On September 16, 1982, Christian Lebanese militiamen allied to Israel entered the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila and the adjacent neighborhood of Sabra in Beirut under the watch of the Israeli army and began a slaughter that caused outrage around the world. Over the next day and a half, up to 3500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were murdered in one of the worst atrocities in modern Middle Eastern history. The New York Times recently published an op-ed containing new details of discussions held between Israeli and American officials before and during the massacre. They reveal how Israeli officials, led by then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, misled and bullied American diplomats, rebuffing their concerns about the safety of the inhabitants of Sabra and Shatila.
Lead Up
On June 6, 1982, Israel launched a massive invasion of Lebanon. It had been long planned by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who wanted to destroy or severely diminish the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was based in Lebanon at the time. Sharon also planned to install a puppet government headed by Israel’s right-wing Lebanese Christian Maronite allies, the Phalangist Party.
Israeli forces advanced all the way to the capital of Beirut, besieging and bombarding the western part of city, where the PLO was headquartered and the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila and the adjacent neighborhood of Sabra are located.
Israel’s bloody weeklong assault on West Beirut in August prompted harsh international criticism, including from the administration of US President Ronald Reagan, who many accused of giving a “green light” to Israel to launch the invasion. Under a US-brokered ceasefire agreement, PLO leaders and more than 14,000 fighters were to be evacuated from the country, with the US providing written assurances for the safety of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians left behind. US Marines were deployed as part of a multinational force to oversee and provide security for the evacuation.
On August 30, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat left Beirut along with the remainder of the Palestinian fighters based in the city.
On September 10, the Marines left Beirut. Four days later, on September 14, the leader of Israel’s Phalangist allies, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated. Gemayel had just been elected president of Lebanon by the Lebanese parliament, under the supervision of the occupying Israeli army. His death was a severe blow to Israel’s designs for the country. The following day, Israeli forces violated the ceasefire agreement, moving into and occupying West Beirut.
The Massacre
On Wednesday, September 15, the Israeli army surrounded the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila and the adjacent neighborhood of Sabra in West Beirut. The next day, September 16, Israeli soldiers allowed about 150 Phalangist militiamen into Sabra and Shatila.
The Phalange, known for their brutality and a history of atrocities against Palestinian civilians, were bitter enemies of the PLO and its leftist and Muslim Lebanese allies during the preceding years of Lebanon’s civil war. The enraged Phalangist militiamen believed, erroneously, that Phalange leader Gemayel had been assassinated by Palestinians. He was actually killed by a Syrian agent.
Over the next day and a half, the Phalangists committed unspeakable atrocities, raping, mutilating, and murdering as many as 3500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, most of them women, children, and the elderly. Sharon would later claim that he could have had no way of knowing that the Phalange would harm civilians, however when US diplomats demanded to know why Israel had broken the ceasefire and entered West Beirut, Israeli army Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan justified the move saying it was “to prevent a Phalangist frenzy of revenge.” On September 15, the day before the massacre began, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin told US envoy Morris Draper that the Israelis had to occupy West Beirut, “Otherwise, there could be pogroms.”
Almost immediately after the killing started, Israeli soldiers surrounding Sabra and Shatila became aware that civilians were being murdered, but did nothing to stop it. Instead, Israeli forces fired flares into the night sky to illuminate the darkness for the Phalangists, allowed reinforcements to enter the area on the second day of the massacre, and provided bulldozers that were used to dispose of the bodies of many of the victims.
On the second day, Friday, September 17, an Israeli journalist in Lebanon called Defense Minister Sharon to inform him of reports that a massacre was taking place in Sabra and Shatila. The journalist, Ron Ben-Yishai, later recalled:
‘I found [Sharon] at home sleeping. He woke up and I told him “Listen, there are stories about killings and massacres in the camps. A lot of our officers know about it and tell me about it, and if they know it, the whole world will know about it. You can still stop it.” I didn’t know that the massacre actually started 24 hours earlier. I thought it started only then and I said to him “Look, we still have time to stop it. Do something about it.” He didn’t react.”‘
On Friday afternoon, almost 24 hours after the killing began, Eitan met with Phalangist representatives. According to notes taken by an Israeli intelligence officer present: “[Eitan] expressed his positive impression received from the statement by the Phalangist forces and their behavior in the field,” telling them to continue “mopping up the empty camps south of Fakahani until tomorrow at 5:00 a.m., at which time they must stop their action due to American pressure.”
On Saturday, American Envoy Morris Draper, sent a furious message to Sharon stating:
‘You must stop the massacres. They are obscene. I have an officer in the camp counting the bodies. You ought to be ashamed. The situation is rotten and terrible. They are killing children. You are in absolute control of the area, and therefore responsible for the area.’
The Phalangists finally left the area at around 8 o’clock Saturday morning, taking many of the surviving men with them for interrogation at a soccer stadium. The interrogations were carried out with Israeli intelligence agents, who handed many of the captives back to the Phalange. Some of the men returned to the Phalange were later found executed.
About an hour after the Phalangists departed Sabra and Shatila, the first journalists arrived on the scene and the first reports of what transpired began to reach the outside world.
Casualty Figures
Thirty years later, there is still no accurate total for the number of people killed in the massacre. Many of the victims were buried in mass graves by the Phalange and there has been no political will on the part of Lebanese authorities to investigate.
An official Israeli investigation, the Kahan Commission, concluded that between 700 and 800 people were killed, based on the assessment of Israeli military intelligence.
An investigation by Beirut-based British journalist Robert Fisk, who was one of the first people on the scene after the massacre ended, concluded that The Palestinian Red Crescent put the number of dead at more than 2000.
Following international outrage, the Israeli government established a committee of inquiry, the Kahan Commission. Its investigation found that Defense Minister Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for the massacre, and recommended that he be removed from office. Although Prime Minister Begin removed him from his post as defense minister, Sharon remained in cabinet as a minister without portfolio. He would go on to hold numerous other cabinet positions in subsequent Israeli governments, including foreign minister during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term in office. Nearly 20 years later, in March 2001, Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel.
