All states in the US mandate vaccines for school children, effectively taking away the right to education for families refusing vaccination. Different states allow one to three exemptions from mandatory vaccination on philosophical, religious or medical grounds. In 2015 the California legislature passed a bill (SB277) removing the philosophical or personal belief exemption. The religious exemption had already been removed. This left only the medical exemption, which is difficult to obtain. because doctors fear losing their medical licenses if they grant the exemption. The Maine state legislature recently followed suit, removing all religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions. Mandatory vaccination depends on the assumption that all recommended vaccines are safe for all children. As state laws are going in the direction of more and more coercion, this is a good time to ask if that assumption is valid.
Dr. Plotkin
In October 2017 the divorced parents of a two year old child brought a case before the Circuit Court of Oakland County Michigan to settle a disagreement as to whether their daughter should have to be vaccinated. The mother was against; the father was for. Dr. Stanley Plotkin, an MD with experience in vaccine research going back to the ’60s, stepped forward as an expert in favor of vaccination. He was questioned by counsel representing the plaintiff (the child’s mother) in a deposition which ended up doing more harm than good not only to the father’s case but to the whole idea that ethics are of any real importance to researchers and industry promoting vaccines.
That he had used orphans to study an experimental vaccine.
That he had used mentally retarded children to study a rubella vaccine.
That he had written a letter to the editor of “Ethics On Human Experimentation” in which he says “the question is whether we are to have experiments performed on fully functioning adults and on children who are potentially contributors to society or to perform initial studies on children and adults who are human in form but not in social potential.”
That he had used babies of mothers in prison to study an experimental vaccine.
That he had used individuals under colonial rule in the Belgian Congo in an experiment involving almost a million people to study an experimental vaccine.
Elsewhere in the deposition, Plotkin said that he had helped create a vaccine advocacy group called Voices For Vaccines. He claimed the group was independent, but admitted on questioning that it was funded by the vaccine industry. Plotkin is a good example of a doctor so immersed in the prevailing dogma about vaccines that he can’t imagine other perspectives, or his own conflicts of interest. Not to mention the criminality of experimenting on people unable to assert their right to informed consent.
Paul Offit
Paul Offit
One of Dr. Plotkin’s students was Dr. Paul Offit, a tireless vaccine industry shill and developer of a rotavirus vaccine which made him a fortune. In October 2018 Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote a letter to Paul Offit to challenge the claim in Offit’s books that medical experts are the only authorities on vaccine safety. Kennedy writes:
“Your book title and press releases suggest that, in contrast to “celebrities, politicians and activists,” you consider yourself to be eminently qualified to furnish health information in a truthful and unbiased manner. I would like to take this opportunity to inquire as to whether your own substantial financial entanglements with the $52 billion vaccine industry—conflicts you deliberately conceal from your allies in the mainstream media—should disqualify you from representing yourself as a neutral and trustworthy voice in this contentious debate. You have accepted tens of millions of dollars from vaccine companies for your work as the primary spokesman for the industry. You occupy a chair at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia endowed with a $1.5 million grant from Merck, and you were a co-developer, with Merck, of the RotaTeq rotavirus vaccine.
Indeed, your financial conflicts of interest with the vaccine industry since the early 2000s, during your tenure on a key Centers for Disease Control vaccine panel, were the subject of two federal investigations. While sitting on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), you voted to add a rotavirus vaccine to the CDC childhood vaccine schedule. You neglected to recuse yourself despite the fact that you had your own rotavirus vaccine patent in development. Six years later, thanks to the inclusion of rotavirus on the CDC schedule, you and your business partners were able to sell your patent for $186 million. This self-dealing transaction in which you effectively “voted yourself rich” was condemned by a 2003 congressional investigation and a 2008 investigation by the HHS Inspector General. Congressman Dan Burton described the “paradox” of the CDC “routinely allow[ing] scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on influential advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines, as well as policy matters,” even though “these same scientists have financial ties, academic affiliations, and other vested interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight.” When ACIP added your vaccine (RotaTeq) to the childhood vaccine schedule in 2006, policy-makers of the time acknowledged that the vaccine was “one of the most expensive” and potentially lucrative ever added to the schedule. Critics of the decision wondered why we were mandating a ruinously expensive and shoddily tested vaccine for tens of millions of children to combat mild illness that accounts for only a few dozen deaths in the United States annually.
You routinely talk about RotaTeq’s achievements, but you have never publicly commented on the elevated rate of agonizingly painful and sometimes deadly intussusception observed in recipients of RotaTeq nor on the vaccine’s contamination with DNA fragments from two porcine circoviruses known to cause serious wasting disease in pigs. Scientists and public health experts suggest that your vaccine may be infecting millions of children each year with these viruses. Since the vaccine was never properly safety tested against inert placebos, we may never know the truth.”
The Spanish Flu
In a November 2018 article, Kevin Barry, former federal attorney and president of First Freedoms, looks back at the beginning of the pharmaceutical industry in the early 20th century as it was getting its start under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. US soldiers about to be sent into World War I in Europe provided medical researchers an opportunity for experimentation (in this case on fully functioning adults).
Between 1918 – 19, Barry reports, more soldiers died of a mysterious disease called “the Spanish flu” than from bullets. The Spanish flu, he says, killed an estimated 50-100 million people worldwide. But it was neither Spanish, nor a flu. According to Barry, it appears to have originated at a military base in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918 where doctors were experimenting with a Rockefeller Institute bacterial meningitis vaccine, using US soldiers. The soldiers who survived were deployed to Europe where they spread a deadly bacterial pneumonia among themselves while the Rockefeller Institute also sent the “vaccine” directly to several countries in Europe, in the end causing the death of millions of people
Gulf War Syndrome
In January1991 The Unites States attacked Iraq in what was called the Persian Gulf War.
An estimated 43,000 US veterans of the war came down with a variety of strange and illnesses attributable to mandatory experimental vaccines and drugs administered without informed consent.
Cornelius Rhoads
In November 1931 a Harvard trained MD named Cornelius Rhoads conducted a cancer experiment in Puerto Rico under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations. Rhoads said in a letter:
“Porto Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere… They are even lower than the Italians. What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the entire population… I have done my best to further the process of their extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more. All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.”
Rhoads should have been tried for murder, but instead found fame and fortune. He went on the establish biological warfare facilities for the US Army, made the cover of TIME magazine in 1949, and became the director of the famous Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Bill Gates
Art by David Dees
In 1999 Bill Gates launched The Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization. Dr. David Ayoub points out that The Global Alliance had membership and goals identical to those set out in US National Security Study Memorandum 200 presented to President Nixon by Rockefeller protegé Henry Kissinger in 1974. Memorandum 200 had an explicit goal of coercive population control in less developed countries.
In 2005 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded tetanus vaccinations for distribution by UNICEF in Africa. The vaccines were administered only to young women of child-bearing age. In 2014, doctors and Catholic clergy in Kenya had the vaccine independently tested and found that the vaccine contained an antigen called “human gonadotropin” which renders women infertile.
