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What I Know and Don’t Know about SARS-CoV-2 Virus

By Edward J Curtin | June 19, 2021

After fifteen months of assiduous reading, study, observation, and research, I have come to some conclusions about what is called COVID-19.  I would like to emphasize that I have done this work obsessively since it seemed so important.  I have consulted information and arguments across all media, corporate and alternative, academic, medical, books, etc.  I have consulted with researchers around the world.  I have read the websites of the CDC, the World Health Organization, and government and non-government health organizations.  In other words, I have left no stone unturned, despite the overt or covert political leanings of the sources.  I have done this as a sociologist and writer, not as a medical doctor, although many of my sources have been medical doctors and medical studies.

My succinct conclusions follow without links to sources since I am not trying to persuade anyone of anything but just stating for the public record what I have concluded.  Life is short.  I am going to say it now.

  • I know that vast numbers of people have been hypnotized by fear, threats, and bribes to accept the corporate mainstream media’s version of COVID-19. I have concluded that many millions are moving in a trance state and do not know this. They have been induced into this state by a well-organized, very sophisticated propaganda campaign that has drawn on the human fear of death and disease.  Those behind this have no doubt studied the high incidence of hypochondriasis in the general population and the fear of an invisible “virus” in societies where belief in God and the spiritual invisible has been replaced by faith in science.  Knowing their audience well, they have concocted a campaign of fear and confusion to induce obedience.
  • I do not know but suspect that those who have been so hypnotized tend to be mainly members of the middle to the upper classes, those who have invested so much belief in the system. This includes the highly schooled.
  • I know that to lockdown hundreds of millions of healthy people, to insist they wear useless masks, to tell them to avoid human contacts, to destroy the economic lives of regular people have created vast suffering that was meant to teach people a lesson about who was in control and that they better revise their understanding of human relations to adjust to the new digital unreality that the producers of this masquerade are trying to put in place of flesh and blood, face to face human reality.
  • I know that the PCR test invented by Kary Mullis cannot test for the alleged virus or any virus and therefore all the numbers of cases and deaths are based on nothing. They are conjured out of thin air in a massive act of magic. I know that the belief that it can so test began with the unscientific PCR Corona protocol created by Christian Drosten in Germany in January 2020 that became the standard method for testing for SARS-CoV-2 worldwide.  I am sure this was preplanned and part of a high-level conspiracy.  This protocol set the cycle threshold (amplification) at 45 which could only result in false positive results.  These were then called cases: An act of fraud on a massive scale.
  • I do not know if the alleged virus has ever been isolated in the sense of being purified or detached from everything else aside from being cultured in a lab. Therefore I do not know if the virus exists.
  • I know that the experimental mRNA “vaccines” that are being pushed on everyone are not traditional vaccines but dangerous experiments whose long-term consequences are unknown. And I know that Moderna says its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” functions “like an operating system on a computer” and that Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, says that the lipid nanoparticles from the injections travel throughout the body and settle in large quantities in multiple organs where the spike protein, being biologically active, can cause massive damage and that the FDA has known this. Additionally, I know that tens of thousands of people have suffered adverse effects from these injections and many thousands have died from them and that these figures are greatly underestimated due to the reporting systems.  I know that with this number of casualties in the past these experimental shots would have been stopped long ago or never started.  That they have not, therefore, convinces me that a radically evil agenda is under way whose goal is harm not health because those in charge know what I know and much more.
  • I do not know where this alleged virus originated, if it exists.
  • I know that from the start of this crisis, there was a concerted effort across the world to deny access to proven effective treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, steroids, ivermectin in a planned effort to vaccinate as many people as possible. This alone reveals an agenda centered not on health but on getting as many people as possible to submit to being vaccinated and controlled. Social control is the name of this deadly game.
  • I know that those pushing these vaccines – The World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, etc. – have a long history of wanting to drastically reduce the world’s population and that their promotion of eugenics under various names is very well known. I am convinced that the totally untested mRNA-type “gene therapy” is the key to their plan for population reduction.
  • I do not know if they will succeed.
  • I know they must be resisted.
  • I do not know why so many good people cannot see through this evil. I can only attribute it to having been seduced by a massive hypnotic propaganda campaign that has appealed to their deepest fears and will result in those fears being realized because they thought they were free. It is a great tragedy.
  • I know that all the statistics about cases and deaths “from” COVID-19 have been manipulated to create a fake pandemic. One of the most obvious proofs of this is the alleged disappearance of the flu and deaths from influenza. Only someone in a trance could fail to understand the absurd logic in the argument that this was the result of mask wearing when at the same time the air-born COVID-19 spread like wildfire until that stopped precipitously in January 2021 when a tiny number of people had been vaccinated.
  • I know there has been barely any excess mortality throughout all this.
  • I do not know where it will all end but hope against hope the growing opposition to this fraud will grow and defeat it despite the organized censorship that is underway against dissenting opinions. I know that when organized censorship on this scale takes place those behind it are afraid of the revelation of the truth. A simple understanding of history confirms this.
  • I know that the temporary reprieve the authorities have granted to their subjects will be followed by further restrictions on fundamental freedoms, the corona virus lockdowns will likely return, “vaccine” boosters will be promoted, and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Great Reset with a Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology with the USA and other countries continuing to slip into a new form of fascist control unless people across the world stand up and resist in great numbers. I am heartened by signs that this resistance is growing.
  • Finally, I know if the authoritarian forces win the immediate battle, someone will write a book with a title like that of Milton Mayer’s classic, They Thought They Were Free. It will be censored. Perhaps it will first be shared via samizdat.  But in the end, after much suffering and death, the truth about this evil agenda will prevail and there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
  • We are in a spiritual war for the soul of the world.

June 19, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

An Essential Journey

My experience of international travel in Covid times

By Joanna Sharp | OffGuardian | June 19, 2021

I had not planned to travel abroad this year, especially after the UK government’s announcement in early 2021 that foreign holidays were forbidden. Even heading towards the airport with an intent to go on a foreign holiday could result in a £5000 fine or imprisonment! Surreal.

Where we live in London under a flight path to Heathrow, we notice that although there are fewer flights, they have not ceased completely. So how do people travel? It’s not something I have thought about.

One day at the end of April I receive a message that my elderly father’s condition is critical. Within an hour I am looking at flights back home in Eastern Europe and checking the UK government travel ‘advice’ webpages.

I say ‘advice’ but that word belongs to the past. Today, ‘command’ might be more appropriate. According to the government, only “essential” international travel is permitted for named valid reasons; ‘medical and compassionate’ is the category which applies to me.

I wonder whose compassion this is a reference to: mine, for wanting to be with my sick father, or the government’s for including this as a possibility. Reassured that I can go, it is now a question of buying the plane tickets, checking in and packing, right? Not quite.

WADING THROUGH THE RED TAPE

Since holiday travel has effectively been banned, the government created intricate webpages full of information on what is and what is not allowed, where citizens cannot travel, and if they must, what documents they need to prepare. So complicated travel advice alone has become that the webpage now includes a step by step flowchart with endless links within each step to be followed.

Getting through this information would take at least a day. It’s like a cross between a maze and a vortex. I soon understand that I cannot buy my tickets until I have uploaded the right Covid related paperwork onto the airline website!

First, I need to fill a Declaration for International Travel (since the 17th May it is no longer required) which asks for personal details including my date of birth, passport number, home address and destination.

The key question is the reason for international travel – and in the actual online questions, the phrase is: ‘What is your excuse for travel?’ My excuse? What kind of language is that? Am I asking a teacher to let me leave the classroom? Am I asked to explain why I haven’t done my homework?

That really shocks me, although I have already noticed my own reaction to the very idea that I need permission to leave the country, as if I was back in Eastern Europe before 1989…I read the following declaration and tick the right box out of the given options.

I hereby declare that my reason for being outside my home to travel internationally is for:

– Work
– Volunteering
– Education
– Medical or compassionate reasons
– Funeral
– Ending a temporary visit (non-UK resident)
– Allowing access to parents with children who do not live in the same country
– Other reasonable excuse – please specify

Next, I am required to sign to ‘certify that the information I have provided is true. I understand that if I provide false or misleading information, I may be issued with a fixed penalty notice and/or a direction to return home or be arrested’.

So, by signing this, and I have no choice not to if I want to get my ticket, I have given the UK authorities permission to arrest of fine me should my excuse to travel turn out to be incorrect. What if my father is not that ill, then what?

But of course, that is not enough. I now need to provide evidence of my father’s illness. How do you do that when the whole of the world is still in lockdown; imagine having to get a doctor’s note on demand. I am still just trying to get a ticket.

I want to travel tomorrow morning, my sister-in-law tells me, Dad is given a couple of days. I ask my brother to send me an email confirming the family crisis, he does that within an hour. He is also trying to copy the notes from my father’s last doctor’s visit and the most recent diagnosis.

Then, still before I buy a return ticket, I need to get a kit of two Covid tests which I will need to take upon return to UK. Another link takes me on to a list of government-approved Covid test providers. A whole list of them, each can be accessed via a separate link. I try a few. They average around £200 each. The cheapest ones are £99 but are sold out.

Why can’t I see any free NHS ones? The ones given out like sweets in schools and local pharmacies? Why are these not available? Why could I not just pick a free one at the airport?

But of course, there is no to answer these questions, I am desperate to leave so agree to this, too. No test, no flight. So, I order one of these almost £200 test kits, get an email confirming the order, upload all the documents and finally I can complete the purchase of my tickets which, as usual, turn out not so low cost after all.

I check in. My boarding card (lucky I had just bought a printer the previous week) says at the top of the page ‘Covid Documentation Uploaded’. So, now I have the boarding card and a pile of printed pages which presumably I will need to show at UK border control in order to prove my excuse for leaving the country is legitimate.

Finally, I download and fill in the compulsory Passenger Locator Form for the destination country that will enable the system to track and trace me. It is nearly bedtime and I now need to pack.

ON THE GO

My husband drives me to Stansted in the middle of the night. An early morning flight, no public transport available but at least it’s quiet and there is no traffic. The airport is still closed; a group of families with young children are waiting for the door to open.

These are not holidaymakers breaking the law to get some forbidden fun. No idea where they are travelling but they look like they are going home somewhere south, southeast perhaps? Turkey, Bulgaria or Ukraine? No idea but they do look like part of the globalised chain of workforce escaping poverty and perhaps the lockdown has pushed them to return. Better to be jobless and poor in your own village. The weather tends to be better and the environment less hostile.

Finally, the doors open. I push the scarf up over my face, my hand clutching a plastic folder with a wad of documents allowing me to leave. It is quiet, no waiting. I go through security, passport control seems non-existent, shops still closed so nothing to stop for. I wonder at which point someone will ask me to see the papers. Ask me what my excuse for leaving is. Strangely, that never happens. I am almost disappointed. I spent about four hours sorting out all that paperwork the night before and now this is not even checked!

Immediately I catch myself: why am I disappointed? Because no one will give me the all-clear? Have I been conditioned to want to be waved through the green light already?

Perhaps that is how normalising oppression works. But of course, there is no need to check, the documents have been uploaded and recorded somewhere and someone now knows everything about me, my plans, my reason (“excuse”) for leaving the country. Or perhaps the intimate details of my family crisis; my father’s terminal illness and my attempt to get to him before it’s too late have now just been converted into big data slushing around the corpo-government’s control AI machine, and turned into useful predictions.

I guess this type of authoritarianism does not even need stern looks from border control officials, no need to divulge private dramas in public. Hours of stress of getting the documents turned into a discreet but vital small print on my boarding card; the only visible proof that my travel is acceptable to the corpo-state. It is all so neat, tidy, hi-tech and invisible that we can just pretend that all is just normal.

After all, the airport trimmings look all the same; with adverts, duty-free shopping, same old queues at departure gates and same safety drills on the plane, down to the irritating Ryanair voice thanking us for choosing to fly with them (no one chooses to fly with Ryanair, just like no one chooses to go to the dentist, you do it because you have to and you hope it won’t be too unpleasant).

We can pretend nothing has changed. Except the masks on faces, of course. Slow drinking and eating is my solution. During the flight many noses protrude against the regulations, of course. People do need to breathe.

We land on time. I send a message to my father, anxious, hoping he is still there. He is not responding. I am worried. From the tarmac I can see the arrivals hall is full. There is no way of entering so the crowd from my plane stops outside and waits in the drizzle. I wonder why that is. Is that Brexit or is it that people’s papers are now checked after all?

