say.
But I will not call for their official rebuke or punishment. I will not try to cancel them. I will not try to extinguish their opinions. And I will not lie to distort their words and defame them. To do so would repeat a behavior of intimidating the discourse that is critical to educating the public and arriving at the scientific truths we desperately need.
As a health policy scholar for over 15 years and as a professor at top universities for 30 years, I now fear for our students and our nation’s future. Some faculty members of our acclaimed universities – many of whom are automatic recipients of society’s respect because of those university titles – are now dangerously intolerant of opinions contrary to their personally favored narrative. Without permitting, indeed encouraging, open exchange of views and admission of errors, we might never solve any future crisis.
At a minimum, university mottos, if such things matter – like Harvard’s “truth,” Stanford’s “the winds of freedom blow,” and Yale’s “light and truth” – need to be explained to all faculty members at these universities.
Some go further, distorting and misrepresenting words to delegitimize and prompt punishment of those of us willing to serve the country – their country – alongside a President they happen to loathe. As Tobin wrote on March 1, “Delegitimizing [Atlas] and his analysis of the coronavirus disaster was a matter of treating all those who have any connection with the Trump administration as criminals, something that could only be accomplished by blatant misrepresentations of his views and statements.”
Worse than a violation of ethical behavior among colleagues, that does not meet my standard of simple human decency.
If academic leaders – and the entire academic community – fail to denounce such attempts to vilify those whom one disagrees with, many more experts with a reputation to lose will be unwilling to serve this country in contentious times. As educators, as parents, as fellow citizens, that would be the worst possible legacy to leave to our children.
We should also fear that the concept of “the science” has been seriously damaged. Even the best journals in the world – NEJM, Lancet, Science and Nature – have become contaminated by politics and published bad science. That adds to the public’s confusion, and it diminishes trust in experts. By now, many in the public have simply become fatigued by the arguments. That reaction is even worse, because widespread fatigue will allow fallacy to triumph over truth.
Americans are now faced with a new status quo: biased social media have joined a dominant voice on campuses to be the arbiter of allowable discussion.
The United States is on the precipice of losing its cherished freedoms, with censorship and cancellation of all those who bring views forward that differ from the “accepted mainstream.”
It is not clear if our democracy, with its defining freedoms, will recover, even after we survive the pandemic itself. But it is clear that people must step up – meaning speak up, as we are allowed, as we are expected to do in free societies – or it has no chance.
Finally: Mackay, again, presciently spoke about the herd: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
So, how do we proceed at this very moment, in this country, with its heavily damaged psyche? Those of us who want the truth must keep seeking it, and those of us who see the truth must keep speaking it. Even if the recovery from madness is slow, and even if it is only one by one. Because truth matters.
Iran rejects ‘baseless’ Israeli claims, urges UNHRC to avoid politicization
Press TV – March 13, 2021
Iran’s permanent ambassador to the UN office in Geneva has dismissed “baseless” accusations leveled by Israel against the Islamic Republic at the United Nations Human rights Council (UNHRC), urging the body to avoid politicization.
Addressing the 46th regular session of the Human Rights Council on Friday, Esmaeil Baghaei Hamaneh said the regime occupying Jerusalem al-Quds has no right to comment on the noble issue of human rights in Iran.
The remarks came after the Israeli mission in Geneva tweeted, “Today, during the Item 4 General Debate, where HRC46 discusses situations which require its attention, we repeated our call for @UN_HRC to focus on Iran.”
Baghaei Hamaneh said the Israeli regime is best described under the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on November 10, 1975. In the Resolution 3379, Israel was declared a racist regime.
He said the rule of law makes up the basis for promoting human rights and protecting the foundations of freedom.
The Iranian envoy also expressed regret that some governments focus on weakening the rule of law in developing countries by targeting their judicial systems under the pretext of defending human rights.
No country or group of states should consider that they have the right to dictate their priorities and ideals to others, the Iranian envoy said, stressing that the world’s countries can freely choose their governments as well as judicial, legal and economic systems according to the principle of independent action.
He further called on the UN Human Rights Council to distance itself from politicization, double standards and stereotypes.
Baghaei Hamaneh also criticized Canada, Australia, Britain, Denmark, the US, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Sweden for accusing others of rights violations while pretending as if no one was aware of their own contradictory performance both inside and outside their countries.
These states, he added, are accused of widespread human rights violations across the world through exporting weapons to aggressor countries and adopting unilateral policies towards developing countries.
Biden’s brand of democracy isolates the Palestinians
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | March 11, 2021
Israel is reportedly concerned that US President Joe Biden will prioritise human rights over traditional allegiances in the Middle East. With a policy shift that departs from the Trump administration’s belligerence, Biden is attempting to bring Washington in line with the human rights rhetoric favoured within the international arena, albeit rarely, if ever, acted upon.
The recent declassification of documents pertaining to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has been used by Israel to claim that the Biden administration risks alienating the settler-colonial state’s allies in the Middle East, particularly at a time when the Netanyahu government is still basking in the diplomatic success of the Abraham Accords.
Israel need not worry, though. While other Middle Eastern governments may indeed come under intense scrutiny and be forced to make cosmetic changes to their atrocious human rights record – releasing prominent activists from prison, for example – Israel will not be required to make any such concessions. The international community has already accomplished a great deal in marketing Israel’s security narrative as indistinguishable from human rights. If Israel says it needs to defend itself, how dare the international community suggest otherwise? On the contrary, governments are eager to support Israel’s killing machine and turn a blind eye to its victims. Collateral damage in the name of human rights is perfectly acceptable, it seems.
The White House has recently released the “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance“. Democracy is Biden’s selling point. Holding the new US administration to account on its democracy, however, is a different story. After all, anything is better than Trump. Such reasoning played into the psyche of the US electorate and political responsibility may well become a relic of the past if the Biden administration continues to be juxtaposed against Trump’s, or viewed as a better option for no other reason than the president is now not Trump. Indeed, there is a risk of Biden being spared the usual scrutiny that comes with being US president, and while Israel may miss the Trump era, the current administration is certainly not averse to upholding the apartheid state’s impunity.
It is more a selective process of which governments the US is going to support militarily in the name of democracy, rather than a repudiation of militarism as Biden is attempting, and failing, to convey to the world.
“In the Middle East, we will maintain our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security, while seeking to further its integration with its neighbours and resuming our role as promoter of a viable two-state solution,” the guidance document proclaims. There’s no conflict for Israel in that, since “two states” is a defunct option that existed only to enhance its own security narrative. An “ironclad commitment” to Israel’s security is undemocratic, though, no matter how much the two-state solution is given a democratic gloss through international consensus.
What Biden’s brand of democracy looks like to Israel will be untenable for the Palestinian people. There is no mention of the Palestinians in the document, indicating to us all for whose benefit the two-state paradigm will be pursued. It is not about the result, but the allegiances forged through such diplomacy, which the Palestinian Authority is still deceiving itself into thinking gives it a say over which governments are supportive of the Palestinians’ struggle for their land and rights. The truth is that Biden’s brand of democracy isolates Palestinians, and all in the name of human rights.