In June 2001, lawyers for 23 survivors of the massacre initiated legal proceedings against Sharon in a Belgian court, under a law allowing people to be prosecuted for war crimes committed anywhere in the world.
In January 2002, Phalangist leader and chief liaison to Israel during the 1982 invasion, Elie Hobeika, was killed by a car bomb in Beirut. Hobeika led the Phalangist militiamen responsible for the massacre, and had announced that he was prepared to testify against Sharon, who was then prime minister of Israel, at a possible war crimes trial in Belgium. Hobeika’s killers were never found.
In June 2002, a panel of Belgian judges dismissed war crimes charges against Sharon because he wasn’t present in the country to stand trial.
In January 2006, Sharon suffered a massive stroke. He remains in a coma on life support.
The United States
For the United States, which had guaranteed the safety of civilians left behind after the PLO departed, the massacre was a deep embarrassment, causing immense damage to its reputation in the region. The fact that US Secretary of State Alexander Haig was believed by many to have given Israel a “green light” to invade Lebanon compounded the damage.
In the wake of the massacre, President Reagan sent the Marines back to Lebanon. Just over a year later, 241 American servicemen would be killed when two massive truck bombs destroyed their barracks in Beirut, leading Reagan to withdraw US forces for good.
The Palestinians
For Palestinians, the Sabra and Shatila massacre was and remains a traumatic event, commemorated annually. Many survivors continue to live in Sabra and Shatila, struggling to eke out a living and haunted by their memories of the slaughter. To this day, no one has faced justice for the crimes that took place.
For Palestinians, the Sabra and Shatila massacre serves as a powerful and tragic reminder of the vulnerable situation of millions of stateless Palestinians, and the dangers that they continue to face across the region, and around the world.
Secretary-General of the PLO’s Executive Committee, Saeb Erekat, said yesterday that the UAE and Bahraini normalisation deals with Israel prepare for the formation of military alliances in the region led by Israel, Anadolu reported.
In a press conference held in Ramallah, Erekat said: “Israel will never be a tool to protect the security of Arabs, but a tool to undermine the security of the Arab states.”
“The Bahraini, Israeli, American agreement to normalise relations is now part of a bigger package in the region. It is not about peace, it is not about relations between countries. It is a military alliance being created in the region led by Israel.”
On Friday, Bahrain joined the UAE in normalising ties with Israel, a move that caused outrage among Palestinians.
“Normalisation does not serve the Palestinian or the Arab interests,” he said, “whoever depends on Israel commits a strategic mistake.”
He also noted that the normalisation deals did not include any indications to the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital and a just solution for refugees.
“What happened was an implementation of the US deal of the century,” he said, stressing that these deals will not achieve peace if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not resolved first.
There are times in life when much of what you hold as truth is debunked, when the sweetest of treats turn out to be the worst of poisons and when you realize that the people who took the oath of doing no harm, in fact, made you or your loved ones sicker. Such a realization has already arrived or is in store for millions of people around the world suffering from insulin resistance, a condition that wrecks the body’s metabolic and immune systems and often condemns people to a poor life and an awful death. How to see through these sweet lies before it’s too late? To discuss this Oksana is joined by Tim Noakes, founder of The Noakes Foundation.
In this video I try to explain in simple terms why a 100% production of energy using windmills is impossible in practice, despite all the positive information coming from green power advocates.
The news that Bahrain has followed the UAE, Jordan and Egypt into Israel’s criminal embrace was no surprise; nor will it be shocking to hear that Saudi Arabia is following suit, as it almost certainly will. The raising of the Israeli flag in Riyadh will happen sooner rather than later. The groundwork for this has already been prepared by what passes for a government in the Saudi capital, with Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, a state-controlled Imam in Makkah, doing a 180 degree U-turn on peace with Israel in a recent sermon.
These deals have been written in the blood of the people of occupied Palestine. Recognition of the colonial state of Israel is acceptance of the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by the nascent state and its terrorist militias in and around 1948, and the subsequent death and destruction that the “Israel Defence Forces” have rained down on Palestinians ever since. It is also the acceptance of the death of international law, which surely has no place left to hide if the world accepts what is going on in the name of “peace” in the Middle East.
Once again, the Palestinians are the fall guys in all of this, but what should they do? What can they do? It is tempting to think that they have been backed into a corner and will now be expected to roll over and die, metaphorically or literally; or possibly both. The fact is, though, that they still have some cards to play, but it will require a major shift in the strategy that has dominated Palestinian politics for more than a quarter of a century.
The rot started when the Palestine Liberation Organisation under Yasser Arafat gave up on “liberation” as a goal and signed the Oslo Accords. Palestine and its people have paid a heavy price ever since, with their leaders making concession after concession while Israel has conceded nothing. On the contrary, the occupation has become even more entrenched during the farce of “negotiations” which have now been on hold for years.
Is there any other place in the world where the victims of criminal activity have been told to negotiate with the criminals in order for justice to be served? Or where justice has never actually been on the agenda of such talks because it would expose the criminals and their allies for what they really are?
Is there any other conflict in the world where the aggressors claim “self-defence” every time they bomb civilians “back to the stone age”, and where this is accepted by the international community even though an occupation state has no such legitimate claim under international law? Or where the legitimate right to resist military occupation by every means at your disposal is regarded as “terrorism”, as it is when you are a Palestinian resisting Israel’s brutal occupation of your land?
We can and should argue that the Palestinian Authority hasn’t got a leg to stand on with complaints about the UAE and now Bahrain doing a deal with Israel, for the simple reason that not only has it been happy to rely on support from Egypt and Jordan for decades, both of which have peace treaties with the Zionist state, but it has also continued to protect Israel and Israelis through its “security cooperation” with Tel Aviv. This cooperation — a euphemism for collaboration — has been described as “sacred” by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, probably because he knows that his Palestinian No Authority Whatsoever was created to serve Israel’s interests, not the interests of the people of occupied Palestine, and is funded accordingly. No collaboration, no funds.
Abbas and his PLO-Fatah-PA cronies can complain as much as they like about “normalisation”, but they know that their words can only ever serve as rhetoric unless and until real changes are made. As my colleague at MEMOMotasem Dalloul wrote this week, such complaints are all for media consumption.
