A 10-month-long covert operation by staff of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) retrieved millions of historical documents from Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem, preserving legal and historical records dating back to 1948 of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and land theft campaign, The Guardian reported on 14 May.
Dozens of staff across four countries carried documents past border checkpoints, airlifted boxes on military planes, and raced Israeli tanks to Rafah to save what could never be replaced.
The archive, kept inside UNRWA’s Gaza City compound, contained the original registration cards of Palestinians who sought refuge in Gaza during the Nakba, alongside birth, marriage, and death certificates spanning generations.
“There are testimonies of how people were forced to flee in 1948, where they came from, where their property was, what was destroyed,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor specializing in West Asian studies.
“Two hundred thousand came to Gaza in between 1948 and 1949, from all over Palestine.”
The operation began days after Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of UNRWA’s Gaza City offices at the start of its assault on Gaza, with International staff being forced to leave on very short notice, with no time to take the documents.
After their forced evacuation, a small team returned and made three trips, driving trucks back through active bombardment to move the records south to a food warehouse in Rafah.
Evacuating the records from Gaza was further complicated as Egyptian authorities required Israeli approval before allowing the archives to cross the border, approval that UNRWA officials were certain would either be denied or used to seize the documents.
Meanwhile, UNRWA had been facing concurrent cyberattacks that threatened to wipe the agency’s servers and the digitized historical records.
“We genuinely thought we could see both the originals destroyed and any digital copies we had made. Then everything would have been gone for good,” said Roger Hearn, the senior UNRWA official who oversaw the rescue.
The documents were collated in Egypt and then airlifted to Amman aboard Jordanian military planes returning from aid deliveries, with the final cargo departing just two weeks before Israeli forces invaded Rafah in May 2024.
A parallel operation extracted a second set of archives from UNRWA’s East Jerusalem compound, which by early 2024 had become the target of arson attacks and mounting Israeli pressure to expel the agency.
Staff secretly transferred those records to Jordan over several months. In January 2025, new Israeli legislation formally barred UNRWA from operating in Israel and Israeli-occupied Palestine.
In Amman, more than 50 staff are currently scanning nearly 30 million documents by hand in a cramped basement facility, funded primarily by Luxembourg, with the digitization effort estimated to take another two years.
“Their destruction would have been catastrophic,” Hearn said. “If there is ever a just and durable solution to this crisis, then this is the only evidence people can use to show there were once Palestinians living in a particular place.”
Israel’s war on Gaza has amounted to a systematic assault on Palestinian cultural existence, targeting the physical and historical foundations of Palestinian identity in an apparent attempt to erase the people’s collective memory and presence from the land.
The destruction of mosques, churches, heritage sites, libraries, manuscripts, museums, cemeteries, and archival records forms part of a broader campaign to sever Palestinians from their history and national continuity.
These repeated attacks on the documentary and material traces of Palestinian life have turned cultural erasure itself into a weapon of war, with UNESCO verifying damage to scores of cultural and historical sites across Gaza since the genocide began in October 2023.
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang was unquestionably an incendiary and highly tendentious work that quickly generated considerable controversy in both the United States and Japan following its publication in 1997. The book received praise from major publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The book achieved such remarkable success that it prompted then fifty-year-old Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, to produce the documentary film Nanking, which he described as a “labor of love.”[1] According to Ted Leonsis, the film was intended to be comparable to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.[2]
Chang, who was Chinese American, was only twenty-seven years old when she began writing The Rape of Nanking. However, Chang died by suicide in 2004 near Los Gatos at the age of thirty-six.[3] Before taking her own life in her automobile, Chang left three suicide notes, one of which stated in part:
“I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.”[4]
Whether Iris Chang’s fears were intensified by the medications she was taking, or whether she genuinely believed that certain organizations were pursuing her, lies beyond the scope of the present analysis. Her references to groups such as the CIA raise additional questions regarding the nature and origin of those concerns.
In any event, what remains undeniable is that Iris Chang’s book helped revive widespread public discussion of the so-called Nanjing Massacre. In a 1998 review of the work, George Will of the The Washington Post declared that: “it has stimulated seminars and conferences at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and many other places, and is assisting those honorable Japanese who are combatting their country’s officially enforced amnesia regarding what the Imperial Army did in December 1937 and January 1938.”[5]
In the same article, Will agreed with Chang’s position and declared that
“Japanese soldiers killed tens of thousands of surrendered Chinese soldiers and almost certainly more than 300,000 noncombatants. (Civilian deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki totaled 210,000. Britain and France suffered a combined total of 169,000 civilian deaths from 1939 to 1945.) The Nanking killing continued for seven weeks in front of international witnesses, without any attempt at concealment, and with the sadism of recreational killing. Chinese were used for bayonet practice and beheading contests. People were roasted alive, hanged by their tongues from hooks, mutilated, drowned in icy ponds, buried up to their waists and then torn apart by German shepherds, buried up to their necks and run over by horses or tanks. In addition to pandemic rape by Japanese soldiers even of young children, some of them tied to beds or posts for days, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, sons their mothers.”[6]
According to these accounts, the alleged atrocities occurred within a period of less than two months. The implicit assumption, therefore, is that Japanese soldiers were killing approximately 5,000 civilians each day! An obituary published in the New York Times similarly stated that “in less than two months they [the Japanese] murdered more than 300,000 civilians and raped more than 80,000 women.”[7] Chang placed the estimated number of rape victims between 20,000 and 80,000, rather than “more than 80,000.” Chang wrote:
“Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified.”[8]
Such an extraordinary claim would appear to require equally extraordinary evidence, thereby prompting several preliminary questions. Why did Mao Zedong— who had Jews fighting for him[9] and who later presided over policies that allegedly resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese citizens[10]—not make substantial use of this alleged evidence against Japan? Why did he never publicly suggest that Japanese soldiers were raping more than 1,300 women per day during the events in question? Is it being suggested that Mao was entirely unaware of such allegations, or that he failed to recognize their potential political significance?
Why did Chiang Kai-shek—who received support from both the Soviet Union and anti-Japanese propagandists such as Morris Cohen and Harold Isaacs in the United States—fail to address these allegations in any substantial manner? Moreover, if Harold Isaacs was deeply sympathetic to revolutionary movements in Asia and maintained associations with figures connected to Leon Trotsky, why did he not emphasize these claims more prominently in his own political and journalistic work?[11] One may ask whether Chang exaggerated certain aspects of the events in question or incorporated claims that were insufficiently substantiated or even fabricated, whether deliberately or unintentionally.
At this point, it is important to note that the book cannot be taken seriously, largely because her book omits many of the issues and questions raised above. Moreover, unlike historians such as David Irving, whose works are often grounded extensively in archival research, Chang’s book relies heavily on secondary sources rather than primary archival documentation. Furthermore, unlike detailed historical studies such as Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War by R. M. Douglas, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military by Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s War by David Irving, or After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh,[12] Chang’s ambitious work is not primarily based on extensive archival materials or a substantial body of primary-source evidence. This is not to suggest that there is anything inherently problematic about the use of secondary sources. Rather, the concern is that many of the sources upon which Chang relied contain their own uncertainties, ambiguities, or expressions of skepticism.
In all honesty, assessing Chang’s The Rape of Nanking is almost like scrutinizing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, a fraudulent book which was quickly denounced for its historical inaccuracies, methodological weaknesses, and a lack of balance. Hitler’s Willing Executioners is indeed filled with citations, but they were largely distortions of the actual facts.
In fact, Goldhagen made things up whenever possible in order to prove the preposterous thesis that ordinary Germans were responsible for what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. When scholars exposed his clear errors and deliberate deceptions, Goldhagen did not apologize. Instead, he wanted to sue those scholars—a response that is completely contrary to genuine scholarship and historical research.[13] Of course, the Holocaust establishment had an interest in promoting Goldhagen’s threadbare hoax. Like Goldhagen’s book, the American establishment also almost certainly had an interest in promoting Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. After all, didn’t Japan attack Pearl Harbor? Didn’t Japan ally itself with Germany? Wasn’t Japan considered one of the villains of the war?
What is especially striking about this controversial debate is that Chang deliberately left out important issues from her book—issues that would have seriously weakened her thesis. For example, she never mentioned the Tongzhou Incident, which took place in the same year as the alleged Nanking Massacre.. In July 29, 1937, a group of some 3,000 Chinese soldiers ambushed Japanese garrison’s barracks
“and proceeded to raid Japanese shops, inns, and private homes. Approximately 200 of the 380 Japanese residents of Tongzhou were slaughtered. The 120 who survived did so only because they fled to the barracks, seeking refuge, before they were surrounded. These acts were flagrant violations of international law relating to the conduct of war (hereafter referred to as ‘international law’). Four days after the incident, the aforementioned director officially condemned the Chinese troops for the abduction, rape, and slaughter of Japanese citizens. Defense attorneys submitted his statement to the Tokyo Trials, but it was rejected by William Webb, the presiding justice, without explanation. The Allies were unwilling to allow any mention of the Tongzhou Massacre in the courtroom.”[14]
In April of 1947,
“defense attorney Levine called Kayashima Takashi (a former lieutenant-general in the Japanese Army) to the witness stand.” Takashi testified that the Chinese were committed brutal acts of rape and murder. His soldiers were called to Tongzhou in order to rescue the Japanese settlers. His accounts obviously make one wonders why Chang completely dismissed the entire incident in her book: The scene inside the town was ghastly. Brutally murdered bodies of Japanese settlers were lying everywhere. Most of them had ropes tied around their necks. I had to force myself to look at the mutilated corpses of women and innocent children. I no longer have the report I wrote at the time. I have relied on my memories for this statement. But I assure you that what I witnessed was so horrifying that I will never be able to forget it.
“I went to a restaurant (I think it was called Asahiken) to investigate. There were seven or eight women there, ranging in age from 17 or 18 to 40. They had all been raped, and then shot to death as they lay naked on the floor. Four or five of them had been stabbed in the genitals with bayonets. … The living quarters had been ransacked, and all the furniture, bedding, and clothing stolen. The situation was virtually the same at the homes of the other Japanese victims. The scene at the Kinsuiro Inn was gruesome. Since many of the Japanese had gathered there, sensing danger, there had been mass carnage. … The owner of Kinsuiro and the maids had been tied together, raped, and decapitated.”[15]
Similar incidents also took place in places such as Tanggu and Tianjin. The Japanese made several attempts to resolve the conflict peacefully, but those efforts failed. In fact, a peace conference between the Japanese and the Chinese was scheduled in Shanghai for August 9, but it never took place because soldiers from the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps killed Navy Sublieutenant Oyama Isao and First Class Seaman Saito Yozo on that very day.[16] Edouard Helsey, China’s correspondent for a Paris newspaper, wrote in 1938:
“An unfortunate incident occurred on August 9, in which a Japanese naval officer was murdered by Chinese sentinels from the Rainbow (Hong) Bridge Airfield. Perhaps the Japanese officer should have been more cautious, but there is no denying that this was a Chinese plot. It is clear that the Nanking government had decided to go to battle in Shanghai at least 15 days prior to this incident. Their plan was not simply to split the Japanese forces in South China, but also to entice them into the Neutral Zone, which act would certainly cause international problems. It was a malicious trick, this engineering of incident upon incident, the misinterpretation of which would sway public opinion in the West.