Domestic Terrorism Goes Transnational: The war on Dissidents Picks Up Momentum
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 11, 2021
The claim is often made that President George W. Bush’s war on terror, which produced legislation that was employed to attack Iraq in 2003, eventually morphed into the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history when that conflict destabilized the entire region and led to an American multifront military engagement that now appears permanent. Few of those in the policymaking business appreciated that by turning “terrorism” into an especially invidious form of evil allowing governments to arrest or even assassinate without due process and bomb civilians if they fit a profile, Pandora’s box was being opened to expand that authority to commit other heinous abuses of authority.
Jim Bovard has described how post 9/11 there were hundreds of arrests for no good reason, in some cases only because someone had a name or countenance that appeared to be “Arabic.” Congressman Ron Paul and a handful of others observed at the time that the legislation would inevitably be used against domestic enemies of the state as well as against foreign or foreign-linked groups, meaning that the real damage done by the Patriot Act, the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) and the Military Commissions Act would be felt somewhere down the road, possibly at a point where the original objective of the legislation would be more or less forgotten.
Now that we have an identified “domestic terror” problem one should expect at a minimum a massive increase in surveillance of innocent citizens coupled with arbitrary arrests and incarcerations. Indeed, the process is already well underway with FBI Director Christopher Wray announcing that there are several thousand terror “cases” under development. There will also be increasing calls to take away guns and to control what is allowed to appear on the internet. Soon Americans will have nothing to measure their remaining liberties by and will be less free to exercise rights including free speech, possibly dramatically so.
So now we have reached a point where we have a government that is committed to further reducing one’s rights in order to “keep us safe” from a domestic threat and congress critters are openly speaking of bringing in “war on terror” type expedients to make sure that they have the tools available to do just that. The Joe Biden White House has made clear that it has embraced fighting domestic terrorists as a top priority. Last week, the Administration sought authorization from the Pentagon to keep thousands of national guard troops in the District of Columbia for 60 days more, presumably to protect the government buildings and staff. The pretext for the continued presence was a vaguely described plot constituting a “potential threat” to overrun the Capitol building on March 4th, a day when it was apparently anticipated that Donald Trump would miraculously be returned to office. The House of Representatives even canceled a session over concerns that they were about to be invaded by a hostile “militia.” Just how “real” the threat was has not been made clear beyond suggestions of “chatter” over the internet, nor has there been any explanation of why the 2,200 strong Capitol Police force is unable to deal with the problem.
Be that as it may, the Biden Administration thinks it knows exactly who the enemy is. The government already has a working definition of a domestic terrorist, i.e. “If you advocate violence as a tool to further political ends, and take concrete steps to do that, you’re a terrorist.” But if you thought that included groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) you would be wrong. For the Biden Administration it is the stereotyped right-wing extremist, who, among other attributes, is represented by the media and government as coming from the class that Hillary Clinton once described as “deplorables.”
The accepted definition of the enemy defies logic as the rioting, arson, and killing that has taken place over the past year has generally been inspired by Antifa and BLM, resulting in major damage and destruction in various cities and states. But the mobs who wrecked and looted have been mostly set free by the courts in the Democratic Party dominated cities. In Portland Oregon 90% of the [arrested] rioters were not prosecuted, presumably because the local judicial system believed that their “cause was just.” Against that is the trauma of the January 6th incident at the Capitol, much smaller in scope and damages but obviously terrifying to the media and Congress. Also what did occur bore a more comfortable theme for the Democrats which they have been beating to death ever since – “insurrection caused by right wing extremists who were overwhelmingly white and support Donald Trump.” That’s apparently all one needs to initiate a campaign to get rid of such dissidents.
For some suggestions about the direction the Biden Administration will be going in to eliminate domestic terrorism, one only has to review the comments of Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland at his Senate confirmation hearing on February 22nd, where he declared that going after domestic terrorists would be a top administration priority. When asked if he regards the numerous attempts by Antifa and BLM rioters to destroy federal courthouses in Portland and Seattle as acts of domestic extremism or terrorism, he hedged on the issue and replied:
“So an attack on a courthouse while in operation, trying to prevent judges from actually deciding cases, that plainly is, uhm, domestic extremism, uhm, domestic terrorism. An attack simply on a government property at night… or any other kind of circumstances, is a clear crime and a serious one and should be punished. I don’t mean… I don’t know enough about the facts of the example you’re talking about, but that’s where I draw the line. One is… both are criminal, but one is a core attack on our democratic institutions.”
According to the man who almost became a Supreme Court Justice and now appears to be on his way to becoming Attorney General if you attack and seek to destroy a government building when there is no one in it is a different level of criminality than seeking to disrupt what is going on inside during business hours. It clearly is a fine line, or at least Garland sees it that way, but in either case you are making the building non-functional in terms of its intended use. Indeed, groups like BLM have regularly condemned the criminal justice system and if you burn the building down it will be unusable for a long, long time. So clearly what makes something “terrorism” as opposed to only “criminality” is the expectation based on the events of 1/6 that it will be right-wing whites who will be doing the disruption. They are the terrorists.
So, it seems pretty clear that the Biden Administration is now preparing to go after the people that it objects to and will create new laws as necessary to do so. Garland will certainly have a hand in that development. And if anyone is thinking of leaving all of this behind by fleeing to another country where there is an actual rule of law, it would be best to consider the matter again. On February 22nd, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that white supremacy right-wing nationalist movements have become a “transnational threat” that has exploited the fear of the coronavirus pandemic to gain support. He said that “White supremacy and neo-Nazi movements are more than domestic terror threats. They are becoming a transnational threat. Today, these extremist movements represent the number one internal security threat in several countries. Far too often, these hate groups are cheered on by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago. We need global coordinated action to defeat this grave and growing danger.”
It means you can run but you can’t hide. It looks like there will be a worldwide coalition to extirpate the evils that come automatically with whiteness and, as BLM is now de facto a major constituency of the U.S. Democratic Party, you know that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi will be leading the charge.
Human Rights Watch – Watching What Suits Their Agenda
By Gary Jordan | Wake the F… Up | March 11, 2021
Is there a more egregious attack on human rights than being forced to accept an injection of experimental, toxic junk into your body with the threat of social benefit sanctions, hefty fines and/or imprisonment should you refuse?
Apparently, President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo of Indonesia doesn’t see it that way. Nor do the folks at the George Soros-funded Human Rights Watch.
On Monday, February 15th 2021 a Jakarta Post headline screamed out ‘Get vaccinated or lose your social aid’, sending a message to the poorest of the poor in the archipelago nation that they would suffer the consequences dearly, should they refuse to be administered the Chinese Sinovac Biotech COVID-19 vaccine. Anyone who has ever visited Indonesia knows that ‘social aid’ is in very short supply and that the Indonesian government dole it out sparingly. But if you’re going to coerce and threaten a segment of the population why not start with the most destitute and poverty-stricken, right? At least that’s the idea Jokowi and his gaggle of drug pushers have. As a friend of mine remarked, Indonesia went from being a nation that severely punishes those who do drugs to one that severely punishes those who don’t. Another example of the inverted, upside-down state of our existence in the 2020s to date.