It is surely time for the PA to call it a day and dissolve itself. Abbas should step aside; his “ministers” should clear their desks; and the “Palestinian security apparatus” should be disbanded. Annexation is going to happen no matter what the PA or anyone else says or does, so let Israel declare its sovereignty over the whole of the occupied Palestinian territories. Such a move will still be illegal, if international law has any meaning left at all, and the status quo won’t really change as far as those living under occupation are concerned. Oppression is still oppression whether your jailers wear Israeli or Palestinian uniforms.
With no PA as its lapdog, Israel will have sole responsibility for security and the civilian infrastructure for everyone living within its as yet undeclared borders (alone amongst all UN member states, Israel has never said where its borders lie), Jews and Arabs alike. That will place a huge financial and logistical burden on Netanyahu and his increasingly far-right government, a burden which it is unlikely to be able to cope with if it wants to retain the mirage that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
Not that Israel has ever really cared what the rest of the world thinks as long as its lobbyists are able to make Western governments dance to their tune. This has allowed Israel to act with impunity and treat international laws and conventions with contempt for more than 70 years, and its leaders have been and remain war criminals and guilty of crimes against humanity. And yet those ostensibly democratic governments in the West, for reasons known only to themselves, continue to declare their undying loyalty to what is, by any measure, a rogue state.
The guardians of international law at the UN are toothless and have acquiesced with Israel’s occupation and presence in the Middle East simply by not acknowledging that it is a settler-colonial state which rides roughshod over Palestinian rights, including the refugees’ right of return. UN agencies provide essential services to the refugees but have to labour under the constraint which has turned Palestine into a humanitarian rather than a political issue.
Moreover, the absurdity of the Security Council veto afforded to the post-World War Two nuclear states means that nothing will happen at the UN if any one of the US, Britain, Russia, China or France disagrees. The rest of the world can have opinions and even majority opinions but that tiny exclusive club will always carry the vote and then apply undue pressure on other countries to do as they are told.
The normalisation of Arab states, therefore, doesn’t really mean “peace” as we are being led to believe; it simply means that they too are displaying contempt for international law; that they too condone the Nakba and the Naksa; that they too condone the ongoing colonisation of Palestine and the oppression of its people; and that they too are bowing to Zionist hegemony in the region, and perhaps the rest of the world as well. Normalisation with Israel actually means RIP international law, it’s been nice knowing you.
Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources as better for nature.
But a new study suggests that the expansion of mining for the materials to make solar panels and wind turbines may pose a greater threat than climate change to endangered species.
“Most mining areas (82%) target materials needed for renewable energy production,” note the authors in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications. And, they add, “these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.”
Recent electricity outages in California forced the state’s governor to acknowledge the dangers posed by attempting to rely on unreliable sources of renewable energy.
“We cannot sacrifice reliability,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said on August 17. “We have to sober up to the reality that… we’re going to have to do more, and be much more mindful, in terms of our capacity to provide backup and insurance.”
The problem with relying on solar panels is that the sun sets during peak demand, which is between 5 pm and 10 pm, requiring a massive ramping up of natural gas power plants. And the same lack of wind behind the heatwaves has also meant a lack of electricity from industrial wind turbines.
Meanwhile, environmental resistance is blocking and slowing the expansion of industrial wind and solar energy projects.
In Britain, Greenpeace has opposed a massive new solar farm, “arguing that ‘vast continuous fields of panels on agricultural land” are not “the best way to go solar.’” New York environmentalists, meanwhile, “say large-scale solar installations will spoil beautiful farmland,” reportedFinancial Times.
As renewables have faltered, pro-nuclear environmentalists have become increasingly vocal, even in Germany, the world’s most anti-nuclear nation.
Europeans Protest Greenpeace
Last Saturday pro-nuclear activists organized by the German pro-nuclear organization Nuklearia dropped a banner in front of Greenpeace’s Germany headquarters. It read, “Climate Crisis? Nuclear energy!”
Pro-nuclear activists similarly protested in front of Greenpeace’s Paris headquarters in late June, denouncing the NGO’s role in replacing nuclear plants with fossil fuels.
“Several dozen protesters — wearing face masks — carried banners in front of the Greenpeace headquarters in Paris, with slogans such as ‘Less nuclear means more coal,’” reportedReuters.
“In the following weeks, there will be similar rallies,” reported the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) last week, “where the five other German nuclear power plants that are still running but whose operating licenses will soon expire.”
Over the next six weeks, there will be over forty pro-nuclear demonstrations around the world organized by the Nuclear Pride Coalition. (My nonprofit organization, Environmental Progress, is a member of the coalition, but did not organize the demonstrations in Germany, France, or other nations.)
The chairman of Nuklearia is Rainer Klute, a computer scientist and eco-modernist. That’s someone who, according to FAZ, ”wants to save the world by relying on modern technology, not on using jute bags.” FAZ noted that Klute is finding allies “among those who oppose wind turbines out of concern for noise and the landscape.”
It wasn’t the first pro-nuclear demonstration in Germany. In December 2019, 120 people from Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic rallied near the Philippsburg nuclear power plant, forty-five minutes from the French border, which the German government had forced to close prematurely.
While Klute emphasizes the need for nuclear to combat climate change, Peters stresses the need for nuclear energy to avoid over-dependence on imported natural gas from Russia. … Full article
9/11, as we were told repeatedly in the days, weeks, and months after the attack, was the day that changed everything. And now a new event has come along to once again throw the world into chaos. But whereas the post-9/11 era introduced America to the concept of homeland security, the COVID-19 era is introducing the world to an altogether more abstract concept: biosecurity. This is the story of the COVID-911 security state.
These were no empty words. They were plain statements of fact. The world did change on that day.
9/11 was the carte blanche for a Great Reset, the institution of a new normal in international relations and domestic affairs. From the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the militarization of the police to the multi-trillion dollar wars of aggression to reshape the Middle East, our lives today are drastically different than they were before that fateful Tuesday in September 2001.
