In 2016, David Ihben moved his wife and three children from Chicago to Jamestown, in rural Tennessee, with high hopes for a new and calmer life.
But the dream turned into a nightmare for David and his children in December 2019, when divorce proceedings and a subsequent custody battle resulted in the forced vaccination of the children — and changed the family’s fortunes forever.
Ihben said his ex-wife decided “this wasn’t the life she wanted.” So they were attempting to develop a parenting plan in family court — when Tennessee judge Todd Burnett “pulled up the vaccine issue” after discovering the couple’s children were unvaccinated — and forced the parents to vaccinate their children.
Ihben’s two oldest children — daughter Hannah and son Joseph — were spared significant adverse events following their vaccination.
But his youngest son, Isaac, wasn’t so fortunate. After receiving 18 vaccines in one day, Isaac developed severe regressive autism. Today, he requires around-the-clock care.
The children’s mother soon abandoned the children, leaving Ihben to raise them as a single parent — even though he is still obliged to pay child support.
Ihben shared his story with Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Vax-Unvax bus. In a subsequent interview with The Defender, he detailed the challenges he faces in caring for Isaac and the harassment he endured from officials in his community. Ihben shared documentation with The Defender verifying his story.
‘How can a judge force medical care without a doctor’s input?’
Ihben told The Defender his entire family was unvaccinated. “I’ve never had any. My dad was drafted by the Army in 1961, and he didn’t get any either. We’ve never vaccinated,” he said. “Our children had to sign religious exemptions for school.”
During divorce proceedings though, his wife’s attorney used the vaccination issue to drive a wedge between the parents.
“When we went to court, I guess her attorney knew that [Burnett] was a pro-vaccine judge and that’s something that they could get me on,” Ihben said.
According to Ihben, Burnett told the couple that it was his “personal opinion that not vaccinating your children is child abuse.” He then told the couple that whichever parent would be willing to vaccinate the children that same day would leave the courthouse with custody.
“I said, ‘Your Honor, we have rights. It’s between the mom and their father,’” Ihben recalled. “Her attorney whispered to her, and she goes, ‘I’ll take them down and vaccinate them today.’”
“I was so surprised, because me and my ex-wife didn’t agree on much, but we did agree on that,” Ihben said, referring to their views on vaccination.
After the hearing, Ihben and his wife were granted joint custody of the children, with their mother as their primary guardian. Later that day, the children received their childhood vaccines — and Isaac immediately became sick.
“My daughter had previous allergies … so the doctor refused to give her all in one day. They split those … She didn’t have any side effects from what I can see,” Ihben said. “[Joseph] was in the ICU for a couple of days but seems to be okay. But [Isaac] spent 12 days in the ICU, eight days with a 106-degree fever.”
Isaac, who was 5 years old at the time, was “just a normal happy kid,” Ihben said.
Today, Isaac has severe regressive autism. Ihben told The Defender :
“He doesn’t talk. He wears a diaper. He eats out of a baby bottle 20-30 times a day, he has speech therapy and will require 24-hour care and supervision for the rest of his life.
“I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in four years. He has to be changed every two hours, or he will have an accident. If you have a child with regressive autism or know someone, you will understand what our days are like.”
Ihben didn’t learn about Isaac’s injuries right away, because the court initially slapped him with a six-month restraining order. When the six months were up, he finally made plans to pick up his children for “two-hour supervised visitation” at a local McDonald’s.
“My youngest comes walking out and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’” He said his oldest children then told him about what happened to Isaac. “My children told me everything that’s going on. Basically, nobody’s given me information. I had to go off what 10- and 11-year-olds were telling me,” Ihben said.
Ihben tried to find out what happened to Isaac — but encountered more obstacles at Cookeville Regional Medical Center, his local hospital. “The judge had sealed the hospital records. I still cannot get them,” he said.
It wasn’t until he enrolled his daughter in high school that, while obtaining her records from the local health department, he had a chance to view Isaac’s records. That’s when he saw that Isaac had received 18 vaccines in one day.
“How can a judge force medical care without a doctor’s input?” Ihben asked. “I don’t think judges should be dictating medical treatment from the bench.”
According to Ihben, doctors at Vanderbilt University in Nashville said Isaac’s injuries “are a direct result from forced vaccination,” with one doctor telling Ihben that “she’s seen only one other kid that acts like Isaac does.”
Required to continue paying child support, despite mother’s disappearance
Soon after seeing his children for the first time after the custody battle, another surprise was in store for Ihben and his family: Ihben’s ex-wife called to say she and the children had been evicted.
After he kept the children for a week, their mother “got a free house, everything furnished and paid,” and the children were returned to her.
“Then she got evicted from there” in May 2020, Ihben said. He again picked up the children — but that was the last they saw of their mother. According to Ihben, after her second eviction, she left town without a trace.
“We haven’t heard from her or seen her,” Ihben said. “It’ll be five years in May.”
Ihben still pays child support to the state, even though he alone takes care of the children. He said the child support money, which remains uncollected, goes to a state fund — and, if it remains unclaimed, will be confiscated by the state when the children reach adulthood.
Ihben said that though he has gone to court to request full custody of his children or a reduction of his child support payments, he has faced a catch-22 situation.
“The judge said, I can’t do anything unless you get her here in front of me,” Ihben said. “I was like, ‘I’ve served her. Nobody knows where she is.’”
Ihben said he believes the children’s mother didn’t realize Isaac was going to be hurt so badly, and “she just can’t face it.” He added, “I just don’t understand, if she’s been gone almost five years, why she still has full custody, why I still have to pay child support.”
Tennessee laws, local officials pose challenges for raising Isaac
Ihben described the day-to-day realities of caring for Isaac, who will turn 11 next month and just started the fifth grade in a special education program. He said:
“Our lives have changed forever. I can’t have a regular job. I pick up stuff here and there … I have an alarm that goes off every two hours to change Isaac. He eats in the middle of the night … We live out in the country. There’s no bus, so I take him to school back and forth.
“He doesn’t talk, so you don’t know if he’s sick, if he’s upset, if he’s hungry, if he’s cold, if he has a stomach ache … I’ve got a mental list, and I just check it off and hopefully I hit the one that calms him and provides what he needs.”
State rules also pose obstacles. “You’re not allowed to have home healthcare for a disabled child unless you have no other children in the home under 18,” Ihben said.
“Our local school district has restraint chairs for autistic children. They are allowed to put Isaac in a chair, to pepper spray him, to tase him. Police departments have no training for dealing with autistic children,” Ihben said.
Ihben said state, county and town officials have attempted to intimidate him and his family.
According to Ihben, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) showed up at his home on Dec. 5, 2023. “Somebody starts beating on the door … there’s a truck at the end of the road, a truck at the end of the other road and two trucks in the driveway. They had assault weapons.”
Ihben said the officers claimed that a social worker wanted to speak with him, but that he refused to open his door for them. He submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the state to find out why his home was raided, but was told there are “no records of anything.”
The TBI raid took a toll on him. “I had a heart attack that night,” he said. “I couldn’t breathe.” He said the incident still affects him today. “I’m sure I have PTSD from it. I’m still under treatment,” Ihben said.
In June 2023, Ihben said he went to his county commission meeting to tell them about what happened to his family. The county commissioner, Jimmy Johnson, left him a voicemail warning him not to hold any rally or protest.
“The commissioner called the sheriff,” Ihben said, but ultimately “they backed off.”
In another incident, Ihben said he was banned from his local Walmart store after a store manager called the police because Isaac “was causing a disturbance.” This obliged Ihben to shop at another Walmart, an hour away from his home.
Ihben said it’s also difficult to find a lawyer to represent him and his family. “No attorney is willing to take on the judge.”
Local officials ‘tried to scare us’ into not doing Vax-Unvax bus interview
Ihben credited CHD and its Tennessee Chapter for helping him and his family. “We wouldn’t be here without CHD helping us out,” Ihben said. “The Tennessee Chapter has helped us out a lot.”
Ihben said he recently saw “Vaxxed 3” with members of the state’s CHD chapter. “What we have to live through every day is horrible, but it could be worse,” Ihben said, citing stories in the film of children who died post-vaccination.
According to Ihben, his efforts to promote CHD initiatives in his community, such as the visit of the Vax-Unvax bus earlier this year, have also been met with intimidation.
“We put a little flyer together [for the Vax-Unvax bus] and we started passing it out,” Ihben said. But on Feb. 1, the day of his bus interview, Ihben said his wife’s attorney, her husband — who is the attorney for the local school board — and Burnett, who mobilized the TBI, “tried to scare us into not doing the bus interview.”