The queue moves very slowly, twenty minutes after landing I send my father another message saying that I’m still waiting for border control. I have no idea why this is so slow; each person seems to spend a good few minutes at the control desk. Finally, an hour and a half after landing I get into the taxi. As the driver pulls away, I notice a long queue of passengers outside the arrivals hall waiting to get a Covid test. I arrive home and find my father hanging on.

MY FATHER’S ILLNESS

There is a twist to this story. My father had been treated for cancer but has been still doing quite well and had been planning to spend the summer away from his flat, in the countryside. His sudden deterioration was unexpected for me but I have not had time to think of reasons. I only learnt of this yesterday. But now I am in the flat, taking my shoes off when my brother drops the bombshell: ‘you know, Dad took the vaccine’.

I am shocked. He told me he was not going to, because he found the registration process too difficult, so he decided to stop trying. I was relieved; I had been persuading him that he should not, that being immunocompromised, his system might not cope. I told him what I knew and what I worried about. My brother tells me another family member helped organize his jab and took him there. Jesus. But I am to pretend I don’t know about it; Dad asked my brother not to tell me.

So, I learn that the day after the Pfizer jab he started to feel weak, and within ten days he was prescribed blood thinning injections, a daily drip and he became bedbound. My brother has hired a hospital-style bed and an oxygen machine, set them up in father’s bedroom and organized a private nurse for daily visits. Dad had not wanted to go to hospital: he believed that hospitals were overrun by contagious Covid patients and that going to hospital would mean certain death under a ventilator.

Luckily (I never thought I would say this), unlike the UK, this ex-communist country never managed to build up its own national health service to a level able to deliver comprehensive care, so a secondary private sector filling the gaps exists and is not beyond the means of many people. So here he is, in his own bedroom and getting care at home.

He is happy to see me but asks me not to touch him. I feel sad, guessing he might worry I am bringing contagion. That hurts. I pretend I know nothing about the jab. Later, much later, I remember this moment and think that, he might have wanted to protect me. He knew the jab made him ill and he worried he was fighting vaccine induced-Covid and did not want to give it to me.

He never told me about the vaccine, I never told him I knew.

Sunset in Quaratine

QUARANTINE ONE: THE APP

The day after arriving I receive a text message telling me I am now under statute of law obliged to download a particular app and use it during my 10-day home quarantine. I start the download but can’t complete it. Something is stuck and I have no idea how to fix it. I try for a while and then abandon it. I spend most of the time caring for my father who now slips in and out of consciousness.

The next morning I get a phone call but it stops ringing before I have time to answer it. The following day the same happens. I realise this is the local track and trace. They ring but don’t wait for me to answer. Their call is logged, the box gets ticked but the robot or a human cannot be bothered to do the job properly. Actually, it must be a human as a robot would not give up. Good. The tyranny will fail due to human error or sheer laziness.

I don’t know what possessed me but somehow, I manage to complete installing the Quarantine App. The system springs into action. I get a message from the app that I must take a selfie within the next 30 minutes and submit it. I take a selfie from the app which gives me as many times as I like to choose the best shot. I choose the worst shot.

Of course, there is a way to cheat: after doing my selfie I could leave the phone at home and go out for a walk. Trouble is, the selfie demand comes at a different time each day, usually towards the end of the day. But I have no reason to go anywhere, really, I have come here to be with him, and his condition continues to be critical. And at some point, during this journey I decided that I would do everything by the book, just to see what the new normal travel feels and looks like, and what exactly they want us to experience.

Well, here I am, in a 10-day quarantine in a flat with my dying father. We are lucky. I have my brother to get the shopping in and kind neighbours ready to help. We are lucky my father is at home. What would be the point of coming here all this way, only to be stuck in quarantine if he was in a hospital with no visitors allowed? So, all in all, we are lucky.

DIFFICULT DAYS

Days go by, my father’s condition improves a little, I am his nurse, and of course I touch him – he stopped protesting as soon as he needed a glass of water; I continue to take my selfies. We talk, I read to him, feed him, then he sleeps. He dies two days after my quarantine ends. That is good timing.

There is a lot to do now, and I will not be breaking the law trying to organize the funeral… I remember my favourite literature lesson at school when we debated who was right: Creon or Antigone. Even then, I was in team Antigone.

A doctor arrives to certify death. She is nice and takes her time. Talks a little. Does not look like a corporate bot. She is sitting at a coffee table doing the paperwork. For the cause of death, she writes ‘Thrombosis’. I ponder for a bit and then hesitatingly say: ‘Did you know he was vaccinated?’.

Her face changes and she asks: ‘No, when?’ We tell her, ‘Four weeks ago, exactly’.

‘I am not allowed to say anything,’ she says, ‘but I can tell you I have seen a lot lately. A lot!’ We try to encourage her to talk more but she is cautious. I just ask her: ‘Why would a person on cancer treatment be given a vaccine? Surely that had not been done before?’ She looks at me and says: ‘Because they want to vaccinate us all.’ So, she knows.

This kind of conversation would have been typical in the days of strict communist authoritarianism before 1989. You never knew whom you could trust so you just dropped hints and checked for people’s response. In those days careless talk was dangerous, and I am too young to remember the worst times: the Stalinist years when children were encouraged to denounce their parents; many were imprisoned, tortured and killed.

Now the threat is only a loss of income and public humiliation and yet the new order based on lies, fraud and corrupt science is already in place. Everyone is just doing their job. A perfect example of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil in which those, following orders in this elaborate house of cards, often do not even know their active contribution to harm inflicted on others. They do not realise because they refuse to look and to know. They stopped taking responsibility for their individual part in the whole.

There is a small group of doctors in the country who are challenging the official narrative, attempt to offer treatment for Covid patients and warn against the untested ‘vaccines’, particularly now that governments want to jab children. Their voices are censored, the people get smeared, ridiculed and shamed by the professional licensing medical body. The modern-day governance in Western democracies!

TRAVELLING HOME

As the funeral preparations get underway, I need to organise my return travel. I check the UK government website again. Travelling from an ‘amber’ coded country, I must test negative for Covid within 72 hours prior to departure. Tricky when the flight is on Monday afternoon.

I start to search for UK government-approved tests available in the city. Only a handful provide the specified UK approved antigen test with results in English. They are also open only in the mornings so if I test on Friday morning, I might be testing a few hours too early to fit within the 72 hours.

After hours of online searching, I find one that looks almost right. I pay the equivalent of £35 online and am told to come on the day, without an appointment. The laboratory website provides useful advice, how to prepare for the test. I learn that I should not brush my teeth or use mouthwash on the morning of test. So now I know what to do.

I arrive at the testing centre early, having heard that queues can be quite long. It is, and it is in the street. The lab’s waiting room only allows three people at a time so the rest stand outside. After about an hour it is my turn. I am allowed inside the surgery.

On the right, by the door, a masked man sitting at a desk behind a glass screen is checking my name and the type of test I have purchased. Then, a young tall, man in full white hazmat suit, his face covered, and in protective glasses ushers me to sit on a chair and tip my head backwards.

This is my first Covid test ever and I am terrified. I have rehearsed telling them how sensitive my face feels and asking not to go deep but there is no eye contact, no talk trying to help me feel comfortable, no attempt to put me at ease. He just tells me to tip my head back far.

I just manage to ask him to go into the left nostril as my right one is not straight. He happily obliges and shoves the long stick into my nostril. As soon as the tip enters my nose I feel shock, a feeling of something unnatural, wrong and threatening happening. The area he just touched is too soft, sensitive and the sensation so unfamiliar I involuntarily, and to my own shock, find myself pushing the man’s arm away. He moves back and looks at me, his body language (there is no face available) disapproves of my behaviour.

I say, please don’t go that deep, you already have some but he insists, tells me not to defend myself and does it again. And again, that feeling that a part of me which is vulnerable and should not be touched, gets scraped. He gets his sample and nods for me to go. I am frozen in that chair, unable to move for what seems like a while. I have tears in my eyes, and I am alone with two hazmat wearing robots. No word is uttered as I leave.

I get my negative result within hours. I recover with an old friend. By then I have a splitting headache and my left nostril is moist with a slight leak. The headache lasts for a couple of days but the leak persists for at least ten.

I arrive at the airport early because I have difficulties completing the UK Passenger Locator Form which UK needs from all passengers. I pass through a manned gate with an automatic wrist temperature check. The airport is unusually quiet, and the staff help me identify the problem which stops me from completing the form. The reference number for the double Covid test needed for the Passenger Locator Form is wrong. I ring home and ask my husband to read the reference number off the Covid test kit. Surely it has arrived now. It hasn’t. It looks like the Day 2 and 8 Test I ordered has not been paid for.

I am told I need to buy a new kit if I want to get this flight. I do as I’m told. No form, no flight. I stand next to the luggage drop off counter feeling sweats, and with my hands shaking I battle the website on my phone. Again, all the ‘cheap’ ones are sold out and somehow, at the last minute I manage to make a purchase for £180, get an email, a reference number, complete the form and have my luggage accepted.

I hurry to my gate and make it just in time as passengers are starting to board. I slow down to join the Ryanair herd waiting on the tarmac for the aircraft to be processed before we are told we can travel.

The pavement is marked with lines at 2-meter intervals. Two men behind me are joking loudly that we must stand on the lines correctly, otherwise the virus will jump on us. I turn and smile (no mask, we are still outside) and make eye contact with the fellow humans.

QUARANTINE TWO: TRACK AND TRACE

Back home in London, the following day I get my first out of ten phone calls from Track and Trace. Each time a different voice reads the same script.

I am contacting you on behalf of the NHS Test and Trace as you have recently travelled into the UK from abroad. Are you happy to continue in English?”

No idea what would happen if I said ‘no’.

Before we proceed, I need to make you aware that this call will be recorded for training and quality improvement purposes and should just take a few minutes of your time. I can confirm I have completed the necessary data security training and all information you provide today will be stored securely. NHS Test and Trace may need to share your details with other organisations including the Home Office, and further information on data security and privacy can be found on http://www.gov.uk/coronavirus. Sharing information in the call today means you consent for it to be stored in the ways I have described. Are you happy to proceed with the call?”

I wish I could say, no, I am not. Once or twice I ask how long the data is going to be stored. The caller is not sure and advises me to find this out from the government website. The call proceeds with them checking my year of birth. Then they ask if I have opted into a ‘test to release’ – I frankly don’t even know it is my option, so I say ‘no’.

I later learn that the Test to Release scheme does not replace the compulsory Day 2 and 8 test. The ten-day quarantine can be shortened to 5 days by ‘opting into’ Test to Release for an additional £99. I realise they ask this question to advertise another product!

Can you confirm that you are quarantining at the address you provided on the passenger locator form and will continue to do so for ten days starting on the day after you arrive in the UK.”

So, again, I confirm, yes. What would happen if I said no?

As part of the Covid 19 response you are legally required to take the test on Day 2 and Day 8 and a failure to do so may result in prosecution.”

That answers my previous question…

Has your test arrived? And have you taken or do you intend to take your test?”

Yes.

Then I am asked if I got my test from the NHS or from a private provider. I am confused as I had no option to get an NHS test and I tell the caller. They seem happy with my answer and continue:

If your Day 2 test is positive confirming Covid 19, you do not need to take another test on Day 8.”

I think, on one occasion, I ask how I am expected to post the test if I am not allowed to leave the house. Of course, the assumption is there is someone else in the house, and if I still have difficulties, again, the go-to place is another NHS number. Amazing what they can do these days; they can even pick up your mail for you!

The call continues:

If you develop any of the three coronavirus symptoms which are: a new continuous cough, a high temperature, or a loss or change to your sense of taste or smell, please visit http://www.gov.uk/coronavirus for further advice. You should not go to the GP, hospital or a pharmacy. If you require medical advice, please ring the NHS on 111 or in an emergency dial 999”.

So here we have the admission of medical malpractice: if I fall ill, I must not seek help from NHS, not even by going to my local pharmacy. I must stay home without help, except of course, if I qualify for 999 ie, a ventilator…

The call continues:

I must advise you that if you test positive for coronavirus or are identified as a close contact of someone who has coronavirus you will be notified by NHS Test and Trace and may be contacted again. Is there anything you would like me to repeat?”

Of course, if someone I sat next to on the (half-empty) plane gets a positive result, my quarantine will stretch to a fortnight or longer! Each time, the call ends with a friendly, youthful, ‘have a great day’. All those who have called me are young voices, all kinds of accents, probably desperate for any job in the current climate. They are trained to stick to the script and any departure from it by my questions seems to trip them up.