Further into the Jakarta Post article, it’s explained that measures would be put in place to ensure steady vaccine uptake and that those who were not willing to be compliant participants in the ongoing trials would be deemed a hindrance to the campaign and therefore could potentially be hit with heavy fines and possible jail time. Does it matter that even the Food and Drug Administration has expressed efficacy and safety concerns and have gone as far as stating that it would NOT be recommending frontline workers are vaccinated with the Sinovac product? Or does it matter that clinical trials in Indonesia have shown a mere 65% efficacy rate? Of course not. Did you think you were living in 2019 and had the freedom to choose what goes into your body? Have the jab or go to jail! Jokowi’s orders.
Of course, as shocking as it is to think that such freedom is a thing of the past in the thriving and modern predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia, when you scratch the surface and delve into the previous actions of their Globalist agenda-pushers called politicians, you’ll soon find that they are on the same road to techno-Fascism as the remaining 192 United Nations members states are. As we speak, for example, a well-known artist from the island of Bali sits in a prison cell for supposed ‘hate speech’ after he publicly declared on social media that the COVID-19 tests are inaccurate (something since acknowledged by authoritative sources) and that the Indonesian Doctor’s Association (IDI) were ‘flunkeys’ to the World Health Organization (WHO). Meeting a similar fate was a 19-year-old girl from the island of Kupang who was arrested after she appeared on video setting fire to a face mask and calling the pandemic out as a hoax. Both are victims of one of the world’s most Orwellian laws, known as the Information and Electronics Transaction Act (UU ITE), which has created a modern-day Stasi-like system in Indonesia where neighbours report neighbours for the sins of speaking their minds. This is the wet dream of Indonesia’s notorious CIA-backed ex-Dictator, Suharto. Had he lived to experience his mata-mata (eyes everywhere) police state be so enabled and enhanced by the current technological advancements in his country he would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. And now, with the introduction of ‘virtual police’ who will directly contact you on your mobile device to warn you that what you are about to post may break the law, it appears the people of Indonesia can do no wrongthink.
I wonder if they agree that the idea of a vaccine mandated, centrally controlled, hive mind, AI driven, Fascist police and military-run Brave New World for the future is just the rant of a crazy conspiracy theorist? Maybe they could ask the Fact-Checkers. After all, when a nation deploys the military to engage in contact tracing and to enforce travel restrictions, as Indonesia has recently done, it’s nothing to be worried about. It’s all for the greater good, right? Best to ignore the fact that the same military which is about to be let loose amongst the public and given unprecedented power over it are the same that have, in relatively recent times, committed human rights abuses that include, but are not limited to, the shooting dead of four young students, the public stripping and hog-tying of dozens of indigenous men for the horrific act of raising a flag, the assassination of two men and the subsequent burning and disposal of their corpses and the rape and torture of sex slaves. What could go wrong?
Sarcasm aside, as someone who has spent over a decade living in Indonesia, I find the state of affairs there extremely worrying. A government that demands an emergency authorized, non approved, low efficacy, potentially harmful, experimental vaccine be administered into the veins of every man, woman and child against their wishes, is a government of occupation – working against its very own people. That same worry is felt by many in the nation with some even resorting to hiding in the woods for fear of being injected. Of course, mainstream media in the country presents these same people as being outsiders and lunatics who have watched too many YouTube videos and ridicules them as subjects of disinformation. We should trace our minds back to recent history, which is littered with stories of demonized persons hiding in the woods for fear of government policy. Perhaps Jokowi and his Big Pharma cartel should be reminded of that.
Perhaps Human Rights agencies should be too.
On receiving the disturbing news of coercion and injection by force in Indonesia, I reached out to several of them, starting with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. To date, I have not had a reply from Amnesty. Human Rights Watch, however, did send me a note from their office in Amsterdam stating that they did not have the capacity to handle individual requests. This I accept as I can imagine an organization of their notoriety receives vast amounts of correspondence from people all over the world who are victims of human rights violations. Nevertheless, I have to ask again; is there a more egregious attack on human rights than being forced to accept an injection of experimental, toxic junk into your body with the threat of social benefit sanctions, hefty fines and/or imprisonment should you refuse?
And if indeed the organization is too busy to investigate this very serious issue in Indonesia, what exactly is keeping them busy? What could be more threatening to the rights of a human being than the accelerated pauperization of social aid recipients or the imprisonment of conscientious objectors? I soon found out the answer to this question was…
Britney Spears.
The state of well being of the multi-millionaire pop princess takes priority over a nation of 275 million people who are about to be turned into guinea pigs. As many people will have heard, Britney Spears was thrust into the spotlight again as a result of a recent documentary that highlighted her plight in regards to her father’s standing as her legal guardian and the implications of this on her career and finances. Poor Britney. Human Rights Watch used this opportunity to jump on the #FreeBritney bandwagon. In their defence, the coverage they had given to the movement did shed light on the issue of guardianship over the many people worldwide who are under the control of others due to mental health or psycho-social issues. Still, it made me take a more in-depth look at Human Rights Watch in specific. As far as I’m concerned, they did not need a random email from myself or anyone else to highlight the horrendous laws which have been passed in Indonesia, threatening the freedom and finances of those who object to being vaccinated. For that reason, they cannot consider themselves serious challengers of Fascist, authoritarian rights-abusing governments who medically terrorize their population. They certainly can’t consider themselves purveyors of human rights when they are turning a blind eye to the arbitrary whims of pharmaceutical cartel-driven establishment policy. So what is the main reason for their ignorance of the current status quo – not just in Indonesia, but in regards to what has been happening worldwide since the COVID-19 cult hijacked our planet?
Have Human Rights Watch stepped forward to voice their disdain when employees of a corporation in the UK called Metropolitan Police were arresting peaceful protestors en masse in London? Were they loudly condemning the presence of 20 agents of the state in Dublin, Ireland when they turned up in cars and riot vans in front of a beauty salon to arrest the owner, who had opened her business during lockdown because she had no other way of earning a living? Were they up in arms over the callous Big Pharma-owned politicians who spat on the faith and beliefs of the people of New York City by eliminating religious exemption to vaccine requirements? Were they vocal when vicious thugs within the Victoria Police Department in Australia were abducting journalists who were reporting on the anti-lockdown street protests? Did they kick up a fuss when perverts, hired by Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada as security guards in mandatory quarantine centers, sexually assaulted detainees? Or how about when a Canadian citizen was forced to skip a potentially life-saving cancer treatment appointment at the demands of malevolent public health officials who insisted he checked into a government detention center? Were they even heard objecting to mandatory quarantine, to begin with?
Have they been heard crying out their disapproval of the apartheid conditions imminent in society as a result of proposed phoney vaccine passports and immunity certificates? Have they condemned the neglect of the unvaccinated in Israel who presently will not be allowed to enter establishments without proof of vaccination via their ‘Green Passport?’ Are they sounding the alarm bells in recognition of the tsunami of discrimination about to be unleashed on unvaccinated people?
No. Tumbleweed. Deafening silence.
These topics matter as much to Human Rights Watch as the penalization of poor Indonesians who are too terrified to come out of the jungle, for fear of being damaged by an ineffective and dangerous vaccine amid credible and very real reports of adverse reactions worldwide.
