Andi Olluri argues that the Gaza “peace process” serves as a propaganda framework that legitimizes Israeli occupation and Western policy objectives while presenting Palestinian surrender and disarmament as prerequisites for peace. Media and political elites, he contends, have systematically reframed ongoing violence, occupation, and collective punishment as diplomacy, while marginalizing Palestinian proposals for political settlement.
In Gaza, “Israel” has effectively been working toward the goal they have had since day one, namely “not fighting a terrorist organization but against the State of Gaza”, “not provide the other side with any capability that prolongs its life” and thus effectively fight against “not only Hamas fighters with weapons”, but “the entire Gaza population”, quoting Giora Eiland, former Israeli head of the National Security Council.
This has been the consistent goal ever since, stated over and over again by the top Israeli leadership. “We are deep inside Gaza and will never leave all of Gaza – that will not happen,” in the words of War Minister Israel Katz. In short, “full conquest of the Gaza Strip, to establish Israeli control over all the territory of the Strip”, as the government explained in April.
The stage for illegal “full conquest of the Gaza strip” was set last fall, when the international community approved of the US Board of Peace (BoP) – Orwell would have loved that one. This brilliant propaganda coup was achieved after we killed at least 200,000 Palestinians, according to Western intelligence estimates, and physically eradicated the country in a war with the specific purpose of ethnic cleansing, and with sadism that would have put Pol Pot to shame.
The background happens to be quite revealing, and is of course completely forgotten now – minimal reporting as there was to begin with. Western designs and plans to control Gaza were basically declared to be tantamount to lawless aggression. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the West is “under obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” and “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal” occupation and attack. The ICJ also ordered to immediately halt “financial, economic, military or technological aid to the State of Israel, and punish such violations” and that Western terror states must pay “full reparation” to the Palestinians.
Naturally, then, the West immediately sent tens of billions in military aid to “Israel” – and engaged directly in military operations and occupation administration, as Western intellectuals marched further with self-adulation of our service for international law and democracy. The story was, incidentally, similar to when the International Criminal Court (ICC) declared an arrest warrant for Western-supported Israeli terrorists and war criminals. In that case, the US, Britain, and the EU simply destroyed the court (once a darling, when it went after Russia) with crushing sanctions, outright threats, and carefully orchestrated smear campaigns.
Western leaders were refreshingly honest, and noted that their official stance here is that the court “is for Africa and thugs like Putin,” according to Senator Lindsey Graham. That is entirely correct: we must pretend to care about international law when condemning official enemies, and make sure to keep quiet when we conduct global gangsterism.
This entire episode was plainly too embarrassing to be remembered, and had to be censored into total historical oblivion – an easy task for the Western doctrinal system. On full display is the utter servility and cowardice of the media and intellectual classes, as they joined their state in its rampage against international law, and defenseless people withstanding Western aggression.
Well, after all of these triumphs, the BoP could be created. Its founding documents – as confirmed by the subsequent events, too – made clear that Gaza has no right to self-defense, and that Israeli-American occupation could continue and in fact expand. Thus, the very purpose of the BoP was to enable maintaining the situation created by “Israel’s” illegal attack, in defiance of the world court – and to the deafening praise and awe of the media.
Thus, Dennis Ross, senior US Middle East diplomat and apologist for Western atrocities, celebrated that the BoP “is reason for hope,” and that the “constellation of force” consisting of “a powerful United States” with its Israeli and Arab satellites “are also cause for optimism.” Not everything is so glitzy, however, and there is a problem: “Hamas … could try to violate the cease-fire’s various terms”. If “commitment from Hamas” can be ensured, then we will be able to enforce the “peace plan”, to quote the European Council on Foreign Relations, the leading European policy forum.
Slaughtering hundreds of thousands in an illegal war of extermination, starving the population, destroying the courts that came in our way is no issue of concern and merits not one phrase in the journals of opinion or the public debate. Only “hope” and admiration of our “force” is permissible after a successful genocide.
The fact that we can even talk of a “peace plan” organized by the attackers ethnically cleansing the victim is a logical impossibility in itself. It is comparable only to, say, the Nazi press being filled with “optimism” as the Führer implements his “peace plan” after he successfully conquered Norway. The plain absurdity of it all is too spectacular even to talk about, but cannot be perceived in a society as deeply indoctrinated as ours. Stating the simple truth is simply incomprehensible, comparable to speaking a foreign language or imagining a “round square”.
We read, without anyone raising even an eyebrow, that this is the “best chance .. in decades to create a Gaza controlled not by Hamas or Israel, but by its people” (a total lie, of course). “For the first time in a long while, there are some bright lights in Gaza”, and therefore “any sensible person should wish success for the Board of Peace”, as liberal Washington Post’s David Ignatiusput it. If this can be achieved through crushing the indigenous resistance, Hamas, then “that would be a historic feat indeed” – to use the words of Cambridge’s Chair of International Law professor Marc Weller, illustrating his contempt for court orders and international law.
The “best chance” for a free Gaza, then, is not to stop the attack, occupation and then colonization, followed by reparations for this crime of this century. Or perhaps to follow the orders of the world court, which would in fact mandate all of these things. Rather, it is to carry out this “war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians” as the top Israeli political echelon itself describes it, and then impose a capitulation ultimatum on the population that has not yet been killed and starved to death. Only then can we celebrate the “bright lights in Gaza”.
We witness with clarity the utter irrelevance and disregard for concepts such as illegal aggression, mass slaughter, and international law among Western intellectuals. This is required for anybody wishing to be regarded as a respected intellectual, be granted a nice law professorship at an elite university or gain access to the media; otherwise you cannot be part of the “debate”.
Well, fast forward to today. The dear Leader declared that “peace” had been achieved and that we ought to look away, and naturally loyal media dutifully followed order. Careful studies showed that Western media coverage of Gaza then immediately dropped, while daily Israeli massacres in Gaza (around 1,000 murdered and more than 2,500 wounded as of writing) continue since November 2025, virtually without a whisper of criticism.
The only issue of concern is whether Hamas will “agree” to disarm or not. Translating that from Newspeak to English: will our victim agree to give up all resistance to our invasion and occupation plans, thus alone sticking to our fraudulent version of the accords, as we violate their terms every day? That is the meaning of the entire “debate” about Hamas’ disarmament when you put the euphemisms aside.
In short: the whole purpose of the fraudulent “ceasefire” designed to lower Hamas’ guard is thus to force the Palestinians to be “implementers of the decisions of others,” leaving them “once again not at all the masters of their own fate” (UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths), and thus “prevent a Palestinian state,” according to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a terrorist culture such as this, in which a leading doctrine is that no one has the right to defend themselves from Western attack, it is natural that we are furious and concerned at the slightest sign that the Palestinians should try to defend themselves instead of capitulating. On this issue, near 100% consensus reigns throughout the entire political spectrum.
For example, former Middle East correspondent for AP, Dan Perry, berated that “Hamas is making a mockery of … Trump’s plan” – not the US and “Israel”, of course. The Palestinians, then, “are still trapped under the boot of a jihadist mafia that destroyed their lives” – again, not the Western genocide and war of extermination – and therefore “Israel will never agree to a Palestinian state as long as Hamas remains an armed militia with any prospect of again seizing control.”
Since everybody has already internalized the understanding that no one has the right to self-defense against Western attack, it is pointless to ask why Hamas and the Palestinians must accept the existence of a Western-armed proxy state occupying it and launching constant wars of aggression against the civilian population, deemed illegal by the world court. Or, why Palestinians must accept the attacker’s murderous “plan” that they have no right to dictate. Or, why “Israel” and the West, the aggressors, should not be held to the same standard as the occupied and attacked, and be forced to disarm as they launch multiple wars of aggression in the region. These suggestions are not denied; rather they cannot be thought in the minds of Western elites – a considerable achievement in the history of brainwashing.
Consider Dennis Ross and David Makovsky – leading foreign policy “experts” and senior Obama Middle East advisors. “The success” of the “peace plan” will “depend on the disarmament of Hamas,” they said, warning that “if Hamas chooses not to disarm and Gaza does not reunify, the future looks bleak.” Similarly, New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman was worried: “Do I think it [disarming Hamas] would be easy? Of course not. Do I think the Palestinians have an aged, corrupt leadership that needs replacing, energizing and reforming — and have plenty to answer for themselves for their own plight? I sure do.” Therefore, “disarmament” must be forced – perhaps without Netanyahu – so that the West may “consolidate any strategic gains.”
Similarly, Elliot Abrams and his colleagues were worried that the Palestinian Resistance “has largely refused to give up its weapons … As a result, the IDF cannot pull out of Gaza.” Furthermore, “there is no easy way to keep Hamas down” since “Hamas, after all, is as unyielding and belligerent as terrorist groups come.”
Putting aside the factual falsifications, let’s consider this logic, which everyone regards as correct. By their own standard, then, Palestine – and a host of others being attacked by the West, such as Iran, Yemen, Lebanon – would have to invade “Israel”, kill (in proportion) 1 million Israelis, physically annihilate most of “Israel”, occupy it and demand that the population capitulates, as well as drop bombs on its financiers in Washington, Brussels, London and so on. “Israel, after all, is as unyielding and belligerent as terrorist” states “come”, and it has “largely refused to give up its weapons” and stop its aggression in accordance with the ICJ orders, so as a result, Hamas cannot pull out of Tel Aviv.
But none of this can be discussed – surely not in any publication that can reach a general audience – since the level of fanaticism, distortion and genocidal frenzy is much too high among Western political and cultural circles.
In other words, only tactical debate over how we best crush our victim and ensure that they will not be able to fight back is permitted to be printed. It is far beyond conceivable that there would be any tactical debate anywhere over how the Palestinians – the party being attacked and ethnically cleansed – could best defeat “Israel” and its Western masters, and that we should send them military aid to do so.
Consider, for example, the leading Middle East “specialist” Julie Norman. She explained that it “was always likely to be difficult to move from the initial ceasefire to the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan.” Reason? Primarily because “Hamas rejected a disarmament plan” by “the US-led ‘Board of Peace’.” Therefore, “there is no peace process on the horizon, nor is there a political pathway available to Hamas if the group lays down its arms.”