And most of them probably think they are doing something socially useful and valuable.

THE QUARANTINE DIY TESTS

The one I have purchased in haste at the airport is a kit with two PCR tests to be administered at home on Day 2 and Day 8. The instructions tell me that the test is run at less than a 30-cycle value threshold.

The first thing to say about the swab is that it is long. It looks like a cotton bud used for everyday use, but on closer inspection it is different. The stick itself is about 12 cm long, that’s 6”, and designed to break off after the sample is collected and put into a small tube provided. The tip itself is 2 cm long, quite thin and covered in almost translucent spiky bristles protruding outwards. It looks a bit like a miniature harsh brush designed to scratch the delicate tissue inside the mouth and nose.

I am told to swab the back of the throat for 3-5 seconds over the posterior pharynx and tonsillar areas but to avoid tongue, teeth and the sides of the mouth. Then I am told to insert the same swab to each nostril about 2 cm deep and to rotate it for 3-5 seconds each time.

The form which I have to complete for each test is yet another mandated opportunity for the corpo-government to harvest my personal data, to store it for as long as it sees fit, yet, as is often the case in abusive relationships I have to (I repeat:) I have to give my consent for all this to happen, and even consent for my possible positive test result which may include my personal details: name, date of birth, gender, home address, telephone number, occupation, place of work, ethnicity and the fact that I have tested positive for Covid 19 to be communicated to Public Health England. Luckily, both of my test results are negative.

Eleven days after arrival in the UK my quarantine is officially over. It takes me a couple of days before I venture outside, I detect a bit of agoraphobia. In the last six weeks I spent twenty days in house arrest. They say it takes six weeks to develop a new habit.

POSTSCRIPTUM

I doubt very much I will travel internationally any time soon. Not planning to take the experimental Covid jab and so will not be enjoying the privilege of freedom promised to those with the vaccine passport. At the time of writing, it is no longer illegal to leave England but the elaborate hoops and the red tape remain and the government website reminds us that “to protect public health in the UK and the vaccine rollout, you should not travel to countries or territories on the red or amber lists”.

The ‘red and amber’ lists cover most countries of the world and returning from an amber list country will involve three or four tests which could come to £240-£340 per person plus the time spent completing all the online forms.

As to the red list countries; even a short spell there ends in an expensive £1750 per person prison-like stay at an airport hotel, as can be seen here.

So whilst not forbidden, even essential travel has been made into a series of expensive, degrading and time-consuming obstacles. Vaccine passports are being rolled out precisely to convince people they will magically bring freedom back to their lives. Do they not realise, that once they have their passports, the vaccine will need regular boosters?

Those still asleep; trusting the governments and the mainstream media think that easy travel is only temporarily put on hold but once the pandemic is ‘under control’, things will get back to the way they used to be. They do not realise the plan is to make travel an exclusive and rare event beyond reach of ordinary people.

This is done to us not just by the predatory elite class. Disappointingly, the pro-lockdown left continues to cheer these restrictions on and dismiss people’s desire and need to travel, as undeserved indulgence or middle-class privilege (interestingly, unrestricted travel around Europe was, until so recently, one of the main reasons for their fierce anti-Brexit position. What happened to their cherished principle of freedom of movement?). They could not be further from the truth.

They forget that, according to official migration data for the end of 2019, the UK is home to 6.2 million people – that is 9% of the total population – who have the nationality of a different country! And that data does not even include naturalised UK citizens like me, first-generation settled migrants who have close relatives all over the world and that unrestricted travel is an essential means to family life, something which is protected by Human Rights Act 1998.

The irony for those like myself, who grew up in communist Eastern Europe, is that freedom of movement, so taken for granted in the West, the right to travel and to have your own passport at home at all times is what we did not have then. The state set limits on where ‘citizens’, treated like its property, could travel.

For many who experienced those times, even as children, a return to state-mandated travel restrictions will feel like going back into tyranny.

As for my own journey: I will never forgive those responsible and all those lockdown fanatics for stealing my Dad’s, and so many other elderly people’s, last year by locking them up in the prison of fear and isolation, and then for pushing them to take the dangerous experimental jab which – for so many – was the last straw in their already weakened bodies.

June 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Smashed Houses, Crushed Orchards, A Trail of Unrestrained Malice

By Barbara Nimri Aziz | June 16, 2021

Residents of Sheikh Jarrah’s resistance to eviction by Israeli Jews evolved into a military confrontation so lopsided, the Israeli bombardments against Gaza so terrifying, it drew widespread condemnation (the US government excepted).

The Palestinian dead, injured and homeless are still being tabulated, while eviction processes of Sheikh Jarrah’s Arab inhabitants continue, even as we learn of similar forced displacement of Arabs in nearby Silwan.

Another Israeli scheme to dislodge Palestinians is home demolition—they number in the many thousands and continue (in Bustan, Silwan) even as I write. For a glimpse of these all-too-routine violations, I append my newly-digitized April 5, 1996 Christian Science Monitor article based on what I witnessed — I likened it to a lynching – when on assignment in the West Bank 25 years ago.

“It’s quite a spectacle, a Palestinian home being blown apart. Furniture, dishes and clothes, hastily removed, are deposited helter-skelter in the path or road.

Villagers stand by, silent and grim . Heavily armed soldiers are massed to prevent any disruption. Confused, awed children turn sullen.

Americans rarely see Israel’s demolition policy at work; but it’s a regular form of punishment. All Palestinians, from toddlers to the elderly, are familiar with it. Perhaps it’s happened to a neighbor. Perhaps they themselves were hauled out of their house in the early morning and told by a soft-spoken Israeli officer, with his troops surrounding the residence, that he has his orders. The entire town is aroused. Neighbors join in the frantic rush to save some household items; they know it’s useless to protest.

The silent frenzy of losing a home this way has no parallel. It’s not like a flood or a fire; it’s more like a lynching. There’s no one to call for help. Hundreds of soldiers surround the house and village to ensure no one interferes with the bulldozers and dynamite teams.

Legalized destruction

It’s all done legally too. That is to say, a paper, written in Hebrew, is presented to the householder spelling out the order to blow up or bulldoze his or her home, or to seal it. Often the order charges that the house lacks a building permit. Typically, a family has two hours’ notice.

In a village near Hebron in 1991, I saw the remains of a mosque that was flattened weeks before. The land had been cleared because of some building infraction, neighbors told me.

At other times, particularly during the intifadah (uprising), a family is informed that their son was caught (not convicted but simply picked up and charged) throwing a Molotov cocktail, or that he was captured in an attack on an Israeli.

In some cases, only the family orchard (their livelihood) is leveled. Again, the family is notified when the machines are already on the nearby road. Orchards have been destroyed based simply on a report that some Palestinian children were hiding from soldiers among the trees, or Jewish settlers claim that someone they were pursuing was heading in that direction.

During the first three years of the intifadah (1987-1991), when communal punishment was the norm for civil disobedience, the Palestinian Human Rights information Center recorded 1,726 demolitions or sealings of homes. On average, there are nine Palestinians living in a home; so those lost houses represent about 15,000 men, women and children, forcibly made homeless during that time. Often the dwelling is not even the family’s original home but a shelter inside a crowded refugee camp built with the help of United Nations funding.

Israel says it demolishes certain houses because they’re the homes of “suicide bombers”. The news media, which remains silent about these actions, are effectively sanctioning the policy. So conditioned is the public that whatever is done to an “Islamist terrorist” seems justified and is endorsed. Are we right to stand by silently and accept that?

Consider this: The demolitions are retaliatory actions that strike deep into the core of Palestinian identity. They are bound to have some traumatic effect on children. Such devastation may quell opposition temporarily, but the long-term effects may be very different. People may become more embittered and hostile towards Israeli authority. Blowing up the home of a family may in fact move the brothers and sisters of a dead man into closer identification with his actions.

Israel does not respond in this manner to all heinous acts. Look at the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by the Israeli law student. Look at Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer. Their actions repelled most Israelis, yet their homes and families remained unharmed. No, these destructive acts are specifically designed for and executed against Palestinians.

Palestinians’ view

Palestinians see this type of punishment as another method Israel uses to “clear the land”, to deny their existence, to implement its “cleansing” policy. People deprived of a home may have one less link with the land. But such actions have other consequences. Children witness their homes, the places they were born, blown apart. They watch fathers and other male relatives helplessly held at gunpoint. They imbibe the horrified reaction of their mothers and grandmothers.

The house as the center

Because this form of punishment is so rare, few can imagine the impact of a house being blown up in front of its owners. We have to understand how central the house is to Palestinian life. Even today, most Palestinians are born at home. This is the place for daily prayer, for family meals, for weddings, for homecomings from jail, and for funerals. This is where everyone gathers to pass the evening. It is not a shelter; it is a community. It is the place for consolation and joy, the haven and the refuge.

Mother is the manager, so the home is unequivocally associated with her power and protective role. Harming the house is like violating the mother. Many children will feel they must avenge this injustice. Especially with the world community standing by seeming to sanction the destruction, family members may feel more responsibility to seek justice. Anyone who understands this would advise Israel to cease this practice for these reasons, if not for moral ones.”


Photos above and below–a sturdy old Jerusalem wall, replaced by a parking lot– was posted by Lisa S Majaj

NOTE: Israel’s removal of Palestinians is interminable: sometimes it’s by shrewd legal maneuvers; sometimes it’s by harassment, sometimes it’s violent takeovers, and sometimes it’s brutal demolition. A protracted process, it’s so routine that it hardly garners outside attention. Besides residences, Palestinian orchards and nature preserves are savagely destroyed by Israeli forces. A recent egregious case was reported by my colleague Raouf Halaby in Counterpunch.

June 19, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Zionist Ethnic Cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah Neighborhood and the Silwan Village

By Dr. Zuhair Sabbagh | June 19, 2021

In order to understand the issue of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Zionist entity and its tools in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, in colonized Jerusalem, we must not address it in the Zionist colonial settler context because it lacks scientific credibility. In order to solve this problem, we have to ask and answer the following questions: Who is the real side that legally owns the properties of the “Jewish Quarter” in colonized Jerusalem? Who legally owns the real estate of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the Silwan village? What follows is a serious attempt to answer these two questions.

Who is the Legal Owner of the Real Estate of the “Jewish Quarter”?

As a result of capitalist contradictions and class conflicts that led to the birth and development of nationalist movements in Europe, European Jewish communities suffered arbitrary persecutions, which included a number of massacres against them. These campaigns of arbitrary persecution have prompted large numbers of European Jews to emigrate from Eastern Europe, particularly Tsarist Russia, to Western Europe. Some of these Jews emigrated also to the Ottoman Empire, particularly to the rising city of Jerusalem.

When the persecution of Jews intensified in a number of European countries in 1880, 

Youssef ibn Rahamim Miyohas arrived in Jerusalem seeking help. Abed Rabbo son of Khalil son of Ibrahim, a resident of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, rented him a plot of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood for 90 years. Due to the fact that the land was an Islamic trust land, this lease allows Jews to rent land and prohibits the sale of land to them under Ottoman regulations and laws. 1

In his research article entitled “Guests, then Renters, then Settlers”, Abed Al-Raoof Arnaoot, a Palestinian researcher, reported that after Miyohas signed the rent agreement, he brought 62 Jews to the location and divided the rented land into 62 pieces, which enabled each of them to build a small house of tens to hundreds of meters in area. They then lived in these houses. 2

The land was then registered in the name of Abed Rabbo, the person in charge of this Islamic trust. This is proven in the Turkish property ownership documents which are still owned by both the Abed Rabbo family and the Hijazi family. 3

In addition, the credible historical references indicate that “the year 1880 and its aftermath witnessed a remarkable influx of thousands of Jews from Europe to Jerusalem after facing persecutions. The then Ottomanic laws allowed the rental of these lands by Jews, but not their sale. According to Ottoman laws, Islamic trust lands are legally permitted for lease but are not legally allowed to be sold. 4

According to a reputable and highly credible scientific reference, 85 percent of the real estate in the ‘Jewish Quarter’ was owned by Muslim Arabs5 in the Ottoman period. This real estate belonged to the Islamic trusts. As is well known, Islamic trusts are prohibited from selling their real estate and are only allowed to rent it.

In 1968, the Zionist state expropriated for public usage 12 percent of the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem, which included the “Jewish Quarter”. The equivalent of 80 percent of the expropriated area was not Jewish property.6 These expropriated properties were put up for sale only to the Israeli and Jewish publics.