Where you will be sure to hear the voice of the Human Rights Watch team though is anywhere that the agendas of the Globalists are threatened. Belarus for example. When the dark suits of the IMF and World Bank showed up in mid-2020 and attempted to bribe the nation’s leader, Aleksander Lukashenko, with almost a billion dollars in exchange for permission to destroy the country with lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, thus creating absolute dependence on the ubiquitous parasites, Lukashenko refused. What would result was the demonization of the President worldwide in the left-wing bought-and-paid-for mainstream media. At the very forefront of this campaign was Human Rights Watch. As police and security personnel in the nation clashed with protestors, this was suddenly viewed by Human Rights Watch as an act of abuse on civil liberties on behalf of the Belarussian law enforcement personnel. The same, and sometimes even worse, behaviour, when committed by police on anti-lockdown protestors in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Toronto, or Dublin is ignored though. Why is that? Simply because the demonization of the Belarussian President and his security force is part of the Globalist banking agenda, which serves the interest of Human Rights Watch major donor, George Soros. Why bother with trivial matters such as the greatest attack on civil liberties this century, as is occurring worldwide with tyrannical practices that are being put in place in the name of keeping us safe from a virus with a 99.97% recovery rate? This is of no significance to Human Rights Watch, who are more interested in the agendas of the Open Society Foundation – for example, Black Lives Matter, Transgender rights and anything anti-Russian. Poor Indonesian families be damned. They’ve got more important people to serve, such as the IMF and World Bank billionaires… and Britney Spears of course.
For certain, the last people on the planet that would object to President Jokowi of Indonesia’s forced medical experimentation on his people are the Human Rights Watch crew. 2020 proved to be a year that would see them run off their feet, waging war week after week with Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who refused to allow undocumented immigrants to swarm his country as and when they pleased – much to the detriment of the radical leftist extremist Soros, who was as hell-bent as ever on transforming the tradition and culture of all European nations. An issue of this importance would never allow Human Rights Watch the time to concern themselves with menial points such as bodily autonomy and freedom to choose. In fact, they seemed to develop a case of amnesia on the ‘my body, my choice’ argument that they’ve spouted for decades.
Nuremberg Code-evading practices in Indonesia were no where near as important to Human Rights Watch as the trial of Alexey Navalny, a man who mainstream media dubiously reported had been poisoned on the orders of Vladimir Putin – amidst no evidence of such an incident occurring. The anti-Putin tool of the Globalists would be given massive amounts of attention by them as they ignored the health violations of the pre-dominantly Muslim citizens of Indonesia. It was imperative that a man who once compared Muslims to cockroaches was given higher priority than Muslims that were been subjected to Big Pharma crime and corruption,
The organization’s bias can only be matched by its hypocrisy. When they are not pushing the Globalist anti-Putin agenda then it’s the anti-China rhetoric. In their 2020 end of year report on China they complained;
“In April, authorities in Guangzhou, home to China’s largest African community, forcibly tested Africans for the Coronavirus, and ordered them to self isolate or to quarantine in designated hotels.”
It’s wrong when China does this to Africans, you see, but when Canadian authorities do exactly the same thing to their own citizens and to tourists today, there isn’t a peep to be heard out of Human Rights Watch.
They continue;
“To combat COVID-19, Chinese tech giants developed an app known as the Health Code. Using unknown algorithms, the app generates one of three colours (green, yellow or red), depending on a range of factors such as whether people have been to virus-hit areas. That colour has a wide-ranging impact on people’s lives, including their freedom of movement, as local authorities throughout the country require people to show the app when they move around.”
Once again, if China does this, it’s wrong. However, no mention has ever been made by them concerning, for example, the UK’s NHS Test and Trace app which supposedly serves the same purpose and undoubtedly creates the same restrictions on freedom of movement as the app in China. Nor is there a mention of the ‘Green Passport’ of Israel or the proposed vaccine passports that have been planned in the UK, Ireland and Australia among other nations. The closest we have come to Human Rights Watch addressing the worldwide Fascist takeover of the past twelve months is a special report entitled ‘COVID Free Speech Abuses’, in which the usual suspects, e.g, China, Russia, Egypt, Brazil, Hungary and Belarus are admonished, with no mention of the severe abuses of the pro-Davos leaders on their people, such as Trudeau, Johnson and Merkel.
But all roads lead to Gates. The likelihood of Human Rights Watch questioning vaccine mandates is slim when we delve into their financial records and see that Bill Gates and his ever-present bribes are at work. In my book, The Covid-19 Illusion; A Cacophony of Lies, I cover the inner workings of Gates and show how far his tentacles stretch. It appears he’s found his way into the grubby little paws of Human Rights Watch’s Board of Directors too. In December 2018, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the NGO a US$200,000 grant for ‘general operating support’. The philanthro-capitalist vaccine vendors have wriggled their way in alongside Soros to keep Human Rights Watch on the straight and narrow, focusing on the goals of the techno-fascist agendas and neglecting the populations of nations that are bound for a vaccine mandated Orwellian dystopia. The only saving grace now is with the people themselves and their desire to reject the Great Reset and all its horrors. For, surely, it will be a cold day in hell before groups like Human Rights Watch concern themselves with anything that remotely resembles human rights if it means disrupting the plans of their wealthy, cash-wielding overlords.
Indeed it may be that Human Rights Watch will fit in just fine with the upcoming techno-Fascist New World Order. Perhaps they will feel right at home with Klaus Schwab, the son of a man who was at one time owned a company referred to as a National Socialist Model Company by the Nazis. They themselves have a history with individuals who greatly admired the Third Reich. Their former senior military analyst, Marc Garlasco, was in possession of a rather large collection of Nazi memorabilia. Perhaps Human Rights Watch don’t consider President Jokowi’s ‘injection by force’ method so abhorrent at all – considering the company they’ve kept in the past.
One thing that’s for certain, it is highly unlikely that their European Media Director, Andrew Stroehlein, will be moved to action by this article – considering he only reads what he agrees with and avoids everything contrary to his narrative. Stroehlein, an active Twitter user, advises his followers, in a pinned Tweet to ‘block early and often’ and singles out ‘fact deniers’ and ‘propagandists for abusive governments’ among those that should be blocked. Firmly entrenched in his echo chamber he tells his followers not to share anything from ‘powerless fools looking for attention’ or to ‘hateful headlines and clickbait’.
I guess when you work for a Human Rights organization that avoids investigating serious human rights violations, you may as well be a Media Director that shuns opinions you disagree with.
Human Rights Watch have fumbled and fidgeted in the face of monstrous crimes against humanity, scoffing at those who called out their Globalist masters for what they are. They are an extension of the cult of COVID-19 that is toying with the world today for evil intentions.
Without a doubt, 2020 was the year the cult that runs the world stepped out of the closet and showed their faces. It was also the year that organizations like Human Rights Watch proved to the world that they have no interest in human rights and are merely a front for political agendas. Going forward we should embrace the fact that once these groups opened the door to the closet, it was firmly latched behind them and the masks slipped off. They now have to be confronted for their atrocities and held accountable for their failure to act on their duties.
thecovid19illusion@protonmail.com
Censorship-happy Twitter suddenly concerned about ‘public conversation’ as Russia cracks down on illegal content
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | March 11, 2021
Twitter’s complaints about Russian regulators slowing down its traffic would be a lot more credible if the platform hadn’t been so eager to turn into a partisan echo chamber and place itself above the law in its own homeland.