In short, “Gaza will also need to deradicalize” and have their weapons removed – only then can “sustainable peace” and the “peace process” be fulfilled (The Atlantic ).
The “peace process” is a funny word used in political discourse. It simply means whatever the West happens to be saying. If “Israel”, Washington, the EU have physically destroyed a country, killed a tenth of the population (almost all civilians), blocked the ICJ orders to stop the illegal occupation, vetoed all diplomatic resolutions at the UN Security Council (UNSC), and then demanded that those left alive in Gaza unconditionally surrender – then that is the “peace process” per definition.
Also, notice that everyone takes for granted as a matter of fact that Hamas has not been willing to accept a political resolution through diplomacy. That fairy tale – which is a total inversion of reality and nurtured in the media – is a remarkable propaganda coup when we look at the actual facts. Unfortunately, the actual historical record is almost uncorrectable thanks to the dishonesty of the Western media and intellectual classes, which have done an impressive job at distorting the plain facts, as they must.
In the real world, the US and “Israel”, with their enthusiastic European sponsors, have rejected all proposals from Hamas, the UNSC, the Arab League, and so on, all of them in fact absurdly accommodating to “Israel” and sometimes going beyond the maximalist and rejectionist claims made even by the Israelis. For the sake of brevity, I will restrict myself to the history spanning one year prior to today, but this has been constant throughout the entire war of extermination in Gaza.
During the spring of 2025, Hamas agreed to the massive reconstruction plan offered by the Arab League, which stipulated that Hamas leave power and be replaced by a technocratic “committee” – which was immediately rejected by the US and “Israel” since it obstructed “ethnic cleansing” of Gazan Palestinians “under any pretext or justification.”
Hamas offered a separate proposal to “end the war in Gaza” with a five-year truce, as well as to “free all hostages at once.”
In September, Hamas repeated its “readiness for a comprehensive deal” releasing “all” captives and ceding all power over Gaza “immediately”, thus “ending war”, in exchange for an end to the Israeli occupation.
In December, Hamas offered “a guarantee that no weapon will be fired from Gaza against Israel, and it will do that by burying the weapons”, and a total truce “for seven to ten years between Gaza and Israel, and Hamas will not use the weapons.”
This month, May, the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, “called for negotiations over the disarmament of Hamas and other groups to be tied to the granting of political rights for the Palestinian people ‘within the national framework,’ as well as to commitments that the people of Gaza would no longer be killed.”
All of these proposals were flatly rejected by the West and “Israel” (thus automatically banning it from history and mainstream reporting too), offering in return only maximalistic demands that we know the Palestinians cannot accept. That is, disarmament and defenselessness before they are given any guarantees in return. They must trust in Washington and Tel Aviv to engage in good behavior and abide by treaties and agreements. Western propagandists cannot comprehend why the Palestinians do not happily agree to this sign of our generosity and humanism, having swallowed their own lofty and embarrassing rhetoric about “peace offers.” But victims have no difficulty in seeing right through the reality which it tries to mask, having witnessed previous “cease-fires” broken by Israel in Gaza, “diplomacy” in Iran, Lebanon and so on.
In fact, Hamas’ compliant stance in diplomatic negotiations is not only infinitely more forthcoming than “Israel’s”, but perhaps unique in modern history. Faced with a lawless aggressor and the world’s superpower waging a war with the intent of – and in practice carrying out – physical eradication of its country, Hamas is willing to guarantee its security, agree to have no means of self-defense against future attack and so on. They do not even demand that “Israel” give back the lands it illegally occupies, nor that it pays reparations, which is the minimum required action as determined by the ICJ court ruling. Most shockingly, Hamas does not even demand that the US and “Israel”, the aggressors that constantly disregard agreements and treaties and attack multiple countries in the region, disarm themselves. That would be the bare minimum any sane person observing the situation would require.
The situation is clear: Hamas’ readiness to accommodate in diplomatic negotiations is – as far as I know – unique in modern political history, agreeing to concessions more far-reaching than, say, the Versailles Treaty. And they cannot demand, and so they do not demand, even the minimal rights they would have in any honest negotiation with the US and “Israel”, since the Western states would never tolerate even the thought of it.
But these trivially obvious truths, and the vast documentation to illustrate them, cannot be mentioned in a cultural climate as ours, where the commitment to terror and lawlessness flourishes and where the population must remain carefully protected from the dangerous realm of fact.
In short, “Israel has effectively been given a licence to torture Palestinians” and continue their war of extermination, “because most of your governments, your ministers, have allowed it”, as UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese put it (the US sanctioned her).
It is through such propaganda techniques and distortions discussed here, that the media and intellectuals have presented the government’s necessary propaganda version of the “peace process.” They have thereby “allowed” for our governments to divert attention away from the basic reality of what is happening, as they exterminate Gaza under the thin facade of “diplomacy.”
In 2022, the U.S. provoked Moscow to invade Ukraine so Washington could attempt to destroy Russia’s economy with sanctions, orchestrate worldwide condemnation in an information war and lead a proxy ground operation to bleed Russia — all part of an attempt to bring down its government.
In case there’s any doubt that this is the goal, recall what President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government said right after Russia’s intervention.
On the day Russia invaded, Biden admitted that the sanctions weren’t meant to prevent an invasion. “No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening. … This is going to take time. And we have to show resolve so he [Putin] knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them. That’s what this is all about.”
On March 1, [2022] Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the sanctions on Russia “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.”
Biden said on March 26, 2022 at the Royal Castle in Warsaw: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
A month later Biden confirmed that the purpose of the draconian U.S. sanctions on Russia was never to prevent the invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. needed to activate its plans, but to punish Russia, get its people to rise up against Putin and ultimately to restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.
“Let’s get something straight,” Biden said. “I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter. … The maintenance of sanctions, the increasing the pain … we will sustain what we’re doing not just next month, the following month, but for the remainder of this entire year. That’s what will stop him.” Of course it’s taken NATO more than a year but they haven’t given up.
The United States could have easily stopped Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s civil war from happening by doing four things: forcing implementation of the 8-year old Minsk peace accords; dissolving extreme right Ukrainian militias; saying Ukraine would not join NATO and engaging Russia in serious negotiations over Moscow’s proposed December 2021 treaties about a new security architecture in Europe. Russia threatened a “technical/military” response if NATO and the U.S. did not take those two treaty proposals seriously.
So the U.S. knew Russia would invade if it rejected those proposals, which called for Ukraine not to join NATO, for missiles in Poland and Romania to be removed and NATO troops in Eastern Europe withdrawn. Instead, the U.S. refused to move the missiles and provocatively sent even more NATO forces to Eastern Europe, knowing full well it would lead to war. Washington was singularly uninterested in preventing Russia’s invasion.
Instead the U.S. essentially set a trap for Russia. Using the precedents of the Afghan trap set for the Soviets in 1979 and the Kuwait trap set for Saddam Hussein in 1990, the U.S. forced Russia’s hand by rejecting the treaty proposals while thousands of Ukrainian troops (Russia claimed as many as 122,00) amassed for an offensive against ethnic Russians in Donbass. Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022.
On March 16, 2022 — the same day it was revealed Russia and Ukraine had worked out a 15-point peace plan that later resulted in a tentative agreement to end the war — Biden announced another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine. As we now know, Emmanuel Macron tricked Putin into withdrawing his troops from outside Kiev to make that agreement work, only for Boris Johnson to intervene to stop the deal once the troops had been removed.
Having lost on the ground in Donbass over the subsequent four years, NATO has turned to an air war, hitting targets deep inside Russia with NATO-operated, long-range missiles and swarms of drones fired from Ukrainian territory. These attacks have damaged Russia’s oil exports and killed civilians. The most prominent provocation was last week in Donbass in which NATO and Ukraine slaughtered 21 Russian students in their sleep.
As our guest Scott Ritter pointed out, these attacks are designed to put internal political pressure on Putin. Either he acts more decisively, or risks his hold on power. Thus Russia has warned embassies in Kiev to evacuate their personnel as Moscow threatens to hit “decision-making centers” in the Ukrainian capital. There are also hardline demands on Putin to hit facilities in Germany and Britain that provided the munitions that murdered the students.
Until now Putin has studiously avoided direct war with NATO. But in the same way that NATO provoked Russia to invade in 2022, NATO now appears to be provoking Russia to strike a NATO country to start a direct war with the aim of strategically defeating Moscow.
Either way Europe thinks it may get what it wants. If Putin doesn’t act against Europe it could threaten his position at home. And if he does hit Europe it could be the casus belli Europe seeks for a direct NATO-Russia war. German and British generals tell their nations to be ready for conflict with Moscow by 2029.
Last week an errant drone — ostensibly Russian — hit a Romanian apartment building near the Ukrainian border. All hell broke loose with calls for an invocation of NATO’s Article 5. It could be a harbinger of what would come if Russia not only devastates Kiev, but conventionally attacks a NATO nation too.
Absent the provocative NATO attacks on Russia, Moscow has shown zero interet in threatening war on Europe.
The big questions are: How would Europe react if decision-making centers are wiped out in Kiev? How would the United States react if Russia hits a NATO country? Donald Trump is no fan of NATO, but would he succumb to pressure from Europe, Congress and his cabinet to directly attack Russia? Without the U.S., NATO could hardly act.
In provoking Moscow with increasingly effective strikes deep inside Russia, why are Britain and Germany — the NATO ringleaders — seemingly so confident that direct war with Russia would not turn nuclear?
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus article “Something ‘unprecedented’ is now happening to Earth’s rotation, scientists say” claims that climate change is causing an “unprecedented” slowing of Earth’s rotation by 1.33 milliseconds per century, something not seen in 3.6 million years. This is false. The data show that millisecond-scale variations in Earth’s length of day are routine, naturally occurring, and both technologically and biologically insignificant.