Thus, the credible historical references undoubtedly prove that the territory of the so-called “Jewish Quarter” is mostly the land of the “waqf” Islamic trusts. As is also well known, Islamic trusts are prohibited from selling their property because they are endowed for the benefit of a social purpose or for the benefit of a mosque or a religious place. The land of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is leased land owned by Islamic trusts. Mr. Abed Rabbo al-Saadi, who is the custodian of the bulk of the land, confirms that: “In 1880, some Jews emigrated to Jerusalem, they were in a deplorable state, they came to our ancestors and asked them to lease them this land, and because of their situation and persecution in Europe, our ancestors agreed. Our ancestors agreed to lease the land to a Jewish person named Yusuf ibn Rahamim Miyohas.” 7

Here we can come to the firm conclusion that the Jews who inhabited the so-called “Jewish Quarter” during the Ottoman rule rented their homes from Arabs and Islamic trusts, and did not buy them, because Islamic trusts do not sell their property. Legally, the majority of Jews are not owners of the properties they lived in, but remain tenants. Therefore, they are not entitled to claim ownership of this real estate. These properties are owned exclusively, and mostly by Islamic trusts.

How the Guardian of the Property of the Absentees Turned into a Despicable Thief

According to a credible research that was carried out by two Israeli criminologists, Uzi Livia and Ariel Aboksis, the state of Israel reached in total area of 20,770 square kilometers (more than four and a half million dunams) at the end of the Zionist war of aggression, which began on November 30, 1947 and ended on July 30, 1949. Most of this area, was considered to be the property of the absentees, i.e. Palestinian refugees, and constituted 77 percent of the total area of the Zionist entity. The absentees, a Zionist term, were “Arabs who “left”, and there are those who say they were “expelled” and/or “fled”, during the war of independence. Absentees’ property includes real estate, land, workshops, factories, bank accounts and movable property.” 8

After the end of the war, the newly established Zionist State designated a custodian on the property of Palestinian refugees and gave him a temporary role, with established legal arrangement to determine that role. Uzi Livia and Ariel Aboksis explain this role as follows:

… Basically, these laws are based on the principle that in a period of war, the government temporarily uses these properties for the benefit of the war effort. Its role is to preserve the property for the benefit of their owners or for war damage compensation, in order to return it to them when the state of emergency is abolished. Under this concept, the custodian was given only a temporary role. His primary duty was to preserve the property of those absentees in the transitional period. 9

The justification set by the Zionist state for the “temporary” seizure of the property of Palestinian refugees was that,

Because of their status as hostile citizens, that are located outside the country, under arrest or under surveillance, the law does not allow them to use their property as long as hostilities are under way. The moment the owners stop being absent, the custodian must return their property to them. Therefore, he cannot make a permanent and final decision on the property that he holds temporarily. For the same reason, he can rent property for only a short period of time, which does not exceed five years, and is not authorized to sell or transfer this property to others in an irreversible manner. 10

As a result of the limitations imposed by the law, the custodian of the property of the absentees requested, in 1949, that the government expand his powers so that, for example, he can transfer or lease property for a longer period than five years and also provide him with freedom of disposal, in order to allow the property to be placed in the service of the colonial settlement and colonial objectives of the Zionist entity. This required the enactment of a new law. 11

All requests of the custodian regarding the expansion of his powers were accepted, and the Zionist parliament enacted the “Absentee Property Act of 1950”. Under this law, all property owned by refugees, including the property of the Islamic Waqf,12 was transferred to the absolute control of the Zionist state, represented by the Zionist custodian on the property of refugees. Thus, the power of the custodian has been transformed into a government institution that is the richest in the Zionist state. 13

It is worth mentioning that the establishment of peace between the Arabs and the Zionist entity required talks and concessions, especially on the issue of the return of the Palestinian refugees. The Zionists opposed the return or compensation of the refugees and threw the blame for the creation of the refugee problem on the Arab side, and falsely accused the Arab side of rejecting peace. Historical facts prove that those who ethnically cleansed the Palestinians and that those who occupied half of the Palestinian proposed state under the Partition Resolution, were the Zionist side. 14 These facts have been confirmed by the two researchers Uzi Livia and Ariel Aboksis, who wrote that:

Thus, we believe that the first seeds of Israel’s anti-peace stance have been cultivated in Israel’s position on the return of refugees, which Israel has sharply opposed. All sources of living for Arab refugees who previously lived in the State of Israel has been completely obliterated. Their economy has been destroyed, so their re-absorption into Israel will produce a social and financial problem that is much worse than the arrangement of their absorption in every other country. 15

Thus, the Zionist State plundered and acted freely and without restrictions regarding the property of the Palestinian refugees, selling and renting it as it wished. In order to establish a false legal cover for this theft, the Parliament of the Zionist entity enacted the so-called “Absentee Property Act of 1950.” According to this law, the role of the custodian of the property of the absentees has changed from a “custodian” with temporary and limited powers, to a despicable thief armed with a settler colonial law. Here, the Zionist State has pursued, in its policies towards the property of the indigenous population, a settler colonial approach that is very similar to that pursued by all settler colonial states such as: the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa during the Apartheid regime, and Algeria under French settler colonialism. When comparing them with each other, one notices the great similarities among them regarding the course of action they adopted towards the lands of the indigenous population. Of course, there are special characteristics for each settler colonial project, and there is a different historical context. 

Today, the Zionist colonial entity is using the Absentee Property Act of 1950 to give justification and legal cover to all ethnic cleansing carried out in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, Al-Khan al-Ahmar, the Al-Walaji village, Jaffa, Hebron and the Negev region.

The Zionist entity uses all its colonial tools to carry out operations associated with ethnic cleansing such as unjust law, false documents, complicit colonial courts, colonial police and army, herds of armed and violent settlers, and settlement organizations financed with American money from Jews and others. All of them, under the leadership of the extremist colonial government of the Zionist right-wing parties, are carrying out a fierce offensive campaign of ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinian population. The focus of this study will be on the ethnic cleansing campaigns that are taking  place in Sheikh Jarrah and Salwan.

Preparing for Ethnic Cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah Neighborhood

Ethnic cleansing in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood began with the settlement organizations of “Benvenisti Endowment”, “Ateret Cohanim”, “the Nahlat Shamoun Limited”, and “El-Aad Society”, filing legal proceedings in Israeli courts against the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The first cases began in 1972, in which they claimed that Palestinian-inhabited houses were owned by Yemeni Jews. Lawyers for these organizations provided fake documents to prove their ownership.

In return, the Palestinians submitted their documents from Turkish agreements, and official receipts that clearly show that the land is Arab and owned by Islamic trusts, and that the Jews rented it from their owners and did not own it. The Palestinians have proved that they are the real owners of the land and that the land of the Islamic Trust is not sold, but is rented.

“We have provided all the documents,” said Yahya Abed Rabbo al-Saadi, who was the custodian for the bulk of the land in Sheikh Jarrah: “We presented to the court all the documents which prove Palestinian ownership of the land. These documents were issued to us by the Islamic Shari’a Court in Jerusalem, the Ottoman Archives in Ankara, and the Land Department of Amman…” 16 The Zionist Central Court refused to accept these documents, arguing that the court does not recognize them as valid documents.

For its part, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry sent 14 official documents concerning Sheikh Jarrah’s houses to the Palestinian Authority. These documents show that in 1956, the Jordanian Ministry of Development and the UNRWA refugee agency, concluded an agreement with 28 Palestinian refugee families under which 28 housing units were built in the Al-Jani vineyard to house them. UNRWA’s condition was for Palestinian refugees to relinquish their legal status as refugees. After three years, their ownership will be legally established. 17 For reasons that remain unknown, these families have not been able to register the land in their names. Consequently, these Jordanian documents have been submitted to the Zionist Central Court, which also rejected them.

In 2010, cartographer Khalil Tofakji traveled to Istanbul. At the Ottoman State Archives he found documents which prove that the territory of Sheikh Jarrah is Palestinian and owned by Palestinians, which is contrary to the Zionist claim. These documents have been submitted to the Israeli court. 18

The Zionist Central Court rejected both the Jordanian and Tofakji’s documents and claimed that it did not recognize their credibility. The court then issued an order to adopt the Zionist position which was based on fake documents and false allegations. This has always been the controversial approach of the Israeli courts.

The Role of Zionist Judicial Institutions in Land Cases

The writer Abdelkader Badawi believes that these Zionist judicial institutions have an important role in the settler colonial system and that they provide the Zionist government with a legal cover for the plunder of Palestinian property. No matter how fragile and discredited this cover may be, the oppression and arrogance of the Zionist entity and its instruments, make the settlers’ cases successful through falsification and when unjust judicial decisions are made, the Palestinians have no real power to change them. It is a racist and colonial justice that is devoid of justice, fairness and credibility. The writer further believes that,

It is customary in the Israeli judiciary system to accept the account of Jews and settlers, particularly in matters of land and property, without paying attention to the nature or eligibility of legal justifications, as these institutions have already existed to be, among other objectives and endeavors, an instrument of the settler colonial system to control the land, and to overcome all legal obstacles to this goal. 19

The writer Abdelkader Badawi stated that Zionist settler colonial associations played a big role “… Through its expansionist post-occupation settlement activities, which have never been separated from the activity, in support of successive Israeli governments, as well as, the Israeli judicial system. They constituted a tool of the Israeli settler colonial system of control, expropriation, displacement and expulsion…” 20 

These associations have emerged as “… a representative of the settlers, through the legal cases it filed in the Israeli courts requesting the evacuation of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood from its Palestinian residents…” 21

The Process of Ethnic Cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah

After the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, and its illegal annexation of it to Israel by the Zionist entity, “… The residents of The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood were surprised when two Jewish committees registered, in 1972, the ownership of the Palestinian-owned 18-dunum land, in settler’s name at the Israeli Department of Lands.” 22

Commenting on the Zionist courts and their arbitrary decisions against the Palestinian population in Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinian-American writer Stephen Salaita wrote that,

Palestinians don’t need to respect the institutions of the Zionist state precisely because those institutions negate the Palestinians’ simplest political imperative: existence. Those institutions represent the machinery of colonization. All settler colonies come equipped with a legal apparatus to validate their cruelty. We cannot expect Western pundits and politicians to question the institutional logic so harmful to Palestinians, for their own legitimacy is contingent on the reproduction of state power. 23

Salaita elaborates on his explanation of the logic on which the idea is based that “property is Jewish” and that the Zionist state seeks to restore it and return it to Jewish ownership. 

More nonsensically, we’re asked to assign ethnic characteristics to abstractions and inanimate objects. The basis for Israel’s aggression in Sheikh Jarrah (as throughout all of historic Palestine) is repossession of so-called Jewish property. The property, in other words, doesn’t belong to people who happen to be Jewish. The property itself is Jewish—nobody can specify which denomination—and is therefore fit only for a certain kind of inhabitant. The property has some kind of innate disposition. It is apparently capable of worship. It becomes a crass approximation of humanity. Endowing housing units with confessional qualities exemplifies the problem of prioritizing property over sentient life:  a dwelling has no utility beyond the project of demographic engineering. Under the Zionist regime, even brick and mortar are sectarian. 24

Both Noura Erikat and Mariam Barghouthi described the atmosphere at today’s Sheikh Jarrah as being “… practically a war zone as armed Israeli settlers, under the protection of Israeli police, terrorize the Palestinian residents. These are the very settlers who are looking to kick out families, including El-Kurd’s.” 25

The Settlers are Cowardly Thieves

I have observed Zionist colonial settlers for a number of years. I have also studied their conduct and explored their ideology. Based on my close observation of their conduct inside Israel proper, as well as inside the colonized territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Syrian Heights, I can certainly state the following.

All Zionist settlers are armed militia of fascists, psychologically deranged, cowards as individuals, and work with great passion as mercenaries of the Zionist settler colonial regime. They’re armed with guns and their Jewish religiosity is nothing but a fragile cover to hide their obnoxious behavior. They are inhuman, school dropouts and have a psycho-social willingness to earn their living by theft, bullying and extreme violence. They work in small groups that look like flocks of wild hyenas that go after their victims and keep tirelessly attempting to eat their flesh. They lack any human moral system but they seem to possess a capitalist system of robbers’ morality. In contrast to this distorted human situation, the Zionist and settler colonial class system is ready to defend their violent banditry behavior because it is itself an inhuman system that uses extreme colonial violence against the indigenous Palestinian population. In addition, the Zionist settler regime deploys the settlers in its colonial schemes. Consequently, the Zionist colonial system is extremely violent. It cannot live in tranquility and thus is unable to conduct a calm and civilized dialogue with the indigenous Palestinians.