Bill Gates appeared in a 2010 TED talk in which he said: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.”
If vaccines and reproductive health services are meant to save lives, how would they be useful in reducing a population?
To all appearances, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations are working together to promote population control under the guise of vaccine philanthropy.
The Vioxx Scandal
Vioxx was not a vaccine but its marketing reveals a great deal about the ethics of Merck Pharmaceutical, a major player in the vaccine industry. Vioxx was the brand name for a popular painkiller introduced by Merck in 1999. The drug was taken off the market in 2004, more than four years after a clinical trial and plenty of evidence, known to Merck, showed that it caused serious cardiovascular problems. Merck’s response was to “discredit, neutralize, and destroy” doctors critical of Vioxx. One spokesman at the FDA, which was by no means innocent in this scandal, said that the drug had caused “more than 27,000 deaths and heart attacks.” Like other pharmaceutical corporations, Merck considered the payment of damages for these deaths to be the price of doing business.
SIV and SV40
Experimental live polio vaccines, including the Salk polio vaccine, contained a virus found in monkeys which, when given to humans, may have created the worldwide HIV epidemic and untold cases of cancer in children and adults. According to the National Vaccine Information Center,
“an article [was] published in the March 1992 issue of The Lancet in which attorney Walter Kyle provided evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may have been created after simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) entered the human population when African green monkey kidney tissues infected with SIV were used to produce polio vaccines. The Kyle article pointed out that scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and within industry suspected as early as the 1950’s and knew, by the mid-1970’s, that polio vaccine had been contaminated with simian viruses and that at least one of these monkey viruses – SV-40 – was later found to cause leukemia and cancerous tumors in lab animals.”
According to an archived fact sheet put out by the Centers for Disease Control, “more than 98 million American received one or more doses of polio vaccine from 1955 to 1963 when a proportion of vaccine was contaminated with SV40; it has been estimated that 10-30 million Americans could have received an SV40 contaminated dose of vaccine.”
Thimerosal
Thimerosal was a mercury-containing component of a several vaccines — the MMR (for measles, mumps, and rubella), DTaP (for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis), and flu shots. According to Shane Ellison, “The People’s Chemist“,
“The last entity to fund a thimerosal study in the United States was Eli Lilly, back in 1929. They’re not even a health agency; they’re a pharmaceutical drug company. That hardly offers proof of safety and efficacy. And, their test churned out horrific results, showing that 100% of the kids jabbed with trace amounts of Merthiolate — the trade name for thimerosal — died from meningitis. How could that possibly be considered safe? Meanwhile, the Pharma-funded authors (using ghostwriting) still concluded that there was no causal association between mercury in vaccines and harm.(4) Future court documents revealed, “Upon closer inspection, however, it is apparent that Lilly Scientists, deliberately withheld facts and, in doing so manipulated and distorted their conclusions, leading to corruption of published scientific literature concerning thimerosal.”
Thimerosal was supposedly taken out of vaccines around 2003 but it still appears in flu shots given to children and adults. Cases of autism in children have been linked to thimerosal. Dr. David Ayoub gave a very informative talk on this on a 2005 lecture linked here.
200 ppb mercury = level in liquid the EPA classifies as hazardous waste.
25,000 ppb mercury = Concentration of mercury in the Hepatitis B vaccine, administered at birth in the U.S., from 1990-2001.
50,000 ppb Mercury = Concentration of mercury in multi-dose DTaP and Haemophilus B vaccine vials, administered 4 times each in the 1990’s to children at 2, 4, 6, 12 and 18 months of age.
50,000 ppb Mercury = Current “preservative” level mercury in multi-dose flu (94% of supply), meningococcal and tetanus (7 and older) vaccines. This can be confirmed by simply analyzing the multi- dose vials.
Conclusion
At best, the history of vaccines is an example of gross human ignorance acting through the field of medical science. This ignorance comes from a lack of humility in our interaction with nature; the belief that science has all the answers; the belief that man can act as God.
At worst, vaccines were used knowingly for the purposes of eugenics. This is another kind of hubris — the usurpation of power by the few over the many, by an elite which believes it is in a position to best guide humanity and which is arrogant enough to believe it can engineer the whole world according to its own interests.
It is also clear that for the sake of money and profit, the pharmaceutical industry has knowingly caused disease and death, especially among poor and disadvantaged people in the world. And they have tried to cover it up. It is hard to accept the adage that “vaccines save lives” when we have so many examples of vaccines actually destroying lives.
Does the state have the right to inject anything into the bodies of children against the wishes of the child’s parents? According to the UN’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, medical intervention must be accompanied by the “free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information.” What we are seeing today is an all-out war being waged by billion dollar pharmaceutical giants to bring more and more vaccines into a recommended schedule, and to make that schedule mandatory, while at the same time controlling the information parents need to protect their children. After so may lies and coverups, parents and doctors have very little reason to trust anything the pharmaceutical industry tells them.
US data beginning in 1985, shared by Bjorn Lomborg. Rising blue line: percentage of deaths attributable to the cold. Orange line: percentage attributable to heat.
In many parts of the world, we’ve just endured an extra snowy winter followed by a cool, delayed spring. But wait for it. When hotter weather arrives it will take no time at all for media outlets to start ‘educating’ us about heat waves and dangerous climate change.
In anticipation of those ‘news’ stories, here’s an inoculation: Cold weather kills far more people than does hot weather. If we truly care about weather-related suffering and sorrow, heat waves should be near the bottom of our priority list.
On his Facebook page, Bjorn Lomborg is calling our attention to a research paper published last year in Environment International. It contains marvelous news. In 7 out of 10 countries studied, heat-related deaths have decreased since 1985.
The researchers conclude that improved health care and infrastructure (aka increased access to air conditioning), have made us less likely to die from the heat. Normal, everyday upgrades are outpacing heat-related risks. As living standards improve, higher temperatures become less life threatening.
But the news isn’t so rosy on the other side of the ledger, where most deaths connected to extreme temperatures actually occur. Depending on the country and the time frame under discussion, the ratio of cold deaths to heat deaths varies. Since Table 3 of this study includes data for all 10 countries for the years 2000-2004, the numbers below are pulled from that column.
During this five-year period no deaths in Ireland were linked to heat, but 9.34% of all deaths were attributed to cold temperatures. (Compared to the 1980s, cold-related deaths in Ireland have fallen dramatically.)
The big picture is that for every person who dies during a heat wave, many more quietly perish from the cold at other times of the year. Here’s the ratio of cold deaths to heat deaths in the locales examined by this study:
Australia: 11:1
Brazil: 6:1
Canada: 13:1
Ireland: cold caused 9.34% of all deaths, heat caused 0%
Japan: 27:1
South Korea: 37:1
Spain: 4:1
Switzerland: 1.5: 1
UK: 28:1
USA: 25:1
When the next heat wave hits, don’t expect journalists and weather broadcasters to provide you with all the relevant facts. In their zeal to hype global warming, they will systematically misinform you. They will encourage you to believe things about weather-related deaths that are the opposite of the truth.
We live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.