On Wednesday, Russia began throttling Twitter as a way of pressuring the San Francisco-based company to remove over 3,100 posts found to be in violation of Russian law. Specifically, this includes 450 instances of child pornography and more than 2,500 incitements to underage suicide.
Twitter responded by saying it was “deeply concerned by increased attempts to block and throttle online public conversation.”
It’s more than a bit disturbing that Twitter considers child porn and calls to suicide “public conversation.” The former is illegal in the US as well, and both are against their own terms of service.
Twitter might argue that it’s based in the US and that the First Amendment of the American Constitution protects the free speech of everyone on their platform – except we all know that for them to do so would be the height of hypocrisy.
Back in May 2018, a US federal judge defined Twitter as a “designated public forum,” ruling that then-President Donald Trump has no right to block hostile users, not even from the official presidential account but from his personal one. That would violate the law, and “no government official is above the law,” argued Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald.
Judge Buchwald was curiously silent when Twitter decided it was above the law, banning Trump’s account while he was still the sitting president in January 2021, on the basis of how his tweets might be “received and interpreted.”
Trump’s tweets “must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence,” Twitter argued, citing his “pattern of behavior” to argue that they amount to “glorification of violence.”
Before removing the account and all its content altogether, Twitter – as well as Facebook and YouTube – outright deleted Trump’s video messages in which he called for his supporters to stay peaceful and respect law and order. Now that those are gone, the only narrative out there is the one pushed by mainstream media and Democrats, who claim Trump “incited insurrection” at the Capitol on January 6.
In the run-up to the 2020 US election, Twitter locked out the New York Post over a legitimate story about Hunter Biden and Ukraine; slapped a label insisting that massive changes to voting procedures were “safe and secure” – by sheer coincidence, in line with the effort to “fortify” the vote and ensure the “proper” outcome – and labeled any questions about the result as “disputed” before eventually banning those who asked them.
Twitter has since degenerated into a partisan echo chamber, where political trends are without exception the Democrat talking points of the day, often astroturfed by paid activists. Ostensibly a platform and not a publisher, their “What’s happening” sidebar editorializes constantly.
For example, earlier this week President Joe Biden seemed unable to remember the name or title of his defense secretary, who was standing right behind him. Through the lens of Twitter, that became the story of that one time Trump called the Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple,” as that’s what “people” were ostensibly talking about instead. Public square? More like loudspeakers blaring official propaganda from every lamppost.
They’re not the only Silicon Valley company to think itself above the law, or more powerful than entire countries. Witness the recent showdown between Facebook and Australia, in which Mark Zuckerberg sought to bully Canberra into abandoning plans to force online platforms to pay for news content. Perhaps Jack Dorsey is thinking he can do the same with Moscow.
Whatever the outcome of this showdown, don’t let anyone gaslight you into thinking it has anything to do with freedom of “online public conversation.” Free speech was a fundamental value of the American Republic, but that is manifestly no longer the case in the entity that has now replaced it, better known as Our Democracy. Silicon Valley supported this revolutionary change. It is now merely reaping what it has sown.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator
Hypocritical Outrage over Khashoggi’s Assassination
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 9, 2021
The mainstream media is outraged over President Biden’s decision to not level sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his purported assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was a prominent columnist for the Washington Post. The CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered the assassination but U.S. officials have sanctioned only lower-level Saudi officials, choosing to leave bin Salman untouched by U.S. sanctions.
The outrage is a model of the hypocrisy that pervades the mainstream media. After all, these people just block out of their minds that the U.S. national-security state is every bit as brutal as Saudi officials are. Moreover, when it comes to the number of state-sponsored assassinations carried out on an annual basis, bin Salman and Saudi Arabia don’t even come close to matching those carried out by the world’s assassination nation.
Just look at the state-sponsored assassinations that are carried out by the Pentagon and the CIA in the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan every month. They have become so normalized — so much a regular part of American life — that the mainstream press has become totally blasé about them. No moral outrage at all.
Of course, Pentagon and CIA officials, along with their acolytes in the mainstream press, would respond, “Jacob, we are only killing terrorists. The Saudis killed an innocent man.”
Oh? And who exactly is a “terrorist.” Is it someone who criticizes a regime? Or is it someone who actually commits a terrorist act? And who makes that determination? If bin Salman concluded that Khashoggi was a terrorist who was trying to bring down the Saudi regime, would the U.S. mainstream press be coming to his defense?
Let’s consider the U.S. assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman. Both of them were U.S. citizens, just as Khashoggi was a Saudi citizen. Where is the outrage among the mainstream press over those two assassinations of American citizens at the hands of their own government?
Oh yes, U.S. officials and their assets in the mainstream press would say that Anwar al-Awlaki was a terrorist. Really? What does that mean? Does it mean that he criticized the U.S. national-security state for its brutal imperialist policies? Or does it mean that he actually engaged in criminal acts of terrorism? If that is the case, who made that determination? I don’t recall there ever being criminal trial in which an American jury listened to evidence and concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that al-Awlaki was guilty of some act of terrorism. All I recall was that U.S. officials concluded that al-Awlaki was a terrorist and, therefore, needed to have his life snuffed out. I also recall that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its customary deference to the authority of the national-security establishment, affirmed the decision to assassinate this American citizen, which snuffed out his life without any due process of law.
U.S. officials claim that 16-year-old Abdulhahman was the unfortunate collateral damage from the U.S. assassination of someone nearby. Even if that’s true — and it might not be — what was the justification for firing a missile at that person, especially knowing that it would end up killing everyone around him? Who died and made the Pentagon and the CIA the deciders of life and death of other people?
The fact is that U.S. and Saudi officials have no business assassinating anyone. The U.S. mainstream press is good at recognizing the wrongfulness of assassinating Khashoggi. Their loyalty to the Pentagon and the CIA, however, has given them a moral blindness that prevents them from recognizing the wrongfulness of state-sponsored assassinations carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment.
It’s also revealing that the mainstream press is calling for sanctions to be imposed on bin Salman but not calling for terminating the U.S. government’s armed sales to the Saudi regime. Yet, it’s those weapons that help the Saudi regime maintain its brutal tyranny over the Saudi people. And remember: the U.S. mainstream press is always calling for new gun-control measures — except when it comes to the U.S. government’s sales of guns to overseas pro-U.S. tyrants.
Notice also that the U.S. government continues to send U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid to brutal and tyrannical regimes, such as to Egypt’s tyrannical military dictatorship. That foreign aid helps to maintain the brutal tyranny that is enforced against the citizens under those regimes. No outrage there among the U.S. mainstream press. On the contrary, they continue to support foreign aid being sent to brutal and tyrannical pro-U.S. regimes.
It’s all just a valuable lesson in what can be called Hypocrisy 101.
The REAL “Lunatic Fringe”, and where to find it
The anti-Lockdown protests in Dublin
By Gary Jordan | OffGuardian | March 5, 2021
On Sunday, an irate Irish society finally said ‘no more’. For a year they had been subjected to a criminally long lockdown to the detriment of their physical, emotional, and financial well being.
Thousands of them took to the streets of Dublin to display their dissatisfaction with a Davos-owned political class and the police state they were held hostage in. Besides one or two trouble-makers the protests were peaceful and the message was loud and clear.