Getting the word out, spreading the message is ‘the only weapon we have’
Isaac has recently shown some improvement, according to Ihben. “He’s doing better slowly … He’s in a lot of therapy. He’s starting to write some numbers and letters on his own. Teachers think he’s reading, but he’s still never said a word.”
Ihben said this has been a learning experience for his oldest children, who will “have to take care of Isaac every day” after his death. “That’s a lifetime commitment.”
Another silver lining, according to Ihben, is that Isaac’s story has become a learning experience for his family and many members of his local community.
“This hasn’t just got me learning. My kids are learning. Hannah and Joseph are learning about their government and their food and their environment. They’re teaching their friends about this.”
For Ihben, getting the word out and spreading the message is “the only weapon we have.” He said, “It’s powerful that my kids’ friends come up and say ‘we’re sorry for what happened to you, we’ve seen the [Vax-Unvax] interview.’”
Ihben said he hopes the message will help other children avoid Isaac’s fate. “I hope Isaac will be the last,” he said.
The Democratic Party is championing presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a born-again champion of freedom. Earlier this year, Democrats shifted their focus from democracy to freedom, convinced that the latter word would enthrall voters on Election Day. Providing “freedom from fear” has become one of their most frequent political promises this past century.
Politicians routinely portray freedom from fear as the apex of freedom, higher than the initial freedoms buttressed by the Bill of Rights. While presidents have defined “freedom from fear” differently, the common thread is that it requires unleashing government agents. Reviewing almost a century of bipartisan scams on freedom from fear provides good cause to doubt the latest geyser of promises.
“Freedom from fear” first entered the American political lexicon thanks to a January 1941 speech by President Franklin Roosevelt. In that State of the Union address, he promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship—two cornerstones of the First Amendment—and added socialist-style “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” FDR’s revised freedoms did not include freedom to dissent, since he said the government would need to take care of the “few slackers or trouble makers in our midst.” Nor did FDR’s improved freedoms include the freedom not be rounded up for concentration camps, as FDR ordered for Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Three years later, FDR amended his definition of freedom by championing a Universal Conscription Act to entitle government to the forced labor of any citizen.
Richard Nixon, in his acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention, promised, “We shall re-establish freedom from fear in America so that America can take the lead in re-establishing freedom from fear in the world.” Nixon asserted, “The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and that right must be guaranteed in this country.” But with the Nixon scorecard, government violence didn’t count. He perpetuated the war in Vietnam, resulting in another 20,000 American soldiers pointlessly dying. On the homefront, he created the Drug Enforcement Administration and appointed the nation’s first drug czar. The FBI perpetuated its COINTELPRO program, carrying out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” as a 1976 Senate report noted.
President George H.W. Bush told the National Baptist Convention on September 8, 1989, “Today freedom from fear…means freedom from drugs.” To boost public fear, a DEA informant arranged for a knucklehead to sell crack cocaine to an undercover narc in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Bush invoked the sell a few days later to justify a national crackdown. He informed the American Legion, “Today I want to focus on one of those freedoms: freedom from fear—the fear of war abroad, the fear of drugs and crime at home. To win that freedom, to build a better and safer life, will require the bravery and sacrifice that Americans have shown before and must again.”
Foremost among the sacrifices that Bush demanded was that of traditional liberties. His administration vastly expanded federal power to arbitrarily seize Americans’ property and increased the role of the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. In a 1992 speech dedicating a new DEA office building, Bush declared, “I am delighted to be here to salute the greatest freedom fighters any nation could have, people who provide freedom from violence and freedom from drugs and freedom from fear.” The DEA’s own crime sprees, corruption, and violence were not permitted to impede Bush’s rhetorical victory lap.
On May 12, 1994, President Bill Clinton declared, “Freedom from violence and freedom from fear are essential to maintaining not only personal freedom but a sense of community in this country.” Clinton banned so-called assault weapons and sought to ban thirty-five million semi-automatic firearms. Gun bans in response to high crime rates mean closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. Citizens would presumedly have nothing to fear after they were forced to abjectly depend on government officials for their own survival. During Clinton’s first term, public housing authorities began mass warrantless searches of apartments to confiscate guns and other banned items. Clinton slammed a federal court ruling blocking the unconstitutional raids. When he visited the Chicago housing projects, Clinton declared, “The most important freedom we have in this country is the freedom from fear. And if people aren’t free from fear, they are not free.” In Clinton’s view, public housing residents had no right to fear the federally-funded housing police storming into their apartments.
In February 1996, Clinton, seeking conservative support for his reelection campaign, endorsed forcing children to wear uniforms at public schools. Clinton justified the fashion dictate: “Every one of us has an obligation to work together, to give our children freedom from fear and the freedom to learn.” But, if mandatory uniforms were the key to ending violence, Postal Service employees would have a lower homicide rate.
Senator Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, repeatedly promised voters “freedom from fear” via crackdowns on crime. How did Dole intend to provide “freedom from fear”? By proclaiming that “we must…untie the hands of the police.” Dole did not specify exactly how many no-knock raids would be necessary to restore domestic tranquility.
George W. Bush, like his father, alternatedpromises of “freedom from fear” with shameless fearmongering. Prior to election day 2004, the Bush administration continually issued terror attack warnings based on flimsy or no evidence.The New York Times derided the Bush administration in late October for having “turned the business of keeping Americans informed about the threat of terrorism into a politically scripted series of color-coded scare sessions.” Yet each time a terror alert was issued, the president’s approval rating rose temporarily by roughly three percent, according to a Cornell University study. The Cornell study found a “halo effect”: the more terrorists who wanted to attack America, the better job Bush was supposedly doing. People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for Bush by a 6-to-1 margin.
The most memorable Bush campaign ad, released a few weeks before the election, opened in a thick forest, with shadows and hazy shots complementing the foreboding music. After vilifying Democratic candidate John Kerry, the ad showed a pack of wolves reclining in a clearing. The voiceover concluded, “And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm” as the wolves began jumping up and running toward the camera. At the end of the ad, the president appeared and announced, “I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message.” One liberal cynic suggested that the ad’s message was that voters would be eaten by wolves if Kerry won. The Bush ad spurred protests by the equivalent of the Lobo Anti-Defamation League. Pat Wendland, the manager of Wolves Offered Life and Friendship, a Colorado wolf refuge, Colorado, complained, “The comparison to terrorists was insulting. We have worked for years, teaching people that Little Red Riding Hood lied.”
Bush’s campaign to terrify voters into granting him four more years to rule America and much of the world did not deter him from announcing a few months later in his State of the Union address, “We will pass along to our children all the freedoms we enjoy, and chief among them is freedom from fear.” This was back when the mainstream media was continuing to hail Bush as a visionary idealist, prior to the collapse of his credibility on the Iraq war, torture, and other debacles.
President Joe Biden milked “freedom from fear” in a Pennsylvania speech earlier this year on what he labeled “the third anniversary of the Insurrection at the United States Capitol.” Biden revealed plans to turn the November election into a referendum on Adolf Hitler, accusing Donald Trump of “echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” CNN reported that Biden campaign aides planned to go “full Hitler” on Trump. Biden spent half an hour fearmongering and then closed by promising “freedom from fear.” This was the famous Biden two-step—demagoguing to his heart’s content and then closing with a few schmaltzy uplift lines, entitling the media to re-christen him as an idealist.
Biden did not survive the Democrats’ version of the Night of the Long Knives and Vice President Kamala Harris has been designated the party’s presidential flagbearer.Harris painted with an even broader brush than most politicians. At a Juneteenth Concert this summer, she condemned Republicans for “a full-on attack” on “the freedom from fear of bigotry and hate.” Harris implied that politicians could wave a psychological magic wand to banish any bias in perpetuity. How can anyone have “freedom from fear of bigotry” unless politicians become entitled to perpetually control everyone’s thoughts?
In August, the Democratic National Convention whooped up freedom in ways that would qualify as “authentic frontier gibberish,” as the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles would say.A campaign video promised “freedom from control, freedom from extremism and fear.” So Americans won’t have true freedom until politicians forcibly suppress any idea they label as immoderate? The Democratic Party platform warned, “Reproductive freedom, freedom from hate, freedom from fear, the freedom to control our own destinies and more are all on the line in this election.” But the whole point of politics nowadays is to preempt individuals from controlling their own destinies. Regardless, a Time magazine headline hailed “How Kamala Harris Took ‘Freedom’ Back from the GOP.”