The BBC sensationalizes the issue as something extraordinary, stating that today’s rate of change is “unequivocally” unlike anything in millions of years. But Earth’s rotation has never been constant. As explained in the Climate Realismrebuttal to Euronews on the same topic, seasonal atmospheric mass redistribution alone produces annual variations of 0.5 to 1 millisecond. Interannual ENSO shifts add another ±0.3 to 0.5 milliseconds. Decadal core-mantle coupling produces swings of 3 to 4 milliseconds. These are measured, observed phenomena, not model projections.
In that context, 1.33 milliseconds per century is not planetary destabilization. It is background noise, certainly nothing that would be noticed by even the most sensitive ecosystem or living being.
The BBC emphasizes that melting ice shifts mass toward the equator, comparing it to a spinning skater extending their arms. That physics analogy is correct in principle. What is incorrect is the implication that this is some new geophysical regime. Earth’s length of day has fluctuated throughout recorded history due to tidal friction from the Moon, atmospheric angular momentum exchange, ocean circulation, and core dynamics. The long-term tidal braking trend alone is about +1.7 to +1.8 milliseconds per century based on 2,500 years of eclipse records, a rate comparable to or larger than the BBC’s headline number.
Even more inconvenient for the narrative is the recent acceleration of Earth’s rotation. As noted in the Climate Realism piece, June 29, 2022 was the shortest day ever recorded in the atomic timekeeping era, about 1.59 milliseconds shorter than 86,400 seconds. If climate change were producing a simple, monotonic slowdown, we would not be seeing record-setting shorter days in the same decade.
The BBC also attempts to inflate the significance of the change by invoking dramatic metaphors. One researcher is quoted comparing the energy involved to a catastrophic earthquake, saying: “The change in the Earth’s rotational energy is equivalent to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.” This is nothing but irresponsible doom mongering. The comparison is not about destructive force, as the article admits, but about abstract energy equivalence. It is an analogy designed to impress, not to inform. No cities are shaking. No ecosystems are collapsing. No lifeform on Earth can feel a thousandth of a second difference.
Let’s put the number in perspective. One millisecond is 0.001 seconds. A 1.33 millisecond change represents approximately 0.000015 percent of a 24-hour day. Human circadian rhythms are tuned to roughly 24 hours, not to thousandths of a second. There is no plausible biological mechanism by which such a tiny change could affect human health, animal behavior, or plant life. It is physiologically undetectable. Even if the rate of change were accurate, consistent, and sustained, it would take approximately 75,188 years for the day to lengthen by exactly one full second.
Technologically, the “crisis” BBC claims is even more absurd. Modern systems already handle irregular rotation through leap seconds. Since 1972, 27 leap seconds have been added to Coordinated Universal Time to synchronize atomic clocks with Earth’s spin. Discussions are underway about possibly implementing a negative leap second because of recent acceleration. GPS, spacecraft navigation, financial trading platforms, and astronomical observatories continuously ingest Earth orientation parameters from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and adjust automatically. They already deal with corrections far larger than 1 millisecond.
Society adjusts clocks by one hour every year for daylight saving time in many regions. That is 3.6 million times larger than the 1.33 millisecond change being described. Leap years add a full day. Compared to those routine adjustments, this isn’t even a rounding error.
The BBC article goes further, suggesting that by 2100 climate change could outpace even the Moon’s gravitational influence on day length. That projection is model-dependent and scenario-driven. It assumes the now discredited and removed RCP8.5 high-emissions pathways and continued ice loss at rates embedded in climate models. It is not an observed reality. It is a modeled extrapolation.
And even if that projection were accurate, we are still talking about millisecond-scale shifts. The practical consequences remain limited to timekeeping adjustments that modern civilization already manages with ease. There is no crisis as the infinitesimal change in the Earth’s rotation has and can have no plausible impact on ecosystems or living beings.
The most telling line in the BBC piece is the assertion that “human influence on the Earth system has become so profound that we are now changing the very way our Earth spins.” That statement is designed to provoke awe and alarm. It is also technically trivial. Humans also change Earth’s mass distribution through groundwater extraction, reservoir construction, mining, and urbanization. These processes are measurable, they are not existential.
In the end, the BBC’s hyped 1.33 millisecond per century change to the Earth’s length of rotation, even if true, represents trivial geophysical adjustment. One that is not biologically meaningful, technologically disruptive, and not outside the envelope of natural variability observed over decades and centuries.
Framing a millisecond-scale variation as “unprecedented” planetary destabilization represents a a textbook example of taking a measurable but trivial geophysical adjustment and inflating it into a symbolic crisis. It is a giant nothingburger. An attempt to scare people with a story that is not scary in the least.
Japan has achieved dramatic long-term declines in childhood tooth decay — despite never implementing nationwide water fluoridation and only recently recommending fluoridated toothpaste, according to a new study in BMC Public Health.
The research, by Yoshihisa Yamashita, D.D.S, Ph.D., of Kyushu Dental University, describes Japan’s experience as a “natural social experiment” that could reshape how public health experts address preventing dental cavities at the population level.
Unlike many other high-income countries, Japan has historically limited fluoride exposure during childhood — which makes the country a “unique and underexplored case.”
Using decades of national dental survey data, the study found that average rates of tooth decay among Japanese 12-year-olds fell steadily over roughly 40 years.
Levels dropped from a peak national Decayed, Missing, and Filled Teeth (DMFT) index score of 4.75 in 1984 to just 0.53 in 2023 — “well below levels historically reported in populations exposed to systemic fluoride through community water fluoridation,” according to the study. DMFT is the standard international measure of decayed, missing and filled teeth.
“This trajectory unfolded in the absence of nationwide community water fluoridation,” the paper states. High-fluoride toothpaste was not widely available in Japan until 2017 and was not officially recommended for school-aged children until 2023, according to the study.
Dr. Griffin Cole, conference chairman of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, said the study’s method of using national dental records across an entire population, rather than measuring fluoride exposure among a small group, provided important evidence on oral health.
“By examining real-world outcomes, Yamashita’s analysis provides strong evidence of what we already know: Oral health can improve through nutrition, behavior and broader public health measures, rather than adding fluoride chemicals to our water supplies,” he said.
The findings are the latest to challenge long-standing assumptions promoted by organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Dental Association that systemic fluoride exposure through community water fluoridation explains large-scale reductions in tooth decay.
Decades-old study by U.S. researchers still used to justify fluoridation?
The study compared modern Japanese cavity rates with historic U.S. data collected by early fluoride researcher and dentist H. Trendley Dean in the 1930s and 1940s, and later consolidated by F.J. McClure.
Despite a small study size and issues with collection bias, Dean’s research formed the scientific foundation for North American fluoridation policies by showing lower cavity rates in four communities with naturally fluoridated water supplies.
But according to the new study, Japan’s current cavity rate is substantially lower than the minimum levels observed in Dean’s high-fluoride communities — even though Japan’s drinking water contains effectively no added fluoride.
Yamashita said it was also notable that Japan has only recently introduced high-fluoride toothpaste. Most toothpaste previously available contained less than 1,000 parts per million (ppm).
Popular children’s toothpaste brands in the U.S., including kids’ Crest and Colgate, contain about 1,100 ppm.
The paper argues that broader social and behavioral changes likely play a major role in reducing tooth decay.
The author suggested several possible contributing factors, including:
A long-term decline in sugar consumption and shifts in dietary habits.
Changes in childhood feeding and parenting practices, including reductions in prolonged bottle feeding.
Universal access to dental care through Japan’s national health insurance system.
Improved oral hygiene awareness and preventive behaviors as a result of greater healthcare access.
Fluoride ‘not a magic bullet for controlling tooth decay’
Japan’s per-capita sugar consumption has declined by more than 30% since the 1970s, according to national statistics cited in the paper.
However, the author noted that cavity rates continued falling even after sugar intake stabilized, suggesting that multiple factors likely worked together over time.
Dr. Hardy Limeback, professor emeritus in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Toronto, told The Defender that a 1996 Japanese study found even lower tooth decay rates in Japan during World War II, when sugar supplies were scarce and rationing took place.
“The effects of total fluoride did not seem to have much effect on the caries rates in Japan in the 20th century,” Limeback said. “In that country, increasing fluoride exposures by means other than fluoridation did not appear to be ‘one of the top 10 public health procedures of the 20th century,’ as claimed for fluoridation by the CDC in America.”
“Fluoride is not a magic bullet for controlling dental decay,” Limeback added. “Limiting sugar intake is.”
Countries should look beyond fluoride for dental health solutions
The study arrives amid renewed international discussion about fluoride safety.
Following a landmark 2024 judgment that found fluoride at current levels recommended for water fluoridation in the U.S. posed an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health, communities and states across the country stopped adding fluoride to their water.
The ruling also mandated that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulate it.
Yamashita argued for a “broader multicausal approach” to oral health policy.
“Substantial and sustained reductions in dental caries can be achieved through multicausal pathways,” the paper concludes, “even in the absence of universal water fluoridation.”
Yamashita said countries seeking to reduce tooth decay should consider not only fluoride-based strategies, but also policies addressing diet, early childhood environments, access to care and wider social determinants of health.
He also suggested that a bias toward fluoride has posed a barrier to understanding the multicausal approach that can improve dental health.
“This analysis highlights insights that have long remained unrecognized — not because the evidence was unavailable, but because prevailing frameworks shaped what researchers expected to see,” Yamashita wrote.
In 2018, a team of researchers at Stanford ran an experiment that should have made bigger headlines than it did. They recruited a few hundred people under the cover story that they were studying the relationship between DNA and diet. They swabbed everyone’s cheeks, ran real genetic tests, and then sat each person down to deliver their results.
Here is the trick: the results were fake. Or rather, they were assigned at random, with no relationship to what the swabs actually showed. Some people were told they carried a high-risk version of a gene linked to poor exercise capacity, or to feeling hungry after meals. Others were told they carried the protective version. Then the researchers measured what happened to their bodies.