GEORGE W. BUSH: On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. [. . .] All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.
TONY BLAIR: If September the 11th hadn’t happened, our assessment of the risk of allowing Saddam—any possibility of him reconstituting his programs—would not have been the same.
CENK UYGUR: The old fact sheet said the primary function of the FBI is law enforcement. That makes sense. That’s what we grew up with. The new fact sheet says the primary function of the FBI is national security.
JANET NAPOLITANO: If you see something suspicious in the parking lot or in the store, say something immediately. Report suspicious activity to your local police or sheriff. If you need help, ask a Wal-mart manager for assistance.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The Obama administration’s internal legal justification for assassinating US citizens without charge has been revealed for the first time.
RAND PAUL: I don’t know. If the president’s going to kill these people, he needs to let them know. Some of the people [who] might be terrorists are people who are missing fingers. Some people have stains on their clothing. Some people have changed the color of their hair. [. . .] People who might like to pay in cash or people who have seven days of food on hand.
But, nearly two decades later, 9/11 has gone from a touchstone event shaping all of the Western world’s national security decisions to a fading cultural memory of a trauma that took place before the newest generation of high school graduates were even born.
9/11 is no longer a driving political issue.
But, as if on cue, a new event has come along to throw the world into chaos.
Once again we are being told that the world has changed forever.
REPORTER: This is not normal. At least it wasn’t until a few weeks ago when everything we take for granted, everything moved just beyond our grasp.
REPORTER: As a global community we’ve experienced a once-in-a-lifetime event that will shift and reshape our behaviors and perceptions for quite some time.
And, once again, this is no empty rhetoric. Governments, businesses and NGOs are now coordinating at the international level on a “Great Reset” to once again completely reshape the world we are living in.
KRISTALINA GEORGIEVA: History would look at this crisis as the great opportunity for reset.
ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: The great reset is a welcome recognition that this human tragedy must be a wake-up call. It is imperative that we re-imagine, rebuild, redesign, reinvigorate and rebalance our world.
JOHN KERRY: Reset cannot mean—we can’t think of it in terms of sort of “pushing a button” and going back to the way things were. [. . . ] And the normal was a crisis. The normal was itself not working.
CHRYSTIA FREELAND: I think all Canadians understand that the restart of our economy needs to be green. It also needs to be equitable. It needs to be inclusive.
MARIA VAN KERKHOVE: What we’re going to have to figure out, and I think what we’re all going to have to figure out together, is what our new normal looks like. Our new normal includes physical distancing from others. Our new normal includes wearing masks where appropriate. Our new normal includes us knowing where this virus is each and every day, where we live, where we work, where we want to travel.
ALLEY WILSON: In parts of Europe, immunity passports are being considered for people who are believed to be immune to the coronavirus. While in China, some cities have already implemented QR codes that generate a color in order for officials to enable how freely an individual may move around outdoors.
Those paying attention will have already noted the parallels between the “War on Terror” declared after 9/11 and the “War on the Invisible Enemy” that has been declared on COVID-19. In fact, the security imperatives imposed by this pandemic crisis are so similar to those imposed by the terror crisis that, in many cases, the “new” security screening tools that are being put into place to combat COVID-19 are openly acknowledged to be mere upgrades of screening tools deployed after 9/11.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Most people know CLEAR by going to the airport. It was born after 9/11. This is another crisis with a new component that’s being born. Explain what this product is in terms of how it’s going to work relating to COVID.
CARYN SEIDMAN BECKER: So, you’re right: CLEAR was born out of 9/11 and it was about a public-private partnership leveraging innovation to enhance homeland security and delight customers. And that was really the beginning of screening 1.0. And just like screening was forever changed post-9/11, in a post-COVID environment you’re going to see screening and public safety significantly shift.
But this time it’s beyond airports, right? It’s sports stadiums. It’s retail, as Dana talked about.
It’s office buildings. It’s restaurants.
And so, while we started with travel, at our core we’re a biometric-secure identity platform, where it’s always been about attaching your identity to your boarding pass at the airport, or your ticket to get into a sports stadium, or your credit card to buy a beer. And so now with the launch of CLEAR Health Pass, it’s about attaching your identity to your COVID-related health insights for employers, for employees, for customers.
Everybody wants to know that each other is safe to start to reopen businesses and get America moving.
Yes, in some ways the coronavirus security state is merely an extension of the 9/11 security state. But even more disturbing parallels between 9/11 and COVID-19 are to be found at a deeper level of analysis.
It is true that, just like the response to the 9/11 attacks, the response to the COVID-19 “crisis” is being framed in terms of “security.” But whereas the post-9/11 era introduced America to the concept of “Homeland Security”—security from “terrorists,” individuals with identifiable intentions belonging to groups with stated political goals—the COVID-19 era is introducing the world to an altogether more abstract concept: biosecurity.
Originally employed to describe threats to the environment—the introduction of invasive species to a habitat, for instance, or the transmission of infectious diseases among crops and livestock—the term “biosecurity” was injected into mainstream political discourse when the 2001 anthrax attacks linked bioterrorism to the global war on terror. Suddenly, “biosecurity” was a pressing national security threat, and an entire architecture of national and international legislation was introduced to institute procedures for implementing medical martial law.
In the US, the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act was passed in multiple state legislatures, giving governors the power to forcibly quarantine and even force vaccinate their populations in the event of a declared public health emergency.
On the international level, the World Health Organization adopted the International Health Regulations in 2005, obligating all 196 WHO member nations to recognize declared “Public Health Emergencies of International Concern” like pandemic disease outbreaks as a global threat requiring international cooperation. Some have even argued that the legislation is broad enough to allow organizations like NATO leeway to enter countries in the interest of “controlling the outbreak.”
Once again, the tie between this biosecurity paradigm and the war on terror paradigm is openly acknowledged. In a 2002 paper on the emerging biosecurity field, two US environmental researchers noted the way that 9/11 had opened the door for biosecurity research and legislation.
“The events of September 11 and subsequent anthrax assaults have made US policymakers and the public more aware of our vulnerability to organisms released with the intent to cause significant harm,” they wrote.