“Freedom from fear” is the ultimate political blank check. The more people government frightens, the more legitimate dictatorial policies become. Pledging “freedom from fear” entitles politicians to seize power over anything that frightens anyone. Giving politicians more power based on people’s fears is like giving firemen pay raises based on how many false alarms they report.
Politicians’ promises of “freedom from fear” imply that freedom properly understood is a risk-free, worry-free condition. It is the type of promise that a mother would make to a young child. Freedom is now supposedly something that exists only in the womb of government paternalism. “Freedom from fear” is to be achieved by trusting everything that politicians say and surrendering everything that politicians demand. New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham epitomized that mindset when she proclaimed at the Democratic National Convention, “We need a president who can be Consoler-in-Chief. We need a president capable of holding us in a great big hug.” And continuing to hold us until we formally become psychological wards of the state?
“Freedom from fear” offers freedom from everything except the government. Anyone who sounds the alarm about excessive government power will automatically be guilty of subverting freedom from fear. Presumably,the fewer inviolable rights the citizen has, the better government will treat him. But as John Locke warned more than 300 years ago, “I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.”
Why not simply offer voters “freedom from the Constitution”? “Freedom from fear” means security via mass delusions about the nature of political power. Painting the motto “freedom from fear” on shackles won’t make them easier to bear. Perhaps our ruling class should be honest and replace the Bill of Rights with a new motto: “Political buncombe will make you free.”
And who is Trent Horn? Dr. E. Michael Jones, arguably America’s leading Catholic intellectual, explains:
Trent Horn is a guy who works for something called Catholic Answers. Catholic Answers got started in the 90s by a guy named Carl Keating, who basically was going to defend the Catholic Church against fundamentalists who would say that the church was the whore of Babylon—fever swamp stuff like that. And it was like shooting fish in a barrel. He made a lot of money. He retired. He got replaced by Chris Check, a guy I knew from the Rockford Institute and Chronicles Magazine, a guy I always liked.
And now the world has changed. And so Trent Horn (took over Catholic Answers)… Some people said he was trying to apply for a job with the Daily Wire. He wanted to get Candace Owens’ slot.
So he’s going to be the Catholic guy who’s going to take up the Jewish cause. Well, it didn’t work. This guy singlehandedly resurrected an idea that really needs to be taken up, which is basically: What exactly is the status of the Jews and the Catholics? What is exactly the Catholic position?
And he took it to the extreme where he said basically it’s a sin to deny the Holocaust. And then he’s got “quotes” from people like Pope Benedict, which don’t say what he said they said. The Pope would never say (that Holocaust denial is a sin). The Pope, responding to the Williamson affair when Bishop Williamson got attacked across the world, said that basically “this is not decent. Decent people don’t do this.” Well, no one ever said Catholicism was just reserved for people who are fit for polite company.
So Trent Horn’s trying to up the ante by saying Catholics commit a sin if they contest Jewish fables. Well, it’s not going to work. And it bombed. There were hundreds of people who wrote in after this “Holocaust Denial Is a Sin” video, including people who noticed, as I did, there was fraud, academic fraud, going on here.
He flashes this image for two seconds, supposedly a letter from Himmler talking about the extermination of the Jews. Wait a minute. I have a pause button, Trent. And I put it on there. It turns out the beginning of this is Latin. It’s the Lorem Ipsum text generator. And then plopped in the middle is some statement—I guess he doesn’t think that anybody can read German because he apparently can’t—that says “the extermination of the Jewish people.”
But the real quote that follows is in a completely different typeset. The real quote is “die Evakuierung des deutschen Volkes,” which means the evacuation of the German people.
So I can’t tell you how angry I was. It’s been a long time since I got that angry. And I said that my friend Chris should either take the video down or stop claiming that he’ speaking for Catholics, because this is not Catholic theology. And you’re putting burdens on Catholics that they do not need to bear.
Catholic Holocaust Denial: A Confession
If crypto-Jew Trent Horn gets his way, Catholics the world over will be filing into confessionals every Sunday to whisper to their priests:
“Forgive me father for I have sinned. I have doubted the existence of the gas chambers.”
“Why would you do that, my son?”
“It has been six months since my last confession, and during that time I have been studying the issue.”
“ّWhy would you ‘study’ such rubbish, my son?”
“I was curious, father.”
“Have you not heard the old saying, my son, that ‘curiosity killed the catamite’”?
“No, I never heard that one, father. (Pause.) What’s a catamite?”
“That, my son, is another of those things you shouldn’t be curious about.”
“But why shouldn’t I ask questions about the Holocaust, father?”
“Because it is an article of faith, my son. If a Catholic denies OR doubts any article of faith determined by the Catholic Church, they are a sinful heretic. To be a Catholic is to be believe everything that the Catholic Church teaches. To doubt or deny ANY dogma is to proclaim oneself a Protestant – even if one continues to attend Mass and, God forbid, receive Holy Communion.”
“But father, is the Holocaust really an article of faith?”
“Of course it is, my son. There is no convincing evidence that it ever happened. That means we must accept it on faith. As Tertullian writes in his De Carne Christi: ‘I believe it because it is absurd.’ That certainly applies to the Holocaust.”
“I’m confused, father. What must I believe about the Holocaust?”
“It’s quite simple, son. Holocaustianity is the new Christianity. Instead of Jesus, we worship the Jewish people and their sacred six million. Instead of the Crucifixion, we have the gas chambers. And instead of the Resurrection, we have the state of Israel. That is the new Holy Trinity.”
“Is there a creed I should recite?”
“Indeed there is, my son. It goes like this:
‘I believe in the Holy Jewish People, the only chosen sons of Yahweh, masters of all things visible and invisible.
‘I believe in the sacred six million.
‘I believe in the gas chambers.
‘I support the holy state of Israel.
‘I will bow down to Antichrist, the Jewish messiah, when he comes.
‘And above all, I condemn Hamas.’
“But father, what you’re saying doesn’t sound like what I learned in Sunday school.”
“That was the old church, son. Today’s church is different. It’s new and fresh and irreverent about everything except the Holocaust and above all it’s no longer antisemitic. By the way, have you considered having a sex change?”
The parishioner hastily leaves the confessional, exits the church, and finds himself in the middle of a Hollywood studio lot. The church he just left, he discovers, was a paper maché mock-up, and the priest and parishioners were actors. (Was that Trent Horn playing the priest?) Discombobulated, he tries to find an exit from the studio lot, but it just seems to go on and on forever…
Genocide Denial IS a Sin
The notion of denial involves willful refusal to face an obvious truth. It does not apply to those who ask questions about matters that are far from obvious, including: Were six million Jews really murdered in German concentration camps? How many, if any, died in gas chambers? Were the deaths of German concentration camp inmates part of a preconceived bureaucratic plan to kill all Jews within reach of the German government?
The Jewish father of Holocaust Studies, Raul Hilberg, denied that six million Jews died. The more plausible number, he said, was 5.1 million. Was he “in denial”? Should he have been imprisoned along with others who offer even lower figures? What number is the cutoff, below which one goes to jail or commits a sin?
Mainstream historians have all sorts of different views about the alleged gas chambers and who may have died in them. Should those who hold less than maximalist views be imprisoned, or condemned for sinfulness, alongside those who see no convincing evidence for gas chambers at all?
Mainstream historians also hold widely varying views on whether there was a preconceived bureaucratic plan to kill all Jews within reach of the German government. Should those who argue for a more ad hoc Holocaust be incarcerated (or deemed guilty of mortal sin) alongside those who think that most of the roughly half-million Jews who died in the camps were victims of starvation and deprivation, not gas or bullets?
There is a plausible case that the German government committed genocide against Jews and gypsies during World War II. But all sorts of reasonable positions on the details of that genocide, if indeed it was one, have been criminalized. Though it is a crime in several European countries to discuss those details, calling it a sin seems a bit of a stretch.
Is Denying the Palestinian Genocide a Sin?
The genocide that is currently taking place in Occupied Palestine is one of the most fully-documented events in human history. It is being broadcast on social media and independent media (despite Israel’s relentless slaughter of journalists) 24/7/365. No reasonable person can doubt that the state of Israel is deliberately slaughtering Palestinian civilians en masse in order to facilitate its theft of their land and resources.
According to official body counts, Israel has killed about 42,000 people in Gaza during the past year. More than two-thirds of the dead are women and children, and most of the rest are noncombatants.