Some settlers admit that they are thieves who steal Palestinian houses, some of whom openly admit it, such as the settler who lives in half of Mona al-Kurd’s house, where he told her, “If I don’t steal, your house it will be stolen by someone else,” said Mona al-Kurd, a young Palestinian woman who accused him of stealing her home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem. 26

Other settlers hide their motives by offering bribes with a threat to the owner of the house. Zuhair Rajabi, who lives in Sheikh Jarrah’s neighborhood in a house with his wife and four children, said the settlers “tried to bribe me by paying 1 million shekels [$300,000], provided I will leave my house quietly. When I refused, they threatened to put me in prison. They then sent the Israeli police to my house to try to arrest me, claiming that I physically attacked the man who was suing me.” 27

These two examples could serve as a proof that the settlers do not own these houses and that the Israeli courts are complicit in the plunder of the indigenous Palestinians.

Inhuman Colonial Brutality

The methods of removing Palestinians from their homes are varied, but some are carried out with extreme cruelty and inhumanity, as happened to the Al-Ghawi family.

Nuha Atiyeh, a resident of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood recalls the following incident. “I watched the doors of our neighbors, the Al-Ghawi family, crash during a black night. The women were evicted by force and were thrown, in their night clothes, outside their house. This scene doesn’t escape my imagination. I remember taking some clothes from my house and giving them to the women.” 28

As a result of dozens of lawsuits filed by the settlers’ committees at the Zionist Central Court in Jerusalem, the Court issued a decision to vacate against 28 Palestinian nuclear families. The total number of people facing expulsion for settlers reached 500, including 111 children. 29/sup>

The Central Zionist Court itself ruled that seven other families would leave their homes from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood by August 1, 2021. In total, an additional 58 people, including 17 children, are to be forcibly displaced to allow Jewish settlers to occupy their homes. 30 The Zionist Central Court also ruled that four families — Kurd, Skaif, Qasim and Al-Jawaani — must leave their homes for settlers, or reach an agreement with these settler organizations by paying rent and recognizing settlers as landowners. 31

Here we clearly see that there are no limits to settler’s arrogance and no limits to colonial insolence, as aggressors and thieves ask real house owners to pay their rent for their houses to the thieves. Of course, if the real Palestinian house owners had acquiesced to this request, they would have lost their right to property.

Ethnic Cleansing in Silwan

In 2002, the custodian of Absentee Property transferred land from the village of Silwan to the “Benvenesti Development Fund”, whose administration belongs to the settler organization “Ateret Cohanim”. This decision was upheld by the Jerusalem District Court, and the transfer was made without informing the Palestinian residents living on the land since the 1950s, and who have contracts to prove it. 32

The colonial settlement project in the village of Silwan began “in 2004, when two outposts were established in the village. By 2014, there were six outposts ranging from apartments for individuals and entire buildings. “Since then, the “Ateret Cohanim” committee has submitted eviction orders against other Palestinian families. In 2017, Palestinian residents petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to challenge the evictions, arguing that in accordance with applicable Ottoman law at that time, the property applied only on buildings, which no longer exist, but not on the same land… 33

Similar to what happened in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, on 26 May 2021, the Jerusalem District Court held a hearing on the forced eviction of some 108 Palestinians from 18 families from their homes in the Batan al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan. The Jewish “Benvenisti Development Fund” claims to own 5.2 dunums of the land of Batan al-Hawa neighborhood. 34

Israeli television channel 12 reported that settlers had placed Israeli flags on 15 houses in Silwan after they were captured by the “Ateret Cohanim”, association and handed over to the settlers’ families. The channel noted that these new houses that were seized joined 22 other houses recently captured by “Ateret Cohanim”. 35

It is worth mentioning that the Zionist state has “… A settlement strategy called the “Holy Basin”, consisting of the construction of housing units for settlers and a series of parks themed after Biblical places and figures around the Old City of Jerusalem. The plan would require the expulsion of Palestinian residents from Silwan neighborhoods and then the evacuation of 87 Palestinians from the Batan al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan, south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. This will be done for the “Ateret Cohanim” settlers association.

Since 1995, the Israeli Antiquities Authority has been excavating sites in Silwan with the official support of the Settlers’ Foundation “Ire David” (the city of David), in order to create a new tourist attraction and find evidence of the 3,000-year-old “City of David”. 36

The group, which aims to expand the presence of settlers within the predominantly Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem around and inside the Old City, sued the residents of Batan al-Hawa, a district of Silwan, claiming that the land belonged to Yemeni Jews during the Ottoman period until 1938, when the residents were transferred to another location by the British Mandate authorities because of political tensions. 37

It is worth mentioning that the Zionist policy of uprooting and ethnic cleansing has been followed in a number of places in Palestinian geography such as the Red Khan, Jaffa, Hebron, the village of Al-Walajeh, and the Palestinian Negev region. These remain tense hotbeds ignited by right-wing leaders who have lost their minds. But this fire will burn their fingers and will increase the determination of the indigenous Palestinian population to unite efforts, escalate the struggle and continue the process of liberation.

The essence of Zionist claims about the property is that it is “Jewish property”, some of which belonged to Jews 3,000 years ago, and some of which belonged to Jews a little more than one hundred years ago. These allegations give no regard to modern laws in determining the legal acquisition of real estate, which have changed radically from the time of the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols and the Vikings, where the property belonged to the usurper and the occupier, not to the indigenous peoples who lived above these properties.

This Zionist nonsense is sponsored and adopted by the Zionist colonial bodies, and those who defend them from Arab protectorates and vassals, European and American imperialists, and by the Zionist and reactionary Arab media, who are hostile to the rights of the Palestinian Arab people in their homeland especially their right to self-determination. 

It is scientifically known that the Jewish Torah does not constitute an official and credible document that is recognized by international law and therefore, can be presented in modern courts as a document of legal ownership. Moreover, God has not been recognized as a feudal landlord who owns the lands of the peoples and can distribute them to whoever he wants and denies them from whoever he wants. Consequently, the British imperialist Lord Balfour does not own Palestine, nor does the extremist right wing President Donald Trump own the colonized land of Palestine or the colonized Syrian Golan Heights, so he has no right to give these lands to the Zionist settler colonialists. 

It should be added that many of the historical events and “facts” mentioned in the Torah were partly a form of broad religious fiction and partly came out of the misappropriation of the heritage of Mesopotamian civilizations. The Torah has no solid scientific credibility, and whoever adopts it reflects the fact that he lacks credible legal documents. Therefore, the claims by the Zionist settler colonialists to their right to own Palestinian land and real estate based on the Torah are fragile and null and void because the real owners were and still are the Arab Palestinians, who are the indigenous people of Palestine, which constitutes a part of the greater Syrian motherland.

International Law is not a Tool in the Service of Zionist Settler Colonialism.

International law prohibits the occupying power from imposing its laws on the inhabitants of the area it has occupied because it is a war zone outside the sovereignty of the belligerent state. International law also prohibits the belligerent occupying power from transferring its citizens to live within the area it has occupied. Moreover, the occupying power may not change the laws in force within the occupied zone.

The Al-Haq human rights foundation stated that,

… the legal framework applicable in occupied East Jerusalem is international humanitarian and international human rights law. Israel is specifically prohibited from annexing the occupied territory under Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As such, Israel’s application of its domestic law, including the Legal and Administrative Matters Law in 1970, and provisions of Israel Tenancy law are not only wrongful acts in violation of international law, of which there can be no recognition, but acts which third States must collectively work to bring to an end. 38

There are clear obligations under Article 43 of the Hague Regulations, to continue the status quo ante bellum including the preservation of private tenancy rights, which are further protected as private property of the civilian population under Article 46 of the Hague Regulations. In particular, such acts amount to forcible transfer, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. 39

American imperialism helps Zionist colonialism, embraces its wars of aggression and provides it with money and weapons. The imperialist West abandoned the Palestinian people, and the son-in-law of the American President, the Zionist Jared Kushner, who financed the right-wing settlement movement in Israel, was given absolute authority to fabricate “A peace process”, aided by the regimes of colonial mercenaries in the Gulf, the most important of which is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who just imprisoned his relatives, after he ordered the assassination of the Saudi opposition journalist Jamal Al-Khashoukji. 

Expected Results of a Deteriorating Zionist Path

Many indications are that the Zionist settlement entity will continue its Judaization quest in colonized East Jerusalem, but during this insane colonial quest, it has transformed East Jerusalem into the world’s most tense outpost that will become the poorest, most racist and most heinous “capital.” No matter how much the colonial mentality brings about more racist laws and more inhumane practices, the situation that is formed before the eyes of the peoples of the world will make the Zionist entity a rogue, aggressive, hideous and repulsive state.

The deteriorating path chosen by the extreme right-wing leadership of the Zionist entity has generated a severe political crisis that has shown a deep structural imbalance in the level of political leadership, which in turn has produced a turbulent political right, fragmented, and does not benefit, either from elections or from democracy to get out of its acute crisis. This deteriorating path has also produced a Zionist voter with callous consciousness, racial intolerance and ideological blindness. This deteriorated situation has produced more failed leadership than its predecessor. After four parliamentary elections that produced repeated results, the Zionist entity got itself into a fiasco that has no equivalent in the world. It is a lost entity that cannot save itself from the path of deterioration because it is the same path that South Africa followed until the world came to save it from its fiasco by imposing on it a solution that it does not desire.

Here it appears that the Palestinian steadfastness and determination to fight for its patriotic rights, with the assistance of Arab and international solidarity, will lead the Zionist regime to choose a solution similar to that chosen by South Africa. The Palestinian national struggle will not be extinguished, as it is developing and promoted by the united efforts of workers, and progressive elements in the Middle Class. During its development, all the reactionary elements, Palestinian, Arab and international, who together are attempting to preserve the dissonant parts of a rogue state that insists on falling, will disappear forever.

References

  1. Arnaout, Abdul Rauf, “Sheikh Jarrah: Guests, Tenants and Settlers”, Palestinian Studies Foundation, https://www.palestine-studies.org, access to the site on 1-6-2021
  2. Scholch, Alexander, “Jerusalem in 19th Century (1831 – 1917 AD)” in Jerusalem in History, Edited by K.J. Asali. 1989. ISBN 0-905906-70-5. Page 234. Quoting Muhammad Adib al-Amiri, “Al Quds al-‘Arabiyya“, Amman, 1971, page 12 and ‘Arif al-‘Arif, “Al-Nakba“, vol 2, Sidon and Beirut, page 490 (90%). As quoted by: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, “Old City” (Jerusalem), https://en.wikipedia.org,1-6-2021.
  3. Dumper, Michael (2017). Najem, Tom; Molloy, Michael J.; Bell, Michael; Bell, John (eds.). “Contested Sites in Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Old City Initiative”. Routledge. p. 156. ISBN 978-1-317-21344-4. As quoted by: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, “Old City” (Jerusalem), https://en.wikipedia.org,1-6-2021.
  4. Livia, Uzi and Aboksis, Ariel, “For the development of the country and for the benefit of its citizens” (in Hebrew), https://web.archive.org, 30-10-2017
  5. 2. See Ilan Papi’s Book, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine https://www.ebay.com, 9-6-2021
  6. Alsaafin, Linah, “What is happening in occupied East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah?”, https://www.aljazeera 
  7. Badawi, Abdel Kader, “Nahalat Chamoun”: A private settler’s company and the arm of the Israeli government in the case of the displacement of the people of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood”, https://www.madarcenter.org,17-5-2021
  8. Jundi, Aseel, “Neighborhood’s resilient women say ‘we will not leave’”, https://www.middleeasteye.net, 11-5-2021
  9.  Salaita, Steve,  “Sheikh Jarrah: Zionism Distilled to Its Purest Expression”, https://alethonews.com, 12-5-2021
  10. Erakat, Noura, and Barghouti, Mariam, “Sheikh Jarrah highlights the violent brazenness of Israel’s colonialist project”, https://www.washingtonpost.com, 10-5-2021
  11.  AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES, “Video shows Israeli settler trying to take over Palestinian house”, https://www.aljazeera.com, 4-5-2021
  12. Kunzl, Kelly, “Families face imminent evictions in East Jerusalem”, The Electronic Intifada, https://electronicintifada.net, 24-12-2020
  13. Jundi, Aseel, “Neighborhood’s resilient women say ‘we will not leave’”, https://www.middleeasteye.net, 11-5-2021
  14. Linah, Alsaafin, “What is happening in occupied East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah?”, https://www.aljazeera.com, 1-5-2021
  15. Palestine Chronicle, “East Jerusalem: Jewish Settlers Seize 15 Palestinian Homes in Silwan”, https://www.palestinechronicle.com, 8-4-2021
  16. MEE staff, “Not just Sheikh Jarrah: Palestinians elsewhere are facing forced eviction”, https://www.middleeasteye.net, 11-5-2021
  17. AL-JAZERA AND NEWS AGENCIES, “Hundreds hurt as Palestinians protest evictions in Jerusalem”,  https://www.aljazeera.com, 8-5-2021

Zuhair Sabbagh is a writer on Israeli and Palestinian issues. He has published a number of books and research articles in both English and Arabic. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He lives in Nazareth, Palestine

June 19, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Canadian Politician Derek Sloan Uses Parliament Hill to Give Voices to Censored Doctors and Scientists Blowing the Whistle on COVID-19 Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

By Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | June 18, 2021

One of our many dear Canadian subscribers emailed me a link to a press conference given in Ontario yesterday at Parliament Hill.