“Chiang Kai-shek himself concurred that that was his intention, and he seemed rather pleased with himself. When I met with him at the end of October (1937) in Nanking, I asked him the following question. ‘That was a clever ploy, since Shanghai is a thorn in Japan’s side. Until it is extracted, the Japanese will be paralyzed, will they not?’ Chiang replied, through an interpreter: ‘You are right. I believe it was successful.’ At that time, the Japanese government and military authorities were attempting to avoid a war. They viewed an attack on Shanghai as a real danger.”[17]
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, about 22,000 Japanese living around the Yangtze River evacuated to Shanghai. It was agreed that the Japanese government had the right to protect those citizens in that area. At the same time, many foreigners from the United States, Britain, France, and Italy were also living in Shanghai. Because of the Boxer Rebellion around 1900, these governments had signed agreements with China that explicitly gave them the right to protect their citizens in Shanghai. So by August 11,
“Japan dispatched a naval landing party of 4,000 to Shanghai, to protect the lives and property of Japanese citizens. But by then, the Chinese force, shielded by pillboxes and creeks, had already swelled to 150,000. Therefore, the Japanese government decided to send two more divisions from Japan to Shanghai on August 13. On the night of August 14, five days after Sublieutenant Oyama was assassinated, as hostilities and tension heightened, Chinese Air Force planes bombed Shanghai. Several aircraft flew toward Shanghai at 10:00 a.m., and dropped bombs on the Japanese Consulate, Naval Landing Force Headquarters, Japanese warships, and on the streets of Shanghai. At about 4:00 p.m., a dozen aircraft bombed the moored warship Izumo, the French Settlement, and the International Settlement. An entry in The China Year Book 1938 reads ‘Chinese planes drop bombs in International Settlement.’ Those bombs killed 1,741 persons and wounded 1,868. Most of the victims were Chinese. The Chinese Air Force had intentionally dropped bombs on its own people, setting a world record, however disgraceful.”[18]
All of these historical backgrounds were completely omitted from Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. Chang claimed that Nanking’s population was around 600,000 when the city fell, but independent estimates place the population closer to 200,000 to 250,000. “The population did not reach 600,000 until June 1940, 30 months after the Japanese occupied the city.”[19] It gets more interesting. As historian Higashinakano Shudo convincingly puts it,
“If 300,000 were indeed massacred over a period of two months, then 5,000 people would have been killed each day, at a rate of three or four per minute, for a period of 60 days… The total area of the Safety Zone was only 3.86 square kilometers. If, in such a small space, 100,000, or 300,000, individuals were massacred, there would have been corpses everywhere.”[20]
If Chang’s claims are incorrect, then what is the historical truth behind the debate? Is it historically accurate to say that the Japanese mercilessly tortured and massacred more than 300,000 noncombatants and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women? What would the Japanese military have gained from such actions? And is it reasonable to believe that the international community knew these events were taking place and did nothing?
Japanese historian Shudo Higashinakano wrote in his documented work The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction that Chang’s book “relies on faked photographs and hugely exaggerated accounts.”[21]
Higashinakano also sent Penguin, the publisher of The Rape of Nanking, a list of no fewer than ninety historical errors found in just the first sixty pages of the book. Penguin eventually corrected some of those errors.[22]
Higashinakano was not the only historian to point out factual errors in Chang’s book. Shortly after the book was published, Ikuhiko Hata, one of Japan’s leading historians, wrote a lengthy article highlighting what he described as serious deceptions involving at least eleven photographs used in the book. I also had the opportunity to receive Hata’s book on comfort women in South Korea through one of his university associates. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it one year after Chang’s book was published:
“One photo, which the book credits to the military Politburo of the Chinese Nationalist government, shows women and children walking across a bridge with Japanese soldiers, and carries the caption: ‘The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution.’ “The truth is, Hata said, that, although the photo was published with a similar caption by the Chinese Nationalists in 1938, apparently as anti-Japanese propaganda, it originally appeared the previous year as one of four in a Japanese newspaper, Asahi Gurafu, showing peaceful scenes of Chinese villagers under Japanese occupation, with women and children returning home from the fields.
“In the sharper original photo, it is possible to see that two of the villagers are smiling, and there is a woman pulling a cart of freshly harvested cotton that was cropped out of the Nationalist Chinese version. The cropped photo appeared in a recent book on Nanjing by a Japanese professor as an illustration of Japanese army atrocities in China. But after its interpretation was challenged, the publisher of his book apologized and retracted it.
“Other mistakes occur in Chang’s book, which quotes as ‘compelling evidence’ a secret telegram by Japan’s foreign minister admitting that Japanese troops, ‘in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns,’ had slaughtered ‘not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians.’ This was, in fact, a quotation from the cable of a British reporter, and concerned deaths not only in Nanjing but elsewhere. The book also describes Japan as the first nation to use air power ‘as a means of terrorizing civilian populations,’ a distinction generally attributed to the Germans in World War I.”[23]
Chang’s thesis is now beginning to fall apart. Historian David M. Kennedy of Stanford noticed similar problems. Although Kennedy praised the book, especially for its many photographs—likely unaware that critics had challenged the authenticity of several of them—he still stated that the book contains “intellectually insufficient” assertions.[24] In a similar vein, historian Roger B. Jeans of Washington and Lee University declared that Chang’s book is “half-baked history.”
Chang, said Jeans, was “greatly inflating the population of Nanjing (Nanking) at that time and uncritically accepting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and contemporary Chinese figures for the numbers of Chinese civilians and soldiers killed.”[25] Historian Timothy M. Kelly put the final nail in the coffin. When academics and the media were praising Chang’s book, Kelly wrote:
“In light of the discrepancies I found in Chang’s book, it makes me wonder whether any of the reviewers know enough about the subject (Chinese and Japanese history, WWII, war crimes, historiography, not to mention the pertinent scholarly literature) to venture an informed opinion about the merits of Chang’s book… The mass media and those who write for it are often incredibly irresponsible and they need to be told so.”[26]
Kelly argued that the problem with the book can be placed in four categories: “simple carelessness, sheer sloppiness, historical inaccuracies, and shameless plagiarism.”[27] Kelly provided multiple examples to support his accusations—far too many to discuss in full here. We will mention only a few of them. On page 166 of her book, Chang writes: “The Westerners themselves were often sprayed with Lysol upon entering the city.” Kelly responded,
“It’s incredulous that Chang would use a brand name here. Does she expect her readers to believe that Japanese authorities really sprayed foreigners with the particular product called Lysol? Surely the generic word ‘disinfectant’ would have been more adequate, not to mention accurate.”[28]
On page 13, Chang says: “In the documentary In the Name of the Emperor, one Japanese historian dismisses the entire Rape of Nanking with these words: ‘Even if twenty or thirty people had been killed, it would have been a great shock to Japan.” Kelly responded: “Chang does not identify this historian here or in the Notes section. Who is this historian? Is he/she a major or minor player? What impact has this historian had?”[29]
Chang: “When Shanghai finally fell in November, the mood of the imperial troops had turned ugly, and many, it was said, lusted for revenge as they marched toward Nanking.” Kelly: “Chang does not document the source of this statement, that is, who said it. This rhetorical device only gives the appearance that Chang is reporting fact.”[30]
Chang: “In July 1853, he (Matthew Perry) sent two ships belching black smoke into Tokyo Bay — giving the people of Japan their first glimpse of metal-clad, steam-powered ships. Surrounding himself with some sixty to seventy aggressive-looking men armed with swords and pistols, Perry strode through the capital of the Shogun and demanded meetings with the highest-ranking officials in Japan.”
Kelly: “The capital Chang refers to here is Edo, the present-day Tokyo. The historical truth is that Perry never set foot in the capital. He was officially, though reluctantly received, after some delay, on the beach at Uraga, some 35 miles from Edo at the entrance to Edo Bay, which has since been renamed Tokyo Bay. At the completion of the ceremonies Perry ordered his fleet of four vessels to a new anchorage about ten miles into the Edo Bay. He later proceeded in the Mississippi further into the bay to a point where he could see the Shinagawa area of Edo.”[31]
Chang: “In March 1944, the United Nations created the Investigation of War Crimes Committee …” Kelly: “How is this possible? The United Nations was not chartered until October 24, 1945. Chang again has her facts wrong.”
Once again, that is only the tip of the iceberg. If you believe Chang’s book is accurate, Kelly’s detailed research will likely come as a major shock. Even historian Takashi Yoshida Western Michigan University, who does not support the Japanese revisionist interpretation of what happened in Nanking, admits that Chang’s book contains “numerous errors and inaccuracies.”[32]
Even if we grant Chang’s questionable thesis that The Rape of Nanking is somehow accurate, it still would not fit with what the Allies actually did to Japan after World War II. Chang never discussed the fact that the Allied forces—especially the United States—committed sexual crimes and abuses, including the rape of many Japanese civilians, after the war. She called on Japan to apologize and pay reparations, yet she said nothing about what the United States did to Japan after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Moreover, Chang never discussed reports that some Chinese soldiers raped Chinese women and then blamed the crimes on Japanese soldiers. Even The New York Times—hardly a Japanese propaganda outlet—published an article in 1938 titled, “Ex-Chinese Officers Among U.S. Refugees: Colonel and His Aides Admit Blaming the Japanese for Crimes in Nanking.” It stated:
“The ex-Chinese officers in the presence of Americans and other foreigners confessed looting in Nanking and also that one night they dragged girls from the refugee camp into the darkness and the next day blamed Japanese soldiers for the attacks.”[33]
When the American professors who had protected those former Chinese officers realized that the officers themselves were involved in wrongdoing, they became “seriously embarrassed.”[34] Chang mentioned none of these. Shudo argues:
“20 days before and immediately prior to the fall of Nanking, the city’s population was 200,000, according to Europeans and Americans who were there at the time. Eight days after the fall and on Christmas Eve, it was still 200,000. No one indicated a vast decrease in population due to mass slaughter. Confronted by these facts, how can anyone claim that 300,000 noncombatants were murdered in Nanking?
“Prior to the capture of the city, Chinese troops stripped off their uniforms and mingled with the civilian population. By doing so, they became unlawful combatants not protected by the Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Hague Convention. No Chinese military personnel inside the city walls surrendered to the Japanese. Accordingly, during the 11-year period spanning December 13, 1937, the day Nanking fell, to December 1948, when the Tokyo Trials ended, no one accused Japanese troops of having killed prisoners of war in violation of the aforementioned regulations. Confronted with these facts, how can anyone claim that the Japanese murdered prisoners of war?
“The Japanese are accused of having murdered 7,000 persons each day, i.e., 300,000 persons over a period of six weeks. But according to ‘Daily Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians,’ the only killing witnessed by a European or American in Nanking was one ‘lawful execution.’ The contents of these reports (issued on a daily basis and submitted to the Japanese Embassy in Nanking) are corroborated by data gathered from the testimonies of European, American and Chinese residents in Nanking, and from Japanese military records (all of which data has been computerized and analyzed). How do we explain a massacre with no witnesses?”[35]
Harold Timperley, a British reporter for the Guardian, wrote the book What War Means, which helped spread the claim that Japanese forces were frequently killing civilians. However, the book itself did not provide documented evidence to support those accusations. Shudo continued:
“Rev. Miner Searle Bates and George Fitch submitted material for What War Means (both used pseudonyms). The ostensible intent of the book, edited by Timperley, was to impress upon the reader the horrors of war via accounts written by disinterested parties (European and American residents of Nanking). But Timperley was, in fact, an advisor to the Nationalist government’s Ministry of Information. Rev. Bates, a famous Christian missionary who taught at the University of Nanking, was also an advisor to the Ministry of Information. And Mrs. Fitch was a close friend of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek.