The people told they had the “bad” exercise gene performed measurably worse on a treadmill. Their lung function changed. They felt more exhausted, sooner, and they ran out of steam earlier, even when their real DNA said nothing of the sort. In the eating experiment, people told they had the “protective” satiety gene produced more of the hormone that signals fullness and reported feeling more satisfied after the same meal as everyone else.
The kicker, reported by the Stanford team, was this: the effect of what people believed about their genes was, in some measures, larger than the effect of the genes themselves.
Sit with that for a moment. A story about your DNA changed your DNA’s behavior more than your DNA did.
What if the steady drip of fear we live inside, the warnings about disease, the urgency of prevention, the dread of the next pandemic, is not only describing our health but quietly shaping it?
What if the constant push toward more checkups, more screening, more tests for things we would never otherwise have noticed slowly trains us to inhabit the identity of the perpetually sick?
And what if a belief, held tightly enough by enough people, does not stay politely inside the mind but reaches down into the body, the way it reached into the lungs of those runners on the treadmill, so that a culture convinced it is fragile and broken and doomed begins, quietly, to become exactly that?
These are questions, not verdicts. But they all circle the same suspect: an idea so familiar we have stopped noticing it is an idea at all. Genetic determinism, the belief that our genes are a sealed verdict, that disease is written into us at conception, that biology is destiny.
It is not a comforting story but a disempowering one, a marketable one, and above all a frightening one, because a person who believes in genetic determinism has surrendered their power before they ever thought to use it. But where our attention goes, our energy flows. And if that is true, then we are not the prisoners of this story at all. We are only beginning to understand the power we carry as conscious, creative beings. The story about genes, in most of the cases that matter most to us, is simply wrong.
The story we were sold
For the better part of three decades, we have been taught to think of the genome as a blueprint. When the Human Genome Project was completed in the early 2000s, the language around it was almost biblical: the “book of life,” the “code of codes,” the “instruction manual” for a human being. Newspapers ran a steady drumbeat of discovery: a gene “for” intelligence, a gene “for” depression, a gene “for” breast cancer, a gene “for” being unfaithful.
The blueprint metaphor is seductive because it is clean. A blueprint fully specifies a building. Hand it to any competent crew and you get the same house every time. If your genome is a blueprint, then your health, your temperament, your fate: these are simply the structure that gets built. Nothing to be done but watch it go up.
But here is the strange thing about a metaphor this powerful: we adopted it before the science was in. And as the science has come in over the last twenty years, it has steadily dismantled the very picture that sold it to us.
The conditions that fill our clinics and our anxieties (ADHD, heart disease, depression, type 2 diabetes, the common cancers) are not determined by one decisive gene but by hundreds or thousands of genetic variants, each nudging risk by a vanishingly small amount. There is no “gene for ADHD” or those other conditions mentioned. Instead, what exists is a faint pull spread across the whole genome, one that environment, behavior, and chance can tip in any direction.
This matters because of a word that gets badly misused: heritability. When you read that a condition is “80% heritable,” it is natural to hear “80% inevitable,” or “80% genetic in you, personally.” Neither is what the number means.
Heritability is a population statistic. It describes how much of the variation between people in a given environment can be statistically attributed to genetic differences. It says nothing about how fixed a trait is, and nothing about any individual.
The cleanest illustration is height, which is roughly 80% heritable. Yet average height in many countries rose by several inches over the twentieth century, far too fast for the gene pool to have changed. What changed was nutrition. A highly heritable trait moved dramatically because the environment moved. Heritable and changeable are not opposites. They were never opposites.
Then there is the discovery that should have ended the blueprint era on its own. When researchers ran large genome-wide studies hunting for the genes behind these heritable psychiatric and physical conditions, the genes mostly weren’t there, or rather, they were there in such tiny, scattered fragments of effect that they couldn’t add up to the heritability the twin studies had promised.
Geneticists named the gap politely: the “missing heritability problem.” The promised master genes for our most common diseases were searched for at enormous expense, and they did not show up. What showed up instead was complexity, contingency, and a genome that behaves far less like a verdict than we were told.
So why does the picture survive?
An idea this disempowering does not endure for decades on the strength of its evidence. It endures because it pays. Whole industries rest on the premise that you are broken in ways only they can manage. The determinism story feeds a steady pipeline of genetic tests, lifelong prescriptions, screening programs, and specialist referrals, each one justified by the conviction that your biology is a defect to be monitored rather than a system you can shape.
It underwrites diagnostic categories that expand a little wider every year and interventions that grow a little more expensive. You do not need to imagine a smoke-filled room or a coordinated conspiracy. You only need to notice the incentive: a story that keeps people anxious, dependent, and coming back is a story with deep-pocketed sponsors, and a person who feels capable and well is, on a great many balance sheets, a customer lost.
Planting a Seed
If the blueprint metaphor is broken, what replaces it?
Think of a seed instead. A seed is not the plant. It is a bundle of possibilities that only becomes something in contact with soil, water, light, and weather. Plant the seed in rich ground and it flourishes; plant it in drought and it withers; plant it in shade and it grows crooked toward whatever light it can reach. The seed sets the range of what is possible. The soil and the season decide what actually grows.
This is what the field of epigenetics has revealed about our DNA. Genes are not simply “on.” They are switched on and off, turned up and turned down, by chemical marks (methylation, histone modification) that respond continuously to what we eat, how we sleep, what we breathe, how stressed we are, and even how connected we feel to other people. The DNA is the seed. Everything around it, and everything we do to it, is the soil.
The evidence here is vivid. There is a famous strain of mouse, the agouti mouse, in which a mother’s diet during pregnancy determines whether her genetically identical pups are born yellow, fat, and disease-prone or brown, lean, and healthy. Same seed. The nutrition is the soil, and the soil decides which animal the seed becomes.
In humans, researchers studying people conceived during the Dutch “Hunger Winter” famine of 1944–45 found epigenetic and metabolic marks of that prenatal starvation still measurable decades later, alongside elevated rates of certain diseases. The famine ended in months. Its signature lasted a lifetime, written not into the genes but onto them.
The lesson is not that environment overrides genetics. It is subtler and more interesting: the genome is built to be responsive. Responsiveness is the point. We did not evolve sealed verdicts. We evolved seeds that read the ground they land in.
So how far does this reach?
If a fake gene can change a body, what can a strongly held belief do? We are used to treating the mind as a spectator to our health, watching from the stands while the real game plays out below in cells and chemistry. What if where we place our attention, and what we expect to be true, can move the body in ways we can actually measure?
You see this most clearly in two phenomena. With the placebo effect, the mere expectation of help is enough to move the body: pain eases, mood lifts, stress drains away, blood pressure settles. Belief shifts the body out of the clenched, defended state we might fairly call dis-ease, and into one of greater ease, the calm physiology in which the body’s own capacity to repair itself can do its work.
Its dark twin, the nocebo effect, is the body worsening in response to the expectation of harm. Patients warned of a drug’s side effects get those side effects more often, even on sugar pills. Expectation is not a passive lens through which we view our health. It is an active input into it.
And consider the most powerful nocebo of all: the prognosis. Two doctors can hold the exact same statistic and hand a patient two entirely different futures. One says, “Ninety percent of people with this disease are dead within five years.” The other says, “One in ten people with this disease recover, and we are going to do everything those people did.” The facts are identical. The arithmetic is identical. But which sentence would you want spoken over your body? Which one leaves a door open, and which one quietly walks you toward its conclusion?
The question cuts deeper when the prophecy is inherited. If your mother died of breast cancer, or your father of heart disease, the medical system can begin to treat you as a smaller, earlier version of them: a case history waiting to repeat itself, marked from your first appointment as the one who is next. At what point does being watched as a fate begin to summon it? At what point does a family history, handed to you as a verdict instead of a probability, become a script you never agreed to perform?
Now return to the Stanford experiment with this in mind. When people were told they carried a high-risk gene, their bodies began, in part, to enact the prophecy. That is the nocebo effect aimed squarely at our deepest story about ourselves: the story of our own DNA. And it points to the most unsettling possibility in this whole essay: that genetic determinism is not only a flawed scientific theory. It may be a self-fulfilling one. Tell a person they are doomed by their biology, and you have just added a risk factor.
Self Fulfilling Prophecies
Here is the part I find genuinely unsettling, and it is the heart of this argument.
A prophecy does not need to be true to come true. It only needs to be believed with enough authority that the believer begins, without noticing, to arrange the world around it. And our culture has no prophecy more authoritative than the one stamped with the word genetic. Tell people their depression, their weight, their heart, their cancer was written into them before birth, and you have not merely described their future. You have begun to build it.
Watch how the loop closes. A person told they are genetically doomed turns their attention toward the threat, and attention is not passive. It is the most powerful filter the brain owns, the thing that decides what is real enough to act on.
Fixed on the fear, the body settles into the physiology of fear: chronic stress, vigilance, inflammation, the very biochemical soil in which disease grows best. The behaviors that would protect them start to feel pointless, so they quietly fall away. Every twinge becomes evidence. Every symptom is a confirmation. In time the prophecy delivers what it promised, and everyone nods knowingly: the genes, of course. This is the dark engine beneath the Stanford treadmill. Those runners did not fake their exhaustion. A belief reached into their lungs and made it true.
Now hold that loop in your mind and run it backwards, because the same machinery turns both ways. This is what people are reaching for, often clumsily, when they talk about being conscious creators.
Strip away the mysticism and a hard, almost mechanical truth is left standing: where attention goes, energy flows, and where energy flows, biology tends to follow. Not because thoughts are magic, but because attention decides what you notice, what you fear, what you feed, and what you repeatedly do. And what you repeatedly do, across months and years, is precisely what lays down the epigenetic marks and builds the body you have to live in.
So if the genome is a seed, you are not the seed. You are the one tending the ground. You did not choose what you were handed, and no amount of will turns a drought into rain. But the soil is made of things you touch every single day: what you eat, how you sleep, who you let close, what you rehearse in your mind, the story you accept about who you are and what you are doomed to become.