This is the painful lesson being imparted with every incident in which someone gets arrested and charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers-that-be.
Merely daring to question, challenge or hesitate when a cop issues an order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, free speech be damned.
In fact, getting charged or arrested is now the best case scenario for encounters with police officers who are allowed to operate under the assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of disagreement or even question.
The worst case scenario involves getting probed, beaten, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, shot, or killed by police.
This mindset that anyone who wears a government uniform (soldier, police officer, prison guard) must be obeyed without question is a telltale sign of authoritarianism goose-stepping its way towards totalitarianism.
Be warned: there can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.
What is this language of force?
Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons.Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.
This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to speak freely.
In Nieves v. Bartlett, the Court ruled 6-3 to dismiss the case of Russell Bartlett, an Alaska resident who was arrested at an outdoor festival for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after he refused to be interrogated by police and then intervened when police attempted to question other attendees about their drinking.
In yet another case, a rapper was charged with making terroristic threats after posting a song critical of police on Facebook and YouTube. In refusing to hear the case of Knox v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court paved the way for individuals who engage in controversial and unpopular political or artistic expression, by criticizing the police for example, to be labeled terrorists and subject to prosecution and suppression by the government.
These cases reflect a growing awareness about the state of free speech in America: it’s all a lie.
Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent and reminding the populace that resistance to the tyranny of the police state is futile.
Weaponized by police, prosecutors, courts and legislatures, “contempt of cop” charges have become yet another means by which to punish those individuals who refuse to be muzzled.
This is the unfortunate price of exercising one’s freedoms today: you may have distinct, protected rights on paper, but dare to exercise those rights and you put yourself at risk for fines, arrests, injuries and even death.
In theory, of course, “we the people” have a constitutional right to talk back to the government.
The Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials.
Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).
Unfortunately, the brutal reality of the age in which we live is far different from the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights: talking back—especially when the police are involved—can get you killed.
The government does not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully. And it definitely does not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
We’re in deep trouble, folks.
Freedom no longer means what it once did.
Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.
Protest laws, contempt of cop charges, and all of the other bogus violations used by cops and prosecutors to muzzle discontent and discourage anyone from challenging government authority are intended to send a strong message that in the American police state, you’re either part of the herd, marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates, or you’re a pariah, a suspect, a criminal, a troublemaker, a terrorist, a radical, a revolutionary.
Over half of the 2020 presidential candidates recorded videos of themselves for this year’s American Jewish Committee Global Forum.
The videos are posted on the AJC website and below.
All the candidates except two spoke in support of Israel, many claiming it is an important American ally. All ignored Israel’s pattern of spying on the US and stealing American technology, attacking a US Navy ship, the cost of Israel to Americans, and the role of Israel partisans in pushing the US into disastrous wars.
The only candidates who did not mention Israel were Tulsi Gabbard (D – HI) and Corey Booker (D-NJ), whose videos focused on opposition to antisemitism. (In the past, Booker has been extremely outspoken in his support for Israel.)
Bernie Sanders (D-VT) went into the greatest detail on the issue, emphasizing his support for Israel while also discussing Palestinian suffering.
Sanders spoke of his Jewish ethnicity and pointed out that as a young man he had lived in Israel for a number of months. He emphasized that he “believes absolutely and unequivocally in Israel’s right to exist in peace and security” and said, “to oppose the reactionary policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu does not make anyone anti-Israel.”
At the same time, Sanders spoke of the “Palestinian people crushed underneath a military occupation now over a half century old, creating a daily reality of pain humiliation and resentment.” [Note: Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians began 72 years ago.] He said: “I do not know how peace can be achieved in that region when in the Gaza Strip poverty is rampant – 53 percent of the people are unemployed….”
Kamala Harris pledges support for Israel
California Senator Kamala Harris and many others emphasized their strong support for Israel. In Harris’s video she mentioned both her past record of working for Israel and her plans to continue this in the future:
“As a member of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee I am deeply involved in ensuring the American-Israeli relationship remains strong.”
Harris promised: “I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense, that is why I strongly support America’s security assistance to Israel and I am committed to strengthening the American Israeli security and defense relationship.”
The U.S. currently gives Israel over $10 million per day. A bill before the Senate, favored by Harris, proposes to give Israel a 10-year package in which it will receive a minimum of $38 billion ($7,000 per minute) – approximately $20,000 per each Israeli family of four.
This is expected to pass easily despite the fact that most Americans feel the US already gives Israel too much money.
AJC advocates for Israel, opposes BDS
Founded over 100 years ago, the AJC says it has “more than 30 offices worldwide, plus partnerships with 34 international Jewish community organizations.” The organization, headquartered in New York City, has net assets of approximately $160 million.
According to its website: “Around the world—from the hallways of the UN in New York, to the corridors of the European Union in Brussels, and to the countries of Asia—AJC advocates for Israel at the highest levels. ”
One of the AJC’s priorities is to oppose the international movement to boycott Israel over its human rights abuses against Palestinians. The AJC website says: “We spearhead anti-BDS legislation at all levels of government and rally elected officials to reject the boycott movement.”
AJC states: “We convinced the governors of all 50 states to declare their opposition to BDS. We were also a driving force behind anti-BDS legislation in California and Illinois.
“As the BDS movement has surged on campus, we have brought dozens of university presidents to Israel and trained hundreds of students as advocates for Israel… we have marshalled our allies in the Christian world to oppose such efforts.”
According to AJC, more than 2,500 people from 70+ countries attend the Global Forum. This reportedly includes hundreds of students brought from more than 40 countries. The event is at the Washington Hilton in Washington D.C. from June 2-4. The schedule is here.
It appears that the only prominent candidates that did not provide videos were Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Jewish Insider reports: “Inquiries to the campaigns of Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Amy Klobuchar about why they didn’t participate went unanswered.”
In the videos below, a number of candidates say they support a “two-state solution,” but do not mention, or are unaware, that this refers to a division in which Israel would get at least 80 percent of the territory, and Palestinians would be left with 20 percent, at most.
The candidates’ messages to AJC
Below are the videos. Underneath each video is an excerpt containing some of the candidate’s statements about Israel from the video.
“… Israel is a strong ally and an important friend to the United States. Good friends can disagree and a candid expression of concerns does not diminish our friendship…”
“… If I’m ever in that exalted place [president] I intend to speak out every chance I get… to speak in favor of a strong democratic Israel and a two-state solution and I hope that people will recognize the contributions of your organization to make sure both of those things happen…”
“… I want to be very clear here at the outset about my position: I will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel as our strongest ally in the Middle East….. I also reject boycotts, disinvestment, or sanctions on Israel. In 2016 I not only signed on to the American Jewish committees governors United against BDS campaign but also signed into law legislation that mandates Colorado’s retirement program divest from firms that boycott Israel….. I will use America’s leadership to push for a resumption of direct negotiations for a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. While we do not know what the exact details of such an agreement will look like, we do know that without such an agreement there will be no assurance of peace and stability for this or future generations of Israelis or Palestinians. I have called on both parties to avoid undertaking unilateral actions which threaten such a long-term agreement and to respect the fundamental human rights of Israelis and Palestinians….”