“It has also become clear that What War Means is a propaganda book compiled and published by the Counterintelligence Division of the Nationalist Ministry of Information’s International Propaganda Section. Timperley was paid by the Ministry of Information for editing the book. Thus, What War Means, perceived as proof of the ‘Nanking Massacre,’ was not written from an impartial standpoint. On the contrary, it can be viewed only as war propaganda.”[36]
As noted earlier, Chiang Kai-shek was aligned with Joseph Stalin in efforts to weaken or defeat Japan. In fact, scholar Li Yuzhen writes that Chiang made several attempts “to secure the direct participation of Soviet forces in China.” Yuzhen argues that Chiang’s cooperation with Stalin contributed significantly to Japan’s defeat during World War II.[37]
Both the Soviets and Chiang “were committed to defeat the Axis powers of Germany and Japan… War necessity compelled two men [Stalin and Chiang] who had every reason to distrust each other to overcome a long history of mutual suspicion and animosity to find common ground.”[38] In other words, although Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin had their differences, they were united in their determination to defeat Japan and Germany. As Yuzhen puts it:
“As the threat of Japan to China increased, and that of Germany and Japan to the Soviet Union, China and the Soviet Union moved gingerly toward an accommodation. While Chiang hoped for Soviet material aid and actual Soviet military involvement in China’s war with Japan, Stalin’s strategy was to trap Japan in China so as to be able to concentrate on Europe and avoid a war with Japan on its eastern frontier. Stalin had the best cards, including a far more powerful army. He resisted China’s pressure to throw Soviet forces into China’s war with Japan until the last two weeks of the war.”[39]
It was Stalin himself who pressured the communist party in China to accept Chiang as their leader. “Soviet financial and military aid was instrumental in sustaining China’s war effort during the first five years of the war against Japan. Even though it is fair to say that the Soviets gained the most, the accommodation between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek paid dividends for both sides.”[40]
Anyone with a minimum level of intellectual honesty would acknowledge that it would have been in Chiang’s interest to promote the so-called Nanking massacre. Yet he never mentioned it. This suggests that the Nanking issue is far more complex than what has been portrayed by publications such as The New York Times and the Chicago Daily News. In addition, numerous key documents from the period of the alleged events in Nanking do not mention the incident either. In fact,
“the International Information Department (a branch of the Ministry of Information established not long before the fall of Nanking) sponsored 300 press conferences for foreign journalists between December 1, 1937 and October 24, 1938. During that time, emergency press conferences were called whenever important news broke (even in the dead of night, according to reports), and the news was transmitted all over the world. But no press conference was ever called to announce a massacre in Nanking.”[41]
So, the so-called rape of Nanking appears to have been shaped by wartime propaganda in the United States and possibly by Chinese authorities at the time. In the next articles, we will interview several Japanese writers and historians to hear their perspectives on this important issue.
Notes
[1] Thomas Heath, “Ted Leonsis Takes a Sharp Turn,” Washington Post, July 31, 2006.
[3] Heidi Benson, “Historian Iris Chang won many battles / The war she lost raged within,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 2005; Kathleen E. McLaughlin, “Iris Chang’s suicide stunned those she tried so hard to help,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 20, 2004. The prevailing vision is that hate mail and threatening notes from Japanese ultranationalists may have contributed to her death. Implausible. First of all, the Chang family never told us who those “ultranationalists” were. The fact is that Chang’s book was widely criticized by Japanese academics for its lack of historical accuracy and intellectual honesty. Furthermore, Chang must have known that writing books like The Rape of Nanking was a huge enterprise which had the potential to create enormous controversy and historical debates. It sounds like she was not prepared to faced criticism and the complete historical inaccuracies in her book.
[7] “Iris Chang, Who Chronicled Rape of Nanking, Dies at 36,” NY Times, November 12, 2004.
[8] Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 6.
[9] Tom Segev, “The Jews Who Fought With Mao,” Haaretz, July 27, 2012.
[10] See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010).
[11] For a meticulous study on these issues, see Joshua Blakeney, Japan Bites Back: Documents Contextualizing Pearl Harbor (Non-Aligned Media, 2015).
[12] R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Brian Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2002); David Irving, Hitler’s War and the War Path (London: Focal Point Publications, 1991).
[13] See Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Verso, 1998).
[14] Shudo Higashinakano, The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction (Minato-ku, Tokyo: Sekai Shuppan, Inc., 2005), 5.
[23] Charles Burress, “Wars of Memory / When Iris Chang wrote ‘The Rape of Nanking,’ to memorialize one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians in modern times, she wasn’t prepared for the firestorm she started,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 26, 1998.
[24] David M. Kennedy, “The Horror: Should the Japanese atrocities in Nanking be equated with the Nazi Holocaust?,” Atlantic, April 1998 issue.
[25] Roger B. Jeans, “Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan,” Journal of Military History, January 2005: 149-195.
[32] Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 146.
[37] Li Yuzhen, “Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin During World War II,” Hans van de Ven and Diana Lary, eds., Negotiating China’s Destiny in World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), chapter 8.
The Canadian Armed Forces reprimanded soldiers who warned that an order to spy on citizens during COVID-19 could violate intelligence-gathering rules. The soldiers were right. The military punished them anyway.
Internal records and emails obtained by CBC News show that on March 11, 2020, a team called Joint Operational Effects (JOE) was ordered to create anonymous social media accounts and scour the internet for information about Canadians.
Under the direction of Col. Chris Henderson, the team produced dozens of reports between March 19 and June 5, tracking what the federal Conservative, NDP, and Bloc Québécois parties were saying about the pandemic.
The Canadian military was monitoring opposition political parties using anonymous accounts created specifically for surveillance.
At least two JOE team members pushed back. They emailed their chain of command, warning that creating anonymous accounts without authorization, while working from home on personal computers, could breach intelligence directives.
One soldier wrote to Maj. John Zwicewicz on March 12, 2020: “Given the sensitivity around social media and military use I have concerns about this.”
They added: “My concern is that by creating these accounts without following proper procedure would come close to, or cross the line set out in the policy.” Another asked to go into the office because they felt it “represented a serious risk” to do the work at home.
Zwicewicz claimed a legal adviser had approved the activities and ordered the group to “cease barrack room lawyering” and get back to work. The team was formally reprimanded more than a week after raising concerns. A source told CBC News that within months, some members quit or were medically released.
The people who raised alarms about potentially illegal surveillance of Canadian citizens got punished. The people who ordered the surveillance kept their positions.
The military’s own top lawyer flagged the problem. Then-commodore Geneviève Bernatchez, the judge advocate general, warned that “this issue has a significant legal component, and… could present legal risk to the rights of Canadian citizens, but also legal risks to the institution.” She noted that, unlike overseas deployments, “the full range of domestic law” would apply, and “such operations will often directly or indirectly implicate the rights of Canadian citizens.” The command structure absorbed the warning and carried on.
A compliance assessment by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, reported by CBC News in April 2026, found three separate military units violated intelligence-gathering rules during Operation Laser between March and July 2020.
One unit used personal laptops to trawl Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook. Another produced over 50 reports on political discourse and was ordered to create accounts to “monitor key regional actors,” but “deliberately disregarded” that order and used personal accounts instead.
Six years later, the legal gap that allowed all of this remains open. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians urged the government in 2020 to legislate rules governing what the military can collect about Canadians. Ottawa has not acted.
DND spokesperson Andrée-Anne Poulin told CBC News that “additional guidance and oversight measures were put in place to prevent a recurrence and to strengthen adherence to established rules.”
Additional guidance. Oversight measures: The standard institutional language for getting caught.
In March 2026, an investigation in Haaretz argued that West Germany may have “secretly financed” much of Israel’s Dimona nuclear project through off‑the‑books loans worth roughly 2 billion Deutschmarks, funneled under the cover of “Negev development.” Historical clues indicate that Germany secretly funded Israel’s nuclear program and raise the questions about how much Dimona cost, who really paid for it, and what that says about Germany’s postwar “moral responsibility”.
This article picks up where that story stops. It goes back to Bundestag files, development‑bank records and declassified intelligence histories to show, in considerably sharper detail, how Bonn built a secret credit machine for Israel, who ran it, and how it locked Germany into a nuclear order it still refuses to name.
Germany did not just look away while Israel built the bomb. It helped pay for it, hid the money off the books, and then spent decades pretending that nothing of the sort had ever happened. Today, the same state that secretly bankrolled Dimona presents itself as a guardian of non‑proliferation and lectures Iran on the dangers of nuclear ambiguity.
Germany’s secret billions that built Israel’s bomb
Germany never tires of preaching its “historical responsibility” to Israel. Reparations. Moral duty, and postwar atonement, even though the archives expose a different reality. What actually happened was a cold-blooded, decade-long secret cash pipeline, codenamed Operation Geschäftsfreund (Business Friend)— that funnelled nearly two billion Deutsche Marks into Israel under the cover of “development” projects while Bonn kept parliament, the public and much of its own bureaucracy in the dark.
The key paper trail runs through the Bundestag’s own 2012 reply, Drucksache 17/10482. There the government finally acknowledged that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion struck a confidential understanding at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on 14 March 1960: a special 2 billion DM credit line, paid out over roughly a decade and shielded from public scrutiny for “foreign-policy reasons.” The arrangement was implemented through the state development bank KfW and booked as bilateral capital aid for Israel’s economy, formally “development assistance,” in practice something far more sensitive.
DOCUMENT: Response to the parliamentary question submitted by Members of Parliament Ulla Jelpke, Jan van Aken, Eva Bulling-Schröter, other Members of Parliament, and the Left Party parliamentary group.– Printed Matter 17/10277 – Granting of loans to Israel and the “business associate” case in the 1960s – Translated from German to English using online translation tools (Source: Bundestag)
Publicly, Bonn clung to the safer script of reparations and “strategic partnership.” Even the 2012 parliamentary answer still tried to dress the arrangement up as generic infrastructure support. The numbers, the secrecy and the timing tell a different story. These were unusually soft loans, with long maturities, low interest, repeated reschedulings, and pushed through a development bank that, as later reporting and archival work show, never seriously monitored how Israel used the funds. The most explicit published account of that opacity remains Dirk Pohlmann’s reconstruction, together with reporting on KfW’s refusal to release historical files. They rolled out at precisely the moment Israel was pouring resources into Israel’s nuclear site known as Dimona, and surrounding it with an elaborate desert-development cover narrative.