In 2010, the World Health Organization issued its own information note on biosecurity, stating that “The overarching goal of biosecurity is to prevent, control and/or manage risks to life and health,” and—echoing post-9/11 declarations about the need for global cooperation in the War on Terror—that this goal can only be reached through “a harmonized and integrated biosecurity approach” based on “international standards.”
What this predictably bland language obscures is the way that “biosecurity” is used to invoke emergency powers and install new security procedures. Just as the Homeland Security paradigm used the presumed threat of terrorism as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, so, too, does the biosecurity paradigm use presumed threats to public health as an excuse to curtail civil liberties.
NARRATOR: Chinese police officers are also seen in another disturbing video nailing in wooden planks to block the front door of an apartment with people inside who had just returned home from Wuhan. Afterwards, officials are seen staking a red sign beside the front door which reads: “The people in this house have just returned from Wuhan. Don’t be in contact with them. The poor people inside are heard desperately screaming, “Open the door!”
MIKE AMOR: Melbourne is in full lockdown tonight as historic stage four restrictions take effect, forcing entire industries and shopping precincts to close. Health officials say it’s the only option to stop the second wave and we’d be looking at twenty thousand cases if we hadn’t shut down.
PETER MITCHELL: Police are preparing to launch their aerial arsenal as part of a crackdown on covert rule breakers. High-powered drones will be used to find people not wearing masks and cars too far from home.
CAMERON CHELL: Dragonfly’s public health and safety system uses standard 4k cameras to provide anonymized data on social distancing, heart rate, respiratory rate and fever detection.
MAN: Why are you surrounding my children? Please step away from my children. Please. Step away. From my children.
POLICE OFFICER: I’m just gonna take care of them, alright? Calming down, yeah?
MAN: My children are fine.
CHILD: Can we just go home?
MAN: But I’ve got cuffs that are too tight on my arms. All I was doing was shopping. I explained to you that I don’t have to have a mask on for health reasons and then three people come up to me and start twisting my arms up. For what? Can you tell me why I’m under arrest.
POLICE OFFICER: You’re not under arrest. You’re detained.
CRESSIDA DICK: Well at the moment we don’t have specific powers, but they will come very shortly, I’m sure. But in the British policing model, we always start by talking to people. We always start by advising people. We can talk even more firmly to people.
ELIAS CLURE: There’s a significant police presence there. A number of these protesters chanting “freedom.”
PROTESTERS: Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
CLURE: We can also see that crowd. Just the size of that crowd and the number of police that have gathered. There’s public order response, there’s mounted police as well. Also riot police have mobilized to try and manage this crowd.
The nightmarish police state that is coming into view on the back of this pandemic panic is not a temporary state of affairs, nor is it a haphazard set of measures thrown together on an ad hoc basis; it is the creation of a new form of governance. This new form of governance relies on the perceived sense of crisis—in this case, a public health crisis—to justify constant surveillance of the public and new powers to inhibit the travel of anyone deemed a health risk.
Famed Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has documented how this biosecurity state is being erected on the back of the panic that 9/11 and the war on terror helped induce in the public.
“We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.
“The other factor, no less disquieting, is the state of fear, which in recent years has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic, for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.
“Therefore, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for safety, which has been created by the same governments who now intervene to satisfy it.”
The parallel nature of 9/11 and COVID-19 as catalyzing events ushering in states of collective panic and, ultimately, new forms of governance, is seen most clearly in the area where these two paradigms overlap: bioterrorism.
The molten steel on the Ground Zero pile had not even cooled before the American public and the people of the world were confronted with the specter of bioterrorism. Beginning a week after 9/11 and continuing for weeks thereafter, a series of letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to media personalities and government officials in an apparent continuation of the terrorist attack on the US. The letters were quickly tied to both Al Qaeda and Iraq in the mainstream media:
BRIAN ROSS: Peter, from three well-placed but separate sources tonight ABC News has been told that initial tests on the anthrax sent to Senator Daschle have found a tell-tale chemical additive whose name means a lot to weapons experts. It is called bentonite. It’s possible other countries may be using it, too, but it is a trademark of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.
TIM TREVAN: It does mean for me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source for the anthrax used in these letters.
The 24/7 coverage of the event in the media ceased abruptly, however, when it was discovered that the strain of anthrax used in the attacks sourced not to Iraq but to the US military’s own bioweapons laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
But this convergence of terrorism and biosecurity did not start with the anthrax attacks. It began in June of 2001, a full three months before 9/11 and the declaration of the war on terror itself. That was when a number of ranking US military and intelligence officials took part in “Dark Winter,” a high-level exercise that simulated the US’ response to a smallpox attack on the homeland by bioterrorists. The drill, co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, took place at Andrews Air Force Base on the 22nd and 23rd of June, 2001, and even involved fake news reports that were broadcast to the participants as the simulation unfolded.
ANGIE MILES: On day six of the smallpox epidemic, the White House confirmed that federal government officials and military personnel are being vaccinated 300 people have died at least 2,000 are infected with smallpox. Still no group claims responsibility for unleashing the deadly smallpox virus, but ncn has learned that Iraq may have provided the technology behind the attack to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.
In an incredible parallel, the same Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security that co-hosted Dark Winter also co-hosted “Event 201,” a simulation of a globally spreading novel coronavirus pandemic that was held in New York just months before the declaration of the globally spreading novel coronavirus pandemic that hailed the advent of the era of biosecurity. This exercise similarly involved fake news broadcasts:
FAKE NEWS REPORTER: It began in healthy looking pigs months, perhaps years ago. A new coronavirus spread silently within herds. Gradually, farmers started getting sick. Infected people got a respiratory illness with symptoms ranging from mild, flu-like signs to severe pneumonia. The sickest required intensive care. Many died.
Unsurprisingly, many of the same characters that were involved in the promotion of the bioterror scare under the old “homeland security” paradigm have been influential in promoting the COVID-19 scare under the new “biosecurity” paradigm.