PM Derek Sloan arranged the press conference, and invited Dr. Bryan Bridle, Dr. Patrick Phillips, and Dr. Donald Welsh to give short presentations on how good doctors and scientists are being censored in Canada, and being harassed and threatened for speaking the truth, which is not getting out to the masses.

These men are true heroes! They have put their careers and lives on the line to speak the truth about the genocide currently being carried out and the crimes against humanity over the COVID-19 response and bioweapon shots.

PM Derek Sloan stated:

“I’ve consistently stood up for Canadians, where no other federal party would.”

He issued a call for whistleblowers within the medical and scientific community in Ontario to contact him. Shocking stories were told, and all agreed that their stories were not being told in either Parliament or the national media.

So he did this press conference on Parliament Hill.

Dr. Bryan Bridle then spoke, explaining how he has been slandered, harassed, and attacked with fake social media accounts put up in his name. His own colleagues have attacked him, and given out confidential medical information about his own parents. His career has been destroyed for speaking out. He says:

“I don’t recognize the country I was born into.”

Dr. Patrick Phillips was next and stated that due to the lockdowns:

“I’ve never seen so many suicidal children.”

He also related how on April 30th the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario came out with a very “chilling statement,”  basically stating that only approved COVID measures could be discussed with patients, no proven effective early treatments like Ivermectin could be discussed, that Vitamin D is “fake” news, and they were not allowed to say anything negative about the COVID-19 shots.

Basically they just want people to die. That’s the apparent goal.

Threatening to take his license to practice medicine away for promoting early treatments like Ivermectin, he was not willing to let patients die:

“There’s something bigger going on than my medical career at this point, because lives are being lost and we need to speak out.”

Dr. Donald Welsh came next and gave an impassioned talk about the death of science in Canada.

This is from our Rumble channel, and it is also on our Bitchute channel.

June 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Hypocrisy 101

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 18, 2021

When President Biden predictably began lecturing Russian President Vladimir Putin about human-rights abuses in Russia, Biden was chagrined when Putin turned the tables on him by asking about human-rights abuses at the hands of the U.S. government.

I’ve often wondered why foreign dictators don’t do that more often. Biden’s position is truly a classic case of Hypocrisy 101.

Consider the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s torture and prison center in Cuba. It could easily fit comfortably within any communist country or other totalitarian regime.

Consider the types of policies that the Pentagon and the CIA have implemented at Guantanamo Bay:

1. No trial by jury. Trials, if they are ever held, are by military tribunal. That means a kangaroo trial. The verdict of guilt is already established before the trial even begins.

2. No trials. Yes, that’s right — people at Gitmo don’t even get a kangaroo trial. There have been people locked up in there for more a decade. Why haven’t they been accorded even a kangaroo trial? That is what is called the power of indefinite detention — the power to take a person into custody and keep him incarcerated for the rest of his life.

3. Torture. U.S. officials torture inmates into confessing their crimes. They also torture witnesses into testifying against people who are accused of crimes. Evidence acquired by torture is admissible at the kangaroo trials (if they are ever held).

4. Hearsay. People who are on trial (if a trial is ever held) are prevented from confronting the witnesses against them and cross-examining them. Instead, witnesses are permitted to recite out-of-court statements made by others as a way to secure convictions.

5. Denial of effective assistance of counsel. The Pentagon and the CIA eavesdrop on communications between inmates and their attorneys.

Now, if I told you that all of these things happen in communist or totalitarian regimes, you would not be surprised. But what is sad is that today no American is surprised that the U.S. government does these things too. It’s all become a normalized and acceptable part of American life, just like assassination has.

Consider assassination. The Fifth Amendment expressly prohibits the federal government from depriving a person of life without due process of law. Due process is a principle requiring formal notice and a trial.

Yet, the Pentagon and the CIA have a formalized program of state-sponsored assassinations. That’s just legalized murder — the taking of people’s lives without notice and trial.

Not surprisingly, the power to assassinate people is wielded by communist and other totalitarian regimes. The power of assassination has also been wielded by Pentagon and CIA officials ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state.

Consider Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. All they did was disclose the truth about these types of sordid, dark-side, communist-like, totalitarian-like policies and actions of the U.S. national-security establishment.

How have U.S. officials treated Snowden and Assange? The same way that communist and totalitarian regimes treat dissidents.

Maybe the pandemic is something that will cause Americans to do some serious soul-searching as to where we are as a nation, how we got here, and what we need to do to get things back on the right track.

In the meantime, Biden needs to keep in mind that when he wags his finger at communist or totalitarian regimes regarding human-rights violations, there are three more fingers pointing back at himself.

June 18, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Philip Zelikow, 9/11 Commission Leader, Leads COVID Commission

“To win the war against this alien invader, we have to win the war globally… this is an opportunity for America to offer a new kind of leadership for a new kind of world crisis… “

By Caroline Newman | UVA Today | April 14, 2021

On Tuesday, the University of Virginia announced that its Miller Center for Public Affairs will serve as a base for a COVID Commission Planning Group, led by UVA professor Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

The planning group hopes to prepare the way for a potential National COVID Commission set up to help America and the world learn from this pandemic and safeguard against future threats.

“This is perhaps the greatest crisis suffered by America, if not the world, since 1945,” said Zelikow, the White Burkett Miller Professor of History and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance, who also led the earlier, privately organized Carter-Ford Commission on Federal Election Reform. “It is vital to take stock, in a massive way, of what happened and why.

“These sorts of civilizational challenges may become more common in the 21st century, and we need to learn from this crisis to strengthen our society,” he continued. “Scholars and journalists will do their jobs, but there is also a role for the kind of massive investigation and research effort that only a large-scale commission can provide.”

The nonpartisan group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health experts, clinicians and former officials, backed by four of America’s leading charitable foundations: Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together. The Miller Center will also work with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Organizers hope the work will feed into a future National COVID Commission, set up either by the White House or Congress, or by an independent organization.

We spoke with Zelikow on Tuesday to learn more about the work ahead.

Q. You have experience in reflecting on and analyzing a national crisis with the 9/11 Commission. How can this type of work help us prevent future crises?

A. In general, it is really important to get a well-grounded understanding of what happened. We should not underestimate the importance of simply having a good, foundational understanding. People can piece that together from newspaper articles, books or scholarly papers. However, my past experience has underscored that a lot of the story will not be properly understood unless there is a systematic effort to pull together information with both depth and breadth that can become a foundation for future debate.

The 9/11 work was smaller in scale than this would be, but it showed how many aspects of the story were not understood until there was a thorough investigation.

Q. Where will you pull information from?

A. It is essential to both examine documents and interview people who made key choices in government at all levels, not just the federal level. In this crisis, a lot of key decisions were made at the state and local levels, and those were very important. Many private firms and nonprofit entities, such as hospitals, pharmaceutical firms or clinics, also made important choices. It will be helpful to understand why they made those choices, what worked well, the kinds of obstacles they faced and the tradeoffs that people making these choices needed to make.

This crisis has been like an X-ray, exposing every single fault line in the American public health system and in our preparedness for large-scale disasters. This is an essential opportunity to learn from this enormous stress test and make our communities safer.

Q. You have emphasized that the work is not just national, but international. How will you include other countries into this work?

A. We are already talking to leaders in other countries about three key things. First, this was a trans-national crisis, and any work on prevention, detection and warning has to be done on a global scale. Second, other governments around the world also made choices about things like lockdowns and school closures. We need to share and learn from the experience of all of these societies as well as our own.

Third, to win the war against this alien invader, we have to win the war globally, not just nationally. It is a world war. That requires an approach on therapies, vaccines and financial support that takes a global view of how to defeat this threat and contain the most dangerous variants.

Q. Vaccines are top-of-mind for many people right now, but what are some other issues on the immediate horizon you are thinking about?

A. On the immediate horizon, we have an opportunity to offer global leadership in helping win the war against this virus. That includes “vaccine diplomacy,” but it is much more than that. At a time when people are worried about traditional threats from Russia and China, which are important, this is an opportunity for America to offer a new kind of leadership for a new kind of world crisis.

Q. How will you share your findings with the government and with the public?

A. We hope the government will be part of this effort, though any National COVID Commission will be independent. It will also be important to write any report that comes of these efforts in a way that anyone who is interested can read and understand. The 9/11 Commission report was the No. 1 bestseller in America for months. We did not dumb it down, but we wrote it in a way that interested citizens could understand.

In this era, that will include multimedia efforts, too, as well as deeper dives on many subjects that could appeal to a more specialized audience.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to add?

A. We are fortunate to have great partners involved, and the Miller Center has been an excellent partner, along with the broader University, in hosting this planning group. It will be up to others to decide how to organize a National COVID Commission, if there is one, but it will be a big enterprise, and therefore needs significant planning. That is what we are doing.

© 2021 BY THE RECTOR AND VISITORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

June 17, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

NHS GP witnessed first-hand the catastrophic way Matt Hancock failed the old and vulnerable

By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | June 14, 2021

The Health Secretary claims he “tried” to throw a protective ring around care homes but, from my experience in the early days of the pandemic, he couldn’t have come up with a more disastrous and deadly policy.

As a GP working mainly with elderly patients in care homes and intermediate care I witnessed, at first hand, the absolute disaster that was the government policy at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. Elderly patients who were Covid-19 positive, or not tested, or perhaps even negative, were simply shovelled out of hospitals and into care homes. ‘The hospitals must be cleared out… nothing else matters.’

At the time there was no PPE available… at all. In fact, in many care homes staff were actually ordered by the management not to wear PPE. This was also the case in hospitals. Not that it would have made a great deal of difference in most care homes where patients with dementia often wander happily from room to room without masks, and oblivious to any potential danger. I had to usher one or two out of the nurse’s office from time to time.

In my work with intermediate-care patients, looking after those who were too well to be in an acute hospital bed, but not yet well enough to be at home, we were placed under massive pressure to just send everyone home. That is, if they were Covid-19 positive, or not, or untested, where they could spread it to their – often elderly – relatives. Alternatively, they could infect their carers who would then travel to the homes of other elderly people they were looking after – without PPE.

In fact, if you wanted to design a system of ensuring that every single vulnerable person in the country gained full exposure to Covid-19, you could not have done a better job. I wrote various increasingly frustrated emails to various managers, but they simply stated they were just following policy so ‘you can’t blame me’. Policy set at the very top.

Here is an example of the type of email I was sending in April 2020. You may sense the frustration (I have changed the names of the unit and wards, for confidentiality reasons).

“I think this is very simple, Unit A is currently ‘hot’. We have five patients and four staff ‘Covid positive’ swabbed. Eight patients have now died of Covid.

“If we admit Covid negative patients into Unit A this is putting them at great risk of being infected. So, we should stop admissions. The only ones that should come in are those found positive, recovered, and 14 days post positive swab – at least.

“Equally if we discharge patients, we are, almost certainly, spreading Covid around the entire care community. Until fourteen days have passed.

“There is also a plan to send Covid positive patients to ward B, and keep Unit A as green (no Covid). The only way Unit A can be green is if we stop admitting patients. Because, once new patients reach Unit A they are likely to get infected, then another 14 – 21 days must pass. So, we will go round and round, forever.