“… As a member of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee I am deeply involved in ensuring the American-Israeli relationship remains strong….. I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense. That is why I strongly support America’s security assistance to Israel and I am committed to strengthening the American Israeli security and defense relationship…. The first resolution I sponsored as a United States Senator was to combat ‘anti Israeli bias’ at the United Nations and affirm and reaffirm that the United States seeks a just, secure and sustainable two-state solution….. the only way Israel can remain a Jewish and democratic state is two states for two peoples living side by side. Palestinians should be able to govern themselves in their own state in peace and dignity, just as Israelis deserve a secure homeland for the Jewish people. I believe that a resolution to this conflict cannot be imposed by outside parties. It must be agreed upon by the parties themselves….”
“… I’ve always worked hard to protect the u.s. Israel Alliance, to make sure it is strong. Our nations have intertwined national security issues, which is why I made sure we fund David sling, Aero, and Iron Dome and to make sure Israel always has a qualitative military edge … I’ve always appreciated AJC’s leadership in being the leading voice for our US-Israel relationship… Thank you, AJC, for the wonderful work you do…”
Tulsi did not mention Israel, instead focusing only on opposition to religious bigotry. “… AJC has contributed so much to the advancement of religious tolerance. For years you’ve been on the front lines of breaking stereotypes and harmful assumptions…. I went specifically to visit two extremely important locations: one was Chernobyl and the other was Auschwitz. It was an experience that I will never ever forget, and the world must never forget…”
“… I value our nation’s longstanding friendship and partnership with Israel. I am completely committed to the security of Israel and recognize them as one of the most important and enduring allies to the United States. I am firmly against effort to delegitimize Israel, such as BDS…”
“… it’s almost exactly a year since I had the eye-opening experience of an AJC Project Interchange visit to Israel and the West Bank with a number of my fellow mayors. It was extraordinary to see firsthand the achievements of what’s taking place in Israel….. We need to make sure that we are steadfast in our support for Israel and for the U.S.-Israel alliance, while also continuing to advance a policy direction that is going to lead to peace and security for the Israeli and Palestinian people…. the need for a two-state solution… need to make sure that the U.S.-Israel Alliance is pointing in a direction that is going to be beneficial for Israeli, Palestinian, and American well-being….”
Booker was the one other candidate who did not mention Israel. His one-minute video focused on opposition to antisemitism: “…I want to thank the American Jewish Committee for the work you are doing to combat anti-semitism, to fight for justice, for light, for love in the face of hate and darkness. We know what Hillel said: ‘If I am not for myself who will be for me…”
“… support for Israel is too important to be a political football or a partisan issue. It’s about all that unites us as a people – our shared democratic values, our spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, our determination to overcome every obstacle and endure. You know I’ll never forget my first visit to Israel as a young senator in 1973… I had a great opportunity to meet Golda Meir… she told me Israel had a secret weapon for her survival. She said, ‘Senator, we have nowhere else to go.’ That’s why I’ve been so adamant that Israel be able to defend itself by itself, but we come to its aid…. I’m proud that an Obama-Biden administration demonstrated unprecedented support for Israel, including… signing a new record-setting 10-year security agreement with with Israel [$38 billion to Israel]… ”
“… let me start by thanking each of you for the work you do to advance the U.S.-Israel relationship….. Israel is a stalwart ally…. it is essential to maintain strong, bipartisan support for our ally….. We must maintain a robust MoU on security assistance to ensure Israel has the tools she needs to prepare for and defend against threats, and our long-standing bond must continue to be bipartisan…”
Sander’s speech was the longest video and the only one to mention Palestinian suffering.”…. [I believe] absolutely and unequivocally in Israel’s right to exist in peace and security…. as a young man lived in Israel for a number of months…to oppose the reactionary policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu does not make anyone anti-Israel.”…..I see a Palestinian people crushed underneath a military occupation now over a half century old, creating a daily reality of pain humiliation and resentment… I do not know how peace can be achieved in that region when in the Gaza Strip poverty is rampant – 53 percent of the people are unemployed… 99 percent of the residents cannot leave that area…. the parameters of a solution are well known. They are based in international law. They are based in multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions…… two states based on the 1967 lines with Jerusalem as the capital of both states……” [Note: Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians began 72 years ago.]
“… We need to recognize…. the very special us-israel relationship and how important it’s been to global security – how important it’s been to both countries. And we need to continue to support that relationship in a variety of different ways – culturally, spiritually, militarily, through soft power and all the rest. It’s a special relationship and Israel is a special country…”
On April 22, 1991, I was only 18 years old; I was out with some of my comrades planning to conduct a march and rally in the streets of our town, Beit Sahour, against the Israeli occupation of our land. This march was one of many peaceful protests held as part of what had become known as the ‘first Intifada’ (popular uprising), which had begun in 1987.
That particular day seemed somehow strange to me, and different from previous marches – usually the Israeli army filled the streets of our town during protests, occupying every corner, but on this day the army remained in their camp, and did not show any presence.
Something felt wrong. Deep inside of me I felt that there was something that did not feel right. Where was the army? What I did not realize was that the army was in fact already present, but in a different shape and form.
On that particular day, it was “the death squads” (as they were known to us), known in Israel as the Dovadim, the Israeli special forces, who were policing and patrolling our demonstration. These are forces which are specially trained for assassinations and are well known for their brutality and their ‘shoot to kill’ orders.
Apparently, after the Israeli prisons were filled with Palestinians, and after the Israeli policies of ‘bone breaking’ and long imprisonment failed to stop the uprising, the army decided on a new policy, a policy of ‘assassinating’ the youth, or at least severely injuring and disabling them.
During the first Intifada, an Israeli high official was quoted as saying that the army should not kill the Palestinian youth, because a youth killed by the army would then be honored as a martyr and thousands would follow their lead. He said that it is better to paralyze and disable the youth, knowing the way society looks down on disabled people.
This official decided that the army, especially the well trained ‘death squads’ should ‘give their utmost effort’ to paralyze the youth of the Intifada.
As for me, on that fateful April morning in 1991, I discovered at one point during the demonstration that I was surrounded by a group of masked men who pretended they were also Palestinian protesters. They tried to talk to me in Arabic and ask me about “the location of the soldiers” in an attempt to fool me, but the man who spoke to me didn’t pronounce the Arabic words correctly. It was at that moment I realized that I was actually surrounded by a death squad.
When the man noticed that I had realized their true identify he pulled a small automatic gun from under his shirt, and I ran away knowing that even if I surrendered to him then, I would have been immediately assassinated, as had happened to so many Palestinian martyrs before me.
The man ran after me, along with the other undercover death squad members, until I came to an area were he was standing above me on a hill, just five meters away from me. When he shouted at me again, I began to turn, and I could see his eyes, or at least, what was visible of them from under his mask. It was at that moment that he started to shoot.
After five or six rounds penetrated my chest and back, I fell to the ground, motionless, soaked with my own blood. I could not feel anything, I could not see clearly, and I could not hear anything.