But the official body count is unrealistically low. It only includes identified bodies killed directly by the Israeli military. Thousands of other bodies remain buried in rubble, while others are excavated but not identified. And then there tens of thousands more whom Israel kills through starvation or deprivation. The Lancet, a leading medical journal, has estimated the real number of deaths in Gaza as over 186,000. Dr. Gideon Polya, an expert on avoidable mortality, thinks the total is even higher:
On 5 September 2024 Professor Devi Sridhar (chair, global health, University of Edinburgh) reported: “Total deaths since the conflict began would be estimated at about 335,500 in total” or 30,500 per month and 366,000 per year. Of these “first year” deaths about 55,000 were violent (from “bullets and bombs”) and 311,000 from horrific imposed deprivation.
By “horrific deprivation” Professor Sridhar is referring to Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gazans, its destruction of water and sewage infrastructure, and its obliteration of almost all of Gaza’s hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities.
The USA and the West are indeed mired in what might be accurately called “genocide denial.” Most Americans and Westerners prefer to look the other way, deliberately averting their gaze from the sniper-murdered babies and whole families dying slowly beneath rubble created by American tax dollars.
That genocide denial is indeed a sin that puts them not only outside of all faith, but outside of all humanity.
The British Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has announced a £7 million procurement process for anti-semitism training in schools, colleges and universities, where she claims there’s been a huge increase in anti-semitic incidents.
However, the statistics on which she’s relying have been provided by the Community Security Trust (CST), which has links to Israel’s overseas spy agency, Mossad.
The British government has announced that its response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine is that it will spend £7 million on tackling anti-semitism in education.
Meanwhile, the government has failed to earmark any money at all to tackle the epidemic of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic racism whipped up by the Zionist movement.
َ£500,000 of the £7 million funding has been awarded to the University Jewish Chaplaincy, or UJC, for ‘welfare support’ for Jewish students in universities.
But what is the UJC, a kindly Jewish religious organization devoted to the welfare and spiritual needs of their students?
Unfortunately not, in fact, it’s a fully signed up Zionist organization with direct links to illegal settlements and to the genocidal occupation forces.
The UJC is a charity that is also a member of the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, JLC.
One of the directors of the UJC, Yuri Goldberg, was appointed a director of the JLC in August 2024.
Both groups are advocates of the genocidal ideology of Zionism, but perhaps the UJC is best known for its chaplain at Leeds University who was involved in the genocide in Gaza as a member of the occupation forces.
In October 2023 it emerged that he had been circulating videos of himself to Jewish students in Israeli occupation forces uniform, claiming: “No one could deny that Israel is dealing with this war with the utmost morality and good ethics”.
“What Israel is trying to do is destroy the evil, which is the most moral thing possible.”
It seems unlikely that this was conducive to the welfare of Jewish students at Leeds or elsewhere.
Zechariah Deutsch and his wife, Nava, the chaplaincy couple, had both trained for two years at Ohr Torah Stone’s Straus-Amiel Institute.
The Institute is located in Migdal Oz in the Gush Etzion settlement block in the West Bank. Ohr Torah Stone is an educational Zionist venture founded by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin in New York. He later became a settler colonist.
In November 2023, the president of Ohr Torah Stone, Riskin’s successor, Rabbi Kenneth Brander, visited the Zionist Northern Front. He was asked by the company commander to write a message to our enemies on one of the rockets used to retaliate to their attacks. In indelible black marker Brander wrote “To fulfill the mitzvah and mission of obliterating Amalek”.
Ohr Torah Stone is, in other words, a genocidal propaganda and indoctrination operation.
How the government imagines it will increase the welfare of Jewish students by giving money to genocidal Zionist extremists is unclear.
University Jewish Chaplaincy, links to illegal settlements and Israeli Occupation Forces
Leeds University is again the subject of outrage as the new chaplaincy couple are withdrawn from campus after shocking anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic posts were found on social media. The posts, mostly made by Sonia Pariente, included her view that Israeli lives were more valuable than those of Palestinians, referred to Palestinian women wearing black bags and to the Arabs of darkness.
“After October 7th I don’t differentiate between Hamas and so called Palestinians”, she wrote going on to say that “for the next 10 to 20 years, the Palestinian people will pay the bill that Hamas set today, and this bill will be paid in blood.”
Under pressure from pro-Palestine groups, the University Jewish Chaplaincy sacked them and removed their internet profile page.
The University Jewish Chaplaincy operates as a charity in the UK. It provides Jewish chaplains to universities up and down the country. Our investigations reveal that many have direct connections to illegal settlement and the occupation forces.
There are currently 17 individuals appointed in the UK, six couples and five individuals.
At Bristol, Asaf and Atara Forges are said to come from Israel, though both trained in the Straus Emil Institute of Ohr Torah Stone. This is the Gush Etzion settlement block run by an openly genocidal organization.
The Glasgow and Edinburgh chaplain, Eliran, trained at a yeshiva that is also run by Torah stone and included service in the occupation forces. His wife, Ayala Shabo, is from the illegal settlement of Efrat and attended Shalem College, in the occupied territory.
The chaplain at Nottingham, Uriya Dvir, attended two Yeshivas for a total of six years. Both were in illegal settlements. The Yeshivas combined Torah study and service in the occupation forces.
Rabbi Fishel Cohen at Birmingham is part of the genocidal Chabad cult, which believes it is justified to kill Palestinian children.
Unsurprisingly, the UJC is funded by a slew of hardline genocidal Zionists such as the convicted fraudster and founder of the Community Security Trust, Gerald Ronson, property developer David Dangoor, whose money is channeled via the Exilarch’s Foundation.
It also donates to the Islamophobic Henry Jackson society as does the Wolfson family, which owns the retailer ‘NEXT’.
The family has donated to Islamophobic think tanks, including Policy Exchange, and the Jerusalem Foundation which is directly involved in ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
The University Jewish Chaplaincy is a charity so these connections must raise questions about its ability to provide public benefit as required by law.
The pharmaceutical industry paid $1.06 billion to reviewers at top medical journals between 2020 and 2022, according to a research letter published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Payments to peer reviewers for The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine included $1 billion to individuals or their institutions for research and $64.18 million in general payments, including travel and meals. Consulting fees and speaking compensation accounted for $34.31 million and $11.80 million respectively.
Among the nearly 2,000 physician peer reviewers analyzed, more than half received at least one industry payment between 2020 and 2022.
Although conflicts of interest among journal editors and authors have been investigated, the study authors wrote, any conflicts of interest the peer reviewers may have have been harder to assess.
“The traditionally opaque nature” of peer review has hindered the evaluation of peer reviewers, “despite their crucial role in academic publishing,” the authors wrote.
The typical conflict-of-interest policies most journals have for authors — requiring only that they disclose their conflicts — do not usually apply to peer reviewers, according to the JAMA study.
Journal editors may inquire about those conflicts, but they rarely publicly disclose them — even though many reviewers for top journals may have industry ties “due to their academic expertise,” the authors wrote.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist at Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender the scientific news process is compromised when reviewers are beholden to Big Pharma, rather than to the scientific community.
“No conflicting or competing interests should be anywhere near the publication process,” he said, adding:
“Science is a community. We need each other to modify and change ideas into better ideas, to critique, to better ourselves, otherwise we do not progress. A scientific publication is how scientists communicate with each other. It is the one thing that is sacrosanct, that is too valuable and too important to be meddled with.
“As scientists, our fundamental duty is to the community. That includes ensuring that our one time-honored method for communicating ideas with each other is free and clear of conflicting interests.”
Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of PharmedOut, a Georgetown University Medical Center project that educates medical professionals about industry marketing practices, told MedPage Today that pharmaceutical companies are the largest purchasers of preprint articles and that they advertise heavily in journals, which “affects what gets published.”
“Obviously, pharma-critical articles are going to be published less often in journals supported by pharmaceutical companies, whose medical editors are supported by pharmaceutical companies, and whose peer reviewers are supported by pharmaceutical companies,” she said.
The study authors identified reviewers based on 2022 reviewer lists for each journal. They searched the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Open Payments database for payments made to reviewers.
Drugmakers are required to report payments to physicians to the database, which was established by legislators in 2013 to address growing public concerns about Big Pharma’s influence over doctors.
The authors of the JAMA research letter limited their analysis to U.S.-based physicians, as those are the only ones listed on Open Payments. Of 7,021 reviewer names, 1,962 were practicing physicians and therefore searchable. Of those, 145 had performed peer reviews for more than one journal.