The phrase “homeland security” itself was popularized in Washington in the late 1990s and capitalized on by the ANSER Institute, which formed an Institute for Homeland Security in 1999 led by Randall Larsen, a professor and department chair at the National War College. The Institute prepared a course on “Homeland Security” which was to be co-taught by Larsen and his National War College colleague, Robert Kadlec. Coincidentally, the course was slated to begin on September 11, 2001. Part of the course syllabus included a review of the Dark Winter exercise, which the Institute for Homeland Security co-created.
The name “Dark Winter” derives from a statement made by Larsen’s colleague, Robert Kadlec, credited as a “Bio-Warfare Defense Expert” during the exercise’s fake news broadcast.
ROBERT KADLEC: . . . and the problem is we don’t have enough vaccine to go around.
MILES: Meaning we don’t have enough vaccine for the United States?
KADLEC: Well, I would like to think that. But we don’t have sufficient stockpiles for the people in Oklahoma, Georgia or Pennsylvania, much less for the entire United States population.
MILES: Well, that certainly doesn’t sound encouraging. What do you mean, exactly?
KADLEC: Angie, it means it could be a very dark winter for America.
MILES: Sobering. Thank you very much for joining us, Dr. Kadlec.
A career officer and physician in the United States Air Force, Kadlec would go on to contribute to the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and then serve in several key biosecurity-related roles in the George W. Bush White House. During this time, Kadlec helped draft the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act. Passed by Congress in 2006, the act greatly expanded federal power during public health emergencies and consolidated many of these powers in a new office, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR). Then, in what Kadlec has called “just a coincidence,” Trump appointed Kadlec himself to that position in 2017.
In his role as ASPR, Kadlec oversaw a joint exercise in 2019 named “Crimson Contagion.” The drill included the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and a raft of other government agencies and simulated the US government’s response to a viral pandemic originating in China and spreading around the globe. Like Dark Winter, the “Crimson Contagion” exercise took place just months before the events it was simulating began to play out in real life. And, like Dark Winter, it gave participants like Kadlec the chance to argue that biosecurity was a pressing national security challenge that the country was ill-prepared to meet—an argument that he made to Congress with Dr. Anthony Fauci by his side just one week before the first reports of the novel coronavirus spreading in China.
DIANA DEGETTE: Dr. Kadlec, what keeps you up at night when you think about preparedness for the next big flu outbreak.
KADLEC: I mean, thank you, ma’am, I appreciate the question. I mean, I sleep like a baby: I wake up every two hours screaming.
DEGETTE: Much like me.
KADLEC: Yeah. But I think the key thing here is a pandemic. Quite frankly I have a unique background on this committee or this dais. I have served two years on the Senate Intelligence Committee and looked at the many threats that face the United States, but there is no singular threat that could devastate our country through our health and our economy and our social institutions then pandemic influenza.
DEGETTE: Yeah.
KADLEC: And we had four during the last century. And even though we’ve had a mild one in this first century, I think the risk is that we’ll have another severe one and that would devastate our country.
Then there’s Donald Rumsfeld. As Secretary of Defense in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, there are few people more closely associated with the “War on Terror.” Rumsfeld, too, has been intimately associated with the emerging biosecurity state for decades. In the 1980s he personally participated in secret meetings with Saddam Hussein that resulted in anthrax, botulism, and other chemical weapons being sent from the US to Iraq. In the 1990s he was named chairman of Gilead Sciences, a California biotech company that profited handsomely from the scramble for Tamiflu during the bird flu scare of 2005 and which is currently profiting handsomely from Remdesivir as a result of the COVID-19 scare.
ANTHONY FAUCI: The data shows that Remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.
There are many others whose careers blaze the same trail, transitioning seamlessly from the homeland security state to the biosecurity state. People like Dr. Richard Hatchett, who served as Director for Biodefense Policy under George W. Bush, then as acting Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and acting Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within HHS before becoming the CEO of CEPI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-founded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. In his position as “global health expert,” Hatchett made waves back in March for his alarmist pronouncements about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
RICHARD HATCHETT: It’s the most frightening disease I’ve ever encountered in my career, and that includes Ebola, it includes MERS, it includes SARS. And it’s frightening because of the combination of infectiousness and a lethality that appears to be manyfold higher than flu.
That so many of the people who were there at the birth of the war on terror are currently acting as midwives to the biosecurity state should come as no surprise. After all, the biosecurity paradigm is not a replacement for the terror paradigm; it is its fulfillment.
The war on terror imagined a covert army of foreign invaders slipping through the defenses of the Homeland and commandeering the resources of the body politic to wreak internal havoc. The biosecurity state posits largely the same scenario, but now those foreign invaders are not “terrorists” possessed with a “hatred of freedom,” they are “asymptomatic carriers” possessed by a pathogen.
Just as the Homeland Security forces and border security agents were entrusted to protect us from the terrorists, now the “front line heroes,” doctors and nurses armed with the tools of the technocratic priest class, can protect us from the invisible enemy.
This speaks to an important aspect of the biosecurity state: ultimately, it is not about health. It is about politics.
Once again we find insight on this turn of events from Giorgio Agamben, who has noted that viral epidemics are
“above all a political concept, which is preparing to become the new terrain of world politics—or non-politics. It is possible, however, that the epidemic that we are living through will be the actualization of the global civil war that, according to the most attentive political theorists, has taken the place of traditional world wars. All nations and all peoples are now in an enduring war with themselves, because the invisible and elusive enemy with which they are struggling is within us.”
Governments are banning gatherings and events. Instituting new screening procedures. Quarantining healthy, functioning people against their will. Tracking and surveilling every individual. Controlling their movements. Monitoring their transactions. Make no mistake: the “War on Terror” is not over. It has just greatly expanded.
The proponents of 9/11 truth have warned for 19 years that the “War on Terror” was always a war on the public. Long pushed to the margins of the political debate, that viewpoint has been vindicated as the “terrorist” label is replaced by the “asymptomatic carrier” label and all the machinery of the police state is wielded against everyone who opposes the biosecurity takeover.