I fell down face first, injuring my face and breaking my teeth on the ground. Then the man approached me and kicked me in my chest, breaking four ribs, in order to flip me over onto my back.
The last thing I heard before I passed out was that man who shot me saying, “After all that, and you’re still alive!?”
Those are words I can never forget, for they revealed to me at that moment the true identity of the Israeli army, the army of criminals and murderers.
In spite of the fact that the Israeli military ambulance was already present in my town when I was shot, apparently they believed that if the death squad was in town, that meant that death was there too, and they didn’t show up until 30 minutes after I was shot.
When the Israeli ambulance crew finally arrived (no Palestinian ambulance was allowed in to take me), the medics told the soldiers that they should impose curfew because “I was dead”. They thought there was no way I could survive such serious wounds – they were sure I would be dead within hours. During the first Intifada the army would impose a curfew every time they killed someone, thus punishing all the Palestinians in the area for the army’s own misdeed.
Military medics tried to give me first aid there on the ground, I was bleeding so much it was flooding the area were I fell.
After the ‘first aid’ they gave me, they drove the ambulance to a military base in Bethlehem – as my body was fighting to stay alive, they went through their procedures, handing over my identity card to the military, filling out forms and filing their report before they even brought me to the hospital. I was driven out of Bethlehem (where there are two hospitals), and all the way to an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem, where it would be difficult or even impossible for my family to come see me due to the Israeli-imposed closure and checkpoints.
Meanwhile, a military commander in Bethlehem phoned my father at home, and told him that I was mildly injured in my face, leaving out the five bullets which were lodged in my lung and spine – apparently these bullets did not count as injuries.
When they finally transferred me to the Israeli hospital I was operated on for the entire night. The surgeon who operated on me decided that it was easier to cut off one third of my lung and throw it away with the bullets than to take the care needed to extract the bullets from the lung (a move which led a Palestinian reporter to editorialize that my ‘surgeon had been a butcher in his past profession’ in an article he wrote about my injury).
One of the bullets penetrated my spine – it went through my chest and lodged in my spine, causing paralysis. That fateful bullet has led to me being paralyzed from the waist down, for life.
In the morning, one of the doctors told my mother, “You have a new born baby for a son” – that was me, paralyzed, unconscious and half dead.
I woke up for a few minutes three days after my injury. I did not know anything, did not remember anything, I saw my mother next to me, I tried to speak but that was useless, she was tortured to see me there, I could feel it, and could easily notice her health had deteriorated fearing that I would die at any moment.
I tried to ask her what I was doing there, and she said, “Relax my son, you are alright”, so I did, and “relaxed” for an additional seven days in another coma.
After those seven days, I was transferred out of the intensive care unit to another branch of the hospital, even though I still felt lost and unconscious even when I was awake.
Then, the hospital administration, after failing to make the army pay for my expenses, decided that I should leave, and told my father he must pay for the expenses. When they realized he could not pay, that he was without money, they told my father, “send him to an Arabic hospital, we saved his life, and he must go”.
But I was in no condition to be moved at all. Out of intensive care, my condition deteriorated rapidly, and I had to go back to intensive care for another ten days. When they decided I was “ok” I had to leave, even though I was nowhere near the condition that would normally be acceptable for releasing a patient with such severe injuries – but after all, I was “just a Palestinian”, and didn’t seem to count for much in the Israeli hospital. In fact, the hospital even insisted that a Palestinian ambulance come to fetch me, for they could not bear the expense of using one of their own ambulances to transport me to a Palestinian hospital. So I was transferred (by a Palestinian ambulance) to Al-Makessed hospital in Jerusalem.
I was hospitalized for three months, during which time I kept losing a lot of blood, internally and externally, due to my injuries (and the part of my lung that had been completely cut out). I still couldn’t think straight, couldn’t figure out why I was there – I had only visions spinning in my head, and vague memories.
After that time, I was transferred to Abu Raya Rehabilitation center in Ramallah. By then I started to realize that my life had changed forever.
I received rehabilitation for several months. I can still remember the first time I could dress alone, it felt good to be able to dress or bathe alone after a lot of work and effort – something that, previously, I would never have thought difficult had become such a challenge in my new body.
Ten months after my injury I enrolled as a student at Bethlehem University, and I studied four years, receiving my B.A degree in English and translation.
Now, many years later, am still paralyzed of course, but my life is a clear proof of the failure of the Israeli vision that paralyzing, injuring and killing us will make us give up. I have learned that the bullet which does not kill us makes us stronger.
So I am in a wheelchair, facing difficulties in life, facing repeated infections and bad health, but I am still the man who stood up to the Israeli occupation day after day and said NO to the occupiers.
One day I saw a program on Israeli TV about the special forces, the so-called ‘death squads’ which shot me. They showed scrambled pictures of soldiers talking about the attacks they carried out in Palestinian areas. Most of them are receiving psychological help now, and therapy. At that moment I felt victorious, after all they failed to kill my will and my internal strength, while these men who shoot unarmed youth with impunity are suffering internal torment and anguish for the crimes they have committed. I sit with my full mind, in honor, knowing I have done no wrong, and even after all they have done to me, I am still here willing to liberate my country, even while sitting on my wheelchair.
Its true, I will live my life on this wheelchair, paralyzed, and that is difficult sometimes to accept. They may have been able to take my mobility away, they may have been able to take my life as a completely healthy young man, but what they could not take, and will never be able to take away is my internal strength, my will and my love of my country.
The spirit of revolution, the path of freedom requires sacrifices we need to be ready and willing to make, until we reach our legitimate goal of freedom and liberation.
After the thousands of sacrifices of the Palestinian people, the thousands of martyrs, and tens of thousands of injured and disabled, we know that there can be no solution without liberation. The revolution will resume, even if it pauses for a while.
Palestine is our dream, our heart and life, the spirit of revolution and the longing for freedom can never die. Their tanks, apaches, shells, and bullets of hatred can never win.
The Judaization of Jerusalem. It used to work under cover of darkness, at least in the mainstream media, but now it’s out in the open with official recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem from the United States.
Israel implements its Judaization of Jerusalem by directly undermining the sanctity of both Muslim (the Haram al-Sharif) and Christian (the Via Dolorosa) holy sites in al-Quds and by continuing to establish irreversible and exclusive control over the holy city as an Israeli-Jewish city.
Israel implements strategies that ensure its physical domination of the city. Since it illegally annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, it has devised numerous policies to create geographic integrity and demographic superiority in favor of a Jewish Jerusalem.
But this strategy did not begin in 1967. In the wake of the 1948 war, the newly-minted Israeli government quickly rejected all calls for internationalizing the city and declared that “Arab aggression” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement the partition plan, and specifically the UN-sanctioned corpus separatum of Jerusalem — Resolution 181 recommended the creation of independent Palestinian and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem.
Today Israel’s hasbara machine falsely declares that Palestinian “terrorism” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement final status negotiations for an independent Palestinian state in the Oslo process, when, in fact, it has been busy leaving nothing for the negotiators to decide upon.