Overall, the authors found that 1,155 of the reviewers included in their study received industry payments between 2020 and 2022, with most payments made to physicians and their institutions to finance research.
More than half of the reviewers accepted payments for travel, speaking and consulting. Those direct, non-research-related payments had a median value of $7,614.
The authors said the study may have underestimated industry payments because it excluded non-U.S.-based physicians and reviewers who are not practicing physicians. It didn’t account for payments from other entities that may present conflicts of interest, including insurance and technology companies.
“Additional research and transparency regarding industry payments in the peer review process are needed,” the researchers concluded.
If you’re of a certain age or demographic and in the northern hemisphere, chances are you’re being invited or encouraged to get a flu vaccine. The claim is that flu vaccines protect you and others from coming down with flu – and that if you do get it, the symptoms will be mild. So, is this true?
Many scientists see the flu shot as an unnecessary measure. For one thing, there’s a big question over whether the flu vaccine even works, particularly for older people, for whom it is recommended. Studies show that the vaccines often do not match the circulating viruses and no significant effects on serious complications or hospitalizations have been demonstrated.
You’d think that vaccinating people against flu would lead to a reduction in deaths from flu. But figures show that this isn’t the case. In fact, even though the number of flu shots given has increased more than eightfold, the number of flu-associated deaths has remained more or less unchanged.
There’s a logical explanation, and it goes like this:
Antibodies are not enough
Flu vaccines, like any other vaccine, primarily rely on the so-called Th2 antibody response. This generates antibodies to help the body fight off the influenza virus once it enters the bloodstream. What vaccines don’t do is impact the first line of defence in the nasal mucosa. This part of the innate immune system does not use antibodies, and it is here where respiratory viruses replicate.
This is whyvaccines for respiratory viruses will never prevent infection or the transmission of the disease.
The immune response to vaccinations also decreases with age, which further reduces the already weak effect of vaccination in older people. Studies bear this out. In particular, a 2012 article in the British Medical Journal quoted an independent study that looked at data from 1967 to 2012 and concluded there isn’t strong evidence showing that the flu vaccine consistently protects people. While it does offer some protection for young, healthy adults who usually don’t face serious flu complications, the researchers noted that there is not enough evidence to support its effectiveness for older adults (65 and older), who account for more than 90% of flu-related deaths.
Recent research into the efficacy of flu shots also reveals their limitations
In 2020, Anderson et al. showed that influenza vaccination of 60 to 70 year olds in England and Wales had no discernible positive impact on hospitalization or deaths:
Another study in Japan reported on 83,146 individuals aged 65 years and followed them up over six years. In 2023, the incidence of hospitalization for influenza did not differ significantly by vaccination and the claimed protective effectiveness against incidence waned quickly after four or five months.
Another 2020 study from Anderson and team analysed data covering 170 million episodes of care and 7.6 million deaths. Turning 65 was associated with a statistically and clinically significant increase in rate of seasonal influenza vaccination. However, no evidence indicated that vaccination reduced hospitalizations or mortality among elderly persons. The study points out that estimates were precise enough to rule out results from many previous studies.
This is not just a concern for the elderly but for all those with weakened immune systems, including those undergoing immunosuppressive treatments, or individuals with chronic health conditions. In such cases, the Th2 response may not produce enough protective antibodies to effectively combat the virus, leading to a higher risk of severe illness.
Here’s another reason to exercise caution of the flu vaccine:
Flu vaccines actually SPREAD the virus
Controlled studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) find that people who receive flu shots emit 630% more flu virus particles into the air compared to non-vaccinated people. In other words, flu vaccines spread the flu!
Physicians for Informed Consent has produced this concise summary of facts that you, your loved ones and your doctor should consider before a potential injection.
All this leads to an important next question:
If the flu shot isn’t a good idea, what is?
The flu shots’ limitations make the prevention and treatment of flu with nutritional supplements like Vitamin D, Quercetin, and Zinc more appealing and safe. These supplements not only enhance the immune response but also offer additional antiviral and anti-inflammatory benefits:
Vitamin D protects the lungs and airways – and much more besides
Studies have shown that Vitamin D supplementation can significantly reduce the risk of influenza infections by enhancing the body’s immune response. It works by modulating the expression of inflammatory cytokines and increasing macrophage function, which are essential for fighting off infections.
Moreover, Vitamin D has been found to protect the lungs and airways through the antimicrobial peptide cathelicidin, which has both antibacterial and antiviral properties. Vitamin D supplementation shows promise in reducing the risk and severity of respiratory infections, including influenza. The evidence suggests that consistent Vitamin D intake can lower the incidence of acute respiratory infections, shorten the duration of symptoms, and enhance immune response, particularly in the elderly. These benefits can translate into reduced hospitalizations and deaths due to flu, making Vitamin D a valuable component in flu prevention and management strategies.
Quercetin: a powerful antiviral and zinc’s vital wingman
Quercetin is a flavonoid found in many fruits and vegetables, known for its antiviral, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant properties. It has been shown to inhibit the entry and replication of viruses in lung cells, making it a potent candidate for managing respiratory infections like the flu. Quercetin also acts as a zinc ionophore, facilitating the transport of zinc into cells, which enhances its antiviral effects. Studies suggest that the co-administration of Quercetin and Vitamin C can exert a synergistic antiviral action, further boosting immune response and reducing viral replication
Zinc: helps prevent and reduce infection severity and duration
Zinc is an essential mineral that supports various cellular functions of both the innate and adaptive immune systems. It interferes with the process that certain cold viruses use to multiply, thereby reducing the severity and duration of infections. Zinc is particularly important for the recruitment and activity of neutrophil granulocytes, natural killer cells, and T cells, all of which play critical roles in the immune response. Supplementation with zinc has been supported by evidence showing its effectiveness in preventing viral infections and reducing their severity.
In summary…
The questionable efficiency and safety of the flu vaccine raises important concerns that cannot be overlooked. Alternative approaches such as supplementing vitamin D, quercetin and zinc, are one way to enhance immunity without the risks associated with traditional vaccinations.
Moreover, the potential for the production of IgG4 antibodies as a response to the vaccine illustrates a complex interaction between immunization and immune system dynamics, where the very act of repeated vaccination may inadvertently lead to a weakened response against certain influenza strains. This effect can also result in the weakening of the immune system in general to fight infections and cancer. This highlights the need for continued research and dialogue about the benefits and risks of flu vaccination versus alternative preventive strategies.
As we navigate through flu seasons, it is crucial to remain informed and consider individualized approaches to immune health. Ultimately, a well-rounded strategy that includes lifestyle choices, nutritional support, and an understanding of the science behind flu immunization could empower individuals to make informed decisions that best suit their health needs. The World Council for Health stands for a better way.
3. http://www.gpk.de/downloadp/STIKO_2011_Bulletin10_110314_Schaetzung_der_Influenza_bedingten_Todesfaelle.pdf. 51 World Health Organization: »List of Members of, and Advisor to, the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency
5. Di Pietrantonj, C.; Rivetti, A.; Bawazeer, G.A.; Al-Ansary, L.A.; Ferroni, E.: ‘Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults’, in: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2010, 7., Art. No.: CD001269, DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001269.pub4.
6. Wittig, Frank. Die weiße Mafia: Wie Ärzte und die Pharmaindustrie unsere Gesundheit aufs Spiel setzen, 2012Yan J, Grantham M, Pantelic J, Bueno de Mesquita PJ, Albert B, Liu F, Ehrman S, Milton DK; EMIT Consortium. Infectious virus in exhaled breath of symptomatic seasonal influenza cases from a college community. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Jan 30;115(5):1081-1086. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1716561115. Epub 2018 Jan 18. PMID: 29348203; PMCID: PMC5798362.
‘With partnerships encompassing over 850 interfaith organizations, influential decision makers, and a network of more than 5 million activists and 250 social media influencers, Cam leads, a united front against Jew hatred”.
This is how the Combat Antisemitism Movement describes itself.
It sounds like an independent campaign group at the head of a global movement, but does it actually lead anything?
The movement advertises that its key initiatives include the global coalition of cities fighting anti-semitism and specialized collaborations with US governors and state legislators.
They say that they reach millions through digital campaigns, influencer partnerships and an innovation lab. They have partnerships with nearly one thousand groups.
The movement started with a pledge to fight antisemitism. It now has more than 850 organizations signed up as members from across the globe, from the South African Jewish board of deputies to the Russian Jewish Community Foundation, the Sweden Israel Alliance and UK Lawyers for Israel to stand with us Brazil.