A gardener cannot command a seed. A gardener can absolutely decide what grows. To be a conscious creator is nothing more mystical than that, and nothing less powerful: to stop being the passive ground your inheritance falls into, and to start, deliberately, attending to what you want to take root.
You are not only the seed. You are the soil, the season, and the hand that tends the ground.
So tend it.
And be careful what you let take root. Attention is the gardener’s most powerful tool, and almost everything competing for yours has an interest in keeping you afraid. The headline built to alarm you. The endless forecasting of the next catastrophe. The tired paradigm that profits whenever you believe you are broken, powerless, and next in line. None of it is neutral, and fear is among the fastest-growing things you can plant. Give it your attention and it will spread until it crowds out everything else.
You do not have to fight every frightening thought. You only have to stop watering it. Turn your attention, again and again, toward what you actually want to grow: the proof that you are capable, the people who steady you, the ordinary daily acts that tell your body it is safe. This is not denial and it is not wishful thinking. It is the most practical thing you can do, because where your attention goes your energy flows, and your biology, patiently, follows.
You were handed a seed. What grows from it is still, in most of the ways that matter, yours to decide.
Germany has gone to arguably insane lengths to go green when it comes to generating electricity. Not only is the country commiting economic suicide with its Energiewende, it is also undergoing ecological suicide in some regions. One example is the destruction of virgin, fairy tale forests, such as the Reinhardswald in the state of Hesse.
The Blackout News article highlights a viral warning from retired forester Josef Erhard.
Speaking out against a planned wind energy zone in his former district within the Bavarian Forest, Erhard leverages decades of boots-on-the-ground experience to shed light on a side of the green transition that many city-dwellers and politicians rarely see.
Incredibly destructive
Many people assume that putting a wind turbine in a forest simply means clearing a small circle for the mast. Erhard warns that the reality of the construction phase is incredibly destructive.
To transport components like 80-meter-long rotor blades and to bring in heavy-duty cranes, existing narrow logging trails must be drastically widened. New access roads with massive turning radiuses have to be bulldozed straight through the trees, ditches built to divert water away, turning quiet woodlands into heavy-construction zones.
“Wind power in the forest: that means forest clearing/deforestation,” reports Blackout News.
More deforestation to clear way for wind turbines in northern Germany. Photo by P. Gosselin
Irreversible forest floor destruction
Rich soil is the foundation of a healthy forest, and Erhard emphasizes that the damage done here is permanent – it cannot be reversed. The sheer weight of construction vehicles causes severe soil compaction. Once compressed to this degree, the earth loses its ability to absorb rainwater and nurture tree roots.
Huge construction road ditches intercept and redirect rainwater and streams away from the downside forest, damaging the biotope. Furthermore, each turbine requires a massive reinforced concrete foundation dug deep into the earth—structures that will remain buried long after the turbine’s lifespan is over. These too massively interfere with the biotope’s water supply system.
Unviable environment
Forests aren’t just collections of trees; they are complex ecosystems. The area slated for development is a known habitat for protected species, including lynxes, wildcats, bats, and birds of prey.
While forests can naturally recover from storms or beetle infestations, Erhard points out that clearing land for wind energy permanently transforms natural habitats into industrial zones. He pulled no punches regarding the threat to wildlife, grimly referring to the spinning blades as “shredders” for birds and insects.
Water pollution
Forests act as giant natural sponges and filters, playing a critical role in replenishing groundwater and securing local drinking water. Erhard warns that digging deep trenches for power cables, carving out roads, and compacting the soil disrupts natural water flow patterns. In high-altitude ridge lines, this could have devastating consequences for downslope water tables and community water supplies.
Mass scale damage and no benefit
Finally, the veteran forester questions whether wind power in forests is actually as sustainable as marketed. He points to the environmental impact of microplastic shedding from the rotor blades, the risk of hydraulic oil leaks, and the carbon footprint of global supply chains required to source the thousands of tonnes of turbine materials.
Furthermore, he notes that regions like southern Germany are notoriously low-wind areas, meaning these projects are often heavily dependent on government subsidies while still requiring conventional power grids to back them up when the wind dies down.
Josef Erhard urges policymakers to rigorously weigh the actual energy output of these turbines against the irreversible, long-term destruction of our natural carbon sinks, biodiversity, and drinking water resources.
Not mentioned in the Blackout News article are the local climatic impacts that turbines have. Studies have shown that air speed on the leeward side of the turbines causes the air temperature to rise, which would only contribute to drying out the forest whose water system has already been severely damaged by the contruction.
In short, you can’t get more environmentally-criminally negligent than this source of power.
From Guantánamo to Palestine, Washington has a long, brutal history of silencing, blacklisting, and deporting rapporteurs who dared tell the truth.
When the United States government decided to impose sanctions against the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, honest defenders of human rights were astonished. The measure, announced in July 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was presented as a response to what the U.S. government called the expert’s “illegitimate and shameful efforts” to promote actions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli and American officials.
In practice, the sanctions meant much more than a diplomatic gesture. Albanese was included in restriction mechanisms linked to the U.S. financial system, which, in theory, may imply the freezing of assets under American jurisdiction, banking restrictions, and travel limitations. The decision is the most blatant attempt to intimidate a United Nations Special Rapporteur.
The importance of the Italian jurist’s work helps explain why she became one of the main targets of Israel and its Western allies. Since assuming office in 2022, Albanese has produced forceful reports on the Israeli occupation system, describing it as a structure of permanent colonization, segregation, and apartheid. After the beginning of the extermination in Gaza in October 2023, she began arguing that there were plausible elements of genocide in Israel’s military campaign.
Behind diplomatic closed doors, her work came to be seen by Israeli authorities as especially dangerous because it combined denunciations of humanitarian violations with a strategy of international legal accountability.
Despite the exceptional nature of the sanctions, the Albanese case did not emerge out of nowhere. Over the last several decades, the United States developed different methods of pressure against UN Special Rapporteurs considered excessively critical of its foreign policies, its allies, or its domestic human rights situation. Before reaching the point of imposing financial sanctions, Washington had already resorted to diplomatic campaigns, public attacks, attempts at delegitimization, restrictions on access, and political pressure within the Human Rights Council.
The most visible precedents of this pattern lie precisely within the mandate dedicated to the occupied Palestinian territories.
Before Albanese, two Special Rapporteurs became frequent targets of discrediting campaigns: John Dugard and Richard Falk.
A South African jurist and expert in international law, Dugard held the position between 2001 and 2008 and became known for drawing comparisons between the Israeli occupation and the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa. In reports presented to the UN, he argued that the combination of territorial segregation, checkpoints, settlement expansion, and severe restrictions on Palestinian mobility produced a system of domination incompatible with international law.
His positions provoked a strong reaction from Israel and growing discomfort in Washington. American diplomats, although often in a less strident manner than Tel Aviv, demonstrated systematic opposition to the rapporteur’s conclusions within the Human Rights Council, orchestrating pressure campaigns on allies and countries that could influence key votes and decisions.
If John Dugard faced diplomatic resistance and attempts at political disqualification, his successor in the Palestinian mandate, Richard Falk, became the target of a far more aggressive and personalized campaign.
An emeritus professor of international law at Princeton, Falk took office in 2008 and quickly entered into open conflict with Israel and the United States. His criticism of the Israeli occupation, the blockade of Gaza, and the country’s military offensives began generating frequent diplomatic confrontations.
Israel went so far as to bar his entry into the country in December 2008, when Falk attempted to carry out an official UN mission in the occupied territories. Detained at Ben Gurion Airport, he was kept in custody and later deported. The episode triggered protests at the United Nations, since independent experts are, in principle, entitled to access in order to carry out their mandates.
Throughout his period as rapporteur, Falk came to argue that Israeli policies displayed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid, exposing the nature of Zionist oppression over Palestinians. At various moments, American diplomats accused the rapporteur of bias and unfitness for office simply because he did not fully follow the dictates of Tel Aviv and Washington, unlike what they had become accustomed to.
One of the most intense episodes occurred after Falk published comments on the national oppression of Palestinians and American foreign policy. Then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice publicly called for his removal from office, stating that he was “unfit to serve” as Special Rapporteur. Organizations from the Zionist lobby, such as UN Watch, also conducted permanent campaigns for his dismissal, accusing him of antisemitism and conspiracism.
Falk responded by saying he was the target of a systematic attempt at silencing. In interviews and public statements, he described the pressure he faced as a campaign of “personal attacks” intended to divert attention from the Israeli violations documented under his mandate.
Guantánamo and the War Against Anti-Torture Rapporteurs
The pattern of pressure seen in mandates on Palestine — public discrediting, diplomatic pressure, and attempts at institutional marginalization — would reappear on other fronts, especially when UN experts began investigating the consequences of the so-called “war on terror” launched by the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The issue of torture became one of the main points of friction between Washington and international human rights mechanisms.
One of the most emblematic episodes involved Austrian jurist Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on torture between 2004 and 2010. During his mandate, Nowak repeatedly sought unrestricted access to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of detainees remained without formal trial under accusations of terrorism.
The Bush administration partially accepted a visit but refused conditions considered essential by the United Nations. Among them was the possibility of conducting private interviews with prisoners — a standard procedure in international investigations into torture and mistreatment. Without such guarantees, Nowak refused what would have been a merely symbolic visit.
In public statements, the rapporteur argued that inspections without confidentiality would amount to a “guided tour,” incapable of producing any serious assessment of detention conditions. Even so, after analyzing documents, testimonies from former prisoners, and medical reports, he concluded that certain practices used at Guantánamo could be classified as torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
In the following years, other UN specialists would face similar reactions when addressing the issue.
Juan Méndez, Special Rapporteur on torture between 2010 and 2016, criticized the prolonged use of solitary confinement, classifying certain periods of extreme isolation as a form of psychological torture. American authorities challenged his conclusions and resisted allowing unrestricted access to prisoners.
Another relevant case was that of British expert Ben Emmerson, Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights. Emmerson called for criminal investigations into the CIA’s secret torture programs, including clandestine prisons (“black sites”) and interrogation techniques used after 9/11.