The official reparations frame had been erected earlier with the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement. It gave West Germany the politically useful language of Wiedergutmachung (making good again), a soothing concept that never matched the scale or nature of the crimes. By the late 1950s, that façade was being quietly supplemented by military aid, intelligence cooperation and a far more dangerous credit line that crossed the line from restitution into nuclear partnership. The same state that lectured its own population and the world with “never again” rhetoric was now using the moral credit of Holocaust memory as diplomatic armour for a secret policy that helped move Israel into the nuclear club under U.S. tutelage. Public atonement and private collusion ran in parallel, and the latter depended on the credibility of the former.
The decisive political moment came at the Waldorf Astoria meeting of 14 March 1960. Adenauer and Ben-Gurion, the same Ben-Gurion who was driving Israel’s nuclear crash programme, sealed the understanding that became Operation Geschäftsfreund. Investigative work by Gaby Weber and Dirk Pohlmann has put that encounter at the heart of the covert financing, showing how the “Negev development” language agreed in New York later appears in German and Israeli files as the umbrella label for the loan scheme and its supposed civilian projects.
The Bundestag reply speaks vaguely of “support for the Israeli economy” and a “special project” for infrastructure. Other records echo the classic civilian fig leaves, including a nuclear-powered desalination plant in the Negev, textile factories, and industrial zones. In plain language, this is the veil that was wrapped around Dimona, the heavy-water reactor and reprocessing complex that anchored Israel’s plutonium production. On the Israeli side, security officials used the same talking points (hasbara) when foreign visitors asked about the huge earthworks in the desert, describing the site as a textile plant, and a water projects for arid regions, “Negev development.” On the German side, KfW approved transfers against project descriptions so vague, and so weakly checked, that nothing resembling normal development finance was ever set up.
Pohlmann’s documentary work ties the 2 billion DM commitment tightly to the nuclear programme’s time frame and to Negev projects that never materialised. Weber’s reconstruction is even more damning on the political climate in early 1960, with the Eichmann kidnapping, Cold War spy bargaining, Adenauer’s domestic fragility and Ben-Gurion’s nuclear ambitions all colliding in a narrow window of back-channel deals and mutual leverage. Link to Gaby Weber’s work Pdf Only: Eichmann wurde noch gebraucht
Weber also names the men who kept the mechanism running. Hans Globke, Adenauer’s iron-fisted chief of the Federal Chancellery and overseer of Germany’s foreign intelligence services or BND, was the gatekeeper, and a former commentator on the Nuremberg Laws who sat at the junction of Nazi-era continuities and anti-communist statecraft. Reinhard Gehlen, ex-Wehrmacht intelligence chief on the Eastern Front and founder of the BND, supplied the other half, providing an intelligence service built on recycled Third Reich networks, heavily penetrated by former SS and Gestapo cadres, and from the outset bound into American strategic planning. For the CIA, the key handler in this phase was James H. Critchfield, the former U.S. occupation officer who became Washington’s liaison to Gehlen between 1950 and 1955 and helped turn the “Org” into the official Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service). Globke and Gehlen met almost daily. Together they formed the real power centre that turned West Germany’s public atonement script into a covert security architecture, including the secret nuclear alliance with Israel.
This German node did not act alone. Francesupplied the Dimona reactor, the initial uranium and the reprocessing know-how. Britain quietly moved heavy water and other sensitive materials. The United States, after a brief phase of resistance, chose to accommodate the emerging Israeli deterrent. Only one Western leader seriously tried to stop the project: John F. Kennedy. Throughout 1963, JFK pressed Ben-Gurion and then Levi Eshkol for regular American inspections at Dimona and warned that continued U.S. support would be at risk if Israel insisted on an opaque weapons programme. For the documentary trail, one of the cleanest public gateway remains the JFK Library’s correspondence holdings and the declassified material discussed in Avner Cohen’s work on Kennedy and Dimona. Six months after Kennedy was shot in Dallas, that pressure evaporated under Lyndon Johnson.
By that point, the ex-Nazi-staffed BND that had helped Adenauer and Globke manage Operation Geschäftsfreund was fully integrated into the U.S. intelligence ecosystem. Gehlen’s service maintained a close operational relationship with James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief and one of Israel’s most committed protectors inside the American apparatus. The overlaps are hard to ignore. The same Western networks that quietly underwrote Dimona, namely German, French, British, American and Israeli, sat close to the levers of power in 1963, and they shared a clear strategic interest in making sure Israel’s nuclear project would not be strangled by an American non-proliferation crusade. For decades, a serious current of JFK research has pointed to this configuration of interests as one of the hidden backdrops to the president’s murder, even if decisive archival proof has never been declassified. The article does not claim to solve the assassination, but insists on something more basic—that any honest account of Kennedy’s fate has to reckon with the fact that he was the lone Western head of state pushing against a secret nuclear order that his own allies were busy constructing and protecting.
What remains is a German policy that cannot be prettified as remorse. Moral theatre, strategic secrecy, financial statecraft and raw power calculation all moved in lockstep. Bonn preached “historical responsibility” while helping to create and entrench a nuclear order it could never have defended openly before its own citizens, and then spent the next sixty years behaving as if none of it had ever happened. The vocabulary of atonement became the shield for a second-order crime, and not the original genocide, but the decision to turn its memory into political capital for clandestine nuclear collusion.
A new report is reigniting debate over the newborn vitamin K shot and sparking intense discussion among parents and physicians. Jefferey Jaxen investigates the claims, the data behind the headlines, and why some families are increasingly looking into alternatives.
The United States helped design and equip at least 13 high-security biological laboratories across Ukraine, establishing a specialized network to handle dangerous pathogens, according to a Sputnik analysis of public records released by the US Embassy in Kiev.
The network cost more than $24.8 million to establish as part of a broader $200 million investment supporting 46 biological sites since 2005.
The facilities were built under the Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP), an initiative within the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program.
While the CTR program was originally designed to dismantle weapons of mass destruction after the Cold War, the BTRP—implemented by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency—focused on partnering with the Ukrainian government to improve biological detection and diagnostic capabilities.
Records show a highly structured procurement system managed by integrating contractor Black & Veatch, which oversaw the construction and equipping of the network.
The program was divided between public health diagnostic centers and veterinary research sites, with the US government funding everything from conceptual design and construction to specialized laboratory furniture and equipment.
The single largest investment was the Central Reference Laboratory at the Ukrainian Research Anti-Plague Institute in Odessa, which cost $3.49 million.
Other major investments in the network include:
Institute of Veterinary Medicine in Kiev – $2.11 million
Dnepropetrovsk Diagnostic Laboratory – $1.94 million
Lvov Diagnostic Laboratory – $1.93 million
Zakarpatskaya Diagnostic Laboratory in Uzhgorod – $1.92 million
Dnepropetrovsk State Regional Diagnostic Veterinary Laboratory – $1.81 million
Ternopol Diagnostic Laboratory – $1.76 million
Kharkov Diagnostic Laboratory – $1.64 million
Lvov Research Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene – $1.53 million
Vinnytsa Diagnostic Laboratory – $1.50 million
The revelations follow a recent announcement by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who launched an investigation into more than 120 US-funded biological laboratories worldwide to identify the pathogens they contain and determine whether any conducted risky gain-of-function research.
The Pakistani security state possesses an almost supernatural ability to discover “sovereignty” whenever cameras are rolling in Washington and to lose it entirely the moment the name Aafia Siddiqui is mentioned.
Apparently, the Field Marshal can help broker ceasefires, whisper into the ears of presidents, posture as a grand strategist of West Asian stability, and market Pakistan as the indispensable hinge of global diplomacy — yet cannot perform the infinitesimally smaller task of demanding the return of a Pakistani woman whose suffering has become one of the ugliest symbols of the War on Terror.
How extraordinary. A nuclear state that can allegedly influence the architecture of regional conflict suddenly develops the political helplessness of a hostage whenever Aafia enters the conversation. But this silence is not weakness. It is guilt.
Because Aafia Siddiqui is not merely a prisoner. She is evidence. Living evidence. Evidence of what Pakistan’s military establishment became during the War on Terror: a comprador security apparatus that rented out sovereignty to Washington in exchange for dollars, weapons, diplomatic indulgence, and the right to rule Pakistan without accountability.
The Pakistani security state did not merely cooperate with America’s post-9/11 imperial machinery; it became one of its most enthusiastic subcontractors.
Entire populations were surveilled, dissidents disappeared, torture outsourced, and citizens quietly transformed into bargaining chips in a grotesque marketplace of empire.
And hovering over this entire era is Aafia’s name — inconvenient, radioactive, impossible to bury completely.
That is why the establishment treats her like a political corpse that refuses to stay buried. To seriously campaign for her release would require reopening the darkest archives of Pakistan’s collaboration with American power. It would force questions about who handed whom over, who facilitated what, who remained silent, and who converted Pakistan into a logistics depot for the Pentagon’s civilizational psychosis after 9/11.
Far easier, then, to wrap the entire thing in patriotic theatre. More military parades. More speeches about dignity. More absurd chest-thumping from men whose understanding of sovereignty begins and ends with securing another meeting in Washington.
And what of Washington itself?
The same American national security class that spent two decades speaking the language of “freedom” while operating black sites, torture chambers, indefinite detentions, drone massacres, and legal black holes across the Muslim world now expects history to forget.
These people vaporized villages, normalized torture with bureaucratic calm, and transformed cruelty into administrative procedure. The War on Terror was not merely a military campaign; it was a moral collapse masquerading as policy sophistication. Entire careers in Washington were built on the suffering of nameless Muslims imprisoned, disappeared, or obliterated in countries most Americans could not locate on a map.
Aafia Siddiqui became one more body fed into that machine.
But perhaps the most nauseating silence of all has come from Pakistan’s self-described liberals — that exquisitely performative class forever eager to sermonise about human rights provided the victims are ideologically fashionable, geopolitically convenient, or capable of earning approving nods from Western think tanks.
For years, many treated Aafia’s case with embarrassment, discomfort, or outright contempt, as though opposing torture and indefinite imprisonment required ideological preconditions.
Their politics, so brave on social media and so submissive before Western power, collapsed entirely when confronted with a Muslim woman brutalised by the American security state.
One quickly discovers that many liberals denounce authoritarianism only when it is not backed, funded, or sanctified by Washington.
And this is why the current spectacle surrounding Pakistan’s supposed geopolitical “importance” feels so hollow.
If Islamabad truly possesses the leverage its propagandists endlessly advertise, then securing the return of Aafia Siddiqui should be diplomatically trivial. The fact that nothing happens exposes the fraud.
This entire performance — the summits, the strategic dialogues, the pompous headlines about mediation and influence — increasingly resembles what it has always been: choreography for a dependent elite desperate to appear powerful before a domestic audience it profoundly despises.
Because genuine sovereignty does not tremble before memory. Yet Aafia’s name continues to haunt Pakistan’s rulers precisely because it resurrects memories they cannot control: the years of submission, the moral prostitution of the War on Terror, the generals who sold obedience as patriotism, the politicians who marketed humiliation as pragmatism, and the intellectual class that watched much of it unfold with cowardly
silence.
Empires eventually decline. Press conferences disappear. Generals retire into gated compounds. But evidence remains.
In the wake of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran and the subsequent maritime banditry and piracy, the Islamic Republic is reportedly moving to assert its long-dormant sovereign rights over the submarine internet cables that traverse the waters of the Strait of Hormuz.