It looks like a very extensive global network, but who is behind it? Answering that question requires peeling back several layers of the onion.
First, there is no organization registered in the US under that name. There is, however, a Combat Hate Foundation which runs the movement, registered with the Internal Revenue Service.
Public documents show that it is funded by a variety of Zionist foundations. The largest contributors seem to be foundations associated with the Kansas based Beren family, which made its fortune in the oil and gas industry.
During a 2021 controversy about the movement, The Forward reported that it functioned as a dark money front group for the Kansas oil billionaire, Adam Beren.
It can be revealed that the Combat Hate Foundation is part of a joint venture run by the Israeli regime. The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is in charge. It is run via the ministry’s deniable corporate intermediary, Voices of Israel, yet, there is no mention of this relationship on the website of the Combat Antisemitism Movement.
A strong clue is that on the board of governors is Brigadier General Sima Vaknin Gill, former Israeli intelligence officer and Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, but the relationship is spelled out on the voices of Israel website.
‘Voices of Israel’ has a joint venture agreement with Israel, led by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combat Antisemitism.
The Combat Antisemitism Movement, in other words, is part of the covert Zionist regime network.
The impressive nature of the 850 partner organizations takes on a rather more sinister hue given this revelation.
Tuesday is the anniversary of the creation of Druzbha – the world’s longest oil pipeline, and one of the most technically sophisticated pieces of man-made engineering every created. Here’s what’s important to know about the project, why it was conceived, and why the US and its allies tried, but failed, to stop it.
October 15 marks the 60th anniversary of the inauguration of the Druzhba (‘Friendship’) oil pipeline. Conceived in 1958 at a meeting of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance – the Soviet-led analogue to Western European integration, Druzhba helped forge closer economic links between the USSR and its Eastern European allies, and eventually, between Russia and the whole of Europe.
Drawn up to aid an economic boom being experienced by Eastern Europe, Druzhba was built to replace more costly and infrastructure-intensive rail-based oil deliveries.
Sourcing oil from the Volga-Ural oil and gas basin and starting off in Almetyevsk, modern-day Tatarstan, Druzhba runs west to Mozyr in Belarus, where it splits into two routes – one to eastern Germany via Poland, and another through Ukraine toward Bratislava in Slovakia, Prague in the Czech Republic and Budapest in Hungary.
Members of the Soviet-led economic alliance, namely Albania, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, contributed equipment and know-how, with the USSR and Poland delivering 730,000 tons of 420-1,220 mm pipes, East Germany pumps for pumping stations, Hungary automation equipment and communications gear, and Czechoslovakia valves and fittings.
The US sought to sanction the project into submission, slapping restrictions on Western European sales of large-diameter pipes to the Eastern Bloc after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Russian Chelyabinsk’s industrialists saved the day, creating pipes of the necessary diameter.
The success of the project led to the construction of a second line – known as Druzhba-2 and running along the same route, in 1974.
With Moscow selling oil to allies via long-term contracts, Eastern Europe was largely insulated from the oil shocks suffered by the West in the 1970s and early 1980s. Between 1971 and 1980, Hungary’s material national income rose by 62%, East Germany’s by 59%, Poland’s by 73%, Czechoslovakia’s by 57%, and capital construction in these countries grew 1.9, 1.7, 2.2, and 1.8 times, respectively.
This allowed the region to build tens of millions of new apartments, industrial goods and finished products ranging from cars and electronics to household goods.
After the USSR’s collapse, Germany’s reunification and the European Union’s expansion, Druzhba became a key source of fuel for Europe’s economic prosperity, helping Eastern Europe with its difficult transition to the market, and Germany in its effort to build on its status as an industrial powerhouse.
Accounting for expansions (including extensions to deliver oil to southern Germany and Austria), Druzhba holds the record as the longest oil pipeline network in the world, consisting of a whopping 8,900 km of pipe, 46 pumping stations, 38 intermediate pumping stations, and reservoirs that can hold up to 1.5 million cubic meters of oil.
Druzhba is also one of the most technically-sophisticated manmade engineering projects in history, crossing the Volga, Oka, Don, Dnepr, Dniestr, Vistula and Dunabe rivers and hundreds of smaller waterways, thousands of roads and railways, the Pinsk Marshes and the mountains of Carpathia.
The pipeline has an estimated capacity to pump up to 2 million barrels per day, or nearly a fifth of Russia’s total oil output. Until recently, it accounted for up to half of all Russian oil exports.
Killing Druzhba?
The US, the Eu and Ukraine have taken a series of steps to try and effectively kill the Druzhba-based energy partnership between Russia and Europe, with the EU banning deliveries of Russian oil through the northern portion of the pipeline in the summer of 2024, and Ukraine raising transit costs by more than 75%, and in July 2024 prohibiting supplies of Lukoil oil through the pipeline’s southern line to Hungary and Slovakia.
While Russia has proven able to replace its dependence on Druzhba by forging new energy ties with countries in the Global South, including India and China, Europe has been trapped by its own restrictions into buying more expensive and less dependable energy sourced in the US, leaving economic growth stagnant and industrial competitiveness in jeopardy.
Florida residents must feel like they have been taking a beating from major hurricanes in recent years, but what do the data show?
The problem with human perception of such things is that the time scale of hurricane activity fluctuations is often longer than human experience. For example, a person born in the 1950s would have no memory of the beating Florida took in the 1940s from major hurricanes (a total of 5). But they would have many memories of the hurricane lull period of the 1970s and 1980s, each decade having only one major hurricane strike in Florida. Then, when an upswing in hurricane strikes occurs, it seems very unusual to them, and they assume that “hurricanes are getting worse”.
Another problem is that any statistics for an area as small as Florida, even over 100+ years, will be pretty noisy. Landfalling hurricanes for the eastern U.S. would be a better metric. And statistics for the entire Atlantic basin would be even better, except that satellite coverage didn’t start until the 1970s and hurricane intensity in remote areas before then would be poorly measured (or not measured at all).
Finally, tropical cyclone statistics for the entire tropics would be the best (if one was trying to determine if climate change is impacting cyclone intensity or frequency). But satellite data for the global tropics is, again, limited to the period since the 1970s. Global tropical cyclone data before the 1970s is sketchy, at best.
So, keeping in mind that any trends we see for Florida are going to be strongly influenced by the “luck of the draw” and the quasi-random nature of hurricane tracks (hurricanes are steered by the large-scale flow of air in the mid-troposphere, say around 20,000 ft altitude or so), what are the statistics of Florida major hurricane intensity and frequency since 1900?
Florida Major Hurricane Intensity & Number
The following plot shows the intensity of major hurricanes (100 knots or greater maximum sustained wind speed) striking Florida since 1900, updated through recent (2024) Hurricane Helene:
As can be seen from the linear trend line, there has been no significant trend in the intensity of major hurricanes striking Florida since 1900.
But what about the number of hurricanes? The next plot shows there has been a weak upward trend in the decadal totals of major hurricanes striking Florida since 1900:
Note that the 2020s number might well increase, since the end of the current (2024) hurricane season will be only half-way through the 2020s. While Hurricane Milton has just been classified as a major hurricane, in 2 days time it is expected to be under increasing wind shear, so it is not obvious it will strike Florida as a major hurricane, and so I did not include it in the above charts.
Another feature of the second chart above shows that a native Floridian born in the 1960s or 1970s would indeed have experienced an increase in major hurricanes striking Florida during their lifetime. But their first couple of decades of personal experience would have occurred during a historic lull in hurricane activity.
Why Start In 1900?
There is reason to believe that the number and/or intensity of major hurricanes striking Florida in the early 1900s has been underestimated, which would bias the trends in the above plots in the upward direction, spuriously suggesting a long-term increase in activity. First of all, there were virtually no people living in Florida in 1900. The population of Miami in 1896 was 444 persons. The intensity of a hurricane is based upon its maximum sustained 1 minute windspeed, which usually covers a very small area. Even with people now inhabiting much of the Florida coastline, it is rare for a coastal anemometer to measure the intensity that the National Hurricane Center gives to a hurricane, because those winds cover such a small area. So, how could it ever be known how intense some hurricanes were in the early 1900s?
Evidence for Long-Term Hurricane Fluctuations Unrelated to Water Temperature
Modern concern centers on the possibility that warm sea surface temperatures from global warming caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions is making hurricanes stronger or more frequent. But studies of coastal lagoon sediments along the Gulf coast and Caribbean deposited by catastrophic hurricane landfalls show large fluctuations in activity on centennial to millennial time scales, even in the absence of the unusually warm sea surface temperatures measured today. (Example here.)