Given that those once derided as “conspiracy theorists” have turned out to be the most prescient political observers of all, perhaps it is time to learn the real lessons from 9/11 that mainstream discourse has always excluded:
That 9/11 and the “War on Terror” was not a war at all, but a power grab;
That the “temporary” measures brought in to deal with an alleged “emergency” will never be relinquished;
And, most importantly, that unless everyone who cares about this—the most blatant power grab in history—rises up, refuses to cower in fear of the invisible enemy, and reclaims their inalienable rights to freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of assembly, then those freedoms will be gone for good.
This is the message of 9/11 truth: that the world was tricked into giving up their rights in the name of an endless parade of bogeymen. In reality, it was the very politicians and officials claiming to protect us from these bogeymen—the ones donning the mantle of “homeland security”—who were the greatest threat to the public. And now they are claiming we are the bogeymen, “asymptomatic carriers” of an invisible enemy,” walking and talking weapons of mass destruction who must be caged in fear forever lest the virus kills us all.
This is a lie, and it exposes what the fearmogers are themselves afraid of: free humanity. Gathering. Talking. Working. Playing. Living.
It is no small irony that this year’s 9/11 memorials have been disrupted by the COVID scare. The torch has well and truly passed, and the annual injunctions to “Never Forget” have been replaced by a litany of “Always Remembers.” Remember to wear your mask. Remember to stay 6 feet apart. Remember to avoid large groups. Remember to stay home.
After 19 years, perhaps it is time to admit that 9/11 truth failed to expose the “War on Terror” lie in time to derail the homeland security agenda. But we are entering a new era, and we have a new chance to wake from this nightmare.
Knowing this, the only question is: Will we reject the “War on the Invisible Enemy” before it’s too late?
Whatever our choice, we better make it quickly. A Great Reset is coming.
BUSH: Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment.
Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us.
DONALD TRUMP: I want to assure the American people that we’re doing everything we can each day to confront and ultimately defeat this horrible, invisible enemy. We’re at war. In a true sense, we’re at war and we’re fighting an invisible enemy. Think of that.
Cohort study of 489 Patients who had a vitamin D level measured in the year before COVID-19 testing
Relative risk of testing positive for COVID-19 was 1.77 times
First clinical trial on vitamin D and COVID Therapy versus best Available Therapy on Intensive Care Unit Admission and Mortality Among Patients Hospitalized for COVID-19: A Pilot Randomized Clinical study (Spain, Journal of steroid biochemistry and molecular biology)
As we approach the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 false flag, Leonard writes in to ask about the insurers who paid Silverstein and his cohorts over four and a half billion dollars as a result of those attacks. Why did the insurers never investigate the possibility of controlled demolition? Why did they pay out billions of dollars without calling the official 9/11 narrative into question? James investigates.
In this video I expose one of the major tools that both Corrupt State Department officials & phony ‘Fact Checkers’ use to stop the spread of news that threatens their Global Corruption Racket! Are the riots in the US linked to the same shady apparatus is covering up the Ukraine scandals? Are the child trafficking cover-upperers using the tools, too?
This essay about medical researchers having trouble getting their papers published because the results don’t support the official pandemic narrative has disturbing parallels with my experience trying to inject some balance into the official polar bear conservation narrative.1 Especially poignant is the mention of models built on assumptions sold as ‘facts’ that fail once data (i.e. evidence) become available – which of course is the entire point of my latest book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.
Read the commentary below, copied from Lockdownsceptics.org (6 September 2020). Bold in original, link added to the story to which this is a response, and brief notes and links added as footnotes for parallels with polar bear conservation science.
Thanks for the ongoing sanity that is Lockdown Sceptics. I read the piece yesterday about how the scientific community is slowly starting to wake up to the fact that we have been significantly underestimating the level of immunity in the population (something that LS has been saying for months).2 I was really struck by these lines:
“Unfortunately, not all scientists are so timid with their views. Could it be the silence of too many sceptical scientists that has allowed more confident scientists like Neil Ferguson to become so influential?”
As sceptical scientist myself, this point hit home, but the reasons for the silence of the sceptical scientific voice are not just to do with lack of confidence.
Firstly, it is important for a scientific argument to have data. Without data you’re just expressing an opinion which, of course, can still carry weight depending on who is expressing it.3 However, there are real issues both with the data we have around COVID-19 and its reporting.
It is a well-known problem in science that the “negative results” are rarely published and so the literature is heavily weighted towards positive findings.4 This can lead to a false perception of what is happening. So for sceptical scientists wanting to make arguments, the data may simply not be there as it was a “negative result”.
Scientists also tend to want to publish interesting findings. As a result, the COVID-19 literature tends to be biased towards the serious or rare cases as these are by definition “interesting”. 5
Here’s an example of the title and the first few lines of a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine from April, which illustrates this point:
Coagulopathy and Antiphospholipid Antibodies in Patients with COVID-19
“We describe a patient with Covid-19 and clinically significant coagulopathy, antiphospholipid antibodies, and multiple infarcts. He was one of three patients with these findings in an intensive care unit designated for patients with COVID-19….”
There is nothing wrong with this paper, it is a typical case report. However notice that the title gives no qualification of the fact that the patients are in the intensive care unit and as such are not representative of the vast number of patients with COVID-19. If you just read the title you could erroneously infer that ALL patients with COVID-19 have issues with their blood coagulating and their immune system going haywire. That’s the problem, a report of a rare finding, designed to alert clinicians in the ICU of potential complications, can feed confirmation bias in a lot of the media (and the public) that COVID-19 is the new plague that will kill you as soon as look at you.
Unfortunately you cannot publish the balancing paper:
Mild cough in Patients with COVID-19
“We describe a patient with Covid-19 and a mild dry cough that resolved itself in a few weeks…”
It is uninteresting. Although ironically it would be interesting (and probably publishable) if COVID-19 was actually causing all patients to have major complications!
Finally as you reported today in your article about Prof. Gupta, there is also further worrying bias in the COVID-19 literature with editors scared to publish “dangerous” ideas that could “impact our response to COVID-19”. Limiting publication of such finding in “lesser journals” (essential ones that aren’t so widely read), is an effective way of burying the findings as they may appear less “valuable” than a publication in Nature.6
This literature bias makes addressing the major issue facing the sceptical scientist even more daunting. This issue is that they need to overturn established orthodoxy around COVID-19 and our responses to it.