This strategic reorientation – as confirmed by some reports – promises to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue while fundamentally reshaping the legal and economic architecture of global data transmission.
The unprovoked military aggression against Iran, which halted with a ceasefire on April 8, 2026, has fundamentally altered the strategic calculus of the Persian Gulf.
During the 40 days of aggression against Iran, a previously overlooked dimension of the country’s sovereign territory emerged as a critical vulnerability for the global digital economy.
Beneath the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran’s territorial sea extends 12 nautical miles and overlaps completely with Omani jurisdiction, leaving no high seas whatsoever, lie at least five major submarine fibre-optic cable systems.
These cables carry approximately 99 percent of all intercontinental internet traffic and an estimated 10 trillion US dollars in daily financial transactions.
Now, in the aftermath of the aggression, which came in the middle of nuclear talks, Iran is moving to exercise its full and legal sovereign authority over this hidden infrastructure.
The plan is increasingly centered on a comprehensive governance model that would include permit requirements, transit fees, Iranian legal jurisdiction over foreign technology companies, and exclusive Iranian control over cable maintenance and repair operations.
Forgotten dimension of the Strait of Hormuz
For decades, international discourse surrounding the Strait of Hormuz focused almost exclusively on traditional dimensions: freedom of navigation for oil tankers, security of energy flows, and the legal regime governing the passage of commercial and military vessels.
This narrow framing, however, systematically ignored one of the most vital emerging dimensions of this strategic corridor: the fibre-optic communication infrastructure and submarine data transmission cables that lie on the seabed of Iran’s territorial waters.
These cables, which include major systems such as FALCON (owned by Tata Communications of India), the Gulf Bridge International (GBI) system, and the TGN-Gulf system, form the backbone of the digital economy, not just for the Persian Gulf region but the entire world.
They carry international internet traffic, cloud data centre synchronization, enterprise virtual private networks, voice-over-IP communications, and – most critically – international banking and financial transactions, including SWIFT messages.
Any disruption to these communication highways, whether from natural disasters, ship anchoring, or military action, could cause irreparable damage to the tune of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars daily.
What makes this issue particularly significant for Iran is the undisputed legal reality that the Strait of Hormuz is not, and has never been, international waters.
The careful repetition of the phrase “international waters” by Western media and think tanks is part of a cognitive and legal battle designed to diminish the legitimate sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran over one of the world’s most vital waterways.
Why is the Strait Iranian territory
The legal status of the Strait of Hormuz must be understood through the precise geometry of international maritime law.
According to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, each coastal state has the right to determine the width of its territorial sea up to a maximum distance of 12 nautical miles from its baselines.
Iran has never ratified this convention, but it serves as a reference point for international practice. Within these 12 miles, the coastal state exercises absolute sovereignty over the water column, the seabed, the subsoil, and even the airspace above.
This is exactly the same sovereignty it exercises over the territory of its capital city.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has determined the width of its territorial sea in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman to be 12 nautical miles. The Kingdom of Oman has adopted exactly the same procedure.
The Strait of Hormuz, at its narrowest point between Iranian islands and the Omani coast, measures approximately 21 nautical miles in width.
When Iran extends its territorial sea 12 nautical miles southward from its northern coast, and Oman extends its territorial sea 12 nautical miles northward from the Musandam Peninsula, the combined territorial waters of the two countries total 24 nautical miles.
This exceeds the total width of the strait at that point by three nautical miles.
The result is geometrically inevitable: the territorial seas of Iran and Oman collide and overlap in the middle of the Strait of Hormuz.
There is not a single drop of water in the narrowest points of the strait and its main shipping channels that can be legally classified as high seas or even as an exclusive economic zone.
Any vessel, submarine, or cable that passes through this point is legally passing within the sovereign borders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To this geometric reality must be added the clarifying force of Article 34 of the Convention on the Law of the Sea.
That article states definitively that the regime of passage through straits used for international navigation does not in any way affect the legal status of the waters forming these straits.
Nor does it affect the exercise of sovereignty and jurisdiction by the bordering states over those waters, their airspace, their bed, and their subsoil.
The international community possesses only the right of passage through these waters under the rules set by Iran. This right of passage is limited to the rapid and continuous movement of ships and aircraft.
It does not extend to the laying of fixed infrastructure such as internet cables or energy pipelines on the seabed.
Sovereignty over the seabed, for laying communication cables, energy pipelines, and conducting research, remains entirely the exclusive preserve of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Value of what passes through Iranian waters
The economic significance of the cables transiting the Strait of Hormuz is staggering.
According to data from the TeleGeography database updated to January 2026, the main cable systems crossing the strait form a complex network connecting the Persian Gulf countries to the global network spanning Europe, India, and East Asia.
These systems carry not only public internet traffic but also the most sensitive and valuable data streams in the global economy.
Global content providers known as hyperscalers, companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, use these fibre-optic cables to connect their local nodes to the core of their global networks.
The traffic these companies carry consists primarily of cloud data centre synchronization, including real-time copies of distributed databases, virtual machine migrations, internal application programming interface traffic, and user-generated content.
In cloud computing architecture, maintaining stability and reliability at the level of 99.999 percent uptime, known as the “five nines” standard, is a mandatory requirement in service level agreements.
Rather than purchasing small amounts of bandwidth, these companies lease long-term dark capacity or purchase irrevocable rights to use submarine cables for periods of 15 to 25 years, keeping network latency in the millisecond range.
Level 1 and Level 2 telecommunications operators, including Etisalat of the UAE, Ooredoo of Qatar and Oman, the Telecommunications Infrastructure Company of Iran, and STC of Saudi Arabia, are responsible for transporting international internet traffic.
This traffic includes Border Gateway Protocol routing information, enterprise virtual private networks, international mobile roaming traffic, and network-based voice packets.
These operators are the gateway to the internet for the countries of the region, receiving terabits per second of capacity from the submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz and then distributing it to smaller operators and end users.
These cables form the backbone of the digital economy of the Persian Gulf countries, creating a near-total dependence on connectivity to the global network.
Most critically, global financial institutions and content distribution networks, including Akamai, Cloudflare, and the SWIFT financial messaging network, depend on these cables.
Bank settlement messages and high-frequency transactions require dedicated, encrypted, low-latency paths with minimal signal variability.
In global stock market trading, a delay of even one millisecond can result in millions of dollars in losses. Submarine cables are the safest, fastest, and most reliable physical medium for transporting these sensitive intercontinental financial transactions.
According to analytical reports from British think tanks and transaction data from international payment networks, including SWIFT and the Central Interbank Dollar Payments System CHIPS, submarine cables carry more than 10 trillion US dollars in financial transactions every single day.
This colossal figure represents bank settlements, stock market transactions, foreign exchange operations, and all financial activities that form the lifeblood of the global economy.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development confirms in its annual Digital Economy Reports that more than 99 percent of all international data traffic is transmitted through this cable network.
At the regional level, the West Asia international broadband market, for which the Strait of Hormuz serves as the main thoroughfare, is worth several billion dollars annually.
This value derives from the bulk sale of capacity by cable owners such as FALCON, GBI, and TGN-Gulf to national telecommunications operators.
The damage caused by a disruption or complete outage at this strategic bottleneck, however, is far larger than the direct revenues of this market.
Modelling based on studies of transatlantic cable outages estimates that a five-day disruption of cables through the Strait of Hormuz could inflict tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in damage daily to the combined economies of the Persian Gulf countries.
Failure of alternatives
In response to Iran’s assertion of its sovereign rights, some Western analysts have suggested that alternative routes or technologies could bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
The technical reality, however, offers no fast and reliable alternative.
Next-generation low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations such as Starlink offer lower latency than fibre-optic cables for very long distances, because lasers in space travel at actual light speed while light in glass fibres travels at roughly two-thirds of that speed.
However, while a single submarine cable can carry terabits of data per second, an entire satellite constellation offers bandwidth measured in gigabits.
Satellites cannot yet handle the massive bandwidth demands of artificial intelligence training, high-definition streaming for millions of users, or cloud backups. They are, in the assessment of industry experts, a boutique solution not scalable to millions of users.
Terrestrial overland corridors represent the most practical alternative, with massive land cables running through Iraq to Turkey or through Syria to the Mediterranean.
Ambitious projects such as Saudi Arabia’s SilkLink and Qatar’s FiG are underway. However, these routes must cross war-torn regions, including Syria and Iraq, where West-backed wars have previously destroyed similar infrastructure and where local militias and unstable governments remain capable of seizure, taxation, or sabotage.
These are not peaceful alternatives; they merely exchange one set of vulnerabilities for another. Free-space optical systems using lasers transmitted through air or vacuum are not a solution for the Strait of Hormuz at all.
Such systems are extremely susceptible to weather interference, including the fog and sandstorms common to the Persian Gulf, and have a limited range of less than 50 kilometres.
The verdict is clear: there exists no single alternative that is simultaneously fast, high-capacity, and secure. The Strait of Hormuz remains an irreplaceable chokepoint for global digital communications.
Repair regime and Iran’s essential role
The maintenance and repair of submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz present another dimension of Iran’s sovereign authority.
According to International Cable Protection Committee technical documents and performance reports, the repair process for a complete cable cut follows a well-established sequence: fault location using optical time-domain reflectometer tools, application for navigation permits under international law, and dispatch of a cable repair ship.
The process of dispatching a ship, retrieving the two ends of the cable from the seabed, performing the reconnection, and returning the cable to the seabed typically requires between 7 and 30 days, depending on weather conditions and the availability of repair vessels.
In the Strait of Hormuz specifically, the exceptionally high volume of maritime traffic requires intensive traffic coordination during cable laying and repair operations.
Under normal conditions with full cooperation from the countries exercising sovereignty over the strait, the repair process would be expected to take up to 45 days.
During the recent joint US-Israeli aggression, however, major cable installation contractors, including Alcatel Submarine Networks, declared force majeure on Persian Gulf operations, halting both new installations and maintenance of existing systems.
Billions of dollars’ worth of cable projects were suspended or abandoned, with some reportedly 90 percent complete before work stopped.
Given that the Strait of Hormuz lies entirely within Iranian territorial waters, the logical conclusion is inescapable: the user companies whose cables transit Iranian sovereign territory must conclude contracts for cable repair and maintenance exclusively with Iranian companies, specifically companies owned more than 50 percent by Iranian entities and operating entirely under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This is not a matter of political choice but of legal necessity arising from the undisputed fact that foreign vessels, including cable repair ships, cannot operate in Iranian territorial waters without Iranian permission.
Global recognition of the new reality
The world media has taken notice of Iran’s digital sovereignty initiative. Indian media outlets, including ABP Live and the Economic Times, have warned that a significant portion of India’s internet passes through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and that any disruption to these routes could disrupt online services, digital banking, and communications, pressuring the digital economy of countries, including India.
Russian media outlet AIA Daily reported that Iran has effectively conveyed the message that it possesses physical access to vital routes of the global internet, emphasizing that at least seven major internet cables pass through the Strait of Hormuz and serve as the backbone of e-commerce, cloud services, and international communications.
Asian media, including Korea’s Asia Business Daily and the English-language Asia Times, have described the Strait of Hormuz as one of the world’s most important internet bottlenecks.