It should also be remembered that not long ago the U.S. experienced an “unprecedented” 11-year drought in major hurricane strikes. That significantly impacts our perception of what is “normal”. When the lull had reached 9 years, a NASA study found such an event was a 1-in-177-years occurrence. As I recall, that was increased to 1-in-250 years when the lull reached 11 years.
The point is that there is a huge amount of natural decadal- to centennial-time scale variability in hurricane activity in Florida (or any other hurricane-prone state). But with increasing numbers of people thinking that the government is somehow influencing hurricane activity (I’m seeing a lot of this on Twitter), I doubt that actual data will have much influence on those people, and as I approach 70 years on this Earth I have noticed a long-term decline in critical thinking regarding weather, climate, and causation. I doubt that trend will change any time soon.
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine to impose a settlement after some NATO countries had undermined the Minsk-2 peace agreement for 7 years. On the first day after the invasion, Zelensky confirmed that Moscow contacted him to discuss negotiations based on restoring Ukraine’s neutrality.[1] On the third day after the invasion, Russia and Ukraine agreed to start negotiations on a peace based on Russian military withdrawal in return for Ukrainian neutrality.[2] Zelensky responded favourably to this condition, and he even called for a “collective security agreement” to include Russia to mitigate the security competition that had sparked the war.[3]
The negotiations that followed are referred to as the Istanbul negotiations, in which Russia and Ukraine were close to an agreement before the US and the UK sabotaged it.
Washington Rejects Negotiations Without Preconditions
In Washington, there were great incentives to use the large proxy army it had built in Ukraine to weaken Russia as a strategic rival, rather than accepting a neutral Ukraine. On the first day after the Russian invasion, when Zelensky responded favourably to start negotiations without preconditions, the US spokesperson rejected peace talks without preconditions as Russia would first have to withdraw all its forces from Ukraine:
“Now we see Moscow suggesting that diplomacy take place at the barrel of a gun or as Moscow’s rockets, mortars, artillery target the Ukrainian people. This is not real diplomacy… If President Putin is serious about diplomacy, he knows what he can do. He should immediately stop the bombing campaign against civilians, order the withdrawal of his forces from Ukraine, and indicate very clearly, unambiguously to the world, that Moscow is prepared to de-escalate”.[4]
This was a demand for capitulation as the Russian military presence in Ukraine was Russia’s bargaining chip to achieve the objective of restoring Ukraine’s neutrality. Less than a month later, the same US spokesperson was asked if Washington would support Zelensky’s negotiations with Moscow, in which he replied negatively as the conflict was part of a larger struggle:
“This is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine… The key point is that there are principles that are at stake here that have universal applicability everywhere, whether in Europe, whether in the Indo-Pacific, anywhere in between”.[5]
The US and UK Demand a Long War: Fighting Russia with Ukrainians
In late March 2022, Zelensky revealed in an interview with the Economist that “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[6]
The Israeli and Turkish mediators confirmed that Ukraine and Russia were both eager to make a compromise to end the war before the US and the UK intervened to prevent peace from breaking out.
Zelensky had contacted former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to mediate the peace negotiations with Moscow. Bennett noted that Putin was willing to make “huge concessions” if Ukraine would restore its neutrality to end NATO expansion. Zelensky accepted this condition and “both sides very much wanted a ceasefire”. However, Bennett argued that the US and UK then intervened and “blocked” the peace agreement as they favoured a long war. With a powerful Ukrainian military at its disposal, the West rejected the Istanbul peace agreement and there was a “decision by the West to keep striking Putin” instead of pursuing peace.[7]
The Turkish negotiators reached the same conclusion: Russia and Ukraine agreed to resolve the conflict by restoring Ukraine’s neutrality, but NATO decided to fight Russia with Ukrainians as a proxy. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu argued some NATO states wanted to extend the war to bleed Russia:
“After the talks in Istanbul, we did not think that the war would take this long… But following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, I had the impression that there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue—let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.[8]
Numan Kurtulmus, the deputy chairman of Erdogan’s political party, confirmed that Zelensky was ready to sign the peace agreement before the US intervened:
“This war is not between Russia and Ukraine, it is a war between Russia and the West. By supporting Ukraine, the United States and some countries in Europe are beginning a process of prolonging this war. What we want is an end to this war. Someone is trying not to end the war. The U.S. sees the prolongation of the war as its interest”.[9]
Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksandr Chalyi, who participated in peace talks with Russia, confirms Putin “tried everything” to reach a peace agreement and they were able “to find a very real compromise”.[10] Davyd Arakhamia, a Ukrainian parliamentary representative and head of Zelensky’s political party, argued Russia’s key demand was Ukrainian neutrality: “They were ready to end the war if we, like Finland once did, would accept neutrality and pledge not to join NATO. In fact, that was the main point. All the rest are cosmetic and political ‘additions’”.[11] Oleksiy Arestovych, the former advisor of Zelensky, also confirmed that Russia was mainly preoccupied with restoring Ukraine’s neutrality.
The main obstacle to peace was thus overcome as Zelensky offered neutrality in the negotiations.[12] The tentative peace agreement was confirmed by Fiona Hill, a former official at the US National Security Council, and Angela Stent, a former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia. Hill and Stent penned an article in Foreign Affairs in which they outlined the main terms of the agreement:
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries”.[13]
Boris Johnson Goes to Kiev
What happened to the Istanbul peace agreement? On 9 April 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kiev in a rush to sabotage the agreement and cited the killings in Bucha as the excuse. Ukrainian media reported that Johnson came to Kiev with two messages:
“The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is thateven if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the UK and US] are not”.[14]
In June 2022, Johnson told the G7 and NATO that the solution to the war was “strategic endurance” and “now is not the time to settle and encourage the Ukrainians to settle for a bad peace”.[15] Johnson also published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing against any negotiations: “The war in Ukraine can end only with Vladimir Putin’s defeat”.[16] Before Boris Johnson’s trip to Kiev, Niall Ferguson had interviewed several American and British leaders, who confirmed that a decision had been made for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime”.[17]
Retired German General Harald Kujat, the former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, confirmed that Johnson had sabotaged the peace negotiations. Kujat argued: “Ukraine had pledged to renounce NATO membership and not to allow any foreign troops or military installations to be stationed’, while “Russia had apparently agreed to withdraw its forces to the level of February 23”. However, “British Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened in Kiev on the 9th of April and prevented a signing. His reasoning was that the West was not ready for an end to the war”.[18] According to Kujat, the West demanded a Russian capitulation: “Now the complete withdrawal is repeatedly demanded as a prerequisite for negotiations”.[19] General Kujat explained that this position was due to the US war plans against Russia:
“Perhaps one day the question will be asked who did not want to prevent this war… Their declared goal is to weaken Russia politically, economically and militarily to such a degree that they can then turn to their geopolitical rival, the only one capable of endangering their supremacy as a world power: China… No, this war is not about our freedom… Russia wants to prevent its geopolitical rival USA from gaining a strategic superiority that threatens Russia’s security”.[20]
What was Ukraine told by the US and the UK? Why did Zelensky make a deal given that he was aware some Western states wanted to use Ukraine to exhaust Russia in a long war – even if it would destroy Ukraine? Zelensky likely received an offer he could not refuse: If Zelensky would pursue peace with Russia, then he would not receive any support from the West and he would predictably face an uprising by the far-right / fascist groups that the US had armed and trained. In contrast, if Zelensky would choose war, then NATO would send all the weapons needed to defeat Russia, NATO would impose crippling sanctions on Russia, and NATO would pressure the international community to isolate Russia. Zelensky could thus achieve what both Napoleon and Hitler had failed to achieve – to defeat Russia.