The advantage that modellers had at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is that they did not much [rely on] real world data because they could run their models built on assumptions.7 So it’s not surprising that the modellers got in first. It is only now that we have the actual data can we look at the modelling predictions and point out how inaccurate these were and start to see where the assumptions were wrong.
The problem is that the models and modellers created and established “facts” and you require a lot more data to overcome an established “fact” than was needed to create that “fact” in the first place.8
This was compounded by the fact that we then implemented solutions with assumed efficacy (e.g. wearing face coverings, lockdowns) and the use of these solutions have now become more articles of faith rather than scientific hypotheses.9 So to overcome such solutions will require large amounts of evidence to achieve a shift amongst the scientific community, many of whom have been active advocates of these very solutions. Imagine what data you would actually need to persuade Nicola Sturgeon that mask wearing has no benefit or Matt Hancock that lockdown is not the answer? I’d wager it would be almost impossible and will be all the more impossible if [they] don’t allow the publication of “dangerous data” in the first place.10
Finally I think it import to also understand that science is a professional industry and that most scientists work for businesses and institutions. Most of these businesses and institutions will have implemented COVID-19 based policies, supported by senior leadership who, even if they don’t believe in the policies, will need to be seen to be “doing the right thing”.11 Scientists working in these organisations will also have contractual obligations that will limit their ability to publish without permission or produce communication that could be deemed to be detrimental to their place of work.12
Imagine if you worked for one of the companies working on developing a vaccine and wanted to publish something saying that “vaccines are a waste of time and money because everyone will be basically immune through infection before they get to the clinic”? This effectively means that the vast majority of scientists are in environments that require a level of collective “self-censorship” and so, with a few exceptions, most of us have to bite our tongues or run the genuine risk of “blow back” on careers.13 We are not in the position of having a comfortable academic chair from which to cast our pearls of wisdom.14
Despite this, science is built on data and so ultimately I have to believe that we can get to a point where we stop treating COVID-19 as a special case and recognize it as just another disease to go alongside all the other risks we face in being alive. I am greatly encouraged by the fact that we’re seeing journals like the BMJ publish “sceptical” opinion pieces as it shows that this shift may be starting to occur although today’s article about Prof. Gupta shows that we may have a lot further to go.15
Footnotes
Of course, this analogy applies also to the experiences of many scientists sceptical of climate science narratives: I am not alone in this regard, nor am I alone in my experience of challenging the dominant narrative of polar bear conservation science. Mitch Taylor, Peter Ridd, Tim Ball, Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr. and a host of other scientists could write a similar list of parallels.
cf. ‘negative results’ for polar bears is evidence of bears not starving due to reduced sea ice (or population increases), such as in the Beaufort Sea and Barents Sea
Sgt. Terrance Yeakey was an Oklahoma City Police Officer, a first responder to the OKC bombing, and an American hero. Officer Yeakey, known to friends as Terry, saved the lives of eight people from the Alfred P. Murrah building on the morning of April 19, 1995.
Terry was a few blocks away from Timothy McVeigh and the now infamous Ryder truck-which was brimming with explosives-when it detonated and erased the lives of 168 people, including 19 children. Yeakey rushed to the blast site, and without regard for his own life, began pulling people from the rubble one by one.
Instead of being showered with accolades by his government for his heroic efforts, Terrance was silenced for what he witnessed in the direct aftermath of one of largest mass murders that the United States has ever seen.
No one is quite sure what Terry actually observed at the Murrah building that April morning, but according to all indications, whatever it was he witnessed did not sync up with the official narrative released by the United States government.
Officer Yeakey began compiling evidence against the tale put out by federal officials and stored his findings in a storage facility outside of El Reno, Oklahoma. The data he was accumulating was also in direct contradiction to “the facts” being reported by media outlets worldwide. According to friends and family, Terry began being intimidated by federal authorities because of his personal pursuit for truth and the information which he possessed. He was being pressured to put an end to his independent investigation.
Terry’s last known words were, “As soon as I shake these Feds that are following me, I’ll be back and we’ll go to dinner.”
He never came back.
The officer’s body was found the next day in a field one mile from his abandoned vehicle. He had been bound, repeatedly cut, strangulated, brutally tortured and killed execution style with a single bullet that entered his right temple at a 45 degree angle. No gun was found at the scene.
His official cause of death was suicide.
I’m not going to suggest that you believe in an elaborate government conspiracy surrounding the Murrah Building bombing based on this one incident, but with that said, Officer Yeakey’s story deserves to be told. What did he know? What really happened that morning in Oklahoma City? Why was he silenced? If we truly respected the lives of police officers, maybe it’s time we find out the answers to these questions.
If not for Terry and his family, then do it for the future of everything you hold dear.
Please watch the extremely informative and startling video below about Officer Yeakey and learn in more detail about the events that surrounded Terry’s death.
At one time, the ‘Arab-Israeli Conflict’ was Arab and Israeli. Over the course of many years, however, it was rebranded. The media is now telling us it is a ‘Hamas-Israeli conflict’.
But what went wrong? Israel simply became too powerful.
The supposedly astounding Israeli victories over the years against Arab armies have emboldened Israel to the extent that it came to view itself, not as a regional superpower, but as a global power as well. Israel, per its own definition, became ‘invincible’.
Such terminology was not a mere scare tactic aimed at breaking the spirit of Palestinians and Arabs alike. Israel believed this.
The ‘Israeli miracle victory’ against Arab armies in 1967 was a watershed moment. Then, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, declared in a speech that “from the podium of the UN, I proclaimed the glorious triumph of the IDF and the redemption of Jerusalem.”
This, in his thinking, could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”
The sentiment in Eban’s words echoed throughout Israel. Even those who doubted their government’s ability to completely prevail over the Arabs, joined the chorus: Israel is unvanquishable.
Little rational discussion took place back then, about the actual reasons why Israel had won, and if that victory would have been possible without Washington’s complete backing and the West’s willingness to support Israel at any cost. … continue
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