Ironically, on 2 Feb 1949, Ben Gurion magnanimously expressed willingness to establish corpus separatum over the Old City, primarily in order to delegitimize Jordan’s hold over the Old City while removing Israel’s own territorial gains from the equation.
Today, unsurprisingly, we hear that Israel’s exclusive control of the Old City is part of the “New Palestine” Deal. At the same time, on June 01, 2019 the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) released a report that documented 130 violations by Israel against Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem during April.
It was the Labor government of Levi Eshkol which set the precedents for complete Israeli sovereignty over a “united” Jerusalem in 1967, with a flurry of Israeli legislative maneuvering that echoed the 1949 frenzy, immediately according Jerusalem a status different than that of the rest of the occupied territories.
Jewish colonization efforts were to emphasize security in the Jordan Valley and in “Greater Jerusalem” as well as the high ground along the western portion of the West Bank. In other words, preserve the Jewish demographic majority won as a result of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 in the Palestinian lands already grabbed.
Likud’s obsession, an obsession which today has the political upper hand, was/is on creating a Jewish demographic majority in the occupied Palestinian territories with the purpose of acquiring more Palestinian territory for the Jewish state.
Israel’s strategies re Jerusalem implemented at the municipal level (with full backing of the Israeli government) have been the most devastating for Palestinian Jerusalemites. The architect of the Israeli master plan for Jerusalem, as many know, was former mayor Teddy Kollek, who pursued plans to cut “Greater Jerusalem” from the rest of the West Bank and facilitated its annexation with the stated objective of ensuring Jewish demographic superiority as well as geographic integrity.
Here are a few of his words from 1984 regarding what he considered to be the premature establishment of the now vast Jewish colony of Ma’aleh Adumim ringing the city:
“I think it is a mistake to establish it before we have filled Jerusalem. In another five years, we will fill Jerusalem and then we will go there [Ma’aleh Adumim]. In Jerusalem, we took upon ourselves, as Jews, a very difficult urban task, in that we received distant neighborhoods, and we had to connect them …”
Note: Jerusalem was not empty and did not need to be “filled”!
The Jewish colonization of Jerusalem is in direct contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 465 Concerning the Application of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Prohibition to Establish Settlements in the Territories, including Jerusalem, 1 March 1980.
Israel has forced a Jewish majority in all parts of Jerusalem and in the process brutally suffocated the legitimate rights and aspirations of Palestinian Jerusalemites, who, nevertheless, cling to their rights and identity in the holy city as Muslims, as Christians and as Palestinians.
Since 1967, successive Israeli governments have systematically eradicated all other visions of the holy city of Jerusalem except for the vision of Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish State.”
Without question, Israel has always viewed the final status of Jerusalem as already settled. With Trump’s “Deal of the Century”, Israel believes it will finally secure unquestionable legitimacy for its exclusive rule over the holy city.
It’s up to the international community to stop it. In its report mentioned above, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) “urged the United Nations and its concerned bodies as well as the European Union to closely monitor the situation in Jerusalem and to condemn the harsh acts to which Palestinians are subjected and to shoulder their responsibilities towards the Palestinians under occupation.”
– Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
The failed coup attempt in Caracas in early May brings to mind the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British intelligence in Iran in 1953 to overthrow the Mohammad Mossadeq government. It is quite astonishing how that regime-change long-ago operation parallels what is currently taking place in Venezuela and also with regards to Iran yet again.
Mossadeq was the democratically elected prime minister of Iran beginning in 1951, serving in a government in which the Shah with limited authority was the head of state presiding over a parliamentary system. Iran was nominally independent at the time, but it was heavily influenced by the neighboring Soviet Union, which retained control over several Iranian provinces after the Second World War ended, and Great Britain, which exploited the country’s oil resources through the mechanism of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which was owned by the British government. When Mossadeq, frustrated by lack of progress in negotiations with the British over sharing of oil revenues, eventually declared that he would nationalize the AIOC, London and Washington conspired to remove him.
The new National Iranian Oil Company was immediately attacked by the British, who used the Royal Navy to block export of oil from Iran’s Abadan refinery. Ships carrying Iranian oil were stopped and boarded with their shipments confiscated as “stolen property” in light of the British government’s former ownership claim on the AIOC.
By mid-1952, Britain’s blockade of Iranian oil exports had badly hurt the Iranian economy, which eventually led to government bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the American CIA, which was initially ambivalent about what the proper role in the Anglo-Iranian conflict might be, joined British agents in supporting groups inside Iran that were hostile to Mossadeq. In the Majlis parliamentary election in the spring of 1952, Mossadeq faced serious opposition funded by the Anglo-Americans, and the election eventually was suspended. By early 1953, pro-communist and pro-Shah mobs supported and coordinated by the U.S. and Britain roamed the streets, sometimes fighting each other. Fearing a communist takeover and also under pressure from London, which was threatening to withdraw from the Korean War as a quid pro quo, President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to carry out a joint coup d’état.
Losing popular support due to a sinking economy, as early as August 1952 a struggling Mossadeq began ruling by emergency powers and started to jail opponents, which only aggravated the crisis. A rigged referendum to dissolve parliament and grant Mossadeq authority to govern by decree passed with 99.9% approval but led to accusations that the prime minister was seeking “total and dictatorial power.” The New York Timesreported, “A plebiscite more fantastic and farcical than any ever held under Hitler or Stalin is now being staged in Iran by Premier Mossadeq in an effort to make himself unchallenged dictator of the country.” The move by Mossadeq also led to the first coup attempt, which was organized by the CIA.
On Aug. 15, 1953, Col. Nemathollah Nassiri, the commander of the Shah’s Imperial Guard, delivered to Mossadeq a decree from the Shah dismissing him. Mossadeq, who had been warned of the plot, had Nassiri arrested, and the Shah and his family fled into exile in Italy. The first coup thus ended with a whimper, but it was lessons learned for the second, better organized successful attempt which followed a few days later, Operation Ajax, coordinated by Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA.
Exploiting pro-Shah sentiment in the military, the CIA and the British turned to their stables of recruited army officers while also exploiting agents infiltrated into the communist party Tudeh, which rose to the occasion by launching mass demonstrations, to include looting and arson, which quickly alienated the public and also provided a pretext for Western support of the coup as it could be promoted as “anti-communist.” Efforts were also made to turn influential clerics against Mossadeq. The Iranian people blamed the government for all their woes and rioting soon led to the calling out of the army to restore order. The army did so and then had Mossadeq arrested. He was condemned to death, but his sentence was later commuted to three years in solitary confinement followed by house arrest. He died in 1967.
End of story, but not quite. All the elements currently being used against Venezuela and Iran were there back in 1953 to bring down Mossadeq and also appear in a detailed 2018 Pentagon plan describing how to bring about a coup in Caracas. Wrecking the countries’ economies through sanctions and exclusion from the global banking network creates a crisis where one need not have existed. Meanwhile, a sustained campaign of vilification by Western political leaders and the media establishes the narrative that the benevolent intention is to block extremism and restore democracy while also eliminating a threat to the United States. And, as a last resort, the threat or actual use of force to stop the export of commodities to further wreck the economy becomes a clearly stated policy option, currently also employing secondary sanctions for anyone who dares to trade with the designated victim. Recently, America’s unilaterally imposed global ban on the export and sale of Iranian oil began. Venezuela’s oil sales are also being blocked and even its electricity grid is being attacked in an attempt to starve the Venezuelan people into rebelling against their government.