Asia Times wrote that data infrastructure and fibre-optic cables have become part of the deterrence equation in the region, warning that an attack on cables could disrupt the global economy without firing a missile, and that future wars may take place on the seabed and over data cables rather than traditional battlefields.
Western media have also acknowledged the vulnerability. Reuters reported in a piece that Iran’s warning about the vulnerability of undersea cables has raised concerns, emphasizing that several important fibre-optic cables lie in the Strait of Hormuz connecting countries in Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Europe, and that any damage in this area would disrupt cloud services, online communications, and the digital economy.
The Washington Post warned that submarine cables have become one of the most vulnerable parts of the world’s digital economy, with Western governments concerned that undersea cables could be used as a tool of strategic pressure.
The French newspaper Le Monde wrote that the joint US-Israeli aggression against Iran has placed infrastructure, including submarine cables, data centres, and cloud computing networks under the simultaneous pressure of geopolitical and security crises.
Three practical steps
Based on the legal, technical, and economic factors, the Islamic Republic of Iran can implement three practical steps to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue from the Strait of Hormuz internet cables while exercising its full sovereign rights.
First, all companies wishing to use this infrastructure must obtain an initial license from Iranian authorities, and because this license must be renewed annually, these companies must pay all outstanding amounts on a recurring basis.
The fee model can draw from international precedents, including the Egyptian model based on providing exclusive services, the Singaporean model based on policy-making and administrative licensing, the Indonesian bureaucratic model based on permits and corridors, and the Russian model based on strategic control and state participation.
Egypt, for example, earns between 250 million and 400 million US dollars annually from submarine cable infrastructure alone, representing 15 to 20 percent of the Egyptian Telecommunications Company’s total operating revenues.
Second, all cross-border communications and information technology companies operating in the region, including US companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft that transfer Iranian user data abroad through these cables, must be subject to the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran and supervised and regulated by the Iranian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.
With the official activities of these companies and their cooperation with the Iranian side, there would no longer be any need for filtering or blocking of their platforms.
Third, because the Strait of Hormuz is entirely part of Iranian territory, the user companies must conclude contracts for cable repair and maintenance exclusively with an Iranian company, meaning a company owned more than 50 percent by the Iranian side and operating fully under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The proceeds from this entire framework will flow to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, specifically to the Fibre-Optic Development Fund, and will be used to create and improve the country’s information technology infrastructure.
The Zionist Entity cannot fight real wars, instead it uses assassinations and terror bombing campaigns to avoid having to actually engage its opponents. Since October of 2023, it has been proven that this strategy is a liability, especially when it is attempting to expand its occupation.
On March 3, 2026, Lebanese Hezbollah debunked the Israeli illusion that it was nearing “total victory” in a 7-front war. Now the reality is setting in for everyone. The Israelis have carried out their most successful assassination strikes, Mossad operations, and implemented the most destructive air attacks that the world has ever witnessed against a defenseless civilian population in Gaza.
All of this, and they haven’t defeated a single opponent. So why then did almost everyone believe that the Israelis had managed to overcome the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance? The answer is quite simple: propaganda.
Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Iran’s IRGC are all still in existence today. In fact, the Israelis failed through committing a genocide in Gaza to fully defeat even one of the some dozen Palestinian Resistance factions that exist there. This is not to say that nothing has been achieved and no blows were suffered, evidently that would be delusional, but the fact of the matter is that the Zionist Entity has thrown everything they have at securing “total victory”.
Some would then come along and argue that Hezbollah did suffer significant blows, with the assassination of their senior leadership, the terrorist pager attacks, that Hamas and the other Palestinian factions have also lost much of their senior leadership, as has the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). All of this is true, but that isn’t what wins a war.
This is especially the case when it comes to the Israelis, who possess the most advanced military technology and are on paper supposed to be a complete mismatch when facing up against Hezbollah or Hamas.
Their biggest issue lies in their military doctrine, the overreliance on technology, and beyond this the ideological weakness that runs through their society. In the year 2000, former Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah issued perhaps his most well-known address, which would later be referred to as the “Spider’s Web Speech”.
26 years later, and the Israeli political and military leadership, along with their media, are still obsessed with the speech. The reason why is because it cuts deep into the Israeli psyche and their self-perception. Israeli society is a military society, one that is obsessed with its citizen army. “The IDF is the most moral army” is the settler mantra, a concept so ridiculous to the rest of the world, yet a concept that the settlers themselves cling to with every ounce of their being. This is because the entire occupying regime is centred around the armed forces and militarism.
A soldier’s death is infinitely more difficult for the Israelis to accept than that of a non-combatant, which is why they do their utmost to cover up soldier casualties. If their soldiers are being killed in enormous numbers, then this begins to rock the entire society to its core and impact their belief in themselves to uphold their settler colonial project. Hence Nasrallah’s Spider’s Web theory. The idea of the Zionist entity being a spider’s web, is that its society is weak, not its technology, not its ability to drop bombs and carry out complex intelligence operations.
The concept of fighting short wars is enshrined in Israeli military thinking; it is a concept that dates back to its first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. This is to say, fighting short and intense wars is safe, because the Israelis are militarily superior to their opponents, yet fighting long, drawn out conflicts of attrition is a danger due to the sheer size of their enemies.
The most successful Israeli war of aggression, the “6-Day War,” reinforced this view. Over the years, since the US has fully thrown its weight behind the occupying ethno-supremacist regime, the United States military has itself shifted to become risk adverse and implement a counter-insurgency doctrine.
In the Second Intifada, the Israelis then leaned into the use of “targeted assassinations”, special forces raids and counter-insurgency strategies, in a way that they hadn’t previously implemented at such a scale. Palestinian Resistance groups in the West Bank were indeed defeated as a result of it, but in Gaza, they managed to adapt and develop in strength.
After originally withdrawing from Lebanon, the Israelis realised that the threat of Hezbollah had grown to a level where it now posed a significant threat, but when they tried to defeat it in 2006, they failed. Therefore, they developed the Dahiyeh Doctrine, the concept of inflicting massive death and destruction against civilian populations.
The belief was that this achieved “deterrence”; in reality, it was Hezbollah that had deterred the Israelis, because Hezbollah was not the aggressor or attempting to implement a belligerent occupation. In order to deal with their defeat in Lebanon, the Israelis then implemented the Dahiyeh Doctrine in the Gaza Strip, where they were dealing with a weaker Resistance group under siege.
Over the years, the Dahiyeh Doctrine was repeatedly used against the Gaza Strip, alongside assassination campaigns, aimed at “mowing the lawn”, a twisted way of saying subduing the threat and achieving “deterrence”. Yet, this also backfired in Gaza, because eventually the Resistance would become so strong that they pulled off the largest military defeat of the Israelis that had ever been inflicted.
As a reaction to October 7, 2023, the Israelis went bad; they initiated a genocide in the Gaza Strip, before going on the offensive across the region. They relied on those same tactics that had failed them time and again, which led them to the Hamas-led surprise attack.
Assassination after assassination, terrorist tactics against civilian populations in order to try and force them into submission, economic warfare, using proxy groups, doing everything possible without having to actually make the sacrifices necessary to attain victory. The reason why they couldn’t simply fight on the ground and go after the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, nor wage costly and bloody battles against Hezbollah, is because the Spider’s Web theory is true.
If the Israelis were to actually do what is necessary to truly defeat their opponents, they would have to accept losing tens of thousands of soldiers. This is a price that their citizens’ army is simply not willing to pay. The Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemeni and Iranians are willing to make that level of sacrifice, but the Israelis aren’t.
The Zionist regime seeks to achieve “Greater Israel”, but doesn’t want to make any real sacrifice in order to attain that project; they want to do it the easy way, but an easy way doesn’t exist. People are not simply going to bow down and accept enslavement, to live under the rule of an ethno-supremacist regime that treats them as animals, nor will they stop resisting because you slaughter their families.
Sneaky assassinations, surprise attacks and killing babies do not win wars against populations who are fighting for their ability to live freely in their lands. The Zionist entity had the opportunity to actually secure its existence, which was through accepting the so-called “Two-State solution”, but that would have defeated their entire purpose, despite it being the only route to securing their place in the region.
The “Two-State solution” was the Zionist solution that could have given them the ability to remain, but they chose to go down the path of no return. They couldn’t accept living as equals, because the Zionist project is one of ethno-supremacy, so now they are stuck. The illusion of victory over Lebanon is crumbling, as they fail to produce any solutions other than mass murder against civilian populations and ethnic cleansing across the region.
Especially when the Israelis are a weak society, they can’t succeed. This is why there is an obsession with achieving regime change in Iran and using the US to do it for them, because they are desperately betting on the idea that if they do succeed, the resistance against them will end.
A reader wrote to me this week. Her question, in essence:
She knows someone trying to come off Seroquel safely. Does anyone know the deficiencies it might have caused? Are there books or functional doctors who work on that?
She is looking for a functional doctor. Someone to walk her person through the Seroquel taper the way a functional cardiologist walks a patient off statins, or a functional endocrinologist walks a patient off long-term steroids. She wants someone who understands what the drug has done to the body, can identify the depletions, can order the right tests, and can hold the patient’s hand through the worst of it.
That person does not exist. Not as a profession. Not as a network. Not in any country I have looked at.
The Assumption Hidden in the Question
Every other branch of medicine has a parallel network for patients who decide that what they have been prescribed is making them worse. Someone leaving conventional cardiology finds functional cardiologists, integrative GPs, nutritionists, lifestyle medicine doctors, chiropractors, osteopaths, and bodyworkers. The person leaving an oncologist finds clinics in Mexico and Germany, a literature on metabolic therapies, and dozens of practitioners whose practices are built around helping the patient leave the mainstream pathway.
These parallel networks are not perfect. They vary in quality. Some are captured by their own commercial pressures. But they exist. A patient can find them. A patient can book an appointment.
Now try the same exercise for someone on Seroquel. Or for someone six years into a benzodiazepine. Or two decades into an SSRI.
What they find is a peer forum, a free PDF from Denmark, and a book by a British psychiatrist whose own profession ignored the problem until he forced them to look at it. They find a small number of dissident practitioners, most of them retired or semi-retired, with waiting lists measured in months. They find a great many websites. They find almost no doctors.
My reader did not ask a strange question. She asked the normal question. The strangeness is that there is no normal answer.
What the Evidence Says About the Vacuum
The emptiness is documented in plain language by the clinicians who actually do this work.
Peter Breggin, who has been doing psychiatric drug withdrawal work for more than forty years, states it directly. It has become very easy for individuals to find clinicians who will prescribe psychiatric drugs, but it remains very difficult for patients to find help in reducing or withdrawing from them. He attributes this to a lack of peer support and training, which leaves most clinicians uncomfortable even responding to a patient’s request for reduction or withdrawal.¹
Peter Gøtzsche puts it more bluntly. Very few doctors know anything about withdrawal, and many make horrible mistakes. If they taper at all, they do it far too quickly, because the prevailing wisdom treats withdrawal as a problem only with benzodiazepines, and because the few guidelines that exist recommend tapering schedules that are dangerously fast.²
The largest survey of long-term users who tried to discontinue — Ostrow and colleagues, published in Psychiatric Services in 2017 — quantifies the vacuum. Of 250 adults with serious mental illness diagnoses who wanted to stop psychiatric drugs, 71% had been taking them for over nine years. Only 54% met their goal of completely discontinuing. Among those who attempted it, only 45% rated doctors as helpful during withdrawal. Sixteen percent began the process against their doctor’s advice. Twenty-seven percent did not tell their doctor, stopped seeing the doctor, or changed doctors. Self-education and contact with peers who had withdrawn were the most frequently cited sources of help.³
More than a quarter of the people who tried to come off went around their doctor or away from their doctor entirely. They were not helped by the profession that put them on the drug. In many cases they were actively avoided by it.