Enough is enough. The Irish did what they do best – demanded freedom, stood up to their oppressors and sang songs.
The oligarchs winced. Butterflies were doing somersaults in their overfed bellies. Panic set in and beads of sweat dripped down their deranged little heads. Their biggest fear was realised; the people refused to comply. As a result, what followed was an onslaught of desperation from every political party and establishment sycophant in the nation.
The usual rhetoric was thrown out; anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, far-right, etc, etc.
Yawn!
In fact, the head henchman of the political Fianna Fail and Fine Gael cartel, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, was in such a desperate state of mind that he screwed up his lines and said that the far-left were involved as well – much to the outrage of the far-left radicalised mainstream media, forcing him to withdraw his statement later.
It sure was a sight to behold, watching their faces as the reality dawned on them that at any point the people could, with the click of a finger, take back their power and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. It was only the inaction of a remaining portion of the population, consisting of indoctrinated zombies, rejecting any effort to reclaim their livelihoods, who saved their backsides.
But for sure it showed them, in case they needed confirmation, that if large enough numbers of people refuse their dictatorial, arbitrary mandates it crushes their illusory power. How would they explain that to the banking and pharmaceutical dynasties that they exist to serve?
In the fallout, widespread establishment media condemnation followed – for the greatest enemy of the tyrant is the advocate of liberty.
The act of peaceful protestors speaking out against elitist Fascism, the medical mafia and the Church of Scientism was too much for the Fourth Estate. It was a sin against the Cult of Covid and there was no excuse for any Irish person demanding the most basic of liberties, according to them.
With the millions and millions of dollars that disgraced Irish state broadcaster, RTE, have been receiving from the pharmaceutical and government vaccine PR institutes, the idea of peasants marching through the streets against the kakistocracy risked putting an end to the lucrative pandemic illusion.
No way could that be allowed to happen. The age-old Bolshevik tactic of using psychiatry to stifle resistance had to be rolled out.
So it was imperative that the protestors were viewed as being an unhinged small minority of the Irish population. Former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar called them ‘bonkers’. Others said they were part of ‘the lunatic fringe’.
Like all forms of Fascist propaganda, it was predictable.
But were those comments warranted?
Is it true that the estimated 4000-5000 people who took to the streets of Dublin on Sunday were all, in actual fact, nut-jobs? Were they dangerous conspiracy theorists? Were they expressing the views of a minority? Were they really ‘the lunatic fringe’?
I had to consider this and here’s what I concluded.
There is undoubtedly a fringe element of society in Ireland that are lunatics. There is undoubtedly a small group of people in our island nation that are, as Leo said, ‘bonkers’. But they are not the people who were on Grafton Street on Sunday.
Aside from the occasional follower of the US Military intelligence-created QAnon movement, the majority of people who marched on Sunday were hard-working, decent, law-abiding Irish men and women who voiced their discontent at the current status quo and who want to get back to making a living and chasing their dreams.
The ACTUAL fringe lunatics are, unfortunately, as they say, running the asylum. They are the people who are in charge. They are the ones who have proved to be utterly, completely, inarguably insane. It is these people who are completely bat-shit crazy. It is they who are bonkers.
Imagine, if you will, a portion of the population who are so helplessly detached from reality that they would shut down the economy of a nation, plunge its people into joblessness and destitution and keep them living under North Korean-style, Communist travel restrictions, using the pretence of a flu virus with a 99.98% survival rate for those who are infected.
Imagine being so severely sick in the head, as Professor Anthony Staines of Dublin City University (DCU) evidently is, that you would encourage your colleagues in private messages, soon leaked, to ‘increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty’ among the public to further mendacious medical agendas.
Imagine being as clinically insane as GSK and Eli Lilly-funded Professor Luke O’Neill of Trinity College, that you would advocate for attending music concerts, gigs and festivals in ridiculous plastic bubbles.
Imagine being so severely deluded, as he is, that you would suggest students attending their graduation night should wear non-removable bracelets to prove they’ve been vaccinated and then chuckle at the concept of civil liberties.
Imagine Looney Luke being so sociopathic that he would promote the idea of mandatory mask-wearing and then appear in public without wearing one himself. And all this only a few months after stating on live TV that masks are unnecessary for asymptomatic people.
The next display of Narcissistic Personality Disorder would come from Labour leader, Alan ‘Rules for Thee but Not For Me’ Kelly who, after tiresomely preaching to the masses about the importance of wearing their shame muzzles, appeared on public transport without wearing his, advising later he was too busy watching a game of football on his phone to be concerned about public health policy.
Then there’s Fine Gael politician Damien English who is so far gone that, during a live debate on national TV, dealing with the subject of retail outlets and their necessity during lockdown, he stated that clothes were not essential. Even the RTE host at the time, Miriam O’Callaghan, remarked ‘but, that seems mad Minister’ making us privy to a rare moment when the State broadcaster airs truthful content.
It gets worse.
Imagine a truly certifiable, callous, demented doctor, Chief Medical Officer and High Priest of the Covidians, Dr. Tony Holohan who is so psychopathically inclined and so devoid of empathy that he would refuse, unequivocally, to apologise for his negligent actions and subsequent cover-up which led to the death of multiple women, on his watch, due to the failures of the now notorious cervical smear scandal.
And consider a gang of thugs so mentally unbalanced they would turn up in their droves to forcibly block off public streets and intimidate passers-by, before harassing and abducting a lady (one in desperate need to open her business so she could pay her bills) in broad daylight and having no shame for it.
In a nation where a sinister gang of psychopathic hoodlums will deploy a patrol car and a riot van just to confiscate an electric bicycle from one citizen; search through the shopping bags of the elderly as they return from the supermarket; one that will humiliate and embarrass a victim of psychological illness to the point she commits suicide and one that will don balaclavas and wield batons and pepper spray while intimidating human rights and housing activists, perhaps the media and their government overlords are searching in the wrong places for the psychos in our society.
Then, we must also consider the deeply disturbed minds of the academics who are campaigning for the absolute subjugation of an entire nation. Consider the Independent Scientific Advisory Group (ISAG) and its zany wackos who want to see the nation subjected to further tyranny, with even more extreme restrictions on freedom of movement, as part of a bizarre and dangerous ‘Zero Covid’ push.
Ironically, and quite disconcertingly, one of the faces of this anti-human movement refers to herself as a human rights activist. Could you be any more dissociated from reality?
The men in white coats have a lot of work to do. This becomes obvious when we observe the Covidian sect known as NPHET (Ireland’s Coronavirus advisory group, who happen to dictate policy to a cuckolded government,) and their troubling desire to put muzzles on small children as young as four years of age, demanding that they are kept on all day for 7 to 8 hours, with no consideration for children with attention deficits or a history of trauma. Truly berserk.
Unsurprisingly, one of Ireland’s leading physicians, Dr. Gabriel Scally approves of these medieval measures on children. As a man who recently distributed a book known as Rules for Radicals to the fellow fanatics in his field, which in the introduction pays tribute to Lucifer, his support for inflicting torturous conditions on children can be expected.
We find more loose screws even at the very top of the ladder in Irish politics. When I say the top, of course, I mean the top that’s visible to the public eye, just before you reach the actual unelected government.