In a particularly strong position, he argued that it was a “legal obligation” of states to investigate and prosecute those responsible for acts of torture authorized in the name of combating terrorism. The American reaction was predominantly defensive, with officials maintaining that internal investigations had already taken place and rejecting international interference.
More recently, Swiss jurist Nils Melzer, also a rapporteur on torture, faced strong political resistance after denouncing abuses linked to U.S. security policy and the treatment of prisoners in contexts of war and international extradition. Although his case is more closely associated with the treatment of Julian Assange, Melzer also criticized the persistent impunity surrounding post-9/11 abuses.
When Abraham Foxman died on May 10, 2026, tributes poured in from presidents, prime ministers, and Jewish leaders worldwide, yet his legacy remains defined as much by controversy as by accomplishment.
Foxman described himself as “a passionate supporter of the State of Israel” and spent his career building the ADL into a roughly $60 million per year organization that defined mainstream American Jewish advocacy on antisemitism, civil rights, and the Jewish state.
Foxman was born Avraham Chanoch Hanach Fuksman on May 1, 1940, in Baranovichi, then under Soviet occupation, now Belarus. When German forces entered Vilnius in June 1941 and began subjecting the Jewish population to forced labor and deportation, his parents placed their 15-month-old son in the care of his Polish Catholic nanny Bronisława Kurpi. Kurpi baptized the child into the Catholic Church, gave him the Polish Christian name Henryk Stanisław Kurpi, and raised him as a Catholic in Vilnius for four years. He learned to pray the rosary, attended church every Sunday, and genuinely believed he was Catholic.
His parents survived the war. After bitter custody battles—Kurpi initially refused to release him, telling the Fuksmans, “I raised him, and he belongs to me, and he is Catholic”—the family escaped to a displaced persons’ camp in Vienna in 1947 and arrived in the United States in 1950.
Foxman settled in Brooklyn, attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush, earned a Bachelor of Arts from the City College of New York, and received his J.D. from New York University School of Law. He joined the ADL in 1965 as a legal assistant and rose quickly through the organization’s ranks. When longtime director Nathan Perlmutter died of cancer in July 1987, Foxman became National Director.
Under Foxman’s 28-year leadership, the ADL built a formidable research arm monitoring white advocacy groups, neo-Nazis, and other dissident groups. The ADL expanded its international reach with consultations across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Foxman was appointed to the council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and was re-appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden—making him, as the USHMM confirmed, “the only member of the Museum’s governing Council to be appointed by four presidents from both parties.”
With Foxman at the helm, the ADL also advocated for LGBTQ rights, including protesting the Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale—which held 5-4 that the Boy Scouts could exclude a gay scoutmaster on First Amendment associational grounds. The organization also developed diversity training for law enforcement agencies and advocated for policies promoting mass migration.
Foxman operated at the center of American Jewry. The ADL and AIPAC were close partners in White House meetings and lobbying coordination. Foxman was a key participant in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and worked closely with the American Jewish Committee on public advocacy.
Further, Foxman was one of the most internationally active American Jewish leaders of his era. In March 2012, releasing the ADL’s survey of ten European countries, Foxman warned that antisemitism in Europe remained a dangerous reality. “In Hungary, Spain and Poland the numbers for anti-Semitic attitudes are literally off-the-charts and demand a serious response from political, civic and religious leaders,” he stated—findings based on poll data showing 63% of Hungarians, 53% of Spaniards, and 48% of Poles holding antisemitic views.
Foxman held consultations in Russia on “problems of ethnic hatred, violence, terrorism and promoting democracy,” attended Limmud FSU conferences engaging Russian-speaking Jewish youth, and remained deeply concerned about antisemitism in post-Soviet states. He consistently condemned Arab and Palestinian resistance and Hamas’s liberation agenda. He insisted that much criticism of Israel crossed into antisemitism, arguing: “If the only nationalism that you find apartheid in is Jewish nationalism, then you’re an anti-Semite.”
Retiring in 2015, Foxman warned that antisemitism was “the worst that it has been since World War II, and it is global”—saying he “never thought anti-Semitism would still be a clear and present danger to Jews around the world.” In 2024, he delivered an address at the ADL’s “Never Is Now” conference stating that antisemitism is “a disease without an antidote and without a vaccine.”
Foxman viewed Iran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an existential threat. In a 2007 speech to the ADL National Commission, he declared: “The greatest threat to the Jewish people and closest thing to dangers of the 1930s and 1940s is a potent cocktail consisting of the ideology of hate from an Iran with a potential nuclear weapon. This is an existential threat to Israel from an irrational regime that must be taken with the utmost seriousness.” When Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei posted content questioning the Holocaust on Twitter in 2014, Foxman responded: “Once again, the injection of Holocaust denial by an Iranian leader shows the world how such deep-seated hatred exists at the helm in Iran. We have seen the Ayatollah spew his vehement animosity toward Jews before on other national occasions in Iran and these statements once again show the bigotry and hypocrisy of this regime.”
Weeks before his death, Foxman backed the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. On February 28, 2026—the day the war broke out—he posted on social media: “Thank you President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for standing up to evil and jihadist extremism. The world hopefully will be a better and safer place in the future.”
Foxman’s willingness to take controversial public stands was no late development. He led or supported numerous high-profile campaigns throughout his career. When Nation of Islam spokesperson Khalid Abdul Muhammad delivered a speech at Kean College in November 1993 referring to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and calling for the genocide of white people, Foxman’s ADL ran a full-page ad in The New York Times reprinting Muhammad’s statements. This mobilization directly contributed to Congress issuing a bipartisan condemnation of the speech in February 1994.
Foxman regularly addressed antisemitic or borderline remarks by public figures. In September 2003, during pre-release controversy over The Passion of the Christ, he asserted that Gibson’s remarks were painting “the portrait of an anti-Semite”—though he walked back the characterization the following day, and by February 2004 told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that Gibson was not an anti-Semite and the film was not antisemitic. Foxman co-authored the 2013 book Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet with attorney Christopher Wolf, who served as national chair of the ADL Civil Rights Committee, addressing how antisemites and racists exploited the internet.
Not all of Foxman’s tenure at the ADL would be remembered in such favorable terms. In April 1993, San Francisco police and the FBI executed searches at ADL offices in California and discovered that the organization had been running an extensive domestic intelligence operation for decades. The operation centered on Roy Bullock, an undercover operative and art dealer who had collected files on more than 12,000 individuals and 950 organizations for more than three decades. His targets included not just white advocates and neo-Nazis but also Arab American groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the African National Congress, Central America solidarity organizations, Greenpeace, the Earth Island Institute, approximately 20 San Francisco area labor unions, anti-apartheid activists, and Jewish peace groups. Bullock had also sold information to South African intelligence for $16,000.
Foxman denied any improper activity while testifying that the ADL had a right to do “whatever it must” to monitor antisemitism and threats to Jews. Critics across the political spectrum condemned the operation as a massive breach of civil liberties.
One of the most sustained controversies of Foxman’s career involved his refusal to unequivocally recognize the Armenian genocide. Critics, including the Armenian National Committee of America, accused Foxman of “genocide denial” motivated by the ADL’s desire to maintain good relations with the Turkish government. The backlash was severe. A dozen Massachusetts communities and the Massachusetts Municipal Association withdrew from the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” program. The ADL’s 2007 statement that the “consequences” of Ottoman actions were “tantamount to genocide” was widely rejected as insufficient because it circumvented the “intent” required under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Foxman also sent a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan expressing regret over the difficulty his position caused for the Turkish government. It was not until May 2014 that Foxman publicly and unambiguously used the word “genocide” in remarks at Suffolk University Law School’s commencement, after years of sustained pressure.
The Armenian Genocide controversy was not the only multi-decade fight to mark Foxman’s career. Foxman engaged in a 22-year campaign against paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan. After Buchanan’s 2011 book Suicide of a Superpower was published, Foxman called him “a racist and an anti-Semite.” Buchanan was suspended from MSNBC in January 2012 and fired in February, and he publicly credited Foxman with playing a role in his dismissal. The ADL published a formal report titled “Patrick Buchanan: Over the Line.” Buchanan described Foxman as leading efforts to “blacklist” him, working “behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats, and off-the-record meetings.” In a similar vein, Justin Raimondo, founder of Antiwar.com, was one of the most sustained libertarian critics of the ADL and Foxman. Raimondo argued that the ADL used antisemitism accusations to suppress foreign policy debate.
Whatever his American critics made of him, Foxman moved comfortably among Israel’s top political leadership across multiple governments. Foxman met with multiple Israeli prime ministers, some of whom made direct appeals to President Bill Clinton for the Marc Rich pardon. Foxman cooperated with World Jewish Congress leader Edgar Bronfman on major campaigns including Holocaust-era Swiss bank restitution. While the primary negotiation was led by Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress, the ADL under Foxman was a coalition partner in pressing Swiss banks to settle Holocaust-era claims, which resulted in a $1.25 billion settlement in 1998.
Foxman made a well-documented intervention in favor of fugitive financier Marc Rich’s pardon from President Clinton. The ADL had received $250,000 from Rich over a period of 16 years, including a $100,000 pledge made just before Foxman traveled to Paris. In February 2000, Foxman met at a Paris restaurant with Avner Azulay, head of the Marc Rich Foundation, and Zvi Rafiah, an Israeli arms consultant, and it was Foxman himself who proposed the strategy of recruiting Denise Rich to approach Clinton for a pardon. “I told them maybe they should consider trying to get a pardon,” Foxman said. “I told them, ‘Why don’t you reach out to Denise Rich… and have her approach the president and see about a pardon.’”
He wrote Clinton on December 7, 2000, urging a pardon on the grounds that “we are a country that was founded on the belief in second chances.” New York Times columnist William Safire called for Foxman to resign, writing that Rich’s $250,000 to the ADL had “induced its national director to lobby President Bill Clinton for forgiveness and thereby bring glee to the hearts of anti-Semites.”