“Also, another plan is to send high risk staff to Unit A, and have low risk staff in ward B, so the staff will be swapped around. Again, Unit A is currently red hot. We will be endangering high risk staff if we send them to Unit A. Some of them will get infected. Then, they will incubate for 7 – 14 days. They will infect patients, and other staff, then they will go off sick. Then, some of them may well die.

“The current plan seems to be to admit elderly vulnerable patients into a high risk Covid ‘hot’ environment and hope they don’t get Covid. We have already seen staff to patient transmission in Unit A. So, some of these patients will get infected, with a very high risk of dying….”

In a way, it is hard to blame management who were trying to follow every changing edict from above. Edicts often directly contradicting what they had been told the day before. It was chaos. Now, we have Matt Hancock, the UK Health Secretary, stating, amazingly without being struck down by a lightning bolt, that he threw a ring of steel around care homes and elderly hospital units at the time. A… ring… of… steel. This was presumably to stop anyone escaping somewhere safer. Of course, he now says that the most important word in his statement is ‘tried’ as in ‘We tried to throw a ring of steel…’

This will now be his perfect defence. I didn’t say we succeeded, I only said that we tried. How completely pathetic. First, he did the exact opposite of trying. He put in place policies that were directly responsible for the massive number of deaths in care homes. He commanded hospitals to be emptied of elderly patients. What’s his next excuse? ‘Lots of the other countries did the same thing.’ Which is true. But you can hardly claim you are a leader, if all you managed to do was follow others down a disastrous policy failure.

How many deaths did this cause? Well, during the first wave of Covid-19 it has been estimated that 40% of deaths occurred in care homes. Here from the Nuffield trust:

“The burden of the virus fell much more severely on care homes (relative to the population generally) in the first wave. Of the 48,213 Covid deaths registered between mid-March and mid-June, 40% were care home residents.”

There are around half a million residents in care homes, which is 0.7% of the entire population. Yet they had 40% of the deaths. Yes, the elderly, especially those in care homes, were most likely to die from Covid-19. But this was known very early on. In Italy, where Covid-19 first hit Europe, the average age of death was 82, and almost all of those who died had other significant diseases.

If there was one population that needed to be protected it was elderly, vulnerable care home residents. Matt Hancock presided over policy decisions that threw care home residents under a bus. Now he is trying to claim he did all he could to protect them. Anyone who works in the health service, or in the care sector, knows exactly what he did.

Malcolm Kendrick is doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.

June 16, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Why do brilliant doctors and scientists toe the party line against COVID treatments?

By James V. DeLong | American Thinker | June 16, 2021

One should believe the science, and the scientific evidence is overwhelming that ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) are effective for preventing and treating COVID, especially when combined with other drugs.

The studies supporting this conclusion are readily available and endorsed by clinicians and scientists with awesome credentials. See, for example, the work of Pierre Kory and his team, the BIRD GroupPeter McCulloughHarvey RischBrett Weinstein/Steve Kirsch/Robert Malone, and many others.

The information has been available since the start of the pandemic. As early as April of 2020, some clinicians were saving their patients and pleading, in vain, with the health authorities to investigate the value of these drugs.

Throughout this time, the major social media companies have suppressed this vital information. Facebook seems to be the most ruthless. YouTube and Twitter are close behind, though some information escapes the eagle eye of the censors.

Facebook’s censorship fits ill with its assurance in its SEC filings:

COVID-19 Response. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched multiple initiatives to support the global public health community’s work to keep people safe and informed. We took steps to provide our community with access to accurate information, stop misinformation and harmful content, and support global health experts, local governments, businesses, and communities. . . We also launched an information center on Facebook and Instagram to provide our community with real-time updates, information, and the ability to offer and ask for help. We have already connected over two billion people to authoritative COVID-19 information[.]

In its zeal to “keep people safe and informed,” Facebook also deplatforms groups that question the safety of the vaccines.

The wages of this sin of official mendacity and private enforcement of The Official Narrative is death. Of the 600,000 Americans who died of COVID (at least according to official numbers), a defensible estimate is that 500,000 could have been saved. And it continues, even as the evidence in favor of these treatments continues to confirm their value.

These facts raise a puzzling issue of corporate governance. All of these companies are controlled by boards of directors composed of the crème de la crème of the American elite.  See the members of the Board of FacebookTwitter, and Alphabet (which owns YouTube). They are well compensated. For example, Alphabet directors get $75,000 to $100,000 in fees, plus bonuses such as stock options that can boost total annual compensation to almost half a million.

Board members are mostly from the corporate and financial worlds, but not entirely. A Twitter director is Fei-Fei Liu, a Canadian cancer researcher, whose personal opinion would be worth knowing. Facebook’s board includes Peter Thiel, one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time, and chair of the company’s Compensation, Nominating, and Governance Committee. Until 2018, the Alphabet Board included Shirley Tilghman, a distinguished molecular biologist. Her opinion on the censorship would also be interesting.

So what is going on here? These people are far too sophisticated to take at face value all the statements of Anthony Fauci or the World Health Organization. They did not get rich and powerful by being so credulous, and their refusal to look behind the Wizard’s curtain demands explanation.

Because stupidity won’t serve, the most logical explanation is strategic cowardice. As long as the companies can pretend to believe Fauci and WHO, they will not bear legal responsibility for any consequences. Were they to provide alternative information, they have reason to fear a weaponized Deep State, which could make a company’s life hell.  All the quasi-monopoly social media outlets need continuing government forbearance.

But neither should one neglect sloth and greed.  For an individual director to raise the alarm would require work to review the literature and would risk the loss of a lucrative board seat. It is easier to pretend to believe the staff’s assurances.

As to the moral responsibility for the unnecessary fatalities, remember the old Tom Lehrer song: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!” In the end, if cornered, the directors can claim that they were just following orders and blame Fauci.

But one would like to see the news media start asking them for an explanation.

June 16, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

HIV Now Sets the Pace in the Bogus-vaxx Race

‘HIV’ and ‘AIDS’ are just as bogus as the ‘novel coronavirus’ and ‘Covid.’ Yet they’re now setting the pace in the vaxx-development race.

By Rosemary Frei, MSc | June 14, 2021

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the first report of what was subsequently dubbed ‘acquired immunodeficiency syndrome’ or ‘AIDS.’

Officials like Anthony Fauci are using the occasion to spread the message that vaccines for HIV, which is the virus said to cause AIDS, will soon be rolling out. Forty years of fruitless effort supposedly are suddenly successful thanks to the precedent of the lightening-speed and ‘successful’ development of Covid vaccines.

Fauci said June 4 in an MSNBC interview by Rachel Maddow that because of “the technologies that have now been perfected, particularly the mRNA technology and other vaccine platforms that were perfected and used in Covid-19, I believe strongly we’ll go back and be able to really forward and advance the HIV [vaccine] effort.”

A June 6 Guardian article says that Fauci “holds out hope that the three HIV vaccines in advanced clinical trials will prove at least 50% efficacious, justifying a global roll out. But he now hopes mRNA or other advanced technologies could yield even more powerful HIV vaccines.”

Note that under Fauci, in July 2020 as part of Operation Warp Speed, four major NIAID-funded HIV global clinical-trials networks were retooled into the Covid-19 Prevention Network (COVPN). People in the network help create vaxxes and other ‘treatments’ for both HIV and Covid.

And already by April 14, 2020, mRNA ‘vaccine’ maker Moderna had announced that soon they’ll be conducting small human trials on their experimental jabs against HIV and the flu.

So far, at least 26 different mRNA shots are on the way from Moderna, in addition to their three types of Covid jabs. The shots in development range from two for HIV to one ‘personalized cancer vaccine.’

Among the main funders of Moderna’s mRNA HIV-vaxx development is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. AIDS is a special focus of Gates’s, including through the Global Fund and especially for people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Vaccines are immensely profitable: the new, Covid jabs are topping the all-time charts for medical money-making. Plus vaccine makers have no liability for the illnesses and deaths they cause. Therefore using the name ‘vaccine’ for all ‘treatments,’ no matter what they contain, is a formula for making huge amounts of money with very little downside.

And the potential market for HIV ‘vaccines’ alone is very large. For example, an October 2020 paper in the journal Lancet HIV — on the use of two experimental HIV vaxxes made by Janssen in healthy, HIV-negative people, and funded by among others the Gates Foundation — starts with the sentence, “Current estimates of 37.9 million people living with HIV worldwide and 1.7 million new infections annually, with no cure on the horizon, make development of an effective prophylactic vaccine a global priority.” (The paper’s authors reported very high rates of adverse events to the vaccines, but still assessed the shots as being “generally safe and well-tolerated.”)

All of this is despite the fact that HIV has not been detected by anything other than indirect methods such as antibody, T-cell and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. HIV also has not been clearly shown to cause disease. Nor has it been isolated or rigorously imaged via electron microscopy. Isolation is a necessary step before sequencing – because otherwise the resulting sequences reflect a heterogeneous mix of material rather than pure virus. Details on this are below.

This also holds true for the novel coronavirus.

Phalanxes of officials such as Fauci censor these inconvenient facts. And they keep the public captive, overloaded and off-balance with an avalanche of complex and contradictory jargon, modelling and scientific studies.

The Myth of HIV and of AIDS

Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for inventing PCR. He died in August 2019. There are many videos of him demolishing Fauci and/or the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. He also discusses this in his autobiography Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.

For example, Mullis said the following in one of his video interviews: “He [Fauci] doesn’t know anything really about anything, and I’d say that to his face. Nothing! … He doesn’t understand electron microscopy, and he doesn’t understand medicine, and he should not be in a position like he’s in…. Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people [taxpayers] who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.”

Indeed, falsely claiming to have isolated HIV and imaged it with electron microscopy are key parts of the artifice used by Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo to assert in 1984 that they’d discovered HIV and that it causes AIDS.

The same applies to the novel coronavirus. For example, one of today’s top electron microscopy experts – Duke University pathology professor Sara Miller — herself failed in an April 2021 paper to prove that an electron-microscopy image shows the novel coronavirus. She simply asserted it’s the virus without giving information on, or even references to, the techniques used to show that it is. (If she had given information, it certainly would have relied on the use of antibodies, because they are the main tool for identification purposes. But as I document in my article The Antibody Deception, antibodies cross-react with many other things and therefore cannot accurately pick out the novel coronavirus.)

Mullis wrote the foreword to the very long but very important book Inventing the AIDS VirusThe book was published in 1996 and is by Peter Duesberg, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology. It details the genesis of the HIV-AIDS myth and is still highly relevant today. (Note that Duesberg believes the virus exists but is harmless because it doesn’t multiply in the body, while Mullis believed the virus doesn’t exist at all.)[Note added June 14 after article posted: Mullis apparently did believe the virus exists. See for example this video, which a friend just emailed me. However, I stand by my assertion that HIV has never been conclusively isolated or imaged. Even Mullis’s statements in that video can be seen as indicating HIV is virtually impossible to conclusively isolate or image.]

Mullis writes this in the forward:

“We [he and Duesberg] have not been able to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus called HIV. There is simply no scientific evidence demonstrating that it is true,” wrote Mullis in that foreword. “… We know that to err is human, but the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is one hell of a mistake.”

In the book, Duesberg documents that one main part of the trajectory toward the creation of the myth started in 1912, with the reorganization of the U.S.’s Public Health Service. Another key part was the creation in 1946 of the predecessor of the current CDC — with its predilection for deeming ‘outbreaks’ to be due to infectious diseases, and then testing, tracking and quarantining people under the premise of stopping the spread.

(Two of many valuable insights by Duesberg are on page 137-138: “The CDC has … continued to exploit public trust by transforming seasonal flus and other minor epidemics into monstrous crises and by manufacturing contagious plagues out of noninfectious medical conditions.” And, “[E]pidemiologists have classically studied clusters of sick people as clues to subtle environmental hazards, not infectious agents. But when public health officials issue ominous warnings about mysterious disease outbreaks, they terrify the public with visions of deadly pandemics.”)

Duesberg also details, on pages 174 to188, the failure of HIV to fulfill Koch’s postulates. And on page 202 he concludes that, “AIDS fails all epidemiological criteria of an infectious disease.”

(I believe the same is true for Covid.)