Here you’ll find Micheal Martin, the current Irish Taoiseach. Martin at times suffers from psychosis and lives in a land of make-believe. At one point he even suffered from false memory syndrome. In 2008, years after syphoning off and leeching from the Irish public, the banks in the nation went belly up and, inevitably (as banks do) turned to the government (read; taxpayer) for bailouts. Not according to Micheal Martin though.
In an obvious bout of neurosis, he argued that it never happened.
Assuming that this was a one-off, we moved on – until Micheal’s psychosis returned. This time he advised the public that the acts of torture, sexual abuse, imprisonment, slavery, rape, infanticide, child trafficking and GSK medical experimentation which occurred in the Catholic Church, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael-created Mother and Baby Institutions were a result of a profound failure of Irish ‘society’, insinuating that we were all to blame. He quickly corrected this after much backlash.
As a side note, GSK, despite their own documentation verifying the crimes against children, has declined to apologise for the horrors they carried out.
But what more can we expect from Micheal Martin – a clown who stands by the people of Belarus and their right to protest as he begrudges his own people that very same right.
You could fill up a funny farm with these people. But in their view, it’s the freedom-loving men and women of Ireland who are ‘bonkers’.
Leo himself is fit to be admitted. Who else, if not a disarranged, unzipped bozo, would stand in front of a nation of people economically and personally devastated by government policy during a supposed-pandemic and play silly games with celebrity millionaire associates on live press briefings.
As the nation buckled under the weight of a bought-and-paid-for, treasonous political class, Leo engaged in stagecraft, quoting Hollywood movie lines. If that’s not bonkers then I can’t say what is.
No wonder then Leo appears as a card-carrying member of the Young Leader program on the website of the World Economic Forum – founded by the stark raving mad son of a former Nazi Party member.
A keen student of war-mongering maniac Henry Kissinger, Klaus Schwab would grow into a man who has a need to read the mind of every human being alive and force them to eat insects. I guess we should judge Leo by the company he keeps.
How ironic it is that a man who often throws out the ‘far right’ label should be courted by an individual who was born in the 1930s Reich to a family highly regarded by the SS.
And then there’s the cuckoo climate extremists – a rabid cluster of fanatics who have lost the plot. Eamon Ryan is the perfect example of one. Absolutely nuts, he believes that the burning of fossil fuels, a practice that has existed in Ireland for literally thousands and thousands of years, is suddenly a life or death situation and if we don’t stop it we’ll all be doomed in the next 9 years.
As a result of this Ireland’s peat harvesting and production are to be brought to a halt and solid fuels are to be imported from overseas. This is the brainchild of the leader of the Green Party who believes, in his paranoid state of mind, that anything less would result in catastrophe.
To prevent such calamity, Eamon has also promised to take action that will force us to share a single car between ten families. This is all to make Ireland CO2 neutral, which will mean life itself cannot continue, as human beings, animals and plant life cannot exist without it.
The dangerous schizoids in charge of policy are completely bonkers. If any more proof of this is needed, then you only need to look at some of the agendas that they and those before them have signed the nation up to.
For example, Ireland is firmly committed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a push for Global Socialism and totalitarianism which promises a future in which ‘wealth is shared’ as part of what many Fabian progressives and academics in the nation believe should be the next ‘Great Leap Forward’ – referencing Chairman Mao Zedong of China’s movement which ended up causing the deaths of 45 million people.
In my book, The COVID-19 Illusion; A Cacophony of Lies, I show how the entire pandemic debacle is contrived in order to achieve these malevolent ends.
Then there’s the Irish government’s Industry 4.0 Strategy, a salute to Klaus Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset, which promises that soon ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’, living in a surveillance state among the Internet of Things and an A.I-driven dystopia.
This is the tomorrow envisioned by the mad hatters in control of the nation. No wonder they are so averse to the idea of a freedom.
Of course there’s Leo’s unhealthy obsession with having us all tagged, traced and tracked through his endorsement of the Mark of the Beast Vaccine Passport program, whilst ignoring the advice of the Council of Europe, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and many others who anticipate a tsunami of discrimination and an apartheid system – as is already being experienced in Israel.
In truth, Leo Varadkar and his cronies know full well that the protestors who marched on Sunday were not ‘bonkers’. He knows that they are part of an ever-growing segment of Irish people who are tiring of the powers-that-should-not-be.
In truth, Leo knows that those same people have the power to end his hustle at a moment’s notice.
In truth, Leo and his associates know that it is they who are insane. And as soon as the vast majority of Irish people wake up to this insanity and realise that it is destructive to their freedom, their liberties and their way of life, then it’s game over for him.
Leo knows this is not very far away.
The lunatic fringe, indeed.
How the US and Great Britain Instigate Coups Nowadays
By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 06.03.2021
Recently, the United States and Britain, actively using the propaganda tools that they possess, have increasingly begun to accuse Russia and China of interfering in their domestic affairs and election campaigns, and of effectively preparing coups in these countries. However, apart from making proclamatory statements, neither Washington nor London has presented any facts or documents that confirm these accusations, nor can they present them, since these accusations are false.
Along with that, documented information about complicity on the part of United States and Britain in various coups that were being set up has begun to appear more frequently in publicly accessible reports in various media outlets.
For example, according to the recent publication in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, UN investigators found out that in 2019 elite fighters from the American Erik Prince’s private military company Blackwater, infamous for their actions during the American occupation of Iraq and several other states, had to take action twice to eliminate the Government of National Accord, which is recognized by the international community. But this “Project Opus” failed…
A group of UN experts studying violations of the UN arms embargo against Libya learned that in the Libyan war in recent years there has been a second, secret front to directly get rid of officials and commanders of the Government of National Accord that rules in Tripoli. “Project Opus” specifically called for delivering 20 elite Blackwater fighters to sites near Tripoli in June 2019 to conduct operations. The officers contacted by the German newspaper in Benghazi confirmed the arrival of 20 fighters from England and South Africa, and one American, in June 2019. The second group, consisting of snipers and fighters trained to fight behind enemy lines, flew to Benghazi in April 2020 and then headed off to the front near Tripoli. On April 24, 2020, 13 French citizens reached the Libyan-Tunisian border and presented themselves as diplomats to the Tunisian border guards, even though they carried heavy weapons. They were arrested, but under diplomatic pressure from Paris they were allowed to leave for Tunisia.
In early May 2020, the world media exploded with reports: another attempt at a military invasion of Venezuela was thwarted, Washington’s mercenaries were captured by the Venezuelan authorities, the United States wanted to repeat the operation in Cochinos Bay (the so-called attempt by the US Central Intelligence Agency to land Cuban emigrants in the Bay of Pigs, something which was aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro). It is worth remembering how on May 3 mercenaries from the American private military company Silvercorp tried to land on the coast of Venezuela near the city of La Guaira, which is located just 32 kilometers from Caracas. Sixty armed, well-equipped militants with satellite phones and fake documents planned to reach the capital and capture the Venezuelan president for his subsequent transfer to the United States. Two of those arrested, Airan Berry and Luke Denman, were US citizens that had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. On May 4, American media interviewed the former US special forces fighter and the head of the Silvercorp PMC, Jordan Goodrow, who trained these fighters in Colombia. Goodrow declared that the goal of “Operation Gideon” was to organize raids into Venezuela to fight “the regime”. The former special forces soldier showed an eight-page $213 million contract signed in October 2019 by Washington-backed self-proclaimed Venezuelan “president” Juan Guaido and Donald Trump’s political advisers. On March 23, the Colombian authorities confiscated an entire arsenal on their territory that was specifically meant for the mercenaries. The mercenaries were equipped fairly well.