Abraham Foxman was the consummate architect of a specific brand of ethnic activism, relentlessly searching for every angle to advance Jewish institutional interests and cement a landscape where the concerns of world Jewry were elevated above all others. Yet, even as he built these formidable structures of influence, he unwittingly accelerated the very forces he claimed to fight.
His career served as a catalyst for a tide of grassroots resentment against World Jewry that has only surged since October 7, 2023. Like many of his kin who sought to reshape Western nations in their own image, Foxman dedicated his life to the systematic erosion of gentile civilization for the benefit of his tribe.
Now that he has exited the stage, he leaves behind a nation awakening to the nature of his subversion. May he face that eternal justice that human institutions could not provide, aware that the tide has finally turned against the Jewish supremacist agenda he spent his entire life promoting.
Marking the 2000 Israeli withdrawal after 22 years of occupation, the Resistance today is still standing strong on the frontlines. Here is a look into the history of occupation and the deterrence written in blood.
Every year, the Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon is marked across the country, especially in the South, with ululations echoing through the streets, feet shaking the ground to liberation songs, and motorcades filling the roads of villages and towns. It is a day that recalls the moment southern Lebanon was liberated from 22 years of Israeli occupation on May 25, 2000, marking the defeat of what was once known as an “invincible army”.
But as I write these words today, southern Lebanon is bleeding again. This year, the memory is no longer only about ululations and celebrations; it is about the resilience of the South, the same resilience that made liberation possible in the first place.
Twenty-six years later, the Israeli occupation has not ended its efforts to occupy southern Lebanon, nor its attacks on civilians, nor its broader expansionist agenda. However, since May 25, a new equation of deterrence has been written across the border. And as the occupation escalates, the resistance continues to adapt; as military capabilities evolve on one side, the other continues to consistently work to deter and resist, even with a hefty price paid in blood.
The occupation came first
The Israeli occupation has always sold a false narrative about its occupation and aggression against southern Lebanon by justifying its attacks under the umbrella of so-called security measures, but history has proven otherwise.
Way before any well-established resistance movement was recorded in southern Lebanon, the Israeli occupation invaded the area on November 1, 1948, and occupied 15 villages, simultaneously with the occupation of Palestine. On October 24, the Israeli Carmeli Brigade invaded the town of Houla and committed a massacre, which resulted in at least 67 martyrs.
There were records of 14 massacres in one week during the so-called “Operation Hiram”, which was launched “in a bid to cleanse the area of its population,” according to records by MERIP. As mentioned in its records, Israeli soldiers violently and forcibly expelled the residents of at least seven Lebanese villages in areas near the northern border of Palestine during that period.
The IOF then withdrew from occupied Lebanese villages by mid-March 1949 (Houla, al-Mansoura, Suruh, Ghabbatiyya, Kafr ‘Inan, Marus, al-Ras al-Ahmar, Kafr Bir’im, Iqrit, Iribbin, Mi’ilya, Arab al-Samniyya, and Nabi Rubin), as under the negotiated armistice terms, “Israel” was compelled to withdraw from occupied villages. Seven villages (Ibl al-Qamh, Hounin, al-Nabi Yusha’, Qadas, al-Malikiyya, Salha, and Tarbikha) remained under occupation and were turned into illegal Israeli settlements.
The aggression, however, didn’t stop there. In 1967, the UN ISPAL recorded Israeli massacres in Houla and Hanin.
The second Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon began on March 14, 1978, killing approximately a thousand civilians, before the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) withdrew under the UNSC Resolution 425, which demanded an immediate withdrawal of the IOF and the transfer of control to the UNFIL. But “Israel” transferred control of border areas to Saad Haddad’s “Army of Free Lebanon” (AFL), an Israeli-backed splinter faction of the Lebanese Army, which emerged in 1976, before being renamed the “South Lebanon Army” (SLA) in May 1980.
“Israel” reinvaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, advancing all the way to Beirut and killing at least 19,000 civilians, before it was forced to withdraw to the so-called “security zone” in southern Lebanon, a point at which a resistance nucleus began to take shape.
Israeli pressure tools in southern Lebanon
The occupation operated through two parallel chains of command: the Israeli Occupation Forces as the occupying power, and the so-called South Lebanon Army (SLA) as “Israel’s” collaborationist force and punching bag, also carrying out different tactics of aggression, targeting the people economically, physically, and psychologically.
One of the crimes carried out by the occupation was the SLA’s practice of forced conscription of Lebanese civilian men. All males over 18 living in the occupied area were required to serve one year as SLA military recruits, effectively fighting for a force occupying their own territory. Human Rights Watch documented that the SLA “filled its ranks through the involuntary conscription of residents of the ‘security zone,’ including children.” Men who refused faced harassment, detention, economic punishment, and their houses were demolished with their families inside.
Khiam Detention Center: Systematic torture
As part of the occupation’s torture tactics was the established Khiam Detention Center in al-Khiam, which was targeted in an Israeli airstrike during the 2006 war on Lebanon and completely razed during the ongoing war today, in an effort to erase the footprints of Israeli barbarism and the subsequent heroic resistance that forced its closure for good.
During the Israeli occupation, the established detention center replaced the Ansar detention camp (located in the southern town of Ansar) and housed more than 5,000 Lebanese citizens, resistance supporters, and fighters, who were held in harsh conditions and subjected to systematic torture by the SLA.
In the center, the Israeli-backed forces exercised extensive torture practices, including electric shocks, prolonged suspension from ceilings, sleep deprivation, deprivation of food and water, and extended solitary confinement, as well as the “red box”, a metal container where the detainee had to sit in a squatting position and the guards would bang on it with metal rods, with the sound reportedly reaching nearby villages.
Additionally, “Israel” denied Red Cross access to detainees despite the evidence of savage torture. The detention system was also reportedly used as a coercive leverage mechanism, with families of detainees pressured to provide information on resistance activities in exchange for updates about, or the release of, their relatives. Today, “Israel” isn’t preventing healthcare workers; it’s deliberately bombing them, alongside journalists, further exposing its savagery against civilians in southern Lebanon and its fear of the truth.
Economic strangulation of occupied South
The Israeli occupation also heavily relied on the economic strangulation of South Lebanon and its people by establishing chokepoints, setting the grounds for economic dependency, destroying the region’s agriculture, and completely isolating the region from the rest of Lebanon.
The IOF’s checkpoint system established economic control as a deliberate instrument of occupation. The occupation installed curfews, bans on night travel, motorcycles, and multiple passengers per vehicle, alongside extensive searches and unpredictable closures. The Awali River checkpoint, which was established in 1982 during the Israeli invasion, became the primary chokepoint for all goods moving between south and north Lebanon, causing delays, confiscations, and arbitrary shutdowns that made normal commerce structurally impossible. Supply chains collapsed, contracts could not be honoured, and agriculture and industry were effectively severed from national markets.
Economic dependency was simultaneously engineered from the other direction. Israeli goods flooded the occupied zone while southern producers were barred from Lebanese markets and forced to sell primarily to “Israel”.
The land itself was targeted. Crop destruction, contamination of farmland with mines, military deployment across cultivated areas, and later use of white phosphorus rendered large tracts unusable. Moreover, significant portions of agricultural land remain inaccessible to this day due to unexploded ordnance.
Approximately 180,000 residents lived outside effective Lebanese state administration for the duration of the occupation. Services, infrastructure, and governance were mediated through the SLA rather than Beirut. Movement restrictions severed access to national courts, healthcare, education, and family networks. Lebanese state investment halted at the occupation perimeter, triggering a long-term demographic displacement.
The cumulative economic disruption did not end with the 2000 withdrawal. The wars of 2006, 2024, and now 2026 have continued the same cycles of infrastructural and agricultural loss, attempting to fracture any attempt at a full economic reset by committing acts of agriecocide and ecocide.
Israeli massacres in southern Lebanon
Beyond the structural violence of occupation, Israeli forces conducted periodic large-scale attacks that killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, in an effort to carry out mass killings and trigger mass displacement. Some of the notable attacks are the Israeli massacre in 1993 and the April aggression (Udwan Nisan) in 1996.
Israeli massacre in July 1993
“Israel” launched the so-called “Operation Accountability” on July 25, 1993. For seven days, the IOF bombarded southern Lebanese villages with massed artillery and airstrikes. Approximately 118 to 120 Lebanese civilians were killed and close to 500 were wounded. The attack displaced an estimated 300,000 people northward toward Beirut, a displacement that was not incidental but declared as a strategic objective. The IOF’s logic, openly stated by Israeli officials, was to generate a humanitarian crisis.
April aggression in 1996
Known in Lebanon as Udwan Nisan, the April Aggression was carried out for seventeen days from April 11 to 27 in 1996, authorized by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The IOF flew over 600 air sorties and fired approximately 25,000 artillery shells against Lebanese territory. Evacuation threats were issued to 86 villages, displacing approximately 400,000 people. Among the deliberate targets struck by a helicopter gunship was an ambulance carrying fleeing civilians near Tyre, killing two women and four children.
On April 18, 1996, at 2:07 in the afternoon, Israeli artillery fired 36 shells at the UNIFIL compound near Qana, which was sheltering between 800 and 845 civilians who had fled the bombardment of surrounding villages. One hundred and six people were killed, among them a disproportionate number of children.
Resistance born under occupation
As it has become clear, before any organized armed group existed in South Lebanon, the region was reeling under Israeli invasions and attacks. The resistance then emerged from the very ground Israeli boots were forced to leave, as the South saw the sprouting of small groups individually targeting the Israeli occupation.
Among the first Lebanese to take up arms were secular leftists. Following the 1978 invasion and “Israel’s” installation of Haddad’s AFL, cadres of the Lebanese Communist Party and the Organization of Communist Action began conducting small-scale armed operations in the South. Simultaneously, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, with deep roots in southern Lebanese villages, was running parallel operations against Israeli patrols and AFL positions.
These operations were scattered and uncoordinated, but they established something essential: an armed Lebanese refusal of the occupation, rooted in the land itself; a mission protected by international law that broadly acknowledges the right of people under foreign occupation to resist, including the use of armed struggle, to achieve self-determination.