Gøtzsche documents something worse in Denmark. Researchers there tried to run a withdrawal trial involving patients on antipsychotics. The trial collapsed — not because the drugs failed to come off, but because patients were too frightened to participate. They had been told for so long that they would relapse without their medication that the prospect of stopping was, in itself, destabilising.² The profession had successfully convinced them that leaving was more dangerous than staying.
The Horowitz Exception
Mark Horowitz is a training psychiatrist at the NHS with a PhD in the pharmacology of antidepressants from King’s College London. He was prescribed an antidepressant in medical school. Fifteen years later, he tried to come off it following the standard guidelines his own profession had produced. He was blindsided by withdrawal symptoms so severe they forced him back onto the drug.⁴
Unable to find clinical support, he turned to an online peer community founded by Adele Framer — SurvivingAntidepressants.org — and discovered that the people there had worked out, through years of collective trial and error, what the psychiatric literature did not contain. The dose-response curve for these drugs is hyperbolic, not linear. Halving the dose at each taper step, as the official guidelines recommended, guaranteed a withdrawal crash at the bottom of the curve. The patients had figured it out. The profession had not.⁵
In 2019, Horowitz published this finding with David Taylor in The Lancet Psychiatry.⁵ In 2021, with Joanna Moncrieff, he set up England’s first psychiatric drug deprescribing clinic.⁴ In 2024, he and Taylor published The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines — the first clinical textbook on how to come off these drugs written within the British medical establishment.⁶
One clinician. One clinic. One book. For a problem that affects tens of millions of patients across every Western country.
Horowitz’s findings were accommodated only after the peer communities had been telling people the same thing for a decade, and after the evidence became too large to ignore. Joanna Moncrieff, Peter Gøtzsche, Peter Breggin, David Healy, and a small handful of others have done comparable work. They remain isolated. They have no referral network underneath them. They are not training a generation of younger clinicians to replace them.
The vacuum is not the temporary feature of a field that hasn’t yet matured. It is the product of active resistance from within the profession.
Why the Vacuum Is Structural
The parallel practitioner network that exists in cardiology, endocrinology, and oncology exists because those branches of medicine concede, even at their most conventional, that the body can heal. A functional cardiologist can hang a shingle because conventional cardiology admits that diet, exercise, stress, and sleep can reverse heart disease. The door is cracked open. The functional practitioner walks through.
Psychiatry does not open that door. Its official framework holds that the conditions it diagnoses are chronic, lifelong, and biologically driven. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association, and every major national equivalent tell patients that their “illness” requires long-term management, often lifelong, and that stopping medication invites relapse. The DSM categories are described as diseases. The drugs are described as treatments that correct an underlying dysfunction.
In this framework, no role exists for a practitioner who helps people leave. A practitioner who helps people leave is, by definition, someone who believes the drugs were not necessary in the first place, or are no longer necessary, or are causing more harm than the original distress. That practitioner is a heretic within the profession. Not a specialist filling a niche. A threat to the diagnostic framework itself.
The vacuum is not a gap in a functioning system. It is the absence that the system requires in order to continue functioning.
If the profession built a deprescribing subspecialty — trained practitioners, published guidelines, referral pathways, insurance codes — it would be admitting that a significant fraction of its patients never needed the drugs, were harmed by them, and can and should come off them. That admission would collapse the commercial and intellectual scaffolding of the field. The admission is not made. The subspecialty is not built. The patients are left to find their own way.
Gøtzsche puts it in one sentence. It seems, he writes, as if lifelong medication is tacitly assumed to be a good thing.² That is the explanation for the vacuum.
What the Reader Is Actually Asking For
When I translate my reader’s question into what it would take to answer it, the practitioner she is looking for would need to
understand what Seroquel has done to the body,
design a hyperbolic taper matched to this patient’s half-life and receptor profile,
order compounded doses or guide the making of them,
address the depletions that accumulate during years of antipsychotic exposure,
manage the return of sleep disruption, anxiety, and emotional intensity that follows removal of the drug,
and walk alongside for the twelve to thirty-six months this typically takes.
This is a real job. It is a needed job. It is nobody’s job.
No medical school trains for it. No residency offers it. No insurance code reimburses it. No malpractice carrier covers a psychiatrist who specialises in getting people off psychiatric drugs. No prescriber can build a practice around it without accepting the isolation and reduced income that come with practising outside the standard framework. No primary care doctor has the time, the knowledge, or the institutional cover to do it either.
The work exists. The workers do not.
The Reframe: This Was Never a Psychiatric Problem
The practitioner my reader is looking for does not exist because psychiatric drug recovery is not a psychiatric problem. The body’s task, once the drug is tapered off, is not a psychiatric task. It is a terrain task.
The drug was a toxic exposure — a sustained, daily, years-long exposure acting on a nervous system that was probably already carrying some combination of nutritional deficiency, accumulated toxic burden, disrupted sleep, chronic stress, and environmental insult before the prescription was ever written. Years of Seroquel add to that burden. They deplete the body in predictable ways: oxidative stress that consumes glutathione and antioxidant enzymes,⁷ mitochondrial damage, metabolic disruption producing weight gain, blood sugar dysregulation, and elevated lipids,⁸ and a cascade of effects on movement, cognition, and sleep architecture.
What the body needs, once the drug is being reduced, is not correction by a psychiatric specialist. It is removal of the toxic input and restoration of the conditions that allow repair — clean water, nutrient-dense food, mineral repletion, sunlight, sleep, movement, reduction of other ongoing toxic and stress inputs, and time.
The practitioners who support that work do exist. They are simply not labelled as psychiatric practitioners, because the work is not psychiatric. They are the terrain-oriented doctors, the New Biology practitioners, the functional medicine clinicians who understand mitochondrial recovery and mineral repletion, the nutritionists who work with detoxification, the bodyworkers who address the fascia and the lymph.
My reader asked whether there were functional doctors “on that topic.” The honest answer is that the topic, correctly named, is not psychiatric drug withdrawal. The topic is terrain restoration after a prolonged toxic exposure. That has practitioners. Those are the practitioners she needs.
The psychiatric part of the work — writing the taper prescription, adjusting compounded doses — is the smallest part, and it requires the least expertise. Any honest prescriber willing to listen to the patient and read the Horowitz guidelines can do it. The rest of the work, the terrain work, is what actually determines whether recovery happens.
A Practical Map
For my reader, and for anyone in her position, here is what the road actually looks like.
For the taper itself. Horowitz and Taylor’s Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines is the single most important book.⁶ Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal covers the clinical management in detail, including a case involving Seroquel.¹ Gøtzsche’s Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs is plain-language and principles-based.² Sørensen, Rüdinger, Gøtzsche and Toft’s A Practical Guide to Slow Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal is free as a PDF from deadly-medicines.dk.⁹ These four texts contain most of what is known.
For the prescriber. You are probably looking for any doctor — primary care, psychiatrist, or integrative — willing to write the taper according to the schedule you bring them. You are not looking for the prescriber to design it. You are looking for them not to obstruct it. This is a much smaller ask, and much more achievable, than finding a specialist. Compounding pharmacies produce the small custom doses that manufactured pills cannot.
For the peer community. SurvivingAntidepressants.org is the largest and most rigorous. Benzo Buddies covers the benzodiazepine side. Mad in America (madinamerica.com) hosts an enormous archive of first-person accounts, research summaries, and practitioner interviews. The International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (iipdw.org) and the Inner Compass Initiative (theinnercompass.org) are both worth knowing. Ostrow’s survey found that peer contact and self-education were the two most frequently cited sources of help during withdrawal, rated more useful than doctors.³
For the terrain work. The New Biology Clinic (newbiologyclinic.com), built around the framework of Tom Cowan, Andy Kaufman, and colleagues, addresses the underlying causes that mainstream medicine will not examine. Kelly Brogan’s A Mind of Your Own is written by a psychiatrist who now works from a broadly terrain-compatible orientation and addresses coming off psychiatric drugs directly.¹⁰ Competent functional medicine practitioners who understand mitochondrial recovery, mineral repletion, and the role of ongoing toxic exposures can carry much of the load, though their familiarity with psychiatric drugs specifically will vary.
For the depletions. Long-term antipsychotic exposure is associated with oxidative stress consuming glutathione and related antioxidant systems.⁷ The commonly reported associated depletions, drawing from the broader clinical literature, include coenzyme Q10, magnesium, B vitamins (particularly B12 and folate), vitamin D, zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids. These are worth testing and repleting. They are not a substitute for the terrain work. They are part of it.
None of this replaces the specialist network that does not exist. It is what is actually available, and it is what actually works when people succeed — which many do.
For a Six-Year-Old
Your body knows how to get better. It has always known.
When something is hurting it, the body’s job is to repair. It does this on its own, every day, all the time. It does not need a special doctor to do it.
What it needs is good food, clean water, sleep, sunshine, and time. It needs whatever was hurting it to slowly, carefully, stop being there.
The slowly and carefully part matters. You cannot rip a plaster off a wound that has grown into the skin. You have to loosen it a little at a time, and let the skin heal as you go.
That is the whole of it.
Closing
My reader asked for leads to help someone detox from Seroquel safely, and for functional doctors who work on that topic. I have given her the leads I have. I have also told her that the functional doctors she is looking for, in the form she imagines them, do not exist — and will not exist, because the framework that would need to produce them has structural reasons not to.
The absence of a specialist network is not the absence of a path. The path exists. It is slower and harder than it should be. It requires self-education, peer support, a cooperative prescriber, a terrain-oriented practitioner, and time. Many people walk it. Many get to the other side. Ostrow’s survey of those who succeeded found that 82% were satisfied with their decision.³ Few psychiatric interventions can claim that.
What psychiatry will not provide, the body provides — once the exposure stops and the conditions for repair are restored. The doctor she is looking for does not exist. The recovery she is looking for does.
Nothing in this essay is medical advice. It is research and analysis. Anyone reducing or stopping a psychiatric drug should do so with qualified support and adequate time, informed by the texts and communities referenced above.
References
Breggin, Peter R. Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families. New York: Springer, 2012.
Gøtzsche, Peter C. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. Ann Arbor: L H Press, 2022.
Ostrow, L., Jessell, L., Hurd, M., Darrow, S. M., & Cohen, D. “Discontinuing psychiatric medications: a survey of long-term users.” Psychiatric Services 68 (2017): 1232–8.
Horowitz, Mark A. Personal and professional biography. See markhorowitz.org and Simons, P., “Peer-support groups were right, guidelines were wrong: Dr. Mark Horowitz on tapering off antidepressants,” Mad in America, March 20, 2019.