The advisor to Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovych, explained in 2019 that a major war with Russia was the price for joining NATO. Arestovych predicted that the threat of Ukraine’s accession to NATO would “provoke Russia to launch a large-scale military operation against Ukraine”, and Ukraine could join NATO after defeating Russia. Victory over Russia was assumed to be a certainty as Ukraine would merely be the spearhead of a wider NATO proxy war: “In this conflict, we will be very actively supported by the West—with weapons, equipment, assistance, new sanctions against Russia and the quite possible introduction of a NATO contingent, a no-fly zone etc. We won’t lose, and that’s good”.[21]
NATO turned on the propaganda machine to convince its public that a war against Russia was the only path to peace: The Russian invasion was “unprovoked”; Moscow’s objective was to conquer all of Ukraine to restore the Soviet Union; Russia’s withdrawal from Kiev was not a sign of good-will to be reciprocated but a sign of weakness; it was impossible to negotiate with Putin; and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg subsequently asserted that “weapons are the way to peace”. The Western public, indoctrinated with anti-Russian propaganda over decades, believed that NATO was merely a passive third-party seeking to protect Ukraine from the most recent reincarnation of Hitler. Zelensky was assigned the role as new Churchill – bravely fighting to the last Ukrainian rather than accepting a bad peace.
The Inevitable Istanbul+ Agreement to End the War
The war did not go as expected. Russia built a powerful army and defeated the NATO-built Ukrainian army; sanctions were overcome by reorienting the economy to the East; and instead of being isolated – Russia took a leading role in constructing a multipolar world order.
How can the war be brought to an end? The suggestions of a land-for-NATO membership agreement ignores that Russia’s leading objective is not territory but ending NATO expansion as it is deemed to be an existential threat. NATO expansion is the source of the conflict and territorial dispute is the consequence, thus Ukrainian territorial concessions in return for NATO membership is a non-starter.
The foundation for any peace agreement must be the Istanbul+: An agreement to restore Ukraine’s neutrality, plus territorial concessions as a consequence of almost 3 years of war. Threatening to expand NATO after the end of the war will merely incentivise Russia to annex the strategic territory from Kharkov to Odessa, and to ensure that only a dysfunctional Ukrainian rump state will remain that is not capable of being used against Russia.
This is a cruel fate for the Ukrainian nation and the millions of Ukrainians who have suffered so greatly. It was also a predictable outcome, as Zelensky cautioned in March 2022: “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[22]
[1] V. Zelensky, ‘Address by the President to Ukrainians at the end of the first day of Russia’s attacks’, President of Ukraine: Official website, 25 February 2022.
[2] S. Raskin and L. Brown, ‘Ukraine and Russia to meet for peace talks ‘without preconditions,’ Zelensky says’, New York Post, 27 February 2022.
[3] M. Hirsh, ‘Hints of a Ukraine-Russia Deal?’, Foreign Policy, 8 March 2022.
[4] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 25 February 2022.
[5] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 21 March 2022.
[6] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[7] N. Bennett, ‘Bennett speaks out’, YouTube Channel of Naftali Bennett, 4 February 2023.
[8] R. Semonsen, ‘Former Israeli PM: West Blocked Russo-Ukraine Peace Deal’, The European Conservative, 7 February 2023.
[9] CNN, ‘Son dakika… Numan Kurtulmuş CNN TÜRK’te: (Rusya-Ukrayna) Birileri savaşı bitirmemek için çabalıyor’ [Last minute… Numan Kurtulmuş on CNN TÜRK: (Russia-Ukraine) Someone is trying not to end the war], CNN Turk, 18 November 2022.
[11] A. Sobczak, ‘Diplomacy Watch: Did the West scuttle the Istanbul talks or not?’, Responsible Statecraft, 12 September 2024.
[12] Guardian, ‘Ukraine has offered neutrality in talks with Russia – what would that mean?’, The Guardian, 30 March 2022.
[13] F. Hill and A. Stent, ‘The World Putin Wants How Distortions About the Past Feed Delusions About the Future’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022.
[14] R. Romaniuk, ‘Possibility of talks between Zelenskyy and Putin came to a halt after Johnson’s visit – UP sources’, Ukraniska Pravda, 5 May 2022.
[15] E. Webber, ‘Boris Johnson warns against seeking ‘bad peace’ in Ukraine’, Politico, 23 June 2022.
[16] B. Johnson, ‘For a Quicker End to the Russia War, Step Up Aid to Ukraine’, Wall Street Journal, 9 December 2022.
[17] N. Ferguson, ‘Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S.’, Bloomberg, 22 March 2022.
[18] J. Helmer, ‘Whr. Gen. Kujat: Ukraine War is Lost, Germany Now Faces an Angry Russia… Alone’, Veterans Today, 25 January 2023.
The Israeli war against Lebanon could end at a stalemate, as violent confrontations at the border indicate that [an Israeli victory] will not be easy, CNN said in a recent report.
According to the network, Hezbollah’s level of resistance has surprised many observers, particularly following the recent Israeli aggression and assassinations, including that of Martyr Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Nevertheless, the Resistance remained organized and continued launching its missiles and rockets against “Israel”.
Hezbollah holds the upper hand in the South
Israeli occupation soldiers fighting in Lebanon have abundantly expressed to CNN that the open, mountainous terrain of Lebanese territories, where Hezbollah fighters are present, makes the operation more difficult to carry out.
One occupation soldier, who had fought in Gaza and is now deployed against Lebanon, highlighted the stark differences between the northern front and his experience in Gaza.
“The challenge is not that Hezbollah is more equipped by Iran or have more training. The challenge is the switch in the head from months of fighting in an urban territory versus fighting in an open area territory,” he said, adding that the most basic maneuvers, including the IOF line-up and how they move, differ.
Additionally, despite claims of the Israeli military being “far more superior” to Hezbollah’s freedom fighters on paper, due to its more sophisticated weapons arsenal, larger battalions, and stronger allies, the soldier confirmed that all their strongholds are rendered worthless in open battle in the Resistance’s homeland.
Guerrilla warfare proves deadly for Israeli soldiers
In the same context, Daniel Sobelman, an international security expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the IOF underwent a similar experience during the 2006 July war against Lebanon.
“Hezbollah were up against the strongest military in the Middle East, there were literally hundreds of Israeli air raids per day, and artillery, and all the capabilities that a modern, advanced military has to offer. And they were not defeated. They survived. And throughout the entire Israeli offensive, Hezbollah was able to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel every day,” he said.
Following “Israel’s” humiliating defeat in 2006, it has spent the past two decades preparing to confront Hezbollah once again, until Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, which was completely unprecedented and unexpected, according to Sobelman.
And while “Israel” decided to wage war against Hezbollah, expecting to end it unscathed, it is worth noting that Hezbollah has also been preparing for war, and “that is never the case with guerrilla warfare.”
Additionally, “Israel” is fighting on lands Hezbollah are masters in and are driven and determined to inflict massive losses against the IOF, Sobelman added.
“They’re entrenched in underground facilities and they’re playing a defensive game,” he said of Hezbollah’s fighters, noting that “it doesn’t matter how many of them you kill, still (in a guerilla war) the weaker side ultimately wins by imposing a sustained accumulation of costs.”
Revisiting “Israel’s” defeat in 2006, Sobelman said today’s scenario is exactly what happened during the July War, noting that despite the occupation’s material superiority, it was still unable to achieve any of its war objectives.
History repeats itself
Therefore, the next move could potentially constitute the deployment of more occupation troops along the northern front, which could quickly transform the current battle into a bloodier one.
“Israel” announced that four divisions of 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers each have been deployed to fight in Lebanon. However, Hezbollah remains undeterred, and continues ambushing the occupation forces and inflicting severe losses among their ranks.
On October 11, the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, in defense of its lands and in support of Gaza, targeted five Israeli forces in Ras al-Naqoura, four of which had been trying to evacuate the casualties that preceded.
In this context, Ziv Hospital in the occupied North announced that it has been receiving influxes of injuries and casualties amid “Israel’s” ground operation in Lebanon.
The hospital’s director, Salman Zarka, said hundreds of injuries flooded the hospital throughout the first few days of direct confrontations at the border.
Yesterday, 20 Israeli soldiers were injured along Lebanon’s southern border. While “Israel” has admitted to the deaths of 14 troops, Hezbollah confirmed that at least 35 fatalities were scored, along with hundreds of injuries, since October 1.
By Jonas E. Alexis | Veterans Today | July 23, 2017
Israeli Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu seems to have picked up where the late Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef left off. The Israeli army, Eliyahu said, must slaughter the Palestinians “and leave no one alive.” The Palestinians, the good rabbi continued, must be “destroyed and crushed in order to end violence.” Here is Eliyahu’s algorithm:
“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1,000. And if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million.”
There is more to this “logic” than meets the eye and ear. Eliyahu even postulated that the Israeli army ought not to get involved in arresting Palestinians because “If you leave him alive, there is a fear that he will be released and kill other people. We must eradicate this evil from within our midst.”
You may say that this is just an isolated case. No Israeli official believes that, right? … continue
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