But you also have to have spies, secret agents, to get the ball rolling, just as was true in 1953. One assumes that the CIA has been active in recruiting the agents of influence inside Venezuelan political opposition as well as military circles who will bring out increasingly larger mobs as the situation continues to deteriorate. How successful they have been is difficult to determine, but Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido failed the first time around, reportedly because the Venezuelan government was aware of what was happening and the contacts that the CIA was relying on to bring out the army were in fact double agents.
The suffering Iranian and Venezuelan people have yet to rise up in revolt. No matter. It took more than one try to bring down Mossadeq, and National Security Advisor John Bolton has recently warned Iran that its government won’t have any more anniversaries to celebrate if it continues with its “threats.” The Trump administration is also reported to be preparing military options for dealing with Venezuela.
Bolton has even warned the Russians, who are assisting Venezuela’s government: “This is our hemisphere. It’s not where the Russians ought to be interfering. This is a mistake on their part.” He is seemingly unaware of the irony, that the Russians might make the same claim about Eurasia and the Iranians regarding the Persian Gulf, where Bolton and his neocon friends in Washington have been the source of nearly continuous conflict.
Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
If US President Donald Trump thinks that by merely saying he doesn’t want regime change in Iran, he can then inveigle the Iranians into talks, he is woefully mistaken.
This week during a state visit to Japan, fresh from watching a bout of Sumo wrestling, the American president said he thinks Iran “is ready” for negotiations. He asserted that Washington isn’t after regime change in the Islamic Republic, and that its only concern is to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons.
Trump also restated he wanted to frame future talks with Iran on additional issues of ballistic missile development and Tehran’s “regional activities” – the latter referring to long-held accusations by Washington of Iran “sponsoring terrorism”.
“I really believe that Iran would like to make a deal, and I think that’s very smart of them, and I think that’s a possibility to happen,” Trump condescended.
This US president is delusional beyond belief. After trashing an international nuclear accord with Iran last year, re-imposing crippling sanctions, and his administration in recent weeks openly threatening military attack, Trump evidently doesn’t have the faintest grasp on reality.
In response to his latest “toned down” rhetoric, Iran’s foreign ministry said Tehran wants to see a fundamental change in US behavior before it could possibly take Trump seriously. In practice, that means Washington returning to the 2015 nuclear accord as an original signatory, lifting punishing economic sanctions (economic terrorism) and withdrawing the recent buildup of military forces from the Persian Gulf.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has said that negotiations with the Trump administration would be akin to drinking poison.
The Trump administration no doubt realizes it has over-reached with its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Iran is not going to be intimidated and is more than capable of defending itself. The White House needs to find a way to muffle the war drums it has been beating in recent weeks, especially given the international censure it has been met with, even from its European allies. In short, the Americans are bluffing.
In a bid to save face, Trump is now posing as a magnanimous player, “offering” the Iranians a chance for negotiations. But Iran is hardly likely to succumb to the apparent overture. Since last year, there are reliable reports that the US president has been seeking talks with Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani on at least eight occasions. Tehran has not budged to oblige Trump.
Tersely put, that is because Trump and his administration have about as much credibility as a snake-oil salesman.
Trump may this week vow that he is not seeking regime change in Tehran. But earlier this year on the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution, he disparaged the nation’s leadership for engaging in “40 years of terrorism”.
Trump’s senior White House aides, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, have also indulged in mouth-foaming threats against Iran.
Abundantly evident to Iran, this US administration cannot be trusted in the slightest. The Iranians must also be taking notes on how Trump’s razzmatazz diplomatic engagement with North Korea has floundered after the American side insisted on Pyongyang decommissioning its nuclear weapons before receiving sanctions relief. Where’s the American reciprocity? There is none. It’s all about dominance by a hegemonic power.
Another non-starter for Iran entering into talks with the Trump administration is that the latter’s position is incorrigibly flawed with false premises. How can dialogue be productive when one side is so delusional in its views?
Trump says he wants to ensure “no nuclear weapons” for Iran, as well as engaging in talks about restricting Iran’s ballistic missile defenses, and its alleged malign activities in the region.
As Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently reiterated Iran does not have nuclear weapons nor has any intention of acquiring them. Iran’s non-nuclear doctrine was clearly spelled out several years ago by Ayatollah Khamenei in a fatwa (edict). Iran may resume uranium enrichment at higher levels if the nuclear accord is not upheld by other international signatories, but that is a far cry from embarking on nuclear weapons development.
Trump is thus presuming negotiations with Iran based on false speculation about Iran having or trying to have nuclear weapons. He keeps promulgating that dead-end falsehood with the help of lousy “journalism” in the Western corporate media. His cancelling of the nuclear accord last year was based on a spurious claim that the accord would not safeguard enough against Iran building nuclear weapons. However, countless UN inspections since the 2015 deal have verified that Iran is in full compliance.
The two other premises underlying Trump’s attempt at engaging Iran in talks are also egregiously flawed. Iran’s sovereign right to develop defensive missile capabilities is perfectly within international legal obligations. It is simply outrageous for an American administration to demand Iran curb its defensive systems, especially given the military threats from that administration and its slavish support for Israel which actually has nuclear weapons pointed at Iran.
As for allegations of Iranian “sponsorship of terrorism”, that’s another canard based on American-Israeli-Saudi propaganda. Iran’s support for Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza is a legitimate international demonstration of solidarity against Israeli aggression. Iran’s support for Shia militia in Iraq and Syria has proven to be a successful mission to thwart the destabilizing of those states by US and Saudi-backed terror proxies.
Any genuine dialogue should be premised on mutual respect. Patently, despite occasional superficial words, the Trump administration is seething with Iranophobia. The same might be gleaned regarding US policy towards Russia, China, Venezuela, North Korea and others. There is no mutual respect from Washington. Just a might-is-right attitude underpinned by a superiority complex commonly invoked as “American exceptionalism”.
All told, Iran is not going to indulge the Trump administration with talks that this administration is – between the lines – eagerly seeking. Trump’s “art of the deal” is all about backsliding on already established international commitments. From Iran’s point of view, there is nothing to be gained from dialogue with a duplicitous, delusional president whose view of the world has zero credibility.
Iran is right. The only prospect for future talks is for Washington to undergo fundamental correctional behavior. Don’t hold your breath for that to happen.
“We are going to intercept and stop all oil exports from the (Middle East) region if we are prevented from exporting our oil. We shall take every measure possible to close the Strait of Hormuz. If the US aims – by sending jets, carriers – to reinforce its positions and status among the international community, it doesn’t concern us. But if the US is seriously aiming to threaten us, it should know that not one drop of oil will leave the region and we shall destroy all US interests in the Middle East”. This is what the President Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei said in 1983, in response to the US President Ronald Regan’s decision to send jet carriers to the Middle East during the Iran-Iraq war. It seems like only yesterday.