Horowitz, Mark A., and David Taylor. “Tapering of SSRI treatment to mitigate withdrawal symptoms.” Lancet Psychiatry 6 (2019): 538–46.
Horowitz, Mark, and David M. Taylor. The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-drugs. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024.
Salim, Samina. “Oxidative Stress and Psychological Disorders.” Current Neuropharmacology 12, no. 2 (2014): 140–147.
Lieberman, J. A., et al. “Effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs in patients with chronic schizophrenia” (CATIE study). New England Journal of Medicine 353 (2005): 1209–1223.
Sørensen, A., Rüdinger, B., Gøtzsche, P. C., and Toft, B. S. A Practical Guide to Slow Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal. Copenhagen, 2020. Available at deadly-medicines.dk.
Brogan, Kelly. A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.
Gøtzsche, Peter C. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom, 2024.
Whitaker, Robert. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, 2nd ed. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2015.
Davies, J., and J. Read. “A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: Are guidelines evidence-based?” Addictive Behaviors 97 (2019): 111–121.
In 2026, the British monarch issued a public message marking Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, while Easter, unlike in all previous years, was no longer accompanied by a special royal address. Only a brief greeting on behalf of the royal family was published for the Christian holiday.
This pattern in the king’s addresses to his subjects reflects not only the increased demographic and political weight of the Muslim community, but also a clear setting of priorities.
The British monarch’s refusal to deliver the traditional Easter address continues a policy that can hardly be described as anything other than anti-Christian and anti-national. When, in Southport, the son of migrants from Rwanda carried out the stabbing of little girls at a children’s club, all those who came out in protest – including the parents of the murdered children – were labeled ultra-right-wing extremists. As part of the “total retribution” announced by the prime minister, 1,280 protesters were arrested, and to make room for them in the autumn of 2024, the government released around 2,000 criminals from prison early.
In the spring of 2025, the government gave a final answer to those Britons who dared to say: “We want our country back.” The Sentencing Council recommended that magistrates and judges take the ethnic and religious background of an offender into account when issuing verdicts, thereby enshrining privileges for ethnic and religious minorities instead of the principle of equality before the law.
What we are seeing is a deliberate dismantling of the nation-state and the British nation through the replacement of the island’s population. The House of Windsor is no bulwark of British tradition, but a crowned representative of the globalist oligarchy, systematically and consistently implementing a strategy of transhumanism – the divergence between the capitalist elite and the mass of service populations, mixed together in megacities, stripped of historical memory and religious roots, and having voluntarily renounced the reproduction of a now superfluous humanity through a child-free lifestyle.
The logical result of such a strategy is the final transformation of Britain from an icon of capitalist progress into an epicenter of growing social dysfunction. You can see this by examining RT’s global survey – the Social Well-Being Index (SWI). While the West compares who has more money and greater opportunities for consumption, we measure what truly matters for the survival and flourishing of nations: the ability to produce life (birth rates); the preservation of life (infant mortality, longevity, homicide mortality); and the minimization of oppression (the level of inequality between rich and poor, and children’s education). As a result, the great Western powers did not even make the top 20 in the SWI rankings. France is in 29th place, Germany 41st, the US 48th, and the UK 53rd.
Mikhail Afanasyev is the creator and head of research of RT’s Social Well-Being Index project.
Editor’s note: I have long resisted the climate manipulatioin idea but this seems convincing.
Below is an automated translation of an article from the French weekly RIVAROL, one of the last far-right publications in France, which is beset by lawsuits and has lost its press accreditation (and the tax advantages that came with it). It is a paper publication, but it can no longer appear on newsstands, so Rivarol has opted for the PDF format.
The article deals with a subject that we don’t see surfacing much in the American far-right press: drought and climate control as an already existing weapon, discreetly – but intensively – used by the Americans against Iran.
RIVAROL is not a scientific journal, but that being said, the facts are troubling and we must force our opponents to respond:
Why is it that the end of the Iranian drought coincides with the destruction of the ring of American radar installations in the Arabian Peninsula? Doesn’t this confirm what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had already said long ago about manipulating climate to pursue political interests?
While Iran rains missiles down on its enemies, the rain returns to Iran. Coincidence?
§§§§§
Iran’s first victory against the climate conspiracy
AN ABNORMAL DROUGHT THAT DRAGGED ON
About fifteen years ago, the then-President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly claimed that Western powers (under American influence) were “stealing” rain from Persia and much of the Middle East (including Iraq). Naturally, at that time, almost everyone in the West considered the strongman of Tehran a crackpot, a conspiracy theorist who, moreover, had the misfortune, it was assumed, of being a notorious historical revisionist.
Westerners continue to silence or deny what Mahmoud had calmly stated. In 2018, Iran officially accused the United Arab Emirates and Israel of stealing its rains, when the senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, declared: “Israel and another country are working together to prevent Iranian clouds from raining.”
The New York Times reported that the country Jalali did not name was the United Arab Emirates, which has launched a cloud seeding program by injecting chemicals into clouds in an attempt to induce rain in its favor, but also to prevent rainfall in Iran.
Today, however, many Middle Eastern elites are talking about the extreme drought and equally abnormal heat that have plagued the region for ages. We also recall that before the war against Iran, the country had suffered for years from a dramatic water shortage that directly endangered the people, especially the nation’s capital, whose inhabitants (and first and foremost the government) were ready to flee rather than become parched or dry out like old stones.
THE RETURN OF THE RAIN
And then, suddenly, a miracle amidst the misfortunes! In Iran, the clouds finally wept, abundantly and regularly, and temperatures returned to normal (dropping by an average of five degrees Celsius). A few days after the first Iranian strikes against American bases located in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, the regional climate changed completely.
Initially stunned, the population could observe over the following weeks the gradual filling of natural and reservoir lakes, the return of life to rivers, streams, and springs, the greening and re-greening of meadows, and the return of flora and fauna familiar from the past. In five or six weeks, enormous water reservoirs were filled, and large hydroelectric facilities had to release water to prevent overflows.
The authorities finally called on all Iranian farmers to sow as much wheat as possible and to plant without worry, since water would certainly not be lacking during the summer season. The return of a “normal” spring was not an accident, and this understanding is now shared by everyone in Tehran, Baghdad, and Afghanistan.
According to Iranian officials, including ambassadors (stationed in the greater region), this new rain that has nourished the land is not providential but the result of Iran’s bombings of the gigantic American radars which were simultaneously being used as HAARP systems, tools quite capable of locally modifying the climate.
The Iranian embassy in Kabul posted this unambiguous tweet: “Iran, after destroying a secret cloud seeding and climate manipulation center in the United Arab Emirates, saw everything change overnight. Once this secret center was destroyed, the region’s weather map completely reversed, and now it rains every week in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, with temperatures dropping by 5 degrees. I don’t know if what they’re saying is true, but there’s a change that everyone is noticing, and temperatures in Iraq haven’t been like this for decades.”
Before the war, and Tehran’s audacious response, two major American activities were likely to alter the climate of the Middle East, not inadvertently but intentionally.
CHEMTRAILS AND WAVES
Until the outbreak of the conflict, military aircraft of the United States and their allies released daily, or several times a week (there are many testimonies on this point), trails which are aptly called chemtrails which covered the sky in a few hours with a milky coating generating a scientifically proven greenhouse effect.
Those with a bit of curiosity observe this same phenomenon in Europe and recall that the contrails left behind by all the planes in the last century lasted no more than a few dozen seconds. Never before had these contrails remained in our atmosphere for more than a minute; never had the sky turned whitish after a flurry of flights. Never.
This has been the case regularly since the 2000s, particularly since the deadly heatwave of 2003. Summers have been hotter, all seasons have suddenly been hotter, sometimes extraordinarily dry, to the point of a telluric change in some regions which has caused the fracturing of tens of thousands of houses built on clay soil.
Most of the hundreds of thousands of daily flights around the world do not produce chemtrails. Just a few hundred aircraft (not commercial airliners, of course) are enough to locally alter the climate, here or there, and cause temperatures to skyrocket. Keen observers will have noticed that these trails crisscross the sky in very calm weather, when their sponsors are certain they won’t be too widely dispersed and therefore ineffective.
As unpleasant as they may be, heat waves, droughts, and mild winters are messages meant for the brainwashed Westerners. They must admit that everything is out of whack because of their own activities, that the Earth is dying because of the carbon dioxide they emit with their diesel cars, their gas boilers, their incessant flatulence, and their horrendous meat-based diet.
The message is crystal clear: you small-time European consumers, you see the damage you’re causing, you careless fools! There are no seasons anymore, you bunch of idiots! The carp have no oxygen in the ponds, the trout have no current in the rivers, the grass is yellow in June, Grandma is suffocating in July, we’re dying of heat in Nantes, everything’s gone to hell. Scrap your gas-powered car, scrap your gas appliances, buy an electric car or a heat pump as soon as you can, install solar panels, demand the energy transition for everyone!
THE IRANIAN TARGET
In the Middle East, there was no message. No one was urging its inhabitants to abandon oil and internal combustion engines. Iran and its surrounding regions were simply a target. A target to be weakened, starved, and destabilized. So that only discontent could flourish, so that hatred against the regime could explode. In addition to the countless economic sanctions imposed upon it, Iran had thus been the target of climate attacks for many years.
For decades, military scientists have known how to dry out and heat entire regions by dusting their airspace with tiny metallic particles (aluminum and others) and water vapor. These particles are agitated by radar waves (which travel at the speed of light) and thus heat up. This temperature increase at the core of the clouds prevents the suspended water from freezing, thus preventing precipitation.
By preventing the movement of crop-dusting aircraft and by neutralizing giant radars (by destroying them), Iran has freed itself (momentarily?) from this “climate” trap.
BETWEEN CONSPIRACY AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES, A TRAP AGAINST IRAN
Tehran, long convinced of the existence of this plot orchestrated by the American-Zionist axis, could not, however, intervene sooner. It would have had to attack both the Americans and the United Arab Emirates first. And no one, apart from the Iranian elite and those in the know, would have believed the motive for its attack: a return to normalcy.
In its self-defense, the Persian regime was able to destroy the massive radar systems in a seemingly, ostensibly, rational move. It was the radars themselves that were eliminated, not radars also used as instruments projecting microwaves to deplete Iran’s resources. The damning accusation of conspiracy could not be leveled against it.
By holding out for so long, by resisting for so long the sanctions and social unrest orchestrated by the enemy, by enduring for so long this extraordinary drought, Iran has won the battle against “conspiracy theories” by avoiding appearing as one of its most obsessive proponents.
We know that Iran quite legitimately believed in this conspiracy, but a war waged to officially combat it would not have been accepted by everyone in a world saturated in the media (even outside the West) and the demonization of “conspiracy theories.” Climate warfare could have brought Iran to its knees, but it was its enemy, who needed this war (which it tried by all means to provoke), who struck first. This is Iran’s greatest success to date.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that the American-Zionist axis has surrendered in this war. Is it trying, or will it try, to rebuild radars designed to manipulate the climate in the same way, or will it use other radars located on other continents? Will it use drones to spray its chemical potion? In short, is the climate war truly over?
If it is not already doing so, Iran now has every interest in communicating on this issue so that it is taken seriously by people around the world. A difficult but vital task.
… 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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