The resistance that eventually drove “Israel” out was never the product of a single sect or ideology. It was communist, nationalist, and Islamic. It was Shia, Sunni, Druze, and Christian, unlike how some try to portray it under tight sectarian titles. What unified these currents was a common geography, the occupied South.
The same occupation planted in the land also saw the blossoming of the Movement of the Deprived, co-founded by Imam Musa al-Sadr and Greek Catholic Bishop Grégoire Haddad in 1974. On January 20, 1975, the military wing was established as the Lebanese Resistance Regiments to fight and repel the occupation. The regiments engaged in operations against the Israelis before evolving toward institutional politics in 1980 after the disappearance of Imam al-Sadr.
34 years after the first Israeli invasion, Hezbollah was formed in 1982 from the very seed that Sayyed al-Sadr had planted against the occupation.
Hezbollah: An imposed deterrent equation
The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon – Hezbollah did not emerge from a conference room; it emerged from under occupation.
The first phase of Hezbollah’s operational strategy was not guerrilla-like in the classical sense. The Resistance group adopted the methodology of strategic coercion through hard-scale operations, designed to make the cost of Israeli presence in Lebanon so high that continued presence became untenable. Hezbollah began engaging in jihadist operations using car bombs.
On November 11, 1982, an explosive-laden truck was driven by a resistance fighter into the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, before exploding and killing 75 soldiers. A year later, on November 4, 1983, the IOF headquarters in Tyre was bombed again, killing 28 Israelis.
After “Israel’s” partial withdrawal to the so-called “security zone” in 1985, the nature of the campaign shifted. Hezbollah, at the time, fought a grinding occupation over a defined strip of territory rather than a sprawling invasion and carried out large-scale frontal raids on IOF and SLA outposts, which resulted in heavy losses.
Katyusha\Grad rockets: A new deterrent equation
In parallel, the Katyusha\Grad rocket was first used in the mid-1980s and was highly visible on the battlefield in the 1990s. What the Katyusha\Grad introduced was not a military victory but something more durable, a deterrence equation. Hezbollah did not fire the rockets indiscriminately. It fired them in calibrated, declared responses to Israeli strikes on Lebanese civilians, establishing through practice what eventually became an informal but understood rule: attacks on Lebanese civilian areas would be met with rockets into northern “Israel”.
This equation was visible during the aforementioned Israeli aggression in 1993 under “Operation Accountability”, and seventeen days in 1996 under the April aggression, “Israel” unleashed its full air and artillery power on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah retaliated every single day with Katyusha\Grad rockets on northern occupied Palestine, emptiying Kiryat Shmona, paralyzed the economy in occupied al-Jalil, and placed the Israeli government under unbearable domestic political pressure, pushing it to turn to Washignton and Paris to broker the 1993 and 1996 understandings.
IED war, tactical adaptation
The 1990s were defined by a single tactical contest: Hezbollah’s roadside bombs against any IOF deployment. When the IOF used sniffer dogs to detect wire-triggered devices, Hezbollah concealed IEDs inside fiberglass rocks and switched to radio detonation.
When the IOF swept radio frequencies from Mount Hermon listening posts, Hezbollah switched to cell phone receivers. By the end of the war in 2000, IOF mine-clearing patrols were physically counting rocks along roads to identify which were fiberglass, an image that captured the dramatic shift in the military balance.
By 1998, the rate of operations had reached nearly four operations per day. The attack on the Ansariyye beach landing in September 1997, in which twelve Shayetet 13 commandos were killed in a single night, after Hezbollah obtained Israeli drone reconnaissance footage of the landing zone four days before the operation, demonstrated that Hezbollah had achieved not just tactical superiority but intelligence penetration of IOF operational planning.
On February 28, 1999, the IED campaign reached its peak, with the killing of Brigadier General Erez Gerstein, the senior IOF commander in Lebanon, in a roadside bomb disguised as a rock near Kfar Shouba.
The day of resistance and liberation
By 1995, a paratrooper unit had been disbanded after soldiers refused a Lebanon deployment, and by 2000, 200 IOF soldiers had been imprisoned for refusing to serve in the area, fearing the Resistance’s operations, thus weakening the Israeli occupation.
When “Israel” completed its withdrawal on May 24, 2000, no IOF officer could credibly claim the army had achieved anything in Lebanon. On the contrary, “Israel” had a designed exit scenario, but the Resistance shattered it before it could have been executed.
May 25, 2000, was announced as a national historic day, marking the IOF’s forced, unconditional withdrawal from southern Lebanon, ending an 18-year military occupation.
Martyred Hezbollah Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, during his famous Bint Jbeil speech on May 26, 2000, declared that the IOF intended to withdraw gradually over several weeks beyond May 25. When the UN Security Council issued a resolution and UNIFIL arrived to take charge, “Israel” intended to frame the departure as a sovereign, orderly transition and, crucially, could have claimed to be “liberating” the al-Khiam detainees as a gesture of goodwill, to sell the narrative of an Israeli choice rather than Israeli defeat.
But instead, civilians from the occupied villages, side by side with Resistance fighters, broke through to liberated areas in the towns of al-Qantara, Deir Seryan, al-Qusair, and al-Taybeh on May 22 and 23. SLA positions began collapsing one after another in a single night. The central sector of the so-called “security zone” collapsed within hours, and Israeli soldiers fled, leaving everything behind.
On the morning of May 23, 2000, residents of al-Khiam marched to the Khiam Detention Center, chanting Allahu Akbar (God is Great), tore the bars off the cells with their bare hands, and carried the detainees who had been unlawfully imprisoned for months and years, out into the sun. Some fainted, some wept, others kissed the ground; southern Lebanon was liberated.
Today, the pattern has not changed. In the 1990s, Hezbollah defeated “Israel’s” wire-detection technology with fiberglass. In 2006, it defeated “Israel’s” air supremacywith Kornet rockets, and in 2026, it continues to defeat “Israel’s” electronic dominance with a fiber-optic cable, introducing the FPV drone, and more specifically, the Ababil FPV drones.
The occupation, indeed, has become more aggressive and bloodier, but the Resistance has proven to be more adaptable. The equation written on May 25, 2000, endures: that the people of this land, given will and time, can raise the cost of occupation beyond what it can bear. It is being rewritten, kilometer by kilometer, in the hills, forests, and valleys of southern Lebanon, with a spool of cable and a low-cost drone.
The equation Hezbollah established in 2000 was not a peace agreement, a ceasefire, or a diplomatic settlement. It was a demonstrated fact that an occupying army, regardless of its technological superiority, can be forced out through sustained, adaptive resistance that raises the cost of presence beyond what the occupying entity is willing to pay.
Twenty-six years later, that same demonstration is being performed again, and “Israel”, with five divisions on Lebanese soil and an “unlimited budget” allocated to counter $400 drones, is on the wrong side of the equation again. The organization that Israeli officials described as “significantly weakened” after the war in 2024 is conducting an average of 24 separate operations on Israeli soldiers, vehicles, and positions in a single day.
Liberation continues to be rewritten right now, in the hills around al-Khiam and in Bint Jbeil, al-Taybeh, Ayta al-Shaab, al-Naqoura, Maroun al-Ras, Ainata, and al-Ghandouriyeh. It is being rewritten across all of southern Lebanon. And the South, our South, remains steadfast and forever-present, holding steady under the boots of the very men that stand their ground on the frontlines, steadfast and resilient.
And “Israel”? as martyr Sayyed Nasrallah put it during his famous speech in Bint Jbeil, “By Allah, Israel, which owns nuclear weapons and the strongest air fleets in the region, is indeed frailer than a spider web.”
Pakistan now receives up to 80% of its military imports from China — a striking reversal of the Cold War era, when the United States served as Islamabad’s primary arms supplier.
How and why did this happen? The key reason was US sanctions, retired Pakistan Air Force Captain Sultan M. Hali told Sputnik.
During Pakistan’s conflicts with India in 1965 and 1971, the United States imposed sanctions on both sides — but Pakistan was more affected since it relied heavily on Western equipment. China stepped in to help at that critical moment.
In the post-Cold War period, repeated US sanctions again disrupted Pakistan’s access to critical hardware.
Beijing, by contrast, offered technology transfer — a step Western suppliers rarely take, and when they do, it comes with a web of restrictive conditions.
Pakistan has now inducted a wide spectrum of Chinese systems, including fighter jets, air defense systems, early warning aircraft, frigates, and submarines.
One of Israel’s biggest lies is that in 1948, it wanted peace and the Arabs refused. The True Story of the Creation of Israel exposes that lie not through Palestinian or international testimony, but through the words of Israeli leaders themselves: their personal diaries, the IDF archives and the testimonies of their own soldiers and commanders.
Run time: 23 mins
Written and Directed by: Muhammad Shehada
Produced by: Muhammad Shehada
By most accounts, German POWs were treated well by the US Army during World War II. Those sent to the United States had no chance to escape so were loosely guarded as they provided valuable farm labor and lived well. But something happened in 1945 that resulted in abuse and thousands of POWs died.
The Rheinwiesenlager, or Rhine Meadow camps in English, were a group of 19 camps built in Germany by the US Army to hold captured German soldiers during the last months of World War II as millions of German soldiers surrendered. German POWs were herded into outdoor pens and held for months with no shelter, toilets, or beds, while water and food were rationed. The horrible conditions led to the death of thousands. This led to controversy and a US Army investigation determined this abuse caused 3053 deaths. Later investigations by the new West German government claimed between 4000 to 27,000 German prisoners perished in these camps because of poor conditions.
In 1989, Canadian James Bacque authored a book titled: “Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II”. He had examined US Army records that showed over a million Germans listed as taken prisoner were never recorded as discharged and disappeared. Bacque assumed that most died in captivity due to intentional neglect.
… As devastating as it may be, at a certain moment in time, a horrible chapter was given an exceptionally meta-historical status. Its ‘factuality’ was sealed by draconian laws and its reasoning was secured by social and political settings. The Holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. … Read full article
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