Today, in 2019, the experienced and veteran leader of the revolution, Sayyed Khamenei – who played a role in the very similar critical situation in the 80s – is facing President Donald Trump and an administration who seem not to have learned much from history and the previous US-Iran confrontation. Looking at past foreign policy with a critical eye seems not to be part of the current US administration’s practice. A small reminder may give many answers to what Trump can expect in a wider confrontation with Iran.
In the 80s, Iran’s “Islamic Revolution” was facing serious problems on many levels. Its armed forces were disorganised and dispersed; there were serious differences between decision-makers and politicians over how to run the country following the fall of the Shah; domestic security was lacking; there were ethnic and national struggles; no country was ready to sell weapons to Iran; the US, Europe and the Gulf states supported Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Iran; and the country was going through serious economic difficulties.
It was a perfect scenario for Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, which he did in September 1980 by bombing Mehrabad international airport and occupied later Khorramshahr, calling for an uprising of ethnic Arabs “in al-Muhammara”. This same objective, and concomitant regime-change is what the US administration has been aiming at since 1979- and it apparently retains the same fixation in 2019.
Many may not remember that Imam Khomeini did not hesitate to encourage the Iranian leadership, led by the current Rahbar (Spiritual Leader) Sayyed Ali Khamenei (1987), who was the President of Iran then, to confront and open fire against US forces or indeed any hostile country sailing in the Gulf. “If I were you (addressing his speech to the political leadership), I would order the armed forces to target the first vessel protecting an oil carrier trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz. You decide what you think best (as a course of action), whatever it takes”, said Imam Khomeini.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (and Sheikh Hashemi Rafsanjani) gave immediate orders to the armed forces to act accordingly. All armed forces were fully coordinated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Forces (IRGC – Pasdaran). Iran launched Chinese-made Silkworm missiles on Kuwait port al-Ahmadi. Another attack was registered on a Kuwaiti oil tanker that had been registered to fly the American flag and was sailing under US Navy protection- it hit an Iranian mine in the Gulf. Moreover, Iran shot down a US helicopter using US-made Stinger missiles delivered by the Afghan Mujahedeen to Iran. It was ready to take the confrontation further in the Persian Gulf, careless of the US “almighty” military power. Iran also attacked a Soviet vessel, the freighter Ivan Korotoyev, sailing in the Gulf and providing naval escorts for its ships.
It was rare to see the two superpowers, the US and Russia, united against Iran in one Middle Eastern conflict, in support of Saddam Hussein. Of course, Iran’s diplomacy skills were not yet sharpened. It was helping the Afghans against the Soviets and was committed to fighting US hegemony in the Middle East.
Sayyed Ali Khamenei went to New York, and at the UN Security Council told the world that “the US will receive a response to its hideous action” in the Gulf (following a US attack against an Iranian commercial ship called Iran Ajr). Indeed, a US owned giant oil tanker carrying the name of Sungari was attacked and set ablaze by the IRGC. Iran was not willing to stand down, but instead showed itself ready to confront two superpower countries at a time when Tehran was in its worst condition.
Today, Iran is well equipped with all kinds of missiles, and is a more powerful, highly productive country with strong and efficient allies who can hurt its enemies much more than in 1987. The Islamic Revolution principles and values are still the same, led by more or less the same people. The IRGC is stronger than ever and is an integrated part of the armed forces.
Sayyed Ali Khamenei was fully devoted to Imam Khomeini. He served as a faithful guardian of the “Islamic Revolution”, supervised the IRGC, represented Imam Khomeini at the Security Council and played an effective role in arming and merging the IRGC into all levels of the country’s armed forces. He will not hesitate to take further steps against any weakness any leader in the country today might show in trying to soften the relationship with the US. Today, the leader of the Revolution is neither afraid of war, nor of peace. He will not negotiate with Trump and will not help him be re-elected in 2020. Those who think Iran is desperate or cornered or failing due to the US sanctions may need to read more carefully the history and behaviour of the “Islamic Revolution” since 1979.
Elijah J. Magnier is a veteran war correspondent and Senior Political Risk Analyst with over 35 years’ experience covering Europe, Africa & the Middle East.
Leaked documents published by whistle-blower Edward Snowden have exposed a deep rift between Israeli intelligence officials and their counterparts in the US National Security Agency (NSA) over the sharing of intelligence which the Israelis requested to carry out assassinations during the 2006 invasion of Lebanon.
Details of the rift were laid out in the NSA’s internal newsletter known as SIDtoday under the heading “The Israel-Hizballah [sic] Crisis — Perspectives from an Acting SLO Tel Aviv”. In the document, an American liaison officer, who is tasked with managing relations with counterparts in Israel, recounted a dispute with the Israelis over intelligence that was to be used for “targeted killings”.
The Israeli demand, the US liaison wrote, “centred on requests for time sensitive tasking, threat warning, including tactical ELINT” — electronic intelligence — “and receipt of geolocational information on Hizballah elements.”
“The latter request was particularly problematic,” he continued, adding that he “had several late-night, sometimes tense, discussions with ISNU,” the elite Israeli equivalent of the NSA. The US official rejected the demand, and said that he provided details of “NSA’s legal prohibition on providing information that could be used in targeted killings.”
The acting SLO officer pointed out that, “Even with his full understanding of the US statutes, [ISNU Commander] BG Harari sought assistance from NSA for an exemption to this legal policy. To ISNU, this prohibition was contrary not only to supporting Israel in its fight against Hizballah but overall, to support the US Global War on Terrorism.”
The account, published by The Intercept — which has released four years’ worth of SIDdtoday material in batches — goes on to suggest that the NSA ultimately reached a compromise with the Israelis by working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and that in the end it was the Israeli team that defined the parameters and methods of what could and could not be shared with them.
According to TheIntercept, the episode recounted by the US liaison officer raises “questions of what intelligence the United States can legally share with a foreign government.” This, it said, is a “notoriously murky” area.
A leaked document is casting doubt on the official narrative of the 2018 Douma gas attacks which were later used to justify American, British and French airstrikes on Syria.
Taking a careful look at the run-up to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran exposes the inner workings of the U.S./Israeli deep state and the covert operations that the CIA and Mossad carry out around the world to lay the groundwork for war.
In this article, I will detail how the U.S. and Israel astroturfed protests in Iran, infiltrated them with rioters, and ran an atrocity propaganda campaign about Iran massacring protestors to manufacture consent for war.
This article will be an examination of the deep state’s war on Iran, prior to the full-scale U.S. invasion.
This article will be specific to Iran, but should be seen as a case study for how American, Israeli, and often British intelligence lay the groundwork for targets of empire around the world. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
![Lebanese men inspect the damage done to their homes after Israel carried out attacks in Beirut, Lebanon on 22 July 2006 [PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2006-Lebanese-men-inspect-the-destruction-caused-by-Israeli-attacksGettyImages-119810831.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all&ssl=1)
Aletho News
Aletho News 