The Washington Post also published a document according to which members of the Venezuelan opposition, following negotiations, in October 2019 entered into a deal with the American private military company Silvercorp, located in Florida. The PMC employees were supposed to infiltrate the territory of Venezuela to overthrow the country’s legitimate president, Nicolas Maduro.
These events in Venezuela were recently well assessed by Bloomberg :
“One would hope that the Central Intelligence Agency could do better than a farcical scheme that was disowned by the Venezuelan opposition, penetrated by regime security forces and disrupted as soon as it began. Yet this trivial episode invites us to think seriously about the role of covert intervention and regime change in US policy.”
Exposing these subversive activities by Blackwater and other US and British mercenaries shows that they are usually committed by former military personnel and criminals involved in a wide variety of activities around the world. They act as bodyguards, protecting people and businesses in “hot spots” (like oil-producing areas off the coast of Nigeria and Sudan), as well as convoys and freight shipments in war zones, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since from the very beginning of hostilities in the region both public opinion in the United States and Democrats in Congress viewed sending their own soldiers to hot spots extremely unfavorably, they had to look for replacements elsewhere.
American wars in the beginning of the 21st century have become a real gold mine for these organizations, which have turned from bands of thugs that toppled shaky “cannibalistic” regimes in Africa during the Cold War into real international corporations. They represent a significant benefit for the United States and its Western allies leading the war, since they consist of veterans that are already experienced – military professionals who have not found a niche for themselves in civilian life. In addition, these organizations are considered private enterprises, and therefore are not accountable to Congress, so the losses these soldiers incur are not included in the total number of casualties for a country’s conventional army, which makes it possible to give a more favorable representation of the situation in a war zone at home. Public opinion in the United States has long called for rejecting the services these companies provide, and reinforcing transparency in their activities. The UN has repeatedly raised the issue of revising the definition of “mercenary”, and banning organizations like Blackwater, over the past several years – but so far it has not yet achieved any significant results.
Besides these examples of Washington’s attempts to instigate a military coup in other countries, nowadays a number of documents have been raised for public review related to the period of the height of the US intervention in Syria in 2014, when Assad’s forces were growing weaker and Damascus was under the threat of capture by Islamists that the West nurtured and supported. For example, the Middle East Eye agency has shown quite convincingly – and with documentary evidence – how during a British-supported operation called Sarkha (Scream), the media tried to turn the Alawites against Assad, and by doing so accomplish a coup in Syria. The publication gives official documents that attest to the social media “protest movement” that was actually created under the authority of the British government. The very same scenario for Operation Sarkha was developed by the American company Pechter Polls of Princeton (New Jersey, USA), which was working under a contract with the British government. The contract for subversive work in Syria was initially administered by the Military Strategic Effects department at the UK Department of Defense, and then by the British government-run The Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, whose objective is to
“resolve conflicts that threaten the Great Britain’s interests.” The project’s budget was £600,000 ($746,000) per year. The published documents indicate that the goal of the operations was “supporting the activities of the Syrian opposition media to reach an audience in Syria… Platforms for this work were created jointly by the UK, USA, and Canada to strengthen popular resentment toward the Assad regime.”
In another issue of the Middle East Eye, documents obtained by the publication show how British contractors hired Syrian citizens who were journalists to promote “moderate opposition” – often without their knowledge. Contracts with these mercenaries were entered into by the British Foreign Office, and were managed by the country’s Ministry of Defense, sometimes by military intelligence officers, paying small amounts of money to the contractors.
After getting to know everything indicated above, the question naturally arises: who exactly is really interfering in the affairs of other states? And how objective is the propaganda coming from Washington and London, as well as their foreign policy as a whole?
Russia will take ‘tough measures’ against German media if Berlin impedes work of Russian journalists
RT | March 4, 2021
Moscow sees the closure of RT-affiliated companies’ accounts by a German bank as “political pressure” on Russia and will react in kind if the work of the Russian media in Germany is impeded, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
“We consider such an openly hostile attitude … toward media, including the Russian ones, unacceptable,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news briefing on Thursday. She referred to the decision of the German Commerzbank to close the accounts of RT’s video agency Ruptly and RT DE Productions GmbH which runs the German-language website by May 31.
Such actions are an “element of political pressure” on journalists and they constitute a “violation of Germany’s commitment to protect the freedom of speech,” Zakharova said.
The Commerzbank decision came just about a month after RT announced its plans to launch a German-language TV channel later this year.
Zakharova said that it is such plans that apparently sparked an angry reaction among the “anti-Russian” forces within the German media and establishment and have led to what she described as a “persecution” campaign.
“All actions of the Russian broadcaster were legally valid. Therefore, such a primitive approach apparently was chosen to obstruct its work.”
RT has been trying to find a replacement for Commerzbank, but several financial institutions have either ignored RT’s inquiries or refused to open accounts on its behalf.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has called on Berlin to stop obstructing the work of Russian journalists in Germany and lift all restrictions imposed against the Russian media. “Otherwise, we will have to take tough reciprocal measures against German media working in Russia,” Zakharova warned.
Russia has its own concerns about the work of the German media and German journalists on its territory, Zakharova noted. She added, though, that all such issues are resolved in accordance with the law and on the basis of “mutual respect” and dialogue.
“We would very much like to see Germany doing the same,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman added.
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Guaido’s true colors: “President” to fix Venezuelan relations with Israel
By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | February 13, 2019
Caracas – In an interview over the weekend, “interim President” of Venezuela Juan Guaido promised he would work on restoring relations with Israel.
Despite not actually having a government or being in any type of official position of power within Venezuela Juan Guaido is still somehow making big promises. Last week it was the promise to sell oil he doesn’t control to the US and this week he is setting foreign policy for a state, a military, and a diplomatic core that he doesn’t have.
Regardless of Juan Guaido’s material position, Israel has been more than willing to indulge in the US fantasy in Venezuela and was one of the early states to recognize the fraud as “interim President.” Now it seems Guaido is more than willing to repay the favor should he ever actually hold office.
Guaido made this promise in a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper where he told the interviewer that he was “very happy to announce that the process of stabilizing relations with Israel is in full swing.” While what exactly that means when you’re a President with no power is rather ambiguous, for some reason Guaido has said restoring relations “is very important for us.”
Regardless of all these factors, there are still several reasons the new President has made this a high priority. Even without any actual diplomatic staff recognized by the state, Guaidó has still been in contact with Israel and has even discussed opening a new Venezuelan embassy in Israel, saying it “is one of the subjects we are talking about.”
Another reason Guaidó claims he wants to restore relations with the Zionists is due to the fact that there “are many Venezuelans in Israel and many Jews in Venezuela.”
According to Guaidó, this Venezuelan Jewish community “is very active and prosperous”… continue
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