Duesberg points, in addition, to the reasons ‘experts’ give for why it’s virtually impossible to directly detect the virus. For example, he writes on page 206 that:

“[I]f little or no HIV can be found in the body, scientists propose hidden reservoirs and special routes of infection. If only antibodies against HIV [rather than HIV itself] can be found, researchers call them ‘nonneutralizing’ (or ineffective) antibodies and assert that the virus mutates too fast for the antibodies to keep up…. All these hypotheses are constantly being disproved or shown to be irrelevant, but the reservoir of new evasions is inexhaustible.”

That of course parallels the pranks ‘experts’ are playing on the public with respect to the novel coronavirus and Covid.

There are many other prominent people who have spent decades exposing the HIV-AIDS hoax. They include: activist and journalist John Lauritsen in his many articles and his books including The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex; microbiologist Eleni Papadopulos in, among others, a 2004 paper detailing the fatal flaws in the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, a 1997 interview and an October 2020 interview; journalist Jon Rappoport in dozens of blog posts including his March 8, 2021 oneand in his 1988 book AIDS Inc.; and Duesberg’s colleague David Rasnick in many formats such as a 2009 article they co-authored, and his blog, including this May 2021 post. (Rappoport and Rasnick, among others, also have pointed out the striking parallels in the politics and deception surrounding HIV and AIDS and the novel coronavirus and COVID.)

What Are the Real Causes of ‘AIDS’?

Duesberg makes the strong case that ‘AIDS’ is actually 30 conditions inappropriately lumped into the single category. And he demonstrates that the main causes are: toxicity from AZT and other meds given to people who test positive for HIV (more on this below); toxicity from recreational drugs like nitrite inhalants — AKA ‘poppers’; and overuse of antibiotics.

In countries such as Africa, the causes also include poverty, malnutrition, lack of indoor plumbing and tropical infections.

Lauritsen also details this in his 1993 book The AIDS War.

“‘AIDS’ … is defined entirely in terms of other, old diseases, in conjunction with dubious test results and even more dubious assumptions. Although people are undeniably sick, ‘AIDS’ itself does not really exist; it is a phoney construct,” Lauritsen states on page 180 of the book.

Yet virtually all the funding for the vast HIV/AIDS research-administrative-medical-industrial complex assumes HIV is the cause of ‘AIDS.

In 1984, just three years after the first report of what later would be dubbed AIDS, Fauci became the head of NIAID.

AIDS made him a star: he’s good at grabbing the spotlight with his gift of glib gab, and under his tenure NIAID ballooned thanks to a huge inflow of AIDS-related funding.

Just three years later, in 1987, the first medication for HIV went on the market: AZT, which is highly toxic.

AZT has killed huge numbers of people, thanks in large part to Fauci pushing the message that it is ‘safe and effective.’

“I would say there were hundreds of thousands of people killed by AZT. And many — perhaps most — of them were perfectly healthy before they were put on the drugs,” Lauritsen told me in a telephone interview from his home in Boston. “They got a positive result on the worthless HIV tests, and then they were told to put time on their side and take AZT. And of course it killed them.”

AZT made a mint for its first manufacturer, Burroughs-Wellcome, and then for its second and current maker, GlaxoSmithKline (which bought Burroughs Wellcome in 1995).

Fauci and other powerful officials have also pushed other deadly drugs, such as Bristol-Myers Squibb’s didanosine (ddI).

Duesberg and Lauritsen detail how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was pressured into giving ddI fast-track approval in 1991 — despite clear evidence that it is toxic, and that there were no placebo-controlled safety or efficacy studies conducted on it.

Even Wikipedia, which usually censors information that criticizes big pharma, states that about one-quarter of people taking ddI develop peripheral neuropathy. And in 2010 the FDA issued a warning that a serious liver disease can occur in people taking ddI.

Today there are at least 46 FDA-approved drugs for people who have tested positive for HIV, according to this list. (The list includes AZT — but for some reason not ddI, even though it’s apparently still on the market).

The most popular of these meds are for pre-exposure prophylaxis’ (PrEP)(also known as ‘treatment as prevention’ or TasP).

Sound familiar? It’s like the billions of perfectly healthy people who are taking the Covid shots.

Most PrEP is combinations of several drugs, many of which are repurposed, older, HIV meds.

The latter include drugs as tenofovir, lamivudine and emtricitabine. These are a type of drug known as nucleoside analogues (AKA nucleoside inhibitors or nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors). And they have the same, and potentially very dangerous, mechanism of action as AZT and ddI: that is, they stop DNA synthesis from taking place in cells throughout the body.

[Full disclosure: in the mid- to late 1990s as a freelance medical writer I co-wrote marketing materials for HIV drugs such as lamivudine and tenofovir through a Toronto, Ontario, marketing agency called Jeffrey Simbrow Associates. Then later, until the mid-2000s, as a medical journalist I wrote many stories for trade publications about HIV drugs. I somehow was completely unaware of the controversy surrounding these drugs and HIV and AIDS.]

Today tens of millions of healthy people are taking PrEP because they’ve been led to believe this will either prevent infection, or lower their HIV levels to undetectable (the latter goes by the slogan ‘U=U’ for ‘undetectable = untransmissible’). And information is suppressed that many people who have tested positive for HIV but haven’t taken any medication remain healthy for decades.

Over the last year, PreP sales have been sliding somewhat, as has HIV testing. ‘Experts’ are blaming this on the curtailment of usual accessible care during the pandemic. (And they’re also telling scary tales of untreated ‘HIV/AIDS’ potentially interfering with efforts to quash Covid.)

Enter the news about HIV vaxxes being on the horizon — and their potentially huge market.

There are tens of millions of people who have tested positive, and many many more being tested every day.

Plus, most people would prefer an HIV vaxx instead of a daily pill; pills are expensive and inconvenient.

Central Players in the HIV and Novel Coronavirus Capers

Not surprisingly, there are major overlaps between the key figures in the HIV-AIDS and novel coronavirus-COVID agendas. And they’re not just the usual suspects such as Bill Gates.

They include names such as Larry Corey, Myron Cohen and Lindsey Baden.

Corey leads the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, a position he’s held since 1999, and which now is the operational center for the COVID-19 Prevention Network (COVPN – mentioned earlier). He also is co-leading vaccine testing at the COVPN – which started, last summer, with a Phase 3 study of one of Moderna’s mRNA Covid jabs.

Cohen is director of the Institute for Global Health and Infections Diseases, and a prof of medical microbiology, immunology and epidemiology at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Cohen also is co-principal investigator of the another of the four networks that form COVPN, the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN). (The other two are the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group.)

They’re testing PrEP drugs and antibodies. The latter includes the AbCellera/Eli Lilly antibody bamlanivumab.

The results of one of those studies, on bamlanivumab for workers and residents in care homes, were announced on Jan. 21 by Lilly via a press release. They were published in the prominent Journal of the American Medical Association on June 3, 2021, with Cohen as the lead author. (In my The Antibody Deception article I described how it’s virtually impossible for bamlanivumab to be an effective treatment for anything.)

Baden is the deputy editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a position he’s had since 2005. And he’s also a long-time associate prof at the Harvard Medical School.

He has been working toward HIV vaxxes since at least 2007

Baden’s pushing both the HIV and Covid agendas forward at warp speed. For example, he’s the first author on the Dec. 30, 2020, NEJM paper that concluded that one of Moderna Covid vaccines has “94.1% efficacy at preventing Covid-19 illness.”

Baden is funded by, among many others, Moderna, the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Janssen, the Military HIV Research Program and NIAID (see pages 2 and 3 of the disclosure forms for the paper’s authors).

There also are many other ways that the money pipers call Baden’s tune.

For example, since February 2020 Baden has been giving once-weekly audio interviews for NEJM, together with the journal’s editor-in-chief Eric Rubin. The pair use this prominent pulpit to, among other things, endorse mass vaccination for Covid including in minoritiespregnant women and children.

And Baden, Corey and Cohen were among the co-authors of a March 2021 NEJM paper titled, ‘Two randomized trials of neutralizing antibodies to prevent HIV-1 acquisition.’ In other, using antibodies for PrEP.

There are hundreds of other key players in the parallel HIV-COVID play. You can use PubMed to look up the papers and conflicts of interest of prominent scientists in your area who have been among those pushing the Covid agenda.

They include everyone from the infamous Neil Ferguson to one of the two co-chairs of the Canadian COVID-19 Immunity Task ForceCatherine Hankins.

They’re all engaged in the gold rush for bogus ‘vaccines’ and other ‘treatments’ for an array of non-existent or benign conditions.

After obtaining an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, Rosemary Frei became a freelance writer. For the next 22 years she was a medical writer and journalist. She pivoted again in early 2016 to full-time, independent activism and investigative journalism. Her website is RosemaryFrei.ca.

June 16, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Dear PETA, Israel’s animal rights record leaves a lot to be desired

By Zarefah Baroud | MEMO | June 15, 2021

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) praised Israel last week for being the first country to ban the sale of animal furs. Such legislation is worthy of praise, of course, but in the case of Israel any praise, especially regarding its ethics towards animals, is completely misplaced.

Throughout the country’s short history, Israel has repeatedly exposed its worrying position on environmental justice with its state-protected environmental terrorism and deliberate military attacks on animals. The military offensive against the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009, for example, killed hundreds of Palestinians, as well as many animals, particularly those sheltered at the Gaza Zoo.

“This camel was pregnant, a missile went into her back,” Gaza zookeeper Emad Jameel Qasim told Gulf News at the time. “Look, look at her face. She was in pain when she died.”

According to Qasim, when Israeli soldiers entered the zoo, they made their way to the lion enclosures and shot the animals at point-blank range. Monkeys nearby tried to flee. Some were shot inside their enclosures, while others attempted to hide in clay pots and adjacent offices, only to be hunted down and killed in the most brutal of ways at the hands of the “world’s most moral army”. Many of the animals that weren’t killed by Israeli bullets starved to death because the people taking care of them were trapped in their own homes due to the Israeli bombardment.

Rather than a condemnation of Israel’s attacks on all living beings in Gaza, less than a month later PETA took it upon itself to come up with a solution to the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. The campaign group appealed to the Israeli Defence Ministry to install a “pro-vegetarian mural” on both sides of Israel’s apartheid wall and barriers in the West Bank and Gaza adorned with the phrases “Give Peas a Chance” and “Nonviolence Begins on Your Plate: Go Vegetarian”. PETA has made it perfectly clear through statements such as these that, like the lives of the people of Palestine, the lives of Palestinian animals are not worthy of mention.

PETA poster [PETA]

Unfortunately, 2008/9 was not the only time that Israel has attacked Gaza Zoo. In 2014, during the occupation state’s so-called “Operation Protective Edge”, Israeli forces bombarded the zoo again, killing more than 80 animals. A number of the zoo’s lions had to be taken elsewhere to recover from the trauma they suffered, a privilege that no Palestinian human beings are afforded.

During that same assault on the Gaza Strip, Palestinian farmers were devastated by the bombing of their agricultural land and livestock. Ali Alommor, a Palestinian farmer in Gaza explained to Middle East Eye that his donkeys were vital for his livelihood and that of his family. However, the Israeli offensive left his donkeys “riddled with bullets” and one looking like it had been run over by a tracked vehicle, such as a tank or armoured bulldozer, as it tried to flee. Another farmer, Sami Abu Hadaeid, had to flee from the bombing, leaving his beloved sheep behind. All 30 of the animals were killed before he could return. They were either shot and decapitated by soldiers or were crushed underneath the rubble of their shelters. Israeli tanks also killed more than 500 cows that supplied many Palestinians with milk, supporting the livelihoods of sixty families. Similarly, in 2017 an Israeli F-16 aircraft fired a missile at a chicken farm in Gaza. The roofs of the enclosures collapsed, killing hundreds of the birds.

Israel’s lack of humanity and concern for Palestinian life has always been extended to include the local environment, livestock, and crops. Whether that be the state-protected illegal settler arson attacks on Palestinian olive groves, toxic waste dumping in the West Bank, or the destruction of Gaza’s water treatment infrastructure leading to the dangerous pollution of the Mediterranean Sea, the Israeli regime has remained consistent in its positions towards Palestine’s people, animals, and wildlife habitats.

At the very least, it is irresponsible for PETA to applaud any action by the Israeli government, considering Israel’s brutal legacy of violence towards Palestine’s environment and the animals it sustains. The activists within the organisation would be better off campaigning for animal rights in the territory occupied and controlled by the colonial state. Anything less diminishes their credibility.

See also:

Critics of conditions in Gaza Zoo expose the value placed on Palestinian lives

June 15, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment